Andreas Latzko

“ 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. ”

“ 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! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Marschner sank into himself as he stood deserted in the empty trench. He felt as though he had been hollowed out, and looked about for help, and his eyes clung to the depression from which the corpses had now been lifted. Only the three Italians were lying there, the life already gone from them. The one showed his face, his mouth was still wide open as for a cry, and his hands dug themselves, as though to ward off pain, into his unnaturally swollen body. The other two lay with their knees drawn up and their heads between their arms. ”

“ And suddenly he grew calm and rose to his feet, elevated by a wonderful composure, ready to let himself be butchered by one of those panting beasts who were storming on, chased by the blind fear of death. He wanted to die like a man, without hatred, without rage, with clean hands.
A hoarse roar, a frightful, dehumanized cry almost beside him wrenched his thoughts back into the trench. A broad stream of light and fire, travelling in a steep curve, flowed blindingly down beside him and sprayed over the shoulder of the tall pock-marked tailor of the first line. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And the pictures that a dying man chiseled into my brain fourteen months ago with the prodigious strength of his final agony—are they supposed to disappear simply because the man that created them is lying in his soldier's grave?
Who, when he reads or hears the word "woods," does not see some woods he has once walked through or looked out on from a train window? Or when a man speaks of his dead father does he not see the face that has long been rotting in the grave appear again, now stern, now gentle, now in the rigidity of the last moments? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Deeply shaken, Marschner bowed his head and swiftly drew his hand across his eyes when the commandant of the trench rushed toward him from the dugout.
Nothing that betokens life was left about the man. His face was ashen, his eyes like lamps extinguished, glazed and surrounded by broad blue rims. His lids were a vivid red from sleeplessness. His hair, his beard, his clothes were encased in a thick crust of mud, so that he looked as if he had just arisen from the grave. He gave a brief, military salute, then grasped the captain's hand with hysterical joy. ”

“ Don't shoot!" Lieutenant Weixler's voice yelled without pause through the trench. His command seemed to lay its grasp on every throat and to hold the fingers moveless that greedily clasped the triggers. The first hand grenade flew into the trench. The captain saw it coming, then saw a man loosen from the mass, reel toward the dugout with outstretched arms, bending over, a veil of blood covering his face. Then—at last!—it was a relief—came the beating of the machine guns, and at once the rifles went off, too, like the raging of an angry pack. A cold, repulsive greed lay on all faces. ”

“ At every table the conversation grew animated, the benefits of the war were told over, and the wits cracked jokes at the expense of the pacifists. There was not a single man in the whole assemblage who did not owe at least two blessings to the war: financial independence and such munificence of living as only much-envied money magnates have allotted to them in times of peace. Among this circle of people the war wore the mask of a Santa Claus with a bag full of wonderful gifts on his back and assignments for brilliant careers in his hand. ”

“ He could have cast it away enthusiastically, and without flying banners, without ecstasy, without the world's applause, had the hostile trenches over there been filled with men like Weixler, had the combat been against such crazy hardness of soul, against catchwords fattened with human flesh, against that whole, cleverly built-up machine of force which drove those whom it was supposed to protect to form a wall to protect itself. He would have hurled himself into the fight with bare fists, unmindful of the bursting of shells, the moans of the wounded. ”

“ Are there really human beings of flesh and blood who can still take a newspaper in their hands and not foam at the mouth with rage? Can one carry in one's brain the picture of wounded men lying exposed on slimy fields in the pouring rain, slowly, dumbly bleeding to death, and yet quietly read the vile stuff written about "perfect hospital service," "smoothly running ambulances," and "elegantly papered trenches," with which these fellows poetize themselves free from military service?
Men come home with motionless, astonished eyes, still reflecting death. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ Alone in the world, with no relatives to go to, with nothing but his knapsack and his little trunk, the brilliant sunlight of the Hungarian plain country flooding down on him, and the village stretching away to a distance before him, John Bogdán suddenly felt himself a prey to timidity, to a terror that he had not known amid the bursting of the shells, the most violent charges, the most ferocious hand-to-hand encounters. His inert peasant intellect, his nature crudely compounded of wilfulness and vanity, had always been a stranger to deep-going reflections. ”

“ You must always watch your enemy so as to guess his move in time. It's from your enemy's face that you must read the right moment for stepping backward. They all behaved the same way—exactly like the first tall wild fellow who gnashed his tusks. All of a sudden their faces turned absolutely smooth, as if the cold iron in their body had chilled their fury, their eyes opened wide in astonishment and looked at their enemy as if to ask in reproach, "What are you doing?" Then they usually clutched at the bayonet and needlessly cut their fingers, too, before they fell over dead. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Am I really sick because those glances of warm compassion from bleeding cripples to sound, strapping young fellows burn in my soul with a fire never to be extinguished? An apprehension sent a chill through our whole train, the foreboding of a hell that one would rather run away from wrapped in bloody bandages than go to meet whole and strong. And when this shudder of apprehension has turned into reality, into experience and memory, is it to be shaken off as long as such trains still meet every day? ”

“ Wherever one stepped the earth had been lacerated by gigantic explosions, laboriously patched up again, once more ripped open to its very bowels, and leveled a second time, so that one reeled on unconscious, as if in a hurricane.
Crushed by the weight of his impressions, Captain Marschner crept through the trench like a worm, and his thoughts turned ever more passionately, ever more desperately to Lieutenant Weixler. ”

“ It was as if that long, grey column slowly winding its way through the trench were carrying away the last hope. The back of the last soldier, growing smaller and smaller, was the world. The captain's eyes clung greedily to that back and measured fearfully the distance to the corner of the trench from which he must lose sight of it forever. There was still time to call out a greeting, and by running very fast one might still catch up and hand over a letter. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Were not the mercenaries led on by hopes of a gay, lawless life—women and ducats and gold-caparisoned steeds? Is this cowering under iron discipline, this holding out of your head to be chopped off, this passive play with monsters that spill their hellish cauldron on you from out of the blue distance still "war"? War was the collision of the superfluous forces, the ruffians of all nations. Youth, for whom the town had grown too small and the doublet too tight, ventured out, intoxicated by the play of its own muscles. ”