DRUNKEN RED CROSS OFFICIAL You there — bring me another whisky and soda and a — dripped Tap — tipped Trab — Trabucco cigar. Hey, you. (He belches.)
COLLEAGUE Hey, what’s up with you?
OFFICIAL Look, there’s one of our walking wounded — it’s off to the Neuhaus garrison with him tomorrow — for a medical—
COLLEAGUE Oh, leave him be!
OFFICIAL Excuse me, but — that’s not on — I’m sending him to the — (belches) front!
OFFICER (to another) What did it say in the communiqué today?
SECOND OFFICER Nothing new.
FIRST OFFICER What about the loss of Czernowitz!
SECOND OFFICER But that’s nothing new, is it?
ARMY DOCTOR (to another) Oi veh, look at him there in the second booth. I gave him a C-rating yesterday — light clerical duties only. Now he’s out on the binge. Damned draft dodger! Still, I wouldn’t mind being as loaded as his old man.
COLLEAGUE I don’t understand you, I’m just the opposite. None of mine ever gets as far as the Appeals Board. You can make the odd exception. But in general, it’s just a gut reaction when you see the perishers trembling in front of you. As soon as one of them starts to shake, I just call out: “Fit for service!” He can bet his life on that! All the more so since we’re not allowed to pass less than 50 percent as fit now, that in itself makes exceptions more difficult. Especially with the new Draft Board.
ARMY DOCTOR Oh, I must tell you. There was quite a stir at the hospital yesterday. I still scare the living daylights out of that nurse, Adele, so she goes and drops the bedpan of some Bosniak who’d been shot in the pelvis. The others were in fits, you should have seen it. Talk about giggles! Until I intervened! Well, you’ve got to show those women who’s boss. All in all, it was quite a day yesterday—
COLLEAGUE We’re the same. I don’t understand how those high-born women can take on so much. The others do the laundry or serve meals and things like that. But they’re literally falling over themselves to do the bedpans.
ARMY DOCTOR I must admit, at first it tickled me to see such swanky wenches actually doing it — but the attraction of even that eventually wears off. I’ve been thinking about it — why do they do it? Well, they want to be fulfilled — patriotic, and all that. I read somewhere that it’s up to us doctors to oppose it, on account of the shock to the female nervous system, and because it ruins their marriage prospects! Some problem, that! You’d be meshugga to take any notice of such problems in wartime. We practitioners—
COLLEAGUE What I was going to say — yesterday was the sort of day you’d have thought you weren’t in a hospital but in a lunatic asylum. Fast work! I sent five cases of shell shock to the front.
ARMY DOCTOR With me it was five intestinal adhesions and three syphilitics. I say to each of them straight out: you’re faking it! No answer to that, so it as good as proves the point — they’re shirkers. (The little orchestra strikes up the “Prince Eugene March.”)
COLLEAGUE I’m catching others out too now, especially ones with the typical shot wound in the left hand — I really don’t see how you could do it any other way, what with the major in the Medical Corps always breathing down your neck and trying to get Teisinger from the Recruiting Board off his back.
ARMY DOCTOR Yes, it’s a cross we have to bear. Yesterday I gave a wonderful kidney inflammation with acute cardiac insufficiency an A-rating — fully fit for service — after all, I haven’t seen much sign yet of anyone going off to war singing. Very lively here tonight, eh?—
COLLEAGUE It’s picking up. It’s incredible how callous we’ve become. You simply don’t have the opportunity to be humane.
ARMY DOCTOR A good doctor — as anyone who sat at Professor Nothnagel’s feet always quoted — has first and foremost to be a good person. That’s certainly something that gets completely forgotten, as I’d be the first to admit, and it’s the first thing one does forget in war. On the contrary, a good military doctor can’t be a good person, otherwise he’d better look out, or his next position will be at the front. Anyhow, Teisinger can’t complain about me this month. I deliver before he sends in his orders. So what, if that’s what it takes!
COLLEAGUE Listen, when one morning up north you’ve seen a couple of hundred Ukrainians strung up and swinging in the air, and down south a couple of hundred Serbs — and I have — then you get used to anything. What’s an individual life worth? You know the case, don’t you, where someone writes to his parents not to worry, in case of emergencies he always carries a white handkerchief in his pocket — the letter arrives, marked—
ARMY DOCTOR I know: “Sender executed by order of a court-martial.” Worse things have happened here.
COLLEAGUE And what about with us? I don’t look to the right, I don’t look to the left, I look straight ahead! It’s enough to make you suicidal. But you want to stay alive.
(Everyone has stood up. The little orchestra plays “O You, My Austria”, then switches to “There, Take My Last Cent.”)
ARMY DOCTOR Very lively here tonight, eh?
COLLEAGUE Yes, probably on account of Czernowitz.
ARMY DOCTOR What do you mean? Because the Russians—
COLLEAGUE Well — no — or rather, yes. Or — I don’t really understand — Look at Paula there, with the lieutenant from the Deutschmeister. I’d accept her for service any time.
ARMY DOCTOR Fancy her, then?
(Shouts of “Tango!” Others of “Boo! Down with the tango! Waltz! This is a German establishment!” Someone shouts “Foxtrot!” Response: “Idiot!”)
DRUNK No English music here, by God — We’re in Vienna, play a waltz, you sod!
PROPRIETOR (buttonholes his regular) Know who the cornet is that’s just come in? Y’see, you don’t know. That’s the one you read about in the papers, Russian soldiers saved him from a swamp using rope ladders. Now he comes here to us every night!
(Change of scene.)
Scene 46
Night. The Graben in Vienna. It is raining. Deserted. In front of the Plague Column. With a view down a side street.
GRUMBLER (enters)
Rain again, I see, rain rising from below,
a soporific sludge, the same old sloppiness,
torpid of tongue, mumbling the formless drawl
of old Vienna — mishmash of goy and Jew.
The city’s heart is here and in Vienna’s heart
a monument commemorates the plague.
(He stops in front of the Plague Column.)
This heart of old Vienna is made of purest gold,
that’s why I’d gladly trade it in for iron!
O barren, lifeless world, the night has come,
which naught can follow except Judgment Day.
The din of slaughter will be swallowed up
by the eternal harmony of the spheres.
Rhythmically gurgling, the last Viennese
seeks for his soul some physical relief,
sprays it through the last rainfall of this world
so that it splashes on wet paving stones.
(He looks down the side street and spots a drunkard answering the call of nature in the middle of the street.)
So here he stands, a column to himself,
an indestructible hulking beast!
He cannot perish, he exemplifies
falsehood made flesh, shaped out of sludge,
the nadir of Creation, knowing he’ll survive
when every living thing returns to dust.
He couldn’t care a fig about the slaughter,
for he must satisfy his deepest need,