The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Vicente Blasco Ibanez (page 8)

A year passed by while his watch was registering a single second, then a century at the same rate . . . and finally the awaited thunder burst forth, making the refuge vibrate, but with a kind of dull elasticity, as though it were made of rubber. In spite of its thud, the explosion wrought horrible damage. Other minor explosions, playful and whistling, followed behind the first. In his imagination, Lacour saw the cataclysm–a writhing serpent, vomiting sparks and smoke, a species of Wagnerian monster that upon striking the ground was disgorging thousands of fiery little snakes, that were covering the earth with their deadly contortions. . . . The shell must have burst nearby, perhaps in the very square occupied by this battery.

He came out of the shelter, expecting to encounter a sickening display of dismembered bodies, and he saw his son smiling, smoking a cigar and talking with Desnoyers. . . . That was a mere nothing! The gunners were tranquilly finishing the charging of a huge piece. They had raised their eyes for a moment as the enemy’s shell went screaming by, and then had continued their work.

“It must have fallen about three hundred yards away,” said Rene cheerfully.

The senator, impressionable soul, felt suddenly filled with heroic confidence. It was not worth while to bother about his personal safety when other men–just like him, only differently dressed–were not paying the slightest attention to the danger.

And as the other projectiles soared over his head to lose themselves in the woods with the explosions of a volcano, he remained by his son’s side, with no other sign of tension than a slight trembling of the knees. It seemed to him now that it was only the French missiles–because they were on his side–that were hitting the bull’s eye. The others must be going up in the air and losing themselves in useless noise. Of just such illusions is valor often compounded! . . . “And is that all?” his eyes seemed to be asking.

He now recalled rather shamefacedly his retreat to the shelter; he was beginning to feel that he could live in the open, the same as Rene.

The German missiles were getting considerably more frequent. They were no longer lost in the wood, and their detonations were sounding nearer and nearer. The two officials exchanged glances. They were responsible for the safety of their distinguished charge.

“Now they are warming up,” said one of them.

Rene, as though reading their thoughts, prepared to go. “Good-bye, father!” They were needing him in his battery. The senator tried to resist; he wished to prolong the interview, but found that he was hitting against something hard and inflexible that repelled all his influence. A senator amounted to very little with people accustomed to discipline. “Farewell, my boy! . . . All success to you! . . . Remember who you are!”

The father wept as he embraced his son, lamenting the brevity of the interview, and thinking of the dangers awaiting him.

When Rene had disappeared, the captains again recommended their departure. It was getting late; they ought to reach a certain cantonment before nightfall. So they went down the hill in the shelter of a cut in the mountain, seeing the enemy’s shells flying high above them.

In a hollow, they came upon several groups of the famed seventy- fives spread about through the woods, hidden by piles of underbrush, like snapping dogs, howling and sticking up their gray muzzles. The great cannon were roaring only at intervals, while the steel pack of hounds were yelping incessantly without the slightest break in their noisy wrath–like the endless tearing of a piece of cloth. The pieces were many, the volleys dizzying, and the shots uniting in one prolonged shriek, as a series of dots unite to form a single line.

The chiefs, stimulated by the din, were giving their orders in yells, and waving their arms from behind the pieces. The cannon were sliding over the motionless gun carriages, advancing and receding like automatic pistols. Each charge dropped an empty shell, and introduced a fresh one into the smoking chamber.

Behind the battery, the air was racking in furious waves. With every shot, Lacour and his companion received a blow on the breast, the violent contact with an invisible hand, pushing them backward and forward. They had to adjust their breathing to the rhythm of the concussions. During the hundredth part of a second, between the passing of one aerial wave and the advance of the next, their chests felt the agony of vacuum. Desnoyers admired the baying of those gray dogs. He knew well their bite, extending across many kilometres. Now they were fresh and at home in their own kennels.

To Lacour it seemed as though the rows of cannon were chanting a measure, monotonous and fiercely impassioned that must be the martial hymn of the humanity of prehistoric times. This music of dry, deafening, delirious notes was awakening in the two what is sleeping in the depths of every soul–the savagery of a remote ancestry. The air was hot with acrid odors, pungent and brutishly intoxicating. The perfumes from the explosions were penetrating to the brain through the mouth, the eyes and the ears.

They began to be infected with the same ardor as the directors, shouting and swinging their arms in the midst of the thundering. The empty capsules were mounting up in thick layers behind the cannon. Fire! . . . always, fire!

“We must sprinkle them well,” yelled the chiefs. “We must give a good soaking to the groves where the Boches are hidden.”

So the mouths of ’75 rained without interruption, inundating the remote thickets with their shells.

Inflamed by this deadly activity, frenzied by the destructive celerity, dominated by the dizzying sway of the ruby leaves, Lacour and Desnoyers found themselves waving their hats, leaping from one side to another as though they were dancing the sacred dance of death, and shouting with mouths dry from the acrid vapor of the powder. . . . “Hurrah! . . . Hurrah!”

The automobile rode all the afternoon long, stopping only when it met long files of convoys. It traversed uncultivated fields with skeletons of dwellings, and ran through burned towns which were no more than a succession of blackened facades.

“Now it is your turn,” said the senator to Desnoyers. “We are going to see your son.”

At nightfall, they ran across groups of infantry, soldiers with long beards and blue uniforms discolored by the inclemency of the weather. They were returning from the intrenchments, carrying over the hump of their knapsacks, spades, picks and other implements for removing the ground, that had acquired the importance of arms of combat. They were covered with mud from head to foot. All looked old in full youth. Their joy at returning to the cantonment after a week in the trenches, made them fill the silence of the plain with songs in time to the tramp of their nailed boots. Through the violet twilight drifted the winged strophes of the Marseillaise, or the heroic affirmations of the Chant du Depart.

“They are the soldiers of the Revolution,” exclaimed Lacour with enthusiasm. “France has returned to 1792.”

The two captains established their charges for the night in a half- ruined town where one of their divisions had its headquarters, and then took their leave. Others would act as their escort the following morning.

The two friends were lodging in the Hotel de la Siren, an old inn with its front gnawed by shell-fire. The proprietor showed them with pride a window broken in the form of a crater. This window had made the old tavern sign–a woman of iron with the tail of a fish– sink into insignificance. As Desnoyers was occupying the room next to the one that had received the mark of the shell, the inn-keeper was anxious to point it out to them before they went to bed.

Everything was broken–walls, floor, roof. The furniture, a pile of splinters in the corner; the flowered wall paper, a fringe of tatters hanging from the walls. Through an enormous hole they could see the stars and feel the chill of the night. The owner stated that this destruction was not the work of the Germans, but was caused by a projectile from one of the seventy-fives when repelling the invaders from the village. And he beamed on the ruin with patriotic pride, repeating:

“There’s a sample of French marksmanship for you! How do you like the workings of the seventy-fives? . . . What do you think of that now? . . .”

In spite of the fatigue of the journey, Don Marcelo slept badly, excited by the thought that his son was not far away.

An hour before daybreak, they left the village, in an automobile, guided by another official. On both sides of the road, they saw camps and camps. They left behind the parks of munitions, passed the third line of troops, and then the second. Thousands and thousands of men were bivouacking there in the open, improvising as best they could their habitations. These human ant-hills seemed vaguely to recall, with the variety of uniforms and races, some of the mighty invasions of history; but it was not a nation en marche. The exodus of people takes with it the women and children. Here there were nothing but men, men everywhere.

All kinds of housing ever used by humanity were here utilized, these military assemblages beginning with the cave. Caverns and quarries were serving as barracks. Some low huts recalled the American ranch; others, high and conical, were facsimiles of the gurbi of Africa. Many of the soldiers had come from the colonies; some had been living as business men in the new world, and upon having to provide a house more stable than the canvas tent, had recalled the architecture of the tribes with which they had had dealings. In this conglomerate of combatants, there were also Moors, blacks and Asiatics who were accustomed to live outside the cities and had acquired in the open a physical superiority which made them more masterful than the civilized peoples.

Near the river beds was flapping white clothing hung out to dry. Rows of men with bared breasts were out in the morning freshness, leaning over the streams, washing themselves with noisy ablutions followed by vigorous rubbings. . . . On a bridge was a soldier writing, utilizing a parapet as a table. . . . The cooks were moving around their savory kettles, and a warm exhalation of morning soup was mixed with the resinous perfume of the trees and the smell of the damp earth.

Long, low barracks of wood and zinc served the cavalry and artillery for their animals and stores. In the open air, the soldiers were currying and shoeing the glossy, plump horses which the trench-war was maintaining in placid obesity.

“If they had only been like that at the battle of the Marne!” sighed Desnoyers to his friend.

Now the cavalry was leading an existence of interminable rest. The troopers were fighting on foot, and finding it necessary to exercise their steeds to keep them from getting sick with their full mangers.

There were spread over the fields several aeroplanes, like great, gray dragon flies, poised for the flight. Many of the men were grouped around them. The farmers, transformed into soldiers, were watching with great admiration their comrade charged with the management of these machines. They looked upon him as one of the wizards so venerated and feared in all the countryside.

Don Marcelo was struck by the general transformation in the French uniforms. All were now clad in gray-blue, from head to foot. The trousers of bright scarlet cloth, the red kepis which he had hailed with such joy in the expedition of the Marne, no longer existed. All the men passing along the roads were soldiers. All the vehicles, even the ox-carts, were guided by military men.

