Men in War | Page 9

a muffled cry.
Then everything was still. One by one the lights went out in the windows of the officers' wing. Soon the garden lay like a bushy black island in the river's silent embrace. Only now and then a gust of wind brought from the west the coughing of the guns like a faint echo.
Once more a crunching sound was heard on the gravel. It was the four sentries marching back to the watch-house. One soldier was cursing under his breath as he tried to refasten his torn blouse. The others were breathing heavily and were wiping the sweat from their red foreheads with the backs of their hands. The old corporal brought up the rear, his pipe in the corner of his mouth, his head bent low. As he turned into the main walk a bright sheet of light lit up the sky, and a prolonged rumbling that finally sank into the earth with a growl shook all the windows of the hospital.
The old man stood still and listened until the rumbling had died away. Then he shook his clenched fist, and sent out a long curve of saliva from between his set teeth, and muttered in a disgust that came from the depths of his soul:
"Hell!"

II
BAPTISM OF FIRE
The company rested for half an hour at the edge of the woods. Then Captain Marschner gave the command to start. He was pale, in spite of the killing heat, and he turned his eyes aside when he gave Lieutenant Weixler instructions that in ten minutes every man should be ready for the march without fail.
He had really forced his own hand in giving the order. For now, he knew very well, there could be no delay. Whenever he left Weixler loose on the privates, everything went like clock-work. They trembled before this lad of barely twenty as though he were the devil incarnate. And sometimes it actually seemed to the captain himself as though there were something uncanny about that overgrown, bony figure. Never, by any chance, did a spark of warmth flash from those small, piercing eyes, which always mirrored a flickering unrest and gleamed as though from fever. The one young thing in his whole personality was the small, shy moustache above the compressed lips, which never opened except to ask in a mean, harsh way for some soldier to be punished. For almost a year Captain Marschner had lived side by side with him and had never yet heard him laugh, knew nothing of his family, nor from where he came, nor whether he had any ties at all. He spoke rarely, in brief, quick sentences, and brought out his words in a hiss, like the seething of a suppressed rage; and his only topic was the service or the war, as though outside these two things there was nothing else in the world worth talking about.
And this man, of all others, fate had tricked by keeping him in the hinterland for the whole first year of the war. The war had been going on for eleven months and a half, and Lieutenant Weixler had not yet seen an enemy.
At the very outset, when only a few miles across the Russian frontier, typhus had caught him before he had fired a single shot. Now at last he was going to face the enemy!
Captain Marschner knew that the young man had a private's rifle dragged along for his own use, and had sacrificed all his savings for special field-glasses in order to be quite on the safe side and know exactly how many enemy lives he had snuffed out. Since they had come within close sound of the firing he had grown almost merry, even talkative, impelled by a nervous zeal, like an enthusiastic hunter who has picked up the trail. The captain saw him going in and out among the massed men, and turned away, hating to see how the fellow plagued his poor weary men, and went at them precisely like a sheep dog gathering in the herd, barking shrilly all the while. Long before the ten minutes were up, the company would be in formation, Weixler's impatience guaranteed that. And then--then there would be no reason any more for longer delay, no further possibility of putting off the fatal decision.
Captain Marschner took a deep breath and looked up at the sky with wide- open eyes that had a peculiarly intent look in them. In the foreground, beyond the steep hill that still hid the actual field of battle from view, the invisible machine guns were beating in breathless haste; and scarcely a fathom above the edge of the slope small, yellowish-white packages floated in thick clusters, like snowballs flung high in the air--the smoke of the barrage fire through which he had to lead his