X

We’ve landed a good job. Eight of us have been detailed to guard a village that has been evacuated because it had been under such heavy shelling.

Our main task is to keep an eye on the supply dump, which hasn’t been emptied yet. We have to draw our own supplies from what’s left there. And we are just the men for the job – Kat, Albert, Muller, Tjaden, Leer, Detering – the whole group of us is there. Mind you, Haie is dead. But even so we’ve been amazingly lucky, because the other squads have had far more losses than we have.

We pick a concrete cellar to use as a dugout, with a stairway leading down to it from outside. In addition, the entrance is protected by a separate concrete wall.

Now we really get busy. This is a chance not only to stretch our legs but also to give our souls a bit of breathing space. And we make the most of chances like this, because our situation is too desperate for us to waste much time on sentiment. Sentimental thoughts are only possible as long as things are not absolutely awful. But we don’t have any choice except to be pragmatic. So pragmatic, in fact, that I sometimes shudder when, just for a moment, an idea strays into my head from the old days before the war. But thoughts like that never stay with me for long.

We have to take our situation as lightly as we can. That’s why we seize every opportunity, and why terror finishes up cheek by jowl with tomfoolery, in stark juxtaposition and without any midway stage. We can’t help it, we just throw ourselves into it.

Here, too, we work like mad to create a paradise, a paradise, needless to say, of guzzling and sleeping.

First of all we fit the place out with mattresses that we drag over from the houses. Even a soldier’s bottom enjoys something soft to sit on for a change. The floor in the middle of the room is the only place we leave empty. Then we go and find ourselves bedcovers and quilts, wonderfully soft affairs. There’s plenty of everything in the village. Albert and I find a mahogany four-poster that can be taken apart – it has a blue silk canopy and a lace coverlet. We sweat like pigs shifting it, but you just can’t pass up a thing like that, when it is sure to be shot to bits in a day or so anyway.

Kat and I go for a little patrol through the houses. In a very short time we have found a dozen eggs and a couple of pounds of fairly fresh butter. In one of the rooms there is a sudden loud noise and an iron stove comes hurtling past us through the wall and then out through the opposite wall a few feet from where we are. Two holes. It’s from the house opposite, which a shell has just hit.

‘Lucky again,’ grins Kat, and we carry on foraging. All of a sudden we prick up our ears and then dash off. And within minutes we are standing in wide-eyed enchantment; there, running about in a little pigsty are two live piglets. We rub our eyes and then risk another cautious look: they are really and truly still there. We grab hold of them – there’s no doubt about it, they are two genuine little pigs.

They will make a magnificent meal. No more than a few dozen yards from our dugout there is a small house that used to serve as officers’ quarters. In the kitchen is a massive cooking range with two gridirons, pots, pans and kettles. It is all there, there is even a shed full of ready-chopped firewood – a regular Aladdin’s cave.

Two men have been out since morning in the fields looking for potatoes, carrots and peas. We are very particular, and will have nothing to do with the canned stuff from the supply depot – we want fresh vegetables. There are already two cauliflowers in the pantry.

The piglets have been slaughtered. Kat saw to that. We decide to have potato pancakes with the roast. But we can’t find anything to grate the potatoes with. However, we soon find a way round it. With some nails we punch a good number of holes into tin fids – and hey presto they are graters! Three men put on heavy-duty gloves to protect their fingers when they are grating, two more peel the potatoes and we’re well on our way.

Kat takes charge of the piglets, the carrots, the peas and the cauliflower. He even makes a white sauce for the cauliflower. I cook the potato pancakes, four at a time. Within ten minutes I’ve got the knack of tossing them so that when the pancakes have been cooked on one side they will fly up into the air and turn over, so I can catch them again in the pan. The pigs are being roasted whole. Everything is arranged around them as if they were on an altar.

Meanwhile some visitors have arrived, a couple of W/T operators, whom generously we invite to the meal. They sit in the living room, where there is a piano. One plays and the other one sings a folk song from Saxony. He sings it with great feeling, but with quite a strong regional accent. For all that, we are caught up by the mood as we stand there by the stove preparing all the good things.

Gradually we notice that we are coming in for a bit of a pasting. The observation balloons have spotted the smoke from our chimney and we’re coming under fire. It’s those bloody daisy-cutters, the little shells that make a small hole and scatter fragments low and wide. The whistling gets closer and closer around us, but we can’t possibly abandon the food. The bastards are getting our range. A few bits of shrapnel whizz through the kitchen window. The roasts are nearly ready, but cooking the potato pancakes is more of a problem. The impacts are so close together now that shrapnel is hitting the wall of the house more and more often, and coming in through the windows. Every time I hear the whistle of one of the things coming over, I duck down by the window wall with my frying pan and the pancakes. Then I straighten up again and carry on cooking.

The soldiers from Saxony stop playing – a bit of shrapnel has hit the piano. We are pretty well ready too, and we arrange our withdrawal. After the next impact two men sprint the fifty-odd yards to the dugout with the saucepans full of vegetables. We watch them disappear.

Another shot. Everyone ducks, and then two men trot off, each with a pot of excellent coffee, and reach the dugout before the next shell lands.