Suddenly the automobile stopped before some ruined houses blackened by fire.

“Here we are,” announced the official. “Now we shall have to walk a little.”

The senator and his friend started along the highway.

“Not that way, no!” the guide turned to say grimly. “That road is bad for the health. We must keep out of the currents of air.”

He further explained that the Germans had their cannon and intrenchments at the end of this highroad which sloped suddenly and again appeared as a white ribbon on the horizon line between two rows of trees and burned houses. The pale morning light with its hazy mist was sheltering them from the enemy’s fire. On a sunny day, the arrival of their automobile would have been saluted with a shell. “That is war,” he concluded. “One is always near to death without seeing it.”

The two recalled the warning of the general with whom they had dined the day before: “Be very careful! The war of the trenches is treacherous.”

In the sweep of plains unrolled before them, not a man was visible. It seemed like a country Sunday, when the farmers are in their homes, and the land scene lying in silent meditation. Some shapeless objects could be seen in the fields, like agricultural implements deserted for a day of rest. Perhaps they were broken automobiles, or artillery carriages destroyed by the force of their volleys.

“This way,” said the officer who had added four soldiers to the party to carry the various bags and packages which Desnoyers had brought out on the roof of the automobile.

They proceeded in a single file the length of a wall of blackened bricks, down a steep hill. After a few steps the surface of the ground was about to their knees; further on, up to their waists, and thus they disappeared within the earth, seeing above their heads, only a narrow strip of sky. They were now under the open field, having left behind them the mass of ruins that hid the entrance of the road. They were advancing in an absurd way, as though they scorned direct lines–in zig-zags, in curves, in angles. Other pathways, no less complicated, branched off from this ditch which was the central avenue of an immense subterranean cavity. They walked . . . and walked . . . and walked. A quarter of an hour went by, a half, an entire hour. Lacour and his friend thought longingly of the roadways flanked with trees, of their tramp in the open air where they could see the sky and meadows. They were not going twenty steps in the same direction. The official marching ahead was every moment vanishing around a new bend. Those who were coming behind were panting and talking unseen, having to quicken their steps in order not to lose sight of the party. Every now and then they had to halt in order to unite and count the little band, to make sure that no one had been lost in a transverse gallery. The ground was exceedingly slippery, in some places almost liquid mud, white and caustic like the drip from the scaffolding of a house in the course of construction.

The thump of their footsteps, and the friction of their shoulders, brought down chunks of earth and smooth stones from the sides. Little by little they climbed through the main artery of this underground body and the veins connected with it. Again they were near the surface where it required but little effort to see the blue above the earth-works. But here the fields were uncultivated, surrounded with wire fences, yet with the same appearance of Sabbath calm. Knowing by sad experience, what curiosity oftentimes cost, the official would not permit them to linger here. “Keep right ahead! Forward march!”

For an hour and a half the party kept doggedly on until the senior members became greatly bewildered and fatigued by their serpentine meanderings. They could no longer tell whether they were advancing or receding, the sudden steeps and the continual turning bringing on an attack of vertigo.

“Have we much further to go?” asked the senator.

“There!” responded the guide pointing to some heaps of earth above them. “There” was a bell tower surrounded by a few charred houses that could be seen a long ways off–the remains of a hamlet which had been taken and retaken by both sides.

By going in a direct line on the surface they would have compassed this distance in half an hour. To the angles of the underground road, arranged to impede the advance of an enemy, there had been added the obstacles of campaign fortification, tunnels cut with wire lattice work, large hanging cages of wire which, on falling, could block the passage and enable the defenders to open fire across their gratings.

They began to meet soldiers with packs and pails of water who were soon lost in the tortuous cross roads. Some, seated on piles of wood, were smiling as they read a little periodical published in the trenches.

The soldiers stepped aside to make way for the visiting procession, bearded and curious faces peeping out of the alleyways. Afar off sounded a crackling of short snaps as though at the end of the winding lanes were a shooting lodge where a group of sportsmen were killing pigeons.

The morning was still cloudy and cold. In spite of the humid atmosphere, a buzzing like that of a horsefly, hummed several times above the two visitors.

“Bullets!” said their conductor laconically.

Desnoyers meanwhile had lowered his head a little. he knew perfectly well that insectivorous sound. The senator walked on more briskly, temporarily forgetting his weariness.

They came to a halt before a lieutenant-colonel who received them like an engineer exhibiting his workshops, like a naval officer showing off the batteries and turrets of his battleships. He was the Chief of the battalion occupying this section of the trenches. Don Marcelo studied him with special interest, knowing that his son was under his orders.

To the two friends, these subterranean fortifications bore a certain resemblance to the lower parts of a vessel. They passed from trench to trench of the last line, the oldest–dark galleries into which penetrated streaks of light across the loopholes and broad, low windows of the mitrailleuse. The long line of defense formed a tunnel cut by short, open spaces. They had to go stumbling from light to darkness, and from darkness to light with a visual suddenness very fatiguing to the eyes. The ground was higher in the open spaces. There were wooden benches placed against the sides so that the observers could put out the head or examine the landscape by means of the periscope. The enclosed space answered both for batteries and sleeping quarters.

As the enemy had been repelled and more ground had been gained, the combatants who had been living all winter in these first quarters, had tried to make themselves more comfortable. Over the trenches in the open air, they had laid beams from the ruined houses; over the beams, planks, doors and windows, and on top of the wood, layers of sacks of earth. These sacks were covered by a top of fertile soil from which sprouted grass and herbs, giving the roofs of the trenches, an appearance of pastoral placidity. The temporary arches could thus resist the shock of the obuses which went ploughing into the earth without causing any special damage. When an explosion was pounding too noisily and weakening the structure, the troglodytes would swarm out in the night like watchful ants, and skilfully readjust the roof of their primitive dwellings.

Everything appeared clean with that simple and rather clumsy cleanliness exercised by men living far from women and thrown upon their own resources. The galleries were something like the cloisters of a monastery, the corridors of a prison, and the middle sections of a ship. Their floors were a half yard lower than that of the open spaces which joined the trenches together. In order that the officers might avoid so many ups and downs, some planks had been laid, forming a sort of scaffolding from doorway to doorway.

Upon the approach of their Chief, the soldiers formed themselves in line, their heads being on a level with the waist of those passing over the planks. Desnoyers ran his eye hungrily over the file of men. Where could Julio be? . . .

He noticed the individual contour of the different redoubts. They all seemed to have been constructed in about the same way, but their occupants had modified them with their special personal decorations. The exteriors were always cut with loopholes in which there were guns pointed toward the enemy, and windows for the mitrailleuses. The watchers near these openings were looking over the lonely landscape like quartermasters surveying the sea from the bridge. Within were the armories and the sleeping rooms–three rows of berths made with planks like the beds of seamen. The desire for artistic ornamentation which even the simplest souls always feel, had led to the embellishment of the underground dwellings. Each soldier had a private museum made with prints from the papers and colored postcards. Photographs of soubrettes and dancers with their painted mouths smiled from the shiny cardboard, enlivening the chaste aspect of the redoubt.

Don Marcelo was growing more and more impatient at seeing so many hundreds of men, but no Julio. The senator, complying with his imploring glance, spoke a few words to the chief preceding him with an aspect of great deference. The official had at first to think very hard to recall Julio to mind, but he soon remembered the exploits of Sergeant Desnoyers. “An excellent soldier,” he said. “He will be sent for immediately, Senator Lacour. . . . He is on duty now with his section in the first line trenches.”

The father, in his anxiety to see him, proposed that they betake themselves to that advanced site, but his petition made the Chief and the others smile. Those open trenches within a hundred or fifty yards from the enemy, with no other defence but barbed wire and sacks of earth, were not for the visits of civilians. They were always filled with mud; the visitors would have to crawl around exposed to bullets and under the dropping chunks of earth loosened by the shells. None but the combatants could get around in these outposts.

“It is always dangerous there,” said the Chief. “There is always random shooting. . . . Just listen to the firing!”

Desnoyers indeed perceived a distant crackling that he had not noted before, and he felt an added anguish at the thought that his son must be in the thick of it. Realization of the dangers to which he must be daily exposed, now stood forth in high relief. What if he should die in the intervening moments, before he could see him? . . .

Time dragged by with desperate sluggishness for Don Marcelo. It seemed to him that the messenger who had been despatched for him would never arrive. He paid scarcely any attention to the affairs which the Chief was so courteously showing them–the caverns which served the soldiers as toilet rooms and bathrooms of most primitive arrangement, the cave with the sign, “Cafe de la Victoire,” another in fanciful lettering, “Theatre.” . . . Lacour was taking a lively interest in all this, lauding the French gaiety which laughs and sings in the presence of danger, while his friend continued brooding about Julio. When would he ever see him?

They stopped near one of the embrasures of a machine-gun position stationing themselves at the recommendations of the soldiers, on both sides of the horizontal opening, keeping their bodies well back, but putting their heads far enough forward to look out with one eye. They saw a very deep excavation and the opposite edge of ground. A short distance away were several rows of X’s of wood united by barbed wire, forming a compact fence. About three hundred feet further on, was a second wire fence. There reigned a profound silence here, a silence of absolute loneliness as though the world was asleep.

“There are the trenches of the Boches,” said the Commandant, in a low tone.

“Where?” asked the senator, making an effort to see.

