THE train stood in the station yard that stretched beside the Danube. It was made up chiefly of cattle cars, but at the far end, beyond the roofed platform, there was one first-class carriage. The lamps in the station were dim and the lamps in the one carriage made no impression on the heavy spring dawn. Gray figures milled about the train, thick as ants but with no visible direction in their movements. Now and then there was a shout or a command, but the noises of backing engines and opened steam vents predominated. Underlying all other sound was the steady shuffle of heavy boots on cinders, like surf pounding a sandy shore.

As the sky began to pale, the lamps under the shed went out and the milling gray figures came into sharper focus. Some were gray, but others were green, some were brown and many were blue. They all looked rumpled and the faces above the uniforms were haggard and gaunt. Now it could be seen that the cattle cars were filled with standing men, close packed. The doors bulged with soldiers, looking down on the ones below who passed back and forth in the hope of finding a place to squeeze themselves into. Heavy boots went on shuffling in the cinders, and the Danube began to catch light on its slow-moving surface.

Across the river the bulging promontory of the fortress of Belgrade pushed its nose between the two rivers that met at its foot. Gray barracks huddled below the mauve brick ramparts, and windows in the enormous buildings of the fortress began to glow as they caught reflections of the rising sun over the Pannonian Plain spreading flat across Croatia and Hungary into the heart of Europe.

A guard unlocked the doors of the first-class carriage with a clanking of keys, and the group of waiting men who were privileged to travel in this space reserved for officers and civilian passengers crowded close. “Zdravo, braté,” the guard said under his breath as he held the others back and let me enter first. I mounted the steps and moved quickly along the corridor to an empty compartment in the middle of the carriage, but I had no sooner seated myself beside the window than the door of the compartment opened and a man in a uniform of olive-green poked in his head. When he saw me in the dim light he backed out quickly and went on. This happened twice, and then a third figure appeared in the door, saw that the compartment was vacant except for me, and moved in.

His clothes were in marked contrast to those of the rest of the passengers pushing up and down the corridor of the carriage. They were civilian cut and made, they were of fine dark broadcloth, they were new and well pressed and immaculately clean. He nodded in my direction, but my uniform produced no disturbing effect upon him. Carefully he placed his black leather suitcase on the rack over his head, folded his topcoat and hung it behind the seat he had chosen opposite me at the window, and then pulled a book from its pocket and prepared to read. He appeared a wealthy Jew, probably twice my age.

The noises on the platform grew louder, the shuffling took on a faster tempo, the engine far ahead let out three high-pitched whistles, and the door of the compartment opened again. This time the man who looked in hesitated, then addressed me with exaggerated respect in the only French words he seemed to know. “Pardon. Occupé?” All travelers found them useful.

He was a well-built, more than middle-aged officer in the uniform of an Austrian infantry regiment. All insignia of rank had been removed, but from the dark patches where they had formerly been, I judged he must have been a colonel. His manner was that of the professional Austrian officer, conservative, cultivated, delicate and even slightly whimsical. He waited for my reply with an attitude of careful indifference. I answered shortly in French that he might come in and take a seat. He bowed slightly, evidently understanding the tone of my voice if not my words, and shut the door behind him as he chose a place next to it.

Again I was asked permission to enter. It was apparent the train was about to get under way. The second man spoke French with a heavy accent. He was also in the olive-green of the Imperial Army, but he was obviously Hungarian. His skin was swarthy and his hair black and oily; his features were sharp, pulling down to a long, pointed chin. Though his uniform, like the Austrian’s, was devoid of any distinguishing marks, his boots showed him to have been a cavalry officer. He sat opposite the Austrian beside the door, on my side of the compartment.

It was after the train had begun to move that I was begged once again for permission to occupy a seat. I had been watching Belgrade disappear over my left shoulder, thinking how the war had actually started here when the fortress was taken by the Austrians, and I scarcely turned my head to answer. I could keep them all out if I wanted to, but why should I? “Mais oui,” I said, “Entrez.”

The last man stepped over the feet of the Hungarian and looked at the two places left in the center of the compartment. He looked at me and then at the civilian. His face moved slightly without becoming any softer as his eyes rested on the man across from me, and then he sat down between the Hungarian and me. I had been watching him in the reflection on the window and I knew without looking up that he was a German. He was a young fellow, hardly older than myself, with a thin, highly-bred face and quick, hard eyes. I judged him to be a Junker, and from the marks where epaulettes had been torn from his shoulders, an officer in a regiment of guards. He sat stiffly, staring straight ahead at the photographs on the wall over the opposite seat.

After that I said “Non” sharply whenever the door opened and my permission was begged to occupy the last seat. I added, “Fermez la porte!” After I had said this several times the Hungarian saved me the trouble by thrusting one of his long legs across the door, motioning away anyone who tried to open it. If they persisted, he merely pointed at my blue uniform, and they went on.

No one spoke in the compartment, and there were only the sounds of the greaseless wheels under us grinding over unrepaired rails. Meadows white with daisies and fringed with pale willows passed by the window, then fields of newly plowed red earth, orchards in feathery bloom, vineyards marked by stiff, bare poles, flaming Judas trees and waxen dogwood in dark patches of woodland, and occasionally a meandering, dirty, slovenly village.

When the train met one of these clusters of houses it usually slowed its pace and sometimes it came to a full stop. Then there arose the sounds of hundreds of voices from the cattle cars ahead and an answering gabble from the peasants and soldiers on the platforms. Where was the train going and where would it stop next? No one in the cattle cars had an idea, and no one on the platforms could give an answer. At every station there was shifting; some jumped from the open doors of the freight cars and as soon as they did, others from the platform crawled in to take their places. Human cattle looking for their stables, with just enough animal instinct to find them in this shifting, unorganized wandering over the scarred face of Middle Europe.

My head fell back against the dirty cushion and I drifted into a sort of half sleep, forgetting where I was, forgetting that it was May in the year 1919. My body was tired and my mind was tired. There was no pattern in my thinking, for it was without will or purpose. A tension held too long had snapped, and now the images poured through my brain unchecked, fighting each other, pushing and shoving, without reason. I couldn’t quite lose consciousness, but I couldn’t stay awake.



