The Red Laugh (Dedalus European Classics)

by Leonid Andreyev

  “It’s far away. About twenty versts.”

  “I feel cold,” said the doctor, snapping his teeth.

  The student looked out of the door and beckoned me to come up to him. I looked out: at different points of the horizon motionless flares of similar conflagration stood out in a mute row: as if dozens of suns were rising simultaneously. And now the darkness was not so great. The distant hills were growing more densely black, sharply outlined against the sky in a broken and wavy contour, while in the foreground all was flooded with a red soft glow, silent and motionless. I glanced at the student; his face was tinged by the same red fantastic colour of blood, that had changed itself into air and light.

  “Are there many wounded?” asked I.

  He waved his hand.

  “A great many madmen. More so than wounded.”

  “Real madmen?”

  “What others can there be?”

  He was looking at me, and his eyes wore the same fixed, wild expression, full of cold horror, that the soldier’s had, who died of sunstroke.

  “Stop that,” said I, turning away.

  “The doctor is mad also. Just look at him.”

  The doctor had not heard. He was sitting cross-legged, like a Turk, swaying to and fro, soundlessly moving his lips and finger-tips. And in his gaze there was the same fixed, stupefied, blunt, stricken expression.

  “I feel cold,” said he, and smiled.

  “Hang you all!” cried I, moving away into a corner of the carriage. “What did you call me up for?”

  Nobody answered, The student stood gazing out at the mute spreading glow, and the back of his head with its curly hair was youthful; and when I looked at him, I do not know why, but I kept picturing to myself a delicate woman’s hand passing through that hair. And this image was so unpleasant, that a feeling of hatred sprang up in my breast, and I could not look at him without a feeling of loathing.

  “How old are you?” I asked, but he did not turn his head and did not answer.

  The doctor kept on rocking himself.

  “I feel cold.”

  “When I think,” said the student, without turning round, “when I think that there are streets, houses, a University …”

  He broke off, as if he had said all and was silent. Suddenly the train stopped almost instantaneously, making me knock myself against the wall, and voices were to be heard. We jumped out. In front of the very engine upon the rails lay something, a not very large lump, out of which a leg was projecting.

  “Wounded?”

  “No, dead. The head is torn off. Say what you will, but I will light the head-light. Otherwise we shall be crushing somebody.”

  The lump with the protruding leg was thrown aside; for an instant the leg lifted itself up, as if it wanted to run through the air, and all disappeared in a black ditch. The head-light was lit and the engine instantly grew black.

  “Listen!” whispered somebody, full of silent terror.

  How was it that we had not heard it before? From everywhere—the exact place could not be defined—a groan, unbroken and scraping, wonderfully calm in its breadth, and even indifferent, as it seemed, was borne upon us. We had heard many cries and groans, but this resembled none of those heard before. On the dim reddish surface our eyes could perceive nothing, and therefore the very earth and sky, lit up by a never-rising sun, seemed to be groaning.

  “The fifth verst,” said the engine-driver.

  “That is where it comes from,” and the doctor pointed forwards. The student shuddered, and slowly turned towards us.

  “What is it? It’s terrible to listen to!”

  “Let’s move on.”

  We walked along in front of the engine, throwing a dense shadow upon the rails, but it was not black but of a dim red colour, lit up by the soft motionless flares, that stood out mutely at the different points of the black sky. And with each step we made, that wild unearthly groan, that had no visible source, grew ominously, as if it was the red air, the very earth and sky, that were groaning. In its ceaselessness and strange indifference it recalled at times the noise of grasshoppers in a meadow—the ceaseless noise of grasshoppers in a meadow on a warm summer day. And we came upon dead bodies oftener and oftener. We examined them rapidly, and threw them off the rails—those indifferent, calm, limp bodies, that left dark oily stains where the blood had soaked into the earth where they had lain. At first we counted them, but soon got muddled, and ceased. They were many—too many for that ominous night, that breathed cold and groans from each fibre of its being.

