Part 8 (1/2)
It was towards evening when I got off the train at this terminal. A bearded soldier with his right arm in a sling was sitting on the ground leaning against the iron railing around the platform. When he saw me pa.s.s by, quite spick and span, he stroked his right arm tenderly with his left hand and threw me an ugly look of hatred and called out through clenched teeth:
”Yes, Lieutenant, here's the place for man salad.”
Am I to forget the wicked grin that widened his mouth, already distorted by pain? Am I sick because each time I hear the word ”front” an echo, ”man salad,” inevitably croaks in my ears? Or are the others sick who do not hear ”man salad,” but swallow down the cowardly stuff written by our war bards, who try like industrious salesmen to make the brand ”world war” famous, because in reward they will have the privilege of das.h.i.+ng about in automobiles like commanding generals instead of being forced to face death in muddy ditches and be bossed by a little corporal?
Are there really human beings of flesh and blood who can still take a newspaper in their hands and not foam at the mouth with rage? Can one carry in one's brain the picture of wounded men lying exposed on slimy fields in the pouring rain, slowly, dumbly bleeding to death, and yet quietly read the vile stuff written about ”perfect hospital service,”
”smoothly running ambulances,” and ”elegantly papered trenches,” with which these fellows poetize themselves free from military service?
Men come home with motionless, astonished eyes, still reflecting death.
They walk about shyly, like somnambulists in brightly lighted streets.
In their ears there still resound the b.e.s.t.i.a.l howls of fury that they themselves bellowed into the hurricane of the drumfire so as to keep from bursting from inner stress. They come loaded down, like beasts of burden, with horrors, the astonished looks of bayoneted, dying foes on their conscience--and they don't dare open their mouths because everybody, wife and child included, grinds out the same tune, a flow of curious questions about sh.e.l.ls, gas bombs and bayonet attacks. So the days of the furlough expire, one by one, and the return to death is almost a deliverance from the shame of being a coward in disguise among the friends at home, to whom dying and killing have become mere commonplaces.
So be it, my dear doctors! It is an honor to be charged with madness if those villains are not called mad who, to save their own necks, have so gloriously hardened the people's hearts and abolished pity and implanted pride in the enemy's suffering, instead of acting as the one intermediary between distress and power and arousing the conscience of the world by going to the most frequented places and shouting _”Man Sal-ad”_ through a megaphone so loud and so long that at length all those whose fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, have gone to the corpse-factory will be seized with terror and all the throats in the world will be _one_ echo to ”Man Sal-ad!”
If you were here right now, dear doctors, I could show you my comrade, summoned to this room in the very body by the flames of hate against news from the front and against the indifference of the hinterland. I feel him standing behind my back, but his face is lying on the white sheet in front of me, like a faint water-mark, and my pen races frantically so as to cover his eyes at least with letters and hide their reproachful stare.
Large, widening, hideously distorted, his face, slowly swelling, rises from the paper like the face of Jesus of the handkerchief.
It was just like this that the three war correspondents saw him lying at the edge of the woods on that midsummer morning and--turned away involuntarily with almost the military exactness of soldiers at a ”right about face.” Their visit was meant for _me_! I was to furnish them with carriage and horses because the automobile that was to have darted them through the danger zone was lying on the road to Goerz with a broken axle.
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 pa.s.s 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 coffee-house.
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 sh.e.l.ls had so often come cras.h.i.+ng, which the huge Cap.r.o.ni 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 sh.e.l.l 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 la.s.so.
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 Ja.n.u.s head, all peace, all gentle humanity on one side; all war, all distorted, puffed-up image of fiendish hatred on the other side.