SOLDIER
On the afternoon of the following day, the company is detailed for
barrack drill. We are lying on our stomachs in the barrack-yard, and are
being drilled in taking aim and firing lying down.
I have just been sighting.
In front of me on the barrack wall over there they have painted targets.
Ring targets, head targets, chest targets. Three hundred yards. I take
pointblank aim, and press the trigger. "Square in the chest." That ought
to count as a bull's-eye.
Wonder how many clips of cartridges am I going to get through?
Wonder if there will be a bull's-eye among them?
If every man of those millions they are putting into the field against
the enemy fires about a hundred cartridges, and there is one bull's-eye
in every hundred, that works out at ... that amounts to ... and I can't
help smiling at this neat sum in arithmetic ... then the answer is no
one at all. That is a merry sum.
Snick!
The fifth cartridge tumbles out.
I ram in another clip of dummy cartridges.
How quickly and smoothly that's done. One--two seconds, and five
cartridges are set in your magazine. Every one of them, if need be, can
penetrate six men; it can penetrate palisades and trees; it can
penetrate earthworks and stone walls. There is practically no cover left
against this dainty little missile, against this little pointed cone.
And what a wonderful bit of mechanism this Mauser rifle is. How
wretchedly badly off they were in 1870-71 with their rattletrap needle
guns. A single feeble bullet at a time, and after you had fired it came
the long, complicated business of reloading.
And yet the war accounted for well over a hundred thousand French and
German dead.
I wonder how many dead this war will ac count for? If only every fifth
man is left on the field, and if another fifth comes home invalided ...
what will its harvest amount to then?
The whole of both countrysides are at this moment covered with soldiers
lying flat, and all of them with their rifles at the ready, and all of
them pointing the death-bearing barrels at one another, are perfecting
themselves in the art of hitting the heart.
But behind them the guns are swinging up. The gunners are jumping down
and dragging the trail round. They are already aligned, and a thousand
black mouths are gaping uncannily toward the heavens.
We were once standing--we were in camp for musketry training at the
time--and watching a battery firing with live ammunition. They had
unlimbered and were ready to fire. The officers were peering into the
distance through their field-glasses. The targets were not as yet in
sight. We were all gazing intently toward the firing zone, where at any
moment something might come into view.... There! Away over there. In the
distance. Something is moving!
A shout of command.
The subaltern points to the moving target with his right hand. He shouts
out the range. The gunners take aim, and:
"Ready! No. I gun. Fire!"
The missile is already a-wing, and for the space of a moment we feel the
iron messenger flitting past. The air is a-hum. Boom--and a thousand
yards in front of us the shell has exploded above the cavalry riding to
the attack, and has spattered its rain of lead over the blue targets.
And then Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
The next target was about a mile away, and the new range quickly found.
Again the strange missile sped away and covered its measured course. It
was a thing to marvel at, to see how it checked in the air of its own
volition and burst. It seemed as though each one of these iron cylinders
had a brain--as if it were endowed with life and consciousness--so
certainly did it find its billet.
And when the battery had ceased firing and had limbered up, and the
danger cone had been pulled down, we went out into the field of fire.
There the linked targets under fire were lying. They had been struck
down by the shrapnel--all, the whole line. Head, body, limbs;--we did
not find a single figure there that had not been drilled through and
through. We stood and marvelled at the accuracy of it, and with a silent
shudder thought of targets other than contraptions of laths and canvas.
Wonder whether they have engines of such perfect precision on the other
side?
How the experts have, day in, day out, been inventing and constructing
new marvels of mechanism. The mechanical side of war has been raised to
a high standard of genius and a fine art. Two hundred and forty bullets
and more to the minute! What a marvel of mechanism one of those
machine-guns is. You set it buzzing, and it spurts out bullets thicker
than rain can fall. And the automaton licks its lips hungrily and sweeps
from right to left. It is pointed on the middle of the body, and sprays
the whole firing-line with one sweep. It is as though Death had scrapped
his scythe for old iron; as if nowadays he had graduated as expert
mechanic. They have ceased to mow corn by hand nowadays. By this time of
day even the sheaves are gathered up by machinery. And so they will have
to shovel our millions of bodies underground with burying machines.
Curse! I cannot get rid of this hideous; thought. It is always cropping
up again. We have passed on from retail to wholesale methods of
business. In place of the loom at which you sat working with your own
hands, they have now set the great power-looms in motion. Once it was a
knightly death, an honorable soldier's death; now it is death by
machinery.
That is what is sticking in my gullet. We are being hustled from life to
death by experts--by mechanicians. And just as they turn out buttons
and pins by wholesale methods of production, so they are now turning out
the crippled and the dead by machinery. Why do I, all of a sudden, begin
to shudder? I feel as if it had suddenly become clear as daylight that
this is madness--blood-red madness lowering for us there.
Curse! I must not go on brooding over it any longer, or it will drive me
mad. Your rifle at the ready! The enemy is facing you! Has that ceased
to be a case of man to man? What does it matter even if the bullet finds
its billet more surely? Aim steadily--straight for the chest.... Who is
it really facing me? The man I am now going to shoot dead! An enemy?
What is an enemy?
And again I see myself on that glorious morning of my holidays, at a
French railway station, and again I am gazing curiously out of the
window. A foreign country and a stranger-people. The moment for
departure has come. The station-master is just giving the signal. Then a
little old woman extends her trembling hand to the window, and a fine
young fellow in our carriage takes the wrinkled hand and strokes it,
until the old woman's tears course down her motherly cheeks. Not a word
does she speak. She only looks at her boy, and the lad gazes down on his
mother. Then it flashes upon me like a revelation. Foreigners can shed
tears. Why, that is just the same thing it is with us. They weep when
they take leave of one another. They love one another and feel grief....
And as the train rolled out of the station, I kept on looking out of the
window and seeing the old woman standing on the platform so desolately,
and gazing after the train without stirring. I could not help thinking
of my own mother. It was I myself who was saying good-by there, and on
the platform yonder my poor old mother was in tears.
Pocket-handkerchiefs were floating in the breeze. They were waving their
hands, and I waved mine too; for I, too, was one who belonged to her....
And again I put my rifle to my shoulder, and take aim for the centre of
the target.
I will not go on torturing myself with these thoughts.
The target seems to have been moved nearer to me.
Of a sudden it seems to me as if the blue-painted figure had stepped out
of its white square. I gape at it. I distinctly see a face in front of
me. I have got my finger on the trigger, and feel the tension of the
pressure. Why don't I pull it through? My finger is trembling.... Now,
now, I recognize the face. That is the young fellow at Nancy who was
saying good-by to his mother....
Then the spring gives, and the great horror masters me, for I have fired
straight into a living face. Murderer! Murderer! You have shot the only
son of his mother dead. Thou art thy brother's murderer....
I take a hold on myself. I pull myself together. A murderer?
Folly! A spook!
You are a soldier.
Soldiers cease to be human beings. The Fatherland is at stake.
And without turning a hair I take aim at the enemy. If you miss him he
will get you.
"Got him! In the middle of the chest."