Down among men

by Will Levington Comfort

To run back—to follow the paths back through the grain—to reach the decent heights again. And this was but a miniature of the thought that mastered the whole Russian army in Asia—to go back—to rise from the ghastly hollows of Asia and turn homeward again.

It leaped like a demon upon the unset volition of the mass. Full-formed, it arose from the lull. It effected the perfect turning.

Morning saw it, and wanted the source. He had planned too long to be denied now. The rout was big to handle, but he wanted the front—a glimpse of the actual inimical line. It was not enough for him to watch the fright and havoc streaming back. Calling a cheery adieu to Fallows, he bowed against the current—alone obeying the Russian Forward.

10

At the edge of the trampled lane, often shunted off into the standing crop, Morning made his way, running when he could.... The pictures were infinite; a lifetime of pictures; hundreds of faces and each a picture. Men passed him, heads bowed, arms about their faces, like figures in the old Dore paintings, running from the wrath of the Lord. Here and there was [Pg 43]pale defiance. Nine sheepish soldiers carried a single wounded man, the much-handled fallen one looking silly as the rest.

The utter ghostliness of it all was in Morning’s mind.... Gasping for breath, after many minutes of running, he sank down to rest. Soldiers sought to pick him up and carry him back. There were others who could not live with themselves after the first panic. They fell out of the retreat to join him. Others stopped to fire—a random emptying of magazines in the millet. Certain groups huddled when they saw him—mistaking a civilian for an officer—and covered their faces. Officers begged, prayed for the men to hold, but the torrent increased, individuals diving into the thick of the grain and leaking around behind. White showed beneath the beards, and white lips moved in prayer. The locked bayonets of the Russians had never seemed so dreadful as when low-held in the grain.... One beardless boy strode back jauntily, his lips puckered in a whistle.

The marvelous complexity of common men—this was the sum of all pictures, and the great realization of John Morning. His soul saw much that his eyes failed. The day was a marvelous cabinet of gifts—secret chambers to be opened in after years.

Now he was running low, having entered the zone of fire. He heard the steel in the grain; stems were snapped by invisible fingers; fox-tails lopped. He saw the slow leaning of stems half-cut.... Among the fallen, on a rising slope, men were crawling back; and here and there, bodies had been cast off, the cloth-covered husks of poor driven peasants. They had gone back to the soil, these bodies, never really belonging to the soldiery. It was only when they writhed that John Morning forgot himself and his work. The art of the dead was consummate.

The grain thinned. He had come to the end of Lowenkampf’s infantry. It had taken an hour and a half for the command to enter in order; less than a half-hour to dissipate. The rout had been like a cloud-burst.

And this was the battle. (Morning had to hold fast to the thought.) Long had he waited for this hour; months he had constructed the army in his story for this hour of demolition. It was enough to know that Lowenkampf had failed. Liaoyang, the battle, was lost.... Old Ritz went by weeping—he had been too old, they said; they had not wanted him to take his regiment to field. Yet he was perhaps the last to leave the field. Only his dead remained, and Colonel Ritz was not weeping for them....