Men in War by Andreas Latzko

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

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 maddeningly from all those eyes. It drove him to sheer despair.

If only he could have driven them back to their own people and gone
ahead alone! With a jerk he threw out his chest, fixed his eyes on a
medal that a man in the middle of the long row was wearing, and said:

"Boys, we're going to meet the enemy now. I count upon each of you to do
his duty, faithful to the oath you have sworn to the flag. I shall ask
nothing of you that the interest of our fatherland and your own interest
therefore and the safety of your wives and children do not absolutely
require. You may depend upon that. Good luck! And now--forward, march!"

Without being conscious of it, he had imitated Weixler's voice, his
unnaturally loud, studiedly incisive tone of command, so as to drown the
emotion that fluttered in his throat. At the last words he faced about
abruptly and without looking around tossed the final command over his
shoulder for the men to deploy, and with his head sunk upon his chest he
began the ascent, taking long strides. Behind him boots crunched and
food pails clattered against some other part of the men's accouterment.
Soon, too, there came the sound of the gasping of heavily laden men; and
a thick, suffocating smell of sweat settled upon the marching company.

Captain Marschner was ashamed. A real physical nausea at the part he had
just played overcame him. What was there left for these simple people to
do, these bricklayers and engineers and cultivators of the earth, who,
bent over their daily tasks, had lived without vision into the future--
what was there left for them to do when the grand folks, the learned
people, their own captain with the three golden stars on his collar,
assured them it was their duty and a most praiseworthy thing to shoot
Italian bricklayers and engineers and farmers into fragments? They went
--gasping behind him, and he--he led them on! Led them, against his inner
conviction, because of his pitiful cowardice, and asked them to be
courageous and contemptuous of death. He had talked them into it, had
abused their confidence, had made capital of their love for their wives
and children, because if he acted in the service of a lie, there was a
chance of his continuing to live and even coming back home safe again,
while if he stuck to the truth he believed in there was the certainty of
his being stood up against a wall and shot.

He staked their lives and his own life on the throw of loaded dice
because he was too cowardly to contemplate the certain loss of the game
for himself alone.

The sun beat down murderously on the steep, treeless declivity. The
sound of shells bursting off at a distance, of tattooing machine guns,
and roaring artillery on their own side was now mingled with the howling
sound of shots whizzing through the air and coming closer and closer.
And still the top of the ridge had not been reached! The captain felt
his breath fail him, stopped and raised his hand. The men were to get
their wind back for a moment; they had been on the march since four
o'clock that morning; they had done bravely with their forty-year-old
legs. He could tell that by his own.

Full of compassion he looked upon the bluish red faces streaming with
sweat, and gave a start when he saw Lieutenant Weixler approaching in
long strides. Why could he no longer see that face without a sense of
being attacked, of being caught at the throat by a hatred he could
hardly control? He ought really to be glad to have the man at his side
there. One glance into those coldly watchful eyes was sufficient to
subdue any surge of compassion.

"With your permission, Captain," he heard him rasp out, "I'm going over
to the left wing. A couple of fellows there that don't please me at all.
Especially Simmel, the red-haired dog. He's already pulling his head in
when a shrapnel bursts over there."

Marschner was silent. The red-haired dog--Simmel? Wasn't that the red-
haired endman in the second line, the paper-hanger and upholsterer who
had carried that exquisite little girl in his arms up to the last
moment--until Weixler had brutally driven him off to the train? It
seemed to the captain as though he could still see the children's
astonished upward look at the mighty man who could scold their own
father.

"Let him be, he'll get used to it by and by," he said mildly. "He's got
his children on his mind and isn't in a hurry to make orphans of them.
The men can't all be heroes. If they just do their duty."

Weixler's face became rigid. His narrow lips tightened again into that
hard, contemptuous expression which the captain felt each time like the
blow of a whip.

"He's not supposed to think of his brats now, but of his oath to the
flag, of the oath he swore to his Majesty, his Commander-in-Chief! You
just told them so yourself, Captain."

"Yes, yes, I know I did," Captain Marschner nodded absent-mindedly, and
let himself slide down slowly on the grass. It was not surprising that
this boy spoke as he did, but what was surprising was that twenty-five
years ago, when he himself had come from the military academy all aglow
with enthusiasm, the phrases "oath to the flag," "his Majesty, and
Commander-in-Chief" had seemed to him, too, to be the sum and substance
of all things. In those days he would have been like this lad and would
have gone to war full of joyous enthusiasm. But now that he had grown
deaf to the fanfaronade of such words and clearly saw the framework on
which they were constructed, how was he to keep pace with the young who
were a credulous echo of every speech they heard? How was he suddenly to
make bold reckless blades of his excellent, comfortable Philistines,
whom life had so thoroughly tamed that at home they were capable of
going hungry and not snatching at treasures that were separated from
them by only a thin partition of glass? What was the use of making the
same demands upon the upholsterer Simmel as upon the young lieutenant,
who had never striven for anything else than to be named first for
fencing, wrestling, and courageous conduct? Have mercenaries ever been
famous for their morals, or good solid citizens for their fearlessness?
Can one and the same man be twenty and forty-five years old at the same
time?

