All Quiet on the Western Front. Erich Maria Remarque
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he’s up atst. joseph's. aflesh wound tothe thigh...
...a goodblighty.
6
joseph behm would not allow himself to be convinced. kantorek did everything but call him a coward. in the end kantorek won the argument...
kropp, mu ̈ller,and I decided togo see kemmerich this afternoon. kropp looked up from a letter.
kantorek had been our schoolmaster, a stern little man in a grey tail-coat, with a face like a shrew mouse. it is very queer that the unhappiness of the world is so often brought on by small men.
kantorek sends you all his best.
won’t youjoin up,comrades?
I wish he was here.
7
naturally we couldn’t blame kantorek for this. he, like thousands of others, were convinced that they were acting for the best, in a way that cost them nothing. and that is why they let us down so badly.
...strange to say, behm was one of the first of us to fall. he got hit in the eye during an attack, and we left him lying for dead.
for us lads of eighteen they ought to have been mediators and guides to the world of maturity. the idea of authority, which they represented, was associated in our minds with a greater insight and more humane wisdom...
...but the first death we saw shattered this belief. we had to recognize that our generation was more to be trusted than theirs.
that afternoon we heard him call and saw him crawling about in no man’s land.
because he could not see, and was mad with pain, he failed to keep under cover, and so was shot down.
8
we pack up kemmerich's things and go to the hospital to see him.
not so bad...but I have a damned pain in my foot.
when I was asleep someone stole my watch.
I always told you that nobody should carry as good a watch as that.
how goes it, franz?
we look at the foot of the bed and, as the orderly has already told us, franz has lost his leg.
mu ̈lleris about to say something about it, but I stop him by a little kick in the shin.
9
it strikes me that these nails will continue to grow like lean fan-tastic cellar-plants long after kemmerich breathes no more.
we have brought your things, franz.
will you take them with you, then, franz?
I think of when we left home. at the train station, franz’s mother wept continually. she made me prom-ise that I would take care of him at the front...
he looks ghastly, yellow and wan. in his face there are already the strained lines that we know so well, we have seen them now hundreds of times.
I cannot bear to look at his hands, they are like wax. under the nails is the dirt of the trenches. it shows through blue- black like poison...
death is working through from within.
kemmerich has a pair of english soft yellow leather boots.
mu ̈lleris delightedat the sight of them. his own boots do not fit him perfectly, and he gets blister after blister.
...but how can a man look after anyone in the field?
put them under the bed.
10
kemmerich doesn’t want to. they are his prized possessions.
we talk a little more and then take our leave. I promise to come back in the morning. mu ̈ller talks of doing so, too. he is thinking of the boots, and knows the orderlies will grab them as soon as he is dead.
we get hold of an orderly outside and ask him to give kemmerich a dose of morphia.
I think of the letter I must write tomorrow to kemmerich’s mother. I am freezing. I could do with a tot of rum.
won’t you leave them with us? out here one can make some use of them.
cheerio,franz.
you only attend to officers properly!
if we were to give morphia to everyone we would have to have tubs full...
do us this favour.
well,all right.
do you think...?
done for.
damned shit! The damned shit!
we started back to our camp.
11
all the older men are linked up with their previous life. they have wives, chil-dren, occupations, and interests, they have a background which is so strong that the war cannot obliterate it.
what has kan-torek written to you?
ha! we are the iron youth!
we all smile bitterly. we are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? youth? that is long ago. we are old folk.
it is strange to think that at home in the drawer of my writing table lies the beginning of a play called “saul” and a bundle of poems. many an evening I worked over them--we all did something of the kind--but that has become so unreal to me I cannot comprehend it any more. our early life is cut off from the moment we came here, and that without our lifting a hand.
for us young men of twenty everything is extraordinarily vague, for kropp, mu ̈ller, leer and for me.
12
kantorek would say that we stood on the thresh-old of life. and so it would seem. we had as yet taken no root. the war swept us away. for the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. they are able to think beyond it. we, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. we know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste- land. all the same, we are not often sad.
though mu ̈ller would be delighted to have kemmerich’s boots, he is really quite as sympathetic as another who might not bear to think of such a thing forgrief. he merely sees things clearly.
were kemmerich able to make any use of the boots, mu ̈ller would rather go bare-foot over barbed wire thanscheme to get hold of them.
once it was different. when we went to the district commandant to enlist, we were a class of twenty young men, many of whom proudly shaved for the first time before going to the barracks. we had no definite plans for the future.
we have lost all other consider-ations, because they are artificial. only the facts are real and important to us. and good boots are scarce.
we learned that a bright button is weightier than four volumes of schopenhauer.