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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Men in War, by Andreas Latzko
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Men in War
+
+Author: Andreas Latzko
+
+
+Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8440]
+This file was first posted on July 10, 2003
+Last Updated: May 10, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEN IN WAR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, Tonya Allen, Charles Franks and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MEN IN WAR
+
+By Andreas Latzko
+
+
+DEDICATED TO FRIEND AND FOE
+
+_"I am convinced the time will come when all will think as I do."_
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I OFF TO WAR
+
+II BAPTISM OF FIRE
+
+III THE VICTOR
+
+IV MY COMRADE
+
+V A HERO'S DEATH
+
+VI HOME AGAIN
+
+
+
+
+
+I. OFF TO WAR
+
+The time was late in the autumn of the second year of the war; the
+place, the garden of a war hospital in a small Austrian town, which lay
+at the base of wooded hills, sequestered as behind a Spanish wall, and
+still preserving its sleepy contented outlook upon existence.
+
+Day and night the locomotives whistled by. Some of them hauled to the
+front trains of soldiers singing and hallooing, high-piled bales of
+hay, bellowing cattle and ammunition in tightly-closed, sinister-looking
+cars. The others, in the opposite direction, came creeping homeward
+slowly, marked by the bleeding cross that the war has thrown upon all
+walls and the people behind them. But the great madness raced through
+the town like a hurricane, without disturbing its calm, as though the
+low, brightly colored houses with the old-fashioned ornate façades
+had tacitly come to the sensible agreement to ignore with aristocratic
+reserve this arrogant, blustering fellow, War, who turned everything
+topsy-turvy.
+
+In the parks the children played unmolested with the large russet leaves
+of the old chestnut trees. Women stood gossiping in front of the shops,
+and somewhere in every street a girl with a bright kerchief on her head
+could be seen washing windows. In spite of the hospital flags waving
+from almost every house, in spite of innumerable bulletin boards,
+notices and sign-posts that the intruder had thrust upon the defenseless
+town, peace still seemed to prevail here, scarcely fifty miles away from
+the butchery, which on clear nights threw its glow on the horizon like
+an artificial illumination. When, for a few moments at a time, there was
+a lull in the stream of heavy, snorting automobile trucks and rattling
+drays, and no train happened to be rumbling over the railroad bridge and
+no signal of trumpet or clanking of sabres sounded the strains of
+war, then the obstinate little place instantly showed up its dull but
+good-natured provincial face, only to hide it again in resignation
+behind its ill-fitting soldier's mask, when the next automobile from
+the general staff came dashing around the corner with a great show of
+importance.
+
+To be sure the cannons growled in the distance, as if a gigantic dog
+were crouching way below the ground ready to jump up at the heavens,
+snarling and snapping. The muffled barking of the big mortars came from
+over there like a bad fit of coughing from a sickroom, frightening the
+watchers who sit with eyes red with crying, listening for every sound
+from the dying man. Even the long, low rows of houses shrank together
+with a rattle and listened horrorstruck each time the coughing convulsed
+the earth, as though the stress of war lay on the world's chest like a
+nightmare.
+
+The streets exchanged astonished glances, blinking sleepily in the
+reflection of the night-lamps that inside cast their merrily dancing
+shadows over close rows of beds. The rooms, choke-full of misery, sent
+piercing shrieks and wails and groans out into the night. Every human
+sound coming through the windows fell upon the silence like a furious
+attack. It was a wild denunciation of the war that out there at the
+front was doing its work, discharging mangled human bodies like so much
+offal and filling all the houses with its bloody refuse.
+
+But the beautiful wrought-iron fountains continued to gurgle and murmur
+complacently, prattling with soothing insistence of the days of their
+youth, when men still had the time and the care for noble lines and
+curves, and war was the affair of princes and adventurers. Legend popped
+out of every corner and every gargoyle, and ran on padded soles through
+all the narrow little streets, like an invisible gossip whispering of
+peace and comfort. And the ancient chestnut trees nodded assent, and
+with the shadows of their outspread fingers stroked the frightened
+façades to calm them. The past grew so lavishly out of the fissured
+walls that any one coming within their embrace heard the plashing of the
+fountains above the thunder of the artillery; and the sick and wounded
+men felt soothed and listened from their fevered couches to the
+talkative night outside. Pale men, who had been carried through the town
+on swinging stretchers, forgot the hell they had come from; and even the
+heavily laden victims tramping through the place on a forced march by
+night became softened for a space, as if they had encountered Peace
+and their own unarmed selves in the shadow of the columns and the
+flower-filled bay-windows.
+
+The same thing took place with the war in this town as with the stream
+that came down from out of the mountains in the north, foaming with rage
+at each pebble it rolled over. At the other end of the town, on passing
+the last houses, it took a tender leave, quite tamed and subdued,
+murmuring very gently, as if treading on tiptoe, as if drowsy with all
+the dreaminess it had reflected. Between wide banks, it stepped out into
+the broad meadowland, and circled about the war hospital, making almost
+an island of the ground it stood on. Thick-stemmed sycamores cast their
+shadow on the hospital, and from three sides came the murmur of the
+slothful stream mingled with the rustling of the leaves, as if the
+garden, when twilight fell, was moved by compassion and sang a slumber
+song for the lacerated men, who had to suffer in rank and file,
+regimented up to their very death, up to the grave, into which
+they--unfortunate cobblers, tinkers, peasants, and clerks--were shoved
+to the accompaniment of salvos from big-mouthed cannon.
+
+The sound of taps had just died away, and the watchmen were making their
+rounds, when they discovered three men in the deep shadow of the broad
+avenue, and drove them into the house.
+
+"Are you officers, eh?" the head-watchman, a stocky corporal of
+the landsturm, with grey on his temples, growled and blustered
+good-naturedly. "Privates must be in bed by nine o'clock." To preserve a
+show of authority he added with poorly simulated bearishness: "Well, are
+you going or not?"
+
+He was about to give his usual order, "Quick, take to your legs!" but
+caught himself just in time, and made a face as though he had swallowed
+something.
+
+The three men now hobbling toward the entrance for inmates, would have
+been only too glad to carry out such an order. However, they had only
+two legs and six clattering crutches between them. It was like a living
+picture posed by a stage manager who has an eye for symmetry. On the
+right went the one whose right leg had been saved, on the left went his
+counterpart, hopping on his left leg, and in the middle the miserable
+left-over of a human body swung between two high crutches, his empty
+trousers raised and pinned across his chest, so that the whole man could
+have gone comfortably into a cradle.
+
+The corporal followed the group with his eyes, his head bent and his
+fists clenched, as if bowed down beneath the burden of the sight. He
+muttered a not exactly patriotic oath and spat out a long curve of
+saliva with a hiss from between his front teeth. As he was about to turn
+and go on his round again, a burst of laughter came from the direction
+of the officers' wing. He stood still and drew in his head as if from a
+blow on the back of his neck, and a gleam of ungovernable hatred flitted
+over his broad, good-natured peasant face. He spat out again, to soothe
+his feelings, then took a fresh start and passed the merry company with
+a stiff salute.
+
+The gentlemen returned the salute carelessly. Infected by the coziness
+that hung over the whole of the town like a light cloud, they were
+sitting chatting in front of the hospital on benches moved together to
+form a square. They spoke of the war and--laughed, laughed like happy
+schoolboys discussing the miseries of examinations just gone through.
+Each had done his duty, each had had his ordeal, and now, under the
+protection of his wound, each sat there in the comfortable expectation
+of returning home, of seeing his people again, of being fêted, and for
+at least two whole weeks, of living the life of a man who is not tagged
+with a number.
+
+The loudest of the laughers was the young lieutenant whom they had
+nicknamed the Mussulman because of the Turkish turban he wore as officer
+of a regiment of Bosnians. A shell had broken his leg, and done its
+work thoroughly. For weeks already the shattered limb had been tightly
+encased in a plaster cast, and its owner, who went about on crutches,
+cherished it carefully, as though it were some precious object that had
+been confided to his care.
+
+On the bench opposite the Mussulman sat two gentlemen, a cavalry
+officer, the only one on the active list, and an artillery officer,
+who in civil life was a professor of philosophy, and so was called
+"Philosopher" for short. The cavalry captain had received a cut across
+his right arm, and the Philosopher's upper lip had been ripped by a
+splinter from a grenade. Two ladies were sitting on the bench that
+leaned against the wall of the hospital, and these three men were
+monopolizing the conversation with them, because the fourth man sat on
+his bench without speaking. He was lost in his own thoughts, his
+limbs twitched, and his eyes wandered unsteadily. In the war he was a
+lieutenant of the landsturm, in civil life a well-known composer. He had
+been brought to the hospital a week before, suffering from severe
+shock. Horror still gloomed in his eyes, and he kept gazing ahead of him
+darkly. He always allowed the attendants at the hospital to do whatever
+they wanted to him without resistance, and he went to bed or sat in the
+garden, separated from the others as by an invisible wall, at which he
+stared and stared. Even the unexpected arrival of his pretty, fair wife
+had not resulted in dispelling for so much as a second the vision of
+the awful occurrence that had unbalanced his mind. With his chin on his
+chest he sat without a smile, while she murmured words of endearment;
+and whenever she tried to touch his poor twitching hands with the tips
+of her fingers, full of infinite love, he would jerk away as if seized
+by a convulsion, or under torture.
+
+Tears rolled down the little woman's cheeks--cheeks hungry for caresses.
+She had fought her way bravely through the zones barred to civilians
+until she finally succeeded in reaching this hospital in the war zone.
+And now, after the great relief and joy of finding her husband alive and
+unmutilated, she suddenly sensed an enigmatic resistance, an unexpected
+obstacle, which she could not beg away or cry away, as she had used to
+do. There was a something there that separated her mercilessly from the
+man she had so yearned to see.
+
+She sat beside him impatiently, tortured by her powerlessness to find an
+explanation for the hostility that he shed around him. Her eyes pierced
+the darkness, and her hands always went the same way, groping forward
+timidly, then quickly withdrawing as though scorched when his shrinking
+away in hatred threw her into despair again.
+
+It was hard to have to choke down her grief like this, and not burst
+out in reproach and tear this secret from her husband, which he in
+his misery still interposed so stubbornly between himself and his one
+support. And it was hard to simulate happiness and take part in the airy
+conversation; hard always to have to force some sort of a reply, and
+hard not to lose patience with the other woman's perpetual giggling. It
+was easy enough for _her_. She knew that her husband, a major-general,
+was safe behind the lines on the staff of a high command. She had fled
+from the ennui of a childless home to enter into the eventful life of
+the war hospital.
+
+The major's wife had been sitting in the garden with the gentlemen ever
+since seven o'clock, always on the point of leaving, quite ready to go
+in her hat and jacket, but she let herself be induced again and again to
+remain a little longer. She kept up her flirtatious conversation in the
+gayest of spirits, as if she had no knowledge of all the torments she
+had seen during the day in the very house against which she was leaning
+her back. The sad little woman breathed a sigh of relief when it grew so
+dark that she could move away from the frivolous chatterbox unnoticed.
+
+And yet in spite of her titillating conversation and the air of
+importance with which she spoke of her duties as a nurse, the Frau Major
+was penetrated by a feeling that, without her being conscious of it,
+raised her high above herself. The great wave of motherliness that had
+swept over all the women when the fatal hour struck for the men, had
+borne her aloft, too. She had seen the three men with whom she was now
+genially exchanging light nothings come to the hospital--like thousands
+of others--streaming with blood, helpless, whimpering with pain. And
+something of the joy of the hen whose brood has safely hatched warmed
+her coquetry.
+
+Since the men have been going for months, crouching, creeping on
+all fours, starving, carrying their own death as mothers carry their
+children; since suffering and waiting and the passive acceptance of
+danger and pain have reversed the sexes, the women have felt strong,
+and even in their sensuality there has been a little glimmer of the new
+passion for mothering.
+
+The melancholy wife, just arrived from a region in which the war exists
+in conversation only, and engrossed in the one man to the exclusion of
+the others, suffered from the sexless familiarity that they so freely
+indulged in there in the shadow of death and agony. But the others were
+at home in the war. They spoke its language, which in the men was a
+mixture of obstinate greed for life and a paradoxical softness born of
+a surfeit of brutality; while in the woman it was a peculiar, garrulous
+cold-bloodedness. She had heard so much of blood and dying that her
+endless curiosity gave the impression of hardness and hysterical
+cruelty.
+
+The Mussulman and the cavalry officer were chaffing the Philosopher and
+poking fun at the phrase-mongers, hair-splitters, and other wasters of
+time. They took a childish delight in his broad smile of embarrassment
+at being teased in the Frau Major's presence, and she, out of feminine
+politeness, came to the Philosopher's rescue, while casting amorous
+looks at the others who could deal such pert blows with their tongues.
+
+"Oh, let the poor man alone," she laughed and cooed. "He's right. War
+is horrible. These two gentlemen are just trying to get your temper up."
+She twinkled at the Philosopher to soothe him. His good nature made him
+so helpless.
+
+The Philosopher grinned phlegmatically and said nothing. The Mussulman,
+setting his teeth, shifted his leg, which in its white bandage was the
+only part of him that was visible, and placed it in a more comfortable
+position on the bench.
+
+"The Philosopher?" he laughed. "As a matter of fact, what does the
+Philosopher know about war? He's in the artillery. And war is conducted
+by the infantry. Don't you know that, Mrs. ----?"
+
+"I am not Mrs. here. Here I am Sister Engelberta," she cut in, and for a
+moment the expression on her face became almost serious.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Sister Engelberta. Artillery and infantry, you see,
+are like husband and wife. We infantrymen must bring the child into the
+world when a victory is to be born. The artillery has only the pleasure,
+just like a man's part in love. It is not until after the child has been
+baptized that he comes strutting out proudly. Am I not right, Captain?"
+he asked, appealing to the cavalry officer. "You are an equestrian on
+foot now, too."
+
+The captain boomed his assent. In his summary view, members of the
+Reichstag who refused to vote enough money for the military, Socialists,
+pacifists, all men, in brief, who lectured or wrote or spoke superfluous
+stuff and lived by their brains belonged in the same category as the
+Philosopher. They were all "bookworms."
+
+"Yes, indeed," he said in his voice hoarse from shouting commands.
+"A philosopher like our friend here is just the right person for the
+artillery. Nothing to do but wait around on the top of a hill and
+look on. If only they don't shoot up our own men! It is easy enough to
+dispose of the fellows on the other side, in front of us. But I always
+have a devilish lot of respect for you assassins in the back. But let's
+stop talking of the war. Else I'll go off to bed. Here we are at last
+with two charming ladies, when it's been an age since we've seen a face
+that isn't covered with stubble, and you still keep talking of that
+damned shooting. Good Lord, when I was in the hospital train and the
+first girl came in with a white cap on her curly light hair, I'd have
+liked to hold her hand and just keep looking and looking at her. Upon my
+word of honor, Sister Engelberta, after a while the shooting gets to
+be a nuisance. The lice are worse. But the worst thing of all is the
+complete absence of the lovely feminine. For five months to see nothing
+but men--and then all of a sudden to hear a dear clear woman's voice!
+That's the finest thing of all. It's worth going to war for."
+
+The Mussulman pulled his mobile face flashing with youth into a grimace.
+
+"The finest thing of all! No, sir. To be quite frank, the finest thing
+of all is to get a bath and a fresh bandage, and be put into a clean
+white bed, and know that for a few weeks you're going to have a rest.
+It's a feeling like--well, there's no comparison for it. But, of course,
+it is very nice, too, to be seeing ladies again."
+
+The Philosopher had tilted his round fleshy Epicurean head to one side,
+and a moist sheen came into his small crafty eyes. He glanced at the
+place where a bright spot in the almost palpable darkness suggested the
+Frau Major's white dress, and began to tell what he thought, very slowly
+in a slight sing-song.
+
+"The finest thing of all, I think, is the quiet--when you have been
+lying up there in the mountains where every shot is echoed back and
+forth five times, and all of a sudden it turns absolutely quiet--no
+whistling, no howling, no thundering--nothing but a glorious quiet that
+you can listen to as to a piece of music! The first few nights I sat up
+the whole time and kept my ears cocked for the quiet, the way you try
+to catch a tune at a distance. I believe I even howled a bit, it was so
+delightful to listen to no sound."
+
+The captain of cavalry sent his cigarette flying through the night like
+a comet scattering sparks, and brought his hand down with a thump on his
+knee.
+
+"There, there, Sister Engelberta, did you get that?" he cried
+sarcastically. "'Listen to no sound.' You see, that's what's called
+philosophy. I know something better than that, Mr. Philosopher, namely,
+not to hear what you hear, especially when it's such philosophical
+rubbish."
+
+They laughed, and the man they were teasing smiled good-naturedly. He,
+too, was permeated by the peacefulness that floated into the garden from
+the sleeping town. The cavalryman's aggressive jokes glided off without
+leaving a sting, as did everything else that might have lessened the
+sweetness of the few days still lying between him and the front. He
+wanted to make the most of his time, and take everything easily with his
+eyes tight shut, like a child who has to enter a dark room.
+
+The Frau Major leaned over to the Philosopher.
+
+"So opinions differ as to what was the finest thing," she said; and her
+breath came more rapidly. "But, tell me, what was the most awful thing
+you went through out there? A lot of the men say the drumfire is the
+worst, and a lot of them can't get over the sight of the first man they
+saw killed. How about you?"
+
+The Philosopher looked tortured. It was a theme that did not fit
+into his programme. He was casting about for an evasive reply when an
+unintelligible wheezing exclamation drew all eyes to the corner in which
+the landsturm officer and his wife were sitting. The others had almost
+forgotten them in the darkness and exchanged frightened glances when
+they heard a voice that scarcely one of them knew, and the man with the
+glazed eyes and uncertain gestures, a marionette with broken joints,
+began to speak hastily in a falsetto like the crowing of a rooster.
+
+"What was the most awful thing? The only awful thing is the going off.
+You go off to war--and they let you go. That's the awful thing."
+
+A cold sickening silence fell upon the company. Even the Mussulman's
+face lost its perpetually happy expression and stiffened in
+embarrassment. It had come so unexpectedly and sounded so
+unintelligible. It caught them by the throat and set their pulses
+bounding--perhaps because of the vibrating of the voice that issued from
+the twitching body, or because of the rattling that went along with it,
+and made it sound like a voice broken by long sobbing.
+
+The Frau Major jumped up. She had seen the landsturm officer brought
+to the hospital strapped fast to the stretcher, because his sobbing
+wrenched and tore his body so that the bearers could not control him
+otherwise. Something inexpressibly hideous--so it was said--had half
+robbed the poor devil of his reason, and the Frau Major suddenly dreaded
+a fit of insanity. She pinched the cavalryman's arm and exclaimed with a
+pretense of great haste:
+
+"My goodness! There's the gong of the last car. Quick, quick,"
+addressing the sick man's wife, "quick! We must run."
+
+They all rose. The Frau Major passed her arm through the unhappy little
+woman's and urged with even greater insistence:
+
+"We'll have a whole hour's walk back to town if we miss the car."
+
+The little wife, completely at a loss, her whole body quivering, bent
+over her husband again to take leave. She was certain that his outburst
+had reference to her and held a grim deadly reproach, which she did not
+comprehend. She felt her husband draw back and start convulsively under
+the touch of her lips. And she sobbed aloud at the awful prospect of
+spending an endless night in the chilly neglected room in the hotel,
+left alone with this tormenting doubt. But the Frau Major drew her
+along, forcing her to run, and did not let go her arm until they
+had passed the sentinel at the gate and were out on the street. The
+gentlemen followed them with their eyes, saw them reappear once again
+on the street in the lamplight, and listened to the sound of the car
+receding in the distance. The Mussulman picked up his crutches, and
+winked at the Philosopher significantly, and said something with a yawn
+about going to bed. The cavalry officer looked down at the sick man
+curiously and felt sorry for him. Wanting to give the poor devil a bit
+of pleasure, he tapped him on his shoulder and said in his free and easy
+way:
+
+"You've got a chic wife, I must say. I congratulate you."
+
+The next instant he drew back startled. The pitiful heap on the bench
+jumped up suddenly, as though a force just awakened had tossed him up
+from his seat.
+
+"Chic wife? Oh, yes. Very dashing!" came sputtering from his twitching
+lips with a fury that cast out the words like a seething stream. "She
+didn't shed a single tear when I left on the train. Oh, they were all
+very dashing when we went off. Poor Dill's wife was, too. Very plucky!
+She threw roses at him in the train and she'd been his wife for only two
+months." He chuckled disdainfully and clenched his teeth, fighting hard
+to suppress the tears burning in his threat. "Roses! He-he! And 'See you
+soon again!' They were all so patriotic! Our colonel congratulated Dill
+because his wife had restrained herself so well--as if he were simply
+going off to maneuvers."
+
+The lieutenant was now standing up. He swayed on his legs, which he
+held wide apart, and supported himself on the cavalry captain's arm, and
+looked up into his face expectantly with unsteady eyes.
+
+"Do you know what happened to him--to Dill? I was there. Do you know
+what?"
+
+The captain looked at the others in dismay.
+
+"Come on--come on to bed. Don't excite yourself," he stammered in
+embarrassment.
+
+With a howl of triumph the sick man cut him short and snapped in an
+unnaturally high voice:
+
+"You don't know what happened to Dill, you don't? We were standing just
+the way we are now, and he was just going to show me the new photograph
+that his wife had sent him--his brave wife, he-he, his restrained
+wife. Oh yes, restrained! That's what they all were--all prepared for
+anything. And while we were standing there, he about to show me the
+picture, a twenty-eighter struck quite a distance away from us, a good
+two-hundred yards. We didn't even look that way. Then all of a sudden I
+saw something black come flying through the air--and Dill fell over with
+his dashing wife's picture in his hand and a boot, a leg, a boot with
+the leg of a baggage soldier sticking in his head--a soldier that the
+twenty-eighter had blown to pieces far away from where we stood."
+
+He stopped for an instant and stared at the captain triumphantly. Then
+he went on with a note of spiteful pride in his voice, though every now
+and then interrupted by a peculiar gurgling groan.
+
+"Poor Dill never said another word--Dill with the spur sticking in his
+skull, a regular cavalry spur, as big as a five-crown piece. He only
+turned up the whites of his eyes a little and looked sadly at his wife's
+picture, that she should have permitted such a thing as that. Such
+a thing as that! Such a thing! It took four of us to pull the boot
+out--four of us. We had to turn it and twist it, until a piece of
+his brain came along--like roots pulled up--like a jellyfish--a dead
+one--sticking to the spur."
+
+"Shut up!" the captain yelled furiously, and tore himself away and
+walked into the house cursing.
+
+The other two looked after him longingly, but they could not let the
+unfortunate man stay there by himself. When the captain had withdrawn
+his arm, he had fallen down on the bench again and sat whimpering like
+a whipped child, with his head leaning on the back. The Philosopher
+touched his shoulder gently, and was about to speak to him kindly and
+induce him to go into the house when he started up again and broke out
+into an ugly, snarling laugh.
+
+"But we tore her out of him, his dashing wife. Four of us had to tug and
+pull until she came out. I got him rid of her. Out with her! She's gone.
+All of them are gone. Mine is gone, too. Mine is torn out, too. All are
+being torn out. There's no wife any more! No wife any more, no--"
+
+His head bobbed and fell forward. Tears slowly rolled down his sad, sad
+face.
+
+The captain reappeared followed by the little assistant physician, who
+was on night duty.
+
+"You must go to bed now, Lieutenant," the physician said with affected
+severity.
+
+The sick man threw his head up and stared blankly at the strange face.
+When the physician repeated the order in a raised voice, his eyes
+suddenly gleamed, and he nodded approvingly.
+
+"Must go, of course," he repeated eagerly, and drew a deep sigh. "We all
+must go. The man who doesn't go is a coward, and they have no use for
+a coward. That's the very thing. Don't you understand? Heroes are the
+style now. The chic Mrs. Dill wanted a hero to match her new hat. Ha-ha!
+That's why poor Dill had to go and lose his brains. I, too--you, too--we
+must go die. You must let yourself be trampled on--your brains trampled
+on, while the women look on--chic--because it's the style now."
+
+He raised his emaciated body painfully, holding on to the back of the
+bench, and eyed each man in turn, waiting for assent.
+
+"Isn't it sad?" he asked softly. Then his voice rose suddenly to a
+shriek again, and the sound of his fury rang out weirdly in the garden.
+"Weren't they deceiving us, eh? I'd like to know--weren't they cheats?
+Was I an assassin? Was I a ruffian? Didn't I suit her when I sat at
+the piano playing? We were expected to be gentle and considerate!
+Considerate! And all at once, because the fashion changed, they had to
+have murderers. Do you understand? Murderers!"
+
+He broke away from the physician, and stood swaying again, and his
+voice gradually sank to a complaining sound like the thick strangulated
+utterance of a drunkard.
+
+"My wife was in fashion too, you know. Not a tear! I kept waiting and
+waiting for her to begin to scream and beg me at last to get out of the
+train, and not go with the others--beg me to be a coward for her sake.
+Not one of them had the courage to. They just wanted to be in fashion.
+Mine, too! Mine, too! She waved her handkerchief just like all the
+rest."
+
+His twitching arms writhed upwards, as though he were calling the
+heavens to witness.
+
+"You want to know what was the most awful thing?" he groaned, turning
+to the Philosopher abruptly. "The disillusionment was the most awful
+thing--the going off. The war wasn't. The war is what it has to be. Did
+it surprise you to find out that war is horrible? The only surprising
+thing was the going off. To find out that the women are horrible--that
+was the surprising thing. That they can smile and throw roses, that they
+can give up their men, their children, the boys they have put to bed a
+thousand times and pulled the covers over a thousand times, and petted
+and brought up to be men. That was the surprise! That they gave us
+up--that they sent us--_sent_ us! Because every one of them would
+have been ashamed to stand there without a hero. That was the great
+disillusionment. Do you think we should have gone if they had not sent
+us? Do you think so? Just ask the stupidest peasant out there why he'd
+like to have a medal before going back on furlough. Because if he has a
+medal his girl will like him better, and the other girls will run after
+him, and he can use his medal to hook other men's women away from under
+their noses. That's the reason, the only reason. The women sent us.
+No general could have made us go if the women hadn't allowed us to be
+stacked on the trains, if they had screamed out that they would never
+look at us again if we turned into murderers. Not a single man would
+have gone off if they had sworn never to give themselves to a man who
+has split open other men's skulls and shot and bayoneted human beings.
+Not one man, I tell you, would have gone. I didn't want to believe that
+they could stand it like that. 'They're only pretending,' I thought.
+'They're just restraining themselves. But when the first whistle blows,
+they'll begin to scream and tear us out of the train, and rescue us.'
+_Once_ they had the chance to protect us, but all they cared about was
+being in style--nothing else in the world but just being in style."
+
+He sank down on the bench again and sat as though he were all broken up.
+His body was shaken by a low weeping, and his head rolled to and fro
+on his panting chest. A little circle of people had gathered behind his
+back. The old landsturm corporal was standing beside the physician with
+four sentries ready to intervene at a moment's notice. All the windows
+in the officers' wing had lighted up, and scantily clad figures leaned
+out, looking down into the garden curiously.
+
+The sick man eagerly scrutinized the indifferent faces around him. He
+was exhausted.
+
+His hoarse throat no longer gave forth a sound. His hand reached out for
+help to the Philosopher, who stood beside him, all upset.
+
+The physician felt the right moment had come to lead him away.
+
+"Come, Lieutenant, let's go to sleep," he said with a clumsy affectation
+of geniality. "That's the way women are once for all, and there's
+nothing to be done about it."
+
+The physician wanted to go on talking and in conversing lure the
+sick man into the house unawares. But the very next sentence remained
+sticking in his throat, and he stopped short in amazement. The limp
+wobbling skeleton that only a moment before had sat there as in a faint
+and let himself be raised up by the physician and the Philosopher,
+suddenly jumped up with a jerk, and tore his arms away so violently that
+the two men who were about to assist him were sent tumbling up against
+the others. He bent over with crooked knees, staggering like a man
+carrying a heavy load on his back. His veins swelled, and he panted with
+fury:
+
+"That's the way women are once for all, are they? Since when, eh?
+Have you never heard of the suffragettes who boxed the ears of prime
+ministers, and set fire to museums, and let themselves be chained to
+lamp-posts for the sake of the vote? For the sake of the vote, do you
+hear? But for the sake of their men? No. Not one sound. Not one single
+outcry!"
+
+He stopped to take breath, overcome by a wild suffocating despair. Then
+he pulled himself together once more and with difficulty suppressing the
+sobs, which kept bringing a lump into his throat, he screamed in deepest
+misery like a hunted animal:
+
+"Have you heard of one woman throwing herself in front of a train for
+the sake of her husband? Has a single one of them boxed the ears of a
+prime minister or tied herself to a railroad track for us? There wasn't
+one that had to be torn away. Not one fought for us or defended us. Not
+one moved a little finger for us in the whole wide world! They drove us
+out! They gagged us! They gave us the spur, like poor Dill. They sent
+us to murder, they sent us to die--for their vanity. Are you going to
+defend them? No! They must be pulled out! Pulled out like weeds, by the
+roots! Four of you together must pull the way we had to do with Dill.
+Four of you together! Then she'll have to come out. Are you the doctor?
+There! Do it to my head. I don't want a wife! Pull--pull her out!"
+
+He flung out his arm and his fist came down like a hammer on his own
+skull, and his crooked fingers clutched pitilessly at the sparse growth
+of hair on the back of his head, until he held up a whole handful torn
+out by the roots, and howled with pain.
+
+The doctor gave a sign, and the next moment the four sentries were on
+him, panting. He screamed, gnashed his teeth, beat about him, kicked
+himself free, shook off his assailants like burrs. It was not until the
+old corporal and the doctor came to their assistance that they succeeded
+in dragging him into the house.
+
+As soon as he was gone the people left the garden. The last to go were
+the Mussulman and the Philosopher. The Mussulman stopped at the door,
+and in the light of the lantern looked gravely down at his leg, which,
+in its plaster cast, hung like a dead thing between his two crutches.
+
+"Do you know, Philosopher," he said, "I'd much rather have this stick
+of mine. The worst thing that can happen to one out there is to go crazy
+like that poor devil. Rather off with one's head altogether and be done
+with it. Or do you think he still has a chance?"
+
+The Philosopher said nothing. His round good-natured face had gone ashen
+pale, and his eyes were swimming with tears. He shrugged his shoulders
+and helped his comrade up the steps without speaking. On entering the
+ward they heard the banging of doors somewhere far away in the house and
+a muffled cry.
+
+Then everything was still. One by one the lights went out in the windows
+of the officers' wing. Soon the garden lay like a bushy black island
+in the river's silent embrace. Only now and then a gust of wind brought
+from the west the coughing of the guns like a faint echo.
+
+Once more a crunching sound was heard on the gravel. It was the four
+sentries marching back to the watch-house. One soldier was cursing under
+his breath as he tried to refasten his torn blouse. The others were
+breathing heavily and were wiping the sweat from their red foreheads
+with the backs of their hands. The old corporal brought up the rear, his
+pipe in the corner of his mouth, his head bent low. As he turned into
+the main walk a bright sheet of light lit up the sky, and a prolonged
+rumbling that finally sank into the earth with a growl shook all the
+windows of the hospital.
+
+The old man stood still and listened until the rumbling had died away.
+Then he shook his clenched fist, and sent out a long curve of saliva
+from between his set teeth, and muttered in a disgust that came from the
+depths of his soul:
+
+"Hell!"
+
+
+
+
+II. BAPTISM OF FIRE
+
+
+The company rested for half an hour at the edge of the woods. Then
+Captain Marschner gave the command to start. He was pale, in spite of
+the killing heat, and he turned his eyes aside when he gave Lieutenant
+Weixler instructions that in ten minutes every man should be ready for
+the march without fail.
+
+He had really forced his own hand in giving the order. For now, he knew
+very well, there could be no delay. Whenever he left Weixler loose on
+the privates, everything went like clock-work. They trembled before
+this lad of barely twenty as though he were the devil incarnate. And
+sometimes it actually seemed to the captain himself as though there
+were something uncanny about that overgrown, bony figure. Never, by any
+chance, did a spark of warmth flash from those small, piercing eyes,
+which always mirrored a flickering unrest and gleamed as though from
+fever. The one young thing in his whole personality was the small, shy
+moustache above the compressed lips, which never opened except to ask
+in a mean, harsh way for some soldier to be punished. For almost a year
+Captain Marschner had lived side by side with him and had never yet
+heard him laugh, knew nothing of his family, nor from where he came,
+nor whether he had any ties at all. He spoke rarely, in brief, quick
+sentences, and brought out his words in a hiss, like the seething of
+a suppressed rage; and his only topic was the service or the war, as
+though outside these two things there was nothing else in the world
+worth talking about.
+
+And this man, of all others, fate had tricked by keeping him in the
+hinterland for the whole first year of the war. The war had been going
+on for eleven months and a half, and Lieutenant Weixler had not yet seen
+an enemy.
+
+At the very outset, when only a few miles across the Russian frontier,
+typhus had caught him before he had fired a single shot. Now at last he
+was going to face the enemy!
+
+Captain Marschner knew that the young man had a private's rifle dragged
+along for his own use, and had sacrificed all his savings for special
+field-glasses in order to be quite on the safe side and know exactly how
+many enemy lives he had snuffed out. Since they had come within close
+sound of the firing he had grown almost merry, even talkative, impelled
+by a nervous zeal, like an enthusiastic hunter who has picked up the
+trail. The captain saw him going in and out among the massed men, and
+turned away, hating to see how the fellow plagued his poor weary men,
+and went at them precisely like a sheep dog gathering in the herd,
+barking shrilly all the while. Long before the ten minutes were up, the
+company would be in formation, Weixler's impatience guaranteed that.
+And then--then there would be no reason any more for longer delay, no
+further possibility of putting off the fatal decision.
+
+Captain Marschner took a deep breath and looked up at the sky with
+wide-open eyes that had a peculiarly intent look in them. In the
+foreground, beyond the steep hill that still hid the actual field of
+battle from view, the invisible machine guns were beating in breathless
+haste; and scarcely a fathom above the edge of the slope small,
+yellowish-white packages floated in thick clusters, like snowballs flung
+high in the air--the smoke of the barrage fire through which he had to
+lead his men.
+
+It was not a short way. Two kilometers still from the farther spur of
+the hill to the entrance of the communication trenches, and straight
+across open fields without cover of any kind. Assuredly no small task
+for a company of the last class of reservists, for respectable family
+men who had been in the field but a few hours, and who were only now to
+smell powder for the first time and receive their baptism of fire. For
+Weixler, whose mind was set on nothing but the medal for distinguished
+service, which he wanted to obtain as soon as possible--for a
+twenty-year-old fighting cock who fancied the world rotated about his
+own, most important person and had had no time to estimate the truer
+values of life--for him it might be no more than an exciting promenade,
+a new sting to the nerves, a fine way of becoming thoroughly conscious
+of one's personality and placing one's fearlessness in a more brilliant
+light. Probably he had long been secretly deriding his old captain's
+indecision and had cursed the last halt because it forced him to wait
+another half hour to achieve his first deed of heroism.
+
+Marschner mowed down the tall blades of grass with his riding whip and
+from time to time glanced at his company surreptitiously. He could
+tell by the way the men dragged themselves to their feet with a sort of
+resistance, like children roused from sleep, that they fully understood
+where they were now to go.
+
+The complete silence in which they packed their bundles and fell into
+line made his heart contract.
+
+Ever since the beginning of the war, he had been preparing himself for
+this moment without relax. He had brooded over it day and night, had
+told himself a thousand times that where a higher interest is at stake,
+the misery of the individual counts for nothing, and a conscientious
+leader must armor himself with indifference. And now he stood there and
+observed with terror how all his good resolutions crumbled, and nothing
+remained in him but an impassioned, boundless pity for these driven
+home-keepers, who prepared themselves with such quiet resignation. It
+was as if they were taking their life into their hands like a costly
+vessel in order to carry it into battle and cast it at the feet of the
+enemy, as though the least thing they owned was that which would soon be
+crashing into fragments.
+
+His friends, among whom he was known as "uncle Marschner," would not
+have dared to suggest his sending a rabbit he had reared to the butcher
+or dragging a dog that had won his affection to the pound. And now he
+was to drive into shrapnel fire men whom he himself had trained to be
+soldiers and had had under his own eyes for months, men whom he knew as
+he did his own pockets. Of what avail were subtle or deep reflections
+now? He saw nothing but the glances of dread and beseeching that his
+men turned on him, asking protection, as though they believed that their
+captain could prescribe a path even for bullets and shells. And now was
+he to abuse their confidence? Was he to marshal these bearded children
+to death and not feel any emotion? Only two days before he had seen them
+surrounded by their little ones, saying good-bye to their sobbing wives.
+Was he to march on without caring if one or another of them was hit and
+fell over and rolled in agony in his blood? Whence was he to take the
+strength for such hardness of heart? From that higher interest? It had
+faded away. It was impalpable. It was too much a matter of mere words,
+too much mere sound for him to think that it could fool his soldiers,
+who looked forward to the barrage fire in dread, with homeward-turned
+souls.
+
+Lieutenant Weixler, red-cheeked and radiant, came and shouted in his
+face that the company was ready. It struck the captain like a blow
+below the belt. It sounded like a challenge. The captain could not help
+hearing in it the insolent question, "Well, why aren't you as glad of
+the danger as I am?" Every drop of Captain Marschner's blood rose to his
+temples. He had to look aside and his eyes wandered involuntarily up
+to the shrapnel clouds, bearing a prayer, a silent invocation to those
+senseless things up there rattling down so indiscriminately, a prayer
+that they would teach this cold-blooded boy suffering, convince him that
+he was vulnerable.
+
+But a moment later he bowed his head in shame. His anger grew against
+the man who had been able to arouse such a feeling in him.
+
+"Thank you. Let the men stand at rest. I must look after the horses once
+more," he said in measured tones, with a forced composure that soothed
+him. He did not intend to be hustled, now less than ever. He was glad
+to see the lieutenant give a start, and he smiled to himself with quiet
+satisfaction at the indignant face, the defiant "Yes, sir," said in a
+voice no longer so loud and so clear, but coming through gnashed teeth
+from a contracted throat. The boy was for once in his turn to experience
+how it feels to be held in check. He was so fond of intoxicating himself
+with his own power at the cost of the privates, triumphing, as though it
+were the force of his own personality that lorded it over them and not
+the rule of the service that was always backing him.
+
+Captain Marschner walked back to the woods deliberately, doubly glad
+of the lesson he had just given Weixler because it also meant a brief
+respite for his old boys. Perhaps a shell would hurtle down into the
+earth before their noses, and so these few minutes would save the lives
+of twenty men. Perhaps? It might turn out just the other way, too. Those
+very minutes--ah, what was the use of speculating? It was better not
+to think at all! He wanted to help the men as much as he could, but he
+could not be a savior to any of them.
+
+And yet, perhaps? One man had just come rushing up to him from the
+woods. This one man he was managing to shelter for the present. He and
+six others were to stay behind with the horses and the baggage. Was
+it an injustice to detail this particular man? All the other
+non-commissioned officers were older and married. The short, fat man
+with the bow-legs even had six children at home. Could he justify
+himself at the bar of his conscience for leaving this young, unmarried
+man here in safety?
+
+With a furious gesture the captain interrupted his thoughts. He would
+have liked best to catch hold of his own chest and give himself a sound
+shaking. Why could he not rid himself of that confounded brooding and
+pondering the right and wrong of things? Was there any justice at all
+left here, here in the domain of the shells that spared the worst
+and laid low the best? Had he not quite made up his mind to leave his
+conscience, his over-sensitiveness, his ever-wakeful sympathy, and
+all his superfluous thoughts at home along with his civilian's clothes
+packed away in camphor in the house where he lived in peace times?
+
+All these things were part of the civil engineer, Rudolf Marschner, who
+once upon a time had been an officer, but who had returned to school
+when thirty years old to exchange the trade of war, into which he had
+wandered in the folly of youth, for a profession that harmonized better
+with his gentle, thoughtful nature. That this war had now, twenty years
+later, turned him into a soldier again was a misfortune, a catastrophe
+which had overtaken him, as it had all the others, without any fault of
+his or theirs. Yet there was nothing to do but to reconcile himself to
+it; and first of all he had to avoid that constant hair-splitting. Why
+torment himself so with questions? Some man had to stay behind in the
+woods as a guard. The commander had decided on the young sergeant, and
+the young sergeant would stay behind. That settled it.
+
+The painful thing was the way the fellow's face so plainly showed
+his emotion. His eyes moistened and looked at the captain in dog-like
+gratitude. Disgusting, simply disgusting! And what possessed the man to
+stammer out something about his mother? He was to stay behind because
+the service required it; his mother had nothing to do with it. She was
+safe in Vienna--and here it was war.
+
+The captain told the man so. He could not let him think it was a bit of
+good fortune, a special dispensation, not to have to go into battle.
+
+Captain Marschner felt easier the minute he had finished scolding the
+crushed sinner. His conscience was now quite clear, just as though it
+had really been by chance that he had placed the man at that post. But
+the feeling did not last very long. The silly fellow would not give up
+adoring him as his savior. And when he stammered, "I take the liberty
+of wishing you good luck, Captain," standing in stiff military attitude,
+but in a voice hoarse and quivering from suppressed tears, such fervor,
+such ardent devotion radiated from his wish that the captain suddenly
+felt a strange emptiness again in the pit of his stomach, and he turned
+sharply and walked away.
+
+Now he knew. Now he could approximately calculate all the things Weixler
+had observed in him. Now he could guess how the fellow must have
+made secret fun of his sensitiveness, if this simple man, this mere
+carpenter's journeyman, could guess his innermost thoughts. For he had
+not spoken to him once--simply the night before last, at the entrainment
+in Vienna, he had furtively observed his leavetaking from his mother.
+How had the confounded fellow come to suspect that the wizened, shrunken
+little old hag whose skin, dried by long living, hung in a thousand
+loose folds from her cheek-bones, had made such an impression on his
+captain? The man himself certainly did not know how touching it looked
+when the tiny mother gazed up at him from below and stroked his broad
+chest with her trembling hand because she could not reach his face. No
+one could have betrayed to the soldier that since then, whenever
+his company commander looked at him, he could not help seeing the
+lemon-hued, thick-veined hand with its knotted, distorted fingers, which
+had touched the rough, hairy cloth with such ineffable love. And yet,
+somehow, the rascal had discovered that this hand floated above him
+protectingly, that it prayed for him and had softened the heart of his
+officer.
+
+Marschner tramped across the meadow in rage against himself. He was as
+ashamed as though some one had torn a mask from his face. Was it as easy
+as that to see through him, then, in spite of all the trouble he took?
+He stopped to get his breath, hewed at the grass again with his riding
+whip, and cursed aloud. Oh, well, he simply couldn't act a part,
+couldn't step out of his skin suddenly, even though there was a world
+war a thousand times over. He used to let his nephews and nieces twist
+him round their fingers, and laughed good-naturedly when they did it. In
+a single day he could not change into a fire-eater and go merrily upon
+the man-hunt. What an utterly mad idea it was, too, to try to cast all
+people into the same mould! No one dreamed of making a soft-hearted
+philanthropist of Weixler; and he was supposed so lightly to turn
+straight into a blood-thirsty militarist. He was no longer twenty, like
+Weixler, and these sad, silent men who had been so cruelly uprooted from
+their lives were each of them far more to him than a mere rifle to be
+sent to the repair shop if broken, or to be indifferently discarded if
+smashed beyond repair. Whoever had looked on life from all sides and
+reflected upon it could not so easily turn into the mere soldier, like
+his lieutenant, who had not been humanized yet, nor seen the world from
+any point of view but the military school and the barracks.
+
+Ah, yes, if conditions still were as at the beginning of the war, when
+none but young fellows, happy to be off on an adventure, hallooed from
+the train windows. If they left any dear ones at all behind, they
+were only their parents, and here at last was a chance to make a great
+impression on the old folks. Then Captain Marschner would have held
+his own as well as anyone, as well even as the strict disciplinarian,
+Lieutenant Weixler, perhaps even better. Then the men marched two or
+three weeks before coming upon the enemy, and the links that bound them
+to life broke off one at a time. They underwent a thousand difficulties
+and deprivations, until under the stress of hunger and thirst and
+weariness they gradually forgot everything they had left far--far
+behind. In those days hatred of the enemy who had done them all that
+harm smouldered and flared higher every day, while actual battle was a
+relief after the long period of passive suffering.
+
+But now things went like lightning. Day before yesterday in Vienna
+still--and now, with the farewell kisses still on one's lips, scarcely
+torn from another's arms, straight into the fire. And not blindly,
+unsuspectingly, like the first ones. For these poor devils now the war
+had no secrets left. Each of them had already lost some relative or
+friend; each had talked to wounded men, had seen mutilated, distorted
+invalids, and knew more about shell wounds, gas grenades, and liquid
+fire than artillery generals or staff physicians had known before the
+war.
+
+And now it was the captain's lot to lead precisely these clairvoyants,
+these men so rudely torn up by the roots--he, the retired captain, the
+civilian, who at first had had to stay at home training recruits. Now
+that it was a thousand times harder, now his turn had come to be a
+leader, and he dared not resist the task to which he was not equal. On
+the contrary, as a matter of decency, he had been forced to push his
+claims so that others who had already shed their blood out there should
+not have to go again for him.
+
+A dull, impotent rage came over him when he stepped up in front of his
+men ranged in deep rows. They stared at his lips in breathless suspense.
+What was he to say to them? It went against him to reel off compliantly
+the usual patriotic phrases that forced themselves on one's lips as
+though dictated by an outside power. For months he had carried about the
+defiant resolve not to utter the prescribed "_dulce et decorum est pro
+patria mori_," whatever the refusal might cost. Nothing was so repulsive
+to him as singing the praises of the sacrifice of one's life. It was
+a juggler's trick to cry out that some one was dying while inside the
+booth murder was being done.
+
+He clenched his teeth and lowered his eyes shyly before the wall of
+pallid faces. The foolish, childlike prayer, "Take care of us!" gazed at
+him maddeningly from all those eyes. It drove him to sheer despair.
+
+If only he could have driven them back to their own people and gone
+ahead alone! With a jerk he threw out his chest, fixed his eyes on a
+medal that a man in the middle of the long row was wearing, and said:
+
+"Boys, we're going to meet the enemy now. I count upon each of you to do
+his duty, faithful to the oath you have sworn to the flag. I shall ask
+nothing of you that the interest of our fatherland and your own interest
+therefore and the safety of your wives and children do not absolutely
+require. You may depend upon that. Good luck! And now--forward, march!"
+
+Without being conscious of it, he had imitated Weixler's voice, his
+unnaturally loud, studiedly incisive tone of command, so as to drown the
+emotion that fluttered in his throat. At the last words he faced about
+abruptly and without looking around tossed the final command over his
+shoulder for the men to deploy, and with his head sunk upon his chest
+he began the ascent, taking long strides. Behind him boots crunched and
+food pails clattered against some other part of the men's accouterment.
+Soon, too, there came the sound of the gasping of heavily laden men; and
+a thick, suffocating smell of sweat settled upon the marching company.
+
+Captain Marschner was ashamed. A real physical nausea at the part he had
+just played overcame him. What was there left for these simple people to
+do, these bricklayers and engineers and cultivators of the earth,
+who, bent over their daily tasks, had lived without vision into the
+future--what was there left for them to do when the grand folks, the
+learned people, their own captain with the three golden stars on his
+collar, assured them it was their duty and a most praiseworthy thing to
+shoot Italian bricklayers and engineers and farmers into fragments? They
+went--gasping behind him, and he--he led them on! Led them, against his
+inner conviction, because of his pitiful cowardice, and asked them to
+be courageous and contemptuous of death. He had talked them into it, had
+abused their confidence, had made capital of their love for their wives
+and children, because if he acted in the service of a lie, there was a
+chance of his continuing to live and even coming back home safe again,
+while if he stuck to the truth he believed in there was the certainty of
+his being stood up against a wall and shot.
+
+He staked their lives and his own life on the throw of loaded dice
+because he was too cowardly to contemplate the certain loss of the game
+for himself alone.
+
+The sun beat down murderously on the steep, treeless declivity. The
+sound of shells bursting off at a distance, of tattooing machine guns,
+and roaring artillery on their own side was now mingled with the howling
+sound of shots whizzing through the air and coming closer and closer.
+And still the top of the ridge had not been reached! The captain felt
+his breath fail him, stopped and raised his hand. The men were to get
+their wind back for a moment; they had been on the march since four
+o'clock that morning; they had done bravely with their forty-year-old
+legs. He could tell that by his own.
+
+Full of compassion he looked upon the bluish red faces streaming with
+sweat, and gave a start when he saw Lieutenant Weixler approaching in
+long strides. Why could he no longer see that face without a sense
+of being attacked, of being caught at the throat by a hatred he could
+hardly control? He ought really to be glad to have the man at his side
+there. One glance into those coldly watchful eyes was sufficient to
+subdue any surge of compassion.
+
+"With your permission, Captain," he heard him rasp out, "I'm going over
+to the left wing. A couple of fellows there that don't please me at all.
+Especially Simmel, the red-haired dog. He's already pulling his head in
+when a shrapnel bursts over there."
+
+Marschner was silent. The red-haired dog--Simmel? Wasn't that the
+red-haired endman in the second line, the paper-hanger and upholsterer
+who had carried that exquisite little girl in his arms up to the last
+moment--until Weixler had brutally driven him off to the train? It
+seemed to the captain as though he could still see the children's
+astonished upward look at the mighty man who could scold their own
+father.
+
+"Let him be, he'll get used to it by and by," he said mildly. "He's got
+his children on his mind and isn't in a hurry to make orphans of them.
+The men can't all be heroes. If they just do their duty."
+
+Weixler's face became rigid. His narrow lips tightened again into that
+hard, contemptuous expression which the captain felt each time like the
+blow of a whip.
+
+"He's not supposed to think of his brats now, but of his oath to the
+flag, of the oath he swore to his Majesty, his Commander-in-Chief! You
+just told them so yourself, Captain."
+
+"Yes, yes, I know I did," Captain Marschner nodded absent-mindedly, and
+let himself slide down slowly on the grass. It was not surprising that
+this boy spoke as he did, but what was surprising was that twenty-five
+years ago, when he himself had come from the military academy all aglow
+with enthusiasm, the phrases "oath to the flag," "his Majesty, and
+Commander-in-Chief" had seemed to him, too, to be the sum and substance
+of all things. In those days he would have been like this lad and would
+have gone to war full of joyous enthusiasm. But now that he had grown
+deaf to the fanfaronade of such words and clearly saw the framework on
+which they were constructed, how was he to keep pace with the young who
+were a credulous echo of every speech they heard? How was he suddenly
+to make bold reckless blades of his excellent, comfortable Philistines,
+whom life had so thoroughly tamed that at home they were capable of
+going hungry and not snatching at treasures that were separated from
+them by only a thin partition of glass? What was the use of making the
+same demands upon the upholsterer Simmel as upon the young lieutenant,
+who had never striven for anything else than to be named first for
+fencing, wrestling, and courageous conduct? Have mercenaries ever been
+famous for their morals, or good solid citizens for their fearlessness?
+Can one and the same man be twenty and forty-five years old at the same
+time?
+
+Crouching there, his head between his fists, the captain became so
+absorbed in these thoughts that he lost all sense of the time and the
+place, and the lieutenant's attempts to rouse him by passing by several
+times and hustling the men about loudly remained unsuccessful. But at
+last the sound of a horse's hoofs brought him back to consciousness. An
+officer was galloping along the path that ran about the hill half way
+from the top. On his head he wore the tall cap that marked him as a
+member of the general staff. He reined in his horse, asked courteously
+where the company was bound and raised his eyebrows when Captain
+Marschner explained the precise position they were to take.
+
+"So that's where you're going?" he exclaimed, and his grimace turned
+into a respectful smile. "Well, I congratulate you! You're going into
+the very thickest of the lousy mess. For three days the Italians have
+been trying to break through at that point. I wouldn't hold you back for
+a moment! The poor devils there now will make good use of the relief.
+Good-bye and good luck!"
+
+Gracefully he touched the edge of his cap. His horse cried out under the
+pressure of his spurs, and he was gone.
+
+The captain stared after him as though dazed. "Well, I congratulate
+you!" The words echoed in his ears. A man, well mounted, thoroughly
+rested, pink and neat as though he had just come out of a band-box,
+meets two hundred fellowmen dedicated to death; sees them sweaty,
+breathless, on the very edge of destruction; knows that in another
+hour many a face now turned upon him curiously will lie in the grass
+distorted by pain or rigid in death--and he says, smiling, "Well, I
+congratulate you!" And he rides on and no shudder of awe creeps down his
+back, no shadow touches his forehead!
+
+The meeting will fade from the man's memory without leaving a trace.
+At dinner that night nothing will remind him of the comrade whose hand,
+perhaps, he was the last one to press. To these chosen ones, who from
+their safe positions in the rear, drive the columns on into the fire,
+what matters a single company's march to death? And the miserable,
+red-haired upholsterer here was trembling, pulling back his head,
+tearing his eyes open mightily, as though the fate of the world depended
+upon whether he would ever again carry his little red-haired girl in
+his arms. To be sure, if one viewed the whole matter in the proper
+perspective--as a member of the general staff riding by, who kept his
+vision fixed on the aim, that is, the victory that sooner or later would
+be celebrated to the clinking of glasses--why, from that point of view
+Weixler was right! It must make him indignant to have events of such
+epic grandeur made ridiculous by such a chicken-hearted creature as
+Simmel and degraded into a doleful family affair.
+
+"The poor devils there now!" A cold shiver ran down Marschner's back.
+The staff officer's words suddenly evoked a vision of the shattered,
+blood-soaked trench where the men, exhausted to the point of death, were
+yearning for him as for a redeemer. He arose, with a groan, seized by a
+grim, embittered hatred against this age. Not a single mesh in the net
+left open! Every minute of respite granted his own men was theft or even
+murder committed against the men out there. He threw up his arms and
+strode forward, determined to rest no more until he reached the trench
+that he and his company were to man and hold. His face was pale
+and careworn, and each time he caught the exasperating rasp of his
+lieutenant's voice from the other wing crying "Forward! Forward!" it was
+drawn by a tortured smile.
+
+Suddenly he stood still. Into the rattle, the boom, the explosion of
+artillery there leaped suddenly a new tone. It rose clearly above the
+rest of the din, which had almost ceased to penetrate the consciousness.
+It approached with such a shrill sound, with such indescribable
+swiftness, with so fierce a threat, that the sound seemed to be visible,
+as though you could actually see a screaming semicircle rise in the air,
+bite its way to one's very forehead, and snap there with a short, hard,
+whiplike crack. A few feet away a little whirl of dust was puffed up,
+and invisible hail stones slapped rattling down upon the grass.
+
+A shrapnel!
+
+Captain Marschner looked round startled, and to his terror saw all the
+men's eyes fixed on him, as though asking his advice. A peculiar smile
+of shame and embarrassment hovered about their lips.
+
+It was his business to set the men a good example, to march on
+carelessly without stopping or looking up. After all it made no
+difference what one did one way or the other. There was no possibility
+of running away or hiding. It was all a matter of chance. Chance was the
+one thing that would protect a man. So the thing to do was to go ahead
+as if not noticing anything. If there was only one man in the company
+who did not seem to care, the others would be put to shame and would
+mutually control each other, and then everything was won. He could tell
+by his own experience how the feeling of being watched on all sides
+upheld him. Had he been by himself, he might have thrown himself on the
+ground and tried to hide behind a stone no matter how small.
+
+"Nothing but a spent shot! Forward, boys!" he cried, the thought of
+being a support to his men almost making him cheerful. But the words
+were not out of his mouth when other shots whizzed through the air. In
+spite of himself, his body twitched backward and his head sank lower
+between his shoulders. That made him stiffen his muscles and grind his
+teeth in rage. It was not the violence with which the scream flew toward
+him that made him twitch. It was the strange precision with which the
+circle of the thing's flight (exactly like a diagram at a lecture on
+artillery) curved in front of him. It was this unnatural feeling of
+perceiving a sound more with the eye than with the ear that made the
+will powerless.
+
+Something had to be done to create the illusion of not being wholly
+defenseless.
+
+"Forward, run!" he shouted at the top of his voice, holding his hands to
+his mouth to make a megaphone.
+
+His men stormed forward as if relieved. The tension left their faces;
+each one was somehow busied with himself, stumbled, picked himself
+up, grasped some piece of equipment that was coming loose; and in the
+general snorting and gasping, the whistle of the approaching shells
+passed almost unobserved.
+
+After a while it came to Captain Marschner's consciousness that some
+one was hissing into his left ear. He turned his head and saw Weixler
+running beside him, scarlet in the face.
+
+"What is it?" he asked, involuntarily slowing down from a run to a walk.
+
+"Captain, I beg to announce that an example ought to be instituted! That
+coward Simmel is demoralizing the whole company. At each shrapnel he
+yells out, 'Jesus, my Savior,' and flings himself to the ground. He
+is frightening the rest of the men. He ought to be made an example of,
+a----"
+
+A charge of four shrapnels whizzed into the middle of his sentence. The
+screaming seemed to have grown louder, more piercing. The captain felt
+as though a monstrous, glittering scythe were flashing in a steep curve
+directly down on his skull. But this time he did not dare to move an
+eyelash. His limbs contracted and grew taut, as in the dentist's chair
+when the forceps grip the tooth. At the same time, he examined the
+lieutenant's face closely, curious to see how he was taking the fire for
+which he had so yearned. But he seemed not to be noticing the shrapnels
+in the least. He was stretching his neck to inspect the left wing.
+
+"There!" he cried indignantly. "D'you see, Captain? The miserable cur is
+down on his face again. I'll go for him!"
+
+Before Marschner could hold him back, he had dashed off. But half-way he
+stopped, stood still, and then turned back in annoyance.
+
+"The fellow's hit," he announced glumly, with an irritated shrug of his
+shoulders.
+
+"Hit?" the captain burst out, and an ugly, bitter taste suddenly made
+his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. He observed the frosty calm
+in Weixler's features, the unsympathetic, indifferent look, and his
+hand started upward. He could have slapped him, his insensibility was so
+maddening and that careless "the fellow's hit" hurt so. The image of the
+dear little girl with the bright ribbon in her red curls flashed into
+his mind, and also the vision of a distorted corpse holding a child in
+its arms. As through a veil he saw Weixler hasten past him to catch up
+with the company, and he ran to where the two stretcher-bearers kneeled
+next to something invisible.
+
+The wounded man lay on his back. His flaming red hair framed a greenish
+grey face ghostly in its rigidity. A few minutes before Captain
+Marschner had seen the man still running--the same face still full of
+vitality--from heat and excitement. His knees gave way. The sight of
+that change, so incomprehensible in its suddenness, gripped at his
+vitals like an icy hand. Was it possible? Could all the life blood
+recede in the twinkling of an eye, and a strong, hale man crumble into
+ruins in a few moments? What powers of hell slept in such pieces of iron
+that between two breaths they could perform the work of many months of
+illness?
+
+"Don't be frightened, Simmel!" the captain stammered, supporting himself
+on the shoulder of one of the stretcher-bearers. "They'll carry you back
+to the baggage!" He forced the lie out with an effort, drawing a deep
+breath. "You'll be the first one to get back to Vienna now!" He wanted
+to add something about the man's family and the little girl with the red
+curls, but he could not get it over his lips. He dreaded a cry from
+the dying man for his dear ones, and when the mouth writhing with pain
+opened slowly, it sent an inner tremor through the captain. He saw the
+eyes open, too, and he shuddered at their glassy stare, which seemed no
+longer to fix itself upon any bodily thing but to be looking through all
+those present and seeking something at a distance.
+
+Simmers body writhed under the forcible examination of the doctor's
+hands. Incomprehensible gurgling sounds arose from his torn chest
+streaming with blood, and his breath blew the scarlet foam at his mouth
+into bursting bubbles.
+
+"Simmel! What do you want, Simmel?" Marschner besought, bending low over
+the wounded man. He listened intently to the broken sounds, convinced
+that he would have to try to catch a last message. He breathed in
+relief when the wandering eyes at last found their way back and fastened
+themselves on his face with a look of anxious inquiry in them. "Simmel!"
+he cried again, and grasped his hand, which trembled toward the wound.
+"Simmel, don't you know me?"
+
+Simmel nodded. His eyes widened, the corners of his mouth drooped.
+
+"It hurts--Captain--hurts so!" came from the shattered breast. To the
+captain it sounded like a reproach. After a short rattling sound of pain
+he cried out again, foaming at the mouth and with a piercing shriek of
+rage: "It hurts! It hurts!" He beat about with his hands and feet.
+
+Captain Marschner jumped up.
+
+"Carry him back," he commanded, and without knowing what he did, he put
+his fingers into his ears, and ran after the company, which had already
+reached the top of the ridge. He ran pressing his head between his hands
+as in a vise, reeling, panting, driven by a fear, as though the wounded
+man's agonized cry were pursuing him with lifted axe. He saw the
+shrunken body writhe, the face that had so suddenly withered, the
+yellowish white of the eyes. And that cry: "Captain--hurts so!" echoed
+within him and clawed at his breast, so that when he reached the summit
+he fell down, half choked, as if the ground had been dragged from under
+his feet.
+
+No, he couldn't do that sort of thing! He didn't want to go on with it.
+He was no hangman, he was incapable of lashing men on to their death. He
+could not be deaf to their woe, to that childlike whimpering which
+stung his conscience like a bitter reproach. He stamped on the ground
+defiantly. Everything in him arose in rebellion against the task that
+called him.
+
+Below, the field of battle stretched far out, cheerlessly grey. No tree,
+no patch of green. A stony waste--chopped up, crushed, dug inside out,
+no sign of life. The communication trenches, which started in the bottom
+of the valley and led to the edge of the hill, from which the wire
+entanglements projected, looked like fingers spread out to grasp
+something and clawed deep into the throttled earth. Marschner looked
+round again involuntarily. Behind him the green slope descended steeply
+to the little woods in which the baggage had been left. Farther behind
+the white highroad gleamed like a river framed in colored meadows. A
+short turn--and the greenness vanished! All life succumbed, as though
+roared down by the cannons, by the howling and pounding that hammered in
+the valley like the pulsating of a colossal fever. Shell hole upon shell
+hole yawned down there. From time to time thick, black pillars of earth
+leaped up and for moments hid small parts of this desert burned to
+ashes, where the cloven stumps of trees, whittled as by pen-knives,
+stuck up like a jeering challenge to the impotent imagination, a
+challenge to recognize in this field of death and refuse, the landscape
+it once had been, before the great madness had swept over it and sown
+it with ruins, leaving it like a dancing floor on which two worlds had
+fought for a loose woman.
+
+And into this vale of hell he was now to descend! _Live_ down there five
+days and five nights, he and his little company of the damned, spewed
+down into that place, their living bodies speared on the fishing hook,
+bait for the enemy!
+
+All alone, with no one near to hear him, amid the fury of the bursting
+shrapnel, which fell up there as thick as rain in a thunderstorm,
+Captain Marschner gave himself up to his rage, his impotent rage against
+a world that had inflicted such a thing on him. He cursed and roared out
+his hatred into the deaf tumult; and then he sprang up when, far below,
+almost in the valley already, his men emerged followed by Lieutenant
+Weixler, who ran behind them like a butcher's helper driving oxen to the
+shambles. The captain saw them hurry, saw the clouds of the explosions
+multiply above their heads, and on the slope in front of him saw
+bluish-green heaps scattered here and there, like knapsacks dropped
+by the way, some motionless, some twitching like great spiders--and he
+rushed on.
+
+He raced like a madman down the steep slope, scarcely feeling the ground
+under his feet, nor hearing the rattle of the exploding shells. He flew
+rather than ran, stumbled over charred roots, fell, picked himself up
+again and darted onward, looking neither to the right nor to the left,
+almost with closed eyes. Now and then, as from a train window, he saw
+a pale, troubled face flit by. Once it seemed to him he heard a man
+moaning for water. But he wished to hear nothing, to see nothing. He ran
+on, blind and deaf, without stopping, driven by the terror of that bad,
+reproachful, "Hurts so!"
+
+Only once did he halt, as though he had stepped into a trap and were
+held fast in an iron vise. A hand stopped him, a grey, convulsed hand
+with crooked fingers. It stuck up in front of him as though hewn out
+of stone. He saw no face, nor knew who it was that held out that dead,
+threatening fist. All he knew was that two hours before, over there in
+the little piece of woods, that hand had still comfortably cut slices
+of rye bread or had written a last post-card home. And a horror of those
+fingers took hold of the captain and lent new strength to his limbs, so
+that he stormed onward in great leaps like a boy until, with throbbing
+sides and a red cloud before his eyes, he caught up with his company
+at last, way down in the valley at the entrance to the communication
+trenches.
+
+Lieutenant Weixler presented himself in strictest military form and
+announced the loss of fourteen men. Marschner heard the ring of pride in
+his voice, like triumph over what had been achieved, like the rejoicing
+of a boy bragging of the first down on his lip and deepening the newly
+acquired dignity of a bass voice. What were the wounded men writhing on
+the slope above to this raw youth, what the red-haired coward with
+his whine, what the children robbed of their provider growing up to be
+beggars, to a life in the abyss, perhaps to a life in jail? All these
+were mere supers, a stage background for Lieutenant Weixler's heroism
+to stand out in relief. Fourteen bloody bodies lined the path he had
+trodden without fear. How should his eyes not radiate arrogance?
+
+The captain hastened on, past Weixler. If only he did not have to see
+him, he told himself, if only he did not have to meet the contented
+gleam of the man's eyes. He feared his rage might master his reason
+and his tongue get beyond his control, and his clenched fist do its own
+will. But here he had to spare this man. Here Lieutenant Weixler was
+within his rights. He grew from moment to moment. His stature dwarfed
+the others. He swam upon the stream, while the others, weighed down by
+the burden of their riper humanity, sank like heavy clods. Here other
+laws obtained. The dark shaft in which they now reeled forward with
+trembling knees led to an island washed by a sea of death. Whoever was
+stranded there dared not keep anything that he used in another world.
+The man who was master here was the one who had kept nothing but his
+axe and his fist. And he was the rich one upon whose superabundance
+the others depended. As Captain Marschner groped his way through the
+slippery trench in a daze, it became clearer and clearer to him that he
+must now hold on to his detested lieutenant like a treasure. Without him
+he would be lost.
+
+He saw the traces of puddles of blood at his feet, and trod upon
+tattered, blood-soaked pieces of uniforms, on empty shells, rattling
+preserve tins, fragments of cannon balls. Yawning shell holes would open
+up suddenly, precariously bridged with half-charred boards.
+
+Everywhere the traces of frenzied devastation grinned, blackened remains
+of a wilderness of wires, beams, sacks, broken tools, a disorder
+that took one's breath away and made one dizzy--all steeped in the
+suffocating stench of combustion, powder smoke, and the pungent,
+stinging breath of the ecrasite shells. Wherever one stepped the earth
+had been lacerated by gigantic explosions, laboriously patched up again,
+once more ripped open to its very bowels, and leveled a second time, so
+that one reeled on unconscious, as if in a hurricane.
+
+Crushed by the weight of his impressions, Captain Marschner crept
+through the trench like a worm, and his thoughts turned ever more
+passionately, ever more desperately to Lieutenant Weixler. Weixler alone
+could help him or take his place, with that grim, cold energy of his,
+with that blindness to everything which did not touch his own life, or
+which was eclipsed by the glowing vision of an Erich Weixler studded
+with decorations and promoted out of his turn. The captain kept looking
+about for him anxiously, and breathed with relief each time the urgent,
+rasping voice came to his ears from the rear.
+
+The trench seemed never to be coming to an end. Marschner felt his
+strength giving way. He stumbled more frequently and closed his eyes
+with a shudder at the criss-cross traces of blood that precisely
+indicated the path of the wounded. Suddenly he raised his head with
+a jerk. A new smell struck him, a sweetish stench which kept getting
+stronger and stronger until at a curve of the trench wall, which swung
+off to the left at this point and receded semicircularly, it burst upon
+him like a great cloud. He looked about, shaken by nausea, his gorge
+rising. In a dip in the trench he saw a pile of dirty, tattered uniforms
+heaped in layers and with strangely rigid outlines. It took him some
+time to grasp the full horror of that which towered in front of him.
+Fallen soldiers were lying there like gathered logs, in the contorted
+shapes of the last death agony. Tent flaps had been spread over them,
+but had slipped down and revealed the grim, stony grey caricatures, the
+fallen jaws, the staring eyes. The arms of those in the top tier hung
+earthward like parts of a trellis, and grasped at the faces of
+those lying below, and were already sown with the livid splotches of
+corruption.
+
+Captain Marschner uttered a short, belching cry and reeled forward. His
+head shook as though loosened from his neck, and his knees gave way so
+that he already saw the ground rising up toward him, when suddenly
+an unknown face emerged directly in front of him and attracted his
+attention, and gave him back his self-control. It was a sergeant, who
+was staring at him silently with great, fevered, gleaming eyes in a
+deathly pale face. For a moment the man stood as though paralyzed, then
+his mouth opened wide, he clapped his hands, and jumped into the air
+like a dancer, and dashed off, without thinking of a salute.
+
+"Relief!" he shouted while running.
+
+He came to a halt before a black hole in the trench wall, like the
+entrance to a cave, and bent down and shouted into the opening with a
+ring of indescribable joy in his voice--with a rejoicing that sounded as
+if it came through tears:
+
+"Relief! Lieutenant! The relief party is here!"
+
+The captain looked after him and heard his cry. His eyes grew moist,
+so touching was that childlike cry of joy, that shout from out of a
+relieved heart. He followed the sergeant slowly, and saw--as though
+the cry had awakened the dead--pallid faces peering from all corners,
+wounded men with blood-soaked bandages, tottering figures holding their
+rifles. Men streamed toward him from every direction, stared at him and
+with speechless lips formed the word "relief," until at length one of
+them roared out a piercing "hurrah," which spread like wildfire and
+found an echo in unseen throats that repeated it enthusiastically.
+Deeply shaken, Marschner bowed his head and swiftly drew his hand across
+his eyes when the commandant of the trench rushed toward him from the
+dugout.
+
+Nothing that betokens life was left about the man. His face was ashen,
+his eyes like lamps extinguished, glazed and surrounded by broad blue
+rims. His lids were a vivid red from sleeplessness. His hair, his beard,
+his clothes were encased in a thick crust of mud, so that he looked as
+if he had just arisen from the grave. He gave a brief, military salute,
+then grasped the captain's hand with hysterical joy. His hand was cold
+as a corpse's and sticky with sweat and dirt. And most uncanny was the
+contrast between this skeleton hung with clothes, this rigid death-mask
+of a face, and the twitching, over-excited nervousness with which the
+lieutenant greeted their liberator.
+
+The words leaped like a waterfall from his cracked lips. He drew
+Marschner into the dugout and pushed him, stumbling and groping as if
+dazzled, down on an invisible something meant for a seat and began to
+tell his tale. He couldn't stand still for a second. He hopped about,
+slapped his thighs, laughed with unnatural loudness, ran up and down
+trippingly, threw himself on the couch in the corner, asked for a
+cigarette every other minute, threw it away without knowing it after two
+puffs, and at once asked for another.
+
+"I tell you, three hours more," he crowed blissfully, with affected
+gaiety, "--three? What am I talking about. _One_ hour more, and it would
+have been too late. D'you know how many rounds of ammunition I've got
+left? Eleven hundred in all! Machine guns? Run down! Telephone? Smashed
+since last night already! Send out a party to repair it? Impossible!
+Needed every man in the trench! A hundred and sixty-four of us at first.
+Now I've got thirty-one, eleven of them wounded so that they can't hold
+a rifle. Thirty-one fellows to hold the trench with! Last night there
+were still forty-five of us when they attacked. We drove 'em to hell, of
+course, but fourteen of our men went again. We haven't had a chance to
+bury them yet. Didn't you see them lying out there?"
+
+The Captain let him talk. He leaned his elbows on the primitive table,
+held his head between his hands, and kept silent. His eyes wandered
+about the dark, mouldy den, filled with the stench of a smoking little
+kerosene lamp. He saw the mildewed straw in the corner, the disconnected
+telephone at the entrance, an empty box of tinned food on which a
+crumpled map was spread out. He saw a mountain of rifles, bundles of
+uniforms, each one ticketed. And he felt how inch by inch, a dumb, icy
+horror arose within him and paralyzed his breathing, as though the
+earth overhead, upheld by only a thin scaffolding of cracked boards
+and threatening to fall at any moment, had already laid its intolerable
+weight upon his chest. And that prancing ghost, that giggling death's
+head, which only a week before perhaps had still been young, affected
+him like a nightmare. And the thought that now his turn had come to
+stick it out in that sepulchral vault for five or six days or a week and
+experience the same horrors that the man there was telling about with
+a laugh intensified his discouragement into a passionate, throbbing
+indignation which he could scarcely control any more. He could have
+roared out, could have jumped up, run out, and shouted to mankind from
+the depths of his soul asking why he had been tossed there, why he would
+have to lie there until he had turned into carrion or a crazy man. How
+could he have let himself be driven out there? He could not understand
+it. He saw no meaning to it all, no aim. All he saw was that hole in the
+earth, those rotting corpses outside, and nearby, but one step removed
+from all that madness, his own Vienna as he had left it only two days
+before, with its tramways, its show windows, its smiling people and its
+lighted theaters. What madness to be crouching there waiting for death
+with idiotic patience, to perish on the naked earth in blood and filth,
+like a beast, while other people, happy, clean, dressed up, sat in
+bright halls and listened to music, and then nestled in soft beds
+without fear, without danger, guarded by a whole world, which would come
+down in indignation upon any who dared to harm a single hair of their
+heads. Had madness already stolen upon him or were the others mad?
+
+His pulse raged as though his heart would burst if he could not relieve
+his soul by a loud shout.
+
+At that very moment Lieutenant Weixler came bustling in, like the master
+of ceremonies at a ball. He stood stiff and straight in front of the
+captain, and announced that everything above was in readiness, that he
+had already assigned the posts and arranged the watches, and placed the
+machine guns. The captain looked at him and had to lower his eyes as if
+boxed on the ears by this tranquillity, which would suddenly wither his
+fury into a burning shame at himself.