Crouching there, his head between his fists, the captain became so
absorbed in these thoughts that he lost all sense of the time and the
place, and the lieutenant's attempts to rouse him by passing by several
times and hustling the men about loudly remained unsuccessful. But at
last the sound of a horse's hoofs brought him back to consciousness. An
officer was galloping along the path that ran about the hill half way
from the top. On his head he wore the tall cap that marked him as a
member of the general staff. He reined in his horse, asked courteously
where the company was bound and raised his eyebrows when Captain
Marschner explained the precise position they were to take.

"So that's where you're going?" he exclaimed, and his grimace turned
into a respectful smile. "Well, I congratulate you! You're going into
the very thickest of the lousy mess. For three days the Italians have
been trying to break through at that point. I wouldn't hold you back for
a moment! The poor devils there now will make good use of the relief.
Good-bye and good luck!"

Gracefully he touched the edge of his cap. His horse cried out under the
pressure of his spurs, and he was gone.

The captain stared after him as though dazed. "Well, I congratulate
you!" The words echoed in his ears. A man, well mounted, thoroughly
rested, pink and neat as though he had just come out of a band-box,
meets two hundred fellowmen dedicated to death; sees them sweaty,
breathless, on the very edge of destruction; knows that in another hour
many a face now turned upon him curiously will lie in the grass
distorted by pain or rigid in death--and he says, smiling, "Well, I
congratulate you!" And he rides on and no shudder of awe creeps down his
back, no shadow touches his forehead!

The meeting will fade from the man's memory without leaving a trace. At
dinner that night nothing will remind him of the comrade whose hand,
perhaps, he was the last one to press. To these chosen ones, who from
their safe positions in the rear, drive the columns on into the fire,
what matters a single company's march to death? And the miserable, red-
haired upholsterer here was trembling, pulling back his head, tearing
his eyes open mightily, as though the fate of the world depended upon
whether he would ever again carry his little red-haired girl in his
arms. To be sure, if one viewed the whole matter in the proper
perspective--as a member of the general staff riding by, who kept his
vision fixed on the aim, that is, the victory that sooner or later would
be celebrated to the clinking of glasses--why, from that point of view
Weixler was right! It must make him indignant to have events of such
epic grandeur made ridiculous by such a chicken-hearted creature as
Simmel and degraded into a doleful family affair.

"The poor devils there now!" A cold shiver ran down Marschner's back.
The staff officer's words suddenly evoked a vision of the shattered,
blood-soaked trench where the men, exhausted to the point of death, were
yearning for him as for a redeemer. He arose, with a groan, seized by a
grim, embittered hatred against this age. Not a single mesh in the net
left open! Every minute of respite granted his own men was theft or even
murder committed against the men out there. He threw up his arms and
strode forward, determined to rest no more until he reached the trench
that he and his company were to man and hold. His face was pale and
careworn, and each time he caught the exasperating rasp of his
lieutenant's voice from the other wing crying "Forward! Forward!" it was
drawn by a tortured smile.

Suddenly he stood still. Into the rattle, the boom, the explosion of
artillery there leaped suddenly a new tone. It rose clearly above the
rest of the din, which had almost ceased to penetrate the consciousness.
It approached with such a shrill sound, with such indescribable
swiftness, with so fierce a threat, that the sound seemed to be visible,
as though you could actually see a screaming semicircle rise in the air,
bite its way to one's very forehead, and snap there with a short, hard,
whiplike crack. A few feet away a little whirl of dust was puffed up,
and invisible hail stones slapped rattling down upon the grass.

A shrapnel!

Captain Marschner looked round startled, and to his terror saw all the
men's eyes fixed on him, as though asking his advice. A peculiar smile
of shame and embarrassment hovered about their lips.

It was his business to set the men a good example, to march on
carelessly without stopping or looking up. After all it made no
difference what one did one way or the other. There was no possibility
of running away or hiding. It was all a matter of chance. Chance was the
one thing that would protect a man. So the thing to do was to go ahead
as if not noticing anything. If there was only one man in the company
who did not seem to care, the others would be put to shame and would
mutually control each other, and then everything was won. He could tell
by his own experience how the feeling of being watched on all sides
upheld him. Had he been by himself, he might have thrown himself on the
ground and tried to hide behind a stone no matter how small.

