“They wouldn’t hear of it. They said you would have to take a staff appointment, where people could look after you.”
“Well, let them look after me,” cried Caspar resentfully; “but when there’s any fighting to be done I guess I won’t necessarily be the last man.”
“That’s it,” responded the Senator. “That’s the spirit.” They both thought that the problem of war would eliminate to an equation of actual battle.
Ultimately Caspar departed into the South to an encampment in salty grass under pine trees. Here lay an Army corps twenty thousand strong. Caspar passed into the dusty sunshine of it, and for many weeks he was lost to view.
II
“Of course I don’t know a blamed thing about it,” said Caspar frankly and modestly to a circle of his fellow staff officers. He was referring to the duties of his office.
Their faces became expressionless; they looked at him with eyes in which he could fathom nothing. After a pause one politely said, “Don’t you?” It was the inevitable two words of convention.
“Why,” cried Caspar, “I didn’t know what a commissary officer was until I was one. My old Guv’nor told me. He’d looked it up in a book somewhere, I suppose; but I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t you?”
The young man’s face glowed with sudden humor. “Do you know, the word was intimately associated in my mind with camels. Funny, eh? I think it came from reading that rhyme of Kipling’s about the commissariat camel.”
“Did it?”
“Yes. Funny, isn’t it? Camels!”
The brigade was ultimately landed at Siboney as part of an army to attack Santiago. The scene at the landing sometimes resembled the inspiriting daily drama at the approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. There was a great bustle, during which the wise man kept his property gripped in his hands lest it might march off into the wilderness in the pocket of one of the striding regiments. Truthfully, Caspar should have had frantic occupation, but men saw him wandering bootlessly here and there, crying, “Has any one seen my saddlebags? Why, if I lose them I’m ruined. I’ve got everything packed away in ’em. Everything!”
They looked at him gloomily and without attention. “No,” they said. It was to intimate that they would not give a rip if he had lost his nose, his teeth, and his self-respect. Reilly’s brigade collected itself from the boats and went off, each regiment’s soul burning with anger because some other regiment was in advance of it. Moving along through the scrub and under the palms, men talked mostly of things that did not pertain to the business in hand.
General Reilly finally planted his headquarters in some tall grass under a mango tree. “Where’s Cadogan?” he said suddenly as he took off his hat and smoothed the wet gray hair from his brow. Nobody knew. “I saw him looking for his saddlebags down at the landing,” said an officer dubiously. “Bother him,” said the General contemptuously. “Let him stay there.”
Three venerable regimental commanders came, saluted stiffly, and sat in the grass. There was a powwow, during which Reilly explained much that the division commander had told him. The venerable colonels nodded; they understood. Everything was smooth and clear to their minds. But still, the colonel of the Forty-fourth Regular Infantry murmured about the commissariat. His men—and then he launched forth in a sentiment concerning the privations of his men in which you were confronted with his feeling that his men—his men were the only creatures of importance in the universe, which feeling was entirely correct for him. Reilly grunted. He did what most commanders did. He set the competent line to doing the work of the incompetent part of the staff.
In time Caspar came trudging along the road merrily swinging his saddlebags. “Well, General,” he cried as he saluted, “I found ’em.”
“Did you?” said Reilly. Later an officer rushed to him tragically: “General, Cadogan is off there in the bushes eatin’ potted ham and crackers all by himself.” The officer was sent back into the bushes for Caspar, and the General sent Caspar with an order. Then Reilly and the three venerable colonels, grinning, partook of potted ham and crackers. “Tashe a’ right,” said Reilly, with his mouth full. “Dorsey, see if ’e got some’n else.”
“Mush be selfish young pig,” said one of the colonels, with his mouth full. “Who’s he, General?”
“Son—Sen’tor Cad’gan—ol’ frien’ mine—dash ’im.”
