distance lies the implacable
lieutenant, his entrails trailing on the ground beside him. They
exchange a last look. Marschner sees a face that is almost strange to
him, pale and sad, with timid eyes. The whole expression is gentle and
plaintive; there is an unforgettable air of tender, anxious resignation.

"He is suffering!" flashed through the captain's mind. "He is
suffering!" Marschner is transported with joy. And therewith he dies.

"My Comrade" (Der Kamarad) is the diary of a soldier in hospital. This
man has been driven mad by the terrible sights at the front, and above
all by the vision of a wounded man in the death agony, a poor wretch
whose face had been torn away by a grapnel. The sight was seared upon
his brain. The image never left him by day or by night. It sat down
beside him at meals; went to bed with him; got up with him in the
morning. It had become "My Comrade." The description is positively
hallucinating, and this story contains some of the most forceful
passages in the book, directed against the warmongers and against the
humbugs of the press.

"A Hero's Death" (Heldentod) describes the death in hospital of First
Lieutenant Otto Kadar. He has a fractured skull. While the regimental
officers were listening to a gramophone playing the Rakoczy march, a
bomb exploded among them. The dying man never stops talking of the
Rakoczy march. He imagines that he is looking at the corpse of a young
officer whose head has been carried away, and in place of the head,
screwed into the neck, is the gramophone disc. In his growing delirium,
he fancies that the same thing has happened to all the common soldiers,
to all the officers, to himself; that in each one the head has been
replaced by a gramophone disc. That is why it is so easy to lead them to
the slaughter. The dying man makes a frantic effort to tear away the
disc from his own neck, and as he does so all is over. The old major
looking on says in a voice vibrating with respect: "He died like a true
Hungarian--singing the Rakoczy march."

"Home Again" (Heimkehr) tells of the homecoming of Johann Bogdan, who
had been the handsomest man in his native village. He returns from the
war hopelessly disfigured. In hospital his face has been remade for him
by means of a number of plastic operations. But when he looks at himself
in the glass he is horror-stricken. No one in the village recognises
him. The only exception is a hunchback whom he had looked on with
conte