And make sure you take good care when you are at the front, Paul.
Oh Mother, Mother! Why dont I take you in my arms and die with you? What wretched creatures we are![213]
Yes, Mother, Ill take care.
I shall pray for you every day, Paul.
Oh Mother, Mother! Why cant we get up and go away from here, back through the years, until all this misery has vanished from us, back to when it was just you and me, Mother?
Maybe you can get a posting that wont be so dangerous.
Yes, Mother. Its quite possible they will put me in the kitchens.
You take a job like that, whatever the others say
Im not worried about what people say, Mother
She sighs. Her face is a pale glow in the darkness.
You really must go to bed now, Mother.
She doesnt answer. I get up and put my bedspread around her shoulders. She holds on to my arm and she is in pain. I take her across and stay with her for a little while. You have to get better by the time I come back, Mother.
Yes, son, yes.
You really mustnt send me your rations, Mother. We get enough to eat out there. You need it more here.
How wretched she looks, lying there in bed, this woman who loves me more than anything in the world. When Im just about to go she says quickly, I got hold of two pairs of underpants for you. They are good quality wool. Theyll keep you warm. You mustnt forget to pack them.
Oh Mother, I know what these two pairs of underpants have cost you in queueing and running around and begging! Oh Mother, Mother, it is quite incomprehensible that I have to leave you! Who has more right to have me here than you? Im still sitting here and you are still lying there, and there are so many things we should say to each other, but we shall never be able to. Goodnight, Mother.
Goodnight, Son.
The room is dark. My mothers breathing is uneven. Meanwhile the clock ticks. There is a breeze outside the windows. The chestnut trees are rustling.
In the vestibule I stumble over my pack, which they have got ready for me, because I have to leave very early in the morning.
I bury my head in my pillow, I clench my fists round the iron uprights on my bedstead. I should never have come home. Out there I was indifferent, and a lot of the time I was completely without hope I can never be like that again. I was a soldier, and now it is all suffering, for myself, for my mother, for everything, because it is all so hopeless and never-ending.
I should never have come home on leave.
VIII
I know the barracks at the training camp out on the moors. This was where Himmelstoss decided to educate Tjaden. But I recognize hardly any of the people; as usual, there have been lots of changes. I remember seeing one or two when I was here before, but only in passing.
I carry out my duties mechanically. I spend most evenings at the Soldiers Club. There are newspapers there, but I dont read them. There is a piano, though, and I like to play it. Two girls serve us, one of them quite young.
The camp is surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence. If you get back late from the Soldiers Club youre supposed to have a pass. Mind you, if you get on to decent terms with the sentries you can slip through anyway.
Every day we practise company manoeuvres on the moors, amongst the juniper bushes and the silver birches. Its all perfectly bearable, as long as you are not too demanding. You run forwards and throw yourself down, with your breath blowing the flowers and stalks of the heathland plants this way and that. Seen from that close to the ground, the sand is as pure as if it were in a laboratory, made up out of many tiny little grains. You get a strange urge to dig your fingers into it.
But best of all are the woodlands, with the birch trees at the edges. They are constantly changing colour. The trunks may be shining and dazzlingly white, with the pastel green of their leaves waving between them, silky and airy; and then in the next moment it all changes to an opalescent blue, with silver coming in from the edges and dabbing the green away; but then all at once it can deepen almost to black at one point, when a cloud crosses the sun. And this shadow flits along like a phantom between the trunks, and suddenly they are pale again, as it passes further across the moors to the horizon and now the birch trees are like ceremonial banners, their white trunks standing out against the red-gold flame of their changing leaves.
I often become completely absorbed in this interplay of the most gentle lights and translucent shadow, so much so that I nearly miss some of the commands when you are on your own you start to look at nature, and to love it. And I havent many contacts here, nor do I want any, beyond normal day-to-day living. You dont get to know other people well enough for anything more than a chat and a game of cards in the evenings.
Next to our barracks is the big POW camp[214] for Russian soldiers. It is separated from us by wire fencing, it is true, but the prisoners still manage to get over to us. They behave in a very shy and nervous manner, even though they are mostly big and bearded; because of this, they seem to us like meek and mistreated St Bernard dogs[215].
