The Bald Man

1

The Bald Man was the key of the position. It was the best observation-post for fifty miles in either direction. Besides this, there ran a vital rail five miles hither of its sheltering crest. If the Germans could get up their guns, it was a good-bye to certain fortresses which had already taken their toll in seven figures, and, it might easily be, the loss of several armies. For these reasons, the Bald Man had been contested time and again, until his slopes ran red. But for several months the Germans had left him alone. The French had bitten in two salients, one either side of him, so as to pocket any possible spearhead. Alan Archer smoked his pipe in quiet, week after week, in the Ambulance Hut by the stream in the valley behind the crest. It was only now and again that he had to pick up chance victims of long-distance firing from among the thin lines that held the ridge.

The Bald Man had not always been bald. Before the war he was tufted with joyous forests; but the shells had left his scalp shining naked under the moon. He was of white limestone, and the shells and the rains had made him pasty as chalk. He was pitted, too, like a face scarred with smallpox in the days before vaccination; and every pit was dangerous with rifle and machine-gun. A fringe of trees remained about his base, and added point to the fantastic nick-name.

Alan Archer knocked out his pipe and rose slowly to return to the hit at the call to dinner. He was tired with that alternation of fierce work and boredom which marks all campaigns. He stretched and yawned. "Come on, Two!" shouted Jacques, the cook of the party. Alan was called Two because he stood two metres in his socks. He disdained to reply; he was by nature silent. "Lazy as the devil"—but quite like another aspect of the Prince of Darkness when anything occurred to arouse him. He had a great record as an athlete in America; his cool courage was to swear by yet in his old college.

"Where's Dolly Gray?" he asked languidly as he entered the hut. "Carrying her bundle, I suppose." 'Dolly Gray' was one of the Corps; her bundle—a wounded man.

"There's been no firing."

"Some one with trench fever, then," put in the surgeon.

It was one of the most important duties of the Corps to dispatch a man, usually by himself, every evening, in order to go over the day's routine with the Observation Officer on the Bald Man, and check up what had been done. In case of his finding a slight case of illness or a trifling wound, this man would attend to the matter himself; if stretcher-bearers were needed, he would signal accordingly to the Ambulance Hut. But the Corps was so short of men and stretchers that one man had often to do the work of two.

"There he comes, through the Bald Man's fringe," cried Jacques, with a tureen of soup in his arms.

"They call it soup," muttered a man called Paunchy, short for Pauncefote, and English type who had not quite assimilated conditions.

"Allow me to observe," quoth the surgeon sententiously, "that Professor Grill of Columbia has shown that when anything inspires us with extreme disgust, it is really that we wish to take it into our mouths!" Every one laughed, for Paunchy was so called for his greed.

But the mirth cut short with Alan's exclamation. He had gone to the door. They all sprang to their feet. "Look, boys! Dolly's running like a rabbit!"

"And he's got no bundle!"

"Good Lord! He's dropped on all fours!"

"Hell! What's doing?"

"Something wrong! Let's go get him!" cried Alan, and ran out with the surgeon at his heels.

But 'Dolly Gray' could give no good account of himself. The man he had been assisting had died suddenly; that was all. For the rest, he was in high hysteria, unable to explain himself. He could not eat his soup. The surgeon thrust out his lip, and got out his hypodermic syringe. "Shut up, everybody!" said he. "He'll be fit in the morning."

But Alan Archer did not sleep that night. He went out and smoked, and watched the moonlight on the scalp of the Bald Man. He knew perfectly well what was wrong with 'Dolly Gray.' It was one of those fits of madness which the Ancients knew, a madness born of loneliness and dread and the horror of empty forests. They feigned that the God of the Forests, Pan, had appeared to such an one, and from Him gave it the name of Panic Fear.

Alan Archer had been terribly afraid, once in his life. It was in Ceylon. He had followed a wounded buffalo into thick jungle; and his beaters had deserted him. He had no idea where the brute might be, from what direction he might charge. And he became aware suddenly of the silence. That moment had taught him that while courage is a matter of heart and character, it depends also upon nervous stability. 'Dolly Gray' was a man of desperate courage, proven five score of times; yet—there was just one thing, probably something utterly trivial, that had the power to strike him morally to the level of the invertebrate. Alan Archer bit his lip till the blood came; for he did not know what that thing, in his own case, might be. He thought of Tamerlane, ruthless as dauntless, how a cat cowed him; of Lord Roberts, conqueror of Khandahar, who came nigh fainting at the squealing of a pig; of twenty other similar cases. He was an instant afraid for himself. His thoughts came to a head. "Curse those blasted Boches!" he cried aloud, "why the deuce can't they get busy on this sector?" He went up to the Bald Man, and passed the night with a group chatting.

