I am a soldier: I am serving my country with a weapon in my fist, as the national rhetoric puts it. We have ridden out on a drill, have stuffed newspapers under our greatcoats and into our boots, and still we writhe in the biting cold. Nevertheless, our spirits are almost recklessly high. We are serving our people rather comfortably. We play at being soldiers, whilst elsewhere the war has long since become deadly serious. We too are armed to the teeth and have live ammunition in our pouches, but we are not yet confronted with an enemy to measure ourselves against. We know that our Fatherland is threatened on many sides—and most directly here in Bessarabia. But this is cant, just as our willingness to defend the Homeland with weapons in our fists is still nothing but cant and posturing.

We enjoy the sublimity of this cant, the nimbus of heroism it adorns us with. But even more, we enjoy our rough youth and, unconsciously, our blessed anonymity in the collective. In our uniforms we are Lieutenant Jonescu or Volunteer Popescu or Private First Class Petrescu only for the sake of functional differentiation. In reality, we are all young men doing military service with no responsibilities except toward certain cant. Serving in this way, however, we are sons of the people.

They creep from their huts, these people, swarming to greet us, bringing tzuika—mild, oily plum brandy—and delicately rancid cakes: a people smelling rancid in their sheepskins, with deeply notched peasant faces, children peeping timidly from behind their mothers’ aprons, silver-haired old men, trembling, dribbling, with broken voices, and here and there the cherry-dark eyes of a girl, the double humps of firm breasts under an embroidered blouse . . . We have dismounted and are chatting with the people, who have their hands in the sleeves of their sheepskins and are stamping from one foot to the other in this awful cold. War? Yes, soon there will be war here too. Those fellows over there, across the Dniester, don’t want us to keep this good land. But we’ll show them that it’s our land, our Romanian earth. We, the sons of the people, will defend this soil with weapons in our fists . . . The cant comes trippingly over my lips, well drilled. I am so proud, so moved, so delighted to be a son of a people—whose language I hardly ever speak, whom I hardly know, whom I have hardly ever seen or experienced except in such a folkloristic genre picture as this one here: costumed farm laborers with backs crooked from bending over furrows and before all kinds of masters, servile people with friendly grins, people sprung directly from their soil, with hair like grass, with skin like bark, with hands like tree roots—and young girls plump as cherries.

And we among them in our uniforms and helmets, warriors hung with sabers, lances, and carbines, with our hoary, steambreathing horses—it all looks like an opera set. The music is supplied by the dogs. There must be hundreds, to judge by the din. They are barking their lungs out. They are yanking so hard at their chains that they turn over in midair. They snap blindly, furiously, into the blue winter sky, drooling, foaming . . .