Part 31

The sutler-woman had come upon him sitting pumped-out by the wayside, had sold him bread, coffee and sausage, doctored his blisters, supplied him with tallowed strips of linen to replace his wornout socks, earned his gratitude, and displayed no reluctance to profit by her philanthropy, when he had volunteered to help lead the jackass as far as Kaiserslautern. True, he spoke a most vile jargon, but you cannot have everything. And the weather was so beautifully dusty, thought the sutler-woman, that an assistant would certainly be of use. Without the dust that clogs the human throat, the trade in liquid lubricants would be less roaring. And the tilt-cart contained, beside other marching-requisites, a twenty-gallon barrel of rather luke-warm beer.

The young man nodded again as the cart-shafts tilted in the hame-straps, and a command to throw his weight on the front-board was issued from behind. There was a good deal of creaking as he obeyed. A heavy weight suddenly added to the jackass's load made Rumschottel look malevolently round his near-side blinker, and display an upper row of long orange-colored teeth in testimony of his desire to bite. Then his driver slid off the board, took the rope reins, and continued to trudge beside him, keeping well to the low hedgerow so as to leave a clear space between the sutler's cart and the seemingly endless column of dusty infantrymen, striding steadily forward through a blazing August noon.

Ahead, where black-and-white and white-and-black lance-pennons flickered at the turn of the road below a steep hill-shoulder covered with bronzing vineyards heavy with purpling grapes, the light-blue of a Prussian Dragoon regiment and the facings of a squadron of Red Uhlans showed through the thick coating of dust that clung to horse and man. But the dark uniforms of a succeeding battery of Horse Artillery and the indigo or rifle-green of the battalions that marched with the needle-gun, had long ago given place to a pervasive whitey-brown.

Schmidt, Klaus, and Klein were pressing on in spite of dust and an eighty-five-in-the-shade thermometer, you must understand, so as not to get left out of the fighting that must be going on ahead. For the First and Second Corps of the Second Army, with the Headquarters Staff, were known to have reached Homburg, and on the previous night the Army of the Crown Prince had bivouacked behind the Klingbach, south of Landau.... Five or six in the morning, supposing him to have marched at dawn, would see him well across the frontier. And scouts on the hills had heliographed and flag-signaled the arrival of Imperial battalions and artillery at Wissembourg, and blue Baden Dragoons reported a cavalry camp at Selz. For all they knew, "Unser Fritz" and the Napoleon were even then at grips.

So they marched--as they had marched since they detrained at Bingen, swinging starkly on under the weight of the knapsack, eighty rounds of ammunition, rolled great-coat, camp-kettle, sword, spade, water-bottle, haversack and bread-roll, or half-a-dozen flint-hard brown biscuits threaded together on a bit of string.

Men sweated and blistered under the relentless sun, but not many fell out, and there were very few severe cases of sunstroke, these for the most part falling to the lot of Reservists. And in the hottest part of the day a plump of thunder broke among the hills eastward, and a deluge that followed turned the dust on them to paste. Then the sun came out again and baked the paste hard; and the sutler-woman stuck her head out between the front flaps of the cart-tilt, and told her young man to pull up for a bit of a rest and a snack.

So P. C. Breagh unharnessed Rumschottel, and the jackass rolled in a sandy hollow in asinine fashion, and rose up braying and refreshed. Then, quite mildly submitting to be hobbled by his mistress, he fell-to upon a patch of thistles that the battery-wheels had spared. And the sutler-woman, who answered to the name of Krumpf, produced black bread and cheese, with peppery sausage of Brunswick, and a mighty tin bottle of cold milk-coffee, from the depths of her vehicle, and liberally dispensed of these refreshments to her servitor. She partook of them herself, largely, lacing her own mug of coffee out of a private bottle of _schnaps_.

