a man with one eye and half a nose was good enough for a peasant girl?
Fatherland? Would Marcsa go to the altar with the fatherland? Could she
show off the fatherland to the women when she would see them looking at
her pityingly? Did the fatherland drive through the village with ribbons
flying from its hat? Ridiculous! Sitting on the bench opposite the
station, with the sign of the village in view, a short name, a single
word, which comprised his whole life, all his memories, hopes and
experiences, John Bogdan suddenly thought of one of the village
characters, Peter the cripple, who had lived in the tumbledown hut
behind the mill many years before, when John was still a child. John saw
him quite distinctly, standing there with his noisy wooden leg and his
sad, starved, emaciated face. He, too, had sacrificed a part of himself,
his leg, "for the fatherland," in Bosnia during the occupation; and then
he had had to live in the old hovel all alone, made fun of by the
children, who imitated his walk, and grumblingly tolerated by the
peasants, who resented the imposition of this burden upon the community.
"In the service of the fatherland." Never had the "fatherland" been
mentioned when Peter the cripple went by. They called him contemptuously
the village pauper, and that was all there was to it.

John Bogdan gnashed his teeth in a rage that he had not thought of Peter
the cripple in the hospital. Then he would have given those city people
a piece of his mind. He would have told them what he thought of their
silly, prattling humbug about the fatherland and about the great honor
it was to return home to Marcsa looking like a monkey. If he had the
doctor in his clutches now! The fakir had photographed him, not once,
but a dozen times, from all sides, after each butchery, as though he had
accomplished a miracle, had turned out a wonderful masterpiece. And here
Julia, even Julia, his playmate, his neighbor, had not recognized him.