Frederick Palmer

“ Then he half raised himself from his chair at sight of a Lanstron with eyes in a daze of brilliancy; a Lanstron with his maimed hand twitching in an outstretched gesture; a Lanstron in the dilemma of being at the same time lover and chief of intelligence. Should he let her make the sacrifice of everything that he held to be sacred to a woman's delicacy? Should he not return to the telephone and tell her that he would not permit her to play such a part? Partow's voice cut in on his demoralization with the sharpness of a blade. ”

“ Oh, I'm burned out, Lanny! I'm ashes. It doesn't seem that I can ever be sane or clean and human again. In order to forget I should have to find a new life, like Feller. Each morning when I look in the mirror I expect to see my hair turned white, like his."
Lanstron felt her suffering as if it were his own. He had let his patriotic passion overwhelm every other consideration. He had allowed her to be a spy; he had sacrificed her sensibilities along with the battalions he had sent into battle. She was right: he was only the inhuman head of a machine. And she and Feller—they were human. ”

“ She was seeing the Roman general, the baron, the first Galland, and the fat, pompous little man, no less in the life than Hedworth Westerling. She had fused them into one.
"Some day you will be chief of staff, the head of the Gray army!" she suddenly exclaimed.
Westerling started as if he had been surprised in a secret. Then he flushed slightly.
"Why?" he asked with forced carelessness. "Your reasons? They're more interesting than your prophecy."
"Because you have the will to be," she said without emphasis, in the impersonal revelations of thought. "You want power. You have ambition." ”

“ Westerling was regarding her with a stare which fixed itself first on one thing and then on another in dull misery. Near by were Bellini, the chief of intelligence, and a subaltern who had arrived only a minute before. The subaltern was dust-covered. He seemed to have come in from a hard ride. Both were watching Marta, as if waiting for her to speak. She met Westerling's look steadily, her eyes dark and still and in his the reflection of the vague realization of more than he had guessed in her relations with Hugo.
"Well," she breathed to Westerling, "the war goes on!" ”

“ Peterkin fell with a piece of jagged steel embedded in his brain. He had gone from the quick to the dead so swiftly that he never knew that his charm had failed. The same explosion got Fracasse, sword in hand, and another buried him where he lay. The banker's son went a little farther; the barber's son still farther. Men who were alive hardly realized life, so mixed were life and death. Infernal imagination goes faint; its wildest similes grow feeble and banal before such a consummation of hell.
But the tide keeps on; the torn gaps of the ram are filled by the rushing legs from the rear. ”

“ Marta, who, in the breeding of her generation, felt sentiment as more or less of a lure from logic, dropped beside the bed in a sudden burst of sentiment and gathered the plump hand in hers and kissed it.
"Mother, you are wonderful!" she said. "Mother, you are great!"
"Tush, Marta!" said Mrs, Galland. "You shouldn't say that. Your grandfather was great—a very great man. He never quite got his deserts; no good man does in politics."
"You are better than great," said Marta. "You soothe; you help; you have—what shall I call it?—the wisdom of mothers! Minna has it, too." ”

“ After a time, her ear becoming as accustomed to the firing as a city dweller's to the distant roar of city traffic Mrs. Galland slept. But Marta could not follow her advice. If, transiently at least, she had found something of the peace of the confessional, the vigor of youth was in her arteries; and youth cannot help remaining awake under some conditions. She tiptoed across the hall into her own room and seated herself by the window, which had often spread the broadening vista of landscape with its lessening detail before her eyes. ”

“ Far up on a peak among the birds and aeroplanes, in a roofed, shell-proof chamber, with a telephone orderly at his side, a powerful pair of field-glasses and range-finders at his elbow, and a telescope before his eye, Gustave Feller, one-time gardener and now acting colonel of artillery, watched the burst of shells over the enemy's lines. While other men had grown lean on war, he had taken on enough flesh to fill out the wrinkles around eyes that shone with an artist's enjoyment of his work. ”

“ Her mind was projected into the thick of the battle. She saw a panic of Grays caught in their triumph; of wounded men writhing and crawling over their dead comrades, their position shown to the marksmen by a search-light's glare. The dead grew thicker; their glassy eyes were staring at her in reproach. She heard the hoarse and straining voices of the Browns in their "God with us!" through the din of automatics. Men snuggled for cover amidst torn flesh and red-tinged mud in the trenches, and other men trampled them in fiendish risk of life to take more lives. ”

