It was four in the morning when Trent came out of the Prison of the Condemned with the Secretary of the American Legation.
A small crowd had gathered around the American Minister’s carriage outside the prison. The horses stamped and pawed at the frozen street while the coachman sat hunched on the box, wrapped in furs.
Southwark helped the Secretary into the carriage and shook Trent’s hand.
“How that scoundrel stared,” he said. “Your testimony hit him harder than a kick. Still, it saved him for the moment—and kept us from getting into a diplomatic mess.”
The Secretary sighed.
“We’ve done our duty. Now let them prove he’s a spy. Once they do, we wash our hands of him. Come on, Captain. Get in, Trent.”
“I need a word with Captain Southwark. I won’t keep him long,” Trent said quickly.
Then he lowered his voice.
“Southwark, help me now. You know what that bastard told us. You know the child is in his rooms. Get the child and take her to my apartment. If they shoot him, I’ll give her a home.”
“I understand,” Southwark said gravely.
“Will you do it immediately?”
“Immediately.”
Their hands met in a firm clasp.
Captain Southwark climbed into the carriage and motioned for Trent to follow, but Trent shook his head.
“Good-bye.”
The carriage rolled away.
Trent watched until it disappeared at the end of the street. He started toward his own neighborhood, but after only a few steps he stopped.
Then he turned and walked in the opposite direction.
Perhaps the sight of the prisoner he had just confronted had made him sick. He needed silence and solitude. The events of the night had shaken him badly.
He would walk until his mind cleared. He would forget everything, bury it, and then return to Sylvia.
He walked quickly.
For a while the bitter thoughts seemed to fade. But when he finally stopped beneath the Arc de Triomphe, breathless, the misery of the whole affair came rushing back.
Not just the misery of that night.
The misery of his entire wasted life.
Then Hartman’s face appeared before his mind again—that pale, terrified face twisted by a horrible grimace.
Trent shuddered.
He wondered whether it had really been fear.
Or had Hartman been triumphant?
The thought struck him so violently that he jumped as if a knife had suddenly touched his throat.
He walked savagely around the square, then returned to the Arc and sat down, trying to fight his despair.
The air was freezing, but his cheeks burned with shame.
Shame?
Why should he be ashamed?
Was it because he had married a girl whom chance had made a mother?
Did he even love Sylvia?
Was this miserable bohemian life really all he wanted?
He searched his own heart and found an ugly story there—the story of his past.
He covered his face in shame.
And beneath the dull pounding in his head, his heart seemed to beat out another story.
The story of his future.
Shame.
Disgrace.
At last he shook himself from the dull trance that had begun to numb his thoughts.
He lifted his head.
A sudden fog had settled over the streets. The great arches of the Arc de Triomphe were disappearing into it.
He would go home.
A terrible fear of being alone seized him.
But he was not alone.
The fog was full of ghosts.
They moved around him, drifting beneath the arches in endless lines before disappearing into the mist. Others rose from the fog, swept past him, and vanished again.
He was not alone.
They crowded around him. They touched him. They swarmed before him, beside him, behind him. They pressed against him, seized him, and carried him along with them.
Down a dim avenue they moved.
Through lanes and narrow streets white with fog.
If they spoke, their voices were as dull and muffled as the mist around them.
At last a huge wall of earth and masonry appeared ahead, cut by a massive iron gate.
The crowd moved more and more slowly until they were packed shoulder to shoulder.
Then everything stopped.
A sudden wind stirred the fog.
It twisted and rolled away.
Shapes began to emerge.
A faint light appeared above the horizon, touching the edges of the wet clouds. Thousands of bayonets caught the first dull rays of dawn.
Bayonets were everywhere.
They cut through the fog or flowed beneath it like rivers of steel.
A great cannon loomed above the wall, with dark figures moving around it.
Below, a broad stream of soldiers carrying bayonets poured through the iron gate and out across the shadowed plain.
The light grew stronger.
Faces appeared among the marching soldiers.
Then Trent recognized one.
“You, Philippe!”
The figure turned.
“Is there room for me?” Trent called.
Philippe only waved vaguely in farewell and disappeared with the others.
