Altsheler Joseph Alexander
The Forest of Swords: A Story of Paris and the Marne
"I forgot to tell you, Philip," said John, "that Wharton is a great sharpshooter. It's natural to him, and I don't believe the shifting platform will interfere with his aim."
"Then I hope that he never has done better sharp-shooting than he will do today. Ah, there goes the machine gun!"
There was a rapid rat-a-tat, not so clear and distinct as it would have been at the same distance on ground, and a stream of bullets poured from the machine gun. But they passed between the Arrow and the Omnibus, and only cut the unoffending air. Meanwhile Wharton was watching. A wrath, cold but consuming, had taken hold of him. The fact that he was high above the earth, perched in a swaying unstable seat was forgotten. He had eyes and thought only for the murderous machine gun and the man who worked it. An instinctive marksman, he and his rifle were now as one, and of all the birds of prey in the air at that moment Wharton was the most dangerous.
The machine gun was silent for a minute. The riflemen in the Taubes on the wings of the attacking force fired a few shots, but all of them went wild. John, tense and silent, sat with his own rifle raised, but half of the time he watched Wharton.
The two forces came a little nearer. Again the machine gun poured forth its stream of bullets. Two glanced off the sides of the Omnibus, and then John saw Wharton's rifle leap to his shoulder. The movement and the flash of the weapon were so near together that be seemed to take no aim. Yet his bullet sped true. The man at the machine gun, who was standing in a stooped position, threw up his hands, fell backward and out of the plane. A thrill of horror shot through John, and he shut his eyes a moment to keep from seeing that falling body.
"What has happened?" asked Lannes, who had not looked around.
"Wharton has shot the man at the machine gun clean out of the aeroplane. He must be falling yet."
"Ghastly, but necessary. Has anybody taken the slain man's place?"
"Yes, another has sprung to the gun! But he's gone! Wharton has shot him too! He's fallen on the floor of the car, and he lies quite still."
"Your friend is indeed a sharpshooter. How many men are left in the plane?"
"Only one! No, good God, there's none! Wharton has shot the third man also, and now the machine goes whirling and falling through space!"
"I said that friend of yours must be a sharpshooter," said Lannes, in a tone of awe, "but he must be more! He must be the king of all riflemen. It's evident that the Omnibus knows how to defend herself. I'll swing in a little, and you can take a shot or two."
John fired once, without hitting anything but the air, which made no complaint, but the battle was over. Horrified by the fate that had overtaken their comrades and seeing help for their enemy at hand the Taubes withdrew.
The Arrow and the Omnibus flew on toward the French lines, whence other machines were coming to meet them.
CHAPTER XI
THE CONTINUING BATTLE
The Arrow bore in toward the Omnibus. Wharton had put his rifle aside and was staring downward as if he would see the wreck that he had made. Lannes called to him loudly:
"You've saved us all!"
Wharton looked rather white, but he shouted back:
"I had no other choice."
The French aeroplanes were around them now, their motors drumming steadily and the aviators shouting congratulations to Lannes and Caumartin, whom they knew well. It was a friendly group, full of pride and exultation, and the Arrow and the Omnibus had a triumphant escort. Soon they were directly over the French, and then they began their descent. As usual, when they reached the army they made it amid cheers, and the first man who greeted John was short and young but with a face of pride.
"You have come back to us out of the air, Monsieur Scott," he said, "and I salute you."
It was Pierre Louis Bougainville, made a colonel already for extraordinary, almost unprecedented, valor and ability in so young a man. John recognized his rank by his uniform, and he acknowledged it gladly.
"It's true, I have come back, Colonel Bougainville," he said, "and right glad I am to come. I see that your country has had no cause to complain of you in the last week."
"Nor of hundreds of thousands of Frenchmen," said Bougainville. "Your company, the Strangers, is close at hand, and here is your captain now."
Captain Daniel Colton, thin and ascetic, walked forward. John gave him his best salute and said:
"Captain Colton, I beg to report to you for duty."
A light smile passed swiftly over Cotton's face.
"You're a little late, Lieutenant Scott," he said.