  “What does it mean?” cried the doctor, and threatened somebody with his fist. “Just listen …”

  We were nearing the sixth verst, and the groans were growing distinct and sharp, and we could almost feel the distorted mouths, from which those terrible sounds were issuing.

  We looked anxiously into the rosy gloom, so deceitful in its fantastic light, when suddenly, almost at our feet, beside the rails, somebody gave a loud, calling, crying groan. We found him instantly, that wounded man, whose face seemed to consist only of two eyes, so big they appeared, when the light of the lantern fell on his face. He stopped groaning, and rested his eyes on each of us and our lanterns in turn, and in his glance there was a mad joy at seeing men and lights—and a mad fear that all would disappear like a vision. Perhaps he had seen men with lanterns bending over him many times, but they had always disappeared in a bloody confused nightmare.

  We moved on, and almost instantly stumbled against two more wounded, one lying on the rails, the other groaning in a ditch. As we were picking them up, the doctor, trembling with anger, said to me: “Well?” and turned away. Several steps farther on we met a man wounded slightly, who was walking alone, supporting one arm with the other. He was walking with his head thrown back, straight towards us, but seemed not to notice us, when we drew aside to let him pass. I believe he did not see us. He stopped for an instant near the engine, turned aside, and went past the train.

  “You had better get in!” cried the doctor, but he did not answer.

  These were the first that we found, and they horrified us. But later on we came upon them oftener and oftener along the rails or near them, and the whole field, lit up by the motionless red flare of the conflagrations, began stirring as if it were alive, breaking out into loud cries, wails, curses and groans. All those dark mounds stirred and crawled about like half-dead lobsters let out of a basket, with outspread legs, scarcely resembling men in their broken, unconscious movements and ponderous immobility. Some were mute and obedient, others groaned, wailed, swore and showed such a passionate hate towards us that were saving them, as if we had brought about that bloodly, indifferent night, and been the cause of all those terrible wounds and their loneliness amidst the night and dead bodies.

  The train was full, and our clothes were saturated with blood, as if we had stood for a long time under a rain of blood, while the wounded were still being brought in, and the field, come to life, was stirring wildly as before.

  Some of the wounded crawled up themselves, some walked up tottering and falling. One soldier almost ran up to us. His face was smashed, and only one eye remained, burning wildly and terribly, and he was almost naked, as if he had come from the bath-room. Pushing me aside, he caught sight of the doctor, and rapidly seized him by the chest with his left hand.

  “I’ll smash your snout!” he cried, shaking the doctor, and added slowly and mordantly a coarse oath. “I’ll smash your snouts! you rabble!”

  The doctor broke away from the soldier, and advancing towards him, cried chokingly:

  “I will have you court-martialled, you scoundrel! To prison with you! You’re hindering my work! Scoundrel! Brute!”

  We pulled them apart, but the soldier kept on crying out for a long time: “Rabble! I’ll smash your snout!”

  I was beginning to get exhausted, and went a little way off to have a smoke and rest a bit. The blood, dried to my hands, covered them like a pair of black gloves, making it difficult for me
to bend my fingers, so that I kept dropping my cigarettes and matches. And when I succeeded in lighting my cigarette, the tobacco smoke struck me as novel and strange, with quite a peculiar taste, the like of which I never experienced before or after. Just then the ambulance student with whom I had travelled came up to me, and it seemed to me as if I had met with him several years back, but where I could not remember. His tread was firm as if he were marching, and he was staring through me at something farther on and higher up.

  “And they are sleeping,” said he, as it seemed, quite calmly.

  I flew in a rage, as if the reproach was addressed to me.

  “You forget, that they fought like lions for ten days.”

  “And they are sleeping,” he repeated, looking through me and higher up. Then he stooped down to me and shaking his finger, continued in the same dry and calm way: “I will tell you—I will tell you …”

  “What?”

