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Updated: May 18, 2025
Fourteen bloody bodies lined the path he had trodden without fear. How should his eyes not radiate arrogance? The captain hastened on, past Weixler. If only he did not have to see him, he told himself, if only he did not have to meet the contented gleam of the man's eyes. He feared his rage might master his reason and his tongue get beyond his control, and his clenched fist do its own will.
The captain had to see! He pulled his head farther out from under the mound and uttered a hoarse cry, a cry of infinite horror. The wretched man was dragging his entrails behind him! "Weixler!" burst from him in a shudder of compassion. The man turned slowly, looked down at Marschner questioningly, pale, sad, with frightened eyes.
Crushed by the weight of his impressions, Captain Marschner crept through the trench like a worm, and his thoughts turned ever more passionately, ever more desperately to Lieutenant Weixler.
Wasn't that the red- haired endman in the second line, the paper-hanger and upholsterer who had carried that exquisite little girl in his arms up to the last moment until Weixler had brutally driven him off to the train? It seemed to the captain as though he could still see the children's astonished upward look at the mighty man who could scold their own father.
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.
After a while it came to Captain Marschner's consciousness that some one was hissing into his left ear. He turned his head and saw Weixler running beside him, scarlet in the face. "What is it?" he asked, involuntarily slowing down from a run to a walk. "Captain, I beg to announce that an example ought to be instituted! That coward Simmel is demoralizing the whole company.
Captain Marschner walked back to the woods deliberately, doubly glad of the lesson he had just given Weixler because it also meant a brief respite for his old boys. Perhaps a shell would hurtle down into the earth before their noses, and so these few minutes would save the lives of twenty men. Perhaps? It might turn out just the other way, too.
As Weixler delayed coming, he crept up through the shaft to the top. The man's small, evil eyes flew to meet him and sought the written order in his hand. The captain acted as though he did not notice the question in his look, and said imperiously: "Lieutenant, I turn the command of the company over to you until " A short roar of unheard-of violence cut short his speech.
To be sure, they won't lie in peace there under the earth very long, because the shells rip everything open right away again. I've had to have my poor ensign buried three times over already." "How did they get in here anyhow?" Weixler asked, pushing himself forward. "Did you have a fight in the trench?" The other lieutenant shook his head proudly. "I should rather say not.
Weixler alone could help him or take his place, with that grim, cold energy of his, with that blindness to everything which did not touch his own life, or which was eclipsed by the glowing vision of an Erich Weixler studded with decorations and promoted out of his turn.
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