Men in War by Andreas Latzko

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Produced by Eric Eldred, Tonya Allen, Charles Franks
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MEN IN WAR

BY ANDREAS LATZKO

DEDICATED TO FRIEND AND FOE

_"I am convinced the time will come when all will think as I do."_

CONTENTS

I OFF TO WAR

II BAPTISM OF FIRE

III THE VICTOR

IV MY COMRADE

V A HERO'S DEATH

VI HOME AGAIN

I

OFF TO WAR

The time was late in the autumn of the second year of the war; the
place, the garden of a war hospital in a small Austrian town, which lay
at the base of wooded hills, sequestered as behind a Spanish wall, and
still preserving its sleepy contented outlook upon existence.

Day and night the locomotives whistled by. Some of them hauled to the
front trains of soldiers singing and hallooing, high-piled bales of hay,
bellowing cattle and ammunition in tightly-closed, sinister-looking
cars. The others, in the opposite direction, came creeping homeward
slowly, marked by the bleeding cross that the war has thrown upon all
walls and the people behind them. But the great madness raced through
the town like a hurricane, without disturbing its calm, as though the
low, brightly colored houses with the old-fashioned ornate facades had
tacitly come to the sensible agreement to ignore with aristocratic
reserve this arrogant, blustering fellow, War, who turned everything
topsy-turvy.

In the parks the children played unmolested with the large russet leaves
of the old chestnut trees. Women stood gossiping in front of the shops,
and somewhere in every street a girl with a bright kerchief on her head
could be seen washing windows. In spite of the hospital flags waving
from almost every house, in spite of innumerable bulletin boards,
notices and sign-posts that the intruder had thrust upon the defenseless
town, peace still seemed to prevail here, scarcely fifty miles away from
the butchery, which on clear nights threw its glow on the horizon like
an artificial illumination. When, for a few moments at a time, there was
a lull in the stream of heavy, snorting automobile trucks and rattling
drays, and no train happened to be rumbling over the railroad bridge and
no signal of trumpet or clanking of sabres sounded the strains of war,
then the obstinate little place instantly showed up its dull but good-
natured provincial face, only to hide it again in resignation behind its
ill-fitting soldier's mask, when the next automobile from the general
staff came dashing around the corner with a great show of importance.

To be sure the cannons growled in the distance, as if a gigantic dog
were crouching way below the ground ready to jump up at the heavens,
snarling and snapping. The muffled barking of the big mortars came from
over there like a bad fit of coughing from a sickroom, frightening the
watchers who sit with eyes red with crying, listening for every sound
from the dying man. Even the long, low rows of houses shrank together
with a rattle and listened horrorstruck each time the coughing convulsed
the earth, as though the stress of war lay on the world's chest like a
nightmare.

The streets exchanged astonished glances, blinking sleepily in the
reflection of the night-lamps that inside cast their merrily dancing
shadows over close rows of beds. The rooms, choke-full of misery, sent
piercing shrieks and wails and groans out into the night. Every human
sound coming through the windows fell upon the silence like a furious
attack. It was a wild denunciation of the war that out there at the
front was doing its work, discharging mangled human bodies like so much
offal and filling all the houses with its bloody refuse.

But the beautiful wrought-iron fountains continued to gurgle and murmur
complacently, prattling with soothing insistence of the days of their
youth, when men still had the time and the care for noble lines and
curves, and war was the affair of princes and adventurers. Legend popped
out of every corner and every gargoyle, and ran on padded soles through
all the narrow little streets, like an invisible gossip whispering of
peace and comfort. And the ancient chestnut trees nodded assent, and
with the shadows of their outspread fingers stroked the frightened
facades to calm them. The past grew so lavishly out of the fissured
walls that any one coming within their embrace heard the plashing of the
fountains above the thunder of the artillery; and the sick and wounded
men felt soothed and listened from their fevered couches to the
talkative night outside. Pale men, who had been carried through the town
on swinging stretchers, forgot the hell they had come from; and even the
heavily laden victims tramping through the place on a forced march by
night became softened for a space, as if they had encountered Peace and
their own unarmed selves in the shadow of the columns and the flower-
filled bay-windows.

