The Silent Prophet by Joseph Roth Page B

they had all been in mufti, both here and over there, barely distinguishable. Why, then should they all at once be able to sing? They had never sung before when they had sat in trains as travellers in perfumery, as lawyers, as officials going on leave or returning to their duties. Had they no respect for death? Did they respect it only when it appeared with the festive insignia which they liked to bestow on it at proper times and in proper churchyards, at coffin-makers and in funeral parlours?
    'I gradually came to recognize my old anger against authority,' Friedrich wrote to me later in the field. 'I was rebelling against authority as it is at the present time. For it is not based on legal assumptions. The book-keeper who goes off singing to the war is no more a hero than the policeman is a policeman, the minister a minister, or the Kaiser a Kaiser. One does not see this in times of peace. But now the hundred thousand lawyers and headmasters who have suddenly turned into officers, expose this illegality which applies even to the regular officers. There is no doubt that society reveals its identity, however it disguises itself.
    'I was in the Union of Young Workers, which you know. The Thursday evening meetings still take place. I read the programme in the entrance-hall. These were the titles of the lectures: "The Central Powers and the War", "Socialism and Germany", "Tsarism and the Proletariat", "The Middle European idea and Freedom of the Peoples". I sought the chairman, a young metal worker. Despite his youth, he was currently exempted from military service because he worked in a munitions factory and on account of his expert knowledge. "Oh, Comrade!" said the young man, overjoyed. He wore a badge in his buttonhole whose design I could not quite make out and which combined a cross, a star and a hammer. A draughtsman in the munitions factory had designed it and it had become officially adopted as the insignia of the heroes of the home front as the metal workers are known, "How marvellous, that you've escaped!" said the young man. "When do you enlist? Will you give us a talk beforehand? There aren't many of us now, most have joined up! " While he was speaking he had the cheerfulness of the president of a festival committee. On his table lay piles of pink field postcards, there was an ashtray he had made himself out of the grenades he helped to produce. On the wall hung one of the familiar prints showing Karl Marx, and a red flag wrapped up with string leaned in a corner. It was rather like a rolled-up sunshade, the ones the flower-sellers spread over their stalls on hot summer days. And because it was snowing outside, it seemed to me in a fit of strange confusion that the flag was really an umbrella.'
    He remembered Grünhut as one remembers a medicine one has already used a few times with success. Grünhut was a lost individual, even a war could not relieve him of his excommunication. And as society was waging war, Friedrich concluded with the consistency of a man who has not yet experienced a war, that the previously convicted must be normal.
    Grünhut jumped up. 'Come in, come in,' he said, and drew Friedrich to the table and lit the gas-lamp which began to diffuse a humming green chill. However, he endeavoured to warm his frozen hands at the flame.
    Friedrich told of his escape. Grünhut walked around in the room and rubbed his hands. 'What heroism!' he said. 'You've earned a decoration even before going into the field! It ought to be published in the papers! What a hero! What a hero!'
    And he began to talk of the imminent siege of the city of Paris, of Hindenburg's march towards Petersburg, of a regiment that had passed under his window that very day on its way to the station, and of his hopes of being rehabilitated at last. He now referred to his old unhappy story as 'a tragic case'. He had put in a request to the regiment in which he had served as a one-year volunteer years ago; he had been a sergeant and been