Kat and Albert grab the piece de resistance: the big dish with the piglets, now roasted and golden-brown. There is a howling noise, they bob down briefly, and then tear across the fifty yards of open ground.

I cook four last potato pancakes – I have to take cover twice while I’m doing so – but it does mean another four pancakes for us, after all, and it’s my favourite food.

Then I grab the plate with the great pile of pancakes and press myself against the door of the house. There is a hiss, a crash, and I dash out, clutching the plate to my chest with both hands. I am nearly there when there is a whistling noise and it is getting louder, so I leap up like a deer, skid around the concrete wall while shrapnel pounds against it, and fall down the steps into the cellar; my elbows are skinned, but I haven’t lost a single pancake and I didn’t even upset the plate.

We start the meal at two. It lasts until six. Until half past we drink coffee – officers-only coffee from the supply dump – and as we do so, we smoke officers-only cigars and cigarettes, also from the supply dump. On the dot of half past six we begin supper. At ten we throw the pork bones out of the door. Then we have rum and brandy, once again from the thrice-blessed supply dump, and once again long, fat cigars with bands. Tjaden insists that only one thing is missing: a few girls from one of the officers-only knocking shops.

Later still that evening we hear a miaowing. A little grey cat is sitting in the doorway. We coax it in and give it something to eat. While we are doing that we get peckish again ourselves. We go to bed still chewing.

But we have a terrible night. The food was too rich and too greasy. Fresh sucking-pig has a lively effect on the guts. There is a continuous to-ing and fro-ing in the dugout. There are always two, three men at a time sitting around outside with their trousers down, cursing. I’m up nine times myself. At about four in the morning we set a new record: all ten men, the guard detail and the visitors, are squatting outside.

Burning houses stand like torches in the night. Shells thunder down and make their impact. Columns of munitions trucks roar down the road. The supply dump has been ripped open on one side. In spite of the shrapnel, the drivers move in like a swarm of bees and steal loaves of bread. We don’t bother to stop them. If we were to say anything, the most that would happen is that we would get a good thumping. So we take a different line. We explain to them that we have been detailed to guard the supplies, and since we know where everything is, we offer them the tinned stuff and swap it for things we haven’t got. What difference does it make? Everything will be shot to pieces in a day or so anyway.

We fetch bars of chocolate for ourselves from the supplies and eat them whole. Kat says chocolate is good when you’ve got the runs.

Nearly two weeks pass with eating, drinking and taking it easy. Nobody bothers us. The village gradually disappears under the shelling, and we have a good time. As long as just a small part of the supply dump is still there, we don’t care what happens, and what we would really like to do is to end the war here.

Tjaden has become so genteel that he only smokes his cigars halfway down. He explains in a superior fashion that this is the style appropriate to his breeding. Even Kat is cheerful. His first words in the morning are ‘My man, fetch the caviare and the coffee!’ We have all become amazingly upper-crust, everyone takes everyone else to be his valet, addresses him in an aristocratic manner and issues orders. ‘Kropp, the sole of my foot is a little itchy; kindly be so good as to remove that louse.’ And with that Leer stretches his leg out to him like a prima donna, and Albert grabs it and pulls him up the stairs. ‘Tjaden!’ – ‘What?’ – ‘You may stand at ease, Tjaden, my good man, and kindly note that the response is not “What?” but “Yes sir, right away, sir.” So we’ll try again. Tjaden!’ Tjaden makes what is by now his automatic response, and once more quotes the famous line from German literature indicating which part of his anatomy he would like kissed.

At the end of a further week we get orders to withdraw. The good times are over. Two large trucks come to fetch us. They are already piled high with planks of wood, but Albert and I stack our four-poster with the blue silk canopy up on top, together with the mattresses and a couple of lace coverlets. Inside the bed, at the head end, we both have a sack full of best quality provisions. We keep running our hands over them; the salamis, the tins of liver pate, the canned food and the boxes of cigars gladden our hearts. All the men have similar sacks with them.

In addition to this, Kropp and I have salvaged two red plush armchairs. They are on the bed, and we lounge in them as if we were in a box at the theatre. The silk cover of the canopy billows out above us. Each of us has a long cigar in his mouth. And so we survey the landscape from on high.

In between us is a parrot cage that we found to keep the cat in. We have brought the cat with us, and it is inside the cage, lying in front of its dish and purring.

The trucks roll slowly along the road. We sing as we go. Behind us the shells are sending up great spurts of earth from the village, which has now been abandoned completely.

A few days later we are sent out to evacuate a district. On the way we meet the escaping locals, who have been ordered to leave. They are carting their bits and pieces away with them on barrows, in prams and on their backs. Their figures are bowed, their frees full of misery, despair, haste and resignation. The children hold on to their mothers’ hands, and sometimes an older girl will be looking after the smaller ones as they stumble forwards, forever turning to look behind them. A few of them are carrying pitiful little dolls. They all pass us by in silence.

