All quiet on the Western Front
says.
Kropp stalks up, with his breeches rolled up and his feet bare. He
lays out his washed socks to dry on the grass. Kat turns his eyes to
heaven, lets off a mighty fart, and says apologetically: "Every
little bean must be heard as well as seen."
The two begin to argue. At the same time they lay a bottle of beer
on the result of an air-fight that's going on above us. Katczinsky
won't budge from the opinion, which as an old Front-hog, he rhymes:
Give 'em all the same grub and all the same pay
And the war would be over and done in a day.
Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration
of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and
bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and
generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed
with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his
country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this
arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.
The subject is dropped. Then the conversation turns to drill.
A picture comes before me. Burning midday in the barrack-yard. The
heat hangs over the square. The barracks are deserted. Everything
sleeps. All one hears is the drummers practising; they have
installed themselves anywhere and practise brokenly, dully,
monotonously. What a concord! Midday heat, barrack-square, and
drummers beating!
The windows of the barracks are empty and dark. From some of them
trousers are hanging to dry. The rooms are cool and one looks toward
them longingly.
O dark, musty platoon huts, with the iron bedsteads, the chequered
bedding, the lockers and the stools! Even you can become the object
of desire; out here you have a faint resemblance to home; your rooms,
full of the smell of stale food, sleep, smoke, and clothes!
Katczinsky paints it all in lively colours. What would we not give
to be able to go back to it! But we must not pursue that line of
thought any further.
Those early morning hours of instruction--"What are the parts of the
98 rifle?"--the midday hours of physical training--"Pianist, forward!
By the right, quick march. Report to the cook-house for
potato-peeling."
We indulge in reminiscences. Kropp laughs suddenly and says: "Change
at Löhne!"
That was our corporal's favourite game. Löhne is a railway junction.
In order that our fellows going on leave shouldn't get lost there,
Himmelstoss used to practise the change in the barrack-room. We had
to learn that at Löhne, to reach the branch-line, we must pass
through a subway. The beds represented the subway and each man stood
at attention on the left side of his bed. Then came the command:
"Change at Löhne!" and like lightning everyone scrambled under the
bed to the opposite side. We practised this for a whole hour----
Meanwhile the German aeroplane has been shot down. Like a comet it
bursts into a streamer of smoke and falls headlong. Kropp has lost
the bottle of beer. Disgruntled he counts out the money from his
wallet.
"Surely Himmelstoss was a very different fellow as a postman," say I,
after Albert's disappointment has subsided. "Then how does it come
that he's such a bully as a drill-sergeant?"
The question revives Kropp, more particularly as he hears there's no
more beer in the canteen. "It's not only Himmelstoss, there are lots
of them. As sure as they get a stripe or a star they become
different men, just as though they'd swallowed concrete."
"That's the uniform," I suggest.
"Roughly speaking it is," says Kat, and prepares for a long speech;
"but the root of the matter lies elsewhere. For instance, if you
train a dog to eat potatoes and then afterwards put a piece of meat
in front of him, he'll snap at it, it's his nature. And if you give
a man a little bit of authority he behaves just the same way, he
snaps at it too. The things are precisely the same. In himself man
is essentially a beast, only he butters it over like a slice of bread
with a little decorum. The army is based on that; one man must
always have power over the other. The mischief is merely that each
one has much too much power. A non-com. can torment a private, a
lieutenant a non-com., a captain a lieutenant, until he goes mad.
And because they know they can, they all soon acquire the habit more
or less. Take a simple case: we are marching back from the
parade-ground dog-tired. Then comes the order to sing. We are glad
enough to be able to trail arms but we sing spiritlessly. At once
the company is turned about and has to do another hour's drill as
punishment. On the march back the order to sing is given again, and
once more we start. Now what's the use of all that? It's simply
that the company commander's head has been turned by having so much
power. And nobody blames him. On the contrary, he is praised for
being strict. That, of course, is only a trifling instance, but it
holds also in very different affairs. Now I ask you: Let a man be
whatever you like in peace-time, what occupation is there in which he
can behave like that without getting a crack on the nose? He can
only do that in the army. It goes to the heads of them all, you see.
And the more insignificant a man has been in civil life the worse it
takes him."
"They say, of course, there must be discipline," ventures Kropp
meditatively.
"True," growls Kat, "they always do. And it may be so; still it
oughtn't to become an abuse. But you try to explain that to a
blacksmith or a labourer or a workman, you try to make that clear to
a simple tommy--and that's what most of them are here. All he
understands is that he has been properly trained so that when he
comes up to the front he thinks he knows exactly what he should do in
every circumstance and what not. It's simply amazing, I tell you,
that the ordinary soldier survives so long up here in the front-line.
Simply amazing!"
No one protests. Everyone knows that drill ceases only in the
front-line and begins again a few miles behind, with all the
absurdities of saluting and parade. It is an iron law that the
soldier must be employed under every circumstance.
