XI

We’ve stopped counting the weeks. It was winter when I arrived, and whenever a shell hit the ground, the frozen clumps of earth it sent up were almost as dangerous as the shrapnel. Now the trees are green again. Our lives move between base camp and front line. To an extent we have become used to it. War is another cause of death, like cancer or tuberculosis or influenza or dysentery. The fatalities are just much more numerous, and more horrible.

Our thoughts have turned to clay, they are moulded by the variation in the days – good, when we are in camp, and deadened when we are under fire. No man’s land is outside us and inside us too.

Everyone feels the same, not just us out here – earlier values don’t count any longer, and nobody really knows how things used to be. The differences brought about by education and upbringing have been almost completely blurred and are now barely recognizable. Sometimes those differences are an advantage in making the most of a given situation; but they have their disadvantages as well, because they give rise to inhibitions which then have to be overcome. It is as if we were once coins from various different countries; we’ve been melted down, and now we have all been restruck so that we are all the same. If you want to pick out differences you have to be able to examine the basic material very closely. We are soldiers, and only as an afterthought and in a strange and shamefaced way are we still individual human beings.

It is a brotherhood on a large scale, in which elements of the good fellowship you get in folk songs, of the solidarity you find among convicts, and of the desperate clinging together of those condemned to die, are all combined in some strange way to give a form of life which, in the midst of all the danger, rises above the tension and the abandonment of death, and leads to a fleeting and quite dispassionate grasping at whatever time we can gain. It is heroic and banal, if you really think about it – but who does?

It is this attitude that makes Tjaden gulp down his pea-and-ham soup as fast as he can when an enemy attack has been reported, because he doesn’t know whether he will still be alive in an hour’s time. We have had long discussions on whether this is the right thing to do or not. Kat thinks it isn’t, because he says we have to reckon with the possibility of a stomach wound, which is much more dangerous on a full belly than on an empty one.

Things like that are problems for us, we take them seriously, and we couldn’t do otherwise. Life here on the very edges of death follows a terribly clear line, it restricts itself to what is absolutely necessary, everything else is part of a dull sleep – it is our crudeness but also our salvation. If we were to make finer distinctions we would long since have gone mad, deserted or been killed. It is like a Polar expedition – every activity is geared exclusively to survival, and is automatically directed to that end. Nothing else is permissible, because it would use up energy unnecessarily. That is the only way we can save ourselves, and I often look at myself and see a stranger, when in quiet hours the puzzling reflection of earlier times places the outlines of my present existence outside me, like a dull mirror image; and then I am amazed at how that nameless active force that we call life has adapted itself to all this. Everything else is in suspended animation, and life is constantly on its guard against the threat of death. It has made us into thinking animals so that we can have instinct as a weapon. It has blunted our sensitivities, so that we don’t go to pieces in the face of a terror that would demolish us if we were thinking clearly and consciously. It has awakened in us a sense of comradeship to help us escape from the abyss of isolation. It has given us the indifference of wild animals, so that in spite of everything we can draw out the positive side from every moment and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of oblivion. And so we live out a closed, hard existence of extreme superficiality, and it is only rarely that an experience sparks something off. But when that happens, a flame of heavy and terrible longing suddenly bursts through.

Those are the dangerous moments, the ones that show us that the way we have adapted is really artificial after all, that it isn’t a simple calmness, but rather a desperate struggle to attain calmness. In our way of life we are barely distinguishable from bushmen as far as the externals are concerned; but while bushmen can always be that way because that is the way they are, and they can at least develop their capacities by their own efforts, with us it is exactly the other way about: our inner forces are not geared to development, but to regression. The attitude of the bushmen is relaxed, as it should be; ours is completely tense and artificial.

And in the night you realize, when you wake out of a dream, overcome and captivated by the enchantment of visions that crowd in on each other, just how fragile a handhold, how tenuous a boundary separates us from the darkness – we are little flames, inadequately sheltered by thin walls from the tempest of dissolution and insensibility in which we flicker and are often all but extinguished. Then the muted roar of battle surrounds us, and we creep into ourselves and stare wide-eyed into the night. The only comfort we have comes from the breathing of our sleeping comrades, and so we wait until the morning comes.

Every day and every hour, every shell and every dead man wear down that thin handhold, and the years grind it down rapidly. I can see how it is already giving way around me.