It was drawn when he returned to the hut. The surgeon took him aside.

"I'm sending Dolly home on a special mission," said he; "he'll never be any good again. I've had a talk with him. Don't say anything to the rest; I only tell you because—you know."

"Why can't we get into the war?" growled Alan. "We've been outraged every way the dirty dogs can think of—Europe's beginning to think we've got a yellow streak, damn it!"

"Oho!" whispered the surgeon to his heart. "So he's afraid of being afraid. That's the worst of these top-notch psychological types; they know too much. They know that anything whatever can happen." "Yes, it's bad luck," he said aloud. "You certainly ought to be in a fighting unit."

"Curse it, I'm a first-rate signaller, to say nothing of gunnery and engineering; and they all laugh at me because I've got Yankee stamped on every inch of my confounded Two Metres!"

"If I were a recruiting sergeant I'd put you down Zulu, and pass you in," laughed the surgeon.

And then that very day the luck turned! A desultory bombardment began, and Alan's little party were alive again, day and night of ceaseless toil, to bring the wounded from the crest. And by them toiled a sadder party still, a party without hope—the Burial Squad.

2

Three weeks passed by, and then the German sniping ceased almost entirely. They had made one or two tentative movements against the salients which protected the Bald Man, but had been easily repulsed. Alan Archer had made a friend of the Observation Officer, and used to spend evenings on the dome of the Bald Man with him. The officer taught him to read the topography of the position, to comprehend the strategy of possible offensives. "If it wasn't for us here," he said once, "given weather bad enough to keep our airplanes at home, they could clean up the whole show with one good stunt. See over there, now, for instance. . . ." and he went into details.

It was late that night when Alan returned to the Hut. On his way, only a few feet below the Apex of the Bald Man, he came across a dead boy. He was laying supine, his face to the young moon. His left flank had been blown away completely, and he was ghastly pale in that wan light, even his lips exsanguine. "Poor chap!" mused Alan, unperturbed, the case being so common, "I wonder how the Burial Squad missed him." But that night he slept ill. The dead face haunted him. He thought of pictured saints, waxen, calm, chaste, bloodless. In particular, he was reminded of a girl martyr, floating dead upon a river. The moon-aura supplied the painter's ghastly fancy of an aureole. Yes, the days of the martyrs were come again. He wished he had the skill to reproduce the mental image; he would have sent it through America like the Fiery Cross, till every man cried out for vengeance, and every woman bade her man arm for war.

But the next night he stopped by the edge of the shell-hole, in surprise. The Burial Squad had still not passed; the boy still lay there. He went close, to renew his impression. But the face had changed; it was distorted, drawn, the jaw dropped, the eyes glazed and dull. He shivered a little. Indeed, the night was chill. A wind blew out of the north-west, and threatened storm. The intense heat of the last week was stricken to the heart thereby. Alan fastened his coat, and went to the Hut at a quick pace.

The third night the storm broke wild and loud. The white face of the corpse was sickly with the beginnings of decomposition; it flared lurid through the gaps of tempest, while the rain lashed the hill like spindrift.

The dead boy had begun to haunt Alan Archer. He felt a certain morbidity in this preoccupation, and determined to check all thoughts concerning him at their first onset. He was a little doubtful as to whether he should avoid that particular route, or whether it would be weak-minded to do so. Again, the Squad might have removed the remains; it would be silly to be keeping out of the way of what was not there. But in the end his reason vigourously insisted on his taking a different road to and from the summit.

The fourth night the storm blew wilder yet. Alan, staggering blind against the rage of heaven, actually stumbled over the carcass. The boy's face seemed to grin, sardonic and sinister, at him. He cursed and went desperately on. All night he lay awake, furious with the Burial Squad for their neglect. But, worse, he blamed himself; he realised that some subconscious power in him had drawn him to the very spot he had determined to avoid.