“ When it seems as if I were about to collapse, something supports me. When the thing grows too horrible and I am about to cry out to Westerling that I am false, I hear his boast that he made the war as a last step in his ambition. And there is Dellarme's smile rising before me. He died so finely in defence of our garden! When my brain goes numb and I can't think what to say, can't act, Feller appears, prompting with ready word and facile change of expression, and I have my wits again. ”

“ After he had gone through the house he went for a flyspecking tour of the grounds, where he came upon a private of the Grays on crutches. With rest and good food the tiny hole in Hugo's leg from the merciful small-calibre bullet had healed rapidly. Confinement was irksome on a sunny day. He had grown strong enough in spirit to face his fate, whatever it might be, and in the absence of the watchful coachman he had risked the delight of a convalescent's adventure in the open, clad in his uniform, the only clothes he had. ”

“ One who fought for peace must take up arms against all armies. Her part as a spy appeared to her clad in a new kind of shame: the desertion of her principles.
Nor did the officers observe a man of thirty-five, wearing the cords of the staff and a general's stars, coming around the corner of the house. Marta's feverish, roving glance had noted him directly he was in sight. His face seemed to be in keeping with the other faces, in the ardor of a hunt unfinished; hand in blouse pocket, his bearing a little too easy to be conventionally military—the same Lanny. ”

“ All her life Marta would be able to live over again the feelings of this moment. It was as if she were frozen, all except brain and nerves, which were on fire, while the rigidity of ice kept her from springing from her chair in contempt and horror. She would always wonder how the bonds of her purpose to save Hugo held her tongue But still another purpose came on the wings of diabolical temptation which would pit the art of woman against the power of a man who set millions against millions in slaughter to gratify personal ambition. ”

“ Back at the telephone, Lanstron, in the fervor of the cheer and the enthusiasm that had transported his chief, gave Marta Partow's message.
"You, Marta, are our brightest hope of victory!"
"Yes?" The monosyllable was detached, dismal, labored. "A woman can be that!" she exclaimed in an uncertain tone, which grew into the distraction of clipped words and broken sentences. "A woman play-acting—a woman acting the most revolting hypocrisy—influences the issue between two nations! Her deceit deals in the lives of sons precious to fathers and mothers, the fate of frontiers, of institutions! ”

“ Across a strip of valley lay the main rise to the heights of the range. Along the summit nothing warlike was visible except the irregular landscape against the horizon. There the enemy rested in his fortifications. The slopes, as far as the judge's son could see on either hand, were like the warrens of an overpopulated rabbit world in hiding. Here was the army of the Grays in its redoubts and trenches A thousand times as many men as were ever at work on the Panama Canal had been digging their way forward—digging regardless of union hours; digging to save their own lives and to take lives. ”

“ One man alone against the tide—rather, the man who has seen a tide rise at his orders now finding all its sweep against him—Westerling, accustomed to have millions of men move at his command, found himself, one man out of the millions, still and helpless while they moved of their own impulses.
As news of positions lost came in, he could only grimly repeat, "Hold! Tell them to hold!" fruitlessly, like adjurations to the wind to cease blowing. The bell of the long distance kept ringing unheeded, until at last his aide came to say that the premier must speak either to him or to the vice-chief. ”

“ Suddenly, both the rifles and the automatic, which had been firing deliberately, began to fire with desperate rapidity. It was as if a boxer, sparring slowly, let out all his power in a rain of blows. She could see nothing of the Grays, but she understood that they were making a rush.
Then a chance shell, striking at the one point which the man who fired it six thousand yards away would have chosen as his bull's-eye, obscured Feller and the automatic and its gunners in the havoc of explosion. ”

“ The soldiers in the garden did not bother with any "Your Excellency, the chief of staff" formula when word had been passed of his presence. Marta looked around to see their tempestuous enthusiasm as they tossed their caps in the air and sent up their spontaneous tribute from the depths of their lungs. Conqueror and hero to the living, but the dead could not speak, whispered some fiend in her heart.
Lanstron uncovered to the demonstration impulsively, when the conventional military acknowledgment would have been a salute. He always looked more like the real Lanny to her with his forehead bare. ”

