Part 7 (2/2)
I should be the stronger of the two, they say. But you cannot kill a dead man, the physicians should know that.
Are not the paintings by t.i.tian and Michael Angelo still hanging in the museums centuries after t.i.tian and Michael Angelo lived? And the pictures that a dying man chiseled into my brain fourteen months ago with the prodigious strength of his final agony--are they supposed to disappear simply because the man that created them is lying in his soldier's grave?
Who, when he reads or hears the word ”woods,” does not see some woods he has once walked through or looked out on from a train window? Or when a man speaks of his dead father does he not see the face that has long been rotting in the grave appear again, now stern, now gentle, now in the rigidity of the last moments? What would our whole existence be without these visions which, each at its own word, rise up for moments out of oblivion as if in the glare of a flashlight?
Sick? Of course. The world is sore, and will have no words or pictures that do not have reference to the wholesale graves. Not for a moment can the comrade within me join the rest of the dead, because everything that happens is as a flashlight falling upon him. There's the newspaper each morning to begin with: ”s.h.i.+ps sunk,” ”Attacks repulsed.” And immediately the film reels off a whirl of gasping, struggling men, fingers rising out of mountainous waves grasping for life once more, faces disfigured by pain and fury. Every conversation that one overhears, every shop window, every breath that is drawn is a reminder of the wholesale carnage. Even the silence of the night is a reminder. Does not each tick of the second-hand mark the death rattle of thousands of men? In order to hear the h.e.l.l raging yonder on the other side of the thick wall of air, is it not enough to know of chins blown off, throats cut open, and corpses locked in a death embrace?
If a man were lying comfortably in bed and then found out for certain that some one next door was being murdered, would you say he was sick if he jumped up out of bed with his heart pounding? And are we anything but next door to the places where thousands duck down in frantic terror, where the earth spits mangled fragments of bodies up into the sky, and the sky hammers down on the earth with fists of iron? Can a man live at a distance from his crucified self when the whole world resounds with reminders of these horrors?
No!
It is the others that are sick. They are sick who gloat over news of victories and see conquered miles of territory rise resplendent above mounds of corpses. They are sick who stretch a wall of flags between themselves and their humanity so as not to know what crimes are being committed against their brothers in the beyond that they call ”the front.” Every man is sick who still can think, talk, discuss, sleep, knowing that other men holding their own entrails in their hands are crawling like half-crushed worms across the furrows in the fields and before they reach the stations for the wounded are dying off like animals, while somewhere, far away, a woman with pa.s.sionate longing is dreaming beside an empty bed. All those are sick who can fail to hear the moaning, the gnas.h.i.+ng of teeth, the howling, the cras.h.i.+ng and bursting, the wailing and cursing and agonizing in death, because the murmur of everyday affairs is around them or the blissful silence of night.
It is the deaf and the blind that are sick, not I!
It is the dull ones that are sick, those whose souls sing neither compa.s.sion for others nor their own anger. All those numerous people are sick who, like a violin without strings, merely echo every sound. Or would you say that the man whose memory is like a photographic plate on which the light has fallen and which cannot record any more impressions, is the healthy man? Is not memory the very highest possession of every human being? It is the treasure that animals do not own, because they are incapable of holding the past and reviving it.
Am I to be cured of my memory as from an illness? Why, without my memory I would not be myself, because every man is built up of his memories and really lives only as long as he goes through life like a loaded camera.
Supposing I could not tell where I lived in my childhood, what color my father's eyes and my mother's hair were, and supposing at any moment that I were called upon to give an account, I could not turn the leaves of the past and point to the right picture, how quick they would be to diagnose my case as feeblemindedness, or imbecility. Then, to be considered mentally normal, must one treat one's brain like a slate to be sponged off and be able at command to tear out pictures that have burned the most hideous misery into the soul, and throw them away as one does leaves from an alb.u.m of photographs?