"I know it, sir, but I've brought Lieutenant Carstairs and Lieutenant Wharton with me. There have been obstacles which prevented our speedy return. We've done our best."
"I can well believe it. You left on horseback, and you return by air. But I'm most heartily glad to see all three of you again. I feared that you were dead."
"Thank you, sir," said John. "But we don't mean to die."
"Nevertheless," said Captain Colton, gravely, "death has been all about us for days and nights. Many of the Strangers are gone. You will find the living lying in the little valley just beyond us, and you can resume your duties."
Lannes, after a word or two, left them, and Caumartin took the Omnibus to another part of the field. Lannes' importance was continually growing in John's eyes, nor was it the effect of imagination. He saw that under the new conditions of warfare the ability of the young Frenchman to carry messages between generals separated widely could not be overrated. He might depart that very night on another flight.
"May I ask, sir," he said to Captain Colton, "to what command or division the Strangers are now attached?"
"To that of General Vaugirard, a very able man."
"I'm glad to hear it, sir. I know him. I was with him before I was taken by the Germans."
"It seems that you're about to have a general reunion," said Carstairs to young Scott, as they walked away.
"I am, and I'm mighty happy over it. I'll admit that I was rather glad to see you, you blooming Britisher."
About one-third of the Strangers were gone forever, and the rest, except the higher officers, were prostrate in the glade. White, worn and motionless they lay in the same stupor that John had seen overtake the German troops. Some were flat upon their backs, with arms outstretched, looking like crosses, others lay on their faces, and others were curled up on their sides. Few were over twenty-five. Nearly all had mothers in America or Great Britain.
While they slept the guns yet grumbled at many points. The sound on the horizon had gone on so long now that it seemed normal to John. He knew that it would continue so throughout the night, and maybe for many more days and nights. Unless it came near and made him a direct personal menace he would pay no attention to it.
It was growing late. Night was spreading once more over the vast battle field, stretching over thirty leagues maybe. The common soldier knew nothing, majors and colonels knew little more, but the silent man whose invisible hand had swept the gigantic German army back from Paris knew much. While the fire of the artillery continued under the searchlights the exhausted infantry sank down. Then the telephones began to talk over a vast stretch of space, dazzling white lights made signals, the sputtering wireless sent messages in the air, and the flying machines shot through the heavens. Commanders talked to one another in many ways now, and they would talk all through the night.
John and his comrades ate supper, while most of the Strangers slept around them. Those who were awake recognized them, shook hands and said a few words. They were a taciturn lot. After supper Carstairs and Wharton dropped upon the grass and were soon sound asleep. Scott was inclined to be wakeful and he walked along the edge of the glade, looking anxiously at the sleeping forms.
He saw the loom of a fire just beyond the ridge and going to the crest to look at it he beheld outlined before it a gigantic figure that he recognized at once. It was General Vaugirard, and John would have been glad to speak to him, but he hesitated to approach a general. While he stood doubting a hand fell upon his shoulder and a glad voice said in his ear:
"And our young American has come back! Ah, my friend, let me shake your hand!"
It was Captain de Rougemont, trim, erect and without a wound. John gladly let him shake. Then in reply to de Rougemont's eager questions he told briefly of all that had happened since they parted.
"The general has asked twice if we had any news of you," said de Rougemont. "He does not forget. A great mind in a vast body."
"Could I speak to him?"
"Of a certainty, my friend; come."
They advanced toward the fire. General Vaugirard was walking up and down, his hands clasped behind his back, and whistling softly. His huge figure looked yet more huge outlined against the flames. He heard the tread of the two young men and looking up recognized John instantly.
"Risen from the dead!" he exclaimed with warmth, clasping the young man's hand in his own gigantic palm. "I had despaired of ever seeing you again! There are so many more gallant lads whom I will certainly never see! Ah, well, such is life! The roll of our brave young dead is long, very long!"
