The Last Shot Part 72

"Sue for peace because women go hysterical? Do you suppose that the Browns will listen now when they think they have the advantage? Leave peace to me! Give me forty-eight hours more! I have told our troops to hold and they will hold. I don't mistake cowardly telegraphers' rumors for facts--"

"Pardon me a moment," the premier interrupted. "I must answer a local call." So astute a man of affairs as he knew that Westerling's voice, storming, breaking, tightening with effort at control, confirmed all reports of disaster. "In fact, the crockery is broken--for you and for me!" said the premier when he spoke again. His life had been a gamble and the gamble had turned against him in playing for a great prize.

There was an admirable stoicism in the way he announced the news he had received from the local call: "The chief of police calls me up to say that the uprising is too vast for him to hold. There isn't any mutiny, but his men simply have become a part of public opinion. A mob of women and children is starting for the palace to ask me what I have done with their husbands, brothers, sons, and fathers. They won't have to break in to find me. I'm very tired. I'm ready. I shall face them from the balcony. Yes, Westerling, you and I have achieved a place in history, and they're far more bitter toward you than me. However, you don't have to come back."

"No, I don't have to go back! No, I was not to go back if I failed!"

said Westerling dizzily.

Again defiance rose strong as the one tangible thought, born of his ruling pa.s.sion. It was inconceivable that so vast an ambition should fail. Failure! He defied it! He burst into the main staff room, where the tired officers regarded him with a glare, or momentary, weary wonder, and continued packing up their papers for departure. He went on into the telegraphers' room. Some of the operators were packing their instruments.

"The news? What is the news?" Westerling asked hoa.r.s.ely.

An operator who was still at the key, without even half rising let alone saluting, glanced up from the cavernous sockets of eyes unawed by the chief of staff's presence.

"All that comes in is bad," he said. "Where we get none because the wires are down we know it's worse. We've been licked."

He went on sending a message, wholly oblivious of Westerling, who stumbled back into the staff room and paused inarticulate before Turcas.

"The army is going--resisting by units, but going. It has made its own orders!" Turcas said. The other division chiefs nodded in agreement.

"Your Excellency, we are doing our best," added the vice-chief, holding the door for Westerling to return to his own office. "The nation is not beaten. Given breathing time for reorganization, the army will settle down to the defensive on our own range. There the enemy may try our costly tactics against the precision and power of modern arms, if they choose. No, the nation is not beaten."

The nation! Westerling was not thinking of the nation.

"You--" he began, looking around from face to face.

Not one showed any sign of softening or deference, and, his mind a blank, he withdrew, driven back to his isolation by an inflexible ostracism. The world had come to an end. Public opinion was master--master of his own staff. He sank down before his desk, staring, just staring; hearing the roar of battle which was drawing nearer; staring at the staff orderlies, who came in to take down the wall maps, and at his aide packing up the papers and leaving him in a room bare of all the appurtenances of his position, with little idea in his coma of despair of the hour or even that time was pa.s.sing. Finally, some one touched him on the shoulder. He looked up to see his aide at his elbow saluting and Francois, his valet, standing by with an overcoat.

"We must go, Your Excellency," said the aide.

"Go?" asked Westerling dazedly.

"Yes, the staff has already gone to a new headquarters."

The announcement was the needle p.r.i.c.k that once more aroused him to a sense of his situation. He rose and struck his fist on the desk in a pulsing outbreak of energy and stubbornness.

"But I stay! I stay!" he cried. "The enemy is not near. He can't be!"

"Very near, general. You can see for yourself, said the aide.

"I will!" Westerling replied. "I will see how the conspiracy of the staff has made ruin of my plans!"

Again something of his old manner returned; something of the stoic's fatalism flashed in his eye. He shook his head to Francois, refusing to slip his arms into the sleeves of the coat which Francois dropped on to his shoulders.

"Yes, I will see for myself!" he repeated, as he led the way out to the veranda. "I'll see what goblin scared my pusillanimous staff and robbed me of victory!"

Every cry of triumph in war is paid for by a cry of pain. On one side, anguish of heart; on the other, inexpressible ecstasy. The Gray staff were oblivious of fatigue in the glum, overpowering necessity of restoring the organization of the Gray army for a second stand. The Brown staff were oblivious of fatigue in the exhilaration of victory.

Had a picture of the sight which the judge's son had witnessed at dawn in the path of the attack and the counter-attack been thrown on the wall of the big lobby room of the Brown headquarters, there might have been less exultation on the part of the junior officers of the staff gathered there. They were not seeing or thinking of the dead. They were seeing only brown-headed pins pus.h.i.+ng gray-headed pins out of the way on the map, as the symbol of an attack become a pursuit and of better than their dreams come true--the symbol of security for altar fires and race and nation. They were of the living, in the mightiest thrill that a soldier may know.

No doubt now! No more suspense! Labor and sacrifice rewarded! Fervent thanks to the Almighty were mingled with whistled s.n.a.t.c.hes of wedding marches and popular songs. An aide taking a message to the wire preferred leaping over a chair to going around it. A subaltern and a colonel danced together. Victory, victory, victory out of the burr of automatics, the pounding of artillery, the popping roar of rifles!

