but no more shells fell.
the night grew dark and showed a field of glittering stars, for the air was sharpening again towards frost. we waited for an hour, crouching just behind the far parapets, but never came that ominous familiar whistle.
then sandy rose and stretched himself. “i’m hungry,” he said. “let’s have out the food, hussin. we’ve eaten nothing since before daybreak. i wonder what is the meaning of this respite?”
i fancied i knew.
“it’s stumm’s way,” i said. “he wants to torture us. he’ll keep us hours on tenterhooks, while he sits over yonder exulting in what he thinks we’re enduring. he has just enough imagination for that ... he would rush us if he had the men. as it is, he’s going to blow us to pieces, but do it slowly and smack his lips over it.”
sandy yawned. “we’ll disappoint him, for we won’t be worried, old man. we three are beyond that kind of fear.”
“meanwhile we’re going to do the best we can,” i said. “he’s got the exact range for his whizz-bangs. we’ve got to find a hole somewhere just outside the castrol, and some sort of head-cover. we’re bound to get damaged whatever happens, but we’ll stick it out to the end. when they think they have finished with us and rush the place, there may be one of us alive to put a bullet through old stumm. what do you say?”
they agreed, and after our meal sandy and i crawled out to prospect, leaving the others on guard in case there should be an attack. we found a hollow in the glacis a little south of the castrol, and, working very quietly, managed to enlarge it and cut a kind of shallow cave in the hill. it would be no use against a direct hit, but it would give some cover from flying fragments. as i read the situation, stumm could land as many shells as he pleased in the castrol and wouldn’t bother to attend to the flanks. when the bad shelling began there would be shelter for one or two in the cave.
our enemies were watchful. the riflemen on the east burnt very flares at intervals, and stumm’s lot sent up a great star-rocket. i remember that just before midnight hell broke loose round fort palantuken. no more russian shells came into our hollow, but all the road to the east was under fire, and at the fort itself there was a shattering explosion and a queer scarlet glow which looked as if a magazine had been hit. for about two hours the firing was intense, and then it died down. but it was towards the north that i kept turning my head. there seemed to be something different in the sound there, something sharper in the report of the guns, as if shells were dropping in a narrow valley whose rock walls doubled the echo. had the russians by any blessed chance worked round that flank?
i got sandy to listen, but he shook his head. “those guns are a dozen miles off,” he said. “they’re no nearer than three days ago. but it looks as if the sportsmen on the south might have a chance. when they break through and stream down the valley, they’ll be puzzled to account for what remains of us ... we’re no longer three adventurers in the enemy’s country. we’re the advance guard of the allies. our pals don’t know about us, and we’re going to be cut off, which has happened to advance guards before now. but all the same, we’re in our own battle-line again. doesn’t that cheer you, dick?”
it cheered me wonderfully, for i knew now what had been the weight on my heart ever since i accepted sir walter’s mission. it was the loneliness of it. i was fighting far away from my friends, far away from the true fronts of battle. it was a side-show which, whatever its importance, had none of the exhilaration of the main effort. but now we had come back to familiar ground. we were like the highlanders cut off at cite st auguste on the first day of loos, or those scots guards at festubert of whom i had heard. only, the others did not know of it, would never hear of it. if peter succeeded he might tell the tale, but most likely he was lying dead somewhere in the no-man’s-land between the lines. we should never be heard of again any more, but our work remained. sir walter would know that, and he would tell our few belongings that we had gone out in our country’s service.
we were in the castrol again, sitting under the parapets. the same thoughts must have been in sandy’s mind, for he suddenly laughed.
“it’s a queer ending, dick. we simply vanish into the infinite. if the russians get through they will never recognize what is left of us among so much of the wreckage of battle. the snow will soon cover us, and when the spring comes there will only be a few bleached bones. upon my soul it is the kind of death i always wanted.” and he quoted softly to himself a verse of an old scots ballad:
“mony’s the ane for him maks mane,
but nane sall ken whar he is gane.
ower his white banes, when they are bare,
the wind sall blaw for evermair.”
