No Man's Land (81 page)

‘Another, please!' ordered the District Commissioner. At last, he removed his pince-nez. He remembered that the notification of his death was still lying on the carpet in the office, and he got up and returned to his residence. Dr Skovronnek followed him. Herr von Trotta appeared unaware of it. But nor was he at all surprised when, without knocking, Skovronnek opened the office door, walked in, and stopped. ‘This is the letter!' said the District Commissioner.

The old Herr von Trotta did not sleep that night or on many of the following nights. His head continued to tremble and shake, even when it was resting on pillows. Sometimes the District Commissioner would have dreams of his son. Lieutenant Trotta would stand in front of his father, with his officer's cap filled with water, and say: ‘Drink, Father, you're thirsty!'The dream recurred more and more frequently. And eventually the District Commissioner learned to summon his son every night, and some nights Carl Joseph came to him more than once. In consequence, Herr von Trotta began to long for night and bedtime, the day made him impatient. And when spring came, and the days grew longer, the District Commissioner would darken his room in the mornings and evenings, and so seek to prolong the nights artificially.

His head would not stop shaking. And he himself and everyone else gradually became used to the continual shaking.

The war seemed not to concern Herr von Trotta very much. He would only pick up a newspaper in order to conceal his trembling head behind it. There was never any discussion of victories and defeats between himself and Dr Skovronnek. Usually they just played chess, and in complete silence. But sometimes one would say to the other: ‘Do you remember the game we played two years ago? You were just as careless then as you are now.' It was as though they were talking about events that had transpired decades before.

A long time had passed since the news of the death, the seasons had relieved one another in accordance with the old and immutable laws of nature, though mankind barely felt them under the red veil of war, and, of all men the District Commissioner felt them perhaps the least. His head was still trembling like a large, though light fruit on the end of a thin stem. Lieutenant Trotta had long since rotted away, or been eaten by the ravens who circled that day over the deadly railway embankment, but old Herr von Trotta continued to feel as though he'd learned of his death only yesterday. And he kept the letter from Major Zoglauer, now also deceased, in his inside pocket; every day he read it and it retained its terrible freshness and novelty, just like a funeral mound that is kept and tended by grieving hands. What did Herr von Trotta care about the hundred thousand dead who had since followed his son? What did he care about the hasty and confused decisions taken by the people above him, that were issued on a weekly basis? And what did he care about the end of the world, which he could now see approaching with even greater clarity than once the prophetic Chojnicki could? His son was dead. His job was over. His world had ended.

Joseph Roth
was born in 1894 in the Galician town of Brody, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He died in Paris in 1939. In 1914, Roth went to Vienna to study philosophy and in 1916 he volunteered to fight in the Imperial Army on the Eastern Front. The war and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were key events in Roth's life and the major themes of his writing. His best-known work is
The Radetzky March
, from which this extract is taken. In his fiction and journalism, Roth deals with the major events of his time – the migration of millions of displaced persons, the rise of National Socialism and the dangers of appeasement. ‘It must be understood – let me say loud and clear – the European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination…'
The Radetzky March
is very much a book that announces the end of empire. At the end of the book, Lieutenant Trotta dies, his father dies and the Emperor dies. Dr Skovronnek is still alive but without a chess partner:

JOHN GALSWORTHY

THE GIBBET

from
Forsytes, Pendyces and Others

I
CAN'T DESCRIBE THE STREET
I turned into then – it was like no street I have ever been in, so long, so narrow, so regular, yet somehow so unsubstantial that one had sometimes a feeling that walking at the grey houses on either side one would pass through them. I must have gone miles down it without meeting even the shadow of a human being, when just as it was growing dusk I saw a young man come silently out as I supposed of a door, though none was opened. I can describe neither his dress nor figure. Like the street, he looked unsubstantial, and left on me an impression as of hunger. Yes, the expression on his shadowy face haunted me; it was so like that of a starving man before whom someone has set a meal down, then snatched it away. And now out of every house on either side young men like him started forth in that mysterious manner, all with that hungry look on their almost invisible faces. They seemed to gaze at me as I passed as if they were looking for someone, till, peering at one of them, I said:

‘What do you want – whom do you want?'