A boy who had once been me was tormenting my mind. Four years ago or four centuries ago? What was there in common between the boy who had gone off to war in search of adventure and the officer in a French uniform who was now myself? I could remember many things the boy had done and thoughts he had dreamed, but what connection did they have with the tired mind and body that was me?

The boy of four years ago had believed that a uniform exchanged for his own clothes would automatically separate him from the world he had left behind. But the new tunic and trousers were unequal to the task of changing a nature overnight, even though they carried thin stripes on sleeves to indicate impending rank when the training course was ended. Nobody bothered about sizes or the fit of uniforms when they were handed out to recruits. Nor was there a walking-out suit or even a change provided. So the boy found himself in patched and spotted clothes previously worn by other unknown soldiers, with cap falling over ears, sleeves over hands, trousers under armpits to keep from being tripped. That didn’t seem the way an adventure should start.

Maybe another kind of uniform would do it, something more dignified. Please sir, could he be transferred from the officer-aspirants’ course to a front-line outfit? He didn’t so much care about a commission. But no one had ever heard of such a request. There were no precedents to follow. At last, however, repeated appeals changed the uniform to a new one of field-gray, and for a few days before the new regiment moved into line everyone in the town of Česká Budějovice looked with a mixture of feelings in their faces at this young boy who was going to fight at the front. The new uniform helped a lot. And then the regiment marched off to the train, with gay martial music helping to lighten the weight of a very heavy pack.

Six horses or forty-eight men in a cattle car. So the signs read, but since they were men there were usually more. Nine days in a cattle car while it crossed slowly the whole of Austria and Hungary, passed through Vienna and Budapest, and moved on toward the Dukla Pass. Then the train stopped in a valley in the Carpathians and the cattle cars were unloaded, and there was no food, no order, no organization, only mistakes. A forced march over the mountains toward the front lines began. On the way we heard that Italy had declared war on us, and the entire thirsty, hungry replacement battalion growled because we were not on our way to fight Italians instead of Russians. Italians were not brother Slavs.

Up and up, over the mountains, with packs growing heavier and legs weaker. A lance-corporal insisted on falling back to stay beside me whenever I couldn’t keep up with the others. It gave me new strength and warmth, in spite of my empty stomach. It was good to have found a friend. We stopped to drink from a mountain spring, with our faces buried in the water. Fifty yards farther, around a bend in the mountain path, we came on two half-decayed Russian soldiers lying in the source of the spring from which we had been drinking.

When the battalion came down onto the plain of Galicia we could see the explosion of big guns on the horizon and feel the ground rumble underfoot. The road was crowded with fleeing Galician Jews, old men with long beards wearing caftans and women in flowing black squares tied over their heads, pushing children before them in carts. Our officers had to force them off the road so we could get through.

We went up to the first line in the night, and at dawn came the order to advance. So we moved forward in the dim light with bayonets fixed and heavy packs on our backs, wondering where the enemy was. We had been told to kill Russians, but how could we if we didn’t know where they were? Through the earsplitting noise of hell came another order: the man on the right of the flank must run over the fields until he found the next battalion, tell them where we were, and return. The man on the right was I. I? A boy who used to bear my name.

How did he feel in his first battle? How was he able to make his legs follow the commands his ears had heard? This was adventure, and he was in it.

The Russians must have seen the movement when I began to run. I could hear bullets cracking by, and then a light field gun let loose, and the earth blew up all around me. I stopped running and began to walk. Why run? Mother would hear that I hadn’t hurried away. Shouts came at me from a deep hidden hole where Hungarians were crouching. I delivered my message and turned to go back. This time I didn’t run at all. I was within sight of my own outfit when an exploding shell knocked me flat.

I was alone in one of the holes our battalion had vacated when I came back to consciousness. My back was warm and sticky with blood and it oozed along my sides. I couldn’t move, except for my hands, and shrapnel was bursting and crashing all around me. Then I knew how frightened I was, and I began to cry. My hand went inside my shirt to find Mother’s picture in my wallet. I began to call her louder between sobs. Someone heard me and came back . . . my friend, the lance-corporal. Our battalion was retreating, but he pulled and carried me until we were in the shelter of a hill. I woke up again to find myself lying in straw on the floor of a schoolhouse in Starysol in Galicia, where typhus and cholera cases had been sent.

When the doctor stood over me he spoke only Hungarian, so I couldn’t tell him about my back. The clotted blood on my uniform was covered by dirt and he didn’t turn me over. He gave each man two tablets of aspirin and went away. It was an ambulance driver who discovered that I was wounded and not sick with disease. He smuggled me into a train with slightly wounded soldiers going back from the front. My lance-corporal friend, he told me when I asked, had been killed.

Five pieces of shell splinters and countless lice were taken from the wound in my back in a wonderfully clean hospital in Hungary. Within six weeks I was learning to walk straight again. In that Hungarian town far away from the war, people complimented me when I walked along the street and called me a hero, but I was ashamed and the shame turned to contempt because they knew so little about the battles they talked of glibly and were so ready to tell me to go back and give the enemy one for them.

I could still hear my own voice crying for Mother when I had been hurt and helpless in the hole. I could also hear the voices of officers as they lashed us with foul words to make us mad enough to fight . . . or perhaps to cover their own inefficiencies. Those didn’t seem to me to be the memories of a hero.



The train rumbled across an iron bridge and ran onto the dirt roadbed again as it continued over the Pannonian Plain. Someone had spoken in the compartment and the sound had cut through my half-waking thoughts, but I couldn’t tell where it had come from. I kept my eyes nearly closed and examined the others. The man across from me was still reading. He seemed to be continually on the point of smiling, though not from amusement. He had clever and sometimes shrewd black eyes that moved from side to side as they scanned the pages of his book.

The three officers were still sitting stiffly with their legs together and their hands lying on their knees. It was a habit they had acquired from the formal etiquette of their armies. They all had set expressions. That, too, was a habit. Before attack you set your face that way, as though against eternity. You were no longer yourself then, because your life was a hostage for the battle, for the reputation of the high command.