The Chief pointed to the second wire fence which Lacour and his friend had supposed belonged to the French. It was the German intrenchment line.

“We are only a hundred yards away from them,” he continued, “but for some time they have not been attacking from this side.”

The visitors were greatly moved at learning that the foe was such a short distance off, hidden in the ground in a mysterious invisibility which made it all the more terrible. What if they should pop out now with their saw-edged bayonets, fire-breathing liquids and asphyxiating bombs to assault this stronghold! . . .

From this window they could observe more clearly the intensity of the firing on the outer line. The shots appeared to be coming nearer. The Commandant brusquely ordered them to leave their observatory, fearing that the fire might become general. The soldiers, with their customary promptitude, without receiving any orders, approached their guns which were in horizontal position, pointing through the loopholes.

Again the visitors walked in single file, going down into cavernous spaces that had been the old wine-cellars of former houses. The officers had taken up their abode in these dens, utilizing all the residue of the ruins. A street door on two wooden horses served as a table; the ceilings and walls were covered with cretonnes from the Paris warehouses; photographs of women and children adorned the side wall between the nickeled glitter of telegraphic and telephonic instruments.

Desnoyers saw above one door an ivory crucifix, yellowed with years, probably with centuries, transmitted from generation to generation, that must have witnessed many agonies of soul. In another den he noticed in a conspicuous place, a horseshoe with seven holes. Religious creeds were spreading their wings very widely in this atmosphere of danger and death, and yet at the same time, the most grotesque superstitions were acquiring new values without any one laughing at them.

Upon leaving one of the cells, in the middle of an open space, the yearning father met his son. He knew that it must be Julio by the Chief’s gesture and because the smiling soldier was coming toward him, holding out his hands; but this time his paternal instinct which he had heretofore considered an infallible thing, had given him no warning. How could he recognize Julio in that sergeant whose feet were two cakes of moist earth, whose faded cloak was a mass of tatters covered with mud, even up to the shoulders, smelling of damp wool and leather? . . . After the first embrace, he drew back his head in order to get a good look at him without letting go of him. His olive pallor had turned to a bronze tone. He was growing a beard, a beard black and curly, which reminded Don Marcelo of his father-in-law. The centaur, Madariaga, had certainly come to life in this warrior hardened by camping in the open air. At first, the father grieved over his dirty and tired aspect, but a second glance made him sure that he was now far more handsome and interesting than in his days of society glory.

“What do you need? . . . What do you want?”

His voice was trembling with tenderness. He was speaking to the tanned and robust combatant in the same tone that he was wont to use twenty years ago when, holding the child by the hand, he had halted before the preserve cupboards of Buenos Aires.

“Would you like money? . . .”

He had brought a large sum with him to give to his son, but the soldier gave a shrug of indifference as though he had offered him a plaything. He had never been so rich as at this moment; he had a lot of money in Paris and he didn’t know what to do with it–he didn’t need anything.

“Send me some cigars . . . for me and my comrades.”

He was constantly receiving from his mother great baskets full of choice goodies, tobacco and clothing. But he never kept anything; all was passed on to his fellow-warriors, sons of poor families or alone in the world. His munificence had spread from his intimates to the company, and from that to the entire battalion. Don Marcelo divined his great popularity in the glances and smiles of the soldiers passing near them. He was the generous son of a millionaire, and this popularity seemed to include even him when the news went around that the father of Sergeant Desnoyers had arrived– a potentate who possessed fabulous wealth on the other side of the sea.

“I guessed that you would want cigars,” chuckled the old man.

And his gaze sought the bags brought from the automobile through the windings of the underground road.

All of the son’s valorous deeds, extolled and magnified by Argensola, now came trooping into his mind. He had the original hero before his very eyes.

“Are you content, satisfied? . . . You do not repent of your decision?”

“Yes, I am content, father . . . very content.”

Julio spoke without boasting, modestly. His life was very hard, but just like that of millions of other men. In his section of a few dozens of soldiers there were many superior to him in intelligence, in studiousness, in character; but they were all courageously undergoing the test, experiencing the satisfaction of duty fulfilled. The common danger was helping to develop the noblest virtues of these men. Never, in times of peace, had he known such comradeship. What magnificent sacrifices he had witnessed!

“When all this is over, men will be better . . . more generous. Those who survive will do great things.”

Yes, of course, he was content. For the first time in his life he was tasting the delights of knowing that he was a useful being, that he was good for something, that his passing through the world would not be fruitless. He recalled with pity that Desnoyers who had not known how to occupy his empty life, and had filled it with every kind of frivolity. Now he had obligations that were taxing all his powers; he was collaborating in the formation of a future. He was a man at last!

“I am content,” he repeated with conviction.

His father believed him, yet he fancied that, in a corner of that frank glance, he detected something sorrowful, a memory of a past which perhaps often forced its way among his present emotions. There flitted through his mind the lovely figure of Madame Laurier. Her charm was, doubtless, still haunting his son. And to think that he could not bring her here! . . . The austere father of the preceding year contemplated himself with astonishment as he caught himself formulating this immoral regret.

They passed a quarter of an hour without loosening hands, looking into each other’s eyes. Julio asked after his mother and Chichi. He frequently received letters from them, but that was not enough for his curiosity. He laughed heartily at hearing of Argensola’s amplified and abundant life. These interesting bits of news came from a world not much more than sixty miles distant in a direct line . . . but so far, so very far away!

Suddenly the father noticed that his boy was listening with less attention. His senses, sharpened by a life of alarms and ambushed attacks, appeared to be withdrawing itself from the company, attracted by the firing. Those were no longer scattered shots; they had combined into a continual crackling.

The senator, who had left father and son together that they might talk more freely, now reappeared.

“We are dismissed from here, my friend,” he announced. “We have no luck in our visits.”

Soldiers were no longer passing to and fro. All had hastened to their posts, like the crew of a ship which clears for action. While Julio was taking up the rifle which he had left against the wall, a bit of dust whirled above his father’s head and a little hole appeared in the ground.

“Quick, get out of here!” he said pushing Don Marcelo.

Then, in the shelter of a covered trench, came the nervous, very brief farewell. “Good-bye, father,” a kiss, and he was gone. He had to return as quickly as possible to the side of his men.

The firing had become general all along the line. The soldiers were shooting serenely, as though fulfilling an ordinary function. It was a combat that took place every day without anybody’s knowing exactly who started it–in consequence of the two armies being installed face to face, and such a short distance apart. . . . The Chief of the battalion was also obliged to desert his guests, fearing a counter-attack.

Again the officer charged with their safe conduct put himself at the head of the file, and they began to retrace their steps through the slippery maze. Desnoyers was tramping sullenly on, angry at the intervention of the enemy which had cut short his happiness.

Before his inward gaze fluttered the vision of Julio with his black, curly beard which to him was the greatest novelty of the trip. He heard again his grave voice, that of a man who has taken up life from a new viewpoint.

“I am content, father . . . I am content.”

The firing, growing constantly more distant, gave the father great uneasiness. Then he felt an instinctive faith, absurd, very firm. He saw his son beautiful and immortal as a god. He had a conviction that he would come out safe and sound from all dangers. That others should die was but natural, but Julio! . . .

As they got further and further away from the soldier boy, Hope appeared to be singing in his ears; and as an echo of his pleasing musings, the father kept repeating mentally:

“No one will kill him. My heart which never deceives me, tells me so. . . . No one will kill him!”

CHAPTER IV

“NO ONE WILL KILL HIM”

Four months later, Don Marcelo’s confidence received a rude shock. Julio was wounded. But at the same time that Lacour bought him this news, lamentably delayed, he tranquilized him with the result of his investigations in the war ministry. Sergeant Desnoyers was now a sub-lieutenant, his wound was almost healed and, thanks to the wire- pulling of the senator, he was coming to pass a fortnight with his family while convalescing.

“An exceptionally brave fellow,” concluded the influential man. “I have read what his chiefs say about him. At the head of his platoon, he attacked a German company; he killed the captain with his own hand; he did I don’t know how many more brave things besides. . . . They have presented him with the military medal and have made him an officer. . . . A regular hero!”

And the rapidly aging father, weeping with emotion, but with increasing enthusiasm, shook his head and trembled. He repented now of his momentary lack of faith when the first news of his wounded boy reached him. How absurd! . . . No one would kill Julio; his heart told him so.

Soon after, he saw him coming home amid the cries and delighted exclamations of the women. Poor Dona Luisa wept as she embraced him, hanging on his neck with sobs of emotion. Chichi contemplated him with grave reflection, putting half of her mind on the recent arrival while the rest flew far away in search of the other warrior. The dusky, South American maids fought each other for the opening in the curtains, peering through the crack with the gaze of an antelope.

The father admired the little scrap of gold on the sleeve of the gray cloak, with the skirts buttoning behind, examining afterwards the dark blue cap with its low brim, adopted by the French for the war in the trenches. The traditional kepi had disappeared. A suitable visor, like that of the men in the Spanish infantry, now shadowed Julio’s face. Don Marcelo noted, too, the short and well- cared-for beard, very different from the one he had seen in the trenches. The boy was coming home, groomed and polished from his recent stay in the hospital.

“Isn’t it true that he looks like me?” queried the old man proudly.

Dona Luisa responded with the inconsequence that mothers always show in matters of resemblance.

“He has always been the living image of you!”

