The Last Shot Part 78

"That's about their last stand in the tangent, their last snarl on our soil," remarked the brigade commander.

"And we're raining sh.e.l.ls on it!" said his aide. "With our gla.s.ses we'll be able to watch the infantry go in."

"Yes, very well."

"We're all used to how it feels, now we'll see how it looks at a distance," piped one of the soldiers.

Not until he had shouted to them did they notice a division staff-officer who had come up from the road. He had a piece of astounding news to impart before he mentioned official business.

"What do you think of this?" he cried. "Nothing could stop him!

Lanstron--yes, Lanstron has gone into that charge with the African Braves!"

In these days, when units of a vast army in the same uniform, drilled in the same way, had become interchangeable parts of a machine, the African Braves still kept regimental fame. They had guarded the stretches of hot sand in one of the desert African colonies of the Browns; and they had served in the jungle in the region of Bodlapoo, which, by the way, was nominally the cause of the war. They had fought Mohammedan fanatics and black savages. It did not matter much to them when they died; now as well as ever. If they had mothers or sisters they were the secrets of each man's heart. The scapegrace youth, the stranded man of thirty who would forget his past, the born adventurer, the renegade come a cropper, the gentleman who had gambled, the remittance man whose remittance had stopped, the peasant's son who had run away from home, criminals and dreamers, some minor poets, some fairly good actors, scholarly fellows who chanted the "Odyssey," and both oath-ripping and taciturn, quiet-mannered fellows who could neither read nor write found a home in the African Braves' muster-roll. Their spirit of corps had a dervish fatalism. They had begged to have a share in the war and Partow had consented. In the night after their long journey, while Westerling's ram was getting its death-blow, they had detrained and started for the front. But the Grays were going as fast as the Braves, and they had been unable to get into action.

"Wait for us! We want to be in it!" cried their impatience. "We'll show you how they fight in Africa! Way for us!"

"Give them a chance!" said Lanstron.

This order a general of corps repeated to a general of division, who repeated it to a general of brigade.

"Give them a chance! Give them a chance!"

Reserves along the route of their advance knew them at a glance by their uniform, their Indian tan, and their jaunty swagger and gave a cheer as they pa.s.sed. They touched the chord of romance in the hearts of officers, who regarded them as an archaic survival which sentiment permitted in an isolated instance in Africa, where it excellently served. And officers looked at one another and shook their heads knowingly, out of the drear, hard experience in spade approaches, when they thought of that brilliant uniform as a target and of frontier tactics against ma.s.sed infantry and gun-fire.

"Once will be enough," said the cynical. "There won't be many left to tell the tale!"

And the African Braves knew how the army felt. They had a reputation out of Africa to sustain, this band of exotics among the millions of home-trained comrades. They didn't quite believe in all this machine business. Down the slopes with their veteran stride, loose-limbed and rhythmic, they went, past the line of the Galland house, with no fighting in sight. What if they had to return to Africa without firing a shot? The lugubrious prospect saddened them. They felt that a battle should be ordered on their account.

"You will take that regiment's place and it will fall back for support, while you storm the knoll beyond!" said the brigade commander, a twinkle in his eye.

"Is it much of a job, do you think?" asked the colonel of the Braves.

He had two fingers' length of service colors on his blouse. Lean he was and bony-jawed, with deep-set eyes. He loved every mother's son of the Braves, from illiterate to the chanter of the "Odyssey"; from peasant's son to penniless n.o.bleman, and thought any one of his privates rather superior to a home brigade commander.

"A pretty good deal. I think the Grays'll make a snappy resistance,"

said the brigade commander honestly. "The way we feel them out, they're getting back their wind, and for the first time we'll be fighting them up-hill. Yes, there's a sting in a retreating army's tail when it gets over its demoralization."

"Good!" observed the colonel as if he had a sweet taste in his mouth.

"And if you find it too stiff," the brigade commander went on, "why, I've seasoned veterans back of you who will press in to your support."

"Veterans, you say, and seasoned? I have some of my own, too! Thank you!

Thank you most kindly!" said the colonel, saluting stiffly, with a twist to the corner of his mouth. "When we need their help it will be to bury our dead," he added. "Can we do it alone? Will we?"

He pa.s.sed these inquiries along the line, which rose to the suggestion with different kinds of oaths and jests and grins and grim whistles. The scholar suddenly transferred his affections from the Greeks' phalanx to the Roman legions and began with the first verse of Virgil's "aeneid." He always made the change when action was near. "The Greeks for poetry and the Romans for war!" he declared, and could argue his company to sleep if anybody disputed him.

"I want to be in one fight. I haven't been under fire in the whole war,"

Lanstron explained to the colonel, who understood precisely the feeling.

