Books: Red Fleece
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Will Levington Comfort >> Red Fleece
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Continual rocking through the long days, and the rumbling of the earth
from the artillery forward. A mountain country of sharply cool nights,
of cool bright days--the scent of cedar and balsam, good water, steady
skirmishing--food just a bit scarce so that the peasants snapped and
bolted, showing sharp about the eyes. It was not hunger--just the lean
kind of fare. Peter often watched the halted columns at night as the
men sprang to the feeding. Supper fires burst forth at the drop of the
rifles. Not so raw now, the Warsaw contingent, a military eye would
remark--getting ripe, in fact.
A week afterward, Boylan reported at supper that they would be
permitted to ride with the battery on the following day. In the
meantime they had not seen nor heard of the other pair. Fighting and
marching from dawn to nightfall usually; human nature refused effort
after that. They were so near dead at night that they laughed about
it, and felt their faces in embarrassment, sharp-boned and unfamiliar
as the faces of the dead. Mowbray's was still clean shaven. Young
Dabnitz, the exquisite of the staff, and a rather brilliant young
Russian, was the only other who had kept his razors in order. Perhaps
a woman ruled his heart, as Berthe Wyndham ruled Mowbray's.
Big Belt had lost his last reservation about his companion. He gave
everything to Peter that he had given to Lonegan and something more--
for the field called a little more, and perhaps Peter called a little
more. The extent of Boylan's loyalty had nothing to do with words or
matters of conduct so far, but it was a huge affair, a suggestion of
which came to the younger man from time to time and humbled him.
Twice during the first fortnight, Boylan had asked if this were
positively his first venture into the field with troops. "The reason I
ask," he explained later, "is that you appear to have been on the job
before."
This would have been a matter interesting to the Old Man of _The
States_, according to Lonegan's story.
"I miss the little guy," said Boylan, referring to Spenski. They were
anticipating the next day with the battery.
"I miss Samarc, too," said Peter.
Romanceless, remorseless routine. The day that followed was their
hardest, for they were pressing the Austrians, taking their punishment
but inflicting punishment, as if called of God to extinguish a nation.
The face of the world seemed turned from them, in Peter's fancy. He
marveled at what seemed the swift disintegration of an ancient worldly
establishment like Austria--going down unsung. It was not like a
country losing its identity, though that had to do with the facts; but
rather like a shadow passing, to be followed, not by sunlight, but by
another shadow of different contour and texture.
"We put such store by names," he muttered, as he watched the Austrian
infantry give way before them, "and yet, the world will get on with
other names just the same."
...There had been no chance for talk. They had merely pressed the
hands of their friends, something darkly melancholy about Samarc, as
if his eyes were in deep shadow, and something luminous in the eyes
that shone from the haggard face of Little Spenski. They looked
forward to the night, as men famished and athirst in a pit listen to
the toil of rescuers. Almost the last thing that Peter remembered was
that the moon came up before the sun had set. The rapid-fire battery
was at work on a hot smoky hill, the shrapnel and larger pieces still
higher, and the great masses of infantry moving below among the wind-
driven hazes of the valley, their long necklaces, of white puffs,
showing and vanishing.
Mowbray's ears were deadened to all sounds save from the immediate
machine-guns and the big hounds above; to his eyes the swaying strings
of infantry smoke-puffs in the valley were spectral and soundless.
The Russians had taken the little town of Judenbach in the early
afternoon, but the Austrians gave them a stand two miles beyond,
finding solid position in a range of craggy hills. The Russians had
not cared to leave them there over night, but the dislodgment proved
difficult. The unlimbering of the batteries toward the end of the day
on the shoulders of a thickly-wooded mass (from which Peter watched
the infantry and the moonrise in daylight), was the final effort of
the day to drive the enemy farther afield from Judenbach.
The two infantries were contending; gray Russian lines in the bottom
land and already advancing up the slopes. Day after day, smitten and
replenished--tillers of land becoming the dung of the land. Mowbray
had always pitied the infantry, and watched them now with unspeakable
awe and depression--moving up the slopes, lost in their white
necklaces of skirmish-fire, sprayed upon with steel vomit from the
Austrian machines.
Samarc's battery was idle. It was often so, Boylan reported, when the
enemy's duplicate pieces were busy.
Now withering--those gray Russian lines. They diminished, gave way, a
thin ghostly pattern of the whole, falling back. An Austrian sortie of
yellow-brown men to finish the task.
