It is a strange thing that all the memories have these two qualities. They are always full of quietness, that is the most striking thing about them; and even when things werent like that in reality, they still seem to have that quality. They are soundless apparitions, which speak to me by looks and gestures, wordless and silent and their silence is precisely what disturbs me, forces me to hold on to my sleeve or my rifle so that I dont abandon myself to this seductive dissolution, in which my body would like to disperse itself and flow away towards the silent powers that he behind all things.
The pictures are so silent because that is something which is quite incomprehensible to us. There is no silence at the front and the spell of the front is so strong that we are never away from it. Even in the depots way behind the lines, or in the rest areas, the buzz and the muted thundering of the shellfire is always in our ears. We are never so far away that we cant hear it any more. But in the last few days it has been unbearable.
The quietness is the reason why all these images awaken in us not so much desire as sadness a vast and inexplicable melancholy. The scenes existed once but they will never return. They are gone, they are another world, a world that is in the past for us. When we were doing our basic training, those scenes called up in us a wild and rebellious longing, they were still a part of us then, we belonged to them and they to us, even if we had been taken away from them. They rose up out of the soldiers songs that we sang, when we marched off to the heath for exercises on the long, long trail а-winding between the red rays of dawn and the black silhouettes of the forest, they were still a strong memory then, a memory that was inside us and came from within us.
But here in the trenches we have lost that memory. It no longer rises up from inside us we are dead and the memory is far off on some distant horizon, an apparition, a puzzling reflection come to haunt us, something we are afraid of and which we love without hope. It is strong, and our desire is strong; but it is unattainable, and we know it. It is just as impossible as the chance of becoming a general.
And even if someone were to give us it back, that landscape of our youth, we wouldnt have much idea of how to handle it. The tender, secret forces that bound it to us cannot come back to life. We should be in the landscape, wandering around; we should remember, and love it, and be moved by the sight of it. But it would be just the same as when we see a photograph of one of our friends who has been killed, and we stop to think about it. The features are his, the face is his, and the days we spent with him take on a deceptive life in our memories; but it isnt really him.
Nowadays we would no longer have any real links with the way we used to be. It wasnt the awareness of how beautiful it was that meant so much to us, or of how good the atmosphere was, but the feeling of community, the way we all felt a kinship with the objects and events of our existence. Thats what set us apart and made our parents world a little difficult for us to understand; because somehow we were always gently bound up with that world, submissive to it all, and the smallest thing led us onwards along the path of eternity. Perhaps it was just the privilege of our youth we were not yet able to see any restrictions, and we could not admit to ourselves that things would ever come to an end; expectation was in our blood, and this meant that we were at one with our lives as the days went by.
Now we would wander around like strangers in those landscapes of our youth. We have been consumed in the fires of reality, we perceive differences only in the way tradesmen do, and we see necessities like butchers. We are free of care no longer we are terrifyingly indifferent. We might be present in that world, but would we be alive in it?
We are like children who have been abandoned and we are as experienced as old men, we are coarse, unhappy and superficial I think that we are lost.
My hands get cold and my flesh shivers; even though it is a warm night. Only the mist is chilly, that ghastly mist that creeps across the dead men in front of us and sucks out their last, concealed scraps of life. By tomorrow they will be green and pallid and their blood will be thickened and black.
The Verey lights are still shooting upwards and throwing their merciless glare over the stony landscape, which is full of craters and a shining coldness, like some dead moon. The blood beneath my skin brings fear and disquiet into my thoughts. They become weak, they tremble, they need warmth and life. They cannot survive without comfort and illusion, they become confused in the face of naked despair.
I hear mess-tins rattling, and at once I have a fierce desire for hot food, which will do me good and calm me down. With some difficulty I force myself to wait until I am relieved.
Then I go into the dugout and get hold of a mug of barley broth. The pearl barley has been cooked in fat and tastes good, and I eat it slowly. But I keep to myself, even though the others are in better spirits now that the shelling has died down.