"Nothing but a spent shot! Forward, boys!" he cried, the thought of
being a support to his men almost making him cheerful. But the words
were not out of his mouth when other shots whizzed through the air. In
spite of himself, his body twitched backward and his head sank lower
between his shoulders. That made him stiffen his muscles and grind his
teeth in rage. It was not the violence with which the scream flew toward
him that made him twitch. It was the strange precision with which the
circle of the thing's flight (exactly like a diagram at a lecture on
artillery) curved in front of him. It was this unnatural feeling of
perceiving a sound more with the eye than with the ear that made the
will powerless.

Something had to be done to create the illusion of not being wholly
defenseless.

"Forward, run!" he shouted at the top of his voice, holding his hands to
his mouth to make a megaphone.

His men stormed forward as if relieved. The tension left their faces;
each one was somehow busied with himself, stumbled, picked himself up,
grasped some piece of equipment that was coming loose; and in the
general snorting and gasping, the whistle of the approaching shells
passed almost unobserved.

After a while it came to Captain Marschner's consciousness that some one
was hissing into his left ear. He turned his head and saw Weixler
running beside him, scarlet in the face.

"What is it?" he asked, involuntarily slowing down from a run to a walk.

"Captain, I beg to announce that an example ought to be instituted! That
coward Simmel is demoralizing the whole company. At each shrapnel he
yells out, 'Jesus, my Savior,' and flings himself to the ground. He is
frightening the rest of the men. He ought to be made an example of,
a----"

A charge of four shrapnels whizzed into the middle of his sentence. The
screaming seemed to have grown louder, more piercing. The captain felt
as though a monstrous, glittering scythe were flashing in a steep curve
directly down on his skull. But this time he did not dare to move an
eyelash. His limbs contracted and grew taut, as in the dentist's chair
when the forceps grip the tooth. At the same time, he examined the
lieutenant's face closely, curious to see how he was taking the fire for
which he had so yearned. But he seemed not to be noticing the shrapnels
in the least. He was stretching his neck to inspect the left wing.

"There!" he cried indignantly. "D'you see, Captain? The miserable cur is
down on his face again. I'll go for him!"

Before Marschner could hold him back, he had dashed off. But half-way he
stopped, stood still, and then turned back in annoyance.

"The fellow's hit," he announced glumly, with an irritated shrug of his
shoulders.

"Hit?" the captain burst out, and an ugly, bitter taste suddenly made
his tongue cleave to the roof of his mouth. He observed the frosty calm
in Weixler's features, the unsympathetic, indifferent look, and his hand
started upward. He could have slapped him, his insensibility was so
maddening and that careless "the fellow's hit" hurt so. The image of the
dear little girl with the bright ribbon in her red curls flashed into
his mind, and also the vision of a distorted corpse holding a child in
its arms. As through a veil he saw Weixler hasten past him to catch up
with the company, and he ran to where the two stretcher-bearers kneeled
next to something invisible.

The wounded man lay on his back. His flaming red hair framed a greenish
grey face ghostly in its rigidity. A few minutes before Captain
Marschner had seen the man still running--the same face still full of
vitality--from heat and excitement. His knees gave way. The sight of
that change, so incomprehensible in its suddenness, gripped at his
vitals like an icy hand. Was it possible? Could all the life blood
recede in the twinkling of an eye, and a strong, hale man crumble into
ruins in a few moments? What powers of hell slept in such pieces of iron
that between two breaths they could perform the work of many months of
illness?

"Don't be frightened, Simmel!" the captain stammered, supporting himself
on the shoulder of one of the stretcher-bearers. "They'll carry you back
to the baggage!" He forced the lie out with an effort, drawing a deep
breath. "You'll be the first one to get back to Vienna now!" He wanted
to add something about the man's family and the little girl with the red
curls, but he could not get it over his lips. He dreaded a cry from the
dying man for his dear ones, and when the mouth writhing with pain
opened slowly, it sent an inner tremor through the captain. He saw the
eyes open, too, and he shuddered at their glassy stare, which seemed no
longer to fix itself upon any bodily thing but to be looking through all
those present and seeking something at a distance.

Simmers body writhed under the forcible examination of the doctor's
hands. Incomprehensible gurgling sounds arose from his torn chest
streaming with blood, and his breath blew the scarlet foam at his mouth
into bursting bubbles.

"Simmel! What do you want, Simmel?" Marschner besought, bending low over
the wounded man. He listened intently to the broken sounds, convinced
that he would have to try to catch a last message. He breathed in relief
when the wandering eyes at last found their way back and fastened
themselves on his face with a look of anxious inquiry in them. "Simmel!"
he cried again, and grasped his hand, which trembled toward the wound.
"Simmel, don't you know me?"

Simmel nodded. His eyes widened, the corners of his mouth drooped.

"It hurts--Captain--hurts so!" came from the shattered breast. To the
captain it sounded like a reproach. After a short rattling sound of pain
he cried out again, foaming at the mouth and with a piercing shriek of
rage: "It hurts! It hurts!" He beat about with his hands and feet.

