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

Lieutenant Weixler, red-cheeked and radiant, came and shouted in his face that the company was ready. It struck the captain like a blow below the belt. It sounded like a challenge. The captain could not help hearing in it the insolent question, “Well, why aren’t you as glad of the danger as I am?” Every drop of Captain Marschner’s blood rose to his temples. He had to look aside and his eyes wandered involuntarily up to the shrapnel clouds, bearing a prayer, a silent invocation to those senseless things up there rattling down so indiscriminately, a prayer that they would teach this cold-blooded boy suffering, convince him that he was vulnerable.

But a moment later he bowed his head in shame. His anger grew against the man who had been able to arouse such a feeling in him.

“Thank you. Let the men stand at rest. I must look after the horses once more,” he said in measured tones, with a forced composure that soothed him. He did not intend to be hustled, now less than ever. He was glad to see the lieutenant give a start, and he smiled to himself with quiet satisfaction at the indignant face, the defiant “Yes, sir,” said in a voice no longer so loud and so clear, but coming through gnashed teeth from a contracted throat. The boy was for once in his turn to experience how it feels to be held in check. He was so fond of intoxicating himself with his own power at the cost of the privates, triumphing, as though it were the force of his own personality that lorded it over them and not the rule of the service that was always backing him.

Captain Marschner walked back to the woods deliberately, doubly glad of the lesson he had just given Weixler because it also meant a brief respite for his old boys. Perhaps a shell would hurtle down into the earth before their noses, and so these few minutes would save the lives of twenty men. Perhaps? It might turn out just the other way, too. Those very minutes—ah, what was the use of speculating? It was better not to think at all! He wanted to help the men as much as he could, but he could not be a savior to any of them.

And yet, perhaps? One man had just come rushing up to him from the woods. This one man he was managing to shelter for the present. He and six others were to stay behind with the horses and the baggage. Was it an injustice to detail this particular man? All the other non-commissioned officers were older and married. The short, fat man with the bow-legs even had six children at home. Could he justify himself at the bar of his conscience for leaving this young, unmarried man here in safety?

With a furious gesture the captain interrupted his thoughts. He would have liked best to catch hold of his own chest and give himself a sound shaking. Why could he not rid himself of that confounded brooding and pondering the right and wrong of things? Was there any justice at all left here, here in the domain of the shells that spared the worst and laid low the best? Had he not quite made up his mind to leave his conscience, his over-sensitiveness, his ever-wakeful sympathy, and all his superfluous thoughts at home along with his civilian’s clothes packed away in camphor in the house where he lived in peace times?

All these things were part of the civil engineer, Rudolf Marschner, who once upon a time had been an officer, but who had returned to school when thirty years old to exchange the trade of war, into which he had wandered in the folly of youth, for a profession that harmonized better with his gentle, thoughtful nature. That this war had now, twenty years later, turned him into a soldier again was a misfortune, a catastrophe which had overtaken him, as it had all the others, without any fault of his or theirs. Yet there was nothing to do but to reconcile himself to it; and first of all he had to avoid that constant hair-splitting. Why torment himself so with questions? Some man had to stay behind in the woods as a guard. The commander had decided on the young sergeant, and the young sergeant would stay behind. That settled it.

The painful thing was the way the fellow’s face so plainly showed his emotion. His eyes moistened and looked at the captain in dog-like gratitude. Disgusting, simply disgusting! And what possessed the man to stammer out something about his mother? He was to stay behind because the service required it; his mother had nothing to do with it. She was safe in Vienna—and here it was war.

The captain told the man so. He could not let him think it was a bit of good fortune, a special dispensation, not to have to go into battle.

Captain Marschner felt easier the minute he had finished scolding the crushed sinner. His conscience was now quite clear, just as though it had really been by chance that he had placed the man at that post. But the feeling did not last very long. The silly fellow would not give up adoring him as his savior. And when he stammered, “I take the liberty of wishing you good luck, Captain,” standing in stiff military attitude, but in a voice hoarse and quivering from suppressed tears, such fervor, such ardent devotion radiated from his wish that the captain suddenly felt a strange emptiness again in the pit of his stomach, and he turned sharply and walked away.

