In Red Read Online Free PDF

the surrender was signed he went to his quarters and released the safety catch of his revolver.
    â€œThe end at last,” he laughed.
    â€œBang!” went the gun.
    But it was not yet the end. It turned out that the dress uniforms had no buttons. Someone had cut them off with a knife, leaving only the loops. In the meantime Ahlberg’s head had already fallen on the arm of his chair, mouth agape, eyes staring. Consternation ensued, and no one was there to take charge – aside from the enemy commander, who smiled sarcastically as he issued marching orders. The Stitchings uhlans were taken into captivity, pulling together the sides of their braided jackets and holding up their pants.
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    THE CRATER THAT THE ARTILLERY SHELL HAD MADE AT THE END of Salt Street drew crowds. The townspeople stared down into the gaping depths; the bottom was filling with water in which clouds were reflected. As the soldiers set up checkpoints they included the crater as part of the town and put up barbed wire to fence it off from the snowy emptiness of the fields.
    For the entertainment of the foreign officers a wooden stage was quickly installed in the officers’ mess. The show reminded the audience – which enjoyed the lights, the ostrich feathers,
the band – of a procession of cavalry mares along the principal avenue of the capital.
    â€œLook at her on the left,” the officers would say in German, handing one another their field glasses. Every number was given a standing ovation. Evening after evening the place was packed. The coarse guffaw of drumrolls set the rhythm for the self-assured trombones, the trumpet announced that life was beautiful, while the violin, barely keeping up, wept drunkenly that it was too fleeting. For the band, hastily assembled from the firemen’s brass and the Gypsy fiddles, played without rehearsing.
    The officers hung about in the mess from early morning waiting for the show; they read the wartime press with a sneer and, taking a napkin and an indelible pencil, sketched out maps that were covered with jumbled arrows pointing east and west, north and south. In Corelli’s café, where the glass display case filled with frosted cakes ran the whole length of the room, pink-faced, chubby-cheeked one-year volunteers worked on forgetting their recent Latin and algebra lessons. They got drunk on the surprises that life brings, as they sat at the marble-topped tables greedily eyeing women over their glasses of mint-flavored liqueur. The blind pianist hunched over his keyboard spread the tinselly brilliance of Viennese waltzes through clouds of bluish smoke.
    The rank and file, meanwhile, were sitting at heavy tables in the tavern drinking juniper vodka, or wandering the streets
armed and in their pickelhaubes. In light of the price of gold and silver thread, and the number of yards of velvet required for the facings, and ribbon for the stripes, the need for a new uniform design without facings or braid had proved an urgent matter right from the beginning of the war. At that time private soldiers did not live long, and what they left behind was in any case thoroughly stained, torn, destroyed. Loom sold the army gray-green fabric to make uniforms for the soldiers who later made a racket outside his window and got on his nerves. At night, when the shouts would carry across the whole town, he would toss and turn, wishing sudden death upon the soldiers. But they were not in the least afraid of death, for they were cheery grenadiers with staunch hearts to whom life seemed everything that they could possibly have desired and that it hardly ever actually is. They cared not the slightest for the people of Stitchings or for Loom himself, a military supplier whose name they had never even heard.
    The streetcar line built with the manpower of the German army formed an equilateral triangle joining the train station, the brothel, and the barracks. It was only then that the grenadiers stopped