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

the high-spirited, forward lad, who on this spot had sung out a last hoarse farewell to his sweetheart, Marcsa, on the first day of mobilization, and the disfigured creature who was standing in front of the same railroad station with one eye gone, a shattered cheekbone, a patched-up cheek, and half a nose, embittered and cast down, as if it were only that morning that he had met with the misfortune.

At the small grille gate stood the wife of the station-guard, Kovacs— since the beginning of the war Kovacs himself had been somewhere on the Russian front—talking and holding the ticket-puncher, impatiently waiting for the last passenger to pass through. John Bogdán saw her, and his heart began to beat so violently that he involuntarily lingered at each step. Would she recognize him, or would she not? His knee joints gave way as if they had suddenly decayed, and his hand trembled as he held out the ticket.

She took the ticket and let him pass through—without a word!

Poor John Bogdán’s breath stopped short.

But he pulled himself together with all his might, looked her firmly in the face with his one eye and said, with a painful effort to steady his voice:

“How do you do?”

“How do you do?” the woman rejoined. He encountered her eyes, saw them widen into a stare, saw them grope over his mangled face, and then quickly turn in another direction, as if she could not bear the sight. He wanted to stop, but he noticed her lips quiver and heard a murmured “Jesus, son of Mary,” as if he were the devil incarnate. And he tottered on, deeply wounded.

“She did not recognize me!” the blood hammered in his ears. “She did not recognize me—did not recognize me!” He dragged himself to the bench opposite the station, threw his luggage to the ground and sank down on the seat.

She did not recognize him! The wife of Kovacs, the station-guard, did not recognize John Bogdán. The house of her parents stood next to the house of his parents. She and he had gone to school together, they had been confirmed together. He had held her in his arms and kissed and kissed her, heaven knows how many times, before Kovacs came to the village to woo her. And she had not recognized him! Not even by his voice, so great was the change.

He glanced over at her again involuntarily, and saw her talking eagerly with the station-master. From her gestures, he guessed she was telling of the horrible sight she had just seen, the stranger soldier so hideously disfigured. He uttered a short croaking sound, an abortive curse, and then his head fell on his chest, and he sobbed like a deserted woman.

What was he to do? Go up to the castle, open the door to the servants’ quarters, and call out a saucy “Hello, Marcsa” to the astonished girl?

That was the way he had always thought of it. The devil knows how often he had painted the picture to the dot—the maids’ screaming, Marcsa’s cry of delight, her flinging her arms about his neck, and the thousand questions that would come pouring down on him, while he would sit there with Marcsa on his knees, and now and then throw out a casual reply to his awed, attentive listeners.

But now—how about it now? Go to Marcsa? He? With that face, the face that had made Julia, the station-guard’s wife, cross herself in fright? Wasn’t Marcsa famed throughout the county for her sharp tongue and haughty ways? She had snubbed the men by the score, laughed at them, made fools of them all, until she finally fell in love with him.

John Bogdán thrust his fist into his mouth and dug his teeth into the flesh, until the pain of it at length helped him subdue his sobbing. Then he buried his head in his hands and tried to think.

Never in his life had anything gone amiss with him. He had always been liked, at school, in the castle, and even in the barracks. He had gone through life whistling contentedly, a good-looking alert lad, an excellent jockey, and a coachman who drove with style and loved his horses, as his horses loved him. When he deigned to toss a kiss to the women as he dashed by, he was accustomed to see a flattered smile come to their faces. Only with Marcsa did it take a little longer. But she was famous for her beauty far and wide. Even John’s master, the lord of the castle, had patted him on the shoulder almost enviously when Marcsa and he had become engaged.

“A handsome couple,” the pastor had said.

John Bogdán groped again for the little mirror in his pocket and then sat with drooping body, oppressed by a profound melancholy. That thing in the glass was to be the bridegroom of the beautiful Marcsa? What did that ape’s face, that piece of patchwork, that checkerboard which the damned quack, the impostor, whom they called a distinguished medical authority, a celebrated doctor, had basted together—what did it have to do with that John Bogdán whom Marcsa had promised to marry and whom she had accompanied to the station crying when he had gone off to the war? For Marcsa there was only one John Bogdán, the one that was coachman to the lord of the castle and the handsomest man in the village. Was he still coachman? The lord would take care not to disgrace his magnificent pair with such a scarecrow or drive to the county seat with such a monstrosity on the box. Haying—that’s what they would put him to—cleaning out the dung from the stables. And Marcsa, the beautiful Marcsa whom all the men were vying for, would she be the wife of a miserable day laborer?

