Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

While all this was going on, Loel had probably died, it would be silly to deny that, and he’d been dead for quite a long time when they lifted him out at the airfield in Berling and took him without more ado to the abandoned garage that served as a mortuary; but you might well say this was war after all, and the Spartan boy could no doubt have been saved, because come to that, what kind of a fox was it that didn’t start yelping when it was being suffocated under that tunic, could it have been a Spartan fox that thought to itself: If I can just keep quiet for five minutes and instead rip open the boy’s chest so that he collapses and dies through loss of blood, I’ll go down in history, I’ll be a fox that they read about in schoolbooks for hundreds of years to come, a really important fox that’ll be of enormous significance for philosophers and for human thought in general, and in that case it’s worth my while to keep quite for five minutes, because normal foxes just start yelping and the fox that I, Boy Larus, had under my shirt when I was eight and wanted to be famous, he made one hell of a row and everybody in the kitchen started staring at me and my Auntie Anna who was operating the separator let go of the handle so suddenly that I remember the warning bell that goes off when you’re not pumping hard enough started ringing and she ripped open my shirt and pulled out the foxcub and I only had a few small tears in my vest and I got a box on the ears and had to go to bed without anything to eat even though I was only doing my best to be courageous.

But the wound inside me was no less big for all that, Mum, will you have a look at my wound, but when she’d unfastened my vest and rolled down my socks, my skin was unbroken and there was no sign of blood, no sign of any abscess or swelling or red patches. Over and over again I was exposed as a liar, and eventually: being obedient was to keep calm and feel the wound growing, to keep the pain bottled up, not to let anybody else and in the end not even myself know how the wound was spreading, spreading to more and more new parts of the body, and before long the inflammation was necessary in order for me to keep on living and living meant obeying and obeying meant never wanting anything, obeying meant receiving and passing on whatever couldn’t be kept and letting whatever couldn’t be passed on stay and form new wounds, obeying meant keeping quiet how sister Betsy was treated by Mum’s lover, obeying meant standing with the rest of the class by an open grave and singing: ‘All hail the glittering memory of our nation’s valiant son, His name will live in glory for the famous deeds he’s done’, though everybody knew that what he’d done was to embezzle his firm’s pension fund and money collected for a new hospital and anything else he could lay his hands on, and then obeying meant -

No, Loel would probably have died anyway, even if I had gone against orders; but what about Brosius? Well, who knows? It was so idiotic when there were only two people in the marker trench, it was so idiotic of Brosius to say he would climb up to the target and stick a three-mark stamp over the first hit, because even before he’d got above the protecting mound on his way up, a ricochet slit his neck open. He was still alive, rolling over and over on the ground as if he were having a wrestling match, but you couldn’t just run and fetch help because they were shooting and when they suddenly stopped the only sound to be heard, and heard it certainly was, and how, so shattering and so horrible that he thought his ears would burst, that was the noise coming from Brosius’ dying body as he lay there wriggling in the dust like a maggot, rolling over and over, over and over again, and when the shooting stopped there was somebody yelling down the telephone: Mark! Naturally, he tried to shout and interrupt him: But, but. . Mark! And he slammed the receiver down, and he tried to ring back but the telephone only worked in one direction and of course it would have been possible to jump up and shout and tell them what had happened, but who could know whether they might start shooting again straight away and they’d drummed into us that we must never leave the trench until we’d been ordered to do so and besides: how could anybody know Brosius was in such a bad way when he was rolling over and over so violently, as that must mean he had strength left and it was only a little bit painful and when he just lay there without moving, well, that could mean that it wasn’t hurting any more, it was only a short time after all, and the orders said we had to mark, and there was probably blood on the bat when he marked, just on the handle, they couldn’t see it from the firing line, but it was on his hands and Brosius was lying on his stomach, all quiet, and if there’d been time to bend over him and see how he was, well, but then they were off again, the whole row, and all twelve targets were riddled at the same time and bits of paper floated down into the trench and the smell of acrid powder came wafting over and up towards the woods, and it seemed as if the shooting would never end, the telephone was silent: and dead and when somebody came over late in the afternoon to relieve him and asked how long Brosius had been dead, he said: Oh, about four hours.

And nobody could believe this perverse indifference, this lack of respect for death, nobody could understand how terrified he’d been and how he’d dashed up and down the marker trench, dragging with him the bloodstained bat and his own pitiful despair and his own terrible regret and his own harsh cowardice, which he’d had imprinted on his mind ‘because that’s how it’s got to be’ and because thou shalt obey thy mother and thy father, and all other mothers and fathers all over the world, all commands and superiors, all officials and laws and rules and regulations and native chieftains and policemen and everything which is big and strong and healthy and has muscles, a rib cage, and authority to fall back on. He sat in jail working out one defence speech after another, and this would be the authorities’ downfall because now if never before it had been proved how inhuman and how cruel, how deadly cruel, literally, the authorities were when they forced him to stay put and mark while his comrade was bleeding to death, but in court he cut a sorry figure and couldn’t understand at all why everybody maintained it would have been so easy to shout when he’d had that telephone command: Hallo, there’s been an accident, you must stop the shooting for a minute, and nobody seemed to understand he couldn’t do that because it’s strictly forbidden to reveal your wounds to anybody else or to yourself. The hypocrites just sat there in their gilded masks and accused him of this and that and the other although they knew full well they’d have done just the same in his place!

But they never were in his place, that was the strange thing about it: he was always the one it happened to, nobody else got in the kind of ridiculous situation he did, he was always getting into the most absurd conflicts and then everyone would say he’d acted in such a stupid way, maybe he was born unlucky because they couldn’t say of anybody else in the regiment, indeed, probably not in any other regiment in the world, and probably nowhere else in the world full stop, that because he was so frightened of making a mistake and even more frightened of being disobedient that he would call out the guard when the most insignificant person came into view in the distance, for instance, or that he would give his superiors quite different and of course much more important titles than they actually had. No, he wasn’t born unlucky, and once he’d got over the worst, when he’d managed to discipline his urge to obey, and loyalty encircled his inner kernel like a nutshell, everything grew better and easier to bear, and he threw himself into all the tasks assigned to him with commendable enthusiasm.