The two staff officers behind the general were nearly silent. There were few sparks crawling within the American lines now. Nearly every one had been diverted into the front-line battles. The two men watched the board with feverish intensity, watching the red glows moving back, and back… .
The chief of staff was shaking like a leaf, watching the American line stretched, and stretched… .
The general looked at him with a twisted smile.
“I know my opponent,” he said suddenly. “I had lunch with him once in Vienna. We were attending a disarmament conference.” He seemed to be amused at the ironic statement. “We talked war and battles, of course. And he showed me, drawing on the tablecloth, the tactical scheme that should have been used at Cambrai, back in 1917. It was a singularly perfect plan. It was a beautiful one.”
“General,” burst out one of the two staff officers behind him. “I need twenty tanks from the reserves.”
“Take them,” said the general. He went on, addressing his chief of staff. “It was an utterly flawless plan. I talked to other men. We were all pretty busy estimating each other there, we soldiers. We discussed each other with some freedom, I may say. And I formed the opinion that the man who is in command of the enemy is an artist: a soldier with the spirit of an amateur. He’s a very skilful fencer, by the way. Doesn’t that suggest anything?”
The chief of staff had his eyes glued to the board.
“That is a feint, sir. A strong feint, yes, but he has his force concentrated in the dead area.”
“You are not listening, sir,” said the general, reprovingly. “I am saying that my opponent is an artist, an amateur, the sort of person who delights in the delicate work of fencing. I, sir, would thank God for the chance to defeat my enemy. He has twice my force, but he will not be content merely to defeat me. He will want to defeat me by a plan of consummate artistry, which will arouse admiration among soldiers for years to come.”
“But General, every minute, every second—”
“We are losing men, of whom we have plenty, and tanks, of which we have not enough. True, very true,” conceded the general. “But I am waiting to hear from two strayed infantrymen. When they report, I will speak to them myself.”
“But, sir,” cried the chief of staff, withheld only by the iron habit of discipline from violent action and the taking over of command himself, “they may be dead! You can’t risk this battle waiting for them! You can’t risk it, sir! You can’t!”
“They are not dead,” said the general coolly. “They cannot be dead. Sometimes, sir, we must obey the motto on our coins. Our country needs this battle to be won. We have got to win it, sir! And the only way to win it—”
The signal-light at his telephone glowed. The general snatched it up, his hands quivering. But his voice, was steady and deliberate as he spoke.
“Hello, Sergeant—Sergeant Coffee, is it? … Very well, Sergeant. Tell me what you’ve found out… . Your prisoner objects to his rations, eh? Very well, go on… . How did he gas our listening-posts? … He did, eh? He got turned around and you caught him wandering about? … Oh, he was second wave! They weren’t taking any chances on any of our listening-posts reporting their tanks, eh? … Say that again, Sergeant Coffee!” The general’s tone had changed indescribably. “Your prisoner has no recognition signals for his own tanks? They told him he wouldn’t see any of them until the battle was over? … Thank you, Sergeant. One of our tanks will stop for you. This is the commanding general speaking.”
He rang off, his eyes blazing. Relaxation was gone. He was a dynamo, snapping orders.
“Supply tanks, machine-shop tanks, ground forces of the air service, concentrate here!” His finger rested on a spot in the middle of the dead area. “Reserve tanks take position behind them. Draw off every tank we’ve got—take ‘em out of action!—and mass them in front, on a line with our former first line of outposts. Every airplane and helicopter take the air and engage in general combat with the enemy, wherever the enemy may be found and in whatever force. And our tanks move straight through here!”
Orders were snapping into telephone transmitters. The commands had been relayed before their import was fully realized. Then there was a gasp.
“General!” cried the chief of staff. “If the enemy is massed there, he’ll destroy our forces in detail as they take position!”
“He isn’t massed there,” said the general, his eyes blazing. “The infantrymen who were gassing our listening-posts were given no recognition signals for their tanks. Sergeant Coffee’s prisoner has his gas-mask broken and is in deadly fear. The enemy commander is foolish in many ways, perhaps, but not foolish enough to break down morale by refusing recognition signals to his own men who will need them. And look at the beautiful plan he’s got.”
