Читать книгу The Last Shot - Frederick Palmer - Страница 11

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Ranks broken in the barracks yard, backs free of packs, shoulders free of rifles, the men of the first battalion of the 28th, which Westerling had seen marching through the park, had no thought except the prospect of the joyous lassitude of resting muscles and of loosening tongues that had been silent on the march. They were simply tired human beings in the democracy of a common life and service.

The 128th had been recruited from a province in the high country distant from the capital. In the days of Maria's old baron, a baron of the same type had plundered their ancestors, and in the days of the first Galland they formed a principality frequently at war with their neighbors of the same blood and language. At length they had united with their neighbors who had in turn united with other neighbors, forming the present nation of the Grays, which vented its fighting spirit against other nations. Each generation must send forth its valorous and adventurous youth to the proof of its manhood in battle, while those who survived wounds and disease became the heroes of their reminiscences, inciting the younger generation to emulation. With each step in the evolution learning had spread and civilization developed.

Since the last war universal conscription had gone hand in hand with popular education and the telegraphic click of the news of the world to all breakfast tables and cheap travel and better living. Every private of the five millions was a scholar compared to the old baron; he had a broader horizon than the first Galland. In the name of defence, to hold their borders secure, the great powers were straining their resources to strengthen the forces that kept an armed peace. Evolution never ceases. What next?

In a group of the members of Company B, who dropped on a bench in the barrack room, were the sons of a farmer, a barber, a butcher, an army officer, a day-laborer, a judge, a blacksmith, a rich man's valet, a banker, a doctor, a manufacturer, and a small shopkeeper.

"Six months more and my tour is up!" cried the judge's son.

"Six months more for me!"

"Now you're counting!"

"And for me—one, two, three, four, five, six!"

"Oh, don't rub it in," the manufacturer's son shouted above the chorus, "you old fellows! I've a year and six months more."

"Here, too!" chimed in the banker's son. "A year and six months more of iron spoons and tin cups and army shoes and army fare and early rising. Hep-hep-hep, drill-drill-drill, and drudgery!"

"Oh, I don't know!" said the day-laborer's son. "I don't have to get up any earlier than I do at home, and I don't have to work as hard as I'll have to when I leave."

"Nor I!" agreed the blacksmith's son. "It's a kind of holiday for me."

"Holiday!" the banker's son gasped. "That's so," he added thoughtfully, and smiled gratefully over a fate that had been indulgent to him in a matter of fathers and limousines.

"Look at the newspapers! Maybe we shall be going to war," said the manufacturer's son.

"Stuff! Nonsense!" said the judge's son. "We are always having scares. They sell papers and give the fellows at the Foreign Office a chance to look unconcerned. But let's have the opinion of an international expert, of the great and only philosopher, guide, companion, and friend. What do you think of the crisis, eh, Hugo? Soberly, now. The fate of nations may hang on your words. If not, at least the price of a ginger soda!"

It was around Hugo Mallin that the group had formed. Groups were always forming around Hugo. He could spring the unexpected and incongruous and make people laugh. Slight but wiry of physique, he had light hair, a freckled and rather nondescript nose, large brown eyes, and a broad, sensitive mouth. Nature had not attempted any regularity of features in his case. She had been content with making each one a mobile servant of his mind. In repose his face was homely, and it was a mask.

"Come on, Hugo! Out with it!"

Hugo's brow contracted; the lines of the mask were drawn in deliberate seriousness.

"I never hear war mentioned that I don't have a shiver right down my spine, as I did when I was a little boy and went into the cellar without a light," he replied.

"Fear?" exclaimed Eugene Aronson, the farmer's son, whose big, plain face expressed dumb incomprehension. He alone was standing. Being the giant and the athlete of the company, the march had not tired him.

"Fear?" some of the others repeated. The sentiment was astounding, and Hugo was as manifestly in earnest as if he were a minister addressing a parliamentary chamber.

"Yes, don't you?" asked Hugo, in bland surprise.

"I should say not!" declared Eugene.

"Do you want to be killed?" asked Hugo, with profound interest.

"The bullet isn't made that will get me!" answered Eugene, throwing back his broad shoulders.

"I don't know," mused Hugo, eying the giant up and down. "You're pretty big, Gene, and a bullet that only nicked one of us in the bark might get you in the wood. However, if you are sure that you are in no danger, why, you don't count. But let's take a census while we are about it and see who wants to be killed. First, you, Armand; do you?" he asked the doctor's son, Armand Daution.

