The Antichrist by Joseph Roth, Richard Panchyk Read Free Book Online

of its practical application, to distort that reason?
    Which of all the forces that control our existence is equipped with such malice and power that it can pay bathing girls and steal from dying men.? Is he just an ordinary thief? Is he not more likely the same one who pays young girls to undress and enter the water while he arms men and sends them to their deaths, selling the shadows of the one and the other for the price of a ticket? Had he really robbed the soldiers of their shadows? Is he not far more mighty than just a thief or robber? Who can use the miraculous rescue of the lawgiver of the world as an excuse for girls to undress? Who can thus play upon our sensuality, which craves living flesh with the same intensity with which it devours horrible death? Who can thus transform the gift of reason into a curse? Who has the power to pay girls who are merely bathing and to rob the dying soldiers? And both at the same time? Had he not arranged a war between Russia and Japan? Just as easily as he arranged a bath for the naked girls? Did he not select the very moment when our reason began to do wondrous things to fool us? The very moment at which we believed that we could not be blinded, since we were performing so-called miracles? Can one fool gods? And do we not think that we are gods because we are in the process of learning from the gods how to perform miracles and even to make them intelligible? This is the moment for the Antichrist, this moment in which we take ourselves for gods because we perform miracles that we understand, even though we are not gods.
    This is his hour; this is the hour of the Antichrist.

AND I ALSO BECAME A SOLDIER
    Then there came unto the world the Great War, which is called the World War; many became soldiers, and I also became a soldier.
    We know that all around the world the Antichrist mingles with the soldiers as he has always done; with soldiers, who are compelled to regard life lightly while continually in the presence of Death, for it is actually Death who is their father and not the kaiser, and the ‘other world’ is their real fatherland even during their lifetime. It is therefore remarkable that the sons of Death should also let themselves be seduced by earthly things, that they should live for earthly glory and conceive a love for it. Although the Evil One can rarely seduce them with the clinking coins that others put into their wallets, he seduces soldiers with similar, somewhat larger coins which they can pin on to their chests. And he also seduces them through stars and buttons, through stripes and braids. I have seen so many who, one hour before we marched forth to sink into the arms of our father, Death, hastily obtain through cunning, baseness, the shabby trick of foolish ambition or even by physical violence, one more star, one more button, one more length of braid, so that he might be distinguished by these things from the others at the very second that they are all about to die. The train that carried us to the battlefield contained different kinds of cars, and in the better ones were those who had more braid and better buttons.
    The first thing I will relate is that during the time when we were training and learning to use weapons we had various mundane tasks to perform on a daily basis. So one day I went out with a squad of soldiers whose job it was to collect metal throughout the town from which would be made cannon and cannonballs – latches, candlesticks and, in general, all kinds of domestic utensils that contained copper, brass, nickel, iron or steel. A large wagon covered with a canvas roof was driven into the courtyard of the barracks, and it was similar to the one that had delivered the first film theatre into our town. We were twenty-four soldiers, and the twenty-fifth, or, more accurately, the first, was the sergeant. When the horses were harnessed and the driver was ready to pull on the reins, the gate of the barracks was opened wide, and into the