"_Herr Je!_" she grumbled presently, "what is he gaping at?" For her young man had finished eating, and was absorbed in watching marching legs.... She added, snorting scornfully: "We might sit here and sleep for three hours, and they would still be going by when we woke up.... Horses' legs and men's legs, just as though they had got clockwork inside them.... It was so in Schleswig-Holstein, and it will be so in France. And what the Danes got the French will get, and that will be a thumping!" She nodded directly afterward and dozed heavily, leaning her broad back against the wheel of her cart.

Perhaps she slept a quarter-of-an-hour while the dusty men marched by, four abreast, without slackening pace or changing step. They had hard-featured, serious, intelligent faces for the most part, thought P. C. Breagh, though here and there was a visage that bore the stamp of vice upon it, or was pimply with drink, or brutal, or merely sly. They had ceased to sing, though their bivouac of the night before had been patriotically vocal; the dusty instruments of the bandsmen came less frequently out of their dustier bags. They marched for the most part in silence, though the trampling of their feet made the solid ground reverberate.

Sometimes a battalion would quit the road, and hedges would go down before it as by magic; and through the middle of a field of browning corn or whitening barley a broad white highway would be beaten hard as any threshing-floor, bare of anything save the most insignificant tokens of their passage, such as a covey of late-hatched partridge chicks trampled into rags, a broken strap, a fragment of biscuit, a scattering of potato-peels, an empty match-box, the paper that had held an ounce of tobacco, and many empty bottles that had held beer. Rarely, a great scurry in the dust where some obstreperous charger had reared and fallen with his rider, the extent of whose injuries might be guessed by a clotted puddle of drying blood and a broken stirrup-iron. Thus, under the rhythmical tread of the dusty boots, as under the iron-shod wheels and iron-shod hoofs that had preceded and would follow them--green things were beaten from the face of earth, and fur and feather fled, as they were flying before the Third Army, marching toward Wissembourg; as they were flying before Steinmetz, bringing the First Army from the North.

Where they halted they left their taint by the scorched hedgerows, and the black circles of their great fires remained to tell of them, like the soil-pits that scarred the fields where they had bivouacked. Last night, by some delusion of the wearied senses of sight and hearing, they had seemed to the boy who had slept on the outskirts of their camp to be marching even as they slept. The lusty snoring of the countless swathes of sleepers between the long, orderly rows of stacked needle-guns topped with gilt-spiked helmets, suggested the rushing of a host in onward motion. When the boy who had lain through the night under the sutler-woman's cart to guard it from light-fingered marauders had fallen into a troubled slumber, his blistered feet had carried him on in dreams behind them still. Then in the blue dusk before dawn cavalry trumpets far ahead and shrill bugles near at hand had shrilled reveillé--and when the tremendous war-machine rushed on again once more, the dusty boy had been caught up once more by the wind of its going, and drawn along with it, as a chip is whirled in the under-draught of a rushing express-train, or a wisp of hay is caught up by a traveling tornado, and borne upon its dreadful way.

He grinned now, reminiscent of the Doctor's analogy, as a blunt-nosed, shaggy dog of no distinguishable breed trotted past, sneezing, between the files at the rear of a half-company-column. "Whose is the beast?" he heard a soldier ask his neighbor on the right-hand, and: "Nobody's--joined the battalion at Bingen!" was the reply. Upon which the inquirer tossed the canine waif a scrap of biscuit, with "Here, Bang!" and Bang, thus adopted and christened, neatly caught the morsel, bolted it, and trotted on,--no more an ownerless mongrel, but a regimental dog.

Now the sutler-woman was waking, rubbing the sleep out of a pair of eyes which were less bright than they had been before their owner became addicted to the use of beer with _schnaps_ as a lacing. She had an incipient beard, and the voice of a heavy dragoon, yet there was a tinge of womanly coquetry in her way of straightening her big, battered bonnet, and adjusting the checked blue-and-yellow shawl tied crosswise over her voluminous bust. She yawned, struggled to the perpendicular position, with some difficulty, owing to her corpulence; and cried, pointing a stout red finger at her henchman, yet squatting in the shade of a clump of dusty whins:

"Lord! if he isn't mooning still, with his chin on his two fists! Such a _gimpel_ I never yet did see! But they say all the _Englisch_ are mad, their climate makes them so. Otherwise would they not live in their country?--but no! they can't. _Hier_! Catch Rumschottel, and let's be moving!"

