Chapter II: Book I: Afield (2)

“God, how generous women are with their treasures! They are devils because of their great-heartedness. So swift, so eager, so delicate in their giving. They look up at you, and you are lost. My life has been gathering a bouquet--and some flowers fade in your hand.... I hated it, but they looked up so wistfully--and it seemed as if I were rending in a vacuum.... Always the moment of illusion--that _this_ one is the last, that here is completion, that peace will come with _this_ fragrance; always their giving is different and very beautiful--and always the man is deeper in hell for their bestowal.... A day or a month--man’s incandescence is gone. Brown eyes, blue eyes--face pale or ruddy--lips passionate or pure--their giving momentary or immortal--and yet, I could not stay. Always they were hurt--less among men, less among their sisters, and no strangers to suffering--and always hell accumulated upon my head.... Then she came. There’s a match in the world for every man. Her name is Eve. She is the answer of her sisterhood to such as I.

“She was made so. She will not have me near. And yet with all her passion and mystery she is calling to me. The rolling Pacific isn’t broad enough. She has bound me by all that I have given to others, by all that I have denied others. She was made to match me, and came to her task full-powered, as the sorrel mare came to corral to-day for you.... Oh, yes, I honor her.”

There was silence which John Morning could not break. Fallows began to talk of death--in terms which the other remembered.

“... For the death of the body makes no difference. In the body here we build our heaven or hell. If we have loved possessions of the earth--we are weighted with them afterward,--imprisoned among them. If we love flesh here, we are held like shadows to fleshly men and women, enmeshed in our own prevailing desire. If our life has been one of giving to others, of high and holy things--we are at the moment of the body’s death, like powerful and splendid birds suddenly hearing the mystic call of the South. Death, it is the great cleansing flight into the South....”

This from the sick man, was new as the first rustle of Spring to John Morning; yet within, he seemed long to have been expectant. There was thrill in the spectacle of the other who had learned by losing....

Morning’s mind was like the beleaguered city--desperate with waiting and potential disorder, outwardly arrogant, afraid in secret.... Duke Fallows was thinking of a woman, as he visioned his lost paradise. The younger man left the lamp-light to go to him, and heard as he leaned over the cot:

“... Like a lost traveler to the single point of light, John, I shall go to her. Eve--the one red light--I will glow red in the desire of her. She is my creation. Out of the desire of my strength she was created. As they have mastered me in the flesh, this creation of mine shall master me afterward--with red perpetual mastery.”

Lowenkampf came in. They saw by his eyes that he was more than ever drawn, in the tension and heart-hunger. He always brought his intimacies to the Americans. A letter had reached him from Europe in the morning, but the army had given him no time to think until now. It was not the letter, but something in it, that reminded him of a story. So he brought his brandy and the memory:

“... It was two or three evenings before I left Petersburg to come here. I had followed him about--my little son who is five years. I had followed him about the house all day. Every little while at some door, or through some curtain--I would see the mother smiling at us. It was new to me--for I had been seldom home in the day-time--this playing with one’s little son through the long day. But God, I knew I was no longer a soldier. I think the little mother knew. She is braver than I. She was the soldier--for not a tear did I see all that day.... And that night I lay down with my little son to talk until he fell asleep. It was dark in the room, but light was in the hall-way and the door open.... You see, he is just five--and very pure and fresh.”

Fallows sat up. He was startling in the shadow.

“... For a long time my little man stirred and talked--of riding horses, when his legs were a little longer, and of many things to do. He would be a soldier, of course. God pity the little thought. We would ride together soon--not in front of my saddle, but on a pony of his own--one that would keep up. I was to take him out to swim ... and we would walk in the country to see the trees and animals.... My heart ached for love of him--and I, the soldier, wished there were no Asia in this world, no Asia, nor any war or torment.... He had seen a gray pony which he liked, because it had put its head down, as if to listen. It didn’t wear any straps nor saddle, but came close, as one knowing a friend, and put its head down--thus the child was speaking to me.

“And I heard her step in the hall--the light, quick step. Her figure came into the light of the door-way. She looked intently through the shadows where we lay, her eyelids lifted, and a smile on her lips. Our little son saw her and this is what he said so drowsily:

“‘We are talking about what we will do--when we get to be men.’”

* * * * *

Fallows broke this silence:

“‘When we get to be men.’ Thank you, General. That was good for me.... Our friend John needed that little white cloud, too. I’ve just been leading him among the wilted primroses.”

Morning did not speak.

Lowenkampf said the fighting would begin around the outer position to-morrow.... But that had been said before.

8

ON the night of August 31st, for all the planning, the progress of the battle was not to the Russian liking. All that day the movements of the Russians had mystified John Morning. The broad bend of the river to the east of the city had been crowded with troops--seemingly an aimless change of pastures. He felt that after all his study of the terrain and its possibilities, the big thing was getting away from him. When he mentioned this ugly fear to Fallows, the answer was:

“And that’s just what the old man feels.”

Fallows referred to Kuropatkin.

