waiting-room to the Beyond, had never witnessed before. Even the awful
recollection of another wounded man who had stood at this same spot
a few days before, his hands looking as though they were modeling
something, while in actuality they were carefully holding his own
entrails--even that hideous recollection faded before the sight of this
Janus head, all peace, all gentle humanity on one side; all war, all
distorted, puffed-up image of fiendish hatred on the other side.
"Shrapnel?" I stammered timidly.
The answer was confused. All I could get out of it was that a dumdum
bullet had smashed his right shinbone. But what was that he kept
mumbling about a hook each time his hand trembled up to his glowing
cheek?
I could not understand him; for the thing he had gone through still
seethed in his veins so violently that he spoke as though it were just
then happening and I were witnessing it. His peasant's mind could not
comprehend that there were people who had not seen or heard of the
tremendous misery of the last hours he had gone through. So it was more
by guess-work that I gradually pieced together his story from unfinished
sentences, coarse oaths, and groans.
For a whole night, after a repulsed attack on the enemy's trench, he had
lain with a broken leg, unconscious, near our own wire entanglements.
At dawn they threw out the iron grappling hook for him, with which they
pull over into the trench the corpses of friend and foe so as to be able
to bury them unceremoniously before the sun of Goerz has a chance to do
its work. With this hook, dipped in hundreds of corpses, a dunce--"God
damn him!"--had torn his cheek open before a more skilful hand caught
hold of it and got him over safely. And now he asked humbly to be taken
away to the hospital quickly, because he was worried--about his leg and
being a crippled beggar the rest of his life.
I ran off as though mad dogs were at my heels, over rocks and roots,
through the woods to the next detachment. In vain! In the whole woods
there was not a single vehicle to be found. I had given up the last one
to those three war correspondents.
Why had I not asked them to take the one wounded man lying on the field
along with them and leave him at the hospital that they would pass? Why
had they themselves not thought of doing their human duty? Why?
I clenched my fists in impotent fury and caught myself reaching for
my revolver as though I could still shoot those gay sparks in their
carriage.
Breathless, overheated from the long race, I tottered back, my knees
trembling the whole way. I felt utterly broken, as though I were
carrying on my shoulders a picture, weighing a ton, of men who for sport
angle for human carrion.
An odd choking and tickling came into my throat--a sensation I had not
known since childhood--when, back at my post again, I had to listen to
the low whimpering of the helpless man.
He was no longer alone. In my absence a little band of slightly wounded
men had joined him. Peering between the tree trunks I saw them sitting
in a circle on the field, while the man who had been hooked was hopping
about holding on to his injured leg and tossing his head from one
shoulder to the other.
Towards noon I sent my corporals in search of a vehicle, promising them
a princely reward, while I ran to the field again with my whisky flask.
He was no longer dancing about. He was kneeling in the center of the
circle of wounded men, his body bent over, rolling his head on the
ground as though it were a thing apart from himself. Suddenly he jumped
up with such a yell of fury that a frightened murmur came even from the
line of wounded men, who had been sitting there indifferent, sunk in
their own suffering.
That was no longer anything human. The man's skin could not stand any
more stretching and had burst. The broad splits ran apart like the lines
of a compass and in the middle the raw flesh glowed and gushed out.
And he yelled! He hammered with his fist on the enormous purplish lump,
until he fell to his knees again moaning under the blows of his own
hand.
It was dark already when--at last!--they came and carted him away.
And when the night slowly wove its web of mist in the woods and I lay
wrapped in a mound of blankets, the only one who was still awake in
the throng of black tree-trunks that moved closer together in the
darkness--there he was back again, standing up stiff in the moonlight,
his tortured cheek, huge as a pumpkin, shining blue against the black
shadows of the trees. It glimmered like a will-o'-the-wisp, now here,
now there. Night after night. It shone into every dream, so that I
forced my eyelids open with my fingers--until, after ten frightful
nights, my body broke down and was carried, a shrieking, convulsed heap,
to the same hospital in which He had succumbed to blood-poisoning.
