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

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: