in civil life was a professor of philosophy, and so was called
"Philosopher" for short. The cavalry captain had received a cut across
his right arm, and the Philosopher's upper lip had been ripped by a
splinter from a grenade. Two ladies were sitting on the bench that
leaned against the wall of the hospital, and these three men were
monopolizing the conversation with them, because the fourth man sat on
his bench without speaking. He was lost in his own thoughts, his limbs
twitched, and his eyes wandered unsteadily. In the war he was a
lieutenant of the landsturm, in civil life a well-known composer. He had
been brought to the hospital a week before, suffering from severe shock.
Horror still gloomed in his eyes, and he kept gazing ahead of him
darkly. He always allowed the attendants at the hospital to do whatever
they wanted to him without resistance, and he went to bed or sat in the
garden, separated from the others as by an invisible wall, at which he
stared and stared. Even the unexpected arrival of his pretty, fair wife
had not resulted in dispelling for so much as a second the vision of the
awful occurrence that had unbalanced his mind. With his chin on his
chest he sat without a smile, while she murmured words of endearment;
and whenever she tried to touch his poor twitching hands with the tips
of her fingers, full of infinite love, he would jerk away as if seized
by a convulsion, or under torture.

Tears rolled down the little woman's cheeks--cheeks hungry for caresses.
She had fought her way bravely through the zones barred to civilians
until she finally succeeded in reaching this hospital in the war zone.
And now, after the great relief and joy of finding her husband alive and
unmutilated, she suddenly sensed an enigmatic resistance, an unexpected
obstacle, which she could not beg away or cry away, as she had used to
do. There was a something there that separated her mercilessly from the
man she had so yearned to see.