Take the stupid business with Detering.

He was one of those who keep themselves very much to themselves. The unlucky thing for him was seeing a cherry tree in someone’s garden. We had just come back from the front, and this cherry tree was suddenly there in front of us in the early morning light, just as we came around a bend in the road near our new quarters. It didn’t have any leaves, but it was a single mass of white blossoms.

That evening Detering was nowhere to be found. Eventually he turned up, and he had a few twigs with cherry blossom in his hand. We had a laugh, and asked him if he was going courting. He didn’t answer, and just lay down on his bed. That night I heard him moving about, and he seemed to be packing his things. I thought there might be trouble brewing, and went over to him. He acted as if nothing was the matter, and I said to him, ‘Don’t do anything daft, Detering.’

‘ Course not – I just can’t get to sleep —’

‘Why did you pick the cherry blossom?’

‘I can pick cherry blossom if I want, can’t I?’ he said sullenly – and then he added after a while, ‘I’ve got a big orchard with cherry trees back home. From the hayloft they look like one huge bed-sheet when they are in blossom, that’s how white they are. It’s at this time of the year.’

‘Maybe you’ll get leave. You might even be demobbed and sent home because you are a farmer.’

He nods, but his mind is elsewhere. When country people like him get into a state they have a peculiar expression on their faces, a bit bovine, but also with an almost numinous look of yearning, half idiocy and half rapture. To try and get him out of himself I ask him for a chunk of bread. He gives it to me without question. That’s suspicious, because he is usually pretty stingy. So I keep an eye on him. Nothing happens, and in the morning he is his usual self.

He had probably realized that I was watching him. Two mornings later, and he is missing after all. I notice, but keep quiet about it so as to give him a bit of time – perhaps he’ll make it. A few men have got through to Holland.

But at roll call his absence is spotted. A week later we hear that the military police, or rather the special battle police everyone hates, have picked him up. He was heading for Germany – that was obviously completely hopeless, and it was equally obvious that everything else he had done was simply stupid. Anyone could have worked out that he had only deserted out of homesickness and a momentary aberration. But what does a court martial miles behind the lines know about things like that? Nothing more’s been heard of Detering.

But they break through in other ways as well, those dangerously dammed-up feelings – like steam escaping from an over-heated boiler. It’s worth reporting how Berger met his end, for example.

Our trenches have long since been shot to pieces, and the front is so fluid that trench warfare is not really possible any more. Once an attack and a counter-attack have come and gone, all that remains is a ragged line and a bitter struggle from one bomb crater to the next. The front line has been broken, and little groups have dug themselves in everywhere, fighting from clusters of foxholes.

We are in one shell hole, with English troops already on one side of us – they are turning our flank and getting round behind us. We are surrounded. It is not easy to surrender. There is fog and smoke all around, and nobody would realize that we were trying to give ourselves up, and perhaps we don’t even want to – no one is quite sure in times like this. We can hear the explosions of hand-grenades getting closer. Our machine-gun sweeps the sector in front of us. The water in the cooling system evaporates and we pass the container round quickly – everyone pisses into it and we have water again and can go on firing. But behind us the explosions are getting closer. In a few minutes we’ll be done for.

Suddenly another machine-gun starts up from very close by. It is in a crater near us, and Berger has got hold of it; now there is a counter-attack from behind, we get out and manage to move backwards and join up with the rest.

Afterwards, by the time we have found some decent cover, one of the food carriers tells us that there is a wounded messenger dog a couple of hundred yards away.

‘Where?’ asks Berger.

The food carrier describes the place for him, Berger sets off to fetch the animal or to shoot it. Even six months ago he would not have bothered about it, and would have behaved sensibly. We try to stop him. But when he sets off – and he’s serious about it – all we can say is ‘He’s crazy’, and let him go. These front-line breakdowns can be dangerous if you can’t wrestle the man to the ground straight away and hold him there. And Berger is over six foot and the strongest man in the company.

He really is mad, because he has to go through the barrage – but that sudden bolt from the blue that hovers over every one of us has hit him, and now he is a man possessed. The way it takes other people is to make them scream with rage, or run away, and there was one man who just kept on trying to dig himself into the earth with his hands, his feet and his mouth.