The monster spectacle had blinded Morning. He had to hold hard at times to keep his rage from finding words in answer to Duke Fallows’ scorn for the big waiting-panorama which had enthralled him utterly--the fleeing refugees, singing infantry, the big gun postures, the fluent cavalry back along the railroad, the armored hills, the whole marvelous atmosphere.... None of this appeared to matter to Fallows. He had written little or nothing. God knew why he had come. He would do a story, of course.... Morning had written a book--the climax of which would be the battle. He had staked all on the majesty of the story. His career would be constructed upon it. He would detach himself from all this and appear suddenly in America--the one man in America who knew Liaoyang. He would be Liaoyang; his mind the whole picture. He knew the wall, the Chinese names of the streets, the city and its tenderloin, where the Cantonese women were held in hideous bondage. He knew the hills and the river--the rapid treachery of the Taitse. He had watched the trains come in from Europe with food, horses, guns and men; had even learned much Russian and some Chinese. He had studied Lowenkampf, Bilderling, Zarubaieff, Mergenthaler; had looked into the eyes of Kuropatkin himself....

Duke Fallows said:

“All this is but one idea, John--one dirty little idea multiplied. Don’t let a couple of hundred thousand soldiers spoil the fact in your mind. Lowenkampf personally isn’t capable of fighting for himself on such a rotten basis. Fighting with a stranger on a neighbor’s property--that’s the situation. Russia says to Old Man China, ‘Go, take a little airing among your hills. A certain enemy of mine is on the way here, and I want to kill him from your house. It will be a dirty job, but it is important to me that he be killed just so. I’ll clean up the door-step afterward, repair all damages, and live in your house myself.... And the Japanese have trampled the flowers and vegetable-beds of the poor old Widow Korea to get here----’”

Thus the Californian took the substance out of the hundred thousand words Morning had written in the past few months. Dozens of small articles had been sent out until a fortnight ago through Lowenkampf, via Shanghai, but the main fiber of each was kept for this great story, which he meant to sell in one piece in America.

_Kuropatkin_--both Morning and Fallows saw him as the mighty beam in the world’s eye at this hour. To Morning he was the risen master of events; to Fallows merely a figure tossed up from the moil. Morning saw him as the source of power to the weak, as a silencer of the disputatious and the envious, as the holding selvage to the vast Russian garment, worn, stained and ready to ravel, the one structure of hope in a field of infinite failures. Fallows saw him as an integral part of all this disorder and disruption, one whose vision was marvelous only in the detection of excuses for himself in the action of others; whose sorrow was a pose and whose _self_ was far too imperious for him firmly to grip the throat of a large and vital obstacle. What Morning called the mystical somberness of the chief, Fallows called the sullen silence of dim comprehension. Somewhere between these notations the Commander stood.... They had seen him at dusk that day. “He seems to be repressing himself by violent effort,” the younger man whispered.

“What would you say he were repressing, John--his appetite?”

The answer was silence, and late that night, (the Russian force was now tense and compact as a set spring), Fallows dropped down upon his cot, saying:

“You think I’m a scoffer, don’t you?”

“You break a man’s point, that’s all----”

“I know--but we’re not to be together always.... Listen, don’t think me a scoffer, even now. These big, bulky things won’t hold you forever. Perhaps, if I were a bigger man, I’d keep silent. You’ll write them well, no doubt about that.... But don’t get into the habit of thinking me a scoffer. There’s such a lot of finer things to fall for. John, I wasn’t a scoffer when I first read your stuff--and saw big forces moving around you.... A man who knows a little about women, knows a whole lot about men.... To be a famous soldier, John, a man can’t have any such forces moving around him. He must be an empty back-ground. All his strength is the compound of meat and eggs and fish; his strength goes to girth and jowl and fist----”

“You’re a wonderful friend to me, Duke.”

“That’s just what I didn’t want you to say.... There’s no excellence on my part. Like a good book, I couldn’t riddle you in one reading.”

Morning found himself again, as he wrote on that last night of preparation; that last night of summer. It was always the way, when the work came well. It brought him liveableness with himself and kindness for others. He had his own precious point of view again, too. He pictured Kuropatkin ... sitting at his desk, harried by his sovereign, tormented by princes, seeing as no other could see the weaknesses in the Russian displays of power, and knowing the Japanese better than any other; the man who had come up from Plevna fighting, who had written his fightings, who was first to say, “We are not ready,” and first to gather up the unpreparedness for battle.

Morning felt himself the reporter of the Fates for this great carnage. He wanted to see the fighting, to miss no phase of it--to know the mechanics, the results, the speed, the power, weakness and every rending of this great force. He did not want the morals of it, the evil spirit behind, but the brute material action. He wanted the literary Kuropatkin, not a possible reality. He wanted the one hundred thousand words driven by the one-seeing, master-seeing reporter’s instinct. He was Russian in hope and aspiration--but absolutely negative in what was to take place. He wanted the illusion of the service; he saw the illusion more clearly; so could the public. The illusion bore out every line of his work so far. To laugh at the essence of the game destroyed its meaning, and the huge effect he planned to make in America.

Morning was sorry now for having lost during the day the sense of fine relation with Fallows, but everything he had found admirable--from toys and sweets to wars and women--the sick man had found futile and betraying; everything that his own mind found good was waylaid and diminished by the other. Fallows, in making light of the dramatic suspense of the city, had struck at the very roots of his ambition. The work of the night had healed this all, however.

The last night of summer--joyously he ended the big picture. Three themes ran through entire--Nodzu’s artillery, under which the Russians were willingly dislodging from the shoulders and slopes of Pensu-marong; the tread of the Russian sentries below, (a real bit of Russian bass in the Liaoyang symphony), and the glissando of the rain.

