All Quiet on the Western Front (7 page)

I see Kat move and I crawl across. The coffin has hit the fourth man in our hole on his outstretched arm. He tries to tear off his gas-mask with the other hand. Kropp seizes him just in time, twists the hand sharply behind his back and holds it fast.

Kat and I proceed to free the wounded arm. The coffin lid is loose and bursts open, we are easily able to pull it off, we toss the corpse out, it slides down to the bottom of the shell-hole, then we try to loosen the under-part.

Fortunately the man swoons and Kropp is able to help us. We no longer have to be careful, but work away till the coffin gives with a sigh before the spade that we have dug in under it.

It has grown lighter. Kat takes a piece of the lid, places it under the shattered arm, and we wrap all our bandages round it. For the moment we can do no more.

Inside the gas-mask my head booms and roars—it is nigh bursting. My lungs are tight, they breathe always the same hot, used-up air, the veins on my temples are swollen. I feel I am suffocating.

A grey light filters through to us. I climb out over the edge of the shell-hole. In the dirty twilight lies a leg torn clean off; the boot is quite whole, I take that all in at a glance. Now something stands up a few yards distant. I polish the windows, in my excitement they are immediately dimmed again. I peer through them, the man there no longer wears his mask.

I wait some seconds—he has not collapsed—he looks around and makes a few paces—rattling in my throat I tear my mask off too and fall down, the air streams into me like cold water, my eyes are bursting the wave sweeps over me and extinguishes me.

The shelling has ceased, I turn towards the crater beckoning to the others. They take off their masks. We lift up the wounded man, one taking his splintered arm. And so we stumble off hastily.

The graveyard is a mass of wreckage. Coffins and corpses lie strewn about. They have been killed once again; but each of them that was flung up saved one of us.

The hedge is destroyed, the rails of the light railway are torn up and rise stiffly in the air in great arches. Someone lies in front of us. We stop; Kropp goes on alone with the wounded man.

The man on the ground is a recruit. His hip is covered with blood; he is so exhausted that I feel for my water-bottle where I have rum and tea. Kat restrains my hand and stoops over him.

“Where’s it got you comrade?”

His eyes move. He is too weak to answer.

We slit open his trousers carefully. He groans. “Gently, gently, it is much better——”

If he has been hit in the stomach, he oughtn’t to drink anything. There’s no vomiting, that’s a good sign. We lay the hip bare. It is one mass of mince-meat and bone splinters. The joint has been hit. This lad won’t walk any more.

I wet his temples with a moistened finger and give him a swig. His eyes move again. We see now that the right arm is bleeding as well.

Kat spreads out two wads of dressing as wide as possible so that they will cover the wound. I look for something to bind loosely round it. We have nothing more, so I slip up the wounded man’s trouser leg still farther in order to use a piece of his underpants as a bandage. But he is wearing none. I now look at him closely. He is the fair-headed boy of a little while ago.

In the meantime Kat has taken a bandage from a dead man’s pocket and we carefully bind the wound. I say to the youngster who looks at us fixedly: “We’re going for a stretcher now——”

Then he opens his mouth and whispers: “Stay here——”

“We’ll be back again soon,” says Kat. “We are only going to get a stretcher for you.”

We don’t know if he understands. He whimpers like a child and plucks at us: “Don’t go away——”

Kat looks around and whispers: “Shouldn’t we just take a revolver and put an end to it?”

The youngster will hardly survive the carrying, and at the most he will only last a few days. What he has gone through so far is nothing to what he’s in for till he dies. Now he is
numb and feels nothing. In an hour he will become one screaming bundle of intolerable pain. Every day that he can live will be a howling torture. And to whom does it matter whether he has them or not——

I nod. “Yes, Kat, we ought to put him out of his misery.”

He stands still a moment. He has made up his mind. We look round—but we are no longer alone. A little group is gathering, from the shell-holes and trenches appear heads.

We get a stretcher.

