IX

We’ve been travelling for a number of days. Then the first aircraft appear in the sky. We roll along past transport convoys. Guns, guns. We change to the field railway. I try to find my regiment. Nobody knows exactly where it is at the moment. I stay overnight somewhere, draw my rations somewhere in the morning, and get a few vague instructions. And so I set off on my way again, with my rifle and pack.

When I get to where the regiment is supposed to be, the place has been shot to pieces and there isn’t anybody there. I find out that we have been turned into a so-called flying division, one they can send wherever things are hottest. I don’t like the sound of that. People tell me about the large-scale losses that we are supposed to have suffered. I ask about Kat and Albert. Nobody knows anything about them.

I carry on searching, wandering about all over the place. For one night, and then for another, I have to camp out like a Red Indian. Then I get definite news, and I am able to report to the guard room by the afternoon.

The sergeant keeps me there. The company will be back in two days and there’s no point in sending me out. ‘How was leave?’ he asks. ‘Good, eh?’

‘Yes and no,’ I reply.

‘Right, right,’ he sighs, ‘if only you didn’t have to go away again. That always mucks up the last half good and proper.’

I hang about until the next morning when the company gets in, grey, dirty, ill-tempered and gloomy. Then I jump up and push in amongst them, looking around – there’s Tjaden, Muller blowing his nose, and there are Kat and Kropp. We put our palliasses together. I’m feeling guilty, though there isn’t any reason why I should. Before we turn in I bring out the rest of the potato pancakes and jam, so that they can have some too.

The two outside pancakes are a bit mouldy, but they are still edible. I take these myself and give the less stale ones to Kat and Kropp.

Kat chews and asks me, ‘I bet these are from your mother?’

I nod.

‘They’re good,’ he says, ‘you can taste where they’re from.’

I could almost weep. I don’t know myself any more. But things will get better again here with Kat and Albert and the others. This is where I belong.

‘You’re in luck,’ whispers Kropp just before we go to sleep at last, ‘there’s word that we are being sent to Russia.’

To Russia. There’s no war there any more.

In the distance there is the thundering of the front. The hut walls rattle.

Suddenly it is all spit-and-polish. Every five minutes we have to parade. We are inspected from all sides. Anything torn is replaced with something decent. I get hold of a spotless new tunic. Kat, of course, manages a whole new uniform. The rumour starts up that peace is coming, but the alternative rumour seems more likely, that we’re being transported to Russia. But why would we need better gear for Russia? Then at last it filters through to us: the Kaiser is coming to review the troops. That’s why there have been so many inspection parades.

For a week you might have thought that we were in training camp, because there is so much work and drill going on. Everyone is bad tempered and edgy, because we are not keen on all this spit-and-polish, and even less so on parade-ground marching. Things like that annoy soldiers even more than being in the trenches.

At last the moment arrives. We stand to attention and the Kaiser appears. We are curious to see what he looks like. He paces along the parade line and I’m a bit disappointed; from his pictures I had imagined him to be bigger and more powerful, but mainly to have a great booming voice.

He gives out a few medals and chats to one or two of the soldiers. Then we are marched off.

Afterwards we talk about it. ‘So that was the supreme commander, the head of them all,’ says Tjaden in amazement. ‘Absolutely everyone has to stand to attention in front of him, whoever they are.’ He thinks about it. ‘Even Hindenburg has to stand to attention in front of him, right?’

‘He certainly does,’ confirms Kat.

Tjaden isn’t finished yet. He ponders for a while, and then asks, ‘Does a king have to stand to attention in front of an emperor?’ Nobody is quite sure, but we don’t think so. They are both so high up that proper standing to attention doesn’t apply.

‘You don’t half talk some nonsense,’ says Kat. ‘The main thing is that you know when to stand to attention.’

But Tjaden is completely fascinated by it. His imagination, which is not usually very fertile, starts to work overtime. ‘Now just a minute,’ he announces, ‘I really can’t believe that an emperor has to go to the lavatory just like I do.’

‘You can bet your life he does,’ laughs Kropp.

