Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

Day appeared, with just the faintest touch of red showing like a broken bit of glass. Rain-clouds, bursting-heavy, immediately rolled over it,—a deluge of grays, leisurely stirring with whitish and watery spots. Though his troops were taking the field, Lowenkampf had not left his quarters in the big freight go-down. Commanders hurried in and out. Fallows was filling two canteens with diluted tea, when an old man entered, weeping. It was Colonel Ritz, bent, red-eyed, nearly seventy, who had been ordered, on account of age and decrepitude, to remain with the staff. Brokenly, he begged for his command.

“I have always stayed with the line, General. I shall be quick as another. Don’t keep an old man, who has always stuck to the line—don’t keep one like that back in time of battle.”

Lowenkampf smiled and embraced him—sending him out with his regiment.

Mergenthaler now came in. There was something icy and hateful about this Roman-faced giant. His countenance was like a bronze shield—so small the black eyes, and so wide and high the cheek-bones. For months his Cossacks had done sensational work—small fighting, far scouting, desperate service. He despised Lowenkampf; believed he had earned the right to be the hammer to-day; and, in truth, he had, but Lowenkampf, who ranked him, had been chosen. Bleak and repulsive with rage, the Cossack chief made no effort to repress himself. Lowenkampf was reminded that he had been policing the streets of Liaoyang for weeks, that his outfit was “fat-heeled and duck-livered.”... More was said before Mergenthaler stamped out, his jaw set like a stone balcony. It seemed as if he tore from the heart of Lowenkampf the remnant of its stamina.... For a moment the three were alone in the head-quarters. Fallows caught the General by the shoulders and looked down in his face:

“Little Father—you’re the finest and most courageous of them all.... It will be known and proven—what I say, old friend—‘when we get to be men.’”

The masses of Lowenkampf’s infantry, forming on the heights among the coal-fields, melted at the outer edges and slid downward. Willingly the men went. They did not know that this was the day. They had been fearfully expectant of battle at first—ever since Lake Baikal was crossed. Battalion after battalion slid off the heights, and were lost in the queer lanes running through the rocks and low timber below. The general movement was silent. The rain held off; the air was close and warm. Lowenkampf, unvaryingly attentive to the two Americans, put them in charge of Lieutenant Luban, the young staff officer, whom Morning had caught in his arms from the back of the sorrel. Down the ledges they went, as the others.

Morning was uneasy, as one who feels he has forgotten something—a tugging in his mind to go back. He was strongly convinced that Lowenkampf was unsubstantial in a military way. He could not overcome the personal element of this dread—as if the General were of his house, and he knew better than another that he was ill-prepared for the day’s trial.

Fallows welcomed any disaster. As he had scorned the army in its waiting, he scorned it now in its strike. He looked very lean and long. The knees were in corduroy and unstable, but his nerve could not have been steadier had he been called to a tea-party by Kuroki. As one who had long since put these things behind him, Fallows appeared; indeed, as one sportively called out by the younger set, to whom severing the spine of a flanker was fresh and engrossing business.... Morning choked with suppressions. Luban talked low and wide. He was in a funk. Both saw it. Neither would have objected, except that he monopolized their thoughts with his broken English, and to no effect.

Now they went into the kao liang—vast, quiet, enfolding. It held the heat stale from yesterday. The seasonal rains had filled the spongy loam at the roots, with much to spare blackening the lower stems.... For an hour and a half they sunk into the several paths and lost themselves, Lowenkampf’s untried battalions. The armies of the world might have vanished so, only to be seen by the birds, moving like vermin in a hide.... Men began to think of food and drink. The heights of Yentai, which they had left in bitter hatred so shortly ago, was now like hills of rest on the long road home. More and more the resistance of men shrunk in the evil magic of this pressure of grain and sky and holding earth—a curious, implacable unworldliness it was, that made the flesh cry out.

“They should have cut this grain,” Luban said for the third time.