"That's _our_ cue," Big Belt whispered.
The officers were already finding the range and fall. Samarc's machine
was set, before his superior spoke. Peter saw what a week had done for
him. Samarc seemed old at the task, already to have grown old. Spenski
at the hopper--and the mutilating racket on. Between fire, Peter could
not hold in mind the inconceivable magnitude and velocity of these
sounds. His brain seemed to plow under, as it does the great events of
pain, the impress of hideous suffering which the proximity of the
machines caused. Yet at every firing the damnable things hurt him
more. Fast beyond count, as the threads break in a strip of canvas
torn with one movement--yet each crackling thread here meant projected
steel.
They saw their work on the Austrian infantry lines. Yet always more
infantry would come forth, and in the silence following the machines,
the gray Russian lines stole forward again. Such was the slow battle
vibration.
A company of sappers was below, opening the wood of the slope, so that
the machine fire would not be impeded in case the Austrians drove back
the infantry beyond the hollows at the bottom of the valley. A hundred
yards down they were working like beavers among the trunks of cedar
and balsam, when a shrapnel broke among them. The Russian higher
batteries had been trying the same game among the Austrian
emplacements, but could not see results.
All battery men near the two Americans knew well that the Austrians
would note _that_ explosion of their shrapnel, and would relate
the range to the higher positions above. That one shot showed the
Russian artillerymen that their position was untenable. It was not
that the Austrians could see the damage they inflicted in one company
of sappers, but that the shattering blow in plain sight from their
position would show the exact means to displace the higher pieces that
devastated their infantry.
"We've got to get out of here," Boylan whispered. Again as he spoke
the orders to retire came quietly as a bit of garrison gossip, and as
coldly. Horses came running down for the ammunition carts; every
muscle of man and beast had its work now.
In thirty or forty seconds Austrian shrapnel would land higher. Peter
was tallying off the seconds, wondering if they would get clear.... At
this moment he noted that the moon had come up and that the sun was
not yet sunk. The two on the eastern and western rims of the world
were almost of a size and color, very huge and alike, except that one
dazzled the eyes--the difference between incandescence and reflection.
The whole dome was lost in florid haze. He almost laughed at what
followed in his mind, so strange is the caravan of pictures that
hurries through in action. It was the beauty above and ghastly waste
of the infantry that brought back to his brain the reason and decency
of the ants in the burning log--their order in contrast to this
chaos....
The Austrians were workmen. Their searching shrapnel had been quite
enough. Samarc's battery had begun to move, when they landed in the
heart of it. All was changed about, and new. The silence was like a
deep excavation, and the smell of fresh ground was in the air.
Peter did not see Boylan. He arose, half crawled up the torn ground to
the place where Spenski and Samarc had stood. They were some distance
--a saving distance for Mowbray--when he saw Samarc arise, his face
sheeted in red. Samarc was staring about for Spenski. Presently, Peter
followed the eyes of Samarc and saw the little man--half down, but
looking up toward his friend, the eyes wide open; also Spenski's
mouth, and the most extraordinary smile in the red beard.
Peter crawled a step nearer. There was no voice yet. He was tranced
before this meeting of the companions, each of whom saw none but the
other. Spenski had been partly kneeling, but as Samarc approached, his
head bowed slowly down, and the smile was gone.
"Come on--they'll do it again!"
Peter heard the words--but did not know who spoke them--possibly
Boylan from behind, possibly _he_ had said it. He had not seen
Samarc's lips move.
The voice was an offense in that silence.
Now Peter saw none but Spenski, until Samarc reached him, lifted,
called. Peter saw the body raised from the ground to Samarc's arms--
saw the little man's body open upon his friend like a melon that has
rotted underneath.
Chapter 5
All went black for Peter. The slope rose up and took him. For an
eternity afterward he felt someone tugging at him--hands of terrible
strength that would not let him die, would not let him sleep. After
that a familiar voice began calling at intervals.
"Hello," said Peter at last. "What have I been doing?"
"Not anything that you've pulled before. Is this an old habit?"
"What?"
"Passing out unhurt--lying like a log for an hour or two?"
"No, it's a new one. Where are we?"
"Judenbach. It's past supper time--"
Peter sat up, wobbled. The terrible hands steadied him again. He knew
now what had lamed him.
"Where is she?" he asked.
"Huh?"
"I was wondering what hit me?"