Kat shakes his head. “Such a kid——” He repeats it. “Young innocents——”

Our losses are less than was to be expected—five killed and eight wounded. It was in fact quite a short bombardment. Two of our dead lie in the upturned graves. We merely throw the earth in on them.

We go back. We trot off silently in single file one behind the other. The wounded are taken to the dressing-station. The morning is cloudy. The bearers make a fuss about numbers and tickets, the wounded whimper. It begins to rain.

An hour later we reach our lorries and climb in. There is more room now than there was. The rain becomes heavier. We take out waterproof sheets and spread them over our heads. The rain rattles down, and flows off at the sides in streams. The lorries bump through the holes, and we rock to and fro in a half-sleep.

Two men in the front of the lorry have long forked poles. They watch for telephone wires which hang crosswise over the road so low that they might easily pull our heads off. The two fellows take them at the right moment on their poles and lift
them over behind us. We hear their call “Mind—wire—,” dip the knee in a half-sleep and straighten up again.

Monotonously the lorries sway, monotonously come the calls, monotonously falls the rain. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up in the line, on the body of the little recruit with the wound that is so much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich’s grave; it falls in our hearts.

An explosion sounds somewhere. We wince, our eyes become tense, our hands are ready to vault over the side of the lorry into the ditch by the road.

Nothing happens—only the monotonous cry: “Mind—wire,”—our knees bend—we are again half asleep.

KILLING EACH
separate louse is a tedious business when a man has hundreds. The little beasts are hard and the everlasting cracking with one’s fingernails very soon becomes wearisome. So Tjaden has rigged up the lid of a boot-polish tin with a piece of wire over the lighted stump of a candle. The lice are simply thrown into this little pan. Crack! and they’re done for.

We sit around with our shirts on our knees, our bodies naked to the warm air and our hands at work. Haie has a particularly fine brand of louse: they have a red cross on their heads. He suggests that he brought them back from the hospital at Thourhout, where they attended personally on a surgeon-general. He says he means to use the fat that slowly accumulates in the tin-lid for polishing his boots, and roars with laughter for half an hour at his own joke.

But he gets little response to-day; we are too preoccupied with another affair.

The rumour has materialized. Himmelstoss has come. He
appeared yesterday; we’ve already heard the well-known voice. He seems to have overdone it with a couple of young recruits on the ploughed field at home and unknown to him the son of the local magistrate was watching. That cooked his goose.

He will get some surprises here. Tjaden has been meditating for hours what to say to him. Haie gazes thoughtfully at his great paws and winks at me. The thrashing was the high water mark of his life. He tells me he often dreams of it. Kropp and Müller are amusing themselves. From somewhere or other, probably the pioneer-cookhouse, Kropp has bagged for himself a mess-tin full of beans. Müller squints hungrily into it but checks himself and says: “Albert, what would you do if it were suddenly peace-time again?”

“There won’t be any peace-time,” says Albert bluntly.

“Well, but if—” persists Müller, “what would you do?”

“Clear out of this!” growls Kropp.

“Of course. And then what?”

“Get drunk,” says Albert.

“Don’t talk rot, I mean seriously—”

“So do I,” says Kropp, “what else should a man do?”

Kat becomes interested. He levies tribute on Kropp’s tin of beans, swallows some, then considers for a while and says: “You might get drunk first, of course, but then you’d take the next train for home and mother. Peace-time, man, Albert——”

He fumbles in his oil-cloth pocket-book for a photograph and suddenly shows it all round. “My old woman!” Then he puts it back and swears: “Damned lousy war——”

“It’s all very well for you to talk,” I tell him. “You’ve a wife and children.”

“True,” he nods, “and I have to see to it that they’ve something to eat.”

We laugh. “They won’t lack for that, Kat, you’d scrounge it from somewhere.”

Müller is insatiable and gives himself no peace. He wakes Haie Westhus out of his dream. “Haie, what would you do if it was peace-time?”

“Give you a kick in the backside for the way you talk,” I say. “How does it come about exactly?”

