Chapter XVIII The Raid
“List his discourse of war, and you shall hear
A fearful battle rendered you in music.”
(King Henry V.).
The forest was now alive with hoarse, guttural cries, as if the wooded depths had released some giant brood of ravens. And then, helter-skelter, even as the last belated hussar, blood streaming from a black gash in his forehead, clattered heavily rearmost of his comrades, reins loose, clinging to the saddle—they came! Squat riders on squat horses—cattle and man as shaggy and unkempt one as the other—with long tags of hair bobbing round wild-bearded faces, pointed fur caps drawn down to the eyes, sheepskin-clad knees up almost to the chin, stirruped with rope, brandishing rough spears; miscellaneous booty—a goose, a sucking-pig, a frying-pan, maybe a cottage clock—swinging at the saddle-bow! They came, shouting their crow-call, exulting, squealing, grunting! They came, filled the road with clamour and clatter, and stench... and were gone before Steven could draw, it seemed to him, the full breath of his amazement!
Like the second gust of the hurricane, they had gathered, broken past them, and were lost; the clamour of their tempest way rising loud, then growing swiftly faint in the distance, as the valley received them.
“Now,” said Geiger-Hans, looking up, “here is an experience for your English-bred youth. Fate has annihilated the centuries; you have beheld the passage of the Huns! Pouah! what a wild-beast trail they have left behind them! To think that Napoleon should have gone to seek these wolves and jackals in their steppes, and spread the Cossack over the face of Europe!”
He sprang out of the ditch; and the grey, much injured in feeling, snorting and sullenly upheaving its haunches, was induced to follow. A roll of far-off musketry crepitated up to them from the plain.
“Do you hear?” said Geiger-Hans. “And do you know what that means?”
“They are fighting on the other side of the hill,” said Steven, spurring towards the crest.
“Yes, it is perhaps worth your youthship’s attention. Do not, however, flatter yourself that you are viewing a battle. A mere skirmish, un combat, nothing more; one of the hundred or so that takes place now, week in, week out, on the marches of the mighty conqueror’s lands. For a small kingdom, little brother Jerome can flatter himself to have gathered to it, from without and within, a considerable collection of enemies—Cossacks hanging like jackals on the flanks of the great army; Prussians from the north, Saxons from the east, peasants and students from his own villages and cities. This raid is scarce like to appear in the Gazette, but it is enough, for the combatants! The dead yonder are as dead as though they had fallen at Austerlitz or the Moskowa. Hark, at the snap of the musket—that is the sound of the Empire cracking! ’Tis the Empire cracking,” repeated the musician, running alongside, his hand at the stirrup-leather. “And the little House of Westphalia is doomed to fall, as the cottage falls on the hillside from the earthquake that has wrecked the city.... A back-wave from Moscow have we here to-day.”
They had halted on the crest, and their gaze plunged into the open valley. A canopy of blue smoke hung over the fields that spread between their knoll and a little town, some half-mile distant. The mist was pierced with slow-moving lines of bayonets which flashed back the sunshine; it was traversed with colour.
Geiger-Hans ran a knowing eye over the scene:
“Aha! What did I tell you? Those are Prussians, holding the townlet,” said he. “Contrast their sober uniform with Jerome’s scarlets and greens, his plumes and gold lace. There go our runaways! See them draw up behind yonder crimson platoon—Brother Jerome’s Grenadiers of the Guard, for he must ape big brother Napoleon.... Look, our friends the Cossacks roll back together like a swarm of hornets at the foot of the hill; they find themselves cut off from their Prussian allies—and if the Hussars but rally in time, we may see the rôles of the drama reversed in a minute.”
He fell abruptly silent: something had flown between his head and Steven’s as the latter bent towards him from his saddle—something that droned a strange song as it passed and puffed a cold breath on their cheeks.
“What was that?” asked Steven, starting.
“That was a stray Death,” said the musician, placidly. “What say you—shall we seek cover?”
