The Last Shot Part 74

"Oh, it was not personal! I did not think of myself as a person or of you as one--only of principles and of thousands of others--to end the killing--to save our country to its people! Oh, I'm sorry and, personally, I'm horrible--horrible!" she called after him in a broken, quavering gust of words which he heard confusedly in tragic mockery.

He made no answer; he did not even look around. Head bowed and hardly seeing the path, he permitted the aide to choose the way, which lay across the boundary of the Galland estate.

They had pa.s.sed the stumps of the linden-trees and were in the vacant lot on the other side, when something white fluttered toward him, rustled by the breeze that carried it, and lay still almost at his feet.

He saw his own picture on the front page of a newspaper, with the caption, "His Excellency, Field-Marshal Hedworth Westerling, Chief of Staff of Our Victorious Army." He stared at the picture and the picture stared at him as if they knew not each other. A racking shudder swept through him. He turned his face with a kind of resolution, appealing in its starkness, toward the battle and his glance rested on the battery and the shattered regiment of infantry in the fields opposite the Galland gate, under a canopy of shrapnel smoke, bravely holding their ground.

"I should be there. That is the place for me!" he exclaimed with a trace of his old forcefulness.

The aide's lips parted as if to speak in protest, but they closed in silence, while a glance of deep human understanding, dissolving the barriers of caste, pa.s.sed between him and the valet, eloquent of their approval and their loyal readiness to share the fate of their fallen chief.

The canopy of shrapnel smoke grew thicker; the infantry began to break.

"But, no!" said Westerling. "The place for a chief of staff is at his headquarters."

XLV

THE RETREAT

Marta remained where Westerling had left her, rooted to the ground by the monstrous spell of the developing panorama of seemingly limitless movement. With each pa.s.sing minute there must be a hundred acts of heroism which, if isolated in the glare of a day's news, would make the public thrill. At the outset of the war she had seen the Browns, as part of a preconceived plan, in cohesive rear-guard resistance, with every detail of personal bravery a utilized factor of organized purpose. Now she saw defence, inchoate and fragmentary, each part acting for itself, all deeds of personal bravery lost in a swirl of disorganization. That was the pity of it, the helplessness of engineers and of levers when the machine was broken; the warning of it to those who undertake war lightly.

The Browns' rifle flashes kept on steadily weaving their way down the slopes, their reserves pressing close on the heels of the skirmishers in greedy swarms. A heavy column of Brown infantry was swinging in toward the myriad-legged, writhing gray caterpillar on the pa.s.s road and many field-batteries were trotting along a parallel road. Their plan developed suddenly when a swath of gun-fire was laid across the pa.s.s road at the mouth of the defile, as much as to say: "Here we make a gate of death!" At the same time the head of the Brown infantry column flashed its bayonets over the crest of a hill toward the point where the sh.e.l.ls were bursting. These men minded not the desperate, scattered rifle-fire into their ranks. Before their eyes was the prize of a panic that grew with their approach. Kinks were out of legs stiffened by long watches. The hot breath of pursuit was in their nostrils, the fever of victory in their blood.

In the defile, the impulse of one Gray straggler, who shook a handkerchief aloft in fatalistic submission to the inevitable, became the impulse of all. Soon a thousand white signals of surrender were blossoming. As the firing abruptly ceased, Marta heard the faint roar of the mighty huzzas of the hunters over the size of their bag.

In the area visible to Marta was the strife of forces larger than the largest that Napoleon ever led in battle; as large as fought the decisive battle in the last war of the Grays. But here was only a section of the raging whole from frontier end to frontier end. The immensity of it! All the young manhood of a nation employed! Marta ceased to see any particular incident of the scene. All was confused in a red mist--red as blood. She, the one being in that landscape who was a detached observer, felt herself condemned to watch the war go on forever.

An edge of the curtain of mist lifted. Sight and mind and soul concentrated on the nearest horror. She saw the whirlpool at the foot of the garden, horses and men in a straggle among dead and wounded, which had grown fiercer now that the portion of the retreat that had not been cut off in the defile pressed forward the more madly. She had thought of herself as ashes; as an immovable creature of flayed nerves, incapable of raising her hand to change the march of events. But the misery that she saw intimately, almost within stone's throw of her door, broke the spell with its appeal. The hectic energy of battle speeded her steps in the blessed oblivion of action.

Some doctors of different regiments thrown together in the havoc of remnants of many organizations, with the help of hospital-corps men, were trying to extricate the wounded from among the dead. They heard a woman's voice and saw a woman's face. They did not wonder at her presence, for there was nothing left in the world for them to wonder at.

Had an imp from h.e.l.l or an angel from heaven appeared, or a shower of diamonds fallen from the sky, they would not have been surprised. Their duty was clear; there was work of their kind to do, endless work. Units of the broken machine, in the instinct of their calling they struggled with the duty nearest at hand.

"What do you need? What can I do?" Marta asked.

"Rest, shelter, safety for these poor fellows," answered one of the doctors.

"There is the house--our house!" said Marta.

"My G.o.d! Aren't you men?" bellowed an officer. "Get away from the road!

Come out here! Form line! You--you; I mean you!"

"You who can walk--you who aren't hurt, you cowards, give us a hand with the wounded!" shouted another doctor.