Having made sure that he was well and happy, the entire family suddenly felt a certain disquietude. They wished to examine his wound so as to convince themselves that he was completely out of danger.

“Oh, it’s nothing at all,” protested the sub-lieutenant. “A bullet wound in the shoulder. The doctor feared at first that I might lose my left arm, but it has healed well and it isn’t worth while to think any more about it.”

Chichi’s appraising glance swept Julio from head to foot; taking in all the details of his military elegance. His cloak was worn thin and dirty; the leggings were spatter-dashed with mud; he smelled of leather, sweaty cloth and strong tobacco; but on one wrist he was wearing a watch, and on the other, his identity medal fastened with a gold chain. She had always admired her brother for his natural good taste, so she stowed away all these little details in her memory in order to pass them on to Rene. Then she surprised her mother with a demand for a loan that she might send a little gift to her artilleryman.

Don Marcelo gloated over the fifteen days of satisfaction ahead of him. Sub-lieutenant Desnoyers found it impossible to go out alone, for his father was always pacing up and down the reception hall before the military cap which was shedding modest splendor and glory upon the hat rack. Scarcely had Julio put it on his head before his sire appeared, also with hat and cane, ready to sally forth.

“Will you permit me to accompany you? . . . I will not bother you.”

This would be said so humbly, with such an evident desire to have his request granted, that his son had not the heart to refuse him. In order to take a walk with Argensola, he had to scurry down the back stairs, or resort to other schoolboy tricks.

Never had the elder Desnoyers promenaded the streets of Paris with such solid satisfaction as by the side of this muscular youth in his gloriously worn cloak, on whose breast were glistening his two decorations–the cross of war and the military medal. He was a hero, and this hero was his son. He accepted as homage to them both the sympathetic glances of the public in the street cars and subways. The interest with which the women regarded the fine- looking youth tickled him immensely. All the other military men that they met, no matter how many bands and crosses they displayed, appeared to the doting father mere embusques, unworthy of comparison with his Julio. . . . The wounded men who got out of the coaches by the aid of staffs and crutches inspired him with the greatest pity. Poor fellows! . . . They did not bear the charmed life of his son. Nobody could kill him; and when, by chance, he had received a wound, the scars had immediately disappeared without detriment to his handsome person.

Sometimes, especially at night, Desnoyers senior would show an unexpected magnanimity, letting Julio fare forth alone. Since before the war, his son had led a life filled with triumphant love- affairs, what might he not achieve now with the added prestige of a distinguished officer! . . .

Passing through his room on his way to bed, the father imagined the hero in the charming company of some aristocratic lady. None but a feminine celebrity was worthy of him; his paternal pride could accept nothing less. . . . And it never occurred to him that Julio might be with Argensola in a music-hall or in a moving-picture show, enjoying the simple and monotonous diversions of a Paris sobered by war, with the homely tastes of a sub-lieutenant whose amorous conquests were no more than the renewal of some old friendships.

One evening as Don Marcelo was accompanying his son down the Champs Elysees, he started at recognizing a lady approaching from the opposite direction. It was Madame Laurier. . . . Would she recognize Julio? He noted that the youth turned pale and began looking at the other people with feigned interest. She continued straight ahead, erect, unseeing. The old gentleman was almost irritated at such coldness. To pass by his son without feeling his presence instinctively! Ah, these women! . . . He turned his head involuntarily to look after her, but had to avert his inquisitive glance immediately. He had surprised Marguerite motionless behind them, pallid with surprise, and fixing her gaze earnestly on the soldier who was separating himself from her. Don Marcelo read in her eyes admiration, love, all of the past that was suddenly surging up in her memory. Poor woman! . . . He felt for her a paternal affection as though she were the wife of Julio. His friend Lacour had again spoken to him about the Lauriers. He knew that Marguerite was going to become a mother, and the old man, without taking into account the reconciliation nor the passage of time, felt as much moved at the thought of this approaching maternity as though the child were going to be Julio’s.

Meanwhile Julio was marching right on, without turning his head, without being conscious of the burning gaze fixed upon him, colorless, but humming a tune to hide his emotion. He always believed that Marguerite had passed near him without recognizing him, since his father did not betray her.

One of Don Marcelo’s pet occupations was to make his son tell about the encounter in which he had been hurt. No visitor ever came to see the sub-lieutenant but the father always made the same petition.

“Tell us how you were wounded. . . . Explain how you killed that German captain.”

Julio tried to excuse himself with visible annoyance. He was already surfeited with his own history. To please his father, he had related the facts to the senator, to Argensola and to Tchernoff in his studio, and to other family friends. . . . He simply could not do it again.

So the father began the narration on his own account, giving the relief and details of the deed as though seen with his own eyes. . . .

He had to take possession of the ruins of a sugar refinery in front of the trench. The Germans had been expelled by the French cannon. A reconnoitring survey under the charge of a trusty man was then necessary. And the heads, as usual, had selected Sergeant Desnoyers.

At daybreak, the platoon had advanced stealthily without encountering any difficulty. The soldiers scattered among the ruins. Julio then went on alone, examining the positions of the enemy; on turning around a corner of the wall, he had the most unexpected of encounters. A German captain was standing in front of him. They had almost bumped into each other. They looked into each other’s eyes with more suspense than hate, yet at the same time, they were trying instinctively to kill each other, each one trying to get the advantage by his swiftness. The captain had dropped the map that he was carrying. His right hand sought his revolver, trying to draw it from its case without once taking his eyes off his enemy. Then he had to give this up as useless–it was too late. With his eyes distended by the proximity of death, he kept his gaze fixed upon the Frenchman who had raised his gun to his face. A shot, from a barrel almost touching him . . . and the German fell dead.

Not till then did the victor notice the captain’s orderly who was but a few steps behind. He shot Desnoyers, wounding him in the shoulder. The French hurried to the spot, killing the corporal. Then there was a sharp cross-fire with the enemy’s company which had halted a little ways off while their commander was exploring the ground. Julio, in spite of his wound, continued at the head of his section, defending the factory against superior forces until supports arrived, and the land remained definitely in the power of the French.

“Wasn’t that about the way of it?” Don Marcelo would always wind up.

The son assented, desirous that his annoyance with the persistent story should come to an end as soon as possible. Yes, that was the way of it. But what the father didn’t know, what Julio would never tell, was the discovery that he had made after killing the captain.

The two men, during the interminable second in which they had confronted each other, had showed in their eyes something more than the surprise of an encounter, and the wish to overcome the other. Desnoyers knew that man. The captain knew him, too. He guessed it from his expression. . . . But self-preservation was more insistent than recollection and prevented them both from co-ordinating their thoughts.

Desnoyers had fired with the certainty that he was killing someone that he knew. Afterwards, while directing the defense of the position and guarding against the approach of reinforcements, he had a suspicion that the enemy whose corpse was lying a few feet away might possibly be a member of the von Hartrott family. No, he looked much older than his cousins, yet younger than his Uncle Karl who at his age, would be no mere captain of infantry.

When, weakened by the loss of blood, they were about to carry him to the trenches, the sergeant expressed a wish to see again the body of his victim. His doubt continued before the face blanched by death. The wide-open eyes still seemed to retain their startled expression. The man had undoubtedly recognized him. His face was familiar. Who was he? . . . Suddenly in his mind’s eye, Julio saw the heaving ocean, a great steamer, a tall, blonde woman looking at him with half-closed eyes of invitation, a corpulent, moustached man making speeches in the style of the Kaiser. “Rest in peace, Captain Erckmann!” . . . Thus culminated in a corner of France the discussions started at table in mid-ocean.

He excused himself mentally as though he were in the presence of the sweet Bertha. He had had to kill, in order not to be killed. Such is war. He tried to console himself by thinking that Erckmann, perhaps, had failed to identify him, without realizing that his slayer was the shipmate of the summer. . . . And he kept carefully hidden in the depths of his memory this encounter arranged by Fate. He did not even tell Argensola who knew of the incidents of the trans-atlantic passage.

When he least expected it, Don Marcelo found himself at the end of that delightful and proud existence which his son’s presence had brought him. The fortnight had flown by so swiftly! The sub- lieutenant had returned to his post, and all the family, after this period of reality, had had to fall back on the fond illusions of hope, watching again for the arrival of his letters, making conjectures about the silence of the absent one, sending him packet after packet of everything that the market was offering for the soldiery–for the most part, useless and absurd things.

The mother became very despondent. Julio’s visit home but made her feel his absence with greater intensity. Seeing him, hearing those tales of death that her husband was so fond of repeating, made her realize all the more clearly the dangers constantly surrounding her son. Fatality appeared to be warning her with funereal presentiments.

“They are going to kill him,” she kept saying to Desnoyers. “That wound was a forewarning from heaven.”

When passing through the streets, she trembled with emotion at sight of the invalid soldiers. The convalescents of energetic appearance, filled her with the greatest pity. They made her think of a certain trip with her husband to San Sebastian where a bull fight had made her cry out with indignation and compassion, pitying the fate of the poor, gored horses. With entrails hanging, they were taken to the corrals, and submitted to a hurried adjustment in order that they might return to the arena stimulated by a false energy. Again and again they were reduced to this makeshift cobbling until finally a fatal goring finished them. . . . These recently cured men continually brought to her mind those poor beasts. Some had been wounded three times since the beginning of the war, and were returning surgically patched together and re-galvanized to take another chance in the lottery of Fate, always in the expectation of the supreme blow. . . . Ay, her son!

