Hubbard, L. Ron (9 page)

As the snake strikes, Mawkey fastened savagely on her ankle as she would have crossed to the lieutenant. It was Greta.

The lieutenant raised on his elbow and whispered hoarsely, "Let her go, you fool!"

Mawkey came to himself. Her skin was soft under his hand and her fingers held no weapon. In the soft firelight the parachute silk revealed the rondeur of a lovely body. Mawkey shamefacedly withdrew his hands. And when again she had her courage up she stepped over him and went on toward the large bed in the deepest recess of the room.

Mawkey d e curtains shut as he rolled outside them. For a little he listened to the whispers, then at last, the girl's soft rich laugh. He smiled, pleased.

One by one the glowing coals went out. Mawkey slept.

Through the morning, the brigade mounted ridge after ridge, keeping to no definite course but working toward a certain objective by arcs and angles. It was hot work and, to Malcolm, senseless, for they only succeeded in exposing themselves to several random shots by hopeful snipers in high rocks who vanished like their powder smoke upon approach, wanderers who coveted a knapsack or two, could they drop it into a ravine and beyond the immediate concern of the troops.

It had taken Malcolm only forty-eight hours of fast traveling to get from the G.H.Q. to the Fourth Brigade, and it was taking the lieutenant interminable days of circuitous march to make the return. Malcolm had followed the high ground with a relief map. It would be very different when he had this command, he thought.

Malcolm's crossness was not lost upon the lieutenant, but it did not wear upon him until they halted wearily at noon on a hill which commanded all approaches.

"What's the matter?" said the lieutenant.

Malcolm looked at him innocently. "Nothing."

"Come on, have it out."

"Well… I think you should have had that village leader shot. Dixon was our friend."

The lieutenant knew that this was a dodge, but he answered. "We had no evidence that those people killed Dixon. Jolly Bill was entirely too good an officer to be rolled down by peasants."

"I never knew you needed evidence to execute a man."

"To put you straight on the matter, I did execute him. Now, are you satisfied?" "How's this? Why, I saw him with my own eyes bidding us good-bye."

"And you saw Toutou issuing their rifles to the thirty-one Pollard dug out of the ground. Tell me, Malcolm, why should I thicken up the atmosphere of that hut any further and so annoy myself when the task was clearly finished at the release of the prisoners? Peasants do strange things. While we were there, there might have been an incident of some sort if the leader had been killed. It is done, anyway."

"You mean those soldiers?"

"Of course. The village, you might say, has passed under a military regime.

And why not? There were few enough men there when we arrived. They should appreciate the additional thirty-one. And who knows but what the place may become all the stronger therefore? However, such matters are outside my domain."

Malcolm was not mollified in the least. He gazed very uneasily at the lieutenant, suddenly unsure in the presence of such cold thoroughness. In fact, he began to feel sorry for the leader, forgetting completely that he had trapped soldiers and enslaved them.

"Sometimes I don't understand you," said Malcolm. "Maybe it is because I have been less long at the front than you. Maybe I'm just a staff officer and always will be. But
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Well, you're not consistent. You were courteous to the Russian commander and yet you treated that village leader like a cur."

The lieutenant had not thought about it. Mawkey came up and spread lunch out on a rock and the two officers ate silently for some time. The lieutenant finished and sat back, looking down across the autumn-colored valley without really seeing it.

At last, he spoke. "I suppose it was because I felt that way. Maybe there are so few of the officers' corps left that we have a feeling we ought to preserve ourselves. Maybe it's because all officers have been taught the necessity of exalting their rank and being as above that of the civilians. Civilians started all this mess anyway, didn't they? Bungling statesmanship, trade mongering, their 'let the soldier do the dirty work' philosophy, these things started it. The Russian was a fellow craftsman. But the leader of that village commune. A stupid blunderer, raised up from filth by guile, a peasant without polish or courage. The thought revolts me! He was silent for a while, staring out at the painted slopes. And then: "There are so few of us left."

Malcolm, a little awed now by the quiet sadness he had drawn forth, could not venture to carry it forward. He had been dwelling, in the main, upon this circuitous marching and had not quite the courage to speak boldly in criticism of a commander in the field.

All that afternoon they stole wraithlike through the wilderness, beating up only rabbits and birds. But by night they had come into a one-time industrial area which scarred the earth for a mile around with the fragments of buildings and machinery.

Although this city had been splattered into atoms at the very beginning of the war, it had been rebuilt, in lessening degree, in each lull which followed in order, to utilize the coal here found. But after each retreating army had damaged the mines turn after ceaseless turn, at last they were wholly unworkable.

Water tanks leaned crazily
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great blobs of rust against the sky. Buildings were heaps of rubble, overgrown with creeping vines and brown weeds. Within a few years the place would be swallowed except for the few battered walls which made ragged patterns against the hazy dusk. Fused glass crunched under foot and twisted chunks of metal attested the violence of thermite bombs and shells.

The brigade, having ascertained that the place was not radioactive, filtered through the tangle, alert and silent. Gian's men sweated the light guns over the unevenness, cursing both guns and the laborious works of man.

The lieutenant caught sight of the Weasel's runner signaling him ahead from the side of an overturned railroad car. He quickened his pace and followed the fellow up to the vanguard.

Weasel, his small self very still, pointed mutely to a crazily suspended railroad rail which jutted out from a wall like a gibbet. It was a gibbet.

Four soldiers, their necks drawn to twice their length, were rotting in their uniforms, swaying to and fro in the gentle wind. Below them was a painted scrawl upon the stone:

SOLDIERS! MOVE ON!

"British," whispered Pollard, coming up.

