The Twelfth bivouacked on the ridge. Little fires were built, and there appeared among the men innumerable blackened tin cups, which were so treasured that a faint suspicion in connection with the loss of one could bring on the grimmest of fights. Meantime certain of the privates silently readjusted their kits as their names were called out by the sergeants. These were the men condemned to picket duty after a hard day of marching and fighting. The dusk came slowly, and the color of the countless fires, spotting the ridge and the plain, grew in the falling darkness. Faraway pickets fired at something.
One by one the men’s heads were lowered to the earth until the ridge was marked by two long shadowy rows of men. Here and there an officer sat musing in his dark cloak with a ray of a weakening fire gleaming on his sword hilt. From the plain there came at times the sound of battery horses moving restlessly at their tethers, and one could imagine he heard the throaty, grumbling curse of the drivers. The moon died swiftly through flying light clouds. Faraway pickets fired at something.
In the morning the infantry and guns breakfasted to the music of a racket between the cavalry and the enemy which was taking place some miles up the valley.
The ambitious Hussars had apparently stirred some kind of a hornet’s nest, and they were having a good fight with no officious friends near enough to interfere. The remainder of the army looked toward the fight musingly over the tops of tin cups. In time the column crawled lazily forward to see.
The Twelfth, as it crawled, saw a regiment deploy to the right, and saw a battery dash to take position. The cavalry jingled back grinning with pride and expecting to be greatly admired. Presently the Twelfth was bidden to take seat by the roadside and await its turn. Instantly the wise men—and there were more than three—came out of the east and announced that they had divined the whole plan. The Kicking Twelfth was to be held in reserve until the critical moment of the fight, and then they were to be sent forward to win a victory. In corroboration, they pointed to the fact that the general in command was sticking close to them, in order, they said, to give the word quickly at the proper moment. And in truth, on a small hill to the right, Major General Richie sat on his horse and used his glasses, while back of him his staff and the orderlies bestrode their champing, dancing mounts.
It is always good to look hard at a general, and the Kickers were transfixed with interest. The wise men again came out of the east and told what was inside the Richie head, but even the wise men wondered what was inside the Richie head.
Suddenly an exciting thing happened. To the left and ahead was a pounding Spitzbergen battery, and a toy suddenly appeared on the slope behind the guns. The toy was a man with a flag—the flag was white save for a square of red in the center. And this toy began to wigwag, wagwig, and it spoke to General Richie under the authority of the captain of the battery. It said: “The Eighty-eighth are being driven on my center and right.”
Now, when the Kicking Twelfth had left Spitzbergen there was an average of six signalmen in each company. A proportion of these signalers had been destroyed in the first engagement, but enough remained so that the Kicking Twelfth read, as a unit, the news of the Eighty-eighth. The word ran quickly. “The Eighty-eighth are being driven on my center and right.”
Richie rode to where Colonel Sponge sat aloft on his big horse, and a moment later a cry ran along the column: “Kim up, the Kickers.” A large number of the men were already in the road, hitching and twisting at their belts and packs. The Kickers moved forward.
They deployed and passed in a straggling line through the battery, and to the left and right of it. The gunners called out to them carefully, telling them not to be afraid.
The scene before them was startling. They were facing a country cut up by many steep-sided ravines, and over the resultant hills were retreating little squads of the Eighty-eighth. The Twelfth laughed in its exultation. The men could now tell by the volume of fire that the Eighty-eighth were retreating for reasons which were not sufficiently expressed in the noise of the Rostina shooting. Held together by the bugle, the Kickers swarmed up the first hill and lay on the crest. Parties of the Eighty-eighth went through their lines, and the Twelfth told them coarsely its several opinions. The sights were clicked up to 600 yards, and, with a crashing volley, the regiment entered its second battle.
A thousand yards away on the right the cavalry and a regiment of infantry were creeping onward. Sponge decided not to be backward, and the bugle told the Twelfth to go ahead once more. The Twelfth charged, followed by a rabble of rallied men of the Eighty-eighth, who were crying aloud that it had been all a mistake.