Caspar wrote a letter:
“Dear Father: I am sitting under a tree using the flattest part of my canteen for a desk. Even as I write the division ahead of us is moving forward and we don’t know what moment the storm of battle may break out. I don’t know what the plans are. General Reilly knows, but he is so good as to give me very little of his confidence. In fact, I might be part of a forlorn hope from all to the contrary I’ve heard from him. I understood you to say in Washington that you at one time had been of some service to him, but if that is true I can assure you he has completely forgotten it. At times his manner to me is little short of being offensive, but of course I understand that it is only the way of a crusty old soldier who has been made boorish and bearish by a long life among the Indians. I dare say I shall manage it all right without a row.
“When you hear that we have captured Santiago, please send me by first steamer a box of provisions and clothing, particularly sardines, pickles, and lightweight underwear. The other men on the staff are nice quiet chaps, but they seem a bit crude. There has been no fighting yet save the skirmish by Young’s brigade. Reilly was furious because we couldn’t get in it. I met General Peel yesterday. He was very nice. He said he knew you well when he was in Congress. Young Jack May is on Peel’s staff. I knew him well in college. We spent an hour talking over old times. Give my love to all at home.”
The march was leisurely. Reilly and his staff strolled out to the head of the long, sinuous column and entered the sultry gloom of the forest. Some less fortunate regiments had to wait among the trees at the side of the trail, and as Reilly’s brigade passed them, officer called to officer, classmate to classmate, and in these greetings rang a note of everything from West Point to Alaska. They were going into an action in which they, the officers, would lose over a hundred in killed and wounded—officers alone—and these greetings, in which many nicknames occurred, were in many cases farewells such as one pictures being given with ostentation, solemnity, fervor. “There goes Gory Widgeon! Hello, Gory! Where you starting for? Hey, Gory!”
Caspar communed with himself and decided that he was not frightened. He was eager and alert; he thought that now his obligation to his country, or himself, was to be faced, and he was mad to prove to old Reilly and the others that after all he was a very capable soldier.
III
Old Reilly was stumping along the line of his brigade and mumbling like a man with a mouthful of grass. The fire from the enemy’s position was incredible in its swift fury, and Reilly’s brigade was getting its share of a very bad ordeal. The old man’s face was of the color of the tomato, and in his rage he mouthed and sputtered strangely. As he pranced along his thin line, scornfully erect, voices arose from the grass beseeching him to take care of himself. At his heels scrambled a bugler with pallid skin and clenched teeth, a chalky, trembling youth, who kept his eye on old Reilly’s back and followed it.
The old gentleman was quite mad. Apparently he thought the whole thing a dreadful mess, but now that his brigade was irrevocably in it he was full-tilting here and everywhere to establish some irreproachable, immaculate kind of behavior on the part of every man-jack in his brigade. The intentions of the three venerable colonels were the same. They stood behind their lines, quiet, stern, courteous old fellows, admonishing their regiments to be very pretty in the face of such a hail of magazine-rifle and machine-gun fire as had never in this world been confronted save by beardless savages when the white man had found occasion to take his burden to some new place.
And the regiments were pretty. The men lay on their little stomachs, and got peppered according to the law, an
d said nothing as the good blood pumped out into the grass; and even if a solitary rookie tried to get a decent reason to move to some haven of rational men, the cold voice of an officer made him look criminal with a shame that was a credit to his regimental education. Behind Reilly’s command was a bullet-torn jungle through which it could not move as a brigade; ahead of it were Spanish trenches on hills. Reilly considered that he was in a fix, no doubt; but he said this only to himself. Suddenly he saw on the right a little point of blue-shirted men already halfway up the hill. It was some pathetic fragment of the Sixth United States Infantry. Chagrined, shocked, horrified, Reilly bellowed to his bugler, and the chalk-faced youth unlocked his teeth and sounded the charge by rushes.
The men formed hastily and grimly, and rushed. Apparently there awaited them only the fate of respectable soldiers. But they went because—of the opinions of others, perhaps. They went because—no loud-mouthed lot of jailbirds such as the Twenty-seventh Infantry could do anything that they could not do better. They went because Reilly ordered it. They went because they went.