I studied the Austrian in the opposite corner. His eyes were red and he was having trouble with his nose. The German beside me continued to stare straight ahead at the photographs on the opposite wall. Though he was as young as I, his features were old-looking, a counterfeit of maturity caused by strain and fatigue rather than wisdom. I supposed I must look much the same.

In the ceiling the lamp swayed from side to side with the train’s motion. It was still burning feebly, to no purpose. Silence filled the compartment like a waiting presence. I turned so that I could look from the window, but the drifting scene failed to make an impression on my mind. It worked as a soporific instead and my eyes closed again.

“It’s a pity no one wants to talk on trains these days. My name is Drucker.” The words, spoken in French, were audible this time. I raised my eyelids slowly and saw the man opposite looking at me, still with his book open in his hands. The Hungarian, the German and the Austrian looked at him too, moving only their eyes. Drucker smiled, passing his glance from one to the other, but it was obvious the language was unfamiliar to them. He looked back at me.

“Even if they could understand,” he went on in French, “they would not speak until Monsieur le Capitaine said something first. It is because of the French uniform, of course, a victor among the defeated. Perhaps they would not speak even then.”

“Perhaps not,” I said. “Who cares?”

“We have a long way to go. It would be pleasant to exchange ideas. You are from Alsace, perhaps?”

“No.” It was only oriental politeness which sought to flatter me by raising my rank. I slipped down in the seat, leaned my head back and closed my eyes.



This is nothing but a jungle, my mind kept repeating. The train is a circus, taking the jungle animals from city to city. Uniforms distinguish the tigers from the leopards and wolves with a few tame herd animals thrown in for contrast. We’re on a railway line running through a jungle. The bars of our cages have been broken and we’re roaming around in a strange environment, hunting for old and famous and familiar places . . . Zagreb, Innsbruck, Danzig, Lodz. Thousands of us on this train are tired animals, trying to find our way home, moving from place to place, not sure any longer where our countries begin or end. All of us are rootless men.

Yet there’s something wrong with that image. It’s right about our countries. Fences at the borders have been taken away, like doors of cages, but do the animals know how to use their freedom? Nobody is sure today whether his home is in one country or another. Can that change a man’s heart? When the fences come down and the animals start to roam, are they happy until the wolves find more wolves, the leopards more leopards, the lions more lions? In this compartment, no one can talk freely until I speak first. But now I have spoken and still the Hungarian will not talk to his Austrian comrade-in-arms. Our Croatian conductor can now openly hate the Hungarian and the Austrian and the German, but he will not hate me if he thinks I am a Frenchman or if he knows I am a Czech. Back at Belgrade, a Serb guard in the station called me brother, but who is my brother? Animals don’t become tame simply because their bars have been removed.



“You are from Paris, perhaps?” Drucker watched me as he pulled at my thoughts, trying to bring them back for the purposes of conversation.

“No.”

“A distinguished city. I know it well. I thought . . . your accent . . . you are on your way home now?”

“Perhaps.” I answered without opening my eyes. But his pleasure in talking to someone he considered a victor in the war was not daunted by my rude replies. Had I rattled my sword and put on a display of Latin arrogance with gestures he would have liked it even better.

“My own city,” he went on, “is Vienna. Perhaps you know it? I wasn’t born there, but I have traveled much in the past twenty years and one becomes a citizen of the world after awhile. Please accept my compliments. The French are a remarkable people.”

“Yes,” I said. “But I’m not French.” I shifted my position on the dirty seat and he stopped talking.



Just when had I ceased to hunt for adventure by way of the war, in those long-ago days of four years ago? At some point, at some moment, I had stopped being a child. But where? When? The days and months were long and filled with strange commands, strange surroundings, strange feelings and thoughts and new points of view. Nothing made sense and there was little time for reasoning anything through to a conclusion. One morning in a battle on the Galician plains I was a frightened, weeping boy. Life had an enormous meaning because at any instant it might cease to be. But after awhile I was an automatic machine, with no feelings, no dreams, no personal will. At what moment had the change taken place? In Vienna, in the training school? Perhaps. But why there, and not some place else? It was difficult now to say.

After being discharged from the hospital in Hungary I was sent to join a class of three hundred and sixty recruits who aspired to win commissions in the Imperial Army. I still wore the dirty gray field uniform, bloodstained from my wound and patched where it had been ripped by the nurses. My classmates were beautiful in the smart outfits of the famous Deutschmeister and Tiroler Kaiserjäger regiments. They liked to spend their evenings in Vienna night clubs and brothels, getting drunk and being entertained by the gypsies in Bruck-Kirajhida. Any overtures on their part for comradeship I refused. Why? It was hard now to say.

There was only one reason why I had finally consented to go through the Officers’ Training School. If I passed the course my pay would give Mother a much larger allowance, but it was something beyond that. I was determined to win a commission, one star and then more stars, for the single purpose of rising in rank above the officers who had beaten us with their walking sticks to keep us awake through the nights before battle, who had cursed us and let me be carried in a manure cart with typhus and cholera cases because no one cared whether I lived or died. I was still less than twenty, and I wanted to pay them back. I was no longer afraid of being afraid.

Every night I studied while my classmates spent their allowances on drink and girls. I would have liked to drink, too, and I’d have liked a lot of girls. But each day I accepted extra duties in order to learn, and every Sunday I spent at the barracks, sitting at a wooden table where I used matches to make formations on a theoretical parade ground. A thorough understanding of parade ground ceremonials was considered essential to winning a war. I had never been a scholar, and if I had thought about it at all, I’d have said I lacked a first-class brain. So I had no choice but to work hard while the others played.

One day in November of 1915 the final examination was given. Sons of the most prominent families of Vienna and the whole empire were there, trying to solve theoretical problems of war. When the results were made known, an unknown corporal in a dirty field uniform led his class. For the first time in my life I realized I could have what I wanted, if I were prepared to work hard enough to earn it.

Two weeks later I was again at the front. Three times I had been commanded to stay in Vienna at the school as an instructor. After a third refusal I had my way. In a new uniform with proper insignia I was sent to join my old regiment on the Italian front, now as a cadet warrant officer. On the Isonzo we went in seven hundred strong. We came out with a hundred and thirty men alive.



