Unto All Men (4 page)

A few moments before there had been sunshine and peace and singing. Now there was death and confusion and terror.

The comrades saw all this. For a long time they did not move. They fixed their eyes upon what they had done. Not a muscle moved in their faces.

Old Hardheel saw what the Germans were about to do now. They were beginning to turn their trucks and cars sideways, pouring out of them like ants. It was evident they were going to use them as impromptu forts. Ruthlessly, in their turning, they rolled over the prostrate bodies of the dead and the dying, bumping and heaving. Orders were shouted. The dust rose; there was a furious backfiring and the roaring of motors, the sharp cries of officers. The dying kept up their thin high keening.

The sergeant saw there was no time to be lost. Once protected by the cars, the Germans had all the game with them. He gave the signal. Eight guns fired simultaneously. The teacher’s desk had been pushed to a window, and the one machine gun they possessed had been placed upon it. Now it vomited out its thin spears of fire, filled the air with a rhythmic tattoo, moving slowly in an arc.

Out there on the road men fell one by one, impotently firing at the schoolhouse. They rolled over and over, as they fell, firing, the guns kicking from their flailing arms, their legs flung up, finally coming to rest in eddying sun-shot dust. The trucks whirled about for position; the officers cursed and shouted, tossed up arms, fell with scuffling thuds. Others struck at their scurrying men with the sides of guns, and booted them, urged them. Panic seized many, and they fell on their faces in abject fear. And the machine gun in the schoolhouse kept up its deadly rhythmic clatter, and the rifles spurted thin jets of fire and smoke.

The men in the schoolhouse did not speak, did not make a single human sound neither of triumph nor hatred nor savagery. In fact, they felt none of these now. This was just something to be done and done well before they died. They flung their few feeble bodies in the breach that treachery had made in the walls of civilization, feeling dimly that perhaps their dead flesh might hold the walls long enough, until men awakened to the sound of the enemy outside.

Behind the strewn bodies the Germans had finally brought their trucks and cars into position. They did not fire. The only firing now was the sporadic sniping of the men in the schoolhouse. They were jealous of and miserly with their bullets, for they had to make each count, and they fired only when they had a direct object.

Then all at once there was a profound and sudden silence . For the men in the schoolhouse saw no vulnerable man to fire upon. The dead were utterly quiet; even the dying no longer screamed. They lay between the embattled trucks and the schoolhouse in bloody and shattered heaps, their mouths and eyes gaping open to the sun, their guns scattered about them, their legs sprawled. Here and there the sun picked out the glitter of a bayonet, the shine of a buckle, the twinkle of a button. But there was no sound.

Old Hardheel knew that the officers were in consultation behind the trucks. He knew that they were aware that the schoolhouse could not hold many men, and that they were deciding what to do. The sergeant had been in Germany, had the highest respect for German military efficiency. He turned to this men.

“Comrades,” he said hoarsely. “It is the end. We have only a few minutes.”

He looked at each face slowly and earnestly. Czechs, Hungarian, Jew, Polish, German. He saw the same look in every eye. Old Hardheel was not a philosopher either by profession or heredity. But fragmentary thoughts stirred in him in these extreme moments. There were no races here, no creeds, no ideology. There were only men about to die, nobly perhaps, ignobly probably. But in that voluntary dying for something stronger than life, they had put off their animalism and were free.

They heard a shout outside. From behind his safe refuge a German officer was bellowing something.

“What did he say?” queried Old Hardheel anxiously.

Tomas replied: “He said: ‘Surrender, swine!’ ”

Spitalny laughed shortly. “Why not pretend to: Let’s push a white handkerchief out on a bayonet. Then when they try to come forward, we’ll shoot them down.”

Old Hardheel smiled grimly. “The Germans aren’t such fools. And even if they were, that would be a dishonorable thing to do. Let the English practice dishonor. We would be poor imitators.

Spitalny wiped the sweat from this forehead and eyes and stared at his officer, incredulous. “You can speak of ‘dishonor’ at a time like this?”

The sergeant nodded. “Yes, comrade, yes! To be dishonorable would make us one with them.”

“Nevertheless,” said Spitalny, “it would be better to do as I suggested. We have come here for one single purpose. To allow honor to interfere with it would be stupid.” He turned from his officer and looked at the others. “Comrades! Are you with me?”

The sergeant crimsoned. He doubled up his fists. But before he could move, Tomas took Spitalny by the arm and said quickly: “The sergeant is right, my friend. There are things we cannot do, even if it is wiser for us to do them.”

“You are no realist,” replied Spitalny, but he smiled

The brothers Gowarski smiled without comprehension, the Pole pursed his big full lips, the little Jew listened with a strange expression on his white mummer’s face, and Boehn, the German, looked at Tomas gravely.

