Big Belt was alone with his friend again, but Peter seemed merely the body of a man, not much use. They were kept very close by the Germans, and told frankly that they were to be sent as soon as possible to the big prison-hospital at Sondreig. Even German correspondents were not permitted afield. Judenbach was retained, but the Americans were drawn forth by the exigencies of service with Colonel Ulrich's force, and on the afternoon of the third day following the German entry, they looked back upon the little hill-town a last time. Though there had not been sound nor sight of Berthe nor the group around her, during the three days, Peter was different afield, as if he missed a certain personal identification with that obscure Galician settlement where so much had happened. He moved about as if there were something dead inside. His world had turned insane.
Those were the terrible days of November, and the two Americans were forgotten at length—as a pair of buttons on the German uniform, forgotten because they served and were not in the way. All that had not to do with Berthe Wyndham was black as the Prussian night to Mowbray's brain, but Big Belt was always by. He could not have managed except for that. There were days in which it appeared as if half the world were down and bleeding; the other half trying to lift, pulling at the edges of the fallen, as one half-stupefied would pull at a fallen body in a burning house.
At night through the silences between the cannon, sometimes over the hills through the cold rains, came to Peter Mowbray's ears the sounds of church-bells. Boylan did not always hear them. The German officers declared that there were no such sounds. Boylan's sack was filled with blood.
“If I ever get out of here,” he said, “I'll write one story—one battle till I die—and I'll call it 'Vintage Fourteen'.”
For he was sick of the spilled wine of men. And other armies were fighting in the vineyards of France—as were these in the piney hills of the ancient shepherd kings; and what a fertilizing it was for the manhandled lands of Europe—potash and phosphor and nitrogen in the perfect solution of the human blood.
More and more Boylan saw that Peter was queer.
“I can't think,” the latter would say. “I feel like a man dying, under a mountain of dead. Mostly I don't want to live. I don't want to die. I believe that it's all one and that this is the end of the world.”
Peter could work, however. Day and night when they would let him, and mostly the Germans accepted his services gratefully now, he tugged at the dead and the dying in the field and in the field hospitals. And with the lanterns at night, often under fire, often so long that Boylan could not rest, but would wait at the hospital-division like a mother for a dissipated son.
“They call this the great German fighting machine,” Peter whispered to Boylan one night, “but we're inside. We can't call it that. It's the most pitiful and devitalized thing that ever ran up and down the earth. And it doesn't mean anything. It's all waste—like a great body killing itself piece by piece—all waste and death.”
He tried to make death easy for a soldier here and there, but there was so much. His clothing smelled of death; and one morning before the smoke fell, he watched the sun shining upon the pine-clad hills. That moment the thought held him that the pine trees were immortal, and men just the dung of the earth.
...One night Boylan asked as they lay down:
“Who are you?”
“Peter Mowbray.”
“Yep, and I'm Boylan. You're at liberty to correct if wrong. Are we ever going to die or get out?”
“I don't know.... Boylan, you've been good to me. We're two to make one—eye to eye—”
“You're making a noise like breaking down again. Don't, Peter. I've gone on a bluff all my life. I'm a rotten sentimentalist at heart—soft as smashed grapes. It's my devil. If you break down, I'll show him to you—”
“It wouldn't hurt you to bellow like a girl.”
“Maybe not, but I'd shoot my head off first.”
“Did you see the old leprous peasant to-day? He was hump-backed, and he had no lips, but teeth like a dog. He pulled at a soldier's stirrup as we came into town. The soldier was afraid and shot him through the mouth—”
“Shut up, Peter, or you'll get me. I've shown you more now than any living soul knows—”
“You ought to show it to a woman. A man isn't right until a woman knows him in and out.”
“For the love of God—go to sleep!”
They sank into restless death-ridden dreaming; and so it was many nights, until the dawn that they fronted a swift river, black from its snowy banks, saw the rising pine hills opposite and were swept possibly by mistake into the center of comprehensible action—a picture lifted from the hundred-mile ruck.
A little town, so far nameless, sat with a shivering look on the slope, about a half mile up from the river. A Russian quick-fire gun or two was emplaced in that vicinity, and two batteries of bigger bores (that the correspondents knew of) were higher on either side. Infantry intrenchments that looked like mole tracks from the distance corrugated the slopes in lateral lines, and roads came down to the two bridges that spanned the swift stream, less than a mile apart.
The morning was spent in artillery dueling. The Russians seemed partly silenced at noon. At no time was their attack cocky and confident. The Germans determined to cross in the early afternoon. This movement was not answered by excessive firing. German cavalry and small guns on the east bridge, a heavy field of helmets took the west. Boylan and Mowbray rode with the artillery. Even as the German forces combined for position, the firing of the Russians was not spiteful. There seemed a note of complaint and hysteria. There was no tension in the German command; it was too weathered for that.
Now the cavalry went into action and guns moved away farther to the east for higher emplacement.
“They're going to charge the horses up into the town. They haven't much respect for the infantry trenches,” said Boylan.
At that instant Peter's mind opened a clearer series of pictures of Berthe Wyndham than he had known for days. Palace Square near the river corner; her little house in Warsaw and the tall flowers between; across the siding after Fransic; her coming to the cot of Samarc, and all the wonderful films of the skylight prison—the dearest of all as she slept. He could not hold the battle in mind, for he was very rich with these pictures, and for days had tried vainly to think just how she looked. It had been easier to remember something which Peter designated secretly as her soul.
Suddenly the turf rocked under his feet and his body was bent in the terrific concussion from behind. They turned and saw the middle stone abutment of the nearer bridge lifted from the stream—the whole background sky black with dust and rock. Then, just as he thought of it, the west bridge went. He spoke before Boylan, and rather unerringly, as one does at times coming up from a dream.
“They've trapped what they think they can handle—and fired the bridges by wire.”
Boylan said: “I can't call it German stupidity, because it didn't occur to me that the bridges were mined.... It's to be another leisure spraying. We're in the slaughter-pen.... God, man, look at the horses!”
It had been too late to call back the cavalry. Peter's eyes followed Boylan's sweeping arm. The horsemen were in skirmish on the slope, just breaking out into charge. The town above and the emplacements adjoining which had kept their secret so well, were now in a blur of sulphur and action directed upon the cavalry charge. The whole line went down in the deluge—suddenly vanished under the hideous blat of the machines—whole rows rubbed into the earth—a few beasts rising empty, shaking themselves and tumbling back, no riders. Peter turned to the infantry in formation on the western slopes. The Russian fire was not lax now, not discouraged in the least, nor hysterical. It was cold-blooded murder in gluttonous quantity.
The Americans forgot themselves. Cavalry gone—they turned to the west and saw the poor men-beasts in rout. Even the infantry comprehended the trick, and felt something superhuman behind it. They rushed back toward the river—swift, ugly with white patches and unfordable, requiring a good swimmer.... The eyes of Boylan turned back to the Horse. He had always loved the cavalry, ridden with the cavalry always by preference. Peter was watching the river—the hands up from the center of the river....
They were alone, and now the Russian machines were on the German batteries not yet emplaced, none unlimbered. It was as if the wind carried them the spray from the sweeping fountains, turned from the horse to put out the upon him, bringing the bells.
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