Desnoyers waxed very indignant over his wife’s low spirits, retorting:

“But I tell you that Nobody will kill Julio! . . . He is my son. In my youth I, too, passed through great dangers. They wounded me, too, in the wars in the other world, and nevertheless, here I am at a ripe old age.”

Events seemed to reinforce his blind faith. Calamities were raining around the family and saddening his relatives, yet not one grazed the intrepid sub-lieutenant who was persisting in his daring deeds with the heroic nerve of a musketeer.

Dona Luisa received a letter from Germany. Her sister wrote from Berlin, transmitting her letters through the kindness of a South American in Switzerland. This time, the good lady wept for some one besides her son; she wept for Elena and the enemies. In Germany there were mothers, too, and she put the sentiment of maternity above all patriotic differences.

Poor Frau von Hartrott! Her letter written a month before, had contained nothing but death notices and words of despair. Captain Otto was dead. Dead, too, was one of his younger brothers. The fact that the latter had fallen in a territory dominated by their nation, at least gave the mother the sad comfort of being able to weep near his grave. But the Captain was buried on French soil, nobody knew where, and she would never be able to find his remains, mingled with hundreds of others. A third son was wounded in Poland. Her two daughters had lost their promised lovers, and the sight of their silent grief, was intensifying the mother’s suffering. Von Hartrott continued presiding over patriotic societies and making plans of expansion after the near victory, but he had aged greatly in the last few months. The “sage” was the only one still holding his own. The family afflictions were aggravating the ferocity of Professor Julius von Hartrott. He was calculating, in a book he was writing, the hundreds of thousands of millions that Germany must exact after her triumph, and the various nations that she would have to annex to the Fatherland.

Dona Luisa imagined that in the avenue Victor Hugo, she could hear the mother’s tears falling in her home in Berlin. “You will understand, Luisa, my despair. . . . We were all so happy! May God punish those who have brought such sorrow on the world! The Emperor is innocent. His adversaries are to blame for it all . . .”

Don Marcelo was silent about the letter in his wife’s presence. He pitied Elena for her losses, so he overlooked her political connections. He was touched, too, at Dona Luisa’s distress about Otto. She had been his godmother and Desnoyers his godfather. That was so–Don Marcelo had forgotten all about it; and the fact recalled to his mental vision the placid life of the ranch, and the play of the blonde children that he had petted behind their grandfather’s back, before Julio was born. For many years, he had lavished great affection on these youngsters, when dismayed at Julio’s delayed arrival. He was really affected at thinking of what must be Karl’s despair.

But then, as soon as he was alone, a selfish coldness would blot out this compassion. War was war, and the Germans had sought it. France had to defend herself, and the more enemies fell the better. . . . The only soldier who interested him now was Julio. And his faith in the destiny of his son made him feel a brutal joy, a paternal satisfaction almost amounting to ferocity.

“No one will kill HIM! . . . My heart tells me so.”

A nearer trouble shook his peace of mind. When he returned to his home one evening, he found Dona Luisa with a terrified aspect holding her hands to her head.

“The daughter, Marcelo . . . our daughter!”

Chichi was stretched out on a sofa in the salon, pale, with an olive tinge, looking fixedly ahead of her as if she could see somebody in the empty air. She was not crying, but a slight palpitation was making her swollen eyes tremble spasmodically.

“I want to see him,” she was saying hoarsely. “I must see him!”

The father conjectured that something terrible must have happened to Lacour’s son. That was the only thing that could make Chichi show such desperation. His wife was telling him the sad news. Rene was wounded, very seriously wounded. A shell had exploded over his battery, killing many of his comrades. The young officer had been dragged out from a mountain of dead, one hand was gone, he had injuries in the legs, chest and head.

“I’ve got to see him!” reiterated Chichi.

And Don Marcelo had to concentrate all his efforts in making his daughter give up this dolorous insistence which made her exact an immediate journey to the front, trampling down all obstacles, in order to reach her wounded lover. The senator finally convinced her of the uselessness of it all. She would simply have to wait; he, the father, had to be patient. He was negotiating for Rene to be transferred to a hospital in Paris.

The great man moved Desnoyers to pity. He was making such heroic efforts to preserve the stoic serenity of ancient days by recalling his glorious ancestors and all the illustrious figures of the Roman Republic. But these oratorical illusions had suddenly fallen flat, and his old friend surprised him weeping more than once. An only child, and he might have to lose him! . . . Chichi’s dumb woe made him feel even greater commiseration. Her grief was without tears or faintings. Her sallow face, the feverish brilliancy of her eyes, and the rigidity that made her move like an automaton were the only signs of her emotion. She was living with her thoughts far away, with no knowledge of what was going on around her.

When the patient arrived in Paris, his father and fiancee were transfigured. They were going to see him, and that was enough to make them imagine that he was already recuperated.

Chichi hastened to the hospital with her mother and the senator. Then she went alone and insisted on remaining there, on living at the wounded man’s side, waging war on all regulations and clashing with Sisters of Charity, trained nurses, and all who roused in her the hatred of rivalry. Soon realizing that all her violence accomplished nothing, she humiliated herself and became suddenly very submissive, trying with her wiles, to win the women over one by one. Finally, she was permitted to spend the greater part of the day with Rene

When Desnoyers first saw the wounded artilleryman in bed, he had to make a great effort to keep the tears back. . . . Ay, his son, too, might be brought to this sad pass! . . . The man looked to him like an Egyptian mummy, because of his complete envelopment in tight bandage wrappings. The sharp hulls of the shell had fairly riddled him. There could only be seen a pair of sweet eyes and a blond bit of moustache sticking up between white bands. The poor fellow was trying to smile at Chichi, who was hovering around him with a certain authority as though she were in her own home.

Two months rolled by. Rene was better, almost well. His betrothed had never doubted his recovery from the moment that they permitted her to remain with him.

“No one that I love, ever dies,” she asserted with a ring of her father’s self-confidence. “As if I would ever permit the Boches to leave me without a husband!”

She had her little sugar soldier back again, but, oh, in what a lamentable state! . . . Never had Don Marcelo realized the de- personalizing horrors of war as when he saw entering his home this convalescent whom he had known months before–elegant and slender, with a delicate and somewhat feminine beauty. His face was now furrowed by a network of scars that had transformed it into a purplish arabesque. Within his body were hidden many such. His left hand had disappeared with a part of the forearm, the empty sleeve hanging over the remainder. The other hand was supported on a cane, a necessary aid in order to be able to move a leg that would never recover its elasticity.

But Chichi was content. She surveyed her dear little soldier with more enthusiasm than ever–a little deformed, perhaps, but very interesting. With her mother, she accompanied the convalescent in his constitutionals through the Bois de Boulogne. When, in crossing a street, automobilists or coachmen failed to stop their vehicles in order to give the invalid the right of way, her eyes shot lightning shafts, as she thundered, “Shameless embusques!” . . . She was now feeling the same fiery resentment as those women of former days who used to insult her Rene when he was well and happy. She trembled with satisfaction and pride when returning the greetings of her friends. Her eloquent eyes seemed to be saying, “Yes, he is my betrothed . . . a hero!” She was constantly arranging the war cross on his blouse of “horizon blue,” taking pains to place it as conspicuously as possible. She also spent much time in prolonging the life of his shabby uniform–always the same one, the old one which he was wearing when wounded. A new one would give him the officery look of the soldiers who never left Paris.

As he grew stronger, Rene vainly tried to emancipate himself from her dominant supervision. It was simply useless to try to walk with more celerity or freedom.

“Lean on me!”

And he had to take his fiancee’s arm. All her plans for the future were based on the devotion with which she was going to protect her husband, on the solicitude that she was going to dedicate to his crippled condition.

“My poor, dear invalid,” she would murmur lovingly. “So ugly and so helpless those blackguards have left you! . . . But luckily you have me, and I adore you! . . . It makes no difference to me that one of your hands is gone. I will care for you; you shall be my little son. You will just see, after we are married, how elegant and stylish I am going to keep you. But don’t you dare to look at any of the other women! The very first moment that you do, my precious little invalid, I’ll leave you alone in your helplessness!”

Desnoyers and the senator were also concerned about their future, but in a very definite way. They must be married as soon as possible. What was the use of waiting? . . . The war was no longer an obstacle. They would be married as quietly as possible. This was no time for wedding pomp.

So Rene Lacour remained permanently in the house on the avenida Victor Hugo, after the nuptial ceremony witnessed by a dozen people.

Don Marcelo had had dreams of other things for his daughter–a grand wedding to which the daily papers would devote much space, a son-in- law with a brilliant future . . . but ay, this war! Everybody was having his fondest hopes dashed to pieces every few hours.

He took what comfort he could out of the situation. What more did they want? Chichi was happy–with a rollicking and selfish happiness which took no interest in anything but her own love- affairs. The Desnoyers business returns could not be improved upon;–after the first crisis had passed, the necessities of the belligerents had begun utilizing the output of his ranches, and never before had meat brought such high prices. Money was flowing in with greater volume than formerly, while the expenses were diminishing. . . . Julio was in daily danger of death, but the old ranchman was buoyed up by his conviction that his son led a charmed life–no harm could touch him. His chief preoccupation, therefore, was to keep himself tranquil, avoiding all emotional storms. He had been reading with considerable alarm of the frequency with which well-known persons, politicians, artists and writers, were dying in Paris. War was not doing all its killing at the front; its shocks were falling like arrows over the land, causing the fall of the weak, the crushed and the exhausted who, in normal times, would probably have lived to a far greater age.

