II

I find it strange to think that at home in a drawer there is the first part of a play I once started to write called ‘Saul’, and a stack of poems as well. I spent so many evenings on them – we all did things like that – but it has all become so unreal to me that I can’t even imagine it any more.

When we came out here we were cut off, whether we liked it or not, from everything we had done up to that point. We often try to find a reason or an explanation for this, but we can never quite manage it. Things are particularly confused for us twenty-year-olds, for Kropp, Muller, Leer and me, the ones Kantorek called young men of iron. The older men still have firm ties to their earlier lives – they have property, wives, children, jobs and interests, and these bonds are all so strong that the war can’t break them. But for us twenty-year-olds there are only our parents, and for some of us a girlfriend. That isn’t much, because at our age parental influence is at its weakest, and girls haven’t really taken over yet. Apart from that, we really didn’t have much else; the occasional passion for something, a few hobbies, school; our lives didn’t go much further than that as yet. And now nothing is left of it all.

Kantorek would say that we had been standing on the very threshold of life itself. It’s pretty well true, too. We hadn’t had a chance to put down any roots. The war swept us away. For the others, for the older men, the war is an interruption, and they can think beyond the end of it. But we were caught up by the war, and we can’t see how things will turn out. All we know for the moment is that in some strange and melancholy way we have become hardened, although we don’t often feel sad about it any more.

If Muller wants Kemmerich’s flying boots, this doesn’t make him any more unfeeling than somebody who would find such a wish too painful even to contemplate. It’s just that he can keep things separate in his mind. If the boots were any use at all to Kemmerich, Muller would sooner walk barefoot over barbed-wire than give a single thought to getting them. But as it is, the boots are objects which now have nothing to do with Kemmerich’s condition, whereas Muller can do with them. Kemmerich is going to die, whoever gets them. So why shouldn’t Muller try and get hold of them – after all, he has more right to them than some orderly. Once Kemmerich is dead it will be too late. That’s why Muller is keeping an eye on them now.

We have lost all our ability to see things in other ways, because they are artificial. For us, it is only the facts that count. And good boots are hard to come by.

We were not always like that. We went down to the local recruiting office, still a class of twenty young men, and then we marched off en masse, full of ourselves, to get a shave at the barber’s – some of us for the first time – before we set foot on a parade-ground. We had no real plans for the future and only very few of us had thoughts of careers or jobs that were firm enough to be meaningful in practical terms. On the other hand, our heads were full of nebulous ideas which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life and even the war for us.

We had ten weeks of basic training, and that changed us more radically than ten years at school. We learnt that a polished tunic button is more important than a set of philosophy books. We came to realize – first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference – that intellect apparently wasn’t the most important thing, it was the kit-brush; not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it no longer struck us as odd that an ex-postman with a couple of stripes should have more power over us than our parents ever had, or our teachers, or the whole course of civilization from Plato to Goethe. With our young, wide-open eyes we saw that the classical notion of patriotism we had heard from our teachers meant, in practical terms at that moment, surrendering our individual personalities more completely than we would ever have believed possible even in the most obsequious errand boy. Saluting, eyes front, marching, presenting arms, right and left about, snapping to attention, insults and a thousand varieties of bloody-mindedness – we had imagined that our task would be rather different from all this, but we discovered that we were being trained to be heroes the way they train circus horses, and we quickly got used to it. We even understood that some of these things were necessary, but that others, by the same token, were completely superfluous. Soldiers soon sort out which is which.

In threes and fours our class was scattered around the different squads as we were put in with fishermen from the Frisian Islands, farmers, labourers and artisans, and we soon got friendly with them. Kropp, Muller, Kemmerich and I were put into Number Nine Squad, the one commanded by Corporal Himmelstoss.

He was reckoned to be the stickiest bastard in the whole barracks, and he was proud of it. He was a short, stocky bloke with twelve years’ service in the reserve, a gingery moustache with waxed ends, and in civilian life he was a postman. He took a particular dislike to Kropp, Tjaden, Westhus and me because he sensed our unspoken defiance.