My thoughts focused back to the compartment and the train when I heard an undertone of whispering on my right. The German and the Hungarian were talking quietly at first and then louder in the German’s native tongue, doubtless convinced that I could not understand what they were saying. They took no notice of the Austrian, though he emphasized his presence by constantly wiping his eyes and blowing his nose on a large blue and red handkerchief he must have bought in a Belgrade bazaar. Drucker seemed to be buried in his book, but I knew he was listening, too.

The Hungarian, it developed from his conversation, was a count. The weakness of Vienna, he was saying, had brought on the catastrophe of the war’s end. Of course, the treason of the Czechs had helped.

The young German Junker was exact in his speech. He agreed with the nobleman that treachery had been entirely to blame, but he hesitated in choosing his words and it was obvious that his mind was confused. He found it impossible to understand the situation in which he found himself. He had been fighting with the German guards in Macedonia, so he knew only that Bulgaria had betrayed them by submitting to an early armistice. At home, he was convinced, someone had stabbed the German army in the back. Why, look, they were so close to Paris . . . Russia had given in over a year ago . . . all of Belgium was in their hands . . . so were Rumania and Serbia and most of Italy . . . only treachery could account for such a sudden collapse.

He stopped speaking and looked across at the Austrian, who blew his nose again. The set of the Junker’s mouth when he turned back to the Hungarian indicated his opinion that the Austrian Empire was one of the weak links in his calculations and the undoubted cause of Germany’s surrender. He looked at Drucker to indicate there might be others. In his own mind, he could never admit defeat.

Drucker glanced at me over his book when I opened my eyes. He knew I had understood the conversation, too. The train had stopped at a station and I got up, stretching as I stepped over the boots of the other officers to reach the door. They stopped speaking at once and allowed me to pass. I stood on the platform of the first-class carriage, breathing deeply of the fresh air. It was Subotica, according to the sign on the station.

Below me, on the platform, was the same milling mass of people who appeared wherever we stopped. No one seemed to know where the train was going or how long it would take. Soldiers tried to get into the cattle cars and the men in the cars tried to keep them out. After awhile the engine whistled and I went back to the compartment. As I entered, the Hungarian was talking about what an impertinence it was of Rumania to claim parts of his country. He gestured broadly to emphasize his statement that Hungary would never vanish, but knew well enough how to recover territory that was rightfully hers.

“At least the Austrians and the French never fought against each other,” Drucker said in French as I sat down.

“Except on the Piave,” I replied.

“Yes, a little on the Piave. Were you there?”

I looked at the Austrian colonel in the corner. “For awhile.” The others were listening, but still they gave no sign of understanding the words we spoke.

“You are going to Prague, perhaps?” Drucker said.

I looked at him. “Perhaps.”

“General Franchet d’Esperey was fortunate in the composition of his army. You come from Salonika?”

“Yes,” I said.

The Hungarian had understood the name of the city and he scowled but he made no comment. His dark brows had come together over his nose.

Drucker’s smile spread across his face. He looked from side to side of the compartment and then he addressed himself to me for the first time in German. “It is too bad we do not at least have newspapers to read on trains these days. But since we do not, any conversation is better than silence, don’t you agree?”

I made no reply and his brown eyes rested on my blue uniform. The others turned their heads slowly to look at me, too. They were all uncomfortable at the disclosure that I understood German. They waited to see what I would do. I closed my eyes and shut them out, and there was silence again in the compartment.



The splintering rocks that fell down the mountainsides when the Italians shelled our positions near Gorizia were more dangerous than shell fragments. Days and nights and weeks and months of 1916 went by. None of the generals seemed to have found out how to fight a war in the mountains. On both sides, each mountain was a fort. We killed each other with artillery and from time to time the Italians launched an attack. Each attack was repulsed with enormous losses on both sides; on ours from their artillery and on theirs when their infantry came forward to occupy the ground.

It was waiting for these attacks, without relief and always in the same sector, that was bad. Whenever I couldn’t stand the inaction any longer I volunteered to go out on patrol. It was easier to take a long chance in some sort of action than to wait through the cold nights on the mountain and try to hide from my thoughts. On patrol we generally had to go down into the valley, and for company down there we had the bodies of Bersaglieri who had been killed months before by avalanches from the hills.

One night at Kostanjevica about a week before Christmas I volunteered again to go on a wire-cutting patrol. It was routine, but it was better than not going. I took six men with me and we worked our way on our bellies over the ground in the darkness, lying still whenever the Italian searchlights moved near us. Suddenly we came on the lip of a huge crater that had been formed in the mountains by centuries of erosion. A star shell broke at that moment and lit it up. We saw what looked like a whole company of Italians crouched in there, the whites of their eyes showing in the light of the star shell. There were about three hundred of them and they were surprised to see us. They had no means of knowing how many more were behind us. Because they were surprised, they took it for granted we were stronger than we were. They surrendered at my order, their hands going up in the air while the star shell sank, its light dwindling.

The Italians seemed docile enough as my men started rounding them up. At least, none of them wanted to commit suicide by making the first move. Then on the far edge of the crater I saw a dim figure sighting along a rifle. I knew he had me. The flash came, but when the bullet cut through my neck just at the Adam’s apple I felt no pain. It was rather as though someone had struck my neck with the side of his hand.

I regained consciousness in a field hospital at the rear of our lines, and from there I was taken to Ljubljana in Slovenia and my head and upper half of my body were put into a plaster cast. I was three months in that cloister they had turned into a hospital and the nuns fed me through a tube in my throat. When it was time to leave I was glad because the sisters were not bad nurses but too strict disciplinarians. I had received another decoration for bravery, but the citation seemed to be without meaning. I had also received a rise in rank to first lieutenant.

Back in Bruck-Kirajhida I was assigned to train officer-aspirants to throw hand grenades. “Remove the pin, count twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, and throw . . .” I kept telling them that over and over. We used live grenades because a man needs practice in keeping his nerve when he holds a live grenade in his hand. He has to learn not to throw it too soon, because if he does the enemy can pick it up and throw it back. He also has to learn to throw it straight, thinking only of himself as he does so, and not what is happening in the minds of the other men around him.