“Let us see the thing out!” cried Steven.
“There will be more lead loose,” said Geiger-Hans, glancing up with an odd expression. “Death flies on a capricious wing when this sort of game is played.”
“Why, then,” answered the bridegroom, with his smile of bitterness, “that might be the simplest solution of all; at least, I should not be deeply mourned.”
“If that be your mind towards bullets,” said the fiddler, with a shadow of sarcasm, “for once your youth and my age are in harmony. But what if you were to tie your horse behind some forest trees? There is no need of offering him up also to our altar of despair—and he might be of use to one of us, when the day is over.”
Steven admitted the suggestion without a word. Presently both men sat upon a high bank, their legs dangling into space.
“How inspiring!” said the fiddler. He unslung his instrument. “Did you hear that volley? It came from troops trained under Bonaparte, I’ll wager my fiddle-bow. Here the insurgents respond. See those puffs of white smoke in and out of the line under the village wall! Not a gun together. Loose shooting... but good hatred! I’ll back it in the long run! Drums! shouts! The bayonet charge. What did I tell you? here come our Huns back again... what’s left of them. I am inspired! Hark you, this is the song of the fight.... First come the Grenadiers, cool and scornful, musket on breast, arms folded; they march like one man. ‘I have served, under the Eagle; I have been of the Guard of the Great Emperor. To Moscow I have been... and back: to-day it is sunshine: it is child’s play, but I would rather be back on the ice with my Emperor. To me he is the Little Corporal: I am one of the old lot. It is I and mine who put the crown on his head. To Jena we went singing:
“‘“We’ll go and bring a kingdom home,
To give little brother Jerome.”
He said little brother should have a little kingdom of his own—well, what is this rabble that would undo his work?... It was warm work at Jena, comrade—oh, and it was cold at Moscow!’...
“‘Aim at the Old Guards, kerls’ (says the Prussian to his gunners). ‘Hurl down the Guard, and the field is ours!... Hurl down the Guard, aha!’
“‘I have to come out to fight for the Fatherland’ (says the peasant lad); ‘my mother put a green sprig in my hat. I shall put a notch on my musket-stock for every Frenchman I have killed, and shall show it to my children when Gretel and I marry.’... Oh, but the Old Guard shoots steady! Green sprig is down on the meadow; his comrades jump over him, one steps on his hand, but he feels nothing. Poor little Patriot; he has not even struck one blow for the Fatherland, but his red blood is sinking into the soil! How bright will bloom the flower of liberty in the land thus watered!”
The fiddler wielded his bow with a kind of frenzy, and his battle music rose above the clamour of the distant combat, the scramble and clatter of the Cossacks up the hills, their defiant calls and grunts.
The remnant of the wild horde had reached the summit again in mad disorder, seeking the forest shelter at the first available point. A flight of bullets came singing through the air among them: the company of grenadiers, marking the routed enemy against the sky-line, had flung a last contemptuous volley after them. The savages squealed and ducked, clinging to their shaggy steeds in fantastic attitudes; a few were struck; one fell; his nearest comrade caught up the reins of his mount and, with exultant yell, led it away with him. The dead man was dragged a few yards till his inert foot fell loose of the hempen stirrup and he lay, a heap of discoloured rags, among the stones. Fear was on no man’s face, but grins of defiance undaunted. Their war-cry was still of triumph.
Geiger-Hans sprang to his feet on the bank. He waved his bow, then drove it across the strings to a new song, shrill and mocking—a song of scorn for the fugitive:
“Spread your dark wings and fly, obscene birds! Yet exult as you go: the scent of Death is in the air. In a little while you may gorge—but to-day the stricken Eagle can still beat back the carrion crows. Fly, flap your wings—caw—caw!”