He sat back from his machine at last. There were two hundred and seventy sheets altogether of thin tough parchment-copy--400 words to the page, and the whole could be folded into an inside pocket. It was ready for the battle itself.... All the Morning moods were in the work--moments of photographic description, of philosophic calm, instant reversals to glowing idealism--then the thrall of the spectacle--finally, a touch, just a touch to add age, of Fallows’ scorn. It was newspaper stuff--what was wanted. He had brought his whole instrument up to concert-pitch to-night. The story was ready for the bloody artist.

His heart softened emotionally toward Fallows lying on his back over in the shadows.... Lowenkampf came in for a queer melting moment.... Morning looked affectionately at his little traveling type-mill. It had never faltered--a hasty, cheap, last-minute purchase in America, but it had seen him through. It was like a horse one picks up afield, wears out and never takes home, but thinks of many times in the years afterward. Good little beast.... And this made him think with a thrill of Eve, brooding in the dark below.... She was adjusted to a thought in his mind that had to do with the end of the battle. It was a big-bored, furious idea. Morning glanced at his watch. Two-fifteen on the morning of September. He unlaced one shoe, but the idea intervened again and he moved off in the stirring dream of it. It was three o’clock when he bent to the other shoe.

9

ALL the next day, Liaoyang was shelled from the south and southeast; all day Eve shivered and sweated in the smoky turmoil. At dusk, Morning, to whom the mare was far too precious to be worn out in halter, rode back to Yentai along the railroad. She operated like a perfect toy over that twelve miles of beaten turf. The rain ceased for an hour or two, and the dark warmth of the night seemed to poise her every spring. The man was electric from her. At the station Morning learned that Lowenkampf, with thirteen battalions, already had occupied the lofty coal-fields, ten miles to the east on a stub of the railroad. He had first supposed the force of Siberians now crowding the station to be Lowenkampf’s men; instead it was his reserve. Eve had lathered richly, so that an hour passed before she was cool enough for grain or water. He rubbed her down, meanwhile, talked to her softly and made plans. Her eye flashed red at the candle, as he shut the door of the stable. That night on foot he did the ten miles to the collieries, joining Fallows and the General at midnight.... Morning was struck with the look of Lowenkampf’s face. He wasn’t taking a drink that night; his mouth was old and white. A thin bar of pallor stretched obliquely from chin to cheek-bone. The chin trembled, too; the eyes were hungerful, yet so kind. Desperate incongruity somewhere. This man should have been back in Europe with his neighbors about the fire--his comrade tucked in up-stairs, the little mother pouring tea. And yet, Lowenkampf--effaced with his anguish and dreamy-eyed, as if surveying the distance between his heaven and hell--was the brain of the sledge that was to break the Flanker’s back-bone to-morrow.

“The Taitse is only ten miles south,” said Fallows, as they turned in. “Bilderling is there. Kuroki is supposed to poke his nose in between, and Lowenkampf is to smash it against Bilderling. Mergenthaler’s Cossacks are here to take the van in the morning, and we’re backed up by a big body of Siberians, stretching behind to Yentai station----”

“I saw ’em,” said Morning. “Lowenkampf looks sick with strain.”

* * * * *

Day appeared, with just the faintest touch of red showing like a broken bit of glass. Rain-clouds, bursting-heavy, immediately rolled over it,--a deluge of grays, leisurely stirring with whitish and watery spots. Though his troops were taking the field, Lowenkampf had not left his quarters in the big freight _go-down_. Commanders hurried in and out. Fallows was filling two canteens with diluted tea, when an old man entered, weeping. It was Colonel Ritz, bent, red-eyed, nearly seventy, who had been ordered, on account of age and decrepitude, to remain with the staff. Brokenly, he begged for his command.

“I have always stayed with the line, General. I shall be quick as another. Don’t keep an old man, who has always stuck to the line--don’t keep one like that back in time of battle.”

Lowenkampf smiled and embraced him--sending him out with his regiment.

Mergenthaler now came in. There was something icy and hateful about this Roman-faced giant. His countenance was like a bronze shield--so small the black eyes, and so wide and high the cheek-bones. For months his Cossacks had done sensational work--small fighting, far scouting, desperate service. He despised Lowenkampf; believed he had earned the right to be the hammer to-day; and, in truth, he had, but Lowenkampf, who ranked him, had been chosen. Bleak and repulsive with rage, the Cossack chief made no effort to repress himself. Lowenkampf was reminded that he had been policing the streets of Liaoyang for weeks, that his outfit was “fat-heeled and duck-livered.”... More was said before Mergenthaler stamped out, his jaw set like a stone balcony. It seemed as if he tore from the heart of Lowenkampf the remnant of its stamina.... For a moment the three were alone in the head-quarters. Fallows caught the General by the shoulders and looked down in his face:

“Little Father--you’re the finest and most courageous of them all.... It will be known and proven--what I say, old friend--‘when we get to be men.’”

The masses of Lowenkampf’s infantry, forming on the heights among the coal-fields, melted at the outer edges and slid downward. Willingly the men went. They did not know that this was the day. They had been fearfully expectant of battle at first--ever since Lake Baikal was crossed. Battalion after battalion slid off the heights, and were lost in the queer lanes running through the rocks and low timber below. The general movement was silent. The rain held off; the air was close and warm. Lowenkampf, unvaryingly attentive to the two Americans, put them in charge of Lieutenant Luban, the young staff officer, whom Morning had caught in his arms from the back of the sorrel. Down the ledges they went, as the others.