The cadets were only a year or two my junior, but they accepted me on my own terms, as an old man hard with experience. They were still apt to think of other things beside the will to kill. Those other things had to be squeezed out and thrown away. Part of my job was to appear confident of the ease and safety of grenade throwing. I must also appear a better man than any of them because I had been in battle and they had not.

One day in the trench where we practiced, an aspirant lost his nerve and dropped his grenade after he had pulled the pin. It rolled along the trench filled with thirty cadets and everyone’s eyes were glued to it when it finally came to rest. My actions were purely reflex. I picked up the bomb, jumped out of the trench and threw it. Just as it left my hand it exploded, and in the shock my reflexes took over completely. Afterward I was told what happened.

They said I jumped back into the trench and saw the boys watching me. “You see?” I said, being matter of fact. “They won’t hurt you. Now once more. Pull . . . count . . . throw.” Their tension relaxed and I called an N.C.O. to take over. The lesson went on.

I got out of the trench and by that time one of my boots was filling up with blood. The next thing I remember clearly was being in hospital again, after a piece of grenade had been taken out of my thigh. I spent two months there, and once during that time I was visited by the commanding general. He complimented me for what he called a brave act, and especially for not letting the cadets know until hours afterward where I had gone or that I had been hit.

All the orderlies and nurses were in the far end of the room, listening. After the general had gone, the orderly who changed my dressings remarked that my wound deserved more than a pat on the shoulder. But decorations were given for killing, not for saving men. What difference did it make, anyway? I had three medals already. I didn’t feel brave and it wasn’t good to be complimented as though someone had mistaken my identity. I tried to figure out why I had picked up the grenade and taken it out of the trench the way I did. Apparently the human body can perform anything if the brain has prepared it. Maybe what men call courage shows at the climax, but the climax itself is the product of many other things and is seldom controllable at the moment. Was my matter-of-fact attitude that day the response to an instinct to keep my dignity, or simply to rectify a mistake and so be immune from my own criticism? It was difficult to say.

When I got out of the hospital I asked to be sent back to the front, and by the time I rejoined my regiment they were at Monte Gabriele. It was 1917 and great preparations were being made for an invasion of Italy. The Italians ran very fast as we chased them across the Tagliamento to the Piave. We were tired when we finally came to rest in Motta di Livenza, but probably not so tired as they were.

Units of the German army had joined us during the last few days of our rapid advance. Now while we rested in billets, the German detachments made a tour of inspection of the Italian equipment we had acquired along the way, and there was a lot of it. Every Italian gun and truck and storeroom filled with matériel the Germans painted over with large white signs to say that it was now the property of the German Imperial Army. Nobody could stop them, of course, and in a little while it was all moved back to Germany. A good many local fights broke out between Austrian and Czech units and the German detachments that had joined us, and whenever this happened the Austrian or Czech battalions involved were moved up to the front-line at once.

In the spring of 1918 our regiment received orders to move again. We were loaded into trains and moved off for an unknown destination. We believed we were headed for a well-earned and long-promised rest in Bohemia, but the train went through Zagreb and on to Belgrade, and at Nish we were unloaded. There was great confusion as we were marched along the Morava River. Even the greenest replacement in the ranks knew that something was wrong. Commands contradicted each other, and usually there were no commands at all.

When a bridge suddenly blew up in front of us the order came to retreat. I was sent in command of a group of thirty unwilling Czechs from my company to make contact with the German army in the Maritsa Valley. On the way we were surrounded by a contingent of Serbian cavalry and we were prisoners of war.

The train ground on its generally northwesterly way, stopping, starting, jerking, puffing, coming apart and being put together again. By the end of the next afternoon the Hungarian had gone. Other officers and a passenger in civilian clothes had joined us in the compartment, and then they had left again at various stations. We were isolated from the world in this train, separated from reality by windows and doors and the movement that took us without personal effort from one point on the map to another. It was morning, it was noon, it was night. The night was long, punctuated by shouting and a mélange of noises whenever the train stopped at a station. Sometimes men came through the train demanding to see identification papers, and then the train moved again, sliding through a world of chaos and confusion and night. It was day again, and the same thing went on, men without meaning being moved through a world of no pattern and no identity. The past was gone and the future refused to appear.

When it was clear that the train was now in Austria, and Vienna not many hours away, the Austrian colonel began to brush himself off for the seventeenth time, shook out the red and blue handkerchief and wiped his watery eyes once more. He had said little during the whole tedious trip from Belgrade, ignoring the subtle insults of the German and the physical kicks of the Hungarian who had trouble keeping his long legs still. There were only four of us in the compartment now: the Jew and the German and the Austrian and myself. There had been almost no conversation except when civilian passengers had joined us for a time. Then Drucker had talked a great deal. Now he had begun another book and was content with silence.

The Austrian colonel cleared his throat and pulled his neck clear of his collar. He looked like a well-meaning professor dressed for a part in a play. He was never quite able to submerge his delicate manners in the part he had assumed. For two days he had been listening, or perhaps only caring for his own thoughts while the bickering went on, and now he had received the cue he had been waiting for.

“I shall be leaving you at Vienna,” he said, looking at no one in particular as he spoke. Drucker raised his eyes from his book and the young German flicked an imaginary spot from his knee. “I gather no one will mind.” His voice was cultivated, with a rich patina of Viennese culture over the German words. No one answered, so he went on. “The fact that this train runs at all is remarkable. This particular car, for instance.” His eyes traveled briefly over the restricted box of a compartment we had shared for so many hours. He looked at its shabby fittings and the dirt on the floor. “For the past four years it has been shunted all over Europe. How many officers do you think have traveled to battle in this very room? How many plans were made where we have been sitting?”

The train bucked over the track and the four of us swayed with its jerky motion, unconscious of discomfort because we had been moving over so many bad roadbeds for so many years.

“For you,” the Austrian went on, speaking directly to me now, “it is strange, wearing that uniform?”

“I’ve been wearing it quite awhile,” I said. “I’m used to it.” I glanced down at my strong, British-made boots. “Where I was, any kind of uniform—any kind of clothes—were good.”