He gave me no answer, and by now it was so dark that I could not see his face at all – none of their faces, and only had the feeling of being hungrily watched as I went along, it seemed for ever, without getting to any turning out of that interminable street. At last in desperation I doubled in my tracks and began walking back in the direction whence I had come. A lamplighter must have been following me, for now every lamp was lighted, giving a faint glittering greenish glare, as might lumps of phosphorescent matter hung up in the dark. The hungry phantomlike young men had vanished, and I was wondering where they could have gone when I saw – some distance ahead – a sort of greyish whirlpool stretching across the street, under one of those lamps that flickered like a marsh light. A noise was coming from that swirl or whatever it was, for it seemed to be raised above the ground – a ghostly sound, swishing as of feet amongst dry leaves, deepened by the gruntings of some deep sense satisfied. I crept forward till I made out that it was really formed of human figures whirling slowly round and round the lamp in what seemed to be a dance. And suddenly I stood still in horror. Every other figure of those dancers was a skeleton, and between every two skeletons danced a young girl in white, so that the whole swirling ring was formed alternately of skeletons and these grey-white girls. They took no notice of me, and I crept a little nearer still. Yes! these skeletons were the young men I had seen starting out of the houses as I passed, with the look of queer and awful hunger on their faces that now seemed to grin. The girls who danced between them had wan, pitiful beauty, and their eyes were turned to the skeletons whose long hands grasped theirs, as though begging them to return to flesh. Not one noticed me, so deeply were they all absorbed in their mystic dance. Then I saw what they were dancing round. Above their heads, below the greenish lamp, a dark thing was dangling. It swung and turned there like a joint of meat roasting before a fire – the fully dressed body of an elderly man. The green lamplight glinted on his grey hair, and on his bloated features when the face came athwart the light. It swung slowly from left to right, and the dancers as slowly whirled from right to left, always meeting that revolving face, as though to enjoy the sight of it. What did it mean – what were they doing? these sad shapes rustling round the obscene thing suspended there! What strange and awful rite was I watching by the ghostly phosphorescence of that lamp? If those hungry skeletons and wan-grey girls haunted and amazed me, much more haunting and gruesome was that dead face up there with the impress still on it of bloated life; how it gripped and horrified me, with its dead fishy eyes and its neck thick-rolled with flabby flesh, turning and turning on its invisible spit to the sound of feet swishing in dead leaves, and those grunting sighs. What was this ghostly revenge on the gibbeted figure which yet had a look of cold and fattened power? Who was it they had caught and swung up there, like some dead crow, to sway in the winds of heaven? What awful crime towards these skeleton dancers and pale maidens could this elderly man be expiating?

And I remembered with a shudder how those young men had looked at me as I passed, and suddenly it came to me:I was watching the execution of MY generation. There it swung, gibbeted by the youths and maidens whom, through its evil courses, it had murdered. And seized with panic I ran forward up the street straight through the fabric of my dream, that swayed and rustled to left and right of me.

John Galsworthy
was born in Surrey in 1867. Trained as a barrister, Galsworthy travelled in the 1890s for his family shipping firm and met Joseph Conrad, whose close friend he became. Conrad encouraged him to write. In 1906, Galsworthy published
The Man of Property
, the first volume of
The Forsyte Saga
, his best-known work which chronicles the suffocating morality of an upper-middle-class family. During the war, Galsworthy worked as a hospital orderly in northern France. This powerful story is a homage to the generation of men who died in the war. It is taken from his short story collection
Forsytes, Pendyces and Others
, which was published posthumously in 1935. Throughout his life Galsworthy campaigned for prison reform, women's rights, animal welfare and the abolition of censorship. In 1932, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died six weeks later in London.

ERICH MARIA REMARQUE

SWEET DREAMS THOUGH THE GUNS ARE BOOMING