The World as I Found It (60 page)

She looked at him in astonishment. He's not so terribly impudent. And, yes, he
is
clever — so what?

Wittgenstein leapt on this. Oh, of course! All Jews are clever! All Jews have poignant stories. As for those of us on the front — well, we can all go to hell as far as you're concerned. We're not so
picturesque
.

Oh, of course! she said, her voice beginning to squeak. And as for your family — we can all go to hell, too. But it's so very selfless to get yourself killed, isn't it? In the army, you can live out your little Tolstoyan fantasy of the common man, shooting those God-fearing pogrom-loving peasants whom you so adore. So Christian! Such a lover of the common man to pillory me for having an unspeakable little Jew for a driver! Worried you might be a bit of a Jew yourself, is it?

No, not worried, he said, moving toward her in a bottled rage. What I'm speaking about is
seeing clearly
.

Good!
Gretl did her best to return his stare, trembling slightly as she said, Then listen to me. No more quarreling or evasions. Yes, you know — you know what I'm talking about.

He knew, and he was moving away. No longer was he the angry patriot. He was the defeatist now, sick to his heart as Gretl pressed in, saying, Just answer me, then. Why can't you leave the army? You've fought honorably. We've paid our share — more than our share. Why can't you leave?

Because I can't.

But you
can
! You can be discharged, I've checked. So why? Mother won't ask, but I can tell you, it will kill her if anything happens to you. So why? Explain it to me.

Gretl was using on him the same arguments he had used on Pinsent, but to no avail. He was trapped. Ripping back and forth across the rug, he said, I don't care what the army says. The army has nothing to do with it.
I
can't. Morally I can't. And not because I'm a diehard. I'm obligated to my men.

Now she was scathing. Oh, don't be an ass! And it's not just patriotism or loyalty, so stop it! Your first obligation is to your family.

Then you don't understand, he protested. You don't understand at all. But beneath his vehemence, he saw that he didn't understand it either — not at all.

At home there had been one more thing that sharpened this mounting sense of moral confusion and ambiguity. It was a letter from Pinsent.

This was the second letter he'd received from Pinsent, and again it was sent through Keynes. Military mail, two thin sheets permissible, mangled by the censor's hasty black pen. Not much, but still he knew he was damned lucky to get it. The problem, though, was what to do with it. With each reading the letter changed. Confounding analysis or reduction, cunningly cheating expectations, it finally crumbled to ashes, sucked dry with repeated readings. No way to reconstruct the living from words or traces. No way to tell if Pinsent was not angry or distant, not changed or lost to him in some fundamental way. The letter said:

T
HE DOCTORS
at the field hospital were stumped: though they were quickly able to rule out typhoid as the root of the big Croat's paralysis, they otherwise didn't know what to make of his symptoms. On the other hand, the doctors knew, from long experience, that they did not want to risk alarming the troops with fears of some unknown malady. With typical candor, they instead sent word that it was an endocrinic flare-up, treatable and absolutely noncontagious — nothing at all to be concerned about.

Unfortunately, by the time the good news filtered back to the field, two more men in Wittgenstein's platoon, as well as four men in another, had been stricken with similar symptoms, rekindling fears of an epidemic. Ensconced in the command dugout, busily reviewing new deployment plans, the stalwart Lieutenant Stize was quick to pooh-pooh this epidemic rubbish, shrewdly noting that all the afflicted were “territorials” who, as anyone knew, were prone to hysterical disorders. Yet when Wittgenstein suggested that an appearance by the lieutenant might calm the men, Stize flatly refused:

That's your job, Sergeant. I'm not here to wet nurse this bunch. As you can see, I'm busy.

