The Man on Horseback/Chapter 36

gray, frowning walls of Spandau fortress swallowed Tom. Cut off he was from the world out side, in a small, neatly furnished room with bathroom attached, the windows doubly barred with steel, the doors, too, of steel and patrolled day and night by armed sentries. The food was good and plentiful, the treatment courteous but severe. Each day he was allowed three hours for exercise on the Kasernenhof, the barrack yard.

"I regret it," General Unruh, who commanded the officers prison wing of the fortress, explained to him. "As a rule, the officers here are allowed complete lib erty. Are put on parole. But I understand that you broke parole in Berlin. Tut mir leid!"

Tom resigned himself to the inevitable. With his clear, simple mind he thought the situation over from the start to the probable finish.

The court-martial would come soon, and he had decided to play there a certain card. He would speak out, straight out. He would tell everything that had happened, exactly, without omitting a single detail, not only as to the duel, but also as to Bertha Wedekind and the reason why he had broken parole. For he had begun to realize that, at the very best, he was in for a term of years in Festung. Thus he would be unable to do what Martin Wedekind had asked him to—to see Bertha home to Spokane personally.

He would therefore do the next best thing. He would raise such a row that the Germans simply would not dare double cross.

Yes! He would give it to them, straight from the shoulder, regardless of what might happen to him.

Of course he knew that court-martials were held in secret session, but something of the evidence given there was certain to leak out, into the outside world, the press, the ear of some sharp American newspaper correspondent, perhaps Trumbull, and the American Government would automatically be forced to act so as to protect Bertha.

There was no doubt of it, and so Tom awaited the summons for court-martial with impatience. He was anxious about Bertha, terribly anxious. He was allowed neither mail nor newspapers. He had no idea what was going on in the outside world, and he fretted.

There were times when he regretted the lost hopes, the lost promises of his young, vigorous manhood, when he cursed the mine in the Hoodoos—the Yankee Doodle Glory which was at the bottom of all his troubles. But he controlled himself with a will. He could not afford to break down, for there was the girl he loved, the girl he must get out of the German Eagle's clutches—and so he waited, waited, for the court-martial summons.

At times he asked General Unruh, who shrugged his shoulders.

"Lieutenant Graves," he said, smiling with his lips, "never in all my long experience as fortress prison commander have I seen anybody as anxious to stand trial as you. You must be very certain that you are going to get off scot-free!"

"Well—but when will they try me?"

"Can't say, I'm sure. You will have to compose yourself in patience."

And Tom did.

Very few visitors were allowed near him, and these only in the presence of the General or some other high-ranking officer. The little Ensign came. Too, von Quitzow, and one or two others. They muttered banalities and went on their way. No—they said, one and all—they had not seen a sign of Miss Wedekind. The Ensign understood that she was down with severe illness; nobody was allowed near her.

And Tom waited, week after week, for the court-martial summons that did not come. He had an idea that they were trying to break his nerve, and he gritted his teeth and forced himself to be quiet.

Outside, late winter changed suddenly into early spring. Green leaves of crocus and tulip peeped out overnight in the cement-framed grass plot next to General Unruh's quarters. The song birds returned from the South. The trees were clad in the delicate tracery of the new foliage. Even the drab, square Julius Tower that was said to house Prussia's mysterious golden war chest, was touched and softened by lacy sprays of color where ivy and vine crept up from the sandy Brandenburg soil.

Thus May passed with soft winds and the virginal pink of hawthorn blossoms, and June came, with the first crass heat of summer, with the sunset sky of summer that was like a great, tropical moth, crimson and orange, its wings barred with black when a thunder storm boomed overland all the way from the chilly, foggy Baltic.

And still he waited, with no word from Bertha, no summons to the court-martial that should decide his fate and hers.

Every evening he paced up and down the cement walk in front of the prison wing, between armed soldiers. The rest of the day he spent at his window, looking out over the fortifications that dipped into the ground like gopher holes, suddenly, threateningly, where a sunken gun emplacement frowned its unseen challenge, farther on, to the east, flattened out into an immense, gray, dusty drill ground; and as the days passed into the cycle of weeks, this drill ground was used more and more. Nervous and swarming it was, like a beehive.

Not only were the artillery men busy with the limbers and the steel thills of their gray-and-blue field guns, but also with sappers and cavalry and infantry.

Wherever Tom looked, miniature battles were in progress.

