Free Unto All Men by Taylor Caldwell Page B

voices. They began to remove their masks, to take off their packs. The slender mirrors of the bayonets flashed on their young grim faces, their set mouths, their weary and bitter eyes, full of hatred and disillusion. No one laughed, or passed an inconsequential remark. Several sat down on their packs, and regarded the clean wooden floor broodingly, their arms dropped between their spread knees. One of them, a father himself, saw the doll. A muscle twitched about this mouth. Suddenly he put up his hand and half-covered his face. The oldest man, the sergeant, stood at the shutter that faced the long wide road. The pencils of light striped his broad peasant face with its thick black mustache. They threw a bright shadow on the broad brown planes of his rigid cheek and chin and low strong forehead. He stood like that for a long time, staring, thinking in his peasant simplicity. Whatever his thoughts, they were hard and desperate, yet unafraid.
    He turned slowly and surveyed the room. He saw the dusky blackboard with their scrawls; he sat the motionless globe on the desk. He saw the books, the benches and the doll. He saw the soldiers, some sitting on their packs, some leaning against the walls, one or two, like himself, standing at the shutters, watching the road. He saw the glinting bayonets.
    For a long time he gazed at them all. And then he said, in his slow reluctant countryman’s voice:
    “There is still time. If there is anyone here who wants to go, let him go at once. We will not blame him. Perhaps he has a wife, children.” His rusty voice broke on a hard breath. “I have four children,” he went on, simply.
    No one answered Now his eyes became fierce, a little wild, almost pleading. “There is yet time. If a man wants to go, we will say: ‘God be with you.’ We will not think him a coward. We will think of his children.”
    No one answered. But each man looked at him and did not move.
    He sighed. He regarded them as a father, or as an older brother, would regard them. He had been a relentless disciplinarian, never fraternizing with them even for an instant, always stubborn and suspicious with the stubbornness and suspiciousness of the peasant. They had called him “Old Hardheel,” and the name had been deserved. None of them had liked him; some of them had hated him. But all had respected him. And now he sighed, and looked at them long and steadfastly, with a curious tremor about his mouth.
    “God bless you,” he said in his simplicity, and again his voice broke, and he turned abruptly and resumed his staring at the road.
    Two of the soldiers were very young men, barely twenty-one. One of them was a Jew, a slender pale little Jew with a thin Talmudic face and deep dark tragic eyes. He had hands like those of a tubercular woman’s, all veins and delicacy, incongruous hands on the muzzle of a gun. His uniform seemed too large for him; his leggings bound legs as frail as a child’s, and his rough boots were of the smallest specifications. There was a dancer’s air about him, and in fact, he had only recently broken a very good engagement at the Grand Theatre in Prague, the first engagement in many lean and anxious months. His gay little dancing partner, his wife Gitel, was now trying frantically to replace him in their engaging repertoire. Her last moments with him had been a tearful confusion of grief and dread and frenzied instructions thrown over the shoulder to a seriously-practicing and sweating young substitute. She had flung her thin little arms about her husband’s neck; she had pressed her tiny triangular face to his, wetting his cheek with her tears. Her dazed wet eyes had gazed at him wildly. And all the time she had shrieked, glancing over her shoulder: “No, no, Anton! Not like that! Three to the right, a bend in the middle, with a comical expression, five to the left, a stumble!” Her brief little dancing skirt, all pink tulle and bright little stars, stuck out backwards from her body as she