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

by the physician and the Philosopher, suddenly jumped up with a jerk, and tore his arms away so violently that the two men who were about to assist him were sent tumbling up against the others. He bent over with crooked knees, staggering like a man carrying a heavy load on his back. His veins swelled, and he panted with fury:

“That’s the way women are once for all, are they? Since when, eh? Have you never heard of the suffragettes who boxed the ears of prime ministers, and set fire to museums, and let themselves be chained to lamp-posts for the sake of the vote? For the sake of the vote, do you hear? But for the sake of their men? No. Not one sound. Not one single outcry!”

He stopped to take breath, overcome by a wild suffocating despair. Then he pulled himself together once more and with difficulty suppressing the sobs, which kept bringing a lump into his throat, he screamed in deepest misery like a hunted animal:

“Have you heard of one woman throwing herself in front of a train for the sake of her husband? Has a single one of them boxed the ears of a prime minister or tied herself to a railroad track for us? There wasn’t one that had to be torn away. Not one fought for us or defended us. Not one moved a little finger for us in the whole wide world! They drove us out! They gagged us! They gave us the spur, like poor Dill. They sent us to murder, they sent us to die—for their vanity. Are you going to defend them? No! They must be pulled out! Pulled out like weeds, by the roots! Four of you together must pull the way we had to do with Dill. Four of you together! Then she’ll have to come out. Are you the doctor? There! Do it to my head. I don’t want a wife! Pull—pull her out!”

He flung out his arm and his fist came down like a hammer on his own skull, and his crooked fingers clutched pitilessly at the sparse growth of hair on the back of his head, until he held up a whole handful torn out by the roots, and howled with pain.

The doctor gave a sign, and the next moment the four sentries were on him, panting. He screamed, gnashed his teeth, beat about him, kicked himself free, shook off his assailants like burrs. It was not until the old corporal and the doctor came to their assistance that they succeeded in dragging him into the house.

As soon as he was gone the people left the garden. The last to go were the Mussulman and the Philosopher. The Mussulman stopped at the door, and in the light of the lantern looked gravely down at his leg, which, in its plaster cast, hung like a dead thing between his two crutches.

“Do you know, Philosopher,” he said, “I’d much rather have this stick of mine. The worst thing that can happen to one out there is to go crazy like that poor devil. Rather off with one’s head altogether and be done with it. Or do you think he still has a chance?”

The Philosopher said nothing. His round good-natured face had gone ashen pale, and his eyes were swimming with tears. He shrugged his shoulders and helped his comrade up the steps without speaking. On entering the ward they heard the banging of doors somewhere far away in the house and a muffled cry.

Then everything was still. One by one the lights went out in the windows of the officers’ wing. Soon the garden lay like a bushy black island in the river’s silent embrace. Only now and then a gust of wind brought from the west the coughing of the guns like a faint echo.

Once more a crunching sound was heard on the gravel. It was the four sentries marching back to the watch-house. One soldier was cursing under his breath as he tried to refasten his torn blouse. The others were breathing heavily and were wiping the sweat from their red foreheads with the backs of their hands. The old corporal brought up the rear, his pipe in the corner of his mouth, his head bent low. As he turned into the main walk a bright sheet of light lit up the sky, and a prolonged rumbling that finally sank into the earth with a growl shook all the windows of the hospital.

The old man stood still and listened until the rumbling had died away. Then he shook his clenched fist, and sent out a long curve of saliva from between his set teeth, and muttered in a disgust that came from the depths of his soul:

“Hell!”

II BAPTISM OF FIRE

The company rested for half an hour at the edge of the woods. Then Captain Marschner gave the command to start. He was pale, in spite of the killing heat, and he turned his eyes aside when he gave Lieutenant Weixler instructions that in ten minutes every man should be ready for the march without fail.

He had really forced his own hand in giving the order. For now, he knew very well, there could be no delay. Whenever he left Weixler loose on the privates, everything went like clock-work. They trembled before this lad of barely twenty as though he were the devil incarnate. And sometimes it actually seemed to the captain himself as though there were something uncanny about that overgrown, bony figure. Never, by any chance, did a spark of warmth flash from those small, piercing eyes, which always mirrored a flickering unrest and gleamed as though from fever. The one young thing in his whole personality was the small, shy moustache above the compressed lips, which never opened except to ask in a mean, harsh way for some soldier to be punished. For almost a year Captain Marschner had lived side by side with him and had never yet heard him laugh, knew nothing of his family, nor from where he came, nor whether he had any ties at all. He spoke rarely, in brief, quick sentences, and brought out his words in a hiss, like the seething of a suppressed rage; and his only topic was the service or the war, as though outside these two things there was nothing else in the world worth talking about.