He reclasped his hands behind his back and walking up and down began to whistle again softly. His emotion over the holocaust had passed, and once more he was the general planning for victory. But he stopped presently and said to John:
"The Strangers, to whom you belong, have come under my command. You are one of my children now. I have my eye on all of you. You are brave lads. Go and seek rest with them while you can. You may not have another chance in a month. We have driven the German, but he will turn, and then we may fight weeks, months, no one knows how long. Ah, well, such is life!"
John saluted respectfully, and withdrew to the little open glade in which the Strangers were lying, sleeping a great sleep. Captain Colton himself, wrapped in a blanket, was now a-slumber under a tree, and Wharton and Carstairs near by, stretched on their sides, were deep in slumber too. Fires were burning on the long line, but they were not numerous, and in the distance they seemed mere pin points. At times bars of intense white light, like flashes of lightning, would sweep along the front, showing that the searchlights of either army still provided illumination for the fighting. The note of the artillery came like a distant and smothered groan, but it did not cease, and it would not cease, since the searchlights would show it a way all through the night.
John sat down, looked at the faint flashes on the far horizon and listened to that moaning which grew in volume as one paid close attention to it. Europe or a great part of it had gone mad. He was filled once more with wrath against kings and all their doings as he looked upon the murderous aftermath of feudalism, the most gigantic of all wars, made in a few hours by a few men sitting around a table. Then he laughed at himself. What was he! A mere feather in a cyclone! Certainly he had been blown about like one!
His nervous imagination now passed quickly and throwing himself upon the ground he slept like those around him. All the Strangers were awakened at early dawn by the signal of a trumpet, and when John opened his eyes he found the air still quivering beneath the throb of the guns. As he had foreseen they had never ceased in the darkness, and he could not remember how many days and nights now they had been raining steel upon human beings.
He was refreshed and strengthened by a night of good sleep, but his mind was as sensitive as ever. In the morning no less bitterly than at night he raged against the folly and ambition of the kings. But the others paid no attention to the cannon. They were light of heart and easy of tongue. They chaffed one another in the cool dawn, and cried to the cooks for breakfast, which was soon brought to them, hot and plentiful.
"I suppose it's forward again," said Carstairs between drinks of coffee.
"I fancy you're right," said Wharton. "Since we've been put in the brigade of that giant of a general, Vaugirard, we're always going forward. He seems to have an uncommon love of fighting for a fat man."
"It's an illusion," said John, "that a fat man is more peaceful than a thin one."
"How are you going to prove it?" asked Wharton.
"Look at Napoleon. When he was thin he was a great fighter, and when he became stout he was just as great a fighter as ever. Fat didn't take away his belligerency."
"I hear that the whole German army has been driven across the Marne," said Carstairs, "and that the force we hoped to cut off has either escaped or is about to escape. If that's so they won't retreat much further. The pride of the Germans is too great, and their army is too powerful for them to yield much more ground to us."
"I think you're right, or about as near right as an Englishman can be, Carstairs," said John. "What must be the feelings of the Emperor and the kings and the princes and the grand dukes and the dukes and the martial professors to know that the German army has been turned back from Paris, just when the City of Light seemed ready to fall into their hands?"
"Pretty bitter, I think," said Carstairs, "but it's not pleasant to have the capital of a country fall into the hands of hostile armies. I don't read of such things with delight. It wouldn't give me any such overwhelming joy for us to march into Berlin. To beat the Germans is enough."
Another trumpet blew and the Strangers rose for battle again with an invisible enemy. All the officers, like the men, were on foot, their horses having been killed in the earlier fighting, and they advanced slowly across the stubble of a wheat field. The morning was still cool, although the sun was bright, and the air was full of vigor. The rumbling of the artillery grew with the day, but the Strangers said little. Battle had ceased to be a novelty. They would fight somewhere and with somebody, but they would wait patiently and without curiosity until the time came.
"I suppose Lannes didn't come back," said Carstairs. "I haven't heard anyone speak of seeing him this morning."
"He may have returned before we awoke," said John. "The Arrow flies very fast. Like as not he delivered his message, whatever it was, and was off again with another in a few minutes. He may be sixty or eighty miles from here now."
"Odd fellow that Lannes," said Carstairs. "Do you know anything about his people, Scott?"