“ For the first time she had real oblivion from the memory of her deceit of Westerling, the oblivion of drear, heart-pulling suspense. All the good times, the sweetly companionable times, she and Lanny had had together; all his flashes of courtship, his outburst in their last interview in the arbor, when she had told him that if she found that she wanted to come to him she would come in a flame, passed in review under the hard light of her petty ironies and sarcasms, which had the false ring of coquetry to her now, genuine as they had been at the time. ”

“ Yes, yes, to beat the Grays! The same, idea—the fighting nature, the brute nature of man—animated both sides. Had the Browns really tried for peace? Had they, in the spirit of her oath, appealed to justice and reason? Why hadn't their premier before all the world said to the premier of the Grays, as one honest, friendly neighbor to another over a matter of dispute:
"We do not want war. We know you outnumber us, but we know you would not take advantage of that. If we are wrong we will make amends; if you are wrong we know that you will. ”

“ Hugo was firing vaguely, like a man in a dream, and thinking that maybe up there on the knoll were the two Browns he had met on the road and perhaps their comrades were as fond of them as he was of Eugene. It is a mistake for a soldier to think much, as Westerling had repeatedly said.
Pilzer was shooting to kill. His eye had the steely gleam of his rifle sight and the liver patch on his cheek was a deeper hue as he sought to avenge Eugene's death. Drowned by the racket of their own fire, not even Peterkin was hearing the whish-whish of the bullets from Dellarme's company now. ”

“ You will use hand-grenades, will you? Snug behind sand-bags you will tear the flesh of our comrades to pieces, will you? They saw red, the red of raw fragments of flesh; the red of the gush from torn artery walls—all except Hugo and Peterkin, who might well begin to believe that there was a measure of art in heroism. Peterkin seemed to share leadership at the captain's side, but he slipped and fell—he had weak ankles, anyway—as Fracasse's men pressed the rear of the wedge forward with the strength of mass, only to be borne back by men, riddled with bullets, tumbling fairly into their faces. ”

“ I brace myself against an explosion of indignation!"
"It is the duty of a teacher of peace to use all her influence with the people she knows," she went on. "So I am going to ask you not to let your country ever go to war against mine while you are chief of staff."
"Mine against yours?" he equivocated. "Why, you live almost within gunshot of the line! Your people have as much Gray as Brown blood in their veins, Your country! My country! Isn't that patriotism?"
"Patriotism, but not martial patriotism," she corrected him. "My thought is to stop war for both countries as war, regardless of sides. ”

“ There is nothing like mixing a little practice in your dreams while the world is still well this side of Utopia, as the head on my old behemoth of a body well knows. She had the right idea with her school. The oath so completely expressed my ideas—the result of all my thinking—that I had a twinge of literary jealousy. My boy, if you do reach the frontier, in pursuit of a broken army, and you do not keep faith with my dream and with her ideals, then you will get a lesson that will last you forever at the foot of the Gray range. ”

“ Not only are they in the midst of the first lot of the Browns' shells at the shorter range, but one Gray battery has either made a mistake in cutting its fuses or struck a streak of powder below standard, and its shells burst among those whom it is aiming to assist.
The ground seems rising under the feet of Fracasse's company; the air is split and racked and wrenched and torn with hideous screams of invisible demons. The men stop; they act on the uncontrollable instinct of self-preservation against an overwhelming force of nature. ”

“ Marta breathed. She, too, in her quick imagination, was seeing the young private and spatters of blood on the terrace. Lanstron feasted his eyes on her face, which mirrored her emotion.
"Oh, the groans of the dying in the night and the cheering when the news of victory came in!" Mrs. Galland continued. "I could not cheer. But that was, long, long ago—long ago, and yet only yesterday! And now we are to have it all over again. The young men must have their turn. They will not be satisfied by the experience of their fathers. ”

“ You picture the hell of your manufacture as coolly as if it were some fairies' dance!"
"Should I be enthusiastic? Should I view the prospect with an old-fashioned Hussar's hurrah?" he asked. "The right way is without illusions. Let us lose our heads, cry out for glory—and then chaos!"
"The heedless barbarism of ignorance intoxicated with primitive passion versus calculating, refined, intellectual, comprehending barbarism! I see no choice," she concluded, rising slowly in the utter weariness of spirit that calls for the end of an interview.
"Marta, you will promise not to remain at the house?" ”