Men in War, Andreas Latzko [best book club books of all time .txt] 📗

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 leavetaking 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