All quiet on the Western Front
on the stretcher, pale, thin, upright and triumphant, with his shaggy
head of curls sits Peter. Sister Libertine with beaming looks pushes
him over to his former bed. He is back from the Dying Room. We have
long supposed him dead.
He looks round: "What do you say now?"
And even Josef has to admit that it is the first time he has ever
known of such a thing.
* *
Gradually a few of us venture to stand up. And I am given crutches
to hobble around on. But I do not make much use of them; I cannot
bear Albert's gaze as I move about the room. His eyes always follow
me with such a strange look. So I sometimes escape to the
corridor;--there I can move about more freely.
On the next floor below are the abdominal and spine cases, head
wounds and double amputations. On the right side of the wing are the
jaw wounds, gas cases, nose, ear, and neck wounds. On the left the
blind and the lung wounds, pelvis wounds, wounds in the joints,
wounds in the testicles, wounds in the intestines. Here a man
realizes for the first time in how many places a man can get hit.
Two fellows die of tetanus. Their skin turns pale, their limbs
stiffen, at last only their eyes live--stubbornly. Many of the
wounded have their shattered limbs hanging free in the air from a
gallows; underneath the wound a basin is placed into which the pus
drips. Every two or three hours the vessel is emptied. Other men
lie in stretching bandages with heavy weights hanging from the end of
the bed. I see intestine wounds that are constantly full of excreta.
The surgeon's clerk shows me X-ray photographs of completely smashed
hip-bones, knees, and shoulders.
A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still
human faces in which life goes its daily round. And this is only one
hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in
Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in
Russia. How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done,
or thought, when such things are possible. It must all be lies and
of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent
this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in
their hundreds of thousands. A hospital alone shows what war is.
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but
despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss
of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in
silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one
another. I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons
and words to make it yet more refined and enduring. And all men of
my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world, see these
things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me. What
would our fathers do if we suddenly stood up and came before them and
proffered our account? What do they expect of us if a time ever
comes when the war is over? Through the years our business has been
killing;--it was our first calling in life. Our knowledge of life is
limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what shall come
out of us?
* *
The oldest man in our room is Lewandowski. He is forty, and has
already lain ten months in the hospital with a severe abdominal
wound. Just in the last few weeks he has improved sufficiently to be
able to hobble about doubled up.
For some days past he has been in great excitement. His wife has
written to him from the little home in Poland where she lives,
telling him that she has saved up enough money to pay for the fare,
and is coming to see him.
She is already on the way and may arrive any day. Lewandowski has
lost his appetite, he even gives away red cabbage and sausage after
he has had a couple of mouthfuls. He goes round the room perpetually
with the letter. Everyone has already read it a dozen times, the
post-marks have been examined heaven knows how often, the address is
hardly legible any longer for spots of grease and thumb-marks, and in
the end what is sure to happen, happens: Lewandowski develops a
fever, and has to go back to bed.
He has not seen his wife for two years. In the meantime she has
given birth to a child, whom she is bringing with her. But something
else occupies Lewandowski's thoughts. He had hoped to get permission
to go out when his old woman came; for obviously seeing is all very
well, but when a man gets his wife again after such a long time, if
at all possible, a man wants something else besides.
Lewandowski has discussed it all with us at great length; in the army
there are no secrets about such things. And what's more, nobody
finds anything objectionable in it. Those of us who are already able
to go out have told him of a couple of very good spots in the town,
parks and squares, where he would not be disturbed; one of us even
knows of a little room.
But what is the use, there Lewandowski lies in bed with his troubles.
Life holds no more joy for him if he has to forego this affair. We
console him and promise to get over the difficulty somehow or other.
One afternoon his wife appears, a tousled little thing with anxious,
quick eyes like a bird, in a sort of black, crinkly mantilla with
ribbons; heaven knows where she inherited the thing.
She murmurs something softly and stands shyly in the doorway. It
terrifies her that there are six of us men present.
"Well, Marja," says Lewandowski, and gulps dangerously with his
Adam's apple, "you can come in all right, they won't hurt you."
She goes the round and proffers each of us her hand. Then she
produces the child, which in the interval has done something in its
napkin. From a large handbag embroidered with pearls she takes out a
clean one and makes the child fresh and presentable. This dispels
her first embarrassment, and the two begin to talk.
Lewandowski is very fidgety, every now and then he squints across at
us most unhappily with his round goggle eyes.
The time is favourable, the doctor's visit is over, at the most there
couldn't be more than one sister left in the ward. So one of us goes
out to prospect. He comes back and nods.
"Not a soul to be seen. Now's your chance, Johann, set to."
The two speak together in an undertone. The woman turns a little red
and looks embarrassed. We grin good-naturedly and make pooh-poohing
gestures, what does it matter! The devil take all the conventions,
they were made for other times; here lies the carpenter Johann
Lewandowski, a soldier shot to a cripple, and there is his wife; who
knows when he will see her again? He wants to have her, and he
should have her, good.
Two men stand at the door to forestall the sisters and keep them
occupied if they chance to come along. They agree to stand guard for
a quarter of an hour or thereabouts.
Lewandowski can only lie on his side, so one of us props a couple of
pillows against his back. Albert gets the child to hold, we all turn
round a bit, the black mantilla disappears under the bed-clothes, we
make a great clatter and play skat noisily.
All goes well. I hold a club solo with four jacks which nearly goes
the round. In the process we almost forget Lewandowski. After a
while the child begins to squall, although Albert, in desperation,
rocks it to and fro. Then there is a bit of creaking and rustling,
and as we look up casually we see that the child has the bottle in
its mouth, and is back again with its mother. The business is over.
We now feel ourselves like one big family, the woman is rather
quieter, and Lewandowski lies there sweating and beaming.
He unpacks the embroidered handbag, and some good sausages come to
light; Lewandowski takes up the knife with a flourish and saws the meat
into slices.
With a handsome gesture he waves toward us--and the little woman goes
from one to the other and smiles at us and hands round the sausage;
she now looks quite handsome. We call her Mother, she is pleased and
shakes up our pillows for us.
* *
After a few weeks I have to go each morning to the massage
department. There my leg is harnessed up and made to move. The arm
has healed long since.
New convoys arrive from the line. The bandages are no longer made of
cloth, but of white crêpe paper. Rag bandages have become scarce at
the front.
Albert's stump heals well. The wound is almost closed. In a few
weeks he should go off to an institute for artificial limbs. He
continues not to talk much, and is much more solemn than formerly.
He often breaks off in his speech and stares in front of him. If he
were not here with us he would have shot himself long ago. But now
he is over the worst of it, and he often looks on while we play skat.
I get convalescent leave.
My mother does not want to let me go away. She is so feeble. It is
all much worse than it was last time.
Then I am sent on from the base and return once more to the line.
Parting from my friend Albert Kropp was very hard. But a man gets
used to that sort of thing in the army.
CHAPTER XI
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