The third captive sat with a morose countenance. He preserved a stoical and cold attitude. To all advances he made one reply without variation, “Ah, go t’ hell!”
The last of the four was always silent and, for the most part, kept his face turned in unmolested directions. From the views the youth received he seemed to be in a state of absolute dejection. Shame was upon him, and with it profound regret that he was, perhaps, no more to be counted in the ranks of his fellows. The youth could detect no expression that would allow him to believe that the other was giving a thought to his narrowed future, the pictured dungeons, perhaps, and starvations and brutalities, liable to the imagination. All to be seen was shame for captivity and regret for the right to antagonize.
After the men had celebrated sufficiently they settled down behind the old rail fence, on the opposite side to the one from which their foes had been driven. A few shot perfunctorily at distant marks.
There was some long grass. The youth nestled in it and rested, making a convenient rail support the flag. His friend, jubilant and glorified, holding his treasure with vanity, came to him there. They sat side by side and congratulated each other.
Chapter 24
The roarings that had stretched in a long line of sound across the face of the forest began to grow intermittent and weaker. The stentorian speeches of the artillery continued in some distant encounter, but the crashes of the musketry had almost ceased. The youth and his friend of a sudden looked up, feeling a deadened form of distress at the waning of these noises, which had become a part of life. They could see changes going on among the troops. There were marchings this way and that way. A battery wheeled leisurely. On the crest of a small hill was the thick gleam of many departing muskets.
The youth arose. “Well, what now, I wonder?” he said. By his tone he seemed to be preparing to resent some new monstrosity in the way of dins and smashes. He shaded his eyes with his grimy hand and gazed over the field.
His friend also arose and stared. “I bet we’re goin’ t’ git along out of this an’ back over th’ river,” said he.
“Well, I swan!” said the youth.
They waited, watching. Within a little while the regiment received orders to retrace its way. The men got up grunting from the grass, regretting the soft repose. They jerked their stiffened legs, and stretched their arms over their heads. One man swore as he rubbed his eyes. They all groaned “O Lord!” They had as many objections to this change as they would have had to a proposal for a new battle.
They trampled slowly back over the field across which they had run in a mad scamper.
The regiment marched until it had joined its fellows. The reformed brigade, in column, aimed through a wood at the road. Directly they were in a mass of dust-covered troops, and were trudging along in a way parallel to the enemy’s lines as these had been defined by the previous turmoil.
They passed within view of a stolid white house, and saw in front of it groups of their comrades lying in wait behind a neat breastwork. A row of guns were booming at a distant enemy. Shells thrown in reply were raising clouds of dust and splinters. Horsemen dashed along the line of intrenchments.
At this point of its march the division curved away from the field and went winding off in the direction of the river. When the significance of this movement had impressed itself upon the youth he turned his head and looked over his shoulder toward the trampled and debris-strewed ground. He breathed a breath of new satisfaction. He finally nudged his friend. “Well, it’s all over,” he said to him.
His friend gazed backward. “B’Gawd, it is,” he assented. They mused.
For a time the youth was obliged to reflect in a puzzled and uncertain way. His mind was undergoing a subtle change. It took moments for it to cast off its battleful ways and resume its accustomed course of thought. Gradually his brain emerged from the clogged clouds, and at last he was enabled to more closely comprehend himself and circumstance.
He understood then that the existence of shot and countershot was in the past. He had dwelt in a land of strange, squalling upheavals and had come forth. He had been where there was red of blood and black of passion, and he was escaped. His first thoughts were given to rejoicings at this fact.
Later he began to study his deeds, his failures, and his achievements. Thus, fresh from scenes where many of his usual machines of reflection had been idle, from where he had proceeded sheeplike, he struggled to marshal all his acts.
At last they marched before him clearly. From this present view point he was enabled to look upon them in spectator fashion and criticise them with some correctness, for his new condition had already defeated certain sympathies.
