The Complete Works of Stephen Crane (194 page)

As the
Chicken
rounded the
Holy Moses
and started inshore, a man called to him from the depths of finished disgust. “They’re takin’ to their boats, sir.” Pent looked and saw the men of the anchored gunboat lower their boats and pull like mad for shore.

The
Chicken
, assisted by the
Holy Moses
, began a methodical killing of the anchored gunboat. The Spanish infantry on shore fired frenziedly at the
Chicken
. Pent, giving the wheel to a waiting sailor, stepped out to a point where he could see the men at the guns. One bullet spanged past him and into the pilot-house. He ducked his head into the window. “That hit you, Murry?” he inquired with interest.

“No, sir,” cheerfully responded the man at the wheel.

Pent became very busy superintending the fire of his absurd battery. The anchored gunboat simply would not sink. It evinced that unnatural stubbornness which is sometimes displayed by inanimate objects. The gunboat at the wharf had sunk as if she had been scuttled but this riddled thing at anchor would not even take fire. Pent began to grow flurried — privately. He could not stay there for ever. Why didn’t the damned gunboat admit its destruction. Why ——

He was at the forward gun when one of his engine room force came to him and, after saluting, said serenely: “The men at the after-gun are all down, sir.”

It was one of those curious lifts which an enlisted man, without in any way knowing it, can give his officer. The impudent tranquillity of the man at once set Pent to rights and the stoker departed admiring the extraordinary coolness of his captain.

The next few moments contained little but heat, an odour, applied mechanics and an expectation of death. Pent developed a fervid and amazed appreciation of the men, his men, men he knew very well, but strange men. What explained them? He was doing his best because he was captain of the
Chicken
and he lived or died by the
Chicken
. But what could move these men to watch his eye in bright anticipation of his orders and then obey them with enthusiastic rapidity? What caused them to speak of the action as some kind of a joke — particularly when they knew he could overhear them? What manner of men? And he anointed them secretly with his fullest affection.

Perhaps Pent did not think all this during the battle. Perhaps he thought it so soon after the battle that his full mind became confused as to the time. At any rate, it stands as an expression of his feeling.

The enemy had gotten a field-gun down to the shore and with it they began to throw three-inch shells at the
Chicken
. In this war it was usual that the down-trodden Spaniards in their ignorance should use smokeless powder while the Americans, by the power of the consistent everlasting three-ply, wire-woven, double back-action imbecility of a hay-seed government, used powder which on sea and on land cried their position to heaven, and, accordingly, good men got killed without reason. At first, Pent could not locate the field-gun at all, but as soon as he found it, he ran aft with one man and brought the after six-pounder again into action. He paid little heed to the old gun crew. One was lying on his face apparently dead; another was prone with a wound in the chest, while the third sat with his back to the deck-house holding a smitten arm. This last one called out huskily, “Give’m hell, sir.”

The minutes of the battle were either days, years, or they were flashes of a second. Once Pent looking up was astonished to see three shell holes in the
Chicken’s
funnel — made surreptitiously, so to speak…. “If we don’t silence that field-gun, she’ll sink us, boys.” … The eyes of the man sitting with his back against the deck-house were looking from out his ghastly face at the new gun-crew. He spoke with the supreme laziness of a wounded man. “Give’m hell.” … Pent felt a sudden twist of his shoulder. He was wounded — slightly…. The anchored gunboat was in flames.

VII

Pent took his little blood-stained tow-boat out to the
Holy Moses
. The yacht was already under way for the bay entrance. As they were passing out of range the Spaniards heroically redoubled their fire — which is their custom. Pent, moving busily about the decks, stopped suddenly at the door of the engine-room. His face was set and his eyes were steely. He spoke to one of the engineers. “During the action I saw you firing at the enemy with a rifle. I told you once to stop, and then I saw you at it again. Pegging away with a rifle is no part of your business. I want you to understand that you are in trouble.” The humbled man did not raise his eyes from the deck. Presently the
Holy Moses
displayed an anxiety for the
Chicken’s
health.

“One killed and four wounded, sir.”

“Have you enough men left to work your ship?”