They creep around our barracks and raid the rubbish bins. Heaven knows what they find there. Our own rations are short and, more to the point, not very good, with things like turnips cut into six pieces and boiled, or carrot-tops that are still dirty. Brown-flecked potatoes are a great luxury, and the best we get is a watery rice soup which is supposed to have strips of beef in it. But they are cut so thinly that you cant even find them.
In spite of this it all gets eaten, of course. On those occasions where someone is really so well off that he doesnt need to wolf down everything hes got, there are other men right beside him who are happy to take it off him. Only the absolute dregs that cant be reached with a spoon are washed out and dumped into the garbage vats. Sometimes they are accompanied by a few turnip peelings, mouldy crusts of bread and all sorts of other refuse.
This cloudy murky water is what the POWs are after. They scoop it greedily out of the stinking vats and carry it away in tins under their tunics.
It is odd seeing these men our enemies at such close quarters. Their faces make you stop and think, good peasant faces, broad foreheads, broad noses, broad lips, broad hands, shaggy hair. They really ought to be ploughing or harvesting or apple-picking. They look even more good-natured than our own farmers from over in Frisia[216].
It is sad to watch their movements, to see them begging for food. They are all pretty weak, because they get just enough to keep them from starving. We have nowhere near enough to fill our own bellies they have dysentery, and many of them show us their blood-stained shirt-tails[217], covertly and with nervous glances. Their backs and their heads are bowed, their knees bent, they look up at you with their heads on one side when they stick their hands out and beg, beg in those gentle, soft bass voices redolent of warm stoves in comfortable rooms back in their homeland.
Some of the men kick them so that they fall over but only a few do that. Most dont hurt them, they just walk past them. Occasionally, when they are especially persistent, it is true, you do lose your temper and give them a kick. If only they wouldnt look at you the way they do how much misery there can be in two little spots that you could cover with your thumbs, their eyes.
In the evenings they come across to the barracks to trade things. They will exchange anything they have for bread. Sometimes they are successful, because they have good boots, whereas ours are poor. The leather of their high boots is wonderfully soft, like suede. The farmers sons among us, who get butter and so on sent to them from home, can afford them. The price of a pair of boots is between two and three loaves of army-issue bread, or one loaf and a small salami.
But nearly all of the Russians have already handed over the things they had long ago. Now they only have shoddy stuff to wear and they try to barter little ornaments and carvings that they have made from bits of shrapnel or from the copper driving bands of shells. These things dont bring much in, of course, even though they have taken a great amount of effort to make theyll go for nothing more than a couple of slices of bread. Our country people are hard and crafty when they are bargaining. They hold the piece of bread or the sausage right under the Russians nose until he goes pale with greed, he rolls his eyes, and hell agree to anything. Our men pack up their booty with all the ceremony they can muster, then slowly and carefully they cut themselves a hunk of bread from their own supplies, take a piece of the good, hard sausage with every mouthful, and get stuck into it, as a reward to themselves. It is annoying watching them having their evening meal, what youd really like to do is clout their thick heads. They seldom share anything. To be fair, people just dont get to know each other well enough.
Im often on guard duty over the Russians. In the darkness you can make out their figures as they move about like sick storks, like huge birds. They come right up to the wire-netting and put their faces against it, with their fingers in the mesh. Often many of them will stand together. And they breathe in the winds that blow across from the moors and the woods.
Only rarely do they speak, and then only a word or two. They behave more humanely, I could almost think in a more brotherly manner towards one another, than we do here. But perhaps that is because they are unhappier than we are. And yet the war is over as far as they are concerned. Still, just waiting for the next bout of dysentery is no kind of life either.
The home guardsmen who are in charge of them say that they were more lively at the beginning. There were the kinds of dealings and conflicts between them that you always get, and apparently fists were raised and knives used to come out. Now they are dulled and indifferent, and most of them dont even masturbate any more because they are too weak, although usually it is so bad that you get whole barracks at it at the same time.