We are still in marching order, because the French are not likely to shell a village when their people are still there. But a few minutes later there is a screeching in the air, the earth shudders, men scream out – a shell has smashed into our rear-guard. We dive apart and throw ourselves on to the ground, but at that very moment I feel how that tenseness slips away from me, the tenseness that usually makes me do the right thing instinctively when I’m under fire, and the thought ‘You’re done for’ jerks into my head with a choking, terrible fear – and the next minute a blow like a whiplash cuts across my left leg. I hear Albert scream – he was right by my side.

‘Get up, Albert, run!’ I shout, because we are lying without any cover in the open.

He stumbles to his feet and runs. I stay at his side. We have to get over a hedge. It’s taller than we are. Kropp grabs hold of the branches, and I get him by the leg, he screams, but I give him enough leverage and he hurtles over. In one movement I get over after him, and land in a pond behind the hedge.

Our faces are covered with pondweed and slime, but it is good cover, and we wade out until we are up to our necks. When a shell comes howling across we duck our heads under the water.

After we have done that about a dozen times I’ve had enough. And Albert groans, ‘Let’s move, otherwise I’ll fall over and drown.’

‘Where did you get it?’ I ask.

‘In the knee, I think.’

‘Can you walk?’

‘I think so —’

‘Right. Let’s go.’

We make it to the ditch by the side of the road and run along, bent double. The gunfire follows us. The road leads to the ammunition dump. If that goes up, nobody will even find one of our buttons afterwards. So we change our plans and set off at an angle across country.

Albert slows down. ‘Run on, I’ll catch you up,’ he says, and throws himself on to the ground.

I pull him up by the arm and give him a shake. ‘Get up, Albert, if you lie down now you’ll never be able to move on again. Come on, I’ll prop you up.’

At last we reach a small dugout. Kropp throws himself down and I bandage him. The wound is just above the knee. Then I look at myself. My trousers have blood on them, and so does my arm. Albert ties his field dressings around the wounds. He is already unable to move his leg, and we are both amazed at how we have managed to get this far at all. It’s only fear that did it: we would still have run for it if our feet had been shot away – we’d have run on the stumps.

I can still crawl a little, and I shout out when an open cart comes past, and we’re picked up. It is full of wounded men. A medical orderly is there and he shoves a tetanus jab into each of us.

At the dressing station we arrange things so that we are put side by side. They give us some thin beef broth, which we treat with contempt, but finish off greedily – we’ve been used to better things recently, but we are hungry all the same.

‘We’ll be heading for home now, Albert,’ I say.

‘With any luck,’ he replies. ‘But I wish I knew exactly what I’ve got.’

The pain gets worse. The bandages are burning like fire. We drink and drink, one mug of water after another.

‘How far above the knee was I hit?’ asks Kropp.

‘A good four inches, Albert,’ I say, though in reality it isn’t much more than an inch.

‘One thing I’ve decided,’ he says after a little while, ‘if they take my leg off, I’ll do myself in. I don’t want to go through life as a cripple.’

And so we he there with our thoughts, and wait.

That same evening they take us to the chopping-block. I’m frightened, and try to think quickly what I should do; because everyone knows that the surgeons in these clearing stations are quick to amputate. With the numbers they have to deal with it is simpler than a complicated patch-up job. I remember what happened to Kemmerich. On no account am I going to let them chloroform me, even if I have to crack a couple of skulls to stop them.

Things go well. The doctor prods around in the wound until I am on the point of passing out. ‘Don’t make such a fuss,’ he snaps, and carries on digging about. His instruments gleam under the bright light like malevolent animals. The pain is unbearable. Two orderlies hold my arms tight, but I get one free and am just about to swing out and get the surgeon in the face when he notices and jumps away. ‘Chloroform him,’ he shouts furiously.

That makes me calm down. ‘I beg your pardon, doctor, I’ll keep quiet, but please don’t chloroform me.’

‘Well, well,’ he mutters, and picks up his instruments again. He’s blond, thirty at the most, with fraternity duelling scars on his face and repulsive gold-rimmed glasses. I can see that he’s messing about with me now, because he is just poking around in the wound and peering at me over his glasses from time to time. I squeeze the hand-grips as tightly as I can but I’d rather die than let him hear another peep out of me.

He has fished out a sliver of metal and chucks it across to me. He seems to be satisfied with my behaviour, because he now puts my leg carefully in splints and tells me, ‘It’s off home tomorrow for you.’ Then they put the leg in plaster. When I am back with Kropp I tell him that it looks as if there will be a hospital train tomorrow.

‘We’ll have to have a word with the medical duty sergeant so that we can stay together, Albert.’

With a few well chosen words I manage to slip the sergeant a couple of my high quality cigars. He sniffs one and asks, ‘Got any more of these?’

‘A good handful of them,’ I tell him, ‘and my pal over there —’ pointing at Kropp – ‘has some as well. We would be very pleased to pass them over to you tomorrow – out of the window of the hospital train.’

He cottons on, of course, has another sniff, and says, ‘Done.’

We don’t get a moment’s sleep during the night. Seven men die in our room. One of them sings snatches of hymns in a high, strained tenor for an hour until it gives way to the death rattle. Another gets out of bed and crawls to the window. He is found lying in front of it, as if he wanted to look out for the last time.