“but our work lives,” i cried, with a sudden great gasp of happiness. “it’s the job that matters, not the men that do it. and our job’s done. we have won, old chap—won hands down—and there is no going back on that. we have won anyway; and if peter has had a slice of luck, we’ve scooped the pool ... after all, we never expected to come out of this thing with our lives.”
blenkiron, with his leg stuck out stiffly before him, was humming quietly to himself, as he often did when he felt cheerful. he had only one song, “john brown’s body”; usually only a line at a time, but now he got as far as the whole verse:
“he captured harper’s ferry, with his nineteen men so true,
and he frightened old virginny till she trembled through and through.
they hung him for a traitor, themselves the traitor crew,
but his soul goes marching along.”
“feeling good?” i asked.
“fine. i’m about the luckiest man on god’s earth, major. i’ve always wanted to get into a big show, but i didn’t see how it would come the way of a homely citizen like me, living in a steam-warmed house and going down town to my office every morning. i used to envy my old dad that fought at chattanooga, and never forgot to tell you about it. but i guess chattanooga was like a scrap in a bowery bar compared to this. when i meet the old man in glory he’ll have to listen some to me.”
it was just after blenkiron spoke that we got a reminder of stumm’s presence. the gun was well laid, for a shell plumped on the near edge of the castro. it made an end of one of the companions who was on guard there, badly wounded another, and a fragment gashed my thigh. we took refuge in the shallow cave, but some wild shooting from the east side brought us back to the parapets, for we feared an attack. none came, nor any more shells, and once again the night was quiet.
i asked blenkiron if he had any near relatives.
“why, no, except a sister’s son, a college-boy who has no need of his uncle. it’s fortunate that we three have no wives. i haven’t any regrets, neither, for i’ve had a mighty deal out of life. i was thinking this morning that it was a pity i was going out when i had just got my duo-denum to listen to reason. but i reckon that’s another of my mercies. the good god took away the pain in my stomach so that i might go to him with a clear head and a thankful heart.”
“we’re lucky fellows,” said sandy; “we’ve all had our whack. when i remember the good times i’ve had i could sing a hymn of praise. we’ve lived long enough to know ourselves, and to shape ourselves into some kind of decency. but think of those boys who have given their lives freely when they scarcely knew what life meant. they were just at the beginning of the road, and they didn’t know what dreary bits lay before them. it was all sunshiny and bright-coloured, and yet they gave it up without a moment’s doubt. and think of the men with wives and children and homes that were the biggest things in life to them. for fellows like us to shirk would be black cowardice. it’s small credit for us to stick it out. but when those others shut their teeth and went forward, they were blessed heroes....”
after that we fell silent. a man’s thoughts at a time like that seem to be double-powered, and the memory becomes very sharp and clear. i don’t know what was in the others’ minds, but i know what filled my own...
i fancy it isn’t the men who get most out of the world and are always buoyant and cheerful that most fear to die. rather it is the weak-engined souls who go about with dull eyes, that cling most fiercely to life. they have not the joy of being alive which is a kind of earnest of immortality ... i know that my thoughts were chiefly about the jolly things that i had seen and done; not regret, but gratitude. the panorama of blue noons on the veld unrolled itself before me, and hunter’s nights in the bush, the taste of food and sleep, the bitter stimulus of dawn, the joy of wild adventure, the voices of old staunch friends. hitherto the war had seemed to make a break with all that had gone before, but now the war was only part of the picture. i thought of my battalion, and the good fellows there, many of whom had fallen on the loos parapets. i had never looked to come out of that myself. but i had been spared, and given the chance of a greater business, and i had succeeded. that was the tremendous fact, and my mood was humble gratitude to god and exultant pride. death was a small price to pay for it. as blenkiron would have said, i had got good value in the deal.
the night was getting bitter cold, as happens before dawn. it was frost again, and the sharpness of it woke our hunger. i got out the remnants of the food and wine and we had a last meal. i remember we pledged each other as we drank.