  He stooped still lower towards me, shaking his finger meaningly, and kept repeating the words as if they expressed a completed idea:

  “I will tell you—I will tell you. Tell them …” And still looking at me in the same severe way, he shook his finger once more, then took out his revolver and shot himself in the temple. And this did not surprise or terrify me in the least. Putting my cigarette into the left hand, I felt his wound with my fingers, and went back to the train.

  “The student has shot himself. I believe he is still alive,” said I to the doctor. The latter caught hold of his head and groaned.

  “D—n him! … There is no room. There, that one will go and shoot himself, too, soon. And I give you my word of honour,” cried he, angrily and menacingly, “I will do the same! Yes! And let me beg you—just walk back. There is no room. You can lodge a complaint against me if you like.”

  And he turned away, still shouting, while I went up to the other who was about to commit suicide. He was an ambulance man, and also, I believe, a student. He stood, pressing his forehead against the wall of the carriage, and his shoulders shook with sobs.

  “Stop!” said I, touching his quivering shoulder. But he did not turn round or answer, and continued crying. And the back of his head was youthful, like the other student’s, and as terrifying, and he stood in an absurd manner with his legs spread out like a person drunk, who is sick; and his neck was covered with blood; probably he had clutched it with his own hands:

  “Well?” said I, impatiently.

  He pushed himself away from the carriage and, stooping like an old man, with his head bent down, he went away into the darkness away from all of us. I do not know why, but I followed him, and we walked along for a long time away from the carriages. I believe he was crying, and a feeling of distress stole over me, and I wanted to cry too.

  “Stop!” I cried, standing still.

  But he walked on, moving his feet ponderously, bent down, looking like an old man with his narrow shoulders and shuffling gait. And soon he disappeared in the reddish haze, that resembled light and yet lit nothing. And I remained alone. To the left of me a row of dim lights floated past—it was the train. I was alone—amidst the dead and dying. How many more remained? Near me all was still and dead, but farther on the field was stirring, as if it were alive—or so it seemed to me in my loneliness. But the moan did not grow less. It spread along the earth—high-pitched, hopeless, like the cry of a child or the yelping of thousands of castaway puppies, starving and cold. Like a sharp, endless, icy needle it pierced your brain and slowly moved backwards and forwards—backwards and forwards ….

  FRAGMENT VI

  ….. THEY were our own men. During the strange confusion of all movements that reigned in both armies, our own and the enemy’s, during the last month, frustrating all orders and plans, we were sure it was the enemy that was approaching us, namely, the 4th corps. And everything was ready for an attack, when somebody clearly discerned our uniforms, and ten minutes later our guess had become a calm and happy certainty: they were our own men. They apparently had recognised us too: they advanced quite calmly, and that calm motion seemed to express the same happy smile of an unexpected meeting.

  And when they began firing, we did not understand for some time what it meant, and still continued smiling—under a hail of shrapnel and bullets, that poured down upon us, snatching away at one stroke hundreds of men. Somebody cried out by mistake and—I clearly remember—we all saw that it was the enemy, that it was his uniform and not ours, and instantly answered the fire. About fifteen minutes after the beginning of that strange engagement both my legs were torn off, and I recovered consciousness in the hospital after the amputation.