‘And if you take away the number you first thought of, then Bob’s your uncle,’ adds Kat by way of explanation. ‘Tjaden, the lice have got to your brain – the best thing you can do is get to the latrines yourself and come back when you’re thinking straight and not talking like a kid.’

Tjaden clears off.

‘There is one thing I’d like to know, though,’ says Albert, ‘and that’s whether there would still have been a war if the Kaiser had said no.’

‘I’m sure there would,’ I put in. ‘After all, they say that he didn’t want to fight at all at the beginning.’

‘Well, if not just him, then perhaps if, let’s say twenty or thirty people in the world had said no?’

‘Maybe not then,’ I admit. ‘But they all did want a war.’

‘It’s funny when you think about it,’ continues Kropp. ‘We’re out here defending our homeland. And yet the French are there defending their homeland as well. Which of us is right?’

‘Maybe both,’ I say, though I don’t believe it.

‘Well then,’ says Albert, and I can see that he is trying to drive me into a corner, ‘our teachers and preachers and newspapers all tell us that we are the only ones with right on our side, and let’s hope it’s true – but the French teachers and preachers and newspapers all insist that they are the only ones in the right. How does that figure?’

‘I don’t know,’ I reply, ‘but at any rate there is a war and every month more countries want to take part.’

Tjaden comes back. He is still worked up and joins in the debate again straight away by asking how a war starts in the first place.

‘Usually when one country insults another one badly,’ answers Kropp, a little patronizingly.

But Tjaden isn’t going to be put off. ‘A country? I don’t get it. A German mountain can’t insult a French mountain, or a river, or a forest, or a cornfield.’

‘Are you really that daft or are you just pretending?’ grumbles Kropp. ‘That isn’t what I mean. One nation insults another…’ ‘Then I shouldn’t be here at all,’ answers Tjaden, ‘because I don’t feel insulted.’

‘It’s hopeless trying to explain anything to you,’ says Kropp with some irritation, ‘it’s got nothing to do with a yokel like you.’

‘In that case I can certainly go home, then,’ insists Tjaden, and everybody laughs.

‘Come on, it means the nation as a whole, that is, the state —’ calls out Muller.

‘The state, the state —’ Tjaden snaps his fingers dismissively – ‘military police, ordinary police, taxes – that’s your state. If you want anything to do with that lot, thanks very much, but leave me out of it.’

‘That’s true,’ says Kat, ‘you’ve got something right for once, Tjaden; there’s a big difference between a homeland and a state.’ ‘But they do go together,’ says Kropp after a moment’s thought. ‘You can’t have a homeland without the state.’

‘Right, but just think for a minute – we are almost all ordinary people, aren’t we? And in France the majority are workers, too, or tradesmen or clerks. Why on earth should a French locksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us? No, it’s just the governments. I’d never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and most of the Frenchmen won’t have seen one of us. Nobody asked them any more than they did us.’

‘So why is there a war at all?’ asks Tjaden.

Kat shrugs. ‘There must be some people who find the war worthwhile.’

‘Well I’m not one of them,’ grins Tjaden.

‘No, and nor is anybody else here.’

‘So who, then?’ persists Tjaden. ‘It’s no use to the Kaiser. He’s got everything he needs anyway.’

‘No, you can’t say that,’ counters Kat, ‘up to now he hadn’t had a war. And all top-grade emperors need at least one war, otherwise they don’t get famous. Have a look in your school history books.’ ‘Generals get famous because of wars, too,’ says Detering.

‘More famous than emperors,’ agrees Kat.

‘And I bet there are other people behind it all who are making a profit out of the war,’ grumbles Detering.

‘I think it’s more a kind of fever,’ says Albert. ‘Nobody really wants it, but all of a sudden, there it is. We didn’t want the war, they say the same thing on the other side – and in spite of that, half the world is at it hammer and tongs.’

‘They tell more lies on the other side than our lot do, though,’ I put in. ‘What about those leaflets the POWs had on them, where they said that we eat Belgian babies? People who write things like that ought to be strung up. They’re the real villains.’

Muller gets up. ‘Anyway, it’s better that war is here than in Germany. Just have a look at no man’s land.’

Tjaden voices his full agreement. ‘That’s true. But it would be better if there were no war at all.’