Of course there is a lot of shamming in situations like this, but even the shamming is really a symptom as well. Berger tries to put the dog out of its misery and is carried back with a shot through the pelvis, and even one of the men who fetches him gets a bullet wound in the calf.

Muller is dead. He got a Verey light in the stomach from close to. He lived for another half-hour, fully conscious and in terrible agony. Before he died he gave me his pay book and passed on his boots – the ones he inherited from Kemmerich that time. I wear them, because they are a good fit. Tjaden will get them after me – I’ve promised him.

We were actually able to bury Muller, but he probably won’t rest in peace for long. Our lines are being moved back. There are too many fresh British and American regiments over there. There is too much corned beef and white flour. And too many new guns. Too many aircraft.

But we are thin and starving. Our food is so bad and full of so much ersatz stuff that it makes us ill. The factory owners in Germany have grown rich, while dysentery racks our guts. The latrine poles always have men squatting over them. The people at home ought to be shown these grey or yellow, wretched, beaten-down faces, these figures who are bent double because of the enteritis that is squeezing the blood out of their bodies so much that the best they can do is to grin through lips trembling with pain, and say ‘It’s hardly worth pulling your trousers up again.’

Our artillery can’t really do much – they have too little ammunition, and the gun-barrels are so clapped out that they can’t shoot straight, and scatter stuff over towards us. We haven’t enough horses. Our new drafts are pitiful lads who really need a rest, unable to carry a pack but able to die. In their thousands. They understand nothing of the war, they just go over the top and allow themselves to be shot down. One single airman knocks off two whole companies of them just for fun, when they were just off a troop train and had no idea about taking cover.

‘Germany must be nearly empty,’ says Kat.

We are quite without hope that there could ever be an end to this. We can’t think nearly so far ahead. You might stop a bullet and be killed; you might be wounded, and then the next stop is the military hospital. As long as they haven’t amputated anything, sooner or later you’ll fall into the hands of one of those staff doctors with a war service ribbon on his chest who says, ‘What’s this? One leg a bit on the short side? You won’t need to run at the front if you’ve got any guts. Passed fit for service! Dismiss!’

Kat tells a story that has done the rounds all along the front, from Flanders to the Vosges, about the staff doctor who reads out the names of the men who come up for medical inspection, and, when the man appears, doesn’t even look up, but says, ‘Passed fit for service, we need soldiers at the front.’ A man with a wooden leg comes up before him, the doctor passes him fit for service again – ‘And then,’ Kat raises his voice, ‘the man says to him, “I’ve already got a wooden leg; but if I go up the line now and they shoot my head off, I’ll have a wooden head made, and then I’ll become a staff doctor.” We all think that’s a really good one.

There may be good doctors – many of them are; but with the hundreds of examinations he has, every soldier will at some time or other get into the clutches of one of the hero-makers, and there are lots of them, whose aim is to turn as many of those on their lists who have only been passed for work detail or garrison duty into class A-l, fit for active service.

There are plenty of stories like that, and most of them are more bitter. But for all that, they have nothing to do with mutiny or malingering; they are honest, and they call a spade a spade; because there really is a lot of fraud, injustice and petty nastiness in the army. But isn’t it enough that regiment after regiment goes off into a fight which is becoming increasingly pointless in spite of everything, and that attack after attack is launched, even though our line is retreating and crumbling?

Tanks, which used to be objects of ridicule, have become a major weapon. They come rolling forward in a long line, heavily armoured, and they embody the horror of war for us more than anything else.

We cannot see the gun batteries that are bombarding us, and the oncoming waves of enemy attackers are human beings just like we are – but tanks are machines, and their caterpillar tracks run on as endlessly as the war itself. They spell out annihilation when they roll without feeling into the shell holes and then climb out again, inexorably, a fleet of roaring, fire-spitting ironclads, invulnerable steel beasts that crush the dead and the wounded. Before these we shrivel down into our thin skins, in the face of their colossal force our arms are like straws and our hand-grenades are like matches.

Shells, gas clouds and flotillas of tanks – crushing, devouring, death.

Dysentery, influenza, typhus – choking, scalding, death.

Trench, hospital, mass grave – there are no other possibilities.