“Attention, Marcelo!” he said to himself with grim humor. “Keep cool now! . . . You must avoid Friend Tchernoff’s four horsemen, you know!”

He spent an afternoon in the studio going over the war news in the papers. The French had begun an offensive in Champagne with great advances and many prisoners.

Desnoyers could not but think of the loss of life that this must represent. Julio’s fate, however, gave him no uneasiness, for his son was not in that part of the front. But yesterday he had received a letter from him, dated the week before; they all took about that length of time to reach him. Sub-lieutenant Desnoyers was as blithe and reckless as ever. They were going to promote him again–he was among those proposed for the Legion d’Honneur. These facts intensified Don Marcelo’s vision of himself as the father of a general as young as those of the revolution; and as he contemplated the daubs and sketches around him, he marvelled at the extraordinary way in which the war had twisted his son’s career.

On his way home, he passed Marguerite Laurier dressed in mourning. The senator had told him a few days before that her brother, the artilleryman, had just been killed at Verdun.

“How many are falling!” he said mournfully to himself. “How hard it will be for his poor mother!”

But he smiled immediately after at the thought of those to be born. Never before had the people been so occupied in accelerating their reproduction. Even Madame Laurier now showed with pride the very visible curves of her approaching maternity, and Desnoyers noted sympathetically the vital volume apparent beneath her long mourning veil. Again he thought of Julio, without taking into account the flight of time. He felt as interested in the little newcomer as though he were in some way related to it, and he promised himself to aid generously the Laurier baby if he ever had the opportunity.

On entering his house, he was met in the hall by Dona Luisa, who told him that Lacour was waiting for him.

“Very good!” he responded gaily. “Let us see what our illustrious father-in-law has to say.”

His good wife was uneasy. She had felt alarmed without knowing exactly why at the senator’s solemn appearance; with that feminine instinct which perforates all masculine precautions, she surmised some hidden mission. She had noticed, too, that Rene and his father were talking together in a low tone, with repressed emotion.

Moved by an irresistible impulse, she hovered near the closed door, hoping to hear something definite. Her wait was not long.

Suddenly a cry . . . a groan . . . the groan that can come only from a body from which all vitality is escaping.

And Dona Luisa rushed in just in time to support her husband as he was falling to the floor.

The senator was excusing himself confusedly to the walls, the furniture, and turning his back in his agitation on the dismayed Rene, the only one who could have listened to him.

“He did not let me finish. . . . He guessed from the very first word. . . .”

Hearing the outcry, Chichi hastened in in time to see her father slipping from his wife’s arms to the sofa, and from there to the floor, with glassy, staring eyes, and foaming at the mouth.

From the luxurious rooms came forth the world-old cry, always the same from the humblest home to the highest and loneliest:–

“Oh, Julio! . . . Oh, my son, my son! . . .

CHAPTER V

THE BURIAL FIELDS

The automobile was going slowly forward under the colorless sky of a winter morning.

In the distance, the earth’s surface seemed trembling with white, fluttering things resembling a band of butterflies poised on the furrows. On one of the fields the swarm was of great size, on others, it was broken into small groups.

As the machine approached these white butterflies, they seemed to be taking on other colors. One wing was turning blue, another flesh- colored. . . . They were little flags, by the hundreds, by the thousands which palpitated night and day, in the mild, sunny, morning breeze, in the damp drip of the dull mornings, in the biting cold of the interminable nights. The rains had washed and re-washed them, stealing away the most of their color. Some of the borders of the restless little strips were mildewed by the dampness while others were scorched by the sun, like insects which have just grazed the flames.

In the midst of the fluttering flags could be seen the black crosses of wood. On these were hanging dark kepis, red caps, and helmets topped with tufts of horsehair, slowly disintegrating and weeping atmospheric tears at every point.

“How many are dead!” sighed Don Marcelo’s voice from the automobile.

And Rene, who was seated in front of him, sadly nodded his head. Dona Luisa was looking at the mournful plain while her lips trembled slightly in constant prayer. Chichi turned her great eyes in astonishment from one side to the other. She appeared larger, more capable in spite of the pallor which blanched her olive skin.

The two ladies were dressed in deepest mourning. The father, too, was in mourning, huddled down in the seat in a crushed attitude, his legs carefully covered with the great fur rugs. Rene was wearing his campaign uniform under his storm coat. In spite of his injuries, he had not wished to retire from the army. He had been transferred to a technical office till the termination of the war.

The Desnoyers family were on the way to carry out their long- cherished hope.

Upon recovering consciousness after the fatal news, the father had concentrated all his will power in one petition.

“I must see him. . . . Oh, my son! . . . My son!”

Vain were the senator’s efforts to show him the impossibility of such a journey. The fighting was still going on in the zone where Julio had fallen. Later on, perhaps, it might be possible to visit it. “I want to see it!” persisted the broken-hearted old man. It was necessary for him to see his son’s grave before dying himself, and Lacour had to requisition all his powers, for four long months formulating requests and overcoming much opposition, in order that Don Marcelo might be permitted to make the trip.

Finally a military automobile came one morning for the entire Desnoyers family. The senator could not accompany them. Rumors of an approaching change in the cabinet were floating about, and he felt obliged to show himself in the senate in case the Republic should again wish to avail itself of his unappreciated services.

They passed the night in a provincial city where there was a military post, and Rene collected considerable information from officers who had witnessed the great combat. With his map before him, he followed the explanations until he thought he could recognize the very plot of ground which Julio’s regiment had occupied.

The following morning they renewed their expedition. A soldier who had taken part in the battle acted as their guide, seated beside the chauffeur. From time to time, Rene consulted the map spread out on his knees, and asked questions of the soldier whose regiment had fought very close to that of Desnoyers’, but he could not remember exactly the ground which they had gone over so many months before. The landscape had undergone many transformations and had presented a very different appearance when covered with men. Its deserted aspect bewildered him . . . and the motor had to go very slowly, veering to the north of the line of graves, following the central highway, level and white, entering crossroads and winding through ditches muddied with deep pools through which they splashed with great bounds and jar on the springs. At times, they drove across fields from one plot of crosses to another, their pneumatic tires crushing flat from the furrows opened by the plowman.

Tombs . . . tombs on all sides! The white locusts of death were swarming over the entire countryside. There was no corner free from their quivering wings. The recently plowed earth, the yellowing roads, the dark woodland, everything was pulsating in weariless undulation. The soil seemed to be clamoring, and its words were the vibrations of the restless little flags. And the thousands of cries, endlessly repeated across the days and nights, were intoning in rhythmic chant the terrible onslaught which this earth had witnessed and from which it still felt tragic shudderings.

“Dead . . . dead,” murmured Chichi, following the rows of crosses incessantly slipping past the sides of the automobile.

“O Lord, for them! . . . for their mothers,” moaned Dona Luisa, renewing her prayers.

Here had taken place the fiercest part of the battle–the fight in the old way, man to man outside of the trenches, with bayonets, with guns, with fists, with teeth.

The guide who was beginning to get his bearings was pointing out the various points on the desolate horizon. There were the African sharpshooters; further on, the chasseurs. The very large groups of graves were where the light infantry had charged with their bayonets on the sides of the road.

The automobile came to a stop. Rene climbed out after the soldier in order to examine the inscriptions on a few of the crosses. Perhaps these might have belonged to the regiment they were seeking. Chichi also alighted mechanically with the irresistible desire of aiding her husband.

Each grave contained several men. The number of bodies within could be told by the mouldering kepis or rusting helmets hanging on the arms of the cross; the number of the regiments could still be deciphered between the rows of ants crawling over the caps. The wreaths with which affection had adorned some of the sepulchres were blackened and stripped of their leaves. On some of the crucifixes, the names of the dead were still clear, but others were beginning to fade out and soon would be entirely illegible.

“What a horrible death! . . . What glory!” thought Chichi sadly.

Not even the names of the greater part of these vigorous men cut down in the strength of their youth were going to survive! Nothing would remain but the memory which would from time to time overwhelm some old countrywoman driving her cow along the French highway, murmuring between her sobs. “My little one! . . . I wonder where they buried my little one!” Or, perhaps, it would live in the heart of the village woman clad in mourning who did not know how to solve the problem of existence; or in the minds of the children going to school in black blouses and saying with ferocious energy–“When I grow up I am going to kill the Boches to avenge my father’s death!”

And Dona Luisa, motionless in her seat, followed with her eyes Chichi’s course among the graves, while returning to her interrupted prayer–“Lord, for the mothers without sons . . . for the little ones without fathers! . . . May thy wrath not be turned against us, and may thy smile shine upon us once more!”

Her husband, shrunken in his seat, was also looking over the funereal fields, but his eyes were fixed most tenaciously on some mounds without wreaths or flags, simple crosses with a little board bearing the briefest inscription. These were the German bodies which seemed to have a page to themselves in the Book of Death. On one side, the innumerable French tombs with inscriptions as small as possible, simple numbers–one, two, three dead. On the other, in each of the spacious, unadorned sepulchres, great quantities of soldiers, with a number of terrifying terseness. Fences of wooden strips, narrow and wide, surrounded these latter ditches filled to the top with bodies. The earth was as bleached as though covered with snow or saltpetre. This was the lime returning to mix with the land. The crosses raised above these huge mounds bore each an inscription stating that it contained Germans, and then a number– 200 . . . 300 . . . 400.

