Читать книгу The Call of the South - Robert Lee Durham - Страница 8

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On the first day of April, 191-, Hayward Graham, wearing the single-barred yellow chevrons of a lance-corporal in Troop M of the 10th Cavalry, was sitting flat on the ground, perspiring and inwardly grumbling as he rubbed away at his sawed-off rifle, and mentally moralizing on his inglorious condition. There was he, almost a graduate of Harvard, a gentleman, accustomed to a bath-tub and a toothbrush, bound up hard and fast for three years' association with a crowd of illiterate, roistering, unwashed, and in the present situation unwashable, negroes of every shade from pale yellow to ebony. Why, thought he, should negroes always be dumped all into one heap as if they were all of one grade? Didn't the government know there were negroes and negroes? Whimsically he wondered why the officers didn't sort them out among the troops like they did the horses, according to colour,—blacks, browns, yellows, ash-coloured, snuff-coloured. Then what possibilities in matching or contrasting the shades of the troopers with those of their mounts: black horse, yellow rider,—bay horse, black rider,—sorrel horse, gingersnap rider—no, that wouldn't do, inartistic combination! And what colour of steed would tastily trim off that freckled abomination of a sergeant yonder? Can't be done,—scheme's a failure!—damn that sergeant anyhow, he had confiscated Graham's only toothbrush to clean his gun with. Graham again records his oath to thrash him when his three years is up.

But three years is an age. It will never roll round. Only two months has he been a soldier, and yet everything that happened before that is becoming vague—even the smile on Helen Phillips' face. He cannot close his eyes and conjure up the picture as he did at first.

Graham was out of temper. Cavalry wasn't what it is cracked up to be, and a horse was of more trouble than convenience anyway, he was convinced. In the battle-drills the men had been put through so repeatedly day after day the horse played no part, and what riding Graham had done so far had served only to make him so sore and stiff that he could neither ride nor walk in comfort. He heartily repented his choice and wished he had taken the infantry, where a man has to look out only for himself and his gun. Oh, the troubles, the numberless troubles, of a green soldier!

All of Corporal Graham's military notions were affronted, and his right-dress, upstanding ideas of soldiering were shattered. The reality is a matter of pushing a curry-comb, getting your nose and mouth and eyes filled with horse-hairs, which get down your neck and up your sleeves, and stick in the sweat and won't come off and there's no water to wash them off. Then the drills—save the mark!—not as much precision in them as in a football manoeuvre,—just a spreading out into a thin line and running forward for five seconds perhaps, falling on your belly and pretending to fire three rounds at an imaginary foe, then jumping up and doing it all over again till you feel faint and foolish,—every man for himself, no order, no alignment, one man crouching behind a shrub, another falling prone on the ground, another hiding behind a tree,—surely no pomp or circumstance or glory in that business. Graham's study of punctilios did him no service there. Not a parade had the regiment had. Mobilized at a Southern port only three days before the sailing of the transport, it had taken every hour of the time to load the horses and equipment and supplies. Graham had found that fighting is a very small part of soldiering, which is mostly drudgery, and he had revised his idea of war several times since his enlistment.

He thought as he sat cleaning his rifle that surely the preliminaries were about over, and, if camp rumour counted for anything, that the day of battle could not be more than one or two suns away. He would have his gun in fine working order, for good luck might bring some shooting on the morrow. At any rate his carbine must glisten when he becomes part of to-morrow's guard, and he hoped that he would be put right on the point of the advance picket. He hadn't had a shave in three weeks, and his uniform was sweat-stained and dusty, and he could not hope to look spick and span; but his gun could be shiny, and he knew Lieutenant Wagner well enough by that time to have learned that a clean gun counted for more with him than a clean shirt. So he hoped and prayed that he would be selected for some duty that was worth while.

The brigades under General Bell, which had been landed at Alta Gracia with difficulty, were pressing forward with all haste to cut off a garrison of Germans that had been thrown into Puerto Cabello from the German cruisers, and to prevent the arrival of reinforcements which were being rushed to their aid from Caracas. Reports from native scouts and communications from General Mañana himself placed the number of these reinforcements at from five to seven thousand. General Bell doubted that this force was so large, but was anxious to meet it, whatever its size.

Despite the vigilance of the all too meagre patrol of warships for Venezuelan waters which the United States had been able to spare from the necessary guard for her Atlantic and Gulf ports, the forehanded and ever-ready Kaiser had landed seven or eight thousand troops from a fleet of transports at Cumana, and with characteristic German promptness had occupied Caracas and Barcelona before Uncle Sam had been able to put any troops on Venezuelan soil. It seemed nonsense for either Germany or the United States to care to fight any battles down in that little out-of-the-way place. They could find other more accessible and far more important battle-grounds: but no, as the Monroe Doctrine forbade Germany to make a foothold in Venezuela and her doing so was the casus belli, the ethics of the affair demanded that there should be a bona fide forcible ejectment of the Kaiser's troops from Venezuelan territory by the United States. The battles there might be only a side issue, and the real test of strength might come at any or all of a dozen places on land and sea, but there must be some fighting done in Venezuela just to prove that the cause of war was not fanciful.

