We count the weeks no more. It was winter when I came up, and when
the shells exploded the frozen clods of earth were just as dangerous
as the fragments. Now the trees are green again. Our life
alternates between billets and the front. We have almost grown
accustomed to it; war is a cause of death like cancer and
tuberculosis, like influenza and dysentery. The deaths are merely
more frequent, more varied and terrible.
Our thoughts are clay, they are moulded with the changes of the
days;--when we are resting they are good; under fire, they are dead.
Fields of craters within and without.
Everyone is so, not only ourselves here--the things that existed
before are no longer valid, and one practically knows them no more.
Distinctions, breeding, education are changed, are almost blotted out
and hardly recognizable any longer. Sometimes they give an advantage
for profiting by a situation;--but they also bring consequences along
with them, in that they arouse prejudices which have to be overcome.
It is as though formerly we were coins of different provinces; and
now we are melted down, and all bear the same stamp. To re-discover
the old distinctions, the metal itself must be tested. First we are
soldiers and afterwards, in a strange and shamefaced fashion,
individual men as well.
It is a great brotherhood, which to a condition of life arising out
of the midst of danger, out of the tension and forlornness of death,
adds something of the good-fellowship of the folk-song, of the
feeling of solidarity of convicts, and of the desperate loyalty to
one another of men condemned to death--seeking in a wholly unpathetic
way a fleeting enjoyment of the hours as they come. If one wants to
appraise it, it is at once heroic and banal--but who wants to do that?
It is this, for example, that makes Tjaden spoon down his ham-and-pea
soup in such tearing haste when an enemy attack is reported, simply
because he cannot be sure that in an hour's time he will still be
alive. We have discussed at length, whether it is right or not to do
so. Kat condemns it, because, he says, a man has to reckon with the
possibility of an abdominal wound, and that is more dangerous on a
full stomach than on an empty one.
Such things are real problems, they are serious matters to us, they
cannot be otherwise. Here, on the borders of death, life follows an
amazingly simple course, it is limited to what is most necessary, all
else lies buried in gloomy sleep;--in that lies our primitiveness and
our survival. Were we more subtly differentiated we must long since
have gone mad, have deserted, or have fallen. As in a polar
expedition, every expression of life must serve only the preservation
of existence, and is absolutely focussed on that. All else is
banished because it would consume energies unnecessarily. That is
the only way to save ourselves. In the quiet hours when the puzzling
reflection of former days, like a blurred mirror, projects beyond me
the figure of my present existence, I often sit over against myself,
as before a stranger, and wonder how the unnameable active principle
that calls itself Life has adapted itself even to this form. All
other expressions lie in a winter sleep, life is simply one continual
watch against the menace of death;--it has transformed us into
unthinking animals in order to give us the weapon of instinct--it has
reinforced us with dullness, so that we do not go to pieces before
the horror, which would overwhelm us if we had clear, conscious
thought--it has awakened in us the sense of comradeship, so that we
escape the abyss of solitude--it has lent us the indifference of wild
creatures, so that in spite of all we perceive the positive in every
moment, and store it up as a reserve against the onslaught of
nothingness. Thus we live a closed, hard existence of the utmost
superficiality, and rarely does an incident strike out a spark. But
then unexpectedly a flame of grievous and terrible yearning flares up.
Those are the dangerous moments. They show us that the adjustment is
only artificial, that it is not simple rest, but sharpest struggle
for rest. In the outward form of our life we are hardly
distinguishable from Bushmen; but whereas the latter can be so
always, because they are so truly, and at best may develop further by
exertion of their spiritual forces, with us it is the reverse;--our
inner forces are not exerted toward regeneration, but toward
degeneration. The Bushmen are primitive and naturally so, but we are
primitive in an artificial sense, and by virtue of the utmost effort.
And at night, waking out of a dream, overwhelmed and bewitched by the
crowding faces, a man perceives with alarm how slight is the support,
how thin the boundary that divides him from the darkness. We are
little flames poorly sheltered by frail walls against the storm of
dissolution and madness, in which we flicker and sometimes almost go
out. Then the muffled roar of the battle becomes a ring that
encircles us, we creep in upon ourselves, and with big eyes stare
into the night. Our only comfort is the steady breathing of our
comrades asleep, and thus we wait for the morning.