Captain Marschner jumped up.

"Carry him back," he commanded, and without knowing what he did, he put
his fingers into his ears, and ran after the company, which had already
reached the top of the ridge. He ran pressing his head between his hands
as in a vise, reeling, panting, driven by a fear, as though the wounded
man's agonized cry were pursuing him with lifted axe. He saw the
shrunken body writhe, the face that had so suddenly withered, the
yellowish white of the eyes. And that cry: "Captain--hurts so!" echoed
within him and clawed at his breast, so that when he reached the summit
he fell down, half choked, as if the ground had been dragged from under
his feet.

No, he couldn't do that sort of thing! He didn't want to go on with it.
He was no hangman, he was incapable of lashing men on to their death. He
could not be deaf to their woe, to that childlike whimpering which stung
his conscience like a bitter reproach. He stamped on the ground
defiantly. Everything in him arose in rebellion against the task that
called him.

Below, the field of battle stretched far out, cheerlessly grey. No tree,
no patch of green. A stony waste--chopped up, crushed, dug inside out,
no sign of life. The communication trenches, which started in the bottom
of the valley and led to the edge of the hill, from which the wire
entanglements projected, looked like fingers spread out to grasp
something and clawed deep into the throttled earth. Marschner looked
round again involuntarily. Behind him the green slope descended steeply
to the little woods in which the baggage had been left. Farther behind
the white highroad gleamed like a river framed in colored meadows. A
short turn--and the greenness vanished! All life succumbed, as though
roared down by the cannons, by the howling and pounding that hammered in
the valley like the pulsating of a colossal fever. Shell hole upon shell
hole yawned down there. From time to time thick, black pillars of earth
leaped up and for moments hid small parts of this desert burned to
ashes, where the cloven stumps of trees, whittled as by pen-knives,
stuck up like a jeering challenge to the impotent imagination, a
challenge to recognize in this field of death and refuse, the landscape
it once had been, before the great madness had swept over it and sown it
with ruins, leaving it like a dancing floor on which two worlds had
fought for a loose woman.

And into this vale of hell he was now to descend! _Live_ down there
five days and five nights, he and his little company of the damned,
spewed down into that place, their living bodies speared on the fishing
hook, bait for the enemy!

All alone, with no one near to hear him, amid the fury of the bursting
shrapnel, which fell up there as thick as rain in a thunderstorm,
Captain Marschner gave himself up to his rage, his impotent rage against
a world that had inflicted such a thing on him. He cursed and roared out
his hatred into the deaf tumult; and then he sprang up when, far below,
almost in the valley already, his men emerged followed by Lieutenant
Weixler, who ran behind them like a butcher's helper driving oxen to the
shambles. The captain saw them hurry, saw the clouds of the explosions
multiply above their heads, and on the slope in front of him saw bluish-
green heaps scattered here and there, like knapsacks dropped by the way,
some motionless, some twitching like great spiders--and he rushed on.

He raced like a madman down the steep slope, scarcely feeling the ground
under his feet, nor hearing the rattle of the exploding shells. He flew
rather than ran, stumbled over charred roots, fell, picked himself up
again and darted onward, looking neither to the right nor to the left,
almost with closed eyes. Now and then, as from a train window, he saw a
pale, troubled face flit by. Once it seemed to him he heard a man
moaning for water. But he wished to hear nothing, to see nothing. He ran
on, blind and deaf, without stopping, driven by the terror of that bad,
reproachful, "Hurts so!"

Only once did he halt, as though he had stepped into a trap and were
held fast in an iron vise. A hand stopped him, a grey, convulsed hand
with crooked fingers. It stuck up in front of him as though hewn out of
stone. He saw no face, nor knew who it was that held out that dead,
threatening fist. All he knew was that two hours before, over there in
the little piece of woods, that hand had still comfortably cut slices of
rye bread or had written a last post-card home. And a horror of those
fingers took hold of the captain and lent new strength to his limbs, so
that he stormed onward in great leaps like a boy until, with throbbing
sides and a red cloud before his eyes, he caught up with his company at
last, way down in the valley at the entrance to the communication
trenches.

Lieutenant Weixler presented himself in strictest military form and
announced the loss of fourteen men. Marschner heard the ring of pride in
his voice, like triumph over what had been achieved, like the rejoicing
of a boy bragging of the first down on his lip and deepening the newly
acquired dignity of a bass voice. What were the wounded men writhing on
the slope above to this raw youth, what the red-haired coward with his
whine, what the children robbed of their provider growing up to be
beggars, to a life in the abyss, perhaps to a life in jail? All these
were mere supers, a stage background for Lieutenant Weixler's heroism to
stand out in relief. Fourteen bloody bodies lined the path he had
trodden without fear. How should his eyes not radiate arrogance?

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10