Part 42 (2/2)

The fort.i.tude to endure their contempt, their enmity, their ostracism would not save those dear to him in his distant provincial home from humiliation and heart-break. There was the rub: his father and mother and his sweetheart. He was an only son. His sweetheart was a G.o.ddess to his eyes. What purpose is there in the rebellion of a grain of sand on the seash.o.r.e, in the insubordination of one of five million soldiers?

Hadn't Westerling answered all doubts with the aphorism, ”It is a mistake for a soldier to think too much”?

Thus pondering, in the company of the stars, Hugo, who had so many thoughts of his own that he led a double life, awaited the dawn. When the church spire became outlined in the rosy, breaking light of the east, he thought how much it was like the church spire of his own town.

He saw that he was in what had been a beautiful, tenderly cared-for old garden before soldiery had ruthlessly trampled its flowers.

Raising his head to a level with the terrace wall--the second terrace was low--he could see the piles of sand-bags on the first terrace only twenty feet away and an old house that belonged to the garden. The location appealed to him as his glance swept over plain and mountains glistening with dew. It must be glorious to come down from the veranda at daybreak or day's end to look at the flowers at your feet and the horizon in the distance.

”Could little White Liver sleep away from home and mamma? Did he long for mamma to tuck him among the goose feathers, with a sweet biscuit in his paddy?” inquired Pilzer awakening.

Hugo looked around at Pilzer in his quizzical fas.h.i.+on.

”Jake, you are unnecessarily uprooting an aster with the toe of your boot,” he said.

Pilzer had a torrent of abuse ready to his tongue's end when Fraca.s.se interrupted with a hoa.r.s.e, whispered warning:

”Silence, Pilzer! You talk too much.”

Now the irascible Pilzer had a further grudge against Hugo for having made him the object of a reprimand.

”You!” he whispered, when the captain's back was turned, calling Hugo a foul name.

This cut through even Hugo's philosophy and the blood went in a hot rush to his cheeks; but he slipped on his pack, as the others were doing, and readjusted his cartridge-box. Word was pa.s.sed to make ready for another rush, and soon the men knew that yesterday was not part of the hideous nightmare which had kept their legs quivering mechanically, as in the charge, while they slept, but that the nightmare was a continuing reality and the peace of morning a dream.

Under cover of the rain of sh.e.l.l fire on Dellarme's position, already described, they mounted the wall of the second terrace and ran to the wall of the first terrace. They had expected to suffer terribly, but pa.s.sed safely underneath a sheet of bullets that caught other sections of their regiment on the lower terraces. Over their heads were the muzzles of the Browns' rifles, blazing toward the road, while in the direction of the tower they saw the first charge of another regiment melting like snow under sprays of flame. They could not fire at Dellarme's men and Dellarme's men could not fire at them without leaning over the parapet. They could not go ahead. There was no room to their rear, for the reserves behind the third terrace had rushed up to the second terrace; those behind the fourth to the third; and still others across the road to the fourth, in successive waves.

With a welter of slaughter around them, Fraca.s.se's men were in something of the position that little Peterkin had enjoyed in the sh.e.l.l crater.

They ate a breakfast of biscuits, washed down by water from their canteens. Trickles of sand from bullet holes sprinkled their shoulders and they had enough resiliency of spirit to grin when a stream of sand from a bag torn by a sh.e.l.l burst ran down the back of Pilzer's neck. It was rather amusing to hear Jake growling as he twisted in his blouse.

Hugo caught the humor of it in another sense, for the same sh.e.l.l burst threw a piece of brown sleeve matted in a piece of flesh among the flowers. The next instant he saw a squad of Grays who sprang up to rush toward the linden stumps go down under the hose stream from the automatic with the precision of having been struck by an electric current. Not occupied, as he had been yesterday, with the business of keeping to his part as a physical cog in the machine, he was seeing war as a spectator--as Marta saw it, as only a privileged few ever see it.

Society, he was thinking, took the trouble to bring boys through the whooping-cough and measles, pay for clothing and doctors' bills, and, while it complained about business losses and safe-guarded trees and harvests and buildings, destroyed the most valuable product of all with a spatter of bullets from a rapid-firer.

The position of him and his comrades struck him as tragically ludicrous.

Were they grown men? Had they reasoning minds? Were they of the great races that had given the world steam-power, electric power, anaesthesia, and antiseptics? Had they the religion of Christ? Had they an inheritance of great ages of art, literature, music, and philosophy? Did they guard the treasures of their libraries and galleries? Would they shudder in indignation if some one sent a bullet through the Sistine Madonna, or throw a bomb at the Venus de Milo, or struck a rare Chinese porcelain into fragments with an axe?

Yes; oh, yes!

Here were beings created in the likeness of their Maker, whose criterion of superiority over other animals was in these symbols and not in that of tooth, claw, or talon, disembowelling their fellow creatures. Here were beings huddled together like a lot of puppies or cubs on an island in the midst of carnage which was not a visitation of the Almighty, but of their own making. And suicide and homicide were against the law in the lands of both the Browns and the Grays!

The whole business was monstrous, lunatic, inconceivable. Yet he himself was one of the actors, without the character or the courage to break free of the machine which was taking lives with the irresponsibility of a baby hammering at the jewels of a watch. The fact that he knew better made him far more culpable, he thought, than little Peterkin or any of his comrades. Yes, he was despicable; he was a coward!

All were lulled into a sense of security except Captain Fraca.s.se, who had a set frown of apprehension which came of a professional knowledge not theirs. Little Peterkin, warmed by the autumn sunlight, began to believe in his star. If there were to be a special dispensation providing sh.e.l.l craters and the reverse walls of redoubts for him, he might retain his reputation for heroism.

The sand still working its way downward between Pilzer's bare skin and his unders.h.i.+rt irritated him to unusual restlessness of ambition for glory and bronze crosses. He was the strong man of his company, now that Eugene Aronson was dead. He must prove his importance. An inspiration made him leap to his feet. This brought his head within a foot of the top of the parapet, with an enemy's rifle barrel in easy reach. Fortunately, or unfortunately, he was the type who must precede action with a boast; a bite with a growl. Let all see that he was about to do a gallant, clever thing.

”Watch me s.n.a.t.c.h that rifle!” he announced.

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