  I asked how the battle had ended, and received an evasive, reassuring answer, by which I could understand that we had been beaten; and afterwards, legless as I was, I was overcome by joy at the thought that now I would be sent home, that I was alive—alive for a long time to come, alive for ever. And only a week later I learnt some particulars, that once more filled me with doubts and a new, unexperienced feeling of terror. Yes, I believe they were our own men after all—and it was with one of our shells, fired out of one of our guns by one of our men, that my legs had been torn off. And nobody could explain how it had happened. Something occurred, something darkened our vision, and two regiments, belonging to the same army, facing each other at a distance of one verst, had been destroying each other for a whole hour in the full conviction that it was the enemy they had before them. Later on the incident was remembered and spoken of reluctantly in half-words and—what is most surprising of all—one could feel that many of the speakers did not admit the mistake even then. That is to say, they admitted it, but thought that it had occurred later on, that in the beginning they really had the enemy before them, but that he disappeared somewhere during the general fray, leaving us in the range of our own shells. Some spoke of it openly, giving precise explanations, which seemed to them plausible and clear. Up to this very minute I cannot say for certain how the strange blunder began, as I saw with equal clearness first our red uniforms and then their orange-coloured ones. And somehow very soon everybody forgot about the incident, forgot about it to such an extent that it was spoken of as a real battle and in that sense many accounts were written and sent to the papers in all good faith; I read them when I was back home. At first the public’s attitude towards us, the wounded in that engagement, was rather strange—we seemed to be less pitied than those wounded in other battles, but soon even that disappeared too. And only new facts, similar to the one just described, and a case in the enemy’s army, when two detachments actually destroyed each other almost entirely, having come to a hand-to-hand fight during the night—gives me the right to think that a mistake did occur.

  Our doctor, the one that did the amputation, a lean, bony old man, tainted with tobacco smoke and carbolic acid, everlastingly smiling at something through his yellowish-grey thin moustache, said to me, winking his eye:

  “You’re in luck to be going home. There’s something wrong here.”

  “What is it?”

  “Something’s going wrong. In our time it was simpler.”

  He had taken part in the last European war almost a quarter of a century back and often referred to it with pleasure. But this war he did not understand, and, as I noticed, feared it.

  “Yes, there’s something wrong,” sighed he, and frowned, disappearing in a cloud of tobacco smoke. “I would leave too, if I could.”

  And bending over me he whispered through his yellow smoked moustache:

  “A time will come when nobody will be able to go away from here. Yes, neither I nor anybody,” and in his old eyes, so close to me, I saw the same fixed, dull, stricken expression. And something terrible, unbearable, resembling the fall of thousands of buildings, darted through my head, and growing cold from terror, I whispered:

  “The red laugh.”

  And he was the first to understand me. He hastily nodded his head and repeated:

  “Yes. The red laugh.”

  He sa
t down quite close to me and looking round began whispering rapidly, in a senile way, wagging his sharp, grey little beard.

  “You are leaving soon, and I will tell you. Did you ever see a fight in an asylum? No? Well, I saw one. And they fought like sane people. You understand—like sane people.” He significantly repeated the last phrase several times.

  “Well, and what of that?” asked I, also in a whisper, full of terror.

  “Nothing. Like sane people.”

  “The red laugh,” said I.

  “They were separated by water being poured over them.”

  I remembered the rain that had frightened us so, and got angry.

  “You are mad, doctor!”

  “Not more than you. Not more than you in any case.”

  He hugged his sharp old knees and chuckled; and, looking at me over his shoulder and still with the echo of that unexpected painful laugh on his parched lips, he winked at me slyly several times, as if we two knew something very funny, that nobody else knew. Then with the solemnity of a professor of black magic giving a conjuring performance, he lifted his arm and, lowering it slowly, carefully touched with two fingers that part of the blanket under which my legs would have been, if they had not been cut off.

  “And do you understand this?” he asked mysteriously.

  Then, in the same solemn and significant manner, he waved his hand towards the row of beds on which the wounded were lying, and repeated:

  “And can you explain this?”

  “The wounded?” said I. “The wounded?”

  “The wounded,” repeated he, like an echo. “The wounded. Legless and armless, with pierced sides, smashed-in chests and torn-out eyes. You understand it? I am very glad. So I suppose you will understand this also?”

  With an agility, quite unexpected for his age, he flung himself down and stood on his hands, balancing his legs in the air. His white working clothes turned down, his face grew purple and, looking at me fixedly with a strange upturned gaze, he threw at me with difficulty a few broken words: