“Very well,” said Mickey. “You have your Luger ready. Why don’t you use it?”

  “Not here,” said the man. “But down there.” He indicated a cluster of trees below in the valley about a thousand feet from the cave.

  Mickey glanced slyly at his watch. There were still three minutes to go before hell would break loose under unsuspecting Heinies on the hill. Mickey smiled inwardly as he hurried down the hill toward the valley.

  “You seem in a hurry,” noted Von Starheim.

  “I don’t like prolonging anything good or bad,” Mickey replied. He turned back to Von Starheim, who was following close on his heels. “Don’t shoot me in the back, will you Von Starheim?”

  “What!” replied the Nazi, “and lose the satisfaction of seeing the expression on your face when my bullets tear through you? Of course not! That would be foolish.”

  Two minutes to go.

  Mickey kept talking. “It’s a beautiful day for a murder, isn’t it rat?” he asked.

  “What do you Americans say about sticks and stones?” asked Von Starheim sarcastically.

  “You’d be surprised,” said Mickey.

  They reached the cluster of trees Von Starheim had ordered Mickey to.

  “Where do you want me to stand, you Nazi bootlicking killer?” asked Mickey. He knew the man couldn’t take much of that.

  One minute to go before the blast.

  * * * *

  The taunt didn’t seem to move Von Starheim. He seemed so intent on the sadistic enjoyment that awaited him when he would behold his Luger steel lay low the American he hated most in the world. He ordered Mickey farther into the cluster of trees.

  Thirty seconds to go.

  “I wonder what all your schoolmates at Breslau University would think if they could see the disgraced and yellow classmate of theirs, Captain Von Starheim of Hitler’s Heinie Rats about to murder a man in cold blood,” asked Mickey.

  “Donnerwetter!” cried the man as Mickey touched off the spark that made the Nazi storm. “This is it!” he screamed. Being reminded of his expulsion was more than even he could take under the circumstances. He raised the Luger muzzle to the line of Mickey’s heart. He could see the cold perspiration gather on the American’s forehead as he waited to receive the hot steel.

  “This is it!” screamed the Nazi again. And as he was about to press the trigger, it was as though he himself had given the signal. Fire flashed from the muzzle of the Luger. But the detonating sound did not seem to come from the pistol but from the hill above.

  The whole earth seemed to rise under their feet; a huge rent in the soil opened up a few feet away, as the sky suddenly blackened above them. The blackness was streaked with an orange flame. As the explosion reverberated through the valley, both men were lifted clear off their feet and thrown about twenty yards by the concussion.

  Von Starheim’s bullet went wide. His gun flew out of his hand and drove for a cluster of brush where it disappeared. There were only two great blasts, but the concussion left both Von Starheim and Mickey limp for almost fifteen minutes.

  When they both came out of the daze, they glanced off to the mountain and saw most of it blown away. The dirt and laughing Heinies that were blown skyward together, now lay quietly in each other’s bosoms.

  Von Starheim and Mickey were not immune to the falling debris. They were covered with it and had to dig themselves out. The German looked for his gun but it was nowhere in sight.

  Mickey was the first to speak.

  “Looks like fists again, rat,” he said.

  Von Starheim was pale from the blast; the threat of a physical beating made him take on a jaundiced appearance; his face turned yellow. His eyes took on a frightened expression.

  “No,” he murmured. “No. You can’t do that to me.” He recalled other beatings administered by Mickey at Breslau. “You can’t do that to me,” he repeated.

  Mickey rose to his feet. He painfully strode over to where Von Starheim was still sitting on the ground. The man tried to crawl back and away from the disaster he knew was about to befall him.

  “Get up you filthy swine,” he gritted. “You’re a brave man facing an unarmed man with a gun in your hand. You’re a brave man when you’re with other dogs like you who you order to shoot men with their hands tied behind their backs. Get up! I’m going to polish you off and this time do a better job of it than I ever did at Breslau.”