Steven stared amazed at his companion, and listened spellbound. The musician was like a man possessed. His grizzled locks seemed to stand out from his face, his left hand danced along the strings, his right arm worked with fury. If ever catgut and wood mocked and insulted, that possessed instrument of Geiger-Hans’ did so that day of the combat of Heiligenstadt, in the teeth of the defeated Kalmuck. “Caw, caw!” it shrieked, catching the very guttural of the last belated Cossack, who struggled in rear of his comrades on a wounded horse. The man turned back in his sheepskin saddle, fury in his bloodshot eyes, poised his weapon over his head, measuring his distance.
“Take care!” cried Steven, leaping from the bank. But louder and shriller played Geiger-Hans. The savage hurled the lance; and Steven, flinging himself forward, with arms extended, caught the blow. He rolled back upon the player and both came to the ground together. The music fell mute. Shouting victory, the Cossack forced his bleeding nag into the brushwood.
“If Madame Sidonia were here,” said the fiddler, with emphasis on the married title, “what a hero you would be to her!”
He had bound Steven’s shoulder—the wound was an ugly gash enough—ministered to him with the wine of the country from a flask of his own, and water from the brook. The contest for the village, between King Jerome’s troops and the raiders, was yet undecided, and fitful sounds of battle were still growling in the valley.
The winds blustered in the tree-tops; they had swept the sky from west to east more blue than there is colour to describe. There was a wonderful pulse of growing things about them. Every grass-blade shook in lusty individual life. The leafage was full of bright-eyed, feathered broods, planning the autumn flitting. The whole forest hummed with the minute creatures of Nature’s fecundity.... In the plain, openly and with tumult, the masters of earth were strewing its fair face with Death.
“If Madame Sidonia were here!” repeated the fiddler, and cast a sly look at the young man’s face over the last knot of his bandage.
Steven frowned and was silent.
“They will go on tearing each other to pieces down there till night. What say you? Shall not grey steed retrace his steps and carry Master Bridegroom back where he should be?”
“No!” cried the other, scarlet leaping to his livid face. “A thousand times no! I am not yet the base thing she deems me.”
The musician subdued a sigh.
“What a noble thing is true pride!” quoth he, picked up his fiddle and began to examine it carefully.—“Heavens!” he cried, “if you had broken it! Can a man fling himself upon another in such inconsiderate fashion when there’s a Stradivarius between them!”
“Had it not been for my want of consideration,” said Steven, with some pique, “I think the precious instrument would hardly have known the touch of your fingers again.”
The fiddler laughed out loud, as if the boyish outcry had pleased him; then, as suddenly, grew grave.
“My friend,” said he, “the steel has not been tempered, I fear, the lead has not been cast, that will reach this heart.... Ah, Lord!”
It was an exclamation of uttermost weariness. He picked at his strings and tightened them with absent fingers. Then he flashed a smile at his companion:
“You are amazed, are you not, at my ingratitude? What! Here have I, Count Waldorff-Kielmansegg, preserved the existence of this wretched tramp at the risk of my noble, valuable one—here have I shed my blue blood to save his muddy fluid, and the creature has not even a ‘Thank you’!... Comrade,” went on the musician, and his eye dilated, his countenance assumed a lofty mien, “I would not shame myself and you by such a word as ‘Thanks’! The creature that would not give himself to save his fellow-creature when he can is not worth the name of man.”
Steven, abashed that he had indeed thought himself heroic, blushed again and, looking down, began idly plucking with his unhurt right hand the wood-violets that grew in patches on the bank. The fiddler followed his movements, then his eye suddenly grew fixed, his jaw dropped. Slowly the healthy colour ebbed from his cheek and left it ashen. Steven, looking at him, was astonished and alarmed.
“For heaven’s sake!” he cried, “are you ill?”
The fiddler stretched out his hand and culled the posy from the other’s grasp. The touch of his fingers was as cold as death.
“Violets!” said he, in a sort of whisper. “There is blood on them!” He shuddered from head to foot.
“Perhaps all the mystery is but that he is a poor mad gentleman,” thought Steven, It was an idea which could not fail to recur to him in the company of this fantastic being; but never had it seemed so justified.