P. C. Breagh obliged, undisturbed by the appellation of idiot, or the contumely heaped on the United Kingdom. It was better to be on the black books of the sutler-woman than distinguished by her too-favorable regard.

For though the stout proprietress of the tilt-cart had undoubtedly played the part of a Samaritaness toward the wandering Englander, she was, it had to be owned, more charitable than chaste; trading not only in beer, bread, sausages, matches, cheap packs of cards, dominoes, pipe-tobacco, sweets and pickled cucumbers, but following, between marches, the oldest profession in the world.

Being invited on the previous evening to convey a verbal billet of the amorous kind to a young Pioneer of Würtemberg Artillery, P. C. Breagh had flatly declined. Conceiving the refusal to be prompted by jealousy, Frau or Fraulein Krumpf had not taken it in ill part. Until, being undeceived upon this point, she uncorked the vials of her anger and exerted a gift for vituperation justly celebrated among her clients of the rank and file.

"You threadling, you whipper-snapper! You pickled herring in a jacket and breeches! There is a man buried in the Domkirche at Mainz, where I belong, that has been dead over a hundred years, and has more of good red life in him to-day than thou! '_Frauenlob_,' they called him, because he couldn't live without women, and women! and when he died, eight of the town-girls carried him on his bier. And they poured wine over his grave so that you stepped up to your knees in it--all because he had liked the women as a tom-cat likes cream!"

The first spate of her resentment over, she had accepted the situation. But the wound remained; and as the better-half of Potiphar may have railed at her husband's young Hebrew steward, the sutler-woman nagged at the young man who limped beside her jackass, through the deep welcome shade of ancient oak-forests or over long blistering stretches of naked mountain roads, as those tireless, dusty men marched by.

There was no keeping up with them; they passed, and others swarmed after them. Batteries succeeded battalions, ammunition and baggage, ambulance and commissariat-trains were followed by yet other battalions, while the sweat dripped into the eyes of P. C. Breagh and the skin wore off his heels.

At midday, when his chest hurt with the very act of breathing and his straining muscles seemed about to crack, a man died.

He was an infantryman of Hessians, and it happened quite suddenly. P. C. Breagh, who had long ago abandoned all unnecessary integuments, marching without coat, vest, collar, or braces, had noticed him a moment previously swinging along with unbuttoned uniform--it was marvelous how small a minority of the soldiers had sought this method of relief.... His open shirt showed the lighter skin of his bare chest, his _pickelhaube_ was perched upon the cooking-pan crowning his knapsack-top, and he had draped a wetted red handkerchief over his steaming head.

Save that his face was purple with congested blood, so that his pale, staring eyes seemed colorless by comparison, and he walked with open mouth, the Adam's apple in his lean throat jerking as he gulped down the hot air, he conveyed no dire impression of breakdown. But suddenly he stumbled and spun round, as if seized by sudden giddiness, clutching at his shirt-breast, dropping his gun. Men were thrown out of step as he fell, with an absurd clatter of metal and tin-ware. Yet they marched on without a pause.

Others came, stepping over the fallen figure lying huddled in the way. Its fingers moved, paddling in the dust; and P. C. Breagh, yielding to a sudden impulse, dropped the bridle of the jackass, ran in, grabbed hold and hauled the heavy body out of the way.

"What are you doing, born stupid that you are?" the sutler-woman cried viciously, for Rumschottel had swerved aside to the hedge and was ravenously devouring weeds. She added, becoming aware of the prone infantryman, who was lying on his back staring at the sun unwinkingly: "It it all up with that one, his eyes are turning white already. Such as he have never six pfennigs to pay for other folks' time and trouble. Better leave him for the _Feld-lazarett_ to pick up."