"Not much except that he has a mother and sister. I spent a night with them at their house in Paris. I've heard that French family ties are strong, but they seemed to look upon him as the weak would regard a great champion, a knight, in their own phrase, without fear and without reproach."
"That speaks well for him."
John's mind traveled back to that modest house across the Seine. It had done so often during all the days and nights of fighting, and he thought of Julie Lannes in her simple white dress, Julie with the golden hair and the bluest of blue eyes. She had not seemed at all foreign to him. In her simplicity and openness she was like one of the young girls of his own country. French custom might have compelled a difference at other times, but war was a great leveler of manners. She and her mother must have suffered agonies of suspense, when the guns were thundering almost within hearing of Paris, suspense for Philip, suspense for their country, and suspense in a less degree for themselves. Maybe Lannes had gone back once in the Arrow to show them that he was safe, and to tell them that, for the time at least, the great German invasion had been rolled back.
"A penny for your dream!" said Carstairs.
"Not for a penny, nor for a pound, nor for anything else," said John. "This dream of mine had something brilliant and beautiful and pure at the very core of it, and I'm not selling."
Carstairs looked curiously at him, and a light smile played across his face. But the smile was sympathetic.
"I'll wager you that with two guesses I can tell the nature of your dream," he said.
John shook his head, and he, too, smiled.
"As we say at home," he said, "you may guess right the very first time, but I won't tell you whether you're right or wrong."
"I take only one guess. That coruscating core of your dream was a girl."
"I told you I wouldn't say whether you were right or wrong."
"Is she blonde or dark?"
"I repeat that I'm answering no questions."
"Does she live in one of your Northern or one of your Southern States?"
John smiled.
"I suppose you haven't heard from her in a long time, as mail from across the water isn't coming with much regularity to this battle field."
John smiled again.
"And now I'll conclude," said Carstairs, speaking very seriously. "If it is a girl, and I know it is, I hope that she'll smile when she thinks of you, as you've been smiling when you think of her. I hope, too, that you'll go through this war without getting killed, although the chances are three or four to one against it, and go back home and win her."
John smiled once more and was silent, but when Carstairs held out his hand he could not keep from shaking it. Then Paris, the modest house beyond the Seine, and the girl within it, floated away like an illusion, driven from thought in an instant by a giant shell that struck within a few hundred yards of them, exploding with a terrible crash and filling the air with deadly bits of flying shell.
There was such a whistling in his ears that John thought at first he had been hit, but when he shook himself a little he found he was unhurt, and his heart resumed its normal beat. Other shells coming out of space began to strike, but none so near, and the Strangers went calmly on. On their right was a Paris regiment made up mostly of short, but thick-chested men, all very dark. Its numbers were only one-third what they had been a week before, and its colonel was Pierre Louis Bougainville, late Apache, late of the Butte Montmartre. All the colonels, majors and captains of this regiment had been killed and he now led it, earning his promotion by the divine right of genius. He, at least, could look into his knapsack and see there the shadow of a marshal's baton, a shadow that might grow more material.
John watched him and he wondered at this transformation of a rat of Montmartre into a man. And yet there had been many such transformations in the French Revolution. What had happened once could always happen again. Napoleon himself had been the son of a poor little lawyer in a distant and half-savage island, not even French in blood, but an Italian and an alien.
Crash! Another shell burst near, and told him to quit thinking of old times and attend to the business before him. The past had nothing more mighty than the present. The speed of the Strangers was increased a little, and the French regiments on either side kept pace with them. More shells fell. They came, shrieking through the air like hideous birds of remote ages. Some passed entirely over the advancing troops, but one fell among the French on John's right, and the column opening out, passed shudderingly around the spot where death had struck.
Two or three of the Strangers were blown away presently. It seemed to John's horrified eyes that one of them entirely vanished in minute fragments. He knew now what annihilation meant.
The heavy French field guns behind them were firing over their heads, but there was still nothing in front, merely the low green hills and not even a flash of flame nor a puff of smoke. The whistling death came out of space.