He walks off, proud to have got the last word over us high-school recruits for once. And in fact his views are typical enough out here, you meet them time and again, and there is no real argument that you can put up against them, because they override any understanding of wider issues. The feelings of nationalism that the ordinary soldier has are expressed in the fact that he is out here. But it doesn’t go any further; all his other judgements are practical ones and made from his own point of view.

Albert lies down on the grass in annoyance. ‘It’s better not to talk about the whole damn thing.’

‘Doesn’t change anything, anyway,’ agrees Kat.

On top of it all, we have to hand in nearly all the new things that we were issued, and we get our old gear back. The good quality stuff was only for the troop inspection.

Instead of going to Russia we go up the line again. On the way we pass through what is left of a wood, with half-blasted tree-trunks and the ground looking as if it had been ploughed up. There are some massive craters. ‘Christ, this place took a pounding,’ I say to Kat.

‘Mortar fire,’ he replies, and then points upwards.

Dead men are hanging in the trees. In one of them a naked soldier is squatting in the branches; his helmet is still on his head, but otherwise he has nothing on. There is only the top half of him up there, a head and body with the legs missing.

‘What happened there?’ I ask.

‘Blown out of his uniform,’ grunts Tjaden.

‘It’s funny,’ says Kat, ‘but we’ve seen that a few times. When a trench mortar goes off you actually do get blown out of your clothes. It’s the blast that does it.’

I look around. It really is true. In some trees there are just bits of uniform, others have a bit of bloody pulp that was once a human limb sticking to them. There is one body which only has a scrap of underpants on one leg and the tunic collar around the neck. Otherwise it is naked. The uniform is hanging in the nearby trees. Both arms are missing from the body, as if they have been wrenched out of their sockets. I come across one of them in the undergrowth twenty paces away.

The dead man is lying on his face. The earth is black from the blood underneath the arm sockets. The ground is scuffed by his feet, as though he went on kicking for a while.

‘It’s no joke, Kat,’ I say.

‘Nor is a bit of shrapnel in the guts,’ he says with a shrug.

‘The main thing is not to let it all get to you,’ adds Tjaden.

All this can’t have happened too long ago, because the blood is still fresh. Since all the soldiers we find are dead we don’t hang about there, but just report the business at the next dressing station. After all, there’s no reason why we should do the donkey work for the stretcher-bearers.

A patrol has to be sent out to establish how many of the enemy positions are still manned. Because I’ve had leave, I still feel a bit awkward as far as the others are concerned, and for that reason I volunteer to join it. We agree on a plan of action; crawl through the wire, and then separate, so that we can move forward independently. After a while I find a shallow crater and slip into it. I take a look at things from there.

The area is being covered by moderate machine-gun fire. They are sweeping it from all sides, and the fire is not very heavy, but still enough for you to make sure you keep your head well down.

A Verey light goes up. The terrain looks barren in the pale glow. By contrast, it seems so much darker when the night closes in again. They told us back in the trenches that there are supposed to be black soldiers in the opposite trenches. That’s bad, because they are hard to see, and besides, they are very good at reconnaissance patrols. Curiously enough, they can often be just plain careless. Both Kat and Kropp have been on patrols where they have shot black soldiers out on counter-reconnaissance who were so keen on cigarettes that they were smoking as they moved along. Ah Kat and Albert had to do was to get a glowing tip in their sights and aim at that.

A small shell whistles down and strikes close to where I am. I hadn’t heard it coining and it gives me a real fright. At that moment I’m overcome by mindless panic. I’m out here on my own in the dark and night is helpless – for I know two eyes have already been watching me for ages from another shell hole and there is a hand-grenade just waiting to blow me to bits. I try to pull myself together. This isn’t my first patrol and it isn’t even a particularly dangerous one. But it is the first one I’ve been on since I was on leave, and on top of that the terrain is still pretty unfamiliar to me.

I tell myself firmly that I am getting worked up for nothing, that there is probably no one watching for me in the dark because if there were they wouldn’t be firing so low.

