The Man on Horseback/Chapter 27

discovered that Baron von Götz-Wrede had not been guilty of exaggeration when he had said that an officer in the Guards must have a private income of at least fifty thousand marks a year.

The demands upon his pocketbook were heavy and incessant.

His uniforms alone, and there were over a dozen of them, from simple fatigue and stable uniform to a gorgeous affair used for parade drill, cost more than Tom back home would have spent for clothes in a life time. His full dress sword was a hammered, chiseled, engraved work of art worth its weight in silver.

Then there were the horses, those for himself as well as for his Bursche and his stable boy, the latter two new acquisitions. And the horses were not the shaggy, round-eyed range ponies one can pick up at a bargain in the West after roundup. These animals were thoroughbreds, English, Arab, Kentucky, and Hungarian, and they cost a thoroughbred price.

He had to subscribe to the band fund, the regimental charity fund, the mess fund, the Liebesmahl fund, and half-a-dozen others. He had to entertain lavishly. Thus the sum which Vyvyan had advanced him melted like snow in a Northwestern chinook wind, and it was not many weeks before he saw the tail end of his roll.

The Baron must have guessed something of the sort.

"I'll buy that mine of yours," he said time after time, with wearying Teutonic persistency, thinking that repetition was synonymous with argument; chiefly one day, late in November when Tom had been initiated into the delights of baccara at a private Club for Guard officers and high Prussian officials called sardonically: "Verein der Harmlosen—Association of the Innocent," where, finding out that all his poker training did not help him a whit in a pure game of chance, he had dropped over eight thou sand marks to the little Hussar, Graf von Bissingen-Trotzow.

So it was with an ear-shattering whoop of relief that early one morning he opened and read a long cablegram, signed Alec Wynn, which brought the startling news that Truex was not dead, that the litigation against the Yankee Doodle Glory had been dismissed, that Lehneke was in jail, and that once more Tom was on the high crest of prosperity.

"Wedekind and I are celebrating to-night!" wound up the lawyer's message. "I'll add the cost of it to my fee."

"Go to it!" Tom cabled back. "I shall do some little celebrating myself at this end!"

He did.

First he telephoned to Vyvyan, who congratulated him, but was unable to attend the festivities. Then he gathered about him a baker's dozen of chosen spirits of his regiment.

The celebration began with a dinner at Dressel's, progressed through the half-dozen layers of the Berlin night-life-layer-cake, from a look-in at the latest Metropol Theater Review where, typical of the German capital, the American actress, Madge Lessing, was the female lead, and Giampietro, an Austrian ex-cavalry officer, the male lead, to the newest Cabaret where the long-haired artist at the piano, a cross between Paul Verlaine and Ernest Dowson, trilled passionate serenades that would have curdled both County Council and Comstock blood; to wind up in a rapid, impromptu switch into civilian dress, at Bissingen-Trotzow's apartment, and a dance at one of the Westend all-night places where stout provincials, on their annual spree, were opening wine, where cocottes from all the world had their nightly rendezvous, and where a Bavarian orchestra was trying hard to bring Teutonic order and efficiency into the disorderly, syncopated swing and rhythm of the latest American ragtime tune.

Results: a headache and a brown taste, and a none too pleasant word when early the next morning (Tom thanked his stars that it was a free day, without stable or drill duties) Krauss announced Baron von Götz-Wrede.

"For the love o' Mike, Baron," Tom said weakly, holding his tousled red head, "don't speak to me! Have a heart. I have a feeling like …"

"I know. Wait. I'll mix you something that will touch the right spot," laughed the other. He went to the kitchen door and spoke a few words to the valet who, a few minutes later, brought in a steaming cup of coffee cut with kirsch.

"Swallow that!" commanded the Baron.

"You're the doctor!" Tom drank the steaming, aromatic mixture, blinked his eyes, smiled, and sat up. "Say," he continued, "and you're a great little doctor. I'll call you in again. Thanks for coming."

"I had to come. Matter of duty. You see, I am the adjutant of the regiment …"

"Sure. Say—is old Wedekind kicking up again? Threatening me with court-martial for some sin or other?"

"No, no. Just a simple little routine matter." And von Götz-Wrede explained to the Westerner that he had not yet made out his sworn statement of property for the regiment, to be filed with the War Office.

"What statement?"

"Oh—just a little statement. You know our army administration is nuts on system. Here you are!" pulling a blank from the leather manuscript case he was carrying—"Have a look at it!"

Tom took the blank, glanced at it, and, under the direction of the Baron, filled it out.

It read as follows:

"Sign here," said the Baron, after Tom had filled out the rubrics under his supervision. "That's right!"

He turned the paper:

"And now sign here, Tom."

Again Tom signed his name.

"Thanks," said the Baron, "that's finished. Sorry to have bothered you." He returned the document to his case. "Go back to sleep, old man. Au revoir!" and he left.

All the rest of that week Tom Graves had not a single moment in which to see any of his friends, not even Lord Vyvyan or Bertha Wedekind. He was on duty mornings and afternoons, and had furthermore been detailed to special lectures every evening, including Sundays, at the Kriegsschule—the War School—in the Dorotheen Strasse.

