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?
The captain hastened on, past Weixler. If only he did not have to see
him, he told himself, if only he did not have to meet the contented
gleam of the man's eyes. He feared his rage might master his reason
and his tongue get beyond his control, and his clenched fist do its own
will. But here he had to spare this man. Here Lieutenant Weixler was
within his rights. He grew from moment to moment. His stature dwarfed
the others. He swam upon the stream, while the others, weighed down by
the burden of their riper humanity, sank like heavy clods. Here other
laws obtained. The dark shaft in which they now reeled forward with
trembling knees led to an island washed by a sea of death. Whoever was
stranded there dared not keep anything that he used in another world.
The man who was master here was the one who had kept nothing but his
axe and his fist. And he was the rich one upon whose superabundance
the others depended. As Captain Marschner groped his way through the
slippery trench in a daze, it became clearer and clearer to him that he
must now hold on to his detested lieutenant like a treasure. Without him
he would be lost.
He saw the traces of puddles of blood at his feet, and trod upon
tattered, blood-soaked pieces of uniforms, on empty shells, rattling
preserve tins, fragments of cannon balls. Yawning shell holes would open
up suddenly, precariously bridged with half-charred boards.
Everywhere the traces of frenzied devastation grinned, blackened remains
of a wilderness of wires, beams, sacks, broken tools, a disorder
that took one's breath away and made one dizzy--all steeped in the
suffocating stench of combustion, powder smoke, and the pungent,
stinging breath of the ecrasite shells. 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. Weixler alone
could help him or take his place, with that grim, cold energy of his,
with that blindness to everything which did not touch his own life, or
which was eclipsed by the glowing vision of an Erich Weixler studded
with decorations and promoted out of his turn. The captain kept looking
about for him anxiously, and breathed with relief each time the urgent,
rasping voice came to his ears from the rear.
The trench seemed never to be coming to an end. Marschner felt his
strength giving way. He stumbled more frequently and closed his eyes
with a shudder at the criss-cross traces of blood that precisely
indicated the path of the wounded. Suddenly he raised his head with
a jerk. A new smell struck him, a sweetish stench which kept getting
stronger and stronger until at a curve of the trench wall, which swung
off to the left at this point and receded semicircularly, it burst upon
him like a great cloud. He looked about, shaken by nausea, his gorge
rising. In a dip in the trench he saw a pile of dirty, tattered uniforms
heaped in layers and with strangely rigid outlines. It took him some
time to grasp the full horror of that which towered in front of him.
Fallen soldiers were lying there like gathered logs, in the contorted
shapes of the last death agony. Tent flaps had been spread over them,
but had slipped down and revealed the grim, stony grey caricatures, the
fallen jaws, the staring eyes. The arms of those in the top tier hung
earthward like parts of a trellis, and grasped at the faces of
those lying below, and were already sown with the livid splotches of
corruption.
Captain Marschner uttered a short, belching cry and reeled forward. His
head shook as though loosened from his neck, and his knees gave way so
that he already saw the ground rising up toward him, when suddenly
an unknown face emerged directly in front of him and attracted his
attention, and gave him back his self-control. It was a sergeant, who
was staring at him silently with great, fevered, gleaming eyes in a
deathly pale face. For a moment the man stood as though paralyzed, then
his mouth opened wide, he clapped his hands, and jumped into the air
like a dancer, and dashed off, without thinking of a salute.
"Relief!" he shouted while running.
He came to a halt before a black hole in the trench wall, like the
entrance to a cave, and bent down and shouted into the opening with a
ring of indescribable joy in his voice--with a rejoicing that sounded as
if it came through tears:
"Relief! Lieutenant! The relief party is here!"
The captain looked after him and heard his cry. His eyes grew moist,
so touching was that childlike cry of joy, that shout from out of a
relieved heart. He followed the sergeant slowly, and saw--as though
the cry had awakened the dead--pallid faces peering from all corners,
wounded men with blood-soaked bandages, tottering figures holding their
rifles. Men streamed toward him from every direction, stared at him and
with speechless lips formed the word "relief," until at length one of
them roared out a piercing "hurrah," which spread like wildfire and
found an echo in unseen throats that repeated it enthusiastically.
