Chapter 4
"Carry him back," he commanded, and without knowing what he did, he put his fingers into his ears, and ran after the company, which had already reached the top of the ridge. He ran pressing his head between his hands as in a vise, reeling, panting, driven by a fear, as though the wounded man's agonized cry were pursuing him with lifted axe. He saw the shrunken body writhe, the face that had so suddenly withered, the yellowish white of the eyes. And that cry: "Captain--hurts so!" echoed within him and clawed at his breast, so that when he reached the summit he fell down, half choked, as if the ground had been dragged from under his feet.
No, he couldn't do that sort of thing! He didn't want to go on with it. He was no hangman, he was incapable of lashing men on to their death. He could not be deaf to their woe, to that childlike whimpering which stung his conscience like a bitter reproach. He stamped on the ground defiantly. Everything in him arose in rebellion against the task that called him.
Below, the field of battle stretched far out, cheerlessly grey. No tree, no patch of green. A stony waste--chopped up, crushed, dug inside out, no sign of life. The communication trenches, which started in the bottom of the valley and led to the edge of the hill, from which the wire entanglements projected, looked like fingers spread out to grasp something and clawed deep into the throttled earth. Marschner looked round again involuntarily. Behind him the green slope descended steeply to the little woods in which the baggage had been left. Farther behind the white highroad gleamed like a river framed in colored meadows. A short turn--and the greenness vanished! All life succumbed, as though roared down by the cannons, by the howling and pounding that hammered in the valley like the pulsating of a colossal fever. Shell hole upon shell hole yawned down there. From time to time thick, black pillars of earth leaped up and for moments hid small parts of this desert burned to ashes, where the cloven stumps of trees, whittled as by pen-knives, stuck up like a jeering challenge to the impotent imagination, a challenge to recognize in this field of death and refuse, the landscape it once had been, before the great madness had swept over it and sown it with ruins, leaving it like a dancing floor on which two worlds had fought for a loose woman.
And into this vale of hell he was now to descend! _Live_ down there five days and five nights, he and his little company of the damned, spewed down into that place, their living bodies speared on the fishing hook, bait for the enemy!
All alone, with no one near to hear him, amid the fury of the bursting shrapnel, which fell up there as thick as rain in a thunderstorm, Captain Marschner gave himself up to his rage, his impotent rage against a world that had inflicted such a thing on him. He cursed and roared out his hatred into the deaf tumult; and then he sprang up when, far below, almost in the valley already, his men emerged followed by Lieutenant Weixler, who ran behind them like a butcher's helper driving oxen to the shambles. The captain saw them hurry, saw the clouds of the explosions multiply above their heads, and on the slope in front of him saw bluish-green heaps scattered here and there, like knapsacks dropped by the way, some motionless, some twitching like great spiders--and he rushed on.
He raced like a madman down the steep slope, scarcely feeling the ground under his feet, nor hearing the rattle of the exploding shells. He flew rather than ran, stumbled over charred roots, fell, picked himself up again and darted onward, looking neither to the right nor to the left, almost with closed eyes. Now and then, as from a train window, he saw a pale, troubled face flit by. Once it seemed to him he heard a man moaning for water. But he wished to hear nothing, to see nothing. He ran on, blind and deaf, without stopping, driven by the terror of that bad, reproachful, "Hurts so!"
Only once did he halt, as though he had stepped into a trap and were held fast in an iron vise. A hand stopped him, a grey, convulsed hand with crooked fingers. It stuck up in front of him as though hewn out of stone. He saw no face, nor knew who it was that held out that dead, threatening fist. All he knew was that two hours before, over there in the little piece of woods, that hand had still comfortably cut slices of rye bread or had written a last post-card home. And a horror of those fingers took hold of the captain and lent new strength to his limbs, so that he stormed onward in great leaps like a boy until, with throbbing sides and a red cloud before his eyes, he caught up with his company at last, way down in the valley at the entrance to the communication trenches.
Lieutenant Weixler presented himself in strictest military form and announced the loss of fourteen men. Marschner heard the ring of pride in his voice, like triumph over what had been achieved, like the rejoicing of a boy bragging of the first down on his lip and deepening the newly acquired dignity of a bass voice. What were the wounded men writhing on the slope above to this raw youth, what the red-haired coward with his whine, what the children robbed of their provider growing up to be beggars, to a life in the abyss, perhaps to a life in jail? All these were mere supers, a stage background for Lieutenant Weixler's heroism to stand out in relief. Fourteen bloody bodies lined the path he had trodden without fear. How should his eyes not radiate arrogance?
The captain hastened on, past Weixler. If only he did not have to see him, he told himself, if only he did not have to meet the contented gleam of the man's eyes. He feared his rage might master his reason and his tongue get beyond his control, and his clenched fist do its own will. But here he had to spare this man. Here Lieutenant Weixler was within his rights. He grew from moment to moment. His stature dwarfed the others. He swam upon the stream, while the others, weighed down by the burden of their riper humanity, sank like heavy clods. Here other laws obtained. The dark shaft in which they now reeled forward with trembling knees led to an island washed by a sea of death. Whoever was stranded there dared not keep anything that he used in another world. The man who was master here was the one who had kept nothing but his axe and his fist. And he was the rich one upon whose superabundance the others depended. As Captain Marschner groped his way through the slippery trench in a daze, it became clearer and clearer to him that he must now hold on to his detested lieutenant like a treasure. Without him he would be lost.
He saw the traces of puddles of blood at his feet, and trod upon tattered, blood-soaked pieces of uniforms, on empty shells, rattling preserve tins, fragments of cannon balls. Yawning shell holes would open up suddenly, precariously bridged with half-charred boards.
Everywhere the traces of frenzied devastation grinned, blackened remains of a wilderness of wires, beams, sacks, broken tools, a disorder that took one's breath away and made one dizzy--all steeped in the suffocating stench of combustion, powder smoke, and the pungent, stinging breath of the ecrasite shells. Wherever one stepped the earth had been lacerated by gigantic explosions, laboriously patched up again, once more ripped open to its very bowels, and leveled a second time, so that one reeled on unconscious, as if in a hurricane.
Crushed by the weight of his impressions, Captain Marschner crept through the trench like a worm, and his thoughts turned ever more passionately, 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 hell, 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 passionate, 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 assigned 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 shells, 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 noble 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 shells, 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 gods. 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 shells 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 hells 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 space it had to bridge--and there was nothing else to bridge it but his yearning.