The Figure Still Lay On The Grass Untouched, And No One Seemed To
Remember That It Had Walked There Of Itself, Or Noticed That The
Cigarette Still Burned, A Tiny Ring Of Living Fire, At The Place
Where The Figure Had First Stood.
The figure was a thing of the past, and the squad shook itself like a
great snake, and then broke into little pieces and started off
jauntily, stumbling in the high grass and striving to keep step to
the music.
The officers led it past the figure in the linen suit, and so close
to it that the file closers had to part with the column to avoid
treading on it. Each soldier as he passed turned and looked down on
it, some craning their necks curiously, others giving a careless
glance, and some without any interest at all, as they would have
looked at a house by the roadside, or a hole in the road.
One young soldier caught his foot in a trailing vine, just opposite
to it, and fell. He grew very red when his comrades giggled at him
for his awkwardness. The crowd of sleepy spectators fell in on
either side of the band. They, too, had forgotten it, and the
priests put their vestments back in the bag and wrapped their heavy
cloaks about them, and hurried off after the others.
Every one seemed to have forgotten it except two men, who came slowly
towards it from the town, driving a bullock-cart that bore an
unplaned coffin, each with a cigarette between his lips, and with his
throat wrapped in a shawl to keep out the morning mists.
At that moment the sun, which had shown some promise of its coming in
the glow above the hills, shot up suddenly from behind them in all
the splendor of the tropics, a fierce, red disk of heat, and filled
the air with warmth and light.
The bayonets of the retreating column flashed in it, and at the sight
a rooster in a farm-yard near by crowed vigorously, and a dozen
bugles answered the challenge with the brisk, cheery notes of the
reveille, and from all parts of the city the church bells jangled out
the call for early mass, and the little world of Santa Clara seemed
to stretch itself and to wake to welcome the day just begun.
But as I fell in at the rear of the procession and looked back, the
figure of the young Cuban, who was no longer a part of the world of
Santa Clara, was asleep in the wet grass, with his motionless arms
still tightly bound behind him, with the scapular twisted awry across
his face, and the blood from his breast sinking into the soil he had
tried to free.
THE GREEK-TURKISH WAR: THE BATTLE OF VELESTINOS {2}
The Turks had made three attacks on Velestinos on three different
days, and each time had been repulsed. A week later, on the 4th of
May, they came back again, to the number of ten thousand, and brought
four batteries with them, and the fighting continued for two more
days. This was called the second battle of Velestinos. In the
afternoon of the 5th the Crown Prince withdrew from Pharsala to take
up a stronger position at Domokos, and the Greeks under General
Smolenski, the military hero of the campaign, were forced to retreat,
and the Turks came in, and, according to their quaint custom, burned
the village and marched on to Volo. John Bass, the American
correspondent, and myself were keeping house in the village, in the
home of the mayor. He had fled from the town, as had nearly all the
villagers; and as we liked the appearance of his house, I gave Bass a
leg up over the wall around his garden, and Bass opened the gate, and
we climbed in through his front window. It was like the invasion of
the home of the Dusantes by Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, and, like
them, we were constantly making discoveries of fresh treasure-trove.
Sometimes it was in the form of a cake of soap or a tin of coffee,
and once it was the mayor's fluted petticoats, which we tried on, and
found very heavy. We could not discover what he did for pockets.
All of these things, and the house itself, were burned to ashes, we
were told, a few hours after we retreated, and we feel less troubled
now at having made such free use of them.
On the morning of the 4th we were awakened by the firing of cannon
from a hill just over our heads, and we met in the middle of the room
and solemnly shook hands. There was to be a battle, and we were the
only correspondents on the spot. As I represented the London Times,
Bass was the only representative of an American newspaper who saw
this fight from its beginning to its end.
We found all the hills to the left of the town topped with long lines
of men crouching in little trenches. There were four rows of hills.
If you had measured the distance from one hill-top to the next, they
would have been from one hundred to three hundred yards distant from
one another. In between the hills were gullies, or little valleys,
and the beds of streams that had dried up in the hot sun. These
valleys were filled with high grass that waved about in the breeze
and was occasionally torn up and tossed in the air by a shell. The
position of the Greek forces was very simple. On the top of each
hill was a trench two or three feet deep and some hundred yards long.
The earth that had been scooped out to make the trench was packed on
the edge facing the enemy, and on the top of that some of the men had
piled stones, through which they poked their rifles.
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