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. His hand was cold
as a corpse's and sticky with sweat and dirt. And most uncanny was the
contrast between this skeleton hung with clothes, this rigid death-mask
of a face, and the twitching, over-excited nervousness with which the
lieutenant greeted their liberator.
The words leaped like a waterfall from his cracked lips. He drew
Marschner into the dugout and pushed him, stumbling and groping as if
dazzled, down on an invisible something meant for a seat and began to
tell his tale. He couldn't stand still for a second. He hopped about,
slapped his thighs, laughed with unnatural loudness, ran up and down
trippingly, threw himself on the couch in the corner, asked for a
cigarette every other minute, threw it away without knowing it after two
puffs, and at once asked for another.
"I tell you, three hours more," he crowed blissfully, with affected
gaiety, "--three? What am I talking about. _One_ hour more, and it would
have been too late. D'you know how many rounds of ammunition I've got
left? Eleven hundred in all! Machine guns? Run down! Telephone? Smashed
since last night already! Send out a party to repair it? Impossible!
Needed every man in the trench! A hundred and sixty-four of us at first.
Now I've got thirty-one, eleven of them wounded so that they can't hold
a rifle. Thirty-one fellows to hold the trench with! Last night there
were still forty-five of us when they attacked. We drove 'em to hell, of
course, but fourteen of our men went again. We haven't had a chance to
bury them yet. Didn't you see them lying out there?"
The Captain let him talk. He leaned his elbows on the primitive table,
held his head between his hands, and kept silent. His eyes wandered
about the dark, mouldy den, filled with the stench of a smoking little
kerosene lamp. He saw the mildewed straw in the corner, the disconnected
telephone at the entrance, an empty box of tinned food on which a
crumpled map was spread out. He saw a mountain of rifles, bundles of
uniforms, each one ticketed. And he felt how inch by inch, a dumb, icy
horror arose within him and paralyzed his breathing, as though the
earth overhead, upheld by only a thin scaffolding of cracked boards
and threatening to fall at any moment, had already laid its intolerable
weight upon his chest. And that prancing ghost, that giggling death's
head, which only a week before perhaps had still been young, affected
him like a nightmare. And the thought that now his turn had come to
stick it out in that sepulchral vault for five or six days or a week and
experience the same horrors that the man there was telling about with
a laugh intensified his discouragement into a passionate, throbbing
indignation which he could scarcely control any more. He could have
roared out, could have jumped up, run out, and shouted to mankind from
the depths of his soul asking why he had been tossed there, why he would
have to lie there until he had turned into carrion or a crazy man. How
could he have let himself be driven out there? He could not understand
it. He saw no meaning to it all, no aim. All he saw was that hole in the
earth, those rotting corpses outside, and nearby, but one step removed
from all that madness, his own Vienna as he had left it only two days
before, with its tramways, its show windows, its smiling people and its
lighted theaters. What madness to be crouching there waiting for death
with idiotic patience, to perish on the naked earth in blood and filth,
like a beast, while other people, happy, clean, dressed up, sat in
bright halls and listened to music, and then nestled in soft beds
without fear, without danger, guarded by a whole world, which would come
down in indignation upon any who dared to harm a single hair of their
heads. Had madness already stolen upon him or were the others mad?
His pulse raged as though his heart would burst if he could not relieve
his soul by a loud shout.
At that very moment Lieutenant Weixler came bustling in, like the master
of ceremonies at a ball. He stood stiff and straight in front of the
captain, and announced that everything above was in readiness, that he
had already assigned the posts and arranged the watches, and placed the
machine guns. The captain looked at him and had to lower his eyes as if
boxed on the ears by this tranquillity, which would suddenly wither his
fury into a burning shame at himself.