It’s no use. Thoughts buzz round in my head in complete confusion – I hear my mother’s warning voice, I see the Russians leaning against the wire-netting, with their beards blowing in the wind, I get a bright and wonderful picture of a canteen with comfortable chairs, then of a cinema in Valenciennes, and then, horrible in my tortured imagination, of a gun barrel, grey and unfeeling, following me around silently wherever I try to turn my head: sweat is breaking out from every pore.

I am still lying in the hollow I found. I look at my watch; only a few minutes have passed. My forehead is wet, there is dampness all round my eyes, my hands are shaking and I’m coughing quietly. It’s nothing more than a bad attack of fear, of common-or-garden cold terror at the prospect of sticking my head out and crawling on.

All my tense readiness melts into the desire to stay lying down. My limbs are glued to the ground, I try to move, but I can’t – they just won’t come away from it. I press myself into the earth, I cannot move forwards, and I decide to stay where I am.

But right away a new wave comes over me, a wave of shame, of regret, and yet still one of self-preservation. I lift myself up slightly to have a look around. My eyes are stinging and I stare into the darkness. Then a Verey light goes up and I duck down again.

I am fighting a crazy, confused battle. I want to get out of my hollow in the ground and I keep on slipping back in; I say to myself, ‘You’ve got to, it’s to do with your mates, not some stupid order,’ and straight after that: ‘So what? I’ve only got the one life to lose.’

It’s all because of that leave, I tell myself bitterly by way of an excuse. But I don’t believe it myself, I just feel horribly drained. I raise myself up slowly and stretch out my arms, then raise my back and prop myself half on the edge of the shell hole.

Then I hear sounds and get down again. In spite of the thunder of the guns you can pick out suspicious noises completely clearly. I listen – the sound is coming from behind me. It is our soldiers moving through the trench. Now I can even hear muted voices. From the sound of it, it might even be Kat speaking.

Suddenly a surprising warmth comes over me. Those voices, those few soft words, those footsteps in the trench behind me tear me with a jolt away from the terrible feeling of isolation that goes with the fear of death, to which I nearly succumbed. Those voices mean more than my life, more than mothering and fear, they are the strongest and most protective thing that there is: they are the voices of my pals.

I’m no longer a shivering scrap of humanity alone in the dark – I belong to them and they to me, we all share the same fear and the same life, and we are bound to each other in a strong and simple way. I want to press my face into them, those voices, those few words that saved me, and which will be my support.

I slip warily over the edge, and snake forwards. I creep along on all fours; things are going well, I fix the direction, look about me and take note of the pattern of artillery fire so that I can find my way back. Then I try to make contact with the others.

I am still afraid, but now it is a rational fear, which is just an extraordinarily enhanced cautiousness. It is a windy night, and the shadows move back and forth in the sudden flashes from the gunfire. By this light you can see too much and too little. Often I freeze suddenly, but there is never anything there. In this way I get quite a long distance forward, and then turn back in a curve. I haven’t made contact. Every few feet closer to our trench makes me more confident, but I still move as fast as I can. It wouldn’t be too good to stop one just at this moment.

And then I get another shock. I’m no longer able to make out the exact direction. Silently I crouch in a shell hole and try and get my bearings. It has happened more than once that a man has jumped cheerfully into a trench, and only then found out that it was the wrong side.

After a while I listen again. I still haven’t sorted out where I am. The wilderness of shell holes seems so confusing that in my agitated state I no longer have any idea which way to go. Maybe I am crawling parallel with the trenches, and I could go on for ever doing that. So I make another turn.

These damned Verey lights! It feels as if they last for an hour, and you can’t make a move, or things soon start whistling round you.

It’s no use, I’ve got to get out. By fits and starts I walk my way along. I crawl crabwise across the ground and tear my hands to pieces on ragged bits of shrapnel as sharp as razor-blades. Often I get the impression that the sky is becoming lighter on the horizon, but that could just be my imagination. Gradually I realize that I am crawling for my life.

A shell hits. Then straight away two more. And then it really starts. A barrage. Machine-guns chatter. Now there is nothing in the world that I can do except he low. It seems to be an offensive. Light-rockets go up everywhere. Incessantly.

I’m lying bent double in a big shell hole in water up to my waist. When the offensive starts I’ll drop into the water as far as I can without drowning and put my face in the mud. I’ll have to play dead.

