“... madness and horror. For the first time I felt this when we walked along the Ennsky road - we walked ten hours continuously, without slowing down, not picking up the fallen and leaving them to the enemy, who was moving behind us and after three to four hours erased the traces of our feet with his feet ... "

The narrator is a young writer, drafted into the army. In a sultry steppe, he is haunted by a vision: a scrap of old blue wallpaper in his office, at home, and a dusty decanter with water, and the voices of his wife and son in the next room. And yet - like a sound hallucination - two words haunt him: "Red laughter."

Where are people going? Why is this heat? Who are they all? What is a house, a scrap of wallpaper, a decanter? He, exhausted by visions - those in front of his eyes, and those in his mind - sits on a roadside stone; next to him, other officers and soldiers, lagging behind the march, sit on red-hot land. Invisible glances, inaudible ears, lips, whispering God knows that ...

The narrative of the war that he wages is like shreds, scraps of dreams and manifestations, fixed by a half-mad mind.

Here is the battle. Three days of satanic roar and screech, almost a day without sleep and food. And again, before my eyes - blue wallpaper, a carafe of water ... Suddenly he sees a young messenger - a volunteer, a former student: "The general asks to hold out for another two hours, and there will be reinforcements." “I was thinking at that moment about why my son was not sleeping in the next room, and replied that I could hold out as long as I wanted ...” The white face of the messenger, white as light, suddenly explodes in a red spot - from the neck on which only that there was a head, gushing blood ...

Here it is: Red laughter! He is everywhere: in our bodies, in the sky, in the sun, and soon he will spill over the whole earth ...

It is no longer possible to distinguish where reality ends and delirium begins. In the army, in hospitals - four psychiatric rests. People go crazy as they get sick, becoming infected from each other during an epidemic. In the attack, the soldiers scream like mad; in between fights - like crazy sing and dance. And they laugh wildly. Red laugh ...

He is in a hospital bed. On the contrary - an officer looking like a dead man, recalling the battle in which he was mortally wounded. He recalls this attack partly with fear, partly with enthusiasm, as if dreaming of experiencing the same thing again. "And again a bullet in the chest?" - "Well, not every time - a bullet ... It would be nice if the order for courage! .."

One who in three days will be thrown onto other dead bodies in a common grave, smiling dreamily, almost chuckling, speaks of the order for courage. Madness...

In the infirmary, a holiday: somewhere we got a samovar, tea, lemon. Tattered, skinny, dirty, withered - they sing, laugh, remember the house. “What is a house? Which house"? Is there any kind of “home” somewhere? ” - “There is where we are not now.” “Where are we?” - "At war..."

... More vision. The train slowly creeps along the rails through the battlefield dotted with the dead. People pick up bodies - those who are still alive. Those who are able to walk on foot give way to seriously wounded calf wagons. The young male orderly cannot stand this madness - he shoots himself a bullet in the forehead. And the train, slowly carrying the cripple “home”, is blown up in a mine: the Red Cross, even the prominent from afar, does not stop the enemy ...

The narrator is at home. Cabinet, blue wallpaper, carafe covered with a layer of dust. Is it really in reality? He asks his wife to sit with his son in the next room. No, it seems, it's still in reality.

Sitting in the bath, he talks with his brother: it looks like we're all going crazy. The brother nods: “You have not read the newspapers yet. They are full of words about death, about murders, about blood. When several people stand somewhere and talk about something, it seems to me that they will immediately rush at each other and kill ... "

The narrator dies of wounds and insane, suicidal labor: two months without sleep, in an office with shutter windows, with electric light, at a desk, almost automatically moving a pen over paper. The interrupted monologue is picked up by his brother: the virus of madness, which has settled in the deceased at the front, is now left alive in the blood. All the symptoms of grievous ailment: fever, delirium, there is already no strength to fight the Red laughter that surrounds you from all sides. I want to run out to the square and shout: "Now stop the war - or ..."

But what kind of "or"? Hundreds of thousands, millions wash over the world with tears, scream it out - and it does not give anything ...

Railway station. Guards escorted prisoners from the carriage; a meeting of glances with an officer walking behind and at a distance along the lines. “Who is this with eyes?” - And his eyes are like an abyss, without pupils. “Crazy,” the escort answers casually. “There are many of them ...”

In the newspaper among hundreds of names of the dead - the name of the groom's sister. Suddenly, a letter arrives from the newspaper, from him, the murdered one, addressed to the deceased brother. Dead - correspond, talk, discuss front-line news. This is more real than that manifestation in which there are still not dead. "The crow is screaming ..." - repeated several times in the letter, still keeping the warmth of the hands of the one who wrote it ... All this is a lie! There is no war! Brother is alive - as is the sister's fiancé! The dead are alive! But then what about the living? ..

Theater. Red light pours from the stage to the stalls. Horror, how many people here - and all alive. And what if you shout now:

"Fire!" - what will be the crush, how many spectators will die in this crush? He is ready to shout - and jump out onto the stage, and watch how they begin to crush, strangle, kill each other. And when silence comes, he will throw into the hall with a laugh: “This is because you killed your brother!”

“Be quiet,” someone whispers to him from the side: he apparently began to utter his thoughts out loud ... Sleep, the other is worse. In each - death, blood, dead. Children on the street are playing war. One, seeing a man in the window, asks him. "Not. You will kill me ... "

More and more brother comes. And with him - other dead people, recognizable and unfamiliar. They fill the house, crowded closely in all rooms - and there is no longer a place for them to live.