We are lying on our stretchers at the station. We are waiting for the train. It’s raining and the station hasn’t any roof. Our blankets are thin. We’ve already been waiting for two hours.

The sergeant looks after us like a mother. Although I’m feeling very ill I don’t stop concentrating on our plan. I let him see the packet of cigars as if by accident, and give him one as an advance payment; for that the sergeant gets a tarpaulin and puts it over us.

‘Bloody hell, Albert,’ I remind him, ‘that four-poster, and the cat…’

‘And the armchairs,’ he adds.

Yes, the red plush armchairs. We sat on those chairs in the evenings like kings, and we had the bright idea of renting them out afterwards by the hour. One hour, one cigarette. We’d have had a good life and a good business.

‘Albert —’ something else occurs to me – ‘what about those sacks of food?’

We become melancholy. We could have done with those things. If the train were to go a day later, I’m sure Kat would have found us and brought us our gear.

It’s a bloody nuisance. We’ve got gruel in our bellies, thin clearing-station grub, and in those sacks of ours there are tins of ham. But we are so weak that we can’t get worked up about it.

The stretchers are soaking wet when the train arrives later that morning. The sergeant arranges for us to be in the same carriage. There are lots of Red Cross nurses. Kropp is put into a lower berth. They lift me out to get into the bed above him.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ I blurt out, suddenly.

‘What’s the matter?’ asks the nurse.

I have another look at the bed. It has been made up with snowy white linen, unimaginably clean linen with the creases where it has been ironed. But my shirt hasn’t been washed for six weeks and it’s filthy.

‘Can’t you manage to get in by yourself?’ asks the nurse anxiously.

‘I can manage that,’ I say, sweating, ‘but please can’t you take those bedclothes away first.’

‘Whatever for?’

I feel as filthy as a pig. And I’m supposed to get in to a bed like that? ‘It’ll get —’ I pause.

‘– a bit dirty?’ she asks, encouragingly. ‘That won’t hurt, we’ll just wash it again afterwards.’

‘No, it’s not just that —’ I say in confusion. This sudden confrontation with the civilized world is too much for me.

‘If you can be out there in the trenches, surely we can wash a bed sheet or two?’ she goes on.

I look at her. She looks crisply turned out and young, well scrubbed and genteel, like everything else on this train; it’s hard to believe that it isn’t intended for officers only, and it makes you feel uncomfortable, and even a bit threatened.

But the wretched woman behaves like a member of the Inquisition and forces me to say it out loud. ‘It’s just —’ and I stop again; surely she must know what I mean?

‘What else is wrong?’

And in the end I positively shout out, ‘It’s because of the Нее!’

She laughs. ‘Well, they have to have a good time occasionally, too.’

So then I don’t care any more. I scramble into bed and get under the covers.

I feel a hand on the bed-cover. The sergeant. He clears off with the cigars.

An hour later we notice that the train is moving.

I wake up in the night. Kropp is restless, too. The train is rolling quietly over the rails. It is still all too much to take in: a bed, a train, going home.

I whisper, ‘Albert?’

‘Yes

‘Any idea where the lavatory is?’

‘I think it’s the door over there on the right.’

‘I’ll have a look.’

It’s dark, I grope for the edge of the bed so that I can slide down carefully. But I miss my footing and slip, the plaster-cast doesn’t give me any support and with a crash I’m lying on the floor.

‘Damn!’ I say.

‘Did you hit anything?’ asks Kropp.

‘I should think you could have heard that,’ I grumble, ‘my head…’

At the back of the carriage a door opens. The nurse comes in with a lamp and sees me.

‘He fell out of bed —’

She takes my pulse and feels my forehead. ‘But you don’t seem to be feverish…’

‘No —’ I admit.

‘Were you dreaming?’

‘Something like that,’ I reply, avoiding the issue. Here we go again with the questions. She looks at me with her clear eyes and she is so clean and delightful that it is even more difficult for me to tell her what I need.

I’m helped back up into bed. That’s good. When she has gone I shall have to have another try at getting down. If she were an old woman it would be easier to say what the matter is, but she is so young, twenty-five at the most, and it’s no good – I can’t tell her.

Then Albert comes to the rescue; he’s not embarrassed and anyway, he isn’t the one with the problem. He calls out to the nurse. ‘Nurse, he wanted…’ but even Albert doesn’t know how to put it properly and decently. Out at the front you can express it with a single verb, but here, to a lady like this… And then suddenly he remembers his schooldays, and he continues smoothly, ‘He wanted to leave the room, nurse.’

‘Oh, I see,’ says the nurse, ‘but he doesn’t have to get out of bed for that, with a leg in plaster.’ And she turns to me and asks, ‘What is it that you need, then?’

I am absolutely mortified by this new twist, because I haven’t the slightest idea what the technical terms are for these functions. The nurse helps me out.

‘A big job or a little one?’

Oh my God! I’m sweating like a pig and answer in embarrassment, ‘Well, just a little one…’

Anyway, it does the trick.

I get a bottle. A few hours later I’m no longer the only one, and by morning we’re all used to it and ask for what we want without a second thought.

The train goes slowly. From time to time it stops, so that the dead can be taken off. It stops a lot.