Suddenly I hear their shellfire give way. Straight away I slip down into the water at the bottom of the shell hole, my helmet right on the back of my neck and my mouth only sufficiently above water to let me breathe.

Then I remain motionless – because somewhere there is a clinking noise, something is coming closer, moving along and stamping; every nerve in my body tenses up and freezes. The clinking noise moves on over me, the first wave of soldiers is past. All that I had in my head was the one explosive thought: what will you do if someone jumps into your shell hole? Now I quickly pull out my small dagger, grip it tight and hide it by keeping my hand downwards in the mud. The idea keeps pounding in my brain that if anyone jumps in I’ll stab him immediately, stick the knife into his throat at once, so that he can’t shout out, there’s no other way, he’ll be as frightened as I am, and we’ll attack each other purely out of fear, so I have to get there first.

Now our gun batteries are firing. There is an impact near me. That makes me furiously angry, that’s all I need, to be hit by our own gunfire; I curse into the mud and grind my teeth, it’s an outburst of rage, and in the end all I can do is groan and plead.

The crash of shells pounds against my ears. If our men launch a counter-offensive, I’m free. I press my head against the earth and I can hear the dull thunder like distant explosions in a mine – then I lift my head to listen to the noises above me.

The machine-guns are rattling away. I know that our barbed-wire entanglements are firm and pretty well undamaged; sections of them are electrified. The gunfire increases. They aren’t getting through. They’ll have to turn back.

I collapse into the shell hole again, tense almost to breaking point. Clattering, crawling, clinking – it all becomes audible, a single scream ringing out in the midst of it all. They’re coming under fire, the attack has been held off.

It’s got a little bit lighter. Footsteps hurry by me. The first few. Past me. Then some more. The rattle of the machine-guns becomes continuous. I am just about to turn round a bit when suddenly there is a noise and a body falls on to me in the shell hole, heavily and with a splash, then slips and lands on top of me —

I don’t think at all, I make no decision – I just stab wildly and feel only how the body jerks, then goes limp and collapses. When I come to myself again, my hand is sticky and wet.

The other man makes a gurgling noise. To me it sounds as if he is roaring, every breath is like a scream, like thunder – but it is only the blood in my own veins that is pounding so hard. I’d like to stop his mouth, to stuff earth into it, to stab again – he has to be quiet or he’ll give me away; but I am so much myself again and suddenly feel so weak that I can’t raise my hand against him any more.

So I crawl away into the furthest corner and stay there, my eyes fixed on him, gripping my knife, ready to go for him again if he moves – but he won’t do anything again. I can hear that just from his gurgling.

I can only see him indistinctly. I have the one single desire – to get away. If I don’t do so quickly it will be too fight; it’s already difficult. But the moment I try to raise my head I become aware that it is impossible. The machine-gun fire is so dense that I would be full of holes before I had gone a step.

I have another go, lifting up my helmet and pushing it forwards to gauge the height of fire. A moment later a bullet knocks it out of my hand. The gunfire is sweeping the ground at a very low level. I am not far enough away from the enemy trenches to escape being hit by one of the snipers the moment I tried to make a break for it.

It gets lighter and lighter. I wait desperately for an attack by our men. My knuckles are white because I am tensing my hands, praying for the firing to die down and for my mates to come.

The minutes trickle past one by one. I daren’t look at the dark figure in the shell hole any more. With great effort I look past him, and wait, just wait. The bullets hiss, they are a mesh of steel, it won’t stop, it won’t stop.

Then I see my bloodied hand and suddenly I feel sick. I take some earth and rub it on to the skin, now at least my hand is dirty and you can’t see the blood any more.

The gunfire still doesn’t die down. It’s just as strong now from both sides. Our lot have probably long since given me up for lost.

It is a light, grey, early morning. The gurgling still continues. I block my ears, but I quickly have to take my hands away from them because otherwise I won’t be able to hear anything else.

The figure opposite me moves. That startles me, and I look across at him, although I don’t want to. Now my eyes are riveted on him. A man with a little moustache is lying there, his head hanging lopsidedly, one arm half crooked and the head against it. The other hand is clasped to his chest. It has blood on it.