Victory out of the mire of trenches after brain-aching strain! Victory for you and for me and for sweethearts and wives and children! Aren't we all Browns, orderly and captain, boyish lieutenant and gray-haired general? A taciturn martinet of a major hugged a telegrapher to whom he had never spoken a single unofficial word. Hadn't the telegraphers, those silent men who were the tongue of the army, received the good news and pa.s.sed it on? Some officers who could be spared from duty went to their quarters, where they dropped like falling logs on their beds.

To them, after their spell of rejoicing, victory meant sleep for the first time in weeks without forked lightnings of apprehension stabbing their sub-consciousness.

Fellows.h.i.+p was in the victory, the fellows.h.i.+p which, developed under Partow, who believed that Napoleons and Colossi and G.o.ds in the car and all such gentlemen belonged to an archaic farce-comedy, had grown under Lanstron. "The staff reports," began the messages that awakened a world, retiring with the idea that the Browns were grimly holding the defensive, to the news that three millions had outgeneralled and defeated five.

In the inner room, whose opening door gave glimpses of Lanstron and the division chiefs, a magic of secret council which the juniors could not quite understand had wrought the wonder. Lanstron had not forgotten the dead. He could see them; he could see everything that happened. Had not Partow said to him: "Don't just read reports. Visualize men and events.

Be the artillery, be the infantry, be the wounded--live and think in their places. In this way only can you really know your work!"

His elation when he saw his plans going right was that of the instrument of Partow's training and Marta's service. He pressed the hands of the men around him; his voice caught in his grat.i.tude and his breaths were very short at times, like those of a spent, happy runner at the goal.

Feeding on victory and growing greedy of more, his division chiefs were discussing how to press the war till the Grays sued for peace; and he was silent in the midst of their talk, which was interrupted by the ringing of the tunnel telephone. When he came out of his bedroom, Lanstron's distress was so evident that those who were seated arose and the others drew near in inquiry and sympathy. It seemed to them that the chief of staff, the head of the machine, who had left the room had returned an individual.

"The connection was broken while we were speaking!" he said blankly.

"That means it must have been cut by the enemy--that the enemy knows of its existence!"

"Perhaps not. Perhaps an accident--a chance shot," said the vice-chief.

"No, I'm sure not," Lanstron replied. "I am sure that it was cut deliberately and not by her."

"The 53d Regiment is going forward in that direction--the same regiment that defended the house--and it can't go any faster than it is going,"

the vice-chief continued, rather incoherently. He and the others no less felt the news as a personal blow. Though absent in person, Marta had become in spirit an intimate of their hopes and councils.

"She is helpless--in their power!" Lanstron said. "There is no telling what they might do to her in the rage of their discovery. I must go to her! I am going to the front!"

The announcement started a storm of protest.

"But you are the chief of staff! You cannot leave the staff!"

"You've no right to expose yourself!"

"A chance sh.e.l.l or bullet--"

"You do not seem to realize what this victory means to you. You might be killed at the very moment of triumph."

"I haven't had any triumph. But if I had, could there be a better time?"

Lanstron asked with a half-bantering smile.

"You couldn't reach there before the 53d Regiment anyway!" declared the vice-chief, having in mind the fact that the staff was fifteen miles to the rear, where it could be at the wire focus. "You will find the roads blocked with the advance. You'll have to ride, you can't go all the way in a car."

"Terrible hards.h.i.+p!" replied Lanstron. "Still, I'm going. Things are well in hand. I can keep in touch by the wire as I proceed. If I get out of touch then you," with a nod to the vice-chief, "know as well as I how to meet any sudden emergency. Yes, you all know how to act--we're so used to working together. The staff will follow as soon as the Galland house is taken. We shall make our headquarters there. I'm free now. I can be my own man for a little while--I can be human!"

A certain awe of him and of his position, born of the prestige of victory, hushed further protest. Who if not he had the right to go where he pleased in the Brown lines now? They noted the eagerness in his eyes, the eagerness of one off the leash, shot with a suspense which was not for the fate of the army, as he left headquarters.

A young officer of the Grays who was with a signal-corps section, trying to keep a brigade headquarters in touch with the staff during the retreat, two or three miles from the Galland house, had seen what looked like an insulated telephone wire at the bottom of a crater in the earth made by the explosion of a heavy sh.e.l.l. The instructions to all subordinates from the chief of intelligence to look for the source of the leak in information to the Browns made him quick to see a clew in anything unusual. He jumped down into the crater and not only found his pains rewarded, but that the wire was intact and ran underground in either direction. Who had laid it? Not the Grays. Why was it there? He called for one of his men to bring a buzzer, and it was the work of little more than a minute to cut the wire and make an attachment. Then he heard a woman's voice talking to "Lanny." Who was Lanny? He waited till he had heard enough to know that it was none other than Lanstron, the chief of staff of the Browns, and the woman must be a spy. An orderly despatched to the chief of intelligence with the news returned with the order:

"Drop everything and report to me in person at once."