Albert is feverish. I’m feeling wretched because of the pain, but what is worse is the fact that there are probably lice underneath the plaster cast. It itches horribly and I can’t scratch it.

We doze through the days. The countryside rolls quietly past the windows. On the third night we reach Herbesthal, on the German border. The nurse tells me that Albert is going to be taken off at the next stop because of his fever. ‘How far is the train going?’ I ask.

‘To Cologne.’

‘Albert,’ I say, ‘we’ll stay together, you wait.’

The next time the nurse does her rounds I hold my breath so that my face swells and goes red. She stops. ‘Are you in pain?’

‘Yes,’ I groan, ‘it came on suddenly.’

She gives me a thermometer and moves on. I wouldn’t be one of Kat’s apprentices if I didn’t know what to do. Army-issue thermometers are no match for old soldiers. All you have to do is get the mercury to go up, and then it will stay where it is in the thin tubing and not go down again.

I stick the thermometer under my arm, pointing downwards, and keep pressing against the bulb with my forefinger. Then I shake it up. That way I get it to over 37,9° Fahrenheit. That isn’t enough, though. A match held judiciously near the bulb brings it up to 38,7°.

When the nurse comes back I gasp out, then make my breathing shallow and irregular, goggle at her with eyes that are a bit staring, fidget restlessly and whisper, ‘I can’t stand it any more…’

She jots my name down on a card. I’m quite sure that they won’t open up my plaster-cast unnecessarily.

Albert and I are taken off the train together.

We are in bed in a Catholic infirmary, in the same ward. This is a piece of luck, because the Catholic hospitals are known for good treatment and good food. This military hospital is full up with men from our train-load, and there are plenty of serious cases amongst them. We are not taken in for examination today, because there aren’t enough doctors. Flat hospital trolleys with rubber wheels are constantly being moved along the corridor, and there is always somebody stretched out on them. A bloody awful position to be – stretched out like that – it’s only bearable when you’re asleep.

We have a very disturbed night. Nobody can sleep. We doze off a bit towards morning. I wake up again when it gets light. The doors are open and I can hear voices coming from the corridor. The others wake up. One of them, who has already been in for a few days, tells us what is going on. ‘Up here the sisters say prayers in the corridor every morning. They call it their morning devotions. They open the doors so that you can get your share of benefit from it.’

I’m sure they mean well, but our bones and our heads are aching.

‘It’s ridiculous,’ I say, ‘when we’ve only just got to sleep.’

‘The less serious cases are up here, that’s why they do it,’ he replies.

Albert groans.

I get angry and shout, ‘Be quiet out there!’

A minute later a nurse appears. In her black-and-white habit she looks like a pretty tea-cosy. Someone says, ‘Please shut the door, Sister.’

‘We’re having prayers, that’s why the door is open,’ she replies.

‘But we want to sleep —’

‘Prayers are better than sleep.’ She stands there and smiles in all innocence. ‘And besides, it is already seven o’clock.’

Albert groans again.

‘Shut the door,’ I snap.

She is quite at a loss, apparently unable to understand such an attitude. ‘But we are praying for you as well.’

‘Makes no difference. Shut the door!’

She disappears, leaving the door open. The litany starts up again. I’m now furious, and shout, ‘I’m going to count to three. If it’s not quiet by then, I’ll let fly.’

‘Me too,’ adds someone else.

I count to five. Then I take a bottle, aim, and throw it through the door into the corridor. It smashes into a thousand pieces. The prayers stop. A whole swarm of nurses come in and make reproachful noises.

‘Shut that door!’ we scream.

They withdraw. The little one who came in before is the last to leave. ‘Heathens,’ she twitters. But she does close the door.

We have won.

The hospital inspector turns up at midday and bawls us out. He threatens us with the clink, and worse. Now military hospital inspectors, just like commissariat officers, are, it is true, entitled to a sword and pips on their shoulders, but really they are just administrators, so not even recruits take them for proper officers. And so we let him talk away. What can they do to us —?

‘Who threw the bottle?’ he asks.

Before I have time to wonder whether I should own up, someone says, ‘I did.’

A man with a stubble of beard sits up in bed. Everyone wonders why he has taken the blame.

‘It was you?’

‘Correct. I became over-excited because we were wakened unnecessarily, and I lost control, so that I was not responsible for my actions.’ He talks like a book.

‘Name?’

‘Josef Hamacher, Supplementary Reserve.’

The inspector leaves.

We are all curious. ‘What on earth did you own up for? It wasn’t you at all!’

He grins. ‘It doesn’t matter. I’ve got a Special Permit.’

Everyone knows what he means, of course. If you have a Special Permit, you can do anything.

‘Yes,’ he explains. ‘I got a head wound, and when that happened they made out a document saying that I might not be responsible for my actions from time to time. Ever since then I’ve had a good time. No one is allowed to get me worked up. So nothing will happen to me. He’ll get pretty angry down there when he finds out. And I owned up because I enjoyed the bottlethrowing. If they leave the door open tomorrow, we’ll chuck another one.’

We couldn’t be happier. As long as we’ve got Josef Hamacher, we can try anything on.