He’s dead, I tell myself, he must be dead, he can’t feel anything any more; that gurgling, it can only be the body. But the head tries to lift itself and for a moment the groaning gets louder, the forehead sinks back on to the arm. The man is not dead. He is dying, but he is not dead. I push myself forward, pause, prop myself on my hands, slip a bit further along, wait – further, a terrible journey of three yards, a long and fearsome journey. At last I am by his side.

Then he opens his eyes. He must have been able to hear me and he looks at me with an expression of absolute terror. His body doesn’t move, but in his eyes there is such an incredible desire to get away that I can imagine for a moment that they might summon up enough strength to drag his body with them, carrying him hundreds of miles away, far, far away, at a single leap. The body is still, completely quiet, there is not a single sound, and even the gurgling has stopped, but the eyes are screaming, roaring, all his life has gathered in them and formed itself into an incredible urge to escape, into a terrible fear of death, a fear of me.

My legs give way and I fall down on to my elbows. ‘No, no,’ I whisper.

The eyes follow me. I am quite incapable of making any movement as long as they are watching me.

Then his hand falls slowly away from his chest, just a little way, dropping only an inch or two. But that movement breaks the spell of the eyes. I lean forward, shake my head and whisper, ‘No, no, no’ and lift up my hand – I have to show him that I want to help him, and I wipe his forehead.

The eyes flinched when my hand came close, but now they lose their fixed gaze, the eyelids sink deeper, the tension eases. I open his collar for him and prop his head a bit more comfortably.

His mouth is half open and he makes an attempt to form some words. His lips are dry. I haven’t got my water bottle, I didn’t bring it with me. But there is water in the mud at the bottom of the shell hole. I scramble down, take out my handkerchief, spread it out, press it down, then cup my hand and scoop up the yellow water that seeps through it.

He swallows it. I fetch more. Then I unbutton his tunic so that I can bandage his wounds, if I can. I have to do that anyway, so that if I get caught the other lot can see that I tried to help him, and won’t shoot me outright. He tries to push me away, but his hand is too weak. The shirt is stuck fast and I can’t move it aside, and since it is buttoned at the back there is nothing for it but to slit it open.

I look for my knife and find it again. But as soon as I start to cut the shirt open his eyes open wide again and that scream is in them once more, and the look of panic, so that I have to close them, press them shut and whisper, ‘I’m trying to help you, comrade, camarade, camarade, camarade – and I stress the word so that he understands me.

There are three stab wounds. My pack of field dressings covers them but the blood flows out underneath, so I press them down more firmly, and he groans.

It’s all I can do. Now we must just wait, wait.

Hours. The gurgling starts up again – how long it takes for a man to die! What I do know is that he is beyond saving. To be sure, I have tried to convince myself otherwise, but by midday this self-delusions has melted away, has been shot to pieces by his groans. If I hadn’t lost my revolver when I was crawling along I would shoot him. I can’t stab him.

By midday I am in that twilight area where reason evaporates. I am ravenously hungry, almost weeping for want of food, but I can’t help it. I fetch water several times for the dying man and I drink some of it myself.

This is the first man I have ever killed with my own hands, the first one I’ve seen at close quarters whose death I’ve caused. Kat and Kropp and Muller have all seen people they have hit as well, it happens often, it’s quite common in hand-to-hand fighting —

But every gasp strips my heart bare. The dying man is the master of these hours, he has an invisible dagger to stab me with: the dagger of time and my own thoughts.

I would give a lot for him to live. It is hard to lie here and have to watch and listen to him.

By three in the afternoon he is dead.

I breathe again. But only for a short time. Soon the silence seems harder for me to bear than the groans. I would even like to hear the gurgling again; in fits and starts, hoarse, sometimes a soft whistling noise and then hoarse and loud again.

What I am doing is crazy. But I have to have something to do. So I move the dead man again so that he is lying more comfortably, even though he can’t feel anything any more. I close his eyes. They are brown. His hair is black and slightly curly at the sides. His mouth is full and soft underneath his moustache; his nose is a little angular and his skin is tanned – it doesn’t seem as pale as before, when he was still alive. For a moment his face even manages to look almost healthy, and then it gives way quickly to become the face of a dead stranger, one of the many I have seen, and every one of them looks alike.