One day I had to make his bed fourteen times. Every time he found some fault with it and pulled it apart. Over a period of twenty hours – with breaks, of course – I polished an ancient and rock-hard pair of boots until they were soft as butter and even Himmelstoss couldn’t find anything to complain about. On his orders I scrubbed the floor of the corporals’ mess with a toothbrush. Kropp and I once had a go at sweeping the parade-ground clear of snow with a dustpan and brush on his orders, and we would have carried on until we froze to death if a lieutenant hadn’t turned up, sent us in, and given Himmelstoss a hell of a dressing-down. Unfortunately, this only turned Himmelstoss against us even more. Every Sunday for a month I was put on guard duty, and he made me room orderly for the same amount of time. I had to practise ‘On your feet! Advance! Get down!’ with full pack and rifle in a sodden ploughed field until I was nothing but a mass of mud myself and I collapsed, and then four hours later I had to present myself for inspection to Himmelstoss with all my gear spick and span, although my hands were raw and bleeding. Kropp, Westhus, Tjaden and I had to stand to attention without gloves in freezing weather, with our bare fingers on the barrels of our rifles, with Himmelstoss prowling around us waiting for the slightest movement so that he could fault us. I had to run eight times from the top floor of the barracks down to the parade-ground at two in the morning in my night things, because my underpants were protruding half an inch more than they should over the edge of the stool where we had to lay out our kit. Himmelstoss as duty corporal ran beside me and trod on my feet. At bayonet practice I was regularly paired with Himmelstoss, and I had to use a heavy iron weapon while he had a handy wooden one, so that it was easy for him to beat me black and blue around the arms. However, I once got so furious that I rushed blindly at him and gave him such a clout in the stomach that it knocked him flat. When he tried to put me on a charge the company commander just laughed and told him to be more careful; he knew Himmelstoss of old, and didn’t seem to mind that he’d been caught out. I got to be first class at climbing on the assault course, and I was pretty nearly the best at physical jerks. We trembled just at the sound of his voice, but the runaway post-horse never broke us down.

One Sunday, when Kropp and I were detailed to lug the latrine buckets across the parade-ground on a pole between us, Himmelstoss happened to come along, all poshed up and ready to go out. He stopped in front of us and asked how we were enjoying ourselves, so we faked a stumble, regardless, and tipped a bucketful over his legs. He was furious, but we had reached breaking point.

‘You’ll get clink for that!’ he shouted.

But Kropp had had enough. ‘Not before there’s been an inquiry, and that’s where we’ll spill the beans,’ he said.

‘Is that how you talk to an NCO?’ roared Himmelstoss. ‘Have you taken leave of your senses? Don’t speak until you’re spoken to! What did you say you’d do?’

‘Spill the beans about Corporal Himmelstoss! Sir!’ said Kropp, standing to attention.

Then Himmelstoss got the message, and cleared off without saying anything, although he did manage to snarl, ‘I’ll make you lot suffer for this,’ before he disappeared – but it was the end of his power over us. During field practice he tried again with his ‘Take cover! On the feet! Move, move!’ We obeyed all his orders, of course, because orders are orders and have to be obeyed. But we followed them so slowly that it drove Himmelstoss to despair. Taking it at a nice comfortable pace, we went down on to our knees, then on to our elbows and so on, and meanwhile he had already shouted another enraged order. He was hoarse before we were even sweating.

From then on he left us in peace. He went on calling us miserable little swine, of course. But there was respect in his voice.

There were plenty of decent drill corporals around, men who were more reasonable; the decent ones were even in the majority. More than anything else every one of them wanted to hang on to his safe job here at home for as long as possible – and they could only do that by being tough with recruits.

In the process we probably picked up every little detail of parade-ground drill that there was, and often we were so angry that it brought us to screaming pitch. It made a good few of us ill, and one of us, Wolf, actually died of pneumonia. But we would have been ashamed of ourselves if we had thrown in the towel. We became tough, suspicious, hardhearted, vengeful and rough – and a good thing too, because they were just the qualities we needed. If they had sent us out into the trenches without this kind of training, then probably most of us would have gone mad. But this way we were prepared for what was waiting for us.