+
+Why did that man remain untouched by the great fear of death which
+impregnated the very air here? How was it that he could give orders
+and commands with the foresightedness of a mature man, while he himself
+crept out of sight like a frightened child and rebelled against his fate
+with the senseless fury of an animal at bay, instead of mastering fate
+as befitted his age? Was he a coward? Was he in the grip of a mean,
+paltry fear, was he overcome by that wretched blindness of the soul
+which cannot lift its vision beyond its own ego nor lose sight of its
+ego for the sake of an idea? Was he really so devoid of any sense for
+the common welfare, so utterly ruled by short-sighted selfishness,
+concerned with nothing but his bare, miserable existence? No, he was not
+like that. He clung to his own life no more than any other man. He could
+have cast it away enthusiastically, and without flying banners, without
+ecstasy, without the world's applause, had the hostile trenches over
+there been filled with men like Weixler, had the combat been against
+such crazy hardness of soul, against catchwords fattened with human
+flesh, against that whole, cleverly built-up machine of force which
+drove those whom it was supposed to protect to form a wall to protect
+itself. He would have hurled himself into the fight with bare fists,
+unmindful of the bursting of shells, the moans of the wounded. Oh no,
+he was not a coward. Not what those two men thought. He saw them wink
+scornfully and make fun of the unhappy old uncle of a reserve officer
+who sat in the corner like a bundle of misery. What did they know of his
+soul's bitterness? They stood there as heroes and felt the glances of
+their home upon them, and spoke words which, upborne by the echo of a
+whole world, peopled the loneliness with all the hosts of the likeminded
+and filled their souls with the strength of millions. And they laughed
+at a man who was to kill without feeling hatred and die without ecstasy,
+for a victory that was nothing to him but a big force which achieved its
+objects simply because it hit harder, not because it had justice on its
+side or a fine and noble aim. He had no cause to slink off, humbled by
+their courage.
+
+A cold, proud defiance heartened him, so that he arose, strengthened
+suddenly, as if elevated by the superhuman burden that he alone carried
+on his shoulders. He saw the strange lieutenant still dancing about,
+hastily gathering up his belongings and stuffing them into his knapsack.
+He heard him scold his orderly and bellow at him to hurry up, in between
+digging up fresh details, hideous episodes, from the combats of the past
+few days, which Weixler devoured in breathless attention.
+
+"What a question!" the commandant of the trench exclaimed, laughing at
+his audience. "Whether the Italians had heavy losses, too? Do you think
+we let them pepper us like rabbits? You can easily calculate what those
+fellows lost in their eleven attacks if we've melted down to thirty men
+without crawling out of our trench. Just let them go on like that a few
+weeks longer and they'll be at the end of their human material."
+
+Captain Marschner had not wanted to listen. He stood bending over a map,
+but at the phrase, "human material," he started violently. It sounded
+like a taunt directed at his own thoughts, as if the two men had seen
+into him and had agreed with each other to give him a good lesson and
+show him how alone he was.
+
+"Human material!"
+
+In a trench, filled with the stench of dead bodies, shaken by the impact
+of the shells, stood two men, each himself a stake in the game, and
+while the dice were still being tossed for their very bones, they talked
+of--human material! They uttered those ruthless, shameful words without
+a shadow of indignation, as though it were natural for their living
+bodies to be no more than a gambler's chips in the hands of men who
+arrogated to themselves the right to play the game of gods. Without
+hesitating they laid their one, irrevocable life at the feet of a
+power that could not prove whether it had known how to place the stakes
+rightly except by their dead bodies. And the men who were speaking that
+way were officers! So where was there a gleam of hope?
+
+Out there, among the simple men, perhaps, the plain cannon fodder? They
+were now crouching resignedly in their places, thinking of home and each
+of them still feeling himself a man. He was drawn to his men, to their
+dull, silent sadness, to their true greatness, which without pathos and
+without solemnity, in everyday clothes, as it were, patiently awaited
+the hero's death.
+
+Outside the dugout stood the remnants of the relieved company ready for
+the march, always two men abreast with a dead comrade on a tent canvas
+between them. A long procession, profoundly stirring in its silent
+expectancy, into which the hissing and crackling of shrapnel and the
+thunder of grenades fell like a warning from above to those who
+still had their lives. Bitterly, Marschner clenched his fist at this
+insatiableness.
+
+At that moment the pale sergeant stepped in front of the place where the
+dead had been piled and frightened Marschner out of his thoughts.
+
+"Captain, I beg to announce that beside the fourteen dead there are
+three seriously wounded men who can't walk--Italians. I have no bearers
+left for them."
+
+"We'll leave them to you as a souvenir," the trench commandant, who was
+just leaving the dugout with Weixler, laughed in his maundering way.
+"You can have them dug in at night up there among the communication
+trenches, Captain. When it gets dark, the Italians direct their barrage
+fire farther back, and give you a chance to climb out. To be sure, they
+won't lie in peace there under the earth very long, because the shells
+rip everything open right away again. I've had to have my poor ensign
+buried three times over already."
+
+"How did they get in here anyhow?" Weixler asked, pushing himself
+forward. "Did you have a fight in the trench?"
+
+The other lieutenant shook his head proudly. "I should rather say not.
+The gentlemen never got as far as that. These three tried to cut the
+wire entanglements night before last, but our machine gun man caught 'em
+at it and his iron spatter spoiled their little game. Well, there they
+lay, of course, right under our very noses and they had on the loveliest
+shoes of bright yellow. My men begrudged 'em those shoes. There--" he
+ended, pointing with his finger at the feet of the pale sergeant--"there
+you see one pair. But we'll have to start now. March, sergeant! My
+respects, Captain. The Italians'll open their eyes when they come over
+to-night to finish us off comfortably and a hundred and fifty rifles go
+off and two brand-new bullet squirters. Ha-ha! Sorry I can't be here to
+see it! Good-by, little man! Good luck!" Humming a merry popular song
+he followed his men without looking back, without even observing that
+Marschner accompanied him a little on his way.
+
+Gaily, as though on a Sunday picnic, the men started on the way, which
+led over the terrible field of shards and ruins and the steep, shot-up
+hill. What hells they must have endured there, in that mole's gallery!
+The captain remained standing and heaved a deep sigh. It was as if
+that long, grey column slowly winding its way through the trench were
+carrying away the last hope. The back of the last soldier, growing
+smaller and smaller, was the world. The captain's eyes clung greedily
+to that back and measured fearfully the distance to the corner of the
+trench from which he must lose sight of it forever. There was still time
+to call out a greeting, and by running very fast one might still catch
+up and hand over a letter.
+
+Then the last medium disappeared--the last possibility of dividing the
+world into two halves. And his yearning recoiled before the endless
+space it had to bridge--and there was nothing else to bridge it but his
+yearning.
+
+Marschner sank into himself as he stood deserted in the empty trench. He
+felt as though he had been hollowed out, and looked about for help, and
+his eyes clung to the depression from which the corpses had now been
+lifted. Only the three Italians were lying there, the life already gone
+from them. The one showed his face, his mouth was still wide open as for
+a cry, and his hands dug themselves, as though to ward off pain, into
+his unnaturally swollen body. The other two lay with their knees drawn
+up and their heads between their arms. The naked feet with their grey
+convulsed toes stared into the communication trench like things robbed,
+with a mute accusal. There was a remoteness about these dead bodies,
+a loneliness, an isolation about their bared feet. A tangled web of
+memories arose, a throng of fleeting faces glimmered in the captain's
+soul--gondoliers of Venice, voluble cabbies, a toothless inn-keeper's
+wife at Posilipo. Two trips on a vacation in Italy drove an army of
+sorrowing figures through his mind. And finally another figure appeared
+in that ghostly dance of death, his own sister, sitting in a concert
+hall in Vienna, care-free, listening to music, while her brother lay
+somewhere stretched out on the ground, rigid in death, an enemy's corpse
+just to be kicked aside.
+
+Shuddering, the captain hastened back down the trench, as though the
+three dead men were pursuing him noiselessly on their naked soles. When
+he reached his own men at last, he felt as if he had arrived at a harbor
+of safety.
+
+The shells were now falling so thick that there was not a moment's pause
+between the explosions, and all sounds merged into a single, equal,
+rolling thunder, which made the earth tremble like the hull of a ship.
+But there was a particularly sharp crashing and splintering from one
+shot that hit the trench squarely and whirled the coverings above in all
+directions. A few minutes later two groaning men dragged down a corpse,
+leaned it against the trench wall, and climbed back to their posts
+through the narrow shaft. Marschner saw his sergeant get up and move
+his lips--then a soldier in the corner arose and took up his rifle
+and followed the two others heavily. It was all so comfortless, so
+unmercifully businesslike, precisely as when "Next!" breaks into the
+monotony of the practising in the yard of the barracks, only with the
+difference that a little group at once gathered about the dead man,
+drawn by that shy curiosity which irresistibly attracts simple folk to
+corpses and funerals. Most of the men expected the same of him--he saw
+it in their eyes--that he, too, would go over and pay a last tribute
+of respect to the dead. But he did not want to. He was absolutely
+determined not to learn the fallen man's name. He was bent upon
+practising self-mastery at last and remaining indifferent to all small
+happenings. So long as he had not seen the dead man's face nor heard his
+name, only a man had fallen in battle, one of the many thousands. If he
+kept his distance and did not bend over each individual and did not
+let a definite fate come to his notice, it was not so hard to remain
+indifferent.
+
+Stubbornly he walked over to the second shaft leading to the top and for
+the first time observed that it had grown quite silent up above. There
+was no longer any screaming or bursting. This silence came upon the
+deafening din like a paralyzing weight and filled space with a tense
+expectancy that flickered in all eyes. He wanted to rid himself of this
+oppression and crept through the crumbling shaft up to the top.
+
+The first thing he saw was Weixler's curved back. He was holding his
+field-glass glued to his eyes under cover of a shooting shield. The
+others were also standing as if pasted to their posts, and there was
+something alarming in the motionlessness of their shoulder blades. All
+at once a twitching ran through the petrified row. Weixler sprang back,
+jostled against the captain, and cried out: "They are coming!" Then he
+stormed to the shaft and blew the alarm whistle.
+
+Marschner stared after him helplessly. He walked with hesitating steps
+to the shield and looked out upon the wide, smoke-covered field, which
+curved beyond the tangle of wires, grey, torn, blood-flecked, like the
+bloated form of a gigantic corpse. Far in the background the sun was
+sinking. Its great copper disc already cut in half by the horizon seemed
+to be growing out of the ground. And against that dazzling background
+black silhouettes were dancing like midges under a microscope, like
+Indians swinging their tomahawks. They were still mere specks. Sometimes
+they disappeared entirely and then leaped high, and came nearer, their
+rifles wriggling in the air like the feet of a polyp. Gradually their
+cries became audible and swelled louder and louder like the far barking
+of dogs. When they called "Avanti!" it was a piercing cry, and when
+the call "Coraggio!" went through their lines, it changed to a dull,
+thunderous roll.
+
+The entire company now stood close-packed up against the slope of the
+trench, their faces as of stone, restrained, pale as chalk, with lipless
+mouths, each man's gun in position--a single beast of prey with a
+hundred eyes and arms.
+
+"Don't shoot! Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" Lieutenant Weixler's voice
+yelled without pause through the trench. His command seemed to lay its
+grasp on every throat and to hold the fingers moveless that greedily
+clasped the triggers. The first hand grenade flew into the trench. The
+captain saw it coming, then saw a man loosen from the mass, reel
+toward the dugout with outstretched arms, bending over, a veil of blood
+covering his face. Then--at last!--it was a relief--came the beating of
+the machine guns, and at once the rifles went off, too, like the raging
+of an angry pack. A cold, repulsive greed lay on all faces. Some of the
+men cried out aloud in their hate and rage when new groups emerged out
+there behind the thinning rows. The barrels of the rifles glowed with
+heat--and still the rumbling cries of "Coraggio!" came nearer and
+nearer.
+
+As though in a frenzy of insanity, the silhouettes hopped about out
+there, sprang into the air, fell, and rolled over each other, as though
+the war dance had only just reached the climax of its paroxysm.
+
+Then Captain Marschner observed the man next to him let his rifle sink
+for a moment and with hasty, shaking hands insert the bayonet into the
+smoking barrel. The captain felt as though he were going to vomit. He
+closed his eyes in dizziness and leaned against the trench wall, and let
+himself glide to the earth. Was he to--to see--that? Was he to see men
+being murdered right alongside of him? He tore his revolver from his
+pocket, emptied it, and threw it away. Now he was defenseless. And
+suddenly he grew calm and rose to his feet, elevated by a wonderful
+composure, ready to let himself be butchered by one of those panting
+beasts who were storming on, chased by the blind fear of death. He
+wanted to die like a man, without hatred, without rage, with clean
+hands.
+
+A hoarse roar, a frightful, dehumanized cry almost beside him wrenched
+his thoughts back into the trench. A broad stream of light and fire,
+travelling in a steep curve, flowed blindingly down beside him and
+sprayed over the shoulder of the tall pock-marked tailor of the first
+line. In the twinkling of an eye the man's entire left side flared up in
+flames. With a howl of agony he threw himself to the ground, writhed and
+screamed and leaped to his feet again, and ran moaning up and down like
+a living torch, until he broke down, half-charred, and twitched, and
+then lay rigid. Captain Marschner saw him lying there and smelt the odor
+of burned flesh, and his eyes involuntarily strayed to his own hand
+on which a tiny, white spot just under his thumb reminded him of the
+torments he had suffered in his boyhood from a bad burn.
+
+At that moment a jubilant hurrah roared through the trench, rising from
+a hundred relieved throats. The attack had been repulsed! Lieutenant
+Weixler had carefully taken aim at the thrower of the liquid fire and
+hit at the first shot. The liquid fire had risen up like a fountain from
+the falling man's stiffening hand and rained down on his own comrades.
+Their decimated lines shrank back suddenly before the unexpected danger
+and they fled pell-mell, followed by the furious shots from all the
+rifles.
+
+The men fell down as if lifeless, with slack faces and lusterless eyes,
+as though some one had turned off the current that had fed those dead
+creatures with strength from some unknown source. Some of them leaned
+against the trench wall white as cheese, and held their heads over, and
+vomited from exhaustion. Marschner also felt his gorge rising and groped
+his way toward the dugout. He wanted to go into his own place now and
+be alone and somehow relieve himself of the despair that held him in its
+grip.
+
+"Hello!" Lieutenant Weixler cried unexpectedly through the silence, and
+bounded over to the left where the machine guns stood.
+
+The captain turned back again, mounted the ladder, and gazed out
+into the foreground of the field. There, right in front of the
+wire-entanglements, kneeled an Italian. His left arm was hanging down
+limp, and his right arm was raised beseechingly, and he was crawling
+toward them slowly. A little farther back, half hidden by the kneeling
+man, something kept stirring on the ground. There three wounded men were
+trying to creep toward their own trench, pressing close to the ground.
+One could see very clearly how they sought cover behind corpses and now
+and then lay motionless so as to escape discovery by the foe. It was a
+pitiful sight--those God-forsaken creatures surrounded by death, each
+moment like an eternity above them, yet clinging with tooth and nail to
+their little remnant of life.
+
+"Come on! Isn't there a rope somewhere?" an old corporal called down
+into the trench. "I'm sorry for the poor devil of an Italian. Let's pull
+him in!"
+
+The machine guns interrupted him. The kneeling man beside the wires
+listened, started as if to run, and fell upon his face. The earth
+behind him rose in dust from the bullets and the others beyond raised
+themselves like snakes, then all three gave a short leap forward
+and--lay very still.
+
+For a moment Captain Marschner stood speechless. He opened his lips,
+but no sound came from his throat. At last his tongue obeyed him and he
+yelled, with a mad choking fury in his voice:
+
+"Lieutenant Weixler!"
+
+"Yes, sir," came back unconcernedly.
+
+Captain Marschner ran toward the lieutenant with clenched fists and
+scarlet face.
+
+"Did you fire?" he panted, breathless.
+
+The lieutenant looked at him in astonishment, placed his hands against
+the seams of his trousers and replied with perfect formality:
+
+"I did, sir."
+
+Marschner's voice failed him again for a moment. His teeth chattered.
+His whole body trembled as he stammered:
+
+"Aren't you ashamed of yourself? A soldier doesn't fire at helpless,
+wounded men. Remember that!"
+
+Weixler went white.
+
+"I beg to inform you, Captain, that the one who was near our trench was
+hiding the others from us. I couldn't spare him." Then, with a sudden
+explosion of anger, he added defiantly: "Besides, I thought we had quite
+enough hungry mouths at home as it is."
+
+The captain jumped at him like a snapping dog and stamped his foot and
+roared:
+
+"I'm not interested in what you think. I forbid you to shoot at the
+wounded! As long as I am commanding officer here every wounded man shall
+be held sacred, whether he tries to get to us or to return to the enemy.
+Do you understand me?"
+
+The lieutenant drew himself up haughtily.
+
+"In that case I must take the liberty, sir, of begging you to hand me
+that order in writing. I consider it my duty to inflict as much injury
+upon the enemy as possible. A man that I let off to-day may be cured and
+come back two months later and perhaps kill ten of my comrades."
+
+For a moment the two men stood still, staring at each other as though
+about to engage in mortal combat. Then Marschner nodded his head almost
+imperceptibly, and said in a toneless voice:
+
+"You shall have it in writing."
+
+He swung on his heel and left. Colored spheres seemed to dance before
+his eyes, and he had to summon all his strength to keep his equilibrium.
+When at last he reached the dugout, he fell on the box of empty tins as
+if he had been beaten. His hatred changed slowly into a deep, embittered
+sense of discouragement. He knew perfectly well that he was in the
+wrong. Not at the bar of his conscience! His conscience told him that
+the deed the lieutenant had done was cowardly murder. But he and his
+conscience had nothing to say here. They had happened to stray into this
+place and would have to stay in the wrong. What was he to do? If he gave
+the order in writing, he would afford Weixler his desired opportunity of
+pushing himself forward and invite an investigation of his own conduct.
+He begrudged the malicious creature that triumph. Perhaps it were better
+to make an end of the whole business by going to the brigade staff and
+telling the exalted gentlemen there frankly to their faces that he could
+no longer be a witness to that bloody firing, that he could not hunt men
+like wild beasts, no matter what uniform they happened to wear. Then, at
+least, this playing at hide and seek would end. Let them shoot him, if
+they wanted to, or hang him like a common felon. He would show them that
+he knew how to die.
+
+He walked out into the trench firmly, and ordered a soldier to summon
+Lieutenant Weixler. Now it was so clear within him and so calm. He
+heard the hellish shooting that the Italians were again directing at the
+trench and went forward slowly like a man out promenading.
+
+"They're throwing heavy mines at us now, Captain," the old corporal
+announced, and looked at Marschner in despair. But Marschner went by
+unmoved. All that no longer mattered to him. The lieutenant would take
+over the command. That was what he was going to tell him. He could
+hardly await the moment to relieve himself of the responsibility.
+
+As Weixler delayed coming, he crept up through the shaft to the top.
+
+The man's small, evil eyes flew to meet him and sought the written order
+in his hand. The captain acted as though he did not notice the question
+in his look, and said imperiously:
+
+"Lieutenant, I turn the command of the company over to you until----"
+A short roar of unheard-of violence cut short his speech. He had the
+feeling, "That will hit me," and that very instant he saw something like
+a black whale rush down in front of his eyes from out of the heavens
+and plunge head foremost into the trench wall behind him. Then a crater
+opened up in the earth, a sea of flame that raised him up and filled his
+lungs with fire.
+
+On slowly recovering his consciousness he found himself buried under a
+huge mound of earth, with only his head and his left arm free. He had
+no feeling in his other limbs. His whole body had grown weightless. He
+could not find his legs. Nothing was there that he could move. But
+there was a burning and burrowing that came from somewhere in his brain,
+scorched his forehead, and made his tongue swell into a heavy, choking
+lump.
+
+"Water!" he moaned. Was there no one there who could pour a drop of
+moisture into the burning hollow of his mouth? No one at all? Then where
+was Weixler? He must be near by. Or else--was it possible that Weixler
+was wounded too? Marschner wanted to jump up and find out what had
+happened to Weixler--he wanted to----
+
+Like an overburdened steam-crane his left hand struggled toward his
+head, and when he at last succeeded in pushing it under his neck, he
+felt with a shudder that his skull offered no resistance and his hand
+slid into a warm, soft mush, and his hair, pasty with coagulated blood,
+stuck to his fingers like warm, moist felt.
+
+"Dying!" went through him with a chill. To die there--all alone. And
+Weixler? He had to find out what had happened to--happened to----
+
+With a superhuman effort he propped his head up on his left hand high
+enough to have a view of a few paces along the trench. Now he saw
+Weixler, with his back turned, leaning on his right side against the
+trench wall, standing there crookedly, his left hand pressed against
+his body, his shoulders hunched as if he had a cramp. The captain raised
+himself a little higher and saw the ground and a broad, dark shadow that
+Weixler cast. Blood? He was bleeding? Or what? Surely that was blood. It
+couldn't be anything but blood. And yet it stretched out so peculiarly
+and drew itself like a thin, red thread up to Weixler, up to where his
+hand pressed his body as though he wanted to pull up the roots that
+bound him to the earth.
+
+The captain _had_ to see! He pulled his head farther out from under the
+mound--and uttered a hoarse cry, a cry of infinite horror. The wretched
+man was dragging his entrails behind him!
+
+"Weixler!" burst from him in a shudder of compassion.
+
+The man turned slowly, looked down at Marschner questioningly, pale,
+sad, with frightened eyes. He stood like that only the fraction of a
+second, then he lost his balance, reeled, and fell down, and was lost
+from the captain's circle of vision. Their glances scarcely had time to
+cross, the pallid face had merely flitted by. And yet it stood there,
+remained fixed in the air, with a mild, soft, plaintive expression about
+the narrow lips, an unforgettable air of gentle anxious resignation.
+
+"He is suffering!" flashed through Marschner. "He is suffering!"--it
+exulted him. And a glow suffused his pallor. His fingers, sticky with
+blood, seemed to caress the air, until his head sank backward, and his
+eyes broke.
+
+The first soldiers who penetrated the towering mound of earth to where
+he lay found him dead. But in spite of his ghastly wound, a contented,
+almost happy smile hovered about his lips.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE VICTOR
+
+On the big square before the old courthouse, which now served as
+regimental headquarters and bore the magic letters A.O.K. as a sort of
+cabalistic sign on its front, a military band played every afternoon
+from three to four at command of His Excellency. This little
+diversion was meant to compensate the civilian population for the many
+inconveniences that the quartering of several hundreds of staff officers
+and a number of lesser officers inevitably brought upon them. Then, too,
+according to His Excellency, such an institution helped considerably
+to promote the popularity of the army and inspire patriotism in school
+children and the masses. In the interest of the right conduct of the
+war the strict commander deemed it highly essential to foster a right
+attitude in the public and to encourage friendly relations between
+military and civilian authorities--while fully preserving his own
+privileges. It was essential to a successful continuation of the war.
+Incidentally, the fact that the staff officers, with His Excellency at
+their head, usually took their black coffee at just about this time had
+helped a good deal to bring about these afternoon concerts.
+
+It was indeed delightful to sit in the shade of the centenarian
+plane-trees, whose intertwining branches overarched the entire square
+like the nave of a cathedral. The autumn sun cast a dull glow on the
+walls of the houses round about, and shed golden rings through the thick
+foliage on the small round tables arrayed in long rows in front of the
+coffeehouse. There was a reserved row for the staff officers set in
+snowy linens, with little flower vases and fresh crisp cakes, which the
+sergeant of the commissary brought punctually at three o'clock every day
+from the field bakery, where they had been baked with particular care
+under the personal supervision of the chef especially for His Excellency
+and staff.
+
+It was a beautiful gay picture of lively, varied metropolitan life that
+surged about the music pavilion. Every one seemed as joyous and
+carefree as on the Graben in Vienna on a sunny spring Sunday in times of
+undisturbed peace. The children crowded around the orchestra, beat the
+measure, and applauded enthusiastically after every piece. The streets
+leading into the square were filled with giggling girls and students
+wearing bright caps; while the _haute-volée_, the wives of the resident
+officials and merchants, sat in the confectioner's shop on the square,
+eagerly awaiting an opportunity to show their righteous indignation at
+the daring millinery, transparent hose, and little more than knee-length
+skirts of a certain class of women who had forced their way into the
+town and, despite all protests and orders, were shamelessly plying their
+trade in broad daylight.
+
+But the chief tone was given by the transient officers. Whether on
+furlough or on their way back to the front, they all had to pass through
+this town, and enjoyed in deep draughts this first or last day of
+freedom. Besides, if anything was needed at the front--horse-shoe nails,
+saddle-soap, sanitary appliances, or bottled beer--this first little
+"big town" was the quickest, most convenient place to buy it in. An
+unlucky or an unpopular man merely received a commendation for his
+bravery, and that settled him. But the man who enjoyed his commanding
+officer's favor was given the preference to do the shopping here as
+a reward. And an amazing ingenuity developed in discovering immediate
+necessities. A secret arithmetical relation undeniably existed between
+the consumption of charcoal, axle grease, etc., by individual troop
+divisions and the distance of their outposts from this favorite
+provisioning station.
+
+Of course, the pleasure did not last long. There was just enough time
+for a hot tub-bath, for showing off one's best newly-pressed uniform
+once or twice on the main streets, for taking two meals at a table
+spread with a tablecloth, and for spending a short night in a
+comfortable bed--with, or, if the man could not help it, without
+caresses--and then off again, depressed and irritable, off to the
+maddeningly overcrowded railroad station, back to the front, into the
+damp trench or the sunbaked block house.
+
+The greed of life in these young officers, who promenaded, hungry-eyed,
+through the town, the racing of their blood, like a diver who fills his
+lungs full in one second, had gradually infected the entire, boresome
+little place. It tingled, it foamed, it enriched itself and became
+frivolous; it could not get enough sensations, now that it stood in the
+center of world activities and had a claim upon real events.
+
+Close-packed, the crowd surged past the music in holiday attire and
+holiday mood on this ordinary week-day, quivering to the rhythm of the
+Blue Danube Waltz, which the orchestra was playing catchingly, with a
+roll of drums and a clash of cymbals. The whole spectacle brought to
+mind the goings-on behind the scenes in a huge playhouse during the
+performance of a tragedy with choruses and mob scenes. Nothing was seen
+or heard here of the sanguinary piece being enacted at the front. The
+features of the actors relaxed, they rested, or threw themselves
+into the gay hubbub, heartily glad not to know how the tragedy was
+progressing; exactly as real actors behind the scenes fall back into
+their unprofessional selves until they get their next cue.
+
+Sitting in the shade of the old trees, over coffee and cigars,
+comfortably watching these doings, one might easily be deluded into
+thinking that the drama taking place at the front was nothing but a
+jolly spectacular play. From this point of view the whole war showed up
+like a life-giving stream that washes orchestras ashore, brings wealth
+and gaiety to the people, is navigated by promenading officers, and
+directed by portly, comfortable generals. No suggestion of its bloody
+side, no roar of artillery reaching your ears, no wounded soldier
+dragging in his personal wretchedness and so striking a false note in
+the general jollification.
+
+Of course, it had not always been like that. In the first days, when the
+daily concert still had the charm of novelty, all the regular, emergency
+and reserve hospitals in the neighborhood had poured their vast number
+of convalescents and slightly wounded men into the square. But that
+lasted only two days. Then His Excellency summoned the head army
+physician to a short interview and in sharp terms made it clear to the
+crushed culprit what an unfavorable influence such a sight would have
+upon the public, and expressed the hope that men wearing bandages, or
+maimed men, or any men who might have a depressing effect on the general
+war enthusiasm, should henceforth remain in the hospitals.
+
+He was not defrauded of his hope. No disagreeable sight ever again
+marred his pleasure when, with his favorite Havana between his teeth,
+he gazed past the long row of his subordinates out on the street. No
+one ever went by without casting a shy, deferential side-glance at the
+omnipotent director of battles, who sat there like any other ordinary
+human being, sipping his coffee, although he was the celebrated General
+X, unlimited master of hundreds of thousands of human lives, the man the
+papers liked to call the "Victor of ----." There was not a human being
+in the town whose fate he could not have changed with one stroke of his
+pen. There was nothing he could not promote or destroy as he saw fit.
+His good will meant orders for army supplies and wealth, or distinction
+and advancement; his ill will meant no prospects at all, or an order to
+march along the way that led to certain death.
+
+Leaning back comfortably in the large wicker chair, a chair destined in
+all likelihood some day to become an object of historic interest, the
+Powerful One jested gaily with the wife of his adjutant. He pointed to
+the street, where the crowds surged in the brilliant sunshine, and said
+with a sort of satisfied, triumphant delight in his tone:
+
+"Just look! I should like to show this picture to our pacifists, who
+always act as though war were nothing but a hideous carnage. You should
+have seen this hole in peace times. It was enough to put you to sleep.
+Why, the porter at the corner is earning more to-day than the biggest
+merchant used to earn before the war. And have you noticed the young
+fellows who come back from the front? Sunburnt, healthy and happy! Most
+of them before the war were employed in offices. They held themselves
+badly and were dissipated and looked cheesy. I assure you, the world has
+never been so healthy as it is now. But if you look at your newspapers,
+you read about a world-catastrophe, about a blood-drained Europe, and a
+whole lot of other stuff."
+
+He raised his bushy white eyebrows until they reached the middle of his
+bulging forehead, and his small, piercing black eyes skimmed observantly
+over the faces of those present.
+
+His Excellency's pronouncement was a suggestion to the others and was
+immediately taken up. At every table the conversation grew animated, the
+benefits of the war were told over, and the wits cracked jokes at
+the expense of the pacifists. There was not a single man in the whole
+assemblage who did not owe at least two blessings to the war: financial
+independence and such munificence of living as only much-envied money
+magnates have allotted to them in times of peace. Among this circle
+of people the war wore the mask of a Santa Claus with a bag full of
+wonderful gifts on his back and assignments for brilliant careers in
+his hand. To be sure here and there a gentleman was to be seen wearing
+a crêpe-band on his sleeve for a brother or a brother-in-law who, as
+officer, had seen that other aspect of the war, the Gorgon's face.
+
+Yet the Gorgon's face was so far away, more than sixty miles in a
+bee-line, and an occasional excursion in its vicinity was an exciting
+little adventure, a brief titillation of the nerves. Inside an hour
+the automobile raced back to safety, back to the bath-tub, and you
+promenaded asphalt streets again in shining pumps. So, who would refrain
+from joining in the hymn of praise to His Excellency?
+
+The mighty man contentedly listened a while longer to the babel of
+voices aroused by what he had said, then gradually sank back into his
+reflections, and gazed ahead of him seriously. He saw the sunbeams
+sifting through the thick foliage and glittering on the crosses and
+stars that covered the left half of his chest in three close rows. It
+was a magnificent and complete collection of every decoration that
+the rulers of four great empires had to bestow upon a man for heroism,
+contempt of death, and high merit. There was no honor left for the
+Victor of ---- still to aspire to. And only eleven short months of war
+had cast all that at his feet. It was the harvest of but a single year
+of war. Thirty-nine years of his life had previously gone in the service
+in tedious monotony, in an eternal struggle with sordid everyday cares.
+He had worn himself out over all the exigencies of a petty bourgeois
+existence, like a poor man ashamed of his poverty, making pathetic
+efforts to conceal a tear in his clothes and always seeing the telltale
+hole staring out from under the covering. For thirty-nine years he had
+never swerved from disciplining himself to abstemiousness, and there was
+much gold on his uniform, but very little in his pocket. As a matter of
+fact, he had been quite ready for some time to quit. He was thoroughly
+tired of the cheap pleasure of tyrannizing over the young officers on
+the drill ground.
+
+But then the miracle occurred! Over night the grouchy, obscure old
+gentleman changed into a sort of national hero, a European celebrity.
+He was "the Victor of ----!" It was like in a fairy tale, when the good
+fairy appears and frees the enchanted prince from his hideous disguise,
+and he emerges in his glowing youth, surrounded by knights and lackeys,
+and enters his magnificent castle.
+
+To be sure the miracle had not brought the general the glow of youth.
+But it put elasticity into him. The eventful year had given him a
+shaking up, and his veins pulsed with the joy of life and the energy for
+work of a man in his prime. It was as a sovereign that he sat there in
+the shadow of the plane-trees, with good fortune sparkling on his chest
+and a city lying at his feet. Nothing, not a single thing, was lacking
+to make the fairy tale perfect.
+
+In front of the coffee-house, guarded by two sturdy corporals, rested
+the great grey beast, with the lungs of a hundred horses in its chest,
+awaiting the cranking-up to rush its master off to his castle high above
+town and valley. Where were the days when, with his general's stripes on
+his trousers, he took the street-car to his home, befitting his station
+in life, a six-room apartment that was really a five-room apartment plus
+a closet? Where was all that? Centuries had given their noblest powers,
+generations had expended their artistic skill in filling the castle
+requisitioned for His Excellency, the Commander-in-Chief of the ----th
+Army, with the choicest treasure. Sun and time had done their best to
+mellow the dazzle of the accumulated wealth till it shone in subdued
+grandeur as through a delicate veil. Any man master in that house, who
+mounted those broad steps and shouted his wishes in those aristocratic
+rooms, necessarily felt like a king and could not take the war in any
+other way than as a glorious fairy tale.
+
+Indeed, was there ever a royal household that approached the miraculous
+more closely? In the kitchen reigned a master of the culinary art, the
+chef of the best hotel in the country, who in other circumstances would
+not have been satisfied with double the wages of a general and was now
+getting only a dollar a day. Yet he was using every bit of his skill. He
+had never been so eager to please the palate of him whom he served. The
+roast he prepared was the finest piece of meat to be selected from among
+the two hundred oxen that daily gave up their lives to the army for the
+fatherland. The men who served the roast on silver platters, wrought
+by pupils of Benvenuto for the ancestors of the house, were generals of
+their trade, who in peace times had had their clothes built in London,
+and stood about tremblingly awaiting each sign from their master. And
+this entire retinue, this whole princely household, functioned quite
+automatically, and--entirely without cost! The master for whom every one
+slaved never once had to perform that inevitable nuisance of putting
+his hand in his pocket to draw out his purse. The gasoline circulated
+inexhaustibly through the veins of the three motor cars, which lounged
+day and night on the marble flagging of the courtyard. As by magic
+everything flowed in that eye and palate could desire.
+
+No servant asked for wages, everything seemed to be there of itself, as
+in fairy castles where it is enough to wish for a thing in order to have
+it.
+
+But that was not all. It was not the whole of the miracle that the
+table spread itself every day of the month and the store-rooms filled
+themselves with provisions. When the first of the month came round,
+bank-notes instead of bills came fluttering into the house.
+
+No worry, no disputing, no stinting of one's self to be borne with a
+sigh. With an air of boredom one stuffed his pockets with greenbacks,
+which were really quite superfluous in this lazy man's paradise that the
+war had opened up to its vassals.
+
+One single lowering cloud now and then streaked the shining firmament
+of this wonderland and cast its shadow on the brow of His Excellency.
+Sometimes his pure joy was disturbed by the thought that the fairy tale
+might give way to reality and he might be awakened from the glorious
+dream. It was not peace that His Excellency dreaded. He never even
+thought of peace. But what if the wall so artfully constructed out of
+human bodies should begin to totter some day? What if the enemy were
+to penetrate all the fortifications, and discipline were to give way
+to panic, and the mighty wall should dissolve into its component parts,
+human beings fleeing madly to save their lives? Then the "Victor of
+----," the almighty fairy tale king, would sink back again into the
+sordid commonplace of old. He would have to eke out his existence in
+some obscure corner, crowd his trophies into some modest apartment,
+and content himself, like other discharged officers, with being a
+coffeehouse king. Were he to suffer a single defeat, the world would
+instantly forget its enthusiasm. Another general would assume the reign,
+another sovereign would fly through the town in a motor car, and the
+vast retinue of servants would reverently bow before their new ruler.
+The old one would be nothing but a past episode, a scarecrow revealed,
+which any sparrow impudently besmirches.
+
+The general's pudgy hand involuntarily clenched itself, and the dreaded
+frown, the "storm-signal" that his own soldiers, as well as the enemy,
+had learned to fear, appeared for a moment on his prominent forehead.
+Then his face cleared again, and His Excellency looked around proudly.
+
+No! The Victor of ---- was not afraid. His wall stood firm and swayed
+not. For three months every report that emissaries brought to camp had
+told of the enormous preparations being made by the enemy. For three
+months they had been storing up ammunition and gathering together their
+forces for the tremendous offensive. And the offensive had begun the
+night before. The general knew that the crowd gaily thronging in the sun
+would not read in the newspaper till the next morning that out at the
+front a fierce battle had been raging for the past twenty hours, and
+hardly sixty miles from the promenade shells were bursting without
+cease, and a heavy rain of hot iron was pouring down upon his soldiers.
+Three infantry attacks had already been reported as repulsed, and now
+the artillery was hammering with frenzied fury, a prologue to fresh
+conflicts during the night.
+
+Well, let them come!
+
+With a jerk, His Excellency sat up, and while his fingers beat on the
+table in tune to the Blue Danube, a tense expression came into his face,
+as though he could hear the terrific drumfire raging at the front like a
+hurricane. His preparations had been made: the human reservoir had been
+filled to overflowing. Two hundred thousand strong young lads of the
+very right age lay behind the lines ready at the proper moment to be
+thrown in front of the steam-roller until it caught and stuck in a
+marsh of blood and bones. Just let them come! The more, the merrier! The
+Victor of ---- was prepared to add another branch to his laurels, and
+his eyes sparkled like the medals on his breast.
+
+His adjutant got up from the table next to his, approached hesitatingly,
+and whispered a few words in His Excellency's ear.
+
+The great man shook his head, waving the adjutant off.
+
+"It is an important foreign newspaper, Your Excellency," the adjutant
+urged; and when his commander still waved him aside, he added
+significantly: "The gentleman has brought a letter of recommendation
+from headquarters, Your Excellency."
+
+At this the general finally gave in, arose with a sigh, and said, half
+in jest, half in annoyance to the lady beside him:
+
+"A drumfire would be more welcome!" Then he followed his adjutant and
+shook hands jovially with the bald civilian, who popped up from his seat
+and bent at the middle like a penknife snapping shut. His Excellency
+invited him to be seated.
+
+The war correspondent stammered a few words of admiration, and opened
+his note-book expectantly, a whole string of questions on his lips.
+But His Excellency did not let him speak. In the course of time he had
+constructed for occasions like this a speech in which every point was
+well thought out and which made a simple impression. He delivered it
+now, speaking with emphasis and pausing occasionally to recall what came
+next.
+
+To begin with he spoke of his brave soldiers, praising their courage,
+their contempt of death, their wonderful deeds of valor. Then he
+expressed regret at the impossibility of rewarding each soldier
+according to his merits, and--this in a raised voice--invoked the
+fatherland's eternal gratitude for such loyalty and self-abnegation
+even unto death. Pointing to the heavy crop of medals on his chest, he
+explained that the distinctions awarded him were really an honor done to
+his men. Finally he wove in a few well-chosen remarks complimenting the
+enemy's fighting ability and cautious leadership, and concluded with an
+expression of his unshakable confidence in ultimate victory.
+
+The newspaper man listened respectfully and occasionally jotted down
+a note. The main thing, of course, was to observe the Great One's
+appearance, his manner of speech, his gestures, and to sum up his
+personality in a few striking phrases.
+
+His Excellency now discarded his military role, and changed himself from
+the Victor of ---- into the man of the world.
+
+"You are going to the front now?" he asked with a courteous smile,
+and responded to the correspondent's enthusiastic "Yes" with a deep,
+melancholy sigh.
+
+"How fortunate you are! I envy you. You see, the tragedy in the life of
+the general of to-day is that he cannot lead his men personally into
+the fray. He spends his whole life preparing for war, he is a soldier
+in body and soul, and yet he knows the excitement of battle only from
+hearsay."
+
+The correspondent was delighted with this subjective utterance which he
+had managed to evoke. Now he could show the commander in the sympathetic
+rôle of one who renounces, one who cannot always do as he would. He bent
+over his note-book for an instant. When he looked up again he found to
+his astonishment that His Excellency's face had completely changed. His
+brow was furrowed, his eyes stared wide-open with an anxiously expectant
+look in them at something back of the correspondent.
+
+The correspondent turned and saw a pale, emaciated infantry captain
+making straight toward His Excellency. The man was grinning and he had
+a peculiar shambling walk. He came closer and closer, and stared with
+glassy, glaring eyes, and laughed an ugly idiotic laugh. The adjutant
+started up from his seat frightened. The veins on His Excellency's
+forehead swelled up like ropes. The correspondent saw an assassination
+coming and turned pale. The uncanny captain swayed to within a foot
+or two of the general and his adjutant, then stood still, giggled
+foolishly, and snatched at the orders on His Excellency's chest like a
+child snatching at a beam of light.
+
+"Beautiful--shines beautifully--" he gurgled in a thick voice. Then he
+pointed his frightfully thin, trembling forefinger up at the sun and
+shrieked, "Sun!" Next he snatched at the medals again and said, "Shines
+beautifully." And all the while his restless glance wandered hither
+and thither as if looking for something, and his ugly, bestial laugh
+repeated itself after each word.
+
+His Excellency's right fist was up in the air ready for a blow at the
+fellow's chest for approaching him so disrespectfully, but, instead, he
+laid his hand soothingly on the poor idiot's shoulder.
+
+"I suppose you have come from the hospital to listen to the music,
+Captain?" he said, winking to his adjutant. "It's a long ride to the
+hospital in the street-car. Take my automobile. It's quicker."
+
+"Auto--quicker," echoed the lunatic with his hideous laugh. He patiently
+let himself be taken by the arm and led away. He turned round once with
+a grin at the glittering medals, but the adjutant pulled him along.
+
+The general followed them with his eyes until they entered the machine.
+The "storm-signal" was hoisted ominously between his eyebrows. He was
+boiling with rage at such carelessness in allowing a creature like
+that to walk abroad freely. But in the nick of time he remembered the
+civilian at his side, and controlled himself, and said with a shrug of
+the shoulders:
+
+"Yes, these are some of the sad aspects of the war. You see, it is just
+because of such things that the leader must stay behind, where nothing
+appeals to his heart. No general could ever summon the necessary
+severity to direct a war if he had to witness all the misery at the
+front."
+
+"Very interesting," the correspondent breathed gratefully, and closed
+his book. "I fear I have already taken up too much of Your Excellency's
+valuable time, but may I be permitted one more question? When does Your
+Excellency hope for peace?"
+
+The general started, bit his underlip, and glanced aside with a look
+that would have made every staff officer of the ----th Army shake in
+his boots. With a visible effort he put on his polite smile and pointed
+across the square to the open portals of the old cathedral.
+
+"The only advice I can give is for you to go over there and ask our
+Heavenly Father. He is the only one who can answer that question."
+
+A friendly nod, a hearty handshake, then His Excellency strode to his
+office across the square amid the respectful salutations of the crowd.
+When he entered the building the dreaded furrow cleaving his brow was
+deeper than ever. An orderly tremblingly conducted him to the office of
+the head army physician. For several minutes the entire house held
+its breath while the voice of the Mighty One thundered through the
+corridors. He ordered the fine old physician to come to his table as if
+he were his secretary, and dictated a decree forbidding all the inmates
+of the hospitals, without distinction or exception, whether sick
+or wounded, to leave the hospital premises. "For"--the decree
+concluded--"if a man is ill, he belongs in bed, and if he feels strong
+enough to go to town and sit in the coffee-house, he should report at
+the front, where his duty calls him."
+
+This pacing to and fro with clinking spurs and this thundering at the
+cowering old doctor calmed his anger. The storm had about blown over
+when unfortunately the general's notice was drawn to the report from the
+brigade that was being most heavily beset by the enemy and had suffered
+desperate losses and was holding its post only in order to make the
+enterprise as costly as possible to the advancing enemy. Behind it the
+mines had already been laid, and a whole new division was already in
+wait in subterranean hiding ready to prepare a little surprise for the
+enemy after the doomed brigade had gone to its destruction. Of course,
+the general had not considered it necessary to inform the brigadier that
+he was holding a lost post and all he was to do was to sell his hide as
+dearly as possible. The longer the struggle raged the better! And men
+fight so much more stubbornly if they hope for relief until the very
+last moment.
+
+All this His Excellency himself had ordained, and he was really greatly
+rejoiced that the brigade was still holding out after three overwhelming
+infantry charges. But now a report lay before him which went against all
+military tradition; and it brought back the storm that had been about to
+subside.
+
+The major-general (His Excellency made careful note of his name)
+described the frightful effect of the drumfire in a nervous, talkative
+way that was most unmilitary. Instead of confining himself to a
+statement of numbers, he explained at length how his brigade had been
+decimated and his men's power of resistance was gone. He concluded his
+report by begging for reinforcements, else it would be impossible for
+the remnant of his company to withstand the attack to take place that
+night.
+
+"Impossible? Impossible?" His Excellency blared like a trumpet into the
+ears of the gentlemen standing motionless around him. "Impossible?
+Since when is the commander instructed by his subordinates as to what is
+possible and what is not?"
+
+Blue in the face with rage he took a pen and wrote this single sentence
+in answer to the report: "The sector is to be held." Underneath he
+signed his name in the perpendicular scrawl that every school child
+knew from the picture card of the "Victor of ----." He himself put
+the envelope into the motor-cyclist's hand for it to be taken to the
+wireless station as the telephone wires of the brigade had long since
+been shot into the ground. Then he blustered like a storm cloud
+from room to room, stayed half an hour in the card room, had a short
+interview with the chief of the staff, and asked to have the evening
+reports sent to the castle. When his rumbling "Good night, gentlemen!"
+at last resounded in the large hall under the dome, every one heaved a
+sigh of relief. The guard stood at attention, the chauffeur started the
+motor, and the big machine plunged into the street with a bellow like a
+wild beast's. Panting and tooting, it darted its way through the narrow
+streets out into the open, where the castle like a fairy palace looked
+down into the misty valley below with its pearly rows of illuminated
+windows.
+
+With his coat collar turned up, His Excellency sat in the car and
+reflected as he usually did at this time on the things that had happened
+during the day. The correspondent came to his mind and the man's stupid
+question, "When does Your Excellency hope for peace?" Hope? Was it
+credible that a man who must have some standing in his profession,
+else he never would have received a letter of recommendation from
+headquarters, had so little suspicion of how contrary that was to every
+soldierly feeling? Hope for peace? What good was a general to expect
+from peace? Could this civilian not comprehend that a commanding general
+really commanded, was really a general, just in times of war, while in
+times of peace he was like a strict teacher in galloons, an old duffer
+who occasionally shouted himself hoarse out of pure ennui? Was he to
+long for that dreary treadmill existence again? Was he to hope for the
+time--to please the gentlemen civilians--when he, the victorious leader
+of the ----th Army, would be used again merely for reviews? Was he to
+await impatiently going back to that other hopeless struggle between a
+meager salary and a life polished for show, a struggle in which the lack
+of money always came out triumphant?
+
+The general leaned back on the cushioned seat in annoyance.
+
+Suddenly the car stopped with a jerk right in the middle of the road.
+The general started up in surprise and was about to question the
+chauffeur, when the first big drops of rain fell on his helmet. It was
+the same storm that earlier in the afternoon had given the men at the
+front a short respite.
+
+The two corporals jumped out and quickly put up the top. His Excellency
+sat stark upright, leaned his ear to the wind, and listened attentively.
+Mingled with the rushing sound of the wind he caught quite clearly, but
+very--very faintly a dull growling, a hollow, scarcely audible pounding,
+like the distant echo of trees being chopped down in the woods.
+
+Drumfire!
+
+His Excellency's eyes brightened. A gleam of inner satisfaction passed
+over his face so recently clouded with vexation.
+
+Thank God! There still was war!
+
+
+
+
+IV. MY COMRADE
+
+(_A Diary_)
+
+
+This world war has given me a comrade, too. You couldn't find a better
+one.
+
+It is exactly fourteen months ago that I met him for the first time in
+a small piece of woods near the road to Goerz. Since then he has never
+left my side for a single moment. We sat up together hundreds of nights
+through, and still he walks beside me steadfastly.
+
+Not that he intrudes himself upon me. On the contrary. He
+conscientiously keeps the distance that separates him, the common
+soldier, from the officer that he must respect in me. Strictly according
+to regulations he stands three paces off in some corner or behind some
+column and only dares to cast his shy glances at me.
+
+He simply wants to be near me. That's all he asks for, just for me to
+let him be in my presence.
+
+Sometimes I close my eyes to be by myself again, quite by myself for a
+few moments, as I used to be before the war. Then he fixes his gaze
+upon me so firmly and penetratingly and with such obstinate, reproachful
+insistence that it burns into my back, settles under my eyelids, and so
+steeps my being with the picture of him that I look round, if a little
+tune has passed without his reminding me of his presence.
+
+He has gnawed his way into me, he has taken up his abode within me. He
+sits inside of me like the mysterious magician at moving-picture shows
+who turns the crank inside of the black booth above the heads of the
+spectators. He casts his picture through my eyes upon every wall, every
+curtain, every flat surface that my eyes fall on.
+
+But even when there is no background for his picture, even when I
+frantically look out of the window and stare into the distance so as
+to be rid of him for a short while, even then he is there, hovering in
+front of me as though impaled upon the lance of my gaze, like a banner
+swaying at the head of a parade. If X-rays could penetrate the skull,
+one would find his picture woven into my brain in vague outline, like
+the figures in old tapestries.
+
+I remember a trip I took before the war from Munich to Vienna on the
+Oriental Express. I looked out upon the autumnal mellowness of the
+country around the Bavarian lakes and the golden glow of the Wiener
+Wald. But across all this glory that I drank in leaning back on the
+comfortable seat in luxurious contentment, there steadily ran an ugly
+black spot--a flaw in the window-pane. That is the way my obstinate
+comrade flits across woods and walls, stands still when I stand still,
+dances over the faces of passers-by, over the asphalt paving wet from
+the rain, over everything my eyes happen to fall upon. He interposes
+himself between me and the world, just like that flaw in the
+window-pane, which degraded everything I saw to the quality of the
+background that it made.
+
+The physicians, of course, know better. They do not believe that He
+lives in me and stays by me like a sworn comrade. From the standpoint of
+science it rests with me not to drag him round any longer, but to give
+him his dismissal, precisely as I might have freed myself from the
+annoying spot by angrily smashing the window-pane. The physicians do
+not believe that one human being can unite himself at death with another
+human being and continue to live on in him with obstinate persistence.
+It is their opinion that a man standing at a window should see the house
+opposite but never the wall of the room behind his back.
+
+The physicians only believe in things that _are_. Such superstitions as
+that a man can carry dead men within him and see them standing in front
+of him so distinctly that they hide a picture behind them from his
+sight, do not come within the range of the gentlemen's reasoning. In
+their lives death plays no part. A patient who dies ceases to be a
+patient. And what does the day know of the night, though the one forever
+succeeds the other?
+
+But I know it is not I who forcibly drag the dead comrade through my
+life. I know that the dead man's life within me is stronger than my own
+life. It may be that the shapes I see flitting across the wall papers,
+cowering in corners and staring into the lighted room from dark
+balconies, and knocking so hard on the windows that the panes rattle,
+are only visions and nothing more. Where do they come from? _My_ brain
+furnishes the picture, _my_ eyes provide the projection, but it is the
+dead man that sits at the crank. He tends to the film. The show begins
+when it suits Him and does not stop as long as He turns the crank. How
+can I help seeing what He shows me? If I close my eyes the picture falls
+upon the inside of my lids, and the drama plays inside of me instead of
+dancing far away over doors and walls.
+
+I should be the stronger of the two, they say. But you cannot kill a
+dead man, the physicians should know that.
+
+Are not the paintings by Titian and Michael Angelo still hanging in
+the museums centuries after Titian and Michael Angelo lived? And the
+pictures that a dying man chiseled into my brain fourteen months ago
+with the prodigious strength of his final agony--are they supposed
+to disappear simply because the man that created them is lying in his
+soldier's grave?
+
+Who, when he reads or hears the word "woods," does not see some woods he
+has once walked through or looked out on from a train window? Or when
+a man speaks of his dead father does he not see the face that has long
+been rotting in the grave appear again, now stern, now gentle, now in
+the rigidity of the last moments? What would our whole existence be
+without these visions which, each at its own word, rise up for moments
+out of oblivion as if in the glare of a flashlight?
+
+Sick? Of course. The world is sore, and will have no words or pictures
+that do not have reference to the wholesale graves. Not for a moment can
+the comrade within me join the rest of the dead, because everything that
+happens is as a flashlight falling upon him. There's the newspaper each
+morning to begin with: "Ships sunk," "Attacks repulsed." And immediately
+the film reels off a whirl of gasping, struggling men, fingers rising
+out of mountainous waves grasping for life once more, faces disfigured
+by pain and fury. Every conversation that one overhears, every shop
+window, every breath that is drawn is a reminder of the wholesale
+carnage. Even the silence of the night is a reminder. Does not each tick
+of the second-hand mark the death rattle of thousands of men? In order
+to hear the hell raging yonder on the other side of the thick wall of
+air, is it not enough to know of chins blown off, throats cut open, and
+corpses locked in a death embrace?
+
+If a man were lying comfortably in bed and then found out for certain
+that some one next door was being murdered, would you say he was sick if
+he jumped up out of bed with his heart pounding? And are we anything
+but next door to the places where thousands duck down in frantic terror,
+where the earth spits mangled fragments of bodies up into the sky, and
+the sky hammers down on the earth with fists of iron? Can a man live at
+a distance from his crucified self when the whole world resounds with
+reminders of these horrors?
+
+No!
+
+It is the others that are sick. They are sick who gloat over news of
+victories and see conquered miles of territory rise resplendent above
+mounds of corpses. They are sick who stretch a wall of flags between
+themselves and their humanity so as not to know what crimes are being
+committed against their brothers in the beyond that they call "the
+front." Every man is sick who still can think, talk, discuss, sleep,
+knowing that other men holding their own entrails in their hands are
+crawling like half-crushed worms across the furrows in the fields
+and before they reach the stations for the wounded are dying off like
+animals, while somewhere, far away, a woman with passionate longing is
+dreaming beside an empty bed. All those are sick who can fail to hear
+the moaning, the gnashing of teeth, the howling, the crashing and
+bursting, the wailing and cursing and agonizing in death, because the
+murmur of everyday affairs is around them or the blissful silence of
+night.
+
+It is the deaf and the blind that are sick, not I!
+
+It is the dull ones that are sick, those whose souls sing neither
+compassion for others nor their own anger. All those numerous people
+are sick who, like a violin without strings, merely echo every sound. Or
+would you say that the man whose memory is like a photographic plate on
+which the light has fallen and which cannot record any more impressions,
+is the healthy man? Is not memory the very highest possession of every
+human being? It is the treasure that animals do not own, because they
+are incapable of holding the past and reviving it.
+
+Am I to be cured of my memory as from an illness? Why, without my memory
+I would not be myself, because every man is built up of his memories and
+really lives only as long as he goes through life like a loaded camera.
+Supposing I could not tell where I lived in my childhood, what color
+my father's eyes and my mother's hair were, and supposing at any moment
+that I were called upon to give an account, I could not turn the leaves
+of the past and point to the right picture, how quick they would be
+to diagnose my case as feeblemindedness, or imbecility. Then, to be
+considered mentally normal, must one treat one's brain like a slate to
+be sponged off and be able at command to tear out pictures that have
+burned the most hideous misery into the soul, and throw them away as one
+does leaves from an album of photographs?
+
+One man died before my eyes, he died hard, torn asunder after a
+frightful struggle between the two Titans, Life and Death. Am I
+sick, then, if I experience all over again all the phases of his
+agonizing--preserved in my brain like snapshots--as long as every
+happening inexorably opens the pages of this series? And the other
+people, are they well, those, I mean, who skip the pages as though they
+were blank that record the dismemberment, the mutilation, the crushing
+of their brothers, the slow writhing to death of men caught in barbed
+wire entanglements?
+
+Tell me, my dear doctors, at just what point am I to begin to forget?
+
+Am I to forget I was in the war? Am I to forget the moment in the smoky
+railway station when I leaned out of the car window and saw my boy ashen
+white, with compressed lips, standing beside his mother, and I made a
+poor show of cheerfulness and talked of seeing them soon again, while
+my eyes greedily searched the features of my wife and child, and my soul
+drank in the picture of them like parched lips after a many days' march
+drinking in the water so madly longed for? Am I to forget the choking
+and the bitterness in my mouth when the train began to move and the
+distance swallowed up my child, my wife, my world?
+
+And the whole ride to death, when I was the only military traveler in a
+car full of happy family men off for a summer Sunday in the country--am
+I to tear it out of my memory like so much cumbersome waste paper? Am
+I to forget how I felt when it grew quieter at each station, as though
+life were crumbling away, bit by bit, until at midnight only one or two
+sleepy soldiers remained in my coach and an ashen young face drawn with
+sorrow hovered about the flickering lamplight? Must one actually be sick
+if it is like an incurable wound always to feel that leave-taking of
+home and warmth, that riding away with hatred and danger awaiting one at
+the end of the trip? Is there anything harder to understand--when have
+men done anything madder--than this: to race through the night at sixty
+miles an hour, to run away from all love, all security, to leave the
+train and take another train because it is the only one that goes to
+where invisible machines belch red-hot pieces, of iron and Death casts
+out a finely meshed net of steel and lead to capture men? Who will
+obliterate from my soul the picture of that small dirty junction, the
+shivering, sleepy soldiers without any intoxication or music in their
+blood, looking wistfully after the civilian's train and its brightly
+lighted windows as it disappeared behind the trees with a jolly blow
+of its whistle? Who will obliterate the picture of that exchanging for
+Death in the drab light of early dawn?
+
+And supposing I could cross out that first endless night as something
+settled and done with, would not the next morning remain, when our train
+stopped at a switch in the middle of a wide, dewy meadow, and we were
+told that we had to wait to let hospital trains go by? How shall I ever
+banish the memory of those thick exhalations of lysol and blood blown
+upon the happy fields from a dragon's nostrils? Won't I forever see
+those endless serpents creeping up so indolently, as though surfeited
+with mangled human flesh? From hundreds of windows white bandages
+gleamed and dull, glassy eyes stared out. Lying, crouching, on top of
+each other, body to body, they even hung on to the running-boards like
+bloody bunches of grapes, an overflowing abundance of distress and
+agony. And those wretched remains of strength and youth, those bruised
+and battered men, looked with pity, yes, _with pity_, at our train. Am
+I really sick because those glances of warm compassion from bleeding
+cripples to sound, strapping young fellows burn in my soul with a fire
+never to be extinguished? An apprehension sent a chill through our whole
+train, the foreboding of a hell that one would rather run away from
+wrapped in bloody bandages than go to meet whole and strong. And when
+this shudder of apprehension has turned into reality, into experience
+and memory, is it to be shaken off as long as such trains still meet
+every day? A casual remark about the transfer of troops, news of fresh
+battles inevitably recall this first actual contact with the war, just
+as a certain note when struck will produce a certain tone, and I see the
+tracks and ties and stones spattered with blood, shining in the early
+morning light of a summer day--signposts pointing to the front.
+
+"The Front!"
+
+Am _I_ really the sick person because I cannot utter that word or write
+it down without my tongue growing coated from the intense hatred I
+feel? Axe not the others mad who look upon this wholesale
+cripple-and-corpse-factory with a mixture of religious devotion,
+romantic longing and shy sympathy? Would it not be wiser once for a
+change to examine those others for the state of their mind? Must _I_
+disclose it to my wise physicians, who watch over me so compassionately,
+that all this mischief is the work of a few words that have been let
+loose upon humanity like a pack of mad dogs?
+
+Front--Enemy--Hero's death--Victory--the curs rage through the world
+with frothing mouth and rolling eyes. Millions who have been carefully
+inoculated against smallpox, cholera and typhoid fever are chased into
+madness. Millions, on either side, are packed into cars--ride, singing,
+to meet each other at the front--hack, stab, shoot at each other, blow
+each other into bits, give their flesh and their bones for the bloody
+hash out of which the dish of peace is to be cooked for those fortunate
+ones who give the flesh of their calves and oxen to their fatherland for
+a hundred per cent profit, instead of carrying their own flesh to market
+for fifty cents a day.
+
+Suppose the word "war" had never been invented and had never been
+hallowed through the ages and decked with gay trappings. Who would
+dare to supplement the deficient phrase, "declaration of war," by the
+following speech?
+
+"After long, fruitless negotiations our emissary to the government of X
+left to-day. From the window of his parlor car he raised his silk hat to
+the gentlemen who had escorted him to the station, and he will not meet
+them with a friendly smile again until _you_ have made corpses of many
+hundreds of thousands of men in the country of X. Up then! Squeeze
+yourself into box-cars meant for six horses or twenty-eight men! Ride to
+meet them, those other men. Knock them dead, hack off their heads, live
+like wild beasts in damp excavations, in neglect, in filth, overrun with
+lice, until we shall deem the time has come again for our emissary to
+take a seat in a parlor car and lift his silk hat, and in ornate rooms
+politely and aristocratically dispute over the advantages which our big
+merchants and manufacturers are to derive from the slaughter. Then as
+many of you as are not rotting under the ground or hobbling on crutches
+and begging from door to door may return to your half-starved families,
+and may--nay must!--take up your work again with redoubled energy, more
+indefatigably and yet with fewer demands than before, so as to be
+able to pay in sweat and privation for the shoes that you wore out in
+hundreds of marches and the clothes that decayed on your bodies."
+
+A fool he who would sue for a following in such terms! But _no_ fools
+they who are the victims, who freeze, starve, kill, and let themselves
+be killed, just because they have learned to believe that this must be
+so, once the mad dog War has burst his chains and bitten the world.
+
+Is this what the wars were like from which the word "war" has come down
+to us? Did not war use to guarantee booty? Were not the mercenaries
+led on by hopes of a gay, lawless life--women and ducats and
+gold-caparisoned steeds? Is this cowering under iron discipline, this
+holding out of your head to be chopped off, this passive play with
+monsters that spill their hellish cauldron on you from out of the blue
+distance still "war"? War was the collision of the superfluous forces,
+the ruffians of all nations. Youth, for whom the town had grown too
+small and the doublet too tight, ventured out, intoxicated by the play
+of its own muscles. And now shall the same word hold good when men
+already anchored to house and home are torn away and whipped into the
+ranks and laid out before the enemy, and made to wait, defenseless, in
+dull resignation, like supers in this duel of the munition industries?
+
+Is it right to misuse the word "war" as a standard when it is not
+courage and strength that count, but explosive bombs and the length of
+range of the guns and the speed with which women and children turn out
+shells? We used to speak with horror of the tyrants of dark ages, who
+threw helpless men and women to the lions and tigers; but now is there
+one of us who would not mention them with respect in comparison with
+the rulers who are at present directing the struggle between men and
+machines, as though it were a puppet show at the end of telegraph wires,
+and who are animated by the delightful hope that our supply of human
+flesh may outlast the enemy's supply of steel and iron?
+
+No! All words coined before this carnage began are too beautiful and too
+honest, like the word "front," which I have learned to abhor. Are you
+"facing" the enemy when their artillery is hidden behind mountains and
+sends death over a distance of a day's journey, and when their sappers
+come creeping up thirty feet below the surface? And your "front" is a
+terminal station, a little house all shot up, behind which the tracks
+have been torn up because the trains turn back here after unloading
+their cargo of fresh, sunburned men, to call for them again when they
+have emerged from the machines with torn limbs and faces covered with
+verdigris.
+
+It was towards evening when I got off the train at this terminal. A
+bearded soldier with his right arm in a sling was sitting on the ground
+leaning against the iron railing around the platform. When he saw me
+pass by, quite spick and span, he stroked his right arm tenderly with
+his left hand and threw me an ugly look of hatred and called out through
+clenched teeth:
+
+"Yes, Lieutenant, here's the place for man salad."
+
+Am I to forget the wicked grin that widened his mouth, already distorted
+by pain? Am I sick because each time I hear the word "front" an echo,
+"man salad," inevitably croaks in my ears? Or are the others sick who do
+not hear "man salad," but swallow down the cowardly stuff written by our
+war bards, who try like industrious salesmen to make the brand "world
+war" famous, because in reward they will have the privilege of dashing
+about in automobiles like commanding generals instead of being forced to
+face death in muddy ditches and be bossed by a little corporal?
+
+Are there really human beings of flesh and blood who can still take a
+newspaper in their hands and not foam at the mouth with rage? Can one
+carry in one's brain the picture of wounded men lying exposed on slimy
+fields in the pouring rain, slowly, dumbly bleeding to death, and yet
+quietly read the vile stuff written about "perfect hospital service,"
+"smoothly running ambulances," and "elegantly papered trenches," with
+which these fellows poetize themselves free from military service?
+
+Men come home with motionless, astonished eyes, still reflecting death.
+They walk about shyly, like somnambulists in brightly lighted streets.
+In their ears there still resound the bestial howls of fury that they
+themselves bellowed into the hurricane of the drumfire so as to keep
+from bursting from inner stress. They come loaded down, like beasts of
+burden, with horrors, the astonished looks of bayoneted, dying foes
+on their conscience--and they don't dare open their mouths because
+everybody, wife and child included, grinds out the same tune, a flow of
+curious questions about shells, gas bombs and bayonet attacks. So the
+days of the furlough expire, one by one, and the return to death is
+almost a deliverance from the shame of being a coward in disguise
+among the friends at home, to whom dying and killing have become mere
+commonplaces.
+
+So be it, my dear doctors! It is an honor to be charged with madness if
+those villains are not called mad who, to save their own necks, have so
+gloriously hardened the people's hearts and abolished pity and
+implanted pride in the enemy's suffering, instead of acting as the one
+intermediary between distress and power and arousing the conscience
+of the world by going to the most frequented places and shouting _"Man
+Sal-ad"_ through a megaphone so loud and so long that at length
+all those whose fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, have gone to the
+corpse-factory will be seized with terror and all the throats in the
+world will be _one_ echo to "Man Sal-ad!"
+
+If you were here right now, dear doctors, I could show you my comrade,
+summoned to this room in the very body by the flames of hate against
+news from the front and against the indifference of the hinterland. I
+feel him standing behind my back, but his face is lying on the white
+sheet in front of me, like a faint water-mark, and my pen races
+frantically so as to cover his eyes at least with letters and hide their
+reproachful stare.
+
+Large, widening, hideously distorted, his face, slowly swelling, rises
+from the paper like the face of Jesus of the handkerchief.
+
+It was just like this that the three war correspondents saw him lying
+at the edge of the woods on that midsummer morning and--turned away
+involuntarily with almost the military exactness of soldiers at a "right
+about face." Their visit was meant for _me_! I was to furnish them with
+carriage and horses because the automobile that was to have darted them
+through the danger zone was lying on the road to Goerz with a broken
+axle.
+
+Charming gentlemen, in wonderfully well-cut breeches and traveling caps,
+looking as if they had stepped out of a Sherlock Holmes motion picture.
+They offered to carry letters back and deliver messages, and they found
+everything on my place perfectly fascinating, and laughed heartily at
+my mattress of willow twigs--and were particularly grateful when the
+carriage stood ready to carry them off before the daily bombardment of
+the Italians began.
+
+On driving out of the woods they had to pass the wounded man again with
+the hideously disfigured face. He was crouching on the meadow. But this
+time they did not see him. As if at command they turned their heads the
+other way and with animated gestures viewed the damage done by an air
+raid the day before, as though they were already sitting over a table in
+a coffee-house.
+
+I lost my breath, as though I had run a long distance up-hill. The place
+where I stood suddenly seemed strange and altered. Was that the same
+piece of woods into which shells had so often come crashing, which
+the huge Caproni planes had circled about with wide-spread wings like
+vultures, shedding bombs, while our machine guns lashed the leaves with
+a hailstorm of shot? Was it out of _this_ piece of woods that three men
+had just driven off, healthy, unscathed, gaily waving their caps? Where
+was the wall that held us others imprisoned under the cracking branches?
+Was there not a door that opened only to let out pale, sunken cheeks,
+feverish eyes, or mangled limbs?
+
+The carriage rolled lightly over the field, trampled down brown, and the
+one thing missing to make it the perfect picture of a pleasure trip was
+the brilliant red of a Baedeker.
+
+Those men were riding back home.
+
+To wife and child, perhaps?
+
+A painful pulling and tugging, as though my eyes were caught to the
+carriage wheels. Then my body rebounded--as if torn off--back into
+emptiness, and--at that moment, just when my soul was as if ploughed
+up by the carriage and laid bare and defenseless by yearning--at that
+moment the experience sprang upon me--with one dreadful leap, one single
+bite--incurable for the rest of my life.
+
+Unsuspecting, I crossed over to the wounded man upon whom the three had
+so unceremoniously turned their backs, as though he did not also belong
+to the interesting museum of shell holes that they had come to inspect.
+He was cowering near the dirty ragged little Red Cross flag, with his
+head between his knees, and did not hear me come up. Behind him lay the
+brown spot which stood out from the green still left on the field like
+a circus ring. The wounded soldiers who gathered here every morning at
+dawn to be driven to the field hospital in the wagons that brought us
+ammunition had rubbed this spot in like a favorite corner of a sofa.
+
+How many I had seen crouching there like that, for ten--often twelve
+hours, when the wagons had left too early, or had been overcrowded, or,
+after violent fighting, had stood waiting in line at the munitions depot
+behind the lines. Happy fellows, some of them, with broken arms or legs,
+the war slang, "a thousand-dollar shot," on their pale, yet laughing
+lips--enviously ogled by the men with slight wounds or the men sick with
+typhoid fever, who would all gladly have sacrificed a thousand dollars
+and a limb into the bargain for the same certainty of not having to
+return to the front again. How many I had seen rolling on the ground,
+biting into the earth in their agony--how many in the pouring rain,
+half buried already in the mud, their bodies ripped open, groaning and
+whimpering and outbellowing the storm.
+
+This man seemed to be only slightly hurt in the right leg. The blood had
+oozed out on one spot through the hastily made bandage, so I offered
+him my first-aid package, besides cognac and cigarettes. But he did not
+move. It was not until I laid my hand on his shoulder that he raised his
+head--and the face he showed me threw me back like a blow on the chest.
+
+His mouth and nose had come apart, and crept like a thick vine up his
+right cheek--which was no longer a cheek. A chunk of bluish red flesh
+swelled up there, covered by skin stretched to bursting and shining from
+being drawn so tight. The whole right side of his face seemed more like
+an exotic fruit than a human countenance, while from the left side, from
+out of grey twitching misery, a sad, frightened eye looked up at me.
+
+Violent terror slung itself round my neck like a lasso.
+
+What was it? Such a frightful thing as that even this field, this
+waiting-room to the Beyond, had never witnessed before. Even the awful
+recollection of another wounded man who had stood at this same spot
+a few days before, his hands looking as though they were modeling
+something, while in actuality they were carefully holding his own
+entrails--even that hideous recollection faded before the sight of this
+Janus head, all peace, all gentle humanity on one side; all war, all
+distorted, puffed-up image of fiendish hatred on the other side.
+
+"Shrapnel?" I stammered timidly.
+
+The answer was confused. All I could get out of it was that a dumdum
+bullet had smashed his right shinbone. But what was that he kept
+mumbling about a hook each time his hand trembled up to his glowing
+cheek?
+
+I could not understand him; for the thing he had gone through still
+seethed in his veins so violently that he spoke as though it were just
+then happening and I were witnessing it. His peasant's mind could not
+comprehend that there were people who had not seen or heard of the
+tremendous misery of the last hours he had gone through. So it was more
+by guess-work that I gradually pieced together his story from unfinished
+sentences, coarse oaths, and groans.
+
+For a whole night, after a repulsed attack on the enemy's trench, he had
+lain with a broken leg, unconscious, near our own wire entanglements.
+At dawn they threw out the iron grappling hook for him, with which they
+pull over into the trench the corpses of friend and foe so as to be able
+to bury them unceremoniously before the sun of Goerz has a chance to do
+its work. With this hook, dipped in hundreds of corpses, a dunce--"God
+damn him!"--had torn his cheek open before a more skilful hand caught
+hold of it and got him over safely. And now he asked humbly to be taken
+away to the hospital quickly, because he was worried--about his leg and
+being a crippled beggar the rest of his life.
+
+I ran off as though mad dogs were at my heels, over rocks and roots,
+through the woods to the next detachment. In vain! In the whole woods
+there was not a single vehicle to be found. I had given up the last one
+to those three war correspondents.
+
+Why had I not asked them to take the one wounded man lying on the field
+along with them and leave him at the hospital that they would pass? Why
+had they themselves not thought of doing their human duty? Why?
+
+I clenched my fists in impotent fury and caught myself reaching for
+my revolver as though I could still shoot those gay sparks in their
+carriage.
+
+Breathless, overheated from the long race, I tottered back, my knees
+trembling the whole way. I felt utterly broken, as though I were
+carrying on my shoulders a picture, weighing a ton, of men who for sport
+angle for human carrion.
+
+An odd choking and tickling came into my throat--a sensation I had not
+known since childhood--when, back at my post again, I had to listen to
+the low whimpering of the helpless man.
+
+He was no longer alone. In my absence a little band of slightly wounded
+men had joined him. Peering between the tree trunks I saw them sitting
+in a circle on the field, while the man who had been hooked was hopping
+about holding on to his injured leg and tossing his head from one
+shoulder to the other.
+
+Towards noon I sent my corporals in search of a vehicle, promising them
+a princely reward, while I ran to the field again with my whisky flask.
+
+He was no longer dancing about. He was kneeling in the center of the
+circle of wounded men, his body bent over, rolling his head on the
+ground as though it were a thing apart from himself. Suddenly he jumped
+up with such a yell of fury that a frightened murmur came even from the
+line of wounded men, who had been sitting there indifferent, sunk in
+their own suffering.
+
+That was no longer anything human. The man's skin could not stand any
+more stretching and had burst. The broad splits ran apart like the lines
+of a compass and in the middle the raw flesh glowed and gushed out.
+
+And he yelled! He hammered with his fist on the enormous purplish lump,
+until he fell to his knees again moaning under the blows of his own
+hand.
+
+It was dark already when--at last!--they came and carted him away.
+And when the night slowly wove its web of mist in the woods and I lay
+wrapped in a mound of blankets, the only one who was still awake in
+the throng of black tree-trunks that moved closer together in the
+darkness--there he was back again, standing up stiff in the moonlight,
+his tortured cheek, huge as a pumpkin, shining blue against the black
+shadows of the trees. It glimmered like a will-o'-the-wisp, now here,
+now there. Night after night. It shone into every dream, so that I
+forced my eyelids open with my fingers--until, after ten frightful
+nights, my body broke down and was carried, a shrieking, convulsed heap,
+to the same hospital in which He had succumbed to blood-poisoning.