Armand grinned. The others grinned, not at him, but at the quizzical solemnity of Hugo's manner.

"If so, state whether you prefer bullets or shrapnel, early in the campaign or late, à la carte or table d'hôte, morning or—" Hugo went on.

But laughter drowned the sentence, though Hugo's face was without a smile.

"You ought to go on the stage!" some one exclaimed.

"If it were as easy to amuse a pay audience as you fellows, I might," Hugo replied. "But I've another question," he pursued. "Do you think that the fellows on the other side of the frontier want to be killed?"

"No danger! They'll give in. They always do," said Eugene.

"I confess that it hardly seems reasonable to make war over the Bodlapoo affair!" This from the judge's son.

"Over some hot weather, some swamp, and some black policemen in Africa," said Hugo.

"But they hauled down our flag!" exclaimed the army officer's son.

"On their territory, they say. We were the aggressors," Hugo interposed.

"It was our flag!" said Eugene.

"But we wouldn't want them to put up their flag on our territory, would we?" Hugo asked.

"Let them try it!" thundered Eugene, with a full breath from the big bellows in his broad chest. "Hugo, I don't like to hear you talk that way," he added, shaking his head sadly. Such views from a friend really hurt him; indeed, he was almost lugubrious. This brought another laugh.

"Don't you see he's getting you, Gene?"

"He's acting!"

"He always gets you, you old simpleton!" The judge's son gave Eugene an affectionate dig in the ribs.

Eugene was well liked and in the way that a big Saint Bernard dog is liked. At the latest man[oe]uvres, on the night that their division had made a rapid flank movement, without any apparent sense that his own load was the heavier for it, he had carried the rifle and pack of Peter Kinderling, a valet's pasty-faced little son "Peterkin," as he was called, was the stupid of Company B. Being generally inoffensive, the butt of the drill sergeant, who thought that he would never learn even the manual of arms, and rounding out the variety of characters which makes for fellowship, he was regarded with a sympathetic kindliness by his comrades.

"But I don't think you ought to joke about the flag That's sacred!" declared Eugene.

"Now you're talking!" said Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son, who sat on the other side of the bench from Eugene. He was heavily built, with an undershot jaw and a patch of liverish birthmark on his cheek.

"Yes," piped Peterkin, who had an opinion when the two strong men of the company agreed on any subject. But he spoke tentatively, nevertheless. He was taking no risks.

"Oh, if we went to war the Bodlapoo affair would be only an excuse," said the manufacturer's son. "We shall go to war as a matter of broad national policy."

"Right you are!" agreed the banker's son. "No emotion about it. Emotion as an international quantity is dead. Everything is business now in this business age."

"Killing people as a broad international policy!" mused Hugo sotto voce, as if this were a matter of his own thoughts.

The others scarcely heard him as the manufacturer's son struck his fist in the palm of his hand resoundingly to demand attention.

"We need room in which to expand. We have eighty million people to their fifty, while our territory is only a little larger than theirs. Our population grows; the Browns' does not!" he announced.

"But there is a remedy for that," Hugo interjected loftly, so softly that everybody looked at him. "Why, all the conscripts of the army for two years could take a vow not to marry," he said. "We could reduce the output, as your father's factory does when the market is dull. We should not have so many babies. This would be cheaper than rearing them to be slaughtered in their young manhood."

"Hear ye! Hear ye!" shouted the doctor's son, in the midst of the hilarity that ensued. "Hugo Mallin solves the whole problem of eugenics by destroying the field for eugenics!"

"The levity of a lot of mere unthinking privates who mistake themselves for sociological experts shall not deter me from finishing my speech," pursued the manufacturer's son.

"Speak on!"

"Listen to the fount of wisdom play!"

"A beer if you produce an idea!"

"War must come some day. It must come if for no other reason than to stop the strikes, arouse patriotism, and give an impetus to industry. An army of five millions on our side against the Browns' three millions! Of course, they won't start it! We shall have to take the aggressive; naturally, they'll not."

"And they'll run, they'll run, just as they always have" Eugene cried enthusiastically.

"You bet they will, or they'll be mush for our bayonets!" said Pilzer, the butcher's son.

"Will they? Do you really think they will?" asked Hugo, drawing down the corners of his mouth in profound contemplation that was actually mournful. "I wonder, now, I wonder if they can run any faster than I can?"

Everybody was laughing except him. If he had laughed too, he would not have been funny. His faint, look of surprise over their outburst only served to prolong it.