The same thing took place with the war in this town as with the stream
that came down from out of the mountains in the north, foaming with rage
at each pebble it rolled over. At the other end of the town, on passing
the last houses, it took a tender leave, quite tamed and subdued,
murmuring very gently, as if treading on tiptoe, as if drowsy with all
the dreaminess it had reflected. Between wide banks, it stepped out into
the broad meadowland, and circled about the war hospital, making almost
an island of the ground it stood on. Thick-stemmed sycamores cast their
shadow on the hospital, and from three sides came the murmur of the
slothful stream mingled with the rustling of the leaves, as if the
garden, when twilight fell, was moved by compassion and sang a slumber
song for the lacerated men, who had to suffer in rank and file,
regimented up to their very death, up to the grave, into which they--
unfortunate cobblers, tinkers, peasants, and clerks--were shoved to the
accompaniment of salvos from big-mouthed cannon.

The sound of taps had just died away, and the watchmen were making their
rounds, when they discovered three men in the deep shadow of the broad
avenue, and drove them into the house.

"Are you officers, eh?" the head-watchman, a stocky corporal of the
landsturm, with grey on his temples, growled and blustered good-
naturedly. "Privates must be in bed by nine o'clock." To preserve a show
of authority he added with poorly simulated bearishness: "Well, are you
going or not?"

He was about to give his usual order, "Quick, take to your legs!" but
caught himself just in time, and made a face as though he had swallowed
something.

The three men now hobbling toward the entrance for inmates, would have
been only too glad to carry out such an order. However, they had only
two legs and six clattering crutches between them. It was like a living
picture posed by a stage manager who has an eye for symmetry. On the
right went the one whose right leg had been saved, on the left went his
counterpart, hopping on his left leg, and in the middle the miserable
left-over of a human body swung between two high crutches, his empty
trousers raised and pinned across his chest, so that the whole man could
have gone comfortably into a cradle.

The corporal followed the group with his eyes, his head bent and his
fists clenched, as if bowed down beneath the burden of the sight. He
muttered a not exactly patriotic oath and spat out a long curve of
saliva with a hiss from between his front teeth. As he was about to turn
and go on his round again, a burst of laughter came from the direction
of the officers' wing. He stood still and drew in his head as if from a
blow on the back of his neck, and a gleam of ungovernable hatred flitted
over his broad, good-natured peasant face. He spat out again, to soothe
his feelings, then took a fresh start and passed the merry company with
a stiff salute.

The gentlemen returned the salute carelessly. Infected by the coziness
that hung over the whole of the town like a light cloud, they were
sitting chatting in front of the hospital on benches moved together to
form a square. They spoke of the war and--laughed, laughed like happy
schoolboys discussing the miseries of examinations just gone through.
Each had done his duty, each had had his ordeal, and now, under the
protection of his wound, each sat there in the comfortable expectation
of returning home, of seeing his people again, of being feted, and for
at least two whole weeks, of living the life of a man who is not tagged
with a number.

The loudest of the laughers was the young lieutenant whom they had
nicknamed the Mussulman because of the Turkish turban he wore as officer
of a regiment of Bosnians. A shell had broken his leg, and done its work
thoroughly. For weeks already the shattered limb had been tightly
encased in a plaster cast, and its owner, who went about on crutches,
cherished it carefully, as though it were some precious object that had
been confided to his care.

On the bench opposite the Mussulman sat two gentlemen, a cavalry
officer, the only one on the active list, and an artillery officer, who
in civil life was a professor of philosophy, and so was called
"Philosopher" for short. The cavalry captain had received a cut across
his right arm, and the Philosopher's upper lip had been ripped by a
splinter from a grenade. Two ladies were sitting on the bench that
leaned against the wall of the hospital, and these three men were
monopolizing the conversation with them, because the fourth man sat on
his bench without speaking. He was lost in his own thoughts, his limbs
twitched, and his eyes wandered unsteadily. In the war he was a
lieutenant of the landsturm, in civil life a well-known composer. He had
been brought to the hospital a week before, suffering from severe shock.
Horror still gloomed in his eyes, and he kept gazing ahead of him
darkly. He always allowed the attendants at the hospital to do whatever
they wanted to him without resistance, and he went to bed or sat in the
garden, separated from the others as by an invisible wall, at which he
stared and stared. Even the unexpected arrival of his pretty, fair wife
had not resulted in dispelling for so much as a second the vision of the
awful occurrence that had unbalanced his mind. With his chin on his
chest he sat without a smile, while she murmured words of endearment;
and whenever she tried to touch his poor twitching hands with the tips
of her fingers, full of infinite love, he would jerk away as if seized
by a convulsion, or under torture.