+
+And now I am a madman! You can read it, black on white, on the placard
+at the head of my bed. They pat me on the back soothingly, like a shying
+horse, when I flare up and ask to be let out of this place in which _the
+others_ should be shut up.
+
+But the others are free! From my window I can look over the garden
+wall into the street, and see them hurrying along, raising their hats,
+shaking hands, and crowding in front of the latest bulletin. I see women
+and girls, dressed coquettishly, tripping along with pride shining in
+their eyes, beside men whom a cross on the breast brands as murderers.
+I see widows in long black veils--still patient. I see lads with flowers
+stuck in their helmets ready to leave for the war. And not one of them
+rebels! Not one of them sees bruised, mangled men cowering in dark
+corners, men ripped apart by grappling hooks, men with their entrails
+gushing out, and men with blue shining cheeks.
+
+They go by under my window, gesticulating, enthusiastic; because the
+enthusiastic phrases arrive coined fresh every day from the mint, and
+each person feels sheltered and enveloped in a warmth of assent if the
+phrases ring clear from his lips. I know that they keep quiet even when
+they would like to speak, to cry out, to scream. I know that they hunt
+down "slackers," and have no word of abuse for those who are a thousand
+times worse cowards, those who clearly recognise the utter senselessness
+of this butchery of millions, yet will not open their mouths for fear of
+the censure of the thoughtless crowd.
+
+From my window I can see the whole globe spinning round like a crazy
+whirligig, whipped on by haughty lords in cunning calculation and by
+venal servants in sneaking submissiveness.
+
+I see the whole pack! The bawlers who are too empty and too lazy to
+develop their own selves and want to puff themselves with the glittering
+praise meant for their herd. The scoundrels who are protected by the
+masses, carried by them and fed by them, and who look up sanctimoniously
+to a bogy of their own invention, and hammer that bogy into the
+conscience of millions of good men, until the mass has been forged that
+has neither heart nor brain, but only fury and blind faith. I see the
+whole game proceeding madly in blood and agony. I see the spectators
+going by indifferently, and I am called a madman when I raise the window
+to call down to them that the sons they have born and bred, the men they
+have loved are being chased like wild animals, are being butchered like
+cattle.
+
+Those fools down there, who for the sake of respectable condolence
+calls, for a neighbor's eyes raised heavenward in sympathy, sacrificed
+the splendor and warmth of their lives, who threw their flesh and blood
+into the barbed wire entanglements, to rot as carrion on the fields or
+be hooked in with grappling hooks, who have no other consolation than
+that the "enemy" have had the same done to them--those fools remain
+free; and in their despicable vanity and wicked patience they may
+daily shove fresh hecatombs out to the cannons. But I must stay here
+impotent--left alone with the relentless comrade that my conscience
+gives birth to over again every day.
+
+I stand at my window and between me and the street lie piled high the
+bodies of the many I saw bleeding. And I stand here powerless--because
+the revolver that was given me to shoot down poor homesick devils,
+forced into a uniform by iron necessity, has been taken from me, out of
+fear that I might dislodge a few mass murderers from their security and
+send them as a warning example down to their victims.
+
+So I must stay here, as a seer over the blind--behind iron gratings. And
+all I can do is consign these leaves to the wind--every day write it all
+down again and keep scattering the pages out on the street.
+
+I will write indefatigably. I will sow the whole world with my pages.
+Until the seed shall sprout in every heart, until every bedroom will be
+entered by a blue apparition--a dear dead one showing his wounds; and at
+last, at last, the glorious song of the world's redemption will resound
+under my window, the wrathful cry shouted by a million throats:
+
+"Man Sal-ad!"
+
+
+
+
+V. A HERO'S DEATH
+
+
+The staff physician had not understood. He shook his head, vexed, and
+looked questioningly over the rims of his glasses at his assistant.
+
+But his assistant had not understood either, and was embarrassed, and
+stood stiffly without saying anything.
+
+The only one who seemed to have any clue at all to the man's ravings was
+his orderly. For two tears glistened on the upturned ends of his waxed
+mustache. But the orderly spoke nothing but Hungarian, and the staff
+physician turned away with a muttered "blooming idiot". Followed by
+his flaxen-haired assistant, he made his way toward the operating room,
+panting and perspiring.
+
+The huge ball of cotton, inside of which, according to the placard
+hanging at the top of the bed, was hidden the head of First Lieutenant
+of the Reserves, Otto Kadar, of the ----th Regiment of Field Artillery,
+sank back on the pillow, and Miska seated himself again on his knapsack,
+snuffed up his tears, put his head between his big unwashed hands, and
+speculated despairingly about his future.
+
+For it was plain that his Lieutenant could not last much longer. Miska
+knew what was hidden in the huge cotton ball. He had seen the crushed
+skull and the horrible grey mess under the bloody splinters which were
+the brains of his poor Lieutenant, who had been such a good man and kind
+superior. Miska could not hope for such wonderful luck a second time.
+You didn't come across such a kind-hearted master twice in your life.
+The many, many slices of salami that the Lieutenant always had given him
+from his own store of provisions, the gentle, cordial words that Miska
+had heard him whisper to every wounded man--all the memories of the
+long, bloody months he had gone through dully beside his master almost
+like a comrade, rose to his mind. He felt dreadfully sorry for himself,
+the good fellow did, in his infinite defenselessness against the huge
+war machine into which he would now be thrown again without the sure
+support of his kind Lieutenant next to him.
+
+His broad peasant's head between his hands, he crouched like a dog
+at the feet of his dying master, and the tears rolled gently down his
+cheeks and stuck one by one on the ends of his mustache glued with dust
+and pomade.
+
+It was not quite clear to Miska either just why the poor Lieutenant kept
+clamoring so frightfully for his talking-machine. All he knew was that
+the officers had been sitting under cover, listening to the Rakoczy
+March on the phonograph, when suddenly that accursed shell burst upon
+them and everything disappeared in smoke and earth. He himself had been
+knocked unconscious by a heavy board which came out of a clear sky and
+hit him on the back. He had fallen flat and it was an eternity before he
+got his breath back again.
+
+Then--then--Miska's recollections of things after this were a bit
+hazy--then he remembered an indescribable heap of splintered boards and
+fallen beams, a hash of rags, cement, earth, human limbs, and quantities
+of blood. And then--then he remembered--young Meltzar. Meltzar was still
+sitting upright with his back against the remains of the wall, and
+the record that had just played the Rakoczy March and had miraculously
+remained whole was perched on the place where his head belonged. But his
+head was not there. It was gone--completely gone, while the black
+record remained, also leaning against the wall, directly on top of the
+bloodsoaked collar. It was awful. Not one of the soldiers had dared
+touch the upright body with the record exactly like a head on its neck.
+
+Brrr! A cold shiver ran down Miska's back at the recollection, and his
+heart stopped beating in fright when just at that moment the Lieutenant
+again began to scream:
+
+"Phonograph! Only a phonograph!"
+
+Miska jumped up and saw the huge ball of cotton lift itself with an
+effort from the pillow, and his officer's one remaining eye fix greedily
+upon some invisible object. He stood there ashamed, as though guilty of
+a crime, when indignant glances were darted at him from the other beds
+in the ward.
+
+"This is unbearable!" cried a Major, who had been severely wounded, from
+the other end of the long ward. "Carry the man out."
+
+But the Major spoke German, and Miska was more than ever at sea. He
+wiped the sweat of anguish from his brow and explained to a lieutenant
+in the next bed, since his master could not hear what he said anyhow,
+that the phonograph had been broken--broken into a thousand pieces,
+else he would never have left it there, but would surely have brought it
+along as he had brought everything else belonging to his Lieutenant that
+he had managed to find.
+
+No one answered him. As at a word of command, each one of the officers
+the whole length of the ward stuck his head under his pillow and pulled
+the covers over his ears so as not to hear that horrible gurgling laugh
+which changed into a howl or into infuriated cries for the phonograph.
+The old Major even wrapped his blood-stained cloak around his head like
+a turban.
+
+"Lieutenant! I beg pardon, Lieutenant----" Miska begged, and very, very
+gently stroked his master's quivering knees with his big hard palms.
+
+But Lieutenant Kadar heard him not. Neither did he feel the heavy hand
+resting on his knees. For, opposite him, young Meltzar was still sitting
+with a flat, black, round head on his neck on which the Rakoczy March
+was ingraved in spirals. And all at once the officer realized that for
+the past six months he had done poor Meltzar a grievous injustice. How
+could the poor fellow help his stupidity, how could he help his silly,
+high-flown patriotic talk? How could he possibly have had sensible ideas
+with a record for a head? Poor Meltzar!
+
+Lieutenant Kadar simply could not understand why it was that six months
+before, right away, when young Meltzar announced his entrance into
+the battery, he had not guessed what they had done to the boy in the
+hinterland.
+
+They had given him a different head. They had unscrewed the handsome
+fair young head of a lad of eighteen and in its place put a black,
+scratched-up disc, which could do nothing but squeak the Rakoczy March.
+That had now been proved! How the boy must have suffered whenever his
+superior officer, his senior by twenty years, inflicted long sermons on
+him about humanity! With the flat, round disc that they had put on him
+he of course could not comprehend that the Italian soldiers being led
+past the battery, reeking with blood and in rags, would also much rather
+have stayed at home, if a bulletin on the street corner had not forced
+them to leave their homes immediately, just as the mobilization in
+Hungary had forced the Hungarian gunners to leave their homes.
+
+Now for the first time Lieutenant Kadar comprehended the young man's
+unbending resistance to him. Now at last he realized why this boy, who
+could have been his son, had so completely ignored his wisest, kindest
+admonitions and explanations, and had always responded by whistling
+the Rakoczy March through clenched teeth and hissing the stereotyped
+fulmination, "The dogs ought to be shot to pieces."
+
+So then it was not because of his being young and stupid that Meltzar
+had behaved as he did; not because he had come direct from the military
+academy to the trenches. The phonograph record was to blame, the
+phonograph record!
+
+Lieutenant Kadar felt his veins swell up like ropes and his blood pound
+on his temples like blows on an anvil, so great was his wrath against
+the wrongdoers who had treacherously unscrewed poor Meltzar's lovely
+young head from his body.
+
+And--this was the most gruesome--as he now thought of his subordinates
+and fellow-officers, he saw them all going about exactly like poor
+Meltzar, without heads on their bodies. He shut his eyes and tried to
+recall the looks of his gunners--in vain! Not a single face rose before
+his mind's eye. He had spent months and months among those men and had
+not discovered until that moment that not one of them had a head on his
+shoulders. Otherwise he would surely have remembered whether his gunner
+had a mustache or not and whether the artillery captain was light or
+dark. No! Nothing stuck in his mind--nothing but phonograph records,
+hideous, black, round plates lying on bloody blouses.
+
+The whole region of the Isonzo suddenly lay spread out way below him
+like a huge map such as he had often seen in illustrated papers. The
+silver ribbon of the river wound in and out among hills and coppices,
+and Lieutenant Kadar soared high above the welter down below without
+motor or aeroplane, but borne along merely by his own outspread arms.
+And everywhere he looked, on every hill and in every hollow, he saw
+the horns of innumerable talking-machines growing out of the ground.
+Thousands upon thousands of those familiar cornucopias of bright lacquer
+with gilt edges pointed their open mouths up at him. And each one was
+the center of a swarming ant-hill of busy gunners carrying shot and
+shell.
+
+And now Lieutenant Kadar saw it very distinctly: all the men had records
+on their necks like young Meltzar. Not a single one carried his own
+head. But when the shells burst with a howl from the lacquered horns and
+flew straight into an ant-hill, then the flat, black discs broke apart
+and at the very same instant changed back into real heads. From his
+height Lieutenant Kadar saw the brains gush out of the shattered discs
+and the evenly-marked surfaces turn on the second into ashen, agonized
+human countenances.
+
+Everything seemed to be revealed now in one stroke to the dying
+lieutenant--all the secrets of the war, all the problems he had brooded
+over for many months past. So he had the key to the riddle. These people
+evidently did not get their heads back until they were about to die.
+Somewhere--somewhere--far back--far back of the lines, their heads had
+been unscrewed and replaced by records that could do nothing but play
+the Rakoczy March. Prepared in this fashion, they had been jammed into
+the trains and sent to the front, like poor Meltzar, like himself, like
+all of them.
+
+In a fury of anger, the ball of cotton tossed itself up again with a
+jerk. Lieutenant Kadar wanted to jump out of bed and reveal the secret
+to his men, and urge them to insist upon having their heads back again.
+He wanted to whisper the secret to each individual along the entire
+front, from Plava all the way down to the sea. He wanted to tell it to
+each gunner, each soldier in the infantry and even to the Italians over
+there! He even wanted to tell it to the Italians. The Italians, too,
+had had records screwed on to their necks. And they should go back home,
+too, back to Verona, to Venice, to Naples, where their heads lay
+piled up in the store-houses for safekeeping until the war was over.
+Lieutenant Kadar wanted to run from one man to another, so as to help
+each individual to recover his head, whether friend or foe.
+
+But all at once he noticed he could not walk. And he wasn't soaring any
+more either. Heavy iron weights clamped his feet down to the bed to keep
+him from revealing the great secret.
+
+Well, then, he would shout it out in a roar, in a voice supernaturally
+loud that would sound above the bursting of the shells and the blare of
+trumpets on the Day of Judgment, and proclaim the truth from Plava to
+Trieste, even into the Tyrol. He would shout as no man had ever shouted
+before:
+
+"Phonograph!--Bring the heads!--Phonograph!--"
+
+Here his voice suddenly broke with a gurgling sound of agony right in
+the midst of his message of salvation. It hurt too much. He could not
+shout. He felt as though at each word a sharp needle went deep into his
+brain.
+
+A needle?
+
+Of course! How could he have forgotten it? His head had been screwed
+off, too. He wore a record on his neck, too, like all the others. When
+he tried to say something, the needle stuck itself into his skull and
+ran mercilessly along all the coils of his brain.
+
+No! He could not bear it! He'd rather keep quiet--keep the secret to
+himself. Only not to feel that pain--that maddening pain in his head!
+
+But the machine ran on. Lieutenant Kadar grabbed his head with both
+hands and dug his nails deep into his temples. If he didn't stop that
+thing in time from going round and round, then his revolving head would
+certainly break his neck in a few seconds.
+
+Icy drops of anguish flowed from all his pores. "Miska!" he yelled in
+the extreme of his distress.
+
+But Miska did not know what to do.
+
+The record kept on revolving and joyously thrummed the Rakoczy March.
+All the sinews in the Lieutenant's body grew tense. Again and again he
+felt his head slip from between his hands--his spine was already rising
+before his eyes! With a last, frantic effort he tried once more to get
+his hands inside the bandages and press his head forward. Then one more
+dreadful gnashing of his teeth and one more horrible groan and--the long
+ward was at length as silent as an empty church.
+
+When the flaxen-haired assistant returned from the operating-room
+Miska's whining informed him from afar that another cot in the officers'
+division was now vacant. The impatient old Major quite needlessly
+beckoned him to his side and announced in a loud voice so that all the
+gentlemen could hear:
+
+"The poor devil there has at last come to the end of his sufferings."
+Then he added in a voice vibrating with respect: "He died like a true
+Hungarian--singing the Rakoczy March."
+
+
+
+
+VI. HOME AGAIN
+
+
+At last the lake gleamed through the leaves, and the familiar grey chalk
+mountains emerged into view, reaching out across the railroad embankment
+as with threatening fingers deep down into the water. There, beyond the
+smoky black opening of the short tunnel, the church steeple and a corner
+of the castle peeped for an instant above the grove.
+
+John Bogdán leaned way out of the train window and looked at
+everything with greedy eyes, like a man going over the inventory of his
+possessions, all tense and distrustful, for fear something may have been
+lost in his absence. As each group of trees for which he waited darted
+by, he gave a satisfied nod, measuring the correctness of the landscape
+by the picture of it that he carried fairly seared in his memory.
+Everything agreed. Every milestone on the highroad, now running parallel
+to the railroad tracks, stood on the right spot. There! The flash of the
+flaming red copper beech, at which the horses always shied and once came
+within an ace of upsetting the carriage.
+
+John Bogdán drew a deep, heavy sigh, fished a small mirror out of his
+pocket, and gave his face a final scrutiny before leaving the train. At
+each station his face seemed to grow uglier. The right side was not
+so bad. A bit of his mustache still remained, and his right cheek was
+fairly smooth except for the gash at the corner of his mouth, which had
+not healed properly. But the left side! He had let those damned city
+folk tell him a whole lot of nonsense about the left side of his face.
+A bunch of damned scoundrels they were, bent upon making fools of poor
+peasants, in wartime just the same as in peacetime--all of them, the
+great doctor as well as the fine ladies in their dazzling white gowns
+and with their silly affected talk. Heaven knows it was no great trick
+to bamboozle a simple coachman, who had managed with only the greatest
+pains to learn a bit of reading and writing. They had smiled and
+simpered at him and were so nice and had promised him such a paradise.
+And now, here he was helpless, left all alone to himself, a lost man.
+
+With a furious curse, he tore off his hat and threw it on the seat.
+
+Was that the face of a human being? Was it permitted to do such a thing
+to a man? His nose looked like a patchwork of small dice of different
+colors. His mouth was awry, and the whole left cheek was like a piece of
+bloated raw meat, red and criss-crossed with deep scars. Ugh! How ugly!
+A fright! And besides, instead of a cheekbone, he had a long hollow,
+deep enough to hold a man's finger. And it was for this he had let
+himself be tortured so? For this he had let himself be enticed seventeen
+times, like a patient sheep, into that confounded room with the glass
+walls and the shining instruments? A shudder ran down his back at the
+recollection of the tortures he had gone through with clenched teeth,
+just to look like a human being again and be able to go back home to his
+bride.
+
+And now he _was_ home.
+
+The train pulled out of the tunnel, the whistle blew, and the dwarf
+acacias in front of the station-master's hut sent a greeting through
+the window. Grimly John Bogdán dragged his heavy bag through the train
+corridor, descended the steps hesitatingly, and stood there at a loss,
+looking around for help as the train rolled on behind his back.
+
+He took out his large flowered handkerchief and wiped off the heavy
+beads of perspiration from his forehead. What was he to do now? Why had
+he come here at all? Now that he had finally set foot again on the home
+soil for which he had yearned so ardently, a great longing came over him
+for the hospital, which he had left that very morning, only a few hours
+before, full of rejoicing. He thought of the long ward with all
+those men wrapped in bandages who limped and hobbled, lame, blind or
+disfigured. There nobody was revolted by the sight of his mutilated
+face, no indeed. On the contrary, most of them envied him. He was at
+least capable of going back to work, his arms and legs were sound, and
+his right eye was perfect. Many would have been ready to exchange places
+with him. Some had begrudged him his lot and said it was wrong for the
+government to have granted him a pension on account of losing his left
+eye. One eye and a face a little scratched up--what was that compared
+with a wooden leg, a crippled arm, or a perforated lung, which wheezed
+and rattled like a poor machine at the slightest exertion?
+
+Among the many cripples in the hospital John Bogdán was looked upon as a
+lucky devil, a celebrity. Everybody knew his story. The visitors to the
+hospital wanted first of all to see the man who had had himself operated
+on seventeen times and the skin cut away in bands from his back, his
+chest, and his thighs. After each operation, as soon as the bandages
+were removed, the door to his ward never remained shut, a hundred
+opinions were pronounced, and every newcomer was given a detailed
+description of how terrible his face had been before. The few men who
+had shared Bogdán's room with him from the start described the former
+awfulness of his face with a sort of pride, as though they had taken
+part in the successful operations.
+
+Thus John Bogdán had gradually become almost vain of his shocking
+mutilation and the progress of the beautifying process. And when he
+left the hospital, it was with the expectation of being admired as a
+sensation in his village.
+
+And now?
+
+Alone in the world, with no relatives to go to, with nothing but his
+knapsack and his little trunk, the brilliant sunlight of the Hungarian
+plain country flooding down on him, and the village stretching away to
+a distance before him, John Bogdán suddenly felt himself a prey to
+timidity, to a terror that he had not known amid the bursting of the
+shells, the most violent charges, the most ferocious hand-to-hand
+encounters. His inert peasant intellect, his nature crudely compounded
+of wilfulness and vanity, had always been a stranger to deep-going
+reflections. Yet an instinctive misgiving, the sense of distrust and
+hostility that overwhelmed him, told him plainly enough that he was
+about to face disillusionment and mortification such as he had not
+dreamed of in the hospital.
+
+He lifted his luggage to his back dejectedly and walked toward the exit
+with hesitating steps. There, in the shadow of the dusty acacias that
+he had seen grow up and that had seen him grow up, he felt himself
+confronted with his former self, with the handsome John Bogdán who was
+known in the village as the smart coachman of the manor. A lot of good
+were all the operations and patchwork now. The thing now was the painful
+contrast between the high-spirited, forward lad, who on this spot had
+sung out a last hoarse farewell to his sweetheart, Marcsa, on the first
+day of mobilization, and the disfigured creature who was standing
+in front of the same railroad station with one eye gone, a shattered
+cheekbone, a patched-up cheek, and half a nose, embittered and
+cast down, as if it were only that morning that he had met with the
+misfortune.
+
+At the small grille gate stood the wife of the station-guard,
+Kovacs--since the beginning of the war Kovacs himself had been
+somewhere on the Russian front--talking and holding the ticket-puncher,
+impatiently waiting for the last passenger to pass through. John Bogdán
+saw her, and his heart began to beat so violently that he involuntarily
+lingered at each step. Would she recognize him, or would she not? His
+knee joints gave way as if they had suddenly decayed, and his hand
+trembled as he held out the ticket.
+
+She took the ticket and let him pass through--without a word!
+
+Poor John Bogdán's breath stopped short.
+
+But he pulled himself together with all his might, looked her firmly in
+the face with his one eye and said, with a painful effort to steady his
+voice:
+
+"How do you do?"
+
+"How do you do?" the woman rejoined. He encountered her eyes, saw them
+widen into a stare, saw them grope over his mangled face, and then
+quickly turn in another direction, as if she could not bear the sight.
+He wanted to stop, but he noticed her lips quiver and heard a murmured
+"Jesus, son of Mary," as if he were the devil incarnate. And he tottered
+on, deeply wounded.
+
+"She did not recognize me!" the blood hammered in his ears. "She did
+not recognize me--did not recognize me!" He dragged himself to the bench
+opposite the station, threw his luggage to the ground and sank down on
+the seat.
+
+She did not recognize him! The wife of Kovacs, the station-guard, did
+not recognize John Bogdán. The house of her parents stood next to the
+house of his parents. She and he had gone to school together, they had
+been confirmed together. He had held her in his arms and kissed and
+kissed her, heaven knows how many times, before Kovacs came to the
+village to woo her. And _she_ had not recognized him! Not even by his
+voice, so great was the change.
+
+He glanced over at her again involuntarily, and saw her talking eagerly
+with the station-master. From her gestures, he guessed she was telling
+of the horrible sight she had just seen, the stranger soldier so
+hideously disfigured. He uttered a short croaking sound, an abortive
+curse, and then his head fell on his chest, and he sobbed like a
+deserted woman.
+
+What was he to do? Go up to the castle, open the door to the servants'
+quarters, and call out a saucy "Hello, Marcsa" to the astonished girl?
+
+That was the way he had always thought of it. The devil knows how often
+he had painted the picture to the dot--the maids' screaming, Marcsa's
+cry of delight, her flinging her arms about his neck, and the thousand
+questions that would come pouring down on him, while he would sit there
+with Marcsa on his knees, and now and then throw out a casual reply to
+his awed, attentive listeners.
+
+But now--how about it now? Go to Marcsa? He? With that face, the face
+that had made Julia, the station-guard's wife, cross herself in fright?
+Wasn't Marcsa famed throughout the county for her sharp tongue and
+haughty ways? She had snubbed the men by the score, laughed at them,
+made fools of them all, until she finally fell in love with him.
+
+John Bogdán thrust his fist into his mouth and dug his teeth into the
+flesh, until the pain of it at length helped him subdue his sobbing.
+Then he buried his head in his hands and tried to think.
+
+Never in his life had anything gone amiss with him. He had always been
+liked, at school, in the castle, and even in the barracks. He had
+gone through life whistling contentedly, a good-looking alert lad, an
+excellent jockey, and a coachman who drove with style and loved his
+horses, as his horses loved him. When he deigned to toss a kiss to the
+women as he dashed by, he was accustomed to see a flattered smile come
+to their faces. Only with Marcsa did it take a little longer. But she
+was famous for her beauty far and wide. Even John's master, the lord of
+the castle, had patted him on the shoulder almost enviously when Marcsa
+and he had become engaged.
+
+"A handsome couple," the pastor had said.
+
+John Bogdán groped again for the little mirror in his pocket and then
+sat with drooping body, oppressed by a profound melancholy. That thing
+in the glass was to be the bridegroom of the beautiful Marcsa? What did
+that ape's face, that piece of patchwork, that checkerboard which the
+damned quack, the impostor, whom they called a distinguished medical
+authority, a celebrated doctor, had basted together--what did it have
+to do with _that_ John Bogdán whom Marcsa had promised to marry and whom
+she had accompanied to the station crying when he had gone off to the
+war? For Marcsa there was only _one_ John Bogdán, the one that was
+coachman to the lord of the castle and the handsomest man in the
+village. Was he still coachman? The lord would take care not to disgrace
+his magnificent pair with such a scarecrow or drive to the county seat
+with such a monstrosity on the box. Haying--that's what they would
+put him to--cleaning out the dung from the stables. And Marcsa, the
+beautiful Marcsa whom all the men were vying for, would she be the wife
+of a miserable day laborer?
+
+No, of this John Bogdán was certain, the man sitting on the bench there
+was no longer John Bogdán to Marcsa. She would not have him now--no
+more than the lord would have him on the coachman's box. A cripple is
+a cripple, and Marcsa had engaged herself to John Bogdán, not to the
+fright that he was bringing back home to her.
+
+His melancholy gradually gave way to an ungovernable fury against those
+people in the city who had given him all that buncombe and talked him
+into heaven knows what. Marcsa should be proud because he had been
+disfigured in the service of his fatherland. Proud? Ha-ha!
+
+He laughed scornfully, and his fingers tightened convulsively about the
+cursed mirror, until the glass broke into bits and cut his hand. The
+blood trickled slowly down his sleeves without his noticing it, so great
+was his rage against that bunch of aristocratic ladies in the hospital
+whose twaddle had deprived him of his reason. They probably thought that
+a man with one eye and half a nose was good enough for a peasant girl?
+Fatherland? Would Marcsa go to the altar with the fatherland? Could she
+show off the fatherland to the women when she would see them looking at
+her pityingly? Did the fatherland drive through the village with ribbons
+flying from its hat? Ridiculous! Sitting on the bench opposite the
+station, with the sign of the village in view, a short name, a single
+word, which comprised his whole life, all his memories, hopes and
+experiences, John Bogdán suddenly thought of one of the village
+characters, Peter the cripple, who had lived in the tumbledown hut
+behind the mill many years before, when John was still a child. John saw
+him quite distinctly, standing there with his noisy wooden leg and his
+sad, starved, emaciated face. He, too, had sacrificed a part of himself,
+his leg, "for the fatherland," in Bosnia during the occupation; and
+then he had had to live in the old hovel all alone, made fun of by
+the children, who imitated his walk, and grumblingly tolerated by the
+peasants, who resented the imposition of this burden upon the community.
+"In the service of the fatherland." Never had the "fatherland" been
+mentioned when Peter the cripple went by. They called him contemptuously
+the village pauper, and that was all there was to it.
+
+John Bogdán gnashed his teeth in a rage that he had not thought of Peter
+the cripple in the hospital. Then he would have given those city people
+a piece of his mind. He would have told them what he thought of their
+silly, prattling humbug about the fatherland and about the great honor
+it was to return home to Marcsa looking like a monkey. If he had the
+doctor in his clutches now! The fakir had photographed him, not once,
+but a dozen times, from all sides, after each butchery, as though he had
+accomplished a miracle, had turned out a wonderful masterpiece. And here
+Julia, even Julia, his playmate, his neighbor, had not recognized him.
+
+So deep was John Bogdán sunk in his misery, so engulfed in grim plans of
+vengeance, that he did not notice a man who had been standing in front
+of him for several minutes, eyeing him curiously from every angle.
+Suddenly a voice woke him up out of his brooding, and a hot wave surged
+into his face, and his heart stood still with delighted terror, as he
+heard some one say:
+
+"Is that you, Bogdán?"
+
+He raised himself, happy at having been recognized after all. But the
+next moment he knitted his brows in complete disappointment. It was
+Mihály the humpback.
+
+There was no other man in the whole village, even in the whole county,
+whose hand John Bogdán would not at that moment have grasped cordially
+in a surge of gratitude. But this humpback--he never had wanted to have
+anything to do with him, and now certainly not. The fellow might imagine
+he had found a comrade, and was probably glad that he was no longer the
+only disfigured person in the place.
+
+"Yes, it's I. Well?"
+
+The humpback's small, piercing eyes searched Bogdán's scarred face
+curiously, and he shook his head in pity.
+
+"Well, well, the Russians certainly have done you up."
+
+Bogdán snarled at him like a vicious cur.
+
+"It's none of your business. What right have you to talk? If I had come
+into the world like you, with my belly on my back, the Russians couldn't
+have done anything to me."
+
+The humpback seated himself quietly beside John without showing the
+least sign of being insulted.
+
+"The war hasn't made you any politer, I can see that," he remarked
+drily. "You're not exactly in a happy frame of mind, which does not
+surprise me. Yes, that's the way it is. The poor people must give up
+their sound flesh and bone so that the enemy should not deprive the rich
+of their superfluity. You may bless your stars you came out of it as
+well as you did."
+
+"I do," Bogdán growled with a glance of hatred. "The shells don't ask if
+you are rich or poor. Counts and barons are lying out there, rotting in
+the sun like dead beasts. Any man that God has not smitten in his
+cradle so that he's not fit to be either a man or a woman is out in
+the battlefield now, whether he's as poor as a church mouse or used to
+eating from golden plates."
+
+The humpback cleared his throat and shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"There are all sorts of people," he observed, and was about to add
+something else, but bethought himself and remained silent.
+
+This Bogdán always had had the soul of a flunkey, proud of being allowed
+to serve the high and mighty and feeling solid with his oppressors
+because he was allowed to contribute to their pomp in gold-laced livery
+and silver buttons. His masters had sicked him on to face the cannons in
+defense of their own wealth, and now the man sat there disfigured, with
+only one eye, and still would not permit any criticism of his gracious
+employers. Against such stupidity there was nothing to be done. There
+was no use wasting a single word on him.
+
+The two remained sitting for a while in silence. Bogdán filled his pipe
+carefully and deliberately, and Mihály watched him with interest.
+
+"Are you going to the castle?" the humpback asked cautiously, when the
+pipe was at last lit.
+
+John Bogdán was well aware just what the hateful creature was aiming
+at. He knew him. A Socialist--that's what he was, one of those
+good-for-nothings who take the bread out of poor people's mouths by
+dinning a lot of nonsense into their ears, just like a mean dog who
+snaps at the hand that feeds him. He had made a good living as foreman
+in the brickyard, and as thanks he had incited all the workmen against
+the owner, Bogdán's master, until they demanded twice as much wages, and
+were ready to set fire to the castle on all four corners. Once Mihály
+had tried his luck with him, too. He had wanted to make his master out a
+bad man. But this time he had bucked up against the right person. A
+box on his right ear and a box on his left ear, and then a good sound
+kick--that was the answer to keep him from ever again trying to make a
+Socialist of John Bogdán, one of those low fellows who know no God or
+fatherland.
+
+Mihály moved on the bench uneasily, every now and then scrutinizing his
+neighbor from the side. At last he plucked up courage and said suddenly:
+
+"They'll probably be glad up there that you are back. Your arms are
+still whole, and they need people in the factory."
+
+Bogdán turned up his nose.
+
+"In the brickyard?" he asked disdainfully.
+
+The humpback burst out laughing.
+
+"Brickyard? Brickyard is good. Who needs bricks in war? The brickyard's
+gone long ago, man. Do you see those trucks over there? They are all
+loaded up with shells. Every Saturday a whole train of shells leaves
+here."
+
+Bogdán listened eagerly. That was news. A change on the estate of which
+he had not yet heard.
+
+"You see, there is such a nice division," Mihály continued, smiling
+sarcastically. "One goes away and lets his head be blown off. The other
+remains comfortably at home and manufactures shells and decorates his
+castle with thousand-dollar bills. Well, I'm satisfied."
+
+"What are we to do, eh, shoot with peas or with air? You can't carry on
+a war without shells. Shells are needed just as much as soldiers."
+
+"Exactly. And because the rich have the choice of being soldiers or
+making shells, they choose to make the shells and send _you_ off to
+have your head blown off. What are you getting for your eye? Twenty-five
+dollars a year? Or perhaps as much as fifty? And the others whom the
+ravens are feeding on don't get even that out of the war. But the
+gentleman up in the castle is making his five hundred a day and doesn't
+risk even his little finger doing it. I'd be a patriot on those terms
+myself. I am telling you the truth. At first, of course, they said he
+was going to war, and he did actually ride off in great state, but three
+weeks later he was back here again with machines and all the equipment,
+and now he delivers fine orations in the townhouse and sends other men
+off to die--and on top of it is gallant to the wives left behind. He
+stuffs his pockets and fools with every girl in the factory. He's the
+cock of the whole district."
+
+Bogdán, his brows knit in annoyance, let the man talk on. But the last
+part struck him with a shock. He pricked up his ears and grew uneasy and
+for a while struggled heroically against asking a question that burned
+on his lips. But in the end he could not restrain himself and blurted
+out:
+
+"Is--is Marcsa working in the factory, too?"
+
+The humpback's eyes flashed.
+
+"Marcsa, the beautiful Marcsa! I should say so! She's been made a
+forelady, though they say she's never had a shell in her hands, but, to
+make up, the lord's hands have--"
+
+With a short, hoarse growl John Bogdán flew at the humpback's throat,
+squeezed in his Adam's apple, pressing it into his neck, and held him
+in a merciless clutch. The man beat about with his arms, his eyes popped
+from his head in fright, his throat gurgled, and his face turned livid.
+Then John Bogdán released his hold, and Mihály fell to the ground and
+lay there gasping. Bogdán quickly gathered up his things and strode
+off, taking long, quick steps, as if afraid of arriving too late for
+something in the castle.
+
+He gave not another look back at Mihály the humpback, never turned
+around once, but quietly went his way and for a long while felt the warm
+throat in his hand.
+
+What was a man who lay gasping on the road to him? One man more or less.
+In the rhythmic regularity of the marching column, he had passed by
+thousands like him, and it had never occurred to his mind, dulled by
+weariness, that the grey spots thickly strewn over the fields, the heaps
+lining the roadway like piles of dung in the spring, were human beings
+struck down by death. He and his comrades had waded in the dead, there
+at Kielce, when they made a dash across the fields, and earthy grey
+hands rose out of every furrow pawing the air, and trousers drenched
+in blood and distorted faces grew out of the ground, as if all the
+dead were scrambling from their graves for the Last Judgment. They
+had stepped and stumbled over corpses. Once the fat little officer of
+reserves, to the great amusement of his company, had gotten deathly sick
+at his stomach because he had inadvertently stepped on the chest of a
+half-decayed Russian, and the body had given way under him, and he had
+scarcely been able to withdraw his foot from the foul hole. John Bogdán
+smiled as he recalled the wicked jokes the men had cracked at the
+officer's expense, how the officer had gone all white and leaned against
+a tree and carried on like a man who has much more than quenched his
+thirst.
+
+The road glowed in the mid-day sun. The village clock struck twelve.
+From the hill yonder came, like an answer, the deep bellow of the
+factory whistle, and a little white cloud rose over the tops of the
+trees. Bogdán quickened his pace, running rather than walking, heedless
+of the drops of sweat that ran down and tickled his neck. For almost a
+year he had breathed nothing but the hospital atmosphere, had smelled
+nothing but iodoform and lysol and seen nothing but roofs and walls.
+His lungs drew in the aroma of the blossoming meadows with deep
+satisfaction, and the soles of his boots tramped the ground sturdily, as
+if he were again marching in regular order.
+
+This was the first walk he had taken since he was wounded, the first
+road he had seen since those wild marches on Russian soil. At moments he
+seemed to hear the cannons roaring. The short struggle with the humpback
+had set his blood coursing, and his memories of the war, for a time
+stifled as it were beneath a layer of dust by the dreary monotony of the
+hospital life, suddenly came whirling back to him.
+
+He almost regretted having let that damned blackguard go so soon. One
+moment more, and he would never have opened his blasphemous mouth again.
+His head would have fallen back exhausted to one side, he would once
+again have embraced the air longingly with outspread fingers, and then
+in a flash would have shrunk together, exactly like the fat, messy
+Russian with the large blue eyes who was the first man to present
+himself to St. Peter with a greeting from John Bogdán. Bogdán had not
+let _him_ loose until he had altogether quit squirming. He had choked
+him dead as a doornail. And still he was a comical fellow, not nearly so
+disgusting as that rascally humpback. But he was the first enemy soldier
+whom he had got into his grasp, his very first Russian. A magnificent
+array of others had followed, though the fat man was the only one Bogdán
+had choked to death. He had smashed scores with the butt-end of his gun
+and run his bayonet through scores of others. He had even squashed with
+his boots the wretch who had struck down his dearest comrade before his
+very eyes. But never again did he choke a man to death. That was why
+the little fat fellow stuck in his memory. He had no recollection of
+the others whatever. All he saw now in his mind was a tangle of
+greyish-green uniforms. And as he thought of his heroic deeds, the
+gnashing, the stamping, the gasping, and the cursing of the hand-to-hand
+encounters resounded in his ears. How many, he wondered, had he sent
+to the other world? God alone may have counted them. He himself had
+had enough to do trying to save his own skin. Had a man stopped to look
+around, he would have carried his curiosity to the next world.
+
+And yet--there was another face that remained fixed in his memory.
+A great big thin fellow, as tall as a beanpole, with enormous yellow
+tusks, which he gnashed like a boar. Yes, he had as clear a picture of
+him as if it had been yesterday. He saw him half-backed up against the
+wall already, swinging his gun over his head. One second more, and the
+butt-end would have come whizzing down. But a sleepy Russian was never
+the man to get the better of John Bogdán. Before he had the chance to
+bring down his gun, Bogdán's bayonet was in between his ribs, and the
+Russian fell over on his own gun. The bayonet pierced him through and
+through, and even went into the wall behind him, and came mighty near
+breaking off.
+
+But the same thing never happened to Bogdán again. It had happened that
+once because he had thrust too hard, with clenched teeth, gripping the
+rod in a tight clutch, as if it were iron that he had to cleave. The
+fact was, he had not yet discovered that it really isn't so difficult
+to mow down a human being. He had been prepared for any amount of
+resistance, and his bayonet had glided into the fellow's body like
+butter. His mouth had remained wide open in astonishment--he recalled
+it to the dot. A man who has never tried a bayonet thrust thinks a
+human being is made up all of bones, and he fetches out for a good hard
+stroke. Then he's in a pickle to free his weapon again before one of the
+messy-looking devils takes advantage of his defenselessness. The way
+to do was to go at it very lightly, with a short jerky thrust. Then
+the blade ran in of itself, like a good horse--you actually had trouble
+holding it back. The most important thing was, not to take your eye off
+your enemy. You mustn't look at your bayonet, or the spot you intend
+to pierce. You must always watch your enemy so as to guess his move in
+time. It's from your enemy's face that you must read the right moment
+for stepping backward. They all behaved the same way--exactly like the
+first tall wild fellow who gnashed his tusks. All of a sudden their
+faces turned absolutely smooth, as if the cold iron in their body had
+chilled their fury, their eyes opened wide in astonishment and looked
+at their enemy as if to ask in reproach, "What are you doing?" Then they
+usually clutched at the bayonet and needlessly cut their fingers, too,
+before they fell over dead. If you didn't know exactly what to do and
+didn't hold your weapon back in time and withdraw it quickly from the
+wound, just when you saw the man's eyes growing large, you would be
+carried along down with him or would get hit on the head by the butt-end
+of another enemy's gun long before you could draw your bayonet out.
+
+These were all things that John Bogdán had often discussed with his
+comrades after severe frays when they criticized the men who had fallen
+for behaving stupidly and who had had to pay with their lives for their
+awkwardness.
+
+As he strode along in haste up the familiar road to the castle, he was
+fairly lost in recollections. His legs moved of themselves, like horses
+on the homeward way. He passed through the open grille gateway and was
+already walking on the gravel path, his head bowed on his chest, without
+noticing that he had reached home.
+
+The neighing of horses woke him up from his thoughts with a start. He
+stood still, deeply stirred by the sight of the stables, only a few feet
+away, and inside, in the twilight, the gleam of his favorite horse's
+flanks. He was about to turn off the path and make for the stable door
+when far away down below, at the other end of the large place, he saw a
+woman coming from the brickyard. She wore a dotted red silk kerchief on
+her head and carried her full figure proudly, and the challenging sway
+of her hips billowed her wide skirts as the wind billows a field of ripe
+grain.
+
+John Bogdán stood stockstill, as if some one had struck him on the
+chest. It was Marcsa! There was not another girl in the whole country
+who walked like that. He threw his luggage to the ground and dashed off.
+
+"Marcsa! Marcsa!" his cry thundered out over the broad courtyard.
+
+The girl turned and waited for his approach, peering curiously through
+half-closed eyes. When almost face to face with her Bogdán stood still.
+
+"Marcsa!" he repeated in a whisper, his gaze fastened upon her face
+anxiously. He saw her turn pale, white as chalk, saw her eyes leap
+to and fro uneasily, from his left cheek to his right cheek, and back
+again. Then horror came into her eyes. She clapped her hands to her
+face, and turned and ran away as fast as her legs would carry her.
+
+In utter sadness Bogdán stared after her. That was exactly the way he
+had imagined their meeting again since Julia, the station-guard's wife,
+the woman he had grown up with, had not recognized him. But to run away!
+That rankled. No need for her to run away. John Bogdán was not the man
+to force himself on a woman. If he no longer pleased her now that he was
+disfigured, well, then she could look for another man, and he, too--he
+would find another woman. He wasn't bothered about that.
+
+This was what he had wanted to tell Marcsa.
+
+He bounded after her and overtook her a few feet from the machine shop.
+
+"Why do you run away from me?" he growled, breathless, and caught her
+hand. "If you don't want me any more, you need only say so. What do you
+think--I'm going to eat you up?"
+
+She stared at him searchingly--in uncertainty. He almost felt sorry for
+her, she was trembling so.
+
+"How you look!" he heard her stammer, and he turned red with anger.
+
+"You knew it. I had them write to you that a shell hit me. Did you think
+it made me better-looking? Just speak straight out if you don't want me
+any more. Straight wine is what I want, no mixture. Yes or no? I won't
+force you to marry me. Just say it right away--yes or no?"
+
+Marcsa was silent. There was something in his face, in his one eye, that
+took her breath away, that dug into her vitals like cold fingers. She
+cast her eyes down and stammered:
+
+"But you have no position yet. How can we marry? You must first ask the
+master if he--"
+
+It was as if a red pall woven of flames dropped in front of John
+Bogdán's eyes. The master? What was she saying about the master? He
+thought of the humpback, and it came to him in a flash that the fellow
+had not lied. His fingers clutched her wrist like a pair of glowing
+tongs, so that she cried out with the pain.
+
+"The master!" Bogdán bellowed. "What has the master got to do between
+you and me? Yes or no? I want an answer. The master has nothing to do
+with us."
+
+Marcsa drew herself up. All of a sudden a remarkable assurance came to
+her. The color returned to her cheeks, and her eyes flashed proudly.
+She stood there with the haughty bearing so familiar to Bogdán, her head
+held high in defiance.
+
+Bogdán observed the change and saw that her gaze traveled over his
+shoulder. He let go her hand and turned instantly. Just what he
+thought--the master coming out of the machine shop. His old forester,
+Tóth, followed him.
+
+Marcsa bounded past Bogdán like a cat and ran up to the lord and bent
+over and kissed his hand.
+
+Bogdán saw the three of them draw near and lowered his head like a
+ram for attack. A cold, determined quiet rose in him slowly, as in the
+trenches when the trumpeter gave the signal for a charge. He felt the
+lord's hand touch his shoulder, and he took a step backward.
+
+What was the meaning of it all? The lord was speaking of heroism and
+fatherland, a lot of rubbish that had nothing to do with Marcsa. He let
+him go on talking, let the words pour down on him like rain, without
+paying any attention to their meaning. His glance wandered to and fro
+uneasily, from the lord to Marcsa and then to the forester, until it
+rested curiously on something shining.
+
+It was the nickeled hilt of the hunting-knife hanging at the old
+forester's side and sparkling in the sunlight.
+
+"Like a bayonet," thought Bogdán, and an idea flashed through his mind,
+to whip the thing out of the scabbard and run it up to the hilt in the
+hussy's body. But her rounded hips, her bright billowing skirts confused
+him. In war he had never had to do with women. He could not exactly
+imagine what it would be like to make a thrust into that beskirted body
+there. His glance traveled back to the master, and now he noticed that
+his stiffnecked silence had pulled him up short.
+
+"He is gnashing his teeth," it struck him, "just like the tall Russian."
+And he almost smiled at a vision that came to his mind--of the lord also
+getting a smooth face and astonished, reproachful eyes.
+
+But hadn't he said something about Marcsa just then? What was Marcsa to
+him?
+
+Bogdán drew himself up defiantly.
+
+"I will arrange matters with Marcsa myself, sir. It's between her and
+me," he rejoined hoarsely, and looked his master straight in the face.
+_He_ still had his mustache, quite even on the two sides, and curling
+delicately upwards at the ends. What was it the humpback had said? "One
+man goes away and lets his head be blown off." He wasn't so stupid after
+all, the humpback wasn't.
+
+What Bogdán said infuriated the master. Bogdán let him shout and stared
+like a man hypnotized at the nickeled hilt of the hunting-knife. It
+was not until the name "Marcsa" again struck his ear that he became
+attentive.
+
+"Marcsa is in my employ now," he heard the lord saying. "You know I am
+fond of you, Bogdán. I'll let you take care of the horses again, if you
+care to. But Marcsa is to be let alone. I won't have any rumpus. If she
+still wants to marry you, all well and good. But if she doesn't, she's
+to be let alone. If I hear once again that you have annoyed her, I'll
+chase you to the devil. Do you understand?"
+
+Foaming with rage, Bogdán let out the stream of his wrath.
+
+"To the devil?" he shouted. "You chase me to the devil? You had first
+better go there yourself. I've been to the devil already. For eight
+months I was in hell. Here's my face--you can tell from my face that I
+come from hell. To play the protector here and stuff your pockets full
+and send the others out to die--that's easy. A man who dawdles at home
+has no right to send men to the devil who have already been in hell for
+his sake."
+
+So overwhelming was his indignation that he spoke like the humpback
+Socialist and was not ashamed of it. He stood there ready to leap, with
+tensely drawn muscles, like a wild animal. He saw the lord make ready
+to strike him, saw his distorted face, saw the riding-crop flash through
+the air, and even saw it descending upon him. But he did not feel the
+short, hard blow on his back.
+
+With one bound he ripped the hunting-knife out of the scabbard and
+thrust it between the lord's ribs--not with a long sweep, so that
+some one could have stayed his arm before he struck. Oh, no! But quite
+lightly, from below, with a short jerk, exactly as he had learned by
+experience in battle. The hunting-knife was as good as his bayonet. It
+ran into the flesh like butter.
+
+Then everything came about just as it always did. John Bogdán stood with
+his chin forward and saw the lord's face distorted by anger suddenly
+smooth out and turn as placid and even as if it had been ironed. He saw
+his eyes widen and look over at him in astonishment with the reproachful
+question, "What are you doing?" The one thing Bogdán did not see was the
+collapsing of the lord's body, for at that instant a blow crashed down
+on the back of his head, like the downpour of a waterfall dropping from
+an infinite height. For one second he still saw Marcsa's face framed in
+a fiery wheel, then, his skull split open, he fell over on top of his
+master, whose body already lay quivering on the ground.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Men in War, by Andreas Latzko
+
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+<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
+
+<!DOCTYPE html
+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Men in War, by Andreas Latzko
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+
+
+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Men in War, by Andreas Latzko
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Men in War
+
+Author: Andreas Latzko
+
+
+Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8440]
+This file was first posted on July 10, 2003
+Last Updated: May 10, 2013
+
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEN IN WAR ***
+
+
+
+
+Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8440]
+This file was first posted on July 10, 2003
+Last Updated: May 10, 2013
+
+
+Text file produced by Eric Eldred, Tonya Allen, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading
+
+HTML file produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      MEN IN WAR
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By Andreas Latzko
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      DEDICATED TO FRIEND AND FOE
+    </h3>
+    <div class="middle">
+      <p>
+        <i>"I am convinced the time will come when all will think as I do."</i>
+      </p>
+    </div>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I. OFF TO WAR </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II. BAPTISM OF FIRE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III. THE VICTOR </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> IV. MY COMRADE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> V. A HERO'S DEATH </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> VI. HOME AGAIN </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      I. OFF TO WAR
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The time was late in the autumn of the second year of the war; the place,
+      the garden of a war hospital in a small Austrian town, which lay at the
+      base of wooded hills, sequestered as behind a Spanish wall, and still
+      preserving its sleepy contented outlook upon existence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Day and night the locomotives whistled by. Some of them hauled to the
+      front trains of soldiers singing and hallooing, high-piled bales of hay,
+      bellowing cattle and ammunition in tightly-closed, sinister-looking cars.
+      The others, in the opposite direction, came creeping homeward slowly,
+      marked by the bleeding cross that the war has thrown upon all walls and
+      the people behind them. But the great madness raced through the town like
+      a hurricane, without disturbing its calm, as though the low, brightly
+      colored houses with the old-fashioned ornate façades had tacitly come to
+      the sensible agreement to ignore with aristocratic reserve this arrogant,
+      blustering fellow, War, who turned everything topsy-turvy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the parks the children played unmolested with the large russet leaves
+      of the old chestnut trees. Women stood gossiping in front of the shops,
+      and somewhere in every street a girl with a bright kerchief on her head
+      could be seen washing windows. In spite of the hospital flags waving from
+      almost every house, in spite of innumerable bulletin boards, notices and
+      sign-posts that the intruder had thrust upon the defenseless town, peace
+      still seemed to prevail here, scarcely fifty miles away from the butchery,
+      which on clear nights threw its glow on the horizon like an artificial
+      illumination. When, for a few moments at a time, there was a lull in the
+      stream of heavy, snorting automobile trucks and rattling drays, and no
+      train happened to be rumbling over the railroad bridge and no signal of
+      trumpet or clanking of sabres sounded the strains of war, then the
+      obstinate little place instantly showed up its dull but good-natured
+      provincial face, only to hide it again in resignation behind its
+      ill-fitting soldier's mask, when the next automobile from the general
+      staff came dashing around the corner with a great show of importance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To be sure the cannons growled in the distance, as if a gigantic dog were
+      crouching way below the ground ready to jump up at the heavens, snarling
+      and snapping. The muffled barking of the big mortars came from over there
+      like a bad fit of coughing from a sickroom, frightening the watchers who
+      sit with eyes red with crying, listening for every sound from the dying
+      man. Even the long, low rows of houses shrank together with a rattle and
+      listened horrorstruck each time the coughing convulsed the earth, as
+      though the stress of war lay on the world's chest like a nightmare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The streets exchanged astonished glances, blinking sleepily in the
+      reflection of the night-lamps that inside cast their merrily dancing
+      shadows over close rows of beds. The rooms, choke-full of misery, sent
+      piercing shrieks and wails and groans out into the night. Every human
+      sound coming through the windows fell upon the silence like a furious
+      attack. It was a wild denunciation of the war that out there at the front
+      was doing its work, discharging mangled human bodies like so much offal
+      and filling all the houses with its bloody refuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the beautiful wrought-iron fountains continued to gurgle and murmur
+      complacently, prattling with soothing insistence of the days of their
+      youth, when men still had the time and the care for noble lines and
+      curves, and war was the affair of princes and adventurers. Legend popped
+      out of every corner and every gargoyle, and ran on padded soles through
+      all the narrow little streets, like an invisible gossip whispering of
+      peace and comfort. And the ancient chestnut trees nodded assent, and with
+      the shadows of their outspread fingers stroked the frightened façades to
+      calm them. The past grew so lavishly out of the fissured walls that any
+      one coming within their embrace heard the plashing of the fountains above
+      the thunder of the artillery; and the sick and wounded men felt soothed
+      and listened from their fevered couches to the talkative night outside.
+      Pale men, who had been carried through the town on swinging stretchers,
+      forgot the hell they had come from; and even the heavily laden victims
+      tramping through the place on a forced march by night became softened for
+      a space, as if they had encountered Peace and their own unarmed selves in
+      the shadow of the columns and the flower-filled bay-windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The same thing took place with the war in this town as with the stream
+      that came down from out of the mountains in the north, foaming with rage
+      at each pebble it rolled over. At the other end of the town, on passing
+      the last houses, it took a tender leave, quite tamed and subdued,
+      murmuring very gently, as if treading on tiptoe, as if drowsy with all the
+      dreaminess it had reflected. Between wide banks, it stepped out into the
+      broad meadowland, and circled about the war hospital, making almost an
+      island of the ground it stood on. Thick-stemmed sycamores cast their
+      shadow on the hospital, and from three sides came the murmur of the
+      slothful stream mingled with the rustling of the leaves, as if the garden,
+      when twilight fell, was moved by compassion and sang a slumber song for
+      the lacerated men, who had to suffer in rank and file, regimented up to
+      their very death, up to the grave, into which they&mdash;unfortunate
+      cobblers, tinkers, peasants, and clerks&mdash;were shoved to the
+      accompaniment of salvos from big-mouthed cannon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sound of taps had just died away, and the watchmen were making their
+      rounds, when they discovered three men in the deep shadow of the broad
+      avenue, and drove them into the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Are you officers, eh?" the head-watchman, a stocky corporal of the
+      landsturm, with grey on his temples, growled and blustered good-naturedly.
+      "Privates must be in bed by nine o'clock." To preserve a show of authority
+      he added with poorly simulated bearishness: "Well, are you going or not?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was about to give his usual order, "Quick, take to your legs!" but
+      caught himself just in time, and made a face as though he had swallowed
+      something.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The three men now hobbling toward the entrance for inmates, would have
+      been only too glad to carry out such an order. However, they had only two
+      legs and six clattering crutches between them. It was like a living
+      picture posed by a stage manager who has an eye for symmetry. On the right
+      went the one whose right leg had been saved, on the left went his
+      counterpart, hopping on his left leg, and in the middle the miserable
+      left-over of a human body swung between two high crutches, his empty
+      trousers raised and pinned across his chest, so that the whole man could
+      have gone comfortably into a cradle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The corporal followed the group with his eyes, his head bent and his fists
+      clenched, as if bowed down beneath the burden of the sight. He muttered a
+      not exactly patriotic oath and spat out a long curve of saliva with a hiss
+      from between his front teeth. As he was about to turn and go on his round
+      again, a burst of laughter came from the direction of the officers' wing.
+      He stood still and drew in his head as if from a blow on the back of his
+      neck, and a gleam of ungovernable hatred flitted over his broad,
+      good-natured peasant face. He spat out again, to soothe his feelings, then
+      took a fresh start and passed the merry company with a stiff salute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The gentlemen returned the salute carelessly. Infected by the coziness
+      that hung over the whole of the town like a light cloud, they were sitting
+      chatting in front of the hospital on benches moved together to form a
+      square. They spoke of the war and&mdash;laughed, laughed like happy
+      schoolboys discussing the miseries of examinations just gone through. Each
+      had done his duty, each had had his ordeal, and now, under the protection
+      of his wound, each sat there in the comfortable expectation of returning
+      home, of seeing his people again, of being fêted, and for at least two
+      whole weeks, of living the life of a man who is not tagged with a number.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The loudest of the laughers was the young lieutenant whom they had
+      nicknamed the Mussulman because of the Turkish turban he wore as officer
+      of a regiment of Bosnians. A shell had broken his leg, and done its work
+      thoroughly. For weeks already the shattered limb had been tightly encased
+      in a plaster cast, and its owner, who went about on crutches, cherished it
+      carefully, as though it were some precious object that had been confided
+      to his care.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the bench opposite the Mussulman sat two gentlemen, a cavalry officer,
+      the only one on the active list, and an artillery officer, who in civil
+      life was a professor of philosophy, and so was called "Philosopher" for
+      short. The cavalry captain had received a cut across his right arm, and
+      the Philosopher's upper lip had been ripped by a splinter from a grenade.
+      Two ladies were sitting on the bench that leaned against the wall of the
+      hospital, and these three men were monopolizing the conversation with
+      them, because the fourth man sat on his bench without speaking. He was
+      lost in his own thoughts, his limbs twitched, and his eyes wandered
+      unsteadily. In the war he was a lieutenant of the landsturm, in civil life
+      a well-known composer. He had been brought to the hospital a week before,
+      suffering from severe shock. Horror still gloomed in his eyes, and he kept
+      gazing ahead of him darkly. He always allowed the attendants at the
+      hospital to do whatever they wanted to him without resistance, and he went
+      to bed or sat in the garden, separated from the others as by an invisible
+      wall, at which he stared and stared. Even the unexpected arrival of his
+      pretty, fair wife had not resulted in dispelling for so much as a second
+      the vision of the awful occurrence that had unbalanced his mind. With his
+      chin on his chest he sat without a smile, while she murmured words of
+      endearment; and whenever she tried to touch his poor twitching hands with
+      the tips of her fingers, full of infinite love, he would jerk away as if
+      seized by a convulsion, or under torture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tears rolled down the little woman's cheeks&mdash;cheeks hungry for
+      caresses. She had fought her way bravely through the zones barred to
+      civilians until she finally succeeded in reaching this hospital in the war
+      zone. And now, after the great relief and joy of finding her husband alive
+      and unmutilated, she suddenly sensed an enigmatic resistance, an
+      unexpected obstacle, which she could not beg away or cry away, as she had
+      used to do. There was a something there that separated her mercilessly
+      from the man she had so yearned to see.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat beside him impatiently, tortured by her powerlessness to find an
+      explanation for the hostility that he shed around him. Her eyes pierced
+      the darkness, and her hands always went the same way, groping forward
+      timidly, then quickly withdrawing as though scorched when his shrinking
+      away in hatred threw her into despair again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was hard to have to choke down her grief like this, and not burst out
+      in reproach and tear this secret from her husband, which he in his misery
+      still interposed so stubbornly between himself and his one support. And it
+      was hard to simulate happiness and take part in the airy conversation;
+      hard always to have to force some sort of a reply, and hard not to lose
+      patience with the other woman's perpetual giggling. It was easy enough for
+      <i>her</i>. She knew that her husband, a major-general, was safe behind
+      the lines on the staff of a high command. She had fled from the ennui of a
+      childless home to enter into the eventful life of the war hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The major's wife had been sitting in the garden with the gentlemen ever
+      since seven o'clock, always on the point of leaving, quite ready to go in
+      her hat and jacket, but she let herself be induced again and again to
+      remain a little longer. She kept up her flirtatious conversation in the
+      gayest of spirits, as if she had no knowledge of all the torments she had
+      seen during the day in the very house against which she was leaning her
+      back. The sad little woman breathed a sigh of relief when it grew so dark
+      that she could move away from the frivolous chatterbox unnoticed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet in spite of her titillating conversation and the air of importance
+      with which she spoke of her duties as a nurse, the Frau Major was
+      penetrated by a feeling that, without her being conscious of it, raised
+      her high above herself. The great wave of motherliness that had swept over
+      all the women when the fatal hour struck for the men, had borne her aloft,
+      too. She had seen the three men with whom she was now genially exchanging
+      light nothings come to the hospital&mdash;like thousands of others&mdash;streaming
+      with blood, helpless, whimpering with pain. And something of the joy of
+      the hen whose brood has safely hatched warmed her coquetry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Since the men have been going for months, crouching, creeping on all
+      fours, starving, carrying their own death as mothers carry their children;
+      since suffering and waiting and the passive acceptance of danger and pain
+      have reversed the sexes, the women have felt strong, and even in their
+      sensuality there has been a little glimmer of the new passion for
+      mothering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The melancholy wife, just arrived from a region in which the war exists in
+      conversation only, and engrossed in the one man to the exclusion of the
+      others, suffered from the sexless familiarity that they so freely indulged
+      in there in the shadow of death and agony. But the others were at home in
+      the war. They spoke its language, which in the men was a mixture of
+      obstinate greed for life and a paradoxical softness born of a surfeit of
+      brutality; while in the woman it was a peculiar, garrulous
+      cold-bloodedness. She had heard so much of blood and dying that her
+      endless curiosity gave the impression of hardness and hysterical cruelty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Mussulman and the cavalry officer were chaffing the Philosopher and
+      poking fun at the phrase-mongers, hair-splitters, and other wasters of
+      time. They took a childish delight in his broad smile of embarrassment at
+      being teased in the Frau Major's presence, and she, out of feminine
+      politeness, came to the Philosopher's rescue, while casting amorous looks
+      at the others who could deal such pert blows with their tongues.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Oh, let the poor man alone," she laughed and cooed. "He's right. War is
+      horrible. These two gentlemen are just trying to get your temper up." She
+      twinkled at the Philosopher to soothe him. His good nature made him so
+      helpless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Philosopher grinned phlegmatically and said nothing. The Mussulman,
+      setting his teeth, shifted his leg, which in its white bandage was the
+      only part of him that was visible, and placed it in a more comfortable
+      position on the bench.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The Philosopher?" he laughed. "As a matter of fact, what does the
+      Philosopher know about war? He's in the artillery. And war is conducted by
+      the infantry. Don't you know that, Mrs. &mdash;&mdash;?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I am not Mrs. here. Here I am Sister Engelberta," she cut in, and for a
+      moment the expression on her face became almost serious.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I beg your pardon, Sister Engelberta. Artillery and infantry, you see,
+      are like husband and wife. We infantrymen must bring the child into the
+      world when a victory is to be born. The artillery has only the pleasure,
+      just like a man's part in love. It is not until after the child has been
+      baptized that he comes strutting out proudly. Am I not right, Captain?" he
+      asked, appealing to the cavalry officer. "You are an equestrian on foot
+      now, too."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain boomed his assent. In his summary view, members of the
+      Reichstag who refused to vote enough money for the military, Socialists,
+      pacifists, all men, in brief, who lectured or wrote or spoke superfluous
+      stuff and lived by their brains belonged in the same category as the
+      Philosopher. They were all "bookworms."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, indeed," he said in his voice hoarse from shouting commands. "A
+      philosopher like our friend here is just the right person for the
+      artillery. Nothing to do but wait around on the top of a hill and look on.
+      If only they don't shoot up our own men! It is easy enough to dispose of
+      the fellows on the other side, in front of us. But I always have a
+      devilish lot of respect for you assassins in the back. But let's stop
+      talking of the war. Else I'll go off to bed. Here we are at last with two
+      charming ladies, when it's been an age since we've seen a face that isn't
+      covered with stubble, and you still keep talking of that damned shooting.
+      Good Lord, when I was in the hospital train and the first girl came in
+      with a white cap on her curly light hair, I'd have liked to hold her hand
+      and just keep looking and looking at her. Upon my word of honor, Sister
+      Engelberta, after a while the shooting gets to be a nuisance. The lice are
+      worse. But the worst thing of all is the complete absence of the lovely
+      feminine. For five months to see nothing but men&mdash;and then all of a
+      sudden to hear a dear clear woman's voice! That's the finest thing of all.
+      It's worth going to war for."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Mussulman pulled his mobile face flashing with youth into a grimace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The finest thing of all! No, sir. To be quite frank, the finest thing of
+      all is to get a bath and a fresh bandage, and be put into a clean white
+      bed, and know that for a few weeks you're going to have a rest. It's a
+      feeling like&mdash;well, there's no comparison for it. But, of course, it
+      is very nice, too, to be seeing ladies again."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Philosopher had tilted his round fleshy Epicurean head to one side,
+      and a moist sheen came into his small crafty eyes. He glanced at the place
+      where a bright spot in the almost palpable darkness suggested the Frau
+      Major's white dress, and began to tell what he thought, very slowly in a
+      slight sing-song.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The finest thing of all, I think, is the quiet&mdash;when you have been
+      lying up there in the mountains where every shot is echoed back and forth
+      five times, and all of a sudden it turns absolutely quiet&mdash;no
+      whistling, no howling, no thundering&mdash;nothing but a glorious quiet
+      that you can listen to as to a piece of music! The first few nights I sat
+      up the whole time and kept my ears cocked for the quiet, the way you try
+      to catch a tune at a distance. I believe I even howled a bit, it was so
+      delightful to listen to no sound."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain of cavalry sent his cigarette flying through the night like a
+      comet scattering sparks, and brought his hand down with a thump on his
+      knee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There, there, Sister Engelberta, did you get that?" he cried
+      sarcastically. "'Listen to no sound.' You see, that's what's called
+      philosophy. I know something better than that, Mr. Philosopher, namely,
+      not to hear what you hear, especially when it's such philosophical
+      rubbish."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They laughed, and the man they were teasing smiled good-naturedly. He,
+      too, was permeated by the peacefulness that floated into the garden from
+      the sleeping town. The cavalryman's aggressive jokes glided off without
+      leaving a sting, as did everything else that might have lessened the
+      sweetness of the few days still lying between him and the front. He wanted
+      to make the most of his time, and take everything easily with his eyes
+      tight shut, like a child who has to enter a dark room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Frau Major leaned over to the Philosopher.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "So opinions differ as to what was the finest thing," she said; and her
+      breath came more rapidly. "But, tell me, what was the most awful thing you
+      went through out there? A lot of the men say the drumfire is the worst,
+      and a lot of them can't get over the sight of the first man they saw
+      killed. How about you?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Philosopher looked tortured. It was a theme that did not fit into his
+      programme. He was casting about for an evasive reply when an
+      unintelligible wheezing exclamation drew all eyes to the corner in which
+      the landsturm officer and his wife were sitting. The others had almost
+      forgotten them in the darkness and exchanged frightened glances when they
+      heard a voice that scarcely one of them knew, and the man with the glazed
+      eyes and uncertain gestures, a marionette with broken joints, began to
+      speak hastily in a falsetto like the crowing of a rooster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What was the most awful thing? The only awful thing is the going off. You
+      go off to war&mdash;and they let you go. That's the awful thing."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A cold sickening silence fell upon the company. Even the Mussulman's face
+      lost its perpetually happy expression and stiffened in embarrassment. It
+      had come so unexpectedly and sounded so unintelligible. It caught them by
+      the throat and set their pulses bounding&mdash;perhaps because of the
+      vibrating of the voice that issued from the twitching body, or because of
+      the rattling that went along with it, and made it sound like a voice
+      broken by long sobbing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Frau Major jumped up. She had seen the landsturm officer brought to
+      the hospital strapped fast to the stretcher, because his sobbing wrenched
+      and tore his body so that the bearers could not control him otherwise.
+      Something inexpressibly hideous&mdash;so it was said&mdash;had half robbed
+      the poor devil of his reason, and the Frau Major suddenly dreaded a fit of
+      insanity. She pinched the cavalryman's arm and exclaimed with a pretense
+      of great haste:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My goodness! There's the gong of the last car. Quick, quick," addressing
+      the sick man's wife, "quick! We must run."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They all rose. The Frau Major passed her arm through the unhappy little
+      woman's and urged with even greater insistence:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "We'll have a whole hour's walk back to town if we miss the car."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little wife, completely at a loss, her whole body quivering, bent over
+      her husband again to take leave. She was certain that his outburst had
+      reference to her and held a grim deadly reproach, which she did not
+      comprehend. She felt her husband draw back and start convulsively under
+      the touch of her lips. And she sobbed aloud at the awful prospect of
+      spending an endless night in the chilly neglected room in the hotel, left
+      alone with this tormenting doubt. But the Frau Major drew her along,
+      forcing her to run, and did not let go her arm until they had passed the
+      sentinel at the gate and were out on the street. The gentlemen followed
+      them with their eyes, saw them reappear once again on the street in the
+      lamplight, and listened to the sound of the car receding in the distance.
+      The Mussulman picked up his crutches, and winked at the Philosopher
+      significantly, and said something with a yawn about going to bed. The
+      cavalry officer looked down at the sick man curiously and felt sorry for
+      him. Wanting to give the poor devil a bit of pleasure, he tapped him on
+      his shoulder and said in his free and easy way:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You've got a chic wife, I must say. I congratulate you."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next instant he drew back startled. The pitiful heap on the bench
+      jumped up suddenly, as though a force just awakened had tossed him up from
+      his seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Chic wife? Oh, yes. Very dashing!" came sputtering from his twitching
+      lips with a fury that cast out the words like a seething stream. "She
+      didn't shed a single tear when I left on the train. Oh, they were all very
+      dashing when we went off. Poor Dill's wife was, too. Very plucky! She
+      threw roses at him in the train and she'd been his wife for only two
+      months." He chuckled disdainfully and clenched his teeth, fighting hard to
+      suppress the tears burning in his threat. "Roses! He-he! And 'See you soon
+      again!' They were all so patriotic! Our colonel congratulated Dill because
+      his wife had restrained herself so well&mdash;as if he were simply going
+      off to maneuvers."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lieutenant was now standing up. He swayed on his legs, which he held
+      wide apart, and supported himself on the cavalry captain's arm, and looked
+      up into his face expectantly with unsteady eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Do you know what happened to him&mdash;to Dill? I was there. Do you know
+      what?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain looked at the others in dismay.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Come on&mdash;come on to bed. Don't excite yourself," he stammered in
+      embarrassment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a howl of triumph the sick man cut him short and snapped in an
+      unnaturally high voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You don't know what happened to Dill, you don't? We were standing just
+      the way we are now, and he was just going to show me the new photograph
+      that his wife had sent him&mdash;his brave wife, he-he, his restrained
+      wife. Oh yes, restrained! That's what they all were&mdash;all prepared for
+      anything. And while we were standing there, he about to show me the
+      picture, a twenty-eighter struck quite a distance away from us, a good
+      two-hundred yards. We didn't even look that way. Then all of a sudden I
+      saw something black come flying through the air&mdash;and Dill fell over
+      with his dashing wife's picture in his hand and a boot, a leg, a boot with
+      the leg of a baggage soldier sticking in his head&mdash;a soldier that the
+      twenty-eighter had blown to pieces far away from where we stood."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped for an instant and stared at the captain triumphantly. Then he
+      went on with a note of spiteful pride in his voice, though every now and
+      then interrupted by a peculiar gurgling groan.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Poor Dill never said another word&mdash;Dill with the spur sticking in
+      his skull, a regular cavalry spur, as big as a five-crown piece. He only
+      turned up the whites of his eyes a little and looked sadly at his wife's
+      picture, that she should have permitted such a thing as that. Such a thing
+      as that! Such a thing! It took four of us to pull the boot out&mdash;four
+      of us. We had to turn it and twist it, until a piece of his brain came
+      along&mdash;like roots pulled up&mdash;like a jellyfish&mdash;a dead one&mdash;sticking
+      to the spur."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Shut up!" the captain yelled furiously, and tore himself away and walked
+      into the house cursing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other two looked after him longingly, but they could not let the
+      unfortunate man stay there by himself. When the captain had withdrawn his
+      arm, he had fallen down on the bench again and sat whimpering like a
+      whipped child, with his head leaning on the back. The Philosopher touched
+      his shoulder gently, and was about to speak to him kindly and induce him
+      to go into the house when he started up again and broke out into an ugly,
+      snarling laugh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But we tore her out of him, his dashing wife. Four of us had to tug and
+      pull until she came out. I got him rid of her. Out with her! She's gone.
+      All of them are gone. Mine is gone, too. Mine is torn out, too. All are
+      being torn out. There's no wife any more! No wife any more, no&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His head bobbed and fell forward. Tears slowly rolled down his sad, sad
+      face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain reappeared followed by the little assistant physician, who was
+      on night duty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You must go to bed now, Lieutenant," the physician said with affected
+      severity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sick man threw his head up and stared blankly at the strange face.
+      When the physician repeated the order in a raised voice, his eyes suddenly
+      gleamed, and he nodded approvingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Must go, of course," he repeated eagerly, and drew a deep sigh. "We all
+      must go. The man who doesn't go is a coward, and they have no use for a
+      coward. That's the very thing. Don't you understand? Heroes are the style
+      now. The chic Mrs. Dill wanted a hero to match her new hat. Ha-ha! That's
+      why poor Dill had to go and lose his brains. I, too&mdash;you, too&mdash;we
+      must go die. You must let yourself be trampled on&mdash;your brains
+      trampled on, while the women look on&mdash;chic&mdash;because it's the
+      style now."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised his emaciated body painfully, holding on to the back of the
+      bench, and eyed each man in turn, waiting for assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Isn't it sad?" he asked softly. Then his voice rose suddenly to a shriek
+      again, and the sound of his fury rang out weirdly in the garden. "Weren't
+      they deceiving us, eh? I'd like to know&mdash;weren't they cheats? Was I
+      an assassin? Was I a ruffian? Didn't I suit her when I sat at the piano
+      playing? We were expected to be gentle and considerate! Considerate! And
+      all at once, because the fashion changed, they had to have murderers. Do
+      you understand? Murderers!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He broke away from the physician, and stood swaying again, and his voice
+      gradually sank to a complaining sound like the thick strangulated
+      utterance of a drunkard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "My wife was in fashion too, you know. Not a tear! I kept waiting and
+      waiting for her to begin to scream and beg me at last to get out of the
+      train, and not go with the others&mdash;beg me to be a coward for her
+      sake. Not one of them had the courage to. They just wanted to be in
+      fashion. Mine, too! Mine, too! She waved her handkerchief just like all
+      the rest."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His twitching arms writhed upwards, as though he were calling the heavens
+      to witness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You want to know what was the most awful thing?" he groaned, turning to
+      the Philosopher abruptly. "The disillusionment was the most awful thing&mdash;the
+      going off. The war wasn't. The war is what it has to be. Did it surprise
+      you to find out that war is horrible? The only surprising thing was the
+      going off. To find out that the women are horrible&mdash;that was the
+      surprising thing. That they can smile and throw roses, that they can give
+      up their men, their children, the boys they have put to bed a thousand
+      times and pulled the covers over a thousand times, and petted and brought
+      up to be men. That was the surprise! That they gave us up&mdash;that they
+      sent us&mdash;<i>sent</i> us! Because every one of them would have been
+      ashamed to stand there without a hero. That was the great disillusionment.
