The Open Boat and Other Stories
discussion. The peasant whined and clamoured, sometimes spitting like
a kitten. The wounded soldier jawed on thunderously, his great hands
stretched in claw-like graspings over the peasant's head. Once he
raised his staff and made threat with it. Then suddenly the row was at
an end. The other sick men saw their comrade mount the leading donkey
and at once begin to drum with his heels. None attempted to gain the
backs of the remaining animals. They gazed after them dully. Finally
they saw the caravan outlined for a moment against the sky. The soldier
was still waving his arms passionately, having it out with the peasant.
Peza was alive with despair for these men who looked at him with such
doleful, quiet eyes. "Ah, my God!" he cried to the lieutenant, "these
poor souls! These poor souls!"
The officer faced about angrily. "If you are coming with me there is
no time for this." Peza obeyed instantly and with a sudden meekness. In
the moment some portion of egotism left him, and he modestly wondered
if the universe took cognizance of him to an important degree. This
theatre for slaughter, built by the inscrutable needs of the earth, was
an enormous affair, and he reflected that the accidental destruction of
an individual, Peza by name, would perhaps be nothing at all.
With the lieutenant he was soon walking along behind a series of little
crescent-shape trenches, in which were soldiers, tranquilly interested,
gossiping with the hum of a tea-party. Although these men were not at
this time under fire, he concluded that they were fabulously brave.
Else they would not be so comfortable, so at home in their sticky brown
trenches. They were certain to be heavily attacked before the day was
old. The universities had not taught him to understand this attitude.
At the passing of the young man in very nice tweed, with his new
leggings, his new white helmet, his new field-glass case, his new
revolver holster, the soiled soldiers turned with the same curiosity
which a being in strange garb meets at the corners of streets. He might
as well have been promenading a populous avenue. The soldiers volubly
discussed his identity.
To Peza there was something awful in the absolute familiarity of each
tone, expression, gesture. These men, menaced with battle, displayed
the curiosity of the café. Then, on the verge of his great encounter
toward death, he found himself extremely embarrassed, composing his
face with difficulty, wondering what to do with his hands, like a gawk
at a levée.
He felt ridiculous, and also he felt awed, aghast, at these men who
could turn their faces from the ominous front and debate his clothes,
his business. There was an element which was new born into his theory
of war. He was not averse to the brisk pace at which the lieutenant
moved along the line.
The roar of fighting was always in Peza's ears. It came from some short
hills ahead and to the left. The road curved suddenly and entered a
wood. The trees stretched their luxuriant and graceful branches over
grassy slopes. A breeze made all this verdure gently rustle and speak
in long silken sighs. Absorbed in listening to the hurricane racket
from the front, he still remembered that these trees were growing, the
grass-blades were extending according to their process. He inhaled a
deep breath of moisture and fragrance from the grove, a wet odour which
expressed all the opulent fecundity of unmoved nature, marching on with
her million plans for multiple life, multiple death.
Further on, they came to a place where the Turkish shells were landing.
There was a long hurtling sound in the air, and then one had sight of a
shell. To Peza it was of the conical missiles which friendly officers
had displayed to him on board warships. Curiously enough, too, this
first shell smacked of the foundry, of men with smudged faces, of the
blare of furnace fires. It brought machinery immediately into his mind.
He thought that if he was killed there at that time it would be as
romantic, to the old standards, as death by a bit of falling iron in a
factory.
II
A child was playing on a mountain and disregarding a battle that was
waging on the plain. Behind him was the little cobbled hut of his fled
parents. It was now occupied by a pearl-coloured cow that stared out
from the darkness thoughtful and tender-eyed. The child ran to and fro,
fumbling with sticks and making great machinations with pebbles. By a
striking exercise of artistic license the sticks were ponies, cows, and
dogs, and the pebbles were sheep. He was managing large agricultural
and herding affairs. He was too intent on them to pay much heed to
the fight four miles away, which at that distance resembled in sound
the beating of surf upon rocks. However, there were occasions when
some louder outbreak of that thunder stirred him from his serious
occupation, and he turned then a questioning eye upon the battle, a
small stick poised in his hand, interrupted in the act of sending his
dog after his sheep. His tranquillity in regard to the death on the
plain was as invincible as that of the mountain on which he stood.
It was evident that fear had swept the parents away from their home
in a manner that could make them forget this child, the first-born.
Nevertheless, the hut was clean bare. The cow had committed no
impropriety in billeting herself at the domicile of her masters. This
smoke-coloured and odorous interior contained nothing as large as
a humming-bird. Terror had operated on these runaway people in its
sinister fashion, elevating details to enormous heights, causing a man
to remember a button while he forgot a coat, overpowering every one
with recollections of a broken coffee-cup, deluging them with fears for
the safety of an old pipe, and causing them to forget their first-born.
Meanwhile the child played soberly with his trinkets.
