All quiet on the Western Front
But every gasp lays my heart bare. This dying man has time with him,
he has an invisible dagger with which he stabs me: Time and my
thoughts.
I would give much if he would but stay alive. It is hard to lie here
and to have to see and hear him.
In the afternoon, about three, he is dead.
I breathe freely again. But only for a short time. Soon the silence
is more unbearable than the groans. I wish the gurgling were there
again, gasping, hoarse, now whistling softly and again hoarse and
loud.
It is mad, what I do. But I must do something. I prop the dead man
up again so that he lies comfortably although he feels nothing any
more. I close his eyes. They are brown, his hair is black and a bit
curly at the sides.
The mouth is full and soft beneath his moustache; the nose is
slightly arched, the skin brownish; it is now not so pale as it was
before, when he was still alive. For a moment the face seems almost
healthy;--then it collapses suddenly into the strange face of the
dead that I have so often seen, strange faces, all alike.
No doubt his wife still thinks of him; she does not know what has
happened. He looks as if he would often have written to her;--she
will still be getting mail from him--To-morrow, in a week's
time--perhaps even a stray letter a month hence. She will read it,
and in it he will be speaking to her.
My state is getting worse, I can no longer control my thoughts. What
would his wife look like? Like the little brunette on the other side
of the canal? Does she belong to me now? Perhaps by this act she
becomes mine. I wish Kantorek were sitting here beside me. If my
mother could see me----. The dead man might have had thirty more
years of life if only I had impressed the way back to our trench more
sharply on my memory. If only he had run two yards farther to the
left, he might now be sitting in the trench over there and writing a
fresh letter to his wife.
But I will get no further that way; for that is the fate of all of
us: if Kemmerich's leg had been six inches to the right; if Haie
Westhus had bent his back three inches further forward----
* *
The silence spreads. I talk and must talk. So I speak to him and
say to him: "Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in
here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you
were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind
and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I
stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me.
I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now
I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me,
comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that
you are just poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as
anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the
same dying and the same agony--. Forgive me, comrade; how could you
be my enemy? If we threw away these rifles and this uniform you
could be my brother just like Kat and Albert. Take twenty years of
my life, comrade, and stand up--take more, for I do not know what I
can even attempt to do with it now."
It is quiet, the front is still except for the crackle of rifle fire.
The bullets rain over, they are not fired haphazard, but shrewdly
aimed from all sides. I cannot get out.
"I will write to your wife," I say hastily to the dead man, "I will
write to her, she must hear it from me, I will tell her everything I
have told you, she shall not suffer, I will help her, and your
parents too, and your child----"
His tunic is half open. The pocket-book is easy to find. But I
hesitate to open it. In it is the book with his name. So long as I
do not know his name perhaps I may still forget him, time will
obliterate it, this picture. But his name, it is a nail that will be
hammered into me and never come out again. It has the power to
recall this for ever, it will always come back and stand before me.
Irresolutely I take the wallet in my hand. It slips out of my hand
and falls open. Some pictures and letters drop out. I gather them
up and want to put them back again, but the strain I am under, the
uncertainty, the hunger, the danger, these hours with the dead man
have confused me, I want to hasten the relief, to intensify and to
end the torture, as one strikes an unendurably painful hand against
the trunk of a tree, regardless of everything.
There are portraits of a woman and a little girl, small amateur
photographs taken against an ivy-clad wall. Along with them are
letters. I take them out and try to read them. Most of it I do not
understand, it is so hard to decipher and I know scarcely any French.
But each word I translate pierces me like a shot in the chest;--like
a stab in the chest.
My brain is taxed beyond endurance. But I realize this much, that I
will never dare to write to these people as I intended. Impossible.
I look at the portraits once more; they are clearly not rich people.
I might send them money anonymously if I earn anything later on. I
seize upon that, it is at least something to hold on to. This dead
man is bound up with my life, therefore I must do everything, promise
everything, in order to save myself; I swear blindly that I mean to
live only for his sake and his family, with wet lips I try to placate
him--and deep down in me lies the hope that I may buy myself off in
this way and perhaps even yet get out of this; it is a little
stratagem: if only I am allowed to escape, then I will see to it. So
I open the book and read slowly:--Gerard Duval, compositor.
With the dead man's pencil I write the address on an envelope, then
swiftly thrust everything back into his tunic.
I have killed the printer, Gerard Duval. I must be a printer, I
think confusedly, be a printer, printer----
* *
By afternoon I am calmer. My fear was groundless. The name troubles
me no more. The madness passes. "Comrade," I say to the dead man,
but I say it calmly, "To-day you, to-morrow me. But if I come out of
it, comrade, I will fight against this, that has struck us both down;
from you, taken life--and from me--? Life also. I promise you,
comrade. It shall never happen again."