Regarding his procession of memory he felt gleeful and unregretting, for in it his public deeds were paraded in great and shining prominence. Those performances which had been witnessed by his fellows marched now in wide purple and gold, having various deflections. They went gayly with music. It was pleasure to watch these things. He spent delightful minutes viewing the gilded images of memory.
He saw that he was good. He recalled with a thrill of joy the respectful comments of his fellows upon his conduct.
Nevertheless, the ghost of his flight from the first engagement appeared to him and danced. There were small shoutings in his brain about these matters. For a moment he blushed, and the light of his soul flickered with shame.
A specter of reproach came to him. There loomed the dogging memory of the tattered soldier—he who, gored by bullets and faint of blood, had fretted concerning an imagined wound in another; he who had loaned his last of strength and intellect for the tall soldier; he who, blind with weariness and pain, had been deserted in the field.
For an instant a wretched chill of sweat was upon him at the thought that he might be detected in the thing. As he stood persistently before his vision, he gave vent to a cry of sharp irritation and agony.
His friend turned. “What’s the matter, Henry?” he demanded. The youth’s reply was an outburst of crimson oaths.
As he marched along the little branch-hung roadway among his prattling companions this vision of cruelty brooded over him. It clung near him always and darkened his view of these deeds in purple and gold. Whichever way his thoughts turned they were followed by the somber phantom of the desertion in the fields. He looked stealthily at his companions, feeling sure that they must discern in his face evidences of this pursuit. But they were plodding in ragged array, discussing with quick tongues the accomplishments of the late battle.
“Oh, if a man should come up an’ ask me, I’d say we got a dum good lickin’.”
“Lickin’—in yer eye! We ain’t licked, sonny. We’re goin’ down here aways, swing aroun’, an’ come in behint ’em.”
“Oh, hush, with your comin’ in behint ’em. I’ve seen all ’a that I wanta. Don’t tell me about comin’ in behint—”
“Bill Smithers, he ses he’d rather been in ten hundred battles than been in that heluva hospital. He ses they got shootin’ in th’ nighttime, an’ shells dropped plum among ’em in th’ hospital. He ses sech hollerin’ he never see.”
“Hasbrouck? He’s th’ best off’cer in this here reg’ment. He’s a whale.”
“Didn’t I tell yeh we’d come aroun’ in behint ’em? Didn’t I tell yeh so? We—”
“Oh, shet yeh mouth!”
For a time this pursuing recollection of the tattered man took all elation from the youth’s veins. He saw his vivid error, and he was afraid that it would stand before him all his life. He took no share in the chatter of his comrades, nor did he look at them or know them, save when he felt sudden suspicion that they were seeing his thoughts and scrutinizing each detail of the scene with the tattered soldier.
Yet gradually he mustered force to put the sin at a distance. And at last his eyes seemed to open to some new ways. He found that he could look back upon the brass and bombast of his earlier gospels and see them truly. He was gleeful when he discovered that he now despised them.<
br />
With this conviction came a store of assurance. He felt a quiet manhood, nonassertive but of sturdy and strong blood. He knew that he would no more quail before his guides wherever they should point. He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death. He was a man.
So it came to pass that as he trudged from the place of blood and wrath his soul changed. He came from hot plowshares to prospects of clover tranquilly, and it was as if hot plowshares were not. Scars faded as flowers.
It rained. The procession of weary soldiers became a bedraggled train, despondent and muttering, marching with churning effort in a trough of liquid brown mud under a low, wretched sky. Yet the youth smiled, for he saw that the world was a world for him, though many discovered it to be made of oaths and walking sticks. He had rid himself of the red sickness of battle. The sultry nightmare was in the past. He had been an animal blistered and sweating in the heat and pain of war. He turned now with a lover’s thirst to images of tranquil skies, fresh meadows, cool brooks—an existence of soft and eternal peace.
Over the river a golden ray of sun came through the hosts of leaden rain clouds.
CAPTAINS VENOMOUS, by Arthur J. Burks
Captain Rogers Croft and Captain Lumford Zane, both of the United States Army Air Corps, were young to be captains. They were twenty-four. The War Department, however, had had to commission them in their rank. They were aces, and aces deserved recognition.
Their careers were curiously parallel. Both were out of West Point, though they had scarcely noticed each other there. Both had succeeded through sheer merit. Nobody had given either of them a lift. Nor would either have accepted help.
Any similarity after that, however, ended. Rogers Croft was a fiery, impulsive sort of fellow who hated his enemies so fervently that he had just one urge—to destroy them utterly. Then to kick the shards and remnants around, to get their blood on his otherwise stainless boots.
Every time he heard of a victory, large or small by the Germans or Japs, he took it as a personal affront, a deadly insult. And that’s what made him a terror, working out of certain secret bases in Dutch New Guinea.
He went berserk, but he went berserk with precision. He had knocked down twenty-four Japanese planes in six days of fighting through the islands. He cursed himself daily because he had bagged so few.
He behaved as if he could knock down the whole Japanese air force, all by himself. Given the time and opportunity, he might have done just that.
Lumford Zane, on the other hand, was not a man anyone, even Croft, would call “Lum” without a vague feeling of uneasiness. It was hard to put your finger on the reason.
It would have been thought that Croft would be the man who wouldn’t take anything from anybody, yet it was Croft who was called “Rog” by brother officers, even by juniors, and he was the man whom enlisted men, excited by his latest exploits, hammered on the back before they remembered that he was a superior officer.
That just was not done to Lumford Zane, for some reason, but nobody knew why. Zane had bagged seventeen Japanese planes. But his score was somewhat greater than that, for he had knocked off ten more while serving with the “Flying Tigers,” who were not supposed to be officers at all.
Zane was one number senior to Croft, and Croft never forgot it, or overlooked the seniority. Though Zane never by word, look or deed indicated that it mattered to him in the least. Men slouched, but efficiently, around Croft. They jumped and did things for Zane, and none could have told why.
There was a kind of race between the two at the moment, though neither would have said so. Each was trying to get in all the flying time he could, each was trying, all-out, to win his share of the war.
* * * *
An Orderly approached Croft, who walked back and forth under the camouflage which hid the field from any chance Japanese reconnaissance planes. Croft walked as if he were about to explode.
Sitting calmly under a tree, in a chair from somewhere, which he leaned back against the bole, Lumford Zane watched Croft stride back and forth.
“An awful lot of energy to use up,” he finally said. “You could down two Japs with it, Croft.”
“I’ll always have enough and to spare for the murdering Nips, Zane!” said Croft. “See what they did today? Shot down a passenger plane, filled with women and children, out of Australia. They knew it wasn’t armed, must have seen who the passengers were!”
Croft’s face was a thunder-cloud, and his eyes shot pencils of flame. A slow smile, a gentle smile, briefly touched the lips of Lumford Zane.
“Women and children, Croft,” he said, “are in this war, too. We must expect them to get hurt!”
Croft whirled on his superior, his fist coming up, clenched, as if he would strike the other man. His teeth showed in a snarl.
“Are you excusing the Japs for killing women and kids?”
Croft strode up until he was within ten paces, when Zane, his smile fading, stopped him.
“Stand still, Croft,” he said. “Here is a perfect example of what I mean! Don’t move! You see, you are angry, wasting energy, and your alertness has disappeared. You are at this moment standing within striking distance, less about a foot, of one of the seven most deadly cobras, in Dutch New Guinea. I’ve been watching the critter try to make up its mind to look me over. Stand still now, and learn a lesson. May you also, hereafter, remember that you should wear leather leggings on the ground, just in case other snakes get curious!”
Lumford Zane rose, with easy grace, seeming to flow from his chair. Croft stood like a statue, afraid even to look down, knowing just how lethally testy the cobras were, and wondering just how Zane, who didn’t have his gat on him at the moment, was going to dispose of the cobra.
Zane came close, within striking distance. Then he made a quick movement that attracted the snake’s attention, causing it to strike—with a blinding whir of speed. As its head hit the ground, at the end of its fast-as-lightning stab, just two inches from the foot of Lumford Zane, Zane put his heel on the head and brought his weight on it.
It was done casually. At least, Croft thought, having seen it all, Zane had made it look casual. But Croft knew how nearly perfect every move of Zane’s had been timed. A high-speed camera would have caught the striking of that reptile only as a blur. Yet Zane had been ready at the exact split second, before the snake could retract its head, to put his foot upon it.
And Croft had just a hint of why the man with the gentle smile was not a man one could, somehow, call “Lum.”
“Captains Zane and Croft,” said the orderly, “to scramble at once.”
It was a small field. Only Zane and Croft could have taken the Bell Airacobras off it. There were many other fields just like it, too small to be of much use, to be worth wasting men to capture, yet large enough to make possible the savage work of men like Zane and Croft.
* * * *
The two captains, pulling on their helmets, strode to their crates, which stood nose to tail. Zane’s was ahead, in the narrow runway that had to be narrow—narrow enough for tree limbs to meet over it to be invisible from the air.
Zane stepped into his fighter, not even looking back to check on Croft. Then, all at once, he lowered his foot from the step, called to the orderly.
“Watch for a cobra,” he said. “A snake, not a plane. I just killed one under the wishing tree. It’ll have a mate on the prowl wondering what happened to it. Watch, and keep the mate from making any mistakes, see?”
Gently Zane smiled at the orderly. There was something in the smile that made the orderly step back.
Now both captains were in their crates, their motors turning over. In a high tree, a high, thick, bushy tree, a lookout scanned the skies for Japanese planes. The Airacobras would not take off if there were any enemy planes visible anywhere. The secret fields must remain secret as long as possible. Zane’s own ground crew were doubling as sentries, to guard against Japanese foot-troops—Tatori’s, who were good in th
e jungle.
The orderly signaled, relaying a signal he took from the look-out. Lumford Zane, sure by the feel of his Bell Airacobra that she was perfect, gunned her. The toughest type fighter plane in the Far East began to roll, with another just behind it.
Behind Zane, and behind Croft, an Allison engine—ten hundred and forty horse power—roared savagely, pushing ’Cobra and pilot up into the air like a hand putting a shot. In a split second after the crate got into the air, it could be doing four hundred miles an hour, level flight. What it could do on a dive—well, the fact that Zane knew to a hair was what made a certain difference between him and Croft, between him and almost any other flyer in any of the United Nations’ services.
The leading Bell ’Cobra shot up through the trees, banked left, away from the vent from the field. The second came out, banked right. Then both screamed up for altitude, while Zane looked at the signal below. Both knew what the signal was, but it could not be mentioned, even between them. It indicated direction, however, and distance.
Northwest, fifty miles, Jap fighter planes. And off-shore, barges, transports, destroyers, light cruisers, bringing death and destruction to the East Indies.
The two Airacobras headed in that direction, Allisons full out. Zane watched other planes, seemingly rising from the green sea of the jungles, speed to the rendezvous. He signaled Croft to the left, and a bit below. Four planes swung in behind Croft, four behind Zane.
There was a gentle, almost wistful smile on the face of Lumford Zane. On the face of Rogers Croft, however, was an expression of demoniac hatred—for the enemy.
What did they expect to accomplish by attacking islands where only cannibals and headhunters lived? Though of course Croft knew. He knew all about tin, and rubber, and oil. But it seemed to him so horrible that people who had never even heard of the Japanese should be slaughtered by them. Naturally tribal wars had been their right from time immemorial. The Japs had no right to compel them to die in any other way.
The Military Megapack Page 15
