All Quiet on the Western Front (4 page)

I become faint, all at once I cannot do any more. I won’t revile any more, it is senseless, I could drop down and never rise up again.

We are by Kemmerich’s bed. He is dead. The face is still wet from the tears. The eyes are half open and yellow like old horn buttons. The orderly pokes me in the ribs, “Are you taking his things with you?” I nod.

He goes on: “We must take him away at once, we want the bed. Outside they are lying on the floor.”

I collect Kemmerich’s things, and untie his identification disc. The orderly asks about the paybook. I say that it is probably in the orderly-room, and go. Behind me they are already hauling Franz on to a waterproof sheet.

Outside the door I am aware of the darkness and the wind as a deliverance. I breathe as deep as I can, and feel the breeze in my face, warm and soft as never before. Thoughts of girls, of flowery meadows, of white clouds suddenly come into my head. My feet begin to move forward in my boots, I go quicker, I run. Soldiers pass by me, I hear their voices without understanding. The earth is streaming with forces which pour into me through the soles of my feet. The night crackles electrically, the front thunders like a concert of drums. My limbs move supplely, I feel my joints strong, I breathe the air deeply. The night lives, I live. I feel a hunger, greater than comes from the belly alone.

Müller stands in front of the hut waiting for me. I give him the boots. We go in and he tries them on. They fit well.

He roots among his supplies and offers me a fine piece of saveloy. With it goes hot tea and rum.

REINFORCEMENTS HAVE ARRIVED
. The vacancies have been filled and the sacks of straw in the huts are already booked. Some of them are old hands, but there are twenty-five men of a later draft from the base. They are about two years younger than us. Kropp nudges me: “Seen the infants?”

I nod. We stick out our chests, shave in the open, shove our hands in our pockets, inspect the recruits and feel ourselves stone-age veterans.

Katczinsky joins us. We stroll past the horse-boxes and go over to the reinforcements, who are already being issued with gas masks and coffee.

“Long time since you’ve had anything decent to eat, eh?” Kat asks one of the youngsters.

He grimaces. “For breakfast, turnip-bread—lunch, turnip-stew—supper, turnip-cutlets and turnip-salad.” Kat gives a knowing whistle.

“Bread made of turnips? You’ve been in luck, it’s nothing new for it to be made of sawdust. But what do you say to haricot beans? Have some?”

The youngster turns red: “You can’t kid me.”

Katczinsky merely says: “Fetch your mess-tin.”

We follow curiously. He takes us to a tub beside his straw sack. Sure enough it is half full of beef and beans. Katczinsky plants himself in front of it like a general and says:

“Sharp eyes and light fingers! That’s what the Prussians say.”

We are surprised. “Great guts, Kat, how did you come by that?” I ask him.

“Ginger was glad I took it. I gave him three pieces of parachute-silk for it. Cold beans taste fine, too.”

Patronizingly he gives the youngster a portion and says:

“Next time you come with your mess-tin have a cigar or a chew of tobacco in your other hand. Get me?” Then he turns to us. “You get off scot free, of course.”

We couldn’t do without Katczinsky; he has a sixth sense. There are such people everywhere but one does not appreciate it at first. Every company has one or two. Katczinsky is the smartest I know. By trade he is a cobbler, I believe, but that hasn’t anything to do with it; he understands all trades. It’s a good thing to be friends with him, as Kropp and I are, and Haie Westhus too, more or less. But Haie is rather the executive arm, operating under Kat’s orders when things come to blows. For that he has his qualifications.

For example, we land at night in some entirely unknown spot, a sorry hole, that has been eaten out to the very walls. We are quartered in a small dark factory adapted to the purpose. There are beds in it, or rather bunks—a couple of wooden beams over which wire netting is stretched.

Wire netting is hard. And there’s nothing to put on it. Our
waterproof sheets are too thin. We use our blankets to cover ourselves.

Kat looks at the place and then says to Haie Westhus: “Come with me.” They go off to explore. Half an hour later they are back again with arms full of straw. Kat has found a horse-box with straw in it. Now we might sleep if we weren’t so terribly hungry.

Kropp asks an artilleryman who has been some time in this neighbourhood: “Is there a canteen anywhere abouts?”

“Is there a what?” he laughs. “There’s nothing to be had here. You won’t find so much as a crust of bread here.”

“Aren’t there any inhabitants here at all then?”

He spits. “Yes, a few. But they hang round the cook-house and beg.”

“That’s a bad business!—Then we’ll have to pull in our belts and wait till the rations come up in the morning.”

But I see Kat has put on his cap.

“Where to, Kat?” I ask.

“Just to explore the place a bit.” He strolls off. The artilleryman grains scornfully. “Go ahead and explore. But don’t strain yourself in carrying what you find.”

Disappointed we lie down and consider whether we couldn’t have a go at the iron rations. But it’s too risky; so we try to get a wink of sleep.

Kropp divides a cigarette and hands me half. Tjaden gives an account of his national dish—broad-beans and bacon. He despises it when not flavoured with bog-myrtle, and, “for God’s sake, let it all be cooked together, not the potatoes, the beans, and the bacon separately.” Someone growls that he will pound Tjaden into bog-myrtle if he doesn’t shut up. Then all becomes quiet in the big room—only the candles flickering
from the necks of a couple of bottles and the artilleryman spitting every now and then.

We are just dozing off when the door opens and Kat appears. I think I must be dreaming; he has two loaves of bread under his arm and a bloodstained sandbag full of horse-flesh in his hand.

