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

all the men had records on their necks like young Meltzar. Not a single one carried his own head. But when the shells burst with a howl from the lacquered horns and flew straight into an ant-hill, then the flat, black discs broke apart and at the very same instant changed back into real heads. From his height Lieutenant Kadar saw the brains gush out of the shattered discs and the evenly-marked surfaces turn on the second into ashen, agonized human countenances.

Everything seemed to be revealed now in one stroke to the dying lieutenant—all the secrets of the war, all the problems he had brooded over for many months past. So he had the key to the riddle. These people evidently did not get their heads back until they were about to die. Somewhere—somewhere—far back—far back of the lines, their heads had been unscrewed and replaced by records that could do nothing but play the Rakoczy March. Prepared in this fashion, they had been jammed into the trains and sent to the front, like poor Meltzar, like himself, like all of them.

In a fury of anger, the ball of cotton tossed itself up again with a jerk. Lieutenant Kadar wanted to jump out of bed and reveal the secret to his men, and urge them to insist upon having their heads back again. He wanted to whisper the secret to each individual along the entire front, from Plava all the way down to the sea. He wanted to tell it to each gunner, each soldier in the infantry and even to the Italians over there! He even wanted to tell it to the Italians. The Italians, too, had had records screwed on to their necks. And they should go back home, too, back to Verona, to Venice, to Naples, where their heads lay piled up in the store-houses for safekeeping until the war was over. Lieutenant Kadar wanted to run from one man to another, so as to help each individual to recover his head, whether friend or foe.

But all at once he noticed he could not walk. And he wasn’t soaring any more either. Heavy iron weights clamped his feet down to the bed to keep him from revealing the great secret.

Well, then, he would shout it out in a roar, in a voice supernaturally loud that would sound above the bursting of the shells and the blare of trumpets on the Day of Judgment, and proclaim the truth from Plava to Trieste, even into the Tyrol. He would shout as no man had ever shouted before:

“Phonograph!—Bring the heads!—Phonograph!—”

Here his voice suddenly broke with a gurgling sound of agony right in the midst of his message of salvation. It hurt too much. He could not shout. He felt as though at each word a sharp needle went deep into his brain.

A needle?

Of course! How could he have forgotten it? His head had been screwed off, too. He wore a record on his neck, too, like all the others. When he tried to say something, the needle stuck itself into his skull and ran mercilessly along all the coils of his brain.

No! He could not bear it! He’d rather keep quiet—keep the secret to himself. Only not to feel that pain—that maddening pain in his head!

But the machine ran on. Lieutenant Kadar grabbed his head with both hands and dug his nails deep into his temples. If he didn’t stop that thing in time from going round and round, then his revolving head would certainly break his neck in a few seconds.

Icy drops of anguish flowed from all his pores. “Miska!” he yelled in the extreme of his distress.

But Miska did not know what to do.

The record kept on revolving and joyously thrummed the Rakoczy March. All the sinews in the Lieutenant’s body grew tense. Again and again he felt his head slip from between his hands—his spine was already rising before his eyes! With a last, frantic effort he tried once more to get his hands inside the bandages and press his head forward. Then one more dreadful gnashing of his teeth and one more horrible groan and—the long ward was at length as silent as an empty church.

When the flaxen-haired assistant returned from the operating-room Miska’s whining informed him from afar that another cot in the officers’ division was now vacant. The impatient old Major quite needlessly beckoned him to his side and announced in a loud voice so that all the gentlemen could hear:

“The poor devil there has at last come to the end of his sufferings.” Then he added in a voice vibrating with respect: “He died like a true Hungarian—singing the Rakoczy March.”

VI HOME AGAIN

At last the lake gleamed through the leaves, and the familiar grey chalk mountains emerged into view, reaching out across the railroad embankment as with threatening fingers deep down into the water. There, beyond the smoky black opening of the short tunnel, the church steeple and a corner of the castle peeped for an instant above the grove.

John Bogdán leaned way out of the train window and looked at everything with greedy eyes, like a man going over the inventory of his possessions, all tense and distrustful, for fear something may have been lost in his absence. As each group of trees for which he waited darted by, he gave a satisfied nod, measuring the correctness of the landscape by the picture of it that he carried fairly seared in his memory. Everything agreed. Every milestone on the highroad, now running parallel to the railroad tracks, stood on the right spot. There! The flash of the flaming red copper beech, at which the horses always shied and once came within an ace of upsetting the carriage.