One man died before my eyes, he died hard, torn asunder after a frightful struggle between the two t.i.tans, Life and Death. Am I sick, then, if I experience all over again all the phases of his agonizing--preserved in my brain like snapshots--as long as every happening inexorably opens the pages of this series? And the other people, are they well, those, I mean, who skip the pages as though they were blank that record the dismemberment, the mutilation, the crus.h.i.+ng of their brothers, the slow writhing to death of men caught in barbed wire entanglements?
Tell me, my dear doctors, at just what point am I to begin to forget?
Am I to forget I was in the war? Am I to forget the moment in the smoky railway station when I leaned out of the car window and saw my boy ashen white, with compressed lips, standing beside his mother, and I made a poor show of cheerfulness and talked of seeing them soon again, while my eyes greedily searched the features of my wife and child, and my soul drank in the picture of them like parched lips after a many days' march drinking in the water so madly longed for? Am I to forget the choking and the bitterness in my mouth when the train began to move and the distance swallowed up my child, my wife, my world?
And the whole ride to death, when I was the only military traveler in a car full of happy family men off for a summer Sunday in the country--am I to tear it out of my memory like so much c.u.mbersome waste paper? Am I to forget how I felt when it grew quieter at each station, as though life were crumbling away, bit by bit, until at midnight only one or two sleepy soldiers remained in my coach and an ashen young face drawn with sorrow hovered about the flickering lamplight? Must one actually be sick if it is like an incurable wound always to feel that leave-taking of home and warmth, that riding away with hatred and danger awaiting one at the end of the trip? Is there anything harder to understand--when have men done anything madder--than this: to race through the night at sixty miles an hour, to run away from all love, all security, to leave the train and take another train because it is the only one that goes to where invisible machines belch red-hot pieces, of iron and Death casts out a finely meshed net of steel and lead to capture men? Who will obliterate from my soul the picture of that small dirty junction, the s.h.i.+vering, sleepy soldiers without any intoxication or music in their blood, looking wistfully after the civilian's train and its brightly lighted windows as it disappeared behind the trees with a jolly blow of its whistle? Who will obliterate the picture of that exchanging for Death in the drab light of early dawn?
And supposing I could cross out that first endless night as something settled and done with, would not the next morning remain, when our train stopped at a switch in the middle of a wide, dewy meadow, and we were told that we had to wait to let hospital trains go by? How shall I ever banish the memory of those thick exhalations of lysol and blood blown upon the happy fields from a dragon's nostrils? Won't I forever see those endless serpents creeping up so indolently, as though surfeited with mangled human flesh? From hundreds of windows white bandages gleamed and dull, gla.s.sy eyes stared out. Lying, crouching, on top of each other, body to body, they even hung on to the running-boards like b.l.o.o.d.y bunches of grapes, an overflowing abundance of distress and agony. And those wretched remains of strength and youth, those bruised and battered men, looked with pity, yes, _with pity_, at our train. Am I really sick because those glances of warm compa.s.sion from bleeding cripples to sound, strapping young fellows burn in my soul with a fire never to be extinguished? An apprehension sent a chill through our whole train, the foreboding of a h.e.l.l that one would rather run away from wrapped in b.l.o.o.d.y bandages than go to meet whole and strong. And when this shudder of apprehension has turned into reality, into experience and memory, is it to be shaken off as long as such trains still meet every day? A casual remark about the transfer of troops, news of fresh battles inevitably recall this first actual contact with the war, just as a certain note when struck will produce a certain tone, and I see the tracks and ties and stones spattered with blood, s.h.i.+ning in the early morning light of a summer day--signposts pointing to the front.
”The Front!”
Am _I_ really the sick person because I cannot utter that word or write it down without my tongue growing coated from the intense hatred I feel? Axe not the others mad who look upon this wholesale cripple-and-corpse-factory with a mixture of religious devotion, romantic longing and shy sympathy? Would it not be wiser once for a change to examine those others for the state of their mind? Must _I_ disclose it to my wise physicians, who watch over me so compa.s.sionately, that all this mischief is the work of a few words that have been let loose upon humanity like a pack of mad dogs?