Morning was uneasy, as one who feels he has forgotten something--a tugging in his mind to go back. He was strongly convinced that Lowenkampf was unsubstantial in a military way. He could not overcome the personal element of this dread--as if the General were of his house, and he knew better than another that he was ill-prepared for the day’s trial.

Fallows welcomed any disaster. As he had scorned the army in its waiting, he scorned it now in its strike. He looked very lean and long. The knees were in corduroy and unstable, but his nerve could not have been steadier had he been called to a tea-party by Kuroki. As one who had long since put these things behind him, Fallows appeared; indeed, as one sportively called out by the younger set, to whom severing the spine of a flanker was fresh and engrossing business.... Morning choked with suppressions. Luban talked low and wide. He was in a funk. Both saw it. Neither would have objected, except that he monopolized their thoughts with his broken English, and to no effect.

Now they went into the _kao liang_--vast, quiet, enfolding. It held the heat stale from yesterday. The seasonal rains had filled the spongy loam at the roots, with much to spare blackening the lower stems.... For an hour and a half they sunk into the several paths and lost themselves, Lowenkampf’s untried battalions. The armies of the world might have vanished so, only to be seen by the birds, moving like vermin in a hide.... Men began to think of food and drink. The heights of Yentai, which they had left in bitter hatred so shortly ago, was now like hills of rest on the long road home. More and more the resistance of men shrunk in the evil magic of this pressure of grain and sky and holding earth--a curious, implacable unworldliness it was, that made the flesh cry out.

“They should have cut this grain,” Luban said for the third time.

Fallows had said it first. Anyone should have seen the ruin of this advance, unless the end of the millet were reached before the beginning of battle. They had to recall with effort at last, that there was an outer world of cities and seas and plains--anything but this hollow country of silence and fatness.

If you have ever jumped at the sudden drumming of a pneumatic hammer, as it rivets a bolt against the steel, you have a suggestion of the nervous shock from that first far machine-gun of Kuroki’s--just a suggestion, because Lowenkampf’s soldiers at the moment were suffocating in _kao liang_.... In such a strange and expensive way, they cut the crops that day.

Morning trod on the tail of the battalion ahead. It had stopped; he had not. The soldier in front whom he bumped turned slowly around and looked into his face. The wide, glassy blue eyes then turned to Fallows, and after resting a curious interval, finally found Luban.

The face was broad and white as lard. Whatever else was in it, there was no denying the fear, the hate, the cunning--all of a rudimentary kind. Luban was held by the man’s gaze. The fright in both hearts sparked in contact. The stupid face of the soldier suddenly reflected the terror of the officer. And this was the result: The wide-staring suddenly altered to a squint; the vacant, helpless staring of a bewildered child turned into the bright activity of a trapped rodent.

Luban had failed in his great instant. His jaw was loose-hinged, his mouth leaked saliva.

Now Morning and Fallows saw other faces--twenty faces in the grain, faces searching for the nearest officer. Their eyes roved to Luban; necks craned among the fox-tails. There was a slow giving of the line, and bumping contacts from ahead like a string of cars.... Morning recalled the look of Luban, as he had helped him down from the sorrel. He had helped then; he hated now. Fallows was better. He plumped the boy on the shoulder and said laughingly:

“Talk to ’em. Get ’em in hand--quick, Luban--or they’ll be off!”

It was all in ten seconds. The nearest soldiers had seen Luban fail. Other platoons, doubtless many, formed in similar tableaux to the same end. A second machine-gun took up the story. It was far-off, and slightly to the left of the Russian line of advance. The incomprehensible energy of the thing weakened the Russian column, although it drew no blood.

A roar ahead from an unseen battalion-officer--the Russian _Forward_. Luban tried to repeat it, but pitifully. A great beast rising from the ooze and settling back _against_ the voice--such was the answer.

The Thought formed. It was the thought of the day. None was too stupid to catch the spirit of it. Certain it was, and pervading as the grain. Indeed, it was conceived of _kao liang_. The drum of the machine-gun, like a file in a tooth, was but its quickener. It flourished under the ghostly grays and whites of the sky. In the forward battalions the Thought already clothed itself in action:

To run back--to follow the paths back through the grain--to reach the decent heights again. And this was but a miniature of the thought that mastered the whole Russian army in Asia--to go back--to rise from the ghastly hollows of Asia and turn homeward again.

It leaped like a demon upon the unset volition of the mass. Full-formed, it arose from the lull. It effected the perfect turning.

Morning saw it, and wanted the source. He had planned too long to be denied now. The rout was big to handle, but he wanted _the front_--a glimpse of the actual inimical line. It was not enough for him to watch the fright and havoc streaming back. Calling a cheery _adieu_ to Fallows, he bowed against the current--alone obeying the Russian _Forward_.

10

AT the edge of the trampled lane, often shunted off into the standing crop, Morning made his way, running when he could.... The pictures were infinite; a lifetime of pictures; hundreds of faces and each a picture. Men passed him, heads bowed, arms about their faces, like figures in the old Dore paintings, running from the wrath of the Lord. Here and there was pale defiance. Nine sheepish soldiers carried a single wounded man, the much-handled fallen one looking silly as the rest.

