"My Comrade" (Der Kamarad) is the diary of a soldier in hospital. This man has been driven mad by the terrible sights at the front, and above all by the vision of a wounded man in the death agony, a poor wretch whose face had been torn away by a grapnel. The sight was seared upon his brain. The image never left him by day or by night. It sat down beside him at meals; went to bed with him; got up with him in the morning. It had become "My Comrade." The description is positively hallucinating, and this story contains some of the most forceful passages in the book, directed against the warmongers and against the humbugs of the press.
"A Hero's Death" (Heldentod) describes the death in hospital of First Lieutenant Otto Kadar. He has a fractured skull. While the regimental officers were listening to a gramophone playing the Rakoczy march, a bomb exploded among them. The dying man never stops talking of the Rakoczy march. He imagines that he is looking at the corpse of a young officer whose head has been carried away, and in place of the head, screwed into the neck, is the gramophone disc. In his growing delirium, he fancies that the same thing has happened to all the common soldiers, to all the officers, to himself; that in each one the head has been replaced by a gramophone disc. That is why it is so easy to lead them to the slaughter. The dying man makes a frantic effort to tear away the disc from his own neck, and as he does so all is over. The old major looking on says in a voice vibrating with respect: "He died like a true Hungarian—singing the Rakoczy march."
"Home Again" (Heimkehr) tells of the homecoming of Johann Bogdan, who had been the handsomest man in his native village. He returns from the war hopelessly disfigured. In hospital his face has been remade for him by means of a number of plastic operations. But when he looks at himself in the glass he is horror-stricken. No one in the village recognises him. The only exception is a hunchback whom he had looked on with contempt, and who now greets him familiarly. The countryside has