The lieutenant looked around. Ahead he could see the mine entrances and piles of waste which bore lines like trails. He gave the place a careful scout and returned to his men.

"I hear people down there," said Weasel, ear to earth.

A bullet smashed into the truck of a railroad car and went yowling away like a broken banjo string.

"I think," said the lieutenant, "that this is a very good place to spend the night. Gian! Gian front into action!

All the following day and the day after, Malcolm was increasingly morose.

He had encountered a problem which he could not solve and it was giving him nerves. He had known the lieutenant very casually at Sandhurst when they were sixteen and cadets. But he did not remember such a man as this, rather, a somewhat quiet, cheerful lad with only a hint of the devil in his eyes. But the blank had been filled by seven battlesome years, two for the lieutenant in England, five for Malcolm. And the five which the lieutenant had spent on the Continent seemed to have forged a steel blade which might stab anywhere.

It was all so irrational! Malcolm had counted on his order and the habit of obedience to the source to bring the lieutenant back. That and tales about what Victor wished to do for the lieutenant. But the lieutenant's mind was not one to run in grooves or to be duped, and here he was, walking back to a loss of command! And Malcolm was fairly certain now that the lieutenant knew what was waiting for him.

Hadn't the lieutenant failed to take any cognizance of the general orders to reorganize on the outline of the B.C.R? Hadn't he been all too successful in his campaigning
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too successful to be safe? Certainly such a man, asserting such independence, could not be left with a body of troops while the general staff was so weak.

And Malcolm was suffering from jealousy. He was used to a close understanding between an officer and his troops, yes, but these fellows actually seemed to wriggle when the lieutenant saw fit to look at them. It was rather disgusting. Well, that would be changed. They'd recognize their rights, these fellows, and know that the new order of things was best. A clever officer was better off under a committee than he was by himself, for he could always manipulate the membership of that committee with benefit to himself and could always blame all failure upon it. Soldiers were such stupid brutes.

Malcolm could understand that the lieutenant was not anxious to check in at G.H.Q., in the light of what he must know. But why, then, didn't he just quietly put a bullet in Malcolm and head south, forgetting that any organization such as G.H.Q. ever existed?

This devious traveling was an annoyance to a man who feels he is constantly being put off from control of his command. And Malcolm had thought about it so often and so long that he was now under the impression that he was truly commanding here and so every order from the lieutenant came as a definite affront.

Then, damn it, those people in that first village had instinctively turned to the lieutenant! And the people there at the mines, even though they had been terribly knocked about in the short fight, had calmed into quiet obedience as soon as the lieutenant confronted them with his orders.

And last night, when they had raided that old fort, the noncom in charge had almost licked the lieutenant's boots!

This brigade was all wrong. Their haversacks were stuffed. Forty impressed carriers were lugging the guns and the carts of provisions. It was glutting itself from the best in the countryside, poor as that best was, but it was also marching and fighting like people possessed. What was the sense of that when a two-day fast march would take them across the looted soil which stood like a band around G.H.Q.? What use did the lieutenant have for all this loot?

That night, secure in a cave-pocked hill which had been taken by assault with the loss of only one man and that a carrier, Malcolm brooded long. He felt he had a very definite quarrel with the lieutenant and, the way Malcolm stood with Victor, a quarrel which would very soon be settled.

The G.H.Q. of the B.E.F. in France was the only thing of permanence which had survived the last mass bombardments. It had been constructed under the direct supervision of the general staff some fifteen years before and was, therefore, probably the only safe refuge in this, now borderless, country. Every artifice discovered for camouflaging and armor-plating a fortress had gone into its making, until neither shell nor gas could make the slightest impression upon it. And its deepest recesses were even proof against atom bombs and radioactive dust. Sickness and bacteria only took toll of men.

Spreading some fifty thousand square yards under the earth, it occupied the better part of a rocky hill. No chamber in it was less shallow than eighty feet and all chambers were designed to withstand, at a blow, the combined blasts of twenty town busters. The appointment had overlooked nothing by way of safety and so the G.H.Q. had remained stationary, quite some distance from the wreck of Paris and still far enough from the sea to prohibit attack from that quarter. The thirty-nine generals who had, in turn, commanded here had only lacked provision for the prevention of casualty through politics.

Every ventilator was a fortress in itself, guarded by an intricate maze of filters which took all impurity from the air. In addition to this, each chamber contained oxygen tanks sufficient for a hundred men for one month.

Water was plentiful, for the place was served by half a dozen artesian wells, two of which operated on their own pressure. The lighting was alcohol driven with a helio-mirror system as auxiliary. The communications alone had been neglected, for provision had been made for telephones and radio only, whereas the lines of the former had long gone dangling for want of copper and the latter had been useless when storage batteries for field receivers had gradually become exhausted, never to be replaced. Radio communication was occasionally established even yet with England, but the occasion for this had now vanished.

Outwardly the place was just a hill, the countryside about rather torn up by constant shelling and bombing and the approach too open to be attempted.

There were a dozen such rises in the neighborhood and many an enemy pilot had mistaken one for the other until the whole terrain was similarly marked. The rusty wrecks of charred tanks and crumpled planes gradually merged with the mud.

In short, the place was an ideal G.H.Q. The generals, in perfect safety, could send the army out to die.

When the lieutenant had last seen it, it had been summer. But the effect of gas upon undergrowth was enough to make little difference between summer and late autumn.

A drizzle of rain was turning the flats into bogs and obscuring the horizon and the brigade marched with helmet visors down and collars up more because it was habit than because their thin clothing could keep out the wet. They bad only had a morning of this but still they were all of a color, and that was of mud.