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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Alfred Neumann: Twilight of a conqueror
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Alfred Neumann
From The Hero (1931)
Translated by Huntley Paterson
Long before the revolutionary Prime Minister could have left his house, Hoff had already taken up his position on the appointed “sector” of the road. As old and new thoughts clashed tumultuously in his brain, he saw that there was very little point in thus borrowing from the technical terminology of the war. The term hardly applied to those few square yards of pavement which were to stage such a terrible gamble with fate, and there was only the lamest excuse for using the expression with its honourable military derivation. Although he did not admit it, however, it was because of this derivation that he had chosen it.
Exasperated by the rushing torrent of his thoughts he suddenly lost his temper. The fatal spot ought to have been called something quite different, something more sensible and straightforward – M.P. for instance. Though this still had a military flavour, at least it stood for the initials of the real thing – Murder Point.
But that was going too far; it was too plain, too explicit. How his turgid thoughts ran on through his exhausted brain! What presumption too! But to get to the heart of the matter, had there not been murder points all the way from Ostend to Bâle, from Constantinople to Reval? Murder lines, murder miles, one after the other, four thousand miles of murder, and fratricidal murder at that, with two dead to every yard – that was four million times two -
Stop!
Just look at that man with paralysis agitans, a war victim, a battlefield case of St. Vitus’s Dance, a wreck – such men were hammered back into middle-class respectability by means of electricity!
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In Hoff’s world men were dubbed friends and enemies to the death with the utmost speed and levity – a mere question of colour, of a badge no bigger or more valuable than a farthing. War cries were wholly obsolete, words superfluous. At the present moment, for all his ogling, he displayed no colours; all he wished to do was to watch the reaction his murderous presence provoked. Or was that in itself a matter of colour, a badge? In this world where mines could be sprung at a touch, it was no longer possible to save even the soul from the infernal similes of our perfected technique of war. And the symbol was lying in the portmanteau under his bed, in the form of a self-loading pistol…
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