Atheist's Funeral March

Monday, Aug. 25, 1952

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But what exactly, he asks himself, is he defending? What is his faith? He cannot say. Nor can any of the soldiers at the fort. Some of them are so disillusioned that they abandon the garrison at the first opportunity; many of them are duped into remaining against their will. All of them know that the fort's equipment is obsolete. But few of them worry. The invaders, say the skeptics, will come by a different route; probably they will not come at all. Only a handful of dedicated soldiers really believe in the threat of the North and yearn for the day when their fidelity will be put to the test. And even these rare men suspect that the only reason for their faith is that they want to "give life some significance."

Dreams to Dust. Except for a couple of brief, unsatisfactory leaves, Lieut. Drogo stays at the fort until he is an old man. And when, at last, the "Tartars" suddenly advance upon the fort, Drogo is so decrepit that he is kicked out to make room for stronger men. Back in the city, utterly disillusioned by his wasted life, he is promptly attacked by a new enemy—death. Mustering his last reserves of discipline and courage, Drogo meets this fatal enemy with a brave smile. As he sees it, in his last moments, death only means that "The worst is over and they [i.e., the facts of life] cannot cheat you any more."

This sounds like the Existentialist answer to the modern dilemma—an answer which assumes that all questions of faith are pointless and only man's pride and courage are of value. It is an answer that would have left Kafka as restless as before and convinced Dostoevsky that the Nihilists had won the day. But Author Buzzati, no Existentialist himself, presents it as a universal truth, a faith to die for; and so, though The Tartar Steppe suffers from being a copy of The Castle, it gains from the gravity and human sympathy with which it is written. Like many another modern novel, it reads like an atheist's funeral march—in which the composer (to say nothing of the corpse) is numbly resigned to the belief that man begins in dreams and ends in dust.