The fifth night the storm had somewhat abated, but the wind was still fearfully high, and the black clouds scudded over heaven showing from time to time a sullen, fitful moon, sickly and angry, through the wrack. Such nights are dreadful to men who walk abroad; the savage gleams, sporadic, serve but to accentuate the darkness. A hideous fascination—the Vertigo of the Abyss, wise men have called it—transformed his fear, just as murderers are impelled to revisit the scene of their crime, and, despite his conscious repulsion, drew him to the edge of the shell-hole. He knew what he was doing, that it was madness, and that he could not help himself. The epileptic violence of the gale had shifted the dead boy, and Alan's imagination read in that swollen and discoloured face the threat of some malignantly unnatural resurrection. The slopes of the Bald Man were slippery with slime, and Alan fell once or twice as he descended. He picked himself up with unnecessary haste; noticed the fact, began to wonder. "Why do I do that?" he muttered. "What's talking in my subconsciousness? Hell!" he slipped again, and strained a muscle with the acrid violence of his recovery.

As he reached the Fringe of the Bald Man the wind suddenly dropped. Utter silence wrapped him. It fell dark as a wolf's mouth. He groped slowly amid the trees. And then—he head footsteps following him. Instantly he thought of the dead man. "They wouldn't bury him," he screamed; "He's coming—he's coming home—with me." His conscious mind reacted to the threat of its hidden master. "Nonsense," he cried aloud; "the dead don't walk. I know it's sheer hallucination!" But that is just the terror of hallucination; it cares nothing for the conscious mind, with its petty canon of reality, based on the limits of so-called 'normal' experience. One cannot convince a madman; his experience is as solid as a sane man's. Alan realised this fact with fury and horror. "It's like live," he thought; "it's all rubbish to third parties, but it's none the less real to those involved in its maelstrom of mania." With that he yielded utterly to the impulse of panic; bruised and battered from his wild flight through the wood, he leapt over the meadow to the Hut, and flung himself panting and screaming on the floor.

The surgeon was by his side in a second. "What's wrong?" he cried. But Alan only sobbed and shrieked. The surgeon gave him a full dose of morphia, and presently he slept.

3

The morning broke fair, but the wind seemed to have gained force from that one lull of yester-even, and blew fiercely from the north. Alan woke refreshed, apparently his own man again; but as the day wore on, he became more and more uneasy. The surgeon, wise as the serpent, had said nothing; it was Alan who approached him at the noon meal.

"Doc!" said he quietly, "I want to transfer to another sector. I can't tell you why; it's just nonsense. But I've fought it out with myself; and the plain fact is, I can't force myself to go up that hill again."

The surgeon meditated. Suddenly a shell burst on the crest of the Bald Man, another, than a dozen, and the roar of German drumfire came rolling from beyond the crest.

"There's your answer," cried the surgeon, slapping Alan on the shoulder; "work to do, my boy! That'll clear away the cobwebs!" But the big man did not answer. "Think it over, lad!" said the other, kindly, "You'll be all right by the time we start." Alan nodded slowly and turned away to busy himself with the preparations for the expedition.

The German fire increased constantly in vehemence all that afternoon. The Scalp of the Bald Man was like a volcano in eruption, so constantly did the shells burst on it. The time came for the party to set out. Then Alan drew himself up.

"I've thought it all out," said he, in a dull voice; "I can't explain. I'm willing to be called a coward. But I can't go. I can't go." He turned and went to the Hut, and squatted by the open door, his face buried in his arms.

The surgeon thought he would try the other tack. "We'll go without him, boys," he cried, loud, so that Alan might hear. "We're better without yellow dogs." Alan shuddered, but he did not stir.

At that moment a high explosive shell came clear over the Bald Man and struck the ground within a yard of the party. In the wind and fury of the catastrophe Alan was hurled fifty feet away.

He came to himself unhurt. The Hut was matchwood; the others—"napoo." He saw by the sun—a rim of fire on the horizon—that he had been unconscious over an hour.

The German fire had ceased absolutely. Dead silence held his inexorable court about him. His Fear alone possessed him.

The dead boy was with him, chuckling; he could hear him. Why couldn't he see him? He wanted to look on that carrion—just once. He understood, with the struggling remnant of his reason, how fatally perverse was the fancy. It was his duty to go, to report what had happened, true; but he knew also that it was the Demon in him that prompted that good argument. A little fillip came from the ruin of his conscious mind; he recalled the surgeon's word that fear and disgust mean that we want to put into our mouths the thing that causes it. Yes, he must crawl through that worn fringe of trees, fire-scarred; he must writhe up those slopes of bloody paste to the Scalp of the Bald Man; and he must batten on the flesh of that dead hero. The sick greens and ochres of that bloated face; the maggots crawling in and out of their meat, till it heaved like a sweating she-devil in some brothel of hell—it was his meat, his, ha! He licked his dry lips.

