Part 78 (2/2)

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.

<script>