The sergeant suddenly shouted. Several of the rear trucks, with roars and ear-splitting back-firing, had hurriedly backed away in the rear, and were racing down the highway towards the mountain. Old Hardheel nodded his head somberly. “I was wondering when they’d think of that,” he said.

The others pressed about the windows, kneeling, cautiously lifting a forehead, dropping it after a swift glance.

It was soon evident what the Germans were about to do. The trucks, those that had left the main body, reached a distant spot on the road, wheeled, rode off at right angles across the fields, then circled about. In their great circling they would come to the rear of the schoolhouse, where those within knew only too well that there were no windows.

“Why don’t they rush us from the front?” asked Tomas.

“Too cowardly,” replied the sergeant. He glanced at the barred door and thought. Should he open the door, and allow two or three of his men to snipe from it? That was the only thing to do, of course. He ordered the door opened briefly and briefly explained his maneuver. “We wont’ live long,” he added grimly, with a jerking smile under his black mustache.

Those at the front windows knelt and watched earnestly for an unwary head. The little Jew, forgetting safety for a moment, raised his own head. There was a sharp whip-lash of a shot outside. The little Jew still knelt by the window. He did not move. Tomas, frightened, reached out and put his hand on the other’s shoulder. Then very slowly, the small and emaciated body tipped sideway with immense slow dignity, fell on its shoulder, rolled over on its back. The little Jew was smiling. But there was a black hole in the center of his forehead.

Tomas gave an exclamation of horror, and fell back. He put up his hand to shut out that sight. The others glanced over their shoulders. They looked at the small dead Jew for a long moment. Then they turned aside their heads.

Tomas was trembling. I am a fool, he thought. In a few moments we shall all be dead.

He glanced about the room. He encountered the black wool eyes of the little cloth doll.

The pounding of motors came closer as the trucks roared to the rear of the schoolhouse. They looked through the door which framed a wide summer scene of bland hills and fields and bright summer sky. Three trucks were thundering abreast each other down the road. Four of the men in the schoolhouse knelt on each side of the doorway and waited.

The trucks halted at a respectful distance from the schoolhouse. Apparently the occupants were taking counsel with each other, for there was no activity. Then all at once a soldier in one of the trucks fired a gun, apparently as a signal. Then in a loud voice he shouted to his comrades on the other side of the schoolhouse.

“What did he say?” asked the sergeant

“ ‘Charge!’ ” replied Tomas curtly, examining the chamber of his rifle.

The sergeant sighed. “Ready,” he said in a quiet voice.

Instantly the road before the schoolhouse and behind the schoolhouse and on each side of the schoolhouse boiled with surging men. The comrades inside the building began their careful but rapid sniping. They were no longer living men but vengeance intent on gun-sight and target. But it was no use. It was true that they killed about a score, but it was like firing into a wall of flesh that shrank in spots but did not retreat, and only filled up the momentary indentations.

The end came quickly. Half a dozen Germans flung hand grenades into the yawning doorway of the schoolhouse, and two of these men fell, shot to death, a second after the throw, every grenade hurtled into the little stone building.

For two instants nothing happened, and then all at once there was a terrific explosion. The windows and the door vomited fire and smoke and bloody fragments. The little schoolhouse visibly shuddered, seemed to leap into the air, then appeared to settle heavily in the earth, apparently intact. But where the roof had been, gray slate and red chimney, there were only broken beams and smoking bricks. Then slowly, in a frightful silence, the bricks began to tumble to the ground.

For a long time there was no sound but the slow plunking fall of the bricks in the soft swirling dust of the roadway. The mountains in the west fumed in a rosy mist, for the sun was rolling towards them. The fields were taking on a brighter richer green, the shadows thickening over them.

The Germans shouted, leapt in the air with triumph and joy. They swarmed back in their cars and trucks. Forgetting their dead, roughly tumbling their wounded into their vehicles, they roared away down the long white road, singing and laughing. Their voices trailed after them, filling the empty countryside.

The schoolhouse, surrounded by corpses, stood in the midst of faint drifts of smoke, silent and forgotten.

That night a transradio flash was broadcast around the world:

“It has been reported that a small band of Czech soldiers with an officer barricaded themselves in a building in the Agar region with the purpose of resisting the ‘token’ invasion of German troops in Sudetenland. It is further reported that before they were murdered by the German troops they killed and wounded many of them. However, the whole story is officially denied by German headquarters in Agar.”

The transradio flash circled the earth, fled off into the abysses of space. But hundreds of thousands of men, listening, wondering if the story were true, began to think.

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