The Complete Works of Stephen Crane (197 page)

“No — d —— your souls — go on — go on!”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and it really was only for a moment. When he opened them he found himself alone with Lige Wigram, who lay on the ground near him.

“Maje,” said Lige, “yer a good man. I’ve been a-follerin’ ye all day an’ I want to say yer a good man.”

The major turned a coldly scornful eye upon the private.

“Where are you wounded? Can you walk? Well, if you can, go to the rear and leave me alone. I’m bleeding to death, and you bother me.”

Lige, despite the pain in his wounded shoulder, grew indignant.

“Well,” he mumbled, “you and me have been on th’ outs fer a long time, an’ I only wanted to tell ye that what I seen of ye t’day has made me feel mighty different.”

“Go to the rear — if you can walk,” said the major.

“Now, Maje, look here. A little thing like that — —”

“Go to the rear.”

Lige gulped with sobs.

“Maje, I know I didn’t understand ye at first, but ruther’n let a little thing like that come between us, I’d — I’d — —”

“Go to the rear.”

In this reiteration Lige discovered a resemblance to that first old offensive phrase, “Come to attention and salute.” He pondered over the resemblance and he saw that nothing had changed. The man bleeding to death was the same man to whom he had once paid a friendly visit with unfriendly results. He thought now that he perceived a certain hopeless gulf, a gulf which is real or unreal, according to circumstances. Sometimes all men are equal; occasionally they are not. If Gates had ever criticised Lige’s manipulation of a hay fork on the farm at home, Lige would have furiously disdained his hate or blame. He saw now that he must not openly approve the major’s conduct in war. The major’s pride was in his business, and his, Lige’s congratulations, were beyond all enduring.

The place where they were lying suddenly fell under a new heavy rain of bullets. They sputtered about the men, making the noise of large grasshoppers.

“Major!” cried Lige. “Major Gates! It won’t do for ye to be left here, sir. Ye’ll be killed.”

“But you can’t help it, lad. You take care of yourself.”

“I’m damned if I do,” said the private, vehemently. “If I can’t git
you
out, I’ll stay and wait.”

The officer gazed at his man with that same icy, contemptuous gaze.

“I’m — I’m a dead man anyhow. You go to the rear, do you hear?”

“No.”

The dying major drew his revolver, cocked it and aimed it unsteadily at Lige’s head.

“Will you obey orders?”

“No.”

“One?”

“No.”

“Two?”

“No.”

Gates weakly dropped his revolver.

“Go to the devil, then. You’re no soldier, but — —” He tried to add something, “But — —”

He heaved a long moan. “But — you — you — oh, I’m so-o-o tired.”

V

After the battle, three correspondents happened to meet on the trail. They were hot, dusty, weary, hungry and thirsty, and they repaired to the shade of a mango tree and sprawled luxuriously. Among them they mustered twoscore friends who on that day had gone to the far shore of the hereafter, but their senses were no longer resonant. Shackles was babbling plaintively about mint-juleps, and the others were bidding him to have done.

“By-the-way,” said one, at last, “it’s too bad about poor old Gates of the 307th. He bled to death. His men were crazy. They were blubbering and cursing around there like wild people. It seems that when they got back there to look for him they found him just about gone, and another wounded man was trying to stop the flow with his hat! His hat, mind you. Poor old Gatesie!”

“Oh, no, Shackles!” said the third man of the party. “Oh, no, you’re wrong. The best mint-juleps in the world are made right in New York, Philadelphia or Boston. That Kentucky idea is only a tradition.”

A wounded man approached them. He had been shot through the shoulder and his shirt had been diagonally cut away, leaving much bare skin. Over the bullet’s point of entry there was a kind of a white spider, shaped from pieces of adhesive plaster. Over the point of departure there was a bloody bulb of cotton strapped to the flesh by other pieces of adhesive plaster. His eyes were dreamy, wistful, sad. “Say, gents, have any of ye got a bottle?” he asked.

A correspondent raised himself suddenly and looked with bright eyes at the soldier.

“Well, you have got a nerve,” he said grinning. “Have we got a bottle, eh! Who in h —— do you think we are? If we had a bottle of good licker, do you suppose we could let the whole army drink out of it? You have too much faith in the generosity of men, my friend!”

The soldier stared, ox-like, and finally said, “Huh?”

“I say,” continued the correspondent, somewhat more loudly, “that if we had had a bottle we would have probably finished it ourselves by this time.”

“But,” said the other, dazed, “I
meant
an empty bottle. I didn’t mean no
full
bottle.”

The correspondent was humorously irascible.

“An empty bottle! You must be crazy! Who ever heard of a man looking for an empty bottle? It isn’t sense! I’ve seen a million men looking for full bottles, but you’re the first man I ever saw who insisted on the bottle’s being empty. What in the world do you want it for?”