Why did that man remain untouched by the great fear of death which
impregnated the very air here? How was it that he could give orders
and commands with the foresightedness of a mature man, while he himself
crept out of sight like a frightened child and rebelled against his fate
with the senseless fury of an animal at bay, instead of mastering fate
as befitted his age? Was he a coward? Was he in the grip of a mean,
paltry fear, was he overcome by that wretched blindness of the soul
which cannot lift its vision beyond its own ego nor lose sight of its
ego for the sake of an idea? Was he really so devoid of any sense for
the common welfare, so utterly ruled by short-sighted selfishness,
concerned with nothing but his bare, miserable existence? No, he was not
like that. He clung to his own life no more than any other man. 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. Oh no,
he was not a coward. Not what those two men thought. He saw them wink
scornfully and make fun of the unhappy old uncle of a reserve officer
who sat in the corner like a bundle of misery. What did they know of his
soul's bitterness? They stood there as heroes and felt the glances of
their home upon them, and spoke words which, upborne by the echo of a
whole world, peopled the loneliness with all the hosts of the likeminded
and filled their souls with the strength of millions. And they laughed
at a man who was to kill without feeling hatred and die without ecstasy,
for a victory that was nothing to him but a big force which achieved its
objects simply because it hit harder, not because it had justice on its
side or a fine and noble aim. He had no cause to slink off, humbled by
their courage.
A cold, proud defiance heartened him, so that he arose, strengthened
suddenly, as if elevated by the superhuman burden that he alone carried
on his shoulders. He saw the strange lieutenant still dancing about,
hastily gathering up his belongings and stuffing them into his knapsack.
He heard him scold his orderly and bellow at him to hurry up, in between
digging up fresh details, hideous episodes, from the combats of the past
few days, which Weixler devoured in breathless attention.
"What a question!" the commandant of the trench exclaimed, laughing at
his audience. "Whether the Italians had heavy losses, too? Do you think
we let them pepper us like rabbits? You can easily calculate what those
fellows lost in their eleven attacks if we've melted down to thirty men
without crawling out of our trench. Just let them go on like that a few
weeks longer and they'll be at the end of their human material."
Captain Marschner had not wanted to listen. He stood bending over a map,
but at the phrase, "human material," he started violently. It sounded
like a taunt directed at his own thoughts, as if the two men had seen
into him and had agreed with each other to give him a good lesson and
show him how alone he was.
"Human material!"
In a trench, filled with the stench of dead bodies, shaken by the impact
of the shells, stood two men, each himself a stake in the game, and
while the dice were still being tossed for their very bones, they talked
of--human material! They uttered those ruthless, shameful words without
a shadow of indignation, as though it were natural for their living
bodies to be no more than a gambler's chips in the hands of men who
arrogated to themselves the right to play the game of gods. Without
hesitating they laid their one, irrevocable life at the feet of a
power that could not prove whether it had known how to place the stakes
rightly except by their dead bodies. And the men who were speaking that
way were officers! So where was there a gleam of hope?
Out there, among the simple men, perhaps, the plain cannon fodder? They
were now crouching resignedly in their places, thinking of home and each
of them still feeling himself a man. He was drawn to his men, to their
dull, silent sadness, to their true greatness, which without pathos and
without solemnity, in everyday clothes, as it were, patiently awaited
the hero's death.
Outside the dugout stood the remnants of the relieved company ready for
the march, always two men abreast with a dead comrade on a tent canvas
between them. A long procession, profoundly stirring in its silent
expectancy, into which the hissing and crackling of shrapnel and the
thunder of grenades fell like a warning from above to those who
still had their lives. Bitterly, Marschner clenched his fist at this
insatiableness.
At that moment the pale sergeant stepped in front of the place where the
dead had been piled and frightened Marschner out of his thoughts.
"Captain, I beg to announce that beside the fourteen dead there are
three seriously wounded men who can't walk--Italians. I have no bearers
left for them."