Such appalling figures obliged Desnoyers to exert his imagination. It was not easy to evoke with exactitude the vision of three hundred carcasses in helmets, boots and cloaks, in all the revolting aspects of death, piled in rows as though they were bricks, locked forever in the depths of a great trench. . . . And this funereal alignment was repeated at intervals all over the great immensity of the plain!

The mere sight of them filled Don Marcelo with a kind of savage joy, as his mourning fatherhood tasted the fleeting consolation of vengeance. Julio had died, and he was going to die, too, not having strength to survive his bitter woe; but how many hundreds of the enemy wasting in these awful trenches were also leaving in the world loved beings who would remember them as he was remembering his son! . . .

He imagined them as they must have been before the death call sounded, as he had seen them in the advance around his castle.

Some of them, the most prominent and terrifying, probably still showed on their faces the theatrical cicatrices of their university duels. They were the soldiers who carried books in their knapsacks, and after the fusillade of a lot of country folk, or the sacking and burning of a hamlet, devoted themselves to reading the poets and philosophers by the glare of the blaze which they had kindled. They were bloated with science as with the puffiness of a toad, proud of their pedantic and all-sufficient intellectuality. Sons of sophistry and grandsons of cant, they had considered themselves capable of proving the greatest absurdities by the mental capers to which they had accustomed their acrobatic intellects.

They had employed the favorite method of the thesis, antithesis and synthesis in order to demonstrate that Germany ought to be the Mistress of the World; that Belgium was guilty of her own ruin because she had defended herself; that true happiness consisted in having all humanity dominated by Prussia; that the supreme idea of existence consisted in a clean stable and a full manger; that Liberty and Justice were nothing more than illusions of the romanticism of the French; that every deed accomplished became virtuous from the moment it triumphed, and that Right was simply a derivative of Might. These metaphysical athletes with guns and sabres were accustomed to consider themselves the paladins of a crusade of civilization. They wished the blond type to triumph definitely over the brunette; they wished to enslave the worthless man of the South, consigning him forever to a world regulated by “the salt of the earth,” “the aristocracy of humanity.” Everything on the page of history that had amounted to anything was German. The ancient Greeks had been of Germanic origin; German, too, the great artists of the Italian Renaissance. The men of the Mediterranean countries, with the inherent badness of their extraction, had falsified history. . . .

“That’s the best place for you. . . You are better where you are buried, you pitiless pedants!” thought Desnoyers, recalling his conversations with his friend, the Russian.

What a shame that there were not here, too, all the Herr Professors of the German universities–those wise men so unquestionably skilful in altering the trademarks of intellectual products and changing the terminology of things! Those men with flowing beards and gold- rimmed spectacles, pacific rabbits of the laboratory and the professor’s chair that had been preparing the ground for the present war with their sophistries and their unblushing effrontery! Their guilt was far greater than that of the Herr Lieutenant of the tight corset and the gleaming monocle, who in his thirst for strife and slaughter was simply and logically working out the professional charts.

While the German soldier of the lower classes was plundering what he could and drunkenly shooting whatever crossed his path, the warrior student was reading by the camp glow, Hegel and Nietzsche. He was too enlightened to execute with his own hands these acts of “historical justice,” but he, with the professors, was rousing all the bad instincts of the Teutonic beast and giving them a varnish of scientific justification.

“Lie there, in your sepulchre, you intellectual scourge!” continued Desnoyers mentally.

The fierce Moors, the negroes of infantile intelligence, the sullen Hindus, appeared to him more deserving of respect than all the ermine-bordered togas parading haughtily and aggressively through the cloisters of the German universities. What peacefulness for the world if their wearers should disappear forever! He preferred the simple and primitive barbarity of the savage to the refined, deliberate and merciless barbarity of the greedy sage;–it did less harm and was not so hypocritical.

For this reason, the only ones in the enemy’s ranks who awakened his commiseration were the lowly and unlettered dead interred beneath the sod. They had been peasants, factory hands, business clerks, German gluttons of measureless (intestinal) capacity, who had seen in the war an opportunity for satisfying their appetites, for beating somebody and ordering them about after having passed their lives in their country, obeying and receiving kicks.

The history of their country was nothing more than a series of raids–like the Indian forays, in order to plunder the property of those who lived in the mild Mediterranean climes. The Herr Professors had proved to their countrymen that such sacking incursions were indispensable to the highest civilization, and that the German was marching onward with the enthusiasm of a good father sacrificing himself in order to secure bread for his family.

Hundreds of thousands of letters, written by their relatives with tremulous hands, were following the great Germanic horde across the invaded countries. Desnoyers had overheard the reading of some of these, at nightfall before his ruined castle. These were some of the messages found in the pockets of the imprisoned or dead:–“Don’t show any pity for the red pantaloons. Kill WHOMEVER YOU CAN, and show no mercy even to the little ones.” . . . “We would thank you for the shoes, but the girl cannot get them on. Those French have such ridiculously small feet!” . . . “Try to get hold of a piano.”. . . “I would very much like a good watch.” . . . “Our neighbor, the Captain, has sent his wife a necklace of pearls. . . . And you send only such insignificant things!”

The virtuous German had been advancing heroically with the double desire of enlarging his country and of making valuable gifts to his offspring. “Deutschland uber alles!” But their most cherished illusions had fallen into the burial ditch in company with thousands of comrades-at-arms fed on the same dreams.

Desnoyers could imagine the impatience on the other side of the Rhine, the pitiful women who were waiting and waiting. The lists of the dead had, perhaps, overlooked the missing ones; and the letters kept coming and coming to the German lines, many of them never reaching their destination. “Why don’t you answer! Perhaps you are not writing so as to give us a great surprise. Don’t forget the necklace! Send us a piano. A carved china cabinet for the dining room would please us greatly. The French have so many beautiful things!” . . .

The bare cross rose stark and motionless above the lime-blanched land. Near it the little flags were fluttering their wings, moving from side to side like a head shaking out a smiling, ironical protest–No! . . . No!

The automobile continued on its painful way. The guide was now pointing to a distant group of graves. That was undoubtedly the place where the regiment had been fighting. So the vehicle left the main road, sinking its wheels in the soft earth, having to make wide detours in order to avoid the mounds scattered about so capriciously by the casualties of the combat.

Almost all of the fields were ploughed. The work of the farmer extended from tomb to tomb, making them more prominent as the morning sun forced its way through the enshrouding mists.

Nature, blind, unfeeling and silent, ignoring individual existence and taking to her bosom with equal indifference, a poor little animal or a million corpses, was beginning to smile under the late winter suns.

The fountains were still crusted with their beards of ice; the earth snapped as the feet weighed down its hidden crystals; the trees, black and sleeping, were still retaining the coat of metallic green in which the winter had clothed them; from the depths of the earth still issued an acute, deadly chill, like that of burned-out planets. . . . But Spring had already girded herself with flowers in her palace in the tropics, and was saddling with green her trusty steed, neighing with impatience. Soon they would race through the fields, driving before them in disordered flight the black goblins of winter, and leaving in their wake green growing things and tender, subtle perfumes. The wayside greenery, robing itself in tiny buds, was already heralding their arrival. The birds were venturing forth from their retreats in order to wing their way among the crows croaking wrathfully above the closed tombs. The landscape was beginning to smile in the sunlight with the artless, deceptive smile of a child who looks candidly around while his pockets are stuffed with stolen goodies.

The husbandmen had ploughed the fields and filled the furrows with seed. Men might go on killing each other as much as they liked; the soil had no concern with their hatreds, and on that account, did not propose to alter its course. As every year, the metal cutter had opened its usual lines, obliterating with its ridges the traces of man and beast, undismayed and with stubborn diligence filling up the tunnels which the bombs had made.

Sometimes the ploughshare had struck against an obstacle underground . . . an unknown, unburied man; but the cultivator had continued on its way without pity. Every now and then, it was stopped by less yielding obstructions, projectiles which had sunk into the ground intact. The rustic had dug up these instruments of death which occasionally had exploded their delayed charge in his hands.

But the man of the soil knows no fear when in search of sustenance, and so was doggedly continuing his rectilinear advance, swerving only before the visible tombs; there the furrows had curved mercifully, making little islands of the mounds surmounted by crosses and flags. The seeds of future bread were preparing to extend their tentacles like devil fish among those who, but a short time before, were animated by such monstrous ambition. Life was about to renew itself once more.

The automobile came to a standstill. The guide was running about among the crosses, stooping over in order to examine their weather- stained inscriptions.

“Here we are!”

He had found above one grave the number of the regiment.

Chichi and her husband promptly dismounted again. Then Dona Luisa, with sad resolution, biting her lips to keep the tears back. Then the three devoted themselves to assisting the father who had thrown off his fur lap-robe. Poor Desnoyers! On touching the ground, he swayed back and forth, moving forward with the greatest effort, lifting his feet with difficulty, and sinking his staff in the hollows.

“Lean on me, my poor dear,” said the old wife, offering her arm.

The masterful head of the family could no longer take a single step without their aid.

Then began their slow, painful pilgrimage among the graves.