The utter ghostliness of it all was in Morning’s mind.... Gasping for breath, after many minutes of running, he sank down to rest. Soldiers sought to pick him up and carry him back. There were others who could not live with themselves after the first panic. They fell out of the retreat to join him. Others stopped to fire--a random emptying of magazines in the millet. Certain groups huddled when they saw him--mistaking a civilian for an officer--and covered their faces. Officers begged, prayed for the men to hold, but the torrent increased, individuals diving into the thick of the grain and leaking around behind. White showed beneath the beards, and white lips moved in prayer. The locked bayonets of the Russians had never seemed so dreadful as when low-held in the grain.... One beardless boy strode back jauntily, his lips puckered in a whistle.

The marvelous complexity of common men--this was the sum of all pictures, and the great realization of John Morning. His soul saw much that his eyes failed. The day was a marvelous cabinet of gifts--secret chambers to be opened in after years.

Now he was running low, having entered the zone of fire. He heard the steel in the grain; stems were snapped by invisible fingers; fox-tails lopped. He saw the slow leaning of stems half-cut.... Among the fallen, on a rising slope, men were crawling back; and here and there, bodies had been cast off, the cloth-covered husks of poor driven peasants. They had gone back to the soil, these bodies, never really belonging to the soldiery. It was only when they writhed that John Morning forgot himself and his work. The art of the dead was consummate.

The grain thinned. He had come to the end of Lowenkampf’s infantry. It had taken an hour and a half for the command to enter in order; less than a half-hour to dissipate. The rout had been like a cloud-burst.

And this was the battle. (Morning had to hold fast to the thought.) Long had he waited for this hour; months he had constructed the army in his story for this hour of demolition. It was enough to know that Lowenkampf had failed. Liaoyang, the battle, was lost.... Old Ritz went by weeping--he had been too old, they said; they had not wanted him to take his regiment to field. Yet he was perhaps the last to leave the field. Only his dead remained, and Colonel Ritz was not weeping for them....

Now Morning saw it was _not_ all over. Before gaining the ridge swept by Kuroki’s fire, he knew that Mergenthaler was still fighting. It came to him with the earthy rumble of cavalry. To the left, in a crevasse under the crest of the ridge, he saw a knot of horses with empty saddles, and a group of men. Closer to them he crawled, along the sheltered side of the ridge, until in the midst of Russian officers, he saw that splendid bruising brute, who had stamped out of headquarters that morning, draining the heart of Lowenkampf as he went. Mergenthaler of the Cossacks--designed merely to be the eyes and fingers of the fighting force; yet unsupported, unbodied as it were, he still held the ridge.

Kuroki, as yet innocent of the rout, would not otherwise have been checked. His ponderous infantry was not the sort to be stopped by these light harriers of the Russian army. The Flanker was watching for the Hammer, and the Hammer already had been shattered.... Mergenthaler, cursing, handled his cavalry squadrons to their death, lightly and perfectly as coins in his palm. Every moment that he stayed the Japanese, he knew well that he was holding up to the quick scorn of the world the foot-soldiers of Lowenkampf, whom he hated. His head was lifted above the rocks to watch the field. His couriers came and went, slipping up and down through the thicker timber, still farther to the left.... Morning crawled up nearby until he saw the field--and now action, more abandoned than he had ever dared to dream:

An uncultivated valley strewn with rocks and low timber. Three columns of Japanese infantry pouring down from the opposite parallel ridge, all smoky with the hideous force of the reserve--machine-guns, and a mile of rifles stretching around to the right. (It was this wing’s firing that had started the havoc in the grain.)

Three columns of infantry pouring down into the ancient valley, under the gray stirring sky--brown columns, very even and unhasting--and below, the Cossacks.

Morning lived in the past ages. He lay between two rocks watching, having no active sense--but pure receptivity. Time was thrust back.... Three brown dragons crawling down the slopes in the gray day--knights upon horses formed to slay the dragons.

Out of the sheltering rocks and timber they rode--and chose the central dragon quite in the classic way. It turned to meet the knights upon horses--head lifted, neck swollen like the nuchal ribs of the cobra. In the act of striking it was ridden down, but the knights were falling upon the smashed head. The mated dragons had attacked from either side....

It was a fragment, a moving upon the ground,--that company of knights upon horses,--and the Voice of it, all but deadened by the rifles, came up spent and pitiful.

Mergenthaler’s thin, high voice was not hushed. He knew how to detach another outfit from the rocks and timber-thickets, already found by the Japanese on the ridge, already deluged with fire. Out from the betraying shelter, the second charge, a new child of disaster, ran forth to strike Kuroki’s left.... Parts of the film were elided. The cavalrymen fell away by a terrible magic. Again the point thickened and drew back, met the charge; again the welter and the thrilling back-sweep of the Russian fragment.

Morning missed something. His soul was listening for something.... It was comment from Duke Fallows, so long marking time to events.... He laughed. He was glad to be free, yet his whole inner life drew back in loathing from Mergenthaler--as if to rush to his old companion.... And Mergenthaler turned--the brown high-boned cheeks hung with a smile of derision. He was climbing far and high on Lowenkampf’s shame.... He gained the saddle--this hard, huge Egoist, the staff clinging to him, and over the ridge they went to set more traps.

The wide, rocking shoulders of the General sank into the timber--as he trotted with his aides down the death-ridden valley. It may have been the sight of this little party that started a particular machine-gun on the Japanese right.... The sizable bay the chief rode looked like a polo-pony under the mighty frame. Morning did not see him fall: only the plunging bay with an empty saddle; and then when the timber opened a little, the staff carrying the leader up the trail.