The French went on, a wide shallow valley opened out before them, and they descended by the easy slope into it. Here the German shells and shrapnel ceased to fall among them, but, as the heavy thunder continued, John knew the guns had merely turned aside their fire for other points on the French line. Carstairs by his side gave an immense sigh of relief.
"I can never get used to the horrible roaring and groaning of those shells," he said. "If I get killed I'd like it to be done without the thing that does it shrieking and gloating over me."
They were well in the valley now, and John noticed that along its right ran a dense wood, fresh and green despite the lateness of the season. But as he looked he heard the shrill snarling of many trumpets, and, for a moment or two, his heart stood still, as a vast body of German cavalry burst from the screen of the wood and rushed down upon them.
It was not often in this war that cavalry had a great chance, but here it had come. The ambush was complete. The German signals, either from the sky or the hills, had told when the French were in the valley, and then the German guns had turned aside their fire for the very good reason that they did not wish to send shells among their own men.
John's feeling was one of horrified surprise. The German cavalry extending across a mile of front seemed countless. Imagination in that terrific moment magnified them into millions. He saw the foaming mouths, the white teeth and the flashing eyes of the horses, and then the tense faces and eyes of their riders. Lances and sabers were held aloft, and the earth thundered with the tread of the mounted legions.
"Good God!" cried Wharton.
"Wheel, men, wheel!" shouted Captain Colton.
As they turned to face the rushing tide of steel, the regiment of Bougainville whirled on their flank and then Bougainville was almost at his side. He saw fire leap from the little man's eye. He saw him shout commands, rapid incisive, and correct and he saw clearly that if this were Napoleon's day that marshal's baton in the knapsack would indeed become a reality.
The Paris regiment, kneeling, was the first to fire, and the next instant flame burst from the rifles of the Strangers. It was not a moment too soon. It seemed to many of the young Americans and Englishmen that they had been ridden down already, but sheet after sheet of bullets fired by men, fighting for their lives, formed a wall of death.
The Uhlans, the hussars and the cuirassiers reeled back in the very moment of triumph. Horses with their riders crashed to the ground, and others, mad with terror, rushed wildly through the French ranks.
John, Carstairs and Wharton snatched up rifles, all three, and began to fire with the men as fast as they could. A vast turmoil, frightful in its fury, followed. The German cavalry reeled back, but it did not retreat. The shrill clamor of many trumpets came again, and once more the horsemen charged. The sheet of death blazed in their faces again, and then the French met them with bayonet.
The Strangers had closed in to meet the shock. John felt rather than saw Carstairs and Wharton on either side of him, and the three of them were firing cartridge after cartridge into the light whitish smoke that hung between them and the charging horsemen. He was devoutly thankful that the Paris regiment was immediately on their right, and that it was led by such a man as Bougainville. General Vaugirard, he knew, was farther to their left, and now he began to hear the rapid firers, pouring a rain of death upon the cavalry.
"We win! we win!" cried Carstairs. "If they couldn't beat us down in the first rush they can't beat us down at all!"
Carstairs was right. The French had broken into no panic, and, when, infantry standing firm, pour forth the incessant and deadly stream of death, that modern arms make possible, no cavalry can live before them. Yet the Germans charged again and again into the hurricane of fire and steel. The tumult of the battle face to face became terrific.
John could no longer hear the words of his comrades. He saw dimly through the whitish smoke in front, but he continued to fire. Once he leaped aside to let a wounded and riderless horse gallop past, and thrice he sprang over the bodies of the dead.
The infantry were advancing now, driving the cavalry before them, and the French were able to bring their lighter field guns into action. John heard the rapid crashes, and he saw the line of cavalry drawing back. He, too, was shouting with triumph, although nobody heard him. But all the Strangers were filled with fiery zeal. Without orders they rushed forward, driving the horsemen yet further. John saw through the whitish mist a fierce face and a powerful arm swinging aloft a saber.
He recognized von Boehlen and von Boehlen recognized him. Shouting, the Prussian urged his horse at him and struck him with the saber. John, under impulse, dropped to his knees, and the heavy blade whistled above him. But something else struck him on the head and he fell senseless to the earth.