“How does the cow-shit come on the roof?” retorts Müller laconically, and turns to Haie Westhus again.

It is too much for Haie. He shakes his freckled head:

“You mean when the war’s over?”

“Exactly. You’ve said it.”

“Well, there’d be women of course, eh?”—Haie licks his lips.

“Sure.”

“By Jove, yes,” says Haie, his face melting, “then I’d grab some good buxom dame, some real kitchen wench with plenty to get hold of, you know, and jump straight into bed. Just you think, boys, a real feather-bed with a spring mattress; I wouldn’t put trousers on again for a week.”

Everyone is silent. The picture is too good. Our flesh creeps. At last Müller pulls himself together and says:

“And then what?”

A pause. Then Haie explains rather awkwardly: “If I were a non-com. I’d stay with the Prussians and serve out my time.”

“Haie, you’ve got a screw loose, surely!” I say.

“Have you ever dug peat?” he retorts good-naturedly. “You try it.”

Then he pulls a spoon out of the top of his boot and reaches over into Kropp’s mess-tin.

“It can’t be worse than digging trenches,” I ventured.

Haie chews and grins: “It lasts longer though. And there’s no getting out of it either.”

“But, man, surely it’s better at home.”

“Some ways,” says he, and with open mouth sinks into a day-dream.

You can see what he is thinking. There is the mean little hut on the moors, the hard work on the heath from morning till night in the heat, the miserable pay, the dirty labourer’s clothes.

“In the army in peace-time you’ve nothing to trouble about,” he goes on, “your food’s found every day, or else you kick up a row; you’ve a bed, every week clean underwear like a perfect gent, you do your non-com.’s duty, you have a good suit of clothes; in the evening you’re a free man and go off to the pub.”

Haie is extraordinarily set on his idea. He’s in love with it.

“And when your twelve years are up you get your pension and become the village bobby, and you can walk about the whole day.”

He’s already sweating on it. “And just you think how you’d be treated. Here a dram, there a pint. Everybody wants to be well in with a bobby.”

“You’ll never be a non-com. though, Haie,” interrupts Kat.

Haie looks at him sadly and is silent. His thoughts still linger over the clear evenings in autumn, the Sundays in the heather, the village bells, the afternoons and evenings with the servant girls, the fried bacon and barley, the carefree hours in the ale-house——

He can’t part with all these dreams so abruptly; he merely growls: “What silly questions you do ask.”

He pulls his shirt over his head and buttons up his tunic.

“What would you do, Tjaden!” asks Kropp.

Tjaden thinks of one thing only. “See to it that Himmelstoss didn’t get past me.”

Apparently he would like most to have him in a cage and sail into him with a club every morning. To Kropp he says warmly: “If I were in your place I’d see to it that I became a lieutenant. Then you could grind him till the water in his backside boils.”

“And you, Detering!” asks Müller like an inquisitor. He’s a born schoolmaster with all his questions.

Detering is sparing with his words. But on this subject he speaks. He looks at the sky and says only the one sentence: “I would go straight on with the harvesting.”

Then he gets up and walks off.

He is worried. His wife has to look after the farm. They’ve already taken away two more of his horses. Every day he reads the papers that come, to see whether it is raining in his little corner of Oldenburg. They haven’t brought in the hay yet.

At this moment Himmelstoss appears. He comes straight up to our group. Tjaden’s face turns red. He stretches his length on the grass and shuts his eyes in excitement.

Himmelstoss is a little hesitant, his gait becomes slower. Then he marches up to us. No one makes any motion to stand up. Kropp looks up at him with interest.

He continues to stand in front of us and wait. As no one says anything he launches a “Well!”

A couple of seconds go by. Apparently Himmelstoss doesn’t quite know what to do. He would like most to set us all on the run again. But he seems to have learned already that the front-line isn’t a parade ground. He tries it on though, and by addressing himself to one instead of to all of us hopes to get some response. Kropp is nearest, so he favours him.