It was the mystery which delayed the Japanese, not Mergenthaler. When at last Kuroki’s left wing continued to report no aggressive movement from Bilderling river-ward; and when continued combing in the north raised nothing but bleak hills and grain-valleys hushed between showers, he flooded further columns down the ridge, and slew what he could of the Russian horsemen who tried with absurd heroism to block his way. At two in the afternoon the Flanker fixed his base among the very rocks where Morning had lain--and the next position for him to take was the coal-hills of Yentai. Only the ghosts of the cavalry stood between--and _kao liang_.

Morning turned back a last time to the fields of millet in the early dusk. He had been waiting for Mergenthaler to die. The General lay in the very _go-down_ where he had outraged Lowenkampf that morning; and now the Japanese were driving the Russians from the position.... Mergenthaler would not die. They carried him to a coal-car, and soldiers pushed it on to Yentai, the station.

The Japanese were closing in. They were already in the northern heights contending with Stakelberg; they were stretched out bluffing Bilderling to the southward. They were locked with Zarubaieff at the southern front of Liaoyang. They were in the grain.... Cold and soulless Morning felt, as one who has failed in a great temptation; as one who has lived to lose, and has not been spared the picture of his own eternal failure.

He looked back a last time at the grain in the closing night. The Japanese were there, brown men, native to the grain. The great shadowed field had whipped Lowenkampf and lost the battle. It lay in the dusk like a woman, trampled, violated, feebly waving. Rain-clouds came with darkness to cover the nakedness and bleeding.

11

DUKE Fallows saw but one face.... John Morning studied a thousand, mastered the heroism of the Cossacks, filled his brain with blood-pictures and the incorrigible mystery of common men. Duke Fallows saw but one face. In the beauty and purity of its inspiration, he read a vile secret out of the past. To the very apocalypse of this secret, he read and understood. The shame of it blackened the heavens for his eyes, but out of its night and torment came a Voice uttering the hope of the human spirit for coming days.

Morning had left. Luban had put on bluster and roaring. Their place in the grain was now broad from trampling; the flight was on in full. It meant something to Fallows. It was not that he wanted the Japanese to win the battle; the doings of the Japanese were of little concern to him. He felt curiously that the Japanese were spiritually estranged from the white man. Russia was different; he was close to the heart of the real Russia whose battle was at home. Russia’s purpose in Asia was black; he was full of scorn for the purpose, but full of love for the troops. Strange gladness was upon him--as the men broke away. Reality at home would come from this disaster. He constructed the world’s battle from it, and sang his song.

One soldier running haltingly for his life looked up to the face of Luban of the roaring voice--and laughed. Luban turned, and perceived that Fallows had not missed the laugh of the soldier. This incident, now closed, was in a way responsible for the next.

... Out of the grain came striding a tall soldier of the ranks. His beard was black, his eyes very blue. In his eyes was a certain fire that kindled the nature of Duke Fallows as it had never been kindled before, not even by the most feminine yielding. The man’s broad shoulders were thrust back; his face clean of cowardice, clean as the grain and as open to the sky. His head was erect and bare; he carried no gun, scorned the pretense of looking for wounded. Had he carried a dinner-pail, the picture would have been as complete--a good man going home from a full-testing day.

In that moment Fallows saw more than from the whole line before.... Here was a conscript. He had been taken from his house, forced across Europe and Asia to this hour. The reverse of his persecutors had set him free. This freedom was the fire in his eyes.... They had torn him from his house; they had driven and brutalized him for months. And now they had come to dreadful disaster. It was such a disaster as a plain man might have prayed for. He _had_ prayed for it in the beginning, but in the long, slow gatherings for battle, in the terrible displays of power, he had lost his faith to pray. Yet the plain man’s God had answered that early prayer. This was the brightness of the burning in the blue eyes.

His persecutors had been shamed and undone. He had seen his companions dissipate, his sergeants run; seen his captains fail to hold. The great force that had tortured him, that had seemed _the world_ in strength, was now broken before his eyes. Its mighty muscles were writhing, their strength running down. The love of God was splendid in the ranker’s heart; the breath of home had come. The turning in the grain--was a turning homeward.

All this Fallows saw. It was illumination to him--the hour of his great reception.

Luban, just insulted by the other infantryman, now faced the big, blithe presence, emerging unhurried from the grain. Luban raised his voice:

“And what are _you_ sneaking back for?”

“I am not sneaking----”

“Rotten soldier stuff--you should be shot down.”

“I am not a soldier--I am a ploughman.”

“You are here to fight----”

“They forced me to come----”

“Forced you to fight for your Fatherland?”

“This is not my Fatherland, but a strange country----”

“You are here for the Fatherland----”

“I have six children in Russia. The Fatherland is not feeding them. My field is not ploughed.”

The talk had crackled; it had required but a few seconds; Luban had done it all for Fallows to see and hear--but Fallows was very far from observing the pose of that weakling. The Ploughman held him heart and soul--as did the infallible and instantly unerring truth of his words. The world’s poor, the world’s degraded, had found its voice.

The man was white with truth, like a priest of Melchizedek.

Luban must have broken altogether. Fallows, listening, watching the Ploughman with his soul, did not turn.... Now the man’s face changed. The lips parted strangely, the eyelids lifting. Whiteness wavered between the eyes of the Ploughman and the eyes of Duke Fallows. Luban’s pistol crashed and the man fell with a sob.