Tears rolled down the little woman's cheeks--cheeks hungry for caresses.
She had fought her way bravely through the zones barred to civilians
until she finally succeeded in reaching this hospital in the war zone.
And now, after the great relief and joy of finding her husband alive and
unmutilated, she suddenly sensed an enigmatic resistance, an unexpected
obstacle, which she could not beg away or cry away, as she had used to
do. There was a something there that separated her mercilessly from the
man she had so yearned to see.

She sat beside him impatiently, tortured by her powerlessness to find an
explanation for the hostility that he shed around him. Her eyes pierced
the darkness, and her hands always went the same way, groping forward
timidly, then quickly withdrawing as though scorched when his shrinking
away in hatred threw her into despair again.

It was hard to have to choke down her grief like this, and not burst out
in reproach and tear this secret from her husband, which he in his
misery still interposed so stubbornly between himself and his one
support. And it was hard to simulate happiness and take part in the airy
conversation; hard always to have to force some sort of a reply, and
hard not to lose patience with the other woman's perpetual giggling. It
was easy enough for _her_. She knew that her husband, a major-
general, was safe behind the lines on the staff of a high command. She
had fled from the ennui of a childless home to enter into the eventful
life of the war hospital.

The major's wife had been sitting in the garden with the gentlemen ever
since seven o'clock, always on the point of leaving, quite ready to go
in her hat and jacket, but she let herself be induced again and again to
remain a little longer. She kept up her flirtatious conversation in the
gayest of spirits, as if she had no knowledge of all the torments she
had seen during the day in the very house against which she was leaning
her back. The sad little woman breathed a sigh of relief when it grew so
dark that she could move away from the frivolous chatterbox unnoticed.

And yet in spite of her titillating conversation and the air of
importance with which she spoke of her duties as a nurse, the Frau Major
was penetrated by a feeling that, without her being conscious of it,
raised her high above herself. The great wave of motherliness that had
swept over all the women when the fatal hour struck for the men, had
borne her aloft, too. She had seen the three men with whom she was now
genially exchanging light nothings come to the hospital--like thousands
of others--streaming with blood, helpless, whimpering with pain. And
something of the joy of the hen whose brood has safely hatched warmed
her coquetry.

Since the men have been going for months, crouching, creeping on all
fours, starving, carrying their own death as mothers carry their
children; since suffering and waiting and the passive acceptance of
danger and pain have reversed the sexes, the women have felt strong, and
even in their sensuality there has been a little glimmer of the new
passion for mothering.

The melancholy wife, just arrived from a region in which the war exists
in conversation only, and engrossed in the one man to the exclusion of
the others, suffered from the sexless familiarity that they so freely
indulged in there in the shadow of death and agony. But the others were
at home in the war. They spoke its language, which in the men was a
mixture of obstinate greed for life and a paradoxical softness born of a
surfeit of brutality; while in the woman it was a peculiar, garrulous
cold-bloodedness. She had heard so much of blood and dying that her
endless curiosity gave the impression of hardness and hysterical
cruelty.

The Mussulman and the cavalry officer were chaffing the Philosopher and
poking fun at the phrase-mongers, hair-splitters, and other wasters of
time. They took a childish delight in his broad smile of embarrassment
at being teased in the Frau Major's presence, and she, out of feminine
politeness, came to the Philosopher's rescue, while casting amorous
looks at the others who could deal such pert blows with their tongues.

"Oh, let the poor man alone," she laughed and cooed. "He's right. War is
horrible. These two gentlemen are just trying to get your temper up."
She twinkled at the Philosopher to soothe him. His good nature made him
so helpless.

The Philosopher grinned phlegmatically and said nothing. The Mussulman,
setting his teeth, shifted his leg, which in its white bandage was the
only part of him that was visible, and placed it in a more comfortable
position on the bench.

"The Philosopher?" he laughed. "As a matter of fact, what does the
Philosopher know about war? He's in the artillery. And war is conducted
by the infantry. Don't you know that, Mrs. ----?"

