The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  And it was in this position that Herr Settembrini found him—metaphorically speaking, of course; for in reality, as we know, our hero’s cool, reserved manners excluded such theatrics. In cool reality, his mentor found him packing his bags—for since the moment of his awakening, Hans Castorp had been caught up in the turmoil and confusion of a wild departure, the result of that bursting thunderbolt in the valley. His “home” was now like an anthill in panic. The “people up here” were tumbling head over heels all five thousand feet down to the flatlands and its ordeal, were storming the little train, thronging its running boards—if need be, even without their baggage, which lay piled in rows on the platforms of the teeming little station, where even high in the mountains one could catch a whiff of the stifling smoke drifting up from below. And Hans tumbled with them. There in the tumult, Lodovico embraced him, literally took him in his arms and gave him a Mediterranean—or perhaps a Russian—kiss, a cause of no little embarrassment for our wild traveler, despite his own surge of emotion. And he almost lost his composure when at the last moment Herr Settembrini called him by his first name, said “Giovanni,” and casting aside the forms appropriate to the educated West, let informal pronouns reign.

  “E così in giù,” he said, “—in giù finalmente! Addio, Giovanni mio! I would have wished to see you go in some other way, but it doesn’t matter. The gods have decreed it so, and not otherwise. I hoped to send you off to your work, and now you will be fighting alongside your fellows. My God, you are the one to go, and not our lieutenant. The tricks life plays. Fight bravely out there where blood joins men together. No one can do more than that now. Forgive me if I use what little energy I have left to rouse my own country to battle, on the side to which intellect and sacred egoism direct it. Addio!”

  Hans Castorp forced his head out from among the ten others filling the little window. He waved above their heads. And Herr Settembrini waved with his right hand, too, while with the tip of the ring finger of his left hand he gently brushed the corner of one eye.

  Where are we? What is that? Where has our dream brought us? Dusk, rain, and mud, fire reddening a murky sky that bellows incessantly with dull thunder, the damp air rent by piercing, singsong whines and raging, onrushing, hellhound howls that end their arc in a splintering, spraying, fiery crash filled with groans and screams, with brass blaring, about to burst, and drumbeats urging onward, faster, faster. There is a wood spewing drab hordes that run, stumble, jump. There is a line of hills, dark against the distant conflagration whose glow sometimes gathers into fluttering flames. Around us is rolling farmland, gouged and battered to sludge. And there is a road covered with muck and splintered branches, much like the wood itself; branching off from the road, a country lane, a rutted quagmire, winds up the hill; tree trunks jut into the cold rain, naked and stripped of branches. Here is a signpost—no point in asking, the twilight would cloak its message even if it had not been riddled and ripped to jagged shreds. East or west? It is the flatlands—this is war. And we are reluctant shades by the roadside, ashamed of our own shadowy security and not in the least inclined to indulge in bombast and rodomontade; but, rather, the spirit of our story has led us here to watch these gray, running, stumbling troops as they swarm now from the woods, urged on by drums, and to gaze into the ordinary face of our companion of so many little years, that kindhearted sinner whose voice we have heard so often, to see him once more before he passes out of view.

  They have been called up, these comrades here, for a final push in a battle that has lasted all day, to regain that hill position and the burning villages just beyond, which were lost to the enemy two days before. It is a regiment of volunteers, youngsters, students mostly, not long at the front. They were rousted out in the night, rode the train till morning, marched in the rain until afternoon, taking wretched roads, or, since the roads were already jammed, no roads at all, just field and moor. Seven hours in heavy, rain-sodden coats, with battle gear—this was no promenade. To keep from losing your boots, you had to bend down at almost every step and grab hold of the tongue with your fingers and tug your foot out of the squishy mire. It had taken one whole hour to cross a little meadow. And now here they are—youth has done it, their exhausted but excited bodies, tense with the last reserves of energy, have no need of the sleep and food they have been denied. Their flushed, wet faces, splattered with mud, are framed by chin straps and gray cloth-covered helmets worn askew; they are flushed with exertion and the sight of the casualties they took moving through the marshy wood. For the enemy, informed of their advance, had laid a barrage across their path, shrapnel and large-caliber grenades that burst into their ranks while they were still in the woods—a splintering, howling, spraying, flaming scourge across the wide, newly plowed fields.

  They have to get through, these three thousand feverish lads; their bayonets have to provide the reinforcements that will decide the attack on the trenches dug before and behind the line of hills, that will help retake the burning villages, until they advance to a spot marked on the orders their leader carries in his pocket. There are three thousand of them, so that they can be two thousand when they reach the hills and the villages—that is the meaning of their numbers. They are a single body, so constructed that even after great losses it can act and triumph, even greet its victory with a thousand-voiced hurrah—despite those who are severed from it and fall away. Already in the course of their forced march, many a man has severed himself, has proved too young and too weak—turned pale and staggered, doggedly forced himself to be a man, only to fall back all the same in the end; he drags himself alongside the marching column for a while longer, as company after company passes by, and then he vanishes, lying down where it was not wise to lie down. And then comes the shattering wood. But they are still many now as they swarm out of it; an army of three thousand men can hemorrhage badly and still be a great teeming force. And they flood out over the scourged, rain-soaked land, the road, the country lane, the muddy fields; we shadows at the roadside watch from their midst. At the edge of the wood they are still fixing bayonets with well-drilled movements—the brass calls out urgently, the pounding and rolling drums sound out above deeper thunder. And they rush forward as best they can, with brash cries and nightmarishly heavy feet, clods of earth clinging leadenly to crude boots.