Fallows was kneeling among the soaked roots of the millet, holding the soldier in his arms:

“Living God, to die for you--you, who are so straight and so young.... Hear me--don’t go yet--I must have your name, Brother.... Luban did not know you--he is just a little sick man--he didn’t know you or he wouldn’t have done this.... Tell me your name ... and the place of your babes, and their mother.... Oh, be sure they shall be fed--glad and proud am I to do that easy thing!... You have shown me the Nearer God.... They shall be fed, and they shall hear! The world, cities and nations, all who suffer, shall hear what the Ploughman said--the soul of the Ploughman, who is the hope of the world.... You have spoken for Russia.... And now rest--rest, Big Brother--you have done your work.”

The soldier looked up to him. There had been pain and wrenching, the vision of a desolated house. Now, his eyes rested upon the American. The shadow of death lifted. He saw his brother in the eyes that held him--his brother, and it seemed, the Son of Man smiled there behind the tears.... He smiled back like a weary child. Peace came to him, lustrous from the shadow, for lo! his field was ploughed and children sang in his house.

* * * * *

Fallows had not risen from his knees. He was talking to himself:

“... Out of the grain he came--the soul of the Ploughman. And gently he spoke to us ... and this is the day of the battle. I came to the battle--and I go to carry his message to the poor--to those who labor--to Russia and the America of the future. Luban spoke the thought of the world, but the Ploughman spoke for humanity risen. He spoke for the women, and for the poor.... Bright he came from the grain--bright and unafraid--and those shall hear him, who suffer and are heavy-laden. This is the battle!... And his voice came to me--a great and gracious voice--for tsars and kings and princes to hear--and I am to carry his message....”

Luban laughed feebly at last, and Fallows looked up to him.

“You’ll hear him in your passing, Luban, poor lad. You’ll hear him in your hell. Until you are as simple and as pure as this Ploughman--you shall hear and see all this again. Though you should hang by the neck to-night, Luban,--this picture would go out with you. For this is the hour you killed your Christ.”

12

LOWENKAMPF was the name that meant defeat. Lowenkampf--it was like the rain that night.... “Lowenkampf started out too soon.”... Morning heard it. Fallows heard it. The coughing sentries heard it. The whole dismal swamp of drenched, whipped soldiery heard it. Sleek History had awakened to grasp it; Kuropatkin had washed his hands.... Lowenkampf had started out too soon that morning. The Siberians had only left Yentai Station proper when Lowenkampf set forth from the Coal-heights. Had his supports been in position (very quickly and clearly the world’s war-experts would see this) the rout in the grain would have been checked.

As it was, many of Lowenkampf’s soldiers had run the entire ten miles from the heights to the station, Yentai--after emerging from _kao-liang_--evading the Siberian supports as they ran, as chaos flies from order. Now in the darkness (with Kuroki bivouacked upon the main trophy of the day, the Coal-heights) the shamed battalions of Lowenkampf re-formed along the main line in the midst of their unused reserves.

The day had been like a month of fever to Morning, but Duke Fallows was a younger man, and a stranger that night.... Morning tried to work, but he was too close to it all, too tired. It was as if he were trying to tell of a misfortune that had no beginning, and whose every phase was his own heart’s concern. His weariness was like the beginning of death--coldness and pervading _ennui_. Against his will he was gathered in the glowing currents of Duke Fallows--watching, listening, not pretending even to understand, but borne along. Together they went in to the General’s private room. Lowenkampf looked up, gathered himself with difficulty and smiled. Fallows turned to Morning, asked him to stand by the door, then strode forward and knelt by the General’s knees. It did not seem extraordinary to Morning--so much was insane.

“You were chosen, old friend. It has been a big day for the under-dog----”

“I have lost Liaoyang.”

“That was written.”

“My little boy will hear it in the street. He will hear it in the school. Before he is a man--he will hear it.”

“I shall take him upon my knee. I shall tell him of you in a way that he shall never forget. And his mother--I shall tell her----”

Lowenkampf rubbed his eyes.

“I have business in Russia. This day I heard what must be done. It is almost as if I had gotten to be a man.”

Fallows leaned back laughingly, his arms extended, as if pushing the other’s knees from him.

Some inner wall broke, and the General wept. Morning put his foot against the door. The thought in his heart was: “This is something I cannot write.”...

Morning held the idea coldly now that Fallows was mentally softened from the strain. Other things came up to support it.... He, too, had seen a soldier shot by an officer. It was discipline. At best, it was but one of the thousand pictures. It had happened less because the man was retiring without a wound--thousands were doing that--than because the man answered back, when the officer spoke. He did not hear what the soldier said. This soldier possibly had trans-Baikal children, too. The day and his long illness had crazed Fallows, now at the knees of the man who had lost the battle.

“... I know what you thought this morning--when you saw your men march down into the grain,” Fallows was saying to the General. “You thought of your little boy and his mother. You thought of the babes and wives and mothers--of those soldiers of yours whom you were sending to the front. You didn’t want to send them out. You’re too close to becoming a man for that. You wondered if you would not have to suffer for sending them out so--and if this particular suffering would not have to do with _your_ little boy and his mother----”

“My God, stop, Fallows----”

“You had to think that. You wouldn’t be Lowenkampf if you failed to think that.... I love you for it, old friend. Big things will come from Lowenkampf, and from the conscript who came to me out of the grain with vision and a voice. The battle at home won’t be so hard to win--now that this is lost.”