And yet not a man of them to this day has made a public speech explaining precisely how he did the whole thing and detailing with what initiative and ability he comprehended and defeated a situation which he did not comprehend at all.
Reilly never saw the top of the hill. He was heroically striving to keep up with his men when a bullet ripped quietly through his left lung, and he fell back into the arms of the bugler, who received him as he would have received a Christmas present. The three venerable colonels inherited the brigade in swift succession. The senior commanded for about fifty seconds, at the end of which he was mortally shot. Before they could get the news to the next in rank he, too, was shot. The junior colonel ultimately arrived with a lean and puffing little brigade at the top of the hill. The men lay down and fired volleys at whatever was practicable.
In and out of the ditch-like trenches lay the Spanish dead, lemon-faced corpses dressed in shabby blue-and-white ticking. Some were huddled down comfortably like sleeping children; one had died in the attitude of a man flung back in a dentist’s chair; one sat in the trench with his chin sunk despondently to his breast; few preserved a record of the agitation of battle. With the greater number it was as if death had touched them so gently, so lightly, that they had not known of it. Death had come to them rather in the form of an opiate than of a bloody blow.
But the arrived men in the blue shirts had no thought of the sallow corpses. They were eagerly exchanging a hail of shots with the Spanish second line, whose ash-colored entrenchments barred the way to a city white amid trees. In the pauses the men talked.
“We done the best. Old E Company got there. Why, one time the hull of B Company was behind us.”
“Jones, he was the first man up. I saw ’im.”
“Which Jones?”
“Did you see ol’ Two-bars runnin’ like a land crab? Made good time, too. He hit only in the high places. He’s all right.”
“The lootenant is all right, too. He was a good ten yards ahead of the best of us. I hated him at the post, but for this here active service there’s none of ’em can touch him.”
“This is mighty different from being at the post.”
“Well, we done it, an’ it wasn’t b’cause I thought it could be done. When we started, I ses to m’self: ‘Well, here goes a lot o’ damned fools.’ ”
“ ’Tain’t over yet.”
“Oh, they’ll never git us back from here. If they start to chase us back from here we’ll pile ’em up so high the last ones can’t climb over. We’ve come this far, an’ we’ll stay here. I ain’t done pantin’.”
“Anything is better than packin’ through that jungle an’ gettin’ blistered from front, rear, an’ both flanks. I’d rather tackle another hill than go trailin’ in them woods, so thick you can’t tell whether you are one man or a division of cav’lry.”
“Where’s that young kitchen-soldier, Cadogan, or whatever his name is? Ain’t seen him today.”
“Well, I seen him. He was right in with it. He got shot, too, about half up the hill, in the leg. I seen it. He’s all right. Don’t worry about him. He’s all right.”
“I seen ’im, too. He done his stunt. As soon as I can git this piece of barbed wire entanglement out o’ me throat I’ll give ’m a cheer.”
“He ain’t shot at all, b’cause there he stands, there. See ’im?”
Rearward, the grassy slope was populous with little groups of men searching for the wounded. Reilly’s brigade began to dig with its bayonets and shovel with its meat-ration cans.
IV
Senator Cadogan paced to and fro in his private parlor and smoked small brown, weak cigars. These little wisps seemed utterly inadequate to console such a ponderous satrap.
It was the evening of the 1st of July, 1898, and the Senator was immensely excited, as could be seen from the superlatively calm way in which he called out to his private secretary, who was in an adjoining room. The voice was serene, gentle, affectionate, low.
“Baker, I wish you’d go over again to the War Department and see if they’ve heard anything about Caspar.”
A very bright-eyed, hatchet-faced young man appeared in a doorway, pen still in hand. He was hiding a nettle-like irritation behind all the finished audacity of a smirking, sharp, lying, trustworthy young politician. “I’ve just got back from there, sir,” he suggested.