Front--Enemy--Hero's death--Victory--the curs rage through the world with frothing mouth and rolling eyes. Millions who have been carefully inoculated against smallpox, cholera and typhoid fever are chased into madness. Millions, on either side, are packed into cars--ride, singing, to meet each other at the front--hack, stab, shoot at each other, blow each other into bits, give their flesh and their bones for the b.l.o.o.d.y hash out of which the dish of peace is to be cooked for those fortunate ones who give the flesh of their calves and oxen to their fatherland for a hundred per cent profit, instead of carrying their own flesh to market for fifty cents a day.
Suppose the word ”war” had never been invented and had never been hallowed through the ages and decked with gay trappings. Who would dare to supplement the deficient phrase, ”declaration of war,” by the following speech?
”After long, fruitless negotiations our emissary to the government of X left to-day. From the window of his parlor car he raised his silk hat to the gentlemen who had escorted him to the station, and he will not meet them with a friendly smile again until _you_ have made corpses of many hundreds of thousands of men in the country of X. Up then! Squeeze yourself into box-cars meant for six horses or twenty-eight men! Ride to meet them, those other men. Knock them dead, hack off their heads, live like wild beasts in damp excavations, in neglect, in filth, overrun with lice, until we shall deem the time has come again for our emissary to take a seat in a parlor car and lift his silk hat, and in ornate rooms politely and aristocratically dispute over the advantages which our big merchants and manufacturers are to derive from the slaughter. Then as many of you as are not rotting under the ground or hobbling on crutches and begging from door to door may return to your half-starved families, and may--nay must!--take up your work again with redoubled energy, more indefatigably and yet with fewer demands than before, so as to be able to pay in sweat and privation for the shoes that you wore out in hundreds of marches and the clothes that decayed on your bodies.”
A fool he who would sue for a following in such terms! But _no_ fools they who are the victims, who freeze, starve, kill, and let themselves be killed, just because they have learned to believe that this must be so, once the mad dog War has burst his chains and bitten the world.
Is this what the wars were like from which the word ”war” has come down to us? Did not war use to guarantee booty? Were not the mercenaries led on by hopes of a gay, lawless life--women and ducats and gold-caparisoned steeds? Is this cowering under iron discipline, this holding out of your head to be chopped off, this pa.s.sive play with monsters that spill their h.e.l.lish cauldron on you from out of the blue distance still ”war”? War was the collision of the superfluous forces, the ruffians of all nations. Youth, for whom the town had grown too small and the doublet too tight, ventured out, intoxicated by the play of its own muscles. And now shall the same word hold good when men already anch.o.r.ed to house and home are torn away and whipped into the ranks and laid out before the enemy, and made to wait, defenseless, in dull resignation, like supers in this duel of the munition industries?
Is it right to misuse the word ”war” as a standard when it is not courage and strength that count, but explosive bombs and the length of range of the guns and the speed with which women and children turn out sh.e.l.ls? We used to speak with horror of the tyrants of dark ages, who threw helpless men and women to the lions and tigers; but now is there one of us who would not mention them with respect in comparison with the rulers who are at present directing the struggle between men and machines, as though it were a puppet show at the end of telegraph wires, and who are animated by the delightful hope that our supply of human flesh may outlast the enemy's supply of steel and iron?
No! All words coined before this carnage began are too beautiful and too honest, like the word ”front,” which I have learned to abhor. Are you ”facing” the enemy when their artillery is hidden behind mountains and sends death over a distance of a day's journey, and when their sappers come creeping up thirty feet below the surface? And your ”front” is a terminal station, a little house all shot up, behind which the tracks have been torn up because the trains turn back here after unloading their cargo of fresh, sunburned men, to call for them again when they have emerged from the machines with torn limbs and faces covered with verdigris.
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