Here Tjaden comes up with a flushed face. He is so excited that he
stutters. Beaming with satisfaction he stammers out: "Himmelstoss is
on his way. He's coming to the front!"
* *
Tjaden has a special grudge against Himmelstoss, because of the way
he educated him in the barracks. Tjaden wets his bed, he does it at
night in his sleep. Himmelstoss maintained that it was sheer
laziness and invented a method worthy of himself for curing Tjaden.
He hunted up another piss-a-bed, named Kindervater, from a
neighbouring hut, and quartered him with Tjaden. In the huts there
were the usual bunks, one above the other in pairs, with mattresses
of wire-netting. Himmelstoss put these two so that one occupied the
upper and the other the lower bunk. The man underneath was of course
disgusted. The next night they were changed over and the lower one
put on top so that he could retaliate. That was Himmelstoss's system
of self-education.
The idea was low but not ill-conceived. Unfortunately it
accomplished nothing because the first assumption was wrong: it was
not laziness in either of them. Anyone who looked at their sallow
skin could see that. The matter ended in one of them always sleeping
on the floor, where he frequently caught cold.
Meanwhile Haie sits down beside us. He winks at me and rubs his paws
thoughtfully. We once spent the finest day of our army-life
together--the day before we left for the front. We had been allotted
to one of the recently formed regiments, but were first to be sent
back for equipment to the garrison, not to the reinforcement-depot,
of course, but to another barracks. We were due to leave next
morning early. In the evening we prepared ourselves to square
accounts with Himmelstoss.
We had sworn for weeks past to do this. Kropp had even gone so far
as to propose entering the postal service in peace-time in order to
be Himmelstoss's superior when he became a postman again. He
revelled in the thought of how he would grind him. It was this that
made it impossible for him to crush us altogether--we always reckoned
that later, at the end of the war, we would have our revenge on him.
In the meantime we decided to give him a good hiding. What could he
do to us anyhow if he didn't recognize us and we left early the next
morning?
We knew which pub he used to visit every evening. Returning to the
barracks he had to go along a dark, uninhabited road. There we
waited for him behind a pile of stones. I had a bed-cover with me.
We trembled with suspense, hoping he would be alone. At last we
heard his footstep, which we recognized easily, so often had we heard
it in the mornings as the door flew open and he bawled: "Get up!"
"Alone?" whispered Kropp.
"Alone."
I slipped round the pile of stones with Tjaden.
Himmelstoss seemed a little elevated; he was singing. His
belt-buckle gleamed. He came on unsuspectingly.
We seized the bed-cover, made a quick leap, threw it over his head
from behind and pulled it round him so that he stood there in a white
sack unable to raise his arms. The singing stopped. The next moment
Haie Westhus was there, and spreading out his arms he shoved us back
in order to be first in. He put himself in position with evident
satisfaction, raised his arm like a signal-mast and his hand like a
coal-shovel and fetched such a blow on the white sack as would have
felled an ox.
Himmelstoss was thrown down, he rolled five yards and started to
yell. But we were prepared for that and had brought a cushion. Haie
squatted down, laid the cushion on his knees, felt where
Himmelstoss's head was and pressed it down on the pillow.
Immediately his voice was muffled. Haie let him get a gasp of air
every so often, when he would give a mighty yell that was immediately
hushed.
Tjaden unbuttoned Himmelstoss's braces and pulled down his trousers,
holding the whip meantime in his teeth. Then he stood up and set to
work.
It was a wonderful picture: Himmelstoss on the ground; Haie bending
over him with a fiendish grin and his mouth open with blood-lust,
Himmelstoss's head on his knees; then the convulsed, striped drawers,
the knock knees, executing at every blow most original movements in
the lowered breeches, and towering over them like a woodcutter the
indefatigable Tjaden. In the end we had to drag him away to get our
turn.
Finally Haie stood Himmelstoss on his feet again and gave one last
personal remonstrance. As he stretched out his right arm preparatory
to giving him a box on the ear he looked as if he were going to reach
down a star.
Himmelstoss staggered. Haie stood him up again, made ready and
fetched him a second, well-aimed beauty with the left hand.
Himmelstoss yelled and fell down on all fours cursing. His striped
postman's backside gleamed in the moonlight.
We disappeared at full speed.
Haie looked round once again and said wrathfully, satisfied and
rather mysteriously:
"Revenge is black-pudding."
Himmelstoss ought to have been pleased; his saying that we should
each educate one another had borne fruit for himself. We had become
successful students of his method.
He never discovered whom he had to thank for the business. At any
rate he scored a bed-cover out of it; for when we returned a few
hours later to look for it, it was no longer to be found.
That evening's work made us more or less content to leave next
morning. And an old buffer was pleased to describe us as "young
heroes."
CHAPTER IV
We have to go up on wiring fatigue. The motor lorries roll up after