Then the silent, flat hospital trolleys come to fetch us.

Our bandages are stuck. We bellow like cattle.

There are eight men in our room. Peter, who has black curly hair, is the one with the most serious wound, a lung injury with complications. Franz Waechter, next to him, has a bullet wound in his arm which did not look too bad at first. But during the third night he calls out to us to ring for help, because he thinks he has begun to haemorrhage.

I ring violently. The night sister doesn’t come. Earlier in the evening we were all pretty demanding of her, because our dressings had all been changed, and so we were suffering. One of us wanted his leg put this way, another of us wanted it that way, a third wanted some water, the fourth needed his pillow plumped up. Eventually the fat old nurse had grumbled crossly and closed the doors on us. Now she probably suspects that it will be the same sort of thing, because she doesn’t come.

We wait. Then Franz says, ‘Ring again.’

I do it. There is still no sign of her. There is only the one ward sister on our wing at night, and perhaps she is busy in one of the other rooms. ‘Are you sure you are bleeding, Franz?’ I ask. ‘If not, they’ll be down on us like a ton of bricks again.’

‘It’s wet. Can’t anyone put the light on?’

We can’t manage that, either. The switch is by the door and nobody can get out of bed. I press the bell until I can’t feel my thumb any more. Maybe the nurse has nodded off. They really have a lot to do and they are all overworked, even during the day. And they have all those prayers to say.

‘Should we chuck a few bottles?’ asks Josef Hamacher, the one with the Special Permit.

‘She’s even less likely to hear that than the bell.’

At last the door opens. The old girl appears, looking sulky.

When she sees what is up with Franz she gets a move on, and shouts at us, ‘Why didn’t any of you call me?’

‘We did ring. None of us can walk.’

He has lost a lot of blood and is bandaged up. In the morning we notice how his face has become sharper and more yellow, while last night he still looked almost healthy. A nurse comes round more often now.

We often get volunteer auxiliary nurses from the Red Cross. They are well meaning, but they can be a bit on the clumsy side. When they re-make our beds they often hurt us, and then they are so shaken that they hurt us even more.

The nuns are more reliable. They know how to get hold of us, but we would really prefer them to be more cheerful. Some of them do have a good sense of humour, it’s true, and those are great. There is no one who wouldn’t do anything in the world for Sister Tina, a wonderful nurse, who cheers up the whole wing, even when we can only see her from a distance. And there are a few more like her. We’d go through hell and high water for them. We really can’t complain – you get treated like a civilian by the nuns here. On the other hand, when you think of the garrison hospitals, then you really start to worry.

Franz Waechter doesn’t regain his strength. One day he is taken out and doesn’t come back. Josef Hamacher knows what has happened. ‘We won’t see him again. He’s been taken to the Dead Man’s Room.’

‘What Dead Man’s Room?’

‘You know, the Dying Room —’

‘What’s that?’

‘The small room at the corner of this wing. Anybody who is about to snuff it gets taken there. There are two beds. It’s called the Dying Room all over the hospital.’

‘But why do they do that?’

‘So they don’t have so much work afterwards. It’s easier, too, because it’s right by the entrance to the mortuary. Maybe they want to make sure that nobody dies on the wards, and do it so as not to upset the others. They can keep an eye on a man better, too, if he is in there on his own.’

‘What about the man himself?’

Josef shrugs. ‘Usually he is past noticing much any more.’

‘Does everyone know about this?’

‘Anyone who has been here for a while finds out, of course.’

That afternoon Franz Waechter’s bed is made up again. After a couple of days they come and take the new man away. Josef indicates with his hand where he is going. We watch a good few more come and go.

Relatives often come and sit by the beds crying, or talking softly and shyly. One old lady is very reluctant to leave, but she can’t stay there all night, of course. She comes back very early on the following morning, but not quite early enough; because when she goes up to the bed there is already somebody new in it. She has to go to the mortuary. She gives us the apples that she had brought with her.

Little Peter is getting worse, too. His temperature chart looks bad, and one day a flat hospital trolley is put beside his bed. ‘Where am I going?’ he asks.

‘To have your dressings done.’

They lift him on to the trolley. But the nurse makes the mistake of taking his battledress tunic from its hook and putting it on the trolley with him, so that she doesn’t have to make two journeys. Peter realizes at once what is going on and tries to roll off the trolley. ‘I’m staying here!’

They hold him down. He cries out weakly with his damaged lung, ‘I don’t want to go to the Dying Room.’

‘But we’re going to the dressing ward.’

‘Then why do you need my tunic?’ He can’t speak any more. Hoarse and agitated, he whispers, ‘Want to stay here.’

They don’t answer, and move him out. By the door he tries to sit up. His head of black curls is bobbing, his eyes are full of tears. ‘I’ll be back! I’ll be back!’ he shouts.

The door closes. We are all rather worked up, but nobody says anything. Eventually Josef says, ‘Plenty of them have said that. But once you are in there you never last.’

They operate on me and I puke for two whole days. My bones don’t seem to want to knit properly, says the doctor’s clerk. There’s another man whose bones grow together badly and he has to have them broken again. It’s all pretty wretched.