But P. C. Breagh only grunted dourly, hunkering by the prostrate Hessian, and with a parting sarcasm the proprietress of Rumschottel seized her beast's head and trudged on. If she had looked back, she would have seen good Irish whisky wasted. For despite the shade of the tree under which he was hauled, the rolled-up coat thrust under his head and the laving of his face and breast with spirit, it was all up with the man, as she had prophesied.

He grabbled with his sunburnt fingers in the dust a little, and tried to lift a hand to his perspiring chest. By the tin crucifix dependent from a leather bootlace round his neck, you could tell that he tried to make the sacred Sign. Then his eyes rolled up, and an expression of great surprise overspread his discolored countenance. His knees jerked and a sound like a rotten stick of wood, breaking, came from his open mouth.

"_A-a-ach!_"

XXXVII

He would breathe for possibly an hour longer, but practically the man was dead. Still listening for the faint, intermittent heart-beats, a splash of gravel stung P. C. Breagh smartly in the neck and cheek, and the dull thunder of horse-hoofs came unpleasantly close and stopped. He lifted his ear from the rattling chest, and looked up into the face of an infantry officer, who was reining up his beast and bending from the saddle as he looked at the casualty on the ground. The officer asked in staccato sentences:

"It is a case of heat-stroke? You are a doctor?"

P. C. Breagh answered shortly:

"Enough of one to know that there is no hope."

The horse, a fine, spirited animal, hoofed the ground impatiently. The captain said, patting the glossy, sweating neck:

"Very good. Will you kindly show me his name-tag?"

P. C. Breagh found the zinc label, bearing the moribund Hessian's name, regimental, battalion and company-number, and turned it face-upward on the discolored breast. The captain, leaning from the saddle, read, and mentally registered. His keen eyes, hedged with dusty fair lashes, narrowed against the blinding white sunshine and, somewhat bloodshot with heat and fatigue, had something like a smile in them; and for some reason, to the dusty young man who squatted on the ground by the dying, the smile was an offense. He scowled, and the officer, noting this, asked curiously:

"Were you acquainted with that one, then?"

He indicated the body by an overhand thumb-gesture. Resenting the gesture for the same inexplicable reason, P. C. Breagh responded with a head-shake. The captain pursued, pulling the damp and blackened reins between his gloved fingers, stained with his own sweat and the horse's within the palms....

"I asked, because you seemed--how shall one put it?--sorry for him, you know!"

The dust-smeared, freckled face turned on the interlocutor angrily. The smouldering fire in the eyes leaped into sudden flame:

"I am, damned sorry for him! To come by his end like this--without firing a single shot!"

There was something unusual about this little dialogue, carried on between the smart mounted officer and the footsore, untidy pedestrian, over the body stretched out by the roadside. As the broad stream of marching men flowed by, curious eyes rolled their way, the whites showing startlingly in their owners' sunburned faces. Men wondered what he had died of, and what they were discussing there. And P. C. Breagh went on, his mouth pulled awry with wrathful bitterness:

"He was as good a patriot, I'd bet my hat!--as any fellow in his battalion. He set as much store as others by King and Fatherland! I daresay he dreamed of getting the Distinguished Service medal for some tremendous act of gallantry, and astonishing his wife--he wears a wedding ring, so I suppose he had one!--with it when he got home. And now it's all over. It makes me feel sick. All over, and nothing to show for it!"

The blank, rolled-up eyes, staring unwinkingly in the face of the coppery, westering sun, and the discolored face, with the look of agonized surprise now fixed upon it, seemed to echo dumbly: "Nothing but this!" The officer returned:

"So! but there will be a war-pension for the widow, as he died upon Active Service, and that will not be so bad, after all. And presently the _Feld-lazarett_ will come up and put him in a wagon. He will be buried at sundown, when we halt.... They will give him a firing party and a bugler--everything will be done decently. After a battle there is not always--you understand?..."

He shrugged, and the Danish and Austrian war-medals on his dark blue tunic glinted, in witness of his ripe knowledge and experience. Hating him still more vigorously, P. C. Breagh ended his sentence:

"Not always time to stow away lost pawns!"