* *
Every day and every hour every shell and every death cuts into this
thin support, and the years waste it rapidly. I see how it is
already gradually breaking down around me.
There is the mad story of Detering.
He was one of those who kept himself to himself. His misfortune was
that he saw a cherry tree in a garden. We were just coming back from
the front line, and at a turning of the road near our new billets,
marvellous in the morning twilight, stood this cherry tree before us.
It had no leaves, but was one white mass of blossom.
In the evening Detering was not to be seen. Then at last he came
back and had a couple of branches of cherry blossom in his hand. We
made fun of him, and asked whether he was going to a wedding. He
made no answer, but laid them on his bed. During the night I heard
him making a noise, he seemed to be packing. I sensed something
amiss and went over to him. He made out it was nothing, and I said
to him: "Don't do anything silly, Detering."
"Ach, why--it's merely that I can't sleep----"
"What did you pick the cherry branches for?"
"I might have been going to get some more cherry branches," he
replied, evasively--and after a while: "I have a big orchard with
cherry trees at home. When they are in blossom, from the hay loft
they look like one single sheet, so white. It is just the time."
"Perhaps you will get leave soon. You may even be sent back as a
farmer."
He nodded, but he was far away. When these peasants are excited they
have a curious expression, a mixture of cow and yearning god, half
stupid and half rapt. In order to turn him away from his thoughts I
asked him for a piece of bread. He gave it to me without a murmur.
That was suspicious, for he is usually tight-fisted. So I stayed
awake. Nothing happened; in the morning he was as usual.
Apparently he had noticed that I had been watching him;--but the
second morning after he was gone. I noticed it, but said nothing, in
order to give him time; he might perhaps get through. Various
fellows have already got into Holland.
But at roll call he was missed. A week after we heard that he had
been caught by the field gendarmes, those despicable military police.
He had headed toward Germany, that was hopeless, of course--and, of
course, he did everything else just as idiotically. Anyone might
have known that his flight was only home-sickness and a momentary
aberration. But what does a court martial hundreds of miles behind
the front-line know about it? We have heard nothing more of Detering.
* *
But sometimes it broke out in other ways, this danger, these pent-up
things, as from an overheated boiler. It will be enough to tell how
Berger met his end.
Our trenches have now for some time been shot to pieces, and we have
an elastic line, so that there is practically no longer any proper
trench warfare. When attack and counter-attack have waged backwards
and forwards there remains a broken line and a bitter struggle from
crater to crater. The front line has been penetrated, and everywhere
small groups have established themselves, the fight is carried on
from clusters of shell-holes.
We are in a crater, the English are coming down obliquely, they are
turning our flank and working in behind us. We are surrounded. It
is not easy to surrender, fog and smoke hang over us, no one would
recognize that we wanted to give ourselves up, and perhaps we don't
want to, a man doesn't even know himself at such moments. We hear
the explosions of the hand-grenades coming toward us. Our
machine-gun sweeps over the semicircle in front of us. The
cooling-water evaporates, we hastily pass round the case, every man
pisses in it, and thus we again have water, and are able to continue
firing. But behind us the attack crashes ever nearer.
A few minutes and we are lost.
Then, at closest range, a second machine-gun bursts out. It is set
up in a crater alongside us; Berger has fetched it, and now the
counter-attack comes over from behind; we are set free and make
contact with the rear.
Afterwards, as we lie in comparatively good cover, one of the
food-carriers reports that a couple of hundred yards distant there
lies a wounded messenger-dog.
"Where?" asks Berger.
The other describes the place to him. Berger goes off either to
fetch the beast in or to shoot it. Six months ago he would not have
cared, he would have been reasonable. We try to prevent him. Then,
as he goes off grimly, all we can say is: "You're mad," and let him
go. For these cases of front-line madness become dangerous if one is
not able to fling the man to the ground and hold him fast. And
Berger is six feet and the most powerful man in the company.
He is absolutely mad for he has to pass through the barrage; but this
lightning that lowers somewhere above us all has struck him and made
him demented. It affects others so that they begin to rave, to run
away--there was one man who even tried to dig himself into the ground
with hands, feet, and teeth.