+      Do you think we should have gone if they had not sent us? Do you think so?
+      Just ask the stupidest peasant out there why he'd like to have a medal
+      before going back on furlough. Because if he has a medal his girl will
+      like him better, and the other girls will run after him, and he can use
+      his medal to hook other men's women away from under their noses. That's
+      the reason, the only reason. The women sent us. No general could have made
+      us go if the women hadn't allowed us to be stacked on the trains, if they
+      had screamed out that they would never look at us again if we turned into
+      murderers. Not a single man would have gone off if they had sworn never to
+      give themselves to a man who has split open other men's skulls and shot
+      and bayoneted human beings. Not one man, I tell you, would have gone. I
+      didn't want to believe that they could stand it like that. 'They're only
+      pretending,' I thought. 'They're just restraining themselves. But when the
+      first whistle blows, they'll begin to scream and tear us out of the train,
+      and rescue us.' <i>Once</i> they had the chance to protect us, but all
+      they cared about was being in style&mdash;nothing else in the world but
+      just being in style."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sank down on the bench again and sat as though he were all broken up.
+      His body was shaken by a low weeping, and his head rolled to and fro on
+      his panting chest. A little circle of people had gathered behind his back.
+      The old landsturm corporal was standing beside the physician with four
+      sentries ready to intervene at a moment's notice. All the windows in the
+      officers' wing had lighted up, and scantily clad figures leaned out,
+      looking down into the garden curiously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sick man eagerly scrutinized the indifferent faces around him. He was
+      exhausted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His hoarse throat no longer gave forth a sound. His hand reached out for
+      help to the Philosopher, who stood beside him, all upset.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The physician felt the right moment had come to lead him away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Come, Lieutenant, let's go to sleep," he said with a clumsy affectation
+      of geniality. "That's the way women are once for all, and there's nothing
+      to be done about it."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The physician wanted to go on talking and in conversing lure the sick man
+      into the house unawares. But the very next sentence remained sticking in
+      his throat, and he stopped short in amazement. The limp wobbling skeleton
+      that only a moment before had sat there as in a faint and let himself be
+      raised up by the physician and the Philosopher, suddenly jumped up with a
+      jerk, and tore his arms away so violently that the two men who were about
+      to assist him were sent tumbling up against the others. He bent over with
+      crooked knees, staggering like a man carrying a heavy load on his back.
+      His veins swelled, and he panted with fury:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "That's the way women are once for all, are they? Since when, eh? Have you
+      never heard of the suffragettes who boxed the ears of prime ministers, and
+      set fire to museums, and let themselves be chained to lamp-posts for the
+      sake of the vote? For the sake of the vote, do you hear? But for the sake
+      of their men? No. Not one sound. Not one single outcry!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped to take breath, overcome by a wild suffocating despair. Then he
+      pulled himself together once more and with difficulty suppressing the
+      sobs, which kept bringing a lump into his throat, he screamed in deepest
+      misery like a hunted animal:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Have you heard of one woman throwing herself in front of a train for the
+      sake of her husband? Has a single one of them boxed the ears of a prime
+      minister or tied herself to a railroad track for us? There wasn't one that
+      had to be torn away. Not one fought for us or defended us. Not one moved a
+      little finger for us in the whole wide world! They drove us out! They
+      gagged us! They gave us the spur, like poor Dill. They sent us to murder,
+      they sent us to die&mdash;for their vanity. Are you going to defend them?
+      No! They must be pulled out! Pulled out like weeds, by the roots! Four of
+      you together must pull the way we had to do with Dill. Four of you
+      together! Then she'll have to come out. Are you the doctor? There! Do it
+      to my head. I don't want a wife! Pull&mdash;pull her out!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He flung out his arm and his fist came down like a hammer on his own
+      skull, and his crooked fingers clutched pitilessly at the sparse growth of
+      hair on the back of his head, until he held up a whole handful torn out by
+      the roots, and howled with pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The doctor gave a sign, and the next moment the four sentries were on him,
+      panting. He screamed, gnashed his teeth, beat about him, kicked himself
+      free, shook off his assailants like burrs. It was not until the old
+      corporal and the doctor came to their assistance that they succeeded in
+      dragging him into the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As soon as he was gone the people left the garden. The last to go were the
+      Mussulman and the Philosopher. The Mussulman stopped at the door, and in
+      the light of the lantern looked gravely down at his leg, which, in its
+      plaster cast, hung like a dead thing between his two crutches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Do you know, Philosopher," he said, "I'd much rather have this stick of
+      mine. The worst thing that can happen to one out there is to go crazy like
+      that poor devil. Rather off with one's head altogether and be done with
+      it. Or do you think he still has a chance?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Philosopher said nothing. His round good-natured face had gone ashen
+      pale, and his eyes were swimming with tears. He shrugged his shoulders and
+      helped his comrade up the steps without speaking. On entering the ward
+      they heard the banging of doors somewhere far away in the house and a
+      muffled cry.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then everything was still. One by one the lights went out in the windows
+      of the officers' wing. Soon the garden lay like a bushy black island in
+      the river's silent embrace. Only now and then a gust of wind brought from
+      the west the coughing of the guns like a faint echo.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once more a crunching sound was heard on the gravel. It was the four
+      sentries marching back to the watch-house. One soldier was cursing under
+      his breath as he tried to refasten his torn blouse. The others were
+      breathing heavily and were wiping the sweat from their red foreheads with
+      the backs of their hands. The old corporal brought up the rear, his pipe
+      in the corner of his mouth, his head bent low. As he turned into the main
+      walk a bright sheet of light lit up the sky, and a prolonged rumbling that
+      finally sank into the earth with a growl shook all the windows of the
+      hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The old man stood still and listened until the rumbling had died away.
+      Then he shook his clenched fist, and sent out a long curve of saliva from
+      between his set teeth, and muttered in a disgust that came from the depths
+      of his soul:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Hell!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      II. BAPTISM OF FIRE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The company rested for half an hour at the edge of the woods. Then Captain
+      Marschner gave the command to start. He was pale, in spite of the killing
+      heat, and he turned his eyes aside when he gave Lieutenant Weixler
+      instructions that in ten minutes every man should be ready for the march
+      without fail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had really forced his own hand in giving the order. For now, he knew
+      very well, there could be no delay. Whenever he left Weixler loose on the
+      privates, everything went like clock-work. They trembled before this lad
+      of barely twenty as though he were the devil incarnate. And sometimes it
+      actually seemed to the captain himself as though there were something
+      uncanny about that overgrown, bony figure. Never, by any chance, did a
+      spark of warmth flash from those small, piercing eyes, which always
+      mirrored a flickering unrest and gleamed as though from fever. The one
+      young thing in his whole personality was the small, shy moustache above
+      the compressed lips, which never opened except to ask in a mean, harsh way
+      for some soldier to be punished. For almost a year Captain Marschner had
+      lived side by side with him and had never yet heard him laugh, knew
+      nothing of his family, nor from where he came, nor whether he had any ties
+      at all. He spoke rarely, in brief, quick sentences, and brought out his
+      words in a hiss, like the seething of a suppressed rage; and his only
+      topic was the service or the war, as though outside these two things there
+      was nothing else in the world worth talking about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And this man, of all others, fate had tricked by keeping him in the
+      hinterland for the whole first year of the war. The war had been going on
+      for eleven months and a half, and Lieutenant Weixler had not yet seen an
+      enemy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the very outset, when only a few miles across the Russian frontier,
+      typhus had caught him before he had fired a single shot. Now at last he
+      was going to face the enemy!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Marschner knew that the young man had a private's rifle dragged
+      along for his own use, and had sacrificed all his savings for special
+      field-glasses in order to be quite on the safe side and know exactly how
+      many enemy lives he had snuffed out. Since they had come within close
+      sound of the firing he had grown almost merry, even talkative, impelled by
+      a nervous zeal, like an enthusiastic hunter who has picked up the trail.
+      The captain saw him going in and out among the massed men, and turned
+      away, hating to see how the fellow plagued his poor weary men, and went at
+      them precisely like a sheep dog gathering in the herd, barking shrilly all
+      the while. Long before the ten minutes were up, the company would be in
+      formation, Weixler's impatience guaranteed that. And then&mdash;then there
+      would be no reason any more for longer delay, no further possibility of
+      putting off the fatal decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Marschner took a deep breath and looked up at the sky with
+      wide-open eyes that had a peculiarly intent look in them. In the
+      foreground, beyond the steep hill that still hid the actual field of
+      battle from view, the invisible machine guns were beating in breathless
+      haste; and scarcely a fathom above the edge of the slope small,
+      yellowish-white packages floated in thick clusters, like snowballs flung
+      high in the air&mdash;the smoke of the barrage fire through which he had
+      to lead his men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not a short way. Two kilometers still from the farther spur of the
+      hill to the entrance of the communication trenches, and straight across
+      open fields without cover of any kind. Assuredly no small task for a
+      company of the last class of reservists, for respectable family men who
+      had been in the field but a few hours, and who were only now to smell
+      powder for the first time and receive their baptism of fire. For Weixler,
+      whose mind was set on nothing but the medal for distinguished service,
+      which he wanted to obtain as soon as possible&mdash;for a twenty-year-old
+      fighting cock who fancied the world rotated about his own, most important
+      person and had had no time to estimate the truer values of life&mdash;for
+      him it might be no more than an exciting promenade, a new sting to the
+      nerves, a fine way of becoming thoroughly conscious of one's personality
+      and placing one's fearlessness in a more brilliant light. Probably he had
+      long been secretly deriding his old captain's indecision and had cursed
+      the last halt because it forced him to wait another half hour to achieve
+      his first deed of heroism.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marschner mowed down the tall blades of grass with his riding whip and
+      from time to time glanced at his company surreptitiously. He could tell by
+      the way the men dragged themselves to their feet with a sort of
+      resistance, like children roused from sleep, that they fully understood
+      where they were now to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The complete silence in which they packed their bundles and fell into line
+      made his heart contract.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ever since the beginning of the war, he had been preparing himself for
+      this moment without relax. He had brooded over it day and night, had told
+      himself a thousand times that where a higher interest is at stake, the
+      misery of the individual counts for nothing, and a conscientious leader
+      must armor himself with indifference. And now he stood there and observed
+      with terror how all his good resolutions crumbled, and nothing remained in
+      him but an impassioned, boundless pity for these driven home-keepers, who
+      prepared themselves with such quiet resignation. It was as if they were
+      taking their life into their hands like a costly vessel in order to carry
+      it into battle and cast it at the feet of the enemy, as though the least
+      thing they owned was that which would soon be crashing into fragments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His friends, among whom he was known as "uncle Marschner," would not have
+      dared to suggest his sending a rabbit he had reared to the butcher or
+      dragging a dog that had won his affection to the pound. And now he was to
+      drive into shrapnel fire men whom he himself had trained to be soldiers
+      and had had under his own eyes for months, men whom he knew as he did his
+      own pockets. Of what avail were subtle or deep reflections now? He saw
+      nothing but the glances of dread and beseeching that his men turned on
+      him, asking protection, as though they believed that their captain could
+      prescribe a path even for bullets and shells. And now was he to abuse
+      their confidence? Was he to marshal these bearded children to death and
+      not feel any emotion? Only two days before he had seen them surrounded by
+      their little ones, saying good-bye to their sobbing wives. Was he to march
+      on without caring if one or another of them was hit and fell over and
+      rolled in agony in his blood? Whence was he to take the strength for such
+      hardness of heart? From that higher interest? It had faded away. It was
+      impalpable. It was too much a matter of mere words, too much mere sound
+      for him to think that it could fool his soldiers, who looked forward to
+      the barrage fire in dread, with homeward-turned souls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lieutenant Weixler, red-cheeked and radiant, came and shouted in his face
+      that the company was ready. It struck the captain like a blow below the
+      belt. It sounded like a challenge. The captain could not help hearing in
+      it the insolent question, "Well, why aren't you as glad of the danger as I
+      am?" Every drop of Captain Marschner's blood rose to his temples. He had
+      to look aside and his eyes wandered involuntarily up to the shrapnel
+      clouds, bearing a prayer, a silent invocation to those senseless things up
+      there rattling down so indiscriminately, a prayer that they would teach
+      this cold-blooded boy suffering, convince him that he was vulnerable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But a moment later he bowed his head in shame. His anger grew against the
+      man who had been able to arouse such a feeling in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Thank you. Let the men stand at rest. I must look after the horses once
+      more," he said in measured tones, with a forced composure that soothed
+      him. He did not intend to be hustled, now less than ever. He was glad to
+      see the lieutenant give a start, and he smiled to himself with quiet
+      satisfaction at the indignant face, the defiant "Yes, sir," said in a
+      voice no longer so loud and so clear, but coming through gnashed teeth
+      from a contracted throat. The boy was for once in his turn to experience
+      how it feels to be held in check. He was so fond of intoxicating himself
+      with his own power at the cost of the privates, triumphing, as though it
+      were the force of his own personality that lorded it over them and not the
+      rule of the service that was always backing him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Marschner walked back to the woods deliberately, doubly glad of
+      the lesson he had just given Weixler because it also meant a brief respite
+      for his old boys. Perhaps a shell would hurtle down into the earth before
+      their noses, and so these few minutes would save the lives of twenty men.
+      Perhaps? It might turn out just the other way, too. Those very minutes&mdash;ah,
+      what was the use of speculating? It was better not to think at all! He
+      wanted to help the men as much as he could, but he could not be a savior
+      to any of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet, perhaps? One man had just come rushing up to him from the woods.
+      This one man he was managing to shelter for the present. He and six others
+      were to stay behind with the horses and the baggage. Was it an injustice
+      to detail this particular man? All the other non-commissioned officers
+      were older and married. The short, fat man with the bow-legs even had six
+      children at home. Could he justify himself at the bar of his conscience
+      for leaving this young, unmarried man here in safety?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a furious gesture the captain interrupted his thoughts. He would have
+      liked best to catch hold of his own chest and give himself a sound
+      shaking. Why could he not rid himself of that confounded brooding and
+      pondering the right and wrong of things? Was there any justice at all left
+      here, here in the domain of the shells that spared the worst and laid low
+      the best? Had he not quite made up his mind to leave his conscience, his
+      over-sensitiveness, his ever-wakeful sympathy, and all his superfluous
+      thoughts at home along with his civilian's clothes packed away in camphor
+      in the house where he lived in peace times?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All these things were part of the civil engineer, Rudolf Marschner, who
+      once upon a time had been an officer, but who had returned to school when
+      thirty years old to exchange the trade of war, into which he had wandered
+      in the folly of youth, for a profession that harmonized better with his
+      gentle, thoughtful nature. That this war had now, twenty years later,
+      turned him into a soldier again was a misfortune, a catastrophe which had
+      overtaken him, as it had all the others, without any fault of his or
+      theirs. Yet there was nothing to do but to reconcile himself to it; and
+      first of all he had to avoid that constant hair-splitting. Why torment
+      himself so with questions? Some man had to stay behind in the woods as a
+      guard. The commander had decided on the young sergeant, and the young
+      sergeant would stay behind. That settled it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The painful thing was the way the fellow's face so plainly showed his
+      emotion. His eyes moistened and looked at the captain in dog-like
+      gratitude. Disgusting, simply disgusting! And what possessed the man to
+      stammer out something about his mother? He was to stay behind because the
+      service required it; his mother had nothing to do with it. She was safe in
+      Vienna&mdash;and here it was war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain told the man so. He could not let him think it was a bit of
+      good fortune, a special dispensation, not to have to go into battle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Marschner felt easier the minute he had finished scolding the
+      crushed sinner. His conscience was now quite clear, just as though it had
+      really been by chance that he had placed the man at that post. But the
+      feeling did not last very long. The silly fellow would not give up adoring
+      him as his savior. And when he stammered, "I take the liberty of wishing
+      you good luck, Captain," standing in stiff military attitude, but in a
+      voice hoarse and quivering from suppressed tears, such fervor, such ardent
+      devotion radiated from his wish that the captain suddenly felt a strange
+      emptiness again in the pit of his stomach, and he turned sharply and
+      walked away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now he knew. Now he could approximately calculate all the things Weixler
+      had observed in him. Now he could guess how the fellow must have made
+      secret fun of his sensitiveness, if this simple man, this mere carpenter's
+      journeyman, could guess his innermost thoughts. For he had not spoken to
+      him once&mdash;simply the night before last, at the entrainment in Vienna,
+      he had furtively observed his leavetaking from his mother. How had the
+      confounded fellow come to suspect that the wizened, shrunken little old
+      hag whose skin, dried by long living, hung in a thousand loose folds from
+      her cheek-bones, had made such an impression on his captain? The man
+      himself certainly did not know how touching it looked when the tiny mother
+      gazed up at him from below and stroked his broad chest with her trembling
+      hand because she could not reach his face. No one could have betrayed to
+      the soldier that since then, whenever his company commander looked at him,
+      he could not help seeing the lemon-hued, thick-veined hand with its
+      knotted, distorted fingers, which had touched the rough, hairy cloth with
+      such ineffable love. And yet, somehow, the rascal had discovered that this
+      hand floated above him protectingly, that it prayed for him and had
+      softened the heart of his officer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marschner tramped across the meadow in rage against himself. He was as
+      ashamed as though some one had torn a mask from his face. Was it as easy
+      as that to see through him, then, in spite of all the trouble he took? He
+      stopped to get his breath, hewed at the grass again with his riding whip,
+      and cursed aloud. Oh, well, he simply couldn't act a part, couldn't step
+      out of his skin suddenly, even though there was a world war a thousand
+      times over. He used to let his nephews and nieces twist him round their
+      fingers, and laughed good-naturedly when they did it. In a single day he
+      could not change into a fire-eater and go merrily upon the man-hunt. What
+      an utterly mad idea it was, too, to try to cast all people into the same
+      mould! No one dreamed of making a soft-hearted philanthropist of Weixler;
+      and he was supposed so lightly to turn straight into a blood-thirsty
+      militarist. He was no longer twenty, like Weixler, and these sad, silent
+      men who had been so cruelly uprooted from their lives were each of them
+      far more to him than a mere rifle to be sent to the repair shop if broken,
+      or to be indifferently discarded if smashed beyond repair. Whoever had
+      looked on life from all sides and reflected upon it could not so easily
+      turn into the mere soldier, like his lieutenant, who had not been
+      humanized yet, nor seen the world from any point of view but the military
+      school and the barracks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Ah, yes, if conditions still were as at the beginning of the war, when
+      none but young fellows, happy to be off on an adventure, hallooed from the
+      train windows. If they left any dear ones at all behind, they were only
+      their parents, and here at last was a chance to make a great impression on
+      the old folks. Then Captain Marschner would have held his own as well as
+      anyone, as well even as the strict disciplinarian, Lieutenant Weixler,
+      perhaps even better. Then the men marched two or three weeks before coming
+      upon the enemy, and the links that bound them to life broke off one at a
+      time. They underwent a thousand difficulties and deprivations, until under
+      the stress of hunger and thirst and weariness they gradually forgot
+      everything they had left far&mdash;far behind. In those days hatred of the
+      enemy who had done them all that harm smouldered and flared higher every
+      day, while actual battle was a relief after the long period of passive
+      suffering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now things went like lightning. Day before yesterday in Vienna still&mdash;and
+      now, with the farewell kisses still on one's lips, scarcely torn from
+      another's arms, straight into the fire. And not blindly, unsuspectingly,
+      like the first ones. For these poor devils now the war had no secrets
+      left. Each of them had already lost some relative or friend; each had
+      talked to wounded men, had seen mutilated, distorted invalids, and knew
+      more about shell wounds, gas grenades, and liquid fire than artillery
+      generals or staff physicians had known before the war.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now it was the captain's lot to lead precisely these clairvoyants,
+      these men so rudely torn up by the roots&mdash;he, the retired captain,
+      the civilian, who at first had had to stay at home training recruits. Now
+      that it was a thousand times harder, now his turn had come to be a leader,
+      and he dared not resist the task to which he was not equal. On the
+      contrary, as a matter of decency, he had been forced to push his claims so
+      that others who had already shed their blood out there should not have to
+      go again for him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A dull, impotent rage came over him when he stepped up in front of his men
+      ranged in deep rows. They stared at his lips in breathless suspense. What
+      was he to say to them? It went against him to reel off compliantly the
+      usual patriotic phrases that forced themselves on one's lips as though
+      dictated by an outside power. For months he had carried about the defiant
+      resolve not to utter the prescribed "<i>dulce et decorum est pro patria
+      mori</i>," whatever the refusal might cost. Nothing was so repulsive to
+      him as singing the praises of the sacrifice of one's life. It was a
+      juggler's trick to cry out that some one was dying while inside the booth
+      murder was being done.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He clenched his teeth and lowered his eyes shyly before the wall of pallid
+      faces. The foolish, childlike prayer, "Take care of us!" gazed at him
+      maddeningly from all those eyes. It drove him to sheer despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If only he could have driven them back to their own people and gone ahead
+      alone! With a jerk he threw out his chest, fixed his eyes on a medal that
+      a man in the middle of the long row was wearing, and said:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Boys, we're going to meet the enemy now. I count upon each of you to do
+      his duty, faithful to the oath you have sworn to the flag. I shall ask
+      nothing of you that the interest of our fatherland and your own interest
+      therefore and the safety of your wives and children do not absolutely
+      require. You may depend upon that. Good luck! And now&mdash;forward,
+      march!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Without being conscious of it, he had imitated Weixler's voice, his
+      unnaturally loud, studiedly incisive tone of command, so as to drown the
+      emotion that fluttered in his throat. At the last words he faced about
+      abruptly and without looking around tossed the final command over his
+      shoulder for the men to deploy, and with his head sunk upon his chest he
+      began the ascent, taking long strides. Behind him boots crunched and food
+      pails clattered against some other part of the men's accouterment. Soon,
+      too, there came the sound of the gasping of heavily laden men; and a
+      thick, suffocating smell of sweat settled upon the marching company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Marschner was ashamed. A real physical nausea at the part he had
+      just played overcame him. What was there left for these simple people to
+      do, these bricklayers and engineers and cultivators of the earth, who,
+      bent over their daily tasks, had lived without vision into the future&mdash;what
+      was there left for them to do when the grand folks, the learned people,
+      their own captain with the three golden stars on his collar, assured them
+      it was their duty and a most praiseworthy thing to shoot Italian
+      bricklayers and engineers and farmers into fragments? They went&mdash;gasping
+      behind him, and he&mdash;he led them on! Led them, against his inner
+      conviction, because of his pitiful cowardice, and asked them to be
+      courageous and contemptuous of death. He had talked them into it, had
+      abused their confidence, had made capital of their love for their wives
+      and children, because if he acted in the service of a lie, there was a
+      chance of his continuing to live and even coming back home safe again,
+      while if he stuck to the truth he believed in there was the certainty of
+      his being stood up against a wall and shot.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He staked their lives and his own life on the throw of loaded dice because
+      he was too cowardly to contemplate the certain loss of the game for
+      himself alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sun beat down murderously on the steep, treeless declivity. The sound
+      of shells bursting off at a distance, of tattooing machine guns, and
+      roaring artillery on their own side was now mingled with the howling sound
+      of shots whizzing through the air and coming closer and closer. And still
+      the top of the ridge had not been reached! The captain felt his breath
+      fail him, stopped and raised his hand. The men were to get their wind back
+      for a moment; they had been on the march since four o'clock that morning;
+      they had done bravely with their forty-year-old legs. He could tell that
+      by his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Full of compassion he looked upon the bluish red faces streaming with
+      sweat, and gave a start when he saw Lieutenant Weixler approaching in long
+      strides. Why could he no longer see that face without a sense of being
+      attacked, of being caught at the throat by a hatred he could hardly
+      control? He ought really to be glad to have the man at his side there. One
+      glance into those coldly watchful eyes was sufficient to subdue any surge
+      of compassion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "With your permission, Captain," he heard him rasp out, "I'm going over to
+      the left wing. A couple of fellows there that don't please me at all.
+      Especially Simmel, the red-haired dog. He's already pulling his head in
+      when a shrapnel bursts over there."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marschner was silent. The red-haired dog&mdash;Simmel? Wasn't that the
+      red-haired endman in the second line, the paper-hanger and upholsterer who
+      had carried that exquisite little girl in his arms up to the last moment&mdash;until
+      Weixler had brutally driven him off to the train? It seemed to the captain
+      as though he could still see the children's astonished upward look at the
+      mighty man who could scold their own father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Let him be, he'll get used to it by and by," he said mildly. "He's got
+      his children on his mind and isn't in a hurry to make orphans of them. The
+      men can't all be heroes. If they just do their duty."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Weixler's face became rigid. His narrow lips tightened again into that
+      hard, contemptuous expression which the captain felt each time like the
+      blow of a whip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "He's not supposed to think of his brats now, but of his oath to the flag,
+      of the oath he swore to his Majesty, his Commander-in-Chief! You just told
+      them so yourself, Captain."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, yes, I know I did," Captain Marschner nodded absent-mindedly, and
+      let himself slide down slowly on the grass. It was not surprising that
+      this boy spoke as he did, but what was surprising was that twenty-five
+      years ago, when he himself had come from the military academy all aglow
+      with enthusiasm, the phrases "oath to the flag," "his Majesty, and
+      Commander-in-Chief" had seemed to him, too, to be the sum and substance of
+      all things. In those days he would have been like this lad and would have
+      gone to war full of joyous enthusiasm. But now that he had grown deaf to
+      the fanfaronade of such words and clearly saw the framework on which they
+      were constructed, how was he to keep pace with the young who were a
+      credulous echo of every speech they heard? How was he suddenly to make
+      bold reckless blades of his excellent, comfortable Philistines, whom life
+      had so thoroughly tamed that at home they were capable of going hungry and
+      not snatching at treasures that were separated from them by only a thin
+      partition of glass? What was the use of making the same demands upon the
+      upholsterer Simmel as upon the young lieutenant, who had never striven for
+      anything else than to be named first for fencing, wrestling, and
+      courageous conduct? Have mercenaries ever been famous for their morals, or
+      good solid citizens for their fearlessness? Can one and the same man be
+      twenty and forty-five years old at the same time?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crouching there, his head between his fists, the captain became so
+      absorbed in these thoughts that he lost all sense of the time and the
+      place, and the lieutenant's attempts to rouse him by passing by several
+      times and hustling the men about loudly remained unsuccessful. But at last
+      the sound of a horse's hoofs brought him back to consciousness. An officer
+      was galloping along the path that ran about the hill half way from the
+      top. On his head he wore the tall cap that marked him as a member of the
+      general staff. He reined in his horse, asked courteously where the company
+      was bound and raised his eyebrows when Captain Marschner explained the
+      precise position they were to take.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "So that's where you're going?" he exclaimed, and his grimace turned into
+      a respectful smile. "Well, I congratulate you! You're going into the very
+      thickest of the lousy mess. For three days the Italians have been trying
+      to break through at that point. I wouldn't hold you back for a moment! The
+      poor devils there now will make good use of the relief. Good-bye and good
+      luck!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gracefully he touched the edge of his cap. His horse cried out under the
+      pressure of his spurs, and he was gone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain stared after him as though dazed. "Well, I congratulate you!"
+      The words echoed in his ears. A man, well mounted, thoroughly rested, pink
+      and neat as though he had just come out of a band-box, meets two hundred
+      fellowmen dedicated to death; sees them sweaty, breathless, on the very
+      edge of destruction; knows that in another hour many a face now turned
+      upon him curiously will lie in the grass distorted by pain or rigid in
+      death&mdash;and he says, smiling, "Well, I congratulate you!" And he rides
+      on and no shudder of awe creeps down his back, no shadow touches his
+      forehead!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The meeting will fade from the man's memory without leaving a trace. At
+      dinner that night nothing will remind him of the comrade whose hand,
+      perhaps, he was the last one to press. To these chosen ones, who from
+      their safe positions in the rear, drive the columns on into the fire, what
+      matters a single company's march to death? And the miserable, red-haired
+      upholsterer here was trembling, pulling back his head, tearing his eyes
+      open mightily, as though the fate of the world depended upon whether he
+      would ever again carry his little red-haired girl in his arms. To be sure,
+      if one viewed the whole matter in the proper perspective&mdash;as a member
+      of the general staff riding by, who kept his vision fixed on the aim, that
+      is, the victory that sooner or later would be celebrated to the clinking
+      of glasses&mdash;why, from that point of view Weixler was right! It must
+      make him indignant to have events of such epic grandeur made ridiculous by
+      such a chicken-hearted creature as Simmel and degraded into a doleful
+      family affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The poor devils there now!" A cold shiver ran down Marschner's back. The
+      staff officer's words suddenly evoked a vision of the shattered,
+      blood-soaked trench where the men, exhausted to the point of death, were
+      yearning for him as for a redeemer. He arose, with a groan, seized by a
+      grim, embittered hatred against this age. Not a single mesh in the net
+      left open! Every minute of respite granted his own men was theft or even
+      murder committed against the men out there. He threw up his arms and
+      strode forward, determined to rest no more until he reached the trench
+      that he and his company were to man and hold. His face was pale and
+      careworn, and each time he caught the exasperating rasp of his
+      lieutenant's voice from the other wing crying "Forward! Forward!" it was
+      drawn by a tortured smile.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly he stood still. Into the rattle, the boom, the explosion of
+      artillery there leaped suddenly a new tone. It rose clearly above the rest
+      of the din, which had almost ceased to penetrate the consciousness. It
+      approached with such a shrill sound, with such indescribable swiftness,
+      with so fierce a threat, that the sound seemed to be visible, as though
+      you could actually see a screaming semicircle rise in the air, bite its
+      way to one's very forehead, and snap there with a short, hard, whiplike
+      crack. A few feet away a little whirl of dust was puffed up, and invisible
+      hail stones slapped rattling down upon the grass.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A shrapnel!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Marschner looked round startled, and to his terror saw all the
+      men's eyes fixed on him, as though asking his advice. A peculiar smile of
+      shame and embarrassment hovered about their lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was his business to set the men a good example, to march on carelessly
+      without stopping or looking up. After all it made no difference what one
+      did one way or the other. There was no possibility of running away or
+      hiding. It was all a matter of chance. Chance was the one thing that would
+      protect a man. So the thing to do was to go ahead as if not noticing
+      anything. If there was only one man in the company who did not seem to
+      care, the others would be put to shame and would mutually control each
+      other, and then everything was won. He could tell by his own experience
+      how the feeling of being watched on all sides upheld him. Had he been by
+      himself, he might have thrown himself on the ground and tried to hide
+      behind a stone no matter how small.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Nothing but a spent shot! Forward, boys!" he cried, the thought of being
+      a support to his men almost making him cheerful. But the words were not
+      out of his mouth when other shots whizzed through the air. In spite of
+      himself, his body twitched backward and his head sank lower between his
+      shoulders. That made him stiffen his muscles and grind his teeth in rage.
+      It was not the violence with which the scream flew toward him that made
+      him twitch. It was the strange precision with which the circle of the
+      thing's flight (exactly like a diagram at a lecture on artillery) curved
+      in front of him. It was this unnatural feeling of perceiving a sound more
+      with the eye than with the ear that made the will powerless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something had to be done to create the illusion of not being wholly
+      defenseless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Forward, run!" he shouted at the top of his voice, holding his hands to
+      his mouth to make a megaphone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His men stormed forward as if relieved. The tension left their faces; each
+      one was somehow busied with himself, stumbled, picked himself up, grasped
+      some piece of equipment that was coming loose; and in the general snorting
+      and gasping, the whistle of the approaching shells passed almost
+      unobserved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a while it came to Captain Marschner's consciousness that some one
+      was hissing into his left ear. He turned his head and saw Weixler running
+      beside him, scarlet in the face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What is it?" he asked, involuntarily slowing down from a run to a walk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Captain, I beg to announce that an example ought to be instituted! That
+      coward Simmel is demoralizing the whole company. At each shrapnel he yells
+      out, 'Jesus, my Savior,' and flings himself to the ground. He is
+      frightening the rest of the men. He ought to be made an example of, a&mdash;&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A charge of four shrapnels whizzed into the middle of his sentence. The
+      screaming seemed to have grown louder, more piercing. The captain felt as
+      though a monstrous, glittering scythe were flashing in a steep curve
+      directly down on his skull. But this time he did not dare to move an
+      eyelash. His limbs contracted and grew taut, as in the dentist's chair
+      when the forceps grip the tooth. At the same time, he examined the
+      lieutenant's face closely, curious to see how he was taking the fire for
+      which he had so yearned. But he seemed not to be noticing the shrapnels in
+      the least. He was stretching his neck to inspect the left wing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There!" he cried indignantly. "D'you see, Captain? The miserable cur is
+      down on his face again. I'll go for him!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before Marschner could hold him back, he had dashed off. But half-way he
+      stopped, stood still, and then turned back in annoyance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The fellow's hit," he announced glumly, with an irritated shrug of his
+      shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Hit?" the captain burst out, and an ugly, bitter taste suddenly made his
+      tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. He observed the frosty calm in
+      Weixler's features, the unsympathetic, indifferent look, and his hand
+      started upward. He could have slapped him, his insensibility was so
+      maddening and that careless "the fellow's hit" hurt so. The image of the
+      dear little girl with the bright ribbon in her red curls flashed into his
+      mind, and also the vision of a distorted corpse holding a child in its
+      arms. As through a veil he saw Weixler hasten past him to catch up with
+      the company, and he ran to where the two stretcher-bearers kneeled next to
+      something invisible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The wounded man lay on his back. His flaming red hair framed a greenish
+      grey face ghostly in its rigidity. A few minutes before Captain Marschner
+      had seen the man still running&mdash;the same face still full of vitality&mdash;from
+      heat and excitement. His knees gave way. The sight of that change, so
+      incomprehensible in its suddenness, gripped at his vitals like an icy
+      hand. Was it possible? Could all the life blood recede in the twinkling of
+      an eye, and a strong, hale man crumble into ruins in a few moments? What
+      powers of hell slept in such pieces of iron that between two breaths they
+      could perform the work of many months of illness?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Don't be frightened, Simmel!" the captain stammered, supporting himself
+      on the shoulder of one of the stretcher-bearers. "They'll carry you back
+      to the baggage!" He forced the lie out with an effort, drawing a deep
+      breath. "You'll be the first one to get back to Vienna now!" He wanted to
+      add something about the man's family and the little girl with the red
+      curls, but he could not get it over his lips. He dreaded a cry from the
+      dying man for his dear ones, and when the mouth writhing with pain opened
+      slowly, it sent an inner tremor through the captain. He saw the eyes open,
+      too, and he shuddered at their glassy stare, which seemed no longer to fix
+      itself upon any bodily thing but to be looking through all those present
+      and seeking something at a distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Simmers body writhed under the forcible examination of the doctor's hands.
+      Incomprehensible gurgling sounds arose from his torn chest streaming with
+      blood, and his breath blew the scarlet foam at his mouth into bursting
+      bubbles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Simmel! What do you want, Simmel?" Marschner besought, bending low over
+      the wounded man. He listened intently to the broken sounds, convinced that
+      he would have to try to catch a last message. He breathed in relief when
+      the wandering eyes at last found their way back and fastened themselves on
+      his face with a look of anxious inquiry in them. "Simmel!" he cried again,
+      and grasped his hand, which trembled toward the wound. "Simmel, don't you
+      know me?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Simmel nodded. His eyes widened, the corners of his mouth drooped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It hurts&mdash;Captain&mdash;hurts so!" came from the shattered breast.
+      To the captain it sounded like a reproach. After a short rattling sound of
+      pain he cried out again, foaming at the mouth and with a piercing shriek
+      of rage: "It hurts! It hurts!" He beat about with his hands and feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Marschner jumped up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Carry him back," he commanded, and without knowing what he did, he put
+      his fingers into his ears, and ran after the company, which had already
+      reached the top of the ridge. He ran pressing his head between his hands
+      as in a vise, reeling, panting, driven by a fear, as though the wounded
+      man's agonized cry were pursuing him with lifted axe. He saw the shrunken
+      body writhe, the face that had so suddenly withered, the yellowish white
+      of the eyes. And that cry: "Captain&mdash;hurts so!" echoed within him and
+      clawed at his breast, so that when he reached the summit he fell down,
+      half choked, as if the ground had been dragged from under his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, he couldn't do that sort of thing! He didn't want to go on with it. He
+      was no hangman, he was incapable of lashing men on to their death. He
+      could not be deaf to their woe, to that childlike whimpering which stung
+      his conscience like a bitter reproach. He stamped on the ground defiantly.
+      Everything in him arose in rebellion against the task that called him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Below, the field of battle stretched far out, cheerlessly grey. No tree,
+      no patch of green. A stony waste&mdash;chopped up, crushed, dug inside
+      out, no sign of life. The communication trenches, which started in the
+      bottom of the valley and led to the edge of the hill, from which the wire
+      entanglements projected, looked like fingers spread out to grasp something
+      and clawed deep into the throttled earth. Marschner looked round again
+      involuntarily. Behind him the green slope descended steeply to the little
+      woods in which the baggage had been left. Farther behind the white
+      highroad gleamed like a river framed in colored meadows. A short turn&mdash;and
+      the greenness vanished! All life succumbed, as though roared down by the
+      cannons, by the howling and pounding that hammered in the valley like the
+      pulsating of a colossal fever. Shell hole upon shell hole yawned down
+      there. From time to time thick, black pillars of earth leaped up and for
+      moments hid small parts of this desert burned to ashes, where the cloven
+      stumps of trees, whittled as by pen-knives, stuck up like a jeering
+      challenge to the impotent imagination, a challenge to recognize in this
+      field of death and refuse, the landscape it once had been, before the
+      great madness had swept over it and sown it with ruins, leaving it like a
+      dancing floor on which two worlds had fought for a loose woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And into this vale of hell he was now to descend! <i>Live</i> down there
+      five days and five nights, he and his little company of the damned, spewed
+      down into that place, their living bodies speared on the fishing hook,
+      bait for the enemy!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All alone, with no one near to hear him, amid the fury of the bursting
+      shrapnel, which fell up there as thick as rain in a thunderstorm, Captain
+      Marschner gave himself up to his rage, his impotent rage against a world
+      that had inflicted such a thing on him. He cursed and roared out his
+      hatred into the deaf tumult; and then he sprang up when, far below, almost
+      in the valley already, his men emerged followed by Lieutenant Weixler, who
+      ran behind them like a butcher's helper driving oxen to the shambles. The
+      captain saw them hurry, saw the clouds of the explosions multiply above
+      their heads, and on the slope in front of him saw bluish-green heaps
+      scattered here and there, like knapsacks dropped by the way, some
+      motionless, some twitching like great spiders&mdash;and he rushed on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He raced like a madman down the steep slope, scarcely feeling the ground
+      under his feet, nor hearing the rattle of the exploding shells. He flew
+      rather than ran, stumbled over charred roots, fell, picked himself up
+      again and darted onward, looking neither to the right nor to the left,
+      almost with closed eyes. Now and then, as from a train window, he saw a
+      pale, troubled face flit by. Once it seemed to him he heard a man moaning
+      for water. But he wished to hear nothing, to see nothing. He ran on, blind
+      and deaf, without stopping, driven by the terror of that bad, reproachful,
+      "Hurts so!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Only once did he halt, as though he had stepped into a trap and were held
+      fast in an iron vise. A hand stopped him, a grey, convulsed hand with
+      crooked fingers. It stuck up in front of him as though hewn out of stone.
+      He saw no face, nor knew who it was that held out that dead, threatening
+      fist. All he knew was that two hours before, over there in the little
+      piece of woods, that hand had still comfortably cut slices of rye bread or
+      had written a last post-card home. And a horror of those fingers took hold
+      of the captain and lent new strength to his limbs, so that he stormed
+      onward in great leaps like a boy until, with throbbing sides and a red
+      cloud before his eyes, he caught up with his company at last, way down in
+      the valley at the entrance to the communication trenches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lieutenant Weixler presented himself in strictest military form and
+      announced the loss of fourteen men. Marschner heard the ring of pride in
+      his voice, like triumph over what had been achieved, like the rejoicing of
+      a boy bragging of the first down on his lip and deepening the newly
+      acquired dignity of a bass voice. What were the wounded men writhing on
+      the slope above to this raw youth, what the red-haired coward with his
+      whine, what the children robbed of their provider growing up to be
+      beggars, to a life in the abyss, perhaps to a life in jail? All these were
+      mere supers, a stage background for Lieutenant Weixler's heroism to stand
+      out in relief. Fourteen bloody bodies lined the path he had trodden
+      without fear. How should his eyes not radiate arrogance?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain hastened on, past Weixler. If only he did not have to see him,
+      he told himself, if only he did not have to meet the contented gleam of
+      the man's eyes. He feared his rage might master his reason and his tongue
+      get beyond his control, and his clenched fist do its own will. But here he
+      had to spare this man. Here Lieutenant Weixler was within his rights. He
+      grew from moment to moment. His stature dwarfed the others. He swam upon
+      the stream, while the others, weighed down by the burden of their riper
+      humanity, sank like heavy clods. Here other laws obtained. The dark shaft
+      in which they now reeled forward with trembling knees led to an island
+      washed by a sea of death. Whoever was stranded there dared not keep
+      anything that he used in another world. The man who was master here was
+      the one who had kept nothing but his axe and his fist. And he was the rich
+      one upon whose superabundance the others depended. As Captain Marschner
+      groped his way through the slippery trench in a daze, it became clearer
+      and clearer to him that he must now hold on to his detested lieutenant
+      like a treasure. Without him he would be lost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw the traces of puddles of blood at his feet, and trod upon tattered,
+      blood-soaked pieces of uniforms, on empty shells, rattling preserve tins,
+      fragments of cannon balls. Yawning shell holes would open up suddenly,
+      precariously bridged with half-charred boards.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everywhere the traces of frenzied devastation grinned, blackened remains
+      of a wilderness of wires, beams, sacks, broken tools, a disorder that took
+      one's breath away and made one dizzy&mdash;all steeped in the suffocating
+      stench of combustion, powder smoke, and the pungent, stinging breath of
+      the ecrasite shells. Wherever one stepped the earth had been lacerated by
+      gigantic explosions, laboriously patched up again, once more ripped open
+      to its very bowels, and leveled a second time, so that one reeled on
+      unconscious, as if in a hurricane.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Crushed by the weight of his impressions, Captain Marschner crept through
+      the trench like a worm, and his thoughts turned ever more passionately,
+      ever more desperately to Lieutenant Weixler. Weixler alone could help him
+      or take his place, with that grim, cold energy of his, with that blindness
+      to everything which did not touch his own life, or which was eclipsed by
+      the glowing vision of an Erich Weixler studded with decorations and
+      promoted out of his turn. The captain kept looking about for him
+      anxiously, and breathed with relief each time the urgent, rasping voice
+      came to his ears from the rear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The trench seemed never to be coming to an end. Marschner felt his
+      strength giving way. He stumbled more frequently and closed his eyes with
+      a shudder at the criss-cross traces of blood that precisely indicated the
+      path of the wounded. Suddenly he raised his head with a jerk. A new smell
+      struck him, a sweetish stench which kept getting stronger and stronger
+      until at a curve of the trench wall, which swung off to the left at this
+      point and receded semicircularly, it burst upon him like a great cloud. He
+      looked about, shaken by nausea, his gorge rising. In a dip in the trench
+      he saw a pile of dirty, tattered uniforms heaped in layers and with
+      strangely rigid outlines. It took him some time to grasp the full horror
+      of that which towered in front of him. Fallen soldiers were lying there
+      like gathered logs, in the contorted shapes of the last death agony. Tent
+      flaps had been spread over them, but had slipped down and revealed the
+      grim, stony grey caricatures, the fallen jaws, the staring eyes. The arms
+      of those in the top tier hung earthward like parts of a trellis, and
+      grasped at the faces of those lying below, and were already sown with the
+      livid splotches of corruption.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Marschner uttered a short, belching cry and reeled forward. His
+      head shook as though loosened from his neck, and his knees gave way so
+      that he already saw the ground rising up toward him, when suddenly an
+      unknown face emerged directly in front of him and attracted his attention,
+      and gave him back his self-control. It was a sergeant, who was staring at
+      him silently with great, fevered, gleaming eyes in a deathly pale face.
+      For a moment the man stood as though paralyzed, then his mouth opened
+      wide, he clapped his hands, and jumped into the air like a dancer, and
+      dashed off, without thinking of a salute.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Relief!" he shouted while running.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to a halt before a black hole in the trench wall, like the
+      entrance to a cave, and bent down and shouted into the opening with a ring
+      of indescribable joy in his voice&mdash;with a rejoicing that sounded as
+      if it came through tears:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Relief! Lieutenant! The relief party is here!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain looked after him and heard his cry. His eyes grew moist, so
+      touching was that childlike cry of joy, that shout from out of a relieved
+      heart. He followed the sergeant slowly, and saw&mdash;as though the cry
+      had awakened the dead&mdash;pallid faces peering from all corners, wounded
+      men with blood-soaked bandages, tottering figures holding their rifles.
+      Men streamed toward him from every direction, stared at him and with
+      speechless lips formed the word "relief," until at length one of them
+      roared out a piercing "hurrah," which spread like wildfire and found an
+      echo in unseen throats that repeated it enthusiastically. Deeply shaken,
+      Marschner bowed his head and swiftly drew his hand across his eyes when
+      the commandant of the trench rushed toward him from the dugout.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nothing that betokens life was left about the man. His face was ashen, his
+      eyes like lamps extinguished, glazed and surrounded by broad blue rims.
+      His lids were a vivid red from sleeplessness. His hair, his beard, his
+      clothes were encased in a thick crust of mud, so that he looked as if he
+      had just arisen from the grave. He gave a brief, military salute, then
+      grasped the captain's hand with hysterical joy. His hand was cold as a
+      corpse's and sticky with sweat and dirt. And most uncanny was the contrast
+      between this skeleton hung with clothes, this rigid death-mask of a face,
+      and the twitching, over-excited nervousness with which the lieutenant
+      greeted their liberator.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The words leaped like a waterfall from his cracked lips. He drew Marschner
+      into the dugout and pushed him, stumbling and groping as if dazzled, down
+      on an invisible something meant for a seat and began to tell his tale. He
+      couldn't stand still for a second. He hopped about, slapped his thighs,
+      laughed with unnatural loudness, ran up and down trippingly, threw himself
+      on the couch in the corner, asked for a cigarette every other minute,
+      threw it away without knowing it after two puffs, and at once asked for
+      another.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I tell you, three hours more," he crowed blissfully, with affected
+      gaiety, "&mdash;three? What am I talking about. <i>One</i> hour more, and
+      it would have been too late. D'you know how many rounds of ammunition I've
+      got left? Eleven hundred in all! Machine guns? Run down! Telephone?
+      Smashed since last night already! Send out a party to repair it?
+      Impossible! Needed every man in the trench! A hundred and sixty-four of us
+      at first. Now I've got thirty-one, eleven of them wounded so that they
+      can't hold a rifle. Thirty-one fellows to hold the trench with! Last night
+      there were still forty-five of us when they attacked. We drove 'em to
+      hell, of course, but fourteen of our men went again. We haven't had a
+      chance to bury them yet. Didn't you see them lying out there?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Captain let him talk. He leaned his elbows on the primitive table,
+      held his head between his hands, and kept silent. His eyes wandered about
+      the dark, mouldy den, filled with the stench of a smoking little kerosene
+      lamp. He saw the mildewed straw in the corner, the disconnected telephone
+      at the entrance, an empty box of tinned food on which a crumpled map was
+      spread out. He saw a mountain of rifles, bundles of uniforms, each one
+      ticketed. And he felt how inch by inch, a dumb, icy horror arose within
+      him and paralyzed his breathing, as though the earth overhead, upheld by
+      only a thin scaffolding of cracked boards and threatening to fall at any
+      moment, had already laid its intolerable weight upon his chest. And that
+      prancing ghost, that giggling death's head, which only a week before
+      perhaps had still been young, affected him like a nightmare. And the
+      thought that now his turn had come to stick it out in that sepulchral
+      vault for five or six days or a week and experience the same horrors that
+      the man there was telling about with a laugh intensified his
+      discouragement into a passionate, throbbing indignation which he could
+      scarcely control any more. He could have roared out, could have jumped up,
+      run out, and shouted to mankind from the depths of his soul asking why he
+      had been tossed there, why he would have to lie there until he had turned
+      into carrion or a crazy man. How could he have let himself be driven out
+      there? He could not understand it. He saw no meaning to it all, no aim.
+      All he saw was that hole in the earth, those rotting corpses outside, and
+      nearby, but one step removed from all that madness, his own Vienna as he
+      had left it only two days before, with its tramways, its show windows, its
+      smiling people and its lighted theaters. What madness to be crouching
+      there waiting for death with idiotic patience, to perish on the naked
+      earth in blood and filth, like a beast, while other people, happy, clean,
+      dressed up, sat in bright halls and listened to music, and then nestled in
+      soft beds without fear, without danger, guarded by a whole world, which
+      would come down in indignation upon any who dared to harm a single hair of
+      their heads. Had madness already stolen upon him or were the others mad?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His pulse raged as though his heart would burst if he could not relieve
+      his soul by a loud shout.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that very moment Lieutenant Weixler came bustling in, like the master
+      of ceremonies at a ball. He stood stiff and straight in front of the
+      captain, and announced that everything above was in readiness, that he had
+      already assigned the posts and arranged the watches, and placed the
+      machine guns. The captain looked at him and had to lower his eyes as if
+      boxed on the ears by this tranquillity, which would suddenly wither his
+      fury into a burning shame at himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why did that man remain untouched by the great fear of death which
+      impregnated the very air here? How was it that he could give orders and
+      commands with the foresightedness of a mature man, while he himself crept
+      out of sight like a frightened child and rebelled against his fate with
+      the senseless fury of an animal at bay, instead of mastering fate as
+      befitted his age? Was he a coward? Was he in the grip of a mean, paltry
+      fear, was he overcome by that wretched blindness of the soul which cannot
+      lift its vision beyond its own ego nor lose sight of its ego for the sake
+      of an idea? Was he really so devoid of any sense for the common welfare,
+      so utterly ruled by short-sighted selfishness, concerned with nothing but
+      his bare, miserable existence? No, he was not like that. He clung to his
+      own life no more than any other man. He could have cast it away
+      enthusiastically, and without flying banners, without ecstasy, without the
+      world's applause, had the hostile trenches over there been filled with men
+      like Weixler, had the combat been against such crazy hardness of soul,
+      against catchwords fattened with human flesh, against that whole, cleverly
+      built-up machine of force which drove those whom it was supposed to
+      protect to form a wall to protect itself. He would have hurled himself
+      into the fight with bare fists, unmindful of the bursting of shells, the
+      moans of the wounded. Oh no, he was not a coward. Not what those two men
+      thought. He saw them wink scornfully and make fun of the unhappy old uncle
+      of a reserve officer who sat in the corner like a bundle of misery. What
+      did they know of his soul's bitterness? They stood there as heroes and
+      felt the glances of their home upon them, and spoke words which, upborne
+      by the echo of a whole world, peopled the loneliness with all the hosts of
+      the likeminded and filled their souls with the strength of millions. And
+      they laughed at a man who was to kill without feeling hatred and die
+      without ecstasy, for a victory that was nothing to him but a big force
+      which achieved its objects simply because it hit harder, not because it
+      had justice on its side or a fine and noble aim. He had no cause to slink
+      off, humbled by their courage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A cold, proud defiance heartened him, so that he arose, strengthened
+      suddenly, as if elevated by the superhuman burden that he alone carried on
+      his shoulders. He saw the strange lieutenant still dancing about, hastily
+      gathering up his belongings and stuffing them into his knapsack. He heard
+      him scold his orderly and bellow at him to hurry up, in between digging up
+      fresh details, hideous episodes, from the combats of the past few days,
+      which Weixler devoured in breathless attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What a question!" the commandant of the trench exclaimed, laughing at his
+      audience. "Whether the Italians had heavy losses, too? Do you think we let
+      them pepper us like rabbits? You can easily calculate what those fellows
+      lost in their eleven attacks if we've melted down to thirty men without
+      crawling out of our trench. Just let them go on like that a few weeks
+      longer and they'll be at the end of their human material."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Marschner had not wanted to listen. He stood bending over a map,
+      but at the phrase, "human material," he started violently. It sounded like
+      a taunt directed at his own thoughts, as if the two men had seen into him
+      and had agreed with each other to give him a good lesson and show him how
+      alone he was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Human material!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a trench, filled with the stench of dead bodies, shaken by the impact
+      of the shells, stood two men, each himself a stake in the game, and while
+      the dice were still being tossed for their very bones, they talked of&mdash;human
+      material! They uttered those ruthless, shameful words without a shadow of
+      indignation, as though it were natural for their living bodies to be no
+      more than a gambler's chips in the hands of men who arrogated to
+      themselves the right to play the game of gods. Without hesitating they
+      laid their one, irrevocable life at the feet of a power that could not
+      prove whether it had known how to place the stakes rightly except by their
+      dead bodies. And the men who were speaking that way were officers! So
+      where was there a gleam of hope?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Out there, among the simple men, perhaps, the plain cannon fodder? They
+      were now crouching resignedly in their places, thinking of home and each
+      of them still feeling himself a man. He was drawn to his men, to their
+      dull, silent sadness, to their true greatness, which without pathos and
+      without solemnity, in everyday clothes, as it were, patiently awaited the
+      hero's death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Outside the dugout stood the remnants of the relieved company ready for
+      the march, always two men abreast with a dead comrade on a tent canvas
+      between them. A long procession, profoundly stirring in its silent
+      expectancy, into which the hissing and crackling of shrapnel and the
+      thunder of grenades fell like a warning from above to those who still had
+      their lives. Bitterly, Marschner clenched his fist at this insatiableness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment the pale sergeant stepped in front of the place where the
+      dead had been piled and frightened Marschner out of his thoughts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Captain, I beg to announce that beside the fourteen dead there are three
+      seriously wounded men who can't walk&mdash;Italians. I have no bearers
+      left for them."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "We'll leave them to you as a souvenir," the trench commandant, who was
+      just leaving the dugout with Weixler, laughed in his maundering way. "You
+      can have them dug in at night up there among the communication trenches,
+      Captain. When it gets dark, the Italians direct their barrage fire farther
+      back, and give you a chance to climb out. To be sure, they won't lie in
+      peace there under the earth very long, because the shells rip everything
+      open right away again. I've had to have my poor ensign buried three times
+      over already."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "How did they get in here anyhow?" Weixler asked, pushing himself forward.
+      "Did you have a fight in the trench?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The other lieutenant shook his head proudly. "I should rather say not. The
+      gentlemen never got as far as that. These three tried to cut the wire
+      entanglements night before last, but our machine gun man caught 'em at it
+      and his iron spatter spoiled their little game. Well, there they lay, of
+      course, right under our very noses and they had on the loveliest shoes of
+      bright yellow. My men begrudged 'em those shoes. There&mdash;" he ended,
+      pointing with his finger at the feet of the pale sergeant&mdash;"there you
+      see one pair. But we'll have to start now. March, sergeant! My respects,
+      Captain. The Italians'll open their eyes when they come over to-night to
+      finish us off comfortably and a hundred and fifty rifles go off and two
+      brand-new bullet squirters. Ha-ha! Sorry I can't be here to see it!
+      Good-by, little man! Good luck!" Humming a merry popular song he followed
+      his men without looking back, without even observing that Marschner
+      accompanied him a little on his way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Gaily, as though on a Sunday picnic, the men started on the way, which led
+      over the terrible field of shards and ruins and the steep, shot-up hill.
+      What hells they must have endured there, in that mole's gallery! The
+      captain remained standing and heaved a deep sigh. It was as if that long,
+      grey column slowly winding its way through the trench were carrying away
+      the last hope. The back of the last soldier, growing smaller and smaller,
+      was the world. The captain's eyes clung greedily to that back and measured
+      fearfully the distance to the corner of the trench from which he must lose
+      sight of it forever. There was still time to call out a greeting, and by
+      running very fast one might still catch up and hand over a letter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the last medium disappeared&mdash;the last possibility of dividing
+      the world into two halves. And his yearning recoiled before the endless
+      space it had to bridge&mdash;and there was nothing else to bridge it but
+      his yearning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marschner sank into himself as he stood deserted in the empty trench. He
+      felt as though he had been hollowed out, and looked about for help, and
+      his eyes clung to the depression from which the corpses had now been
+      lifted. Only the three Italians were lying there, the life already gone
+      from them. The one showed his face, his mouth was still wide open as for a
+      cry, and his hands dug themselves, as though to ward off pain, into his
+      unnaturally swollen body. The other two lay with their knees drawn up and
+      their heads between their arms. The naked feet with their grey convulsed
+      toes stared into the communication trench like things robbed, with a mute
+      accusal. There was a remoteness about these dead bodies, a loneliness, an
+      isolation about their bared feet. A tangled web of memories arose, a
+      throng of fleeting faces glimmered in the captain's soul&mdash;gondoliers
+      of Venice, voluble cabbies, a toothless inn-keeper's wife at Posilipo. Two
+      trips on a vacation in Italy drove an army of sorrowing figures through
+      his mind. And finally another figure appeared in that ghostly dance of
+      death, his own sister, sitting in a concert hall in Vienna, care-free,
+      listening to music, while her brother lay somewhere stretched out on the
+      ground, rigid in death, an enemy's corpse just to be kicked aside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Shuddering, the captain hastened back down the trench, as though the three
+      dead men were pursuing him noiselessly on their naked soles. When he
+      reached his own men at last, he felt as if he had arrived at a harbor of
+      safety.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The shells were now falling so thick that there was not a moment's pause
+      between the explosions, and all sounds merged into a single, equal,
+      rolling thunder, which made the earth tremble like the hull of a ship. But
+      there was a particularly sharp crashing and splintering from one shot that
+      hit the trench squarely and whirled the coverings above in all directions.
+      A few minutes later two groaning men dragged down a corpse, leaned it
+      against the trench wall, and climbed back to their posts through the
+      narrow shaft. Marschner saw his sergeant get up and move his lips&mdash;then
+      a soldier in the corner arose and took up his rifle and followed the two
+      others heavily. It was all so comfortless, so unmercifully businesslike,
+      precisely as when "Next!" breaks into the monotony of the practising in
+      the yard of the barracks, only with the difference that a little group at
+      once gathered about the dead man, drawn by that shy curiosity which
+      irresistibly attracts simple folk to corpses and funerals. Most of the men
+      expected the same of him&mdash;he saw it in their eyes&mdash;that he, too,
+      would go over and pay a last tribute of respect to the dead. But he did
+      not want to. He was absolutely determined not to learn the fallen man's
+      name. He was bent upon practising self-mastery at last and remaining
+      indifferent to all small happenings. So long as he had not seen the dead
+      man's face nor heard his name, only a man had fallen in battle, one of the
+      many thousands. If he kept his distance and did not bend over each
+      individual and did not let a definite fate come to his notice, it was not
+      so hard to remain indifferent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Stubbornly he walked over to the second shaft leading to the top and for
+      the first time observed that it had grown quite silent up above. There was
+      no longer any screaming or bursting. This silence came upon the deafening
+      din like a paralyzing weight and filled space with a tense expectancy that
+      flickered in all eyes. He wanted to rid himself of this oppression and
+      crept through the crumbling shaft up to the top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first thing he saw was Weixler's curved back. He was holding his
+      field-glass glued to his eyes under cover of a shooting shield. The others
+      were also standing as if pasted to their posts, and there was something
+      alarming in the motionlessness of their shoulder blades. All at once a
+      twitching ran through the petrified row. Weixler sprang back, jostled
+      against the captain, and cried out: "They are coming!" Then he stormed to
+      the shaft and blew the alarm whistle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marschner stared after him helplessly. He walked with hesitating steps to
+      the shield and looked out upon the wide, smoke-covered field, which curved
+      beyond the tangle of wires, grey, torn, blood-flecked, like the bloated
+      form of a gigantic corpse. Far in the background the sun was sinking. Its
+      great copper disc already cut in half by the horizon seemed to be growing
+      out of the ground. And against that dazzling background black silhouettes
+      were dancing like midges under a microscope, like Indians swinging their
+      tomahawks. They were still mere specks. Sometimes they disappeared
+      entirely and then leaped high, and came nearer, their rifles wriggling in
+      the air like the feet of a polyp. Gradually their cries became audible and
+      swelled louder and louder like the far barking of dogs. When they called
+      "Avanti!" it was a piercing cry, and when the call "Coraggio!" went
+      through their lines, it changed to a dull, thunderous roll.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The entire company now stood close-packed up against the slope of the
+      trench, their faces as of stone, restrained, pale as chalk, with lipless
+      mouths, each man's gun in position&mdash;a single beast of prey with a
+      hundred eyes and arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Don't shoot! Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" Lieutenant Weixler's voice yelled
+      without pause through the trench. His command seemed to lay its grasp on
+      every throat and to hold the fingers moveless that greedily clasped the
+      triggers. The first hand grenade flew into the trench. The captain saw it
+      coming, then saw a man loosen from the mass, reel toward the dugout with
+      outstretched arms, bending over, a veil of blood covering his face. Then&mdash;at
+      last!&mdash;it was a relief&mdash;came the beating of the machine guns,
+      and at once the rifles went off, too, like the raging of an angry pack. A
+      cold, repulsive greed lay on all faces. Some of the men cried out aloud in
+      their hate and rage when new groups emerged out there behind the thinning
+      rows. The barrels of the rifles glowed with heat&mdash;and still the
+      rumbling cries of "Coraggio!" came nearer and nearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As though in a frenzy of insanity, the silhouettes hopped about out there,
+      sprang into the air, fell, and rolled over each other, as though the war
+      dance had only just reached the climax of its paroxysm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Captain Marschner observed the man next to him let his rifle sink for
+      a moment and with hasty, shaking hands insert the bayonet into the smoking
+      barrel. The captain felt as though he were going to vomit. He closed his
+      eyes in dizziness and leaned against the trench wall, and let himself
+      glide to the earth. Was he to&mdash;to see&mdash;that? Was he to see men
+      being murdered right alongside of him? He tore his revolver from his
+      pocket, emptied it, and threw it away. Now he was defenseless. And
+      suddenly he grew calm and rose to his feet, elevated by a wonderful
+      composure, ready to let himself be butchered by one of those panting
+      beasts who were storming on, chased by the blind fear of death. He wanted
+      to die like a man, without hatred, without rage, with clean hands.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A hoarse roar, a frightful, dehumanized cry almost beside him wrenched his
+      thoughts back into the trench. A broad stream of light and fire,
+      travelling in a steep curve, flowed blindingly down beside him and sprayed
+      over the shoulder of the tall pock-marked tailor of the first line. In the
+      twinkling of an eye the man's entire left side flared up in flames. With a
+      howl of agony he threw himself to the ground, writhed and screamed and
+      leaped to his feet again, and ran moaning up and down like a living torch,
+      until he broke down, half-charred, and twitched, and then lay rigid.
+      Captain Marschner saw him lying there and smelt the odor of burned flesh,
+      and his eyes involuntarily strayed to his own hand on which a tiny, white
+      spot just under his thumb reminded him of the torments he had suffered in
+      his boyhood from a bad burn.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At that moment a jubilant hurrah roared through the trench, rising from a
+      hundred relieved throats. The attack had been repulsed! Lieutenant Weixler
+      had carefully taken aim at the thrower of the liquid fire and hit at the
+      first shot. The liquid fire had risen up like a fountain from the falling
+      man's stiffening hand and rained down on his own comrades. Their decimated
+      lines shrank back suddenly before the unexpected danger and they fled
+      pell-mell, followed by the furious shots from all the rifles.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The men fell down as if lifeless, with slack faces and lusterless eyes, as
+      though some one had turned off the current that had fed those dead
+      creatures with strength from some unknown source. Some of them leaned
+      against the trench wall white as cheese, and held their heads over, and
+      vomited from exhaustion. Marschner also felt his gorge rising and groped
+      his way toward the dugout. He wanted to go into his own place now and be
+      alone and somehow relieve himself of the despair that held him in its
+      grip.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Hello!" Lieutenant Weixler cried unexpectedly through the silence, and
+      bounded over to the left where the machine guns stood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain turned back again, mounted the ladder, and gazed out into the
+      foreground of the field. There, right in front of the wire-entanglements,
+      kneeled an Italian. His left arm was hanging down limp, and his right arm
+      was raised beseechingly, and he was crawling toward them slowly. A little
+      farther back, half hidden by the kneeling man, something kept stirring on
+      the ground. There three wounded men were trying to creep toward their own
+      trench, pressing close to the ground. One could see very clearly how they
+      sought cover behind corpses and now and then lay motionless so as to
+      escape discovery by the foe. It was a pitiful sight&mdash;those
+      God-forsaken creatures surrounded by death, each moment like an eternity
+      above them, yet clinging with tooth and nail to their little remnant of
+      life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Come on! Isn't there a rope somewhere?" an old corporal called down into
+      the trench. "I'm sorry for the poor devil of an Italian. Let's pull him
+      in!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The machine guns interrupted him. The kneeling man beside the wires
+      listened, started as if to run, and fell upon his face. The earth behind
+      him rose in dust from the bullets and the others beyond raised themselves
+      like snakes, then all three gave a short leap forward and&mdash;lay very
+      still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment Captain Marschner stood speechless. He opened his lips, but
+      no sound came from his throat. At last his tongue obeyed him and he
+      yelled, with a mad choking fury in his voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Lieutenant Weixler!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, sir," came back unconcernedly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Captain Marschner ran toward the lieutenant with clenched fists and
+      scarlet face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Did you fire?" he panted, breathless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lieutenant looked at him in astonishment, placed his hands against the
+      seams of his trousers and replied with perfect formality:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I did, sir."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marschner's voice failed him again for a moment. His teeth chattered. His
+      whole body trembled as he stammered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Aren't you ashamed of yourself? A soldier doesn't fire at helpless,
+      wounded men. Remember that!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Weixler went white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I beg to inform you, Captain, that the one who was near our trench was
+      hiding the others from us. I couldn't spare him." Then, with a sudden
+      explosion of anger, he added defiantly: "Besides, I thought we had quite
+      enough hungry mouths at home as it is."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain jumped at him like a snapping dog and stamped his foot and
+      roared:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I'm not interested in what you think. I forbid you to shoot at the
+      wounded! As long as I am commanding officer here every wounded man shall
+      be held sacred, whether he tries to get to us or to return to the enemy.
+      Do you understand me?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The lieutenant drew himself up haughtily.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "In that case I must take the liberty, sir, of begging you to hand me that
+      order in writing. I consider it my duty to inflict as much injury upon the
+      enemy as possible. A man that I let off to-day may be cured and come back
+      two months later and perhaps kill ten of my comrades."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a moment the two men stood still, staring at each other as though
+      about to engage in mortal combat. Then Marschner nodded his head almost
+      imperceptibly, and said in a toneless voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You shall have it in writing."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He swung on his heel and left. Colored spheres seemed to dance before his
+      eyes, and he had to summon all his strength to keep his equilibrium. When
+      at last he reached the dugout, he fell on the box of empty tins as if he
+      had been beaten. His hatred changed slowly into a deep, embittered sense
+      of discouragement. He knew perfectly well that he was in the wrong. Not at
+      the bar of his conscience! His conscience told him that the deed the
+      lieutenant had done was cowardly murder. But he and his conscience had
+      nothing to say here. They had happened to stray into this place and would
+      have to stay in the wrong. What was he to do? If he gave the order in
+      writing, he would afford Weixler his desired opportunity of pushing
+      himself forward and invite an investigation of his own conduct. He
+      begrudged the malicious creature that triumph. Perhaps it were better to
+      make an end of the whole business by going to the brigade staff and
+      telling the exalted gentlemen there frankly to their faces that he could
+      no longer be a witness to that bloody firing, that he could not hunt men
+      like wild beasts, no matter what uniform they happened to wear. Then, at
+      least, this playing at hide and seek would end. Let them shoot him, if
+      they wanted to, or hang him like a common felon. He would show them that
+      he knew how to die.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked out into the trench firmly, and ordered a soldier to summon
+      Lieutenant Weixler. Now it was so clear within him and so calm. He heard
+      the hellish shooting that the Italians were again directing at the trench
+      and went forward slowly like a man out promenading.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "They're throwing heavy mines at us now, Captain," the old corporal
+      announced, and looked at Marschner in despair. But Marschner went by
+      unmoved. All that no longer mattered to him. The lieutenant would take
+      over the command. That was what he was going to tell him. He could hardly
+      await the moment to relieve himself of the responsibility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As Weixler delayed coming, he crept up through the shaft to the top.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man's small, evil eyes flew to meet him and sought the written order
+      in his hand. The captain acted as though he did not notice the question in
+      his look, and said imperiously:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Lieutenant, I turn the command of the company over to you until&mdash;&mdash;"
+      A short roar of unheard-of violence cut short his speech. He had the
+      feeling, "That will hit me," and that very instant he saw something like a
+      black whale rush down in front of his eyes from out of the heavens and
+      plunge head foremost into the trench wall behind him. Then a crater opened
+      up in the earth, a sea of flame that raised him up and filled his lungs
+      with fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On slowly recovering his consciousness he found himself buried under a
+      huge mound of earth, with only his head and his left arm free. He had no
+      feeling in his other limbs. His whole body had grown weightless. He could
+      not find his legs. Nothing was there that he could move. But there was a
+      burning and burrowing that came from somewhere in his brain, scorched his
+      forehead, and made his tongue swell into a heavy, choking lump.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Water!" he moaned. Was there no one there who could pour a drop of
+      moisture into the burning hollow of his mouth? No one at all? Then where
+      was Weixler? He must be near by. Or else&mdash;was it possible that
+      Weixler was wounded too? Marschner wanted to jump up and find out what had
+      happened to Weixler&mdash;he wanted to&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Like an overburdened steam-crane his left hand struggled toward his head,
+      and when he at last succeeded in pushing it under his neck, he felt with a
+      shudder that his skull offered no resistance and his hand slid into a
+      warm, soft mush, and his hair, pasty with coagulated blood, stuck to his
+      fingers like warm, moist felt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Dying!" went through him with a chill. To die there&mdash;all alone. And
+      Weixler? He had to find out what had happened to&mdash;happened to&mdash;&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a superhuman effort he propped his head up on his left hand high
+      enough to have a view of a few paces along the trench. Now he saw Weixler,
+      with his back turned, leaning on his right side against the trench wall,
+      standing there crookedly, his left hand pressed against his body, his
+      shoulders hunched as if he had a cramp. The captain raised himself a
+      little higher and saw the ground and a broad, dark shadow that Weixler
+      cast. Blood? He was bleeding? Or what? Surely that was blood. It couldn't
+      be anything but blood. And yet it stretched out so peculiarly and drew
+      itself like a thin, red thread up to Weixler, up to where his hand pressed
+      his body as though he wanted to pull up the roots that bound him to the
+      earth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The captain <i>had</i> to see! He pulled his head farther out from under
+      the mound&mdash;and uttered a hoarse cry, a cry of infinite horror. The
+      wretched man was dragging his entrails behind him!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Weixler!" burst from him in a shudder of compassion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man turned slowly, looked down at Marschner questioningly, pale, sad,
+      with frightened eyes. He stood like that only the fraction of a second,
+      then he lost his balance, reeled, and fell down, and was lost from the
+      captain's circle of vision. Their glances scarcely had time to cross, the
+      pallid face had merely flitted by. And yet it stood there, remained fixed
+      in the air, with a mild, soft, plaintive expression about the narrow lips,
+      an unforgettable air of gentle anxious resignation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "He is suffering!" flashed through Marschner. "He is suffering!"&mdash;it
+      exulted him. And a glow suffused his pallor. His fingers, sticky with
+      blood, seemed to caress the air, until his head sank backward, and his
+      eyes broke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The first soldiers who penetrated the towering mound of earth to where he
+      lay found him dead. But in spite of his ghastly wound, a contented, almost
+      happy smile hovered about his lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      III. THE VICTOR
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      On the big square before the old courthouse, which now served as
+      regimental headquarters and bore the magic letters A.O.K. as a sort of
+      cabalistic sign on its front, a military band played every afternoon from
+      three to four at command of His Excellency. This little diversion was
+      meant to compensate the civilian population for the many inconveniences
+      that the quartering of several hundreds of staff officers and a number of
+      lesser officers inevitably brought upon them. Then, too, according to His
+      Excellency, such an institution helped considerably to promote the
+      popularity of the army and inspire patriotism in school children and the
+      masses. In the interest of the right conduct of the war the strict
+      commander deemed it highly essential to foster a right attitude in the
+      public and to encourage friendly relations between military and civilian
+      authorities&mdash;while fully preserving his own privileges. It was
+      essential to a successful continuation of the war. Incidentally, the fact
+      that the staff officers, with His Excellency at their head, usually took
+      their black coffee at just about this time had helped a good deal to bring
+      about these afternoon concerts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was indeed delightful to sit in the shade of the centenarian
+      plane-trees, whose intertwining branches overarched the entire square like
+      the nave of a cathedral. The autumn sun cast a dull glow on the walls of
+      the houses round about, and shed golden rings through the thick foliage on
+      the small round tables arrayed in long rows in front of the coffeehouse.
+      There was a reserved row for the staff officers set in snowy linens, with
+      little flower vases and fresh crisp cakes, which the sergeant of the
+      commissary brought punctually at three o'clock every day from the field
+      bakery, where they had been baked with particular care under the personal
+      supervision of the chef especially for His Excellency and staff.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a beautiful gay picture of lively, varied metropolitan life that
+      surged about the music pavilion. Every one seemed as joyous and carefree
+      as on the Graben in Vienna on a sunny spring Sunday in times of
+      undisturbed peace. The children crowded around the orchestra, beat the
+      measure, and applauded enthusiastically after every piece. The streets
+      leading into the square were filled with giggling girls and students
+      wearing bright caps; while the <i>haute-volée</i>, the wives of the
+      resident officials and merchants, sat in the confectioner's shop on the
+      square, eagerly awaiting an opportunity to show their righteous
+      indignation at the daring millinery, transparent hose, and little more
+      than knee-length skirts of a certain class of women who had forced their
+      way into the town and, despite all protests and orders, were shamelessly
+      plying their trade in broad daylight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the chief tone was given by the transient officers. Whether on
+      furlough or on their way back to the front, they all had to pass through
+      this town, and enjoyed in deep draughts this first or last day of freedom.