And this man, of all others, fate had tricked by keeping him in the hinterland for the whole first year of the war. The war had been going on for eleven months and a half, and Lieutenant Weixler had not yet seen an enemy.

At the very outset, when only a few miles across the Russian frontier, typhus had caught him before he had fired a single shot. Now at last he was going to face the enemy!

Captain Marschner knew that the young man had a private’s rifle dragged along for his own use, and had sacrificed all his savings for special field-glasses in order to be quite on the safe side and know exactly how many enemy lives he had snuffed out. Since they had come within close sound of the firing he had grown almost merry, even talkative, impelled by a nervous zeal, like an enthusiastic hunter who has picked up the trail. The captain saw him going in and out among the massed men, and turned away, hating to see how the fellow plagued his poor weary men, and went at them precisely like a sheep dog gathering in the herd, barking shrilly all the while. Long before the ten minutes were up, the company would be in formation, Weixler’s impatience guaranteed that. And then—then there would be no reason any more for longer delay, no further possibility of putting off the fatal decision.

Captain Marschner took a deep breath and looked up at the sky with wide-open eyes that had a peculiarly intent look in them. In the foreground, beyond the steep hill that still hid the actual field of battle from view, the invisible machine guns were beating in breathless haste; and scarcely a fathom above the edge of the slope small, yellowish-white packages floated in thick clusters, like snowballs flung high in the air—the smoke of the barrage fire through which he had to lead his men.

It was not a short way. Two kilometers still from the farther spur of the hill to the entrance of the communication trenches, and straight across open fields without cover of any kind. Assuredly no small task for a company of the last class of reservists, for respectable family men who had been in the field but a few hours, and who were only now to smell powder for the first time and receive their baptism of fire. For Weixler, whose mind was set on nothing but the medal for distinguished service, which he wanted to obtain as soon as possible—for a twenty-year-old fighting cock who fancied the world rotated about his own, most important person and had had no time to estimate the truer values of life—for him it might be no more than an exciting promenade, a new sting to the nerves, a fine way of becoming thoroughly conscious of one’s personality and placing one’s fearlessness in a more brilliant light. Probably he had long been secretly deriding his old captain’s indecision and had cursed the last halt because it forced him to wait another half hour to achieve his first deed of heroism.

Marschner mowed down the tall blades of grass with his riding whip and from time to time glanced at his company surreptitiously. He could tell by the way the men dragged themselves to their feet with a sort of resistance, like children roused from sleep, that they fully understood where they were now to go.

The complete silence in which they packed their bundles and fell into line made his heart contract.

Ever since the beginning of the war, he had been preparing himself for this moment without relax. He had brooded over it day and night, had told himself a thousand times that where a higher interest is at stake, the misery of the individual counts for nothing, and a conscientious leader must armor himself with indifference. And now he stood there and observed with terror how all his good resolutions crumbled, and nothing remained in him but an impassioned, boundless pity for these driven home-keepers, who prepared themselves with such quiet resignation. It was as if they were taking their life into their hands like a costly vessel in order to carry it into battle and cast it at the feet of the enemy, as though the least thing they owned was that which would soon be crashing into fragments.

His friends, among whom he was known as “uncle Marschner,” would not have dared to suggest his sending a rabbit he had reared to the butcher or dragging a dog that had won his affection to the pound. And now he was to drive into shrapnel fire men whom he himself had trained to be soldiers and had had under his own eyes for months, men whom he knew as he did his own pockets. Of what avail were subtle or deep reflections now? He saw nothing but the glances of dread and beseeching that his men turned on him, asking protection, as though they believed that their captain could prescribe a path even for bullets and shells. And now was he to abuse their confidence? Was he to marshal these bearded children to death and not feel any emotion? Only two days before he had seen them surrounded by their little ones, saying good-bye to their sobbing wives. Was he to march on without caring if one or another of them was hit and fell over and rolled in agony in his blood? Whence was he