It is true, such things are often simulated, but the pretence itself
is a symptom. Berger, who means to finish off the dog, is carried
off with a wound in the pelvis, and one of the fellows who carry him
gets a bullet in the cheek while doing it.
* *
Müller is dead. Someone shot him point blank with a Verey light in
the stomach. He lived for half an hour, quite conscious, and in
terrible pain.
Before he died he handed over his pocketbook to me, and bequeathed me
his boots--the same that he once inherited from Kemmerich. I wear
them, for they fit me quite well. After me Tjaden will get them, I
have promised them to him.
We have been able to bury Müller, but he is not likely to remain long
undisturbed. Our lines are falling back. There are too many fresh
English and American regiments over there. There's too much corned
beef and white wheaten bread. Too many new guns. Too many
aeroplanes.
But we are emaciated and starved. Our food is so bad and mixed up
with so much substitute stuff that it makes us ill. The factory
owners in Germany have grown wealthy;--dysentery dissolves our
bowels. The latrine poles are always densely crowded; the people at
home ought to be shown these grey, yellow, miserable, wasted faces
here, these bent figures from whose bodies the colic wrings out the
blood, and who with lips trembling and distorted with pain, grin at
one another and say: "It is not much sense pulling up one's trousers
again----"
Our artillery is fired out, it has too few shells and the barrels are
so worn that they shoot uncertainly, and scatter so widely as even to
fall on ourselves. We have too few horses. Our fresh troops are
anaemic boys in need of rest, who cannot carry a pack, but merely
know how to die. By thousands. They understand nothing about
warfare, they simply go on and let themselves be shot down. A single
flyer routed two companies of them for a joke, just as they came
fresh from the train--before they had ever heard of such a thing as
cover.
"Germany ought to be empty soon," says Kat.
We have given up hope that some day an end may come. We never think
so far. A man can stop a bullet and be killed; he can get wounded,
and then the hospital is his next stop. There, if they do not
amputate him, he sooner or later falls into the hands of one of those
staff surgeons who, with the War Service Cross in his button-hole,
says to him: "What, one leg a bit short? If you have any pluck you
don't need to run at the front. The man is A1. Dismiss!"
Kat tells a story that has travelled the whole length of the front
from the Vosges to Flanders;--of the staff surgeon who reads the
names on the list, and when a man comes before him, without looking
up, says: "A1. We need soldiers up there." A fellow with a wooden
leg comes up before him, the staff surgeon again says A1---- "And
then," Kat raises his voice, "the fellow says to him: 'I already have
a wooden leg, but when I go back again and they shoot off my head,
then I will get a wooden head made and become a staff surgeon." This
answer tickles us all immensely.
There may be good doctors, and there are, lots of them; all the same,
every soldier some time during his hundreds of inspections falls into
the clutches of one of these countless hero-grabbers who pride
themselves on changing as many C3's and B3's as possible into A1's.
There are many such stories, they are mostly far more bitter. All
the same, they have nothing to do with mutiny or lead-swinging. They
are merely honest and call a thing by its name; for there is a very
great deal of fraud, injustice, and baseness in the army.--Is it
nothing that regiment after regiment returns again and again to the
ever more hopeless struggle, that attack follows attack along the
weakening, retreating, crumbling line?
From a mockery the tanks have become a terrible weapon. Armoured
they come rolling on in long lines, and more than anything else
embody for us the horror of war.
We do not see the guns that bombard us; the attacking lines of the
enemy infantry are men like ourselves; but these tanks are machines,
their caterpillars run on as endless as the war, they are
annihilation, they roll without feeling into the craters, and climb
up again without stopping, a fleet of roaring, smoke-belching
armour-clads, invulnerable steel beasts squashing the dead and the
wounded--we shrivel up in our thin skin before them, against their
colossal weight our arms are sticks of straw, and our hand-grenades
matches.
Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks--shattering, starvation,
death.
Dysentery, influenza, typhus--murder, burning, death.
Trenches, hospitals, the common grave--there are no other
possibilities.
* *
In one attack our Company Commander, Bertinck, falls. He was one of
those superb front-line officers who are foremost in every hot place.
He was with us for two years without being wounded, so that something
had to happen in the end.