"Now, you're getting glib again," said Boylan. Peter's reserve had
interposed. His absence had something to do with her, but he could not
remember. "Where is she?" had got away from him as he crossed the
border back into the racking physical domain. He didn't like that.
"Did I say anything?"
"Nothing that will be used against you," Boylan observed. "As for what
hit you--that's the mystery. Not a scratch in sight.... I was behind.
You were standing still as a sentry after that shrapnel. Presently you
bowled over--"
"That shrapnel?"
"Yep--"
There was an instant of silence; the picture returned and wrung a
groan from Peter. All the energy of his life rebelled against _the
fact_. Boylan's hand tightened upon him. For the moment Mowbray was
in a kind of delirium.
"The moon had just come up," he said, "like another sun. The real sun
was still in the sky from our hill."
"I know. I was there. Cut it, Peter."
"Where is Samarc?"
"In one of the hospital buildings, likely. I meant to find him as soon
as I could leave you--"
"I'll go with you."
Big Belt fumbled in his saddled bags for a flask, brought it in one
hand, a cup of water in the other....
They were in the streets, very dark. Once they were caught in a swift
current of sheep driven in for the commissary. Judenbach sat on the
slope of a hill, a little city, its heart of stone, very ancient, its
"hoopskirts," as Boylan said, made of woven-cane huts. Already the
stone buildings of the narrow main street were crowded with wounded.
The correspondents were not permitted far either way from
headquarters. Finally it was necessary to get Dabnitz of the staff to
conduct them.... It had all been a jumble of ambulances at nightfall
from the field, the lieutenant said. Russian soldiers were not
ticketed. Many faces on the cots were bandaged beyond recognition. The
three gave up at midnight, Peter gaining strength rather than losing
it in the later hours. Orders were that the streets be emptied of all
but sentries.
"No, nothing like that--" said Boylan, as Mowbray sank to the floor by
his blanket roll. "You haven't had supper--"
"Don't, Boylan.... I say, what do they do with the dead?"
Rain was pattering down; the smell of drugs reached them.
"It _does_ make a difference when you know one of them--doesn't
it?.... God, man, we're cluttered with wounded. The dead are at peace--"
"I wonder what stars he's watching to-night?"
"Come, come. Peter--"
"I know.... I know, Boylan. Only it shows me something. He was a great
workman. There are things in the world that can't be done because he's
gone. There are others like him. He had a girl. He had a friend. He
had us--"
Boylan decided that talking was good. He listened and prepared soup.
"And to-morrow they're at it again," said Peter.
"It won't look the same in the morning--"
Peter did not answer.
"Anyway, you didn't bring on the war, Peter--"
"It makes a man cold with that kind of cold a supper-fire don't help."
"Peter, you've got me stopped with your moods--like a woman. Women
were always too profound for Mr. B. B. Boylan--"
"Sorry. You've been a prince. I'll do better now. I'll get out of it.
Little shock--that's all. I think it wasn't so much physical.
Something changed all around. I've been taking things as I found them
so long. That helps to bring on a war--"
Boylan glanced at him narrowly.
Peter laughed. "I'm all right. Head's working."
Big Belt sighed. "I loved that little guy, too. God, I'd run east to
Asia and keep on running rather than meet his girl."
Peter drank hot soup and slept. Next morning it was like a hard
problem that one has slept upon and awakened with the process and
answer straight-going. They had not searched ten minutes (calling
"Samarc" softly among the cots where the faces were bandaged) before a
hand came up to them. It was Peter who took it; and as their hands
met, the whole fabric of the man on the cot broke into trembling. They
understood. Samarc had been lying there rigid with his tragedy.
Peter's touch had been enough to break the dam of his misery.
"_I have ceased to kill,_" he said.
The head was twice as big with bandages; yet under that effigy, so
terrible was the intensity of the moment, Peter became conscious of
ruin there, also of a sudden icy cold in the morning air. Samarc's
powerful hand still clutched his. The voice that had emerged from
under the cloths was still in his ears. It had seemed to come as water
from a pipe--loosely, the faucet gone. The hand was unhurt.
"_...He came in the night. I did not speak--but my heart was
fighting against the guns. He was moving here and there. He turned to
me, as if I had suddenly cried out, 'What shall I do?'...'You can
cease to kill,' he said._"
Boylan was watching Peter. His face turned gray.
They received the intelligence of the words, as they came, although at
another time the mouthing would have been inarticulate as wind in one
of Judenbach's archaic street-lamps.