The guide was still exploring the spot bristling with crosses, spelling out the names, and hesitating before the faded lettering. Rene was doing the same on the other side of the road. Chichi went on alone, the wind whirling her black veil around her, and making the little curls escape from under her mourning hat every time she leaned over to decipher a name. Her daintily shod feet sunk deep into the ruts, and she had to gather her skirts about her in order to move more comfortably–revealing thus at every step evidences of the joy of living, of hidden beauty, of consummated love following her course through this land of death and desolation.

In the distance sounded feebly her father’s voice:

“Not yet?”

The two elders were growing impatient, anxious to find their son’s resting place as soon as possible.

A half hour thus dragged by without any result–always unfamiliar names, anonymous crosses or the numbers of other regiments. Don Marcelo was no longer able to stand. Their passage across the irregularities of the soft earth had been torment for him. He was beginning to despair. . . . Ay, they would never find Julio’s remains! The parents, too, had been scrutinizing the plots nearest them, bending sadly before cross after cross. They stopped before a long, narrow hillock, and read the name. . . . No, he was not there, either; and they continued desperately along the painful path of alternate hopes and disappointments.

It was Chichi who notified them with a cry, “Here. . . . Here it is!” The old folks tried to run, almost falling at every step. All the family were soon grouped around a heap of earth in the vague outline of a bier, and beginning to be covered with herbage. At the head was a cross with letters cut in deep with the point of a knife, the kind deed of some of his comrades-at-arms–“DESNOYERS.” . . . Then in military abbreviations, the rank, regiment and company.

A long silence. Dona Luisa had knelt instantly, with her eyes fixed on the cross–those great, bloodshot eyes that could no longer weep. Till then, tears had been constantly in her eyes, but now they deserted her as though overcome by the immensity of a grief incapable of expressing itself in the usual ways.

The father was staring at the rustic grave in dumb amazement. His son was there, there forever! . . . and he would never see him again! He imagined him sleeping unshrouded below, in direct contact with the earth, just as Death had surprised him in his miserable and heroic old uniform. He recalled the exquisite care which the lad had always given his body–the long bath, the massage, the invigorating exercise of boxing and fencing, the cold shower, the elegant and subtle perfume . . . all that he might come to this! . . . that he might be interred just where he had fallen in his tracks, like a wornout beast of burden!

The bereaved father wished to transfer his son immediately from the official burial fields, but he could not do it yet. As soon as possible it should be done, and he would erect for him a mausoleum fit for a king. . . . And what good would that do? He would merely be changing the location of a mass of bones, but his body, his physical semblance–all that had contributed to the charm of his personality would be mixed with the earth. The son of the rich Desnoyers would have become an inseparable part of a poor field in Champagne. Ah, the pity of it all! And for this, had he worked so hard and so long to accumulate his millions? . . .

He could never know how Julio’s death had happened. Nobody could tell him his last words. He was ignorant as to whether his end had been instantaneous, overwhelming–his idol going out of the world with his usual gay smile on his lips, or whether he had endured long hours of agony abandoned in the field, writhing like a reptile or passing through phases of hellish torment before collapsing in merciful oblivion. He was also ignorant of just how much was beneath this mound–whether an entire body discreetly touched by the hand of Death, or an assemblage of shapeless remnants from the devastating hurricane of steel! . . . And he would never see him again! And that Julio who had been filling his thoughts would become simply a memory, a name that would live while his parents lived, fading away, little by little, after they had disappeared! . . .

He was startled to hear a moan, a sob. . . . Then he recognized dully that they were his own, that he had been accompanying his reflections with groans of grief.

His wife was still at his feet, kneeling, alone with her heartbreak, fixing her dry eyes on the cross with a gaze of hypnotic tenacity. . . . There was her son near her knees, lying stretched out as she had so often watched him when sleeping in his cradle! . . . The father’s sobs were wringing her heart, too, but with an unbearable depression, without his wrathful exasperation. And she would never see him again! . . . Could it be possible! . . .

Chichi’s presence interrupted the despairing thoughts of her parents. She had run to the automobile, and was returning with an armful of flowers. She hung a wreath on the cross and placed a great spray of blossoms at the foot. Then she scattered a shower of petals over the entire surface of the grave, sadly, intensely, as though performing a religious rite, accompanying the offering with her outspoken thoughts–“For you who so loved life for its beauties and pleasures! . . . for you who knew so well how to make yourself beloved!” . . . And as her tears fell, her affectionate memories were as full of admiration as of grief. Had she not been his sister, she would have liked to have been his beloved.

And having exhausted the rain of flower-petals, she wandered away so as not to disturb the lamentations of her parents.

Before the uselessness of his bitter plaints, Don Marcelo’s former dominant character had come to life, raging against destiny.

He looked at the horizon where so often he had imagined the adversary to be, and clenched his fists in a paroxysm of fury. His disordered mind believed that it saw the Beast, the Nemesis of humanity. And how much longer would the evil be allowed to go unpunished? . . .

There was no justice; the world was ruled by blind chance;–all lies, mere words of consolation in order that mankind might exist unterrified by the hopeless abandon in which it lived!

It appeared to him that from afar was echoing the gallop of the four Apocalyptic horsemen, riding rough-shod over all his fellow- creatures. He saw the strong and brutal giant with the sword of War, the archer with his repulsive smile, shooting his pestilential arrows, the bald-headed miser with the scales of Famine, the hard- riding spectre with the scythe of Death. He recognized them as only divinities, familiar and terrible-which had made their presence felt by mankind. All the rest was a dream. The four horsemen were the reality. . . .

Suddenly, by the mysterious process of telepathy, he seemed to read the thoughts of the one grieving at his feet.

The mother, impelled by her own sorrow, was thinking of that of others. She, too, was looking toward the distant horizon. There she seemed to see a procession of the enemy, grieving in the same way as were her family. She saw Elena with her daughters going in and out among the burial grounds, seeking a loved one, falling on their knees before a cross. Ay, this mournful satisfaction, she could never know completely! It would be forever impossible for her to pass to the opposite side in search of the other grave, for, even after some time had passed by, she could never find it. The beloved body of Otto would have disappeared forever in one of the nameless pits which they had just passed.

“O Lord, why did we ever come to these lands? Why did we not continue living in the land where we were born?” . . .

Desnoyers, too, uniting his thoughts with hers, was seeing again the pampas, the immense green plains of the ranch where he had become acquainted with his wife. Again he could hear the tread of the herds. He recalled Madariaga on tranquil nights proclaiming, under the splendor of the stars, the joys of peace, the sacred brotherhood of these people of most diverse extraction, united by labor, abundance and the lack of political ambition.

And as his thoughts swung back to the lost son he, too, exclaimed with his wife, “Oh, why did we ever come? . . .” He, too, with the solidarity of grief, began to sympathize with those on the other side of the battle front. They were suffering just as he was; they had lost their sons. Human grief is the same everywhere.

But then he revolted against his commiseration. Karl had been an advocate of this war. He was among those who had looked upon war as the perfect state for mankind, who had prepared it with their provocations. It was just that War should devour his sons; he ought not to bewail their loss. . . . But he who had always loved Peace! He who had only one son, only one! . . . and now he was losing him forever! . . .

He was going to die; he was sure that he was going to die. . . . Only a few months of life were left in him. And his pitiful, devoted companion kneeling at his feet, she, too, would soon pass away. She could not long survive the blow which they had just received. There was nothing further for them to do; nobody needed them any longer.

Their daughter was thinking only of herself, of founding a separate home interest–with the hard instinct of independence which separates children from their parents in order that humanity may continue its work of renovation.

Julio was the only one who would have prolonged the family, passing on the name. The Desnoyers had died; his daughter’s children would be Lacour. . . . All was ended.

Don Marcelo even felt a certain satisfaction in thinking of his approaching death. More than anything else, he wished to pass out of the world. He no longer had any curiosity as to the end of this war in which he had been so interested. Whatever the end might be, it would be sure to turn out badly. Although the Beast might be mutilated, it would again come forth years afterward, as the eternal curse of mankind. . . . For him the only important thing now was that the war had robbed him of his son. All was gloomy, all was black. The world was going to its ruin. . . . He was going to rest.

Chichi had clambered up on the hillock which contained, perhaps, more than their dead. With furrowed brow, she was contemplating the plain. Graves . . . graves everywhere! The recollection of Julio had already passed to second place in her mind. She could not bring him back, no matter how much she might weep.

This vision of the fields of death made her think all the more of the living. As her eyes roved from side to side, she tried, with her hands, to keep down the whirling of her wind-tossed skirts. Rene was standing at the foot of the knoll, and several times after a sweeping glance at the numberless mounds around them, she looked thoughtfully at him, as though trying to establish a relationship between her husband and those below. And he had exposed his life in combats just as these men had done! . . .

“And you, my poor darling,” she continued aloud. “At this very moment you, too, might be lying here under a heap of earth with a wooden cross at your head, just like these poor unfortunates!”

The sub-lieutenant smiled sadly. Yes, it was so.

“Come here; climb up here!” said Chichi impetuously. “I want to give you something!”

As soon as he approached her, she flung her arms around his neck, pressed him against the warm softness of her breast, exhaling a perfume of life and love, and kissed him passionately without a thought of her brother, without seeing her aged parents grieving below them and longing to die. . . . And her skirts, freed by the breeze, molded her figure in the superb sweep of the curves of a Grecian vase.