"'Pawns!' My worthy sir, _our_ pawns are battalions!" The captain laughed, showing even, but tobacco-stained teeth under his thick brown mustache. "This was--a unit among myriads of myriads.... You will find plenty of work waiting for you among his comrades, if, as I guess, you are a graduate in surgery out for practice.... Let me advise you to join a Red Cross ambulance--the arm-badge is a protection--of a definite kind."

He saluted, gave rein, and the tired, yet impatient horse snorted relief, and cantered on with him, sending another shower of dust-grains and gravel-grit over the extinct "unit among myriads of myriads" and the unkempt Samaritan hunkering by its side.

A scalding wave of bitterness and resentment had swept over him a moment previously. Behind and through the officer's brown-eyed, good-looking face he had seen the fierce, challenging blue stare and great domed skull and bulldog jaw of the great Minister who made wars at will. And the limp, dead body of the "unit among myriads of myriads," lying by the beaten track where twenty thousand men thus clad and armed had passed already, had awakened in him a rage of pity and a fury of disgust.

This War that had seemed such a huge and splendid world-event, shaking sovereigns upon their thrones and stirring nations to wildest enthusiasm, meant catastrophes innumerable as minute; infinitesimal tragedies never to be heard of, related or known,--involving the humbler and the weaker among the people of both sides.

Meanwhile--here was a letter, pinned inside the dead man's shirt, an ill-spelt, loving scrawl, containing a wilted sprig of some kind of garden-herb, smelling evilly.

"Glory is glory," said the poor soul who wrote, "but so thou bring thyself safe back to me and the Kinder, that will be enough." Meanwhile, entreating her lambkin to remember that "old man" kept off the fleas, she enclosed "a bit picked from the clump in the garden border by the old red gooseberry bush," and with a tender inquiry after his poor corns, and a row of blotty kisses, signed herself his faithful wife Lottchen. One could only be sorry for poor Lottchen and note down her address, together with her deceased lambkin's name and regiment, and send her presently a line from a stranger who had been near him when he died.

For the unit among myriads of myriads, nothing could be done beyond pulling his yet pliant limbs into decent straightness and folding the already stiffening hands upon the unheaving breast. Then P. C. Breagh covered his face with the red handkerchief, and--a tin crucifix being suspended from the neck by a leather bootlace--touched the violet-mottled lips with it, and whispered a prayer for the departed soul, before, resuming possession of his discarded jacket and shouldering his knapsack, he trudged upon his way.

"Our Moltke" was testing his material at the outset, by heavy marching. Since breakfast-time there had been no halt; the columns of human flesh and horsemeat had pegged along, tirelessly as though the sinews that bore them had been forged of elastic steel.

The blazing sun set in a great whirlpool of molten rubies and gold beyond the Birkenfeld, while the sky to the north and east was green, with a vivid, springlike hue. The clear, thin dusk of August fell, yet the tireless columns marched on--and in company of other, even queerer wayfarers, the dusty young man with the knapsack doggedly continued to trudge beside them. When at length the halt was sounded, he staggered through a hedge-gap into a field of flax, and threw himself heavily face downward amid the yellowing stems that had long ago flowered, and seeded, and ripened for pulling.

Stupid with weariness, he might have lain there ten minutes, when a bugle shrilled close by, and the brown, hairy heads and forelegs of the leaders of a team of gun-horses crashed through the hedgerow, the scarlet face, open shouting mouth, and uplifted whip-arm of the forerider showing above. As luck would have it, orders had been given that a half-battery of mounted artillery should bivouac in this flax-field. And death under the iron-shod hoofs of the horses, and the iron-shod wheels that followed them, shaved very close to P. C. Breagh.

Yet he was not grateful as he picked himself out of the hollow into which his frog-like, instinctive leap for life had landed him. The heavy riding-whip of the forerider had cut him bitterly across the loins while yet in mid-air. Adding insult to injury, the artilleryman had cursed his victim for getting in the way of the battery, and the other riders and the gunners on the limber were grinning from ear to ear. Smarting, P. C. Breagh cursed back, in a cautious but vigorous whisper, as he hobbled back to the road....