Soon the cavalry began to pass.
One squadron followed another, pouring into the darkness.
Then came cannon.
Then an ambulance.
Then more endless lines of infantry.
Beside Trent, a cuirassier sat on his steaming horse.
Ahead, among a group of mounted officers, Trent saw a general. The astrakhan collar of his coat was turned up around his pale, bloodless face.
Nearby, women were crying.
One woman struggled to force a loaf of black bread into a soldier’s haversack.
The soldier tried to help, but the sack was fastened, and his rifle kept getting in the way.
Trent took the rifle from him.
The woman opened the sack and pushed the bread inside. By then the loaf was soaked with her tears.
The rifle felt surprisingly light in Trent’s hands.
He examined the bayonet.
Was it sharp?
He touched the point.
Then a sudden, fierce desire seized him.
He wanted to go.
He wanted to fight.
“Chouette!” a street boy shouted from the gate. “Encore toi, mon vieux?”
Trent looked up.
The rat-killer laughed straight into his face.
A moment later the soldier took back his rifle.
“Thank you,” he said, and ran to catch up with his battalion.
Trent plunged into the crowd around the gate.
“Are you going?” he asked a marine who sat in the gutter, bandaging his foot.
“Yes.”
A young girl suddenly caught Trent by the hand.
She led him into the café opposite the gate.
The room was packed with soldiers.
Some sat pale and silent on the floor. Others groaned on the leather-covered benches.
The air was sour and suffocating.
“Choose,” the girl said with a small gesture of pity. “They can’t go.”
Trent searched through a heap of clothing and found a military coat and a képi.
The girl helped him fasten the knapsack, cartridge box, and belt.
Then she showed him how to load the chassepot rifle, resting it across her knees.
When Trent thanked her, she suddenly stood up.
“You’re a foreigner!”
“American,” Trent replied, heading toward the door.
But the girl stepped in front of him.
“I’m Breton,” she said. “My father is up there with the marine artillery. If you’re a spy, he’ll shoot you.”
They stared at each other.
Then Trent sighed, bent down, and kissed her.
“Pray for France, little one.”
She smiled faintly.
“For France and for you, beau monsieur.”
Trent ran across the street and through the gate.
Once outside, he slipped into the marching line and worked his way forward.
A corporal passed him.
Then the man looked back.
He passed again.
Finally he called an officer.
“You belong to the 60th,” the corporal growled, looking at the number on Trent’s képi.
The officer noticed Trent’s black trousers.
“We have no use for franc-tireurs.”
“I want to volunteer in place of a comrade,” Trent said.
The officer merely shrugged and moved on.
Nobody paid much attention to Trent after that. A few soldiers glanced at his trousers, but no one stopped him.
The road was deep in slush, churned into mud by wheels and horses.
A soldier ahead twisted his foot in an icy rut. He dragged himself toward the embankment, groaning.
The plain stretched away on both sides, gray with melting snow.
Here and there, behind ruined hedges, stood wagons carrying white flags marked with red crosses.
Sometimes a priest in a rusty hat and worn robes drove them.
Sometimes a crippled Mobile soldier did.
Once they passed a wagon driven by a Sister of Charity.
Silent, empty houses stood along the road, their walls torn open by shells and their windows staring blankly into the fog.
Farther on, inside the danger zone, nothing remained of human habitation except piles of frozen bricks and blackened cellars buried beneath snow.
For some time Trent had been irritated by the soldier behind him, who kept stepping on his heels.
Finally convinced it was deliberate, Trent turned around to complain.
Instead, he found himself staring into the face of a fellow student from the Beaux-Arts.
Trent could hardly believe it.
“I thought you were in the hospital!”
The other man shook his head and pointed to his bandaged jaw.
“I see. You can’t speak. Can I help you?”
The wounded man searched through his haversack and pulled out a crust of black bread.
The soldier beside him explained, “His jaw is smashed. He can’t eat it. He wants you to chew it for him.”
Trent took the bread.
He chewed it slowly, grinding it into small pieces, then passed it back to the starving man.
From time to time mounted orderlies raced toward the front, splashing them with slush.