“Well, ye see, mister,” explained Lige, slowly, “our major he was killed this mornin’ an’ we’re jes’ goin’ to bury him, an’ I thought I’d jest take a look ‘round an’ see if I couldn’t borry an empty bottle, an’ then I’d take an’ write his name an’ reg’ment on a paper an’ put it in th’ bottle an’ bury it with him, so’s when they come fer to dig him up sometime an’ take him home, there sure wouldn’t be no mistake.”

“Oh!”

MARINES
SIGNALLING
UNDER
FIRE
AT
GUANTANAMO

They were four Guantanamo marines, officially known for the time as signalmen, and it was their duty to lie in the trenches of Camp McCalla, that faced the water, and, by day, signal the
Marblehead
with a flag and, by night, signal the
Marblehead
with lanterns. It was my good fortune — at that time I considered it my bad fortune, indeed — to be with them on two of the nights when a wild storm of fighting was pealing about the hill; and, of all the actions of the war, none were so hard on the nerves, none strained courage so near the panic point, as those swift nights in Camp McCalla. With a thousand rifles rattling; with the field-guns booming in your ears; with the diabolic Colt automatics clacking; with the roar of the
Marblehead
coming from the bay, and, last, with Mauser bullets sneering always in the air a few inches over one’s head, and with this enduring from dusk to dawn, it is extremely doubtful if any one who was there will be able to forget it easily. The noise; the impenetrable darkness; the knowledge from the sound of the bullets that the enemy was on three sides of the camp; the infrequent bloody stumbling and death of some man with whom, perhaps, one had messed two hours previous; the weariness of the body, and the more terrible weariness of the mind, at the endlessness of the thing, made it wonderful that at least some of the men did not come out of it with their nerves hopelessly in shreds.

But, as this interesting ceremony proceeded in the darkness, it was necessary for the signal squad to coolly take and send messages. Captain McCalla always participated in the defence of the camp by raking the woods on two of its sides with the guns of the
Marblehead
. Moreover, he was the senior officer present, and he wanted to know what was happening. All night long the crews of the ships in the bay would stare sleeplessly into the blackness toward the roaring hill.

The signal squad had an old cracker-box placed on top of the trench. When not signalling they hid the lanterns in this-box; but as soon as an order to send a message was received, it became necessary for one of the men to stand up and expose the lights. And then — oh, my eye — how the guerillas hidden in the gulf of night would turn loose at those yellow gleams!

Signalling in this way is done by letting one lantern remain stationary — on top of the cracker-box, in this case — and moving the other over to the left and right and so on in the regular gestures of the wig-wagging code. It is a very simple system of night communication, but one can see that it presents rare possibilities when used in front of an enemy who, a few hundred yards away, is overjoyed at sighting so definite a mark.

How, in the name of wonders, those four men at Camp McCalla were not riddled from head to foot and sent home more as repositories of Spanish ammunition than as marines is beyond all comprehension. To make a confession — when one of these men stood up to wave his lantern, I, lying in the trench, invariably rolled a little to the right or left, in order that, when he was shot, he would not fall on me. But the squad came off scathless, despite the best efforts of the most formidable corps in the Spanish army — the Escuadra de Guantanamo. That it was the most formidable corps in the Spanish army of occupation has been told me by many Spanish officers and also by General Menocal and other insurgent officers. General Menocal was Garcia’s chief-of-staff when the latter was operating busily in Santiago province. The regiment was composed solely of
practicos
, or guides, who knew every shrub and tree on the ground over which they moved.

Whenever the adjutant, Lieutenant Draper, came plunging along through the darkness with an order — such as: “Ask the
Marblehead
to please shell the woods to the left” — my heart would come into my mouth, for I knew then that one of my pals was going to stand up behind the lanterns and have all Spain shoot at him.

The answer was always upon the instant:

“Yes, sir.” Then the bullets began to snap, snap, snap, at his head while all the woods began to crackle like burning straw. I could lie near and watch the face of the signalman, illumed as it was by the yellow shine of lantern light, and the absence of excitement, fright, or any emotion at all on his countenance, was something to astonish all theories out of one’s mind. The face was in every instance merely that of a man intent upon his business, the business of wig-wagging into the gulf of night where a light on the
Marblehead
was seen to move slowly.

These times on the hill resembled, in some days, those terrible scenes on the stage — scenes of intense gloom, blinding lightning, with a cloaked devil or assassin or other appropriate character muttering deeply amid the awful roll of the thunder-drums. It was theatric beyond words: one felt like a leaf in this booming chaos, this prolonged tragedy of the night. Amid it all one could see from time to time the yellow light on the face of a preoccupied signalman.

Possibly no man who was there ever before understood the true eloquence of the breaking of the day. We would lie staring into the east, fairly ravenous for the dawn. Utterly worn to rags, with our nerves standing on end like so many bristles, we lay and watched the east — the unspeakably obdurate and slow east. It was a wonder that the eyes of some of us did not turn to glass balls from the fixity of our gaze.