Now there set in complete dissociation of his personality, and he strive manfully against the obscene impulse. But ever the same side of him began to acquiesce in the hallucination that the dead boy stood by him, a hell-creature goading him with chuckling friendliness to the mad act. He must—he must. So now he became furtive, fearing lest his comrades should perceive him and hinder him. He was one of the company of the damned, a soul sold to Satan. He thought of ghouls, witches, vampires, wehr-wolves, and laughed aloud, and licked his lips again. He tossed his head as he loped up the slopes of bloody slime; and as he loped he howled.

It was his comrades whom he feared now; the dead boy no longer pursued him. No, they were good friends now. He thought the dead boy sat astride him, cried Tally-Ho on that foul parody of a hunt. The full moon met him as he reached the crest; he gibbered wild and weird; a thick slime dribbled from his mouth. Oho! he was the devil's hound, hot on the slot; and it was moonlight. Ah, the moon! Dead queen of sorceries and murders, hail! She was his, hurrah! By her light he would hunt—he would hunt! Kill and eat! Kill and eat! Wasn't it Samuel Butler who said that love was only perfect when one ate the other? Dear old Butler; and by God, he was right about humanity's duty to destroy all machines, wasn't he?

As he reached the crest of the Bald Man, the full moon met him, ablaze, in her rising. Ha! Hecate:—he gloated horribly, a thick slime dribbling from his mouth. And then he reached his prey. What was this? The corpse was no longer there, and with an animal growl of baulked grief he scrabbled at the earth with his beasts' claws.

And then a new thought came into his mind. They had bombarded the Bald Man; of course, a shell had hit; yes, there was the new hole, right on the edge of the other.

He suddenly realised that he was Alan Archer of the Red Cross. He called aloud to his friend the Observation Officer. The hill was silent as the grave that it was. Alan understood perfectly that every man had been killed in that fearful blast of cannon-wrath that had raged all the afternoon.

He went up to the Dome. Yes, there lay those brave men. My God! what tragedy! There lay his friend, too. And at the sight of him he became lucid, like a disembodied spirit. He seized his dead friend's field-glasses; they were uninjured. He swept the east. The situation realised itself, a veritable Apocalypse. Look! Two thousand yards below him, what were those grey lines? And there, to the South-East, those masses, far as the eye could reach?

He knew the Germans dared not venture on the slopes of the Bald Man until they were ready to smash in one of the protecting salients. And there was the whole plan, bare to him. It was a major offensive—he understood the scheme from A to Z. Then, what were the French doing? Why were they silent, when the very life-line was threatened? He remembered—some days of storm, his officer had told him. My God, the French didn't know! He thrilled cold through every nerve in his body. He knew, and he alone. He must telephone instantly.

A glance showed him the impossibility of doing so. The whole dome was a torn mass of wreck. God! God! he cried, feeling the weight of the whole world upon his shoulders. Liberty herself, for that one tragic moment, lay in his hands; and he was—paralysed. He threw up his arms in despair, and cried out to the moon, as it might be a Pagan priest of Artemis. And the moon gave sudden answer.

Yes, she was lifted over the Bald Man so that her light struck clear on Staff Headquarters, far behind in the valley. If he stood up against the sky, he might be seen. He could semaphore with his arms. It was certain death, of course; the act of a madman to raise even a hand in that bright light; but—well, he had been mad already, and less nobly. He climbed to the edge of the shell-hole, collected his thoughts into a brief concentrated message, commended his soul to his Maker, reared aloft his giant frame, and began to signal with desperate speed.

The man who happened to see him said afterwards that he thought it was a man struck lunatic by the pain of a wound, and dancing in the agony of the damned. He got lamps and signalled back.

"Not crazy!" gesticulated Alan. "Listen! Listen! Listen!" and repeated his message from the beginning. The bullets whined past him, like shrikes darting; but God was for France that night, and he had come to his last phrase before he fell. And ere his eyes lost light he heard the bass crescendo of the French barrage as it broke high over his head, and the raucous yell of the Blue Devils as they raced forward to the assault.

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