After deliberation, Pent answered: “No, sir.”

“Shall I send you assistance?”

“No, sir. I can get to sea all right.”

As they neared the point they were edified by the sudden appearance of a serio-comic ally. The
Chancellorville
at last had been unable to stand the strain, and had sent in her launch with an ensign, five seamen and a number of marksmen marines. She swept hot-foot around the point, bent on terrible slaughter; the one-pounder of her bow presented a formidable appearance. The
Holy Moses
and the
Chicken
laughed until they brought indignation to the brow of the young ensign. But he forgot it when with some of his men he boarded the
Chicken
to do what was possible for the wounded. The nearest surgeon was aboard the
Chancellorville
. There was absolute silence on board the cruiser as the
Holy Moses
steamed up to report. The blue-jackets listened with all their ears. The commander of the yacht spoke slowly into his megaphone: “We have — destroyed — the two — gun-boats — sir.” There was a burst of confused cheering on the forecastle of the
Chancellorville
, but an officer’s cry quelled it.

“Very — good. Will — you — come aboard?”

Two correspondents were already on the deck of the cruiser. Before the last of the wounded were hoisted aboard the cruiser the
Adolphus
was on her way to Key West. When she arrived at that port of desolation Shackles fled to file the telegrams and the other correspondents fled to the hotel for clothes, good clothes, clean clothes; and food, good food, much food; and drink, much drink, any kind of drink.

Days afterward, when the officers of the noble squadron received the newspapers containing an account of their performance, they looked at each other somewhat dejectedly: “Heroic assault — grand daring of Boatswain Pent — superb accuracy of the
Holy Moses’
fire — gallant tars of the
Chicken
— their names should be remembered as long as America stands — terrible losses of the enemy — —”

When the Secretary of the Navy ultimately read the report of Commander Surrey, S.O.P., he had to prick himself with a dagger in order to remember that anything at all out of the ordinary had occurred.

THE
SERGEANT’S
PRIVATE
MADHOUSE

The moonlight was almost steady blue flame and all this radiance was lavished out upon a still lifeless wilderness of stunted trees and cactus plants. The shadows lay upon the ground, pools of black and sharply outlined, resembling substances, fabrics, and not shadows at all. From afar came the sound of the sea coughing among the hollows in the coral rock.

The land was very empty; one could easily imagine that Cuba was a simple vast solitude; one could wonder at the moon taking all the trouble of this splendid illumination. There was no wind; nothing seemed to live.

But in a particular large group of shadows lay an outpost of some forty United States marines. If it had been possible to approach them from any direction without encountering one of their sentries, one could have gone stumbling among sleeping men and men who sat waiting, their blankets tented over their heads; one would have been in among them before one’s mind could have decided whether they were men or devils. If a marine moved, he took the care and the time of one who walks across a death-chamber. The lieutenant in command reached for his watch and the nickel chain gave forth the faintest tinkling sound. He could see the glistening five or six pairs of eyes that slowly turned to regard him. His sergeant lay near him and he bent his face down to whisper. “Who’s on post behind the big cactus plant?”

“Dryden,” rejoined the sergeant just over his breath.

After a pause the lieutenant murmured: “He’s got too many nerves. I shouldn’t have put him there.” The sergeant asked if he should crawl down and look into affairs at Dryden’s post. The young officer nodded assent and the sergeant, softly cocking his rifle, went away on his hands and knees. The lieutenant with his back to a dwarf tree, sat watching the sergeant’s progress for the few moments that he could see him moving from one shadow to another. Afterward, the officer waited to hear Dryden’s quick but low-voiced challenge, but time passed and no sound came from the direction of the post behind the cactus bush.

The sergeant, as he came nearer and nearer to this cactus bush — a number of peculiarly dignified columns throwing shadows of inky darkness — had slowed his pace, for he did not wish to trifle with the feelings of the sentry, and he was expecting the stern hail and was ready with the immediate answer which turns away wrath. He was not made anxious by the fact that he could not yet see Dryden, for he knew that the man would be hidden in a way practised by sentry marines since the time when two men had been killed by a disease of excessive confidence on picket. Indeed, as the sergeant went still nearer, he became more and more angry. Dryden was evidently a most proper sentry.