"We'll leave them to you as a souvenir," the trench commandant, who was
just leaving the dugout with Weixler, laughed in his maundering way.
"You can have them dug in at night up there among the communication
trenches, Captain. When it gets dark, the Italians direct their barrage
fire farther back, and give you a chance to climb out. To be sure, they
won't lie in peace there under the earth very long, because the shells
rip everything open right away again. I've had to have my poor ensign
buried three times over already."
"How did they get in here anyhow?" Weixler asked, pushing himself
forward. "Did you have a fight in the trench?"
The other lieutenant shook his head proudly. "I should rather say not.
The gentlemen never got as far as that. These three tried to cut the
wire entanglements night before last, but our machine gun man caught 'em
at it and his iron spatter spoiled their little game. Well, there they
lay, of course, right under our very noses and they had on the loveliest
shoes of bright yellow. My men begrudged 'em those shoes. There--" he
ended, pointing with his finger at the feet of the pale sergeant--"there
you see one pair. But we'll have to start now. March, sergeant! My
respects, Captain. The Italians'll open their eyes when they come over
to-night to finish us off comfortably and a hundred and fifty rifles go
off and two brand-new bullet squirters. Ha-ha! Sorry I can't be here to
see it! Good-by, little man! Good luck!" Humming a merry popular song
he followed his men without looking back, without even observing that
Marschner accompanied him a little on his way.
Gaily, as though on a Sunday picnic, the men started on the way, which
led over the terrible field of shards and ruins and the steep, shot-up
hill. What hells they must have endured there, in that mole's gallery!
The captain remained standing and heaved a deep sigh. 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.
Then the last medium disappeared--the last possibility of dividing the
world into two halves. And his yearning recoiled before the endless
space it had to bridge--and there was nothing else to bridge it but his
yearning.
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. The naked feet with their grey
convulsed toes stared into the communication trench like things robbed,
with a mute accusal. There was a remoteness about these dead bodies,
a loneliness, an isolation about their bared feet. A tangled web of
memories arose, a throng of fleeting faces glimmered in the captain's
soul--gondoliers of Venice, voluble cabbies, a toothless inn-keeper's
wife at Posilipo. Two trips on a vacation in Italy drove an army of
sorrowing figures through his mind. And finally another figure appeared
in that ghostly dance of death, his own sister, sitting in a concert
hall in Vienna, care-free, listening to music, while her brother lay
somewhere stretched out on the ground, rigid in death, an enemy's corpse
just to be kicked aside.
Shuddering, the captain hastened back down the trench, as though the
three dead men were pursuing him noiselessly on their naked soles. When
he reached his own men at last, he felt as if he had arrived at a harbor
of safety.
The shells were now falling so thick that there was not a moment's pause
between the explosions, and all sounds merged into a single, equal,
rolling thunder, which made the earth tremble like the hull of a ship.
But there was a particularly sharp crashing and splintering from one
shot that hit the trench squarely and whirled the coverings above in all
directions. A few minutes later two groaning men dragged down a corpse,
leaned it against the trench wall, and climbed back to their posts
through the narrow shaft. Marschner saw his sergeant get up and move
his lips--then a soldier in the corner arose and took up his rifle
and followed the two others heavily. It was all so comfortless, so
unmercifully businesslike, precisely as when "Next!" breaks into the
monotony of the practising in the yard of the barracks, only with the
difference that a little group at once gathered about the dead man,
drawn by that shy curiosity which irresistibly attracts simple folk to
corpses and funerals. Most of the men expected the same of him--he saw
it in their eyes--that he, too, would go over and pay a last tribute
of respect to the dead. But he did not want to. He was absolutely
determined not to learn the fallen man's name. He was bent upon
practising self-mastery at last and remaining indifferent to all small
happenings. So long as he had not seen the dead man's face nor heard his
name, only a man had fallen in battle, one of the many thousands. If he
kept his distance and did not bend over each individual and did not
let a definite fate come to his notice, it was not so hard to remain
indifferent.