His wife is bound to be thinking of him just now: she doesn’t know what has happened. He looks as if he used to write to her a lot; she will go on getting his letters, too – tomorrow, next week – maybe a stray one in a month’s time. She’ll read it, and he’ll be speaking to her in it.

My state of mind is getting worse all the time, and I can’t control my thoughts. What does his wife look like? Like the slim dark girl in the house by the canal? Doesn’t she belong to me? Perhaps she belongs to me now because of all this! If only Kantorek were sitting here by me! What if my mother saw me in this state – The dead man would surely have been able to live for another thirty years if I’d taken more care about how I was going to get back. If only he had been running a couple of yards further to the left he’d be back in his trench over there writing another letter to his wife.

But this will get me nowhere, it’s the fate we all share. If Kemmerich’s leg had been a few inches further to the right, if Haie had leaned an inch or two further forward —

The silence spreads. I talk, I have to talk. So I talk to him and tell him directly, ‘I didn’t mean to kill you, mate. If you were to jump in here again, I wouldn’t do it, not so long as you were sensible too. But earlier on you were just an idea to me, a concept in my mind that called up an automatic response – it was that concept that I stabbed. It is only now that I can see that you are a human being like me. I just thought about your hand-grenades, your bayonet and your weapons – now I can see your wife, and your face, and what we have in common. Forgive me, camarade. We always realize too late. Why don’t they keep on reminding us that you are all miserable wretches just like us, that your mothers worry themselves just as much as ours and that we’re all just as scared of death, and that we die the same way and feel the same pain. Forgive me, camarade, how could you be my enemy? If we threw these uniforms and weapons away you could be just as much my brother as Kat and Albert. Take twenty years from my life, camarade, and get up again – take more, because I don’t know what I am going to do with the years I’ve got.’

He is silent, the front is quiet apart from the chatter of machine-guns. The bullets are close together and this is not just random firing – there is careful aiming from both sides. I can’t get out.

‘I’ll write to your wife,’ I tell the dead man breathlessly, ‘I’ll write to her, she ought to hear about it from me, I’ll tell her everything that I’m telling you. I don’t want her to suffer, I want to help her, and your parents too and your child —’

His uniform is still half open. It is easy to find his wallet. But I am reluctant to open it. Inside it will be his pay book with his name. As long as I don’t know his name it’s still possible that I might forget him, that time will wipe out the image of all this. But his name is a nail that will be hammered into me and that can never be drawn out again. It will always have the power to bring everything back, it will return constantly and will rise up in front of me.

I hold the wallet, unable to make up my mind. It slips out of my hand and falls open. A few pictures and letters drop out. I collect them up and go to put them back in, but the pressure that I am under, the complete uncertainty of it ah, the hunger, the danger, the hours spent with the dead man, these things have all made me desperate, and I want to find out as quickly as possible, to intensify the pain so as to end it, just as you might smash an unbearably painful hand against a tree, regardless of the result.

There are photographs of a woman and of a little girl, small amateur snapshots, taken in front of an ivy-covered wall. There are letters with them. I take them out and try to read them. I can’t understand most of them, since they are difficult to decipher and I don’t know much French. But every word I translate hits me like a bullet in the chest – or like a dagger in the chest —

My head is nearly bursting, but I am still able to grasp the fact that I can never write to these people, as I thought I would earlier on. Impossible. I look at the photos again; these are not rich people. I could send them money anonymously, if I start earning later. I cling to this idea, it is at least a straw to grasp at. This dead man is bound up with my life, and therefore I have to do everything for him and promise him everything so that I can be rescued. I swear wildly that I will devote my whole existence to him and to his family. I assure him of this with wet bps, and deep within me, while I am doing so, there is the hope that I can buy my own salvation that way, and maybe get out of this alive – it’s a little trick of the mind, because what you promise are always things that you could only see to afterwards. And so I open the pay book and read slowly: Gerard Duval, compositor.

I write down the address on an envelope with the dead man’s pencil, and then in a great hurry I shove everything back into his tunic again.