Then there would come into the sky a patch of faint blue light. It was like a piece of moonshine. Some would say it was the beginning of daybreak; others would declare it was nothing of the kind. Men would get very disgusted with each other in these low-toned arguments held in the trenches. For my part, this development in the eastern sky destroyed many of my ideas and theories concerning the dawning of the day; but then I had never before had occasion to give it such solemn attention.

This patch widened and whitened in about the speed of a man’s accomplishment if he should be in the way of painting Madison Square Garden with a camel’s hair brush. The guerillas always set out to whoop it up about this time, because they knew the occasion was approaching when it would be expedient for them to elope. I, at least, always grew furious with this wretched sunrise. I thought I could have walked around the world in the time required for the old thing to get up above the horizon.

One midnight, when an important message was to be sent to the
Marblehead
, Colonel Huntington came himself to the signal place with Adjutant Draper and Captain McCauley, the quartermaster. When the man stood up to signal, the colonel stood beside him. At sight of the lights, the Spaniards performed as usual. They drove enough bullets into that immediate vicinity to kill all the marines in the corps.

Lieutenant Draper was agitated for his chief. “Colonel, won’t you step down, sir?”

“Why, I guess not,” said the grey old veteran in his slow, sad, always-gentle way. “I am in no more danger than the man.”

“But, sir — —” began the adjutant.

“Oh, it’s all right, Draper.”

So the colonel and the private stood side to side and took the heavy fire without either moving a muscle.

Day was always obliged to come at last, punctuated by a final exchange of scattering shots. And the light shone on the marines, the dumb guns, the flag. Grimy yellow face looked into grimy yellow face, and grinned with weary satisfaction. Coffee!

Usually it was impossible for many of the men to sleep at once. It always took me, for instance, some hours to get my nerves combed down. But then it was great joy to lie in the trench with the four signalmen, and understand thoroughly that that night was fully over at last, and that, although the future might have in store other bad nights, that one could never escape from the prison-house which we call the past.

At the wild little fight at Cusco there were some splendid exhibitions of wig-wagging under fire. Action began when an advanced detachment of marines under Lieutenant Lucas with the Cuban guides had reached the summit of a ridge overlooking a small valley where there was a house, a well, and a thicket of some kind of shrub with great broad, oily leaves. This thicket, which was perhaps an acre in extent, contained the guerillas. The valley was open to the sea. The distance from the top of the ridge to the thicket was barely two hundred yards.

The
Dolphin
had sailed up the coast in line with the marine advance, ready with her guns to assist in any action. Captain Elliott, who commanded the two hundred marines in this fight, suddenly called out for a signalman. He wanted a man to tell the
Dolphin
to open fire on the house and the thicket. It was a blazing, bitter hot day on top of the ridge with its shrivelled chaparral and its straight, tall cactus plants. The sky was bare and blue, and hurt like brass. In two minutes the prostrate marines were red and sweating like so many hull-buried stokers in the tropics.

Captain Elliott called out:

“Where’s a signalman? Who’s a signalman here?”

A red-headed “mick” — I think his name was Clancy — at any rate, it will do to call him Clancy — twisted his head from where he lay on his stomach pumping his Lee, and, saluting, said that he was a signalman.

There was no regulation flag with the expedition, so Clancy was obliged to tie his blue polka-dot neckerchief on the end of his rifle. It did not make a very good flag. At first Clancy moved a ways down the safe side of the ridge and wigwagged there very busily. But what with the flag being so poor for the purpose, and the background of ridge being so dark, those on the
Dolphin
did not see it. So Clancy had to return to the top of the ridge and outline himself and his flag against the sky.

The usual thing happened. As soon as the Spaniards caught sight of this silhouette, they let go like mad at it. To make things more comfortable for Clancy, the situation demanded that he face the sea and turn his back to the Spanish bullets. This was a hard game, mark you — to stand with the small of your back to volley firing. Clancy thought so. Everybody thought so. We all cleared out of his neighbourhood. If he wanted sole possession of any particular spot on that hill, he could have it for all we would interfere with him.

It cannot be denied that Clancy was in a hurry. I watched him. He was so occupied with the bullets that snarled close to his ears that he was obliged to repeat the letters of his message softly to himself. It seemed an intolerable time before the
Dolphin
answered the little signal. Meanwhile, we gazed at him, marvelling every second that he had not yet pitched headlong. He swore at times.

Finally the
Dolphin
replied to his frantic gesticulation, and he delivered his message. As his part of the transaction was quite finished — whoop! — he dropped like a brick into the firing line and began to shoot; began to get “hunky” with all those people who had been plugging at him. The blue polka-dot neckerchief still fluttered from the barrel of his rifle. I am quite certain that he let it remain there until the end of the fight.