And now I am a madman! You can read it, black on white, on the placard
at the head of my bed. They pat me on the back soothingly, like a shying
horse, when I flare up and ask to be let out of this place in which _the
others_ should be shut up.
But the others are free! From my window I can look over the garden
wall into the street, and see them hurrying along, raising their hats,
shaking hands, and crowding in front of the latest bulletin. I see women
and girls, dressed coquettishly, tripping along with pride shining in
their eyes, beside men whom a cross on the breast brands as murderers.
I see widows in long black veils--still patient. I see lads with flowers
stuck in their helmets ready to leave for the war. And not one of them
rebels! Not one of them sees bruised, mangled men cowering in dark
corners, men ripped apart by grappling hooks, men with their entrails
gushing out, and men with blue shining cheeks.
They go by under my window, gesticulating, enthusiastic; because the
enthusiastic phrases arrive coined fresh every day from the mint, and
each person feels sheltered and enveloped in a warmth of assent if the
phrases ring clear from his lips. I know that they keep quiet even when
they would like to speak, to cry out, to scream. I know that they hunt
down "slackers," and have no word of abuse for those who are a thousand
times worse cowards, those who clearly recognise the utter senselessness
of this butchery of millions, yet will not open their mouths for fear of
the censure of the thoughtless crowd.
From my window I can see the whole globe spinning round like a crazy
whirligig, whipped on by haughty lords in cunning calculation and by
venal servants in sneaking submissiveness.
I see the whole pack! The bawlers who are too empty and too lazy to
develop their own selves and want to puff themselves with the glittering
praise meant for their herd. The scoundrels who are protected by the
masses, carried by them and fed by them, and who look up sanctimoniously
to a bogy of their own invention, and hammer that bogy into the
conscience of millions of good men, until the mass has been forged that
has neither heart nor brain, but only fury and blind faith. I see the
whole game proceeding madly in blood and agony. I see the spectators
going by indifferently, and I am called a madman when I raise the window
to call down to them that the sons they have born and bred, the men they
have loved are being chased like wild animals, are being butchered like
cattle.
Those fools down there, who for the sake of respectable condolence
calls, for a neighbor's eyes raised heavenward in sympathy, sacrificed
the splendor and warmth of their lives, who threw their flesh and blood
into the barbed wire entanglements, to rot as carrion on the fields or
be hooked in with grappling hooks, who have no other consolation than
that the "enemy" have had the same done to them--those fools remain
free; and in their despicable vanity and wicked patience they may
daily shove fresh hecatombs out to the cannons. But I must stay here
impotent--left alone with the relentless comrade that my conscience
gives birth to over again every day.
I stand at my window and between me and the street lie piled high the
bodies of the many I saw bleeding. And I stand here powerless--because
the revolver that was given me to shoot down poor homesick devils,
forced into a uniform by iron necessity, has been taken from me, out of
fear that I might dislodge a few mass murderers from their security and
send them as a warning example down to their victims.
So I must stay here, as a seer over the blind--behind iron gratings. And
all I can do is consign these leaves to the wind--every day write it all
down again and keep scattering the pages out on the street.
I will write indefatigably. I will sow the whole world with my pages.
Until the seed shall sprout in every heart, until every bedroom will be
entered by a blue apparition--a dear dead one showing his wounds; and at
last, at last, the glorious song of the world's redemption will resound
under my window, the wrathful cry shouted by a million throats:
"Man Sal-ad!"
V. A HERO'S DEATH
The staff physician had not understood. He shook his head, vexed, and
looked questioningly over the rims of his glasses at his assistant.
But his assistant had not understood either, and was embarrassed, and
stood stiffly without saying anything.
The only one who seemed to have any clue at all to the man's ravings was
his orderly. For two tears glistened on the upturned ends of his waxed
mustache. But the orderly spoke nothing but Hungarian, and the staff
physician turned away with a muttered "blooming idiot". Followed by
his flaxen-haired assistant, he made his way toward the operating room,
panting and perspiring.
The huge ball of cotton, inside of which, according to the placard
hanging at the top of the bed, was hidden the head of First Lieutenant
of the Reserves, Otto Kadar, of the ----th Regiment of Field Artillery,
sank back on the pillow, and Miska seated himself again on his knapsack,
snuffed up his tears, put his head between his big unwashed hands, and
speculated despairingly about his future.
