lives in me and stays by me like a sworn comrade. From the standpoint of
science it rests with me not to drag him round any longer, but to give
him his dismissal, precisely as I might have freed myself from the
annoying spot by angrily smashing the window-pane. The physicians do
not believe that one human being can unite himself at death with another
human being and continue to live on in him with obstinate persistence.
It is their opinion that a man standing at a window should see the house
opposite but never the wall of the room behind his back.
The physicians only believe in things that _are_. Such superstitions as
that a man can carry dead men within him and see them standing in front
of him so distinctly that they hide a picture behind them from his
sight, do not come within the range of the gentlemen's reasoning. In
their lives death plays no part. A patient who dies ceases to be a
patient. And what does the day know of the night, though the one forever
succeeds the other?
But I know it is not I who forcibly drag the dead comrade through my
life. I know that the dead man's life within me is stronger than my own
life. It may be that the shapes I see flitting across the wall papers,
cowering in corners and staring into the lighted room from dark
balconies, and knocking so hard on the windows that the panes rattle,
are only visions and nothing more. Where do they come from? _My_ brain
furnishes the picture, _my_ eyes provide the projection, but it is the
dead man that sits at the crank. He tends to the film. The show begins
when it suits Him and does not stop as long as He turns the crank. How
can I help seeing what He shows me? If I close my eyes the picture falls
upon the inside of my lids, and the drama plays inside of me instead of
dancing far away over doors and walls.
I should be the stronger of the two, they say. But you cannot kill a
dead man, the physicians should know that.
Are not the paintings by Titian and Michael Angelo still hanging in
the museums centuries after Titian and Michael Angelo lived? 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? What would our whole existence be
without these visions which, each at its own word, rise up for moments
out of oblivion as if in the glare of a flashlight?
Sick? Of course. The world is sore, and will have no words or pictures
that do not have reference to the wholesale graves. Not for a moment can
the comrade within me join the rest of the dead, because everything that
happens is as a flashlight falling upon him. There's the newspaper each
morning to begin with: "Ships sunk," "Attacks repulsed." And immediately
the film reels off a whirl of gasping, struggling men, fingers rising
out of mountainous waves grasping for life once more, faces disfigured
by pain and fury. Every conversation that one overhears, every shop
window, every breath that is drawn is a reminder of the wholesale
carnage. Even the silence of the night is a reminder. Does not each tick
of the second-hand mark the death rattle of thousands of men? In order
to hear the hell raging yonder on the other side of the thick wall of
air, is it not enough to know of chins blown off, throats cut open, and
corpses locked in a death embrace?
If a man were lying comfortably in bed and then found out for certain
that some one next door was being murdered, would you say he was sick if
he jumped up out of bed with his heart pounding? And are we anything
but next door to the places where thousands duck down in frantic terror,
where the earth spits mangled fragments of bodies up into the sky, and
the sky hammers down on the earth with fists of iron? Can a man live at
a distance from his crucified self when the whole world resounds with
reminders of these horrors?
No!
It is the others that are sick. They are sick who gloat over news of
victories and see conquered miles of territory rise resplendent above
mounds of corpses. They are sick who stretch a wall of flags between
themselves and their humanity so as not to know what crimes are being
committed against their brothers in the beyond that they call "the
front." Every man is sick who still can think, talk, discuss, sleep,
knowing that other men holding their own entrails in their hands are
crawling like half-crushed worms across the furrows in the fields
and before they reach the stations for the wounded are dying off like
animals, while somewhere, far away, a woman with passionate longing is
dreaming beside an empty bed. All those are sick who can fail to hear
the moaning, the gnashing of teeth, the howling, the crashing and
bursting, the wailing and cursing and agonizing in death, because the
murmur of everyday affairs is around them or the blissful silence of
night.
It is the deaf and the blind that are sick, not I!
It is the dull ones that are sick, those whose souls sing neither
compassion for others nor their own anger. All those numerous people
are sick who, like a violin without strings, merely echo every sound. Or
would you say that the man whose memory is like a photographic plate on
which the light has fallen and which cannot record any more impressions,
is the healthy man? Is not memory the very highest possession of every
human being? It is the treasure that animals do not own, because they
are incapable of holding the past and reviving it.
Am I to be cured of my memory as from an illness? Why, without my memory
I would not be myself, because every man is built up of his memories and
really lives only as long as he goes through life like a loaded camera.
Supposing I could not tell where I lived in my childhood, what color
my father's eyes and my mother's hair were, and supposing at any moment
that I were called upon to give an account, I could not turn the leaves
of the past and point to the right picture, how quick they would be
to diagnose my case as feeblemindedness, or imbecility. Then, to be
considered mentally normal, must one treat one's brain like a slate to
be sponged off and be able at command to tear out pictures that have
burned the most hideous misery into the soul, and throw them away as one
does leaves from an album of photographs?
