Schubert's Lindenbaum – Part 4 (MM42) (2024) Painting by Noël Van Hoof

Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain – Part 42

There is our friend, there is Hans Castorp! We recognized him a good distance off from that little beard he grew when he moved to the Bad Russian table. He is soaked through, his face is flushed, like all the others. He runs with feet weighed down by mud, his bayoneted rifle clutched in his hand and hanging at his side. Look, he is stepping on the hand of a fallen comrade – stepping on it with his hobnailed boots, pressing it deep into the soggy, branch-strewn earth. But it is him, all the same. What's this? He's singing? The way a man sings to himself in moments of dazed, thoughtless excitement, without even knowing – and he uses what tatters breath he has left to sing to himself:

Upon its bark I've ca-arved there
So many words of love –

He stumbles. No, he was thrown himself on his stomach at the approach of a howling hound of hell, a large explosive shell, a hideous sugarloaf from the abyss. He lies there, face in the cool muck, legs spread, feet twisted until the heels press the earth. Laden with horror, this product of science gone berserk crosses thirty yards in front of him, buries itself in the ground, and explodes like the devil himself, bursts inside the earth with ghastly superstrength and casts up a house-high fountain of soil, fire, iron lead and dismembered humanity. For two men had flung themselves down there beside one another – they were friends. Commingled now, they vanish.
Oh, how ashamed we feel in our shadowy security! We're leaving – we can't describe this! But was our friend hit, too? For a moment, he thought he was. A large clod of dirt struck his shin – it certainly hurt, but how silly, it was nothing. He gets up, he limps and stumbles forward on mud-laden feet, singing thoughtlessly:

And all its branches ru-ustled
As if they called to me –

And so, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, he disappears from sight.

(English translation by John E. Woods)
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Postscript: This is the last part of the series “The Magic Mountain”. It was a great pleasure and thrill to work on this project and I would like to thank everyone who visited my webpage.

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Thomas MannThe Magic MountainDer Zauberberg