We occupy a crater and get surrounded. The stink of petroleum or oil
blows across with the fumes of powder. Two fellows with a
flame-thrower are seen, one carries the tin on his back, the other
has the hose in his hands from which the fire spouts. If they get so
near that they can reach us we are done for, we cannot retreat yet.
We open fire on them. But they work nearer and things begin to look
bad. Bertinck is lying in the hole with us. When he sees that we
cannot escape because under the sharp fire we must make the most of
this cover, he takes a rifle, crawls out of the hole, and lying down
propped on his elbows, he takes aim. He fires--the same moment a
bullet smacks into him, they have got him. Still he lies and aims
again;--once he shifts and again takes his aim; at last the rifle
cracks. Bertinck lets the gun drop and says: "Good," and slips back
into the hole. The hindermost of the two flame-throwers is hit, he
falls, the hose slips away from the other fellow, the fire squirts
about on all sides and the man burns.
Bertinck has a chest wound. After a while a fragment smashes away
his chin, and the same fragment has sufficient force to tear open
Leer's hip. Leer groans as he supports himself on his arm, he bleeds
quickly, no one can help him. Like an emptying tube, after a couple
of minutes he collapses.
What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at
school.
* *
The months pass by. The summer of 1918 is the most bloody and the
most terrible. The days stand like angels in gold and blue,
incomprehensible, above the ring of annihilation. Every man here
knows that we are losing the war. Not much is said about it, we are
falling back, we will not be able to attack again after this big
offensive, we have no more men and no more ammunition.
Still the campaign goes on--the dying goes on----
Summer of 1918--Never has life in its niggardliness seemed to us so
desirable as now;--the red poppies in the meadows round our billets,
the smooth beetles on the blades of grass, the warm evenings in the
cool, dim rooms, the black, mysterious trees of the twilight, the
stars and the flowing waters, dreams and long sleep----. O Life,
life, life!
Summer of 1918--Never was so much silently suffered as in the moment
when we depart once again for the front-line. Wild, tormenting
rumours of an armistice and peace are in the air, they lay hold on
our hearts and make the return to the front harder than ever.
Summer of 1918--Never was life in the line more bitter and more full
of horror than in the hours of the bombardment, when the blanched
faces lie in the dirt, and the hands clutch at the one thought: No!
No! Not now! Not now at the last moment!
Summer of 1918--Breath of hope that sweeps over the scorched fields,
raging fever of impatience, of disappointment, of the most agonizing
terror of death, insensate question: Why? Why do they not make an
end? And why do these rumours of an end fly about?
* *
There are so many airmen here, and they are so sure of themselves
that they give chase to single individuals, just as though they were
hares. For every one German plane there come at least five English
and American. For one hungry, wretched German soldier come five of
the enemy, fresh and fit. For one German army loaf there are fifty
tins of canned beef over there. We are not beaten, for as soldiers
we are better and more experienced; we are simply crushed and driven
back by overwhelmingly superior forces.
Behind us lie rainy weeks--grey sky, grey fluid earth, grey dying.
If we go out, the rain at once soaks through our overcoat and
clothing;--and we remain wet all the time we are in the line. We
never get dry. Those who still wear high boots tie sand bags round
the top so that the mud does not pour in so fast. The rifles are
caked, the uniforms caked, everything is fluid and dissolved, the
earth one dripping, soaked, oily mass in which lie the yellow pools
with red spiral streams of blood and into which the dead, wounded,
and survivors slowly sink down.
The storm lashes us, out of the confusion of grey and yellow the hail
of splinters whips forth the childlike cries of the wounded, and in
the night shattered life groans wearily to the silence.
Our hands are earth, our bodies clay and our eyes pools of rain. We
do not know whether we still live.
Then the heat sinks heavily into our shell holes like a jelly fish,
moist and oppressive, and on one of these late summer days, while
bringing food, Kat falls. We two are alone. I bind up his wound;
his shin seems to be smashed. It has got the bone, and Kat groans
desperately: "At last--just at the last----"
I comfort him. "Who knows how long the mess will go on yet! Now you
are saved----"
The wound begins to bleed fast. Kat cannot be left by himself while
I try to find a stretcher. Anyway, I don't know of a
stretcher-bearer's post in the neighbourhood.