One man died before my eyes, he died hard, torn asunder after a
frightful struggle between the two Titans, Life and Death. Am I
sick, then, if I experience all over again all the phases of his
agonizing--preserved in my brain like snapshots--as long as every
happening inexorably opens the pages of this series? And the other
people, are they well, those, I mean, who skip the pages as though they
were blank that record the dismemberment, the mutilation, the crushing
of their brothers, the slow writhing to death of men caught in barbed
wire entanglements?
Tell me, my dear doctors, at just what point am I to begin to forget?
Am I to forget I was in the war? Am I to forget the moment in the smoky
railway station when I leaned out of the car window and saw my boy ashen
white, with compressed lips, standing beside his mother, and I made a
poor show of cheerfulness and talked of seeing them soon again, while
my eyes greedily searched the features of my wife and child, and my soul
drank in the picture of them like parched lips after a many days' march
drinking in the water so madly longed for? Am I to forget the choking
and the bitterness in my mouth when the train began to move and the
distance swallowed up my child, my wife, my world?
And the whole ride to death, when I was the only military traveler in a
car full of happy family men off for a summer Sunday in the country--am
I to tear it out of my memory like so much cumbersome waste paper? Am
I to forget how I felt when it grew quieter at each station, as though
life were crumbling away, bit by bit, until at midnight only one or two
sleepy soldiers remained in my coach and an ashen young face drawn with
sorrow hovered about the flickering lamplight? Must one actually be sick
if it is like an incurable wound always to feel that leave-taking of
home and warmth, that riding away with hatred and danger awaiting one at
the end of the trip? Is there anything harder to understand--when have
men done anything madder--than this: to race through the night at sixty
miles an hour, to run away from all love, all security, to leave the
train and take another train because it is the only one that goes to
where invisible machines belch red-hot pieces, of iron and Death casts
out a finely meshed net of steel and lead to capture men? Who will
obliterate from my soul the picture of that small dirty junction, the
shivering, sleepy soldiers without any intoxication or music in their
blood, looking wistfully after the civilian's train and its brightly
lighted windows as it disappeared behind the trees with a jolly blow
of its whistle? Who will obliterate the picture of that exchanging for
Death in the drab light of early dawn?
And supposing I could cross out that first endless night as something
settled and done with, would not the next morning remain, when our train
stopped at a switch in the middle of a wide, dewy meadow, and we were
told that we had to wait to let hospital trains go by? How shall I ever
banish the memory of those thick exhalations of lysol and blood blown
upon the happy fields from a dragon's nostrils? Won't I forever see
those endless serpents creeping up so indolently, as though surfeited
with mangled human flesh? From hundreds of windows white bandages
gleamed and dull, glassy eyes stared out. Lying, crouching, on top of
each other, body to body, they even hung on to the running-boards like
bloody bunches of grapes, an overflowing abundance of distress and
agony. And those wretched remains of strength and youth, those bruised
and battered men, looked with pity, yes, _with pity_, at our train. 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? A casual remark about the transfer of troops, news of fresh
battles inevitably recall this first actual contact with the war, just
as a certain note when struck will produce a certain tone, and I see the
tracks and ties and stones spattered with blood, shining in the early
morning light of a summer day--signposts pointing to the front.
"The Front!"
Am _I_ really the sick person because I cannot utter that word or write
it down without my tongue growing coated from the intense hatred I
feel? Axe not the others mad who look upon this wholesale
cripple-and-corpse-factory with a mixture of religious devotion,
romantic longing and shy sympathy? Would it not be wiser once for a
change to examine those others for the state of their mind? Must _I_
disclose it to my wise physicians, who watch over me so compassionately,
that all this mischief is the work of a few words that have been let
loose upon humanity like a pack of mad dogs?
Front--Enemy--Hero's death--Victory--the curs rage through the world
with frothing mouth and rolling eyes. Millions who have been carefully
inoculated against smallpox, cholera and typhoid fever are chased into
madness. Millions, on either side, are packed into cars--ride, singing,
to meet each other at the front--hack, stab, shoot at each other, blow
each other into bits, give their flesh and their bones for the bloody
hash out of which the dish of peace is to be cooked for those fortunate
ones who give the flesh of their calves and oxen to their fatherland for
a hundred per cent profit, instead of carrying their own flesh to market
for fifty cents a day.
