All Quiet on the Western Front (16 page)

“They’ve done that a couple of times already,” grins Mittelstaedt. “People have begun to watch for them coming.”

“Excellent,” I say, “but hasn’t he reported you yet?”

“He did try. Our C.O. laughed like the deuce when he heard the story. He hasn’t any time for schoolmasters. Besides, I’m sweet with his daughter.”

“He’ll mess up the examination for you.”

“I don’t care,” says Mittelstaedt calmly. “Besides, his complaint came to nothing because I could show that he had had hardly anything but light duty.”

“Couldn’t you polish him up a bit?” I ask.

“He’s too stupid, I couldn’t be bothered,” answers Mittelstaedt contemptuously.

What is leave?—A pause that only makes everything after it so much worse. Already the sense of parting begins to intrude itself. My mother watches me silently; I know she counts the days; every morning she is sad. It is one day less. She has put away my pack, she does not want to be reminded by it.

The hours pass quickly if a man broods. I pull myself together, and go with my sister to the slaughter-house to get a pound or two of bones. That is a great favour and people line up early in the morning and stand waiting. Many of them faint.

We have no luck. After waiting by turns for three hours the queue disperses. The bones have not lasted out.

It is a good thing that I get my rations. I bring them to my mother and in that way we all get something decent to eat.

The days grow ever more strained and my mother’s eyes more sorrowful. Four days left now. I must go and see Kemmerich’s mother.

I cannot write that down. This quaking, sobbing woman who shakes me and cries out on me: “Why are you living then, when he is dead?”—who drowns me in tears and calls out: “What are you there for at all, child, when you——”—who drops into a chair and wails: “Did you see him? Did you see him then? How did he die?”

I tell her he was shot through the heart and died instantaneously. She looks at me, she doubts me: “You lie. I know better. I have felt how terribly he died. I have heard his voice at night, I have felt his anguish—tell the truth, I want to know it, I must know it.”

“No,” I say, “I was beside him. He died at once.”

She pleads with me gently: “Tell me. You must tell me. I know you want to comfort me, but don’t you see, you torment me far more than if you told me the truth? I cannot bear the uncertainty. Tell me how it was and even though it will be terrible, it will be far better than what I have to think if you don’t.”

I will never tell her, she can make mincemeat out of me first. I pity her, but she strikes me as rather stupid all the same. Why doesn’t she stop worrying? Kemmerich will stay dead whether she knows about it or not. When a man has seen so many dead he cannot understand any longer why there should be so much anguish over a single individual. So I say
rather impatiently: “He died immediately. He felt absolutely nothing at all. His face was quite calm.”

She is silent. Then says slowly: “Will you swear it?”

“Yes.”

“By everything that is sacred to you?”

Good God, what is there that is sacred to me?—such things change pretty quickly with us.

“Yes, he died at once.”

“Are you willing never to come back yourself, if it isn’t true?”

“May I never come back if he wasn’t killed instantaneously.”

I would swear to anything. But she seems to believe me. She moans and weeps steadily. I have to tell how it happened, so I invent a story and I almost believe it myself.

As I leave she kisses me and gives me a picture of him. In his recruit’s uniform he leans on a round rustic table with legs made of birch branches. Behind him a wood is painted on a curtain, and on the table stands a mug of beer.

It is the last evening at home. Everyone is silent. I go to bed early, I seize the pillow, press it against myself and bury my head in it. Who knows if I will ever lie in a feather bed again?

Late in the night my mother comes into my room. She thinks I am asleep, and I pretend to be so. To talk, to stay awake with one another, it is too hard.

She sits long into the night although she is in pain and often writhes. At last I can bear it no longer, and pretend I have just wakened up.

“Go and sleep, Mother, you will catch cold here.”

“I can sleep enough later,” she says.

I sit up. “I don’t go straight back to the front, Mother. I
have to do four weeks at the training camp. I may come over from there on Sunday, perhaps.”

She is silent. Then she asks gently: “Are you very much afraid?”

“No Mother.”

“I would like to tell you to be on your guard against the women out in France. They are no good.”

Ah! Mother, Mother! You still think I am a child—why can I not put my head in your lap and weep? Why have I always to be strong and self-controlled? I would like to weep and be comforted too, indeed I am little more than a child; in the wardrobe still hang short, boy’s trousers—it is such a little time ago, why is it over?

“Where we are there aren’t any women, Mother,” I say as calmly as I can.

“And be very careful at the front, Paul.”

Ah, Mother, Mother! Why do I not take you in my arms and die with you. What poor wretches we are!

“Yes Mother, I will.”

“I will pray for you every day, Paul.”

Ah! Mother, Mother! Let us rise up and go out, back through the years, where the burden of all this misery lies on us no more, back to you and me alone, Mother!

“Perhaps you can get a job that is not so dangerous.”

“Yes, Mother, perhaps I can get into the cook-house, that can easily be done.”

“You do it then, and if the others say anything——”

“That won’t worry me, Mother——”

She sighs. Her face is a white gleam in the darkness.

“Now you must go to sleep, Mother.”

She does not reply. I get up and wrap my cover round her shoulders.

She supports herself on my arm, she is in pain. And so I take her to her room. I stay with her a little while.

“And you must get well again, Mother, before I come back.”

“Yes, yes, my child.”

“You ought not to send your things to me, Mother. We have plenty to eat out there. You can make much better use of them here.”

How destitute she lies there in her bed, she that loves me more than all the world. As I am about to leave, she says hastily: “I have two pairs of underpants for you. They are all wool. They will keep you warm. You must not forget to put them in your pack.”