“we have eaten our passover feast,” said sandy. “when do you look for the end?”
“after dawn,” i said. “stumm wants daylight to get the full savour of his revenge.”
slowly the sky passed from ebony to grey, and black shapes of hill outlined themselves against it. a wind blew down the valley, bringing the acrid smell of burning, but something too of the freshness of morn. it stirred strange thoughts in me, and woke the old morning vigour of the blood which was never to be mine again. for the first time in that long vigil i was torn with a sudden regret.
“we must get into the cave before it is full light,” i said. “we had better draw lots for the two to go.”
the choice fell on one of the companions and blenkiron. “you can count me out,” said the latter. “if it’s your wish to find a man to be alive when our friends come up to count their spoil, i guess i’m the worst of the lot. i’d prefer, if you don’t mind, to stay here. i’ve made my peace with my maker, and i’d like to wait quietly on his call. i’ll play a game of patience to pass the time.”
he would take no denial, so we drew again, and the lot fell to sandy.
“if i’m the last to go,” he said, “i promise i don’t miss. stumm won’t be long in following me.”
he shook hands with his cheery smile, and he and the companion slipped over the parapet in the final shadows before dawn.
blenkiron spread his patience cards on a flat rock, and dealt out the double napoleon. he was perfectly calm, and hummed to himself his only tune. for myself i was drinking in my last draught of the hill air. my contentment was going. i suddenly felt bitterly loath to die.
something of the same kind must have passed through blenkiron’s head. he suddenly looked up and asked, “sister anne, sister anne, do you see anybody coming?”
i stood close to the parapet, watching every detail of the landscape as shown by the revealing daybreak. up on the shoulders of the palantuken, snowdrifts lipped over the edges of the cliffs. i wondered when they would come down as avalanches. there was a kind of croft on one hillside, and from a hut the smoke of breakfast was beginning to curl. stumm’s gunners were awake and apparently holding council. far down on the main road a convoy was moving—i heard the creak of the wheels two miles away, for the air was deathly still.
then, as if a spring had been loosed, the world suddenly leaped to a hideous life. with a growl the guns opened round all the horizon. they were especially fierce to the south, where a rafale beat as i had never heard it before. the one glance i cast behind me showed the gap in the hills choked with fumes and dust.
but my eyes were on the north. from erzerum city tall tongues of flame leaped from a dozen quarters. beyond, towards the opening of the euphrates glen, there was the sharp crack of field-guns. i strained eyes and ears, mad with impatience, and i read the riddle.
“sandy,” i yelled, “peter has got through. the russians are round the flank. the town is burning. glory to god, we’ve won, we’ve won!”
and as i spoke the earth seemed to split beside me, and i was flung forward on the gravel which covered hilda von einem’s grave.
as i picked myself up, and to my amazement found myself uninjured, i saw blenkiron rubbing the dust out of his eyes and arranging a disordered card. he had stopped humming, and was singing aloud:
“he captured harper’s ferry, with his nineteen men so true
and he frightened old virginny ...”
“say, major,” he cried, “i believe this game of mine is coming out.”
i was now pretty well mad. the thought that old peter had won, that we had won beyond our wildest dreams, that if we died there were those coming who would exact the uttermost vengeance, rode my brain like a fever. i sprang on the parapet and waved my hand to stumm, shouting defiance. rifle shots cracked out from behind, and i leaped back just in time for the next shell.
the charge must have been short, for it was a bad miss, landing somewhere on the glacis. the next was better and crashed on the near parapet, carving a great hole in the rocky kranz. this time my arm hung limp, broken by a fragment of stone, but i felt no pain. blenkiron seemed to bear a charmed life, for he was smothered in dust, but unhurt. he blew the dust away from his cards very gingerly and went on playing.
then came a dud which dropped neatly inside on the soft ground. i was determined to break for the open and chance the rifle fire, for if stumm went on shooting the castrol was certain death. i caught blenkiron round the middle, scattering his cards to the winds, and jumped over the parapet.
