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These scout skirmishers of Stransky's men of the 53d Regiment of the Browns made beckoning gestures as to a crowd, before they sprang over the hedge and ran swiftly, watchfully, toward the linden stumps, closely followed by their comrades. Soon the whole garden was overrun by the lean, businesslike fellows, their glances all ferret-like to the front. "Look, Minna!" exclaimed Marta.
For this they had crawled across the road in the night to find themselves unable to move either way and directly under the flashes of the Browns' rifles. Feller's and Stransky's shouts rose together in a peculiar unity of direction and full of the fellowship they had found in their first exchange of glances. "You engineers, make ready!" "Hand-grenades to the men under the tree!
After they had shaken hands, the colonel scowled as he heard the situation explained, with the old sergeant, still holding fast to Stransky's collar, a capable and insistent witness for the prosecution; while Stransky, the fire in his eyes dying to coals, stared straight ahead.
In the haziness of fleecy thought, as slumber drew its soft clouds around her, her last conscious visions were the pleasant ones rising free of a background of horror: of Feller's smile when he went back to his automatic for good; of Dellarme's smile as he was dying; of Stransky's smile as Minna gave him hope; and of Hugo's face as he uttered his flute-like cry of protest.
"You heard what he said, sir?" "The latter part enough!" "It's incitation to mutiny! An example!" "Yes, put him under arrest." The sergeant still held fast to the collar of Stransky's blouse. Stransky could have shaken himself free, as a mastiff frees himself from a puppy, but this was resistance to arrest and he had not yet made up his mind to go that far.
She was thinking what a simple, what a glorious thing was a love such as Stransky's and Minna's: the mating of a man and a woman whose brains were not oversensitized by too complicated mentality; of a man and a woman direct and sincere, primarily and clearly a man and a woman. Such happiness could never be for her now; for her who had let a man make love to her for his own undoing.
"Yes, sir!" said the sergeant mechanically as he released his grip of the offender. "We had two anarchists in my company in Africa," he observed in loyal agreement with orders. "They fought like devils. The only trouble was to keep them from shooting innocent natives for sport." Stransky's collar was still crumpled on the nape of his neck.
Then the telephone in the redoubt brought some news. The staff begged to inform the army that the enemy's casualties in the last three days had been two hundred thousand! Immediately everybody was talking at once in Stransky's parliament, as he sometimes called that company of which he was, in the final analysis, unlimited monarch. "How do they know?" "Do you think it's fake?"
A voice that seemed to speak some uncontrollable thought of her own broke in, and it rang with the authority and leadership of a mature officer's command, even though coming from a gardener in blue blouse and crownless straw hat. "Your rifles, your rifles, quick!" called Feller. "We're only beginning to fight!" And then another voice in a bull roar, Stransky's: "Avenge his death!
His knees weakened their grip and his legs swung pendulum-like with Stransky's steps. "What about me for a sleeping-car!" thought Stransky. "But he's certainly harder to carry." Yet it pleased Stransky not to waken his passenger until they reached the station his ticket called for. Entering the cut, he was halted by the challenging cry of "Who goes there?" in his own tongue.
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