A charge in these days is not a running match. Those splendid pictures of leveled bayonets dashing a headlong pace toward the closed ranks of the enemy are absurd as soon as they are mistaken for the actuality of the present. In these days charges are likely to cover at least the half of a mile, and to go at the pace exhibited in the pictures a man would be obliged to have a little steam engine inside of him.
The charge of the Kicking Twelfth somewhat resembled the advance of a great crowd of beaters who, for some reason, passionately desired to start the game. Men stumbled; men fell; men swore. There were cries: “This way!” “Come this way!” “Don’t go that way!” “You can’t get up that way!” Over the rocks the Twelfth scrambled, red in the face, sweating and angry. Soldiers fell because they were struck by bullets and because they had not an ounce of strength left in them. Colonel Sponge, with a face like a red cushion, was being dragged windless up the steeps by devoted and athletic men. Three of the older captains lay afar back, and swearing with their eyes because their tongues were temporarily out of service.
And yet—and yet, the speed of the charge was slow. From the position of the battery, it looked as if the Kickers were taking a walk over some extremely difficult country.
The regiment ascended a superior height, and found trenches and dead men. They took seat with the dead, satisfied with this company until they could get their wind. For thirty minutes purple-faced stragglers rejoined from the rear. Colonel Sponge looked behind him, and saw that Richie, with his staff, had approached by another route, and had evidently been near enough to see the full extent of the Kickers’ exertions. Presently Richie began to pick a way for his horse toward the captured position. He disappeared in a gully between two hills.
Now it came to pass that a Spitzbergen battery on the far right took occasion to mistake the identity of the Kicking Twelfth, and the captain of these guns, not having anything to occupy him in front, directed his six 3.2’s upon the ridge where the tired Kickers lay side by side with the Rostina dead. A shrapnel came swinging over the Kickers, seething and fuming. It burst directly over the trenches, and the shrapnel, of course, scattered forward, hurting nobody. But a man screamed out to his officer: “By God, sir, that is one of our own batteries!” The whole line quivered with fright. Five more shells streaked overhead, and one flung its hail into the middle of the third battalion’s line, and the Kicking Twelfth shuddered to the very center of its heart and arose like one man and fled.
Colonel Sponge, fighting, frothing at the mouth, dealing blows with his fist right and left, found himself confronting a fury on horseback. Richie was as pale as death, and his eyes sent out sparks. “What does this conduct mean?” he flashed out between his fastened teeth.
Sponge could only gurgle: “The battery—the battery—the battery!”
“The battery?” cried Richie, in a voice which sounded like pistol shots. “Are you afraid of the guns you almost took yesterday? Go back there, you white-livered cowards! You swine! You dogs! Curs! Curs! Curs! Go back there!”
Most of the men halted and crouched under the lashing tongue of their maddened general. But one man found desperate speech, and yelled: “General, it is our own battery that is firing on us!”
Many say that the General’s face tightened until it looked like a mask. The Kicking Twelfth retired to a comfortable place, where they were only under the fire of the Ro
stina artillery. The men saw a staff officer riding over the obstructions in a manner calculated to break his neck directly.
The Kickers were aggrieved, but the heart of the colonel was cut in twain. He even babbled to his majors, talking like a man who is about to die of simple rage. “Did you hear what he said to me? Did you hear what he called us? Did you hear what he called us?”
The majors searched their minds for words to heal a deep wound.
The Twelfth received orders to go into camp upon the hill where they had been insulted. Old Sponge looked as if he were about to knock the aide out of the saddle, but he saluted and took the regiment back to the temporary companionship of the Rostina dead.