"I'll stay with him, Boylan," said Peter, choosing the hardest thing,
but Big Belt would not leave, though the Russian columns were moving
in the street--off to renew the battle among the hills. The two sat by
until Samarc slept.
* * *
They were in the street again, moving close to the walls, for the
cavalry was crowding the narrow highway. They crossed finally to a
stone-paved area at the side of Judenbach's main building. Their feet
were upon the stone flags of this court, when Dabnitz suddenly hurried
forward, with a gesture for them to stand back.
"Just a moment, my friends," he said. "A little formality, but very
necessary--"
Peter lifted his eyes, perceived three men standing bare-headed
against the wall of head-quarters, twenty paces away. One of them
exclaimed, his voice calm but penetrating:
"We are not spies. We do not care to turn our backs. We are not afraid
to die, for we have made our lives count--"
It was the voice of a public speaker; the voice of a man making good
many words.... Dabnitz stepped between Boylan and Mowbray, stretching
out his arms before them. It was all in an instant. They saw Dabnitz's
apologetic smile--and a Russian platoon at their right, rifles raised
--then the ragged volley.
Each of the three fell differently.
Chapter 6
Boylan and Peter sat together in the ante-room of headquarters. They
did not speak. Peter was getting down to the quick. He thought many
things which a man never tells another man, and seldom tells a woman;
yet they were matters of truth and reason, no sentiment about them. He
recalled many incidents of early years in which his mother had tried
to teach him sensitiveness and mercy. Until now her effort seemed to
have been wasted. It had been more simple and appealing to him to
follow his father's picture of manhood. Possibly his mother had
wearied of pitting her will against his. He had grown up under his
father's control and ideal. As it looked to him now, he had become all
that was obvious and average and easy; while his mother's passion had
been for him to become one of the singular and precious and elect....
He would never have seen this so clearly had it not been for Berthe
Wyndham. She had given him a kind of new birth, taken up the work
wherein his mother had failed....
Dabnitz came in. The young staff-officer was handsome, soldierly,
black-eyed. His manner was one of enfolding cheerfulness. He had
proved fair and kindly, temperate in his tastes and delicate in his
appreciations of humor and natural effects. He could express himself
fluently in Russian, German, English and French, but was a caste-man
to the core, a militarist and autocrat. As such he proved rather
appalling to Peter Mowbray on this day.
"Is General Kohlvihr out with the fronts?" Boylan asked.
"He's in the field, but not at the front. We got the point yesterday,
you see. I'd rather be in the van every day than left to these matters
of clean-up--"
Peter looked up at him. "Is there much of this to do?"
"I'm afraid so. They work among the hospitals. You don't catch many of
them in the ranks--"
"Perhaps they would rather tend the wounded than to make the wounds."
Dabnitz smiled cheerfully. "They're afraid of their hides. When a man
does a lot of talking, he is generally shy on action--"
Peter saw the ease of the acceptance of this view on the part of the
others; saw how clearly it was the view of the military man.
"And yet it was a clean-cut death of that talker and his two
companions you just executed--"
"An exception now and then," Dabnitz granted.
"How do you catch them?"
"We have a system at work for that purpose--everywhere, especially in
the hospitals. There isn't much temporizing when we get them."
Peter Mowbray's skull prickled with heat and his face was cold with
sweat.
"What do they preach?" he managed to ask.
"Sometimes for men to rise and go home; sometimes for them to cease to
kill, and sometimes to shoot down the officers. It isn't all that a
man has to do now to lead his men forward," Dabnitz observed. "He must
do that, of course, but all the danger isn't in front. It doesn't
follow that a man has turned his back upon the enemy nowadays--if he
happens to be found with a wound in the back."
"Were these--these that you put out this morning--working in the
hospitals?"
"Yes."
Peter turned away.
"In a good many cases we bring a man to his feet again from a bad
wound--to find him not a soldier but a damned anarchist."
"It's expensive and cumbersome also to carry such a hospital system
afield," Peter observed.
Dabnitz did not catch the irony. "Yes, it would be cheaper and simpler
to put a hard-hit soldier out of his misery--"
Boylan, watching Peter's face, suddenly arose, suggesting that they
ride out toward the fighting. ....When they were alone, he added:
"I know you don't want the front to-day, but it was very clear that
I'd better get you out of there....Peter, did you ever kill a man?"
"No." The question did not seem wild to either of them--there by the
open court of Judenbach.