The Skowmulligan war horse lifted his eyes and looked for a short second into the eyes of his private secretary. It was not a glare or an eagle glance; it was something beyond the practice of an actor; it was simply meaning. The clever private secretary grabbed his hat and was at once enthusiastically away. “All right, sir,” he cried. “I’ll find out.”
The War Department was ablaze with light, and messengers were running. With the assurance of a retainer of an old house Baker made his way through much small-caliber vociferation. There was rumor of a big victory; there was rumor of a big defeat. In the corridors various watchdogs arose from their armchairs and asked him of his business in tones of uncertainty which in no wise compared with their previous habitual deference to the private secretary of the war horse of Skowmulligan.
Ultimately Baker arrived in a room where some kind of head clerk sat writing feverishly at a roll-top desk. Baker asked a question, and the head clerk mumbled profanely without lifting his head. Apparently he said: “How in the blankety-blank blazes do I know?”
The private secretary let his jaw fall. Surely some new spirit had come suddenly upon the heart of Washington—a spirit which Baker understood to be almost defiantly indifferent to the wishes of Senator Cadogan, a spirit which was not courteously oily. What could it mean? Baker’s foxlike mind sprang wildly to a conception of overturned factions, changed friends, new combinations. The assurance which had come from experience of a broad political situation suddenly left him, and he would not have been amazed if some one had told him that Senator Cadogan now controlled only six votes in the State of Skowmulligan. “Well,” he stammered in his bewilderment, “well—there isn’t any news of the old man’s son, hey?” Again the head clerk replied blasphemously.
Eventually Baker retreated in disorder from the presence of this head clerk, having learned that the latter did not give a damn if Caspar Cadogan were sailing through Hades on an ice yacht.
Baker stormed other and more formidable officials. In fact, he struck as high as he dared. They one and all flung him short, hard words, even as men pelt an annoying cur with pebbles. He emerged from the brilliant light, from the groups of men with anxious, puzzled faces, and as he walked back to the hotel he did not know if his name were Baker or Cholmondeley.
However, as he walked up the stairs to the Senator’s rooms he contrived to concentrate his intellect upon a manner of speaking.
The war horse was still pacing his parlor and smoking. He paused at Baker’s entrance. “Well?”
“Mr. Cadogan,” said the private secretary coolly, “th
ey told me at the Department that they did not give a cuss whether your son was alive or dead.”
The Senator looked at Baker and smiled gently. “What’s that, my boy?” he asked in a soft and considerate voice.
“They said—” gulped Baker, with a certain tenacity. “They said that they didn’t give a cuss whether your son was alive or dead.”
There was a silence for the space of three seconds. Baker stood like an image; he had no machinery for balancing the issues of this kind of situation, and he seemed to feel that if he stood as still as a stone frog he would escape the ravages of a terrible Senatorial wrath which was about to break forth in a hurricane speech which would snap off trees and sweep away barns. “Well,” drawled the Senator lazily, “who did you see, Baker?”
The private secretary resumed a certain usual manner of breathing. He told the names of the men whom he had seen.
“Ye-e-es,” remarked the Senator. He took another little brown cigar and held it with a thumb and first finger, staring at it with the calm and steady scrutiny of a scientist investigating a new thing. “So they don’t care whether Caspar is alive or dead, eh? Well … maybe they don’t.… That’s all right.… However … I think I’ll just look in on ’em and state my views.”
When the Senator had gone, the private secretary ran to the window and leaned afar out. Pennsylvania Avenue was gleaming silver blue in the light of many arc-lamps; the cable trains groaned along to the clangor of gongs; from the window, the walks presented a hardly diversified aspect of shirt-waists and straw hats. Sometimes a newsboy screeched.
Baker watched the tall, heavy figure of the Senator moving out to intercept a cable train. “Great Scott!” cried the private secretary to himself, “there’ll be three distinct kinds of grand, plain practical fireworks. The old man is going for ’em. I wouldn’t be in Lascum’s boots. Ye gods, what a row there’ll be.”