The Salt of the Earth

At dawn, a swarm of locusts descended on every town. The darkness of that night had spawned a swarm of blue insects – centipedes stabbing with bayonets, wasps armed with deadly stings. Are these the same soldiers who entertained us last Sunday with a fine parade?

Cars full of generals nosily speed along the streets. The tunics’ red facings flash before the crowds of onlookers like matadors’ red capes.

Gutenberg, Johannes Gutenberg, was the name of that man the devil had intoxicated with Rhine wine in Mainz in 1450, ordering him to invent a new torture for the illiterate and the slow-witted. Possessed by the devil, Gutenberg founded the first printing press, together with a certain Faust. Since that time the devilish seed had spread like a plague of cholera across the entire globe, disturbing, bewitching and poisoning by night and day greedy souls in thrall to their pride in knowledge. But although so many reams of white paper had been smudged by the devil’s black characters that the entire globe could be wrapped up in it, in the year 1914 there were nevertheless many honest people in this world, especially in the Śniatyn province, who had not succumbed to the temptation. They were not even intimidated by the law introducing compulsory school attendance or by fines and imprisonment, preferring to pay the fines and suffer imprisonment rather than defile their descendants’ souls with the Latin alphabet or the Cyrillic script. It is true, of course, that in this victorious struggle they had a silent but powerful ally, the budget of the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Religious Affairs and Education. In this way the government itself indirectly fought the devil, who inhabits all written words, even the Holy Scriptures. For this reason no God-fearing person would sign documents, recording only three crosses. These three holy signs drive out the devil from all contracts, receipts and promissory notes.

‘Attention!’ means intense alertness, from which everything military, that is to say everything human, can be derived. When a man is standing to attention, you can fling him to the ground, you can tell him to run, kneel, throw himself into the water, to shoot, to stab, to trample! ‘Attention!’ This is the golden key to understanding the history of nations!