“You were in the Balkans a long time then?”

“Long enough.”

“So . . . you have both lost and won the war. What a peculiar feeling that must give you.”

I turned my head to look directly at the colonel, but his face was tragic in its meaningless expression, rather than resentful. The German had become rigid, looking at neither of us.

“So much that was lovely has gone forever,” the Austrian went on as he examined his eyes in the mirror over his seat. “Of course, many of the stories we heard at the front are doubtless untrue. Vienna could never change as much as they say. It would be useless to have survived if things were as bad as that. One must be moderate, even in crediting rumors. It is well to remember that our heritage will never forsake us.”

The German rose to his feet and pushed toward the door. When it stuck, he kicked it open. Then he stood in the corridor staring out at the darkening countryside, his hands clasping and unclasping behind his back. The Austrian pulled the door shut behind him.

“I recognize the outskirts of Vienna,” he said. “It will unfortunately be dark before we get in. I am sorry you gentlemen must continue into the wilderness without me.”

Drucker spoke to me in French. “The last time I was in Vienna, not many weeks ago, they were beating up any officer seen on the streets who was still wearing his decorations.”

I made no reply. The Austrian took his luggage from the rack and went along the corridor toward the platform at the end of the car. The German stayed in the corridor, his back still turned. The Jew went on. “One can always be wrong. They are beating up officers in Vienna because the mob remembers how badly they were treated as soldiers by these same men. If they had won the war, flowers would have been thrown at them.”

I looked at the man who sat across from me. He had no wish to be unkind. Before we were many hours out of Belgrade he explained to me in French, so our companions couldn’t understand his words, how easily he recognized their hatred for him. He said it was because the Austrians and Germans had chased his people out of Galicia. The Jews who had been made homeless had crowded into Vienna and many cities of Germany. It was only a natural will to survive. Like himself, many of them had made good in their new homes, and now they were hated for having done so. They hated him on this train because he represented all the refugees who hadn’t starved to death, but had become wealthy instead by way of newly discovered talents in the large cities. While they were establishing themselves in business, the Germans and Austrians had lost this war of their own starting. It was necessary to find a whipping boy to drain off disgust with oneself. So the German and Austrian let him see their dislike.

He was expanding the same subject now. “In your new republic,” he was saying, “there has not been a single riot or street fight. Not that I know. When officers return, what do they do? The men who served under them take a vote. Those officers who are not acceptable to their men are demobilized and sent home. So their career ends, but they are not beaten.”

I had not heard of this. It sent my thoughts off again on a new tangent. “They’re mobilizing all over Czechoslovakia,” the voice went on. “There’s a campaign on against Hungary, but I doubt if they will succeed in taking back the part of Hungary ceded to your nation at Versailles. One day you Czechs will be hated by Germans the way they hate us now. When you have become prosperous and strong they will all curse you twice over, the way they are already cursing us.”

The train slowed down and stopped on a siding on the outskirts of Vienna and there it stayed for the rest of the night. No one knew why. It was the way of railroads everywhere in Europe in those days. Some of the first-class passengers walked up and down, up and down on the siding through the night, but the cattle cars remained crowded because no one dared lose his place in them. I stayed where I was, half asleep. Toward morning Drucker came back from his pacing and after awhile the train moved on again. The German had found a seat in another compartment.



The last time I left Vienna I had been wearing a gray field uniform of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Army, heavy with decoration ribbons and the stars of a first lieutenant. How long ago was that? A year—a century? I was on my way to the front again, filled with a renewed sense of excitement because I had been given one more chance to run away from a boy who would catch up and turn into me if I didn’t put him far behind. I had no idea then how nearly finished my active career was, in an army that would soon go out of existence altogether.

When the Serbs surrounded us and took us prisoner they removed the only purpose I had known for months and months and years and years. War had absorbed every thought, every reaction of my body and my mind. And then suddenly there was nothing to strain against any more. All we had to do now was walk. The Serbs told us when and where to go and we followed blindly, with no will and no reasoning and no responsibility. The whole of Macedonia lay ahead of us.

We walked through crooked valleys, up the sides of mountains that looked like giant slag heaps in hell, except that they froze at night. We walked down steep inclines and found it much worse than climbing up. But we always went on climbing up again, otherwise there would have been nothing to come down, and every day it was harder.

The mountains killed us more easily than they did the Serbs who were accustomed to them. Each day some of us died. In no time at all we had no boots left, and then there was blood on the rocks as we walked. Whenever a man fell, the Serbs let him lie and we marched on. It was a wilderness of rock and starving peasants. Many wars had been fought here, many battles had been lost and won on these same steep slopes. And as though the mountains we had to cross weren’t enough, the higher mountains of Albania on our right threw their shadows across our path.

For twenty days we marched over Macedonia with the altitude tearing at our lungs. The only food we ate we foraged for ourselves. We dug potatoes in the fields and ate them raw. We ate cabbage raw, too. Once we commandeered two live sheep and then we had to kill them and cook them into a stew with more cabbage and potatoes in a huge pot over a fire we built in a tilted field. But we had no utensils with which to eat the stew after it was made and the Serbs didn’t care whether we died of starvation or not. So we raided a hut that had been a malaria hospital for Germans when they had been in command of this territory. We found bedside basins and instruments in a makeshift laboratory, and we used them to eat the stew.

When we had followed the brown, swift-rushing Vardar down its cold way from the mountains to Skopje we were glad to see shops and houses again, even these Turkish buildings on steep, cobbled streets. Our minds were too tired and empty of thought to realize what our ragged, dirty column looked like as we moved slowly through the crooked streets of the town, but I saw minarets and women with covered faces and bearded men with fezzes on their heads sitting in cafés. The smell of Turkish cooking and the muted sounds of Turkish life were there, too, but our tiredness held them off, as something guessed at behind a screen.

We didn’t stop in Skoplje. We went on and on, threading our way across more mountains in our raw, bleeding feet. The near hills beyond the Turkish town were spattered with white markers on Moslem graves and the far hills were blue against the sky. We had to cross those, too, if we happened still to be alive when the column got that far. Sometimes the sun shone through racing clouds close overhead, but most of the time it rained.