Our latest additions include two recruits who have flat feet. When he is doing his rounds the chief surgeon finds this out and stops, delighted. ‘We’ll get rid of that problem,’ he tells them. ‘We’ll just do a little operation and you’ll both have healthy feet. Take their names, nurse.’

Once he has left, Josef – who knows everything – gives them a warning. ‘Whatever you do, don’t let him operate on you. That business is the old man’s medical hobby-horse. He’s dead keen on anyone he can get hold of to work on. He’ll operate on you for flat feet, and sure enough, when he’s finished you won’t have flat feet any more. Instead you’ll have club feet and you’ll be on crutches for the rest of your days.’

‘What can we do?’ asks one of them.

‘Just say no. You’re here to have your bullet wounds treated, not your flat feet. Think about it. Now you can still walk, but just let the old man get you under the knife and you’re cripples. He’s after guinea pigs for his experiments, and the war is a good time for him, just like it is for all the doctors. Have a look around the ward downstairs; there are at least a dozen men hobbling about after he’s operated on them. A good few of them have been here since 1914 or 15 – for years. Not a single one of them can walk better than he could before, and for nearly all of them it’s worse, most of them have to have their legs in plaster. Every six months he catches up with them and breaks the bones again, and every time that’s supposed to do the trick. You be careful – he’s not allowed to do it if you refuse.’

‘What the hell,’ says one of the two men wearily, ‘better your feet than your head. Who knows what you’ll get when you’re back at the front. I don’t care what they do to me, so long as I get sent home. Having a club foot’s better than being dead.’

The other one, a young man like us, doesn’t want to. The next morning the old man has them brought down and argues with them and bullies them for so long that they both agree after all. What else can they do? They are just the poor bloody infantry and he’s top brass. They are brought back chloroformed and with plaster casts on.

Albert is in a bad way. They take him away and amputate. The whole leg from the upper thigh downwards is taken off. Now he hardly ever speaks. Once he says that he will shoot himself the minute he can lay his hands on a revolver.

A new hospital transport train arrives. Our room gets two blinded soldiers. One of them is very young, a musician. The nurses never use knives when they feed him; he’s already grabbed one once out of a nurse’s hand. In spite of these precautions, something still happens. The sister who is feeding him one evening is called away, and leaves the plate and the fork on the side table while she is gone. He gropes across for the fork, gets hold of it and rams it with all his force into his chest, then grabs a shoe and hammers on the shaft as hard as he can. We shout for help and it takes three men to get the fork out. The blunt prongs had gone in a long way. He swears at us all night, so that none of us can sleep. In the morning he has a screaming fit.

Again there are empty beds. One day follows another, days filled with pain and fear, with groans and with the death rattle. Even having a Dying Room is no use any more because it isn’t enough; men die during the night in our room. Things just go faster than the nurses can spot.

One day, though, our door is flung open, a hospital trolley is rolled in, and there sits Peter on his stretcher, pale, thin, upright and triumphant, with his tangle of black curls. Sister Tina pushes the trolley over to his old bed with a broad smile on her face. He’s come back from the Dying Room. We had assumed he was long since dead.

He looks at us. ‘What about that, then?’

And even Josef has to admit that it is a new one on him.

After a while a few of us are allowed out of bed. I am given a pair of crutches, too, so that I can hobble about. But I don’t use them much; I can’t bear the way Albert looks at me when I walk across the ward. His eyes follow me with such a strange look in them. Because of that I often try to slip out into the corridor – I can move more freely there.

On the floor below us there are men with stomach and spinal wounds, men with head wounds and men with both legs or arms amputated. In the right-hand wing are men with wounds in the jaw, men who have been gassed and men wounded in the nose, ears or throat. In the left-hand wing are those who have been blinded and men who have been hit in the lungs or in the pelvis, in one of the joints, in the kidneys, in the testicles or in the stomach. It is only here that you realize all the different places where a man can be hit.

Two men die of tetanus. Their skin becomes pale, their limbs stiffen, and at the end only their eyes remain alive – for a long time. With many of the wounded, the damaged limb has been hoisted up into the air on a kind of gallows; underneath the wound itself there is a dish for the pus to drip into. The basins are emptied every two or three hours. Other men are in traction, with heavy weights pulling down at the end of the bed. I see wounds in the gut which are permanently full of matter. The doctor’s clerk shows me X-rays of hips, knees and shoulders that have been shattered completely.

It is impossible to grasp the fact that there are human faces above these torn bodies, faces in which life goes on from day to day. And on top of it all, this is just one single military hospital, just one – there are hundreds of thousands of them in Germany, hundreds of thousands of them in France, hundreds of thousands of them in Russia. How pointless all human thoughts, words and deeds must be, if things like this are possible! Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren’t even able to prevent this river of blood, couldn’t stop these torture chambers existing in their hundreds of thousands. Only a military hospital can really show you what war is.

I am young, I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering. I see people being driven against one another, and silently, uncomprehendingly, foolishly, obediently and innocently killing one another. I see the best brains in the world inventing weapons and words to make the whole process that much more sophisticated and long-lasting. And watching this with me are all my contemporaries, here and on the other side, all over the world – my whole generation is experiencing this with me. What would our fathers do if one day we rose up and confronted them, and called them to account? What do they expect from us when a time comes in which there is no more war? For years our occupation has been killing – that was the first experience we had. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us?