In one attack Bertinck, our company commander, is killed. He was one of those fine front-line officers who are always at the forefront of every tricky situation. He had been with us for two years without being wounded, so something had to happen in the end. We are sitting in a shell hole and we have been surrounded. With the smell of cordite, the smell of oil or petrol wafts across to us. Two men with a flame-thrower are spotted, one with the cylinder on his back, the other holding the pipe where the fire shoots out. If they get close enough to reach us, we’ve had it, because just at the moment we can’t get back.

We start to fire at them. But they work their way closer to us, and things look bad. Bertinck is with us in the hole. When he sees that we are not hitting them because the firing is so heavy and we have to concentrate too much on cover, he takes a rifle, crawls out of the hole and aims, lying there propped on his elbows. He shoots – and at the same moment a bullet smacks down by him with a crack, he has been hit. But he stays where he is and aims again – he lowers his rifle once, and then takes aim; at last the shot rings out. Bertinck drops the gun, says, ‘Good’ and slides back. The second man with the flame-thrower is wounded and falls, the pipe is wrenched out of the other one’s hands, fire is sprayed all around and the man is burning.

Bertinck has been hit in the chest. A short while later a piece of shrapnel smashes away the lower part of his face. That same piece of shrapnel has enough force left to rip open Leer’s side. Leer groans and props himself on his arms, but he bleeds to death very quickly and no one can help him. After a few minutes he sinks down like a rubber tyre when the air escapes. What use is it to him now that he was so good at mathematics at school?

The months drag on. This summer of 1918 is the bloodiest and the hardest. The days are like angels in blue and gold, rising up untouchable above the circle of destruction. Everyone knows that we are losing the war. Nobody talks about it much. We are retreating. We won’t be able to attack again after this massive offensive. We have no more men and no more ammunition.

But the campaign goes on – the dying continues.

Summer, 1918. Never has life in its simplest outline seemed so desirable to us as it does now; the poppies in the fields near our base camp, the shiny beetles on the blades of grass, the warm evenings in the cool, half-dark rooms, black, mysterious trees at twilight, the stars and the streams, dreams and the long sleep. Oh life, life, life!

Summer, 1918. Never has more been suffered in silence as in the moment when we set off for the front. The wild and urgent rumours of an armistice and peace have surfaced again, they disturb the heart and make setting out harder than ever.

Summer, 1918. Never has life at the front been more bitter and more full of horror than when we are under fire, when the pallid faces are pressed into the mud and the fists are clenched and your whole being is saying, No! No! No, not now! Not now at the very last minute!

Summer, 1918. A wind of hope sweeping over the burnt-out fields, a raging fever of impatience, of disappointment, the most agonizing terror of death, the impossible question: why? Why don’t they stop? And why are there all these rumours about it ending?

There are so many airmen here, and they are so skilful that they can hunt down individuals like rabbits. For every German aircraft there are five British or American ones. For every hungry, tired German soldier in the trenches there are five strong, fresh men on the enemy side. For every German army-issue loaf there are fifty cans of beef over there. We haven’t been defeated, because as soldiers we are better and more experienced; we have simply been crushed and pushed back by forces many times superior to ours.

Several weeks of steady rain lie behind us – grey skies, grey, liquid earth, grey death. When we go out the damp penetrates right through our coats and uniforms – and it is like that all the time we are at the front. We can never get dry. Anyone who still has a pair of boots ties them up at the top with little bags of sand to stop the muddy water getting in so quickly. Rifles are caked in mud, uniforms are caked in mud, everything is fluid and liquefied, a dripping, damp and oily mass of earth in which there are yellow puddles with spiral pools of blood, and in which the dead, the wounded and the living are slowly swallowed up.

The storm is like a whiplash over us, the hail of shrapnel wrenches the sharp, children’s cries of the wounded from the confusion of grey and yellow, and in the night shattered life groans itself painfully into silence.

Our hands are earth, our bodies mud and our eyes puddles of rain. We no longer know whether we are still alive or not.

Then heat steals into our shell holes, damp and oppressive, like a jellyfish, and on one of these late summer days, Kat topples over. I am alone with him. I bandage the wound. His shin seems to be shattered. Damage to the bone, and Kat groans in despair. ‘Now of all times! Why did it have to be now… ?’

I comfort him. ‘Who knows how much longer the whole mess will go on? At least you’re out of it…’

The wound begins to bleed a lot. Kat cannot stay where he is while I try and find a stretcher. I don’t know where the nearest casualty post is, either.