Then toward sunset one evening we climbed another ridge of sharp, jutting stone, like hundreds we had climbed before, and there below us, beyond the foothills and a strip of coastal plain, was the sea. We could even make out moving specks on the water which we guessed were ships of the British navy. The low sun polished everything and made it glow. We had reached the Ægean, and I knew then I was not going to die.



The train began to run somewhat faster now, picking up speed gradually through the open country. A short, nondescript little man had joined us outside Vienna, but he kept a newspaper before his face and paid no attention to the two of us left by the window. The German came back once to collect his bag, and when he went out he deliberately left the door open behind him. We didn’t see him again.

Soon we would be at the new border of my country they called Czechoslovakia, and I would be nearly home. I was on my way to report to the headquarters of my regiment in Česká Budějovice. I tried to think how it felt to be a Czechoslovakian. How would it feel to go back to Prague, having left it to join an army that was now technically of an enemy country? It didn’t make sense. I hadn’t been fighting for a political principle, to free a nation. I’d been fighting to escape from myself, to merge myself with the biggest adventure open to a boy in my time.

And now, just because I had been born in Prague, and not some miles south on the other side of the Danube, I was a victor and not one of the vanquished. Had I earned that role?

It was a strange name, Czechoslovakia. Not really a choice name for a country, but probably the best they could find to say what they wanted to tell the world. Anyway, it was the name we had, though it had no great ring like England, or a deep resonance like France, or the hurry and sharpness of America, or the sound of wind over empty steppes like Russia. Belonging to a new country would mean new responsibilities. I tried to think about them but my mind rebelled and stopped working on this pattern of its own devising. I wasn’t ready to think about the future yet.

The prison camp the Serbs put us in was at Mikra, on a dirty waste along the sea beyond Salonika. We lived in tents half-buried in the ground inside fences of barbed wire. The wire separated us from the world outside, but there were strong, invisible wires to separate us from each other within the camp, too. German prisoners had nothing to do with Bulgarians, Czechs had nothing to do with Germans, and Hungarians had nothing to do with either of us. So the summer wore away, full of meaningless days and nights without end. We were still half-starved, half sick, and our minds were incapable of coherent thought.

It was in September of 1918 when a group of Czech Legionnaires arrived at our prison camp. They had a list containing the names of every soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army who had been born within the boundary of what they claimed as the new state headed by Thomas Masaryk. Those in the prison camp whose names were on the list were lined up in the yard, and I was among them. They asked if we were ready to consider ourselves citizens of Czechoslovakia and to proclaim our loyalty to it. I looked down the line, and most of them said yes. It seemed a good thing to do, so I said yes, too.

After the Legionnaires had gone I thought about what had happened. It was hard to make my mind stay with the thing that was worrying me. We had been fighting for nearly four years like beasts, not men. We had been disciplined by an army into organized killing and we had been able to lean back on discipline as though it were a wall. Not to think and not to question was a virtue. Now we had been asked suddenly to make a decision for ourselves, with no time to learn once again how to reason and weigh both sides.

I had agreed to consider myself a citizen of Czechoslovakia, but did that mean I must admit shame at having been an officer of a defeated army? I felt a duty toward an organization that had given me a chance to get away from a life I had found intolerable in Prague. Had I now deserted my duty this day? What did it mean, this act of mine, not only for now but for a distant future? Had I a right to claim my national birthright when others had won it for me?

What would this new country of mine be like? How could I tell? Faint echoes of words I had once heard Mother speak about independence and birthrights traveled in and out of my mind, but I couldn’t hold onto them. If I could have talked to Grandfather, he might have made the issue clear.

The first men in this camp to proclaim their allegiance to the new Czechoslovakia were not ones I would have chosen for compatriots. Some were officers who up to now had been fanatic German admirers, who had refused to speak to the Czech soldiers under them in any but the German language, whether the Czechs understood or not. Now something new had happened and it flattered their sense of power to think they had done it. So they were enthusiastic and loud in their new allegiance, ready enough to speak their native tongue.

Some of those men who had been questioned in the yard had refused to consider themselves members of the new republic because they had always lived in Vienna, even though they had been born in Bohemia or Moravia. At least they were honest with themselves, in spite of the temptation to wipe away the past few years by this sudden opportunity to change their citizenship.

Was I being equally honest with myself? I tried to lash my mind into coherent thought as it slipped away into another channel in order to forget. What would Mother have told me to do? She had taught me loyalty, but I remembered more clearly now some of the things she had said about one day being free. I had once joined the Imperial Army of Austria-Hungary because I was a subject of the empire. It was coming clear now. But in doing so, had I ever denied an attachment to my own race and my own people and the city of my birth? No, because at that time they were one. The empire was being dissolved, so my allegiance had been dissolved, too—by a force outside myself.

In a few days we were released from the prison camp, some two dozen of us. We were given new French uniforms that fit us, and the same ranks we had held as Austrian officers. We were quartered in Salonika under huge French army tents, fed well at a special barracks mess, and were allowed pay commensurate with our ranks. It was dizzying. General Franchet d’Esperey was our commander. Under him we were an army basically French, but augmented by groups of men from nearly a dozen other armies, some of them whole divisions, who were at heart on the same side. This was a recognition that the heart and the mind could co-operate as one. In a certain sense they won the war.

General Franchet d’Esperey was short, solid-plump and somewhat brutal in appearance because of the way his black mustache sprayed out under his hooked nose across his fat face. But he was a good general. He had a staff of British and French officers who had learned their trade on the Somme and at Passchendaele and in Palestine, at Verdun and the Oise and the Argonne. By this time they knew as much about fighting as the Germans did and more than the Bulgars would ever know. Besides, they had plenty of supplies. The British navy saw to that.

In the fall of 1918, a picked regiment of this army moved into Bulgaria and simply kept going. They stabbed up into Europe just where the Germans couldn’t reach them, and before mid-October Bulgaria was knocked completely out. In that sense, they won the war, for when Ludendorff heard this news he fell down in a fit.