Finally he arrived at a point where he could see Dryden seated in the shadow, staring into the bushes ahead of him, his rifle ready on his knee. The sergeant in his rage longed for the peaceful precincts of the Washington Marine Barracks where there would have been no situation to prevent the most complete non-commissioned oratory. He felt indecent in his capacity of a man able to creep up to the back of a G Company member on guard duty. Never mind; in the morning back at camp ——

But, suddenly, he felt afraid. There was something wrong with Dryden. He remembered old tales of comrades creeping out to find a picket seated against a tree perhaps, upright enough but stone dead. The sergeant paused and gave the inscrutable back of the sentry a long stare. Dubious he again moved forward. At three paces, he hissed like a little snake. Dryden did not show a sign of hearing. At last, the sergeant was in a position from which he was able to reach out and touch Dryden on the arm. Whereupon was turned to him the face of a man livid with mad fright. The sergeant grabbed him by the wrist and with discreet fury shook him. “Here! Pull yourself together!”

Dryden paid no heed but turned his wild face from the newcomer to the ground in front. “Don’t you see ‘em, sergeant? Don’t you see ‘em?”

“Where?” whispered the sergeant.

“Ahead, and a little on the right flank. A reg’lar skirmish line. Don’t you see ‘em?”

“Naw,” whispered the sergeant. Dryden began to shake. He began moving one hand from his head to his knee and from his knee to his head rapidly, in a way that is without explanation. “I don’t dare fire,” he wept. “If I do they’ll see me, and oh, how they’ll pepper me!”

The sergeant lying on his belly, understood one thing. Dryden had gone mad. Dryden was the March Hare. The old man gulped down his uproarious emotions as well as he was able and used the most simple device. “Go,” he said, “and tell the lieutenant while I cover your post for you.”

“No! They’d see me! They’d see me! And then they’d pepper me! O, how they’d pepper me!”

The sergeant was face to face with the biggest situation of his life. In the first place he knew that at night a large or small force of Spanish guerillas was never more than easy rifle range from any marine outpost, both sides maintaining a secrecy as absolute as possible in regard to their real position and strength. Everything was on a watch-spring foundation. A loud word might be paid for by a night-attack which would involve five hundred men who needed their earned sleep, not to speak of some of them who would need their lives. The slip of a foot and the rolling of a pint of gravel might go from consequence to consequence until various crews went to general quarters on their ships in the harbour, their batteries booming as the swift search-light flashes tore through the foliage. Men would get killed — notably the sergeant and Dryden — and outposts would be cut off and the whole night would be one pitiless turmoil. And so Sergeant George H. Peasley began to run his private madhouse behind the cactus-bush.

“Dryden,” said the sergeant, “you do as I tell you and go tell the lieutenant.”

“I don’t dare move,” shivered the man. “They’ll see me if I move. They’ll see me. They’re almost up now. Let’s hide — —”

“Well, then you stay here a moment and I’ll go and — —”

Dryden turned upon him a look so tigerish that the old man felt his hair move. “Don’t you stir,” he hissed. “You want to give me away. You want them to see me. Don’t you stir.” The sergeant decided not to stir.

He became aware of the slow wheeling of eternity, its majestic incomprehensibility of movement. Seconds, minutes, were quaint little things, tangible as toys, and there were billions of them, all alike. “Dryden,” he whispered at the end of a century in which, curiously, he had never joined the marine corps at all but had taken to another walk of life and prospered greatly in it. “Dryden, this is all foolishness.” He thought of the expedient of smashing the man over the head with his rifle, but Dryden was so supernaturally alert that there surely would issue some small scuffle and there could be not even the fraction of a scuffle. The sergeant relapsed into the contemplation of another century.