No, of this John Bogdán was certain, the man sitting on the bench there was no longer John Bogdán to Marcsa. She would not have him now—no more than the lord would have him on the coachman’s box. A cripple is a cripple, and Marcsa had engaged herself to John Bogdán, not to the fright that he was bringing back home to her.

His melancholy gradually gave way to an ungovernable fury against those people in the city who had given him all that buncombe and talked him into heaven knows what. Marcsa should be proud because he had been disfigured in the service of his fatherland. Proud? Ha-ha!

He laughed scornfully, and his fingers tightened convulsively about the cursed mirror, until the glass broke into bits and cut his hand. The blood trickled slowly down his sleeves without his noticing it, so great was his rage against that bunch of aristocratic ladies in the hospital whose twaddle had deprived him of his reason. They probably thought that a man with one eye and half a nose was good enough for a peasant girl? Fatherland? Would Marcsa go to the altar with the fatherland? Could she show off the fatherland to the women when she would see them looking at her pityingly? Did the fatherland drive through the village with ribbons flying from its hat? Ridiculous! Sitting on the bench opposite the station, with the sign of the village in view, a short name, a single word, which comprised his whole life, all his memories, hopes and experiences, John Bogdán suddenly thought of one of the village characters, Peter the cripple, who had lived in the tumbledown hut behind the mill many years before, when John was still a child. John saw him quite distinctly, standing there with his noisy wooden leg and his sad, starved, emaciated face. He, too, had sacrificed a part of himself, his leg, “for the fatherland,” in Bosnia during the occupation; and then he had had to live in the old hovel all alone, made fun of by the children, who imitated his walk, and grumblingly tolerated by the peasants, who resented the imposition of this burden upon the community. “In the service of the fatherland.” Never had the “fatherland” been mentioned when Peter the cripple went by. They called him contemptuously the village pauper, and that was all there was to it.

John Bogdán gnashed his teeth in a rage that he had not thought of Peter the cripple in the hospital. Then he would have given those city people a piece of his mind. He would have told them what he thought of their silly, prattling humbug about the fatherland and about the great honor it was to return home to Marcsa looking like a monkey. If he had the doctor in his clutches now! The fakir had photographed him, not once, but a dozen times, from all sides, after each butchery, as though he had accomplished a miracle, had turned out a wonderful masterpiece. And here Julia, even Julia, his playmate, his neighbor, had not recognized him.

So deep was John Bogdán sunk in his misery, so engulfed in grim plans of vengeance, that he did not notice a man who had been standing in front of him for several minutes, eyeing him curiously from every angle. Suddenly a voice woke him up out of his brooding, and a hot wave surged into his face, and his heart stood still with delighted terror, as he heard some one say:

“Is that you, Bogdán?”

He raised himself, happy at having been recognized after all. But the next moment he knitted his brows in complete disappointment. It was Mihály the humpback.

There was no other man in the whole village, even in the whole county, whose hand John Bogdán would not at that moment have grasped cordially in a surge of gratitude. But this humpback—he never had wanted to have anything to do with him, and now certainly not. The fellow might imagine he had found a comrade, and was probably glad that he was no longer the only disfigured person in the place.

“Yes, it’s I. Well?”

The humpback’s small, piercing eyes searched Bogdán’s scarred face curiously, and he shook his head in pity.

“Well, well, the Russians certainly have done you up.”

Bogdán snarled at him like a vicious cur.

“It’s none of your business. What right have you to talk? If I had come into the world like you, with my belly on my back, the Russians couldn’t have done anything to me.”

The humpback seated himself quietly beside John without showing the least sign of being insulted.

“The war hasn’t made you any politer, I can see that,” he remarked drily. “You’re not exactly in a happy frame of mind, which does not surprise me. Yes, that’s the way it is. The poor people must give up their sound flesh and bone so that the enemy should not deprive the rich of their superfluity. You may bless your stars you came out of it as well as you did.”

“I do,” Bogdán growled with a glance of hatred. “The shells don’t ask if you are rich or poor. Counts and barons are lying out there, rotting in the sun like dead beasts. Any man that God has not smitten in his cradle so that he’s not fit to be either a man or a woman is out in the battlefield now, whether he’s as poor as a church mouse or used to eating from golden plates.”

The humpback cleared his throat and shrugged his shoulders.

“There are all sorts of people,” he observed, and was about to add something else, but bethought himself and remained silent.

This Bogdán always had had the soul of a flunkey, proud of being allowed to serve the high and mighty and feeling solid with his oppressors because he was allowed to contribute to their pomp in gold-laced livery and silver buttons. His masters had sicked him on to face the cannons in defense of their own