Now he knew. Now he could approximately calculate all the things Weixler had observed in him. Now he could guess how the fellow must have made secret fun of his sensitiveness, if this simple man, this mere carpenter’s journeyman, could guess his innermost thoughts. For he had not spoken to him once—simply the night before last, at the entrainment in Vienna, he had furtively observed his leavetaking from his mother. How had the confounded fellow come to suspect that the wizened, shrunken little old hag whose skin, dried by long living, hung in a thousand loose folds from her cheekbones, had made such an impression on his captain? The man himself certainly did not know how touching it looked when the tiny mother gazed up at him from below and stroked his broad chest with her trembling hand because she could not reach his face. No one could have betrayed to the soldier that since then, whenever his company commander looked at him, he could not help seeing the lemon-hued, thick-veined hand with its knotted, distorted fingers, which had touched the rough, hairy cloth with such ineffable love. And yet, somehow, the rascal had discovered that this hand floated above him protectingly, that it prayed for him and had softened the heart of his officer.

Marschner tramped across the meadow in rage against himself. He was as ashamed as though some one had torn a mask from his face. Was it as easy as that to see through him, then, in spite of all the trouble he took? He stopped to get his breath, hewed at the grass again with his riding whip, and cursed aloud. Oh, well, he simply couldn’t act a part, couldn’t step out of his skin suddenly, even though there was a world war a thousand times over. He used to let his nephews and nieces twist him round their fingers, and laughed good-naturedly when they did it. In a single day he could not change into a fire-eater and go merrily upon the man-hunt. What an utterly mad idea it was, too, to try to cast all people into the same mould! No one dreamed of making a soft-hearted philanthropist of Weixler; and he was supposed so lightly to turn straight into a blood-thirsty militarist. He was no longer twenty, like Weixler, and these sad, silent men who had been so cruelly uprooted from their lives were each of them far more to him than a mere rifle to be sent to the repair shop if broken, or to be indifferently discarded if smashed beyond repair. Whoever had looked on life from all sides and reflected upon it could not so easily turn into the mere soldier, like his lieutenant, who had not been humanized yet, nor seen the world from any point of view but the military school and the barracks.

Ah, yes, if conditions still were as at the beginning of the war, when none but young fellows, happy to be off on an adventure, hallooed from the train windows. If they left any dear ones at all behind, they were only their parents, and here at last was a chance to make a great impression on the old folks. Then Captain Marschner would have held his own as well as anyone, as well even as the strict disciplinarian, Lieutenant Weixler, perhaps even better. Then the men marched two or three weeks before coming upon the enemy, and the links that bound them to life broke off one at a time. They underwent a thousand difficulties and deprivations, until under the stress of hunger and thirst and weariness they gradually forgot everything they had left far—far behind. In those days hatred of the enemy who had done them all that harm smouldered and flared higher every day, while actual battle was a relief after the long period of passive suffering.

But now things went like lightning. Day before yesterday in Vienna still—and now, with the farewell kisses still on one’s lips, scarcely torn from another’s arms, straight into the fire. And not blindly, unsuspectingly, like the first ones. For these poor devils now the war had no secrets left. Each of them had already lost some relative or friend; each had talked to wounded men, had seen mutilated, distorted invalids, and knew more about shell wounds, gas grenades, and liquid fire than artillery generals or staff physicians had known before the war.

And now it was the captain’s lot to lead precisely these clairvoyants, these men so rudely torn up by the roots—he, the retired captain, the civilian, who at first had had to stay at home training recruits. Now that it was a thousand times harder, now his turn had come to be a leader, and he dared not resist the task to which he was not equal. On the contrary, as a matter of decency, he had been forced to push his claims so that others who had already shed their blood out there should not have to go again for him.

A dull, impotent rage came over him when he stepped up in front of his men ranged in deep rows. They stared at his lips in breathless suspense. What was he to say to them? It went against him to reel off compliantly the usual patriotic phrases that forced themselves on one’s lips as though dictated by an outside power. For months he had carried about the defiant resolve not to utter the prescribed “dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” whatever the refusal might cost. Nothing was so repulsive to him as singing the praises of the sacrifice of one’s life. It was a juggler’s trick to cry out that some one was dying while inside the booth murder was being done.

He clenched his teeth and lowered his eyes shyly before the wall of pallid faces. The foolish, childlike prayer, “Take care of us!” gazed at him