There was a challenge and heavy steps on the platform--and one low, hurried voice.

Lowenkampf stood up and wiped his eyes.

“The Commander----” he whispered.

A pair of captains towered above him, a grizzled colonel behind; then Morning saw the gray of the short beard, and the dark, dry-burning of unblinking eyes, fixed upon Lowenkampf.... The latter’s shoulders drooped a little, and his eyes lowered deprecatingly for just an instant. Kuropatkin passed in. The soft fullness of his shoulders was like a woman’s. Fleshly and failing, he looked, from behind.... The Americans waited outside with the colonel and captains. The door was shut.

Midnight.... Fallows and Morning had moved in the rain among the different commands. The army at Yentai seemed to be emerging from prolonged anæsthesia to find itself missing in part and strangely disordered. It was afraid to sleep, afraid to think of itself, and denied drink. Fallows had told everywhere the story of the Ploughman; just now he helped himself to a bundle of Morning’s Chinese parchment, and was writing copy in long-hand.

His head was bowed, his eyes expressionless.

“And I alone remain to tell thee!” he muttered at last.

Morning did not answer, but resigned himself to hear more of the Messiah who came out of the grain.

“I told one of Mergenthaler’s aides the story,” Fallows said coldly. “He said it was quite the proper thing to do--to shoot down a man who was leaving the field unwounded. I told Manlewson of the First Siberians, who replied that the Russians would begin to win battles when they murdered all such, as unflinchingly and instantly as the Japanese did, and hospital malingerers as well. I told Bibinoff (who is Luban’s captain), and he said: ‘That’s the first good thing I ever heard about Luban.’ He was pleased and epigrammatic....”

Fallows stood up--his face was in shadow, so far beneath was the odorous lamp.

“Living God--I can’t make them see--I can’t make them see! They’re all enchanted. Or else I’m dead and this is hell.... They talk about Country. They talk about making a man stand in a place of sure death for his Country--in this Twentieth Century--when war has lost its last vestige of meaning to the man in the ranks, and his Country is a thing of rottenness and moral desolation! What is the Country to the man in the ranks? A group of corrupt, inbred undermen who study to sate themselves--to tickle and soften themselves--with the property and blood and slavery of the poor.... A good man, a clean man, is torn from his house to fight, to stand in the fire-pits and die for such monsters. Suddenly the poor man sees!

“... He came forth from the grain with vision--smiling and unafraid. He is not afraid to fight, but he has found himself on the wrong side of the battle. When he fights again it will be for his child, for his house, for his brother, for his woman, for his soul. Blood in plenty has he for such a war.... Think of it, John Morning, the Empire was entrusted to poor little Luban--against this man of vision! He came forth smiling from the grain. ‘_I do not belong here, my masters. I was torn away from my woman and children, and I must be home for the winter ploughing. It is a long way--and I must be off. I am a ploughman, not a soldier. I belong to my children and my field. My country does not plough my field--does not feed my children...._ What could Luban do but kill him--little agent of Herod? But the starry child lives!...

“And listen, John, to-night--you heard them--we heard these fat-necked, vulture-breasted commanders--vain, envy-poisoned, scandal-mongering commanders, complaining to each other: ‘See, what stuff has been given us to win battles with!... I have told it and they cannot see. They are not even good devils; they are not decent devourers. They have no humor--that is their deadly sin. An adult, half-human murderer, seeing his soldiers leave the field, would cry aloud, ‘Hello, you Innocents--so you have wakened up at last!’ But these cannot see. Their eyes are stuck together. It is their deadly sin--the sin against the Holy Ghost--to lack humor to this extent!”

Morning laughed strangely. “Come on to bed, you old anarchist,” he said, though sleep was far from his own eyes.

“That’s it, John. Anarchy. In the name of Fatherland, Russia murders a hundred thousand workmen out here in Asia. In answer, a few men and women gather together in a Petersburg cellar, saying, ‘We are fools, not heroes. When we fight again it will be for _Our_ Country!’ And they are anarchists--their cause is Terrorism!”

“We’re all shot to pieces to-night, Duke----”

“We are alive, John. Lowenkampf is alive. But he who spoke to me this day, who came forth so blithely to die in my arms (his woman sleeps ill to-night in the midst of her babes), and he is lying out in the rain, his face turned up to the rain. God damn the fat reptile that calls itself Fatherland!... But, I say to you, that we’re come nearly to the end of the prince and pauper business on this planet. The soul of the Ploughman was heard to-day--as long ago they heard the Soul of the Carpenter.... He is lying out there in the millet--his face turned up to the rain. Yet I say to you, John, there’s more life in him this hour than in his Tsar and all the princes of the blood.”

Fallows covered his face with his hands.

“You’re tired and thick to-night, John, but you are one who must see!” he finished passionately. “You must help me tell the story to the cellar gatherings in Petersburg, to the secret meetings in all the centers of misery, wherever a few are gathered together in the name of Brotherhood--in New York, London, Paris, and Berlin.... You must help me to make other men see--help me to tell this thing so that the world will hear it, and with such power that the world will be unable longer to lie to itself.

“I can see it now--how Jesus, the Christ, tried to make men see.... That was His Gethsemane--that He could not make men see. I tell you it is a God’s work--and it came to Jesus, the Christ, at last--‘If they crucify me, perhaps, a few will see!’... I’m going over to Russia, John, to learn how to tell them better.”

13