"I knew a man who did. I saw him getting whiter and whiter like your
face--and looking into his victim's eyes in that queer surprised way
you looked at Dabnitz. It wasn't in the field; in a city bar-room. I
didn't look for what happened--but I knew something was coming. The
fool went on talking, talking. The other watched him, and when all the
blood was burned out of him....Great God, here I am talking blood--"
"It's in the air," said Peter. "It's hard to breathe!....No, I won't
go down front to-day. I wish I could go back--back--oh, to the clean
Pole--no, to some little snowy woods in the States....Boylan, does it
suffocate you?"
"It's different from anything I knew," said Boylan. "It's so damned
businesslike. Something's come over the world. War was more like a
picnic before. I never saw it like this. I believe we've gone crazy."
They stood before the main building, just at the entrance of the stone
court--halted by the hideous outcry that reached them from another
building just a few doors below. It was as if a strong man were being
murdered by torture. The big cannons boomed up the narrow cobble-paved
road from the field. As far as they could see in either direction, the
street was crowded with soldiers, stepping aside for artillery going
south, and the stream of ambulances coming in from the front. Passing
them now from the street into the court was a cortege, little but
grim--a Cossack trooper leading two bare-headed men by a rope attached
to his saddle, a Cossack non-commissioned officer walking behind with
raised pistol. Both the prisoners were young, one a mere boy, yet he
was supporting the elder. Peter's eyes turned to the blank wall of the
main building where Dabnitz had been busy as they passed. To the
right, in the gloom from the walls, was a row of iron gratings, the
windows knocked out--darkness under the low stone lintels.
Peter had not noticed before this dim square, within the square. His
mind dwelt upon it now in the peculiar way of the faculties, when
thoughts are too swift and too terrible to bear....It was like
something he had seen before, the dark little square. Yes, it was like
part of a recess yard he had known in an old school-building years
ago....
He couldn't keep off the reality long. In every direction the
murderous army--no song, no laugh, no human nature, no love, no work,
but death. He was imprisoned. And somewhere near or far in the midst
of such a chaos, was Berthe Wyndham. Could she live in this?.... Peter
was suicidal, very close to that, a new thing to him. Queerly he
realized that death would be easy for himself, simple, acceptable. For
there was no escape. They would not let him go. There was no place
that one could go out of the army. Not even the dead go back.... It
would not be fair to her. She might live, and call to him afterward.
He did not think she could live, but there was that chance. He thought
of his mother--quite as a little boy would, his lip quivering.... He
started at the touch of Boylan's hand.
"I'll tell you what we'll do," Big Belt said. "We'll write, Peter.
We'll get out the machines to-day. We'll write a story--just as if we
could file it on a free cable. It will do us good. We'll tell the
story--"
"We'd have to eat it....Boylan, if I should tell this story on paper,
the Russians would burn it and me and the house in which it was
written....No. I must work better than that. Come back. I want
Dabnitz--"
Boylan drew him face about.
"You're not going to--"
"No--no. I wasn't thinking of killing him. It wouldn't do any good.
One would have to kill all the officers and save enough energy for the
Little Father at the last. No, I want him to help me--"
They found him at headquarters.
"Lieutenant Dabnitz," Peter said, his hand upon the Russian's
shoulder, speaking very quietly, "I feel like a fool doing nothing all
day long--and so much to do. I want you to take me over to that
hospital Samarc is in, and set me officially to work. Let me be
orderly, anything, to-day. I want to help, if you'll forgive me--"
"Gladly, Mr. Mowbray. I'm sure they'll be very glad. Of course, they
are always short-handed in the hospitals."
"Thanks."
Boylan's heart gave a thump at the new light in Mowbray's eyes.
"I'll go along, too," he said. "I'm the daddy of them all, when it
comes to lifting."
A ragged platoon volley crashed from the court as they entered the
street. Peter's steps quickened.
Chapter 7
Of course, they did not know it in _The States'_ office, neither
the Old Man nor his managing editor, but a way had been found to
_rock_ Peter Mowbray. Indeed he would have been rocked to pieces
had he not found his work that day in Judenbach. ....When no one was
listening, he would talk to the wounded. Peter discovered that there
was a woman in him, as many a field-man has discovered. In fact he
came to believe that we are all mixed men and women, and that it is
the woman in us that suffers most. He had a suspicion that there was a
woman in Boylan, and had to smile just there. He sank into the work,
and saved himself. Samarc appeared to be asleep.
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