"I am not Mrs. here. Here I am Sister Engelberta," she cut in, and for a
moment the expression on her face became almost serious.

"I beg your pardon, Sister Engelberta. Artillery and infantry, you see,
are like husband and wife. We infantrymen must bring the child into the
world when a victory is to be born. The artillery has only the pleasure,
just like a man's part in love. It is not until after the child has been
baptized that he comes strutting out proudly. Am I not right, Captain?"
he asked, appealing to the cavalry officer. "You are an equestrian on
foot now, too."

The captain boomed his assent. In his summary view, members of the
Reichstag who refused to vote enough money for the military, Socialists,
pacifists, all men, in brief, who lectured or wrote or spoke superfluous
stuff and lived by their brains belonged in the same category as the
Philosopher. They were all "bookworms."

"Yes, indeed," he said in his voice hoarse from shouting commands. "A
philosopher like our friend here is just the right person for the
artillery. Nothing to do but wait around on the top of a hill and look
on. If only they don't shoot up our own men! It is easy enough to
dispose of the fellows on the other side, in front of us. But I always
have a devilish lot of respect for you assassins in the back. But let's
stop talking of the war. Else I'll go off to bed. Here we are at last
with two charming ladies, when it's been an age since we've seen a face
that isn't covered with stubble, and you still keep talking of that
damned shooting. Good Lord, when I was in the hospital train and the
first girl came in with a white cap on her curly light hair, I'd have
liked to hold her hand and just keep looking and looking at her. Upon my
word of honor, Sister Engelberta, after a while the shooting gets to be
a nuisance. The lice are worse. But the worst thing of all is the
complete absence of the lovely feminine. For five months to see nothing
but men--and then all of a sudden to hear a dear clear woman's voice!
That's the finest thing of all. It's worth going to war for."

The Mussulman pulled his mobile face flashing with youth into a grimace.

"The finest thing of all! No, sir. To be quite frank, the finest thing
of all is to get a bath and a fresh bandage, and be put into a clean
white bed, and know that for a few weeks you're going to have a rest.
It's a feeling like--well, there's no comparison for it. But, of course,
it is very nice, too, to be seeing ladies again."

The Philosopher had tilted his round fleshy Epicurean head to one side,
and a moist sheen came into his small crafty eyes. He glanced at the
place where a bright spot in the almost palpable darkness suggested the
Frau Major's white dress, and began to tell what he thought, very slowly
in a slight sing-song.

"The finest thing of all, I think, is the quiet--when you have been
lying up there in the mountains where every shot is echoed back and
forth five times, and all of a sudden it turns absolutely quiet--no
whistling, no howling, no thundering--nothing but a glorious quiet that
you can listen to as to a piece of music! The first few nights I sat up
the whole time and kept my ears cocked for the quiet, the way you try to
catch a tune at a distance. I believe I even howled a bit, it was so
delightful to listen to no sound."

The captain of cavalry sent his cigarette flying through the night like
a comet scattering sparks, and brought his hand down with a thump on his
knee.

"There, there, Sister Engelberta, did you get that?" he cried
sarcastically. "'Listen to no sound.' You see, that's what's called
philosophy. I know something better than that, Mr. Philosopher, namely,
not to hear what you hear, especially when it's such philosophical
rubbish."

They laughed, and the man they were teasing smiled good-naturedly. He,
too, was permeated by the peacefulness that floated into the garden from
the sleeping town. The cavalryman's aggressive jokes glided off without
leaving a sting, as did everything else that might have lessened the
sweetness of the few days still lying between him and the front. He
wanted to make the most of his time, and take everything easily with his
eyes tight shut, like a child who has to enter a dark room.

The Frau Major leaned over to the Philosopher.

"So opinions differ as to what was the finest thing," she said; and her
breath came more rapidly. "But, tell me, what was the most awful thing
you went through out there? A lot of the men say the drumfire is the
worst, and a lot of them can't get over the sight of the first man they
saw killed. How about you?"