All one morning a dozen heaped batteries practiced drum fire with blank shells until Tom thought his ears would burst under the roar and slam and clank of the continuous salvos, wailing as the shells left the barrels and rushed on, madly crashing as they thumped down to their targets. The same at night, varied by star shells, flashing and vanishing in an intolerable orange haze, leaping and flickering up, then down, then along the ground in a gamut of flame. And again the deafening sequence of shells, overlapping, stretching into one unceasing roar, throbbing to the firmament like a gigantic drum, with triangular sheets of white, brilliant light flaring to the zenith, and countless projectiles rushing through the air with a noise as the tearing of silk.

Or a sudden, terrible silence—more terrible than the inferno of sounds that had preceded it and a young officer's voice, high, shrill, foolish, frightfully inadequate:

"Battery! Over there!"

A non-commissioned officer's echoing voice:

"Zu Befehl, Herr Leutnant!"

And once more the latter's order: "Barrage! Ten rounds gun fire! Fire—fire!"—and the crash, the roar, the whining and wailing of tortured steel smiting tortured earth.

The drum fire over, platoons of infantry or dismounted cavalry would be put through their paces. During his months in the army Tom had taken part in maneuvers and military reviews and was more or less familiar with the surface of ordinary tactics. But the drill which he watched day after day from his window was new to him.

At times, indeed, the old traditional Prussian formation, the attack by massed phalanx, grenadiers charging, shoulder to shoulder, relying on brawn and weight to crush the enemy's opposition regardless of the cost in blood to their own men, was followed. But at other times the lines were deployed, in a thin loop, very much—Tom thought—as Western range riders spread, fan-like, when cattle stampede.

Scouts these, the nerves of the army. Then another barrage, plopping and splashing unexpectedly in a screen of fire that melted from scarlet and gold to livid purple, and specially picked troops—he heard General Unruh call them Stosstruppen, shock troops—were sent forward, without rifle or bayonet, armed instead with trench knife and hand grenade, fused for instant action.

Over and over again they would be hurled forth. Drill was incessant, discipline even more merciless than usual. Men who fell from exhaustion were kicked and cuffed and belted by the non-coms while the officers turned their heads, pretending not to see.

No newspaper correspondents, no photographers, no civilians of any sort were allowed near the parade ground; and the troops that were trained did not remain the same. They changed every few days. On a Monday it would be the Maikäfer Grenadiers, forty-eight hours later the First Mecklenburg Regiment of Foot, again East Prussian fusiliers, until it seemed that the whole North Germany army corps were passing through the Spandau mill.

Formerly Tom would have smiled. But not now.

Formerly he would have said to himself that the German army was only the glitter, the vanity, the imagination of the nation concretely realized in color and pomp, very much like a cowboy who swaggers into town, his chaps dyed a violent vermilion. But now he saw the army as a working body, a pitiless, never-resting machine, and at times his thoughts swerved away from the figures, drilling out there in the heat and dust, and winged to the German homes; the homes where these men must have been born and bred. Puppets they were, puppets of an armed, rasping, insolent, ruling caste. But they had women and children; mothers and sisters and sweethearts.

And what were these women thinking? What were they doing? Were they entirely inarticulate, like Siwash squaws? And what, then, of civilization, and progress, and culture, and Christianity?

Thus Tom pondered—Tom, who was simple no more. He asked himself what it was all about, and he was afraid of finding the answer.

Still the days passed, with no news from Bertha, no summons to court-martial, until one Saturday morning the General came to his room and told him that a visitor was there to see him.

"Mrs. Wedekind. Colonel Wedekind's mother."

A minute later the General left, and the sentry ushered Mrs. Wedekind in. It was fortunate for Tom that the officer on watch that day, the officer ordered to listen to the conversation between the prisoner and his callers and to make a detailed report of it to the proper authorities, was the Junker, von Quitzow, who had been forced into the Uhlan tunic by his father and who had never really quite forgotten his native good-humor and sentimentality—"damned civilian sentimentality" Tom one day had heard the Colonel characterize it.

Mrs. Wedekind was close to the Biblical span of years. White haired she was, and wrinkled. But in her youth she had loved, very deeply, she had had her beautiful summer, and when her husband had died in his prime, her heart, instead of becoming blunted, had mellowed, had become receptive. She drew people to her, instinctively. Added to this was a great, slightly malicious, natural shrewdness, a wonderful charm of manner, a knowledge of man's vulnerable spots.