I remained in Salonika with a communications detachment, and for the next six months I learned more about certain aspects of the world than I could have dreamed existed. In those months Salonika was a cesspool, a Babylon, an incredible place to a boy who had seen nothing of city life for three years of dogged fighting, and who had seen little enough of any kind of varied life before that. Scum from all over the world was in this dirty Ægean port, and some cream was still floating on top.

There were English and French officers who displayed freak records and abilities. There were military formations of Indo-Chinese like little monkeys in their French uniforms, East Indians, Sudanese with tattoo marks on their faces, Senegalese, Maltese, Moroccans with turbans and veils hanging over their uniforms, Arabs, Syrians, Greeks, Italians, Rumanians and Serbs to add to the polyglot of tongues. Thousands of Spanish Jews formed the core of the city’s basic activities. And then there were the South African negroes from the merchant marines.

Along the waterfront the buildings were in ruins, but under the castle the cobblestone streets of the Turkish section crawled laboriously up the mountain to form a labyrinth of pinched and crowded houses that had been untouched by the great fire. In the Vardar section, out-of-bounds for officers, the streets were lined with nothing but brothels. They all had balconies, which hung over the narrow streets that were like lanes, and on the balconies the naked women of all colors and shades and flesh tones stood while a seething mass of men passed below them, up and down, up and down all day and all night long.

Some of the brothels were large rooms open to the street with mats laid about on the floor. There were always lines waiting and watching the whores give service inside. East Indians in line awaiting their turns always squatted on the ground, their weight on their heels and their faces impassive. In other brothels there were bars and improvised platforms in the middle of the room where little boys and girls of nine and ten, wearing next to no clothes, went through the contortions of belly and nautch dances.

Homosexuals offered their particular wares openly. There were always more customers than the market could supply. Colors were brilliant in Salonika, smells were intense, sounds were polyglot, hopes were high. Every little news vendor on the corner spoke six or seven languages. All street signs were in three tongues: Greek, Hebrew and French. Signs were hung on the sides of buildings warning anyone who found a rat to kill it because Bubonic plague had broken out within the city limits.

One of the mind-jerking experiences of my months in Salonika was the constant contact with men I had considered my enemies because I had sworn to go into battle to kill them. Englishmen, Australians, Frenchmen, Americans—these represented only a part of an enormous concentrated power that stretched around the globe. They had plenty of food, good uniforms, a spirit of self-confidence. But of them all, the British Tommy impressed me most. He was reasonable, fair, well-behaved and he looked better in every way than men I would have considered his superiors without question a few months ago—officers in the imperial armies.

The world had suddenly become so much wider and more exciting and complex than I had dreamed it was. It had so many different faces, it had so much more variety of sound and color than I had ever thought existed anywhere. What had Austria-Hungary and Germany been fighting for? It was obvious to me now that all the propaganda I had been taught in school was foolish and untrue. Our enemies were not monsters; they were these same Englishmen and Frenchmen and Americans. I began to feel pride in being considered their ally.

I had not heard a word from Mother in more than a year and a half and there was no method now by which I could send her a portion of my pay. So it went down my throat in liquor. Along the waterfront in the luxurious night clubs of the Tour Blanche, Greek society and officers met, but they were too expensive for a first lieutenant, even if his uniform was now blue. So were the Russian girls who had escaped from the revolution in their country and were now offering the fullness of their beauty for the pleasure of Syrian, Latin, Nordic, Jew and Greek.

So September passed and it was October. It was a lifetime of experience, it was November, and the war was over at last. Searchlights tore the sky into shreds; sirens blasted eardrums; drunks became more drunk, and officers roamed freely through the forbidden Vardar while soldiers found themselves on the Tour Blanche for the first time. The war was over, but Salonika went on. It was December, January, February, March. It was another lifetime, a new existence, unrelated to anything past.

In the early part of May we were told we could go home. The smells, the colors, the voices and sounds of weird music in Salonika went on. They were still beating through my blood and my brain after five days on the train.

What was my home? Where had I been? How could this stranger in a French uniform go home to a world he had never known? He had come into being in the midst of a war, homeless, in a world without boundaries. What would it mean now, to be a citizen of an independent country? A wild animal looking for its home was independent, but could still be lost.

Where was Mother and what did her long silence mean? Had her letters been withheld from me, or was she dead? In all the letters I had received from her, she had talked only of her love and encouragement. They had told nothing of what she must have gone through. What use would she have for the stranger who was coming back to her in place of the boy who had gone? I wasn’t ready to call any place home, when I had yet to find out who the man was who had taken the boy’s place in my mind.

The brakes of the train ground against its wheels and then it stopped and steam blew off from the engine. Once more there was the noise of mixed voices outside and the closing and opening of doors. An official in nondescript uniform stuck his head in the compartment, asked a few questions, looked at our papers, and when he handed mine back he said to me in Czech, “A French officer, eh? On your way to Česká Budĕjovice?”

“That’s what it says on my pass.”

“So I see. Where do you live?”

I hesitated and he turned an eye of suspicion on me. “I’m going to rejoin my old regiment,” I said.

He turned my papers over and read them again. After a moment he shrugged and handed them back to me and went away.

I turned to watch the country from the window. Was it my imagination that made me think it looked tidier, better kept and more fruitful than the country we had been passing through before? The small villages were immaculate, and those people I could see were smiling as they worked. Perhaps they were not exactly smiling, but they looked as though they were happy and were likely to smile easily and often. They were certainly different from the Serbian peasants, and even distinguishable from the Austrians who had appeared in the unfolding scenes outside the window the day before. What made that difference? Or was it only an extension of my imagination? Where were we now, and who were these people who could smile though they lived in the very center of Europe?

I thought about it awhile and then suddenly I realized we were in Czechoslovakia. Was that what it meant to be part of a new and independent nation, respected by oneself as well as in the eyes of the world?

The train had stopped again. I heard the voice of Drucker. “You’ve been asleep,” he said. “This is your station. I wish you a pleasant journey from now on. It has been most interesting, this trip.”

I tumbled out onto the platform with my bag and discovered that my heart was beating too fast. Morning mists were still lying over the plain. It was difficult to make out what lay beyond the station as I picked up my bag and started off on the avenue that led to the barracks.