His patient had one fine virtue. He was in such terror of the phantom skirmish line that his voice never went above a whisper, whereas his delusion might have expressed itself in hyena yells and shots from his rifle. The sergeant, shuddering, had visions of how it might have been — the mad private leaping into the air and howling and shooting at his friends and making them the centre of the enemy’s eager attention. This, to his mind, would have been conventional conduct for a maniac. The trembling victim of an idea was somewhat puzzling. The sergeant decided that from time to time he would reason with his patient. “Look here, Dryden, you don’t see any real Spaniards. You’ve been drinking or — something. Now — —”

But Dryden only glared him into silence. Dryden was inspired with such a profound contempt of him that it was become hatred. “Don’t you stir!” And it was clear that if the sergeant did stir, the mad private would introduce calamity. “Now,” said Peasley to himself, “if those guerillas
should
take a crack at us to-night, they’d find a lunatic asylum right in the front and it would be astonishing.”

The silence of the night was broken by the quick low voice of a sentry to the left some distance. The breathless stillness brought an effect to the words as if they had been spoken in one’s ear.

“
Halt — who’s there — halt or I’ll fire!
” Bang!

At the moment of sudden attack particularly at night, it is improbable that a man registers much detail of either thought or action. He may afterward say: “I was here.” He may say: “I was there.” “I did this.” “I did that.” But there remains a great incoherency because of the tumultuous thought which seethes through the head. “Is this defeat?” At night in a wilderness and against skilful foes half-seen, one does not trouble to ask if it is also Death. Defeat is Death, then, save for the miraculous. But the exaggerating magnifying first thought subsides in the ordered mind of the soldier and he knows, soon, what he is doing and how much of it. The sergeant’s immediate impulse had been to squeeze close to the ground and listen — listen — above all else, listen. But the next moment he grabbed his private asylum by the scruff of its neck, jerked it to its feet and started to retreat upon the main outpost.

To the left, rifle-flashes were bursting from the shadows. To the rear, the lieutenant was giving some hoarse order or admonition. Through the air swept some Spanish bullets, very high, as if they had been fired at a man in a tree. The private asylum came on so hastily that the sergeant found he could remove his grip, and soon they were in the midst of the men of the outpost. Here there was no occasion for enlightening the lieutenant. In the first place such surprises required statement, question and answer. It is impossible to get a grossly original and fantastic idea through a man’s head in less than one minute of rapid talk, and the sergeant knew the lieutenant could not spare the minute. He himself had no minutes to devote to anything but the business of the outpost. And the madman disappeared from his pen and he forgot about him.

It was a long night and the little fight was as long as the night. It was a heart-breaking work. The forty marines lay in an irregular oval. From all sides, the Mauser bullets sang low and hard. Their occupation was to prevent a rush, and to this end they potted carefully at the flash of a Mauser — save when they got excited for a moment, in which case their magazines rattled like a great Waterbury watch. Then they settled again to a systematic potting.

The enemy were not of the regular Spanish forces. They were of a corps of guerillas, native-born Cubans, who preferred the flag of Spain. They were all men who knew the craft of the woods and were all recruited from the district. They fought more like red Indians than any people but the red Indians themselves. Each seemed to possess an individuality, a fighting individuality, which is only found in the highest order of irregular soldiers. Personally they were as distinct as possible, but through equality of knowledge and experience, they arrived at concert of action. So long as they operated in the wilderness, they were formidable troops. It mattered little whether it was daylight or dark; they were mainly invisible. They had schooled from the Cubans insurgent to Spain. As the Cubans fought the Spanish troops, so would these particular Spanish troops fight the Americans. It was wisdom.

The marines thoroughly understood the game. They must lie close and fight until daylight when the guerillas promptly would go away. They had withstood other nights of this kind, and now their principal emotion was probably a sort of frantic annoyance.

Back at the main camp, whenever the roaring volleys lulled, the men in the trenches could hear their comrades of the outpost, and the guerillas pattering away interminably. The moonlight faded and left an equal darkness upon the wilderness. A man could barely see the comrade at his side. Sometimes guerillas crept so close that the flame from their rifles seemed to scorch the faces of the marines, and the reports sounded as if from two or three inches of their very noses. If a pause came, one could hear the guerillas gabbling to each other in a kind of drunken delirium. The lieutenant was praying that the ammunition would last. Everybody was praying for daybreak.