MOBILIZATION
War! War is declared! So the news speeds hollow-eyed through the streets. We are at war. It's the real thing this time.
Mobilization!
The ominous word dominates the placards on the hoardings. The newspapers reproduce the proclamations in their heaviest type, and rumors and dispatches flutter like a ruffled dovecote round this day of Blood and Iron.
It is deadly earnest now. And this sense of the seriousness of it has numbed the State like a stroke of paralysis. But then a jar, as of a lever thrown over, goes through the vast iron fabric. And every one has got to yield to this jar. The time for anxiety and hesitation is over, for doubts and oscillation. The moment has now come when we cease to be citizens, from henceforward we are only soldiers—soldiers who have no time to think, who only have time to die.
So they come flocking in from the work-shops, from the factories, from behind the counters, from business offices, and the open country—they come flocking into the town, and every man falls in to stand by his native land.
"Four days from date" was the order on my summons. Well, the fourth morning has come, and I have said good-by to my wife and my two children. Thank God, the fourth morning has come, for the parting was not easy, and my heart aches when I think of them "at home."
"Where are you going, Daddy?" asked Baby, as I kissed her for the last time with my portmanteau in my hand.
"Daddy's going on a journey," said her mother, and looked at me with a smile amid her tears. "Yes, he's going on a journey, girlie, and you, little chap, you've got to be good, and do as Mummy tells you."
And then we got the parting over quickly, for Dora kept up her pluck until the last moment....
Now we are drawn up in the barrack-yard with bag and baggage—we of the rank and file—we reservists and militiamen, every man at his place by the table.
How serious their faces are. They reveal no trace of youthful high spirits or martial exuberance. Their expressions rather betoken deep thought.
"The war that in the end was bound to come"—so we heard and so we read in the papers. "That is bound to be so, that is a law of Nature. The nations are snatching the bread from one another's mouths; they are depriving each other of the air to breathe. That is a thing which in the end can only be settled by Force. And if it has to be, better it should be today than tomorrow."
We are mercenaries no longer—those hirelings for murder, who once sold their blood for money down to all and sundry. We are gladiators no longer—slaves who enact the drama of dying as an exciting spectacle for the entertainment of the rich, and for the lust of their eyes. It is to our native land we took our oath. And if it must be, we are resolved to die as citizens, to die in the full consciousness and full responsibility for our acts.
What will the next few days have in store for us?
Not one of us has probably ever, with his own eyes, seen a field of battle. But we have heard about it from others, and we have read in books of other men what a battlefield looked like in 1870-71, and, as though with our own eyes, we have watched the shells shattering human bodies. And another thing we know is that forty years ago in spite of inferior guns and rifles, over a hundred and twenty thousand dead stayed behind on the field of honor. What percentage of the living will modern warfare claim? Armies are being marshalled vaster than the world has ever seen. Germany alone can put six million soldiers in the field; France as many. Then the war of '70-'71 was nothing more than a long-drawn affair of outposts! My brain reels when I try to visualize these masses—starting to march against one another; I seem to choke for breath.
Then are we a breed of men other than our fathers?
Is the reason because we only have one life to lose? And do we cling so passionately to this life? Isn't our native land worth more than this scrap of life?
There probably won't be many among us who believe in the Resurrection, who believe that our mangled bodies will rise again in new splendor. Nor do we believe that our Father in Heaven will have pleasure in our murderous doings, that in that better world He will regard us other than as our brothers' murderers. But we bend our heads before iron Necessity. The Fatherland has called us, and we, as loyal sons, obey the command there is no evading, submissively.... From today onward we belong to our native land, so the Major shouted a minute ago as he read out the articles of war.
And it's going to be the real thing this time.
The Sergeant-Major has already read the roll and checked it. We are already told off in fours. Now, in a long column, we are marching across the barrack-yard, for this very day we are ordered to doff our civilian dress, and don our new kit. This very day we have got to become soldiers.
Things are moving apace with us now.