The Magic Mountain (129 page)

And so there he lay, and once again, as the height of summer came round for the seventh time since his arrival—but he did not count—the year closed on itself.

Then came the rumble of thunder—

But modesty and reserve keep us from turning that thundering rumble into a blustering narrative. No bombast, no rodomontade, here. With appropriately lowered voice, we shall say that the thunderbolt itself (with which we are all familiar) was the deafening detonation of great destructive masses of accumulated stupor and petulance. It was, to speak in subdued, respectful tones, a historic thunderclap that shook the foundations of the earth; but for us it is the thunderbolt that bursts open the magic mountain and rudely sets its entranced sleeper outside the gates. There he sits in the grass, sheepishly rubbing his eyes, like a man who, despite many an admonition, has failed to read the daily papers.

His Mediterranean friend and mentor had constantly tried to rectify this situation somewhat and made a point of keeping his pedagogic problem child roughly informed about events down below; but he had not been given much of a hearing by his pupil, who while “playing king” had let his mind turn the shadows of such things into one dream or another, but had never paid any attention to the things themselves, primarily out of an arrogant preference for seeing shadows as things, and things as mere shadows—for which one should not scold him too harshly, since that relationship has never been definitively decided.

Things were no longer as they had been once, when, after first establishing sudden clarity, Herr Settembrini would sit down at the bedside of a horizontal Hans Castorp and attempt to influence him by correcting his opinions about matters of life and death. It was the other way around now; with hands tucked between his knees, the student now sat beside the bed of the humanist in the little garret bedroom or next to the divan in the cozy and private dormered studio, with its Carbonaro chairs and water carafe, kept him company and listened politely to his presentations of the world situation—for Herr Lodovico was seldom on his feet these days. Naphta’s crude end, that terrorist deed committed by a caustically desperate antagonist, had been a terrible blow to his sensitive nature; he had been unable to get over it, had been frail and subject to fainting spells ever since. His contribution to
Sociological Pathology
, a lexicon of all the works of literature with human suffering for their theme, had come to a standstill, had stagnated, and the league waited in vain for that particular volume of their encyclopedia. Herr Settembrini was forced to limit his contribution to the Organization of Progress to oral reports, and he would have had to have forgone even those had it not been for the opportunity offered by Hans Castorp’s friendly visits.

He spoke in a weak, but heartfelt voice, and he had much to say about humanity’s self-perfection by way of social reform. His discourses would begin on dove’s feet, but soon, when he turned to liberated peoples uniting for universal happiness, there would come a sound as of the rushing pinions of eagles—not that he wished it or even knew whence it came, though doubtless it originated in the politics he had inherited from his grandfather, which had then blended with the humanistic inheritance of his father to create beautiful literature within him, Lodovico, just as humanity and politics were blended in the lofty idea of civilization, to which he raised a toast, an idea full of the mildness of the dove and the boldness of the eagle and awaiting its day, the dawn of the Day of Nations, when the principle of obduracy would be defeated and a path opened for the Holy Alliance of bourgeois democracy. In short, there were inconsistencies here. Herr Settembrini was a humanitarian, and yet at the same time and bound up with it, he was, as he half admitted, a man of war. He had behaved very humanely in his duel with crude Naphta; but more generally, whenever his enthusiasms blended humanity and politics for the ideal of civilization’s ultimate victory and dominion, whenever the citizen’s pike was consecrated on the altar of humanity, it became doubtful whether, on a more impersonal level, he remained of a mind to hold back his sword from shedding blood. Yes, Herr Settembrini’s own inner state meant that in his world of beautiful views, the element of the eagle’s boldness prevailed more and more over the dove’s mildness.

It was not unusual for him to be unsettled by his own scruples, to feel divided and perplexed in his attitudes toward the world’s larger constellations. Recently—a year and a half or two years before—the diplomatic cooperation of his own country and Austria in Albania had troubled his discourse, a cooperation that both inspired him, since it was directed against demi-Asia with its lack of Latin, against knouts and Schlüsselburg prison, and tormented him as a misalliance with his country’s sworn enemy, with the principle of obduracy and the bondage of nations. The previous autumn, the immense loan France had made to Russia for constructing railroads in Poland had awakened within him a similar conflict of feelings. For Herr Settembrini belonged to the Francophile party in his homeland, which was in no way astonishing when one recalls that his grandfather had equated the days of the July Revolution with the days of Creation; but a pact between that enlightened republic and Scythian Byzantium was a moral embarrassment to him—his chest felt constricted, but then, at the thought of the strategic significance of those railroads, it would try to expand and take in rapid breaths of hope and joy. Then came the murder of the archduke, which for everyone except our German sleeper served as a storm warning, a word to the wise, among whom we have good cause to count Herr Settembrini. Hans Castorp noticed how as a private, humane man, the Italian shuddered at the awful deed, but he also noticed how that chest rose at the thought that it was committed to free a nation, was directed against the citadel he hated—even though it could also be seen as the upshot of Moscow’s schemes, which then constricted his breathing, and yet did not prevent him from characterizing the ultimatum presented by the Hapsburgs to Serbia only three weeks later as an insult to humanity and a ghastly crime, whose consequences he, as an initiate in such matters, clearly saw and greeted with quick, shallow breaths.

In short, Herr Settembrini’s reactions were as complex as the cataclysm he saw gathering and to which he tried to open his pupil’s eyes with veiled words; at the same time, however, a kind of patriotic courtesy and compassion kept him from opening up entirely on the matter. In the days of the first mobilization, of the first declarations of war, he got into the habit of reaching out both hands to his visitor and squeezing them in his own—which deeply touched the nincompoop’s heart, if not his head. “My friend,” the Italian said, “gunpowder, the printing press—yes, you undeniably invented those. But if you think that we would ever march against revolution—
caro
. . .”

During the days of stifling suspense, while Europe’s nerves were stretched on the rack, Hans Castorp did not go to see Herr Settembrini. The wild headlines from below now found their way directly to his balcony door, they sent the Berghof into spasms, filled the dining hall with an odor of sulfur that constricted the chest, seeping even into the rooms of the bedridden and moribund. And it was during those same moments that our sleeper slowly began to sit up in the grass, not knowing what had happened, not rubbing his eyes yet . . . and let us draw the metaphor out in full, so that we may be just to the rush of his emotions. He drew his legs back under him, stood up, looked around. He saw that the enchantment was broken, that he was released, set free—not by his own actions, as he had to admit to his shame, but set free by elementary external forces, for whom his liberation was a very irrelevant matter. But even if his little fate shrank to nothing before universal destiny, was it not, all the same, an expression of some goodness and justice intended personally for him, and thus in some way divine? If life was to receive back her sinful problem child, it could not happen on the cheap, but only like this, in a serious, rigorous fashion, as a kind of ordeal, which in this case did not perhaps mean life so much as it meant three salvos fired in his, the sinner’s, honor. And so he sank back down on his knees, his face and hands raised toward a heaven darkened by sulfurous fumes, but no longer the grotto ceiling in a sinful mountain of delight.

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.