Major General Richie never apologized to Colonel Sponge. When you are a commanding officer you do not adopt the custom of apologizing for the wrong done to your subordinates. You ride away; and they understand, and are confident of the restitution to honor. Richie never opened his stern young lips to Sponge in reference to the scene near the hill of the Rostina dead, but in time there was a general order No. 20, which spoke definitely of the gallantry of His Majesty’s Twelfth regiment of the line and its colonel. In the end Sponge was given a high decoration, because he had been badly used by Richie on that day. Richie knew that it is hard for men to withstand the shrapnel of their friends.
A few days later the Kickers, marching in column on the road, came upon their friend the battery, halted in a field; and they addressed the battery, and the captain of the battery blanched to the tips of his ears. But the men of the battery told the Kickers to go to the devil—frankly, freely, placidly, told the Kickers to go to the devil.
And this story proves that it is sometimes better to be a private.
May, 1900
[Ainslee’s Magazine, Vol. 5, pp. 303–305.]
* Spitzbergen Tales.
“AND IF HE WILLS, WE MUST DIE”*
[The End of the Battle]
A sergeant, a corporal, and fourteen men of the Twelfth Regiment of the Line had been sent out to occupy a house on the main highway. They would be at least a half of a mile in advance of any other picket of their own people. Sergeant Morton was deeply angry at being sent on this duty. He said that he was overworked. There were at least two sergeants, he claimed furiously, whose turn it should have been to go on this arduous mission. He was treated unfairly; he was abused by his superiors; why did any damned fool ever join the army? As for him he would get out of it as soon as possible; he was sick of it; the life of a dog. All this he said to the corporal, who listened attentively, giving grunts of respectful assent.
On the way to this post two privates took occasion to drop to the rear and pilfer in the orchard of a deserted plantation. When the sergeant discovered this absence, he grew black with a rage which was an accumulation of all his irritations. “Run, you!” he howled. “Bring them here! I’ll show them—” A private ran swiftly to the rear. The remainder of the squad began to shout nervously at the two delinquents, whose figures they could see in the deep shade of the orchard, hurriedly picking fruit from the ground and cramming it within their shirts, next to their skins. The beseeching cries of their comrades stirred the criminals more than did the barking of the sergeant. They ran to rejoin the squad, while holding their loaded bosoms, their mouths open with aggrieved explanations.
Jones faced the sergeant with a horrible cancer marked in bumps on his left side. The disease of Patterson showed quite around the front of his waist in many protuberances. “A nice pair!” said the sergeant, with sudden frigidity. “You’re the kind of soldiers a man wants to choose for a dangerous outpost duty, ain’t you?”
The two privates stood at attention, still looking much aggrieved. “We only—” began Jones huskily.
“Oh, you ‘only’!” cried the sergeant. “Yes, you ‘only.’ I know all about that. But if you think you are going to trifle with me—”
A moment later the squad moved on toward its station. Behind the sergeant’s back Jones and Patterson were slyly passing apples and pears to their friends while the sergeant expounded eloquently to the corporal. “You see what kind of men are in the army now. Why, when I joined the regiment it was a very different thing, I can tell you. Then a sergeant had some authority, and if a man disobeyed orders, he had a very small chance of escaping something extremely serious. But now! Good God! If I report these men, the captain will look over a lot of beastly orderly sheets and say: ‘Haw, eh, well, Sergeant Morton, these men seem to have very good records; very good records, indeed. I can’t be too hard on them; no, not too hard.’ ” Continued the sergeant: “I tell you, Flagler, the army is no place for a decent man.”
Flagler, the corporal, answered with a sincerity of appreciation which with him had become a science. “I think you are right, sergeant,” he answered.
Behind them the privates mumbled discreetly. “Damn this sergeant of ours! He thinks we are made of wood. I don’t see any reason for all this strictness when we are on active service. It isn’t like being at home in barracks! There is no great harm in a couple of men dropping out to raid an orchard of the enemy when all the world knows that we haven’t had a decent meal in twenty days.”
The reddened face of Sergeant Morton suddenly showed to the rear. “A little more marching and less talking,” he said.