The Philosopher looked tortured. It was a theme that did not fit into
his programme. He was casting about for an evasive reply when an
unintelligible wheezing exclamation drew all eyes to the corner in which
the landsturm officer and his wife were sitting. The others had almost
forgotten them in the darkness and exchanged frightened glances when
they heard a voice that scarcely one of them knew, and the man with the
glazed eyes and uncertain gestures, a marionette with broken joints,
began to speak hastily in a falsetto like the crowing of a rooster.

"What was the most awful thing? The only awful thing is the going off.
You go off to war--and they let you go. That's the awful thing."

A cold sickening silence fell upon the company. Even the Mussulman's
face lost its perpetually happy expression and stiffened in
embarrassment. It had come so unexpectedly and sounded so
unintelligible. It caught them by the throat and set their pulses
bounding--perhaps because of the vibrating of the voice that issued from
the twitching body, or because of the rattling that went along with it,
and made it sound like a voice broken by long sobbing.

The Frau Major jumped up. She had seen the landsturm officer brought to
the hospital strapped fast to the stretcher, because his sobbing
wrenched and tore his body so that the bearers could not control him
otherwise. Something inexpressibly hideous--so it was said--had half
robbed the poor devil of his reason, and the Frau Major suddenly dreaded
a fit of insanity. She pinched the cavalryman's arm and exclaimed with a
pretense of great haste:

"My goodness! There's the gong of the last car. Quick, quick,"
addressing the sick man's wife, "quick! We must run."

They all rose. The Frau Major passed her arm through the unhappy little
woman's and urged with even greater insistence:

"We'll have a whole hour's walk back to town if we miss the car."

The little wife, completely at a loss, her whole body quivering, bent
over her husband again to take leave. She was certain that his outburst
had reference to her and held a grim deadly reproach, which she did not
comprehend. She felt her husband draw back and start convulsively under
the touch of her lips. And she sobbed aloud at the awful prospect of
spending an endless night in the chilly neglected room in the hotel,
left alone with this tormenting doubt. But the Frau Major drew her
along, forcing her to run, and did not let go her arm until they had
passed the sentinel at the gate and were out on the street. The
gentlemen followed them with their eyes, saw them reappear once again on
the street in the lamplight, and listened to the sound of the car
receding in the distance. The Mussulman picked up his crutches, and
winked at the Philosopher significantly, and said something with a yawn
about going to bed. The cavalry officer looked down at the sick man
curiously and felt sorry for him. Wanting to give the poor devil a bit
of pleasure, he tapped him on his shoulder and said in his free and easy
way:

"You've got a chic wife, I must say. I congratulate you."

The next instant he drew back startled. The pitiful heap on the bench
jumped up suddenly, as though a force just awakened had tossed him up
from his seat.

"Chic wife? Oh, yes. Very dashing!" came sputtering from his twitching
lips with a fury that cast out the words like a seething stream. "She
didn't shed a single tear when I left on the train. Oh, they were all
very dashing when we went off. Poor Dill's wife was, too. Very plucky!
She threw roses at him in the train and she'd been his wife for only two
months." He chuckled disdainfully and clenched his teeth, fighting hard
to suppress the tears burning in his threat. "Roses! He-he! And 'See you
soon again!' They were all so patriotic! Our colonel congratulated Dill
because his wife had restrained herself so well--as if he were simply
going off to maneuvers."

The lieutenant was now standing up. He swayed on his legs, which he held
wide apart, and supported himself on the cavalry captain's arm, and
looked up into his face expectantly with unsteady eyes.

"Do you know what happened to him--to Dill? I was there. Do you know
what?"

The captain looked at the others in dismay.

"Come on--come on to bed. Don't excite yourself," he stammered in
embarrassment.

With a howl of triumph the sick man cut him short and snapped in an
unnaturally high voice:

"You don't know what happened to Dill, you don't? We were standing just
the way we are now, and he was just going to show me the new photograph
that his wife had sent him--his brave wife, he-he, his restrained wife.
Oh yes, restrained! That's what they all were--all prepared for
anything. And while we were standing there, he about to show me the
picture, a twenty-eighter struck quite a distance away from us, a good
two-hundred yards. We didn't even look that way. Then all of a sudden I
saw something black come flying through the air--and Dill fell over with
his dashing wife's picture in his hand and a boot, a leg, a boot with
the leg of a baggage soldier sticking in his head--a soldier that the
twenty-eighter had blown to pieces far away from where we stood."

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