We didn’t break; we adapted. The fact that we were only twenty helped us to do that, even though it made other things so difficult. But most important of all, we developed a firm, practical feeling of solidarity, which grew, on the battlefield, into the best thing that the war produced – comradeship in arms.

I’m sitting by Kemmerich’s bed. He is fading more and more visibly. There’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing around us. A hospital train has come in, and they are sorting out any of the wounded that can be moved. A doctor goes past Kemmerich’s bed and doesn’t even look at him.

‘Next time round, Franz,’ I tell him.

He lifts himself up on one elbow, propped against the pillow. ‘They’ve amputated my leg.’

So now he has realized after all. I nod and by way of a response I say, ‘You want to be glad that you got away with that.’

He doesn’t say anything.

I carry on talking. ‘It could have been both your legs, Franz. Wegler lost his right arm. That’s a lot worse. And it means you’ll go home.’

He looks at me. ‘Do you think so?’

‘Of course I do.’

He says it again, ‘Do you think so?’

‘Of course you will, Franz. You just have to recover from the operation.’

He signals to me to come a bit closer. I lean over him and he whispers, ‘I don’t reckon I will.’

‘Don’t talk such rubbish, Franz, you’ll see yourself that I’m right in a couple of days. It’s not such a big thing, having a leg amputated. They patch up a lot of worse things here.’

He lifts his hand. ‘Just have a look at my fingers.’

‘That’s all because of the operation. Just get a decent amount of grub into you, and you’ll pick up again. Are they feeding you properly?’

He points to a dish, but it is still half full. I begin to get worked up. ‘Franz, you’ve got to eat. Eating is the main thing. And the food’s pretty good here.’

He shakes his head. After a while he says slowly, ‘I used to want to be a forester.’

I try to reassure him. ‘You still can be. They can make amazing artificial limbs these days – you hardly notice that they aren’t real. They fix them on to the muscles. You can move the fingers on artificial hands and you can use them, you can even write. And besides, they are making improvements all the time.’

He lies there for a while without a word. Then he says, ‘You can take my flying boots for Muller.’

I nod and try to think of something to say that will cheer him up. His lips are pallid, his mouth has got bigger and his teeth look very prominent, as if they were made of chalk. His flesh is melting away, his forehead is higher, his cheekbones more pronounced. The skeleton is working its way to the surface. His eyes are sinking already. In a few hours it will all be over.

He isn’t the first one I have seen like this; but we grew up together, and that always makes it different. I’ve copied school exercises from him. In school he usually wore a brown jacket with a belt, with parts of the sleeves worn smooth. And he was the only one of us that could do a full arm-turn on the high bar. His hair flew into his face like silk when he did it. Kantorek was proud of him for being able to do it. But he couldn’t stand cigarettes. His skin was very white, and there was something feminine about him.

I glance down at my own boots. They are big and heavy and my trousers are tucked into them; standing up, you look solid and strong in these wide-legged things. But when we undress for swimming we suddenly have thin legs and narrow shoulders. We aren’t soldiers any more then, we are almost schoolboys again; nobody would believe that we could carry a full pack. It is really strange when we are naked; we are civilians again, and we almost feel like civilians.

Whenever we went swimming, Franz Kemmerich used to look as small and slim as a child. Now he is lying there – and for what reason? Everybody in the whole world ought to be made to walk past his bed and be told: ‘This is Franz Kemmerich, he’s nineteen and a half, and he doesn’t want to die! Don’t let him die!’

My thoughts run wild. This smell of carbolic and gangrene clogs the lungs, like thick, suffocating porridge.

It gets dark. Kemmerich’s face gets paler, it stands out against his pillow and is so white that it looks luminous. He makes a small movement with his mouth. I get closer to him. He whispers, ‘If you find my watch, send it home.’

I don’t argue. There is no point any more. He is beyond convincing. I’m sick with helplessness. That forehead, sunk in at the temples, that mouth, which is all teeth now, that thin, sharp nose. And the flit, tearful woman at home that I shall have to write to – I wish I had that job behind me already.

