none but young fellows, happy to be off on an adventure, hallooed from
the train windows. If they left any dear ones at all behind, they were
only their parents, and here at last was a chance to make a great
impression on the old folks. Then Captain Marschner would have held his
own as well as anyone, as well even as the strict disciplinarian,
Lieutenant Weixler, perhaps even better. Then the men marched two or
three weeks before coming upon the enemy, and the links that bound them
to life broke off one at a time. They underwent a thousand difficulties
and deprivations, until under the stress of hunger and thirst and
weariness they gradually forgot everything they had left far--far
behind. In those days hatred of the enemy who had done them all that
harm smouldered and flared higher every day, while actual battle was a
relief after the long period of passive suffering.

But now things went like lightning. Day before yesterday in Vienna
still--and now, with the farewell kisses still on one's lips, scarcely
torn from another's arms, straight into the fire. And not blindly,
unsuspectingly, like the first ones. For these poor devils now the war
had no secrets left. Each of them had already lost some relative or
friend; each had talked to wounded men, had seen mutilated, distorted
invalids, and knew more about shell wounds, gas grenades, and liquid
fire than artillery generals or staff physicians had known before the
war.

And now it was the captain's lot to lead precisely these clairvoyants,
these men so rudely torn up by the roots--he, the retired captain, the
civilian, who at first had had to stay at home training recruits. Now
that it was a thousand times harder, now his turn had come to be a
leader, and he dared not resist the task to which he was not equal. On
the contrary, as a matter of decency, he had been forced to push his