In Red Read Online Free Page A

the uneasy breathing of the officer leaning over his games of solitaire would fill the room with the vapors of hateful thoughts. The orderly dozing in the corner was woken by the fug and hurried to open a window; the vapors billowed into the sky. Dark clouds like dismal armies gathered over the barracks.
    â€œThat was how it looked before the Russian-Japanese War,” the housewives would comment. And so they set about clarifying butter, bolting flour, and sifting buckwheat into impregnated canvas sacks.
    In the officers’ mess, as always the gas lamps burned and the smoke-blackened mirrors were crowded with uniforms above which the faces showed indistinctly, blurred and all alike. When baccarat was played at one of the tables, in the mirrors braided sleeves shuffled the cards and gathered undeserved winnings. They knocked ash from pipes and turned the pages of newspapers with indecipherable backward headlines.
    When the mess was about to close for the night, Kazimierz would rest his forehead on the table amid the scattered cards and through tightly closed eyelids he would see unclearly, as if through fog or dust clouds, pennants and horses and cannon
pulled by gun carriages. Yet there were too few of them and they were too far away to be able to relieve him in his torment. Immediately before the outbreak of war he had a waking dream of bayonet attacks in which the cold glint of metal cut through a swirling tangle of desires. Uniforms of undetermined color weltered in red. A trail of the same red, seeping from who knew where, stained his daily thoughts.
    Before the engagement came about, war was to draw the young lieutenant into its machinery, along with his bootjack, his handkerchiefs with their intricate monogram, and his cheery orderly, who walked behind carrying his officer’s trunk. The war, about which the newspapers wrote that it had been caused by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in heat-scorched Sarajevo, from another point of view was the result of an icy stagnation in which dark clouds were swelled by the vapors of hate-filled thoughts and turned easily into death. To look at the war from this perspective, it was Kazimierz himself who had provoked it, tipping the scales of dynastic interests and diplomatic tensions with the weight of his sighs.
    â€œI heard you’ve gotten a grip on yourself,” said Commander Ahlberg to Lieutenant Krasnowolski as he received him in his quarters one afternoon. “I’m glad.”
    From his desk he took out a half-empty bottle – evidence of the responsibility with which the colonel bore the honor of an officer. And a sign that the previous day it had required all his
strength to set the bottle aside before he could see its bottom. He took out two glasses and slowly filled them. Kazimierz downed his, set the glass aside, and took a deep breath.
    â€œColonel, you’re well aware that a defense of this mound of snow is out of the question,” he declared. “Even if we were all to perish. And perishing won’t be easy either.”
    He meant a proper death, from bullets. Colonel Ahlberg harbored no illusions regarding the effectiveness of any resistance that could be presented to the enemy in that open space where there was only the howling of German and Austrian and Russian winds, and he agreed with the other man at once, though he gave a hearty laugh as he did so.
    â€œPerishing will be difficult, I like that! At the last hour, bang, you fall down, and it’s all over. It’s the easiest of all the things we have to do in this life.”
    Kazimierz listened with furrowed brow. The colonel glanced at him, stopped laughing, and reached for his handbell. His orderly reported in with an empty pail, and took away one that was full from a leak in the ceiling. Through Kazimierz’s bloodshot eyes the water in the pail flashed with a red gleam. The colonel was already discoursing on holes in the roof; his gaze did not reach any