+      Besides, if anything was needed at the front&mdash;horse-shoe nails,
+      saddle-soap, sanitary appliances, or bottled beer&mdash;this first little
+      "big town" was the quickest, most convenient place to buy it in. An
+      unlucky or an unpopular man merely received a commendation for his
+      bravery, and that settled him. But the man who enjoyed his commanding
+      officer's favor was given the preference to do the shopping here as a
+      reward. And an amazing ingenuity developed in discovering immediate
+      necessities. A secret arithmetical relation undeniably existed between the
+      consumption of charcoal, axle grease, etc., by individual troop divisions
+      and the distance of their outposts from this favorite provisioning
+      station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, the pleasure did not last long. There was just enough time for
+      a hot tub-bath, for showing off one's best newly-pressed uniform once or
+      twice on the main streets, for taking two meals at a table spread with a
+      tablecloth, and for spending a short night in a comfortable bed&mdash;with,
+      or, if the man could not help it, without caresses&mdash;and then off
+      again, depressed and irritable, off to the maddeningly overcrowded
+      railroad station, back to the front, into the damp trench or the sunbaked
+      block house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The greed of life in these young officers, who promenaded, hungry-eyed,
+      through the town, the racing of their blood, like a diver who fills his
+      lungs full in one second, had gradually infected the entire, boresome
+      little place. It tingled, it foamed, it enriched itself and became
+      frivolous; it could not get enough sensations, now that it stood in the
+      center of world activities and had a claim upon real events.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Close-packed, the crowd surged past the music in holiday attire and
+      holiday mood on this ordinary week-day, quivering to the rhythm of the
+      Blue Danube Waltz, which the orchestra was playing catchingly, with a roll
+      of drums and a clash of cymbals. The whole spectacle brought to mind the
+      goings-on behind the scenes in a huge playhouse during the performance of
+      a tragedy with choruses and mob scenes. Nothing was seen or heard here of
+      the sanguinary piece being enacted at the front. The features of the
+      actors relaxed, they rested, or threw themselves into the gay hubbub,
+      heartily glad not to know how the tragedy was progressing; exactly as real
+      actors behind the scenes fall back into their unprofessional selves until
+      they get their next cue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sitting in the shade of the old trees, over coffee and cigars, comfortably
+      watching these doings, one might easily be deluded into thinking that the
+      drama taking place at the front was nothing but a jolly spectacular play.
+      From this point of view the whole war showed up like a life-giving stream
+      that washes orchestras ashore, brings wealth and gaiety to the people, is
+      navigated by promenading officers, and directed by portly, comfortable
+      generals. No suggestion of its bloody side, no roar of artillery reaching
+      your ears, no wounded soldier dragging in his personal wretchedness and so
+      striking a false note in the general jollification.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course, it had not always been like that. In the first days, when the
+      daily concert still had the charm of novelty, all the regular, emergency
+      and reserve hospitals in the neighborhood had poured their vast number of
+      convalescents and slightly wounded men into the square. But that lasted
+      only two days. Then His Excellency summoned the head army physician to a
+      short interview and in sharp terms made it clear to the crushed culprit
+      what an unfavorable influence such a sight would have upon the public, and
+      expressed the hope that men wearing bandages, or maimed men, or any men
+      who might have a depressing effect on the general war enthusiasm, should
+      henceforth remain in the hospitals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was not defrauded of his hope. No disagreeable sight ever again marred
+      his pleasure when, with his favorite Havana between his teeth, he gazed
+      past the long row of his subordinates out on the street. No one ever went
+      by without casting a shy, deferential side-glance at the omnipotent
+      director of battles, who sat there like any other ordinary human being,
+      sipping his coffee, although he was the celebrated General X, unlimited
+      master of hundreds of thousands of human lives, the man the papers liked
+      to call the "Victor of &mdash;&mdash;." There was not a human being in the
+      town whose fate he could not have changed with one stroke of his pen.
+      There was nothing he could not promote or destroy as he saw fit. His good
+      will meant orders for army supplies and wealth, or distinction and
+      advancement; his ill will meant no prospects at all, or an order to march
+      along the way that led to certain death.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Leaning back comfortably in the large wicker chair, a chair destined in
+      all likelihood some day to become an object of historic interest, the
+      Powerful One jested gaily with the wife of his adjutant. He pointed to the
+      street, where the crowds surged in the brilliant sunshine, and said with a
+      sort of satisfied, triumphant delight in his tone:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Just look! I should like to show this picture to our pacifists, who
+      always act as though war were nothing but a hideous carnage. You should
+      have seen this hole in peace times. It was enough to put you to sleep.
+      Why, the porter at the corner is earning more to-day than the biggest
+      merchant used to earn before the war. And have you noticed the young
+      fellows who come back from the front? Sunburnt, healthy and happy! Most of
+      them before the war were employed in offices. They held themselves badly
+      and were dissipated and looked cheesy. I assure you, the world has never
+      been so healthy as it is now. But if you look at your newspapers, you read
+      about a world-catastrophe, about a blood-drained Europe, and a whole lot
+      of other stuff."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised his bushy white eyebrows until they reached the middle of his
+      bulging forehead, and his small, piercing black eyes skimmed observantly
+      over the faces of those present.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His Excellency's pronouncement was a suggestion to the others and was
+      immediately taken up. At every table the conversation grew animated, the
+      benefits of the war were told over, and the wits cracked jokes at the
+      expense of the pacifists. There was not a single man in the whole
+      assemblage who did not owe at least two blessings to the war: financial
+      independence and such munificence of living as only much-envied money
+      magnates have allotted to them in times of peace. Among this circle of
+      people the war wore the mask of a Santa Claus with a bag full of wonderful
+      gifts on his back and assignments for brilliant careers in his hand. To be
+      sure here and there a gentleman was to be seen wearing a crêpe-band on his
+      sleeve for a brother or a brother-in-law who, as officer, had seen that
+      other aspect of the war, the Gorgon's face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet the Gorgon's face was so far away, more than sixty miles in a
+      bee-line, and an occasional excursion in its vicinity was an exciting
+      little adventure, a brief titillation of the nerves. Inside an hour the
+      automobile raced back to safety, back to the bath-tub, and you promenaded
+      asphalt streets again in shining pumps. So, who would refrain from joining
+      in the hymn of praise to His Excellency?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mighty man contentedly listened a while longer to the babel of voices
+      aroused by what he had said, then gradually sank back into his
+      reflections, and gazed ahead of him seriously. He saw the sunbeams sifting
+      through the thick foliage and glittering on the crosses and stars that
+      covered the left half of his chest in three close rows. It was a
+      magnificent and complete collection of every decoration that the rulers of
+      four great empires had to bestow upon a man for heroism, contempt of
+      death, and high merit. There was no honor left for the Victor of &mdash;&mdash;
+      still to aspire to. And only eleven short months of war had cast all that
+      at his feet. It was the harvest of but a single year of war. Thirty-nine
+      years of his life had previously gone in the service in tedious monotony,
+      in an eternal struggle with sordid everyday cares. He had worn himself out
+      over all the exigencies of a petty bourgeois existence, like a poor man
+      ashamed of his poverty, making pathetic efforts to conceal a tear in his
+      clothes and always seeing the telltale hole staring out from under the
+      covering. For thirty-nine years he had never swerved from disciplining
+      himself to abstemiousness, and there was much gold on his uniform, but
+      very little in his pocket. As a matter of fact, he had been quite ready
+      for some time to quit. He was thoroughly tired of the cheap pleasure of
+      tyrannizing over the young officers on the drill ground.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But then the miracle occurred! Over night the grouchy, obscure old
+      gentleman changed into a sort of national hero, a European celebrity. He
+      was "the Victor of &mdash;&mdash;!" It was like in a fairy tale, when the
+      good fairy appears and frees the enchanted prince from his hideous
+      disguise, and he emerges in his glowing youth, surrounded by knights and
+      lackeys, and enters his magnificent castle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To be sure the miracle had not brought the general the glow of youth. But
+      it put elasticity into him. The eventful year had given him a shaking up,
+      and his veins pulsed with the joy of life and the energy for work of a man
+      in his prime. It was as a sovereign that he sat there in the shadow of the
+      plane-trees, with good fortune sparkling on his chest and a city lying at
+      his feet. Nothing, not a single thing, was lacking to make the fairy tale
+      perfect.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In front of the coffee-house, guarded by two sturdy corporals, rested the
+      great grey beast, with the lungs of a hundred horses in its chest,
+      awaiting the cranking-up to rush its master off to his castle high above
+      town and valley. Where were the days when, with his general's stripes on
+      his trousers, he took the street-car to his home, befitting his station in
+      life, a six-room apartment that was really a five-room apartment plus a
+      closet? Where was all that? Centuries had given their noblest powers,
+      generations had expended their artistic skill in filling the castle
+      requisitioned for His Excellency, the Commander-in-Chief of the &mdash;&mdash;th
+      Army, with the choicest treasure. Sun and time had done their best to
+      mellow the dazzle of the accumulated wealth till it shone in subdued
+      grandeur as through a delicate veil. Any man master in that house, who
+      mounted those broad steps and shouted his wishes in those aristocratic
+      rooms, necessarily felt like a king and could not take the war in any
+      other way than as a glorious fairy tale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, was there ever a royal household that approached the miraculous
+      more closely? In the kitchen reigned a master of the culinary art, the
+      chef of the best hotel in the country, who in other circumstances would
+      not have been satisfied with double the wages of a general and was now
+      getting only a dollar a day. Yet he was using every bit of his skill. He
+      had never been so eager to please the palate of him whom he served. The
+      roast he prepared was the finest piece of meat to be selected from among
+      the two hundred oxen that daily gave up their lives to the army for the
+      fatherland. The men who served the roast on silver platters, wrought by
+      pupils of Benvenuto for the ancestors of the house, were generals of their
+      trade, who in peace times had had their clothes built in London, and stood
+      about tremblingly awaiting each sign from their master. And this entire
+      retinue, this whole princely household, functioned quite automatically,
+      and&mdash;entirely without cost! The master for whom every one slaved
+      never once had to perform that inevitable nuisance of putting his hand in
+      his pocket to draw out his purse. The gasoline circulated inexhaustibly
+      through the veins of the three motor cars, which lounged day and night on
+      the marble flagging of the courtyard. As by magic everything flowed in
+      that eye and palate could desire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No servant asked for wages, everything seemed to be there of itself, as in
+      fairy castles where it is enough to wish for a thing in order to have it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But that was not all. It was not the whole of the miracle that the table
+      spread itself every day of the month and the store-rooms filled themselves
+      with provisions. When the first of the month came round, bank-notes
+      instead of bills came fluttering into the house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No worry, no disputing, no stinting of one's self to be borne with a sigh.
+      With an air of boredom one stuffed his pockets with greenbacks, which were
+      really quite superfluous in this lazy man's paradise that the war had
+      opened up to its vassals.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One single lowering cloud now and then streaked the shining firmament of
+      this wonderland and cast its shadow on the brow of His Excellency.
+      Sometimes his pure joy was disturbed by the thought that the fairy tale
+      might give way to reality and he might be awakened from the glorious
+      dream. It was not peace that His Excellency dreaded. He never even thought
+      of peace. But what if the wall so artfully constructed out of human bodies
+      should begin to totter some day? What if the enemy were to penetrate all
+      the fortifications, and discipline were to give way to panic, and the
+      mighty wall should dissolve into its component parts, human beings fleeing
+      madly to save their lives? Then the "Victor of &mdash;&mdash;," the
+      almighty fairy tale king, would sink back again into the sordid
+      commonplace of old. He would have to eke out his existence in some obscure
+      corner, crowd his trophies into some modest apartment, and content
+      himself, like other discharged officers, with being a coffeehouse king.
+      Were he to suffer a single defeat, the world would instantly forget its
+      enthusiasm. Another general would assume the reign, another sovereign
+      would fly through the town in a motor car, and the vast retinue of
+      servants would reverently bow before their new ruler. The old one would be
+      nothing but a past episode, a scarecrow revealed, which any sparrow
+      impudently besmirches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general's pudgy hand involuntarily clenched itself, and the dreaded
+      frown, the "storm-signal" that his own soldiers, as well as the enemy, had
+      learned to fear, appeared for a moment on his prominent forehead. Then his
+      face cleared again, and His Excellency looked around proudly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No! The Victor of &mdash;&mdash; was not afraid. His wall stood firm and
+      swayed not. For three months every report that emissaries brought to camp
+      had told of the enormous preparations being made by the enemy. For three
+      months they had been storing up ammunition and gathering together their
+      forces for the tremendous offensive. And the offensive had begun the night
+      before. The general knew that the crowd gaily thronging in the sun would
+      not read in the newspaper till the next morning that out at the front a
+      fierce battle had been raging for the past twenty hours, and hardly sixty
+      miles from the promenade shells were bursting without cease, and a heavy
+      rain of hot iron was pouring down upon his soldiers. Three infantry
+      attacks had already been reported as repulsed, and now the artillery was
+      hammering with frenzied fury, a prologue to fresh conflicts during the
+      night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, let them come!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a jerk, His Excellency sat up, and while his fingers beat on the
+      table in tune to the Blue Danube, a tense expression came into his face,
+      as though he could hear the terrific drumfire raging at the front like a
+      hurricane. His preparations had been made: the human reservoir had been
+      filled to overflowing. Two hundred thousand strong young lads of the very
+      right age lay behind the lines ready at the proper moment to be thrown in
+      front of the steam-roller until it caught and stuck in a marsh of blood
+      and bones. Just let them come! The more, the merrier! The Victor of
+      &mdash;&mdash; was prepared to add another branch to his laurels, and his
+      eyes sparkled like the medals on his breast.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His adjutant got up from the table next to his, approached hesitatingly,
+      and whispered a few words in His Excellency's ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The great man shook his head, waving the adjutant off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It is an important foreign newspaper, Your Excellency," the adjutant
+      urged; and when his commander still waved him aside, he added
+      significantly: "The gentleman has brought a letter of recommendation from
+      headquarters, Your Excellency."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this the general finally gave in, arose with a sigh, and said, half in
+      jest, half in annoyance to the lady beside him:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "A drumfire would be more welcome!" Then he followed his adjutant and
+      shook hands jovially with the bald civilian, who popped up from his seat
+      and bent at the middle like a penknife snapping shut. His Excellency
+      invited him to be seated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The war correspondent stammered a few words of admiration, and opened his
+      note-book expectantly, a whole string of questions on his lips. But His
+      Excellency did not let him speak. In the course of time he had constructed
+      for occasions like this a speech in which every point was well thought out
+      and which made a simple impression. He delivered it now, speaking with
+      emphasis and pausing occasionally to recall what came next.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To begin with he spoke of his brave soldiers, praising their courage,
+      their contempt of death, their wonderful deeds of valor. Then he expressed
+      regret at the impossibility of rewarding each soldier according to his
+      merits, and&mdash;this in a raised voice&mdash;invoked the fatherland's
+      eternal gratitude for such loyalty and self-abnegation even unto death.
+      Pointing to the heavy crop of medals on his chest, he explained that the
+      distinctions awarded him were really an honor done to his men. Finally he
+      wove in a few well-chosen remarks complimenting the enemy's fighting
+      ability and cautious leadership, and concluded with an expression of his
+      unshakable confidence in ultimate victory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The newspaper man listened respectfully and occasionally jotted down a
+      note. The main thing, of course, was to observe the Great One's
+      appearance, his manner of speech, his gestures, and to sum up his
+      personality in a few striking phrases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His Excellency now discarded his military role, and changed himself from
+      the Victor of &mdash;&mdash; into the man of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You are going to the front now?" he asked with a courteous smile, and
+      responded to the correspondent's enthusiastic "Yes" with a deep,
+      melancholy sigh.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "How fortunate you are! I envy you. You see, the tragedy in the life of
+      the general of to-day is that he cannot lead his men personally into the
+      fray. He spends his whole life preparing for war, he is a soldier in body
+      and soul, and yet he knows the excitement of battle only from hearsay."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The correspondent was delighted with this subjective utterance which he
+      had managed to evoke. Now he could show the commander in the sympathetic
+      rôle of one who renounces, one who cannot always do as he would. He bent
+      over his note-book for an instant. When he looked up again he found to his
+      astonishment that His Excellency's face had completely changed. His brow
+      was furrowed, his eyes stared wide-open with an anxiously expectant look
+      in them at something back of the correspondent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The correspondent turned and saw a pale, emaciated infantry captain making
+      straight toward His Excellency. The man was grinning and he had a peculiar
+      shambling walk. He came closer and closer, and stared with glassy, glaring
+      eyes, and laughed an ugly idiotic laugh. The adjutant started up from his
+      seat frightened. The veins on His Excellency's forehead swelled up like
+      ropes. The correspondent saw an assassination coming and turned pale. The
+      uncanny captain swayed to within a foot or two of the general and his
+      adjutant, then stood still, giggled foolishly, and snatched at the orders
+      on His Excellency's chest like a child snatching at a beam of light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Beautiful&mdash;shines beautifully&mdash;" he gurgled in a thick voice.
+      Then he pointed his frightfully thin, trembling forefinger up at the sun
+      and shrieked, "Sun!" Next he snatched at the medals again and said,
+      "Shines beautifully." And all the while his restless glance wandered
+      hither and thither as if looking for something, and his ugly, bestial
+      laugh repeated itself after each word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His Excellency's right fist was up in the air ready for a blow at the
+      fellow's chest for approaching him so disrespectfully, but, instead, he
+      laid his hand soothingly on the poor idiot's shoulder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I suppose you have come from the hospital to listen to the music,
+      Captain?" he said, winking to his adjutant. "It's a long ride to the
+      hospital in the street-car. Take my automobile. It's quicker."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Auto&mdash;quicker," echoed the lunatic with his hideous laugh. He
+      patiently let himself be taken by the arm and led away. He turned round
+      once with a grin at the glittering medals, but the adjutant pulled him
+      along.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general followed them with his eyes until they entered the machine.
+      The "storm-signal" was hoisted ominously between his eyebrows. He was
+      boiling with rage at such carelessness in allowing a creature like that to
+      walk abroad freely. But in the nick of time he remembered the civilian at
+      his side, and controlled himself, and said with a shrug of the shoulders:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, these are some of the sad aspects of the war. You see, it is just
+      because of such things that the leader must stay behind, where nothing
+      appeals to his heart. No general could ever summon the necessary severity
+      to direct a war if he had to witness all the misery at the front."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Very interesting," the correspondent breathed gratefully, and closed his
+      book. "I fear I have already taken up too much of Your Excellency's
+      valuable time, but may I be permitted one more question? When does Your
+      Excellency hope for peace?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general started, bit his underlip, and glanced aside with a look that
+      would have made every staff officer of the &mdash;&mdash;th Army shake in
+      his boots. With a visible effort he put on his polite smile and pointed
+      across the square to the open portals of the old cathedral.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The only advice I can give is for you to go over there and ask our
+      Heavenly Father. He is the only one who can answer that question."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A friendly nod, a hearty handshake, then His Excellency strode to his
+      office across the square amid the respectful salutations of the crowd.
+      When he entered the building the dreaded furrow cleaving his brow was
+      deeper than ever. An orderly tremblingly conducted him to the office of
+      the head army physician. For several minutes the entire house held its
+      breath while the voice of the Mighty One thundered through the corridors.
+      He ordered the fine old physician to come to his table as if he were his
+      secretary, and dictated a decree forbidding all the inmates of the
+      hospitals, without distinction or exception, whether sick or wounded, to
+      leave the hospital premises. "For"&mdash;the decree concluded&mdash;"if a
+      man is ill, he belongs in bed, and if he feels strong enough to go to town
+      and sit in the coffee-house, he should report at the front, where his duty
+      calls him."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This pacing to and fro with clinking spurs and this thundering at the
+      cowering old doctor calmed his anger. The storm had about blown over when
+      unfortunately the general's notice was drawn to the report from the
+      brigade that was being most heavily beset by the enemy and had suffered
+      desperate losses and was holding its post only in order to make the
+      enterprise as costly as possible to the advancing enemy. Behind it the
+      mines had already been laid, and a whole new division was already in wait
+      in subterranean hiding ready to prepare a little surprise for the enemy
+      after the doomed brigade had gone to its destruction. Of course, the
+      general had not considered it necessary to inform the brigadier that he
+      was holding a lost post and all he was to do was to sell his hide as
+      dearly as possible. The longer the struggle raged the better! And men
+      fight so much more stubbornly if they hope for relief until the very last
+      moment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All this His Excellency himself had ordained, and he was really greatly
+      rejoiced that the brigade was still holding out after three overwhelming
+      infantry charges. But now a report lay before him which went against all
+      military tradition; and it brought back the storm that had been about to
+      subside.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The major-general (His Excellency made careful note of his name) described
+      the frightful effect of the drumfire in a nervous, talkative way that was
+      most unmilitary. Instead of confining himself to a statement of numbers,
+      he explained at length how his brigade had been decimated and his men's
+      power of resistance was gone. He concluded his report by begging for
+      reinforcements, else it would be impossible for the remnant of his company
+      to withstand the attack to take place that night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Impossible? Impossible?" His Excellency blared like a trumpet into the
+      ears of the gentlemen standing motionless around him. "Impossible? Since
+      when is the commander instructed by his subordinates as to what is
+      possible and what is not?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Blue in the face with rage he took a pen and wrote this single sentence in
+      answer to the report: "The sector is to be held." Underneath he signed his
+      name in the perpendicular scrawl that every school child knew from the
+      picture card of the "Victor of &mdash;&mdash;." He himself put the
+      envelope into the motor-cyclist's hand for it to be taken to the wireless
+      station as the telephone wires of the brigade had long since been shot
+      into the ground. Then he blustered like a storm cloud from room to room,
+      stayed half an hour in the card room, had a short interview with the chief
+      of the staff, and asked to have the evening reports sent to the castle.
+      When his rumbling "Good night, gentlemen!" at last resounded in the large
+      hall under the dome, every one heaved a sigh of relief. The guard stood at
+      attention, the chauffeur started the motor, and the big machine plunged
+      into the street with a bellow like a wild beast's. Panting and tooting, it
+      darted its way through the narrow streets out into the open, where the
+      castle like a fairy palace looked down into the misty valley below with
+      its pearly rows of illuminated windows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With his coat collar turned up, His Excellency sat in the car and
+      reflected as he usually did at this time on the things that had happened
+      during the day. The correspondent came to his mind and the man's stupid
+      question, "When does Your Excellency hope for peace?" Hope? Was it
+      credible that a man who must have some standing in his profession, else he
+      never would have received a letter of recommendation from headquarters,
+      had so little suspicion of how contrary that was to every soldierly
+      feeling? Hope for peace? What good was a general to expect from peace?
+      Could this civilian not comprehend that a commanding general really
+      commanded, was really a general, just in times of war, while in times of
+      peace he was like a strict teacher in galloons, an old duffer who
+      occasionally shouted himself hoarse out of pure ennui? Was he to long for
+      that dreary treadmill existence again? Was he to hope for the time&mdash;to
+      please the gentlemen civilians&mdash;when he, the victorious leader of the
+      &mdash;&mdash;th Army, would be used again merely for reviews? Was he to
+      await impatiently going back to that other hopeless struggle between a
+      meager salary and a life polished for show, a struggle in which the lack
+      of money always came out triumphant?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The general leaned back on the cushioned seat in annoyance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly the car stopped with a jerk right in the middle of the road. The
+      general started up in surprise and was about to question the chauffeur,
+      when the first big drops of rain fell on his helmet. It was the same storm
+      that earlier in the afternoon had given the men at the front a short
+      respite.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two corporals jumped out and quickly put up the top. His Excellency
+      sat stark upright, leaned his ear to the wind, and listened attentively.
+      Mingled with the rushing sound of the wind he caught quite clearly, but
+      very&mdash;very faintly a dull growling, a hollow, scarcely audible
+      pounding, like the distant echo of trees being chopped down in the woods.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Drumfire!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His Excellency's eyes brightened. A gleam of inner satisfaction passed
+      over his face so recently clouded with vexation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thank God! There still was war!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IV. MY COMRADE
+    </h2>
+    <h3>
+      (<i>A Diary</i>)
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      This world war has given me a comrade, too. You couldn't find a better
+      one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is exactly fourteen months ago that I met him for the first time in a
+      small piece of woods near the road to Goerz. Since then he has never left
+      my side for a single moment. We sat up together hundreds of nights
+      through, and still he walks beside me steadfastly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Not that he intrudes himself upon me. On the contrary. He conscientiously
+      keeps the distance that separates him, the common soldier, from the
+      officer that he must respect in me. Strictly according to regulations he
+      stands three paces off in some corner or behind some column and only dares
+      to cast his shy glances at me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He simply wants to be near me. That's all he asks for, just for me to let
+      him be in my presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sometimes I close my eyes to be by myself again, quite by myself for a few
+      moments, as I used to be before the war. Then he fixes his gaze upon me so
+      firmly and penetratingly and with such obstinate, reproachful insistence
+      that it burns into my back, settles under my eyelids, and so steeps my
+      being with the picture of him that I look round, if a little tune has
+      passed without his reminding me of his presence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He has gnawed his way into me, he has taken up his abode within me. He
+      sits inside of me like the mysterious magician at moving-picture shows who
+      turns the crank inside of the black booth above the heads of the
+      spectators. He casts his picture through my eyes upon every wall, every
+      curtain, every flat surface that my eyes fall on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But even when there is no background for his picture, even when I
+      frantically look out of the window and stare into the distance so as to be
+      rid of him for a short while, even then he is there, hovering in front of
+      me as though impaled upon the lance of my gaze, like a banner swaying at
+      the head of a parade. If X-rays could penetrate the skull, one would find
+      his picture woven into my brain in vague outline, like the figures in old
+      tapestries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I remember a trip I took before the war from Munich to Vienna on the
+      Oriental Express. I looked out upon the autumnal mellowness of the country
+      around the Bavarian lakes and the golden glow of the Wiener Wald. But
+      across all this glory that I drank in leaning back on the comfortable seat
+      in luxurious contentment, there steadily ran an ugly black spot&mdash;a
+      flaw in the window-pane. That is the way my obstinate comrade flits across
+      woods and walls, stands still when I stand still, dances over the faces of
+      passers-by, over the asphalt paving wet from the rain, over everything my
+      eyes happen to fall upon. He interposes himself between me and the world,
+      just like that flaw in the window-pane, which degraded everything I saw to
+      the quality of the background that it made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The physicians, of course, know better. They do not believe that He lives
+      in me and stays by me like a sworn comrade. From the standpoint of science
+      it rests with me not to drag him round any longer, but to give him his
+      dismissal, precisely as I might have freed myself from the annoying spot
+      by angrily smashing the window-pane. The physicians do not believe that
+      one human being can unite himself at death with another human being and
+      continue to live on in him with obstinate persistence. It is their opinion
+      that a man standing at a window should see the house opposite but never
+      the wall of the room behind his back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The physicians only believe in things that <i>are</i>. Such superstitions
+      as that a man can carry dead men within him and see them standing in front
+      of him so distinctly that they hide a picture behind them from his sight,
+      do not come within the range of the gentlemen's reasoning. In their lives
+      death plays no part. A patient who dies ceases to be a patient. And what
+      does the day know of the night, though the one forever succeeds the other?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I know it is not I who forcibly drag the dead comrade through my life.
+      I know that the dead man's life within me is stronger than my own life. It
+      may be that the shapes I see flitting across the wall papers, cowering in
+      corners and staring into the lighted room from dark balconies, and
+      knocking so hard on the windows that the panes rattle, are only visions
+      and nothing more. Where do they come from? <i>My</i> brain furnishes the
+      picture, <i>my</i> eyes provide the projection, but it is the dead man
+      that sits at the crank. He tends to the film. The show begins when it
+      suits Him and does not stop as long as He turns the crank. How can I help
+      seeing what He shows me? If I close my eyes the picture falls upon the
+      inside of my lids, and the drama plays inside of me instead of dancing far
+      away over doors and walls.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I should be the stronger of the two, they say. But you cannot kill a dead
+      man, the physicians should know that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Are not the paintings by Titian and Michael Angelo still hanging in the
+      museums centuries after Titian and Michael Angelo lived? And the pictures
+      that a dying man chiseled into my brain fourteen months ago with the
+      prodigious strength of his final agony&mdash;are they supposed to
+      disappear simply because the man that created them is lying in his
+      soldier's grave?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Who, when he reads or hears the word "woods," does not see some woods he
+      has once walked through or looked out on from a train window? Or when a
+      man speaks of his dead father does he not see the face that has long been
+      rotting in the grave appear again, now stern, now gentle, now in the
+      rigidity of the last moments? What would our whole existence be without
+      these visions which, each at its own word, rise up for moments out of
+      oblivion as if in the glare of a flashlight?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sick? Of course. The world is sore, and will have no words or pictures
+      that do not have reference to the wholesale graves. Not for a moment can
+      the comrade within me join the rest of the dead, because everything that
+      happens is as a flashlight falling upon him. There's the newspaper each
+      morning to begin with: "Ships sunk," "Attacks repulsed." And immediately
+      the film reels off a whirl of gasping, struggling men, fingers rising out
+      of mountainous waves grasping for life once more, faces disfigured by pain
+      and fury. Every conversation that one overhears, every shop window, every
+      breath that is drawn is a reminder of the wholesale carnage. Even the
+      silence of the night is a reminder. Does not each tick of the second-hand
+      mark the death rattle of thousands of men? In order to hear the hell
+      raging yonder on the other side of the thick wall of air, is it not enough
+      to know of chins blown off, throats cut open, and corpses locked in a
+      death embrace?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If a man were lying comfortably in bed and then found out for certain that
+      some one next door was being murdered, would you say he was sick if he
+      jumped up out of bed with his heart pounding? And are we anything but next
+      door to the places where thousands duck down in frantic terror, where the
+      earth spits mangled fragments of bodies up into the sky, and the sky
+      hammers down on the earth with fists of iron? Can a man live at a distance
+      from his crucified self when the whole world resounds with reminders of
+      these horrors?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the others that are sick. They are sick who gloat over news of
+      victories and see conquered miles of territory rise resplendent above
+      mounds of corpses. They are sick who stretch a wall of flags between
+      themselves and their humanity so as not to know what crimes are being
+      committed against their brothers in the beyond that they call "the front."
+      Every man is sick who still can think, talk, discuss, sleep, knowing that
+      other men holding their own entrails in their hands are crawling like
+      half-crushed worms across the furrows in the fields and before they reach
+      the stations for the wounded are dying off like animals, while somewhere,
+      far away, a woman with passionate longing is dreaming beside an empty bed.
+      All those are sick who can fail to hear the moaning, the gnashing of
+      teeth, the howling, the crashing and bursting, the wailing and cursing and
+      agonizing in death, because the murmur of everyday affairs is around them
+      or the blissful silence of night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the deaf and the blind that are sick, not I!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is the dull ones that are sick, those whose souls sing neither
+      compassion for others nor their own anger. All those numerous people are
+      sick who, like a violin without strings, merely echo every sound. Or would
+      you say that the man whose memory is like a photographic plate on which
+      the light has fallen and which cannot record any more impressions, is the
+      healthy man? Is not memory the very highest possession of every human
+      being? It is the treasure that animals do not own, because they are
+      incapable of holding the past and reviving it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Am I to be cured of my memory as from an illness? Why, without my memory I
+      would not be myself, because every man is built up of his memories and
+      really lives only as long as he goes through life like a loaded camera.
+      Supposing I could not tell where I lived in my childhood, what color my
+      father's eyes and my mother's hair were, and supposing at any moment that
+      I were called upon to give an account, I could not turn the leaves of the
+      past and point to the right picture, how quick they would be to diagnose
+      my case as feeblemindedness, or imbecility. Then, to be considered
+      mentally normal, must one treat one's brain like a slate to be sponged off
+      and be able at command to tear out pictures that have burned the most
+      hideous misery into the soul, and throw them away as one does leaves from
+      an album of photographs?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One man died before my eyes, he died hard, torn asunder after a frightful
+      struggle between the two Titans, Life and Death. Am I sick, then, if I
+      experience all over again all the phases of his agonizing&mdash;preserved
+      in my brain like snapshots&mdash;as long as every happening inexorably
+      opens the pages of this series? And the other people, are they well,
+      those, I mean, who skip the pages as though they were blank that record
+      the dismemberment, the mutilation, the crushing of their brothers, the
+      slow writhing to death of men caught in barbed wire entanglements?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Tell me, my dear doctors, at just what point am I to begin to forget?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Am I to forget I was in the war? Am I to forget the moment in the smoky
+      railway station when I leaned out of the car window and saw my boy ashen
+      white, with compressed lips, standing beside his mother, and I made a poor
+      show of cheerfulness and talked of seeing them soon again, while my eyes
+      greedily searched the features of my wife and child, and my soul drank in
+      the picture of them like parched lips after a many days' march drinking in
+      the water so madly longed for? Am I to forget the choking and the
+      bitterness in my mouth when the train began to move and the distance
+      swallowed up my child, my wife, my world?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And the whole ride to death, when I was the only military traveler in a
+      car full of happy family men off for a summer Sunday in the country&mdash;am
+      I to tear it out of my memory like so much cumbersome waste paper? Am I to
+      forget how I felt when it grew quieter at each station, as though life
+      were crumbling away, bit by bit, until at midnight only one or two sleepy
+      soldiers remained in my coach and an ashen young face drawn with sorrow
+      hovered about the flickering lamplight? Must one actually be sick if it is
+      like an incurable wound always to feel that leave-taking of home and
+      warmth, that riding away with hatred and danger awaiting one at the end of
+      the trip? Is there anything harder to understand&mdash;when have men done
+      anything madder&mdash;than this: to race through the night at sixty miles
+      an hour, to run away from all love, all security, to leave the train and
+      take another train because it is the only one that goes to where invisible
+      machines belch red-hot pieces, of iron and Death casts out a finely meshed
+      net of steel and lead to capture men? Who will obliterate from my soul the
+      picture of that small dirty junction, the shivering, sleepy soldiers
+      without any intoxication or music in their blood, looking wistfully after
+      the civilian's train and its brightly lighted windows as it disappeared
+      behind the trees with a jolly blow of its whistle? Who will obliterate the
+      picture of that exchanging for Death in the drab light of early dawn?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And supposing I could cross out that first endless night as something
+      settled and done with, would not the next morning remain, when our train
+      stopped at a switch in the middle of a wide, dewy meadow, and we were told
+      that we had to wait to let hospital trains go by? How shall I ever banish
+      the memory of those thick exhalations of lysol and blood blown upon the
+      happy fields from a dragon's nostrils? Won't I forever see those endless
+      serpents creeping up so indolently, as though surfeited with mangled human
+      flesh? From hundreds of windows white bandages gleamed and dull, glassy
+      eyes stared out. Lying, crouching, on top of each other, body to body,
+      they even hung on to the running-boards like bloody bunches of grapes, an
+      overflowing abundance of distress and agony. And those wretched remains of
+      strength and youth, those bruised and battered men, looked with pity, yes,
+      <i>with pity</i>, at our train. Am I really sick because those glances of
+      warm compassion from bleeding cripples to sound, strapping young fellows
+      burn in my soul with a fire never to be extinguished? An apprehension sent
+      a chill through our whole train, the foreboding of a hell that one would
+      rather run away from wrapped in bloody bandages than go to meet whole and
+      strong. And when this shudder of apprehension has turned into reality,
+      into experience and memory, is it to be shaken off as long as such trains
+      still meet every day? A casual remark about the transfer of troops, news
+      of fresh battles inevitably recall this first actual contact with the war,
+      just as a certain note when struck will produce a certain tone, and I see
+      the tracks and ties and stones spattered with blood, shining in the early
+      morning light of a summer day&mdash;signposts pointing to the front.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The Front!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Am <i>I</i> really the sick person because I cannot utter that word or
+      write it down without my tongue growing coated from the intense hatred I
+      feel? Axe not the others mad who look upon this wholesale
+      cripple-and-corpse-factory with a mixture of religious devotion, romantic
+      longing and shy sympathy? Would it not be wiser once for a change to
+      examine those others for the state of their mind? Must <i>I</i> disclose
+      it to my wise physicians, who watch over me so compassionately, that all
+      this mischief is the work of a few words that have been let loose upon
+      humanity like a pack of mad dogs?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Front&mdash;Enemy&mdash;Hero's death&mdash;Victory&mdash;the curs rage
+      through the world with frothing mouth and rolling eyes. Millions who have
+      been carefully inoculated against smallpox, cholera and typhoid fever are
+      chased into madness. Millions, on either side, are packed into cars&mdash;ride,
+      singing, to meet each other at the front&mdash;hack, stab, shoot at each
+      other, blow each other into bits, give their flesh and their bones for the
+      bloody hash out of which the dish of peace is to be cooked for those
+      fortunate ones who give the flesh of their calves and oxen to their
+      fatherland for a hundred per cent profit, instead of carrying their own
+      flesh to market for fifty cents a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suppose the word "war" had never been invented and had never been hallowed
+      through the ages and decked with gay trappings. Who would dare to
+      supplement the deficient phrase, "declaration of war," by the following
+      speech?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "After long, fruitless negotiations our emissary to the government of X
+      left to-day. From the window of his parlor car he raised his silk hat to
+      the gentlemen who had escorted him to the station, and he will not meet
+      them with a friendly smile again until <i>you</i> have made corpses of
+      many hundreds of thousands of men in the country of X. Up then! Squeeze
+      yourself into box-cars meant for six horses or twenty-eight men! Ride to
+      meet them, those other men. Knock them dead, hack off their heads, live
+      like wild beasts in damp excavations, in neglect, in filth, overrun with
+      lice, until we shall deem the time has come again for our emissary to take
+      a seat in a parlor car and lift his silk hat, and in ornate rooms politely
+      and aristocratically dispute over the advantages which our big merchants
+      and manufacturers are to derive from the slaughter. Then as many of you as
+      are not rotting under the ground or hobbling on crutches and begging from
+      door to door may return to your half-starved families, and may&mdash;nay
+      must!&mdash;take up your work again with redoubled energy, more
+      indefatigably and yet with fewer demands than before, so as to be able to
+      pay in sweat and privation for the shoes that you wore out in hundreds of
+      marches and the clothes that decayed on your bodies."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A fool he who would sue for a following in such terms! But <i>no</i> fools
+      they who are the victims, who freeze, starve, kill, and let themselves be
+      killed, just because they have learned to believe that this must be so,
+      once the mad dog War has burst his chains and bitten the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is this what the wars were like from which the word "war" has come down to
+      us? Did not war use to guarantee booty? Were not the mercenaries led on by
+      hopes of a gay, lawless life&mdash;women and ducats and gold-caparisoned
+      steeds? Is this cowering under iron discipline, this holding out of your
+      head to be chopped off, this passive play with monsters that spill their
+      hellish cauldron on you from out of the blue distance still "war"? War was
+      the collision of the superfluous forces, the ruffians of all nations.
+      Youth, for whom the town had grown too small and the doublet too tight,
+      ventured out, intoxicated by the play of its own muscles. And now shall
+      the same word hold good when men already anchored to house and home are
+      torn away and whipped into the ranks and laid out before the enemy, and
+      made to wait, defenseless, in dull resignation, like supers in this duel
+      of the munition industries?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Is it right to misuse the word "war" as a standard when it is not courage
+      and strength that count, but explosive bombs and the length of range of
+      the guns and the speed with which women and children turn out shells? We
+      used to speak with horror of the tyrants of dark ages, who threw helpless
+      men and women to the lions and tigers; but now is there one of us who
+      would not mention them with respect in comparison with the rulers who are
+      at present directing the struggle between men and machines, as though it
+      were a puppet show at the end of telegraph wires, and who are animated by
+      the delightful hope that our supply of human flesh may outlast the enemy's
+      supply of steel and iron?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No! All words coined before this carnage began are too beautiful and too
+      honest, like the word "front," which I have learned to abhor. Are you
+      "facing" the enemy when their artillery is hidden behind mountains and
+      sends death over a distance of a day's journey, and when their sappers
+      come creeping up thirty feet below the surface? And your "front" is a
+      terminal station, a little house all shot up, behind which the tracks have
+      been torn up because the trains turn back here after unloading their cargo
+      of fresh, sunburned men, to call for them again when they have emerged
+      from the machines with torn limbs and faces covered with verdigris.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was towards evening when I got off the train at this terminal. A
+      bearded soldier with his right arm in a sling was sitting on the ground
+      leaning against the iron railing around the platform. When he saw me pass
+      by, quite spick and span, he stroked his right arm tenderly with his left
+      hand and threw me an ugly look of hatred and called out through clenched
+      teeth:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, Lieutenant, here's the place for man salad."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Am I to forget the wicked grin that widened his mouth, already distorted
+      by pain? Am I sick because each time I hear the word "front" an echo, "man
+      salad," inevitably croaks in my ears? Or are the others sick who do not
+      hear "man salad," but swallow down the cowardly stuff written by our war
+      bards, who try like industrious salesmen to make the brand "world war"
+      famous, because in reward they will have the privilege of dashing about in
+      automobiles like commanding generals instead of being forced to face death
+      in muddy ditches and be bossed by a little corporal?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Are there really human beings of flesh and blood who can still take a
+      newspaper in their hands and not foam at the mouth with rage? Can one
+      carry in one's brain the picture of wounded men lying exposed on slimy
+      fields in the pouring rain, slowly, dumbly bleeding to death, and yet
+      quietly read the vile stuff written about "perfect hospital service,"
+      "smoothly running ambulances," and "elegantly papered trenches," with
+      which these fellows poetize themselves free from military service?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Men come home with motionless, astonished eyes, still reflecting death.
+      They walk about shyly, like somnambulists in brightly lighted streets. In
+      their ears there still resound the bestial howls of fury that they
+      themselves bellowed into the hurricane of the drumfire so as to keep from
+      bursting from inner stress. They come loaded down, like beasts of burden,
+      with horrors, the astonished looks of bayoneted, dying foes on their
+      conscience&mdash;and they don't dare open their mouths because everybody,
+      wife and child included, grinds out the same tune, a flow of curious
+      questions about shells, gas bombs and bayonet attacks. So the days of the
+      furlough expire, one by one, and the return to death is almost a
+      deliverance from the shame of being a coward in disguise among the friends
+      at home, to whom dying and killing have become mere commonplaces.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So be it, my dear doctors! It is an honor to be charged with madness if
+      those villains are not called mad who, to save their own necks, have so
+      gloriously hardened the people's hearts and abolished pity and implanted
+      pride in the enemy's suffering, instead of acting as the one intermediary
+      between distress and power and arousing the conscience of the world by
+      going to the most frequented places and shouting <i>"Man Sal-ad"</i>
+      through a megaphone so loud and so long that at length all those whose
+      fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, have gone to the corpse-factory will be
+      seized with terror and all the throats in the world will be <i>one</i>
+      echo to "Man Sal-ad!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If you were here right now, dear doctors, I could show you my comrade,
+      summoned to this room in the very body by the flames of hate against news
+      from the front and against the indifference of the hinterland. I feel him
+      standing behind my back, but his face is lying on the white sheet in front
+      of me, like a faint water-mark, and my pen races frantically so as to
+      cover his eyes at least with letters and hide their reproachful stare.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Large, widening, hideously distorted, his face, slowly swelling, rises
+      from the paper like the face of Jesus of the handkerchief.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was just like this that the three war correspondents saw him lying at
+      the edge of the woods on that midsummer morning and&mdash;turned away
+      involuntarily with almost the military exactness of soldiers at a "right
+      about face." Their visit was meant for <i>me</i>! I was to furnish them
+      with carriage and horses because the automobile that was to have darted
+      them through the danger zone was lying on the road to Goerz with a broken
+      axle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Charming gentlemen, in wonderfully well-cut breeches and traveling caps,
+      looking as if they had stepped out of a Sherlock Holmes motion picture.
+      They offered to carry letters back and deliver messages, and they found
+      everything on my place perfectly fascinating, and laughed heartily at my
+      mattress of willow twigs&mdash;and were particularly grateful when the
+      carriage stood ready to carry them off before the daily bombardment of the
+      Italians began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On driving out of the woods they had to pass the wounded man again with
+      the hideously disfigured face. He was crouching on the meadow. But this
+      time they did not see him. As if at command they turned their heads the
+      other way and with animated gestures viewed the damage done by an air raid
+      the day before, as though they were already sitting over a table in a
+      coffee-house.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I lost my breath, as though I had run a long distance up-hill. The place
+      where I stood suddenly seemed strange and altered. Was that the same piece
+      of woods into which shells had so often come crashing, which the huge
+      Caproni planes had circled about with wide-spread wings like vultures,
+      shedding bombs, while our machine guns lashed the leaves with a hailstorm
+      of shot? Was it out of <i>this</i> piece of woods that three men had just
+      driven off, healthy, unscathed, gaily waving their caps? Where was the
+      wall that held us others imprisoned under the cracking branches? Was there
+      not a door that opened only to let out pale, sunken cheeks, feverish eyes,
+      or mangled limbs?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The carriage rolled lightly over the field, trampled down brown, and the
+      one thing missing to make it the perfect picture of a pleasure trip was
+      the brilliant red of a Baedeker.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those men were riding back home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To wife and child, perhaps?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A painful pulling and tugging, as though my eyes were caught to the
+      carriage wheels. Then my body rebounded&mdash;as if torn off&mdash;back
+      into emptiness, and&mdash;at that moment, just when my soul was as if
+      ploughed up by the carriage and laid bare and defenseless by yearning&mdash;at
+      that moment the experience sprang upon me&mdash;with one dreadful leap,
+      one single bite&mdash;incurable for the rest of my life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unsuspecting, I crossed over to the wounded man upon whom the three had so
+      unceremoniously turned their backs, as though he did not also belong to
+      the interesting museum of shell holes that they had come to inspect. He
+      was cowering near the dirty ragged little Red Cross flag, with his head
+      between his knees, and did not hear me come up. Behind him lay the brown
+      spot which stood out from the green still left on the field like a circus
+      ring. The wounded soldiers who gathered here every morning at dawn to be
+      driven to the field hospital in the wagons that brought us ammunition had
+      rubbed this spot in like a favorite corner of a sofa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      How many I had seen crouching there like that, for ten&mdash;often twelve
+      hours, when the wagons had left too early, or had been overcrowded, or,
+      after violent fighting, had stood waiting in line at the munitions depot
+      behind the lines. Happy fellows, some of them, with broken arms or legs,
+      the war slang, "a thousand-dollar shot," on their pale, yet laughing lips&mdash;enviously
+      ogled by the men with slight wounds or the men sick with typhoid fever,
+      who would all gladly have sacrificed a thousand dollars and a limb into
+      the bargain for the same certainty of not having to return to the front
+      again. How many I had seen rolling on the ground, biting into the earth in
+      their agony&mdash;how many in the pouring rain, half buried already in the
+      mud, their bodies ripped open, groaning and whimpering and outbellowing
+      the storm.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This man seemed to be only slightly hurt in the right leg. The blood had
+      oozed out on one spot through the hastily made bandage, so I offered him
+      my first-aid package, besides cognac and cigarettes. But he did not move.
+      It was not until I laid my hand on his shoulder that he raised his head&mdash;and
+      the face he showed me threw me back like a blow on the chest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His mouth and nose had come apart, and crept like a thick vine up his
+      right cheek&mdash;which was no longer a cheek. A chunk of bluish red flesh
+      swelled up there, covered by skin stretched to bursting and shining from
+      being drawn so tight. The whole right side of his face seemed more like an
+      exotic fruit than a human countenance, while from the left side, from out
+      of grey twitching misery, a sad, frightened eye looked up at me.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Violent terror slung itself round my neck like a lasso.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was it? Such a frightful thing as that even this field, this
+      waiting-room to the Beyond, had never witnessed before. Even the awful
+      recollection of another wounded man who had stood at this same spot a few
+      days before, his hands looking as though they were modeling something,
+      while in actuality they were carefully holding his own entrails&mdash;even
+      that hideous recollection faded before the sight of this Janus head, all
+      peace, all gentle humanity on one side; all war, all distorted, puffed-up
+      image of fiendish hatred on the other side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Shrapnel?" I stammered timidly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The answer was confused. All I could get out of it was that a dumdum
+      bullet had smashed his right shinbone. But what was that he kept mumbling
+      about a hook each time his hand trembled up to his glowing cheek?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I could not understand him; for the thing he had gone through still
+      seethed in his veins so violently that he spoke as though it were just
+      then happening and I were witnessing it. His peasant's mind could not
+      comprehend that there were people who had not seen or heard of the
+      tremendous misery of the last hours he had gone through. So it was more by
+      guess-work that I gradually pieced together his story from unfinished
+      sentences, coarse oaths, and groans.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a whole night, after a repulsed attack on the enemy's trench, he had
+      lain with a broken leg, unconscious, near our own wire entanglements. At
+      dawn they threw out the iron grappling hook for him, with which they pull
+      over into the trench the corpses of friend and foe so as to be able to
+      bury them unceremoniously before the sun of Goerz has a chance to do its
+      work. With this hook, dipped in hundreds of corpses, a dunce&mdash;"God
+      damn him!"&mdash;had torn his cheek open before a more skilful hand caught
+      hold of it and got him over safely. And now he asked humbly to be taken
+      away to the hospital quickly, because he was worried&mdash;about his leg
+      and being a crippled beggar the rest of his life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I ran off as though mad dogs were at my heels, over rocks and roots,
+      through the woods to the next detachment. In vain! In the whole woods
+      there was not a single vehicle to be found. I had given up the last one to
+      those three war correspondents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why had I not asked them to take the one wounded man lying on the field
+      along with them and leave him at the hospital that they would pass? Why
+      had they themselves not thought of doing their human duty? Why?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I clenched my fists in impotent fury and caught myself reaching for my
+      revolver as though I could still shoot those gay sparks in their carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Breathless, overheated from the long race, I tottered back, my knees
+      trembling the whole way. I felt utterly broken, as though I were carrying
+      on my shoulders a picture, weighing a ton, of men who for sport angle for
+      human carrion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An odd choking and tickling came into my throat&mdash;a sensation I had
+      not known since childhood&mdash;when, back at my post again, I had to
+      listen to the low whimpering of the helpless man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was no longer alone. In my absence a little band of slightly wounded
+      men had joined him. Peering between the tree trunks I saw them sitting in
+      a circle on the field, while the man who had been hooked was hopping about
+      holding on to his injured leg and tossing his head from one shoulder to
+      the other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Towards noon I sent my corporals in search of a vehicle, promising them a
+      princely reward, while I ran to the field again with my whisky flask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was no longer dancing about. He was kneeling in the center of the
+      circle of wounded men, his body bent over, rolling his head on the ground
+      as though it were a thing apart from himself. Suddenly he jumped up with
+      such a yell of fury that a frightened murmur came even from the line of
+      wounded men, who had been sitting there indifferent, sunk in their own
+      suffering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was no longer anything human. The man's skin could not stand any more
+      stretching and had burst. The broad splits ran apart like the lines of a
+      compass and in the middle the raw flesh glowed and gushed out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he yelled! He hammered with his fist on the enormous purplish lump,
+      until he fell to his knees again moaning under the blows of his own hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was dark already when&mdash;at last!&mdash;they came and carted him
+      away. And when the night slowly wove its web of mist in the woods and I
+      lay wrapped in a mound of blankets, the only one who was still awake in
+      the throng of black tree-trunks that moved closer together in the darkness&mdash;there
+      he was back again, standing up stiff in the moonlight, his tortured cheek,
+      huge as a pumpkin, shining blue against the black shadows of the trees. It
+      glimmered like a will-o'-the-wisp, now here, now there. Night after night.
+      It shone into every dream, so that I forced my eyelids open with my
+      fingers&mdash;until, after ten frightful nights, my body broke down and
+      was carried, a shrieking, convulsed heap, to the same hospital in which He
+      had succumbed to blood-poisoning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now I am a madman! You can read it, black on white, on the placard at
+      the head of my bed. They pat me on the back soothingly, like a shying
+      horse, when I flare up and ask to be let out of this place in which <i>the
+      others</i> should be shut up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the others are free! From my window I can look over the garden wall
+      into the street, and see them hurrying along, raising their hats, shaking
+      hands, and crowding in front of the latest bulletin. I see women and
+      girls, dressed coquettishly, tripping along with pride shining in their
+      eyes, beside men whom a cross on the breast brands as murderers. I see
+      widows in long black veils&mdash;still patient. I see lads with flowers
+      stuck in their helmets ready to leave for the war. And not one of them
+      rebels! Not one of them sees bruised, mangled men cowering in dark
+      corners, men ripped apart by grappling hooks, men with their entrails
+      gushing out, and men with blue shining cheeks.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They go by under my window, gesticulating, enthusiastic; because the
+      enthusiastic phrases arrive coined fresh every day from the mint, and each
+      person feels sheltered and enveloped in a warmth of assent if the phrases
+      ring clear from his lips. I know that they keep quiet even when they would
+      like to speak, to cry out, to scream. I know that they hunt down
+      "slackers," and have no word of abuse for those who are a thousand times
+      worse cowards, those who clearly recognise the utter senselessness of this
+      butchery of millions, yet will not open their mouths for fear of the
+      censure of the thoughtless crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From my window I can see the whole globe spinning round like a crazy
+      whirligig, whipped on by haughty lords in cunning calculation and by venal
+      servants in sneaking submissiveness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I see the whole pack! The bawlers who are too empty and too lazy to
+      develop their own selves and want to puff themselves with the glittering
+      praise meant for their herd. The scoundrels who are protected by the
+      masses, carried by them and fed by them, and who look up sanctimoniously
+      to a bogy of their own invention, and hammer that bogy into the conscience
+      of millions of good men, until the mass has been forged that has neither
+      heart nor brain, but only fury and blind faith. I see the whole game
+      proceeding madly in blood and agony. I see the spectators going by
+      indifferently, and I am called a madman when I raise the window to call
+      down to them that the sons they have born and bred, the men they have
+      loved are being chased like wild animals, are being butchered like cattle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Those fools down there, who for the sake of respectable condolence calls,
+      for a neighbor's eyes raised heavenward in sympathy, sacrificed the
+      splendor and warmth of their lives, who threw their flesh and blood into
+      the barbed wire entanglements, to rot as carrion on the fields or be
+      hooked in with grappling hooks, who have no other consolation than that
+      the "enemy" have had the same done to them&mdash;those fools remain free;
+      and in their despicable vanity and wicked patience they may daily shove
+      fresh hecatombs out to the cannons. But I must stay here impotent&mdash;left
+      alone with the relentless comrade that my conscience gives birth to over
+      again every day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I stand at my window and between me and the street lie piled high the
+      bodies of the many I saw bleeding. And I stand here powerless&mdash;because
+      the revolver that was given me to shoot down poor homesick devils, forced
+      into a uniform by iron necessity, has been taken from me, out of fear that
+      I might dislodge a few mass murderers from their security and send them as
+      a warning example down to their victims.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So I must stay here, as a seer over the blind&mdash;behind iron gratings.
+      And all I can do is consign these leaves to the wind&mdash;every day write
+      it all down again and keep scattering the pages out on the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I will write indefatigably. I will sow the whole world with my pages.
+      Until the seed shall sprout in every heart, until every bedroom will be
+      entered by a blue apparition&mdash;a dear dead one showing his wounds; and
+      at last, at last, the glorious song of the world's redemption will resound
+      under my window, the wrathful cry shouted by a million throats:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Man Sal-ad!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      V. A HERO'S DEATH
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The staff physician had not understood. He shook his head, vexed, and
+      looked questioningly over the rims of his glasses at his assistant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his assistant had not understood either, and was embarrassed, and
+      stood stiffly without saying anything.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The only one who seemed to have any clue at all to the man's ravings was
+      his orderly. For two tears glistened on the upturned ends of his waxed
+      mustache. But the orderly spoke nothing but Hungarian, and the staff
+      physician turned away with a muttered "blooming idiot". Followed by his
+      flaxen-haired assistant, he made his way toward the operating room,
+      panting and perspiring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The huge ball of cotton, inside of which, according to the placard hanging
+      at the top of the bed, was hidden the head of First Lieutenant of the
+      Reserves, Otto Kadar, of the &mdash;&mdash;th Regiment of Field Artillery,
+      sank back on the pillow, and Miska seated himself again on his knapsack,
+      snuffed up his tears, put his head between his big unwashed hands, and
+      speculated despairingly about his future.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For it was plain that his Lieutenant could not last much longer. Miska
+      knew what was hidden in the huge cotton ball. He had seen the crushed
+      skull and the horrible grey mess under the bloody splinters which were the
+      brains of his poor Lieutenant, who had been such a good man and kind
+      superior. Miska could not hope for such wonderful luck a second time. You
+      didn't come across such a kind-hearted master twice in your life. The
+      many, many slices of salami that the Lieutenant always had given him from
+      his own store of provisions, the gentle, cordial words that Miska had
+      heard him whisper to every wounded man&mdash;all the memories of the long,
+      bloody months he had gone through dully beside his master almost like a
+      comrade, rose to his mind. He felt dreadfully sorry for himself, the good
+      fellow did, in his infinite defenselessness against the huge war machine
+      into which he would now be thrown again without the sure support of his
+      kind Lieutenant next to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His broad peasant's head between his hands, he crouched like a dog at the
+      feet of his dying master, and the tears rolled gently down his cheeks and
+      stuck one by one on the ends of his mustache glued with dust and pomade.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not quite clear to Miska either just why the poor Lieutenant kept
+      clamoring so frightfully for his talking-machine. All he knew was that the
+      officers had been sitting under cover, listening to the Rakoczy March on
+      the phonograph, when suddenly that accursed shell burst upon them and
+      everything disappeared in smoke and earth. He himself had been knocked
+      unconscious by a heavy board which came out of a clear sky and hit him on
+      the back. He had fallen flat and it was an eternity before he got his
+      breath back again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then&mdash;then&mdash;Miska's recollections of things after this were a
+      bit hazy&mdash;then he remembered an indescribable heap of splintered
+      boards and fallen beams, a hash of rags, cement, earth, human limbs, and
+      quantities of blood. And then&mdash;then he remembered&mdash;young
+      Meltzar. Meltzar was still sitting upright with his back against the
+      remains of the wall, and the record that had just played the Rakoczy March
+      and had miraculously remained whole was perched on the place where his
+      head belonged. But his head was not there. It was gone&mdash;completely
+      gone, while the black record remained, also leaning against the wall,
+      directly on top of the bloodsoaked collar. It was awful. Not one of the
+      soldiers had dared touch the upright body with the record exactly like a
+      head on its neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Brrr! A cold shiver ran down Miska's back at the recollection, and his
+      heart stopped beating in fright when just at that moment the Lieutenant
+      again began to scream:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Phonograph! Only a phonograph!"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Miska jumped up and saw the huge ball of cotton lift itself with an effort
+      from the pillow, and his officer's one remaining eye fix greedily upon
+      some invisible object. He stood there ashamed, as though guilty of a
+      crime, when indignant glances were darted at him from the other beds in
+      the ward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "This is unbearable!" cried a Major, who had been severely wounded, from
+      the other end of the long ward. "Carry the man out."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the Major spoke German, and Miska was more than ever at sea. He wiped
+      the sweat of anguish from his brow and explained to a lieutenant in the
+      next bed, since his master could not hear what he said anyhow, that the
+      phonograph had been broken&mdash;broken into a thousand pieces, else he
+      would never have left it there, but would surely have brought it along as
+      he had brought everything else belonging to his Lieutenant that he had
+      managed to find.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No one answered him. As at a word of command, each one of the officers the
+      whole length of the ward stuck his head under his pillow and pulled the
+      covers over his ears so as not to hear that horrible gurgling laugh which
+      changed into a howl or into infuriated cries for the phonograph. The old
+      Major even wrapped his blood-stained cloak around his head like a turban.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Lieutenant! I beg pardon, Lieutenant&mdash;&mdash;" Miska begged, and
+      very, very gently stroked his master's quivering knees with his big hard
+      palms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Lieutenant Kadar heard him not. Neither did he feel the heavy hand
+      resting on his knees. For, opposite him, young Meltzar was still sitting
+      with a flat, black, round head on his neck on which the Rakoczy March was
+      ingraved in spirals. And all at once the officer realized that for the
+      past six months he had done poor Meltzar a grievous injustice. How could
+      the poor fellow help his stupidity, how could he help his silly,
+      high-flown patriotic talk? How could he possibly have had sensible ideas
+      with a record for a head? Poor Meltzar!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lieutenant Kadar simply could not understand why it was that six months
+      before, right away, when young Meltzar announced his entrance into the
+      battery, he had not guessed what they had done to the boy in the
+      hinterland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They had given him a different head. They had unscrewed the handsome fair
+      young head of a lad of eighteen and in its place put a black, scratched-up
+      disc, which could do nothing but squeak the Rakoczy March. That had now
+      been proved! How the boy must have suffered whenever his superior officer,
+      his senior by twenty years, inflicted long sermons on him about humanity!
+      With the flat, round disc that they had put on him he of course could not
+      comprehend that the Italian soldiers being led past the battery, reeking
+      with blood and in rags, would also much rather have stayed at home, if a
+      bulletin on the street corner had not forced them to leave their homes
+      immediately, just as the mobilization in Hungary had forced the Hungarian
+      gunners to leave their homes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now for the first time Lieutenant Kadar comprehended the young man's
+      unbending resistance to him. Now at last he realized why this boy, who
+      could have been his son, had so completely ignored his wisest, kindest
+      admonitions and explanations, and had always responded by whistling the
+      Rakoczy March through clenched teeth and hissing the stereotyped
+      fulmination, "The dogs ought to be shot to pieces."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So then it was not because of his being young and stupid that Meltzar had
+      behaved as he did; not because he had come direct from the military
+      academy to the trenches. The phonograph record was to blame, the
+      phonograph record!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lieutenant Kadar felt his veins swell up like ropes and his blood pound on
+      his temples like blows on an anvil, so great was his wrath against the
+      wrongdoers who had treacherously unscrewed poor Meltzar's lovely young
+      head from his body.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And&mdash;this was the most gruesome&mdash;as he now thought of his
+      subordinates and fellow-officers, he saw them all going about exactly like
+      poor Meltzar, without heads on their bodies. He shut his eyes and tried to
+      recall the looks of his gunners&mdash;in vain! Not a single face rose
+      before his mind's eye. He had spent months and months among those men and
+      had not discovered until that moment that not one of them had a head on
+      his shoulders. Otherwise he would surely have remembered whether his
+      gunner had a mustache or not and whether the artillery captain was light
+      or dark. No! Nothing stuck in his mind&mdash;nothing but phonograph
+      records, hideous, black, round plates lying on bloody blouses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The whole region of the Isonzo suddenly lay spread out way below him like
+      a huge map such as he had often seen in illustrated papers. The silver
+      ribbon of the river wound in and out among hills and coppices, and
+      Lieutenant Kadar soared high above the welter down below without motor or
+      aeroplane, but borne along merely by his own outspread arms. And
+      everywhere he looked, on every hill and in every hollow, he saw the horns
+      of innumerable talking-machines growing out of the ground. Thousands upon
+      thousands of those familiar cornucopias of bright lacquer with gilt edges
+      pointed their open mouths up at him. And each one was the center of a
+      swarming ant-hill of busy gunners carrying shot and shell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now Lieutenant Kadar saw it very distinctly: all the men had records
+      on their necks like young Meltzar. Not a single one carried his own head.
+      But when the shells burst with a howl from the lacquered horns and flew
+      straight into an ant-hill, then the flat, black discs broke apart and at
+      the very same instant changed back into real heads. From his height
+      Lieutenant Kadar saw the brains gush out of the shattered discs and the
+      evenly-marked surfaces turn on the second into ashen, agonized human
+      countenances.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everything seemed to be revealed now in one stroke to the dying lieutenant&mdash;all
+      the secrets of the war, all the problems he had brooded over for many
+      months past. So he had the key to the riddle. These people evidently did
+      not get their heads back until they were about to die. Somewhere&mdash;somewhere&mdash;far
+      back&mdash;far back of the lines, their heads had been unscrewed and
+      replaced by records that could do nothing but play the Rakoczy March.
+      Prepared in this fashion, they had been jammed into the trains and sent to
+      the front, like poor Meltzar, like himself, like all of them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In a fury of anger, the ball of cotton tossed itself up again with a jerk.
+      Lieutenant Kadar wanted to jump out of bed and reveal the secret to his
+      men, and urge them to insist upon having their heads back again. He wanted
+      to whisper the secret to each individual along the entire front, from
+      Plava all the way down to the sea. He wanted to tell it to each gunner,
+      each soldier in the infantry and even to the Italians over there! He even
+      wanted to tell it to the Italians. The Italians, too, had had records
+      screwed on to their necks. And they should go back home, too, back to
+      Verona, to Venice, to Naples, where their heads lay piled up in the
+      store-houses for safekeeping until the war was over. Lieutenant Kadar
+      wanted to run from one man to another, so as to help each individual to
+      recover his head, whether friend or foe.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But all at once he noticed he could not walk. And he wasn't soaring any
+      more either. Heavy iron weights clamped his feet down to the bed to keep
+      him from revealing the great secret.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Well, then, he would shout it out in a roar, in a voice supernaturally
+      loud that would sound above the bursting of the shells and the blare of
+      trumpets on the Day of Judgment, and proclaim the truth from Plava to
+      Trieste, even into the Tyrol. He would shout as no man had ever shouted
+      before:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Phonograph!&mdash;Bring the heads!&mdash;Phonograph!&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here his voice suddenly broke with a gurgling sound of agony right in the
+      midst of his message of salvation. It hurt too much. He could not shout.
+      He felt as though at each word a sharp needle went deep into his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A needle?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course! How could he have forgotten it? His head had been screwed off,
+      too. He wore a record on his neck, too, like all the others. When he tried
+      to say something, the needle stuck itself into his skull and ran
+      mercilessly along all the coils of his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No! He could not bear it! He'd rather keep quiet&mdash;keep the secret to
+      himself. Only not to feel that pain&mdash;that maddening pain in his head!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the machine ran on. Lieutenant Kadar grabbed his head with both hands
+      and dug his nails deep into his temples. If he didn't stop that thing in
+      time from going round and round, then his revolving head would certainly
+      break his neck in a few seconds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Icy drops of anguish flowed from all his pores. "Miska!" he yelled in the
+      extreme of his distress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Miska did not know what to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The record kept on revolving and joyously thrummed the Rakoczy March. All
+      the sinews in the Lieutenant's body grew tense. Again and again he felt
+      his head slip from between his hands&mdash;his spine was already rising
+      before his eyes! With a last, frantic effort he tried once more to get his
+      hands inside the bandages and press his head forward. Then one more
+      dreadful gnashing of his teeth and one more horrible groan and&mdash;the
+      long ward was at length as silent as an empty church.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the flaxen-haired assistant returned from the operating-room Miska's
+      whining informed him from afar that another cot in the officers' division
+      was now vacant. The impatient old Major quite needlessly beckoned him to
+      his side and announced in a loud voice so that all the gentlemen could
+      hear:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The poor devil there has at last come to the end of his sufferings." Then
+      he added in a voice vibrating with respect: "He died like a true Hungarian&mdash;singing
+      the Rakoczy March."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      VI. HOME AGAIN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      At last the lake gleamed through the leaves, and the familiar grey chalk
+      mountains emerged into view, reaching out across the railroad embankment
+      as with threatening fingers deep down into the water. There, beyond the
+      smoky black opening of the short tunnel, the church steeple and a corner
+      of the castle peeped for an instant above the grove.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Bogdán leaned way out of the train window and looked at everything
+      with greedy eyes, like a man going over the inventory of his possessions,
+      all tense and distrustful, for fear something may have been lost in his
+      absence. As each group of trees for which he waited darted by, he gave a
+      satisfied nod, measuring the correctness of the landscape by the picture
+      of it that he carried fairly seared in his memory. Everything agreed.
+      Every milestone on the highroad, now running parallel to the railroad
+      tracks, stood on the right spot. There! The flash of the flaming red
+      copper beech, at which the horses always shied and once came within an ace
+      of upsetting the carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Bogdán drew a deep, heavy sigh, fished a small mirror out of his
+      pocket, and gave his face a final scrutiny before leaving the train. At
+      each station his face seemed to grow uglier. The right side was not so
+      bad. A bit of his mustache still remained, and his right cheek was fairly
+      smooth except for the gash at the corner of his mouth, which had not
+      healed properly. But the left side! He had let those damned city folk tell
+      him a whole lot of nonsense about the left side of his face. A bunch of
+      damned scoundrels they were, bent upon making fools of poor peasants, in
+      wartime just the same as in peacetime&mdash;all of them, the great doctor
+      as well as the fine ladies in their dazzling white gowns and with their
+      silly affected talk. Heaven knows it was no great trick to bamboozle a
+      simple coachman, who had managed with only the greatest pains to learn a
+      bit of reading and writing. They had smiled and simpered at him and were
+      so nice and had promised him such a paradise. And now, here he was
+      helpless, left all alone to himself, a lost man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a furious curse, he tore off his hat and threw it on the seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was that the face of a human being? Was it permitted to do such a thing to
+      a man? His nose looked like a patchwork of small dice of different colors.
+      His mouth was awry, and the whole left cheek was like a piece of bloated
+      raw meat, red and criss-crossed with deep scars. Ugh! How ugly! A fright!
+      And besides, instead of a cheekbone, he had a long hollow, deep enough to
+      hold a man's finger. And it was for this he had let himself be tortured
+      so? For this he had let himself be enticed seventeen times, like a patient
+      sheep, into that confounded room with the glass walls and the shining
+      instruments? A shudder ran down his back at the recollection of the
+      tortures he had gone through with clenched teeth, just to look like a
+      human being again and be able to go back home to his bride.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now he <i>was</i> home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The train pulled out of the tunnel, the whistle blew, and the dwarf
+      acacias in front of the station-master's hut sent a greeting through the
+      window. Grimly John Bogdán dragged his heavy bag through the train
+      corridor, descended the steps hesitatingly, and stood there at a loss,
+      looking around for help as the train rolled on behind his back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took out his large flowered handkerchief and wiped off the heavy beads
+      of perspiration from his forehead. What was he to do now? Why had he come
+      here at all? Now that he had finally set foot again on the home soil for
+      which he had yearned so ardently, a great longing came over him for the
+      hospital, which he had left that very morning, only a few hours before,
+      full of rejoicing. He thought of the long ward with all those men wrapped
+      in bandages who limped and hobbled, lame, blind or disfigured. There
+      nobody was revolted by the sight of his mutilated face, no indeed. On the
+      contrary, most of them envied him. He was at least capable of going back
+      to work, his arms and legs were sound, and his right eye was perfect. Many
+      would have been ready to exchange places with him. Some had begrudged him
+      his lot and said it was wrong for the government to have granted him a
+      pension on account of losing his left eye. One eye and a face a little
+      scratched up&mdash;what was that compared with a wooden leg, a crippled
+      arm, or a perforated lung, which wheezed and rattled like a poor machine
+      at the slightest exertion?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Among the many cripples in the hospital John Bogdán was looked upon as a
+      lucky devil, a celebrity. Everybody knew his story. The visitors to the
+      hospital wanted first of all to see the man who had had himself operated
+      on seventeen times and the skin cut away in bands from his back, his
+      chest, and his thighs. After each operation, as soon as the bandages were
+      removed, the door to his ward never remained shut, a hundred opinions were
+      pronounced, and every newcomer was given a detailed description of how
+      terrible his face had been before. The few men who had shared Bogdán's
+      room with him from the start described the former awfulness of his face
+      with a sort of pride, as though they had taken part in the successful
+      operations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Thus John Bogdán had gradually become almost vain of his shocking
+      mutilation and the progress of the beautifying process. And when he left
+      the hospital, it was with the expectation of being admired as a sensation
+      in his village.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Alone in the world, with no relatives to go to, with nothing but his
+      knapsack and his little trunk, the brilliant sunlight of the Hungarian
+      plain country flooding down on him, and the village stretching away to a
+      distance before him, John Bogdán suddenly felt himself a prey to timidity,
+      to a terror that he had not known amid the bursting of the shells, the
+      most violent charges, the most ferocious hand-to-hand encounters. His
+      inert peasant intellect, his nature crudely compounded of wilfulness and
+      vanity, had always been a stranger to deep-going reflections. Yet an
+      instinctive misgiving, the sense of distrust and hostility that
+      overwhelmed him, told him plainly enough that he was about to face
+      disillusionment and mortification such as he had not dreamed of in the
+      hospital.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted his luggage to his back dejectedly and walked toward the exit
+      with hesitating steps. There, in the shadow of the dusty acacias that he
+      had seen grow up and that had seen him grow up, he felt himself confronted
+      with his former self, with the handsome John Bogdán who was known in the
+      village as the smart coachman of the manor. A lot of good were all the
+      operations and patchwork now. The thing now was the painful contrast
+      between the high-spirited, forward lad, who on this spot had sung out a
+      last hoarse farewell to his sweetheart, Marcsa, on the first day of
+      mobilization, and the disfigured creature who was standing in front of the
+      same railroad station with one eye gone, a shattered cheekbone, a
+      patched-up cheek, and half a nose, embittered and cast down, as if it were
+      only that morning that he had met with the misfortune.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the small grille gate stood the wife of the station-guard, Kovacs&mdash;since
+      the beginning of the war Kovacs himself had been somewhere on the Russian
+      front&mdash;talking and holding the ticket-puncher, impatiently waiting
+      for the last passenger to pass through. John Bogdán saw her, and his heart
+      began to beat so violently that he involuntarily lingered at each step.
+      Would she recognize him, or would she not? His knee joints gave way as if
+      they had suddenly decayed, and his hand trembled as he held out the
+      ticket.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took the ticket and let him pass through&mdash;without a word!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Poor John Bogdán's breath stopped short.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he pulled himself together with all his might, looked her firmly in
+      the face with his one eye and said, with a painful effort to steady his
+      voice:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "How do you do?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "How do you do?" the woman rejoined. He encountered her eyes, saw them
+      widen into a stare, saw them grope over his mangled face, and then quickly
+      turn in another direction, as if she could not bear the sight. He wanted
+      to stop, but he noticed her lips quiver and heard a murmured "Jesus, son
+      of Mary," as if he were the devil incarnate. And he tottered on, deeply
+      wounded.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "She did not recognize me!" the blood hammered in his ears. "She did not
+      recognize me&mdash;did not recognize me!" He dragged himself to the bench
+      opposite the station, threw his luggage to the ground and sank down on the
+      seat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She did not recognize him! The wife of Kovacs, the station-guard, did not
+      recognize John Bogdán. The house of her parents stood next to the house of
+      his parents. She and he had gone to school together, they had been
+      confirmed together. He had held her in his arms and kissed and kissed her,
+      heaven knows how many times, before Kovacs came to the village to woo her.