  He reached down and lifted the Nazi to his feet; then, in his best pile-driver fashion, sent his big fist crashing into the man’s mouth, driving the Nazi’s front teeth down the back of his throat.

  Mickey followed this by a left to the man’s nose. He felt the bone crush under the impact and the wine flowed as it had never flowed in any wine cellar in Germany. The murderous Nazi face was crimson; the mouth that gaped black with a huge toothless cavity, screamed for mercy.

  “What mercy did you give those Russians?” asked Mickey now in a red fury himself.

  “Help! Help!” cried Von Starheim as Mickey pounded on the man’s chest and ribs until they cracked under the trip-hammer blows.

  “Don’t call for help,” cried Mickey. “God himself wouldn’t listen to you—and right now there isn’t anyone else who could hear you.”

  He continued to beat the man into insensibility. But before the Nazi passed out, Mickey, hysterical himself now, screamed at him in a frenzy: “I set off that explosion, you dog! I blew your Nazi band to pieces! I did it!”

  He felt the German collapse under him as he shook the life out of the man to impress him with the fact that it was Mickey who destroyed his band of killers. He let him go and the man fell unconscious to the dirt-covered grass.

  Mickey himself dropped to the ground, exhausted; weeping bitterly with anger, and at the loss of his young friend Feodor.

  There was nothing weak in his tears. No stronger man could have helped cracking under the gigantic strain. Mickey Tchekov was an ordinary human, like any other ordinary human with an average human’s courage.

  Calmed, his strength recovered, three hours later he walking into the camp of the escaped guerrillas carrying the badly mashed Von Starheim over his strong young shoulder. He dumped the man to the ground and turned him over to his comrades.

  “There he is,” he said. “This is what is left of Von Starheim.”

  “Why didn’t you kill him?” asked one of the men.

  “No,” replied Mickey. “I’m a doctor. I’m supposed to save lives; not destroy them. That’s your job.”

  “But Feodor was your friend,” reminded one of the men significantly.

  “He was your leader,” recalled Mickey.

  “He is right,” said another of the Russian guerrillas, a giant of a Cossack. “The doctor is right.” He leaned down and lifted the now whimpering Von Starheim as though the one hundred and sixty pound German were just a child. He swung him over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and headed for the rear of the barn on the farm where the guerrillas had found haven. Other of the men followed him.

  * * * *

  Mickey walked off toward a small scrub pine that grew in front of a taller growth of pine trees. It was so symbolic of young Feodor and his guerrilla band of men, that Mickey felt it was a silent memorial to the boy and his faithful followers.

  His hand caressed the pine needles and stopped suddenly as a number of shots rang out on the otherwise quiet air about the farm. There was no expression of joy on his face at the sound. He knew it was all over with his old enemy; but he knew, too, that it was all over with his young friend.

  “It won’t be—it isn’t over,” he murmured. “I’ll always remember that kid as I knew him—not as I left him. He was brave, unselfish, and fine. I’m proud to have served under him—even if he was years younger than I. Boy though he was; he was every inch a man. I hope, when I go, my friends will be able to say as much for me.”

  Mickey Tchekov gave the little pine a gentle, affectionate pat—and turned back to the farmhouse where the men had gathered.

  A MYSTERY OF HEROISM, by Stephen Crane

  The dark uniforms of the men were so coated with dust from the incessant wrestling of the two armies that the regiment almost seemed a part of the clay bank which shielded them from the shells. On the top of the hill a battery was arguing in tremendous roars with some other guns, and to the eye of the infantry, the artillerymen, the guns, the caissons, the horses, were distinctly outlined upon the blue sky. When a piece was fired, a red streak as round as a log flashed low in the heavens, like a monstrous bolt of lightning. The men of the battery wore white duck trousers, which somehow emphasized their legs; and when they ran and crowded in little groups at the bidding of the shouting officers, it was more impressive than usual to the infantry.

  Fred Collins, of A Company, was saying: “Thunder! I wisht I had a drink. Ain’t there any water round here?” Then somebody yelled, “There goes th’ bugler!”

  As the eyes of half the regiment swept in one machinelike movement there was an instant’s picture of a horse in a great convulsive leap of a death wound and a rider leaning back with a crooked arm and spread fingers before his face. On the ground was the crimson terror of an exploding shell, with fibres of flame that seemed like lances. A glittering bugle swung clear of the rider’s back as fell headlong the horse and the man. In the air was an odour as from a conflagration.

  Sometimes they of the infantry looked down at a fair little meadow which spread at their feet. Its long, green grass was rippling gently in a breeze. Beyond it was the gray form of a house half torn to pieces by shells and by the busy axes of soldiers who had pursued firewood. The line of an old fence was now dimly marked by long weeds and by an occasional post. A shell had blown the well-house to fragments. Little lines of gray smoke ribboning upward from some embers indicated the place where had stood the barn.

  From beyond a curtain of green woods there came the sound of some stupendous scuffle, as if two animals of the size of islands were fighting. At a distance there were occasional appearances of swift-moving men, horses, batteries, flags, and, with the crashing of infantry volleys were heard, often, wild and frenzied cheers. In the midst of it all Smith and Ferguson, two privates of A Company, were engaged in a heated discussion, which involved the greatest questions of the national existence.

  The battery on the hill presently engaged in a frightful duel. The white legs of the gunners scampered this way and that way, and the officers redoubled their shouts. The guns, with their demeanours of stolidity and courage, were typical of something infinitely self-possessed in this clamour of death that swirled around the hill.

  One of a “swing” team was suddenly smitten quivering to the ground, and his maddened brethren dragged his torn body in their struggle to escape from this turmoil and danger. A young soldier astride one of the leaders swore and fumed in his saddle, and furiously jerked at the bridle. An officer screamed out an order so violently that his voice broke and ended the sentence in a falsetto shriek.

  The leading company of the infantry regiment was somewhat exposed, and the colonel ordered it moved more fully under the shelter of the hill. There was the clank of steel against steel.

  A lieutenant of the battery rode down and passed them, holding his right arm carefully in his left hand. And it was as if this arm was not at all a part of him, but belonged to another man. His sober and reflective charger went slowly. The officer’s face was grimy and perspiring, and his uniform was tousled as if he had been in direct grapple with an enemy. He smiled grimly when the men stared at him. He turned his horse toward the meadow.

  Collins, of A Company, said: “I wisht I had a drink. I bet there’s water in that there ol’ well yonder!”

  “Yes; but how you goin’ to git it?”

  For the little meadow which intervened was now suffering a terrible onslaught of shells. Its green and beautiful calm had vanished utterly. Brown earth was being flung in monstrous handfuls. And there was a massacre of the young blades of grass. They were being torn, burned, obliterated. Some curious fortune of the battle had made this gentle little meadow the object of the red hate of the shells, and each one as it exploded seemed like an imprecation in the face of a maiden.

  The wounded officer who was riding across this expanse said to himself, “Why, they couldn’t shoot any harder if the whole army was massed here!”

  A shell struck the gray ruins of the house, and as, after the roar, the shattered wall fell in fragments, there was a noise which resembled the flapping of shutters during a wild gale of winter. Indeed, the infantry paused in the shelter of the bank appeared as men standing upon a shore contemplating a madness of the sea. The angel of calamity had under its glance the battery upon the hill. Fewer white-legged men laboured about the guns. A shell had smitten one of the pieces, and after the flare, the smoke, the dust, the wrath of this blow were gone, it was possible to see white legs stretched horizontally upon the ground. And at that interval to the rear, where it is the business of battery horses to stand with their noses to the fight awaiting the command to drag their guns out of the destruction or into it or wheresoever these incomprehensible humans demanded with whip and spur—in this line of passive and dumb spectators, whose fluttering hearts yet would not let them forget the iron laws of man’s control of them—in this rank of brute-soldiers there had been relentless and hideous carnage. From the ruck of bleeding and prostrate horses, the men of the infantry could see one animal raising its stricken body with its fore legs, and turning its nose with mystic and profound eloquence toward the sky.

