Routledge rides alone

by Will Levington Comfort

This last referred to the dead and wounded which the hospital corps was now bringing back.... From out of the welter, a new charge formed and failed. Again—even Bingley was shaken by the slaughter and his organs stuck together—Nodzu hurled a third torrent of the Samurai up that unconquerable roll of earth. It curled like a feather in a flame, diminished, and faltered back....

The day was ending—Bingley’s gorgeous, memorable day. He had travelled twenty-five miles on foot; he had caught up with the Japanese army after five months in the field; he had seen Nodzu charge and Zurubaieff hold; he had seen the wounded who would not cry, and the dead who would not frown.

The whole was a veritable disease in his veins. The day had burned, devoured him. He was tired enough to sleep in a tree, chilled from spent energy; so hungry that he could have eaten horn or hoof; but over all he was mastered by the thought of Bingley and his work—the free cable, the story, the Thames, the battle, Bingley, the first and greatest story, acclaim of the world, the world by the horns! So his brain ran, and far back in his brain the films of carnage were sorted, filed, and labelled—living, wounded, dead; the voices of the Japanese as they ran, Russian-pits from which death spread, shrapnel emplacements which exploded hell; barbed entanglements spitting the Japanese for leisure-slaying, as the butcher-bird hangs up its living meat to keep it fresh for the hunger-time; the long, quick-moving, burnished guns that caught the sun, when the smoke cleared, and reflected it like a burning-glass—such were the details of the hideous panorama in Bingley’s brain.

The chief of his troubles was that Liaoyang still held. He had always laughed at the Russians, and looked forward to the time when he should watch the British beat them back forever from India. The valor of the stolid, ox-like holding angered him now. Suppose Liaoyang should not be taken! It would spoil his story and hold him in the field longer than he cared to stay. He had but scant provisions for two days. He planned to be off for the free cable to-morrow night.

“It’s going to rain,” he gasped, as he let himself down at nightfall into his ravine. He heard the nicker of the horse below. It did not come to him with any spirit of welcome, for Bingley was sufficient unto himself, but with the thought that he must keep the beast alive for the race to the cable after the battle.

“Yes, it’s going to rain,” he repeated. “You can count on rain after artillery like to-day.... Living God! I thought I knew war before, but it was all sparrow-squabbling until to-day!”

He found his saddle-bags safely in the cache where he had left them—this with a gulp of joy, for the little food he had was in them. Crackers, sardines, a drink of brandy that set his empty organism to drumming like a partridge. It also whetted his appetite to a paring edge, but he spared his ration and smoked his hunger away. Then in the last drab of day, and in the rain, he cut grasses and branches, piling them within the reach of his horse. A stream of water began to trickle presently down the rocks when the shower broke. Bingley drank deeply, and caught many ponchos full afterward for his mount. Later he fell asleep, shivering, and dreamed that the devil was lashing the world’s people—a nation at a time—into pits of incandescence. The savagery of the dream aroused him, and he became conscious of a strangeness in his ears. It was the silence, and it pained like rarefied air. Wet, stiffened, deathly cold, he fell asleep again.

The next day, the thirty-first, and the worst of the battle, Bingley curved about Oku’s rear to the railroad which marked for him a short cut to the outer world. Another, that day, watched Oku closely as he forced the Russian right wing to face the Japanese, but Bingley, even from a distance, was charged and maddened by the dynamics of the action....

Late in the afternoon, a little to the west of the railway, he stopped to finish his food and gather forage for his horse, when over the crest of a low hill appeared a tall human figure. The Japanese put no such giants in the field, and Bingley was startled by a certain familiarity of movement.

The man approached, a white man. Chill, weakness, and hatred welled suddenly in Bingley’s veins. He was not alone on the road to a free cable. The man he feared most in the world was entered in the race with him—the man he had seen last at the Army and Navy reception, and roughed and insulted, nearly three years before.