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

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