He sketched half a dozen lines with his fingers, moving them in lightning gestures as his orders took effect.
“His main force is here, behind those skirmishes that look like a feint. As fast as we reinforce our skirmishing-line, he reinforces his—just enough to drive our tanks back slowly. It looks like a strong feint, but it’s a trap! This dead space is empty. He thinks we are concentrating to face it. When he is sure of it—his helicopters will sweep across any minute, now, to see—he’ll throw his whole force on our front line. It’ll crumple up. His whole fighting force will smash through to take us, facing the dead space, in the rear! With twice our numbers, he’ll drive us before him.”
“But general! You’re ordering a concentration there! You’re falling in with his plans!”
The general laughed.
“I had lunch with the general in command over there, once upon a time. He is an artist. He won’t be content with a defeat like that! He’ll want to make his battle a masterpiece, a work of art! There’s just one touch he can add. He has to have reserves to protect his supply-tanks and machine-shops. They’re fixed. The ideal touch, the perfect tactical fillip, will be—Here! Look. He expects to smash in our rear, here. The heaviest blow will fall here. He will swing around our right wing, drive us out of the dead area into his own lines—and drive us on his reserves! Do you see it? He’ll use every tank he’s got in one beautiful final blow. We’ll be outwitted, outnumbered, out-flanked and finally caught between his main body and his reserves and pounded to bits. It is a perfect, a masterly bit of work!”
He watched the board, hawklike.
“We’ll concentrate, but our machine-shops and supplies will concentrate with us. Before he has time to take us in rear we’ll drive ahead, in just the line he plans for us! We don’t wait to be driven into his reserves. We roll into them and over them! We smash his supplies! We destroy his shops! And then we can advance along his line of communication and destroy it, our own depots being blown up—give the orders when necessary—and leaving him stranded with motor-driven tanks, motorized artillery, and nothing to run his motors with! He’ll be marooned beyond help in the middle of our country, and we will have him at our mercy when his tanks run out of fuel. As a matter of fact, I shall expect him to surrender in three days.”
The little blocks of green and yellow that had showed the position of the reserve and supply-tanks, changed abruptly to white, and began to crawl across the maneuver-board. Other little white sparks turned about. Every white spark upon the maneuver-board suddenly took to itself a new direction.
“Disconnect cables,” said the general, crisply. “We move with our tanks, in the lead!”
The monotonous humming of the electric generator was drowned out in a thunderous uproar that was muffled as an airtight door was shut abruptly. Fifteen seconds later there was a violent lurch, and the colossal tank was on the move in the midst of a crawling, thundering horde of metal monsters whose lumbering progress shook the earth.
Sergeant Coffee, still blinking his amazement, absentmindedly lighted the last of his share of the cigarettes looted from the prisoner.
“The big guy himself!” he said, still stunned. “My Gawd! The big guy himself!”
A distant thunder began, a deep-toned rumbling that seemed to come from the rear. It came nearer and grew louder. A peculiar quivering seemed to set up in the earth. The noise was tanks moving through the fog, not one tank or two tanks, or twenty tanks, but all the tanks in creation rumbling and lurching at their topmost speed in serried array.
Corporal Wallis heard, and turned pale. The prisoner heard, and his knees caved in.
“Hell,” said Corporal Wallis dispairingly. “They can’t see us, an’ they couldn’t dodge us if they did!”
The prisoner wailed, and slumped to the floor.
Coffee picked him up by the collar and jerked him out of the pill-box.
“C’mon Pete,” he ordered briefly. “They ain’t givin’ us a infantryman’s chance, but maybe we can do some dodgin’!”
Then the roar of engines, of metal treads crushing upon earth and clinking upon their joints, drowned out all possible other sounds. Before the three men beside the pill-box could have moved a muscle, monster shapes loomed up, rushing, rolling, lurching, squeaking. They thundered past, and the hot fumes of their exhausts enveloped the trio.
Coffee growled and put himself in a position of defiance, his feet braced against the concrete of the pill-box dome. His expression was snarling and angry but, surreptitiously, he crossed himself. He heard the fellows of the two tanks that had roared by him, thundering along in alignment to right and left. A twenty-yard space, and a second row of the monsters came hurtling on, gun muzzles gaping, gas-tubes elevated, spitting smoke from their exhausts that was even thicker than the fog. A third row, a fourth, a fifth… .
The universe was a monster uproar. One could not think in this volume of sound. It seemed that there was fighting overhead. Crackling noises came feebly through the reverberating uproar that was the army of the United States in full charge. Something came whirling down through the overhanging mist and exploded in a lurid flare that for a second or two cast the grotesque shadows of a row of tanks clearly before the trio of shaken infantrymen.
Still the tanks came on and roared past. Twenty tanks, twenty-one … twenty-two… . Coffee lost count, dazed and almost stunned by the sheer noise. It rose from the earth and seemed to be echoed back from the topmost limit of the skies. It was a colossal din, an incredible uproar, a sustained thunder that beat at the eardrums like the reiterated concussions of a thousand guns that fired without ceasing. There was no intermission, no cessation of the tumult. Row after row after row of the monsters roared by, beaked and armed, going greedily with hungry guns into battle.
And then, for a space of seconds, no tanks passed. Through the pandemonium of their going, however, the sound of firing somehow seemed to creep. It was gunfire of incredible intensity, and it came from the direction in which the front-rank tanks were heading.
“Forty-eight, forty-nine, forty-ten, forty-’leven,” muttered Coffee dazedly, his senses beaten down almost to unconsciousness by the ordeal of sound. “Gawd! The whole army went by!”
The roaring of the fighting-tanks was less, but it was still a monstrous din. Through it, however, came now a series of concussions that were so close together that they were inseparable, and so violent that they were like slaps upon the chest.
Then came other noises, louder only because nearer. These were different noises, too, from those the fighting-tanks had made. Lighter noises. The curious, misshapen service tanks began to rush by, of all sizes and all shapes. Fuel-carrier tanks. Machine-shop tanks, huge ones, these. Commissary tanks… .
Something enormous and glistening stopped short. A door opened. A voice roared an order. The three men, beaten and whipped by noise, stared dumbly.
“Sergeant Coffee!” roared the voice. “Bring your men! Quick!”
Coffee dragged himself back to a semblance of life. Corporal Wallis moved forward, sagging. The two of them loaded their prisoner into the door and tumbled in. They were instantly sent into a heap as the tank took up its progress again with a sudden sharp leap.
“Good man,” grinned a sooty-faced officer, clinging to a handhold. “The general sent special orders you were to be picked up. Said you’d won the battle. It isn’t finished yet, but when the general says that—”
“Battle?” said Coffee dully. “This ain’t my battle. It’s a parade of a lot of damn tanks!”
There was a howl of joy from somewhere above. Discipline in the machine-shop tanks was strict enough, but vastly different in kind from the formality of the fighting-machines.
“Contact!” roared the voice again. “General wireless is going again! Our fellows have rolled over their reserves and are smashing their machine-shops and supplies!”
Yells reverberated deafeningly inside the steel walls, already filled with tumult from the running motors and rumbling treads.
“Smashed ‘em up!” shrieked the voice above, insane with joy. “Smashed ‘em! Smashed ‘em! Smashed ‘em! We’ve wiped out their whole reserve and—” A series of detonations came through even the steel shell of the lurching tank. Detonations so violent, so monstrous, that even through the springs and treads of the tank the earth-concussion could be felt. “There goes their ammunition! We set off all their dumps!”
There was sheer pandemonium inside the service-tank, speeding behind the fighting force with only a thin skin of reserve-tanks between it and a panic-stricken, mechanically pursuing enemy.
“Yell, you birds!” screamed the voice. “The general says we’ve won the battle! Thanks to the fighting force! We’re to go on and wipe out the enemy line of communications, letting him chase us till his gas gives out! Then we come back and pound him to bits! Our tanks have wiped him out!”
