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may be quite certain death to peep over that foot of ground in order to find out, and while they wait for a few instants shells may burst in their midst and destroy a half of them. Then the rest nerving themselves, rush up the ridge, and fall in a line dead under machine-gun fire. The supports come up, creeping over their corpses, get past the ridge, into scrub which some shell has set on fire. Men fall wounded in the fire, and the cartridges in their bandoliers explode and slowly kill them. The survivors crawl through the scrub, half-choked, and come out on a field full of flowers tangled three feet high with strong barbed wire. They wait for a while, to try to make out where the enemy is. They may see nothing but the slope of the field running up to a sky line, and a flash of distant sea on a flank, but no sign of any enemy, only the crash of guns and the pipe and croon and spurt of bullets. Gathering themselves together their brave men dash out to cut the wire and are killed; others take their places and are killed; others step out with too great a pride even to stoop, and pull up the supports of the wires and fling them down, and fall dead on top of them, having perhaps cleared a couple of yards. Then a couple of machine guns open on the survivors and kill them all in thirty seconds, with the concentrated fire of a battalion.

The supports come up, and hear about the wire from some wounded man who has crawled back through the scrub. They send back word, "Held up by wire," and in time the message comes to the telephone which has just been blown to pieces by a shell. Presently when the telephone is repaired, the message reaches the gunners, who fire high-explosive shells on to the wire, and on to the slopes where the machine guns may be hidden. Then the supports go on over the flowers and are met midway by a concentrated fire of shells, shrapnel, machine guns and rifles. Those who are not killed lie down among the flowers and begin to scrape little heaps of earth with their hands to give protection to their heads. In the light sandy

marl this does not take long, though many are blown to pieces or hit in the back as they scrape. As before, they cannot see how the rest of the attack is faring, nor even where the other platoons of the battalion are; they lie scraping in the roots of daffodils and lilies, while bullets sing and shriek a foot or two over their heads. A man peering from his place in the flowers may make out that the man next to him, some three yards away, is dead, and that the man beyond is praying, the man beyond him cursing, and the man beyond him out of his mind from nerves or thirst.

Long hours pass, but the air above them never ceases to cry like a live thing with bullets flying. Men are killed or maimed, and the wounded cry for water Men get up to give them water and are killed. Shells fall at regular intervals along the field. The waiting men count the seconds between the shells to check the precision of the battery's fire. Some of the bursts fling the blossoms and bulbs of flowers into the bodies of men, where they are found long afterwards by the X-rays. Bursts and roars of fire on either flank tell of some intense moment in other parts of the line. Every feeling of terror and mental anguish and anxiety goes through the mind of each man there, and is put down by resolve.

The supports come up, they rise with a cheer, and get out of the accursed flowers into a gulley where some men of their regiment are already lying dead. There is a little wood to their front; they make for that, and suddenly come upon a deep and narrow Turk trench full of men. This is their first sight of the enemy. They leap down into the trench and fight hand to hand, kill and are killed, in the long grave already dug. They take the trench, but opening from the trench are saps, which the Turks still hold. Men are shot dead at these saps by Turk sharpshooters cunningly screened within them. Bullets fall in particular places in the trench from snipers hidden in the trees of the wood. The men send back for bombs, others try to find out where the

rest of the battalion lies, or send word that from the noise of the fire there must be a battery of machine guns beyond the wood, if the guns would shell it.

Presently, before the bombs come, bombs begin to drop among them from the Turks. Creeping up, the men catch. them in their hands before they explode and fling them back so that they burst among the Turks. Some have their hands blown off, others their heads, in doing this, but the bloody game of catch goes on till no Turks are left in the sap, only a few wounded groaning men who slowly bleed to death there. After long hours, the supports come up and a storm of high explosives searches the little wood, and then with a cheer the remnant goes forward out of the trench into the darkness of the pines. Fire opens on them from snipers in the trees and from machine guns everywhere; they drop and die, and the survivors see no enemy, only their friends falling and a place where no living thing can pass. Men find themselves suddenly alone, with all their friends dead, and no enemy in sight, but the rush of bullets filling the air. They go back to the trench, not afraid, but in a kind of maze, and as they take stock and count their strength there comes the roar of the Turkish war cry, the drumlike proclamation of the faith, and the Turks come at them with the bayonet. Then that lonely remnant of a platoon stands to it with rapid fire, and the machine gun rattles like a motor bicycle, and some ribald or silly song goes up, and the Turks fail to get home, but die or waver and retreat and are themselves charged as they turn. It is evening now; the day has passed in long hours of deep experience, and the men have made two hundred yards. They send back for sup

