Men in War | Page 3

of seeing his people again, of being fêted, and for at least two whole weeks, of living the life of a man who is not tagged with a number.
The loudest of the laughers was the young lieutenant whom they had nicknamed the Mussulman because of the Turkish turban he wore as officer of a regiment of Bosnians. A shell had broken his leg, and done its work thoroughly. For weeks already the shattered limb had been tightly encased in a plaster cast, and its owner, who went about on crutches, cherished it carefully, as though it were some precious object that had been confided to his care.
On the bench opposite the Mussulman sat two gentlemen, a cavalry officer, the only one on the active list, and an artillery officer, who in civil life was a professor of philosophy, and so was called "Philosopher" for short. The cavalry captain had received a cut across his right arm, and the Philosopher's upper lip had been ripped by a splinter from a grenade. Two ladies were sitting on the bench that leaned against the wall of the hospital, and these three men were monopolizing the conversation with them, because the fourth man sat on his bench without speaking. He was lost in his own thoughts, his limbs twitched, and his eyes wandered unsteadily. In the war he was a lieutenant of the landsturm, in civil life a well-known composer. He had been brought to the hospital a week before, suffering from severe shock. Horror still gloomed in his eyes, and he kept gazing ahead of him darkly. He always allowed the attendants at the hospital to do whatever they wanted to him without resistance, and he went to bed or sat in the garden, separated from the others as by an invisible wall, at which he stared and stared. Even the unexpected arrival of his pretty, fair wife had not resulted in dispelling for so much as a second the vision of the awful occurrence that had unbalanced his mind. With his chin on his chest he sat without a smile, while she murmured words of endearment; and whenever she tried to touch his poor twitching hands with the tips of her fingers, full of infinite love, he would jerk away as if seized by a convulsion, or under torture.
Tears rolled down the little woman's cheeks--cheeks hungry for caresses. She had fought her way bravely through the zones barred to civilians until she finally succeeded in reaching this hospital in the war zone. And now, after the great relief and joy of finding her husband alive and unmutilated, she suddenly sensed an enigmatic resistance, an unexpected obstacle, which she could not beg away or cry away, as she had used to do. There was a something there that separated her mercilessly from the man she had so yearned to see.
She sat beside him impatiently, tortured by her powerlessness to find an explanation for the hostility that he shed around him. Her eyes pierced the darkness, and her hands always went the same way, groping forward timidly, then quickly withdrawing as though scorched when his shrinking away in hatred threw her into despair again.
It was hard to have to choke down her grief like this, and not burst out in reproach and tear this secret from her husband, which he in his misery still interposed so stubbornly between himself and his one support. And it was hard to simulate happiness and take part in the airy conversation; hard always to have to force some sort of a reply, and hard not to lose patience with the other woman's perpetual giggling. It was easy enough for her. She knew that her husband, a major- general, was safe behind the lines on the staff of a high command. She had fled from the ennui of a childless home to enter into the eventful life of the war hospital.
The major's wife had been sitting in the garden with the gentlemen ever since seven o'clock, always on the point of leaving, quite ready to go in her hat and jacket, but she let herself be induced again and again to remain a little longer. She kept up her flirtatious conversation in the gayest of spirits, as if she had no knowledge of all the torments she had seen during the day in the very house against which she was leaning her back. The sad little woman breathed a sigh of relief when it grew so dark that she could move away from the frivolous chatterbox unnoticed.
And yet in spite of her titillating conversation and the air of importance with which she spoke of her duties as a nurse, the Frau Major was penetrated by a feeling that, without her being conscious of it, raised her high above herself.