"Hugo, you're immense!"

"You're a scream!"

"But I am considering," Hugo resumed, when there was silence. "If both sides ran as fast as they could when the war began, it would be interesting to see which army reached home first. Some of us might get out of breath, but nobody would be killed." He had to wait on another laugh before he could continue. It takes little to amuse men in garrison if one knows how. "I don't want to be killed, and why should I want to kill strangers on the other side of the frontier?" He paused on the rising inflection of his question, a calm, earnest challenge in his eyes. "I don't know them. I haven't the slightest grudge against them."

No grudge against the Browns—against the ancient enemy! The faces around were frowning, as if in doubt how to take him.

"What did you come into the army for, then?" called Pilzer, the butcher's son. "You didn't have to, being an only son. Talk that stuff to your officers! They will let you out. They don't want any cowards like you!"

"Cowards! Hold on, there!" said Eugene, who was very fond of Hugo. He spoke in the even voice of his vast good nature, but he looked meaningly at the butcher's son.

"Coward? Is that the word, Jake?" Hugo inquired amiably. "Now, maybe I am. I don't know. But it wouldn't prove that I wasn't if I fought you any more than if I fought the strangers on the other side of the frontier."

"Well, if you don't want to fight, what are you in the army for? That's a fair question, isn't it?" growled Pilzer, in an appeal to public opinion.

"Yes, you can carry a joke too far," said the army officer's son. "Yes, why?"

The others nodded. An atmosphere of hostility was gathering around Hugo. In face of it a smile began playing about the corners of his lips. The smile spread. For the first time he was laughing, while all the others were serious. Suddenly he threw his arms around the necks of the men next to him.

"Why, to be with all you good fellows, of course!" he said, "and to complete my education. If I hadn't taken my period in the army, you might have shaved me, Eduardo; you might have fixed a horseshoe for me, Henry; you might have sold me turnips, Eugene, but I shouldn't have known you. Now we all know one another by eating the same food, wearing the same clothes, marching side by side, and submitting to another kind of discipline than that of our officers—the discipline of close association in a community of service. There's hope for humanity in that—for humanity trying to free itself of its fetters. We have mixed with the people of the capital. They have found us and we have found them to be of the same human family."

"That's so! This business of moving regiments about from one garrison to another is a good cure for provincialism," said the doctor's son.

"Judge's son or banker's son or blacksmith's son, whenever we meet in after-life there will be a thought of fellowship exchanged in our glances," Hugo continued. "Haven't we got something that we couldn't get otherwise? Doesn't it thrill you now when we're all tired from the march except leviathan Gene—thrill you with a warm glow from the flow of good, rich, healthy red blood?"

"Yes, yes, yes!"

There was a chorus of assent. Banker's son clapped valet's son on the shoulder; laborer's son and doctor's son locked arms and teetered on the edge of the cot together.

"And I've another idea," proceeded Hugo very seriously as the vows of eternal friendship subsided. "It is one to spread education and the spirit of comradeship still further. Instead of two sets of autumn man[oe]uvres, one on either side of the frontier, I'd have our army and the Browns hold a man[oe]uvre together—this year on their side and next year on ours."

The biggest roar yet rose from throats that had been venting a tender tone. Only the slow Eugene Aronson was blank and puzzled. But directly he, too, broke into laughter, louder and more prolonged than the others.

"You can be so solemn that it takes a minute to see your joke," he said.

"And humorous when we expect him to be solemn—and, presto, there he goes!" added the judge's son.

Hugo's lips were twitching peculiarly.

"Look at him!" exclaimed the manufacturer's son. "Oh, you've had us all going this afternoon, you old farceur, you, Hugo!"

In the silence that waited on another extravagance from the entertainer the sergeant entered the room.

"We shall entrain to-morrow morning!" he announced. "We are going to South La Tir on the frontier."

Oh, joy! Oh, lucky 128th! It was to see still more of the world! The sergeant stood by listening to the uproar and cautioning the men not to overturn the tables and benches. Even the banker's and the manufacturer's sons, who had toured the country from frontier to frontier in paternal automobiles, were as happy as the laborer's son.

"What fun it would be if we could visit back and forth with the fellows on the other side of the frontier!" said Hugo.

"What the—eh!" exclaimed the sergeant. "Will you never stop your joking, you, Hugo Mallin?"

"Never, sir," replied Hugo dryly. "It comes natural to me!"