The Captain let him talk. He leaned his elbows on the primitive table,
held his head between his hands, and kept silent. His eyes wandered
about the dark, mouldy den, filled with the stench of a smoking little
kerosene lamp. He saw the mildewed straw in the corner, the disconnected
telephone at the entrance, an empty box of tinned food on which a
crumpled map was spread out. He saw a mountain of rifles, bundles of
uniforms, each one ticketed. And he felt how inch by inch, a dumb, icy
horror arose within him and paralyzed his breathing, as though the earth
overhead, upheld by only a thin scaffolding of cracked boards and
threatening to fall at any moment, had already laid its intolerable
weight upon his chest. And that prancing ghost, that giggling death's
head, which only a week before perhaps had still been young, affected
him like a nightmare. And the thought that now his turn had come to
stick it out in that sepulchral vault for five or six days or a week and
experience the same horrors that the man there was telling about with a
laugh intensified his discouragement into a passionate, throbbing
indignation which he could scarcely control any more. He could have
roared out, could have jumped up, run out, and shouted to mankind from
the depths of his soul asking why he had been tossed there, why he would
have to lie there until he had turned into carrion or a crazy man. How
could he have let himself be driven out there? He could not understand
it. He saw no meaning to it all, no aim. All he saw was that hole in the
earth, those rotting corpses outside, and nearby, but one step removed
from all that madness, his own Vienna as he had left it only two days
before, with its tramways, its show windows, its smiling people and its
lighted theaters. What madness to be crouching there waiting for death
with idiotic patience, to perish on the naked earth in blood and filth,
like a beast, while other people, happy, clean, dressed up, sat in
bright halls and listened to music, and then nestled in soft beds
without fear, without danger, guarded by a whole world, which would come