In fact, Stize was only repeating wisdom gleaned from the officers' mess, that indestructible café-bunker where he and his cohorts were now spending more time than ever. In the meantime, it hardly escaped the attention of malcontents like Grundhardt that the officers were staying far away from what they knew to be a contagious disease spread by bad water (the officers were said to have “special water”), rats, corpses or, in yet another variation, a mosquito found only in the pestilential Pripet marshes. By the next day, when twenty-two more were stricken, panic set in as rumors circulated that half of the sick men had already died from the disease, which was now called typhus, diphtheria, scarlet fever, sleeping sickness and even plague.

At the same time, the Russians were stepping up their own campaign of nerves. Airplanes buzzed over the Austrian trenches, scattering leaflets printed in five languages urging Czechs and other nationals to desert the Hapsburg tyrants, citing devastating fuel, food and ammunition shortages that would soon bring crushing defeat. In good times, such propaganda was scorned or ignored, but under the circumstances it fueled even wilder rumors that the Russians, having poisoned their water and food, were now about to unleash a new and more deadly form of chemical gas.

Wittgenstein felt the rumor campaign mounting against him as well. Coming around a traverse that morning, he had found a group of men standing in simple-minded merriment before a crude chalk drawing of a bug-eyed creature named
Shitgenstein
swallowing the shaft of an enormous cock labeled
Ernst
.

It was as if someone had struck him over the head. Without even thinking, Wittgenstein swiped up a handful of mud and blotted out the drawing. But then as he looked around at his men, he realized that this would only be taken as an embarrassed admission of guilt. Yet wasn't he guilty? It made no difference that he was innocent of this particular charge. The picture expressed a pictorial
possibility
. It was the potent latency of wish, a dreaded connectedness.

Damn it, he told himself, feeling himself dying before them.
Think!
Drive them back.

But seeing the men staring at him, judges now, he realized that here, in the kangaroo court of the trenches, guilt was its own truth. Lies bind reality as much as truth does. Men believed they were sick, therefore they were sick; with their own eyes they saw a picture that pleased them, hence it was true. The picture, open in form, offered itself equally to truth and falsity. The picture was true because he feared it.

How could he have been such a fool? he wondered dizzily. Clearly, they had known his proclivities all along. Steeling himself, he ordered the men off. He was all atremble then, thoroughly smearing it out with mud, when Ernst found him. Evidently Ernst had discovered another drawing, because he looked ready to throttle someone — possibly him, Wittgenstein thought.

Packing his fists, Ernst said, God damn it, Wittgenstein, I've had it! I'm going to teach that little son of a bitch a lesson.

No! Wittgenstein caught him by the arm. Damn it, Ernst, you thrash him and you'll only be dignifying this muck. It may not even be Grundhardt.

Ernst slammed his fist into the sandbags. So what do we do, huh? Let him make bloody fools of us? Christ, he said, raging off. You're as bad as Stize in my book.

More leaflets fell. And then, to give added weight to their warnings, the Russians pounded them for over four hours with their heaviest artillery in a barrage so well orchestrated that the senior staff wondered if the batteries were really Russian. Something was amiss. Ever since their long retreat the previous summer, the Russians were reported to be suffering from a chronic shortage of shells: they hadn't dared use harassing tactics like these. But instead of responding with a galloping wall of fire, the Austrian return barrage was so tentative and thin that the troops became even more disheartened, feeling the enemy leaflets spoke the truth.

Blind as a charging rhinoceros, the Austrian army was incapable of quickly switching tactics to confront battlefield exigencies. The Austrian senior staff had still less patience for, or interest in, frivolous civilian niceties, such as timing. And so, even as the dead and wounded were being carted off after the bombardment — at a time when the epidemic was for the moment forgotten and the troops were most concerned with shoring up their broken defenses — they were instead confronted with medical officers, who arrived with jars of big blue placebos that they promised would stop this “flu.”

Stize and most of the other officers were not about to tarnish their prestige (or unnecessarily expose themselves) by being present when these jawbreakers were distributed. That task instead fell on platoon leaders like Wittgenstein. The men were understandably skeptical as he and Ernst started passing out the pills. Still, their native ignorance and herd fear might have led them to trust the efficacy of this sugar medicine had not Grundhardt spat his pill in the mud and squalled, These are worthless!

