Supper was over, and they had tossed on a decayed log to keep up the fire. A nest of ants was presently driven forth by the heat from the soft heart of the wood. They found themselves hemmed in flame and turned back, as Peter thought, to seek the treacherous shelter of the nest again. It was not so; they were wiser than that, and marched forth in scores once more, each carrying an egg in its jaws. Spenski swung the end of the log out to the grass for them to make good their retiring. It was all very sane and admirable. Peter respected them....
The dead were with them. They had not learned to forget. Spenski would whimper in his sleep. The days did not fill him, wearied his body but other faculties and potencies were restless at night. This man who could grind a lens so that a line from the center of the earth to the center of the sun would pass through it without chromatic aberration, was more shocked than the other three by the cursory killing of the days, his imagination intoxicated and sleep perverted. His companion who imagined himself of coarser and heavier texture often placed his hand upon the dreaming one. Spenski would start, open his eyes and say, “Thanks, Samarc.”
Continual rocking through the long days, and the rumbling of the earth from the artillery forward. A mountain country of sharply cool nights, of cool bright days—the scent of cedar and balsam, good water, steady skirmishing—food just a bit scarce so that the peasants snapped and bolted, showing sharp about the eyes. It was not hunger—just the lean kind of fare. Peter often watched the halted columns at night as the men sprang to the feeding. Supper fires burst forth at the drop of the rifles. Not so raw now, the Warsaw contingent, a military eye would remark—getting ripe, in fact.
A week afterward, Boylan reported at supper that they would be permitted to ride with the battery on the following day. In the meantime they had not seen nor heard of the other pair. Fighting and marching from dawn to nightfall usually; human nature refused effort after that. They were so near dead at night that they laughed about it, and felt their faces in embarrassment, sharp-boned and unfamiliar as the faces of the dead. Mowbray's was still clean shaven. Young Dabnitz, the exquisite of the staff, and a rather brilliant young Russian, was the only other who had kept his razors in order. Perhaps a woman ruled his heart, as Berthe Wyndham ruled Mowbray's.
Big Belt had lost his last reservation about his companion. He gave everything to Peter that he had given to Lonegan and something more—for the field called a little more, and perhaps Peter called a little more. The extent of Boylan's loyalty had nothing to do with words or matters of conduct so far, but it was a huge affair, a suggestion of which came to the younger man from time to time and humbled him.
Twice during the first fortnight, Boylan had asked if this were positively his first venture into the field with troops. “The reason I ask,” he explained later, “is that you appear to have been on the job before.”
This would have been a matter interesting to the Old Man of The States, according to Lonegan's story.
“I miss the little guy,” said Boylan, referring to Spenski. They were anticipating the next day with the battery.
“I miss Samarc, too,” said Peter.
Romanceless, remorseless routine. The day that followed was their hardest, for they were pressing the Austrians, taking their punishment but inflicting punishment, as if called of God to extinguish a nation. The face of the world seemed turned from them, in Peter's fancy. He marveled at what seemed the swift disintegration of an ancient worldly establishment like Austria—going down unsung. It was not like a country losing its identity, though that had to do with the facts; but rather like a shadow passing, to be followed, not by sunlight, but by another shadow of different contour and texture.