  Some comrades joked Collins about his thirst. “Well, if yeh want a drink so bad, why don’t yeh go git it!”

  “Well, I will in a minnet, if yeh don’t shut up!”

  A lieutenant of artillery floundered his horse straight down the hill with as great concern as if it were level ground. As he galloped past the colonel of the infantry, he threw up his hand in swift salute. “We’ve got to get out of that,” he roared angrily. He was a black-bearded officer, and his eyes, which resembled beads, sparkled like those of an insane man. His jumping horse sped along the column of infantry.

  The fat major, standing carelessly with his sword held horizontally behind him and with his legs far apart, looked after the receding horseman and laughed. “He wants to get back with orders pretty quick, or there’ll be no batt’ry left,” he observed.

  The wise young captain of the second company hazarded to the lieutenant colonel that the enemy’s infantry would probably soon attack the hill, and the lieutenant colonel snubbed him.

  A private in one of the rear companies looked out over the meadow, and then turned to a companion and said, “Look there, Jim!” It was the wounded officer from the battery, who some time before had started to ride across the meadow, supporting his right arm carefully with his left hand. This man had encountered a shell apparently at a time when no one perceived him, and he could now be seen lying face downward with a stirruped foot stretched across the body of his dead horse. A leg of the charger extended slantingly upward precisely as stiff as a stake. Around this motionless pair the shells still howled.

  There was a quarrel in A Company. Collins was shaking his fist in the faces of some laughing comrades. “Dern yeh! I ain’t afraid t’ go. If yeh say much, I will go!”

  “Of course, yeh will! You’ll run through that there medder, won’t yeh?”

  Collins said, in a terrible voice, “You see now!” At this ominous threat his comrades broke into renewed jeers.

  Collins gave them a dark scowl and went to find his captain. The latter was conversing with the colonel of the regiment.

  “Captain,” said Collins, saluting and standing at attention—in those days all trousers bagged at the knees—”captain, I want t’ get permission to go git some water from that there well over yonder!”

  The colonel and the captain swung about simultaneously and stared across the meadow. The captain laughed. “You must be pretty thirsty, Collins?”

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  “Well—ah,” said the captain. After a moment, he asked, “Can’t you wait?”

  “No, sir.”

  The colonel was watching Collins’s face. “Look here, my lad,” he said, in a pious sort of a voice—”look here, my lad”—Collins was not a lad—”don’t you think that’s taking pretty big risks for a little drink of water?”

  “I dunno,” said Collins uncomfortably. Some of the resentment toward his companions, which perhaps had forced him into this affair, was beginning to fade. “I dunno wether ’tis.”

  The colonel and the captain contemplated him for a time.

  “Well,” said the captain finally.

  “Well,” said the colonel, “if you want to go, why, go.”

  Collins saluted. “Much obliged t’ yeh.”

  As he moved away the colonel called after him. “Take some of the other boys’ canteens with you an’ hurry back now.”

  “Yes, sir, I will.”

  The colonel and the captain looked at each other then, for it had suddenly occurred that they could not for the life of them tell whether Collins wanted to go or whether he did not.

  They turned to regard Collins, and as they perceived him surrounded by gesticulating comrades, the colonel said: “Well, by thunder! I guess he’s going.”

  Collins appeared as a man dreaming. In the midst of the questions, the advice, the warnings, all the excited talk of his company mates, he maintained a curious silence.

  They were very busy in preparing him for his ordeal. When they inspected him carefully it was somewhat like the examination that grooms give a horse before a race; and they were amazed, staggered by the whole affair. Their astonishment found vent in strange repetitions.

  “Are yeh sure a-goin’?” they demanded again and again.

  “Certainly I am,” cried Collins, at last furiously.

  He strode sullenly away from them. He was swinging five or six canteens by their cords. It seemed that his cap would not remain firmly on his head, and often he reached and pulled it down over his brow.