Men in War | Page 3

laughed like happy
schoolboys discussing the miseries of examinations just gone through.
Each had done his duty, each had had his ordeal, and now, under the
protection of his wound, each sat there in the comfortable expectation
of returning home, 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