For it was plain that his Lieutenant could not last much longer. Miska
knew what was hidden in the huge cotton ball. He had seen the crushed
skull and the horrible grey mess under the bloody splinters which were
the brains of his poor Lieutenant, who had been such a good man and kind
superior. Miska could not hope for such wonderful luck a second time.
You didn't come across such a kind-hearted master twice in your life.
The many, many slices of salami that the Lieutenant always had given him
from his own store of provisions, the gentle, cordial words that Miska
had heard him whisper to every wounded man--all the memories of the
long, bloody months he had gone through dully beside his master almost
like a comrade, rose to his mind. He felt dreadfully sorry for himself,
the good fellow did, in his infinite defenselessness against the huge
war machine into which he would now be thrown again without the sure
support of his kind Lieutenant next to him.
His broad peasant's head between his hands, he crouched like a dog
at the feet of his dying master, and the tears rolled gently down his
cheeks and stuck one by one on the ends of his mustache glued with dust
and pomade.
It was not quite clear to Miska either just why the poor Lieutenant kept
clamoring so frightfully for his talking-machine. All he knew was that
the officers had been sitting under cover, listening to the Rakoczy
March on the phonograph, when suddenly that accursed shell burst upon
them and everything disappeared in smoke and earth. He himself had been
knocked unconscious by a heavy board which came out of a clear sky and
hit him on the back. He had fallen flat and it was an eternity before he
got his breath back again.
Then--then--Miska's recollections of things after this were a bit
hazy--then he remembered an indescribable heap of splintered boards and
fallen beams, a hash of rags, cement, earth, human limbs, and quantities
of blood. And then--then he remembered--young Meltzar. Meltzar was still
sitting upright with his back against the remains of the wall, and
the record that had just played the Rakoczy March and had miraculously
remained whole was perched on the place where his head belonged. But his
head was not there. It was gone--completely gone, while the black
record remained, also leaning against the wall, directly on top of the
bloodsoaked collar. It was awful. Not one of the soldiers had dared
touch the upright body with the record exactly like a head on its neck.
Brrr! A cold shiver ran down Miska's back at the recollection, and his
heart stopped beating in fright when just at that moment the Lieutenant
again began to scream:
"Phonograph! Only a phonograph!"
Miska jumped up and saw the huge ball of cotton lift itself with an
effort from the pillow, and his officer's one remaining eye fix greedily
upon some invisible object. He stood there ashamed, as though guilty of
a crime, when indignant glances were darted at him from the other beds
in the ward.
"This is unbearable!" cried a Major, who had been severely wounded, from
the other end of the long ward. "Carry the man out."
But the Major spoke German, and Miska was more than ever at sea. He
wiped the sweat of anguish from his brow and explained to a lieutenant
in the next bed, since his master could not hear what he said anyhow,
that the phonograph had been broken--broken into a thousand pieces,
else he would never have left it there, but would surely have brought it
along as he had brought everything else belonging to his Lieutenant that
he had managed to find.
No one answered him. As at a word of command, each one of the officers
the whole length of the ward stuck his head under his pillow and pulled
the covers over his ears so as not to hear that horrible gurgling laugh
which changed into a howl or into infuriated cries for the phonograph.
The old Major even wrapped his blood-stained cloak around his head like
a turban.
"Lieutenant! I beg pardon, Lieutenant----" Miska begged, and very, very
gently stroked his master's quivering knees with his big hard palms.
But Lieutenant Kadar heard him not. Neither did he feel the heavy hand
resting on his knees. For, opposite him, young Meltzar was still sitting
with a flat, black, round head on his neck on which the Rakoczy March
was ingraved in spirals. And all at once the officer realized that for
the past six months he had done poor Meltzar a grievous injustice. How
could the poor fellow help his stupidity, how could he help his silly,
high-flown patriotic talk? How could he possibly have had sensible ideas
with a record for a head? Poor Meltzar!
