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

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