Joseph Roth - The Silent Prophet

In fact, the troops froze more because they advanced slowly, had to retreat again, and because in the south they had to contend with better organized and more numerous enemy forces. Also they were still exhausted by the long journey, after which they were immediately thrown into the struggle again. The small war of movement had become as accepted by them as the great World War had once been, and just as they had lain patiently for months before the fortress of Przemysl or in the Carpathians, so they had now become familiarized with the short forced marches, the tedious railway journeys, the hurried digging of trenches, the assault on a village and the battle for a station, the hand-to-hand struggle in a church and the sudden shooting in the streets, squeezed in the shadow of a gateway. They knew what was in store for them tomorrow, as soon as they left the railway, but they did not think of the battle, only of thermometers and mittens, things in general and everyday events, politics and the Revolution. Yes, of the Revolution, which they discussed as if it concerned themselves very little, as if it was happening somewhere else, outside their ranks, and as if they were not at this very moment about to shed their blood for it. Only sometimes, when they got hold of one of the pamphlets or hurriedly produced newspapers, did they become aware that they themselves were the Revolution. In the entire train there was only one person who never for a moment forgot for what, and in whose name, he was fighting, and who told the soldiers so again and again; this was Friedrich.

After three long months, which seemed to him like years, he met up with Berzejev again in Kursk. ‘Whenever I come across you again,’ said Berzejev, ‘you seem different to me! That was already the case when we had to separate repeatedly during our escape. One might say that you change your face even quicker than your name.’ Since his return to Russia, Friedrich had borne the pseudonym under which he had published articles in the newspapers. He did not even confess to Berzejev that, in secret; he loved his new name like a kind of rank conferred by himself. He loved it as the expression of a new existence. He loved the clothing he now wore, the phrases that lay in his brain and on his tongue and which he untiringly uttered and wrote down; for he found a sensual pleasure in the very repetition. A hundred times already he had written the same things in the pamphlets. And each time it was his experience that there were certain words that never grew stale and were rather like bells that always produced the same sound, but also always a fresh awe because they hung so high above the heads of men. There were sounds not shaped by human tongues but which — borne by unknown winds in the midst of thousands of words of earthly speech — had been wafted from other-worldly spheres. There was the word: ‘Freedom!’ A word as vast as the sky, as unattainable by the human hand as a star. Yet created by the yearning of men who ever and again reached out for it, and drunk from the red blood of millions of dead. How many times already he had repeated the phrase: ‘We want a new world!’ And always the phrase was just as new as that which it expressed. And ever and again it fell like a sudden light over a distant land. There was the word: ‘People.’ When he uttered it before the soldiers, before these sailors and peasants and day-labourers and workers whom he regarded as the people, he felt as if he were holding to a light a mirror which magnified it. How he had once striven for newer and more meaningful words when he still gave clever lectures for young workers, and how little there actually was to say. How many useless words speech contained, while the few simple ones were still denied their right, their measure and their reality. Bread was not bread as long as it was not eaten by all, and as long as its sound was accompanied by that of hunger like a body by its shadow. One made do with a few ideas, a few words, and a passion which had no names. It was hate and love at the same time. He thought he was holding it in his hand like a light with which one illuminates and with which one kindles a fire. Killing had become as familiar to him as eating and drinking. There was no other kind of hatred. Annihilate, annihilate! Only what the eye saw dead had disappeared. Only the enemy’s corpse was no longer an enemy. In burnt-out churches one could no longer pray. It seemed that all his powers had rallied together in this one passion like regiments on the battlefield. It embraced the ambition of his youthful days, the hatred for his mother’s uncle and his superiors at the office, the envy of the children of rich homes, the yearning for the world, the foolish expectation of woman, the marvellous bliss with which one merged with her, the bitterness of his lonely hours, his innate malice, his trained intelligence, the sharpness of his eye and even his cowardice and proneness to fear. Yes, anxiety even helped him to win battles. And with that lightning-swift shrewdness by which one is favoured only in the seconds when life itself is at stake he grasped the foreign rules of military strategy. He translated into military tactics what his innate cunning had dictated to him from earliest youth. He became a master of the art of spying out the enemy. He entered the villages and towns of the adversary in many disguises. There were no bounds to the mischievous play of his fantasy, the romantic tendencies of his nature, the perilous excursions dictated by his private curiosity. There was no superior authority to control him in the confusion of this civil war, nor was the enemy well enough organized to initiate a proper campaign according to the proper rules of modern warfare. One overrates danger when one has no experience of it, thought Friedrich. In reality it is a state to which one becomes as accustomed as to a bourgeois life with regular lunch hours. One can actually speak of the commonplaceness of danger. Smiling, he heard Parthagener’s old question sounding in his ears: ‘Was it really necessary?’ and, smiling, answered, ‘Yes! It was really necessary!’ One did not come defenceless, without a homeland and outlawed, into a hostile world and let things go on as they were. One did not possess intelligence to place it at the disposal of stupidity, nor eyes to lead the blind. ‘I could have become a minister!’ he said to Berzejev, not without a little arrogance. ‘Despite everything. We prefer to hang the ministers.’

‘I should have thought you were smarter,’ answered Berzejev. ‘You were so sensibly undecided, so agreeably aimless, so private, without obvious passion …’

Friedrich interrupted him. ‘It is not my world, the one into which I fell by the accident of birth. I had nothing to do in it. Now I have something to do. I always lived with the feeling of having missed my time. I did not know that I was yet to experience it.’

He conducted his own war. He had a personal account to settle with the world. He had his own tactics. Berzejev called them ‘anti-military.’ ‘They are unbourgeois,’ replied Friedrich. ‘Those of the bourgeois generals are wordless, and therefore spiritless. The bourgeois commander fights with the help of orders, we fight with the help of oratory.’ And once again he assembled his comrades for the third time that week and once again uttered the old new words: ‘Freedom’ and ‘New World’!

‘In the Great War your officers ordered you: “Stand to attention!” We, your comrade commanders, shout the opposite at you: “Forward.” Your officers ordered you to hold your tongues. We ask that you shout, “Long live the Revolution!” Your officers ordered you to obey. We entreat you to understand. There they told you: “Die for the Tsar!” And we say to you, “Live! But if you have to die, then die for yourselves!” ‘