It was a cold, silent march through wet meadows covered in fog.
Across the ditch, along the railroad embankment, another column moved parallel to them.
Trent watched the dark mass of soldiers appear and disappear in the fog.
For half an hour he lost sight of them completely.
Then they appeared again.
A thin line detached itself from the flank.
It bowed outward in the middle and swung rapidly west.
At the same moment, a long crackling sound erupted somewhere ahead.
More lines peeled away from the column, moving east and west.
The crackling became continuous.
A battery thundered past at full gallop.
Trent and his comrades stepped aside to let it through.
The guns went into position a little to the right of their battalion.
The first rifled cannon fired.
Its boom rolled through the fog.
Then the guns in the fortifications answered with a tremendous roar.
An officer galloped past shouting something Trent could not understand.
The ranks ahead suddenly broke away from his battalion and disappeared into the twilight.
More officers rode up and stared into the fog.
Far ahead, the crackling had become one continuous crash.
The waiting was horrible.
Trent continued chewing bread for the wounded man behind him.
The man tried to swallow it, then finally shook his head and motioned for Trent to eat the rest.
A corporal offered Trent a little brandy.
He drank it.
When he turned to return the flask, the corporal was lying on the ground.
Alarmed, Trent looked at the soldier beside him.
The man shrugged and opened his mouth to speak.
Something struck him.
He fell backward and rolled into the ditch.
At that moment one of the officers’ horses suddenly reared and backed into the battalion, kicking wildly.
One soldier was knocked down beneath its hooves.
Another was kicked in the chest and thrown through the ranks.
The officer drove his spurs into the horse and forced it forward again.
The animal stood trembling.
The cannon fire seemed to be coming closer.
A staff officer slowly rode up and down the battalion.
Suddenly he collapsed in his saddle and grabbed his horse’s mane.
One boot hung from the stirrup, crimson and dripping.
Then men came running out of the fog.
They poured along the roads, across the fields, through the ditches.
Many fell as they ran.
For an instant Trent thought he saw horsemen moving like ghosts through the mist.
The man behind him cursed violently.
“I saw them too! Uhlans!”
But the battalion remained where it was.
The fog closed over the fields again.
The colonel sat heavily on his horse.
His bullet-shaped head was buried inside the astrakhan collar of his coat, and his fat legs stuck straight out from the stirrups.
The buglers gathered around him with their instruments ready.
Behind him, a staff officer in a pale blue jacket smoked a cigarette while talking to a hussar captain.
From the road ahead came the thunder of galloping horses.
An orderly pulled up beside the colonel.
Without even turning his head, the colonel waved him toward the rear.
Then a confused murmur rose on the left.
It ended in a shout.
A hussar flashed past like the wind.
Another followed.
Then another.
Squadron after squadron swept past them and disappeared into the fog.
The colonel suddenly straightened in his saddle.
The bugles rang out.
The entire battalion scrambled down the embankment, crossed the ditch, and charged into the soaked meadow.
Almost immediately Trent lost his cap.
Something struck it from his head.
He thought it was a tree branch.
Men around him fell into the slush and ice.
He assumed they had slipped.
One man fell directly across his path.
Trent stopped to help him.
But the soldier screamed when Trent touched him.
“Forward! Forward!” an officer shouted.
Trent ran on.
They jogged for what seemed like an eternity through the fog.
He kept shifting his rifle from one hand to the other.
At last they collapsed behind the railroad embankment, gasping for breath.
Trent looked around.
This was what he had wanted.
Action.
Violence.
A desperate physical struggle.
He had wanted to kill.
He had wanted to throw himself into the mass of men and tear his way through them.
He wanted to fire his rifle.
He wanted to drive the thin, sharp bayonet into someone.
He had not expected this hunger for blood.
He wanted to exhaust himself completely, to fight and cut until he could no longer lift his arm.
Then he would go home.
Someone said that half the battalion had been lost in the charge.
Nearby, another soldier was examining a body beneath the embankment.
The corpse was still warm.
It wore a strange uniform.
Even when Trent noticed the spiked helmet lying a few inches away, he still did not understand what had happened.
The colonel sat on his horse a few feet to the left.
