Men in War | Page 7

Four of us had to tug and pull until she came out. I got him rid of her. Out with her! She's gone. All of them are gone. Mine is gone, too. Mine is torn out, too. All are being torn out. There's no wife any more! No wife any more, no--"
His head bobbed and fell forward. Tears slowly rolled down his sad, sad face.
The captain reappeared followed by the little assistant physician, who was on night duty.
"You must go to bed now, Lieutenant," the physician said with affected severity.
The sick man threw his head up and stared blankly at the strange face. When the physician repeated the order in a raised voice, his eyes suddenly gleamed, and he nodded approvingly.
"Must go, of course," he repeated eagerly, and drew a deep sigh. "We all must go. The man who doesn't go is a coward, and they have no use for a coward. That's the very thing. Don't you understand? Heroes are the style now. The chic Mrs. Dill wanted a hero to match her new hat. Ha-ha! That's why poor Dill had to go and lose his brains. I, too--you, too--we must go die. You must let yourself be trampled on--your brains trampled on, while the women look on--chic--because it's the style now."
He raised his emaciated body painfully, holding on to the back of the bench, and eyed each man in turn, waiting for assent.
"Isn't it sad?" he asked softly. Then his voice rose suddenly to a shriek again, and the sound of his fury rang out weirdly in the garden. "Weren't they deceiving us, eh? I'd like to know--weren't they cheats? Was I an assassin? Was I a ruffian? Didn't I suit her when I sat at the piano playing? We were expected to be gentle and considerate! Considerate! And all at once, because the fashion changed, they had to have murderers. Do you understand? Murderers!"
He broke away from the physician, and stood swaying again, and his voice gradually sank to a complaining sound like the thick strangulated utterance of a drunkard.
"My wife was in fashion too, you know. Not a tear! I kept waiting and waiting for her to begin to scream and beg me at last to get out of the train, and not go with the others--beg me to be a coward for her sake. Not one of them had the courage to. They just wanted to be in fashion. Mine, too! Mine, too! She waved her handkerchief just like all the rest."
His twitching arms writhed upwards, as though he were calling the heavens to witness.
"You want to know what was the most awful thing?" he groaned, turning to the Philosopher abruptly. "The disillusionment was the most awful thing --the going off. The war wasn't. The war is what it has to be. Did it surprise you to find out that war is horrible? The only surprising thing was the going off. To find out that the women are horrible--that was the surprising thing. That they can smile and throw roses, that they can give up their men, their children, the boys they have put to bed a thousand times and pulled the covers over a thousand times, and petted and brought up to be men. That was the surprise! That they gave us up-- that they sent us--sent us! Because every one of them would have been ashamed to stand there without a hero. That was the great disillusionment. Do you think we should have gone if they had not sent us? Do you think so? Just ask the stupidest peasant out there why he'd like to have a medal before going back on furlough. Because if he has a medal his girl will like him better, and the other girls will run after him, and he can use his medal to hook other men's women away from under their noses. That's the reason, the only reason. The women sent us. No general could have made us go if the women hadn't allowed us to be stacked on the trains, if they had screamed out that they would never look at us again if we turned into murderers. Not a single man would have gone off if they had sworn never to give themselves to a man who has split open other men's skulls and shot and bayoneted human beings. Not one man, I tell you, would have gone. I didn't want to believe that they could stand it like that. 'They're only pretending,' I thought. 'They're just restraining themselves. But when the first whistle blows, they'll begin to scream and tear us out of the train, and rescue us.' Once they had the chance to protect us, but all they cared about was being in style--nothing else in the world but just being in