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
which I do not read; 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.
Between the junipers and the birch trees on the moor we practice
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 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 passes 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 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!
* *
I am often on guard over the Russians. In the darkness one sees
their forms move like sick storks, like great birds. They come close
up to the wire fence and lean their faces against it; their fingers
hook round the mesh. Often many stand side by side, and breathe the
wind that comes down from the moors and the forest.
They rarely speak and then only a few words. They are more human and
more brotherly towards one another, it seems to me, than we are. But
perhaps that is merely because they feel themselves to be more
unfortunate than us. Anyway the war is over so far as they are
concerned. But to wait for dysentery is not much of a life either.
The Territorials who are in charge of them say that they were much
more lively at first. They used to have intrigues among themselves,
as always happens, and it would often come to blows and knives. But
now they are quite apathetic, and listless; most of them do not
masturbate any more, they are so feeble, though occasionally it is so
bad that they do it barracks fashion.
They stand at the wire fence; sometimes one goes away and then
another at once takes his place in the line. Most of them are
silent; occasionally one begs a cigarette butt.
I see their dark forms, their beards move in the wind. I know
nothing of them except that they are prisoners, and that is exactly
what troubles me. Their life is obscure and guiltless;--if I could
know more of them, what their names are, how they live, what they are
waiting for, what are their burdens, then my emotion would have an
object and might become sympathy. But as it is I perceive behind
them only the suffering of the creature, the awful melancholy of life
and the pitilessness of men.
A word of command has made these silent figures our enemies; a word
of command might transform them into our friends. At some table a
document is signed by some persons whom none of us knows, and then
for years together that very crime on which formerly the world's
condemnation and severest penalty fell, becomes our highest aim. But
who can draw such a distinction when he looks at these quiet men with
their childlike faces and apostles' beards. Any non-commissioned
officer is more of an enemy to a recruit, any schoolmaster to a pupil
than they are to us. And yet we would shoot at them again and they
at us if they were free.
I am frightened: I dare think this way no more. This way lies the
abyss. It is not now the time; but I will not lose these thoughts, I
will keep them, shut them away until the war is ended. My heart
beats fast: this is the aim, the great, the sole aim, that I have
thought of in the trenches; that I have looked for as the only
possibility of existence after this annihilation of all human
feeling; this is a task that will make life afterward worthy of these
hideous years.
I take out my cigarettes, break each one in half and give them to the
Russians. They bow to me and then they light the cigarettes. Now
red points glow in every face. They comfort me; it looks as though
there were little windows in dark village cottages saying that behind
them are rooms full of peace.
* *
The days go by. On a foggy morning another of the Russians is
buried; almost every day one of them dies. I am on guard during the
burial. The prisoners sing a chorale, they sing in parts, and it
sounds almost as if there were no voices, but an organ far away on
the moor.
The burial is quickly over.
In the evening they stand again at the wire fence and the wind comes
down to them from the beech woods. The stars are cold.
I now know a few of those who speak a little German. There is a
musician amongst them, he says he used to be a violinist in Berlin.
When he hears that I can play the piano he fetches his violin and
plays. The others sit down and lean their backs against the fence.
He stands up and plays, sometimes he has that absent expression which
violinists get when they close their eyes; or again he sways the
instrument to the rhythm and smiles across to me.
He plays mostly folk songs and the others hum with him. They are
like a country of dark hills that sing far down under the ground.
The sound of the violin stands like a slender girl above it and is
clear and alone. The voices cease and the violin continues alone.
In the night it is so thin it sounds frozen; one must stand close up;
it would be much better in a room;--out here it makes a man grow sad.
* *
Because I have already had a long leave I get none on Sundays. So
the last Sunday before I go back to the front my father and eldest
sister come over to see me. All day we sit in the Soldiers' Home.
Where else could we go, we don't want to stay in the camp. About
midday we go for a walk on the moors.
The hours are a torture; we do not know what to talk about, so we
speak of my mother's illness. It is now definitely cancer, she is
already in the hospital and will be operated on shortly. The doctors
hope she will recover, but we have never heard of cancer being cured.
"Where is she then?" I ask.
"In the Luisa Hospital," says my father.
"In which class?"
"Third. We must wait till we know what the operation costs. She
wanted to be in the third herself. She said that then she would have
some company. And besides it is cheaper."
"So she is lying there with all those people. If only she could
sleep properly."
My father nods. His face is broken and full of furrows. My mother
has always been sickly; and though she has only gone to the hospital
when she has been compelled to, it has cost a great deal of money,
and my father's life has been practically given up to it.
"If only I knew how much the operation costs," says he.
"Have you not asked?"
"Not directly, I cannot do that--the surgeon might take it amiss and
that would not do, he must operate on mother."
Yes, I think bitterly, that's how it is with us, and with all poor
people. They don't dare to ask the price, but worry themselves
dreadfully beforehand about it; but the others, for whom it is not
important, they settle the price first as a matter of course. And
the doctor does not take it amiss from them.
"And the dressings afterwards are so expensive," says my father.
"Doesn't the Invalid's Fund pay anything toward it, then?" I ask.
"Mother has been ill too long."
"Have you any money at all?"
He shakes his head: "No, but I can do some overtime."
I know. He will stand at his desk folding and pasting and cutting
until twelve o'clock at night. At eight o'clock in the evening he
will eat some of the miserable rubbish they get in exchange for their
food tickets, then he will take a powder for his headache and work on.
In order to cheer him up a bit I tell him a few stories, soldiers'
jokes, and the like, about generals and sergeant-majors.
Afterwards I accompany them both to the railway station. They give
me a pot of jam and a bag of potato-cakes that my mother has made for
me.
Then they go off and I return to the camp.
In the evening I spread the jam on the cakes and eat some. But I
have no taste for them. So I go out to give them to the Russians.
Then it occurs to me that my mother cooked them herself and that she
was probably in pain as she stood before the hot stove. I put the
bag back in my pack and take only two cakes to the Russians.