Lieutenant Kadar simply could not understand why it was that six months
before, right away, when young Meltzar announced his entrance into
the battery, he had not guessed what they had done to the boy in the
hinterland.
They had given him a different head. They had unscrewed the handsome
fair young head of a lad of eighteen and in its place put a black,
scratched-up disc, which could do nothing but squeak the Rakoczy March.
That had now been proved! How the boy must have suffered whenever his
superior officer, his senior by twenty years, inflicted long sermons on
him about humanity! With the flat, round disc that they had put on him
he of course could not comprehend that the Italian soldiers being led
past the battery, reeking with blood and in rags, would also much rather
have stayed at home, if a bulletin on the street corner had not forced
them to leave their homes immediately, just as the mobilization in
Hungary had forced the Hungarian gunners to leave their homes.
Now for the first time Lieutenant Kadar comprehended the young man's
unbending resistance to him. Now at last he realized why this boy, who
could have been his son, had so completely ignored his wisest, kindest
admonitions and explanations, and had always responded by whistling
the Rakoczy March through clenched teeth and hissing the stereotyped
fulmination, "The dogs ought to be shot to pieces."
So then it was not because of his being young and stupid that Meltzar
had behaved as he did; not because he had come direct from the military
academy to the trenches. The phonograph record was to blame, the
phonograph record!
Lieutenant Kadar felt his veins swell up like ropes and his blood pound
on his temples like blows on an anvil, so great was his wrath against
the wrongdoers who had treacherously unscrewed poor Meltzar's lovely
young head from his body.
And--this was the most gruesome--as he now thought of his subordinates
and fellow-officers, he saw them all going about exactly like poor
Meltzar, without heads on their bodies. He shut his eyes and tried to
recall the looks of his gunners--in vain! Not a single face rose before
his mind's eye. He had spent months and months among those men and had
not discovered until that moment that not one of them had a head on his
shoulders. Otherwise he would surely have remembered whether his gunner
had a mustache or not and whether the artillery captain was light or
dark. No! Nothing stuck in his mind--nothing but phonograph records,
hideous, black, round plates lying on bloody blouses.
The whole region of the Isonzo suddenly lay spread out way below him
like a huge map such as he had often seen in illustrated papers. The
silver ribbon of the river wound in and out among hills and coppices,
and Lieutenant Kadar soared high above the welter down below without
motor or aeroplane, but borne along merely by his own outspread arms.
And everywhere he looked, on every hill and in every hollow, he saw
the horns of innumerable talking-machines growing out of the ground.
Thousands upon thousands of those familiar cornucopias of bright lacquer
with gilt edges pointed their open mouths up at him. And each one was
the center of a swarming ant-hill of busy gunners carrying shot and
shell.
And now Lieutenant Kadar saw it very distinctly: all the men had records
on their necks like young Meltzar. Not a single one carried his own
head. But when the shells burst with a howl from the lacquered horns and
flew straight into an ant-hill, then the flat, black discs broke apart
and at the very same instant changed back into real heads. From his
height Lieutenant Kadar saw the brains gush out of the shattered discs
and the evenly-marked surfaces turn on the second into ashen, agonized
human countenances.
Everything seemed to be revealed now in one stroke to the dying
lieutenant--all the secrets of the war, all the problems he had brooded
over for many months past. So he had the key to the riddle. These people
evidently did not get their heads back until they were about to die.
Somewhere--somewhere--far back--far back of the lines, their heads had
been unscrewed and replaced by records that could do nothing but play
the Rakoczy March. Prepared in this fashion, they had been jammed into
the trains and sent to the front, like poor Meltzar, like himself, like
all of them.
In a fury of anger, the ball of cotton tossed itself up again with a
jerk. Lieutenant Kadar wanted to jump out of bed and reveal the secret
to his men, and urge them to insist upon having their heads back again.
He wanted to whisper the secret to each individual along the entire
front, from Plava all the way down to the sea. He wanted to tell it to
each gunner, each soldier in the infantry and even to the Italians over
there! He even wanted to tell it to the Italians. The Italians, too,
had had records screwed on to their necks. And they should go back home,
too, back to Verona, to Venice, to Naples, where their heads lay
piled up in the store-houses for safekeeping until the war was over.
