The Last Shot Part 25

"Like a top!" chimed in pasty-faced Peterkin, the valet's son, to be in fas.h.i.+on.

"I didn't sleep much myself; in fact, not at all," said Hugo Mallin.

"Oh, ho!" groaned Pilzer, the butcher's son, with a broad grin that made a crease in the liver patch on his cheek.

"You see, it's a new experience for me," Hugo explained in a drawl, his face drawn as a mask. "I'm not so used to war as you other fellows are.

I'm not so brave!"

There was a forced laugh because Hugo appeared droll, and when he appeared droll it was the proper thing to laugh. Besides, in the best humor there is a grain of truth, whether you see it or not. This time a number saw it quite clearly.

"I was thinking how ridiculous we all are," Hugo went on without change of tone or expression, "grovelling here on our stomachs and pretending that we slept when we didn't and that we want to be killed when we don't!"

"White feather again!" Pilzer exclaimed.

"Oh, shut up!" snapped the doctor's son irritably. "Let Hugo talk. He's only ga.s.sing. It's so monotonous lying here that any kind of nonsense is better than growling."

"Yes, yes!" the others agreed.

Hugo's outburst of the previous evening was forgotten. They welcomed anything that broke the suspense. Let the regimental wag make a little fun any way that he could. As the officers had withdrawn somewhat to the rear for breakfast, there was no constraint.

"I was thinking how I'd like to go out and shake hands with the Browns,"

said Hugo. "That's the way fencers and pugilists do before they set to.

It seems polite and sportsmanlike, indicating that there's no prejudice."

There was a ripple of half-hearted merriment punctuated by exclamations.

"What a fool idea!"

"How do all your notions get into your head, Hugo?"

"Sometimes by squinting at the moonlight and counting odd numbers; sometimes by knowing that anything that's different is ridiculous; and sometimes by looking for tangent truths out of professorial ruts," Hugo observed with a sort of erudite discursiveness which was the rank dissimulation of a hypocrite to Pilzer and wholly confusing to Peterkin, not to say a draught on mental effort for many of the others. "For instance, I got a good one from two fellows of the Browns whom I met on the road the first day we arrived. They were reservists. We were soon talking together and so peaceably that I was sceptical if they were Browns at all. So I determined on a test. I told them I was from a distant province and hadn't travelled much and wouldn't they please take off their hats. They consented very good-naturedly."

"Oh, good old Hugo! He got one on the Browns!"

"I'd like to have been there to see it!"

"And when they took off their hats, what then?"

"Why, I said: 'This isn't convincing at all.'" Hugo's drawl paused for a second while interest developed. "'You haven't any horns! Haven't you any forked tails, either? Or are they curled up nicely inside your trousers' legs?'"

"Whew! But they must have felt cheap to have been got in that way!"

"And old Hugo looking so solemn!"

"Just like he does now!"

But the judge's son said under his breath, "Very pretty!" and the doctor's son, who was next him in the ranks, nodded understandingly.

"It seems they had checked their horns and tails at the frontier," Hugo continued, "and, as I had left mine hanging in the rifle racks at the barracks, we got on together like real human beings. I found they could speak my language better than my lesson-book try at theirs--yes, as well as I can speak it myself--and that made it all the easier. After a while I mentioned the war. They were very amiable and they didn't begin to call me a swill-eating land-shark or any other of the pretty names I've heard they are so fond of using. 'We want to keep what is ours,' they said. 'Your side will have to start the fight by crossing the line. We shall not!"'

"Because they know they'll be licked!" put in Pilzer hotly.

"No, we may beat them in fighting," agreed Hugo, "but these two fellows had me beaten on the argument!"

"They hauled down our flag! They insulted us in their despatches! They quibble! They're the perfidious Browns!" cried big Eugene Aronson, speaking the lesson taught him by the newspapers, which had it from the premier.

"There, he's got you again, Gene!"

