Men in War Part 4

Crushed by the weight of his impressions, Captain Marschner crept through the trench like a worm, and his thoughts turned ever more pa.s.sionately, 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 h.e.l.l, 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 pa.s.sionate, 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 a.s.signed 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 n.o.ble 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 G.o.ds. 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 h.e.l.ls 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 s.p.a.ce 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 sh.e.l.ls 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.

Stubbornly he walked over to the second shaft leading to the top and for the first time observed that it had grown quite silent up above. There was no longer any screaming or bursting. This silence came upon the deafening din like a paralyzing weight and filled s.p.a.ce with a tense expectancy that flickered in all eyes. He wanted to rid himself of this oppression and crept through the crumbling shaft up to the top.

The first thing he saw was Weixler's curved back. He was holding his field-gla.s.s glued to his eyes under cover of a shooting shield. The others were also standing as if pasted to their posts, and there was something alarming in the motionlessness of their shoulder blades. All at once a twitching ran through the petrified row. Weixler sprang back, jostled against the captain, and cried out: "They are coming!" Then he stormed to the shaft and blew the alarm whistle.

Marschner stared after him helplessly. He walked with hesitating steps to the shield and looked out upon the wide, smoke-covered field, which curved beyond the tangle of wires, grey, torn, blood-flecked, like the bloated form of a gigantic corpse. Far in the background the sun was sinking. Its great copper disc already cut in half by the horizon seemed to be growing out of the ground. And against that dazzling background black silhouettes were dancing like midges under a microscope, like Indians swinging their tomahawks. They were still mere specks. Sometimes they disappeared entirely and then leaped high, and came nearer, their rifles wriggling in the air like the feet of a polyp. Gradually their cries became audible and swelled louder and louder like the far barking of dogs. When they called "Avanti!" it was a piercing cry, and when the call "Coraggio!" went through their lines, it changed to a dull, thunderous roll.

The entire company now stood close-packed up against the slope of the trench, their faces as of stone, restrained, pale as chalk, with lipless mouths, each man's gun in position--a single beast of prey with a hundred eyes and arms.

"Don't shoot! Don't shoot! Don't shoot!" Lieutenant Weixler's voice yelled without pause through the trench. His command seemed to lay its grasp on every throat and to hold the fingers moveless that greedily clasped the triggers. The first hand grenade flew into the trench. The captain saw it coming, then saw a man loosen from the ma.s.s, reel toward the dugout with outstretched arms, bending over, a veil of blood covering his face. Then--at last!--it was a relief--came the beating of the machine guns, and at once the rifles went off, too, like the raging of an angry pack. A cold, repulsive greed lay on all faces. Some of the men cried out aloud in their hate and rage when new groups emerged out there behind the thinning rows. The barrels of the rifles glowed with heat--and still the rumbling cries of "Coraggio!" came nearer and nearer.

As though in a frenzy of insanity, the silhouettes hopped about out there, sprang into the air, fell, and rolled over each other, as though the war dance had only just reached the climax of its paroxysm.

Then Captain Marschner observed the man next to him let his rifle sink for a moment and with hasty, shaking hands insert the bayonet into the smoking barrel. The captain felt as though he were going to vomit. He closed his eyes in dizziness and leaned against the trench wall, and let himself glide to the earth. Was he to--to see--that? Was he to see men being murdered right alongside of him? He tore his revolver from his pocket, emptied it, and threw it away. Now he was defenseless. And suddenly he grew calm and rose to his feet, elevated by a wonderful composure, ready to let himself be butchered by one of those panting beasts who were storming on, chased by the blind fear of death. He wanted to die like a man, without hatred, without rage, with clean hands.

A hoa.r.s.e roar, a frightful, dehumanized cry almost beside him wrenched his thoughts back into the trench. A broad stream of light and fire, travelling in a steep curve, flowed blindingly down beside him and sprayed over the shoulder of the tall pock-marked tailor of the first line. In the twinkling of an eye the man's entire left side flared up in flames. With a howl of agony he threw himself to the ground, writhed and screamed and leaped to his feet again, and ran moaning up and down like a living torch, until he broke down, half-charred, and twitched, and then lay rigid. Captain Marschner saw him lying there and smelt the odor of burned flesh, and his eyes involuntarily strayed to his own hand on which a tiny, white spot just under his thumb reminded him of the torments he had suffered in his boyhood from a bad burn.

At that moment a jubilant hurrah roared through the trench, rising from a hundred relieved throats. The attack had been repulsed! Lieutenant Weixler had carefully taken aim at the thrower of the liquid fire and hit at the first shot. The liquid fire had risen up like a fountain from the falling man's stiffening hand and rained down on his own comrades.

Their decimated lines shrank back suddenly before the unexpected danger and they fled pell-mell, followed by the furious shots from all the rifles.

The men fell down as if lifeless, with slack faces and l.u.s.terless eyes, as though some one had turned off the current that had fed those dead creatures with strength from some unknown source. Some of them leaned against the trench wall white as cheese, and held their heads over, and vomited from exhaustion. Marschner also felt his gorge rising and groped his way toward the dugout. He wanted to go into his own place now and be alone and somehow relieve himself of the despair that held him in its grip.

"h.e.l.lo!" Lieutenant Weixler cried unexpectedly through the silence, and bounded over to the left where the machine guns stood.

The captain turned back again, mounted the ladder, and gazed out into the foreground of the field. There, right in front of the wire-entanglements, kneeled an Italian. His left arm was hanging down limp, and his right arm was raised beseechingly, and he was crawling toward them slowly. A little farther back, half hidden by the kneeling man, something kept stirring on the ground. There three wounded men were trying to creep toward their own trench, pressing close to the ground.

One could see very clearly how they sought cover behind corpses and now and then lay motionless so as to escape discovery by the foe. It was a pitiful sight--those G.o.d-forsaken creatures surrounded by death, each moment like an eternity above them, yet clinging with tooth and nail to their little remnant of life.

"Come on! Isn't there a rope somewhere?" an old corporal called down into the trench. "I'm sorry for the poor devil of an Italian. Let's pull him in!"