Hospital orderlies move about with bottles and buckets. One comes up to us, glances at Kemmerich speculatively and goes away again. He is obviously waiting – probably he needs the bed.

I get close to Franz and start to talk, as if that could save him: ‘Maybe you’ll finish up in that convalescent home in Klosterberg, Franz, up where the big houses are. Then you’ll be able to look out over the fields from your window, right across to the two trees on the horizon. It’s the best time now, when the corn is ripening, and the fields look like mother-of-pearl when the evening sun is on them. And the row of poplars by the stream where we used to catch sticklebacks. You can get yourself an aquarium again and breed fish, and you can go out without having to ask permission and you can even play the piano again if you want to.’

I bend down over his face, which is now in shadow. He is still breathing, but faintly. His face is wet, he is crying. So much for my stupid chattering.

‘Come on, Franz —’ I put my arm around his shoulder and my face is close to his. ‘Do you want to get some sleep now?’

He doesn’t answer. The tears are running down his cheeks. I would like to wipe them away, but my handkerchief is too dirty.

An hour passes. I sit there, tense and watching his every movement, in case he might want to say something else. If only he would open his mouth wide and scream. But he just weeps, his head turned away. He doesn’t talk about his mother or his brothers and sisters; he doesn’t say anything. All that is probably already far behind him; now he is all alone with his life of nineteen short years, and he is crying because it is slipping away from him.

This is the hardest, the most desperately difficult leave-taking I have experienced, although it was bad with Tiedjen, too, who kept on shouting for his mother – Tiedjen was a great tough chap who held the doctor away from his bed with a bayonet, his eyes wide open with terror, until he collapsed.

Suddenly Kemmerich groans, and there is rattling in his throat.

I’m on my feet, rush outside and ask, ‘Where’s the doctor?’ I see a white coat and grab hold of it. ‘Please come quickly or Franz Kemmerich will die.’

He pulls away from me and says to a hospital orderly who is standing nearby, ‘What’s all this about?’

The orderly replies, ‘Bed twenty-six, amputation at the upper thigh.’

‘How should I know anything about it?’ the doctor snaps, ‘I’ve done five leg amputations today.’ Then he pushes me out of the way, tells the orderly, ‘Go and see to it,’ and rushes off to the operating room.

I’m shaking with anger as I follow the orderly. The man looks round at me and says, ‘One operation after the other since five o’clock this morning – crazy, I tell you; just today we’ve had another sixteen fatalities – your man will make seventeen. There’s bound to be twenty at least —’

I feel faint; suddenly I can’t go on. I don’t even want to curse any more – it’s pointless. I just want to throw myself down and never get up again.

We reach Kemmerich’s bed. He is dead. His face is still wet with tears. His eyes are half open, and look as yellow as old-fashioned horn buttons.

The orderly nudges me. ‘Taking his things with you?’

I nod.

‘We’ve got to move him right away,’ he continues. ‘We need the bed. We’ve already got them lying on the ground out there.’

I take the things and undo Kemmerich’s identity tag. The orderly asks for his pay book. It isn’t there. I say that it is probably in the guard room, and leave. Behind me they are already bundling Franz on to a tarpaulin.

Once I get outside, the darkness and the wind are a salvation. I breathe as deeply as I can, and feel the air warmer and softer than ever before in my face. Images of girls, fields of flowers, of white clouds all pass rapidly through my mind. My feet move onwards in my boots, I am going faster, I’m running. Soldiers come towards me, their words excite me, even though I can’t understand what they are saying. The whole earth is suffused with power and it is streaming into me, up through the soles of my feet. The night crackles with electricity, there is a dull thundering from the front line, like some concerto for kettle drums. My limbs are moving smoothly, there is strength in my joints as I pant with the effort. The night is alive, I am alive. What I feel is hunger, but a stronger hunger than just the desire to eat —

Muller is waiting for me in front of the huts. I give him the flying boots. We go in and he tries them on. They are a perfect fit – He digs into his kit and gives me a decent chunk of salami. And there is hot tea with rum as well.