Men in War. Andreas Latzko
and looking at her. Upon my word of honor, Sister Engelberta, after a while the shooting gets to be a nuisance. The lice are worse. But the worst thing of all is the complete absence of the lovely feminine. For five months to see nothing but men—and then all of a sudden to hear a dear clear woman's voice! That's the finest thing of all. It's worth going to war for."
The Mussulman pulled his mobile face flashing with youth into a grimace.
"The finest thing of all! No, sir. To be quite frank, the finest thing of all is to get a bath and a fresh bandage, and be put into a clean white bed, and know that for a few weeks you're going to have a rest. It's a feeling like—well, there's no comparison for it. But, of course, it is very nice, too, to be seeing ladies again."
The Philosopher had tilted his round fleshy Epicurean head to one side, and a moist sheen came into his small crafty eyes. He glanced at the place where a bright spot in the almost palpable darkness suggested the Frau Major's white dress, and began to tell what he thought, very slowly in a slight sing-song.
"The finest thing of all, I think, is the quiet—when you have been lying up there in the mountains where every shot is echoed back and forth five times, and all of a sudden it turns absolutely quiet—no whistling, no howling, no thundering—nothing but a glorious quiet that you can listen to as to a piece of music! The first few nights I sat up the whole time and kept my ears cocked for the quiet, the way you try to catch a tune at a distance. I believe I even howled a bit, it was so delightful to listen to no sound."
The captain of cavalry sent his cigarette flying through the night like a comet scattering sparks, and brought his hand down with a thump on his knee.
"There, there, Sister Engelberta, did you get that?" he cried sarcastically. "'Listen to no sound.' You see, that's what's called philosophy. I know something better than that, Mr. Philosopher, namely, not to hear what you hear, especially when it's such philosophical rubbish."
They laughed, and the man they were teasing smiled good-naturedly. He, too, was permeated by the peacefulness that floated into the garden from the sleeping town. The cavalryman's aggressive jokes glided off without leaving a sting, as did everything else that might have lessened the sweetness of the few days still lying between him and the front. He wanted to make the most of his time, and take everything easily with his eyes tight shut, like a child who has to enter a dark room.
The Frau Major leaned over to the Philosopher.
"So opinions differ as to what was the finest thing," she said; and her breath came more rapidly. "But, tell me, what was the most awful thing you went through out there? A lot of the men say the drumfire is the worst, and a lot of them can't get over the sight of the first man they saw killed. How about you?"
The Philosopher looked tortured. It was a theme that did not fit into his programme. He was casting about for an evasive reply when an unintelligible wheezing exclamation drew all eyes to the corner in which the landsturm officer and his wife were sitting. The others had almost forgotten them in the darkness and exchanged frightened glances when they heard a voice that scarcely one of them knew, and the man with the glazed eyes and uncertain gestures, a marionette with broken joints, began to speak hastily in a falsetto like the crowing of a rooster.
"What was the most awful thing? The only awful thing is the going off. You go off to war—and they let you go. That's the awful thing."
A cold sickening silence fell upon the company. Even the Mussulman's face lost its perpetually happy expression and stiffened in embarrassment. It had come so unexpectedly and sounded so unintelligible. It caught them by the throat and set their pulses bounding—perhaps because of the vibrating of the voice that issued from the twitching body, or because of the rattling that went along with it, and made it sound like a voice broken by long sobbing.
The Frau Major jumped up. She had seen the landsturm officer brought to the hospital strapped fast to the stretcher, because his sobbing wrenched and tore his body so that the bearers could not control him otherwise. Something inexpressibly hideous—so it was said—had half robbed the poor devil of his reason, and the Frau Major suddenly dreaded a fit of insanity. She pinched the cavalryman's arm and exclaimed with a pretense of great haste:
"My goodness! There's the gong of the last car. Quick, quick," addressing the sick man's wife, "quick! We must run."
They all rose. The Frau Major passed her arm through the unhappy little woman's and urged with even greater insistence:
"We'll have a whole hour's walk back to town if we miss the car."
The little wife, completely at a loss, her whole body quivering, bent over her husband again to take leave. She was certain that his outburst had reference to her and held a grim deadly reproach, which she did not comprehend. She felt her husband draw back and start convulsively under the touch of her lips. And she sobbed aloud at the awful prospect of spending an endless night in the chilly neglected room in the hotel, left alone with this tormenting doubt. But the Frau Major drew her along, forcing her to run, and did not let go her arm until they had passed the sentinel at the gate and were out on the street. The gentlemen followed them with their eyes, saw them reappear once again on the street in the lamplight, and listened to the sound of the car receding in the distance. The Mussulman picked up his crutches, and winked at the Philosopher significantly, and said something with a yawn about going to bed. The cavalry officer looked down at the sick man curiously and felt sorry for him. Wanting to give the poor devil a bit of pleasure, he tapped him on his shoulder and said in his free and easy way:
"You've got a chic wife, I must say. I congratulate you."
The next instant he drew back startled. The pitiful heap on the bench jumped up suddenly, as though a force just awakened had tossed him up from his seat.
"Chic wife? Oh, yes. Very dashing!" came sputtering from his twitching lips with a fury that cast out the words like a seething stream. "She didn't shed a single tear when I left on the train. Oh, they were all very dashing when we went off. Poor Dill's wife was, too. Very plucky! She threw roses at him in the train and she'd been his wife for only two months." He chuckled disdainfully and clenched his teeth, fighting hard to suppress the tears burning in his threat. "Roses! He-he! And 'See you soon again!' They were all so patriotic! Our colonel congratulated Dill because his wife had restrained herself so well—as if he were simply going off to maneuvers."
The lieutenant was now standing up. He swayed on his legs, which he held wide apart, and supported himself on the cavalry captain's arm, and looked up into his face expectantly with unsteady eyes.
"Do you know what happened to him—to Dill? I was there. Do you know what?"
The captain looked at the others in dismay.
"Come on—come on to bed. Don't excite yourself," he stammered in embarrassment.
With a howl of triumph the sick man cut him short and snapped in an unnaturally high voice:
"You don't know what happened to Dill, you don't? We were standing just the way we are now, and he was just going to show me the new photograph that his wife had sent him—his brave wife, he-he, his restrained wife. Oh yes, restrained! That's what they all were—all prepared for anything. And while we were standing there, he about to show me the picture, a twenty-eighter struck quite a distance away from us, a good two-hundred yards. We didn't even look that way. Then all of a sudden I saw something black come flying through the air—and Dill fell over with his dashing wife's picture in his hand and a boot, a leg, a boot with the leg of a baggage soldier sticking in his head—a soldier that the twenty-eighter had blown to pieces far away from where we stood."
He stopped for an instant and stared at the captain triumphantly. Then he went on with a note of spiteful pride in his voice, though every now and then interrupted by a peculiar gurgling groan.
"Poor Dill never said another word—Dill with the spur sticking in his skull, a regular cavalry spur, as big as a five-crown piece. He only turned up the whites of his eyes a little and looked sadly at his wife's picture, that she should have permitted such a thing as that. Such a thing as that! Such a thing! It took four of us to pull