The Last Shot. Frederick Palmer
Table of Contents
THE DIVIDENDS OF POWER
Westerling realized that the question of marriage as a social requirement might arise when he should become officially chief of staff with the retirement of His Excellency the field-marshal. For the present he enjoyed his position as a bachelor who was the most favored man in the army too much to think of marriage. This did not imply an absence of fondness for women; rather the contrary. He liked sitting next to a beautiful neck and shoulders and having a pair of feminine eyes sparkle into his at dinner; though, with rare exceptions, not the same neck and shoulders on succeeding nights. His natural sense of organization divided women into two classes: those of family and wealth, whom he met at great houses, and those purring kittens who live in small flats. Both afforded him diversion. A woman had been the most telling influence in making him vice-chief of staff; an affair to which gossip gave the breath of scandal had been an argument against him.
It was a little surprising that the bell that the girl of seventeen had rung in his secret mind when he was on one of the first rounds of the ladder, now lost in the mists of a lower stratum of existence, should ever tinkle again. … Yet he had heard its note in the tone of her prophecy with each step in his promotion; and while the other people whom he had known at La Tir were the vaguest shadows of personalities, her picture was as definite in detail as when she said: "You have the will! You have the ambition!" She had recognized in him the power that he felt; foreseen his ascent to the very apex of the pyramid. She was still unmarried, which was strange; for she had not been bad-looking and she was of a fine old family. What was she like now? Commonplace and provincial, most likely. Many of the people he had known in his early days appeared so when he met them again. But, at the worst, he looked for an interesting half-hour.
The throbbing activity of the streets of the capital, as his car proceeded on the way to her hotel, formed an energetic accompaniment to his gratifying backward survey of how all his plans had worked out from the very day of the prophecy. Had he heard the remark of a great manufacturer to the banker at his side in a passing limousine, "There goes the greatest captain of industry of us all!" Westerling would only have thought: "Certainly. I am chief of staff. I am at the head of all your workmen at one time or another!" Had he heard the banker's answer, "But pretty poor pay, pretty small dividends!" he would have thought: "Splendid dividends—the dividends of power!"
He had a caste contempt for the men of commerce, with their mercenary talk about credit and market prices; and also for the scientists, doctors, engineers, and men of other professions, who spoke of things in books which he did not understand. Reading books was one of the faults of Turcas, his assistant. No bookish soldier, he knew, had ever been a great general. He resented the growing power of these leaders of the civil world, taking distinction away from the military, even when, as a man of parts, he had to court their influence. His was the profession that was and ever should be the elect. A penniless subaltern was a gentleman, while he could never think of a man hi business as one.
All the faces in the street belonged to a strange, busy world outside his interest and thoughts. They formed what was known as the public, often making a clatter About things which they did not understand, when they Should obey the orders of their superiors. Of late, their clatter had been about the extra taxes for the recent increase of the standing forces by another corps. The public was bovine with a parrot's head. Yet it did not admire the toiling ox, but the eagle and the lion.
As his car came to the park his eyes lighted at sight of one of the dividends—one feature of urban life that ever gave him a thrill. A battalion of the 128th, which he had ordered that afternoon to the very garrison at South La Tir that he had once commanded, was marching through the main avenue. Youths all, of twenty-one or two, they were in a muddy-grayish uniform which was the color of the plain as seen from the veranda of the Galland house.
Around them, in a mighty, pervasive monotone, was the roar of city traffic, broken by the nearer sounds of the cries of children playing in the sand piles, the bark of motor horns, the screech of small boys' velocipedes on the paths of the park; while they themselves were silent, except for the rhythmic tramp of the military shoes of identical pattern, as was every article of their clothing and equipment from head to foot, whose character had been the subject of the weightiest deliberation of the staff.
How much can a soldier carry and how best carry it easily? What shoes are the most serviceable for marching and yet cheap? Nothing was so precise in all their surroundings, nothing seemed so resolutely dependable as this column of soldiers. They were the last word in filling human tissue into a mould for a set task. Where these came from were other boys growing up to take their places. The mothers of the nation were doing their duty. All the land was a breeding-ground for the dividends of Hedworth Westerling.
At the far side of the park he saw another kind of dividend—another group of marching men. These were not in uniform. They were the unemployed. Many were middle-aged, with worn, tired faces. Beside the flag of the country at the head of the procession was that of universal radicalism. And his car had to stop to let them pass. For an instant the indignation of military autocracy rose strong within him at sight of the national colors in such company. But he noted how naturally the men kept step; the solidarity of their movement. The stamp of their army service in youth could not be easily removed. He realized the advantage of heading an army in which defence was not dependent on a mixture of regulars and volunteers, but on universal conscription that brought every able-bodied man under discipline.
These reservists, in the event of war, would hear the call of race and they would fight for the one flag that then had any significance. Yes, the old human impulses would predominate and the only enemy would be on the other side of the frontier. They would be pawns of his will—the will that Marta Galland had said would make him chief of staff.
Wasn't war the real cure for the general unrest? Wasn't the nation growing stale from the long peace? He was ready for war now that he had become vice-chief, when the retirement of His Excellency, unable to bear the weight of his years and decorations in the field, would make him the supreme commander. One ambition gained, he heard the appeal of another: to live to see the guns and rifles that had fired only blank cartridges in practice pouring out shells and bullets, and all the battalions that had played at sham war in man[oe]uvres engaged in real war, under his direction. He saw his columns sweeping up the slopes of the Brown range. Victory was certain. He would be the first to lead a great modern army against a great modern army; his place as the master of modern tactics secure in the minds of all the soldiers of the world. The public would forget its unrest in the thrill of battles won and provinces conquered, and its clatter would be that of acclaim for a new idol of its old faith.
V
OFF TO THE FRONTIER
Ranks broken in the barracks yard, backs free of packs, shoulders free of rifles, the men of the first battalion of the 28th, which Westerling had seen marching through the park, had no thought except the prospect of the joyous lassitude of resting muscles and of loosening tongues that had been silent on the march. They were simply tired human beings in the democracy of a common life and service.
The 128th had been recruited from a province in the high country distant from the capital. In the days of Maria's old baron, a baron of the same type had plundered their ancestors, and in the days of the first Galland they formed a principality frequently at war with their neighbors of the same blood and language. At length they had united with their neighbors who had in turn united with other neighbors, forming the present nation of the Grays, which vented its fighting spirit against