So then it was not because of his being young and stupid that Meltzar
had behaved as he did; not because he had come direct from the military
academy to the trenches. The phonograph record was to blame, the
phonograph record!

Lieutenant Kadar felt his veins swell up like ropes and his blood pound
on his temples like blows on an anvil, so great was his wrath against
the wrongdoers who had treacherously unscrewed poor Meltzar's lovely
young head from his body.

And--this was the most gruesome--as he now thought of his subordinates
and fellow-officers, he saw them all going about exactly like poor
Meltzar, without heads on their bodies. He shut his eyes and tried to
recall the looks of his gunners--in vain! Not a single face rose before
his mind's eye. He had spent months and months among those men and had
not discovered until that moment that not one of them had a head on his
shoulders. Otherwise he would surely have remembered whether his gunner
had a mustache or not and whether the artillery captain was light or
dark. No! Nothing stuck in his mind--nothing but phonograph records,
hideous, black, round plates lying on bloody blouses.

The whole region of the Isonzo suddenly lay spread out way below him
like a huge map such as he had often seen in illustrated papers. The
silver ribbon of the river wound in and out among hills and coppices,
and Lieutenant Kadar soared high above the welter down below without
motor or aeroplane, but borne along merely by his own outspread arms.
And everywhere he looked, on every hill and in every hollow, he saw the
horns of innumerable talking-machines growing out of the ground.
Thousands upon thousands of those familiar cornucopias of bright lacquer