“don’t apologize, major,” said he. “the game was as good as won. but for god’s sake drop me, for if you wave me like the banner of freedom i’ll get plugged sure and good.”
my one thought was to get cover for the next minutes, for i had an instinct that our vigil was near its end. the defences of erzerum were crumbling like sand-castles, and it was a proof of the tenseness of my nerves that i seemed to be deaf to the sound. stumm had seen us cross the parapet, and he started to sprinkle all the surroundings of the castrol. blenkiron and i lay like a working-party between the lines caught by machine-guns, taking a pull on ourselves as best we could. sandy had some kind of cover, but we were on the bare farther slope, and the riflemen on that side might have had us at their mercy.
but no shots came from them. as i looked east, the hillside, which a little before had been held by our enemies, was as empty as the desert. and then i saw on the main road a sight which for a second time made me yell like a maniac. down that glen came a throng of men and galloping limbers—a crazy, jostling crowd, spreading away beyond the road to the steep slopes, and leaving behind it many black dots to darken the snows. the gates of the south had yielded, and our friends were through them.
at that sight i forgot all about our danger. i didn’t give a cent for stumm’s shells. i didn’t believe he could hit me. the fate which had mercifully preserved us for the first taste of victory would see us through to the end.
i remember bundling blenkiron along the hill to find sandy. but our news was anticipated. for down our own side-glen came the same broken tumult of men. more; for at their backs, far up at the throat of the pass, i saw horsemen—the horsemen of the pursuit. old nicholas had flung his cavalry in.
sandy was on his feet, with his lips set and his eye abstracted. if his face hadn’t been burned black by weather it would have been pale as a dish-clout. a man like him doesn’t make up his mind for death and then be given his life again without being wrenched out of his bearings. i thought he didn’t understand what had happened, so i beat him on the shoulders.
“man, d’you see?” i cried. “the cossacks! the cossacks! god! how they’re taking that slope! they’re into them now. by heaven, we’ll ride with them! we’ll get the gun horses!”
a little knoll prevented stumm and his men from seeing what was happening farther up the glen, till the first wave of the rout was on them. he had gone on bombarding the castrol and its environs while the world was cracking over his head. the gun team was in the hollow below the road, and down the hill among the boulders we crawled, blenkiron as lame as a duck, and me with a limp left arm.
the poor beasts were straining at their pickets and sniffing the morning wind, which brought down the thick fumes of the great bombardment and the indescribable babbling cries of a beaten army. before we reached them that maddened horde had swept down on them, men panting and gasping in their flight, many of them bloody from wounds, many tottering in the first stages of collapse and death. i saw the horses seized by a dozen hands, and a desperate fight for their possession. but as we halted there our eyes were fixed on the battery on the road above us, for round it was now sweeping the van of the retreat.
i had never seen a rout before, when strong men come to the end of their tether and only their broken shadows stumble towards the refuge they never find. no more had stumm, poor devil. i had no ill-will left for him, though coming down that hill i was rather hoping that the two of us might have a final scrap. he was a brute and a bully, but, by god! he was a man. i heard his great roar when he saw the tumult, and the next i saw was his monstrous figure working at the gun. he swung it south and turned it on the fugitives.
but he never fired it. the press was on him, and the gun was swept sideways. he stood up, a foot higher than any of them, and he seemed to be trying to check the rush with his pistol. there is power in numbers, even though every unit is broken and fleeing. for a second to that wild crowd stumm was the enemy, and they had strength enough to crush him. the wave flowed round and then across him. i saw the butt-ends of rifles crash on his head and shoulders, and the next second the stream had passed over his body.
that was god’s judgement on the man who had set himself above his kind.
sandy gripped my shoulder and was shouting in my ear:
“they’re coming, dick. look at the grey devils ... oh, god be thanked, it’s our friends!”