+      And <i>she</i> had not recognized him! Not even by his voice, so great was
+      the change.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He glanced over at her again involuntarily, and saw her talking eagerly
+      with the station-master. From her gestures, he guessed she was telling of
+      the horrible sight she had just seen, the stranger soldier so hideously
+      disfigured. He uttered a short croaking sound, an abortive curse, and then
+      his head fell on his chest, and he sobbed like a deserted woman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was he to do? Go up to the castle, open the door to the servants'
+      quarters, and call out a saucy "Hello, Marcsa" to the astonished girl?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the way he had always thought of it. The devil knows how often he
+      had painted the picture to the dot&mdash;the maids' screaming, Marcsa's
+      cry of delight, her flinging her arms about his neck, and the thousand
+      questions that would come pouring down on him, while he would sit there
+      with Marcsa on his knees, and now and then throw out a casual reply to his
+      awed, attentive listeners.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But now&mdash;how about it now? Go to Marcsa? He? With that face, the face
+      that had made Julia, the station-guard's wife, cross herself in fright?
+      Wasn't Marcsa famed throughout the county for her sharp tongue and haughty
+      ways? She had snubbed the men by the score, laughed at them, made fools of
+      them all, until she finally fell in love with him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Bogdán thrust his fist into his mouth and dug his teeth into the
+      flesh, until the pain of it at length helped him subdue his sobbing. Then
+      he buried his head in his hands and tried to think.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Never in his life had anything gone amiss with him. He had always been
+      liked, at school, in the castle, and even in the barracks. He had gone
+      through life whistling contentedly, a good-looking alert lad, an excellent
+      jockey, and a coachman who drove with style and loved his horses, as his
+      horses loved him. When he deigned to toss a kiss to the women as he dashed
+      by, he was accustomed to see a flattered smile come to their faces. Only
+      with Marcsa did it take a little longer. But she was famous for her beauty
+      far and wide. Even John's master, the lord of the castle, had patted him
+      on the shoulder almost enviously when Marcsa and he had become engaged.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "A handsome couple," the pastor had said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Bogdán groped again for the little mirror in his pocket and then sat
+      with drooping body, oppressed by a profound melancholy. That thing in the
+      glass was to be the bridegroom of the beautiful Marcsa? What did that
+      ape's face, that piece of patchwork, that checkerboard which the damned
+      quack, the impostor, whom they called a distinguished medical authority, a
+      celebrated doctor, had basted together&mdash;what did it have to do with
+      <i>that</i> John Bogdán whom Marcsa had promised to marry and whom she had
+      accompanied to the station crying when he had gone off to the war? For
+      Marcsa there was only <i>one</i> John Bogdán, the one that was coachman to
+      the lord of the castle and the handsomest man in the village. Was he still
+      coachman? The lord would take care not to disgrace his magnificent pair
+      with such a scarecrow or drive to the county seat with such a monstrosity
+      on the box. Haying&mdash;that's what they would put him to&mdash;cleaning
+      out the dung from the stables. And Marcsa, the beautiful Marcsa whom all
+      the men were vying for, would she be the wife of a miserable day laborer?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No, of this John Bogdán was certain, the man sitting on the bench there
+      was no longer John Bogdán to Marcsa. She would not have him now&mdash;no
+      more than the lord would have him on the coachman's box. A cripple is a
+      cripple, and Marcsa had engaged herself to John Bogdán, not to the fright
+      that he was bringing back home to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His melancholy gradually gave way to an ungovernable fury against those
+      people in the city who had given him all that buncombe and talked him into
+      heaven knows what. Marcsa should be proud because he had been disfigured
+      in the service of his fatherland. Proud? Ha-ha!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed scornfully, and his fingers tightened convulsively about the
+      cursed mirror, until the glass broke into bits and cut his hand. The blood
+      trickled slowly down his sleeves without his noticing it, so great was his
+      rage against that bunch of aristocratic ladies in the hospital whose
+      twaddle had deprived him of his reason. They probably thought that a man
+      with one eye and half a nose was good enough for a peasant girl?
+      Fatherland? Would Marcsa go to the altar with the fatherland? Could she
+      show off the fatherland to the women when she would see them looking at
+      her pityingly? Did the fatherland drive through the village with ribbons
+      flying from its hat? Ridiculous! Sitting on the bench opposite the
+      station, with the sign of the village in view, a short name, a single
+      word, which comprised his whole life, all his memories, hopes and
+      experiences, John Bogdán suddenly thought of one of the village
+      characters, Peter the cripple, who had lived in the tumbledown hut behind
+      the mill many years before, when John was still a child. John saw him
+      quite distinctly, standing there with his noisy wooden leg and his sad,
+      starved, emaciated face. He, too, had sacrificed a part of himself, his
+      leg, "for the fatherland," in Bosnia during the occupation; and then he
+      had had to live in the old hovel all alone, made fun of by the children,
+      who imitated his walk, and grumblingly tolerated by the peasants, who
+      resented the imposition of this burden upon the community. "In the service
+      of the fatherland." Never had the "fatherland" been mentioned when Peter
+      the cripple went by. They called him contemptuously the village pauper,
+      and that was all there was to it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Bogdán gnashed his teeth in a rage that he had not thought of Peter
+      the cripple in the hospital. Then he would have given those city people a
+      piece of his mind. He would have told them what he thought of their silly,
+      prattling humbug about the fatherland and about the great honor it was to
+      return home to Marcsa looking like a monkey. If he had the doctor in his
+      clutches now! The fakir had photographed him, not once, but a dozen times,
+      from all sides, after each butchery, as though he had accomplished a
+      miracle, had turned out a wonderful masterpiece. And here Julia, even
+      Julia, his playmate, his neighbor, had not recognized him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So deep was John Bogdán sunk in his misery, so engulfed in grim plans of
+      vengeance, that he did not notice a man who had been standing in front of
+      him for several minutes, eyeing him curiously from every angle. Suddenly a
+      voice woke him up out of his brooding, and a hot wave surged into his
+      face, and his heart stood still with delighted terror, as he heard some
+      one say:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is that you, Bogdán?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He raised himself, happy at having been recognized after all. But the next
+      moment he knitted his brows in complete disappointment. It was Mihály the
+      humpback.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was no other man in the whole village, even in the whole county,
+      whose hand John Bogdán would not at that moment have grasped cordially in
+      a surge of gratitude. But this humpback&mdash;he never had wanted to have
+      anything to do with him, and now certainly not. The fellow might imagine
+      he had found a comrade, and was probably glad that he was no longer the
+      only disfigured person in the place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Yes, it's I. Well?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The humpback's small, piercing eyes searched Bogdán's scarred face
+      curiously, and he shook his head in pity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Well, well, the Russians certainly have done you up."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bogdán snarled at him like a vicious cur.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "It's none of your business. What right have you to talk? If I had come
+      into the world like you, with my belly on my back, the Russians couldn't
+      have done anything to me."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The humpback seated himself quietly beside John without showing the least
+      sign of being insulted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The war hasn't made you any politer, I can see that," he remarked drily.
+      "You're not exactly in a happy frame of mind, which does not surprise me.
+      Yes, that's the way it is. The poor people must give up their sound flesh
+      and bone so that the enemy should not deprive the rich of their
+      superfluity. You may bless your stars you came out of it as well as you
+      did."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I do," Bogdán growled with a glance of hatred. "The shells don't ask if
+      you are rich or poor. Counts and barons are lying out there, rotting in
+      the sun like dead beasts. Any man that God has not smitten in his cradle
+      so that he's not fit to be either a man or a woman is out in the
+      battlefield now, whether he's as poor as a church mouse or used to eating
+      from golden plates."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The humpback cleared his throat and shrugged his shoulders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "There are all sorts of people," he observed, and was about to add
+      something else, but bethought himself and remained silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This Bogdán always had had the soul of a flunkey, proud of being allowed
+      to serve the high and mighty and feeling solid with his oppressors because
+      he was allowed to contribute to their pomp in gold-laced livery and silver
+      buttons. His masters had sicked him on to face the cannons in defense of
+      their own wealth, and now the man sat there disfigured, with only one eye,
+      and still would not permit any criticism of his gracious employers.
+      Against such stupidity there was nothing to be done. There was no use
+      wasting a single word on him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two remained sitting for a while in silence. Bogdán filled his pipe
+      carefully and deliberately, and Mihály watched him with interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Are you going to the castle?" the humpback asked cautiously, when the
+      pipe was at last lit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Bogdán was well aware just what the hateful creature was aiming at.
+      He knew him. A Socialist&mdash;that's what he was, one of those
+      good-for-nothings who take the bread out of poor people's mouths by
+      dinning a lot of nonsense into their ears, just like a mean dog who snaps
+      at the hand that feeds him. He had made a good living as foreman in the
+      brickyard, and as thanks he had incited all the workmen against the owner,
+      Bogdán's master, until they demanded twice as much wages, and were ready
+      to set fire to the castle on all four corners. Once Mihály had tried his
+      luck with him, too. He had wanted to make his master out a bad man. But
+      this time he had bucked up against the right person. A box on his right
+      ear and a box on his left ear, and then a good sound kick&mdash;that was
+      the answer to keep him from ever again trying to make a Socialist of John
+      Bogdán, one of those low fellows who know no God or fatherland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Mihály moved on the bench uneasily, every now and then scrutinizing his
+      neighbor from the side. At last he plucked up courage and said suddenly:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "They'll probably be glad up there that you are back. Your arms are still
+      whole, and they need people in the factory."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bogdán turned up his nose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "In the brickyard?" he asked disdainfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The humpback burst out laughing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Brickyard? Brickyard is good. Who needs bricks in war? The brickyard's
+      gone long ago, man. Do you see those trucks over there? They are all
+      loaded up with shells. Every Saturday a whole train of shells leaves
+      here."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bogdán listened eagerly. That was news. A change on the estate of which he
+      had not yet heard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You see, there is such a nice division," Mihály continued, smiling
+      sarcastically. "One goes away and lets his head be blown off. The other
+      remains comfortably at home and manufactures shells and decorates his
+      castle with thousand-dollar bills. Well, I'm satisfied."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "What are we to do, eh, shoot with peas or with air? You can't carry on a
+      war without shells. Shells are needed just as much as soldiers."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Exactly. And because the rich have the choice of being soldiers or making
+      shells, they choose to make the shells and send <i>you</i> off to have
+      your head blown off. What are you getting for your eye? Twenty-five
+      dollars a year? Or perhaps as much as fifty? And the others whom the
+      ravens are feeding on don't get even that out of the war. But the
+      gentleman up in the castle is making his five hundred a day and doesn't
+      risk even his little finger doing it. I'd be a patriot on those terms
+      myself. I am telling you the truth. At first, of course, they said he was
+      going to war, and he did actually ride off in great state, but three weeks
+      later he was back here again with machines and all the equipment, and now
+      he delivers fine orations in the townhouse and sends other men off to die&mdash;and
+      on top of it is gallant to the wives left behind. He stuffs his pockets
+      and fools with every girl in the factory. He's the cock of the whole
+      district."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bogdán, his brows knit in annoyance, let the man talk on. But the last
+      part struck him with a shock. He pricked up his ears and grew uneasy and
+      for a while struggled heroically against asking a question that burned on
+      his lips. But in the end he could not restrain himself and blurted out:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Is&mdash;is Marcsa working in the factory, too?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The humpback's eyes flashed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Marcsa, the beautiful Marcsa! I should say so! She's been made a
+      forelady, though they say she's never had a shell in her hands, but, to
+      make up, the lord's hands have&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a short, hoarse growl John Bogdán flew at the humpback's throat,
+      squeezed in his Adam's apple, pressing it into his neck, and held him in a
+      merciless clutch. The man beat about with his arms, his eyes popped from
+      his head in fright, his throat gurgled, and his face turned livid. Then
+      John Bogdán released his hold, and Mihály fell to the ground and lay there
+      gasping. Bogdán quickly gathered up his things and strode off, taking
+      long, quick steps, as if afraid of arriving too late for something in the
+      castle.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He gave not another look back at Mihály the humpback, never turned around
+      once, but quietly went his way and for a long while felt the warm throat
+      in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was a man who lay gasping on the road to him? One man more or less.
+      In the rhythmic regularity of the marching column, he had passed by
+      thousands like him, and it had never occurred to his mind, dulled by
+      weariness, that the grey spots thickly strewn over the fields, the heaps
+      lining the roadway like piles of dung in the spring, were human beings
+      struck down by death. He and his comrades had waded in the dead, there at
+      Kielce, when they made a dash across the fields, and earthy grey hands
+      rose out of every furrow pawing the air, and trousers drenched in blood
+      and distorted faces grew out of the ground, as if all the dead were
+      scrambling from their graves for the Last Judgment. They had stepped and
+      stumbled over corpses. Once the fat little officer of reserves, to the
+      great amusement of his company, had gotten deathly sick at his stomach
+      because he had inadvertently stepped on the chest of a half-decayed
+      Russian, and the body had given way under him, and he had scarcely been
+      able to withdraw his foot from the foul hole. John Bogdán smiled as he
+      recalled the wicked jokes the men had cracked at the officer's expense,
+      how the officer had gone all white and leaned against a tree and carried
+      on like a man who has much more than quenched his thirst.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The road glowed in the mid-day sun. The village clock struck twelve. From
+      the hill yonder came, like an answer, the deep bellow of the factory
+      whistle, and a little white cloud rose over the tops of the trees. Bogdán
+      quickened his pace, running rather than walking, heedless of the drops of
+      sweat that ran down and tickled his neck. For almost a year he had
+      breathed nothing but the hospital atmosphere, had smelled nothing but
+      iodoform and lysol and seen nothing but roofs and walls. His lungs drew in
+      the aroma of the blossoming meadows with deep satisfaction, and the soles
+      of his boots tramped the ground sturdily, as if he were again marching in
+      regular order.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was the first walk he had taken since he was wounded, the first road
+      he had seen since those wild marches on Russian soil. At moments he seemed
+      to hear the cannons roaring. The short struggle with the humpback had set
+      his blood coursing, and his memories of the war, for a time stifled as it
+      were beneath a layer of dust by the dreary monotony of the hospital life,
+      suddenly came whirling back to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He almost regretted having let that damned blackguard go so soon. One
+      moment more, and he would never have opened his blasphemous mouth again.
+      His head would have fallen back exhausted to one side, he would once again
+      have embraced the air longingly with outspread fingers, and then in a
+      flash would have shrunk together, exactly like the fat, messy Russian with
+      the large blue eyes who was the first man to present himself to St. Peter
+      with a greeting from John Bogdán. Bogdán had not let <i>him</i> loose
+      until he had altogether quit squirming. He had choked him dead as a
+      doornail. And still he was a comical fellow, not nearly so disgusting as
+      that rascally humpback. But he was the first enemy soldier whom he had got
+      into his grasp, his very first Russian. A magnificent array of others had
+      followed, though the fat man was the only one Bogdán had choked to death.
+      He had smashed scores with the butt-end of his gun and run his bayonet
+      through scores of others. He had even squashed with his boots the wretch
+      who had struck down his dearest comrade before his very eyes. But never
+      again did he choke a man to death. That was why the little fat fellow
+      stuck in his memory. He had no recollection of the others whatever. All he
+      saw now in his mind was a tangle of greyish-green uniforms. And as he
+      thought of his heroic deeds, the gnashing, the stamping, the gasping, and
+      the cursing of the hand-to-hand encounters resounded in his ears. How
+      many, he wondered, had he sent to the other world? God alone may have
+      counted them. He himself had had enough to do trying to save his own skin.
+      Had a man stopped to look around, he would have carried his curiosity to
+      the next world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet&mdash;there was another face that remained fixed in his memory. A
+      great big thin fellow, as tall as a beanpole, with enormous yellow tusks,
+      which he gnashed like a boar. Yes, he had as clear a picture of him as if
+      it had been yesterday. He saw him half-backed up against the wall already,
+      swinging his gun over his head. One second more, and the butt-end would
+      have come whizzing down. But a sleepy Russian was never the man to get the
+      better of John Bogdán. Before he had the chance to bring down his gun,
+      Bogdán's bayonet was in between his ribs, and the Russian fell over on his
+      own gun. The bayonet pierced him through and through, and even went into
+      the wall behind him, and came mighty near breaking off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the same thing never happened to Bogdán again. It had happened that
+      once because he had thrust too hard, with clenched teeth, gripping the rod
+      in a tight clutch, as if it were iron that he had to cleave. The fact was,
+      he had not yet discovered that it really isn't so difficult to mow down a
+      human being. He had been prepared for any amount of resistance, and his
+      bayonet had glided into the fellow's body like butter. His mouth had
+      remained wide open in astonishment&mdash;he recalled it to the dot. A man
+      who has never tried a bayonet thrust thinks a human being is made up all
+      of bones, and he fetches out for a good hard stroke. Then he's in a pickle
+      to free his weapon again before one of the messy-looking devils takes
+      advantage of his defenselessness. The way to do was to go at it very
+      lightly, with a short jerky thrust. Then the blade ran in of itself, like
+      a good horse&mdash;you actually had trouble holding it back. The most
+      important thing was, not to take your eye off your enemy. You mustn't look
+      at your bayonet, or the spot you intend to pierce. You must always watch
+      your enemy so as to guess his move in time. It's from your enemy's face
+      that you must read the right moment for stepping backward. They all
+      behaved the same way&mdash;exactly like the first tall wild fellow who
+      gnashed his tusks. All of a sudden their faces turned absolutely smooth,
+      as if the cold iron in their body had chilled their fury, their eyes
+      opened wide in astonishment and looked at their enemy as if to ask in
+      reproach, "What are you doing?" Then they usually clutched at the bayonet
+      and needlessly cut their fingers, too, before they fell over dead. If you
+      didn't know exactly what to do and didn't hold your weapon back in time
+      and withdraw it quickly from the wound, just when you saw the man's eyes
+      growing large, you would be carried along down with him or would get hit
+      on the head by the butt-end of another enemy's gun long before you could
+      draw your bayonet out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These were all things that John Bogdán had often discussed with his
+      comrades after severe frays when they criticized the men who had fallen
+      for behaving stupidly and who had had to pay with their lives for their
+      awkwardness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he strode along in haste up the familiar road to the castle, he was
+      fairly lost in recollections. His legs moved of themselves, like horses on
+      the homeward way. He passed through the open grille gateway and was
+      already walking on the gravel path, his head bowed on his chest, without
+      noticing that he had reached home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The neighing of horses woke him up from his thoughts with a start. He
+      stood still, deeply stirred by the sight of the stables, only a few feet
+      away, and inside, in the twilight, the gleam of his favorite horse's
+      flanks. He was about to turn off the path and make for the stable door
+      when far away down below, at the other end of the large place, he saw a
+      woman coming from the brickyard. She wore a dotted red silk kerchief on
+      her head and carried her full figure proudly, and the challenging sway of
+      her hips billowed her wide skirts as the wind billows a field of ripe
+      grain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      John Bogdán stood stockstill, as if some one had struck him on the chest.
+      It was Marcsa! There was not another girl in the whole country who walked
+      like that. He threw his luggage to the ground and dashed off.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Marcsa! Marcsa!" his cry thundered out over the broad courtyard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The girl turned and waited for his approach, peering curiously through
+      half-closed eyes. When almost face to face with her Bogdán stood still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Marcsa!" he repeated in a whisper, his gaze fastened upon her face
+      anxiously. He saw her turn pale, white as chalk, saw her eyes leap to and
+      fro uneasily, from his left cheek to his right cheek, and back again. Then
+      horror came into her eyes. She clapped her hands to her face, and turned
+      and ran away as fast as her legs would carry her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In utter sadness Bogdán stared after her. That was exactly the way he had
+      imagined their meeting again since Julia, the station-guard's wife, the
+      woman he had grown up with, had not recognized him. But to run away! That
+      rankled. No need for her to run away. John Bogdán was not the man to force
+      himself on a woman. If he no longer pleased her now that he was
+      disfigured, well, then she could look for another man, and he, too&mdash;he
+      would find another woman. He wasn't bothered about that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This was what he had wanted to tell Marcsa.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He bounded after her and overtook her a few feet from the machine shop.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Why do you run away from me?" he growled, breathless, and caught her
+      hand. "If you don't want me any more, you need only say so. What do you
+      think&mdash;I'm going to eat you up?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stared at him searchingly&mdash;in uncertainty. He almost felt sorry
+      for her, she was trembling so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "How you look!" he heard her stammer, and he turned red with anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "You knew it. I had them write to you that a shell hit me. Did you think
+      it made me better-looking? Just speak straight out if you don't want me
+      any more. Straight wine is what I want, no mixture. Yes or no? I won't
+      force you to marry me. Just say it right away&mdash;yes or no?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marcsa was silent. There was something in his face, in his one eye, that
+      took her breath away, that dug into her vitals like cold fingers. She cast
+      her eyes down and stammered:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "But you have no position yet. How can we marry? You must first ask the
+      master if he&mdash;"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was as if a red pall woven of flames dropped in front of John Bogdán's
+      eyes. The master? What was she saying about the master? He thought of the
+      humpback, and it came to him in a flash that the fellow had not lied. His
+      fingers clutched her wrist like a pair of glowing tongs, so that she cried
+      out with the pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "The master!" Bogdán bellowed. "What has the master got to do between you
+      and me? Yes or no? I want an answer. The master has nothing to do with
+      us."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marcsa drew herself up. All of a sudden a remarkable assurance came to
+      her. The color returned to her cheeks, and her eyes flashed proudly. She
+      stood there with the haughty bearing so familiar to Bogdán, her head held
+      high in defiance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bogdán observed the change and saw that her gaze traveled over his
+      shoulder. He let go her hand and turned instantly. Just what he thought&mdash;the
+      master coming out of the machine shop. His old forester, Tóth, followed
+      him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Marcsa bounded past Bogdán like a cat and ran up to the lord and bent over
+      and kissed his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bogdán saw the three of them draw near and lowered his head like a ram for
+      attack. A cold, determined quiet rose in him slowly, as in the trenches
+      when the trumpeter gave the signal for a charge. He felt the lord's hand
+      touch his shoulder, and he took a step backward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was the meaning of it all? The lord was speaking of heroism and
+      fatherland, a lot of rubbish that had nothing to do with Marcsa. He let
+      him go on talking, let the words pour down on him like rain, without
+      paying any attention to their meaning. His glance wandered to and fro
+      uneasily, from the lord to Marcsa and then to the forester, until it
+      rested curiously on something shining.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the nickeled hilt of the hunting-knife hanging at the old
+      forester's side and sparkling in the sunlight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Like a bayonet," thought Bogdán, and an idea flashed through his mind, to
+      whip the thing out of the scabbard and run it up to the hilt in the
+      hussy's body. But her rounded hips, her bright billowing skirts confused
+      him. In war he had never had to do with women. He could not exactly
+      imagine what it would be like to make a thrust into that beskirted body
+      there. His glance traveled back to the master, and now he noticed that his
+      stiffnecked silence had pulled him up short.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "He is gnashing his teeth," it struck him, "just like the tall Russian."
+      And he almost smiled at a vision that came to his mind&mdash;of the lord
+      also getting a smooth face and astonished, reproachful eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But hadn't he said something about Marcsa just then? What was Marcsa to
+      him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Bogdán drew himself up defiantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "I will arrange matters with Marcsa myself, sir. It's between her and me,"
+      he rejoined hoarsely, and looked his master straight in the face. <i>He</i>
+      still had his mustache, quite even on the two sides, and curling
+      delicately upwards at the ends. What was it the humpback had said? "One
+      man goes away and lets his head be blown off." He wasn't so stupid after
+      all, the humpback wasn't.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What Bogdán said infuriated the master. Bogdán let him shout and stared
+      like a man hypnotized at the nickeled hilt of the hunting-knife. It was
+      not until the name "Marcsa" again struck his ear that he became attentive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "Marcsa is in my employ now," he heard the lord saying. "You know I am
+      fond of you, Bogdán. I'll let you take care of the horses again, if you
+      care to. But Marcsa is to be let alone. I won't have any rumpus. If she
+      still wants to marry you, all well and good. But if she doesn't, she's to
+      be let alone. If I hear once again that you have annoyed her, I'll chase
+      you to the devil. Do you understand?"
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Foaming with rage, Bogdán let out the stream of his wrath.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      "To the devil?" he shouted. "You chase me to the devil? You had first
+      better go there yourself. I've been to the devil already. For eight months
+      I was in hell. Here's my face&mdash;you can tell from my face that I come
+      from hell. To play the protector here and stuff your pockets full and send
+      the others out to die&mdash;that's easy. A man who dawdles at home has no
+      right to send men to the devil who have already been in hell for his
+      sake."
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So overwhelming was his indignation that he spoke like the humpback
+      Socialist and was not ashamed of it. He stood there ready to leap, with
+      tensely drawn muscles, like a wild animal. He saw the lord make ready to
+      strike him, saw his distorted face, saw the riding-crop flash through the
+      air, and even saw it descending upon him. But he did not feel the short,
+      hard blow on his back.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With one bound he ripped the hunting-knife out of the scabbard and thrust
+      it between the lord's ribs&mdash;not with a long sweep, so that some one
+      could have stayed his arm before he struck. Oh, no! But quite lightly,
+      from below, with a short jerk, exactly as he had learned by experience in
+      battle. The hunting-knife was as good as his bayonet. It ran into the
+      flesh like butter.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then everything came about just as it always did. John Bogdán stood with
+      his chin forward and saw the lord's face distorted by anger suddenly
+      smooth out and turn as placid and even as if it had been ironed. He saw
+      his eyes widen and look over at him in astonishment with the reproachful
+      question, "What are you doing?" The one thing Bogdán did not see was the
+      collapsing of the lord's body, for at that instant a blow crashed down on
+      the back of his head, like the downpour of a waterfall dropping from an
+      infinite height. For one second he still saw Marcsa's face framed in a
+      fiery wheel, then, his skull split open, he fell over on top of his
+      master, whose body already lay quivering on the ground.
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
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+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Men in War, by Andreas Latzko
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Men in War
+
+Author: Andreas Latzko
+
+
+Release Date: July, 2005 [EBook #8440]
+This file was first posted on July 10, 2003
+Last Updated: May 10, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEN IN WAR ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Eric Eldred, Tonya Allen, Charles Franks and
+the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+MEN IN WAR
+
+By Andreas Latzko
+
+
+DEDICATED TO FRIEND AND FOE
+
+_"I am convinced the time will come when all will think as I do."_
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+I OFF TO WAR
+
+II BAPTISM OF FIRE
+
+III THE VICTOR
+
+IV MY COMRADE
+
+V A HERO'S DEATH
+
+VI HOME AGAIN
+
+
+
+
+
+I. OFF TO WAR
+
+The time was late in the autumn of the second year of the war; the
+place, the garden of a war hospital in a small Austrian town, which lay
+at the base of wooded hills, sequestered as behind a Spanish wall, and
+still preserving its sleepy contented outlook upon existence.
+
+Day and night the locomotives whistled by. Some of them hauled to the
+front trains of soldiers singing and hallooing, high-piled bales of
+hay, bellowing cattle and ammunition in tightly-closed, sinister-looking
+cars. The others, in the opposite direction, came creeping homeward
+slowly, marked by the bleeding cross that the war has thrown upon all
+walls and the people behind them. But the great madness raced through
+the town like a hurricane, without disturbing its calm, as though the
+low, brightly colored houses with the old-fashioned ornate facades
+had tacitly come to the sensible agreement to ignore with aristocratic
+reserve this arrogant, blustering fellow, War, who turned everything
+topsy-turvy.
+
+In the parks the children played unmolested with the large russet leaves
+of the old chestnut trees. Women stood gossiping in front of the shops,
+and somewhere in every street a girl with a bright kerchief on her head
+could be seen washing windows. In spite of the hospital flags waving
+from almost every house, in spite of innumerable bulletin boards,
+notices and sign-posts that the intruder had thrust upon the defenseless
+town, peace still seemed to prevail here, scarcely fifty miles away from
+the butchery, which on clear nights threw its glow on the horizon like
+an artificial illumination. When, for a few moments at a time, there was
+a lull in the stream of heavy, snorting automobile trucks and rattling
+drays, and no train happened to be rumbling over the railroad bridge and
+no signal of trumpet or clanking of sabres sounded the strains of
+war, then the obstinate little place instantly showed up its dull but
+good-natured provincial face, only to hide it again in resignation
+behind its ill-fitting soldier's mask, when the next automobile from
+the general staff came dashing around the corner with a great show of
+importance.
+
+To be sure the cannons growled in the distance, as if a gigantic dog
+were crouching way below the ground ready to jump up at the heavens,
+snarling and snapping. The muffled barking of the big mortars came from
+over there like a bad fit of coughing from a sickroom, frightening the
+watchers who sit with eyes red with crying, listening for every sound
+from the dying man. Even the long, low rows of houses shrank together
+with a rattle and listened horrorstruck each time the coughing convulsed
+the earth, as though the stress of war lay on the world's chest like a
+nightmare.
+
+The streets exchanged astonished glances, blinking sleepily in the
+reflection of the night-lamps that inside cast their merrily dancing
+shadows over close rows of beds. The rooms, choke-full of misery, sent
+piercing shrieks and wails and groans out into the night. Every human
+sound coming through the windows fell upon the silence like a furious
+attack. It was a wild denunciation of the war that out there at the
+front was doing its work, discharging mangled human bodies like so much
+offal and filling all the houses with its bloody refuse.
+
+But the beautiful wrought-iron fountains continued to gurgle and murmur
+complacently, prattling with soothing insistence of the days of their
+youth, when men still had the time and the care for noble lines and
+curves, and war was the affair of princes and adventurers. Legend popped
+out of every corner and every gargoyle, and ran on padded soles through
+all the narrow little streets, like an invisible gossip whispering of
+peace and comfort. And the ancient chestnut trees nodded assent, and
+with the shadows of their outspread fingers stroked the frightened
+facades to calm them. The past grew so lavishly out of the fissured
+walls that any one coming within their embrace heard the plashing of the
+fountains above the thunder of the artillery; and the sick and wounded
+men felt soothed and listened from their fevered couches to the
+talkative night outside. Pale men, who had been carried through the town
+on swinging stretchers, forgot the hell they had come from; and even the
+heavily laden victims tramping through the place on a forced march by
+night became softened for a space, as if they had encountered Peace
+and their own unarmed selves in the shadow of the columns and the
+flower-filled bay-windows.
+
+The same thing took place with the war in this town as with the stream
+that came down from out of the mountains in the north, foaming with rage
+at each pebble it rolled over. At the other end of the town, on passing
+the last houses, it took a tender leave, quite tamed and subdued,
+murmuring very gently, as if treading on tiptoe, as if drowsy with all
+the dreaminess it had reflected. Between wide banks, it stepped out into
+the broad meadowland, and circled about the war hospital, making almost
+an island of the ground it stood on. Thick-stemmed sycamores cast their
+shadow on the hospital, and from three sides came the murmur of the
+slothful stream mingled with the rustling of the leaves, as if the
+garden, when twilight fell, was moved by compassion and sang a slumber
+song for the lacerated men, who had to suffer in rank and file,
+regimented up to their very death, up to the grave, into which
+they--unfortunate cobblers, tinkers, peasants, and clerks--were shoved
+to the accompaniment of salvos from big-mouthed cannon.
+
+The sound of taps had just died away, and the watchmen were making their
+rounds, when they discovered three men in the deep shadow of the broad
+avenue, and drove them into the house.
+
+"Are you officers, eh?" the head-watchman, a stocky corporal of
+the landsturm, with grey on his temples, growled and blustered
+good-naturedly. "Privates must be in bed by nine o'clock." To preserve a
+show of authority he added with poorly simulated bearishness: "Well, are
+you going or not?"
+
+He was about to give his usual order, "Quick, take to your legs!" but
+caught himself just in time, and made a face as though he had swallowed
+something.
+
+The three men now hobbling toward the entrance for inmates, would have
+been only too glad to carry out such an order. However, they had only
+two legs and six clattering crutches between them. It was like a living
+picture posed by a stage manager who has an eye for symmetry. On the
+right went the one whose right leg had been saved, on the left went his
+counterpart, hopping on his left leg, and in the middle the miserable
+left-over of a human body swung between two high crutches, his empty
+trousers raised and pinned across his chest, so that the whole man could
+have gone comfortably into a cradle.
+
+The corporal followed the group with his eyes, his head bent and his
+fists clenched, as if bowed down beneath the burden of the sight. He
+muttered a not exactly patriotic oath and spat out a long curve of
+saliva with a hiss from between his front teeth. As he was about to turn
+and go on his round again, a burst of laughter came from the direction
+of the officers' wing. He stood still and drew in his head as if from a
+blow on the back of his neck, and a gleam of ungovernable hatred flitted
+over his broad, good-natured peasant face. He spat out again, to soothe
+his feelings, then took a fresh start and passed the merry company with
+a stiff salute.
+
+The gentlemen returned the salute carelessly. Infected by the coziness
+that hung over the whole of the town like a light cloud, they were
+sitting chatting in front of the hospital on benches moved together to
+form a square. They spoke of the war and--laughed, laughed like happy
+schoolboys discussing the miseries of examinations just gone through.
+Each had done his duty, each had had his ordeal, and now, under the
+protection of his wound, each sat there in the comfortable expectation
+of returning home, of seeing his people again, of being feted, and for
+at least two whole weeks, of living the life of a man who is not tagged
+with a number.
+
+The loudest of the laughers was the young lieutenant whom they had
+nicknamed the Mussulman because of the Turkish turban he wore as officer
+of a regiment of Bosnians. A shell had broken his leg, and done its
+work thoroughly. For weeks already the shattered limb had been tightly
+encased in a plaster cast, and its owner, who went about on crutches,
+cherished it carefully, as though it were some precious object that had
+been confided to his care.
+
+On the bench opposite the Mussulman sat two gentlemen, a cavalry
+officer, the only one on the active list, and an artillery officer,
+who in civil life was a professor of philosophy, and so was called
+"Philosopher" for short. The cavalry captain had received a cut across
+his right arm, and the Philosopher's upper lip had been ripped by a
+splinter from a grenade. Two ladies were sitting on the bench that
+leaned against the wall of the hospital, and these three men were
+monopolizing the conversation with them, because the fourth man sat on
+his bench without speaking. He was lost in his own thoughts, his
+limbs twitched, and his eyes wandered unsteadily. In the war he was a
+lieutenant of the landsturm, in civil life a well-known composer. He had
+been brought to the hospital a week before, suffering from severe
+shock. Horror still gloomed in his eyes, and he kept gazing ahead of him
+darkly. He always allowed the attendants at the hospital to do whatever
+they wanted to him without resistance, and he went to bed or sat in the
+garden, separated from the others as by an invisible wall, at which he
+stared and stared. Even the unexpected arrival of his pretty, fair wife
+had not resulted in dispelling for so much as a second the vision of
+the awful occurrence that had unbalanced his mind. With his chin on his
+chest he sat without a smile, while she murmured words of endearment;
+and whenever she tried to touch his poor twitching hands with the tips
+of her fingers, full of infinite love, he would jerk away as if seized
+by a convulsion, or under torture.
+
+Tears rolled down the little woman's cheeks--cheeks hungry for caresses.
+She had fought her way bravely through the zones barred to civilians
+until she finally succeeded in reaching this hospital in the war zone.
+And now, after the great relief and joy of finding her husband alive and
+unmutilated, she suddenly sensed an enigmatic resistance, an unexpected
+obstacle, which she could not beg away or cry away, as she had used to
+do. There was a something there that separated her mercilessly from the
+man she had so yearned to see.
+
+She sat beside him impatiently, tortured by her powerlessness to find an
+explanation for the hostility that he shed around him. Her eyes pierced
+the darkness, and her hands always went the same way, groping forward
+timidly, then quickly withdrawing as though scorched when his shrinking
+away in hatred threw her into despair again.
+
+It was hard to have to choke down her grief like this, and not burst
+out in reproach and tear this secret from her husband, which he in
+his misery still interposed so stubbornly between himself and his one
+support. And it was hard to simulate happiness and take part in the airy
+conversation; hard always to have to force some sort of a reply, and
+hard not to lose patience with the other woman's perpetual giggling. It
+was easy enough for _her_. She knew that her husband, a major-general,
+was safe behind the lines on the staff of a high command. She had fled
+from the ennui of a childless home to enter into the eventful life of
+the war hospital.
+
+The major's wife had been sitting in the garden with the gentlemen ever
+since seven o'clock, always on the point of leaving, quite ready to go
+in her hat and jacket, but she let herself be induced again and again to
+remain a little longer. She kept up her flirtatious conversation in the
+gayest of spirits, as if she had no knowledge of all the torments she
+had seen during the day in the very house against which she was leaning
+her back. The sad little woman breathed a sigh of relief when it grew so
+dark that she could move away from the frivolous chatterbox unnoticed.
+
+And yet in spite of her titillating conversation and the air of
+importance with which she spoke of her duties as a nurse, the Frau Major
+was penetrated by a feeling that, without her being conscious of it,
+raised her high above herself. The great wave of motherliness that had
+swept over all the women when the fatal hour struck for the men, had
+borne her aloft, too. She had seen the three men with whom she was now
+genially exchanging light nothings come to the hospital--like thousands
+of others--streaming with blood, helpless, whimpering with pain. And
+something of the joy of the hen whose brood has safely hatched warmed
+her coquetry.
+
+Since the men have been going for months, crouching, creeping on
+all fours, starving, carrying their own death as mothers carry their
+children; since suffering and waiting and the passive acceptance of
+danger and pain have reversed the sexes, the women have felt strong,
+and even in their sensuality there has been a little glimmer of the new
+passion for mothering.
+
+The melancholy wife, just arrived from a region in which the war exists
+in conversation only, and engrossed in the one man to the exclusion of
+the others, suffered from the sexless familiarity that they so freely
+indulged in there in the shadow of death and agony. But the others were
+at home in the war. They spoke its language, which in the men was a
+mixture of obstinate greed for life and a paradoxical softness born of
+a surfeit of brutality; while in the woman it was a peculiar, garrulous
+cold-bloodedness. She had heard so much of blood and dying that her
+endless curiosity gave the impression of hardness and hysterical
+cruelty.
+
+The Mussulman and the cavalry officer were chaffing the Philosopher and
+poking fun at the phrase-mongers, hair-splitters, and other wasters of
+time. They took a childish delight in his broad smile of embarrassment
+at being teased in the Frau Major's presence, and she, out of feminine
+politeness, came to the Philosopher's rescue, while casting amorous
+looks at the others who could deal such pert blows with their tongues.
+
+"Oh, let the poor man alone," she laughed and cooed. "He's right. War
+is horrible. These two gentlemen are just trying to get your temper up."
+She twinkled at the Philosopher to soothe him. His good nature made him
+so helpless.
+
+The Philosopher grinned phlegmatically and said nothing. The Mussulman,
+setting his teeth, shifted his leg, which in its white bandage was the
+only part of him that was visible, and placed it in a more comfortable
+position on the bench.
+
+"The Philosopher?" he laughed. "As a matter of fact, what does the
+Philosopher know about war? He's in the artillery. And war is conducted
+by the infantry. Don't you know that, Mrs. ----?"
+
+"I am not Mrs. here. Here I am Sister Engelberta," she cut in, and for a
+moment the expression on her face became almost serious.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Sister Engelberta. Artillery and infantry, you see,
+are like husband and wife. We infantrymen must bring the child into the
+world when a victory is to be born. The artillery has only the pleasure,
+just like a man's part in love. It is not until after the child has been
+baptized that he comes strutting out proudly. Am I not right, Captain?"
+he asked, appealing to the cavalry officer. "You are an equestrian on
+foot now, too."
+
+The captain boomed his assent. In his summary view, members of the
+Reichstag who refused to vote enough money for the military, Socialists,
+pacifists, all men, in brief, who lectured or wrote or spoke superfluous
+stuff and lived by their brains belonged in the same category as the
+Philosopher. They were all "bookworms."
+
+"Yes, indeed," he said in his voice hoarse from shouting commands.
+"A philosopher like our friend here is just the right person for the
+artillery. Nothing to do but wait around on the top of a hill and
+look on. If only they don't shoot up our own men! It is easy enough to
+dispose of the fellows on the other side, in front of us. But I always
+have a devilish lot of respect for you assassins in the back. But let's
+stop talking of the war. Else I'll go off to bed. Here we are at last
+with two charming ladies, when it's been an age since we've seen a face
+that isn't covered with stubble, and you still keep talking of that
+damned shooting. Good Lord, when I was in the hospital train and the
+first girl came in with a white cap on her curly light hair, I'd have
+liked to hold her hand and just keep looking and looking at her. Upon my
+word of honor, Sister Engelberta, after a while the shooting gets to
+be a nuisance. The lice are worse. But the worst thing of all is the
+complete absence of the lovely feminine. For five months to see nothing
+but men--and then all of a sudden to hear a dear clear woman's voice!
+That's the finest thing of all. It's worth going to war for."
+
+The Mussulman pulled his mobile face flashing with youth into a grimace.
+
+"The finest thing of all! No, sir. To be quite frank, the finest thing
+of all is to get a bath and a fresh bandage, and be put into a clean
+white bed, and know that for a few weeks you're going to have a rest.
+It's a feeling like--well, there's no comparison for it. But, of course,
+it is very nice, too, to be seeing ladies again."
+
+The Philosopher had tilted his round fleshy Epicurean head to one side,
+and a moist sheen came into his small crafty eyes. He glanced at the
+place where a bright spot in the almost palpable darkness suggested the
+Frau Major's white dress, and began to tell what he thought, very slowly
+in a slight sing-song.
+
+"The finest thing of all, I think, is the quiet--when you have been
+lying up there in the mountains where every shot is echoed back and
+forth five times, and all of a sudden it turns absolutely quiet--no
+whistling, no howling, no thundering--nothing but a glorious quiet that
+you can listen to as to a piece of music! The first few nights I sat up
+the whole time and kept my ears cocked for the quiet, the way you try
+to catch a tune at a distance. I believe I even howled a bit, it was so
+delightful to listen to no sound."
+
+The captain of cavalry sent his cigarette flying through the night like
+a comet scattering sparks, and brought his hand down with a thump on his
+knee.
+
+"There, there, Sister Engelberta, did you get that?" he cried
+sarcastically. "'Listen to no sound.' You see, that's what's called
+philosophy. I know something better than that, Mr. Philosopher, namely,
+not to hear what you hear, especially when it's such philosophical
+rubbish."
+
+They laughed, and the man they were teasing smiled good-naturedly. He,
+too, was permeated by the peacefulness that floated into the garden from
+the sleeping town. The cavalryman's aggressive jokes glided off without
+leaving a sting, as did everything else that might have lessened the
+sweetness of the few days still lying between him and the front. He
+wanted to make the most of his time, and take everything easily with his
+eyes tight shut, like a child who has to enter a dark room.
+
+The Frau Major leaned over to the Philosopher.
+
+"So opinions differ as to what was the finest thing," she said; and her
+breath came more rapidly. "But, tell me, what was the most awful thing
+you went through out there? A lot of the men say the drumfire is the
+worst, and a lot of them can't get over the sight of the first man they
+saw killed. How about you?"
+
+The Philosopher looked tortured. It was a theme that did not fit
+into his programme. He was casting about for an evasive reply when an
+unintelligible wheezing exclamation drew all eyes to the corner in which
+the landsturm officer and his wife were sitting. The others had almost
+forgotten them in the darkness and exchanged frightened glances when
+they heard a voice that scarcely one of them knew, and the man with the
+glazed eyes and uncertain gestures, a marionette with broken joints,
+began to speak hastily in a falsetto like the crowing of a rooster.
+
+"What was the most awful thing? The only awful thing is the going off.
+You go off to war--and they let you go. That's the awful thing."
+
+A cold sickening silence fell upon the company. Even the Mussulman's
+face lost its perpetually happy expression and stiffened in
+embarrassment. It had come so unexpectedly and sounded so
+unintelligible. It caught them by the throat and set their pulses
+bounding--perhaps because of the vibrating of the voice that issued from
+the twitching body, or because of the rattling that went along with it,
+and made it sound like a voice broken by long sobbing.
+
+The Frau Major jumped up. She had seen the landsturm officer brought
+to the hospital strapped fast to the stretcher, because his sobbing
+wrenched and tore his body so that the bearers could not control him
+otherwise. Something inexpressibly hideous--so it was said--had half
+robbed the poor devil of his reason, and the Frau Major suddenly dreaded
+a fit of insanity. She pinched the cavalryman's arm and exclaimed with a
+pretense of great haste:
+
+"My goodness! There's the gong of the last car. Quick, quick,"
+addressing the sick man's wife, "quick! We must run."
+
+They all rose. The Frau Major passed her arm through the unhappy little
+woman's and urged with even greater insistence:
+
+"We'll have a whole hour's walk back to town if we miss the car."
+
+The little wife, completely at a loss, her whole body quivering, bent
+over her husband again to take leave. She was certain that his outburst
+had reference to her and held a grim deadly reproach, which she did not
+comprehend. She felt her husband draw back and start convulsively under
+the touch of her lips. And she sobbed aloud at the awful prospect of
+spending an endless night in the chilly neglected room in the hotel,
+left alone with this tormenting doubt. But the Frau Major drew her
+along, forcing her to run, and did not let go her arm until they
+had passed the sentinel at the gate and were out on the street. The
+gentlemen followed them with their eyes, saw them reappear once again
+on the street in the lamplight, and listened to the sound of the car
+receding in the distance. The Mussulman picked up his crutches, and
+winked at the Philosopher significantly, and said something with a yawn
+about going to bed. The cavalry officer looked down at the sick man
+curiously and felt sorry for him. Wanting to give the poor devil a bit
+of pleasure, he tapped him on his shoulder and said in his free and easy
+way:
+
+"You've got a chic wife, I must say. I congratulate you."
+
+The next instant he drew back startled. The pitiful heap on the bench
+jumped up suddenly, as though a force just awakened had tossed him up
+from his seat.
+
+"Chic wife? Oh, yes. Very dashing!" came sputtering from his twitching
+lips with a fury that cast out the words like a seething stream. "She
+didn't shed a single tear when I left on the train. Oh, they were all
+very dashing when we went off. Poor Dill's wife was, too. Very plucky!
+She threw roses at him in the train and she'd been his wife for only two
+months." He chuckled disdainfully and clenched his teeth, fighting hard
+to suppress the tears burning in his threat. "Roses! He-he! And 'See you
+soon again!' They were all so patriotic! Our colonel congratulated Dill
+because his wife had restrained herself so well--as if he were simply
+going off to maneuvers."
+
+The lieutenant was now standing up. He swayed on his legs, which he
+held wide apart, and supported himself on the cavalry captain's arm, and
+looked up into his face expectantly with unsteady eyes.
+
+"Do you know what happened to him--to Dill? I was there. Do you know
+what?"
+
+The captain looked at the others in dismay.
+
+"Come on--come on to bed. Don't excite yourself," he stammered in
+embarrassment.
+
+With a howl of triumph the sick man cut him short and snapped in an
+unnaturally high voice:
+
+"You don't know what happened to Dill, you don't? We were standing just
+the way we are now, and he was just going to show me the new photograph
+that his wife had sent him--his brave wife, he-he, his restrained
+wife. Oh yes, restrained! That's what they all were--all prepared for
+anything. And while we were standing there, he about to show me the
+picture, a twenty-eighter struck quite a distance away from us, a good
+two-hundred yards. We didn't even look that way. Then all of a sudden I
+saw something black come flying through the air--and Dill fell over with
+his dashing wife's picture in his hand and a boot, a leg, a boot with
+the leg of a baggage soldier sticking in his head--a soldier that the
+twenty-eighter had blown to pieces far away from where we stood."
+
+He stopped for an instant and stared at the captain triumphantly. Then
+he went on with a note of spiteful pride in his voice, though every now
+and then interrupted by a peculiar gurgling groan.
+
+"Poor Dill never said another word--Dill with the spur sticking in his
+skull, a regular cavalry spur, as big as a five-crown piece. He only
+turned up the whites of his eyes a little and looked sadly at his wife's
+picture, that she should have permitted such a thing as that. Such
+a thing as that! Such a thing! It took four of us to pull the boot
+out--four of us. We had to turn it and twist it, until a piece of
+his brain came along--like roots pulled up--like a jellyfish--a dead
+one--sticking to the spur."
+
+"Shut up!" the captain yelled furiously, and tore himself away and
+walked into the house cursing.
+
+The other two looked after him longingly, but they could not let the
+unfortunate man stay there by himself. When the captain had withdrawn
+his arm, he had fallen down on the bench again and sat whimpering like
+a whipped child, with his head leaning on the back. The Philosopher
+touched his shoulder gently, and was about to speak to him kindly and
+induce him to go into the house when he started up again and broke out
+into an ugly, snarling laugh.
+
+"But we tore her out of him, his dashing wife. Four of us had to tug and
+pull until she came out. I got him rid of her. Out with her! She's gone.
+All of them are gone. Mine is gone, too. Mine is torn out, too. All are
+being torn out. There's no wife any more! No wife any more, no--"
+
+His head bobbed and fell forward. Tears slowly rolled down his sad, sad
+face.
+
+The captain reappeared followed by the little assistant physician, who
+was on night duty.
+
+"You must go to bed now, Lieutenant," the physician said with affected
+severity.
+
+The sick man threw his head up and stared blankly at the strange face.
+When the physician repeated the order in a raised voice, his eyes
+suddenly gleamed, and he nodded approvingly.
+
+"Must go, of course," he repeated eagerly, and drew a deep sigh. "We all
+must go. The man who doesn't go is a coward, and they have no use for
+a coward. That's the very thing. Don't you understand? Heroes are the
+style now. The chic Mrs. Dill wanted a hero to match her new hat. Ha-ha!
+That's why poor Dill had to go and lose his brains. I, too--you, too--we
+must go die. You must let yourself be trampled on--your brains trampled
+on, while the women look on--chic--because it's the style now."
+
+He raised his emaciated body painfully, holding on to the back of the
+bench, and eyed each man in turn, waiting for assent.
+
+"Isn't it sad?" he asked softly. Then his voice rose suddenly to a
+shriek again, and the sound of his fury rang out weirdly in the garden.
+"Weren't they deceiving us, eh? I'd like to know--weren't they cheats?
+Was I an assassin? Was I a ruffian? Didn't I suit her when I sat at
+the piano playing? We were expected to be gentle and considerate!
+Considerate! And all at once, because the fashion changed, they had to
+have murderers. Do you understand? Murderers!"
+
+He broke away from the physician, and stood swaying again, and his
+voice gradually sank to a complaining sound like the thick strangulated
+utterance of a drunkard.
+
+"My wife was in fashion too, you know. Not a tear! I kept waiting and
+waiting for her to begin to scream and beg me at last to get out of the
+train, and not go with the others--beg me to be a coward for her sake.
+Not one of them had the courage to. They just wanted to be in fashion.
+Mine, too! Mine, too! She waved her handkerchief just like all the
+rest."
+
+His twitching arms writhed upwards, as though he were calling the
+heavens to witness.
+
+"You want to know what was the most awful thing?" he groaned, turning
+to the Philosopher abruptly. "The disillusionment was the most awful
+thing--the going off. The war wasn't. The war is what it has to be. Did
+it surprise you to find out that war is horrible? The only surprising
+thing was the going off. To find out that the women are horrible--that
+was the surprising thing. That they can smile and throw roses, that they
+can give up their men, their children, the boys they have put to bed a
+thousand times and pulled the covers over a thousand times, and petted
+and brought up to be men. That was the surprise! That they gave us
+up--that they sent us--_sent_ us! Because every one of them would
+have been ashamed to stand there without a hero. That was the great
+disillusionment. Do you think we should have gone if they had not sent
+us? Do you think so? Just ask the stupidest peasant out there why he'd
+like to have a medal before going back on furlough. Because if he has a
+medal his girl will like him better, and the other girls will run after
+him, and he can use his medal to hook other men's women away from under
+their noses. That's the reason, the only reason. The women sent us.
+No general could have made us go if the women hadn't allowed us to be
+stacked on the trains, if they had screamed out that they would never
+look at us again if we turned into murderers. Not a single man would
+have gone off if they had sworn never to give themselves to a man who
+has split open other men's skulls and shot and bayoneted human beings.
+Not one man, I tell you, would have gone. I didn't want to believe that
+they could stand it like that. 'They're only pretending,' I thought.
+'They're just restraining themselves. But when the first whistle blows,
+they'll begin to scream and tear us out of the train, and rescue us.'
+_Once_ they had the chance to protect us, but all they cared about was
+being in style--nothing else in the world but just being in style."
+
+He sank down on the bench again and sat as though he were all broken up.
+His body was shaken by a low weeping, and his head rolled to and fro
+on his panting chest. A little circle of people had gathered behind his
+back. The old landsturm corporal was standing beside the physician with
+four sentries ready to intervene at a moment's notice. All the windows
+in the officers' wing had lighted up, and scantily clad figures leaned
+out, looking down into the garden curiously.
+
+The sick man eagerly scrutinized the indifferent faces around him. He
+was exhausted.
+
+His hoarse throat no longer gave forth a sound. His hand reached out for
+help to the Philosopher, who stood beside him, all upset.
+
+The physician felt the right moment had come to lead him away.
+
+"Come, Lieutenant, let's go to sleep," he said with a clumsy affectation
+of geniality. "That's the way women are once for all, and there's
+nothing to be done about it."
+
+The physician wanted to go on talking and in conversing lure the
+sick man into the house unawares. But the very next sentence remained
+sticking in his throat, and he stopped short in amazement. The limp
+wobbling skeleton that only a moment before had sat there as in a faint
+and let himself be raised up by the physician and the Philosopher,
+suddenly jumped up with a jerk, and tore his arms away so violently that
+the two men who were about to assist him were sent tumbling up against
+the others. He bent over with crooked knees, staggering like a man
+carrying a heavy load on his back. His veins swelled, and he panted with
+fury:
+
+"That's the way women are once for all, are they? Since when, eh?
+Have you never heard of the suffragettes who boxed the ears of prime
+ministers, and set fire to museums, and let themselves be chained to
+lamp-posts for the sake of the vote? For the sake of the vote, do you
+hear? But for the sake of their men? No. Not one sound. Not one single
+outcry!"
+
+He stopped to take breath, overcome by a wild suffocating despair. Then
+he pulled himself together once more and with difficulty suppressing the
+sobs, which kept bringing a lump into his throat, he screamed in deepest
+misery like a hunted animal:
+
+"Have you heard of one woman throwing herself in front of a train for
+the sake of her husband? Has a single one of them boxed the ears of a
+prime minister or tied herself to a railroad track for us? There wasn't
+one that had to be torn away. Not one fought for us or defended us. Not
+one moved a little finger for us in the whole wide world! They drove us
+out! They gagged us! They gave us the spur, like poor Dill. They sent
+us to murder, they sent us to die--for their vanity. Are you going to
+defend them? No! They must be pulled out! Pulled out like weeds, by the
+roots! Four of you together must pull the way we had to do with Dill.
+Four of you together! Then she'll have to come out. Are you the doctor?
+There! Do it to my head. I don't want a wife! Pull--pull her out!"
+
+He flung out his arm and his fist came down like a hammer on his own
+skull, and his crooked fingers clutched pitilessly at the sparse growth
+of hair on the back of his head, until he held up a whole handful torn
+out by the roots, and howled with pain.
+
+The doctor gave a sign, and the next moment the four sentries were on
+him, panting. He screamed, gnashed his teeth, beat about him, kicked
+himself free, shook off his assailants like burrs. It was not until the
+old corporal and the doctor came to their assistance that they succeeded
+in dragging him into the house.
+
+As soon as he was gone the people left the garden. The last to go were
+the Mussulman and the Philosopher. The Mussulman stopped at the door,
+and in the light of the lantern looked gravely down at his leg, which,
+in its plaster cast, hung like a dead thing between his two crutches.
+
+"Do you know, Philosopher," he said, "I'd much rather have this stick
+of mine. The worst thing that can happen to one out there is to go crazy
+like that poor devil. Rather off with one's head altogether and be done
+with it. Or do you think he still has a chance?"
+
+The Philosopher said nothing. His round good-natured face had gone ashen
+pale, and his eyes were swimming with tears. He shrugged his shoulders
+and helped his comrade up the steps without speaking. On entering the
+ward they heard the banging of doors somewhere far away in the house and
+a muffled cry.
+
+Then everything was still. One by one the lights went out in the windows
+of the officers' wing. Soon the garden lay like a bushy black island
+in the river's silent embrace. Only now and then a gust of wind brought
+from the west the coughing of the guns like a faint echo.
+
+Once more a crunching sound was heard on the gravel. It was the four
+sentries marching back to the watch-house. One soldier was cursing under
+his breath as he tried to refasten his torn blouse. The others were
+breathing heavily and were wiping the sweat from their red foreheads
+with the backs of their hands. The old corporal brought up the rear, his
+pipe in the corner of his mouth, his head bent low. As he turned into
+the main walk a bright sheet of light lit up the sky, and a prolonged
+rumbling that finally sank into the earth with a growl shook all the
+windows of the hospital.
+
+The old man stood still and listened until the rumbling had died away.
+Then he shook his clenched fist, and sent out a long curve of saliva
+from between his set teeth, and muttered in a disgust that came from the
+depths of his soul:
+
+"Hell!"
+
+
+
+
+II. BAPTISM OF FIRE
+
+
+The company rested for half an hour at the edge of the woods. Then
+Captain Marschner gave the command to start. He was pale, in spite of
+the killing heat, and he turned his eyes aside when he gave Lieutenant
+Weixler instructions that in ten minutes every man should be ready for
+the march without fail.
+
+He had really forced his own hand in giving the order. For now, he knew
+very well, there could be no delay. Whenever he left Weixler loose on
+the privates, everything went like clock-work. They trembled before
+this lad of barely twenty as though he were the devil incarnate. And
+sometimes it actually seemed to the captain himself as though there
+were something uncanny about that overgrown, bony figure. Never, by any
+chance, did a spark of warmth flash from those small, piercing eyes,
+which always mirrored a flickering unrest and gleamed as though from
+fever. The one young thing in his whole personality was the small, shy
+moustache above the compressed lips, which never opened except to ask
+in a mean, harsh way for some soldier to be punished. For almost a year
+Captain Marschner had lived side by side with him and had never yet
+heard him laugh, knew nothing of his family, nor from where he came,
+nor whether he had any ties at all. He spoke rarely, in brief, quick
+sentences, and brought out his words in a hiss, like the seething of
+a suppressed rage; and his only topic was the service or the war, as
+though outside these two things there was nothing else in the world
+worth talking about.
+
+And this man, of all others, fate had tricked by keeping him in the
+hinterland for the whole first year of the war. The war had been going
+on for eleven months and a half, and Lieutenant Weixler had not yet seen
+an enemy.
+
+At the very outset, when only a few miles across the Russian frontier,
+typhus had caught him before he had fired a single shot. Now at last he
+was going to face the enemy!
+
+Captain Marschner knew that the young man had a private's rifle dragged
+along for his own use, and had sacrificed all his savings for special
+field-glasses in order to be quite on the safe side and know exactly how
+many enemy lives he had snuffed out. Since they had come within close
+sound of the firing he had grown almost merry, even talkative, impelled
+by a nervous zeal, like an enthusiastic hunter who has picked up the
+trail. The captain saw him going in and out among the massed men, and
+turned away, hating to see how the fellow plagued his poor weary men,
+and went at them precisely like a sheep dog gathering in the herd,
+barking shrilly all the while. Long before the ten minutes were up, the
+company would be in formation, Weixler's impatience guaranteed that.
+And then--then there would be no reason any more for longer delay, no
+further possibility of putting off the fatal decision.
+
+Captain Marschner took a deep breath and looked up at the sky with
+wide-open eyes that had a peculiarly intent look in them. In the
+foreground, beyond the steep hill that still hid the actual field of
+battle from view, the invisible machine guns were beating in breathless
+haste; and scarcely a fathom above the edge of the slope small,
+yellowish-white packages floated in thick clusters, like snowballs flung
+high in the air--the smoke of the barrage fire through which he had to
+lead his men.
+
+It was not a short way. Two kilometers still from the farther spur of
+the hill to the entrance of the communication trenches, and straight
+across open fields without cover of any kind. Assuredly no small task
+for a company of the last class of reservists, for respectable family
+men who had been in the field but a few hours, and who were only now to
+smell powder for the first time and receive their baptism of fire. For
+Weixler, whose mind was set on nothing but the medal for distinguished
+service, which he wanted to obtain as soon as possible--for a
+twenty-year-old fighting cock who fancied the world rotated about his
+own, most important person and had had no time to estimate the truer
+values of life--for him it might be no more than an exciting promenade,
+a new sting to the nerves, a fine way of becoming thoroughly conscious
+of one's personality and placing one's fearlessness in a more brilliant
+light. Probably he had long been secretly deriding his old captain's
+indecision and had cursed the last halt because it forced him to wait
+another half hour to achieve his first deed of heroism.
+
+Marschner mowed down the tall blades of grass with his riding whip and
+from time to time glanced at his company surreptitiously. He could
+tell by the way the men dragged themselves to their feet with a sort of
+resistance, like children roused from sleep, that they fully understood
+where they were now to go.
+
+The complete silence in which they packed their bundles and fell into
+line made his heart contract.
+
+Ever since the beginning of the war, he had been preparing himself for
+this moment without relax. He had brooded over it day and night, had
+told himself a thousand times that where a higher interest is at stake,
+the misery of the individual counts for nothing, and a conscientious
+leader must armor himself with indifference. And now he stood there and
+observed with terror how all his good resolutions crumbled, and nothing
+remained in him but an impassioned, boundless pity for these driven
+home-keepers, who prepared themselves with such quiet resignation. It
+was as if they were taking their life into their hands like a costly
+vessel in order to carry it into battle and cast it at the feet of the
+enemy, as though the least thing they owned was that which would soon be
+crashing into fragments.
+
+His friends, among whom he was known as "uncle Marschner," would not
+have dared to suggest his sending a rabbit he had reared to the butcher
+or dragging a dog that had won his affection to the pound. And now he
+was to drive into shrapnel fire men whom he himself had trained to be
+soldiers and had had under his own eyes for months, men whom he knew as
+he did his own pockets. Of what avail were subtle or deep reflections
+now? He saw nothing but the glances of dread and beseeching that his
+men turned on him, asking protection, as though they believed that their
+captain could prescribe a path even for bullets and shells. And now was
+he to abuse their confidence? Was he to marshal these bearded children
+to death and not feel any emotion? Only two days before he had seen them
+surrounded by their little ones, saying good-bye to their sobbing wives.
+Was he to march on without caring if one or another of them was hit and
+fell over and rolled in agony in his blood? Whence was he to take the
+strength for such hardness of heart? From that higher interest? It had
+faded away. It was impalpable. It was too much a matter of mere words,
+too much mere sound for him to think that it could fool his soldiers,
+who looked forward to the barrage fire in dread, with homeward-turned
+souls.
+
+Lieutenant Weixler, red-cheeked and radiant, came and shouted in his
+face that the company was ready. It struck the captain like a blow
+below the belt. It sounded like a challenge. The captain could not help
+hearing in it the insolent question, "Well, why aren't you as glad of
+the danger as I am?" Every drop of Captain Marschner's blood rose to his
+temples. He had to look aside and his eyes wandered involuntarily up
+to the shrapnel clouds, bearing a prayer, a silent invocation to those
+senseless things up there rattling down so indiscriminately, a prayer
+that they would teach this cold-blooded boy suffering, convince him that
+he was vulnerable.
+
+But a moment later he bowed his head in shame. His anger grew against
+the man who had been able to arouse such a feeling in him.
+
+"Thank you. Let the men stand at rest. I must look after the horses once
+more," he said in measured tones, with a forced composure that soothed
+him. He did not intend to be hustled, now less than ever. He was glad
+to see the lieutenant give a start, and he smiled to himself with quiet
+satisfaction at the indignant face, the defiant "Yes, sir," said in a
+voice no longer so loud and so clear, but coming through gnashed teeth
+from a contracted throat. The boy was for once in his turn to experience
+how it feels to be held in check. He was so fond of intoxicating himself
+with his own power at the cost of the privates, triumphing, as though it
+were the force of his own personality that lorded it over them and not
+the rule of the service that was always backing him.
+
+Captain Marschner walked back to the woods deliberately, doubly glad
+of the lesson he had just given Weixler because it also meant a brief
+respite for his old boys. Perhaps a shell would hurtle down into the
+earth before their noses, and so these few minutes would save the lives
+of twenty men. Perhaps? It might turn out just the other way, too. Those
+very minutes--ah, what was the use of speculating? It was better not
+to think at all! He wanted to help the men as much as he could, but he
+could not be a savior to any of them.
+
+And yet, perhaps? One man had just come rushing up to him from the
+woods. This one man he was managing to shelter for the present. He and
+six others were to stay behind with the horses and the baggage. Was
+it an injustice to detail this particular man? All the other
+non-commissioned officers were older and married. The short, fat man
+with the bow-legs even had six children at home. Could he justify
+himself at the bar of his conscience for leaving this young, unmarried
+man here in safety?
+
+With a furious gesture the captain interrupted his thoughts. He would
+have liked best to catch hold of his own chest and give himself a sound
+shaking. Why could he not rid himself of that confounded brooding and
+pondering the right and wrong of things? Was there any justice at all
+left here, here in the domain of the shells that spared the worst
+and laid low the best? Had he not quite made up his mind to leave his
+conscience, his over-sensitiveness, his ever-wakeful sympathy, and
+all his superfluous thoughts at home along with his civilian's clothes
+packed away in camphor in the house where he lived in peace times?
+
+All these things were part of the civil engineer, Rudolf Marschner, who
+once upon a time had been an officer, but who had returned to school
+when thirty years old to exchange the trade of war, into which he had
+wandered in the folly of youth, for a profession that harmonized better
+with his gentle, thoughtful nature. That this war had now, twenty years
+later, turned him into a soldier again was a misfortune, a catastrophe
+which had overtaken him, as it had all the others, without any fault of
+his or theirs. Yet there was nothing to do but to reconcile himself to
+it; and first of all he had to avoid that constant hair-splitting. Why
+torment himself so with questions? Some man had to stay behind in the
+woods as a guard. The commander had decided on the young sergeant, and
+the young sergeant would stay behind. That settled it.
+
+The painful thing was the way the fellow's face so plainly showed
+his emotion. His eyes moistened and looked at the captain in dog-like
+gratitude. Disgusting, simply disgusting! And what possessed the man to
+stammer out something about his mother? He was to stay behind because
+the service required it; his mother had nothing to do with it. She was
+safe in Vienna--and here it was war.
+
+The captain told the man so. He could not let him think it was a bit of
+good fortune, a special dispensation, not to have to go into battle.
+
+Captain Marschner felt easier the minute he had finished scolding the
+crushed sinner. His conscience was now quite clear, just as though it
+had really been by chance that he had placed the man at that post. But
+the feeling did not last very long. The silly fellow would not give up
+adoring him as his savior. And when he stammered, "I take the liberty
+of wishing you good luck, Captain," standing in stiff military attitude,
+but in a voice hoarse and quivering from suppressed tears, such fervor,
+such ardent devotion radiated from his wish that the captain suddenly
+felt a strange emptiness again in the pit of his stomach, and he turned
+sharply and walked away.
+
+Now he knew. Now he could approximately calculate all the things Weixler
+had observed in him. Now he could guess how the fellow must have
+made secret fun of his sensitiveness, if this simple man, this mere
+carpenter's journeyman, could guess his innermost thoughts. For he had
+not spoken to him once--simply the night before last, at the entrainment
+in Vienna, he had furtively observed his leavetaking from his mother.
+How had the confounded fellow come to suspect that the wizened, shrunken
+little old hag whose skin, dried by long living, hung in a thousand
+loose folds from her cheek-bones, had made such an impression on his
+captain? The man himself certainly did not know how touching it looked
+when the tiny mother gazed up at him from below and stroked his broad
+chest with her trembling hand because she could not reach his face. No
+one could have betrayed to the soldier that since then, whenever
+his company commander looked at him, he could not help seeing the
+lemon-hued, thick-veined hand with its knotted, distorted fingers, which
+had touched the rough, hairy cloth with such ineffable love. And yet,
+somehow, the rascal had discovered that this hand floated above him
+protectingly, that it prayed for him and had softened the heart of his
+officer.
+
+Marschner tramped across the meadow in rage against himself. He was as
+ashamed as though some one had torn a mask from his face. Was it as easy
+as that to see through him, then, in spite of all the trouble he took?
+He stopped to get his breath, hewed at the grass again with his riding
+whip, and cursed aloud. Oh, well, he simply couldn't act a part,
+couldn't step out of his skin suddenly, even though there was a world
+war a thousand times over. He used to let his nephews and nieces twist
+him round their fingers, and laughed good-naturedly when they did it. In
+a single day he could not change into a fire-eater and go merrily upon
+the man-hunt. What an utterly mad idea it was, too, to try to cast all
+people into the same mould! No one dreamed of making a soft-hearted
+philanthropist of Weixler; and he was supposed so lightly to turn
+straight into a blood-thirsty militarist. He was no longer twenty, like
+Weixler, and these sad, silent men who had been so cruelly uprooted from
+their lives were each of them far more to him than a mere rifle to be
+sent to the repair shop if broken, or to be indifferently discarded if
+smashed beyond repair. Whoever had looked on life from all sides and
+reflected upon it could not so easily turn into the mere soldier, like
+his lieutenant, who had not been humanized yet, nor seen the world from
+any point of view but the military school and the barracks.
+
+Ah, yes, if conditions still were as at the beginning of the war, when
+none but young fellows, happy to be off on an adventure, hallooed from
+the train windows. If they left any dear ones at all behind, they
+were only their parents, and here at last was a chance to make a great
+impression on the old folks. Then Captain Marschner would have held
+his own as well as anyone, as well even as the strict disciplinarian,
+Lieutenant Weixler, perhaps even better. Then the men marched two or
+three weeks before coming upon the enemy, and the links that bound them
+to life broke off one at a time. They underwent a thousand difficulties
+and deprivations, until under the stress of hunger and thirst and
+weariness they gradually forgot everything they had left far--far
+behind. In those days hatred of the enemy who had done them all that
+harm smouldered and flared higher every day, while actual battle was a
+relief after the long period of passive suffering.
+
+But now things went like lightning. Day before yesterday in Vienna
+still--and now, with the farewell kisses still on one's lips, scarcely
+torn from another's arms, straight into the fire. And not blindly,
+unsuspectingly, like the first ones. For these poor devils now the war
+had no secrets left. Each of them had already lost some relative or
+friend; each had talked to wounded men, had seen mutilated, distorted
+invalids, and knew more about shell wounds, gas grenades, and liquid
+fire than artillery generals or staff physicians had known before the
+war.
+
+And now it was the captain's lot to lead precisely these clairvoyants,
+these men so rudely torn up by the roots--he, the retired captain, the
+civilian, who at first had had to stay at home training recruits. Now
+that it was a thousand times harder, now his turn had come to be a
+leader, and he dared not resist the task to which he was not equal. On
+the contrary, as a matter of decency, he had been forced to push his
+claims so that others who had already shed their blood out there should
+not have to go again for him.
+
+A dull, impotent rage came over him when he stepped up in front of his
+men ranged in deep rows. They stared at his lips in breathless suspense.
+What was he to say to them? It went against him to reel off compliantly
+the usual patriotic phrases that forced themselves on one's lips as
+though dictated by an outside power. For months he had carried about the
+defiant resolve not to utter the prescribed "_dulce et decorum est pro
+patria mori_," whatever the refusal might cost. Nothing was so repulsive
+to him as singing the praises of the sacrifice of one's life. It was
+a juggler's trick to cry out that some one was dying while inside the
+booth murder was being done.
+
+He clenched his teeth and lowered his eyes shyly before the wall of
+pallid faces. The foolish, childlike prayer, "Take care of us!" gazed at
+him maddeningly from all those eyes. It drove him to sheer despair.
+
+If only he could have driven them back to their own people and gone
+ahead alone! With a jerk he threw out his chest, fixed his eyes on a
+medal that a man in the middle of the long row was wearing, and said:
+
+"Boys, we're going to meet the enemy now. I count upon each of you to do
+his duty, faithful to the oath you have sworn to the flag. I shall ask
+nothing of you that the interest of our fatherland and your own interest
+therefore and the safety of your wives and children do not absolutely
+require. You may depend upon that. Good luck! And now--forward, march!"
+
+Without being conscious of it, he had imitated Weixler's voice, his
+unnaturally loud, studiedly incisive tone of command, so as to drown the
+emotion that fluttered in his throat. At the last words he faced about
+abruptly and without looking around tossed the final command over his
+shoulder for the men to deploy, and with his head sunk upon his chest
+he began the ascent, taking long strides. Behind him boots crunched and
+food pails clattered against some other part of the men's accouterment.
+Soon, too, there came the sound of the gasping of heavily laden men; and
+a thick, suffocating smell of sweat settled upon the marching company.
+
+Captain Marschner was ashamed. A real physical nausea at the part he had
+just played overcame him. What was there left for these simple people to
+do, these bricklayers and engineers and cultivators of the earth,
+who, bent over their daily tasks, had lived without vision into the
+future--what was there left for them to do when the grand folks, the
+learned people, their own captain with the three golden stars on his
+collar, assured them it was their duty and a most praiseworthy thing to
+shoot Italian bricklayers and engineers and farmers into fragments? They
+went--gasping behind him, and he--he led them on! Led them, against his
+inner conviction, because of his pitiful cowardice, and asked them to
+be courageous and contemptuous of death. He had talked them into it, had
+abused their confidence, had made capital of their love for their wives
+and children, because if he acted in the service of a lie, there was a
+chance of his continuing to live and even coming back home safe again,
+while if he stuck to the truth he believed in there was the certainty of
+his being stood up against a wall and shot.
+
+He staked their lives and his own life on the throw of loaded dice
+because he was too cowardly to contemplate the certain loss of the game
+for himself alone.
+
+The sun beat down murderously on the steep, treeless declivity. The
+sound of shells bursting off at a distance, of tattooing machine guns,
+and roaring artillery on their own side was now mingled with the howling
+sound of shots whizzing through the air and coming closer and closer.