John Bogdán drew a deep, heavy sigh, fished a small mirror out of his pocket, and gave his face a final scrutiny before leaving the train. At each station his face seemed to grow uglier. The right side was not so bad. A bit of his mustache still remained, and his right cheek was fairly smooth except for the gash at the corner of his mouth, which had not healed properly. But the left side! He had let those damned city folk tell him a whole lot of nonsense about the left side of his face. A bunch of damned scoundrels they were, bent upon making fools of poor peasants, in wartime just the same as in peacetime—all of them, the great doctor as well as the fine ladies in their dazzling white gowns and with their silly affected talk. Heaven knows it was no great trick to bamboozle a simple coachman, who had managed with only the greatest pains to learn a bit of reading and writing. They had smiled and simpered at him and were so nice and had promised him such a paradise. And now, here he was helpless, left all alone to himself, a lost man.

With a furious curse, he tore off his hat and threw it on the seat.

Was that the face of a human being? Was it permitted to do such a thing to a man? His nose looked like a patchwork of small dice of different colors. His mouth was awry, and the whole left cheek was like a piece of bloated raw meat, red and criss-crossed with deep scars. Ugh! How ugly! A fright! And besides, instead of a cheekbone, he had a long hollow, deep enough to hold a man’s finger. And it was for this he had let himself be tortured so? For this he had let himself be enticed seventeen times, like a patient sheep, into that confounded room with the glass walls and the shining instruments? A shudder ran down his back at the recollection of the tortures he had gone through with clenched teeth, just to look like a human being again and be able to go back home to his bride.

And now he was home.

The train pulled out of the tunnel, the whistle blew, and the dwarf acacias in front of the station-master’s hut sent a greeting through the window. Grimly John Bogdán dragged his heavy bag through the train corridor, descended the steps hesitatingly, and stood there at a loss, looking around for help as the train rolled on behind his back.

He took out his large flowered handkerchief and wiped off the heavy beads of perspiration from his forehead. What was he to do now? Why had he come here at all? Now that he had finally set foot again on the home soil for which he had yearned so ardently, a great longing came over him for the hospital, which he had left that very morning, only a few hours before, full of rejoicing. He thought of the long ward with all those men wrapped in bandages who limped and hobbled, lame, blind or disfigured. There nobody was revolted by the sight of his mutilated face, no indeed. On the contrary, most of them envied him. He was at least capable of going back to work, his arms and legs were sound, and his right eye was perfect. Many would have been ready to exchange places with him. Some had begrudged him his lot and said it was wrong for the government to have granted him a pension on account of losing his left eye. One eye and a face a little scratched up—what was that compared with a wooden leg, a crippled arm, or a perforated lung, which wheezed and rattled like a poor machine at the slightest exertion?

Among the many cripples in the hospital John Bogdán was looked upon as a lucky devil, a celebrity. Everybody knew his story. The visitors to the hospital wanted first of all to see the man who had had himself operated on seventeen times and the skin cut away in bands from his back, his chest, and his thighs. After each operation, as soon as the bandages were removed, the door to his ward never remained shut, a hundred opinions were pronounced, and every newcomer was given a detailed description of how terrible his face had been before. The few men who had shared Bogdán’s room with him from the start described the former awfulness of his face with a sort of pride, as though they had taken part in the successful operations.

Thus John Bogdán had gradually become almost vain of his shocking mutilation and the progress of the beautifying process. And when he left the hospital, it was with the expectation of being admired as a sensation in his village.

And now?

Alone in the world, with no relatives to go to, with nothing but his knapsack and his little trunk, the brilliant sunlight of the Hungarian plain country flooding down on him, and the village stretching away to a distance before him, John Bogdán suddenly felt himself a prey to timidity, to a terror that he had not known amid the bursting of the shells, the most violent charges, the most ferocious hand-to-hand encounters. His inert peasant intellect, his nature crudely compounded of wilfulness and vanity, had always been a stranger to deep-going reflections. Yet an instinctive misgiving, the sense of distrust and hostility that overwhelmed him, told him plainly enough that he was about to face disillusionment and mortification such as he had not dreamed of in the hospital.

He lifted his luggage to his back dejectedly and walked toward the exit with hesitating steps. There, in the shadow of the dusty acacias that he had seen grow up and that had seen him grow up, he felt himself confronted with his former self, with the handsome John Bogdán who was known in the village as the smart coachman of the manor. A lot of good were all the operations and patchwork now. The thing now was the painful contrast between