ports and orders, link up, if they are lucky, with some other part of their battalion, whose adventures, fifty yards away, have been as intense, but wholly different, and prepare the Turk trench for the night. Presently word reaches them from some far-away H. Q. (some dug-out five hundred yards back, in what seems, by comparison, like peaceful England) that there are no supports, and that the orders are to hold the line at all costs and prepare for a fresh advance on the morrow. Darkness falls, and ammunition and water come up, and the stretcherbearers hunt for the wounded by the groans, while the Turks search the entire field with shell to kill the supports which are not there. Some of the men in the trench creep out to their front, and are killed there as they fix a wire entanglement. The survivors make ready for the Turk attack, certain soon to come. There is no thought of sleep; it is too cold for sleep; the men shiver as they stare into the night; they take the coats of the dead, and try to get a little warmth. There is no moon and the rain begins. The marl at the bottom of the trench is soon a sticky mud, and the one dry patch is continually being sniped. A few exhausted ones fall not into sleep but into nervous dreams, full of twitches and cries, like dogs' nightmares, and away at sea some ship opens with her great guns at an unseen target up the hill. The terrific crashes shake the air; some one sees a movement in the grass and fires; others start up and fire. The whole irregular line starts up and fires, the machine guns rattle, the officers curse, and the guns behind, expecting an attack, send shells into the woods. Then slowly

the fire drops and dies, and stray Turks, creeping up, fling bombs into the trench.

B. NARRATION OF FICTION

Fiction is the "white-headed boy" of literature, the darling of both writer and reader. Its appeal is felt by the imaginative child, the dreaming old crone, and the men and women of that busier and more practical middle period. Wherein lies this charm? It may be that the narration of incidents and sensations which we find either strange or only partly familiar but which we have little difficulty in experiencing vicariously fills us with the delight of a mysterious Perhaps, a word in which some one has said is wrapped all of this world's wisdom. Or again, and not at all paradoxically, it may be that we derive great satisfaction in discovering that others. throb to the same emotions that we do, and are actuated by the same motives.

Be that as it may, Fiction, beginning with the relation of isolated anecdotes, developed through the episodic or (when extended) loosely constructed tale and the interminably long romance into the novel, novelette, and short story that we know to-day. These latter narratives are the product of years of experiment during which the type was being evolved. This, of course, is ignoring the drama, a very special subdivision of objective narration, whose origin dates back some five or six centuries before the Christian era. Drama actually imitates the actions of life which the other forms of narration merely report. In consequence, it demands a technique peculiar to itself. As the only type of Fiction which comes within the scope of this book is the Short Story, whatever mention is made of these other forms will necessarily be by indirection and as a means of better understanding this latest development in the realm of prose.

Broadly speaking, all writers of Fiction are by nature either Romanticists or Realists. The distinction between the two is rather one of attitude and treatment than of subject matter; although the Romanticist is attracted to the re

mote, the bizarre, the sentimental, and the Realist to the familiar, the commonplace, and not seldom the sordid. The same materials, however, will serve either for the romantic or the realistic writer. The former will achieve by a definite artistic design the truth of a possible reality; the latter by a less arbitrary pattern, the truth of actuality. As Clayton Hamilton philosophically states it, the Romanticist, employing the deductive method, conceives a general law and illustrates it specifically; the Realist, using the inductive method, "leads us through a series of imagined facts as similar as possible to the details of actual life which he studied in order to arrive at his general conception." So Hawthorne in "The Ambitious Guest" and Kipling in "The Brushwood Boy" illustrate spiritual truths by a sequence of incidents not necessarily imitative of actuality; while Alexander Kuprin in "Anathema" and Anzia Yezierska in "The Fat of the Land" acquaint us with the truths they wish to express by implying in the details of their narratives a larger meaning.

Each of these methods has its advantages. Each also has its dangers. Romanticism through its function of exalted symbolism offers freedom from cold facts; but it also tends not merely to gross improbability of theme, but to mawkish sentiment, arbitrary actions, and inconsistent characterization. Realism appeals to the scientific spirit of the moderns, but when all artistic restraint is removed, it often assumes a formlessness from which no truth at all can be educed. The purely photographic has little or no significance. Even in the most uncompromising Realism there must be the suggestion of some design, some attempt to group selected details in a pattern, else there is no artonly a register.

As Realism began to deal openly with

Clayton Hamilton, A Manual of the Art of Fiction, Doubleday, Page and Company, page 33.

many subjects which had previously been false idealisms and finding in the naked

taboo, the question of morality in art and letters flared up with much the same intensity that marked the more justifiable controversy during the late Restoration period. Nineteenth century Realists like Balzac and Zola (especially the latter), writing side by side with the Romanticists Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward, found such feverish delight in depicting the ugliness of man's baser nature that the smug respectability of many eminent Victorians received a decided shock. The result is that the moralists still look askance at the later phase of Realism, finding much of it if not pernicious at least lacking in inspiration and purpose.

What these modern Realists claim to be doing is stripping the tinsel from our

ness of truth a terrible beauty that is sometimes passionate, sometimes restrained, but always fearless. This search for beauty wherever it may be found. raises the Realist from the rôle of psychologist to that of artist. When Lulu Bett, in Zona Gale's famous novel, disillusioned by her first marriage, accepts the love of Cornish, the uninspired dispenser of cheap music, it is not the conventional fulfillment of happiest hopes, as some would have us think, but the realization (to quote the Pfarrer in Sudermann's Heimat) that there comes to nearly all of us an hour when we must gather the fragments of our shattered ambitions and piece them together the best we may; and in that brave adjustment to reality lies a true beauty.