Suppose the word "war" had never been invented and had never been
hallowed through the ages and decked with gay trappings. Who would
dare to supplement the deficient phrase, "declaration of war," by the
following speech?
"After long, fruitless negotiations our emissary to the government of X
left to-day. From the window of his parlor car he raised his silk hat to
the gentlemen who had escorted him to the station, and he will not meet
them with a friendly smile again until _you_ have made corpses of many
hundreds of thousands of men in the country of X. Up then! Squeeze
yourself into box-cars meant for six horses or twenty-eight men! Ride to
meet them, those other men. Knock them dead, hack off their heads, live
like wild beasts in damp excavations, in neglect, in filth, overrun with
lice, until we shall deem the time has come again for our emissary to
take a seat in a parlor car and lift his silk hat, and in ornate rooms
politely and aristocratically dispute over the advantages which our big
merchants and manufacturers are to derive from the slaughter. Then as
many of you as are not rotting under the ground or hobbling on crutches
and begging from door to door may return to your half-starved families,
and may--nay must!--take up your work again with redoubled energy, more
indefatigably and yet with fewer demands than before, so as to be
able to pay in sweat and privation for the shoes that you wore out in
hundreds of marches and the clothes that decayed on your bodies."
A fool he who would sue for a following in such terms! But _no_ fools
they who are the victims, who freeze, starve, kill, and let themselves
be killed, just because they have learned to believe that this must be
so, once the mad dog War has burst his chains and bitten the world.
Is this what the wars were like from which the word "war" has come down
to us? Did not war use to guarantee booty? 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. And now shall the same word hold good when men
already anchored to house and home are torn away and whipped into the
ranks and laid out before the enemy, and made to wait, defenseless, in
dull resignation, like supers in this duel of the munition industries?
Is it right to misuse the word "war" as a standard when it is not
courage and strength that count, but explosive bombs and the length of
range of the guns and the speed with which women and children turn out
shells? We used to speak with horror of the tyrants of dark ages, who
threw helpless men and women to the lions and tigers; but now is there
one of us who would not mention them with respect in comparison with
the rulers who are at present directing the struggle between men and
machines, as though it were a puppet show at the end of telegraph wires,
and who are animated by the delightful hope that our supply of human
flesh may outlast the enemy's supply of steel and iron?
No! All words coined before this carnage began are too beautiful and too
honest, like the word "front," which I have learned to abhor. Are you
"facing" the enemy when their artillery is hidden behind mountains and
sends death over a distance of a day's journey, and when their sappers
come creeping up thirty feet below the surface? And your "front" is a
terminal station, a little house all shot up, behind which the tracks
have been torn up because the trains turn back here after unloading
their cargo of fresh, sunburned men, to call for them again when they
have emerged from the machines with torn limbs and faces covered with
verdigris.
It was towards evening when I got off the train at this terminal. A
bearded soldier with his right arm in a sling was sitting on the ground
leaning against the iron railing around the platform. When he saw me
pass by, quite spick and span, he stroked his right arm tenderly with
his left hand and threw me an ugly look of hatred and called out through
clenched teeth:
"Yes, Lieutenant, here's the place for man salad."
Am I to forget the wicked grin that widened his mouth, already distorted
by pain? Am I sick because each time I hear the word "front" an echo,
"man salad," inevitably croaks in my ears? Or are the others sick who do
not hear "man salad," but swallow down the cowardly stuff written by our
war bards, who try like industrious salesmen to make the brand "world
war" famous, because in reward they will have the privilege of dashing
about in automobiles like commanding generals instead of being forced to
face death in muddy ditches and be bossed by a little corporal?
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.
They walk about shyly, like somnambulists in brightly lighted streets.
In their ears there still resound the bestial howls of fury that they
themselves bellowed into the hurricane of the drumfire so as to keep
from bursting from inner stress. They come loaded down, like beasts of
burden, with horrors, the astonished looks of bayoneted, dying foes
on their conscience--and they don't dare open their mouths because
everybody, wife and child included, grinds out the same tune, a flow of
curious questions about shells, gas bombs and bayonet attacks. So the
days of the furlough expire, one by one, and the return to death is
almost a deliverance from the shame of being a coward in disguise
among the friends at home, to whom dying and killing have become mere
commonplaces.
So be it, my dear doctors! It is an honor to be charged with madness if
those villains are not called mad who, to save their own necks, have so
gloriously hardened the people's hearts and abolished pity and
implanted pride in the enemy's suffering, instead of acting as the one
intermediary between distress and power and arousing the conscience
of the world by going to the most frequented places and shouting _"Man
Sal-ad"_ through a megaphone so loud and so long that at length
all those whose fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, have gone to the
corpse-factory will be seized with terror and all the throats in the
world will be _one_ echo to "Man Sal-ad!"