"Yes, you funny old simpleton! You are almost too easy!"

There was something of the vivacity of the barrack-room banter in the exclamations at Eugene's expense. Yet they were not the same. The look on no man's face was the same. The humorist was silent.

"What next, Hugo?"

He half stared at them, and his mask was not solemn but tragic.

"I was thinking how men work their courage up, as if patriotism were a Moloch of which they were afraid," he said. "How in order to get killed we go out to kill others, when right is on their side! How you, Armand, or you, Eugene, might be dead before to-morrow! How--."

"The bullet is not made that will get me!" exclaimed Eugene, with a swelling breath from his bellows-like lungs.

"Take him home to mother!" groaned Pilzer.

"That will do for you, Hugo Mallin!" came another interruption, a sharp one from Captain Fraca.s.se, who had returned un.o.bserved from the rear in time to overhear Hugo's remarks. "And that's the way to talk, Aronson and Pilzer. As for you, Mallin, I've a mind to put you under arrest and send you back for a coward! A coward--do you hear?"

"Ah-h!" breathed Pilzer in a guttural of satisfaction.

Hugo crimsoned at first in confusion, then he looked frankly and unflinchingly at the captain.

"Very well, sir!" he said with a certain dignity which Fraca.s.se, who was a good deal of a martinet, found very irritating.

"No, that would suit you too well!" Fraca.s.se declared. "You shall stay!

You shall do the duty for which your country trained you and take your share of the chances."

"Yes, sir!" answered Hugo. "But won't you," he asked persuasively and with the wondering inquiry of the suggestion that had sprung into his heretic brain, "won't you ask the men if there are not some here who really, in their hearts, the logic of their hearts--which is often better than brain logic--do not believe just as I do?"

"Have you gone insane? There are none!" In the impulse of anger that swept his cheeks with a red wave Fraca.s.se half drew his sword as if he would strike Hugo. "And, Mallin, you are a marked man. I shall watch you! I'll have the lieutenants and sergeants watch you. At the first sign of flunking I'll make an example of you!"

"Yes, sir," answered Hugo, with the automatic deference of private to officer but with a reserved and studious inquiry that made the captain bite his lip.

"I'll have Aronson and Pilzer watch you, too!" Fraca.s.se added.

"Yes, sir!" said Pilzer promptly.

Then, under the restraint of the captain's presence, there was a silence that endured. The men were left to the sole resource of their thoughts and observation of their surroundings. They were lying in a pasture facing the line of white posts whose tops ran in an even row over level ground. On the other side of the boundary was a wheat-field. Here a farmer had commenced his fall ploughing. His plough was in the furrow where he had left it when he unhitched his team for the day, before an orderly had come to tell him that he must move out of his house overnight. The wheat stubble swept on up to a knoll in the distance.

All the landscape in front of Fraca.s.se's company seemed to have been deserted; no moving figures were anywhere in sight; no sign of the enemy's infantry. No trains came or went along the lines of steel into the mountain tunnel, which had been mined at a dozen points by the Browns. No vehicles and no foot-pa.s.sengers dotted the highway into the town. Over the mountains and over the plain, planes and dirigibles moved in wide circles restively, watching for a signal as hawks watch for prey. Suspense this--suspense of such a swift vibration that it was like a taut G string of a violin under the bow!

Faintly the town clock was heard striking the hour. From eight to nine and nine to ten Fraca.s.se's men waited; waited until the machine was ready and Westerling should throw in the clutch; waited until the troops were in place for the first move before he hurled his battalions forward. Every p.a.w.n of flesh facing the white posts had a thousand thoughts whirling in such a medley that he could be said to have no thought at all, only an impression juggled by destiny. No one would have confessed what he felt, while physical inactivity gave free rein to mental activity. That thing of a nation's nightmare; that thing for which generations had drilled without its materializing; that thing of speculation, of hazard, of horror; that thing of quick action and long-enduring consequences was coming.