It was a typically German experience through which he was passing. Whatever Baron von Götz-Wrede's ulterior reasons for suggesting an army career to the Westerner, whatever the ulterior reasons of Colonel Wedekind, of Prince Ludwig Karl, of the Emperor himself for confirming the Baron's choice and granting the gazetting, now that Tom actually was in the army, the army proceeded—tried to proceed—to Prussianize him, his speech as well as his limbs, his thoughts as well as his unborn thought-germs, his very imagination, his very morality, his very prejudices. He had entered the crunching maw of the great machine—the greatest, for sheer, cold-blooded, soulless efficiency, the world has yet seen—and it was up to the machine, to the trained engineers who directed its destinies, to turn Tom into the finished product, the stiff, rectangular, disciplined Prussian pattern.

The machine, the engineers, began by calmly assuming that Tom's human life had commenced the moment he joined the Prussian army. What had gone before, his American blood and birth and training and freedom, was not to be considered. It simply was forgotten. Did not exist. Never had existed.

Tom's was one mind, untrained, against a crushing, overwhelming majority of trained minds.

Yet he fought. He resisted.

Unconsciously, of course, for he hardly realized what was happening to him. But there was in his veins a drop of Scots blood from his mother's side, and his father's family had once or twice intermarried with Vermont Yankees, who had left their worked-out farms and taken the wilderness trail. Thus he was of a combative, an argumentative turn of mind. He was in the habit of replying to questions by asking one. He argued in a dryly, persistent manner.

"This is right—and that—and again this!" said his teachers at War School.

"Why?" said the irrepressible horse wrangler. "I want to know."

And it was this incessant "I want to know" which, in the end, saved Tom from a great tragedy.

Thus he resisted unconsciously.

But there was one thing which he fought quite consciously, one thing which he refused to learn, simply because he was not able to.

And that was machinery.

"I'm all right with horses," he told Major Kurt Werningerode, the chief instructor, "and I caught on to the saber and lance trick. But—Gosh!—I'm in the cavalry. What the hell's the use of my learning all that dope about wheels and electricity and steam and things?"

"The cavalry are the eyes of the army," said the Major sententiously. "But what earthly good are eyes without nerves to register what they see, brain cells to store the knowledge away, without hands and arms and legs and feet to obey the nervous reaction of the brain cells? Furthermore," he went on, "what chance has the bare hand against the hand armed with machinery?"

"Sure," admitted Tom. "But, Gee II am a cavalry man. No getting away from that. Let somebody else act the part of the hand, the machine."

"No. In modern warfare nobody knows what might happen."

"Go on! Who's talking of war?"

"I am!" the Major replied succinctly. "That's what we are here for, Lieutenant Graves. The army isn't all cakes and ale and glittering uniforms and parade reviews in front of visiting royalty. War may come …"

"Not if I can help it!"

"You won't be consulted. And if war comes, nobody, I repeat, knows what might happen. Just suppose your squadron is rushed in suddenly, on foot …"

"Not on foot?" groaned the Westerner.

"Yes. On foot. Suppose you are rushed in to support a brigade of infantry. Suppose the day is critical. Suppose the battle, the whole campaign, the very fate of the Empire, depends on the defense of a certain bridge head. For hours it has been shelled. Nearly destroyed. Nearly taken. The sappers and miners have been decimated. The infantry barely holding its own. The reserve is cut off by a vicious barrage fire. But your squadron has been scouting, is there, in direct communication, direct support. Then it would be up to you, Lieutenant Graves, to do the sappers work. Up to you and your squadron. That's why you must familiarize yourself with machinery."

He pointed to the blue print on the table.

"Now—as to this lifting- jack," he recommenced his lecture in dry, academic accents, and Tom bent his red head and listened.

But it was of no use. He could not understand, try as he might. His was not the mind to grasp and retain mechanical and scientific details. In every other respect he was a good officer. He knew horses, of course, and had mastered quickly and thoroughly the art of saber and lance. Too, he was an excellent squadron leader, for he had the natural knack of the free Westerner, the "good mixer," to make people obey him without bullying them, and he got on splendidly with the privates and the non-coms. It was the same with his brother officers. Of natural dignity, not to forget natural humor, clean and straight and square, he was socially easy and sympathetic.

But machinery? The machinery of modern warfare?

"Auf Ehrenwort, Herr Kamerad!" snarled little, rosy-cheeked Ensign Baron von Königsmark, recently graduated from the Lichterfelder cadets school and gazetted to the Uhlans of the Guard, "if ever you should have special reasons for quitting the army in a hurry and there was a ninety horse-power Rolls-Royce at your door, all gassed up and ready to leap, you wouldn't know which button to push."

"Right, young fellow," grinned Tom. "I'd rather have one horse-power, as long as it's a horse of flesh and blood and bone, than ninety horse-power of steel and spark plugs. I'm the original little man on horseback!"

The result was that finally, at least in that one particular, the Prussian war machine gave in. Tom was released from special lectures, and was detailed altogether to stable duties, where he made supremely good.

Thus his evenings were his own, and he spent more than half of them with Bertha.

Regularly he proposed to her. Regularly she refused him. And the next day he would come right back to the attack with a certain affectionate defiance.

"All your fault, Bertha," he said, when she objected laughingly; "you want to turn me into a Dutchman, and I have learned the first trick of their game. I've become pig-headed, see? Therefore—will you marry me, Bertha? I'm just plumb crazy about you!"