If you were here right now, dear doctors, I could show you my comrade,
summoned to this room in the very body by the flames of hate against
news from the front and against the indifference of the hinterland. I
feel him standing behind my back, but his face is lying on the white
sheet in front of me, like a faint water-mark, and my pen races
frantically so as to cover his eyes at least with letters and hide their
reproachful stare.
Large, widening, hideously distorted, his face, slowly swelling, rises
from the paper like the face of Jesus of the handkerchief.
It was just like this that the three war correspondents saw him lying
at the edge of the woods on that midsummer morning and--turned away
involuntarily with almost the military exactness of soldiers at a "right
about face." Their visit was meant for _me_! I was to furnish them with
carriage and horses because the automobile that was to have darted them
through the danger zone was lying on the road to Goerz with a broken
axle.
Charming gentlemen, in wonderfully well-cut breeches and traveling caps,
looking as if they had stepped out of a Sherlock Holmes motion picture.
They offered to carry letters back and deliver messages, and they found
everything on my place perfectly fascinating, and laughed heartily at
my mattress of willow twigs--and were particularly grateful when the
carriage stood ready to carry them off before the daily bombardment of
the Italians began.
On driving out of the woods they had to pass the wounded man again with
the hideously disfigured face. He was crouching on the meadow. But this
time they did not see him. As if at command they turned their heads the
other way and with animated gestures viewed the damage done by an air
raid the day before, as though they were already sitting over a table in
a coffee-house.
I lost my breath, as though I had run a long distance up-hill. The place
where I stood suddenly seemed strange and altered. Was that the same
piece of woods into which shells had so often come crashing, which
the huge Caproni planes had circled about with wide-spread wings like
vultures, shedding bombs, while our machine guns lashed the leaves with
a hailstorm of shot? Was it out of _this_ piece of woods that three men
had just driven off, healthy, unscathed, gaily waving their caps? Where
was the wall that held us others imprisoned under the cracking branches?
Was there not a door that opened only to let out pale, sunken cheeks,
feverish eyes, or mangled limbs?
The carriage rolled lightly over the field, trampled down brown, and the
one thing missing to make it the perfect picture of a pleasure trip was
the brilliant red of a Baedeker.
Those men were riding back home.
To wife and child, perhaps?
A painful pulling and tugging, as though my eyes were caught to the
carriage wheels. Then my body rebounded--as if torn off--back into
emptiness, and--at that moment, just when my soul was as if ploughed
up by the carriage and laid bare and defenseless by yearning--at that
moment the experience sprang upon me--with one dreadful leap, one single
bite--incurable for the rest of my life.
Unsuspecting, I crossed over to the wounded man upon whom the three had
so unceremoniously turned their backs, as though he did not also belong
to the interesting museum of shell holes that they had come to inspect.
He was cowering near the dirty ragged little Red Cross flag, with his
head between his knees, and did not hear me come up. Behind him lay the
brown spot which stood out from the green still left on the field like
a circus ring. The wounded soldiers who gathered here every morning at
dawn to be driven to the field hospital in the wagons that brought us
ammunition had rubbed this spot in like a favorite corner of a sofa.
How many I had seen crouching there like that, for ten--often twelve
hours, when the wagons had left too early, or had been overcrowded, or,
after violent fighting, had stood waiting in line at the munitions depot
behind the lines. Happy fellows, some of them, with broken arms or legs,
the war slang, "a thousand-dollar shot," on their pale, yet laughing
lips--enviously ogled by the men with slight wounds or the men sick with
typhoid fever, who would all gladly have sacrificed a thousand dollars
and a limb into the bargain for the same certainty of not having to
return to the front again. How many I had seen rolling on the ground,
biting into the earth in their agony--how many in the pouring rain,
half buried already in the mud, their bodies ripped open, groaning and
whimpering and outbellowing the storm.
This man seemed to be only slightly hurt in the right leg. The blood had
oozed out on one spot through the hastily made bandage, so I offered
him my first-aid package, besides cognac and cigarettes. But he did not
move. It was not until I laid my hand on his shoulder that he raised his
head--and the face he showed me threw me back like a blow on the chest.
His mouth and nose had come apart, and crept like a thick vine up his
right cheek--which was no longer a cheek. A chunk of bluish red flesh
swelled up there, covered by skin stretched to bursting and shining from
being drawn so tight. The whole right side of his face seemed more like
an exotic fruit than a human countenance, while from the left side, from
out of grey twitching misery, a sad, frightened eye looked up at me.
Violent terror slung itself round my neck like a lasso.