The sun strikes low. I am stupefied with exhaustion and hunger.
Yesterday is like a fog to me, there is no hope of getting out of
this yet. I fall into a doze and do not at first realize that
evening is approaching. The twilight comes. It seems to me to come
quickly now. One hour more. If it were summer, it would be three
hours more. One hour more.
Now suddenly I begin to tremble; something might happen in the
interval. I think no more of the dead man, he is of no consequence
to me now. With one bound the lust to live flares up again and
everything that has filled my thoughts goes down before it. Now,
merely to avert any ill-luck, I babble mechanically: "I will fulfil
everything, fulfil everything I have promised you----" but already I
know that I shall not do so.
Suddenly it occurs to me that my own comrades may fire on me as I
creep up; they do not know I am coming. I will call out as soon as I
can so that they will recognize me. I will stay lying in front of
the trench until they answer me.
The first star. The front remains quiet. I breathe deeply and talk
to myself in my excitement: "No foolishness now, Paul--Quiet, Paul,
quiet--then you will be saved, Paul." When I use my Christian name
it works as though someone else spoke to me, it has more power.
The darkness grows. My excitement subsides, I wait cautiously until
the first rocket goes up. Then I crawl out of the shell-hole. I
have forgotten the dead man. Before me lies the on-coming night and
the pale gleaming field. I fix my eye on a shell-hole; the moment
the light dies I scurry over into it, grope farther, spring into the
next, duck down, scramble onward.
I come nearer. There, by the light of a rocket I see something move
in the wire, then it stiffens and lies still. Next time I see it
again, yes, they are men from our trench. But I am suspicious until
I recognize our helmets. Then I call. And immediately an answer
rings out, my name: "Paul--Paul----"
I call again in answer. It is Kat and Albert who have come out with
a stretcher to look for me.
"Are you wounded?"
"No, no----"
We drop into the trench. I ask for something to eat and wolf it
down. Müller gives me a cigarette. In a few words I tell what
happened. There is nothing new about it; it happens quite often.
The night attack is the only unusual feature of the business. In
Russia Kat once lay for two days behind the enemy lines before he
could make his way back.
I do not mention the dead printer.
But by next morning I can keep it to myself no longer. I must tell
Kat and Albert. They both try to calm me. "You can't do anything
about it. What else could you have done? That is what you are here
for."
I listen to them and feel comforted, reassured by their presence. It
was mere drivelling nonsense that I talked out there in the
shell-hole.
"Look there for instance," points Kat.
On the fire-step stand some snipers. They rest their rifles with
telescopic sights on the parapet and watch the enemy front. Once and
again a shot cracks out.
Then we hear the cry: "That's found a billet!" "Did you see how he
leapt in the air?" Sergeant Oellrich turns round proudly and scores
his point. He heads the shooting list for to-day with three
unquestionable hits.
"What do you say to that?" asks Kat.
I nod.
"If he keeps that up he will get a little coloured bird for his
buttonhole by this evening," says Albert.
"Or rather he will soon be made acting-sergeant-major," says Kat.
We look at one another. "I would not do it," I say.
"All the same," says Kat, "it's very good for you to see it just now."
Sergeant Oellrich returns to the fire-step. The muzzle of his rifle
searches to and fro.
"You don't need to lose any more sleep over your affair," nods Albert.
And now I hardly understand it myself any more.
"It was only because I had to lie there with him so long," I say.
"After all, war is war."
Oellrich's rifle cracks out sharp and dry.
CHAPTER X
We have dropped in for a good job. Eight of us have to guard a
village that has been abandoned because it is being shelled too
heavily.
In particular we have to watch the supply dump as that is not yet
empty. We are supposed to provision ourselves from the same store.
We are just the right people for that;--Kat, Albert, Müller, Tjaden,
Detering, our whole gang is there. Haie is dead, though. But we are
mighty lucky all the same, all the other squads have had more
casualties than we have.
We select, as a dug-out, a reinforced concrete cellar into which
steps lead down from above. The entrance is protected by a separate
concrete wall.
Now we develop an immense industry. This is an opportunity not only
to stretch one's legs, but to stretch one's soul also. We make the
best use of such opportunities. The war is too desperate to allow us
to be sentimental for long. That is only possible so long as things
are not going too badly. After all, we cannot afford to be anything
but matter-of-fact. So matter-of-fact, indeed, that I often shudder
when a thought from the days before the war comes momentarily into my
head. But it does not stay long.
We have to take things as lightly as we can, so we make the most of
every opportunity, and nonsense stands stark and immediate beside
horror. It cannot be otherwise, that is how we hearten ourselves.
So we zealously set to work to create an idyll--an idyll of eating
and sleeping, of course.
The floor is first covered with mattresses which we haul in from the