Men in War Part 9

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 gla.s.ses at his a.s.sistant.

But his a.s.sistant had not understood either, and was embarra.s.sed, 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 a.s.sistant, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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, b.l.o.o.d.y 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 sh.e.l.l 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 quant.i.ties 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 sh.e.l.l.

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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 a.s.sistant 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."