+And still the top of the ridge had not been reached! The captain felt
+his breath fail him, stopped and raised his hand. The men were to get
+their wind back for a moment; they had been on the march since four
+o'clock that morning; they had done bravely with their forty-year-old
+legs. He could tell that by his own.
+
+Full of compassion he looked upon the bluish red faces streaming with
+sweat, and gave a start when he saw Lieutenant Weixler approaching in
+long strides. Why could he no longer see that face without a sense
+of being attacked, of being caught at the throat by a hatred he could
+hardly control? He ought really to be glad to have the man at his side
+there. One glance into those coldly watchful eyes was sufficient to
+subdue any surge of compassion.
+
+"With your permission, Captain," he heard him rasp out, "I'm going over
+to the left wing. A couple of fellows there that don't please me at all.
+Especially Simmel, the red-haired dog. He's already pulling his head in
+when a shrapnel bursts over there."
+
+Marschner was silent. The red-haired dog--Simmel? Wasn't that the
+red-haired endman in the second line, the paper-hanger and upholsterer
+who had carried that exquisite little girl in his arms up to the last
+moment--until Weixler had brutally driven him off to the train? It
+seemed to the captain as though he could still see the children's
+astonished upward look at the mighty man who could scold their own
+father.
+
+"Let him be, he'll get used to it by and by," he said mildly. "He's got
+his children on his mind and isn't in a hurry to make orphans of them.
+The men can't all be heroes. If they just do their duty."
+
+Weixler's face became rigid. His narrow lips tightened again into that
+hard, contemptuous expression which the captain felt each time like the
+blow of a whip.
+
+"He's not supposed to think of his brats now, but of his oath to the
+flag, of the oath he swore to his Majesty, his Commander-in-Chief! You
+just told them so yourself, Captain."
+
+"Yes, yes, I know I did," Captain Marschner nodded absent-mindedly, and
+let himself slide down slowly on the grass. It was not surprising that
+this boy spoke as he did, but what was surprising was that twenty-five
+years ago, when he himself had come from the military academy all aglow
+with enthusiasm, the phrases "oath to the flag," "his Majesty, and
+Commander-in-Chief" had seemed to him, too, to be the sum and substance
+of all things. In those days he would have been like this lad and would
+have gone to war full of joyous enthusiasm. But now that he had grown
+deaf to the fanfaronade of such words and clearly saw the framework on
+which they were constructed, how was he to keep pace with the young who
+were a credulous echo of every speech they heard? How was he suddenly
+to make bold reckless blades of his excellent, comfortable Philistines,
+whom life had so thoroughly tamed that at home they were capable of
+going hungry and not snatching at treasures that were separated from
+them by only a thin partition of glass? What was the use of making the
+same demands upon the upholsterer Simmel as upon the young lieutenant,
+who had never striven for anything else than to be named first for
+fencing, wrestling, and courageous conduct? Have mercenaries ever been
+famous for their morals, or good solid citizens for their fearlessness?
+Can one and the same man be twenty and forty-five years old at the same
+time?
+
+Crouching there, his head between his fists, the captain became so
+absorbed in these thoughts that he lost all sense of the time and the
+place, and the lieutenant's attempts to rouse him by passing by several
+times and hustling the men about loudly remained unsuccessful. But at
+last the sound of a horse's hoofs brought him back to consciousness. An
+officer was galloping along the path that ran about the hill half way
+from the top. On his head he wore the tall cap that marked him as a
+member of the general staff. He reined in his horse, asked courteously
+where the company was bound and raised his eyebrows when Captain
+Marschner explained the precise position they were to take.
+
+"So that's where you're going?" he exclaimed, and his grimace turned
+into a respectful smile. "Well, I congratulate you! You're going into
+the very thickest of the lousy mess. For three days the Italians have
+been trying to break through at that point. I wouldn't hold you back for
+a moment! The poor devils there now will make good use of the relief.
+Good-bye and good luck!"
+
+Gracefully he touched the edge of his cap. His horse cried out under the
+pressure of his spurs, and he was gone.
+
+The captain stared after him as though dazed. "Well, I congratulate
+you!" The words echoed in his ears. A man, well mounted, thoroughly
+rested, pink and neat as though he had just come out of a band-box,
+meets two hundred fellowmen dedicated to death; sees them sweaty,
+breathless, on the very edge of destruction; knows that in another
+hour many a face now turned upon him curiously will lie in the grass
+distorted by pain or rigid in death--and he says, smiling, "Well, I
+congratulate you!" And he rides on and no shudder of awe creeps down his
+back, no shadow touches his forehead!
+
+The meeting will fade from the man's memory without leaving a trace.
+At dinner that night nothing will remind him of the comrade whose hand,
+perhaps, he was the last one to press. To these chosen ones, who from
+their safe positions in the rear, drive the columns on into the fire,
+what matters a single company's march to death? And the miserable,
+red-haired upholsterer here was trembling, pulling back his head,
+tearing his eyes open mightily, as though the fate of the world depended
+upon whether he would ever again carry his little red-haired girl in
+his arms. To be sure, if one viewed the whole matter in the proper
+perspective--as a member of the general staff riding by, who kept his
+vision fixed on the aim, that is, the victory that sooner or later would
+be celebrated to the clinking of glasses--why, from that point of view
+Weixler was right! It must make him indignant to have events of such
+epic grandeur made ridiculous by such a chicken-hearted creature as
+Simmel and degraded into a doleful family affair.
+
+"The poor devils there now!" A cold shiver ran down Marschner's back.
+The staff officer's words suddenly evoked a vision of the shattered,
+blood-soaked trench where the men, exhausted to the point of death, were
+yearning for him as for a redeemer. He arose, with a groan, seized by a
+grim, embittered hatred against this age. Not a single mesh in the net
+left open! Every minute of respite granted his own men was theft or even
+murder committed against the men out there. He threw up his arms and
+strode forward, determined to rest no more until he reached the trench
+that he and his company were to man and hold. His face was pale
+and careworn, and each time he caught the exasperating rasp of his
+lieutenant's voice from the other wing crying "Forward! Forward!" it was
+drawn by a tortured smile.
+
+Suddenly he stood still. Into the rattle, the boom, the explosion of
+artillery there leaped suddenly a new tone. It rose clearly above the
+rest of the din, which had almost ceased to penetrate the consciousness.
+It approached with such a shrill sound, with such indescribable
+swiftness, with so fierce a threat, that the sound seemed to be visible,
+as though you could actually see a screaming semicircle rise in the air,
+bite its way to one's very forehead, and snap there with a short, hard,
+whiplike crack. A few feet away a little whirl of dust was puffed up,
+and invisible hail stones slapped rattling down upon the grass.
+
+A shrapnel!
+
+Captain Marschner looked round startled, and to his terror saw all the
+men's eyes fixed on him, as though asking his advice. A peculiar smile
+of shame and embarrassment hovered about their lips.
+
+It was his business to set the men a good example, to march on
+carelessly without stopping or looking up. After all it made no
+difference what one did one way or the other. There was no possibility
+of running away or hiding. It was all a matter of chance. Chance was the
+one thing that would protect a man. So the thing to do was to go ahead
+as if not noticing anything. If there was only one man in the company
+who did not seem to care, the others would be put to shame and would
+mutually control each other, and then everything was won. He could tell
+by his own experience how the feeling of being watched on all sides
+upheld him. Had he been by himself, he might have thrown himself on the
+ground and tried to hide behind a stone no matter how small.
+
+"Nothing but a spent shot! Forward, boys!" he cried, the thought of
+being a support to his men almost making him cheerful. But the words
+were not out of his mouth when other shots whizzed through the air. In
+spite of himself, his body twitched backward and his head sank lower
+between his shoulders. That made him stiffen his muscles and grind his
+teeth in rage. It was not the violence with which the scream flew toward
+him that made him twitch. It was the strange precision with which the
+circle of the thing's flight (exactly like a diagram at a lecture on
+artillery) curved in front of him. It was this unnatural feeling of
+perceiving a sound more with the eye than with the ear that made the
+will powerless.
+
+Something had to be done to create the illusion of not being wholly
+defenseless.
+
+"Forward, run!" he shouted at the top of his voice, holding his hands to
+his mouth to make a megaphone.
+
+His men stormed forward as if relieved. The tension left their faces;
+each one was somehow busied with himself, stumbled, picked himself
+up, grasped some piece of equipment that was coming loose; and in the
+general snorting and gasping, the whistle of the approaching shells
+passed almost unobserved.
+
+After a while it came to Captain Marschner's consciousness that some
+one was hissing into his left ear. He turned his head and saw Weixler
+running beside him, scarlet in the face.
+
+"What is it?" he asked, involuntarily slowing down from a run to a walk.
+
+"Captain, I beg to announce that an example ought to be instituted! That
+coward Simmel is demoralizing the whole company. At each shrapnel he
+yells out, 'Jesus, my Savior,' and flings himself to the ground. He
+is frightening the rest of the men. He ought to be made an example of,
+a----"
+
+A charge of four shrapnels whizzed into the middle of his sentence. The
+screaming seemed to have grown louder, more piercing. The captain felt
+as though a monstrous, glittering scythe were flashing in a steep curve
+directly down on his skull. But this time he did not dare to move an
+eyelash. His limbs contracted and grew taut, as in the dentist's chair
+when the forceps grip the tooth. At the same time, he examined the
+lieutenant's face closely, curious to see how he was taking the fire for
+which he had so yearned. But he seemed not to be noticing the shrapnels
+in the least. He was stretching his neck to inspect the left wing.
+
+"There!" he cried indignantly. "D'you see, Captain? The miserable cur is
+down on his face again. I'll go for him!"
+
+Before Marschner could hold him back, he had dashed off. But half-way he
+stopped, stood still, and then turned back in annoyance.
+
+"The fellow's hit," he announced glumly, with an irritated shrug of his
+shoulders.
+
+"Hit?" the captain burst out, and an ugly, bitter taste suddenly made
+his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. He observed the frosty calm
+in Weixler's features, the unsympathetic, indifferent look, and his
+hand started upward. He could have slapped him, his insensibility was so
+maddening and that careless "the fellow's hit" hurt so. The image of the
+dear little girl with the bright ribbon in her red curls flashed into
+his mind, and also the vision of a distorted corpse holding a child in
+its arms. As through a veil he saw Weixler hasten past him to catch up
+with the company, and he ran to where the two stretcher-bearers kneeled
+next to something invisible.
+
+The wounded man lay on his back. His flaming red hair framed a greenish
+grey face ghostly in its rigidity. A few minutes before Captain
+Marschner had seen the man still running--the same face still full of
+vitality--from heat and excitement. His knees gave way. The sight of
+that change, so incomprehensible in its suddenness, gripped at his
+vitals like an icy hand. Was it possible? Could all the life blood
+recede in the twinkling of an eye, and a strong, hale man crumble into
+ruins in a few moments? What powers of hell slept in such pieces of iron
+that between two breaths they could perform the work of many months of
+illness?
+
+"Don't be frightened, Simmel!" the captain stammered, supporting himself
+on the shoulder of one of the stretcher-bearers. "They'll carry you back
+to the baggage!" He forced the lie out with an effort, drawing a deep
+breath. "You'll be the first one to get back to Vienna now!" He wanted
+to add something about the man's family and the little girl with the red
+curls, but he could not get it over his lips. He dreaded a cry from
+the dying man for his dear ones, and when the mouth writhing with pain
+opened slowly, it sent an inner tremor through the captain. He saw the
+eyes open, too, and he shuddered at their glassy stare, which seemed no
+longer to fix itself upon any bodily thing but to be looking through all
+those present and seeking something at a distance.
+
+Simmers body writhed under the forcible examination of the doctor's
+hands. Incomprehensible gurgling sounds arose from his torn chest
+streaming with blood, and his breath blew the scarlet foam at his mouth
+into bursting bubbles.
+
+"Simmel! What do you want, Simmel?" Marschner besought, bending low over
+the wounded man. He listened intently to the broken sounds, convinced
+that he would have to try to catch a last message. He breathed in
+relief when the wandering eyes at last found their way back and fastened
+themselves on his face with a look of anxious inquiry in them. "Simmel!"
+he cried again, and grasped his hand, which trembled toward the wound.
+"Simmel, don't you know me?"
+
+Simmel nodded. His eyes widened, the corners of his mouth drooped.
+
+"It hurts--Captain--hurts so!" came from the shattered breast. To the
+captain it sounded like a reproach. After a short rattling sound of pain
+he cried out again, foaming at the mouth and with a piercing shriek of
+rage: "It hurts! It hurts!" He beat about with his hands and feet.
+
+Captain Marschner jumped up.
+
+"Carry him back," he commanded, and without knowing what he did, he put
+his fingers into his ears, and ran after the company, which had already
+reached the top of the ridge. He ran pressing his head between his hands
+as in a vise, reeling, panting, driven by a fear, as though the wounded
+man's agonized cry were pursuing him with lifted axe. He saw the
+shrunken body writhe, the face that had so suddenly withered, the
+yellowish white of the eyes. And that cry: "Captain--hurts so!" echoed
+within him and clawed at his breast, so that when he reached the summit
+he fell down, half choked, as if the ground had been dragged from under
+his feet.
+
+No, he couldn't do that sort of thing! He didn't want to go on with it.
+He was no hangman, he was incapable of lashing men on to their death. He
+could not be deaf to their woe, to that childlike whimpering which
+stung his conscience like a bitter reproach. He stamped on the ground
+defiantly. Everything in him arose in rebellion against the task that
+called him.
+
+Below, the field of battle stretched far out, cheerlessly grey. No tree,
+no patch of green. A stony waste--chopped up, crushed, dug inside out,
+no sign of life. The communication trenches, which started in the bottom
+of the valley and led to the edge of the hill, from which the wire
+entanglements projected, looked like fingers spread out to grasp
+something and clawed deep into the throttled earth. Marschner looked
+round again involuntarily. Behind him the green slope descended steeply
+to the little woods in which the baggage had been left. Farther behind
+the white highroad gleamed like a river framed in colored meadows. A
+short turn--and the greenness vanished! All life succumbed, as though
+roared down by the cannons, by the howling and pounding that hammered in
+the valley like the pulsating of a colossal fever. Shell hole upon shell
+hole yawned down there. From time to time thick, black pillars of earth
+leaped up and for moments hid small parts of this desert burned to
+ashes, where the cloven stumps of trees, whittled as by pen-knives,
+stuck up like a jeering challenge to the impotent imagination, a
+challenge to recognize in this field of death and refuse, the landscape
+it once had been, before the great madness had swept over it and sown
+it with ruins, leaving it like a dancing floor on which two worlds had
+fought for a loose woman.
+
+And into this vale of hell he was now to descend! _Live_ down there five
+days and five nights, he and his little company of the damned, spewed
+down into that place, their living bodies speared on the fishing hook,
+bait for the enemy!
+
+All alone, with no one near to hear him, amid the fury of the bursting
+shrapnel, which fell up there as thick as rain in a thunderstorm,
+Captain Marschner gave himself up to his rage, his impotent rage against
+a world that had inflicted such a thing on him. He cursed and roared out
+his hatred into the deaf tumult; and then he sprang up when, far below,
+almost in the valley already, his men emerged followed by Lieutenant
+Weixler, who ran behind them like a butcher's helper driving oxen to the
+shambles. The captain saw them hurry, saw the clouds of the explosions
+multiply above their heads, and on the slope in front of him saw
+bluish-green heaps scattered here and there, like knapsacks dropped
+by the way, some motionless, some twitching like great spiders--and he
+rushed on.
+
+He raced like a madman down the steep slope, scarcely feeling the ground
+under his feet, nor hearing the rattle of the exploding shells. He flew
+rather than ran, stumbled over charred roots, fell, picked himself up
+again and darted onward, looking neither to the right nor to the left,
+almost with closed eyes. Now and then, as from a train window, he saw
+a pale, troubled face flit by. Once it seemed to him he heard a man
+moaning for water. But he wished to hear nothing, to see nothing. He ran
+on, blind and deaf, without stopping, driven by the terror of that bad,
+reproachful, "Hurts so!"
+
+Only once did he halt, as though he had stepped into a trap and were
+held fast in an iron vise. A hand stopped him, a grey, convulsed hand
+with crooked fingers. It stuck up in front of him as though hewn out
+of stone. He saw no face, nor knew who it was that held out that dead,
+threatening fist. All he knew was that two hours before, over there in
+the little piece of woods, that hand had still comfortably cut slices
+of rye bread or had written a last post-card home. And a horror of those
+fingers took hold of the captain and lent new strength to his limbs, so
+that he stormed onward in great leaps like a boy until, with throbbing
+sides and a red cloud before his eyes, he caught up with his company
+at last, way down in the valley at the entrance to the communication
+trenches.
+
+Lieutenant Weixler presented himself in strictest military form and
+announced the loss of fourteen men. Marschner heard the ring of pride in
+his voice, like triumph over what had been achieved, like the rejoicing
+of a boy bragging of the first down on his lip and deepening the newly
+acquired dignity of a bass voice. What were the wounded men writhing on
+the slope above to this raw youth, what the red-haired coward with
+his whine, what the children robbed of their provider growing up to be
+beggars, to a life in the abyss, perhaps to a life in jail? All these
+were mere supers, a stage background for Lieutenant Weixler's heroism
+to stand out in relief. Fourteen bloody bodies lined the path he had
+trodden without fear. How should his eyes not radiate arrogance?
+
+The captain hastened on, past Weixler. If only he did not have to see
+him, he told himself, if only he did not have to meet the contented
+gleam of the man's eyes. He feared his rage might master his reason
+and his tongue get beyond his control, and his clenched fist do its own
+will. But here he had to spare this man. Here Lieutenant Weixler was
+within his rights. He grew from moment to moment. His stature dwarfed
+the others. He swam upon the stream, while the others, weighed down by
+the burden of their riper humanity, sank like heavy clods. Here other
+laws obtained. The dark shaft in which they now reeled forward with
+trembling knees led to an island washed by a sea of death. Whoever was
+stranded there dared not keep anything that he used in another world.
+The man who was master here was the one who had kept nothing but his
+axe and his fist. And he was the rich one upon whose superabundance
+the others depended. As Captain Marschner groped his way through the
+slippery trench in a daze, it became clearer and clearer to him that he
+must now hold on to his detested lieutenant like a treasure. Without him
+he would be lost.
+
+He saw the traces of puddles of blood at his feet, and trod upon
+tattered, blood-soaked pieces of uniforms, on empty shells, rattling
+preserve tins, fragments of cannon balls. Yawning shell holes would open
+up suddenly, precariously bridged with half-charred boards.
+
+Everywhere the traces of frenzied devastation grinned, blackened remains
+of a wilderness of wires, beams, sacks, broken tools, a disorder
+that took one's breath away and made one dizzy--all steeped in the
+suffocating stench of combustion, powder smoke, and the pungent,
+stinging breath of the ecrasite shells. Wherever one stepped the earth
+had been lacerated by gigantic explosions, laboriously patched up again,
+once more ripped open to its very bowels, and leveled a second time, so
+that one reeled on unconscious, as if in a hurricane.
+
+Crushed by the weight of his impressions, Captain Marschner crept
+through the trench like a worm, and his thoughts turned ever more
+passionately, ever more desperately to Lieutenant Weixler. Weixler alone
+could help him or take his place, with that grim, cold energy of his,
+with that blindness to everything which did not touch his own life, or
+which was eclipsed by the glowing vision of an Erich Weixler studded
+with decorations and promoted out of his turn. The captain kept looking
+about for him anxiously, and breathed with relief each time the urgent,
+rasping voice came to his ears from the rear.
+
+The trench seemed never to be coming to an end. Marschner felt his
+strength giving way. He stumbled more frequently and closed his eyes
+with a shudder at the criss-cross traces of blood that precisely
+indicated the path of the wounded. Suddenly he raised his head with
+a jerk. A new smell struck him, a sweetish stench which kept getting
+stronger and stronger until at a curve of the trench wall, which swung
+off to the left at this point and receded semicircularly, it burst upon
+him like a great cloud. He looked about, shaken by nausea, his gorge
+rising. In a dip in the trench he saw a pile of dirty, tattered uniforms
+heaped in layers and with strangely rigid outlines. It took him some
+time to grasp the full horror of that which towered in front of him.
+Fallen soldiers were lying there like gathered logs, in the contorted
+shapes of the last death agony. Tent flaps had been spread over them,
+but had slipped down and revealed the grim, stony grey caricatures, the
+fallen jaws, the staring eyes. The arms of those in the top tier hung
+earthward like parts of a trellis, and grasped at the faces of
+those lying below, and were already sown with the livid splotches of
+corruption.
+
+Captain Marschner uttered a short, belching cry and reeled forward. His
+head shook as though loosened from his neck, and his knees gave way so
+that he already saw the ground rising up toward him, when suddenly
+an unknown face emerged directly in front of him and attracted his
+attention, and gave him back his self-control. It was a sergeant, who
+was staring at him silently with great, fevered, gleaming eyes in a
+deathly pale face. For a moment the man stood as though paralyzed, then
+his mouth opened wide, he clapped his hands, and jumped into the air
+like a dancer, and dashed off, without thinking of a salute.
+
+"Relief!" he shouted while running.
+
+He came to a halt before a black hole in the trench wall, like the
+entrance to a cave, and bent down and shouted into the opening with a
+ring of indescribable joy in his voice--with a rejoicing that sounded as
+if it came through tears:
+
+"Relief! Lieutenant! The relief party is here!"
+
+The captain looked after him and heard his cry. His eyes grew moist,
+so touching was that childlike cry of joy, that shout from out of a
+relieved heart. He followed the sergeant slowly, and saw--as though
+the cry had awakened the dead--pallid faces peering from all corners,
+wounded men with blood-soaked bandages, tottering figures holding their
+rifles. Men streamed toward him from every direction, stared at him and
+with speechless lips formed the word "relief," until at length one of
+them roared out a piercing "hurrah," which spread like wildfire and
+found an echo in unseen throats that repeated it enthusiastically.
+Deeply shaken, Marschner bowed his head and swiftly drew his hand across
+his eyes when the commandant of the trench rushed toward him from the
+dugout.
+
+Nothing that betokens life was left about the man. His face was ashen,
+his eyes like lamps extinguished, glazed and surrounded by broad blue
+rims. His lids were a vivid red from sleeplessness. His hair, his beard,
+his clothes were encased in a thick crust of mud, so that he looked as
+if he had just arisen from the grave. He gave a brief, military salute,
+then grasped the captain's hand with hysterical joy. His hand was cold
+as a corpse's and sticky with sweat and dirt. And most uncanny was the
+contrast between this skeleton hung with clothes, this rigid death-mask
+of a face, and the twitching, over-excited nervousness with which the
+lieutenant greeted their liberator.
+
+The words leaped like a waterfall from his cracked lips. He drew
+Marschner into the dugout and pushed him, stumbling and groping as if
+dazzled, down on an invisible something meant for a seat and began to
+tell his tale. He couldn't stand still for a second. He hopped about,
+slapped his thighs, laughed with unnatural loudness, ran up and down
+trippingly, threw himself on the couch in the corner, asked for a
+cigarette every other minute, threw it away without knowing it after two
+puffs, and at once asked for another.
+
+"I tell you, three hours more," he crowed blissfully, with affected
+gaiety, "--three? What am I talking about. _One_ hour more, and it would
+have been too late. D'you know how many rounds of ammunition I've got
+left? Eleven hundred in all! Machine guns? Run down! Telephone? Smashed
+since last night already! Send out a party to repair it? Impossible!
+Needed every man in the trench! A hundred and sixty-four of us at first.
+Now I've got thirty-one, eleven of them wounded so that they can't hold
+a rifle. Thirty-one fellows to hold the trench with! Last night there
+were still forty-five of us when they attacked. We drove 'em to hell, of
+course, but fourteen of our men went again. We haven't had a chance to
+bury them yet. Didn't you see them lying out there?"
+
+The Captain let him talk. He leaned his elbows on the primitive table,
+held his head between his hands, and kept silent. His eyes wandered
+about the dark, mouldy den, filled with the stench of a smoking little
+kerosene lamp. He saw the mildewed straw in the corner, the disconnected
+telephone at the entrance, an empty box of tinned food on which a
+crumpled map was spread out. He saw a mountain of rifles, bundles of
+uniforms, each one ticketed. And he felt how inch by inch, a dumb, icy
+horror arose within him and paralyzed his breathing, as though the
+earth overhead, upheld by only a thin scaffolding of cracked boards
+and threatening to fall at any moment, had already laid its intolerable
+weight upon his chest. And that prancing ghost, that giggling death's
+head, which only a week before perhaps had still been young, affected
+him like a nightmare. And the thought that now his turn had come to
+stick it out in that sepulchral vault for five or six days or a week and
+experience the same horrors that the man there was telling about with
+a laugh intensified his discouragement into a passionate, throbbing
+indignation which he could scarcely control any more. He could have
+roared out, could have jumped up, run out, and shouted to mankind from
+the depths of his soul asking why he had been tossed there, why he would
+have to lie there until he had turned into carrion or a crazy man. How
+could he have let himself be driven out there? He could not understand
+it. He saw no meaning to it all, no aim. All he saw was that hole in the
+earth, those rotting corpses outside, and nearby, but one step removed
+from all that madness, his own Vienna as he had left it only two days
+before, with its tramways, its show windows, its smiling people and its
+lighted theaters. What madness to be crouching there waiting for death
+with idiotic patience, to perish on the naked earth in blood and filth,
+like a beast, while other people, happy, clean, dressed up, sat in
+bright halls and listened to music, and then nestled in soft beds
+without fear, without danger, guarded by a whole world, which would come
+down in indignation upon any who dared to harm a single hair of their
+heads. Had madness already stolen upon him or were the others mad?
+
+His pulse raged as though his heart would burst if he could not relieve
+his soul by a loud shout.
+
+At that very moment Lieutenant Weixler came bustling in, like the master
+of ceremonies at a ball. He stood stiff and straight in front of the
+captain, and announced that everything above was in readiness, that he
+had already assigned the posts and arranged the watches, and placed the
+machine guns. The captain looked at him and had to lower his eyes as if
+boxed on the ears by this tranquillity, which would suddenly wither his
+fury into a burning shame at himself.
+
+Why did that man remain untouched by the great fear of death which
+impregnated the very air here? How was it that he could give orders
+and commands with the foresightedness of a mature man, while he himself
+crept out of sight like a frightened child and rebelled against his fate
+with the senseless fury of an animal at bay, instead of mastering fate
+as befitted his age? Was he a coward? Was he in the grip of a mean,
+paltry fear, was he overcome by that wretched blindness of the soul
+which cannot lift its vision beyond its own ego nor lose sight of its
+ego for the sake of an idea? Was he really so devoid of any sense for
+the common welfare, so utterly ruled by short-sighted selfishness,
+concerned with nothing but his bare, miserable existence? No, he was not
+like that. He clung to his own life no more than any other man. He could
+have cast it away enthusiastically, and without flying banners, without
+ecstasy, without the world's applause, had the hostile trenches over
+there been filled with men like Weixler, had the combat been against
+such crazy hardness of soul, against catchwords fattened with human
+flesh, against that whole, cleverly built-up machine of force which
+drove those whom it was supposed to protect to form a wall to protect
+itself. He would have hurled himself into the fight with bare fists,
+unmindful of the bursting of shells, the moans of the wounded. Oh no,
+he was not a coward. Not what those two men thought. He saw them wink
+scornfully and make fun of the unhappy old uncle of a reserve officer
+who sat in the corner like a bundle of misery. What did they know of his
+soul's bitterness? They stood there as heroes and felt the glances of
+their home upon them, and spoke words which, upborne by the echo of a
+whole world, peopled the loneliness with all the hosts of the likeminded
+and filled their souls with the strength of millions. And they laughed
+at a man who was to kill without feeling hatred and die without ecstasy,
+for a victory that was nothing to him but a big force which achieved its
+objects simply because it hit harder, not because it had justice on its
+side or a fine and noble aim. He had no cause to slink off, humbled by
+their courage.
+
+A cold, proud defiance heartened him, so that he arose, strengthened
+suddenly, as if elevated by the superhuman burden that he alone carried
+on his shoulders. He saw the strange lieutenant still dancing about,
+hastily gathering up his belongings and stuffing them into his knapsack.
+He heard him scold his orderly and bellow at him to hurry up, in between
+digging up fresh details, hideous episodes, from the combats of the past
+few days, which Weixler devoured in breathless attention.
+
+"What a question!" the commandant of the trench exclaimed, laughing at
+his audience. "Whether the Italians had heavy losses, too? Do you think
+we let them pepper us like rabbits? You can easily calculate what those
+fellows lost in their eleven attacks if we've melted down to thirty men
+without crawling out of our trench. Just let them go on like that a few
+weeks longer and they'll be at the end of their human material."
+
+Captain Marschner had not wanted to listen. He stood bending over a map,
+but at the phrase, "human material," he started violently. It sounded
+like a taunt directed at his own thoughts, as if the two men had seen
+into him and had agreed with each other to give him a good lesson and
+show him how alone he was.
+
+"Human material!"
+
+In a trench, filled with the stench of dead bodies, shaken by the impact
+of the shells, stood two men, each himself a stake in the game, and
+while the dice were still being tossed for their very bones, they talked
+of--human material! They uttered those ruthless, shameful words without
+a shadow of indignation, as though it were natural for their living
+bodies to be no more than a gambler's chips in the hands of men who
+arrogated to themselves the right to play the game of gods. Without
+hesitating they laid their one, irrevocable life at the feet of a
+power that could not prove whether it had known how to place the stakes
+rightly except by their dead bodies. And the men who were speaking that
+way were officers! So where was there a gleam of hope?
+
+Out there, among the simple men, perhaps, the plain cannon fodder? They
+were now crouching resignedly in their places, thinking of home and each
+of them still feeling himself a man. He was drawn to his men, to their
+dull, silent sadness, to their true greatness, which without pathos and
+without solemnity, in everyday clothes, as it were, patiently awaited
+the hero's death.
+
+Outside the dugout stood the remnants of the relieved company ready for
+the march, always two men abreast with a dead comrade on a tent canvas
+between them. A long procession, profoundly stirring in its silent
+expectancy, into which the hissing and crackling of shrapnel and the
+thunder of grenades fell like a warning from above to those who
+still had their lives. Bitterly, Marschner clenched his fist at this
+insatiableness.
+
+At that moment the pale sergeant stepped in front of the place where the
+dead had been piled and frightened Marschner out of his thoughts.
+
+"Captain, I beg to announce that beside the fourteen dead there are
+three seriously wounded men who can't walk--Italians. I have no bearers
+left for them."
+
+"We'll leave them to you as a souvenir," the trench commandant, who was
+just leaving the dugout with Weixler, laughed in his maundering way.
+"You can have them dug in at night up there among the communication
+trenches, Captain. When it gets dark, the Italians direct their barrage
+fire farther back, and give you a chance to climb out. To be sure, they
+won't lie in peace there under the earth very long, because the shells
+rip everything open right away again. I've had to have my poor ensign
+buried three times over already."
+
+"How did they get in here anyhow?" Weixler asked, pushing himself
+forward. "Did you have a fight in the trench?"
+
+The other lieutenant shook his head proudly. "I should rather say not.
+The gentlemen never got as far as that. These three tried to cut the
+wire entanglements night before last, but our machine gun man caught 'em
+at it and his iron spatter spoiled their little game. Well, there they
+lay, of course, right under our very noses and they had on the loveliest
+shoes of bright yellow. My men begrudged 'em those shoes. There--" he
+ended, pointing with his finger at the feet of the pale sergeant--"there
+you see one pair. But we'll have to start now. March, sergeant! My
+respects, Captain. The Italians'll open their eyes when they come over
+to-night to finish us off comfortably and a hundred and fifty rifles go
+off and two brand-new bullet squirters. Ha-ha! Sorry I can't be here to
+see it! Good-by, little man! Good luck!" Humming a merry popular song
+he followed his men without looking back, without even observing that
+Marschner accompanied him a little on his way.
+
+Gaily, as though on a Sunday picnic, the men started on the way, which
+led over the terrible field of shards and ruins and the steep, shot-up
+hill. What hells they must have endured there, in that mole's gallery!
+The captain remained standing and heaved a deep sigh. It was as if
+that long, grey column slowly winding its way through the trench were
+carrying away the last hope. The back of the last soldier, growing
+smaller and smaller, was the world. The captain's eyes clung greedily
+to that back and measured fearfully the distance to the corner of the
+trench from which he must lose sight of it forever. There was still time
+to call out a greeting, and by running very fast one might still catch
+up and hand over a letter.
+
+Then the last medium disappeared--the last possibility of dividing the
+world into two halves. And his yearning recoiled before the endless
+space it had to bridge--and there was nothing else to bridge it but his
+yearning.
+
+Marschner sank into himself as he stood deserted in the empty trench. He
+felt as though he had been hollowed out, and looked about for help, and
+his eyes clung to the depression from which the corpses had now been
+lifted. Only the three Italians were lying there, the life already gone
+from them. The one showed his face, his mouth was still wide open as for
+a cry, and his hands dug themselves, as though to ward off pain, into
+his unnaturally swollen body. The other two lay with their knees drawn
+up and their heads between their arms. The naked feet with their grey
+convulsed toes stared into the communication trench like things robbed,
+with a mute accusal. There was a remoteness about these dead bodies,
+a loneliness, an isolation about their bared feet. A tangled web of
+memories arose, a throng of fleeting faces glimmered in the captain's
+soul--gondoliers of Venice, voluble cabbies, a toothless inn-keeper's
+wife at Posilipo. Two trips on a vacation in Italy drove an army of
+sorrowing figures through his mind. And finally another figure appeared
+in that ghostly dance of death, his own sister, sitting in a concert
+hall in Vienna, care-free, listening to music, while her brother lay
+somewhere stretched out on the ground, rigid in death, an enemy's corpse
+just to be kicked aside.
+
+Shuddering, the captain hastened back down the trench, as though the
+three dead men were pursuing him noiselessly on their naked soles. When
+he reached his own men at last, he felt as if he had arrived at a harbor
+of safety.
+
+The shells were now falling so thick that there was not a moment's pause
+between the explosions, and all sounds merged into a single, equal,
+rolling thunder, which made the earth tremble like the hull of a ship.
+But there was a particularly sharp crashing and splintering from one
+shot that hit the trench squarely and whirled the coverings above in all
+directions. A few minutes later two groaning men dragged down a corpse,
+leaned it against the trench wall, and climbed back to their posts
+through the narrow shaft. Marschner saw his sergeant get up and move
+his lips--then a soldier in the corner arose and took up his rifle
+and followed the two others heavily. It was all so comfortless, so
+unmercifully businesslike, precisely as when "Next!" breaks into the
+monotony of the practising in the yard of the barracks, only with the
+difference that a little group at once gathered about the dead man,
+drawn by that shy curiosity which irresistibly attracts simple folk to
+corpses and funerals. Most of the men expected the same of him--he saw
+it in their eyes--that he, too, would go over and pay a last tribute
+of respect to the dead. But he did not want to. He was absolutely
+determined not to learn the fallen man's name. He was bent upon
+practising self-mastery at last and remaining indifferent to all small
+happenings. So long as he had not seen the dead man's face nor heard his
+name, only a man had fallen in battle, one of the many thousands. If he
+kept his distance and did not bend over each individual and did not
+let a definite fate come to his notice, it was not so hard to remain
+indifferent.
+
+Stubbornly he walked over to the second shaft leading to the top and for
+the first time observed that it had grown quite silent up above. There
+was no longer any screaming or bursting. This silence came upon the
+deafening din like a paralyzing weight and filled space with a tense
+expectancy that flickered in all eyes. He wanted to rid himself of this
+oppression and crept through the crumbling shaft up to the top.
+
+The first thing he saw was Weixler's curved back. He was holding his
+field-glass glued to his eyes under cover of a shooting shield. The
+others were also standing as if pasted to their posts, and there was
+something alarming in the motionlessness of their shoulder blades. All
+at once a twitching ran through the petrified row. Weixler sprang back,
+jostled against the captain, and cried out: "They are coming!" Then he
+stormed to the shaft and blew the alarm whistle.
+
+Marschner stared after him helplessly. He walked with hesitating steps
+to the shield and looked out upon the wide, smoke-covered field, which
+curved beyond the tangle of wires, grey, torn, blood-flecked, like the
+bloated form of a gigantic corpse. Far in the background the sun was
+sinking. Its great copper disc already cut in half by the horizon seemed
+to be growing out of the ground. And against that dazzling background
+black silhouettes were dancing like midges under a microscope, like
+Indians swinging their tomahawks. They were still mere specks. Sometimes
+they disappeared entirely and then leaped high, and came nearer, their
+rifles wriggling in the air like the feet of a polyp. Gradually their
+cries became audible and swelled louder and louder like the far barking
+of dogs. When they called "Avanti!" it was a piercing cry, and when
+the call "Coraggio!" went through their lines, it changed to a dull,
+thunderous roll.
+
+The entire company now stood close-packed up against the slope of the
+trench, their faces as of stone, restrained, pale as chalk, with lipless
+mouths, each man's gun in position--a single beast of prey with a
+hundred eyes and arms.
+
+"Don't shoot! Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" Lieutenant Weixler's voice
+yelled without pause through the trench. His command seemed to lay its
+grasp on every throat and to hold the fingers moveless that greedily
+clasped the triggers. The first hand grenade flew into the trench. The
+captain saw it coming, then saw a man loosen from the mass, reel
+toward the dugout with outstretched arms, bending over, a veil of blood
+covering his face. Then--at last!--it was a relief--came the beating of
+the machine guns, and at once the rifles went off, too, like the raging
+of an angry pack. A cold, repulsive greed lay on all faces. Some of the
+men cried out aloud in their hate and rage when new groups emerged out
+there behind the thinning rows. The barrels of the rifles glowed with
+heat--and still the rumbling cries of "Coraggio!" came nearer and
+nearer.
+
+As though in a frenzy of insanity, the silhouettes hopped about out
+there, sprang into the air, fell, and rolled over each other, as though
+the war dance had only just reached the climax of its paroxysm.
+
+Then Captain Marschner observed the man next to him let his rifle sink
+for a moment and with hasty, shaking hands insert the bayonet into the
+smoking barrel. The captain felt as though he were going to vomit. He
+closed his eyes in dizziness and leaned against the trench wall, and let
+himself glide to the earth. Was he to--to see--that? Was he to see men
+being murdered right alongside of him? He tore his revolver from his
+pocket, emptied it, and threw it away. Now he was defenseless. And
+suddenly he grew calm and rose to his feet, elevated by a wonderful
+composure, ready to let himself be butchered by one of those panting
+beasts who were storming on, chased by the blind fear of death. He
+wanted to die like a man, without hatred, without rage, with clean
+hands.
+
+A hoarse roar, a frightful, dehumanized cry almost beside him wrenched
+his thoughts back into the trench. A broad stream of light and fire,
+travelling in a steep curve, flowed blindingly down beside him and
+sprayed over the shoulder of the tall pock-marked tailor of the first
+line. In the twinkling of an eye the man's entire left side flared up in
+flames. With a howl of agony he threw himself to the ground, writhed and
+screamed and leaped to his feet again, and ran moaning up and down like
+a living torch, until he broke down, half-charred, and twitched, and
+then lay rigid. Captain Marschner saw him lying there and smelt the odor
+of burned flesh, and his eyes involuntarily strayed to his own hand
+on which a tiny, white spot just under his thumb reminded him of the
+torments he had suffered in his boyhood from a bad burn.
+
+At that moment a jubilant hurrah roared through the trench, rising from
+a hundred relieved throats. The attack had been repulsed! Lieutenant
+Weixler had carefully taken aim at the thrower of the liquid fire and
+hit at the first shot. The liquid fire had risen up like a fountain from
+the falling man's stiffening hand and rained down on his own comrades.
+Their decimated lines shrank back suddenly before the unexpected danger
+and they fled pell-mell, followed by the furious shots from all the
+rifles.
+
+The men fell down as if lifeless, with slack faces and lusterless eyes,
+as though some one had turned off the current that had fed those dead
+creatures with strength from some unknown source. Some of them leaned
+against the trench wall white as cheese, and held their heads over, and
+vomited from exhaustion. Marschner also felt his gorge rising and groped
+his way toward the dugout. He wanted to go into his own place now and
+be alone and somehow relieve himself of the despair that held him in its
+grip.
+
+"Hello!" Lieutenant Weixler cried unexpectedly through the silence, and
+bounded over to the left where the machine guns stood.
+
+The captain turned back again, mounted the ladder, and gazed out
+into the foreground of the field. There, right in front of the
+wire-entanglements, kneeled an Italian. His left arm was hanging down
+limp, and his right arm was raised beseechingly, and he was crawling
+toward them slowly. A little farther back, half hidden by the kneeling
+man, something kept stirring on the ground. There three wounded men were
+trying to creep toward their own trench, pressing close to the ground.
+One could see very clearly how they sought cover behind corpses and now
+and then lay motionless so as to escape discovery by the foe. It was a
+pitiful sight--those God-forsaken creatures surrounded by death, each
+moment like an eternity above them, yet clinging with tooth and nail to
+their little remnant of life.
+
+"Come on! Isn't there a rope somewhere?" an old corporal called down
+into the trench. "I'm sorry for the poor devil of an Italian. Let's pull
+him in!"
+
+The machine guns interrupted him. The kneeling man beside the wires
+listened, started as if to run, and fell upon his face. The earth
+behind him rose in dust from the bullets and the others beyond raised
+themselves like snakes, then all three gave a short leap forward
+and--lay very still.
+
+For a moment Captain Marschner stood speechless. He opened his lips,
+but no sound came from his throat. At last his tongue obeyed him and he
+yelled, with a mad choking fury in his voice:
+
+"Lieutenant Weixler!"
+
+"Yes, sir," came back unconcernedly.
+
+Captain Marschner ran toward the lieutenant with clenched fists and
+scarlet face.
+
+"Did you fire?" he panted, breathless.
+
+The lieutenant looked at him in astonishment, placed his hands against
+the seams of his trousers and replied with perfect formality:
+
+"I did, sir."
+
+Marschner's voice failed him again for a moment. His teeth chattered.
+His whole body trembled as he stammered:
+
+"Aren't you ashamed of yourself? A soldier doesn't fire at helpless,
+wounded men. Remember that!"
+
+Weixler went white.
+
+"I beg to inform you, Captain, that the one who was near our trench was
+hiding the others from us. I couldn't spare him." Then, with a sudden
+explosion of anger, he added defiantly: "Besides, I thought we had quite
+enough hungry mouths at home as it is."
+
+The captain jumped at him like a snapping dog and stamped his foot and
+roared:
+
+"I'm not interested in what you think. I forbid you to shoot at the
+wounded! As long as I am commanding officer here every wounded man shall
+be held sacred, whether he tries to get to us or to return to the enemy.
+Do you understand me?"
+
+The lieutenant drew himself up haughtily.
+
+"In that case I must take the liberty, sir, of begging you to hand me
+that order in writing. I consider it my duty to inflict as much injury
+upon the enemy as possible. A man that I let off to-day may be cured and
+come back two months later and perhaps kill ten of my comrades."
+
+For a moment the two men stood still, staring at each other as though
+about to engage in mortal combat. Then Marschner nodded his head almost
+imperceptibly, and said in a toneless voice:
+
+"You shall have it in writing."
+
+He swung on his heel and left. Colored spheres seemed to dance before
+his eyes, and he had to summon all his strength to keep his equilibrium.
+When at last he reached the dugout, he fell on the box of empty tins as
+if he had been beaten. His hatred changed slowly into a deep, embittered
+sense of discouragement. He knew perfectly well that he was in the
+wrong. Not at the bar of his conscience! His conscience told him that
+the deed the lieutenant had done was cowardly murder. But he and his
+conscience had nothing to say here. They had happened to stray into this
+place and would have to stay in the wrong. What was he to do? If he gave
+the order in writing, he would afford Weixler his desired opportunity of
+pushing himself forward and invite an investigation of his own conduct.
+He begrudged the malicious creature that triumph. Perhaps it were better
+to make an end of the whole business by going to the brigade staff and
+telling the exalted gentlemen there frankly to their faces that he could
+no longer be a witness to that bloody firing, that he could not hunt men
+like wild beasts, no matter what uniform they happened to wear. Then, at
+least, this playing at hide and seek would end. Let them shoot him, if
+they wanted to, or hang him like a common felon. He would show them that
+he knew how to die.
+
+He walked out into the trench firmly, and ordered a soldier to summon
+Lieutenant Weixler. Now it was so clear within him and so calm. He
+heard the hellish shooting that the Italians were again directing at the
+trench and went forward slowly like a man out promenading.
+
+"They're throwing heavy mines at us now, Captain," the old corporal
+announced, and looked at Marschner in despair. But Marschner went by
+unmoved. All that no longer mattered to him. The lieutenant would take
+over the command. That was what he was going to tell him. He could
+hardly await the moment to relieve himself of the responsibility.
+
+As Weixler delayed coming, he crept up through the shaft to the top.
+
+The man's small, evil eyes flew to meet him and sought the written order
+in his hand. The captain acted as though he did not notice the question
+in his look, and said imperiously:
+
+"Lieutenant, I turn the command of the company over to you until----"
+A short roar of unheard-of violence cut short his speech. He had the
+feeling, "That will hit me," and that very instant he saw something like
+a black whale rush down in front of his eyes from out of the heavens
+and plunge head foremost into the trench wall behind him. Then a crater
+opened up in the earth, a sea of flame that raised him up and filled his
+lungs with fire.
+
+On slowly recovering his consciousness he found himself buried under a
+huge mound of earth, with only his head and his left arm free. He had
+no feeling in his other limbs. His whole body had grown weightless. He
+could not find his legs. Nothing was there that he could move. But
+there was a burning and burrowing that came from somewhere in his brain,
+scorched his forehead, and made his tongue swell into a heavy, choking
+lump.
+
+"Water!" he moaned. Was there no one there who could pour a drop of
+moisture into the burning hollow of his mouth? No one at all? Then where
+was Weixler? He must be near by. Or else--was it possible that Weixler
+was wounded too? Marschner wanted to jump up and find out what had
+happened to Weixler--he wanted to----
+
+Like an overburdened steam-crane his left hand struggled toward his
+head, and when he at last succeeded in pushing it under his neck, he
+felt with a shudder that his skull offered no resistance and his hand
+slid into a warm, soft mush, and his hair, pasty with coagulated blood,
+stuck to his fingers like warm, moist felt.
+
+"Dying!" went through him with a chill. To die there--all alone. And
+Weixler? He had to find out what had happened to--happened to----
+
+With a superhuman effort he propped his head up on his left hand high
+enough to have a view of a few paces along the trench. Now he saw
+Weixler, with his back turned, leaning on his right side against the
+trench wall, standing there crookedly, his left hand pressed against
+his body, his shoulders hunched as if he had a cramp. The captain raised
+himself a little higher and saw the ground and a broad, dark shadow that
+Weixler cast. Blood? He was bleeding? Or what? Surely that was blood. It
+couldn't be anything but blood. And yet it stretched out so peculiarly
+and drew itself like a thin, red thread up to Weixler, up to where his
+hand pressed his body as though he wanted to pull up the roots that
+bound him to the earth.
+
+The captain _had_ to see! He pulled his head farther out from under the
+mound--and uttered a hoarse cry, a cry of infinite horror. The wretched
+man was dragging his entrails behind him!
+
+"Weixler!" burst from him in a shudder of compassion.
+
+The man turned slowly, looked down at Marschner questioningly, pale,
+sad, with frightened eyes. He stood like that only the fraction of a
+second, then he lost his balance, reeled, and fell down, and was lost
+from the captain's circle of vision. Their glances scarcely had time to
+cross, the pallid face had merely flitted by. And yet it stood there,
+remained fixed in the air, with a mild, soft, plaintive expression about
+the narrow lips, an unforgettable air of gentle anxious resignation.
+
+"He is suffering!" flashed through Marschner. "He is suffering!"--it
+exulted him. And a glow suffused his pallor. His fingers, sticky with
+blood, seemed to caress the air, until his head sank backward, and his
+eyes broke.
+
+The first soldiers who penetrated the towering mound of earth to where
+he lay found him dead. But in spite of his ghastly wound, a contented,
+almost happy smile hovered about his lips.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE VICTOR
+
+On the big square before the old courthouse, which now served as
+regimental headquarters and bore the magic letters A.O.K. as a sort of
+cabalistic sign on its front, a military band played every afternoon
+from three to four at command of His Excellency. This little
+diversion was meant to compensate the civilian population for the many
+inconveniences that the quartering of several hundreds of staff officers
+and a number of lesser officers inevitably brought upon them. Then, too,
+according to His Excellency, such an institution helped considerably
+to promote the popularity of the army and inspire patriotism in school
+children and the masses. In the interest of the right conduct of the
+war the strict commander deemed it highly essential to foster a right
+attitude in the public and to encourage friendly relations between
+military and civilian authorities--while fully preserving his own
+privileges. It was essential to a successful continuation of the war.
+Incidentally, the fact that the staff officers, with His Excellency at
+their head, usually took their black coffee at just about this time had
+helped a good deal to bring about these afternoon concerts.
+
+It was indeed delightful to sit in the shade of the centenarian
+plane-trees, whose intertwining branches overarched the entire square
+like the nave of a cathedral. The autumn sun cast a dull glow on the
+walls of the houses round about, and shed golden rings through the thick
+foliage on the small round tables arrayed in long rows in front of the
+coffeehouse. There was a reserved row for the staff officers set in
+snowy linens, with little flower vases and fresh crisp cakes, which the
+sergeant of the commissary brought punctually at three o'clock every day
+from the field bakery, where they had been baked with particular care
+under the personal supervision of the chef especially for His Excellency
+and staff.
+
+It was a beautiful gay picture of lively, varied metropolitan life that
+surged about the music pavilion. Every one seemed as joyous and
+carefree as on the Graben in Vienna on a sunny spring Sunday in times of
+undisturbed peace. The children crowded around the orchestra, beat the
+measure, and applauded enthusiastically after every piece. The streets
+leading into the square were filled with giggling girls and students
+wearing bright caps; while the _haute-volee_, the wives of the resident
+officials and merchants, sat in the confectioner's shop on the square,
+eagerly awaiting an opportunity to show their righteous indignation at
+the daring millinery, transparent hose, and little more than knee-length
+skirts of a certain class of women who had forced their way into the
+town and, despite all protests and orders, were shamelessly plying their
+trade in broad daylight.
+
+But the chief tone was given by the transient officers. Whether on
+furlough or on their way back to the front, they all had to pass through
+this town, and enjoyed in deep draughts this first or last day of
+freedom. Besides, if anything was needed at the front--horse-shoe nails,
+saddle-soap, sanitary appliances, or bottled beer--this first little
+"big town" was the quickest, most convenient place to buy it in. An
+unlucky or an unpopular man merely received a commendation for his
+bravery, and that settled him. But the man who enjoyed his commanding
+officer's favor was given the preference to do the shopping here as
+a reward. And an amazing ingenuity developed in discovering immediate
+necessities. A secret arithmetical relation undeniably existed between
+the consumption of charcoal, axle grease, etc., by individual troop
+divisions and the distance of their outposts from this favorite
+provisioning station.
+
+Of course, the pleasure did not last long. There was just enough time
+for a hot tub-bath, for showing off one's best newly-pressed uniform
+once or twice on the main streets, for taking two meals at a table
+spread with a tablecloth, and for spending a short night in a
+comfortable bed--with, or, if the man could not help it, without
+caresses--and then off again, depressed and irritable, off to the
+maddeningly overcrowded railroad station, back to the front, into the
+damp trench or the sunbaked block house.
+
+The greed of life in these young officers, who promenaded, hungry-eyed,
+through the town, the racing of their blood, like a diver who fills his
+lungs full in one second, had gradually infected the entire, boresome
+little place. It tingled, it foamed, it enriched itself and became
+frivolous; it could not get enough sensations, now that it stood in the
+center of world activities and had a claim upon real events.
+
+Close-packed, the crowd surged past the music in holiday attire and
+holiday mood on this ordinary week-day, quivering to the rhythm of the
+Blue Danube Waltz, which the orchestra was playing catchingly, with a
+roll of drums and a clash of cymbals. The whole spectacle brought to
+mind the goings-on behind the scenes in a huge playhouse during the
+performance of a tragedy with choruses and mob scenes. Nothing was seen
+or heard here of the sanguinary piece being enacted at the front. The
+features of the actors relaxed, they rested, or threw themselves
+into the gay hubbub, heartily glad not to know how the tragedy was
+progressing; exactly as real actors behind the scenes fall back into
+their unprofessional selves until they get their next cue.
+
+Sitting in the shade of the old trees, over coffee and cigars,
+comfortably watching these doings, one might easily be deluded into
+thinking that the drama taking place at the front was nothing but a
+jolly spectacular play. From this point of view the whole war showed up
+like a life-giving stream that washes orchestras ashore, brings wealth
+and gaiety to the people, is navigated by promenading officers, and
+directed by portly, comfortable generals. No suggestion of its bloody
+side, no roar of artillery reaching your ears, no wounded soldier
+dragging in his personal wretchedness and so striking a false note in
+the general jollification.
+
+Of course, it had not always been like that. In the first days, when the
+daily concert still had the charm of novelty, all the regular, emergency
+and reserve hospitals in the neighborhood had poured their vast number
+of convalescents and slightly wounded men into the square. But that
+lasted only two days. Then His Excellency summoned the head army
+physician to a short interview and in sharp terms made it clear to the
+crushed culprit what an unfavorable influence such a sight would have
+upon the public, and expressed the hope that men wearing bandages, or
+maimed men, or any men who might have a depressing effect on the general
+war enthusiasm, should henceforth remain in the hospitals.
+
+He was not defrauded of his hope. No disagreeable sight ever again
+marred his pleasure when, with his favorite Havana between his teeth,
+he gazed past the long row of his subordinates out on the street. No
+one ever went by without casting a shy, deferential side-glance at the
+omnipotent director of battles, who sat there like any other ordinary
+human being, sipping his coffee, although he was the celebrated General
+X, unlimited master of hundreds of thousands of human lives, the man the
+papers liked to call the "Victor of ----." There was not a human being
+in the town whose fate he could not have changed with one stroke of his
+pen. There was nothing he could not promote or destroy as he saw fit.
+His good will meant orders for army supplies and wealth, or distinction
+and advancement; his ill will meant no prospects at all, or an order to
+march along the way that led to certain death.
+
+Leaning back comfortably in the large wicker chair, a chair destined in
+all likelihood some day to become an object of historic interest, the
+Powerful One jested gaily with the wife of his adjutant. He pointed to
+the street, where the crowds surged in the brilliant sunshine, and said
+with a sort of satisfied, triumphant delight in his tone:
+
+"Just look! I should like to show this picture to our pacifists, who
+always act as though war were nothing but a hideous carnage. You should
+have seen this hole in peace times. It was enough to put you to sleep.
+Why, the porter at the corner is earning more to-day than the biggest
+merchant used to earn before the war. And have you noticed the young
+fellows who come back from the front? Sunburnt, healthy and happy! Most
+of them before the war were employed in offices. They held themselves
+badly and were dissipated and looked cheesy. I assure you, the world has
+never been so healthy as it is now. But if you look at your newspapers,
+you read about a world-catastrophe, about a blood-drained Europe, and a
+whole lot of other stuff."
+
+He raised his bushy white eyebrows until they reached the middle of his
+bulging forehead, and his small, piercing black eyes skimmed observantly
+over the faces of those present.
+
+His Excellency's pronouncement was a suggestion to the others and was
+immediately taken up. At every table the conversation grew animated, the
+benefits of the war were told over, and the wits cracked jokes at
+the expense of the pacifists. There was not a single man in the whole
+assemblage who did not owe at least two blessings to the war: financial
+independence and such munificence of living as only much-envied money
+magnates have allotted to them in times of peace. Among this circle
+of people the war wore the mask of a Santa Claus with a bag full of
+wonderful gifts on his back and assignments for brilliant careers in
+his hand. To be sure here and there a gentleman was to be seen wearing
+a crepe-band on his sleeve for a brother or a brother-in-law who, as
+officer, had seen that other aspect of the war, the Gorgon's face.
+
+Yet the Gorgon's face was so far away, more than sixty miles in a
+bee-line, and an occasional excursion in its vicinity was an exciting
+little adventure, a brief titillation of the nerves. Inside an hour
+the automobile raced back to safety, back to the bath-tub, and you
+promenaded asphalt streets again in shining pumps. So, who would refrain
+from joining in the hymn of praise to His Excellency?
+
+The mighty man contentedly listened a while longer to the babel of
+voices aroused by what he had said, then gradually sank back into his
+reflections, and gazed ahead of him seriously. He saw the sunbeams
+sifting through the thick foliage and glittering on the crosses and
+stars that covered the left half of his chest in three close rows. It
+was a magnificent and complete collection of every decoration that
+the rulers of four great empires had to bestow upon a man for heroism,
+contempt of death, and high merit. There was no honor left for the
+Victor of ---- still to aspire to. And only eleven short months of war
+had cast all that at his feet. It was the harvest of but a single year
+of war. Thirty-nine years of his life had previously gone in the service
+in tedious monotony, in an eternal struggle with sordid everyday cares.
+He had worn himself out over all the exigencies of a petty bourgeois
+existence, like a poor man ashamed of his poverty, making pathetic
+efforts to conceal a tear in his clothes and always seeing the telltale
+hole staring out from under the covering. For thirty-nine years he had
+never swerved from disciplining himself to abstemiousness, and there was
+much gold on his uniform, but very little in his pocket. As a matter of
+fact, he had been quite ready for some time to quit. He was thoroughly
+tired of the cheap pleasure of tyrannizing over the young officers on
+the drill ground.
+
+But then the miracle occurred! Over night the grouchy, obscure old
+gentleman changed into a sort of national hero, a European celebrity.
+He was "the Victor of ----!" It was like in a fairy tale, when the good
+fairy appears and frees the enchanted prince from his hideous disguise,
+and he emerges in his glowing youth, surrounded by knights and lackeys,
+and enters his magnificent castle.
+
+To be sure the miracle had not brought the general the glow of youth.
+But it put elasticity into him. The eventful year had given him a
+shaking up, and his veins pulsed with the joy of life and the energy for
+work of a man in his prime. It was as a sovereign that he sat there in
+the shadow of the plane-trees, with good fortune sparkling on his chest
+and a city lying at his feet. Nothing, not a single thing, was lacking
+to make the fairy tale perfect.
+
+In front of the coffee-house, guarded by two sturdy corporals, rested
+the great grey beast, with the lungs of a hundred horses in its chest,
+awaiting the cranking-up to rush its master off to his castle high above
+town and valley. Where were the days when, with his general's stripes on
+his trousers, he took the street-car to his home, befitting his station
+in life, a six-room apartment that was really a five-room apartment plus
+a closet? Where was all that? Centuries had given their noblest powers,
+generations had expended their artistic skill in filling the castle
+requisitioned for His Excellency, the Commander-in-Chief of the ----th
+Army, with the choicest treasure. Sun and time had done their best to
+mellow the dazzle of the accumulated wealth till it shone in subdued
+grandeur as through a delicate veil. Any man master in that house, who
+mounted those broad steps and shouted his wishes in those aristocratic
+rooms, necessarily felt like a king and could not take the war in any
+other way than as a glorious fairy tale.
+
+Indeed, was there ever a royal household that approached the miraculous
+more closely? In the kitchen reigned a master of the culinary art, the
+chef of the best hotel in the country, who in other circumstances would
+not have been satisfied with double the wages of a general and was now
+getting only a dollar a day. Yet he was using every bit of his skill. He
+had never been so eager to please the palate of him whom he served. The
+roast he prepared was the finest piece of meat to be selected from among
+the two hundred oxen that daily gave up their lives to the army for the
+fatherland. The men who served the roast on silver platters, wrought
+by pupils of Benvenuto for the ancestors of the house, were generals of
+their trade, who in peace times had had their clothes built in London,
+and stood about tremblingly awaiting each sign from their master. And
+this entire retinue, this whole princely household, functioned quite
+automatically, and--entirely without cost! The master for whom every one
+slaved never once had to perform that inevitable nuisance of putting
+his hand in his pocket to draw out his purse. The gasoline circulated
+inexhaustibly through the veins of the three motor cars, which lounged
+day and night on the marble flagging of the courtyard. As by magic
+everything flowed in that eye and palate could desire.
+
+No servant asked for wages, everything seemed to be there of itself, as
+in fairy castles where it is enough to wish for a thing in order to have
+it.
+
+But that was not all. It was not the whole of the miracle that the
+table spread itself every day of the month and the store-rooms filled
+themselves with provisions. When the first of the month came round,
+bank-notes instead of bills came fluttering into the house.
+
+No worry, no disputing, no stinting of one's self to be borne with a
+sigh. With an air of boredom one stuffed his pockets with greenbacks,
+which were really quite superfluous in this lazy man's paradise that the
+war had opened up to its vassals.
+
+One single lowering cloud now and then streaked the shining firmament
+of this wonderland and cast its shadow on the brow of His Excellency.
+Sometimes his pure joy was disturbed by the thought that the fairy tale
+might give way to reality and he might be awakened from the glorious
+dream. It was not peace that His Excellency dreaded. He never even
+thought of peace. But what if the wall so artfully constructed out of
+human bodies should begin to totter some day? What if the enemy were
+to penetrate all the fortifications, and discipline were to give way
+to panic, and the mighty wall should dissolve into its component parts,
+human beings fleeing madly to save their lives? Then the "Victor of
+----," the almighty fairy tale king, would sink back again into the
+sordid commonplace of old. He would have to eke out his existence in
+some obscure corner, crowd his trophies into some modest apartment,
+and content himself, like other discharged officers, with being a
+coffeehouse king. Were he to suffer a single defeat, the world would
+instantly forget its enthusiasm. Another general would assume the reign,
+another sovereign would fly through the town in a motor car, and the
+vast retinue of servants would reverently bow before their new ruler.
+The old one would be nothing but a past episode, a scarecrow revealed,
+which any sparrow impudently besmirches.
+
+The general's pudgy hand involuntarily clenched itself, and the dreaded
+frown, the "storm-signal" that his own soldiers, as well as the enemy,
+had learned to fear, appeared for a moment on his prominent forehead.
+Then his face cleared again, and His Excellency looked around proudly.
+
+No! The Victor of ---- was not afraid. His wall stood firm and swayed
+not. For three months every report that emissaries brought to camp had
+told of the enormous preparations being made by the enemy. For three
+months they had been storing up ammunition and gathering together their
+forces for the tremendous offensive. And the offensive had begun the
+night before. The general knew that the crowd gaily thronging in the sun
+would not read in the newspaper till the next morning that out at the
+front a fierce battle had been raging for the past twenty hours, and
+hardly sixty miles from the promenade shells were bursting without
+cease, and a heavy rain of hot iron was pouring down upon his soldiers.
+Three infantry attacks had already been reported as repulsed, and now
+the artillery was hammering with frenzied fury, a prologue to fresh
+conflicts during the night.
+
+Well, let them come!
+
+With a jerk, His Excellency sat up, and while his fingers beat on the
+table in tune to the Blue Danube, a tense expression came into his face,
+as though he could hear the terrific drumfire raging at the front like a
+hurricane. His preparations had been made: the human reservoir had been
+filled to overflowing. Two hundred thousand strong young lads of the
+very right age lay behind the lines ready at the proper moment to be
+thrown in front of the steam-roller until it caught and stuck in a
+marsh of blood and bones. Just let them come! The more, the merrier! The
+Victor of ---- was prepared to add another branch to his laurels, and
+his eyes sparkled like the medals on his breast.
+
+His adjutant got up from the table next to his, approached hesitatingly,
+and whispered a few words in His Excellency's ear.
+
+The great man shook his head, waving the adjutant off.
+
+"It is an important foreign newspaper, Your Excellency," the adjutant
+urged; and when his commander still waved him aside, he added
+significantly: "The gentleman has brought a letter of recommendation
+from headquarters, Your Excellency."
+
+At this the general finally gave in, arose with a sigh, and said, half
+in jest, half in annoyance to the lady beside him:
+
+"A drumfire would be more welcome!" Then he followed his adjutant and
+shook hands jovially with the bald civilian, who popped up from his seat
+and bent at the middle like a penknife snapping shut. His Excellency
+invited him to be seated.
+
+The war correspondent stammered a few words of admiration, and opened
+his note-book expectantly, a whole string of questions on his lips.
+But His Excellency did not let him speak. In the course of time he had
+constructed for occasions like this a speech in which every point was
+well thought out and which made a simple impression. He delivered it
+now, speaking with emphasis and pausing occasionally to recall what came
+next.
+
+To begin with he spoke of his brave soldiers, praising their courage,
+their contempt of death, their wonderful deeds of valor. Then he
+expressed regret at the impossibility of rewarding each soldier
+according to his merits, and--this in a raised voice--invoked the
+fatherland's eternal gratitude for such loyalty and self-abnegation
+even unto death. Pointing to the heavy crop of medals on his chest, he
+explained that the distinctions awarded him were really an honor done to
+his men. Finally he wove in a few well-chosen remarks complimenting the
+enemy's fighting ability and cautious leadership, and concluded with an
+expression of his unshakable confidence in ultimate victory.
+
+The newspaper man listened respectfully and occasionally jotted down
+a note. The main thing, of course, was to observe the Great One's
+appearance, his manner of speech, his gestures, and to sum up his
+personality in a few striking phrases.
+
+His Excellency now discarded his military role, and changed himself from
+the Victor of ---- into the man of the world.
+
+"You are going to the front now?" he asked with a courteous smile,
+and responded to the correspondent's enthusiastic "Yes" with a deep,
+melancholy sigh.
+
+"How fortunate you are! I envy you. You see, the tragedy in the life of
+the general of to-day is that he cannot lead his men personally into
+the fray. He spends his whole life preparing for war, he is a soldier
+in body and soul, and yet he knows the excitement of battle only from
+hearsay."
+
+The correspondent was delighted with this subjective utterance which he
+had managed to evoke. Now he could show the commander in the sympathetic
+role of one who renounces, one who cannot always do as he would. He bent
+over his note-book for an instant. When he looked up again he found to
+his astonishment that His Excellency's face had completely changed. His
+brow was furrowed, his eyes stared wide-open with an anxiously expectant
+look in them at something back of the correspondent.
+
+The correspondent turned and saw a pale, emaciated infantry captain
+making straight toward His Excellency. The man was grinning and he had
+a peculiar shambling walk. He came closer and closer, and stared with
+glassy, glaring eyes, and laughed an ugly idiotic laugh. The adjutant
+started up from his seat frightened. The veins on His Excellency's
+forehead swelled up like ropes. The correspondent saw an assassination
+coming and turned pale. The uncanny captain swayed to within a foot
+or two of the general and his adjutant, then stood still, giggled
+foolishly, and snatched at the orders on His Excellency's chest like a
+child snatching at a beam of light.
+
+"Beautiful--shines beautifully--" he gurgled in a thick voice. Then he
+pointed his frightfully thin, trembling forefinger up at the sun and
+shrieked, "Sun!" Next he snatched at the medals again and said, "Shines
+beautifully." And all the while his restless glance wandered hither
+and thither as if looking for something, and his ugly, bestial laugh
+repeated itself after each word.
+
+His Excellency's right fist was up in the air ready for a blow at the
+fellow's chest for approaching him so disrespectfully, but, instead, he
+laid his hand soothingly on the poor idiot's shoulder.
+
+"I suppose you have come from the hospital to listen to the music,
+Captain?" he said, winking to his adjutant. "It's a long ride to the
+hospital in the street-car. Take my automobile. It's quicker."
+
+"Auto--quicker," echoed the lunatic with his hideous laugh. He patiently
+let himself be taken by the arm and led away. He turned round once with
+a grin at the glittering medals, but the adjutant pulled him along.
+
+The general followed them with his eyes until they entered the machine.
+The "storm-signal" was hoisted ominously between his eyebrows. He was
+boiling with rage at such carelessness in allowing a creature like
+that to walk abroad freely. But in the nick of time he remembered the
+civilian at his side, and controlled himself, and said with a shrug of
+the shoulders:
+
+"Yes, these are some of the sad aspects of the war. You see, it is just
+because of such things that the leader must stay behind, where nothing
+appeals to his heart. No general could ever summon the necessary
+severity to direct a war if he had to witness all the misery at the
+front."
+
+"Very interesting," the correspondent breathed gratefully, and closed
+his book. "I fear I have already taken up too much of Your Excellency's
+valuable time, but may I be permitted one more question? When does Your
+Excellency hope for peace?"
+
+The general started, bit his underlip, and glanced aside with a look
+that would have made every staff officer of the ----th Army shake in
+his boots. With a visible effort he put on his polite smile and pointed
+across the square to the open portals of the old cathedral.
+
+"The only advice I can give is for you to go over there and ask our
+Heavenly Father. He is the only one who can answer that question."
+
+A friendly nod, a hearty handshake, then His Excellency strode to his
+office across the square amid the respectful salutations of the crowd.
+When he entered the building the dreaded furrow cleaving his brow was
+deeper than ever. An orderly tremblingly conducted him to the office of
+the head army physician. For several minutes the entire house held
+its breath while the voice of the Mighty One thundered through the
+corridors. He ordered the fine old physician to come to his table as if
+he were his secretary, and dictated a decree forbidding all the inmates
+of the hospitals, without distinction or exception, whether sick
+or wounded, to leave the hospital premises. "For"--the decree
+concluded--"if a man is ill, he belongs in bed, and if he feels strong
+enough to go to town and sit in the coffee-house, he should report at
+the front, where his duty calls him."
+
+This pacing to and fro with clinking spurs and this thundering at the
+cowering old doctor calmed his anger. The storm had about blown over
+when unfortunately the general's notice was drawn to the report from the
+brigade that was being most heavily beset by the enemy and had suffered
+desperate losses and was holding its post only in order to make the
+enterprise as costly as possible to the advancing enemy. Behind it the
+mines had already been laid, and a whole new division was already in
+wait in subterranean hiding ready to prepare a little surprise for the
+enemy after the doomed brigade had gone to its destruction. Of course,
+the general had not considered it necessary to inform the brigadier that
+he was holding a lost post and all he was to do was to sell his hide as
+dearly as possible. The longer the struggle raged the better! And men
+fight so much more stubbornly if they hope for relief until the very
+last moment.
+
+All this His Excellency himself had ordained, and he was really greatly
+rejoiced that the brigade was still holding out after three overwhelming
+infantry charges. But now a report lay before him which went against all
+military tradition; and it brought back the storm that had been about to
+subside.
+
+The major-general (His Excellency made careful note of his name)
+described the frightful effect of the drumfire in a nervous, talkative
+way that was most unmilitary. Instead of confining himself to a
+statement of numbers, he explained at length how his brigade had been
+decimated and his men's power of resistance was gone. He concluded his
+report by begging for reinforcements, else it would be impossible for
+the remnant of his company to withstand the attack to take place that
+night.
+
+"Impossible? Impossible?" His Excellency blared like a trumpet into the
+ears of the gentlemen standing motionless around him. "Impossible?
+Since when is the commander instructed by his subordinates as to what is
+possible and what is not?"
+
+Blue in the face with rage he took a pen and wrote this single sentence
+in answer to the report: "The sector is to be held." Underneath he
+signed his name in the perpendicular scrawl that every school child
+knew from the picture card of the "Victor of ----." He himself put
+the envelope into the motor-cyclist's hand for it to be taken to the
+wireless station as the telephone wires of the brigade had long since
+been shot into the ground. Then he blustered like a storm cloud
+from room to room, stayed half an hour in the card room, had a short
+interview with the chief of the staff, and asked to have the evening
+reports sent to the castle. When his rumbling "Good night, gentlemen!"
+at last resounded in the large hall under the dome, every one heaved a
+sigh of relief. The guard stood at attention, the chauffeur started the
+motor, and the big machine plunged into the street with a bellow like a
+wild beast's. Panting and tooting, it darted its way through the narrow
+streets out into the open, where the castle like a fairy palace looked
+down into the misty valley below with its pearly rows of illuminated
+windows.
+
+With his coat collar turned up, His Excellency sat in the car and
+reflected as he usually did at this time on the things that had happened
+during the day. The correspondent came to his mind and the man's stupid
+question, "When does Your Excellency hope for peace?" Hope? Was it
+credible that a man who must have some standing in his profession,
+else he never would have received a letter of recommendation from
+headquarters, had so little suspicion of how contrary that was to every
+soldierly feeling? Hope for peace? What good was a general to expect
+from peace? Could this civilian not comprehend that a commanding general
+really commanded, was really a general, just in times of war, while in
+times of peace he was like a strict teacher in galloons, an old duffer
+who occasionally shouted himself hoarse out of pure ennui? Was he to
+long for that dreary treadmill existence again? Was he to hope for the
+time--to please the gentlemen civilians--when he, the victorious leader
+of the ----th Army, would be used again merely for reviews? Was he to
+await impatiently going back to that other hopeless struggle between a
+meager salary and a life polished for show, a struggle in which the lack
+of money always came out triumphant?
+
+The general leaned back on the cushioned seat in annoyance.
+
+Suddenly the car stopped with a jerk right in the middle of the road.
+The general started up in surprise and was about to question the
+chauffeur, when the first big drops of rain fell on his helmet. It was
+the same storm that earlier in the afternoon had given the men at the
+front a short respite.
+
+The two corporals jumped out and quickly put up the top. His Excellency
+sat stark upright, leaned his ear to the wind, and listened attentively.
+Mingled with the rushing sound of the wind he caught quite clearly, but
+very--very faintly a dull growling, a hollow, scarcely audible pounding,
+like the distant echo of trees being chopped down in the woods.
+
+Drumfire!
+
+His Excellency's eyes brightened. A gleam of inner satisfaction passed
+over his face so recently clouded with vexation.
+
+Thank God! There still was war!
+
+
+
+
+IV. MY COMRADE
+
+(_A Diary_)
+
+
+This world war has given me a comrade, too. You couldn't find a better
+one.
+
+It is exactly fourteen months ago that I met him for the first time in
+a small piece of woods near the road to Goerz. Since then he has never
+left my side for a single moment. We sat up together hundreds of nights
+through, and still he walks beside me steadfastly.
+
+Not that he intrudes himself upon me. On the contrary. He
+conscientiously keeps the distance that separates him, the common
+soldier, from the officer that he must respect in me. Strictly according
+to regulations he stands three paces off in some corner or behind some
+column and only dares to cast his shy glances at me.
+
+He simply wants to be near me. That's all he asks for, just for me to
+let him be in my presence.
