Reinforcements have arrived. The vacancies have been filled and the
sacks of straw are already laid out in the huts. 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 to be
stone-age veterans.
Katczinsky joins us. We stroll past the horse-boxes and go over to
the reinforcements, who have already been 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. It
is nearly half full of a stew 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."
Grudgingly 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."
* *
Katczinsky never goes short; 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 couple. But they mostly loaf 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
grins scornfully. "Let him explore! But don't be too hopeful about
it."
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 stir a bit as the door opens and Kat appears. I think I must be
dreaming; he has two loaves of bread under his arm and a
blood-stained 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 but 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
wants to talk. To-day we have been practising saluting because
Tjaden failed to salute a major. Kat can't get it out of his head.
"You see, 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 apologetically: "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:
Give 'em all the same grub and all the same pay
And the war would be over and done in a day.
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. Everything
sleeps. All one hears is the drummers practising; they have
installed themselves anywhere 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 go back to it! But we must not pursue that line of
thought any further.
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 leave 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 a whole hour----
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 elsewhere. 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 are glad
enough to be able to trail arms but we sing spiritlessly. 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 peace-time, 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.
"True," growls Kat, "they always do. And it may be so; still it
oughtn't to become an abuse. But you try to explain that to a
blacksmith or a labourer or a workman, you try to make that clear to
a simple tommy--and that's what most of them are here. All he
understands is that he has been properly trained so that when he
comes up to the front he thinks he knows exactly what he should do in
every circumstance and what not. It's simply amazing, I tell you,
that the ordinary soldier survives so long up here in the front-line.
Simply amazing!"
No one protests. Everyone knows that drill ceases only in the
front-line and begins again a few miles behind, with all the
absurdities of saluting and parade. It is an iron law that the
soldier must be employed under every circumstance.
Here Tjaden comes up with a flushed face. He is so excited that he
stutters. Beaming with satisfaction he stammers out: "Himmelstoss is
on his way. He's coming to the front!"
* *
Tjaden has a special grudge against Himmelstoss, because of the way
he educated him in the barracks. Tjaden wets his bed, he does it at
night in his sleep. Himmelstoss maintained that it was sheer
laziness and invented a method worthy of himself for curing Tjaden.
He hunted up another piss-a-bed, named Kindervater, from a
neighbouring hut, and quartered him with Tjaden. In the huts there
were the usual bunks, one above the other in pairs, with mattresses
of wire-netting. Himmelstoss put these two so that one occupied the
upper and the other the lower bunk. The man underneath was of course
disgusted. The next night they were changed over and the lower one
put on top so that he could retaliate. That was Himmelstoss's system
of self-education.
The idea was low but not ill-conceived. Unfortunately it
accomplished nothing because the first assumption was wrong: it was
not laziness in either of them. Anyone who looked at their sallow
skin could see that. The matter ended in one of them always sleeping
on the floor, where he frequently caught cold.
Meanwhile Haie sits down beside us. He winks at me and rubs his paws
thoughtfully. We once spent the finest day of our army-life
together--the day before we left for the front. We had been allotted
to one of the recently formed regiments, but were first to be sent
back for equipment to the garrison, not to the reinforcement-depot,
of course, but to another barracks. We were due to leave next
morning early. In the evening we prepared ourselves to square
accounts with Himmelstoss.
We had sworn for weeks past to do this. Kropp had even gone so far
as to propose entering the postal service in peace-time in order to
be Himmelstoss's superior when he became a postman again. He
revelled in the thought of how he would grind him. It was this that
made it impossible for him to crush us altogether--we always reckoned
that later, at the end of the war, we would have our revenge on him.
In the meantime we decided to give him a good hiding. What could he
do to us anyhow if he didn't recognize us and we left early the next
morning?
We knew which pub he used to visit every evening. Returning to the
barracks he had to go along a dark, uninhabited road. There we
waited for him behind a pile of stones. I had a bed-cover with me.
We trembled with suspense, hoping he would be alone. At last we
heard his footstep, which we recognized easily, so often had we heard
it in the mornings as the door flew open and he bawled: "Get up!"
"Alone?" whispered Kropp.
"Alone."
I slipped round the pile of stones with Tjaden.
Himmelstoss seemed a little elevated; he was singing. His
belt-buckle gleamed. He came on unsuspectingly.
We seized the bed-cover, made a quick leap, threw it over his head
from behind and pulled it round him so that he stood there in a white
sack unable to raise his arms. The singing stopped. The next moment
Haie Westhus was there, and spreading out his arms he shoved us back
in order to be first in. He put himself in position with evident
satisfaction, raised his arm like a signal-mast and his hand like a
coal-shovel and fetched such a blow on the white sack as would have
felled an ox.
Himmelstoss was thrown down, he rolled five yards and started to
yell. But we were prepared for that and had brought a cushion. Haie
squatted down, laid the cushion on his knees, felt where
Himmelstoss's head was and pressed it down on the pillow.
Immediately his voice was muffled. Haie let him get a gasp of air
every so often, when he would give a mighty yell that was immediately
hushed.
Tjaden unbuttoned Himmelstoss's braces and pulled down his trousers,
holding the whip meantime in his teeth. Then he stood up and set to
work.
It was a wonderful picture: Himmelstoss on the ground; Haie bending
over him with a fiendish grin and his mouth open with blood-lust,
Himmelstoss's head on his knees; then the convulsed, striped drawers,
the knock knees, executing at every blow most original movements in
the lowered breeches, and towering over them like a woodcutter the
indefatigable Tjaden. In the end we had to drag him away to get our
turn.
Finally Haie stood Himmelstoss on his feet again and gave one last
personal remonstrance. As he stretched out his right arm preparatory
to giving him a box on the ear he looked as if he were going to reach
down a star.
Himmelstoss staggered. Haie stood him up again, made ready and
fetched him a second, well-aimed beauty with the left hand.
Himmelstoss yelled and fell down on all fours cursing. His striped
postman's backside gleamed in the moonlight.
We disappeared at full speed.
Haie looked round once again and said wrathfully, satisfied and
rather mysteriously:
"Revenge is black-pudding."
Himmelstoss ought to have been pleased; his saying that we should
each educate one another had borne fruit for himself. We had become
successful students of his method.
He never discovered whom he had to thank for the business. At any
rate he scored a bed-cover out of it; for when we returned a few
hours later to look for it, it was no longer to be found.
That evening's work made us more or less content to leave next
morning. And an old buffer was pleased to describe us as "young
heroes."