The oldest man in our room is Lewandowski. He is forty, and has been in the hospital for ten months already with a serious stomach wound. Only in recent weeks has he made enough progress to be able to limp around a little, bent double.

For the past few days he has been very excited. His wife has written to him from the little place away in Poland where she lives, that she has managed to get enough money together to pay for the journey to come and visit him.

She is on her way and might turn up any day. LewandowskI has lost his appetite, and even gives away sausage with red cabbage when he has only eaten a couple of mouthfuls. He is forever going round the room with his letter, and all of us have read it a dozen times already, the postmark has been inspected God knows how often, and there are so many grease stains and fingermarks on it that the writing can barely be deciphered any more. The inevitable happens: LewandowskI gets a fever and has to go back into bed.

He hasn’t seen his wife for two years. She had a baby after he left, and she’s bringing it with her. But LewandowskI has something quite different on his mind. He had been hoping to get permission to leave the hospital when his old woman came, for obvious reasons; it’s all very nice to see someone, but when you get your wife back after such a long time you want something else altogether, if at all possible.

LewandowskI has talked about all this for hours with us, because there are no secrets in the army. Nobody bothers about it, anyway. Those of us who are already allowed out have told him about a few perfect places in the town, gardens and parks where nobody would disturb him. One man even knew of a small room.

But what use is all that now? LewandowskI is confined to bed and miserable. All the joy will go out of his life if he has to miss out on this. We tell him not to worry and promise that we will sort the whole business out somehow.

His wife appears the next afternoon, a little crumpled thing with anxious, darting eyes, like a bird’s, wearing a kind of mantilla with frills and bands. God alone knows where she can have inherited the thing.

She murmurs something quietly, and waits shyly by the door. She is shocked to find that there are six of us in the room.

‘Come on, Marya,’ says Lewandowski, swallowing his Adam’s apple dangerously, ‘you can come on in, nobody’s going to hurt you.’

She walks round the room and shakes hands with each one of us. Then she shows us the baby, which in the meantime has dirtied its nappy. She has a large, beaded bag with her and she takes a clean nappy out of it and neatly changes the child. This gets her over any initial embarrassment, and the two start to talk to each other.

LewandowskI is extremely fidgety and keeps looking across at us miserably with his bulging round eyes.

The time is right. The doctor has done his rounds, and at most a nurse might stick her head into the room. One of us goes outside again nevertheless – to make sure. He comes back in and nods. ‘No sign of man nor beast. Just tell her, Johann, and then get on with it!’

The two of them talk in their own language. The wife looks up, blushing a little and embarrassed. We grin amiably and make dismissive gestures – what is there to worry about? To hell with the proprieties, they were made for different times. Here in bed is Johann LewandowskI the carpenter, a soldier who has been crippled by a bullet, and there is his wife – who knows when he will see her again, he wants to have her and he shall have her, and that’s that.

Two men stand guard at the door to intercept and occupy any nurses that might happen to come past. They reckon to keep watch for about a quarter of an hour.

LewandowskI can only lie on one side, so someone props a couple of pillows against his back. Albert gets the baby to hold, then we all turn round a bit, and the black mantilla disappears under the covers while we play a noisy and vigorous game of cards.

Everything is fine. I’m holding a damn good hand with all the high cards in clubs which has just about beaten everyone. With all this going on we have almost forgotten Lewandowski. After a time the baby begins to howl, although Albert is rocking it backwards and forwards despairingly. There is a bit of rustling and crackling and when we glance up, as if we were just doing so casually, we see that the child has the bottle in its mouth and is already back with its mother. It all worked.

We now feel like one big family, the woman is bright and cheerful, and LewandowskI lies there sweating and beaming.

He unpacks the beaded bag, and out come a couple of good sausages. LewandowskI takes the knife as if it were a bunch of flowers and saws the meat into chunks. He makes a sweeping gesture of invitation towards us all, and his little crumpled wife moves from one of us to the next, and laughs, and shares out the meat – she looks positively pretty as she does so. We call her ‘mother’ and she likes that, and plumps our pillows up for us.

After a few weeks I have to go to physiotherapy every morning. There they strap up my leg and exercise it. My arm has long since healed.

New hospital transport trains arrive from the front. The bandages are not made out of cloth any more, they are just white crepe paper. There is too much of a shortage of proper bandage material out there.

Albert’s stump heals well. The wound has practically closed. In a few weeks’ time he will be sent to be fitted for an artificial leg. He still doesn’t talk a lot, and he’s much more serious than he was before. Often he breaks off in mid-conversation and just stares into the distance. If he hadn’t been with the rest of us he’d have put an end to it long ago.

But now he is over the worst. Sometimes he even watches while we play cards.

I’m given convalescent leave.

My mother doesn’t want to let me go again. She is so weak. It is all even worse than last time.

Then I’m recalled by my regiment, and go back to the front. Leaving my friend Albert Kropp is hard. But in the army you get used to things like that.