+
+Sometimes I close my eyes to be by myself again, quite by myself for a
+few moments, as I used to be before the war. Then he fixes his gaze
+upon me so firmly and penetratingly and with such obstinate, reproachful
+insistence that it burns into my back, settles under my eyelids, and so
+steeps my being with the picture of him that I look round, if a little
+tune has passed without his reminding me of his presence.
+
+He has gnawed his way into me, he has taken up his abode within me. He
+sits inside of me like the mysterious magician at moving-picture shows
+who turns the crank inside of the black booth above the heads of the
+spectators. He casts his picture through my eyes upon every wall, every
+curtain, every flat surface that my eyes fall on.
+
+But even when there is no background for his picture, even when I
+frantically look out of the window and stare into the distance so as
+to be rid of him for a short while, even then he is there, hovering in
+front of me as though impaled upon the lance of my gaze, like a banner
+swaying at the head of a parade. If X-rays could penetrate the skull,
+one would find his picture woven into my brain in vague outline, like
+the figures in old tapestries.
+
+I remember a trip I took before the war from Munich to Vienna on the
+Oriental Express. I looked out upon the autumnal mellowness of the
+country around the Bavarian lakes and the golden glow of the Wiener
+Wald. But across all this glory that I drank in leaning back on the
+comfortable seat in luxurious contentment, there steadily ran an ugly
+black spot--a flaw in the window-pane. That is the way my obstinate
+comrade flits across woods and walls, stands still when I stand still,
+dances over the faces of passers-by, over the asphalt paving wet from
+the rain, over everything my eyes happen to fall upon. He interposes
+himself between me and the world, just like that flaw in the
+window-pane, which degraded everything I saw to the quality of the
+background that it made.
+
+The physicians, of course, know better. They do not believe that He
+lives in me and stays by me like a sworn comrade. From the standpoint of
+science it rests with me not to drag him round any longer, but to give
+him his dismissal, precisely as I might have freed myself from the
+annoying spot by angrily smashing the window-pane. The physicians do
+not believe that one human being can unite himself at death with another
+human being and continue to live on in him with obstinate persistence.
+It is their opinion that a man standing at a window should see the house
+opposite but never the wall of the room behind his back.
+
+The physicians only believe in things that _are_. Such superstitions as
+that a man can carry dead men within him and see them standing in front
+of him so distinctly that they hide a picture behind them from his
+sight, do not come within the range of the gentlemen's reasoning. In
+their lives death plays no part. A patient who dies ceases to be a
+patient. And what does the day know of the night, though the one forever
+succeeds the other?
+
+But I know it is not I who forcibly drag the dead comrade through my
+life. I know that the dead man's life within me is stronger than my own
+life. It may be that the shapes I see flitting across the wall papers,
+cowering in corners and staring into the lighted room from dark
+balconies, and knocking so hard on the windows that the panes rattle,
+are only visions and nothing more. Where do they come from? _My_ brain
+furnishes the picture, _my_ eyes provide the projection, but it is the
+dead man that sits at the crank. He tends to the film. The show begins
+when it suits Him and does not stop as long as He turns the crank. How
+can I help seeing what He shows me? If I close my eyes the picture falls
+upon the inside of my lids, and the drama plays inside of me instead of
+dancing far away over doors and walls.
+
+I should be the stronger of the two, they say. But you cannot kill a
+dead man, the physicians should know that.
+
+Are not the paintings by Titian and Michael Angelo still hanging in
+the museums centuries after Titian and Michael Angelo lived? And the
+pictures that a dying man chiseled into my brain fourteen months ago
+with the prodigious strength of his final agony--are they supposed
+to disappear simply because the man that created them is lying in his
+soldier's grave?
+
+Who, when he reads or hears the word "woods," does not see some woods he
+has once walked through or looked out on from a train window? Or when
+a man speaks of his dead father does he not see the face that has long
+been rotting in the grave appear again, now stern, now gentle, now in
+the rigidity of the last moments? What would our whole existence be
+without these visions which, each at its own word, rise up for moments
+out of oblivion as if in the glare of a flashlight?
+
+Sick? Of course. The world is sore, and will have no words or pictures
+that do not have reference to the wholesale graves. Not for a moment can
+the comrade within me join the rest of the dead, because everything that
+happens is as a flashlight falling upon him. There's the newspaper each
+morning to begin with: "Ships sunk," "Attacks repulsed." And immediately
+the film reels off a whirl of gasping, struggling men, fingers rising
+out of mountainous waves grasping for life once more, faces disfigured
+by pain and fury. Every conversation that one overhears, every shop
+window, every breath that is drawn is a reminder of the wholesale
+carnage. Even the silence of the night is a reminder. Does not each tick
+of the second-hand mark the death rattle of thousands of men? In order
+to hear the hell raging yonder on the other side of the thick wall of
+air, is it not enough to know of chins blown off, throats cut open, and
+corpses locked in a death embrace?
+
+If a man were lying comfortably in bed and then found out for certain
+that some one next door was being murdered, would you say he was sick if
+he jumped up out of bed with his heart pounding? And are we anything
+but next door to the places where thousands duck down in frantic terror,
+where the earth spits mangled fragments of bodies up into the sky, and
+the sky hammers down on the earth with fists of iron? Can a man live at
+a distance from his crucified self when the whole world resounds with
+reminders of these horrors?
+
+No!
+
+It is the others that are sick. They are sick who gloat over news of
+victories and see conquered miles of territory rise resplendent above
+mounds of corpses. They are sick who stretch a wall of flags between
+themselves and their humanity so as not to know what crimes are being
+committed against their brothers in the beyond that they call "the
+front." Every man is sick who still can think, talk, discuss, sleep,
+knowing that other men holding their own entrails in their hands are
+crawling like half-crushed worms across the furrows in the fields
+and before they reach the stations for the wounded are dying off like
+animals, while somewhere, far away, a woman with passionate longing is
+dreaming beside an empty bed. All those are sick who can fail to hear
+the moaning, the gnashing of teeth, the howling, the crashing and
+bursting, the wailing and cursing and agonizing in death, because the
+murmur of everyday affairs is around them or the blissful silence of
+night.
+
+It is the deaf and the blind that are sick, not I!
+
+It is the dull ones that are sick, those whose souls sing neither
+compassion for others nor their own anger. All those numerous people
+are sick who, like a violin without strings, merely echo every sound. Or
+would you say that the man whose memory is like a photographic plate on
+which the light has fallen and which cannot record any more impressions,
+is the healthy man? Is not memory the very highest possession of every
+human being? It is the treasure that animals do not own, because they
+are incapable of holding the past and reviving it.
+
+Am I to be cured of my memory as from an illness? Why, without my memory
+I would not be myself, because every man is built up of his memories and
+really lives only as long as he goes through life like a loaded camera.
+Supposing I could not tell where I lived in my childhood, what color
+my father's eyes and my mother's hair were, and supposing at any moment
+that I were called upon to give an account, I could not turn the leaves
+of the past and point to the right picture, how quick they would be
+to diagnose my case as feeblemindedness, or imbecility. Then, to be
+considered mentally normal, must one treat one's brain like a slate to
+be sponged off and be able at command to tear out pictures that have
+burned the most hideous misery into the soul, and throw them away as one
+does leaves from an album of photographs?
+
+One man died before my eyes, he died hard, torn asunder after a
+frightful struggle between the two Titans, Life and Death. Am I
+sick, then, if I experience all over again all the phases of his
+agonizing--preserved in my brain like snapshots--as long as every
+happening inexorably opens the pages of this series? And the other
+people, are they well, those, I mean, who skip the pages as though they
+were blank that record the dismemberment, the mutilation, the crushing
+of their brothers, the slow writhing to death of men caught in barbed
+wire entanglements?
+
+Tell me, my dear doctors, at just what point am I to begin to forget?
+
+Am I to forget I was in the war? Am I to forget the moment in the smoky
+railway station when I leaned out of the car window and saw my boy ashen
+white, with compressed lips, standing beside his mother, and I made a
+poor show of cheerfulness and talked of seeing them soon again, while
+my eyes greedily searched the features of my wife and child, and my soul
+drank in the picture of them like parched lips after a many days' march
+drinking in the water so madly longed for? Am I to forget the choking
+and the bitterness in my mouth when the train began to move and the
+distance swallowed up my child, my wife, my world?
+
+And the whole ride to death, when I was the only military traveler in a
+car full of happy family men off for a summer Sunday in the country--am
+I to tear it out of my memory like so much cumbersome waste paper? Am
+I to forget how I felt when it grew quieter at each station, as though
+life were crumbling away, bit by bit, until at midnight only one or two
+sleepy soldiers remained in my coach and an ashen young face drawn with
+sorrow hovered about the flickering lamplight? Must one actually be sick
+if it is like an incurable wound always to feel that leave-taking of
+home and warmth, that riding away with hatred and danger awaiting one at
+the end of the trip? Is there anything harder to understand--when have
+men done anything madder--than this: to race through the night at sixty
+miles an hour, to run away from all love, all security, to leave the
+train and take another train because it is the only one that goes to
+where invisible machines belch red-hot pieces, of iron and Death casts
+out a finely meshed net of steel and lead to capture men? Who will
+obliterate from my soul the picture of that small dirty junction, the
+shivering, sleepy soldiers without any intoxication or music in their
+blood, looking wistfully after the civilian's train and its brightly
+lighted windows as it disappeared behind the trees with a jolly blow
+of its whistle? Who will obliterate the picture of that exchanging for
+Death in the drab light of early dawn?
+
+And supposing I could cross out that first endless night as something
+settled and done with, would not the next morning remain, when our train
+stopped at a switch in the middle of a wide, dewy meadow, and we were
+told that we had to wait to let hospital trains go by? How shall I ever
+banish the memory of those thick exhalations of lysol and blood blown
+upon the happy fields from a dragon's nostrils? Won't I forever see
+those endless serpents creeping up so indolently, as though surfeited
+with mangled human flesh? From hundreds of windows white bandages
+gleamed and dull, glassy eyes stared out. Lying, crouching, on top of
+each other, body to body, they even hung on to the running-boards like
+bloody bunches of grapes, an overflowing abundance of distress and
+agony. And those wretched remains of strength and youth, those bruised
+and battered men, looked with pity, yes, _with pity_, at our train. Am
+I really sick because those glances of warm compassion from bleeding
+cripples to sound, strapping young fellows burn in my soul with a fire
+never to be extinguished? An apprehension sent a chill through our whole
+train, the foreboding of a hell that one would rather run away from
+wrapped in bloody bandages than go to meet whole and strong. And when
+this shudder of apprehension has turned into reality, into experience
+and memory, is it to be shaken off as long as such trains still meet
+every day? A casual remark about the transfer of troops, news of fresh
+battles inevitably recall this first actual contact with the war, just
+as a certain note when struck will produce a certain tone, and I see the
+tracks and ties and stones spattered with blood, shining in the early
+morning light of a summer day--signposts pointing to the front.
+
+"The Front!"
+
+Am _I_ really the sick person because I cannot utter that word or write
+it down without my tongue growing coated from the intense hatred I
+feel? Axe not the others mad who look upon this wholesale
+cripple-and-corpse-factory with a mixture of religious devotion,
+romantic longing and shy sympathy? Would it not be wiser once for a
+change to examine those others for the state of their mind? Must _I_
+disclose it to my wise physicians, who watch over me so compassionately,
+that all this mischief is the work of a few words that have been let
+loose upon humanity like a pack of mad dogs?
+
+Front--Enemy--Hero's death--Victory--the curs rage through the world
+with frothing mouth and rolling eyes. Millions who have been carefully
+inoculated against smallpox, cholera and typhoid fever are chased into
+madness. Millions, on either side, are packed into cars--ride, singing,
+to meet each other at the front--hack, stab, shoot at each other, blow
+each other into bits, give their flesh and their bones for the bloody
+hash out of which the dish of peace is to be cooked for those fortunate
+ones who give the flesh of their calves and oxen to their fatherland for
+a hundred per cent profit, instead of carrying their own flesh to market
+for fifty cents a day.
+
+Suppose the word "war" had never been invented and had never been
+hallowed through the ages and decked with gay trappings. Who would
+dare to supplement the deficient phrase, "declaration of war," by the
+following speech?
+
+"After long, fruitless negotiations our emissary to the government of X
+left to-day. From the window of his parlor car he raised his silk hat to
+the gentlemen who had escorted him to the station, and he will not meet
+them with a friendly smile again until _you_ have made corpses of many
+hundreds of thousands of men in the country of X. Up then! Squeeze
+yourself into box-cars meant for six horses or twenty-eight men! Ride to
+meet them, those other men. Knock them dead, hack off their heads, live
+like wild beasts in damp excavations, in neglect, in filth, overrun with
+lice, until we shall deem the time has come again for our emissary to
+take a seat in a parlor car and lift his silk hat, and in ornate rooms
+politely and aristocratically dispute over the advantages which our big
+merchants and manufacturers are to derive from the slaughter. Then as
+many of you as are not rotting under the ground or hobbling on crutches
+and begging from door to door may return to your half-starved families,
+and may--nay must!--take up your work again with redoubled energy, more
+indefatigably and yet with fewer demands than before, so as to be
+able to pay in sweat and privation for the shoes that you wore out in
+hundreds of marches and the clothes that decayed on your bodies."
+
+A fool he who would sue for a following in such terms! But _no_ fools
+they who are the victims, who freeze, starve, kill, and let themselves
+be killed, just because they have learned to believe that this must be
+so, once the mad dog War has burst his chains and bitten the world.
+
+Is this what the wars were like from which the word "war" has come down
+to us? Did not war use to guarantee booty? Were not the mercenaries
+led on by hopes of a gay, lawless life--women and ducats and
+gold-caparisoned steeds? Is this cowering under iron discipline, this
+holding out of your head to be chopped off, this passive play with
+monsters that spill their hellish cauldron on you from out of the blue
+distance still "war"? War was the collision of the superfluous forces,
+the ruffians of all nations. Youth, for whom the town had grown too
+small and the doublet too tight, ventured out, intoxicated by the play
+of its own muscles. And now shall the same word hold good when men
+already anchored to house and home are torn away and whipped into the
+ranks and laid out before the enemy, and made to wait, defenseless, in
+dull resignation, like supers in this duel of the munition industries?
+
+Is it right to misuse the word "war" as a standard when it is not
+courage and strength that count, but explosive bombs and the length of
+range of the guns and the speed with which women and children turn out
+shells? We used to speak with horror of the tyrants of dark ages, who
+threw helpless men and women to the lions and tigers; but now is there
+one of us who would not mention them with respect in comparison with
+the rulers who are at present directing the struggle between men and
+machines, as though it were a puppet show at the end of telegraph wires,
+and who are animated by the delightful hope that our supply of human
+flesh may outlast the enemy's supply of steel and iron?
+
+No! All words coined before this carnage began are too beautiful and too
+honest, like the word "front," which I have learned to abhor. Are you
+"facing" the enemy when their artillery is hidden behind mountains and
+sends death over a distance of a day's journey, and when their sappers
+come creeping up thirty feet below the surface? And your "front" is a
+terminal station, a little house all shot up, behind which the tracks
+have been torn up because the trains turn back here after unloading
+their cargo of fresh, sunburned men, to call for them again when they
+have emerged from the machines with torn limbs and faces covered with
+verdigris.
+
+It was towards evening when I got off the train at this terminal. A
+bearded soldier with his right arm in a sling was sitting on the ground
+leaning against the iron railing around the platform. When he saw me
+pass by, quite spick and span, he stroked his right arm tenderly with
+his left hand and threw me an ugly look of hatred and called out through
+clenched teeth:
+
+"Yes, Lieutenant, here's the place for man salad."
+
+Am I to forget the wicked grin that widened his mouth, already distorted
+by pain? Am I sick because each time I hear the word "front" an echo,
+"man salad," inevitably croaks in my ears? Or are the others sick who do
+not hear "man salad," but swallow down the cowardly stuff written by our
+war bards, who try like industrious salesmen to make the brand "world
+war" famous, because in reward they will have the privilege of dashing
+about in automobiles like commanding generals instead of being forced to
+face death in muddy ditches and be bossed by a little corporal?
+
+Are there really human beings of flesh and blood who can still take a
+newspaper in their hands and not foam at the mouth with rage? Can one
+carry in one's brain the picture of wounded men lying exposed on slimy
+fields in the pouring rain, slowly, dumbly bleeding to death, and yet
+quietly read the vile stuff written about "perfect hospital service,"
+"smoothly running ambulances," and "elegantly papered trenches," with
+which these fellows poetize themselves free from military service?
+
+Men come home with motionless, astonished eyes, still reflecting death.
+They walk about shyly, like somnambulists in brightly lighted streets.
+In their ears there still resound the bestial howls of fury that they
+themselves bellowed into the hurricane of the drumfire so as to keep
+from bursting from inner stress. They come loaded down, like beasts of
+burden, with horrors, the astonished looks of bayoneted, dying foes
+on their conscience--and they don't dare open their mouths because
+everybody, wife and child included, grinds out the same tune, a flow of
+curious questions about shells, gas bombs and bayonet attacks. So the
+days of the furlough expire, one by one, and the return to death is
+almost a deliverance from the shame of being a coward in disguise
+among the friends at home, to whom dying and killing have become mere
+commonplaces.
+
+So be it, my dear doctors! It is an honor to be charged with madness if
+those villains are not called mad who, to save their own necks, have so
+gloriously hardened the people's hearts and abolished pity and
+implanted pride in the enemy's suffering, instead of acting as the one
+intermediary between distress and power and arousing the conscience
+of the world by going to the most frequented places and shouting _"Man
+Sal-ad"_ through a megaphone so loud and so long that at length
+all those whose fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, have gone to the
+corpse-factory will be seized with terror and all the throats in the
+world will be _one_ echo to "Man Sal-ad!"
+
+If you were here right now, dear doctors, I could show you my comrade,
+summoned to this room in the very body by the flames of hate against
+news from the front and against the indifference of the hinterland. I
+feel him standing behind my back, but his face is lying on the white
+sheet in front of me, like a faint water-mark, and my pen races
+frantically so as to cover his eyes at least with letters and hide their
+reproachful stare.
+
+Large, widening, hideously distorted, his face, slowly swelling, rises
+from the paper like the face of Jesus of the handkerchief.
+
+It was just like this that the three war correspondents saw him lying
+at the edge of the woods on that midsummer morning and--turned away
+involuntarily with almost the military exactness of soldiers at a "right
+about face." Their visit was meant for _me_! I was to furnish them with
+carriage and horses because the automobile that was to have darted them
+through the danger zone was lying on the road to Goerz with a broken
+axle.
+
+Charming gentlemen, in wonderfully well-cut breeches and traveling caps,
+looking as if they had stepped out of a Sherlock Holmes motion picture.
+They offered to carry letters back and deliver messages, and they found
+everything on my place perfectly fascinating, and laughed heartily at
+my mattress of willow twigs--and were particularly grateful when the
+carriage stood ready to carry them off before the daily bombardment of
+the Italians began.
+
+On driving out of the woods they had to pass the wounded man again with
+the hideously disfigured face. He was crouching on the meadow. But this
+time they did not see him. As if at command they turned their heads the
+other way and with animated gestures viewed the damage done by an air
+raid the day before, as though they were already sitting over a table in
+a coffee-house.
+
+I lost my breath, as though I had run a long distance up-hill. The place
+where I stood suddenly seemed strange and altered. Was that the same
+piece of woods into which shells had so often come crashing, which
+the huge Caproni planes had circled about with wide-spread wings like
+vultures, shedding bombs, while our machine guns lashed the leaves with
+a hailstorm of shot? Was it out of _this_ piece of woods that three men
+had just driven off, healthy, unscathed, gaily waving their caps? Where
+was the wall that held us others imprisoned under the cracking branches?
+Was there not a door that opened only to let out pale, sunken cheeks,
+feverish eyes, or mangled limbs?
+
+The carriage rolled lightly over the field, trampled down brown, and the
+one thing missing to make it the perfect picture of a pleasure trip was
+the brilliant red of a Baedeker.
+
+Those men were riding back home.
+
+To wife and child, perhaps?
+
+A painful pulling and tugging, as though my eyes were caught to the
+carriage wheels. Then my body rebounded--as if torn off--back into
+emptiness, and--at that moment, just when my soul was as if ploughed
+up by the carriage and laid bare and defenseless by yearning--at that
+moment the experience sprang upon me--with one dreadful leap, one single
+bite--incurable for the rest of my life.
+
+Unsuspecting, I crossed over to the wounded man upon whom the three had
+so unceremoniously turned their backs, as though he did not also belong
+to the interesting museum of shell holes that they had come to inspect.
+He was cowering near the dirty ragged little Red Cross flag, with his
+head between his knees, and did not hear me come up. Behind him lay the
+brown spot which stood out from the green still left on the field like
+a circus ring. The wounded soldiers who gathered here every morning at
+dawn to be driven to the field hospital in the wagons that brought us
+ammunition had rubbed this spot in like a favorite corner of a sofa.
+
+How many I had seen crouching there like that, for ten--often twelve
+hours, when the wagons had left too early, or had been overcrowded, or,
+after violent fighting, had stood waiting in line at the munitions depot
+behind the lines. Happy fellows, some of them, with broken arms or legs,
+the war slang, "a thousand-dollar shot," on their pale, yet laughing
+lips--enviously ogled by the men with slight wounds or the men sick with
+typhoid fever, who would all gladly have sacrificed a thousand dollars
+and a limb into the bargain for the same certainty of not having to
+return to the front again. How many I had seen rolling on the ground,
+biting into the earth in their agony--how many in the pouring rain,
+half buried already in the mud, their bodies ripped open, groaning and
+whimpering and outbellowing the storm.
+
+This man seemed to be only slightly hurt in the right leg. The blood had
+oozed out on one spot through the hastily made bandage, so I offered
+him my first-aid package, besides cognac and cigarettes. But he did not
+move. It was not until I laid my hand on his shoulder that he raised his
+head--and the face he showed me threw me back like a blow on the chest.
+
+His mouth and nose had come apart, and crept like a thick vine up his
+right cheek--which was no longer a cheek. A chunk of bluish red flesh
+swelled up there, covered by skin stretched to bursting and shining from
+being drawn so tight. The whole right side of his face seemed more like
+an exotic fruit than a human countenance, while from the left side, from
+out of grey twitching misery, a sad, frightened eye looked up at me.
+
+Violent terror slung itself round my neck like a lasso.
+
+What was it? Such a frightful thing as that even this field, this
+waiting-room to the Beyond, had never witnessed before. Even the awful
+recollection of another wounded man who had stood at this same spot
+a few days before, his hands looking as though they were modeling
+something, while in actuality they were carefully holding his own
+entrails--even that hideous recollection faded before the sight of this
+Janus head, all peace, all gentle humanity on one side; all war, all
+distorted, puffed-up image of fiendish hatred on the other side.
+
+"Shrapnel?" I stammered timidly.
+
+The answer was confused. All I could get out of it was that a dumdum
+bullet had smashed his right shinbone. But what was that he kept
+mumbling about a hook each time his hand trembled up to his glowing
+cheek?
+
+I could not understand him; for the thing he had gone through still
+seethed in his veins so violently that he spoke as though it were just
+then happening and I were witnessing it. His peasant's mind could not
+comprehend that there were people who had not seen or heard of the
+tremendous misery of the last hours he had gone through. So it was more
+by guess-work that I gradually pieced together his story from unfinished
+sentences, coarse oaths, and groans.
+
+For a whole night, after a repulsed attack on the enemy's trench, he had
+lain with a broken leg, unconscious, near our own wire entanglements.
+At dawn they threw out the iron grappling hook for him, with which they
+pull over into the trench the corpses of friend and foe so as to be able
+to bury them unceremoniously before the sun of Goerz has a chance to do
+its work. With this hook, dipped in hundreds of corpses, a dunce--"God
+damn him!"--had torn his cheek open before a more skilful hand caught
+hold of it and got him over safely. And now he asked humbly to be taken
+away to the hospital quickly, because he was worried--about his leg and
+being a crippled beggar the rest of his life.
+
+I ran off as though mad dogs were at my heels, over rocks and roots,
+through the woods to the next detachment. In vain! In the whole woods
+there was not a single vehicle to be found. I had given up the last one
+to those three war correspondents.
+
+Why had I not asked them to take the one wounded man lying on the field
+along with them and leave him at the hospital that they would pass? Why
+had they themselves not thought of doing their human duty? Why?
+
+I clenched my fists in impotent fury and caught myself reaching for
+my revolver as though I could still shoot those gay sparks in their
+carriage.
+
+Breathless, overheated from the long race, I tottered back, my knees
+trembling the whole way. I felt utterly broken, as though I were
+carrying on my shoulders a picture, weighing a ton, of men who for sport
+angle for human carrion.
+
+An odd choking and tickling came into my throat--a sensation I had not
+known since childhood--when, back at my post again, I had to listen to
+the low whimpering of the helpless man.
+
+He was no longer alone. In my absence a little band of slightly wounded
+men had joined him. Peering between the tree trunks I saw them sitting
+in a circle on the field, while the man who had been hooked was hopping
+about holding on to his injured leg and tossing his head from one
+shoulder to the other.
+
+Towards noon I sent my corporals in search of a vehicle, promising them
+a princely reward, while I ran to the field again with my whisky flask.
+
+He was no longer dancing about. He was kneeling in the center of the
+circle of wounded men, his body bent over, rolling his head on the
+ground as though it were a thing apart from himself. Suddenly he jumped
+up with such a yell of fury that a frightened murmur came even from the
+line of wounded men, who had been sitting there indifferent, sunk in
+their own suffering.
+
+That was no longer anything human. The man's skin could not stand any
+more stretching and had burst. The broad splits ran apart like the lines
+of a compass and in the middle the raw flesh glowed and gushed out.
+
+And he yelled! He hammered with his fist on the enormous purplish lump,
+until he fell to his knees again moaning under the blows of his own
+hand.
+
+It was dark already when--at last!--they came and carted him away.
+And when the night slowly wove its web of mist in the woods and I lay
+wrapped in a mound of blankets, the only one who was still awake in
+the throng of black tree-trunks that moved closer together in the
+darkness--there he was back again, standing up stiff in the moonlight,
+his tortured cheek, huge as a pumpkin, shining blue against the black
+shadows of the trees. It glimmered like a will-o'-the-wisp, now here,
+now there. Night after night. It shone into every dream, so that I
+forced my eyelids open with my fingers--until, after ten frightful
+nights, my body broke down and was carried, a shrieking, convulsed heap,
+to the same hospital in which He had succumbed to blood-poisoning.
+
+And now I am a madman! You can read it, black on white, on the placard
+at the head of my bed. They pat me on the back soothingly, like a shying
+horse, when I flare up and ask to be let out of this place in which _the
+others_ should be shut up.
+
+But the others are free! From my window I can look over the garden
+wall into the street, and see them hurrying along, raising their hats,
+shaking hands, and crowding in front of the latest bulletin. I see women
+and girls, dressed coquettishly, tripping along with pride shining in
+their eyes, beside men whom a cross on the breast brands as murderers.
+I see widows in long black veils--still patient. I see lads with flowers
+stuck in their helmets ready to leave for the war. And not one of them
+rebels! Not one of them sees bruised, mangled men cowering in dark
+corners, men ripped apart by grappling hooks, men with their entrails
+gushing out, and men with blue shining cheeks.
+
+They go by under my window, gesticulating, enthusiastic; because the
+enthusiastic phrases arrive coined fresh every day from the mint, and
+each person feels sheltered and enveloped in a warmth of assent if the
+phrases ring clear from his lips. I know that they keep quiet even when
+they would like to speak, to cry out, to scream. I know that they hunt
+down "slackers," and have no word of abuse for those who are a thousand
+times worse cowards, those who clearly recognise the utter senselessness
+of this butchery of millions, yet will not open their mouths for fear of
+the censure of the thoughtless crowd.
+
+From my window I can see the whole globe spinning round like a crazy
+whirligig, whipped on by haughty lords in cunning calculation and by
+venal servants in sneaking submissiveness.
+
+I see the whole pack! The bawlers who are too empty and too lazy to
+develop their own selves and want to puff themselves with the glittering
+praise meant for their herd. The scoundrels who are protected by the
+masses, carried by them and fed by them, and who look up sanctimoniously
+to a bogy of their own invention, and hammer that bogy into the
+conscience of millions of good men, until the mass has been forged that
+has neither heart nor brain, but only fury and blind faith. I see the
+whole game proceeding madly in blood and agony. I see the spectators
+going by indifferently, and I am called a madman when I raise the window
+to call down to them that the sons they have born and bred, the men they
+have loved are being chased like wild animals, are being butchered like
+cattle.
+
+Those fools down there, who for the sake of respectable condolence
+calls, for a neighbor's eyes raised heavenward in sympathy, sacrificed
+the splendor and warmth of their lives, who threw their flesh and blood
+into the barbed wire entanglements, to rot as carrion on the fields or
+be hooked in with grappling hooks, who have no other consolation than
+that the "enemy" have had the same done to them--those fools remain
+free; and in their despicable vanity and wicked patience they may
+daily shove fresh hecatombs out to the cannons. But I must stay here
+impotent--left alone with the relentless comrade that my conscience
+gives birth to over again every day.
+
+I stand at my window and between me and the street lie piled high the
+bodies of the many I saw bleeding. And I stand here powerless--because
+the revolver that was given me to shoot down poor homesick devils,
+forced into a uniform by iron necessity, has been taken from me, out of
+fear that I might dislodge a few mass murderers from their security and
+send them as a warning example down to their victims.
+
+So I must stay here, as a seer over the blind--behind iron gratings. And
+all I can do is consign these leaves to the wind--every day write it all
+down again and keep scattering the pages out on the street.
+
+I will write indefatigably. I will sow the whole world with my pages.
+Until the seed shall sprout in every heart, until every bedroom will be
+entered by a blue apparition--a dear dead one showing his wounds; and at
+last, at last, the glorious song of the world's redemption will resound
+under my window, the wrathful cry shouted by a million throats:
+
+"Man Sal-ad!"
+
+
+
+
+V. A HERO'S DEATH
+
+
+The staff physician had not understood. He shook his head, vexed, and
+looked questioningly over the rims of his glasses at his assistant.
+
+But his assistant had not understood either, and was embarrassed, and
+stood stiffly without saying anything.
+
+The only one who seemed to have any clue at all to the man's ravings was
+his orderly. For two tears glistened on the upturned ends of his waxed
+mustache. But the orderly spoke nothing but Hungarian, and the staff
+physician turned away with a muttered "blooming idiot". Followed by
+his flaxen-haired assistant, he made his way toward the operating room,
+panting and perspiring.
+
+The huge ball of cotton, inside of which, according to the placard
+hanging at the top of the bed, was hidden the head of First Lieutenant
+of the Reserves, Otto Kadar, of the ----th Regiment of Field Artillery,
+sank back on the pillow, and Miska seated himself again on his knapsack,
+snuffed up his tears, put his head between his big unwashed hands, and
+speculated despairingly about his future.
+
+For it was plain that his Lieutenant could not last much longer. Miska
+knew what was hidden in the huge cotton ball. He had seen the crushed
+skull and the horrible grey mess under the bloody splinters which were
+the brains of his poor Lieutenant, who had been such a good man and kind
+superior. Miska could not hope for such wonderful luck a second time.
+You didn't come across such a kind-hearted master twice in your life.
+The many, many slices of salami that the Lieutenant always had given him
+from his own store of provisions, the gentle, cordial words that Miska
+had heard him whisper to every wounded man--all the memories of the
+long, bloody months he had gone through dully beside his master almost
+like a comrade, rose to his mind. He felt dreadfully sorry for himself,
+the good fellow did, in his infinite defenselessness against the huge
+war machine into which he would now be thrown again without the sure
+support of his kind Lieutenant next to him.
+
+His broad peasant's head between his hands, he crouched like a dog
+at the feet of his dying master, and the tears rolled gently down his
+cheeks and stuck one by one on the ends of his mustache glued with dust
+and pomade.
+
+It was not quite clear to Miska either just why the poor Lieutenant kept
+clamoring so frightfully for his talking-machine. All he knew was that
+the officers had been sitting under cover, listening to the Rakoczy
+March on the phonograph, when suddenly that accursed shell burst upon
+them and everything disappeared in smoke and earth. He himself had been
+knocked unconscious by a heavy board which came out of a clear sky and
+hit him on the back. He had fallen flat and it was an eternity before he
+got his breath back again.
+
+Then--then--Miska's recollections of things after this were a bit
+hazy--then he remembered an indescribable heap of splintered boards and
+fallen beams, a hash of rags, cement, earth, human limbs, and quantities
+of blood. And then--then he remembered--young Meltzar. Meltzar was still
+sitting upright with his back against the remains of the wall, and
+the record that had just played the Rakoczy March and had miraculously
+remained whole was perched on the place where his head belonged. But his
+head was not there. It was gone--completely gone, while the black
+record remained, also leaning against the wall, directly on top of the
+bloodsoaked collar. It was awful. Not one of the soldiers had dared
+touch the upright body with the record exactly like a head on its neck.
+
+Brrr! A cold shiver ran down Miska's back at the recollection, and his
+heart stopped beating in fright when just at that moment the Lieutenant
+again began to scream:
+
+"Phonograph! Only a phonograph!"
+
+Miska jumped up and saw the huge ball of cotton lift itself with an
+effort from the pillow, and his officer's one remaining eye fix greedily
+upon some invisible object. He stood there ashamed, as though guilty of
+a crime, when indignant glances were darted at him from the other beds
+in the ward.
+
+"This is unbearable!" cried a Major, who had been severely wounded, from
+the other end of the long ward. "Carry the man out."
+
+But the Major spoke German, and Miska was more than ever at sea. He
+wiped the sweat of anguish from his brow and explained to a lieutenant
+in the next bed, since his master could not hear what he said anyhow,
+that the phonograph had been broken--broken into a thousand pieces,
+else he would never have left it there, but would surely have brought it
+along as he had brought everything else belonging to his Lieutenant that
+he had managed to find.
+
+No one answered him. As at a word of command, each one of the officers
+the whole length of the ward stuck his head under his pillow and pulled
+the covers over his ears so as not to hear that horrible gurgling laugh
+which changed into a howl or into infuriated cries for the phonograph.
+The old Major even wrapped his blood-stained cloak around his head like
+a turban.
+
+"Lieutenant! I beg pardon, Lieutenant----" Miska begged, and very, very
+gently stroked his master's quivering knees with his big hard palms.
+
+But Lieutenant Kadar heard him not. Neither did he feel the heavy hand
+resting on his knees. For, opposite him, young Meltzar was still sitting
+with a flat, black, round head on his neck on which the Rakoczy March
+was ingraved in spirals. And all at once the officer realized that for
+the past six months he had done poor Meltzar a grievous injustice. How
+could the poor fellow help his stupidity, how could he help his silly,
+high-flown patriotic talk? How could he possibly have had sensible ideas
+with a record for a head? Poor Meltzar!
+
+Lieutenant Kadar simply could not understand why it was that six months
+before, right away, when young Meltzar announced his entrance into
+the battery, he had not guessed what they had done to the boy in the
+hinterland.
+
+They had given him a different head. They had unscrewed the handsome
+fair young head of a lad of eighteen and in its place put a black,
+scratched-up disc, which could do nothing but squeak the Rakoczy March.
+That had now been proved! How the boy must have suffered whenever his
+superior officer, his senior by twenty years, inflicted long sermons on
+him about humanity! With the flat, round disc that they had put on him
+he of course could not comprehend that the Italian soldiers being led
+past the battery, reeking with blood and in rags, would also much rather
+have stayed at home, if a bulletin on the street corner had not forced
+them to leave their homes immediately, just as the mobilization in
+Hungary had forced the Hungarian gunners to leave their homes.
+
+Now for the first time Lieutenant Kadar comprehended the young man's
+unbending resistance to him. Now at last he realized why this boy, who
+could have been his son, had so completely ignored his wisest, kindest
+admonitions and explanations, and had always responded by whistling
+the Rakoczy March through clenched teeth and hissing the stereotyped
+fulmination, "The dogs ought to be shot to pieces."
+
+So then it was not because of his being young and stupid that Meltzar
+had behaved as he did; not because he had come direct from the military
+academy to the trenches. The phonograph record was to blame, the
+phonograph record!
+
+Lieutenant Kadar felt his veins swell up like ropes and his blood pound
+on his temples like blows on an anvil, so great was his wrath against
+the wrongdoers who had treacherously unscrewed poor Meltzar's lovely
+young head from his body.
+
+And--this was the most gruesome--as he now thought of his subordinates
+and fellow-officers, he saw them all going about exactly like poor
+Meltzar, without heads on their bodies. He shut his eyes and tried to
+recall the looks of his gunners--in vain! Not a single face rose before
+his mind's eye. He had spent months and months among those men and had
+not discovered until that moment that not one of them had a head on his
+shoulders. Otherwise he would surely have remembered whether his gunner
+had a mustache or not and whether the artillery captain was light or
+dark. No! Nothing stuck in his mind--nothing but phonograph records,
+hideous, black, round plates lying on bloody blouses.
+
+The whole region of the Isonzo suddenly lay spread out way below him
+like a huge map such as he had often seen in illustrated papers. The
+silver ribbon of the river wound in and out among hills and coppices,
+and Lieutenant Kadar soared high above the welter down below without
+motor or aeroplane, but borne along merely by his own outspread arms.
+And everywhere he looked, on every hill and in every hollow, he saw
+the horns of innumerable talking-machines growing out of the ground.
+Thousands upon thousands of those familiar cornucopias of bright lacquer
+with gilt edges pointed their open mouths up at him. And each one was
+the center of a swarming ant-hill of busy gunners carrying shot and
+shell.
+
+And now Lieutenant Kadar saw it very distinctly: all the men had records
+on their necks like young Meltzar. Not a single one carried his own
+head. But when the shells burst with a howl from the lacquered horns and
+flew straight into an ant-hill, then the flat, black discs broke apart
+and at the very same instant changed back into real heads. From his
+height Lieutenant Kadar saw the brains gush out of the shattered discs
+and the evenly-marked surfaces turn on the second into ashen, agonized
+human countenances.
+
+Everything seemed to be revealed now in one stroke to the dying
+lieutenant--all the secrets of the war, all the problems he had brooded
+over for many months past. So he had the key to the riddle. These people
+evidently did not get their heads back until they were about to die.
+Somewhere--somewhere--far back--far back of the lines, their heads had
+been unscrewed and replaced by records that could do nothing but play
+the Rakoczy March. Prepared in this fashion, they had been jammed into
+the trains and sent to the front, like poor Meltzar, like himself, like
+all of them.
+
+In a fury of anger, the ball of cotton tossed itself up again with a
+jerk. Lieutenant Kadar wanted to jump out of bed and reveal the secret
+to his men, and urge them to insist upon having their heads back again.
+He wanted to whisper the secret to each individual along the entire
+front, from Plava all the way down to the sea. He wanted to tell it to
+each gunner, each soldier in the infantry and even to the Italians over
+there! He even wanted to tell it to the Italians. The Italians, too,
+had had records screwed on to their necks. And they should go back home,
+too, back to Verona, to Venice, to Naples, where their heads lay
+piled up in the store-houses for safekeeping until the war was over.
+Lieutenant Kadar wanted to run from one man to another, so as to help
+each individual to recover his head, whether friend or foe.
+
+But all at once he noticed he could not walk. And he wasn't soaring any
+more either. Heavy iron weights clamped his feet down to the bed to keep
+him from revealing the great secret.
+
+Well, then, he would shout it out in a roar, in a voice supernaturally
+loud that would sound above the bursting of the shells and the blare of
+trumpets on the Day of Judgment, and proclaim the truth from Plava to
+Trieste, even into the Tyrol. He would shout as no man had ever shouted
+before:
+
+"Phonograph!--Bring the heads!--Phonograph!--"
+
+Here his voice suddenly broke with a gurgling sound of agony right in
+the midst of his message of salvation. It hurt too much. He could not
+shout. He felt as though at each word a sharp needle went deep into his
+brain.
+
+A needle?
+
+Of course! How could he have forgotten it? His head had been screwed
+off, too. He wore a record on his neck, too, like all the others. When
+he tried to say something, the needle stuck itself into his skull and
+ran mercilessly along all the coils of his brain.
+
+No! He could not bear it! He'd rather keep quiet--keep the secret to
+himself. Only not to feel that pain--that maddening pain in his head!
+
+But the machine ran on. Lieutenant Kadar grabbed his head with both
+hands and dug his nails deep into his temples. If he didn't stop that
+thing in time from going round and round, then his revolving head would
+certainly break his neck in a few seconds.
+
+Icy drops of anguish flowed from all his pores. "Miska!" he yelled in
+the extreme of his distress.
+
+But Miska did not know what to do.
+
+The record kept on revolving and joyously thrummed the Rakoczy March.
+All the sinews in the Lieutenant's body grew tense. Again and again he
+felt his head slip from between his hands--his spine was already rising
+before his eyes! With a last, frantic effort he tried once more to get
+his hands inside the bandages and press his head forward. Then one more
+dreadful gnashing of his teeth and one more horrible groan and--the long
+ward was at length as silent as an empty church.
+
+When the flaxen-haired assistant returned from the operating-room
+Miska's whining informed him from afar that another cot in the officers'
+division was now vacant. The impatient old Major quite needlessly
+beckoned him to his side and announced in a loud voice so that all the
+gentlemen could hear:
+
+"The poor devil there has at last come to the end of his sufferings."
+Then he added in a voice vibrating with respect: "He died like a true
+Hungarian--singing the Rakoczy March."
+
+
+
+
+VI. HOME AGAIN
+
+
+At last the lake gleamed through the leaves, and the familiar grey chalk
+mountains emerged into view, reaching out across the railroad embankment
+as with threatening fingers deep down into the water. There, beyond the
+smoky black opening of the short tunnel, the church steeple and a corner
+of the castle peeped for an instant above the grove.
+
+John Bogdan leaned way out of the train window and looked at
+everything with greedy eyes, like a man going over the inventory of his
+possessions, all tense and distrustful, for fear something may have been
+lost in his absence. As each group of trees for which he waited darted
+by, he gave a satisfied nod, measuring the correctness of the landscape
+by the picture of it that he carried fairly seared in his memory.
+Everything agreed. Every milestone on the highroad, now running parallel
+to the railroad tracks, stood on the right spot. There! The flash of the
+flaming red copper beech, at which the horses always shied and once came
+within an ace of upsetting the carriage.
+
+John Bogdan drew a deep, heavy sigh, fished a small mirror out of his
+pocket, and gave his face a final scrutiny before leaving the train. At
+each station his face seemed to grow uglier. The right side was not
+so bad. A bit of his mustache still remained, and his right cheek was
+fairly smooth except for the gash at the corner of his mouth, which had
+not healed properly. But the left side! He had let those damned city
+folk tell him a whole lot of nonsense about the left side of his face.
+A bunch of damned scoundrels they were, bent upon making fools of poor
+peasants, in wartime just the same as in peacetime--all of them, the
+great doctor as well as the fine ladies in their dazzling white gowns
+and with their silly affected talk. Heaven knows it was no great trick
+to bamboozle a simple coachman, who had managed with only the greatest
+pains to learn a bit of reading and writing. They had smiled and
+simpered at him and were so nice and had promised him such a paradise.
+And now, here he was helpless, left all alone to himself, a lost man.
+
+With a furious curse, he tore off his hat and threw it on the seat.
+
+Was that the face of a human being? Was it permitted to do such a thing
+to a man? His nose looked like a patchwork of small dice of different
+colors. His mouth was awry, and the whole left cheek was like a piece of
+bloated raw meat, red and criss-crossed with deep scars. Ugh! How ugly!
+A fright! And besides, instead of a cheekbone, he had a long hollow,
+deep enough to hold a man's finger. And it was for this he had let
+himself be tortured so? For this he had let himself be enticed seventeen
+times, like a patient sheep, into that confounded room with the glass
+walls and the shining instruments? A shudder ran down his back at the
+recollection of the tortures he had gone through with clenched teeth,
+just to look like a human being again and be able to go back home to his
+bride.
+
+And now he _was_ home.
+
+The train pulled out of the tunnel, the whistle blew, and the dwarf
+acacias in front of the station-master's hut sent a greeting through
+the window. Grimly John Bogdan dragged his heavy bag through the train
+corridor, descended the steps hesitatingly, and stood there at a loss,
+looking around for help as the train rolled on behind his back.
+
+He took out his large flowered handkerchief and wiped off the heavy
+beads of perspiration from his forehead. What was he to do now? Why had
+he come here at all? Now that he had finally set foot again on the home
+soil for which he had yearned so ardently, a great longing came over him
+for the hospital, which he had left that very morning, only a few hours
+before, full of rejoicing. He thought of the long ward with all
+those men wrapped in bandages who limped and hobbled, lame, blind or
+disfigured. There nobody was revolted by the sight of his mutilated
+face, no indeed. On the contrary, most of them envied him. He was at
+least capable of going back to work, his arms and legs were sound, and
+his right eye was perfect. Many would have been ready to exchange places
+with him. Some had begrudged him his lot and said it was wrong for the
+government to have granted him a pension on account of losing his left
+eye. One eye and a face a little scratched up--what was that compared
+with a wooden leg, a crippled arm, or a perforated lung, which wheezed
+and rattled like a poor machine at the slightest exertion?
+
+Among the many cripples in the hospital John Bogdan was looked upon as a
+lucky devil, a celebrity. Everybody knew his story. The visitors to the
+hospital wanted first of all to see the man who had had himself operated
+on seventeen times and the skin cut away in bands from his back, his
+chest, and his thighs. After each operation, as soon as the bandages
+were removed, the door to his ward never remained shut, a hundred
+opinions were pronounced, and every newcomer was given a detailed
+description of how terrible his face had been before. The few men who
+had shared Bogdan's room with him from the start described the former
+awfulness of his face with a sort of pride, as though they had taken
+part in the successful operations.
+
+Thus John Bogdan had gradually become almost vain of his shocking
+mutilation and the progress of the beautifying process. And when he
+left the hospital, it was with the expectation of being admired as a
+sensation in his village.
+
+And now?
+
+Alone in the world, with no relatives to go to, with nothing but his
+knapsack and his little trunk, the brilliant sunlight of the Hungarian
+plain country flooding down on him, and the village stretching away to
+a distance before him, John Bogdan suddenly felt himself a prey to
+timidity, to a terror that he had not known amid the bursting of the
+shells, the most violent charges, the most ferocious hand-to-hand
+encounters. His inert peasant intellect, his nature crudely compounded
+of wilfulness and vanity, had always been a stranger to deep-going
+reflections. Yet an instinctive misgiving, the sense of distrust and
+hostility that overwhelmed him, told him plainly enough that he was
+about to face disillusionment and mortification such as he had not
+dreamed of in the hospital.
+
+He lifted his luggage to his back dejectedly and walked toward the exit
+with hesitating steps. There, in the shadow of the dusty acacias that
+he had seen grow up and that had seen him grow up, he felt himself
+confronted with his former self, with the handsome John Bogdan who was
+known in the village as the smart coachman of the manor. A lot of good
+were all the operations and patchwork now. The thing now was the painful
+contrast between the high-spirited, forward lad, who on this spot had
+sung out a last hoarse farewell to his sweetheart, Marcsa, on the first
+day of mobilization, and the disfigured creature who was standing
+in front of the same railroad station with one eye gone, a shattered
+cheekbone, a patched-up cheek, and half a nose, embittered and
+cast down, as if it were only that morning that he had met with the
+misfortune.
+
+At the small grille gate stood the wife of the station-guard,
+Kovacs--since the beginning of the war Kovacs himself had been
+somewhere on the Russian front--talking and holding the ticket-puncher,
+impatiently waiting for the last passenger to pass through. John Bogdan
+saw her, and his heart began to beat so violently that he involuntarily
+lingered at each step. Would she recognize him, or would she not? His
+knee joints gave way as if they had suddenly decayed, and his hand
+trembled as he held out the ticket.
+
+She took the ticket and let him pass through--without a word!
+
+Poor John Bogdan's breath stopped short.
+
+But he pulled himself together with all his might, looked her firmly in
+the face with his one eye and said, with a painful effort to steady his
+voice:
+
+"How do you do?"
+
+"How do you do?" the woman rejoined. He encountered her eyes, saw them
+widen into a stare, saw them grope over his mangled face, and then
+quickly turn in another direction, as if she could not bear the sight.
+He wanted to stop, but he noticed her lips quiver and heard a murmured
+"Jesus, son of Mary," as if he were the devil incarnate. And he tottered
+on, deeply wounded.
+
+"She did not recognize me!" the blood hammered in his ears. "She did
+not recognize me--did not recognize me!" He dragged himself to the bench
+opposite the station, threw his luggage to the ground and sank down on
+the seat.
+
+She did not recognize him! The wife of Kovacs, the station-guard, did
+not recognize John Bogdan. The house of her parents stood next to the
+house of his parents. She and he had gone to school together, they had
+been confirmed together. He had held her in his arms and kissed and
+kissed her, heaven knows how many times, before Kovacs came to the
+village to woo her. And _she_ had not recognized him! Not even by his
+voice, so great was the change.
+
+He glanced over at her again involuntarily, and saw her talking eagerly
+with the station-master. From her gestures, he guessed she was telling
+of the horrible sight she had just seen, the stranger soldier so
+hideously disfigured. He uttered a short croaking sound, an abortive
+curse, and then his head fell on his chest, and he sobbed like a
+deserted woman.
+
+What was he to do? Go up to the castle, open the door to the servants'
+quarters, and call out a saucy "Hello, Marcsa" to the astonished girl?
+
+That was the way he had always thought of it. The devil knows how often
+he had painted the picture to the dot--the maids' screaming, Marcsa's
+cry of delight, her flinging her arms about his neck, and the thousand
+questions that would come pouring down on him, while he would sit there
+with Marcsa on his knees, and now and then throw out a casual reply to
+his awed, attentive listeners.
+
+But now--how about it now? Go to Marcsa? He? With that face, the face
+that had made Julia, the station-guard's wife, cross herself in fright?
+Wasn't Marcsa famed throughout the county for her sharp tongue and
+haughty ways? She had snubbed the men by the score, laughed at them,
+made fools of them all, until she finally fell in love with him.
+
+John Bogdan thrust his fist into his mouth and dug his teeth into the
+flesh, until the pain of it at length helped him subdue his sobbing.
+Then he buried his head in his hands and tried to think.
+
+Never in his life had anything gone amiss with him. He had always been
+liked, at school, in the castle, and even in the barracks. He had
+gone through life whistling contentedly, a good-looking alert lad, an
+excellent jockey, and a coachman who drove with style and loved his
+horses, as his horses loved him. When he deigned to toss a kiss to the
+women as he dashed by, he was accustomed to see a flattered smile come
+to their faces. Only with Marcsa did it take a little longer. But she
+was famous for her beauty far and wide. Even John's master, the lord of
+the castle, had patted him on the shoulder almost enviously when Marcsa
+and he had become engaged.
+
+"A handsome couple," the pastor had said.
+
+John Bogdan groped again for the little mirror in his pocket and then
+sat with drooping body, oppressed by a profound melancholy. That thing
+in the glass was to be the bridegroom of the beautiful Marcsa? What did
+that ape's face, that piece of patchwork, that checkerboard which the
+damned quack, the impostor, whom they called a distinguished medical
+authority, a celebrated doctor, had basted together--what did it have
+to do with _that_ John Bogdan whom Marcsa had promised to marry and whom
+she had accompanied to the station crying when he had gone off to the
+war? For Marcsa there was only _one_ John Bogdan, the one that was
+coachman to the lord of the castle and the handsomest man in the
+village. Was he still coachman? The lord would take care not to disgrace
+his magnificent pair with such a scarecrow or drive to the county seat
+with such a monstrosity on the box. Haying--that's what they would
+put him to--cleaning out the dung from the stables. And Marcsa, the
+beautiful Marcsa whom all the men were vying for, would she be the wife
+of a miserable day laborer?
+
+No, of this John Bogdan was certain, the man sitting on the bench there
+was no longer John Bogdan to Marcsa. She would not have him now--no
+more than the lord would have him on the coachman's box. A cripple is
+a cripple, and Marcsa had engaged herself to John Bogdan, not to the
+fright that he was bringing back home to her.
+
+His melancholy gradually gave way to an ungovernable fury against those
+people in the city who had given him all that buncombe and talked him
+into heaven knows what. Marcsa should be proud because he had been
+disfigured in the service of his fatherland. Proud? Ha-ha!
+
+He laughed scornfully, and his fingers tightened convulsively about the
+cursed mirror, until the glass broke into bits and cut his hand. The
+blood trickled slowly down his sleeves without his noticing it, so great
+was his rage against that bunch of aristocratic ladies in the hospital
+whose twaddle had deprived him of his reason. They probably thought that
+a man with one eye and half a nose was good enough for a peasant girl?
+Fatherland? Would Marcsa go to the altar with the fatherland? Could she
+show off the fatherland to the women when she would see them looking at
+her pityingly? Did the fatherland drive through the village with ribbons
+flying from its hat? Ridiculous! Sitting on the bench opposite the
+station, with the sign of the village in view, a short name, a single
+word, which comprised his whole life, all his memories, hopes and
+experiences, John Bogdan suddenly thought of one of the village
+characters, Peter the cripple, who had lived in the tumbledown hut
+behind the mill many years before, when John was still a child. John saw
+him quite distinctly, standing there with his noisy wooden leg and his
+sad, starved, emaciated face. He, too, had sacrificed a part of himself,
+his leg, "for the fatherland," in Bosnia during the occupation; and
+then he had had to live in the old hovel all alone, made fun of by
+the children, who imitated his walk, and grumblingly tolerated by the
+peasants, who resented the imposition of this burden upon the community.
+"In the service of the fatherland." Never had the "fatherland" been
+mentioned when Peter the cripple went by. They called him contemptuously
+the village pauper, and that was all there was to it.
+
+John Bogdan gnashed his teeth in a rage that he had not thought of Peter
+the cripple in the hospital. Then he would have given those city people
+a piece of his mind. He would have told them what he thought of their
+silly, prattling humbug about the fatherland and about the great honor
+it was to return home to Marcsa looking like a monkey. If he had the
+doctor in his clutches now! The fakir had photographed him, not once,
+but a dozen times, from all sides, after each butchery, as though he had
+accomplished a miracle, had turned out a wonderful masterpiece. And here
+Julia, even Julia, his playmate, his neighbor, had not recognized him.
+
+So deep was John Bogdan sunk in his misery, so engulfed in grim plans of
+vengeance, that he did not notice a man who had been standing in front
+of him for several minutes, eyeing him curiously from every angle.
+Suddenly a voice woke him up out of his brooding, and a hot wave surged
+into his face, and his heart stood still with delighted terror, as he
+heard some one say:
+
+"Is that you, Bogdan?"
+
+He raised himself, happy at having been recognized after all. But the
+next moment he knitted his brows in complete disappointment. It was
+Mihaly the humpback.
+
+There was no other man in the whole village, even in the whole county,
+whose hand John Bogdan would not at that moment have grasped cordially
+in a surge of gratitude. But this humpback--he never had wanted to have
+anything to do with him, and now certainly not. The fellow might imagine
+he had found a comrade, and was probably glad that he was no longer the
+only disfigured person in the place.
+
+"Yes, it's I. Well?"
+
+The humpback's small, piercing eyes searched Bogdan's scarred face
+curiously, and he shook his head in pity.
+
+"Well, well, the Russians certainly have done you up."
+
+Bogdan snarled at him like a vicious cur.
+
+"It's none of your business. What right have you to talk? If I had come
+into the world like you, with my belly on my back, the Russians couldn't
+have done anything to me."
+
+The humpback seated himself quietly beside John without showing the
+least sign of being insulted.
+
+"The war hasn't made you any politer, I can see that," he remarked
+drily. "You're not exactly in a happy frame of mind, which does not
+surprise me. Yes, that's the way it is. The poor people must give up
+their sound flesh and bone so that the enemy should not deprive the rich
+of their superfluity. You may bless your stars you came out of it as
+well as you did."
+
+"I do," Bogdan growled with a glance of hatred. "The shells don't ask if
+you are rich or poor. Counts and barons are lying out there, rotting in
+the sun like dead beasts. Any man that God has not smitten in his
+cradle so that he's not fit to be either a man or a woman is out in
+the battlefield now, whether he's as poor as a church mouse or used to
+eating from golden plates."
+
+The humpback cleared his throat and shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"There are all sorts of people," he observed, and was about to add
+something else, but bethought himself and remained silent.
+
+This Bogdan always had had the soul of a flunkey, proud of being allowed
+to serve the high and mighty and feeling solid with his oppressors
+because he was allowed to contribute to their pomp in gold-laced livery
+and silver buttons. His masters had sicked him on to face the cannons in
+defense of their own wealth, and now the man sat there disfigured, with
+only one eye, and still would not permit any criticism of his gracious
+employers. Against such stupidity there was nothing to be done. There
+was no use wasting a single word on him.
+
+The two remained sitting for a while in silence. Bogdan filled his pipe
+carefully and deliberately, and Mihaly watched him with interest.
+
+"Are you going to the castle?" the humpback asked cautiously, when the
+pipe was at last lit.
+
+John Bogdan was well aware just what the hateful creature was aiming
+at. He knew him. A Socialist--that's what he was, one of those
+good-for-nothings who take the bread out of poor people's mouths by
+dinning a lot of nonsense into their ears, just like a mean dog who
+snaps at the hand that feeds him. He had made a good living as foreman
+in the brickyard, and as thanks he had incited all the workmen against
+the owner, Bogdan's master, until they demanded twice as much wages, and
+were ready to set fire to the castle on all four corners. Once Mihaly
+had tried his luck with him, too. He had wanted to make his master out a
+bad man. But this time he had bucked up against the right person. A
+box on his right ear and a box on his left ear, and then a good sound
+kick--that was the answer to keep him from ever again trying to make a
+Socialist of John Bogdan, one of those low fellows who know no God or
+fatherland.
+
+Mihaly moved on the bench uneasily, every now and then scrutinizing his
+neighbor from the side. At last he plucked up courage and said suddenly:
+
+"They'll probably be glad up there that you are back. Your arms are
+still whole, and they need people in the factory."
+
+Bogdan turned up his nose.
+
+"In the brickyard?" he asked disdainfully.
+
+The humpback burst out laughing.
+
+"Brickyard? Brickyard is good. Who needs bricks in war? The brickyard's
+gone long ago, man. Do you see those trucks over there? They are all
+loaded up with shells. Every Saturday a whole train of shells leaves
+here."
+
+Bogdan listened eagerly. That was news. A change on the estate of which
+he had not yet heard.
+
+"You see, there is such a nice division," Mihaly continued, smiling
+sarcastically. "One goes away and lets his head be blown off. The other
+remains comfortably at home and manufactures shells and decorates his
+castle with thousand-dollar bills. Well, I'm satisfied."
+
+"What are we to do, eh, shoot with peas or with air? You can't carry on
+a war without shells. Shells are needed just as much as soldiers."
+
+"Exactly. And because the rich have the choice of being soldiers or
+making shells, they choose to make the shells and send _you_ off to
+have your head blown off. What are you getting for your eye? Twenty-five
+dollars a year? Or perhaps as much as fifty? And the others whom the
+ravens are feeding on don't get even that out of the war. But the
+gentleman up in the castle is making his five hundred a day and doesn't
+risk even his little finger doing it. I'd be a patriot on those terms
+myself. I am telling you the truth. At first, of course, they said he
+was going to war, and he did actually ride off in great state, but three
+weeks later he was back here again with machines and all the equipment,
+and now he delivers fine orations in the townhouse and sends other men
+off to die--and on top of it is gallant to the wives left behind. He
+stuffs his pockets and fools with every girl in the factory. He's the
+cock of the whole district."
+
+Bogdan, his brows knit in annoyance, let the man talk on. But the last
+part struck him with a shock. He pricked up his ears and grew uneasy and
+for a while struggled heroically against asking a question that burned
+on his lips. But in the end he could not restrain himself and blurted
+out:
+
+"Is--is Marcsa working in the factory, too?"
+
+The humpback's eyes flashed.
+
+"Marcsa, the beautiful Marcsa! I should say so! She's been made a
+forelady, though they say she's never had a shell in her hands, but, to
+make up, the lord's hands have--"
+
+With a short, hoarse growl John Bogdan flew at the humpback's throat,
+squeezed in his Adam's apple, pressing it into his neck, and held him
+in a merciless clutch. The man beat about with his arms, his eyes popped
+from his head in fright, his throat gurgled, and his face turned livid.
+Then John Bogdan released his hold, and Mihaly fell to the ground and
+lay there gasping. Bogdan quickly gathered up his things and strode
+off, taking long, quick steps, as if afraid of arriving too late for
+something in the castle.
+
+He gave not another look back at Mihaly the humpback, never turned
+around once, but quietly went his way and for a long while felt the warm
+throat in his hand.
+
+What was a man who lay gasping on the road to him? One man more or less.
+In the rhythmic regularity of the marching column, he had passed by
+thousands like him, and it had never occurred to his mind, dulled by
+weariness, that the grey spots thickly strewn over the fields, the heaps
+lining the roadway like piles of dung in the spring, were human beings
+struck down by death. He and his comrades had waded in the dead, there
+at Kielce, when they made a dash across the fields, and earthy grey
+hands rose out of every furrow pawing the air, and trousers drenched
+in blood and distorted faces grew out of the ground, as if all the
+dead were scrambling from their graves for the Last Judgment. They
+had stepped and stumbled over corpses. Once the fat little officer of
+reserves, to the great amusement of his company, had gotten deathly sick
+at his stomach because he had inadvertently stepped on the chest of a
+half-decayed Russian, and the body had given way under him, and he had
+scarcely been able to withdraw his foot from the foul hole. John Bogdan
+smiled as he recalled the wicked jokes the men had cracked at the
+officer's expense, how the officer had gone all white and leaned against
+a tree and carried on like a man who has much more than quenched his
+thirst.
+
+The road glowed in the mid-day sun. The village clock struck twelve.
+From the hill yonder came, like an answer, the deep bellow of the
+factory whistle, and a little white cloud rose over the tops of the
+trees. Bogdan quickened his pace, running rather than walking, heedless
+of the drops of sweat that ran down and tickled his neck. For almost a
+year he had breathed nothing but the hospital atmosphere, had smelled
+nothing but iodoform and lysol and seen nothing but roofs and walls.
+His lungs drew in the aroma of the blossoming meadows with deep
+satisfaction, and the soles of his boots tramped the ground sturdily, as
+if he were again marching in regular order.
+
+This was the first walk he had taken since he was wounded, the first
+road he had seen since those wild marches on Russian soil. At moments he
+seemed to hear the cannons roaring. The short struggle with the humpback
+had set his blood coursing, and his memories of the war, for a time
+stifled as it were beneath a layer of dust by the dreary monotony of the
+hospital life, suddenly came whirling back to him.
+
+He almost regretted having let that damned blackguard go so soon. One
+moment more, and he would never have opened his blasphemous mouth again.
+His head would have fallen back exhausted to one side, he would once
+again have embraced the air longingly with outspread fingers, and then
+in a flash would have shrunk together, exactly like the fat, messy
+Russian with the large blue eyes who was the first man to present
+himself to St. Peter with a greeting from John Bogdan. Bogdan had not
+let _him_ loose until he had altogether quit squirming. He had choked
+him dead as a doornail. And still he was a comical fellow, not nearly so
+disgusting as that rascally humpback. But he was the first enemy soldier
+whom he had got into his grasp, his very first Russian. A magnificent
+array of others had followed, though the fat man was the only one Bogdan
+had choked to death. He had smashed scores with the butt-end of his gun
+and run his bayonet through scores of others. He had even squashed with
+his boots the wretch who had struck down his dearest comrade before his
+very eyes. But never again did he choke a man to death. That was why
+the little fat fellow stuck in his memory. He had no recollection of
+the others whatever. All he saw now in his mind was a tangle of
+greyish-green uniforms. And as he thought of his heroic deeds, the
+gnashing, the stamping, the gasping, and the cursing of the hand-to-hand
+encounters resounded in his ears. How many, he wondered, had he sent
+to the other world? God alone may have counted them. He himself had
+had enough to do trying to save his own skin. Had a man stopped to look
+around, he would have carried his curiosity to the next world.
+
+And yet--there was another face that remained fixed in his memory.
+A great big thin fellow, as tall as a beanpole, with enormous yellow
+tusks, which he gnashed like a boar. Yes, he had as clear a picture of
+him as if it had been yesterday. He saw him half-backed up against the
+wall already, swinging his gun over his head. One second more, and the
+butt-end would have come whizzing down. But a sleepy Russian was never
+the man to get the better of John Bogdan. Before he had the chance to
+bring down his gun, Bogdan's bayonet was in between his ribs, and the
+Russian fell over on his own gun. The bayonet pierced him through and
+through, and even went into the wall behind him, and came mighty near
+breaking off.
+
+But the same thing never happened to Bogdan again. It had happened that
+once because he had thrust too hard, with clenched teeth, gripping the
+rod in a tight clutch, as if it were iron that he had to cleave. The
+fact was, he had not yet discovered that it really isn't so difficult
+to mow down a human being. He had been prepared for any amount of
+resistance, and his bayonet had glided into the fellow's body like
+butter. His mouth had remained wide open in astonishment--he recalled
+it to the dot. A man who has never tried a bayonet thrust thinks a
+human being is made up all of bones, and he fetches out for a good hard
+stroke. Then he's in a pickle to free his weapon again before one of the
+messy-looking devils takes advantage of his defenselessness. The way
+to do was to go at it very lightly, with a short jerky thrust. Then
+the blade ran in of itself, like a good horse--you actually had trouble
+holding it back. The most important thing was, not to take your eye off
+your enemy. You mustn't look at your bayonet, or the spot you intend
+to pierce. You must always watch your enemy so as to guess his move in
+time. It's from your enemy's face that you must read the right moment
+for stepping backward. They all behaved the same way--exactly like the
+first tall wild fellow who gnashed his tusks. All of a sudden their
+faces turned absolutely smooth, as if the cold iron in their body had
+chilled their fury, their eyes opened wide in astonishment and looked
+at their enemy as if to ask in reproach, "What are you doing?" Then they
+usually clutched at the bayonet and needlessly cut their fingers, too,
+before they fell over dead. If you didn't know exactly what to do and
+didn't hold your weapon back in time and withdraw it quickly from the
+wound, just when you saw the man's eyes growing large, you would be
+carried along down with him or would get hit on the head by the butt-end
+of another enemy's gun long before you could draw your bayonet out.
+
+These were all things that John Bogdan had often discussed with his
+comrades after severe frays when they criticized the men who had fallen
+for behaving stupidly and who had had to pay with their lives for their
+awkwardness.
+
+As he strode along in haste up the familiar road to the castle, he was
+fairly lost in recollections. His legs moved of themselves, like horses
+on the homeward way. He passed through the open grille gateway and was
+already walking on the gravel path, his head bowed on his chest, without
+noticing that he had reached home.
+
+The neighing of horses woke him up from his thoughts with a start. He
+stood still, deeply stirred by the sight of the stables, only a few feet
+away, and inside, in the twilight, the gleam of his favorite horse's
+flanks. He was about to turn off the path and make for the stable door
+when far away down below, at the other end of the large place, he saw a
+woman coming from the brickyard. She wore a dotted red silk kerchief on
+her head and carried her full figure proudly, and the challenging sway
+of her hips billowed her wide skirts as the wind billows a field of ripe
+grain.
+
+John Bogdan stood stockstill, as if some one had struck him on the
+chest. It was Marcsa! There was not another girl in the whole country
+who walked like that. He threw his luggage to the ground and dashed off.
+
+"Marcsa! Marcsa!" his cry thundered out over the broad courtyard.
+
+The girl turned and waited for his approach, peering curiously through
+half-closed eyes. When almost face to face with her Bogdan stood still.
+
+"Marcsa!" he repeated in a whisper, his gaze fastened upon her face
+anxiously. He saw her turn pale, white as chalk, saw her eyes leap
+to and fro uneasily, from his left cheek to his right cheek, and back
+again. Then horror came into her eyes. She clapped her hands to her
+face, and turned and ran away as fast as her legs would carry her.
+
+In utter sadness Bogdan stared after her. That was exactly the way he
+had imagined their meeting again since Julia, the station-guard's wife,
+the woman he had grown up with, had not recognized him. But to run away!
+That rankled. No need for her to run away. John Bogdan was not the man
+to force himself on a woman. If he no longer pleased her now that he was
+disfigured, well, then she could look for another man, and he, too--he
+would find another woman. He wasn't bothered about that.
+
+This was what he had wanted to tell Marcsa.
+
+He bounded after her and overtook her a few feet from the machine shop.
+
+"Why do you run away from me?" he growled, breathless, and caught her
+hand. "If you don't want me any more, you need only say so. What do you
+think--I'm going to eat you up?"
+
+She stared at him searchingly--in uncertainty. He almost felt sorry for
+her, she was trembling so.
+
+"How you look!" he heard her stammer, and he turned red with anger.
+
+"You knew it. I had them write to you that a shell hit me. Did you think
+it made me better-looking? Just speak straight out if you don't want me
+any more. Straight wine is what I want, no mixture. Yes or no? I won't
+force you to marry me. Just say it right away--yes or no?"
+
+Marcsa was silent. There was something in his face, in his one eye, that
+took her breath away, that dug into her vitals like cold fingers. She
+cast her eyes down and stammered:
+
+"But you have no position yet. How can we marry? You must first ask the
+master if he--"
+
+It was as if a red pall woven of flames dropped in front of John
+Bogdan's eyes. The master? What was she saying about the master? He
+thought of the humpback, and it came to him in a flash that the fellow
+had not lied. His fingers clutched her wrist like a pair of glowing
+tongs, so that she cried out with the pain.
+
+"The master!" Bogdan bellowed. "What has the master got to do between
+you and me? Yes or no? I want an answer. The master has nothing to do
+with us."
+
+Marcsa drew herself up. All of a sudden a remarkable assurance came to
+her. The color returned to her cheeks, and her eyes flashed proudly.
+She stood there with the haughty bearing so familiar to Bogdan, her head
+held high in defiance.
+
+Bogdan observed the change and saw that her gaze traveled over his
+shoulder. He let go her hand and turned instantly. Just what he
+thought--the master coming out of the machine shop. His old forester,
+Toth, followed him.
+
+Marcsa bounded past Bogdan like a cat and ran up to the lord and bent
+over and kissed his hand.
+
+Bogdan saw the three of them draw near and lowered his head like a
+ram for attack. A cold, determined quiet rose in him slowly, as in the
+trenches when the trumpeter gave the signal for a charge. He felt the
+lord's hand touch his shoulder, and he took a step backward.
+
+What was the meaning of it all? The lord was speaking of heroism and
+fatherland, a lot of rubbish that had nothing to do with Marcsa. He let
+him go on talking, let the words pour down on him like rain, without
+paying any attention to their meaning. His glance wandered to and fro
+uneasily, from the lord to Marcsa and then to the forester, until it
+rested curiously on something shining.
+
+It was the nickeled hilt of the hunting-knife hanging at the old
+forester's side and sparkling in the sunlight.
+
+"Like a bayonet," thought Bogdan, and an idea flashed through his mind,
+to whip the thing out of the scabbard and run it up to the hilt in the
+hussy's body. But her rounded hips, her bright billowing skirts confused
+him. In war he had never had to do with women. He could not exactly
+imagine what it would be like to make a thrust into that beskirted body
+there. His glance traveled back to the master, and now he noticed that
+his stiffnecked silence had pulled him up short.
+
+"He is gnashing his teeth," it struck him, "just like the tall Russian."
+And he almost smiled at a vision that came to his mind--of the lord also
+getting a smooth face and astonished, reproachful eyes.
+
+But hadn't he said something about Marcsa just then? What was Marcsa to
+him?
+
+Bogdan drew himself up defiantly.
+
+"I will arrange matters with Marcsa myself, sir. It's between her and
+me," he rejoined hoarsely, and looked his master straight in the face.
+_He_ still had his mustache, quite even on the two sides, and curling
+delicately upwards at the ends. What was it the humpback had said? "One
+man goes away and lets his head be blown off." He wasn't so stupid after
+all, the humpback wasn't.
+
+What Bogdan said infuriated the master. Bogdan let him shout and stared
+like a man hypnotized at the nickeled hilt of the hunting-knife. It
+was not until the name "Marcsa" again struck his ear that he became
+attentive.
+
+"Marcsa is in my employ now," he heard the lord saying. "You know I am
+fond of you, Bogdan. I'll let you take care of the horses again, if you
+care to. But Marcsa is to be let alone. I won't have any rumpus. If she
+still wants to marry you, all well and good. But if she doesn't, she's
+to be let alone. If I hear once again that you have annoyed her, I'll
+chase you to the devil. Do you understand?"
+
+Foaming with rage, Bogdan let out the stream of his wrath.
+
+"To the devil?" he shouted. "You chase me to the devil? You had first
+better go there yourself. I've been to the devil already. For eight
+months I was in hell. Here's my face--you can tell from my face that I
+come from hell. To play the protector here and stuff your pockets full
+and send the others out to die--that's easy. A man who dawdles at home
+has no right to send men to the devil who have already been in hell for
+his sake."
+
+So overwhelming was his indignation that he spoke like the humpback
+Socialist and was not ashamed of it. He stood there ready to leap, with
+tensely drawn muscles, like a wild animal. He saw the lord make ready
+to strike him, saw his distorted face, saw the riding-crop flash through
+the air, and even saw it descending upon him. But he did not feel the
+short, hard blow on his back.
+
+With one bound he ripped the hunting-knife out of the scabbard and
+thrust it between the lord's ribs--not with a long sweep, so that
+some one could have stayed his arm before he struck. Oh, no! But quite
+lightly, from below, with a short jerk, exactly as he had learned by
+experience in battle. The hunting-knife was as good as his bayonet. It
+ran into the flesh like butter.
+
+Then everything came about just as it always did. John Bogdan stood with
+his chin forward and saw the lord's face distorted by anger suddenly
+smooth out and turn as placid and even as if it had been ironed. He saw
+his eyes widen and look over at him in astonishment with the reproachful
+question, "What are you doing?" The one thing Bogdan did not see was the
+collapsing of the lord's body, for at that instant a blow crashed down
+on the back of his head, like the downpour of a waterfall dropping from
+an infinite height. For one second he still saw Marcsa's face framed in
+a fiery wheel, then, his skull split open, he fell over on top of his
+master, whose body already lay quivering on the ground.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Men in War, by Andreas Latzko
+
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