Coffee managed to find something to hold on to. He struggled to his feet. Corporal Wallis, recovering from the certainty of death and the torture of sound, was being very sea-sick from the tank’s motion. The prisoner moved away from him on the steel floor. He looked gloomily up at Coffee.
“Listen to ‘em,” said Coffee bitterly. “Tanks! Tanks! Tanks! Hell! If they’d given us infantry a chance—”
“You said it,” said the prisoner savagely. “This is a hell of a way to fight a war.”
Corporal Wallis turned a greenish face to them.
“The infantry always gets the dirty end of the stick,” he gasped. “Now they—now they’ makin’ infantry ride in tanks! Hell!”
THE MAN WHO SAVED THE EARTH
Austin Hall (1926)
CHAPTER I: THE BEGINNING
Even the beginning. From the start the whole thing has the precision of machine work. Fate and its working—and the wonderful Providence which watches over Man and his future. The whole thing unerring: the incident, the work, the calamity, and the martyr. In the retrospect of disaster we may all of us grow strong in wisdom. Let us go into history.
A hot July day. A sun of scant pity, and a staggering street; panting thousands dragging along, hatless; fans and parasols; the sultry vengeance of a real day of summer. A day of bursting tires; hot pavements, and wrecked endeavor, heartaches for the seashore, for leafy bowers beside rippling water, a day of broken hopes and listless ambition.
Perhaps Fate chose the day because of its heat and because of its natural benefit on fecundity. We have no way of knowing. But we do know this: the date, the time, the meeting; the boy with the burning glass and the old doctor. So commonplace, so trivial and hidden in obscurity! Who would have guessed it? Yet it is—after the creation—one of the most important dates in the world’s history.
This is saying a whole lot. Let us go into it and see what it amounts to. Let us trace the thing out in history, weigh it up and balance it with sequence.
Of Charley Huyck we know nothing up to this day. It is a thing which, for some reason, he has always kept hidden. Recent investigation as to his previous life and antecedents have availed us nothing. Perhaps he could have told us; but as he has gone down as the world’s great martyr, there is no hope of gaining from his lips what we would so like to know.
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br /> After all, it does not matter. We have the day—the incident, and its purport, and its climax of sequence to the day of the great disaster. Also we have the blasted mountains and the lake of blue water which will ever live with his memory. His greatness is not of warfare, nor personal ambition; but of all mankind. The wreaths that we bestow upon him have no doubtful color. The man who saved the earth!
From such a beginning, Charley Huyck, lean and frail of body, with, even then, the wistfulness of the idealist, and the eyes of a poet. Charley Huyck, the boy, crossing the hot pavement with his pack of papers; the much treasured piece of glass in his pocket, and the sun which only he should master burning down upon him. A moment out of the ages; the turning of a straw destined to out-balance all the previous accumulation of man’s history.
The sun was hot and burning, and the child—he could not have been more than ten—cast a glance over his shoulder. It was in the way of calculation. In the heyday of childhood he was not dragged down by the heat and weather: he had the enthusiasm of his half-score of years and the joy of the plaything. We will not presume to call it the spirit of the scientist, though it was, perhaps, the spark of latent investigation that was destined to lead so far.
A moment picked out of destiny! A boy and a plaything. Uncounted millions of boys have played with glass and the sun rays. Who cannot remember the little, round-burning dot in the palm of the hand and the subsequent exclamation? Charley Huyck had found a new toy, it was a simple thing and as old as glass. Fate will ever be so in her working.
And the doctor? Why should he have been waiting? If it was not destiny, it was at least an accumulation of moment. In the heavy eyeglasses, the square, close-cut beard; and his uncompromising fact-seeking expression. Those who knew Dr. Robold are strong in the affirmation that he was the antithesis of all emotion. He was the sternest product of science: unbending, hardened by experiment, and caustic in his condemnation of the frailness of human nature.
It had been his one function to topple over the castles of the foolish; with his hard-seeing wisdom he had spotted sophistry where we thought it not. Even into the castles of science he had gone like a juggernaut. It is hard to have one’s theories derided—yea, even for a scientist—and to be called a fool! Dr. Robold knew no middle language; he was not relished by science.
Classic Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories Page 49