They were the most terrible of all that I had seen, for they were little and could penetrate everywhere. Their mouths, resembling the jaws of toads or frogs, opening widely and convulsively behind the transparent skin of their naked bodies the red blood was coursing angrily-and they were killing each other at play. They were jumping lightly and nimbly, like young goats at play, and were breathing with difficulty, like sick people. In the morbid imagination of the writer of these "Fragments," dementia appears the normal state of those in war, as depicted in the description of trains full of mad soldiers passing through a railway station.Something was ominously burning in a broad red glare, and in the smoke there swarmed monstrous, misshapen children, with heads of grown-up murderers. But the greatest horror of war is found in the deranged minds of its participants. His mind collapses with the death of his brother, and under the numerous tragedies witnessed by him day after day, such as the commonplace tragedy of a mother receiving tender letters from her soldier son, long after an official telegram has been delivered announcing his death in battle.
The narrator sees red, a "red laugh" - "something enormous, red and bloody.laughing a toothless laugh." When death mercifully delivers the unfortunate soldier from the clutches of the "red agony," the man's brother, who has stayed at home, becomes infected by the horrors brought back by those returning from the trenches. Seen through the eyes of a sensitive intellectual, shell-shocked and mutilated, war is deprived of all sense and justification and is reduced to an insane orgy of madmen annihilating one another without knowing why. Many great writers have written about war, but few have explored the personal trauma endured by combatants as did Leonid Andreyev in this tale of the traumatic experiences of a soldier in the Russo - Japanese war in 1905.
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