Finally, one of them, with an
inward struggle, brought himself to ask, "Are you from the outside?"
I was forced to admit that I was. I felt that I had taken an
unwarrantable liberty in intruding on a besieged garrison. I wanted
to say that I had lost my way and had ridden into the town by
mistake, and that I begged to be allowed to withdraw with apologies.
The other officer woke up suddenly and handed me a printed list of
the prices which had been paid during the siege for food and tobacco.
He seemed to offer it as being in some way an official apology for
his starved appearance. The price of cigars struck me as especially
pathetic, and I commented on it. The first officer gazed mournfully
at the blazing sunshine before him. "I have not smoked a cigar in
two months," he said. My surging sympathy, and my terror at again
offending the haughty garrison, combated so fiercely that it was only
with a great effort that I produced a handful. "Will you have
these?" The other officer started in his saddle so violently that I
thought his horse had stumbled, but he also kept his eyes straight in
front. "Thank you, I will take one if I may - just one," said the
first officer. "Are you sure I am not robbing you?" They each took
one, but they refused to put the rest of the cigars in their pockets.
As the printed list stated that a dozen matches sold for $1.75, I
handed them a box of matches. Then a beautiful thing happened. They
lit the cigars and at the first taste of the smoke - and they were not
good cigars - an almost human expression of peace and good-will and
utter abandonment to joy spread over their yellow skins and cracked
lips and fever-lit eyes. The first man dropped his reins and put his
hands on his hips and threw back his head and shoulders and closed
his eyelids. I felt that I had intruded at a moment which should
have been left sacred. {5}
Another boy officer in stainless khaki and beautifully turned out,
polished and burnished and varnished, but with the same yellow skin
and sharpened cheek-bones and protruding teeth, a skeleton on horse-
back, rode slowly toward us down the hill. As he reached us he
glanced up and then swayed in his saddle, gazing at my companions
fearfully. "Good God," he cried. His brother officers seemed to
understand, but made no answer, except to jerk their heads toward me.
They were too occupied to speak. I handed the skeleton a cigar, and
he took it in great embarrassment, laughing and stammering and
blushing. Then I began to understand; I began to appreciate the
heroic self-sacrifice of the first two, who, when they had been given
the chance, had refused to fill their pockets. I knew then that it
was an effort worthy of the V. C.
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