Lieutenant Kadar wanted to run from one man to another, so as to help
each individual to recover his head, whether friend or foe.
But all at once he noticed he could not walk. And he wasn't soaring any
more either. Heavy iron weights clamped his feet down to the bed to keep
him from revealing the great secret.
Well, then, he would shout it out in a roar, in a voice supernaturally
loud that would sound above the bursting of the shells and the blare of
trumpets on the Day of Judgment, and proclaim the truth from Plava to
Trieste, even into the Tyrol. He would shout as no man had ever shouted
before:
"Phonograph!--Bring the heads!--Phonograph!--"
Here his voice suddenly broke with a gurgling sound of agony right in
the midst of his message of salvation. It hurt too much. He could not
shout. He felt as though at each word a sharp needle went deep into his
brain.
A needle?
Of course! How could he have forgotten it? His head had been screwed
off, too. He wore a record on his neck, too, like all the others. When
he tried to say something, the needle stuck itself into his skull and
ran mercilessly along all the coils of his brain.
No! He could not bear it! He'd rather keep quiet--keep the secret to
himself. Only not to feel that pain--that maddening pain in his head!
But the machine ran on. Lieutenant Kadar grabbed his head with both
hands and dug his nails deep into his temples. If he didn't stop that
thing in time from going round and round, then his revolving head would
certainly break his neck in a few seconds.
Icy drops of anguish flowed from all his pores. "Miska!" he yelled in
the extreme of his distress.
But Miska did not know what to do.
The record kept on revolving and joyously thrummed the Rakoczy March.
All the sinews in the Lieutenant's body grew tense. Again and again he
felt his head slip from between his hands--his spine was already rising
before his eyes! With a last, frantic effort he tried once more to get
his hands inside the bandages and press his head forward. Then one more
dreadful gnashing of his teeth and one more horrible groan and--the long
ward was at length as silent as an empty church.
When the flaxen-haired assistant returned from the operating-room
Miska's whining informed him from afar that another cot in the officers'
division was now vacant. The impatient old Major quite needlessly
beckoned him to his side and announced in a loud voice so that all the
gentlemen could hear:
"The poor devil there has at last come to the end of his sufferings."
Then he added in a voice vibrating with respect: "He died like a true
Hungarian--singing the Rakoczy March."
VI. HOME AGAIN
At last the lake gleamed through the leaves, and the familiar grey chalk
mountains emerged into view, reaching out across the railroad embankment
as with threatening fingers deep down into the water. There, beyond the
smoky black opening of the short tunnel, the church steeple and a corner
of the castle peeped for an instant above the grove.
John Bogdán leaned way out of the train window and looked at
everything with greedy eyes, like a man going over the inventory of his
possessions, all tense and distrustful, for fear something may have been
lost in his absence. As each group of trees for which he waited darted
by, he gave a satisfied nod, measuring the correctness of the landscape
by the picture of it that he carried fairly seared in his memory.
Everything agreed. Every milestone on the highroad, now running parallel
to the railroad tracks, stood on the right spot. There! The flash of the
flaming red copper beech, at which the horses always shied and once came
within an ace of upsetting the carriage.
John Bogdán drew a deep, heavy sigh, fished a small mirror out of his
pocket, and gave his face a final scrutiny before leaving the train. At
each station his face seemed to grow uglier. The right side was not
so bad. A bit of his mustache still remained, and his right cheek was
fairly smooth except for the gash at the corner of his mouth, which had
not healed properly. But the left side! He had let those damned city
folk tell him a whole lot of nonsense about the left side of his face.
A bunch of damned scoundrels they were, bent upon making fools of poor
peasants, in wartime just the same as in peacetime--all of them, the
great doctor as well as the fine ladies in their dazzling white gowns
and with their silly affected talk. Heaven knows it was no great trick
to bamboozle a simple coachman, who had managed with only the greatest
pains to learn a bit of reading and writing. They had smiled and
simpered at him and were so nice and had promised him such a paradise.
And now, here he was helpless, left all alone to himself, a lost man.
With a furious curse, he tore off his hat and threw it on the seat.