THE SHORT STORY

In England the novel attained a rank that challenged the best efforts of the other nations. In Germany, the novelette, or Novelle, was brought to perfection by the Romanticists of the nineteenth century. It remained for America to win supremacy in the field of the short story. Mr. Edward J. O'Brien, instituting in 1915 an annual volume of the best American short stories, remarked, "The American short story has been developed as an art form to a point where it may fairly claim a sustained superiority, as different in kind as in quality from the tale or conte of other literatures."

If one inquires into the reason for this superiority, he will not discover it in the great bulk of the material which floods our periodicals, for though quantity of production expresses a live interest in the form it does not necessarily spell quality. He will find it rather in the adroit adaptation to material of a flexible form which still cherishes the fundamental principles of the genre; and in the recognition by our best writers that the surest means of creating a permanent literature is to reflect in it the various phases of our national life.

The short story as a literary form is a comparatively recent development dating back little earlier than the middle of the nineteenth century. There were of course ancient fables and tales in which usually a single episode was given special significance, or a string of episodes tied together with only the frailest of unifying devices.

The Egyptian, Indian, and Persian tales of the marvelous, the Hebrew lyrical narratives, the Greek and Roman animal fables, and later the sagas of the Norsemen and the lays of the Normans, to say nothing of the early narratives of many less vigorous races, show us at a glance the delight our ancient ancestors took in the fiction then in vogue.

With this popularity as an urgent force, it is strange that the form was so inert. The drama was brought to an early perfection among the Greeks and later under different skies burst forth with renewed vigor during the Renaissance; the essay rose to sudden favor, and declined; and the novel, which still holds a noble place in prose literature, suddenly eclipsed all its rivals. eclipsed all its rivals. The tale, however, was almost static, although the practice

of grouping within a "frame" a number of brief narratives often highly divergent in tone and subject became more and more popular. The Decameron of Boccaccio and (in poetry) the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer are medieval examples which illustrate this tendency. Some of the tales in these collections were original, some current of the time, and still others culled from classical sources.

catch many reflections from the innumerable facets of human experience and time for that "leisurely analysis" which distinguishes all great novels; but the short story writer "seeks to interpret life, not fully, but keenly," and his entire perspective must be changed to accommodate the smaller canvas. It is a mistake to assume that a short story is a condensed novelette or a developed sketch, even though the types sometimes blend. The middle form entails a dramatic conflict which comes to a swift climax, a characteristic which is peculiar to itself and to the one-act play.

The origin of the Short Story proper may be traced to a union of the episodic tale and the eighteenth century essay. In the Sir Roger De Coverley Papers, Steele and Addison employed the vividness of narration to give added weight to their satire. But it was a means to an end, not the end itself. It remained for Washington Irving in those American. classics "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle" so to emphasize the narrative element as to create a recognizable link between the essay and the Short Story. With this heritage the pioneers of the true genre-Prosper Merimée, Alexander Pushkin, Edgar Allan Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne-be--which is another way of saying that gan their work.

It is easy to see from the lack of condensation, the unnecessary violation of the unity of time, and the resulting blur of the intended impression in "The Shot" | (1830) that Alexander Pushkin either had not understood the precepts which were to govern the Short Story for the next century or else had been unable to apply them. It was Prosper Merimée who in "Mateo Falcone" (1829) had first pointed the way to that nice proportion, that economy of detail and singleness of impression which Poe was to bring to perfection a decade later.

What are the characteristics of this new artistic form? In some respects the materials of the novel and the Short Story are similar. Both deal with imaginary incidents that happen to imaginary people in a place which may or may not exist. It is the great difference in length which utterly separates the technique of the two forms. The novelist in his hundred thousand words or more has room to

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This rising dramatic interest involved in what textbook cant calls the opposition of forces is what chiefly differentiates the Short Story from the tale or sketch. On the other hand it is unity of action and singleness of impression that marks the distinction between the Short Story and the longer forms. Edgar Allan Poe was continually preaching the necessity for keeping the dénouement always in view and for pruning ruthlessly all excrescences

the writer must not be seduced into blindalley incidents or be lured by the charms of quaint character or picturesque locality to inscribe impressions which his ultimate purpose does not demand. Conscious art must rise above predilection.

If, then, the attempt is made to formulate a definition which will accord with the philosophy of the critics and the practice of the writers, the result will approximate the following dictum: A Short Story is the adroit resolution of a dramatic conflict in a prose narrative brief enough to permit a single, definite impression. Like all fiction except drama it is told from the point of view of the chief character, a minor character, or the "omniscient author."

When one begins to catalogue the various types of prose that fall within this definition, he is staggered by the number and variety of the possible classifications. There are stories of the highly romantic and the highly realistic, the allegorical and the supernatural, the analytic (for

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