The days roll by and every hour is incomprehensible and matter of fact at the same time. Attacks alternate with counter-attacks and slowly the dead pile up between the trenches in no mans land. We can usually get out and fetch back any wounded men that arent too far away. Some have to lie there for a long time, though, and we listen to them dying.
We search for one of them for two whole days, in vain. He must be lying face downwards, and cant turn over. Its the only explanation for why we cant find him; because only when someone is screaming with his mouth close to the ground does it make it hard to gauge the direction.
Hell have one of the worst sort of wounds, one of those that are not so bad as to weaken the body quickly and let you just drift off in a half-numbed state, but not so light that you can bear the pain with any reasonable expectation of getting over it. Kat reckons that either his pelvis has been shattered, or he has been hit in the spine. He says that his chest cant have been hit, or he wouldnt have so much strength to scream, but if he had some other kind of wound you would be able to see him moving.
Gradually he gets hoarser. His voice sounds so weird that it could come from anywhere. Three times during the first night groups of our men go out there. But every time they think they have the right direction and are crawling towards him, the next time they hear his voice it is coming from somewhere else. We search in vain until it starts to get light. During the daytime we scan the area with field glasses; not a trace. By the second day the man is quieter, and you can tell that his throat and lips are parched.
Our company commander has promised priority leave and three extra days to anyone who finds him. That is a huge incentive, but even without it we would do all we could anyway; the shouting is so awful. Kat and Kropp even make another sortie during the afternoon. In the process Kropp gets an earlobe shot off. But it is no use, and they come back without him.
And on top of it all you can hear quite clearly what he is shouting. At first he just screamed for help all the time then in the second night he must have become feverish, because he is talking to his wife and children, and we can pick out the name Efise. Today he is just crying. Towards evening the voice dies away to just a croak. But he groans softly all through the night. We can hear him so clearly because the wind is blowing towards our trench. In the morning, when we think he must have gone to his rest long since, we hear a gurgling rattle once again.
The days are hot and the dead lie unburied. We cant fetch them all, and we dont know where to put them. The shells bury them for us. Quite often their bellies swell up like balloons. They hiss, belch and move because of the gases which are rumbling about inside them.
The sky is blue and cloudless. In the evenings it becomes oppressive, and the heat rises out of the ground. When the wind is in our direction it brings the smell of blood, heavy, and with a repulsive sweetness, a waft of death breathing out of the shell holes, a smell that seems to be composed of a mixture of chloroform and decomposition, and which makes us feel faint, or makes us vomit.
The nights turn quiet, and the hunt for copper driving bands from shells, or for the silk parachutes from French rocket flares starts up. Nobody really knows why the driving bands are so eagerly sought after. The men who collect them simply declare that they are valuable. There are people who hump so many of these away with them that they are bent and staggering under their weight when we withdraw.
Haie at least gives a reason for collecting them: he wants to send them to his girlfriend as a substitute for garters. When they hear this, there is naturally a great outburst of merriment among the other lads from his part of the world; they slap their thighs Thats a good un, bloody hell, old Haie, hes a sharp one and no mistake! Of all of them, Tjaden is the one who just cant stop laughing; hes got the biggest of the driving bands and is forever sticking his leg through it to show how much room there is to spare. Christ, Haie, she must have a pair of thighs, thighs!
And mentally he moves up a bit and a bum, too, she must have a bum like like an elephants.
He cant get over it. I wouldnt mind a bit of slap and tickle with her, not half I wouldnt
Haie beams to hear his girlfriend getting all this acclaim, and says in a self-satisfied and succinct manner, Oh aye, shes a big lass. The silk parachutes are of greater practical value. Three or four will make up a blouse, depending on bust size. Kropp and I use them for handkerchiefs. The others send them home. If their womenfolk could see the risks that the men sometimes take fetching these flimsy rags it would really give them a shock.
Kat catches Tjaden trying to hammer the driving band off a dud shell, calm as you please. With anyone else, the thing would have exploded, but Tjaden is lucky he always is.