Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Alfred Neumann
From The Devil (1926)
Translated by Huntley Paterson
At the beginning of November, the undisciplined soldiers, exasperated by the stubborn resistance and their own heavy losses, were still engaged in murder and pillage in the conquered city. The Duke’s Limburger troops were methodically setting it on fire for the third time, and the swollen corpses of the drowned, mingling with the floating ice on the Meuse, were being carried down the stream like ghastly flotsam, while the Burgundian cavalry with their lances were massacring the rest of the inhabitants – men, women and children – who had fled to the hills.
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Louis’ will to keep death at arm’s length had driven his misanthropic and suspicious habits of mind to extremes. Matters had become so bad that he could no longer endure to look on the houses of the town from the windows of the castle. And accordingly…he retired to the lonely and inaccessible fortress of Plessis-les-Tours, and with the frenzy of a madman who imagines he is being persecuted, strengthened it with the most formidable defences. In order to make it even more secure, he strictly forbade anyone to approach it, and punished with death all who disobeyed – that is to say, all who, unaware of the dangers, had not already fallen victims to the thousand and one pitfalls, man-traps and automatic spring-guns that lay hidden about the approaches to the castle. And it was from this stronghold that, with Oliver at his side, he directed the affairs of the realm with a sharp and a hard hand. As deaf to the groans of his oppressed people as he was blind to their heroic obedience, he guided the country’s destiny with skill and certainty, and displayed so deep a knowledge of every political factor that the people – filled with mingled admiration and horror – regarded the omniscience of their invisible monarch as a result of his alliance with the Antichrist, and secretly called him by the name of his strange friend and adviser. It was if these two devils, from their rocky fastness far removed from human ken, swayed the destinies of Europe…
He also possessed horses of European breed…With the pertinacity of the monomaniac, the King called them by the great names to be found on the grave-stones marking the miles along his life-road.
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All around the fortress and for some distance beyond the outermost walls, a network of strong iron piles was built, so that the whole castle bore a terrible resemblance on a large scale to the cages that the King had designed for the incarceration of distinguished prisoners. At each of the four corners of this monstrous cage, four armoured towers on wheels were erected – crested larks, as they were called – each of which was garrisoned by forty sharpshooters, who had orders to shoot without challenge anyone approaching the network of iron piles by night, and during the hours of admission made a personal search of all who presented themselves, whether they were princes or merely tradesmen delivering goods. The walls behind the iron piles were protected by spokes and chevaux de frise, while the no man’s land between was used as a dry moat, covered overhead and patrolled day and night by guards…
The King’s need to prove to himself and to the world that he still existed increased as his health declined…He also began once more to take a personal interest in the business of government and even in the trivial details of administration, and addressed the world in terms which grew more truculent the greater difficulty his tired mouth found in pronouncing them…
Oliver made no attempt to oppose the old man’s yearning for activity or his outbreaks of spite and petty tyranny in which, according to his strength at the moment, he either tormented or merely irritated his subjects – cancelling or reducing their pensions, depriving them of offices and dignities and inflicting all manner of arbitrary and terrifying punishments upon them…
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