He was solitary; engrossed in his own pursuits, it was seldom that he
lifted his head to inquire of the world why it made so much noise. The
stick in his hand was much larger to him than was an army corps of the
distance. It was too childish for the mind of the child. He was dealing
with sticks.
The battle lines writhed at times in the agony of a sea-creature on
the sands. These tentacles flung and waved in a supreme excitement of
pain, and the struggles of the great outlined body brought it nearer
and nearer to the child. Once he looked at the plain and saw some men
running wildly across a field. He had seen people chasing obdurate
beasts in such fashion, and it struck him immediately that it was
a manly thing which he would incorporate in his game. Consequently
he raced furiously at his stone sheep, flourishing a cudgel, crying
the shepherd calls. He paused frequently to get a cue of manner from
the soldiers fighting on the plain. He reproduced, to a degree, any
movements which he accounted rational to his theory of sheep-herding,
the business of men, the traditional and exalted living of his father.
III
It was as if Peza was a corpse walking on the bottom of the sea, and
finding there fields of grain, groves, weeds, the faces of men, voices.
War, a strange employment of the race, presented to him a scene crowded
with familiar objects which wore the livery of their commonness,
placidly, undauntedly. He was smitten with keen astonishment; a spread
of green grass lit with the flames of poppies was too old for the
company of this new ogre. If he had been devoting the full lens of his
mind to this phase, he would have known he was amazed that the trees,
the flowers, the grass, all tender and peaceful nature had not taken to
heels at once upon the outbreak of battle. He venerated the immovable
poppies.
The road seemed to lead into the apex of an angle formed by the two
defensive lines of the Greeks. There was a straggle of wounded men and
of gunless and jaded men. These latter did not seem to be frightened.
They remained very cool, walking with unhurried steps and busy in
gossip. Peza tried to define them. Perhaps during the fight they
had reached the limit of their mental storage, their capacity for
excitement, for tragedy, and had then simply come away. Peza remembered
his visit to a certain place of pictures, where he had found himself
amid heavenly skies and diabolic midnights--the sunshine beating
red upon desert sands, nude bodies flung to the shore in the green
moon-glow, ghastly and starving men clawing at a wall in darkness, a
girl at her bath with screened rays falling upon her pearly shoulders,
a dance, a funeral, a review, an execution, all the strength of
argus-eyed art: and he had whirled and whirled amid this universe with
cries of woe and joy, sin and beauty piercing his ears until he had
been obliged to simply come away. He remembered that as he had emerged
he had lit a cigarette with unction and advanced promptly to a café. A
great hollow quiet seemed to be upon the earth.
This was a different case, but in his thoughts he conceded the same
causes to many of these gunless wanderers. They too may have dreamed
at lightning speed until the capacity for it was overwhelmed. As he
watched them, he again saw himself walking toward the café, puffing
upon his cigarette. As if to reinforce his theory, a soldier stopped
him with an eager but polite inquiry for a match. He watched the
man light his little roll of tobacco and paper and begin to smoke
ravenously.
Peza no longer was torn with sorrow at the sight of wounded men.
Evidently he found that pity had a numerical limit, and when this was
passed the emotion became another thing. Now, as he viewed them, he
merely felt himself very lucky, and beseeched the continuance of his
superior fortune. At the passing of these slouched and stained figures
he now heard a reiteration of warning. A part of himself was appealing
through the medium of these grim shapes. It was plucking at his sleeve
and pointing, telling him to beware; and so it had come to pass that he
cared for the implacable misery of these soldiers only as he would have
cared for the harms of broken dolls. His whole vision was focussed
upon his own chance.
The lieutenant suddenly halted. "Look," he said. "I find that my duty
is in another direction. I must go another way. But if you wish to
fight you have only to go forward, and any officer of the fighting
line will give you opportunity." He raised his cap ceremoniously; Peza
raised his new white helmet. The stranger to battles uttered thanks to
his chaperon, the one who had presented him. They bowed punctiliously,
staring at each other with civil eyes.
The lieutenant moved quietly away through a field. In an instant it
flashed upon Peza's mind that this desertion was perfidious. He had
been subjected to a criminal discourtesy. The officer had fetched him
into the middle of the thing, and then left him to wander helplessly
toward death. At one time he was upon the point of shouting at the
officer.
In the vale there was an effect as if one was then beneath the battle.
It was going on above somewhere. Alone, unguided, Peza felt like a
man groping in a cellar. He reflected too that one should always see
the beginning of a fight. It was too difficult to thus approach it
when the affair was in full swing. The trees hid all movements of
troops from him, and he thought he might be walking out to the very
spot which chance had provided for the reception of a fool. He asked
eager questions of passing soldiers. Some paid no heed to him; others
shook their heads mournfully. They knew nothing save that war was hard
work. If they talked at all it was in testimony of having fought well,
savagely. They did not know if the army was going to advance, hold its
ground, or retreat; they were weary.