This knowledge, this charm and shrewdness, she used now on Captain von Quitzow.

She flashed a rapid look from her canny old eyes at Tom. But she shook hands first with the Junker.

"Ah, guten Morgen, mein liebster Herr Hauptmann! It has been such a long time since I have seen you, since I had the pleasure of listening to your charming music. Why, my dear, they call you the Richard Wagner of the Uhlans! They do, positively. When will you come and play for me? Or—am I too old, perhaps, for a dashing young Captain like yourself?"

Dashing! Tom hid a smile. That was the one thing which von Quitzow was not, but he took the bait, blushed, mumbled something, and bowed deep over Mrs. Wedekind's right hand while she, at the same fraction of a moment, passed a tiny envelope to Tom. He slipped it up his sleeve.

Then came a banal conversation, lasting several minutes, at the end of which Mrs. Wedekind rose, shook hands with both men and went to the door.

"Thanks for having come," said Tom. "You don't know when my court-martial's going to come off, do you?"

Mrs. Wedekind looked straight at him.

"Lieutenant Graves," she replied, "I have no idea. But at times I imagine that the Prussian army just now is too—ah—busy to waste precious days on such an altogether charming and altogether worthless young American like yourself!" And she swept out with an old-fashioned curtsy, followed by the still blushing von Quitzow, who had not caught the peculiar inflection of her parting speech.

Tom had. But he had no time to think about it right then. For there was the envelope which she had given him.

He tore it open, took out a slip of paper, read.

There were just a few lines, from Bertha.

"I am waiting, waiting!" she wrote. "Waiting for you! Come to me, dear. I need you. I want you. Every night I pray for you. Bertha."

That was all. But Tom kissed the letter. He felt a hot tear running down his cheek, and he was not ashamed of it.

Late that evening, and again the next morning, Mrs. Wedekind's words came back to him … "The army just now is too busy to waste precious days on you!"

Directly bordering on the military prison was the mess barrack of the gunner officers. Heretofore, every night, the great banqueting hall had been silent and dark. The officers had been busy day and night, had snatched food on the run, to return, often past midnight, to their quarters and sleep the dreamless sleep of utter exhaustion. But to-night the room was festively lit. Around nine o'clock officers entered the building, and, an hour later, a banquet was in full swing.

The windows had been thrown wide open, and very distinctly Tom could hear the popping of champagne corks, voices, laughter, the clinking of glass, once in a while the band thumping and scraping and braying a martial rhythm—playing the old favorites of the German army: "Maria Teresa, geh' nicht in den Krieg!" "Der alte Derflinger" "Lützows wilde, verwegene Jagd!" and many others.

Then there was a silence and, after a minute, somebody giving a toast. Tom heard a few words:

"The army is ready, meine Herren Offiziere! Ready to conquer …"

Then somebody closed the windows of the banquet hall and Tom heard no more except vague, indistinct sounds. But he was nervous. He paced up and down.

War?

He shook his head.

He was no more the provincial American, isolated in the valor of his ignorance. During the last months he had read the newspapers, the foreign news, the editorials. He knew that the German nation was nervous, fretful, on tenter-hooks, that a change had come over it.

But … War?

War, bloodshed, without rhyme or reason?

And there was no reason. He had followed the news of the world. No, no! War would not come. Could, must not come! It was out of the question.

Yet again the next morning, Sunday, when Tom, escorted by von Quitzow, went to hear service in the Garnisonskirche, the cantonment church, Mrs. Wedekind's strange words came back to him … And, too, other words: Vyvyan's, Martin Wedekind's, the Emperor's, the little professor's.

The church was crowded with officers. Doctor Stöckl, the Kaiser's favorite, was in the pulpit.

He had taken the sixteenth chapter of Revelations for his text:

"And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth. …"

Later on:

"The sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great River Euphrates, and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the Kings of the East might be prepared. …"

The clergyman looked up.

"The Kings of the East, brethren," he went on, "the Kings of the East! Our Emperor! The Emperor of Austria-Hungary! The Sultan of Turkey! The three Kings out of the East. …"

Tom stopped his ears. He was not a religious man, but he had the fine, instinctive antipathy of the man of the open range against blasphemy.

The clergyman droned on. Tom could hear his voice as from a great distance, vague, wiped over. He could not make out the words.

But he saw the faces of the officers.

They seemed utterly fascinated, utterly enwrapt.