Men in War - Andreas Latzko (libby ebook reader .txt) 📗

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 coffeehouse.

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.

What was it? Such a frightful thing as that even this field, this 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