rpse, wouldn't the living hand grab for it in brute
greediness?
The thinner the veneer of civilized habit, the more easily the animal,
always waiting and craving war, breaks through. And the animal was
strong in Jacob Pilzer, the butcher's son. He had a bull's heart and
lacked the little tendrils of sensibility whose writhing would tire him.
Hugo Mallin had these tendrils by the thousand. He had so many that they
gave him a reserve physical endurance like a kind of intoxication. He
felt as if he had been drinking some noxious, foamy wine which made his
mind singularly keen to every impression. Therefore he and Pilzer alone
of Fracasse's company were not utterly fatigued.
The savagery of Pilzer's bitterness at seeing another get the bronze
cross before he received one turned not on little Peterkin, the valet's
son, but on Hugo. As he and Hugo moved, elbow to elbow, picking their
way forward from the knoll, he eased his mind with rough sarcasm at
Hugo's expense. He christened Hugo "White Liver." When Hugo stumbled
over a stone he whispered:
"White Liver, that comes from the shaking knees of a coward!"
Hugo did not answer, nor did he after they had crossed the road and were
under the cover of the fourth terrace wall, and Pilzer whispered:
"Still with us, little White Liver? Cowards are lucky. But your time
will come. You will die of fright."
They worked their way ahead in the darkness to the third terrace and
then to the second, without drawing fire. There they were told to unslip
their packs "and sleep--sleep!"
Fracasse passed the word, as if this were also an order which perforce
must be obeyed. They dropped down in a row, their heads against the cold
stone wall. So closely packed were their bodies that they could feel one
another's breaths and heart-beats. Where last night they had thought of
a multitude of things in vivid flashes, to-night nothing was vivid after
the last explosion in the town and there was an end of firing. Spaces of
consciousness and unconsciousness were woven together in a kind of
patchwork chaos of mind. For the raw brains were not yet quite
calloused; they quivered from the successive benumbing shocks of the
day.
Hugo would not even cheat himself by trying to close his eyes. He lay
quite still looking at the quietly twinkling, kindly stars. Unlike his
comrades, he had not to go to hell in order to know what hell was like.
He had foreseen the nature of war's reality, so it had not
|