All quiet on the Western Front
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 butcher's to get a pound of bones. That is
a great luxury 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 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
console 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 she 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 one
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 my 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 under-pants 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, and we have so much to say,
that we could 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 bite 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.
CHAPTER VIII
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