When he came to the house he had been ordered to occupy, the sergeant sniffed with disdain. “These people must have lived like cattle,” he said angrily. To be sure, the place was not alluring. The ground floor had been used for the housing of cattle, and it was dark and terrible. A flight of steps led to the lofty first floor, which was denuded but respectable. The sergeant’s visage lightened when he saw the strong walls of stone and cement. “Unless they turn guns on us, they will never get us out of here,” he said cheerfully to the squad. The men, anxious to keep him in an amiable mood, all hurriedly grinned and seemed very appreciative and pleased. “I’ll make this into a fortress,” he announced. He sent Jones and Patterson, the two orchard thieves, out on sentry duty. He worked the others, then, until he could think of no more things to tell them to do. Afterward he went forth, with a major general’s serious scowl, and examined the ground in front of his position. In returning he came upon a sentry, Jones, munching an apple. He sternly commanded him to throw it away.
The men spread their blankets on the floors of the bare rooms, and, putting their packs under their heads and lighting their pipes, they lived in easy peace. Bees hummed in the garden, and a scent of flowers came through the open window. A great fan-shaped bit of sunshine smote the face of one man, and he indolently cursed as he moved his primitive bed to a shadier place.
Another private explained to a comrade: “This is all nonsense anyhow. No sense in occupying this post. They—”
“But, of course,” said the corporal, “when she told me herself that she cared more for me than she did for him, I wasn’t going to stand any of his talk—” The corporal’s listener was so sleepy that he could only grunt his sympathy.
There was a sudden little spatter of shooting. A cry from Jones rang out. With no intermediate scrambling, the sergeant leaped straight to his feet. “Now,” he cried, “let us see what you are made of! If,” he added bitterly, “you are made of anything!”
A man yelled, “Good God, can’t you see you’re all tangled up in my cartridge belt?”
Another man yelled: “Keep off my legs! Can’t you walk on the floor?”
To the windows there was a blind rush of slumberous men who brushed hair from their eyes even as they made ready their rifles. Jones and Patterson came stumbling up the steps, crying dreadful information. Already the enemy’s bullets were spitting and singing over the house.
The sergeant suddenly was stiff and cold with a sense of the importance of the thing. “Wait until you see one,” he drawled loudly and calmly, “then shoot.”
For some moments the enemy’s bullets swung swifter than lightning over the house without anybody being able to discover a target. I
n this interval a man was shot in the throat. He gurgled, and then lay down on the floor. The blood slowly waved down the brown skin of his neck while he looked meekly at his comrades.
There was a howl. “There they are! There they come!” The rifles crackled. A light smoke drifted idly through the rooms. There was a strong odor as if from burnt paper and the powder of firecrackers. The men were silent. Through the windows and about the house the bullets of an entirely invisible enemy moaned, hummed, spat, burst, and sang.
The men began to curse. “Why can’t we see them?” they muttered through their teeth. The sergeant was still frigid. He answered soothingly, as if he were directly reprehensible for this behavior of the enemy. “Wait a moment. You will soon be able to see them. There! Give it to them.” A little skirt of black figures had appeared in a field. It was really like shooting at an upright needle from the full length of a ballroom. But the men’s spirits improved as soon as the enemy—this mysterious enemy—became a tangible thing, and far off. They had believed the foe to be shooting at them from the adjacent garden.
“Now,” said the sergeant ambitiously, “we can beat them off easily if you men are good enough.”
A man called out in a tone of quick, great interest. “See that fellow on horseback, Bill? Isn’t he on horseback? I thought he was on horseback.”
There was a fusillade against another side of the house. The sergeant dashed into the room which commanded that situation. He found a dead soldier on the floor. He rushed out howling: “When was Knowles killed? When was Knowles killed? Damn it, when was Knowles killed?” It was absolutely essential to find out the exact moment this man died. A blackened private turned upon his sergeant and demanded: “How in hell do I know?” Sergeant Morton had a sense of anger so brief that in the next second he cried: “Patterson!” He had even forgotten his vital interest in the time of Knowles’s death.