The soldiers were deaf to commands, but they heard a feminine voice above the oaths and groans and heavy breathing and rustle of pressing bodies and thrusting arms; a feminine voice, clear and steadying in that orgy of male ferocity. It was like a chemical precipitate clearing muddy water. Their wild glances saw a woman's features in exaltation and in her eyes something as definite as the fire of command. She was shaming them for their unmanliness; shaming their panic--the foolish panic at a theatre exit--and giving orders as if that were her part and theirs was to obey; a woman to soldiers, the weak s.e.x to the strong. They did obey, under the spell of the amazing fact of her presence, in the relief of having some simple human purpose to cling to.

After the work was begun they needed no urging to carry the wounded up the terrace steps; and men who had knocked down and trampled on the wounded were gentle with them now, under the guidance of better impulses. How could they falter directed by a woman unmindful of occasional sh.e.l.ls and bullet whistles? They begged her to go back to the house; this was no place for her.

But Marta did not want safety. Danger was sweet; it was expiation. She was helping, actually helping; that was enough. She envied the peaceful dead--they had no nightmares--as she aided the doctors in separating the bodies that were still breathing from those that were not; and she steeled herself against every ghastly sight save one, that of a man lying with his legs pinned under a wagon body. His jaw had been shot away. Slowly he was bleeding to death, but he did not realize it. He realized nothing in his delirium except the nature of his wound. He was dipping his finger in the cavity and, dab by dab, writing "Kill me!" on the wagon body. It sent reeling waves of red before her eyes. Then a sh.e.l.l burst near her and a doctor cried out:

"She's. .h.i.t!"

But Marta did not hear him. She heard only the dreadful crack of the splitting shrapnel jacket. She had a sense of falling, and that was all.

The next that she knew she was in a long chair on the veranda and the vague shadows bending over her gradually identified themselves as her mother and Minna.

"I remember when you were telling of the last war that you didn't swoon at the sight of the wounded, mother," Marta whispered.

"But I was not wounded," replied Mrs Galland.

Marta ceased to be only a consciousness swimming in a haze. With the return of her faculties, she noticed that both her mother and Minna were looking significantly at her forearm; so she looked at it, too. It was bandaged.

"A cut from a shrapnel fragment," said a doctor. "Not deep," he added.

"Do I get an iron cross?" she asked, smiling faintly. It was rather pleasant to be alive.

"All the crosses--iron and bronze and silver and gold!" he replied.

"You forgot platinum," she said almost playfully, as she found nerves, muscles, and bones intact after that drop over a precipice into a black chasm. It was like the Marta of the days before she had undertaken to reform all creation, her mother was thinking. "Did I help any?" she asked seriously.

"Well, I should say so!" declared the doctor. "I should say so!" he repeated. "You did the whole business down there by the gate."

"Yes, the whole business! I brought it all on--all! I--" She flung a wild gesture at the landscape and then buried her face in her hands.

"Yes, I did the whole business I--I played, smiled, lied! That awful sight--and he might not have been writing 'kill me' if I--"

The doctor grasped her shoulders to keep her from rising. He spoke the first soothing words that came to mind. There was another shudder, an effort at control, and her hands dropped and she was looking up with a dull steadiness.

"I'm not going mad!" she exclaimed. "What happened to--to that man who was pleading for death? Did any one who had been engaged in killing men who wanted to live kill the one who wanted to die?"

"The sh.e.l.l burst that wounded you finished him," said the doctor.

"Which, of course, was quite according to the tenets of civilization, which wouldn't have allowed it to be done as an open act of mercy!" said Marta. "But that is only satire. It is of no service," she added, rising to a sitting posture to look around.

The struggle by the gate was over. All the uninjured had made good their escape. A Red Cross flag floated above the wounded and the debris of overturned wagons. Brown skirmishers were descending the near-by slopes and crossing the path of the cavalry charge. Signal-corps men were spinning out their wires. A regiment of guns were being emplaced behind a foot-hill. A returning Brown dirigible swept over the town. All firing except occasional scattered shots had ceased in the immediate vicinity, though in the distance could be heard the snarl of the firmer resistance that the Grays were making at some other point. The Galland house, for the time being, was isolated--in possession of neither side.

"Isn't there something else I can do to help with the wounded?" Marta asked. She longed for action in order to escape her thoughts.

"You've had a terrible shock--when you are stronger," said the doctor.

"When you have had something to eat and drink," observed the practical Minna authoritatively.

Marta would not have the food brought to her. She insisted that she was strong enough to accompany Minna to the tower. While Minna urged mouthfuls down Marta's dry throat as she sat outside the door of the sitting-room with her mother a number of weary, dust-streaked faces, with feverish energy in their eyes, peered over the hedge that bounded the garden on the side toward the pa.s.s. These scout skirmishers of Stransky's men of the 53d Regiment of the Browns made beckoning gestures as to a crowd, before they sprang over the hedge and ran swiftly, watchfully, toward the linden stumps, closely followed by their comrades. Soon the whole garden was overrun by the lean, businesslike fellows, their glances all ferret-like to the front.

"Look, Minna!" exclaimed Marta. "The giant who carried the old man in pickaback the first night of the war!"

"Yes, the bold impudence of him!" said Minna. "As if there was nothing that could stand in his way and what he wanted he would have!"