Kat is not very heavy; so I take him on my back and carry him to the rear, to the dressing station.

Twice we stop to rest. Being carried is causing him a lot of pain. We don’t talk much. I’ve undone the neck of my tunic and I’m breathing heavily and sweating, and my face is red from the effort of carrying him. In spite of that I make us move on, because the terrain is dangerous.

‘All right to move, Kat?’

‘I have to be, Paul.’

‘Let’s go.’

I help him up. He stands on his good leg and steadies himself against a tree. Then I get hold of his wounded leg very carefully, he pushes upwards, and I get my arm under the knee of his good leg.

Moving becomes more difficult. Often, shells whistle past. I go as fast as I can, because the blood from his wounded leg is dripping on to the ground. We can’t ready protect ourselves from shell-blast, because it is over before we could have taken cover.

We get down in a small shed crater until it quietens down a bit. I give Kat some tea from my flask. We smoke a cigarette. ‘Yes, Kat,’ I say sadly, ‘we’d get split up now after all.’

He says nothing, and just looks at me.

‘Kat, do you still remember how we bagged that goose? And how you got me out of the scrap when I was still a raw recruit and I’d just been wounded for the first time? I cried, then, Kat, and it was nearly three years ago.’

Kat nods.

The fear of loneliness weds up in me. If Kat is taken out I’d have no friends here at all.

‘Kat, we must get in touch again, if peace ready does come before you get back.’

‘With what’s happened to the old leg, do you reckon I’d ever be fit for service again?’ he asks bitterly.

‘You’d be able to convalesce in peace and quiet. The joint is still OK. Maybe it will all be all right.’

‘Give me another cigarette,’ he says.

‘Maybe we could do something or other together afterwards, Kat.’ I am very sad, it is impossible that Kat, my friend Kat, Kat with the drooping shoulders and the thin, soft moustache, Kat, whom I know in a different way from every other person, Kat, the man I have shared these years with – it is impossible that I might never see Kat again.

‘Give me your address anyway, Kat. Here’s mine, I’ll write it down for you.’

I tuck the piece of paper into the breast-pocket of my tunic. I feel so isolated already, even though he is still sitting there with me. Maybe I should shoot myself in the foot, just so that I can stay with him?

Suddenly Kat makes a choking noise and goes greenish-yellow. ‘We’d better move,’ he stammers.

I jump up, eager to help him. I hoist him up and set off with long, slow strides so as not to shake his leg too much.

My throat is parched and I have red and black spots before my eyes by the time I eventually stumble, doggedly and relentlessly, into the casualty station.

There I drop to my knees, but I have enough strength left to fall on to the side where Kat’s good leg is. After a few minutes I ease myself up slowly. My legs and my hands are still shaking violently, and I have trouble finding my flask to take a drink out of it. My lips tremble as I do so. But Kat is safe.

After a time I am able to distinguish sounds from the barrage of noise battering in my ears.

‘You could have saved yourself the trouble,’ says an orderly.

I stare at him uncomprehending.

He points to Kat. ‘He’s dead.’

I can’t understand what he means. ‘He’s got a lower leg wound,’ I say.

The orderly stops. ‘Yes, that as well…’

I turn round. My eyes are still dimmed, I have started to sweat again and it is running into my eyes. I wipe it away and look at Kat. He is lying still. ‘Must have fainted,’ I say quickly.

The orderly whistles softly. ‘I know more about it than you do. He’s dead. I’ll bet you anything.’

I shake my head. ‘Can’t be. I was talking to him not ten minutes ago. He’s fainted.’

Kat’s hands are warm. I get hold of his shoulders to give him some tea to bring him round. Then I feel how my fingers are getting wet. When I take my hands out from behind his head they are bloody. The orderly whistles between his teeth. ‘Told you so —’

Without my noticing it, Kat got a splinter of shrapnel in the head on the way. It’s only a little hole. It must have been a tiny, stray fragment. But it was enough. Kat is dead.

I stand up slowly.

‘Do you want to take his pay book and his things?’ the orderly asks me.

I nod and he gives them to me.

The orderly is baffled. ‘You’re not related, are you?’

No, we are not related.

Am I walking? Do I still have legs? I look up, I look about me. And then I turn right round, and then I stop. Everything is just the same as usual. It’s only that Private Stanislaus Katczinsky is dead.

After that I remember nothing.