General Bell's brigades were one under General Earnhardt, consisting of the 5th, 7th, 10th and 15th Cavalry, and a second, including the 4th and 11th regular infantry, the 71st Ohio, and the 1st X——, under General Cowles, with a battalion of engineers and four batteries of field artillery. General Earnhardt's cavalry brigade was striving to reach the Valencia road, the only passable route from Caracas to Puerto Cabello, before the German force should pass. General Mañana had sent a courier to say that he would hold the Germans in check till Earnhardt's arrival.

On the morning of April 2d Graham was among the advance pickets and almost forgot his saddle pains and creaking joints in the excitement of expected battle. For half a day Earnhardt pushed forward as fast as the trail would permit. He had halted his troops for five minutes' rest about noon, when a native on a wiry pony, riding like one possessed, dashed into the picket and came near getting his head punched off before he could make Graham understand that he was a friend with a message for the Americano capitan. Graham carried him before General Earnhardt, who at the head of his column was reclining on a bank beside the trail, perspiring and dusty and brushing viciously at the flies and mosquitoes that swarmed around him. The general did not change his position when the native, who was clad in a nondescript but much-beribboned uniform, slid from his horse and with a ceremonious bow and salute informed him that he was Captain Miguel of General Mañana's staff, and had the honour to report that he was despatched by General Mañana to say that, despite that gentleman's earnest and desperate resistance, a large and outnumbering force of German cavalry had forced a passage of the road to Puerto Cabello about eleven o'clock that morning. While Captain Miguel was delivering his elaborate message to the disgusted cavalryman, the picket passed in an old soldier of the 10th who had been detailed as a scout at the beginning of the campaign; and this scout rode up to report just as the native captain finished speaking. Earnhardt turned impatiently from Mañana's aide to his own trusted man and said:

"Well, Morris, what is it?"

"Small force of German cavalry, sir, had a scrimmage with General Mañana's troops this morning on the Valencia road, and rode on in the direction of Puerto Cabello."

"How many Germans got through?" asked the general.

"All of them, sir; about two troops, as near as I could count."

"And how many men did Mañana have?" the question came sharply.

"Something like fifteen hundred I should judge, sir, from the sound of the firing and what I could see," answered the scout.

General Earnhardt, without rising, turned with unconcealed contempt to Captain Miguel and said:

"My compliments to General Mañana, and he's a —— old fraud and I don't want to have anything more to do with him;" and while the red-splashed aide was trying to solve the curt message which he but half understood, the trumpeter at a word from the angry cavalryman sounded mount and forward and the brigade was again off at top speed, hoping still to cut off the main relief force sent out from Caracas. General Earnhardt considered himself a lucky soldier to find that this force had not passed when at last he reached the road (which was hardly worthy of the name highway, though one of the thoroughfares of Venezuela); and he hastily disposed his forces to meet the German advance.

It was not long in coming. The crack of a rifle was the first notice Corporal Graham had that he was about to be under fire. He felt a cold breeze blow upon his back for a moment, and then as the popping began to approach a rattle the joy of contest entered his soul and sent his blood bounding.

But the joy was short-lived. When the Germans came near enough to see that they were opposed by men in Uncle Sam's uniform, and not by the nagging natives who had been popping harmlessly away at them from the roadside, they decided it was best not to be too precipitate. They stopped and began to feel for the American line. After some desultory sharpshooting they finally located it, and quieted down to wait till the German commander could get his little army up and into line of battle.

Then Hayward Graham had to sit still and hold his gun while the exhilaration and enthusiasm died down in him like the fiz in a glass of soda-water. He had worked his nerves up to such a tension that the reaction was nothing less than painful, and he was full of impatience and profanity. He could hardly wait for to-morrow, when Germany and Uncle Sam would get up after a good night's rest and lay on like men.

Again what was his unspeakable disgust and almost unbearable disappointment when the next morning came and he was detailed as stable guard, and given charge of the 10th's corral, quite a distance in rear of the line of battle and absolutely out of all danger. Profanity was a lame and feeble remedy for that situation. He sat down and growled.

"Oh, for an assorted supply of languages in which to separately and collectively and properly consign this whole bloody system of details to the cellar of Hades!"

A veteran sergeant of Graham's troop, who on occasions wore a medal of honour on his blouse, and at all times bore an unsightly scar on his cheek as a souvenir of Wounded Knee, sought to soothe the young man's feelings.

"It all comes along in the run of the business, corporal," he said. "Soldiering is not all fighting. A man earns his money by doing whatever duty is assigned to him."

Graham answered with heat: "I didn't come into this nasty, sweaty, horse-smelly business for any such consideration as fifteen dollars a month and feed, and if I am to miss the scrapping and the glory I prefer to cut the whole affair."

His temper improved, however, as the day began to drag itself away with no sound of conflict from the battle-line save the occasional pop of a pot-shot by the pickets, and as the rumour began to leak back to the corral that both sides must be waiting for their guns to come up. This was doubtless true: for the four batteries of American artillery arrived late in the afternoon, and the infantry brigade was all up by nightfall.