Men in War

by Andreas Latzko

Not that he intrudes himself upon me. On the contrary. He conscientiously keeps the distance that separates him, the common soldier, from the officer that he must respect in me. Strictly according to regulations he stands three paces off in some corner or behind some column and only dares to cast his shy glances at me.

He simply wants to be near me. That's all he asks for, just for me to let him be in my presence.

Sometimes I close my eyes to be by myself again, quite by myself for a few moments, as I used to be before the war. Then he fixes his gaze upon me so firmly and penetratingly and with such obstinate, reproachful insistence that it burns into my back, settles under my eyelids, and so steeps my being with the picture of him that I look round, if a little tune has passed without his reminding me of his presence.

He has gnawed his way into me, he has taken up his abode within me. He sits inside of me like the mysterious magician at moving-picture shows who turns the crank inside of the black booth above the heads of the spectators. He casts his picture through my eyes upon every wall, every curtain, every flat surface that my eyes fall on.

But even when there is no background for his picture, even when I frantically look out of the window and stare into the distance so as to be rid of him for a short while, even then he is there, hovering in front of me as though impaled upon the lance of my gaze, like a banner swaying at the head of a parade. If X-rays could penetrate the skull, one would find his picture woven into my brain in vague outline, like the figures in old tapestries.

I remember a trip I took before the war from Munich to Vienna on the Oriental Express. I looked out upon the autumnal mellowness of the country around the Bavarian lakes and the golden glow of the Wiener Wald. But across all this glory that I drank in leaning back on the comfortable seat in luxurious contentment, there steadily ran an ugly black spot—a flaw in the window-pane. That is the way my obstinate comrade flits across woods and walls, stands still when I stand still, dances over the faces of passers-by, over the asphalt paving wet from the rain, over everything my eyes happen to fall upon. He interposes himself between me and the world, just like that flaw in the window-pane, which degraded everything I saw to the quality of the background that it made.

The physicians, of course, know better. They do not believe that He lives in me and stays by me like a sworn comrade. From the standpoint of science it rests with me not to drag him round any longer, but to give him his dismissal, precisely as I might have freed myself from the annoying spot by angrily smashing the window-pane. The physicians do not believe that one human being can unite himself at death with another human being and continue to live on in him with obstinate persistence. It is their opinion that a man standing at a window should see the house opposite but never the wall of the room behind his back.

The physicians only believe in things that are. Such superstitions as that a man can carry dead men within him and see them standing in front of him so distinctly that they hide a picture behind them from his sight, do not come within the range of the gentlemen's reasoning. In their lives death plays no part. A patient who dies ceases to be a patient. And what does the day know of the night, though the one forever succeeds the other?

But I know it is not I who forcibly drag the dead comrade through my life. I know that the dead man's life within me is stronger than my own life. It may be that the shapes I see flitting across the wall papers, cowering in corners and staring into the lighted room from dark balconies, and knocking so hard on the windows that the panes rattle, are only visions and nothing more. Where do they come from? My brain furnishes the picture, my eyes provide the projection, but it is the dead man that sits at the crank. He tends to the film. The show begins when it suits Him and does not stop as long as He turns the crank. How can I help seeing what He shows me? If I close my eyes the picture falls upon the inside of my lids, and the drama plays inside of me instead of dancing far away over doors and walls.

I should be the stronger of the two, they say. But you cannot kill a dead man, the physicians should know that.