I have killed Gerard Duval, the printer. I think wildly that I shall have to become a printer, become a printer, a printer —

By the afternoon I am calmer. All my fears were groundless. The name no longer bothers me. The attack has passed. ‘Well, pal,’ I call across to the dead man, but now I say it calmly, ‘Your turn today, mine tomorrow. But if I get out of all this, pal, I’ll fight against the things that wrecked it for both of us: your life, and my —? Yes, my life too. I promise you, pal. It must never happen again.’

The sun’s rays are slanting. I am numb with exhaustion and hunger. Yesterday seems nebulous to me. I no longer have any hopes of getting out of here. So I doze fitfully, and don’t even realize that it is evening again. Twilight. It seems to come quickly now. Another hour. If it were summer, another three hours. Another hour.

Now I suddenly start to tremble in case anything goes wrong. I am not thinking about the dead man any more, he’s of no importance to me. All at once my desire for life comes back and everything that I promised before gives way in the face of that desire. But just so as not to attract bad luck at this stage I babble mechanically, ‘I’ll do everything, everything that I promised you’ – but I know already that I won’t.

It suddenly occurs to me that my own mates might shoot at me if I crawl their way: they don’t know it’s me. I’ll shout out at the first possible point where they might understand me. Then I’ll wait there, I’ll lie in front of the trench until they answer.

The first star. The front is still quiet. I breathe out and talk to myself in my excitement: ‘Don’t do anything stupid now, Paul – keep calm, Paul, calm – then you’ll be OK, Paul.’ It’s a good move for me to say my own name, because it sounds as if someone else were doing it, and is that much more effective.

The darkness deepens. My agitation subsides and to be on the safe side I wait until the first light-rockets go up. Then I crawl out of the shell hole. I have forgotten the dead man. In front of me is the young night and the battlefield bathed in pale light. I pick out a shell hole; the moment the light dies away I rush across, feel my way onwards, get to the next one, take cover, hurry on.

I get nearer. Then by the light of one of the rockets I see something in the barbed-wire that moves for a moment before it stops, so I lie still. The next time, I spot it again, it must be men from our trench. But I’m still cautious until I recognize our helmets. Then I shout.

My own name echoes back to me straight away as an answer: ‘Paul – Paul.’

I shout again. It is Kat and Albert, who have come out with a tarpaulin to look for me.

‘Are you wounded?’

‘No, no —’

We tumble into the trench. I ask for something to eat and gobble it down. Muller gives me a cigarette. I give a brief account of what happened. After all, it is nothing new; that sort of thing has happened plenty of times. The only difference in the whole thing was the night attack. But once in Russia Kat had to lie up for two days behind the Russian lines before he could break through.

I don’t say anything about the dead printer.

It’s not until the following morning that I find I can’t hold out any longer. I have to tell Kat and Albert. They both calm me down. ‘You can’t do anything about it. What else could you do? That’s why you’re out here.’

I listen to them, comforted, feeling better because of their presence. What sort of rubbish did I dream up in that shell hole?

‘Have a look at that,’ says Kat, and points.

There are some snipers standing on the parapet. Their rifles have telescopic sights and they are keeping an eye on the sector facing our trench. Every so often a shot rings out.

Then we hear shouts – ‘That was a hit!’ ‘Did you see how high he jumped?’ Sergeant Oellrich turns around proudly and notes his score. He is in the lead in today’s shooting fist with three direct hits confirmed as certain.

‘What do you think of that?’ asks Kat.

I nod.

‘If he goes on that way he’ll have another sharpshooter’s badge by this evening,’ reckons Kropp.

‘Or he’ll soon be promoted to staff sergeant,’ adds Kat.

We look at each other.

‘I wouldn’t do it,’ I say.

‘All the same,’ says Kat, ‘it’s a good idea for you to watch him just now.’

Sergeant Oellrich goes back to the fire-step. The end of his rifle moves this way and that.

‘You don’t need to waste another thought on that business of yours,’ nods Albert.

I can’t even understand it myself any more.

‘It was just because I had to stay there with him for such a long time,’ I say. ‘After all, war is war.’

There is a short, dry crack from Oellrich’s rifle.