the next minute we were tumbling down the hillside, blenkiron hopping on one leg between us. i heard dimly sandy crying, “oh, well done our side!” and blenkiron declaiming about harper’s ferry, but i had no voice at all and no wish to shout. i know the tears were in my eyes, and that if i had been left alone i would have sat down and cried with pure thankfulness. for sweeping down the glen came a cloud of grey cavalry on little wiry horses, a cloud which stayed not for the rear of the fugitives, but swept on like a flight of rainbows, with the steel of their lance-heads glittering in the winter sun. they were riding for erzerum.
remember that for three months we had been with the enemy and had never seen the face of an ally in arms. we had been cut off from the fellowship of a great cause, like a fort surrounded by an army. and now we were delivered, and there fell around us the warm joy of comradeship as well as the exultation of victory.
we flung caution to the winds, and went stark mad. sandy, still in his emerald coat and turban, was scrambling up the farther slope of the hollow, yelling greetings in every language known to man. the leader saw him, with a word checked his men for a moment—it was marvellous to see the horses reined in in such a break-neck ride—and from the squadron half a dozen troopers swung loose and wheeled towards us. then a man in a grey overcoat and a sheepskin cap was on the ground beside us wringing our hands.
“you are safe, my old friends”—it was peter’s voice that spoke—“i will take you back to our army, and get you breakfast.”
“no, by the lord, you won’t,” cried sandy. “we’ve had the rough end of the job and now we’ll have the fun. look after blenkiron and these fellows of mine. i’m going to ride knee by knee with your sportsmen for the city.”
peter spoke a word, and two of the cossacks dismounted. the next i knew i was mixed up in the cloud of greycoats, galloping down the road up which the morning before we had strained to the castrol.
that was the great hour of my life, and to live through it was worth a dozen years of slavery. with a broken left arm i had little hold on my beast, so i trusted my neck to him and let him have his will. black with dirt and smoke, hatless, with no kind of uniform, i was a wilder figure than any cossack. i soon was separated from sandy, who had two hands and a better horse, and seemed resolute to press forward to the very van. that would have been suicide for me, and i had all i could do to keep my place in the bunch i rode with.
but, great god! what an hour it was! there was loose shooting on our flank, but nothing to trouble us, though the gun team of some austrian howitzer, struggling madly at a bridge, gave us a bit of a tussle. everything flitted past me like smoke, or like the mad finale of a dream just before waking. i knew the living movement under me, and the companionship of men, but all dimly, for at heart i was alone, grappling with the realization of a new world. i felt the shadows of the palantuken glen fading, and the great burst of light as we emerged on the wider valley. somewhere before us was a pall of smoke seamed with red flames, and beyond the darkness of still higher hills. all that time i was dreaming, crooning daft catches of song to myself, so happy, so deliriously happy that i dared not try to think. i kept muttering a kind of prayer made up of bible words to him who had shown me his goodness in the land of the living.
but as we drew out from the skirts of the hills and began the long slope to the city, i woke to clear consciousness. i felt the smell of sheepskin and lathered horses, and above all the bitter smell of fire. down in the trough lay erzerum, now burning in many places, and from the east, past the silent forts, horsemen were closing in on it. i yelled to my comrades that we were nearest, that we would be first in the city, and they nodded happily and shouted their strange war-cries. as we topped the last ridge i saw below me the van of our charge—a dark mass on the snow—while the broken enemy on both sides were flinging away their arms and scattering in the fields.
in the very front, now nearing the city ramparts, was one man. he was like the point of the steel spear soon to be driven home. in the clear morning air i could see that he did not wear the uniform of the invaders. he was turbaned and rode like one possessed, and against the snow i caught the dark sheen of emerald. as he rode it seemed that the fleeing turks were stricken still, and sank by the roadside with eyes strained after his unheeding figure ...
then i knew that the prophecy had been true, and that their prophet had not failed them. the long-looked for revelation had come. greenmantle had appeared at last to an awaiting people.
