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The End Of The Battle
by
“Go in to Knowles’ window and shoot at those people,” said the sergeant hoarsely. Afterwards he coughed. Some of the fumes of the fight had made way to his lungs.
Patterson looked at the door into this other room. He looked at it as if he suspected it was to be his death-chamber. Then he entered and stood across the body of Knowles and fired vigorously into a group of plum trees.
“They can’t take this house,” declared the sergeant in a contemptuous and argumentative tone. He was apparently replying to somebody. The man who had been shot in the throat looked up at him. Eight men were firing from the windows. The sergeant detected in a corner three wounded men talking together feebly. “Don’t you think there is anything to do?” he bawled. “Go and get Knowles’ cartridges and give them to somebody who can use them! Take Simpson’s too.” The man who had been shot in the throat looked at him. Of the three wounded men who had been talking, one said: “My leg is all doubled up under me, sergeant.” He spoke apologetically.
Meantime the sergeant was re-loading his rifle. His foot slipped in the blood of the man who had been shot in the throat, and the military boot made a greasy red streak on the floor.
“Why, we can hold this place!” shouted the sergeant jubilantly. “Who says we can’t?”
Corporal Flagler suddenly spun away from his window and fell in a heap.
“Sergeant,” murmured a man as he dropped to a seat on the floor out of danger, “I can’t stand this. I swear I can’t. I think we should run away.”
Morton, with the kindly eyes of a good shepherd, looked at the man. “You are afraid, Johnston, you are afraid,” he said softly. The man struggled to his feet, cast upon the sergeant a gaze full of admiration, reproach, and despair, and returned to his post. A moment later he pitched forward, and thereafter his body hung out of the window, his arms straight and the fists clenched. Incidentally this corpse was pierced afterwards by chance three times by bullets of the enemy.
The sergeant laid his rifle against the stonework of the window-frame and shot with care until his magazine was empty. Behind him a man, simply grazed on the elbow, was wildly sobbing like a girl. “Damn it, shut up!” said Morton, without turning his head. Before him was a vista of a garden, fields, clumps of trees, woods, populated at the time with little fleeting figures.
He grew furious. “Why didn’t he send me orders?” he cried aloud. The emphasis on the word “he” was impressive. A mile back on the road a galloper of the Hussars lay dead beside his dead horse.
The man who had been grazed on the elbow still set up his bleat. Morton’s fury veered to this soldier. “Can’t you shut up? Can’t you shut up? Can’t you shut up? Fight! That’s the thing to do. Fight!”
A bullet struck Morton, and he fell upon the man who had been shot in the throat. There was a sickening moment. Then the sergeant rolled off to a position upon the bloody floor. He turned himself with a last effort until he could look at the wounded who were able to look at him.
“Kim up, the Kickers,” he said thickly. His arms weakened and he dropped on his face.
After an interval a young subaltern of the enemy’s infantry, followed by his eager men, burst into this reeking interior. But just over the threshold he halted before the scene of blood and death. He turned with a shrug to his sergeant. “God, I should have estimated them at least one hundred strong.”