Kat is not very heavy; so I take him up on my back and start off to
the dressing station with him.
Twice we rest. He suffers acutely on the way. We do not speak much.
I have opened the collar of my tunic and breathe heavily, I sweat and
my face is swollen with the strain of carrying. All the same I urge
him to let us go on, for the place is dangerous.
"Shall we go on again, Kat?"
"Must, Paul."
"Then come."
I raise him up, he stands on the uninjured leg and supports himself
against a tree. I take up the wounded leg carefully, then he gives a
jump and I take the knee of the sound leg also under my arm.
The going is more difficult. Often a shell whistles across. I go as
quickly as I can, for the blood from Kat's wound drips to the ground.
We cannot shelter ourselves properly from the explosions; before we
can take cover the danger is all over.
We lie down in a small shell hole to rest. I give Kat some tea from
my water bottle. We smoke a cigarette. "Well, Kat," I say gloomily,
"We are going to be separated at last."
He is silent and looks at me.
"Do you remember, Kat, how we commandeered the goose? And how you
brought me out of the barrage when I was still a young recruit and
was wounded for the first time? I cried then. Kat, that is almost
three years ago."
He nods.
The anguish of solitude rises up in me. When Kat is taken away I
will not have one friend left.
"Kat, in any case we must see one another again, if it is peace time
before you come back."
"Do you think that I will be marked A1 again with this leg?" he asks
bitterly.
"With rest it will get better. The joint is all right. It may limp
a bit."
"Give me another cigarette," he says.
"Perhaps we could do something together later on, Kat." I am very
miserable, it is impossible that Kat--Kat my friend, Kat with the
drooping shoulders and the poor, thin moustache, Kat, whom I know as
I know no other man, Kat with whom I have shared these years--it is
impossible that perhaps I shall not see Kat again.
"In any case give me your address at home, Kat. And here is mine, I
will write it down for you."
I write his address in my pocket book. How forlorn I am already,
though he still sits here beside me. Couldn't I shoot myself quickly
in the foot so as to be able to go with him.
Suddenly Kat gurgles and turns green and yellow. "Let us go on," he
stammers.
I jump up, eager to help him, I take him up and start off at a run, a
slow steady pace, so as not to jolt his leg too much.
My throat is parched; everything dances red and black before my eyes,
I stagger on doggedly and pitilessly and at last reach the dressing
station.
There I drop down on my knees, but have still enough strength to fall
on to the side where Kat's sound leg is. After a few minutes I
straighten myself up again. My legs and my hands tremble. I have
trouble in finding my water bottle, to take a pull. My lips tremble
as I try to drink. But I smile--Kat is saved.
After a while I begin to sort out the confusion of voices that falls
on my ears.
"You might have spared yourself that," says an orderly.
I look at him without comprehending.
He points to Kat. "He is stone dead."
I do not understand him. "He has been hit in the shin," I say.
The orderly stands still. "That as well."
I turn round. My eyes are still dulled, the sweat breaks out on me
again, it runs over my eyelids. I wipe it away and peer at Kat. He
lies still. "Fainted," I say quickly.
The orderly whistles softly. "I know better than that. He is dead.
I'll lay any money on that."
I shake my head: "Not possible. Only ten minutes ago I was talking
to him. He has fainted."
Kat's hands are warm, I pass my arm under his shoulders in order to
rub his temples with some tea. I feel my fingers become moist. As I
draw them away from behind his head, they are bloody. "You see----"
The orderly whistles once more through his teeth.
On the way without my having noticed it, Kat has caught a splinter in
the head. There is just one little hole, it must have been a very
tiny, stray splinter. But it has sufficed. Kat is dead.
Slowly I get up.
"Would you like to take his pay book and his things?" the
lance-corporal asks me.
I nod, and he gives them to me.
The orderly is mystified. "You are not related, are you?"
No, we are not related. No, we are not related.
Do I walk? Have I feet still? I raise my eyes, I let them move
round, and turn myself with them, one circle, one circle, and I stand
in the midst. All is as usual. Only the Militiaman Stanislaus
Katczinsky has died.
Then I know nothing more.