Short Stories

War

The story came to me from a woman met on a train.  The car was crowded and I took the seat beside her.  There was a man in the offing who belonged with her—­a slender girlish figure of a man in a heavy brown canvas coat such as teamsters wear in the winter.  He moved up and down in the aisle of the car, wanting my place by the woman’s side, but I did not know that at the time.

The woman had a heavy face and a thick nose.  Something had happened to her.  She had been struck a blow or had a fall.  Nature could never have made a nose so broad and thick and ugly.  She had talked to me in very good English.  I suspect now that she was temporarily weary of the man in the brown canvas coat, that she had travelled with him for days, perhaps weeks, and was glad of the chance to spend a few hours in the company of some one else.

Everyone knows the feeling of a crowded train in the middle of the night.  We ran along through western Iowa and eastern Nebraska.  It had rained for days and the fields were flooded.  In the clear night the moon came out and the scene outside the car-window was strange and in an odd way very beautiful.

You get the feeling:  the black bare trees standing up in clusters as they do out in that country, the pools of water with the moon reflected and running quickly as it does when the train hurries along, the rattle of the car-trucks, the lights in isolated farm-houses, and occasionally the clustered lights of a town as the train rushed through it into the west.

The woman had just come out of war-ridden Poland, had got out of that stricken land with her lover by God knows what miracles of effort.  She made me feel the war, that woman did, and she told me the tale that I want to tell you.

I do not remember the beginning of our talk, nor can I tell you of how the strangeness of my mood grew to match her mood until the story she told became a part of the mystery of the still night outside the car-window and very pregnant with meaning to me.

There was a company of Polish refugees moving along a road in Poland in charge of a German.  The German was a man of perhaps fifty, with a beard.  As I got him, he was much such a man as might be professor of foreign languages in a college in our country, say at Des Moines, Iowa, or Springfield, Ohio.  He would be sturdy and strong of body and given to the eating of rather rank foods, as such men are.  Also he would be a fellow of books and in his thinking inclined toward the ranker philosophies.  He was dragged into the war because he was a German, and he had steeped his soul in the German philosophy of might.  Faintly, I fancy, there was another notion in his head that kept bothering him, and so to serve his government with a whole heart he read books that would re-establish his feeling for the strong, terrible thing for which he fought.  Because he was past fifty he was not on the battle line, but was in charge of the refugees, taking them out of their destroyed village to a camp near a railroad where they could be fed.

The refugees were peasants, all except the woman in the American train with me, her lover and her mother, an old woman of sixty-five.  They had been small landowners and the others in their party had worked on their estate.

Along a country road in Poland went this party in charge of the German who tramped heavily along, urging them forward.  He was brutal in his insistence, and the old woman of sixty-five, who was a kind of leader of the refugees, was almost equally brutal in her constant refusal to go forward.  In the rainy night she stopped in the muddy road and her party gathered about her.  Like a stubborn horse she shook her head and muttered Polish words.  “I want to be let alone, that’s what I want.  All I want in the world is to be let alone,” she said, over and over; and then the German came up and putting his hand on her back pushed her along, so that their progress through the dismal night was a constant repetition of the stopping, her muttered words, and his pushing.  They hated each other with whole-hearted hatred, that old Polish woman and the German.

The party came to a clump of trees on the bank of a shallow stream and the German took hold of the old woman’s arm and dragged her through the stream while the others followed.  Over and over she said the words:  “I want to be let alone.  All I want in the world is to be let alone.”

In the clump of trees the German started a fire.  With incredible efficiency he had it blazing high in a few minutes, taking the matches and even some bits of dry wood from a little rubber-lined pouch carried in his inside coat pocket.  Then he got out tobacco and, sitting down on the protruding root of a tree, smoked and stared at the refugees, clustered about the old woman on the opposite side of the fire.

The German went to sleep.  That was what started his trouble.  He slept for an hour and when he awoke the refugees were gone.  You can imagine him jumping up and tramping heavily back through the shallow stream and along the muddy road to gather his party together again.  He would be angry through and through, but he would not be alarmed.  It was only a matter, he knew, of going far enough back along the road as one goes back along a road for strayed cattle.

And then, when the German came up to the party, he and the old woman began to fight.  She stopped muttering the words about being let alone and sprang at him.  One of her old hands gripped his beard and the other buried itself in the thick skin of his neck.

The struggle in the road lasted a long time.  The German was tired and not as strong as he looked, and there was that faint thing in him that kept him from hitting the old woman with his fist.  He took hold of her thin shoulders and pushed, and she pulled.  The struggle was like a man trying to lift himself by his boot straps.  The two fought and were full of the determination that will not stop fighting, but they were not very strong physically.

And so their two souls began to struggle.  The woman in the train made me understand that quite clearly, although it may be difficult to get the sense of it over to you.  I had the night and the mystery of the moving train to help me.  It was a physical thing, the fight of the two souls in the dim light of the rainy night on that deserted muddy road.  The air was full of the struggle and the refugees gathered about and stood shivering.  They shivered with cold and weariness, of course, but also with something else.  In the air everywhere about them they could feel the vague something going on.  The woman said that she would gladly have given her life to have it stopped, or to have someone strike a light, and that her man felt the same way.  It was like two winds struggling, she said, like a soft yielding cloud become hard and trying vainly to push another cloud out of the sky.

Then the struggle ended and the old woman and the German fell down exhausted in the road.  The refugees gathered about and waited.  They thought something more was going to happen, knew in fact something more would happen.  The feeling they had persisted, you see, and they huddled together and perhaps whimpered a little.

What happened is the whole point of the story.  The woman in the train explained it very clearly.  She said that the two souls, after struggling, went back into the two bodies, but that the soul of the old woman went into the body of the German and the soul of the German into the body of the old woman.

After that, of course, everything was quite simple.  The German sat down by the road and began shaking his head and saying he wanted to be let alone, declared that all he wanted in the world was to be let alone, and the Polish woman took papers out of his pocket and began driving her companions back along the road, driving them harshly and brutally along, and when they grew weary pushing them with her hands.

There was more of the story after that.  The woman’s lover, who had been a school-teacher, took the papers and got out of the country, taking his sweetheart with him.  But my mind has forgotten the details.  I only remember the German sitting by the road and muttering that he wanted to be let alone, and the old tired mother-in-Poland saying the harsh words and forcing her weary companions to march through the night back into their own country.