The artilleryman’s pipe drops from his mouth. He feels the bread. “Real bread, by God, and still hot too?”

Kat gives no explanation. He has the bread, the rest doesn’t matter. I’m sure that if he were planted down in the middle of the desert, in half an hour he would have gathered together a supper of roast meat, dates, and wine.

“Cut some wood,” he says curtly to Haie.

Then he hauls out a frying pan from under his coat, and a handful of salt as well as a lump of fat from his pocket. He has thought of everything. Haie makes a fire on the floor. It lights up the empty room of the factory. We climb out of bed.

The artilleryman hesitates. He wonders whether to praise Kat and so perhaps gain a little for himself. But Katczinsky doesn’t even see him, he might as well be thin air. He goes off cursing.

Kat knows the way to roast horse-flesh so that it’s tender. It shouldn’t be put straight into the pan, that makes it tough. It should be boiled, first in a little water. With our knives we squat round in a circle and fill our bellies.

That is Kat. If for one hour in a year something eatable were to be had in some one place only, within that hour, as if moved by a vision, he would put on his cap, go out and walk directly there, as though following a compass, and find it.

He finds everything—if it is cold, a small stove and wood, hay and straw, a table and chairs—but above all food. It is
uncanny; one would think he conjured it out of the air. His masterpiece was four boxes of lobsters. Admittedly we would rather have had a good beef steak.

We have settled ourselves on the sunny side of the hut. There is a smell of tar, of summer, and of sweaty feet. Kat sits beside me. He likes to talk. Today we have done an hour’s saluting drill because Tjaden failed to salute a major smartly enough. Kat can’t get it out of his head.

“You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well,” he says.

Kropp stalks up, with his breeches rolled up and his feet bare. He lays out his washed socks to dry on the grass. Kat turns his eyes to heaven, lets off a mighty fart, and says meditatively: “Every little bean must be heard as well as seen.”

The two begin to argue. At the same time they lay a bottle of beer on the result of an air-fight that’s going on above us. Katczinsky won’t budge from the opinion which as an old Front-hog, he rhymes:

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.

The subject is dropped. Then the conversation turns to drill.

A picture comes before me. Burning midday in the barrack-yard. The heat hangs over the square. The barracks are deserted. Every thing sleeps. All one hears is the drummers practising; they have installed themselves somewhere and practise brokenly, dully, monotonously. What a concord! Midday heat, barrack square, and drummers beating!

The windows of the barracks are empty and dark. From some of them trousers are hanging to dry. The rooms are cool and one looks toward them longingly.

O dark, musty platoon huts, with the iron bedsteads, the chequered bedding, the lockers and the stools! Even you can become the object of desire; out here you have a faint resemblance to home; your rooms, full of the smell of stale food, sleep, smoke, and clothes.

Katczinsky paints it all in lively colours. What would we not give to be able to return to it! Farther back than that our thoughts dare not go.

Those early morning hours of instruction—“What are the parts of the 98 rifle?”—the midday hours of physical training—“Pianist forward! By the right, quick march. Report to the cook-house for potato-peeling.”

We indulge in reminiscences. Kropp laughs suddenly and says: “Change at Löhne!”

That was our corporal’s favourite game. Löhne is a railway junction. In order that our fellows going on shouldn’t get lost there, Himmelstoss used to practise the change in the barrack-room. We had to learn that at Löhne, to reach the branch-line, we must pass through a subway. The beds represented the subway and each man stood at attention on the left side of his bed. Then came the command: “Change at Löhne!” and like
lightning everyone scrambled under the bed to the opposite side. We practised this for hours on end.

Meanwhile the German aeroplane has been shot down. Like a comet it bursts into a streamer of smoke and falls headlong. Kropp has lost the bottle of beer. Disgruntled he counts out the money from his wallet.

“Surely Himmelstoss was a very different fellow as a postman,” say I, after Albert’s disappointment has subsided. “Then how does it come that he’s such a bully as a drill-sergeant?”

The question revives Kropp, more particularly as he hears there’s no more beer in the canteen. “It’s not only Himmelstoss, there are lots of them. As sure as they get a stripe or a star they become different men, just as though they’d swallowed concrete.”

“That’s the uniform,” I suggest.

“Roughly speaking it is,” says Kat, and prepares for a long speech; “but the root of the matter lies somewhere. For instance, if you train a dog to eat potatoes and then afterwards put a piece of meat in front of him, he’ll snap at it, it’s his nature. And if you give a man a little bit of authority he behaves just the same way, he snaps at it too. The things are precisely the same. In himself man is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread with a little decorum. The army is based on that; one man must always have power over the other. The mischief is merely that each one has much too much power. A non-com. can torment a private, a lieutenant a non-com., a captain a lieutenant, until he goes mad. And because they know they can, they all soon acquire the habit more or less. Take a simple case: we are marching back from the parade-ground dog-tired. Then comes the order to sing. We sing spiritlessly, for it is all we can do to
trudge along with our rifles. At once the company is turned about and has to do another hour’s drill as punishment. On the march back the order to sing is given again, and once more we start. Now what’s the use of all that? It’s simply that the company commander’s head has been turned by having so much power. And nobody blames him. On the contrary, he is praised for being strict. That, of course, is only a trifling instance, but it holds also in very different affairs. Now I ask you: Let a man be whatever you like in peacetime, what occupation is there in which he can behave like that without getting a crack on the nose? He can only do that in the army. It goes to the heads of them all, you see. And the more insignificant a man has been in civil life the worse it takes him.”

“They say, of course, there must be discipline,” ventures Kropp meditatively.