“A little while ago Spenski found his girl, and I would have withdrawn—for that is the high test,” Samarc resumed. “But Spenski managed to keep us both without strain.... And then the war came along. A blight fell upon all workmanship in an hour. I had been on the military side of things from a boy, a matter of training and heredity. Of course, I would go. Spenski looked around the shop when I told him this. It was stricken, the machinery cranking down, the faces of the men white and troubled. 'I'll go, too,' said he.... I reminded him of her.... 'She wouldn't be interested in a chap who remained at home,' he said.... I told him of the big plants in Switzerland and America, where he could be of great value, but he was not tempted. 'I want to go if they'll take me in your battery,' was his last word on the matter.
“Of course I saw to that, but there's no work here, and there won't be, that can bring out Spenski's real values. Think of using such a man to feed the hopper of a rapid-fire piece.... But it's good to have him along. Spenski's a hard habit to break.”
That night, when Boylan and Mowbray were together again, but a little apart from the others, Big Belt said:
“Say, Peter, that little Spenski is a card. A good little chap, smart and modest. I like him.”
“I found Samarc worth cultivating, too,” said Peter.
Chapter 2
Marching south along the Vistula with the old-fashioned army—no airships, nothing that intensely puzzled Mowbray in this service—that is, in the exteriors of it—nothing but earth poundage and earth power, a game that had much to do with earth and not with heaven. Seven quiet days of marching in splendid summer weather, the raw peasant soldiery well fed and comfortable, becoming a unit, all outbreak of separate consciousness anywhere more and more impossible, hardening to the peculiar day's work. They were used to heavy work, but this was a particular task that needed specific hardening of feet and lungs; also the personal idea in each breast required numbing. The physical aim was to make men light for heavy work; to give them a taste of the joy and the true health of the field—before the entrainments, the haste and the fighting; but the psychological purpose was to make each atom forget itself, to weave it well into the fabric of the mass. Kohlvihr's division had to be moved; very well, let the movement gather the values of practice marching as well.
A raw division, with a scattering of Poles and Finns mixed with the straight Slav peasantry and regarded by the Russian war office, as Peter Mowbray understood at once, a ticklish proposition. The cement for this new service was “green” as yet; it had to set, required frequent wettings of fine humor and affiliation. The marvel to Mowbray was that the thousands fell for it. They had practically all left something that was life and death to them—land, labor, women, children. Each had established the beginnings at least of a personal connection in the world, and this relation had to be rubbed out. What had they been promised to take its place? Freedom, doubtless. But intrinsically they were free men.