trol which had helped to take the
madman back into the hospital repassed, with the old corporal in the
rear, hanging his head. From afar off came the flash of an explosion,
followed by a prolonged rumbling. The old man stood still, listened,
shook his fist, spat disgustedly, and muttered:

"Oh, Hell!"

I have given lengthy extracts from this story, for I wished to convey a
notion of the author's pulsating, vibrant, and impassioned style. There
is more of the drama here than of the novel, and an elemental fierceness
like that of Shakespearean drama. It would be well if these pages, so
profound in the bitterness of their injustice, were to become widely
known. It would be well if the poor women who, in all love as a rule,
adopt a superhuman pose, could be made to realise, by means of this
madman's outpourings, the secret thoughts which no man will dare to tell
them, to understand the mute and almost shamefaced appeal to their poor
human kindliness, to their simple and motherly compassion.

* * * * *

I shall deal more briefly with the other episodes.

The second, "Baptism of Fire" (Feuertaufe), is long, perhaps too long,
but full of pity and of pain. Almost the whole scene is played within
the soul of Captain Marschner, a man of fifty, who is leading his
company to the front-line trench under the enemy's fire. He is not a
professional soldier. As a young man he had been an officer, but at the
age of thirty he had gone to school again, wishing to quit the trade of
war and to become a civil engineer. Now the war had brought him back to
the army. He had been in Vienna only the day before yesterday. His men
were fathers of families, stonemasons, peasants, factory hands, and so
on. None of them had any patriotic enthusiasm. He read their minds, and
felt ashamed of himself because he was leading to certain death these
poor fellows who trusted him. Beside him marched Weixler, a young
lieutenant, cold, ruthless, inhuman--as one so often is at twenty years
of age "when one has had no time yet to learn the value of life." The
hardness of this man (an irreproachable officer) arouses in Marschner
mingled anger and suffering. By degrees a fierce but unspoken feud
arises between them. At the very end, just when open war is about to
break out between the two, a huge shell bursts in their trench and both
are buried under the wreckage. The captain comes to himself with a
shattered skull. At a few paces'