The Last Shot. Frederick Palmer
nations. Each generation must send forth its valorous and adventurous youth to the proof of its manhood in battle, while those who survived wounds and disease became the heroes of their reminiscences, inciting the younger generation to emulation. With each step in the evolution learning had spread and civilization developed.
Since the last war universal conscription had gone hand in hand with popular education and the telegraphic click of the news of the world to all breakfast tables and cheap travel and better living. Every private of the five millions was a scholar compared to the old baron; he had a broader horizon than the first Galland. In the name of defence, to hold their borders secure, the great powers were straining their resources to strengthen the forces that kept an armed peace. Evolution never ceases. What next?
In a group of the members of Company B, who dropped on a bench in the barrack room, were the sons of a farmer, a barber, a butcher, an army officer, a day-laborer, a judge, a blacksmith, a rich man's valet, a banker, a doctor, a manufacturer, and a small shopkeeper.
"Six months more and my tour is up!" cried the judge's son.
"Six months more for me!"
"Now you're counting!"
"And for me—one, two, three, four, five, six!"
"Oh, don't rub it in," the manufacturer's son shouted above the chorus, "you old fellows! I've a year and six months more."
"Here, too!" chimed in the banker's son. "A year and six months more of iron spoons and tin cups and army shoes and army fare and early rising. Hep-hep-hep, drill-drill-drill, and drudgery!"
"Oh, I don't know!" said the day-laborer's son. "I don't have to get up any earlier than I do at home, and I don't have to work as hard as I'll have to when I leave."
"Nor I!" agreed the blacksmith's son. "It's a kind of holiday for me."
"Holiday!" the banker's son gasped. "That's so," he added thoughtfully, and smiled gratefully over a fate that had been indulgent to him in a matter of fathers and limousines.
"Look at the newspapers! Maybe we shall be going to war," said the manufacturer's son.
"Stuff! Nonsense!" said the judge's son. "We are always having scares. They sell papers and give the fellows at the Foreign Office a chance to look unconcerned. But let's have the opinion of an international expert, of the great and only philosopher, guide, companion, and friend. What do you think of the crisis, eh, Hugo? Soberly, now. The fate of nations may hang on your words. If not, at least the price of a ginger soda!"
It was around Hugo Mallin that the group had formed. Groups were always forming around Hugo. He could spring the unexpected and incongruous and make people laugh. Slight but wiry of physique, he had light hair, a freckled and rather nondescript nose, large brown eyes, and a broad, sensitive mouth. Nature had not attempted any regularity of features in his case. She had been content with making each one a mobile servant of his mind. In repose his face was homely, and it was a mask.
"Come on, Hugo! Out with it!"
Hugo's brow contracted; the lines of the mask were drawn in deliberate seriousness.
"I never hear war mentioned that I don't have a shiver right down my spine, as I did when I was a little boy and went into the cellar without a light," he replied.
"Fear?" exclaimed Eugene Aronson, the farmer's son, whose big, plain face expressed dumb incomprehension. He alone was standing. Being the giant and the athlete of the company, the march had not tired him.
"Fear?" some of the others repeated. The sentiment was astounding, and Hugo was as manifestly in earnest as if he were a minister addressing a parliamentary chamber.
"Yes, don't you?" asked Hugo, in bland surprise.
"I should say not!" declared Eugene.
"Do you want to be killed?" asked Hugo, with profound interest.
"The bullet isn't made that will get me!" answered Eugene, throwing back his broad shoulders.
"I don't know," mused Hugo, eying the giant up and down. "You're pretty big, Gene, and a bullet that only nicked one of us in the bark might get you in the wood. However, if you are sure that you are in no danger, why, you don't count. But let's take a census while we are about it and see who wants to be killed. First, you, Armand; do you?" he asked the doctor's son, Armand Daution.
Armand grinned. The others grinned, not at him, but at the quizzical solemnity of Hugo's manner.
"If so, state whether you prefer bullets or shrapnel, early in the campaign or late, à la carte or table d'hôte, morning or—" Hugo went on.
But laughter drowned the sentence, though Hugo's face was without a smile.
"You ought to go on the stage!" some one exclaimed.
"If it were as easy to amuse a pay audience as you fellows, I might," Hugo replied. "But I've another question," he pursued. "Do you think that the fellows on the other side of the frontier want to be killed?"
"No danger! They'll give in. They always do," said Eugene.
"I confess that it hardly seems reasonable to make war over the Bodlapoo affair!" This from the judge's son.
"Over some hot weather, some swamp, and some black policemen in Africa," said Hugo.
"But they hauled down our flag!" exclaimed the army officer's son.
"On their territory, they say. We were the aggressors," Hugo interposed.
"It was our flag!" said Eugene.
"But we wouldn't want them to put up their flag on our territory, would we?" Hugo asked.
"Let them try it!" thundered Eugene, with a full breath from the big bellows in his broad chest. "Hugo, I don't like to hear you talk that way," he added, shaking his head sadly. Such views from a friend really hurt him; indeed, he was almost lugubrious. This brought another laugh.
"Don't you see he's getting you, Gene?"
"He's acting!"
"He always gets you, you old simpleton!" The judge's son gave Eugene an affectionate dig in the ribs.
Eugene was well liked and in the way that a big Saint Bernard dog is liked. At the latest man[oe]uvres, on the night that their division had made a rapid flank movement, without any apparent sense that his own load was the heavier for it, he had carried the rifle and pack of Peter Kinderling, a valet's pasty-faced little son "Peterkin," as he was called, was the stupid of Company B. Being generally inoffensive, the butt of the drill sergeant, who thought that he would never learn even the manual of arms, and rounding out the variety of characters which makes for fellowship, he was regarded with a sympathetic kindliness by his comrades.
"But I don't think you ought to joke about the flag That's sacred!" declared Eugene.
"Now you're talking!" said Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son, who sat on the other side of the bench from Eugene. He was heavily built, with an undershot jaw and a patch of liverish birthmark on his cheek.
"Yes," piped Peterkin, who had an opinion when the two strong men of the company agreed on any subject. But he spoke tentatively, nevertheless. He was taking no risks.
"Oh, if we went to war the Bodlapoo affair would be only an excuse," said the manufacturer's son. "We shall go to war as a matter of broad national policy."
"Right you are!" agreed the banker's son. "No emotion about it. Emotion as an international quantity is dead. Everything is business now in this business age."
"Killing people as a broad international policy!" mused Hugo sotto voce, as if this were a matter of his own thoughts.
The others scarcely heard him as the manufacturer's son struck his fist in the palm of his hand resoundingly to demand attention.
"We need room in which to expand. We have eighty million people to their fifty, while our territory is only