Standing down the trench, Wittgenstein pointed at him and said, Pick it up! And then, as if obeying his order, Ernst snatched up the muddy pill and rammed it down Grundhardt's throat.

Spit it out! Ernst sneered, cocking back his fist. Go on, you slimy little fucker. I dare you!

Wittgenstein was too late to stop him. But even then Grundhardt managed to turn the situation to his advantage, gagging and coughing so fiercely that the men felt Wittgenstein and Ernst were lashing back — trying to poison all of them.

That was it for Wittgenstein. He immediately went to Stize and insisted that Grundhardt be jailed for inciting unrest. Stize, then being shaved by Krull, wouldn't hear it.

How can you bother me with this nonsense? he asked, blowing a wisp of lather from his upper lip. Here we have an epidemic on our hands, the Russians are poised to attack, and you bother me with
this?
I don't care what he spit out. I don't even blame him. Now go! I have work to do.

Wittgenstein did not know what he was going to do when he emerged from Stize's dugout. Everyone knew he had gone to Stize about Grundhardt, and when he came back empty-handed, his authority would be a joke, if it wasn't a joke already. Grundhardt had won. He had even succeeded in driving a wedge between him and Ernst. And now here was Grundhardt. Wittgenstein had ordered him to wait by the latrine, fearing that Ernst might kill him. He felt a terrific sense of anxiety when he saw the little pimp down the trench, smiling that malignant smile. Grundhardt was openly flouting him now, talking to two men when Wittgenstein had ordered him to stand at attention and not to speak to anyone. Wittgenstein hardly knew what he was doing. He must have said something to the two men because they parted from his vision like sheaves of wheat, and suddenly he found himself alone with Grundhardt. Wittgenstein was walking behind him, enraged now, with an ungodly clapping in his ears. And then Grundhardt turned to him with that nasty smile. Scratching his crotch insinuatingly, he then casually raised his middle finger to scratch his long nose — just, it seemed, so Wittgenstein could see the chalk under his nails. Wittgenstein wasn't made of iron. He snapped then — snapped so suddenly that he fairly overwhelmed himself as he pounced on Grundhardt, his thumbs locked on his windpipe as he said in a voice that issued deep from the pit of his stomach,
So you think you can outsmart me? Think so!

Struggling up with blood-engorged tongue, gurgling with rage, Grundhardt clawed at his hands as Wittgenstein hauled him up by the neck, then slammed his head down so violently that the black mud spattered up into his eyes. No telling what stopped Wittgenstein from killing Grundhardt. Certainly it was not a matter of conscious choice or some inner sense of decency. Wittgenstein simply felt a stab of revulsion and yanked him up by the collar. Coughing and gasping, Grundhardt spat and jerked away, wiping his purple face with a mud-drenched sleeve. Trembling, Wittgenstein felt utterly crazed, like an animal facing a natural predator, a hamstringing wolf who had now cut him from the fold.
Kill him
, said a stricken voice.
Kill him while you still can
. But over this came the quailing instinct of civilization, the astounding notion that even now this matter could somehow be negotiated, tidied, explained. But here Grundhardt was eons ahead of him; Grundhardt knew they had long passed that primal meridian. With his gray wolf eyes burning through the bitter black mud, Grundhardt scraped a long nail under his throat, a pig slit, slow and deep. Then, trembling like a berserker, he bit his thumb so hard that it cracked as he growled, I'll kill you for this, you cocksucker — you kike. I swear to God I will. And then in a little wind he was gone, slipping like a greased turd down the trench.

It wasn't like Ernst to apologize. But he must have been sorry for his outburst, or perhaps just lonely, because he came to Wittgenstein a few minutes later and said, Want to hear our latest intelligence?