"Lanstron is with us! The chief of staff is watching us!" ran the whisper from flank to flank of the Braves. It was not wonderful to them that he should be there. This complicated business of running a war over a telephone was not in the ken of their calculations. The colonel was with them, so all the generals ought to be. "We'll show Lanstron!"

determined the Braves. "We'll show him how we fight in Africa!"

"With the first rush you go to the bottom of the valley; with the second, take the knoll!" Such were the colonel's simple tactics. "But stop on the top of the knoll. Though we'd like to take the capital this afternoon, it's against orders."

Lanstron, dropping into place in the line, felt as if he were about to renew his youth. He had the elation of his early aeroplane flights, when he was likely to be hung on a church steeple. Now he was not sending men to death; he was having his personal fling. It was all very simple beside sitting at a desk with battle raging in the distance. He dodged at the first bullet that whistled near his head and looked rather sheepishly at the man next him, who was grinning.

"Lots of fellows do that with the first one, no matter how many times they've been under fire," said the comrade. "But if they do it with the second one--" He dropped the corners of his mouth with a significance that required no further comment to express his views on that kind of a soldier.

"I shan't!" said Lanstron; and he kept his word.

"I knew by the cut of your jib you wouldn't!" observed the Brave, speaking not to the chief of staff but to the man. What were chiefs of staff to him? Everybody on the firing-line was simply another Brave.

Lanstron liked the compliment. It pleased him better than those endowing him with military genius. It was free of rank and etiquette and selfishness.

Of such stuff were the Braves as Caesar's veterans who walloped the Belgae, the adventurous ruffians of Cortez, the swashbucklers who fought in Flanders, the followers of Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the regulars of the American Indian campaigns. When they rose to the charge with a yell, in a wave of scarlet and blue, flas.h.i.+ng with bra.s.s b.u.t.tons, their silken flag rippling in the front rank, they made a picture to please the romantic taste. Here on the brown background of the commonplace three millions of moderns was a patch of the color and glamour that story-tellers, poets, artists, and moving-picture men would choose as the theme of real military glory.

Intoxication of all the senses, of muscles and nerves, with the mesmerism of movement and burning desire which calls the imagination of youth to arms! The supreme moment of fury and splendid rush, which becomes the recollection to the survivor to be told from the knee to future generations in a way to make small boys love to play with soldiers! These men knew nothing except that they had legs and that ahead was a goal. Oaths and laughter were mingled in their souls; the energy of a delirium sped their steps. They were so many human missiles fired by an impulse, with too much initial velocity to stop at the bottom of the valley as the colonel had directed. Lord, no! Let's have the thing over with, bit in teeth! The common instinct of the living, who neither saw nor thought of those who fell, swept them up the slope.

Every man who survived was the whole regiment in himself; its pride, its gallantry, its inheritance in his keeping.

"Fiends of h.e.l.l and angels of heaven! We're here and we did it alone!"

gasped the winded, ragged line that reached the crest.

"I thought they would!" said the brigade commander, who had watched the charge through his gla.s.ses from an eminence. "But at what a cost! It was lucky for them that it was only a rear-guard resistance. However, it certainly thrills the imagination and it will be a good thing for Brown prestige in Africa."

"Why?" Marta heard the officers around her asking after their exclamations of amazement at the news that Lanstron was going in the charge. "Why should the chief of staff risk his life in this fas.h.i.+on?"

Marta knew. All her taunts about sending others to death from his office chair, uttered as the fugitive sarcasm of a mood, recurred in the merciless hammer-beat of recollection. For a moment she was aghast, speechless. Then the officers, occupied with the startling news, heard a voice, wrenched from a dry throat in anguish, saying:

"The telephone! Try to reach him! Tell him he must not!"

"We can hardly say 'must not' to a chief of staff," said the general automatically.

"Tell him I ask him not to! Try to reach him--try--you can try!"

"Yes, yes! Certainly!" exclaimed the general, turning to the telephone operator.

He had seen now what the younger men had seen at a glance. They were recalling Lanstron's relief at seeing her; how he had pa.s.sed them by to speak to her; the intensity of the two in their almost wordless meeting.

Her bloodless lips, the imploring pa.s.sion in her eyes, her quivering impatience told the rest.

"Division headquarters!" called the operator. "They're getting brigade headquarters," he added while he waited in silence. "Brigade headquarters says the Braves have no wire. It's too late. The charge is starting."

"So it is!" cried one of the subalterns. "Look! Look!"

Marta looked toward the rising ground this side of the knoll in time to see bayonets flash in the waning afternoon sunlight and disappear as they descended the slope.

"There! They're up on the other slope without stopping!" exclaimed the general. "Quick! Don't you want to see?" He offered his gla.s.ses to Marta.

"No, I can see well enough," she murmured, though the landscape was moving before her eyes in giddy waves.