He had partaken of the tragic, senseless exaltation that able-bodied men everywhere were experiencing on starting for the front.... Then deliverance from the carping tongue of Mizzi; the simplest things more and more caused her to fly unexpectedly up in the air like a rocket; there would be a sputtering and something would darken and go out. These were among the reasons why Hermann had settled back in the motor that day and with a laugh set out for the front. But there was something else that none of them had known about, that then, that now, was always in his mind, in his heart, in every fibre of his being. Even when he was watching the most indifferent things, such as the buffet Fräulein that very morning,—he didn't need to be alone—suddenly she would be with him and fling her lost radiance around him once again, and wrap him up into that magnetic world of longing for the might have been. He wouldn't hear the "wer giebt," "Pagat," "an' dreier" of the Tarok players, or the rustling of newspapers being turned on their sticks, or the "Sie, Ober," or the "Pikkolo, du dummer,"—she was always more real than anything else, ... even at the café, when he would be holding the Neue Freie Presse and pretending to read. She was everywhere and all. Even as he dropped back in that chair, with Tante Ilde's touch still warm upon his arm and his eyes apparently fixed on the quite uninteresting enlarged and colored photograph of Mizzi's dead father, (Mizzi, year by year was getting to be his very image, with that hint of moustache) he was thinking only of her—Marie.
That January of 1915, one windy, icy twilight, he had had a hurry call from the Elizabethspital and had put off many patients still waiting and closed his office.
Before he got to the gate of the hospital grounds, out in the street even, he found row upon row of stretchers laid down low upon the earth, bearing shattered forms whose silence was more terrible than groans; their grey cloaks were wrapped about them, their poor boots, in which they had marched to destruction at the word of command, were mostly tied to the handles.... Pale faces, bandaged heads, arms crossed on their breasts or inert by their sides, under their capes.... Raised but a foot from the ground where the stretcher bearers had deposited them they looked already like their own graves, as grey, as voiceless. Yet the biting cold of that windy twilight was heavily charged with their unuttered groans.
Within the hospital it was still the same. The corridors were blocked. Outside the douche rooms they waited for their turn. At last clean, sheet-covered, they waited again at the door of the operating room.
He had met Marie von Sternberg that very evening ... so quiet, so deft, her pale blue eyes so compassionate under her heavy, dark brows and lashes, her jaw so nobly strong, her hands so beautiful in spite of the discoloration of acids and disinfectants. He had suddenly noticed her hands as she was passing him a probe.
But he hadn't looked at her face then, it was only some hours after,—not even in a pause, for still the men were being brought in,—when a young, yellow-haired Tirolese had been put on the table. As Doctor Bruckner bent over him, he had cried out in a loud voice "Mother" and had suddenly given up his youthful ghost. Then Doctor Bruckner found that he was looking full into the blue eyes, so heavily lashed, so darkly circled, of the woman at his side. He saw there a spark of the same everlasting pity that flamed in his own. They hadn't said anything even then, for quickly the youth had been carried away and his place had been filled by a swarthy family man from one of the Slavic Crownlands, his wedding ring still hanging about the finger of his mangled hand. Hermann had never forgotten either of those two men, for in between them was set, like a jewel in death and pain, that look that he and Marie von Sternberg had exchanged.
All that winter, that winter of his content, of his happiness, they breathed the same air, did the same work, to the same end. Those afternoon hours had been, quite strangely, enough for happiness. In the early summer she had been sent to the Russian front. When he was mobilized she was still there, and that was the true reason why he was laughing the day he left Vienna. A thousand miles of battle-field and ruined towns might lie between them; then again she, like himself, might be sent where the need was greatest, their roads could easily converge. He hoped blindly, confidently from the war; all his hope was in its vicissitudes.
Then one evening, after the fiery setting of a hard, red sun over a scorched, interminable plain, the dim air thick with odors of blood and death, cut now and then feebly by disinfectants used not too generously, as he stood outside that hospital tent, thinking of her, longing desperately for her, a quick, light step approached, he heard her voice:
"Hermann, it is I."