Page:The forerunners.djvu/110

108 garden of a war hospital in a quiet little Austrian town thirty miles from the front. It is an evening late in autumn. The tattoo has just sounded. All is quiet. From afar comes the sound of heavy guns, as if huge dogs were baying underground. Some young wounded officers are enjoying the peace of the evening. Three of them are talking gaily with two ladies. The fourth, a Landsturm lieutenant, in civil life a well-known composer, sits gloomily apart. He has had a severe nervous shock, and is utterly prostrated, so that not even the arrival of his fair young wife enables him to pull himself together. When she speaks to him, he is unmoved. When she tries to touch him, he draws irritably away. She suffers, and cannot understand his enmity. The other woman takes the lead in the conversation. She is a Frau Major, a major's wife, who spends all her time at the hospital and has acquired there "a peculiar, garrulous cold-bloodedness." She is surfeited with horrors; her endless curiosity gives the impression of hardness and hysterical cruelty. The men are discussing, what is "the finest thing" in the war. According to one of them the finest thing is to find oneself, as this evening, in women's company.

"… For five months to see nothing but men—and then all of a sudden to hear a dear woman's clear voice! That's the finest thing of all. It's worth going to war for."

One of the others rejoins that the finest thing is to have a bath, a clean bandage, to get into a nice white bed, to know that for a few weeks you are going to have a rest. Number three says:

"The finest thing of all, I think, is the quiet—when you've been lying up there in the mountains where every shot is echoed five times, and all of a sudden it turns absolutely quiet, no whistling, no howling, no thundering—nothing but a glorious quiet that you can listen to as to a piece of music! The first few nights I sat up the whole time and kept my ears cocked for the quiet, the way you try to catch a tune at a distance. I believe I even shed a tear or two—it was so delightful to listen to no sound."