  They hurl themselves down before projectiles howling toward them, only to leap up and rush on, shouting courage in brash, young voices—they have not been hit. Then they are hit, they fall, flailing their arms, shot in the head, the heart, the gut. They lie with their faces in the mire and do not stir. They lie, arched over their knapsacks, the backs of their heads buried in the soft ground, their hands clutching at the air like talons. But the wood keeps sending new men, who hurl themselves down, leap up, and, with a shout or without a word, stagger forward among those who have already fallen.

  Youngsters with their backpacks and bayoneted rifles, with their filthy coats and boots—and in watching, one might also see them with a humanistic, beatific eye, might dream of other scenes. One might imagine such a lad spurring a horse on or swimming in a bay, strolling along the shore with a girlfriend, his lips pressed to his gentle beloved’s ear, or in happy friendship instructing another lad to string a bow. And instead, there they all lie, noses in the fiery filth. That they do it with joy, and also with boundless fear and an unutterable longing for home, is both shameful and sublime, but surely no reason to bring them here to this.

  There is our friend, there is Hans Castorp! We recognized him a good distance off from that little beard he grew when he moved to the Bad Russian table. He is soaked through, his face is flushed, like all the others. He runs with feet weighed down by mud, his bayoneted rifle clutched in his hand and hanging at his side. Look, he is stepping on the hand of a fallen comrade—stepping on it with his hobnailed boots, pressing it deep into the soggy, branch-strewn earth. But it is him, all the same. What’s this? He’s singing? The way a man sings to himself in moments of dazed, thoughtless excitement
, without even knowing—and he uses what tatters of breath he has left to sing to himself:

  Upon its bark I’ve ca-arved there

  So many words of love—

  He stumbles. No, he has thrown himself on his stomach at the approach of a howling hound of hell, a large explosive shell, a hideous sugarloaf from the abyss. He lies there, face in the cool muck, legs spread, feet twisted until the heels press the earth. Laden with horror, this product of science gone berserk crosses thirty yards in front of him, buries itself in the ground, and explodes like the Devil himself, bursts inside the earth with ghastly superstrength and casts up a house-high fountain of soil, fire, iron, lead, and dismembered humanity. For two men had flung themselves down there beside one another—they were friends. Commingled now, they vanish.

  Oh, how ashamed we feel in our shadowy security! We’re leaving—we can’t describe this! But was our friend hit, too? For a moment, he thought he was. A large clod of din struck his shin—it certainly hurt, but how silly, it was nothing. He gets up, he limps and stumbles forward on mud-laden feet, singing thoughtlessly:

  And all its branches ru-ustled,

  As if they called to me—

  And so, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, he disappears from sight.

  Farewell, Hans Castorp, life’s faithful problem child. Your story is over. We have told it to its end; it was neither short on diversion nor long on boredom—it was a hermetic story. We told it for its own sake, not yours, for you were a simple fellow. But it was your story at last, and since it happened to you, there surely must have been something to you; and we do not deny that in the course of telling it, we have taken a certain pedagogic liking to you, might be tempted gently to dab the corner of an eye with one fingertip at the thought that we shall neither see you nor hear from you in the future.

  Farewell, Hans—whether you live or stay where you are! Your chances are not good. The wicked dance in which you are caught up will last many a little sinful year yet, and we would not wager much that you will come out whole. To be honest, we are not really bothered about leaving the question open. Adventures in the flesh and spirit, which enhanced and heightened your ordinariness, allowed you to survive in the spirit what you probably will not survive in the flesh. There were moments when, as you “played king,” you saw the intimation of a dream of love rising up out of death and this carnal body. And out of this worldwide festival of death, this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all round—will love someday rise up out of this, too?

  FINIS OPERIS

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  JOHN E. WOODS is the distinguished translator of many books. His translation of The Magic Mountain won him the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize in 1996, and his other translations of Thomas Mann—Buddenbrooks, Doctor Faustus and, most recently, Joseph and His Brothers—have been highly acclaimed. Other notable translations include Arno Schmidt’s Evening Edged in Gold, for which he won both the American Book Award for translation and the PEN Translation Prize in 1981; Patrick Süskind’s Perfume, for which he again won the PEN Translation Prize, in 1987; Christoph Ransmayr’s The Terrors of Ice and Darkness, The Last World (for which he was awarded the Schlegel-Tieck Price in 1991) and The Dog King; Ingo Schulze’s 33 Moments of Happiness and Simple Stories; Jan Philipp Reemtsma’s More Than a Champion; John Rabe’s The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, and Bernhard Schlink’s Flights of Love.

  ABOUT THE INTRODUCER

  A. S. BYATT was Senior Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London, before becoming a full-time writer. Her fiction includes The Virgin in the Garden, Possession (for which she won the Booker Prize in 1990), Angels and Insects and Elementals. Her critical work includes studies of Wordsworth and Coleridge and of Iris Murdoch. She is also the author of Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers (with Ignês Sodré). She was appointed a CBE in 1990 and a DBE in 1999.

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