The Guarded Heights
"Besides, it's enough to make me cry to know you wouldn't say all this
unless you were certain I'm going to be killed."
"Hope not," Wandel laughed, "but picnics are full of germs. What's
this?"
A grimy figure approached like a man fantastically imitating some
animal. His route was devious as if he were perpetually dodging
something that miraculously failed to materialize. He stopped,
straightened reluctantly, and saluted George.
"Captain sent me on, sir. I've located Jerry opposite at----"
He rattled off some coordinates. George looked him over.
"How did you find that out?" he snapped.
"Ran across Jerry----"
The dirty young man recited jerkily and selflessly a story of fear and
risks overcome, of cunning stealth, of passionate and promiscuous
murder----
"Report back," George said.
When he had gone George called for his adjutant and turned to Wandel.
"Before anything happens to me," he said, "I'll recommend that dirty
young assassin for a citation."
Wandel laughed in a satisfied way.
"I'm always right about you, great man. Don't you see that? Never think
about your own citation----"
George stared at him, uncomprehending.
"Citation! A thousand citations for a bed!"
He watched Wandel uneasily when, at the heels of a guide, he dodged down
the slope in search of Lambert, calling back:
"Don't swallow any germs."
"That's very fine, Driggs," he thought, "but why all that and not the
rest? I'd give a good deal to guess what you know about me and Sylvia
Planter."
X
George hoped Wandel would find Lambert. Day by day he had dreaded bad
news. Other officers and men got hit every hour; why not himself or
Lambert? For he had never forgotten Mrs. Planter's unexpected and
revealing whisper. It had shown him that even beneath such exteriors
emotion lurks as raw, as desirous, as violent as a savage's. The rest,
then, was habit which people inherited, or acquired, or imitated with
varying success. It had made him admire her all the more, had forced on
him a wish to obey her, but what could he do? It was not in him to play
favourites. One man's life was as good as another's; but he watched
Lambert as he could, while in his tired brain lingered a feeling of fear
for that woman's son.
During the peaceful days dividing the Aisne and the Argonne he looked at
Lambert and fingered his own clothing, stained and torn where death had
nearly reached, with a wondering doubt that they could both be whole,
that Mrs. Planter in her unemotional way could still welcome guests to
Oakmont. And he recalled that impression he had shared with Sylvia on
the bluff above Lake Champlain of being suspended, but he no longer felt
free. He seemed to hang, indeed, helplessly, in a resounding silence
which at any moment would commence giving forth unbearable, Gargantuan
noises; for, bathed and comfortable, eating in leisure from a mess-kit,
he never forgot that this was a respite, that to-morrow or the next day
or the day after the sounding board would reverberate again, holding him
a deafened victim.
Wandel caught up with them one evening in the sylvan peace that preceded
the fatal forest uproar. The Argonne still slumbered; was nearly silent;
offered untouched trees under which to loaf after a palatable cold
supper. The brown figures of enlisted men also lounged near by,
reminiscing, wondering, doubtless, as these officers did, about New
York which had assumed the attributes of an unattainable paradise.
George hadn't been particularly pleased to see Wandel. What Wandel knew
made more difference in this quiet place, and George had a vague, shamed
recollection of having accused himself of being rotten inside, of not
having even started to climb.
"Must have had a touch of shell shock without knowing it," he mused as
he stared through the dusk at the precise, clean little man.
Indifferently he listened to Lambert's good-natured raillery at the
general staff, then he focussed his attention, for Lambert's voice had
suddenly turned serious, his hand had indicated the lounging figures of
the enlisted men.
"With all your ridiculous fuss and feathers at nice headquarters
chateaux, I don't suppose you ever get to know those fellows, Driggs."
"I don't see why not," Wandel drawled.
"Do you love them, everyone?"
"Can't say that I do, but then my heart is only a small organ."
"I do," Lambert said, warmly. "And you'll find George does. You can't
help it when you see them pulling through this thing. They're real men,
aren't they, George?"
George yawned.
"Are they any more so," he asked, dryly, "than they were when they lived
in the same little town with you? I mean, if all you say about them is
true why did you have to wait for war to introduce you to unveil their
admirable qualities?"
Lambert straightened.
"It's wrong," he said, defiantly, "that I should have waited. It's wrong
that I couldn't help myself."
"And you once tried to take a horse whip to me," George whispered in his
ear.
It was Lambert's absurd earnestness that worried him. Did Lambert, too,
have a touch of shell shock? Wandel was trying to smooth out his
doubts.
"I think what you mean to say is that war, aside from military rank, is
a great leveller. We can leave that out altogether. You know the
professional officer's creed: 'Good Colonel, deliver us.' 'We beseech ye
to hear us, good General,' and so on up to the top man, who begs the
Secretary of War, who prays to the President, who, one ventures to hope,
gets a word to God. You mean, Lambert, that out here it never occurs to
you to ask these men who their fathers were, or what preps they went to,
or what clubs they're members of. It's the war spirit--aside from
military rank--this sham equality. Titled ladies dine with embarrassed
Tommies. Your own sister dances with doughboys who'd be a lot happier if
she'd leave them alone. It's in the air, beautiful, gorgeous, hysterical
war democracy which declares that all men are equal until they're
wounded; then they're superior; or until they're dead; then they're
forgotten."
George grunted.
"You're right, Driggs. It won't survive the war."
"Paper work!" Wandel sneered.
"It ought to last!" Lambert cried. "I hope it does."
"Pray that it doesn't," Wandel said. "I fancy the real hell of war comes
after the war is over. We'll find that out, if we live. As for me, even
now when we're all beloved brothers, I'd give a good deal to be sitting
in a Fifth Avenue club looking out on lesser men."
"I would, too," George said, fervently.
Lambert spoke with abysmal seriousness.
"I'd rather have some of the splendid lesser men sitting on the same
side of the window with me."
George stared at him. What had happened to this aristocrat who had once
made a medieval gesture with a horse whip? Certainly he, the plebeian
victim of that attack, had no such wish. Put these men on the same side
of a club window, or a factory window, for that matter, and they'd drag
the whole business down to their level, to eternal smash fast enough.
Why, hang Lambert! It amounted to visualizing his sister as a slattern.
He smiled with a curious pride. Reddest revolution couldn't make her
that. She wouldn't come down off her high horse if a dozen bayonets
were at her throat. What the deuce was he thinking about? Why should he
be proud of that? For, if he lived, he was going to drag her off
himself, but he wouldn't make her a slattern.
"You talk like Allen," he said, "and you haven't even his excuse."
"I've seen the primeval for the first time," Lambert answered.
"I'll admit it has qualities," Wandel yawned. "Anyway, I'm off."
Mrs. Planter came back to George's mind, momentarily as primeval as a
man surrendered to the battle lust. What one saw, except in
self-destructive emergencies, he told himself, was all veneer. Ages,
epochs, generations, merely determined its depth. The hell after war!
Did Wandel mean there was danger then of an attempt to thin the veneer?
Was Lambert, of all people, going to assist the Allens to plane it away?
"It would mean another dark ages," he mused.
His own little self-imposed coat he saw now had gone on top of a far
thicker one without which he would have been as helpless as a bushman or
some anthropoidal creature escaped from an unexplored country.
He laughed, but uncomfortably. Those two had made him uneasy, and
Squibs, naturally, was at Lambert's folly. There had been a letter a day
or two ago which he had scarcely had time to read because of the demands
of an extended movement and the confusion of receiving replacements and
re-equipping the men he had. He read it over now. "Understanding,"
"Brotherhood."
"You are helping to bring it about, because you are helping to win this
war."
In a fit of irritation he tore the letter up. What the devil was he
fighting the war for?
The question wouldn't let him asleep. Lambert, Wandel, and Squibs
between them had made him for the first time in his life thoroughly,
uncomfortably, abominably afraid--physically afraid--afraid of being
killed. For all at once there was more than Sylvia to make him want to
live. He didn't see how he could die without knowing what the deuce he
was fighting this man's war for, anyway.
XI
He hadn't learned any more about it when Lambert and he were caught on
the same afternoon a week later.
In the interminable, haggard thicket the attack had abruptly halted.
Word reached George that Lambert's company was falling back. To him that
was beyond belief if Lambert was still with his men. He hurried forward
before regimental headquarters had had a chance to open its distant
mouth. There were machine-gun nests ahead, foolish stragglers told him.
Of course. Those were what he had ordered Lambert to take. The company
was disorganized. Little groups slunk back, dragging their rifles as if
they were too heavy. Others squatted in the underbrush, waiting
apparently for some valuable advice.
George found the senior lieutenant, crouched behind a fallen log,
getting the company in hand again through runners.
"Where's Captain Planter?"
The lieutenant nodded carelessly ahead.
"Hundred yards or so out there. He ran the show too much himself," he
complained. "Bunch of Jerries jumped out of the thicket and threw potato
mashers, then crawled back to the guns. When the captain went down the
men near him broke. Sort of thing spreads like a pestilence."
"Dead?" George asked.
"Don't know. Potato mashers!"
"Why haven't you found out?" George asked, irritably.
The complaining note increased in the other's voice.
"He's at the foot of that tree. Hear those guns? They're just zipping a
few while they wait for someone to get to him."
"Pull your company together," George said with an absurd feeling that he
spoke to Mrs. Planter. "I'll go along and see that we get him and those
nests. They're spoiling the entire afternoon."
The lieutenant glanced at him, startled.
"I can do it----"
"You haven't," George reminded him.
He despatched runners to the flank companies and to regimental
headquarters announcing that he was moving ahead. When the battalion
advanced, like a lot of fairly clever Indians, he was in the van, making
straight for the tree. He had a queer idea that Mrs. Planter quietly
searched in the underbrush ahead of him. The machine guns, which had
been trickling, gushed.
"You're hit, sir," the lieutenant said.
George glanced at his right boot. There was a hole in the leather, but
he didn't feel any pain. He dismissed the lieutenant's suggestion of
stretcher bearers. He limped ahead. Why should he assume this risk for
Lambert? Sylvia wouldn't thank him for it. She wouldn't thank him for
anything, but her mother would. He had to get Lambert back and complete