His eyes glittered beneath his crimson képi.
Trent heard him answer an officer.
“I can hold this position. But one more charge, and I won’t have enough men left even to sound a bugle.”
“Were the Prussians here?” Trent asked a soldier who sat wiping blood from his hair.
“Yes. The hussars drove them away. We got caught in their crossfire.”
“We’re supporting a battery on the embankment,” another soldier said.
The battalion crawled over the embankment and moved along the twisted railroad tracks.
Trent rolled up his trousers and tucked them into his wool socks.
Then they stopped again.
Some of the soldiers sat down on the dismantled tracks.
Trent looked for his wounded Beaux-Arts friend.
The man was still standing in his place, very pale.
The cannonade had become terrifying.
For a moment the fog lifted.
Trent saw the first battalion standing motionless on the railroad tracks ahead.
Regiments stood on either side.
Then the fog closed in again.
Drums began to beat.
Bugles sounded far away on the extreme left.
A restless movement passed through the troops.
The colonel raised his arm.
The drums rolled.
The battalion moved into the fog.
They were close to the front now.
The battalion was firing as it advanced.
Ambulances raced along the foot of the embankment toward the rear.
The hussars passed and repassed like ghosts.
At last they reached the front.
Everything around Trent was movement and chaos.
From somewhere close inside the fog came screams, groans, and crashing volleys.
Shells fell everywhere.
They exploded along the embankment and showered the soldiers with frozen mud.
Trent was frightened.
For the first time he truly dreaded the unknown thing waiting inside the fog.
The cannon fire made him sick.
He could see the mist glowing dull orange whenever a gun fired, and the earth shook beneath his feet.
It was close.
He knew it.
The colonel shouted:
“Forward!”
The first battalion hurried into the fog.
Trent felt the heat of battle reaching for him.
He trembled, but kept moving.
A terrifying explosion erupted ahead.
Men somewhere in the mist began cheering.
The colonel’s horse, streaked with blood, plunged wildly through the smoke.
Another blast struck almost directly in Trent’s face.
The shock nearly knocked him unconscious.
He staggered.
Every man to his right had fallen.
His head spun.
The fog and smoke seemed to numb his senses.
He reached out for something to steady himself.
His hand caught the wheel of a gun carriage.
A man sprang out from behind it and swung a rammer at Trent’s head.
Trent reacted instinctively.
His bayonet drove into the man’s neck.
The man stumbled backward, screaming.
Then he collapsed.
Trent stared at him.
He knew he had killed him.
He mechanically bent down to retrieve his rifle.
But the bayonet was still buried in the man.
The wounded soldier lay on the ground, beating weakly at the earth with bloody hands.
Trent felt sick.
He leaned against the cannon.
Men were fighting everywhere.
The air stank of smoke, sweat, and blood.
Someone grabbed Trent from behind.
Another man seized him from the front.
Then other soldiers attacked those men.
The sharp clicking of bayonets drove Trent into a frenzy.
He grabbed the rammer and swung it blindly.
He struck again and again until the wooden shaft shattered.
A man threw an arm around his neck and dragged him to the ground.
Trent strangled him.
He forced himself back onto his knees.
He saw one of his comrades seize the cannon, only to collapse across it with his skull crushed.
He saw the colonel fall completely from his saddle into the mud.
Then everything went black.
When Trent regained consciousness, he was lying beside the railroad embankment among twisted rails.
Men huddled everywhere.
Some screamed.
Some cursed.
Others fled blindly into the fog.
Trent staggered to his feet and followed them.
Once he stopped to help a comrade with a bandaged jaw.
The man could not speak.
He clung to Trent’s arm for a moment.
Then he collapsed and died in the freezing mud.
Again Trent stopped to help another wounded man.
The man groaned:
“Trent… c’est moi… Philippe.”
Then a sudden volley tore through the fog and took the wounded man from him.
An icy wind swept down from the heights.
It shredded the fog and drove it across the battlefield.
For one brief moment, the sun appeared through the bare woods of Vincennes.
It looked like a bloody clot sinking into the smoke above the guns.
Lower and lower it fell.
Down toward the plain soaked in blood.