Ah! Mother! I know what these underpants have cost you in waiting, and walking, and begging! Ah! Mother, Mother! how can it be that I must part from you? Who else is there that has any claim on me but you? Here I sit and there you are lying; we have so much to say, and we shall never say it.

“Good-night, Mother.”

“Good-night, my child.”

The room is dark. I hear my mother’s breathing, and the ticking of the clock. Outside the window the wind blows and the chestnut trees rustle.

On the landing I stumble over my pack, which lies there already made up because I have to leave early in the morning.

I bit into my pillow. I grasp the iron rods of my bed with my fists. I ought never to have come here. Out there I was indifferent and often hopeless—I will never be able to be so again. I was a soldier, and now I am nothing but an agony for myself, for my mother, for everything that is so comfortless and without end.

I ought never to have come on leave.

I ALREADY KNOW
the camp on the moors. It was here that Himmelstoss gave Tjaden his education. But now I know hardly anyone here; as ever, all is altered. There are only a few people that I have occasionally met before.

I go through the routine mechanically. In the evenings I generally go to the Soldiers’ Home, where the newspapers are laid out, but I do not read them; still there is a piano there that I am glad enough to play on. Two girls are in attendance, one of them is young.

The camp is surrounded with high barbed-wire fences. If we come back late from the Soldiers’ Home we have to show passes. But those who are on good terms with the guard can get through, of course.

Among the junipers and the birch trees on the moor we practise company drill each day. It is bearable if one expects nothing better. We advance at a run, fling ourselves down, and our panting breath moves the stalks of the grasses and the flowers of the heather to and fro. Looked at so closely one sees the fine sand is composed of millions of the tiniest pebbles, as
clear as if they had been made in a laboratory. It is strangely inviting to dig one’s hands into it.

But the most beautiful are the woods with their line of birch trees. Their colour changes with every minute. Now the stems gleam purest white, and between them airy and silken, hangs the pastel-green of the leaves; the next moment all changes to an opalescent blue, as the shivering breezes pass down from the heights and touch the green lightly away; and again in one place it deepens almost to black as a cloud passes over the sun. And this shadow moves like a ghost through the dim trunks and rides far out over the moor to the sky—then the birches stand out again like gay banners on white poles, with their red and gold patches of autumn-tinted leaves.

I often become so lost in the play of soft light and transparent shadow, that I almost fail to hear the commands. It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her. And here I have not much companionship, and do not even desire it. We are too little acquainted with one another to do more than joke a bit and play poker or nap in the evenings.

Alongside our camp is the big Russian prison camp. It is separated from us by a wire fence, but in spite of this the prisoners come across to us. They seem nervous and fearful, though most of them are big fellows with beards—they look like meek, scolded, St. Bernard dogs.

They slink about our camp and pick over the garbage tins. One can imagine what they find there. With us food is pretty scarce and none too good at that—turnips cut into six pieces and boiled in water, and unwashed carrot tops—mouldy potatoes are tit-bits, and the chief luxury is a thin rice soup in which float little bits of beef-sinew, but these are cut up so small that they take a lot of finding.

Everything gets eaten, notwithstanding, and if ever anyone is so well off as not to want all his share, there are a dozen others standing by ready to relieve him of it. Only the dregs that the ladle cannot reach are tipped out and thrown into the garbage tins. Along with that there sometimes go a few turnip peelings, mouldy bread crusts and all kinds of muck.

This thin, miserable, dirty garbage is the objective of the prisoners. They pick it out of the stinking tins greedily and go off with it under their blouses.

It is strange to see these enemies of ours so close up. They have faces that make one think—honest peasant faces, broad foreheads, broad noses, broad mouths, broad hands, and thick hair.

They ought to be put to threshing, reaping, and apple picking. They look just as kindly as our own peasants in Friesland.

It is distressing to watch their movements, to see them begging for something to eat. They are all rather feeble, for they only get enough nourishment to keep them from starving. Ourselves we have not had sufficient to eat for long enough. They have dysentery; furtively many of them display the blood-stained tails of their shirts. Their backs, their necks are bent, their knees sag, their heads droop as they stretch out their hands and beg in the few words of German that they know—beg with those soft, deep, musical voices, that are like warm stoves and cosy rooms at home.

Some men there are who give them a kick, so that they fall over;—but those are not many. The majority do nothing to them, just ignore them. Occasionally, when they are too grovelling, it makes a man mad and then he kicks them. If only they would not look at one so—What great misery can be in two such small spots, no bigger than a man’s thumb—in their eyes!

They come over to the camp in the evenings and trade. They exchange whatever they possess for bread. Often they have fair success, because they have very good boots and ours are bad. The leather of their knee boots is wonderfully soft, like suede. The peasants among us who get tit-bits sent from home can afford to trade. The price of a pair of boots is about two or three loaves of army bread, or a loaf of bread and a small, tough ham sausage.

But most of the Russians have long since parted with whatever things they had. Now they wear only the most pitiful clothing, and try to exchange little carvings and objects that they have made out of shell fragments and copper driving bands. Of course, they don’t get much for such things, though they may have taken immense pains with them—they go for a slice or two of bread. Our peasants are hard and cunning when they bargain. They hold the piece of bread or sausage right under the nose of the Russian till he grows pale with greed and his eyes bulge and then he will give anything for it. The peasants wrap up their booty with the utmost solemnity, and then get out their big pocket knives, and slowly and deliberately cut off a slice of bread for themselves from their supply and with every mouthful take a piece of the good tough sausage and so reward themselves with a good feed. It is distressing to watch them take their afternoon meal thus; one would like to crack them over their thick pates. They rarely give anything away. How little we understand one another.