Men in War by Andreas Latzko (best fiction novels to read txt) 📕

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 coffeehouse, 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!

(_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