Youll be going home now, says Kropp. You would have had to wait at least another three or four months before you got leave. Kemmerich nods. I cant look at his hands, they are like wax. The dirt of the trenches is underneath his fingernails, and it is bluey-grey, like poison. It occurs to me that those fingernails will go on getting longer and longer for a good while yet, like some ghastly underground growths, long after Kemmerich has stopped breathing. I can see them before my eyes, twisting like corkscrews and growing and growing, and with them the hair on his caved-in skull, like grass on good earth, just like grass how can all that be? Muller leans forward. Weve brought your things, Franz. Kemmerich gestures with one hand. Put them under the bed. Muller does as he says. Kemmerich starts on about the watch again. How can we possibly calm him down without making him suspicious?
Muller bobs up again with a pair of airmans flying boots, best quality English ones made of soft yellow leather, the sort that come up to the knee, with lacing all the way to the top something really worth having. The sight of them makes Muller excited, and he holds the soles against his own clumsy boots and says, Are you going to take these with you, Franz?
All three of us are thinking the same thing: even if he did get better he would only be able to wear one of them, so they wouldnt be any use to him. But as things are it would be a pity to leave them here the orderlies are bound to pinch them the moment he is dead.
Muller repeats, Why dont you leave them here?
Kemmerich doesnt want to. They are his prize possession.
We could do a swap, suggests Muller, trying again, you can really do with boots like that out here. But Kemmerich wont be persuaded.
I kick Muller, and reluctantly he puts the splendid boots back under the bed.
We chat for a bit longer, and then say goodbye. Chin up[34], Franz.
I promise him that I will come back tomorrow. Muller says that he will as well. He is still thinking about the flying boots and he wants to keep an eye on things.
Kemmerich groans. He is feverish[35]. We get hold of a medical orderly outside, and try and persuade him to give Kemmerich a shot of morphia.
He says no. If we wanted to give morphia to everyone wed need buckets of the stuff
Only give it to officers, then, do you? snarls Kropp.
I step in quickly and the first thing I do is give the orderly a cigarette. He takes it. Then I ask him, Are you allowed to give shots at all?
He is annoyed. If you think I cant, what are you asking me for ?
I press a few more cigarettes into his hand. Just as a favour
Well, OK, he says. Kropp goes in with him, because he doesnt trust him and wants to see him do it. We wait outside.
Muller starts on again about the flying boots. They would fit me perfectly. In these clodhoppers even my blisters get blisters. Do you think hell last until we come off duty tomorrow? If he goes during the night weve seen the last of the boots
Albert comes back and says, Do you reckon ?
Had it, says Muller, and thats that.
We walk back to camp. Im thinking about the letter I shall have to write to Kemmerichs mother tomorrow. Im shivering, I could do with a stiff drink. Muller is pulling up grass stems and hes chewing on one. Suddenly little Kropp tosses his cigarette away, stamps on it like a madman, stares round with an unfocused and disturbed look on his face and stammers, Shit! Shit! The whole damned thing is a load of shit!
We walk on for a long time. Kropp calms down we know what was wrong, its just the strain of being at the front, we all get that way from time to time.
Muller asks him, What did Kantorek say in his letter?
He laughs. He calls us young men of iron.
That makes the three of us laugh, though not because it is funny. Kropp curses. He is happy to be able to talk again
And yes, thats it, that is what they think, those hundred thousand Kantoreks. Young men of iron. Young? None of us is more than twenty. But young? Young men? That was a long time ago. We are old now.
II
I find it strange to think that at home in a drawer there is the first part of a play I once started to write called Saul, and a stack of poems as well. I spent so many evenings on them we all did things like that but it has all become so unreal to me that I cant even imagine it any more.
When we came out here we were cut off, whether we liked it or not, from everything we had done up to that point. We often try to find a reason or an explanation for this, but we can never quite manage it. Things are particularly confused for us twenty-year-olds, for Kropp, Muller, Leer and me, the ones Kantorek called young men of iron. The older men still have firm ties to their earlier lives they have property, wives, children, jobs and interests, and these bonds are all so strong that the war cant break them. But for us twenty-year-olds there are only our parents, and for some of us a girlfriend. That isnt much, because at our age parental influence is at its weakest, and girls havent really taken over yet. Apart from that, we really didnt have much else; the occasional passion for something, a few hobbies, school; our lives didnt go much further than that as yet. And now nothing is left of it all.
Kantorek would say that we had been standing on the very threshold of life itself. Its pretty well true, too. We hadnt had a chance to put down any roots. The war swept us away. For the others, for the older men, the war is an interruption, and they can think beyond the end of it. But we were caught up by the war, and we cant see how things will turn out. All we know for the moment is that in some strange and melancholy way we have become hardened, although we dont often feel sad about it any more.
If Muller wants Kemmerichs flying boots, this doesnt make him any more unfeeling than somebody who would find such a wish too painful even to contemplate. Its just that he can keep things separate in his mind. If the boots were any use at all to Kemmerich, Muller would sooner walk barefoot over barbed-wire than give a single thought to getting them. But as it is, the boots are objects which now have nothing to do with Kemmerichs condition, whereas Muller can do with them. Kemmerich is going to die, whoever gets them. So why shouldnt Muller try and get hold of them after all, he has more right to them than some orderly. Once Kemmerich is dead it will be too late. Thats why Muller is keeping an eye on them now.
We have lost all our ability to see things in other ways, because they are artificial. For us, it is only the facts that count. And good boots are hard to come by.
We were not always like that. We went down to the local recruiting office, still a class of twenty young men, and then we marched off en masse[36], full of ourselves, to get a shave at the barbers some of us for the first time before we set foot on a parade-ground[37]. We had no real plans for the future and only very few of us had thoughts of careers or jobs that were firm enough to be meaningful in practical terms. On the other hand, our heads were full of nebulous ideas which cast an idealized, almost romantic glow over life and even the war for us.
We had ten weeks of basic training, and that changed us more radically than ten years at school. We learnt that a polished tunic button is more important than a set of philosophy books. We came to realize first with astonishment, then bitterness, and finally with indifference that intellect apparently wasnt the most important thing, it was the kit-brush[38]; not ideas, but the system; not freedom, but drill. We had joined up with enthusiasm and with good will; but they did everything to knock that out of us. After three weeks it no longer struck us as odd that an ex-postman with a couple of stripes should have more power over us than our parents ever had, or our teachers, or the whole course of civilization from Plato[39] to Goethe[40]. With our young, wide-open eyes we saw that the classical notion of patriotism we had heard from our teachers meant, in practical terms at that moment, surrendering our individual personalities more completely than we would ever have believed possible even in the most obsequious errand boy[41]. Saluting, eyes front, marching, presenting arms, right and left about, snapping to attention[42], insults and a thousand varieties of bloody-mindedness we had imagined that our task would be rather different from all this, but we discovered that we were being trained to be heroes the way they train circus horses, and we quickly got used to it. We even understood that some of these things were necessary, but that others, by the same token[43], were completely superfluous. Soldiers soon sort out which is which.
In threes and fours our class was scattered around the different squads as we were put in with fishermen from the Frisian Islands[44], farmers, labourers and artisans, and we soon got friendly with them. Kropp, Muller, Kemmerich and I were put into Number Nine Squad, the one commanded by Corporal Himmelstoss.
He was reckoned to be the stickiest bastard in the whole barracks[45], and he was proud of it. He was a short, stocky bloke with twelve years service in the reserve, a gingery moustache with waxed ends, and in civilian life he was a postman. He took a particular dislike to Kropp, Tjaden, Westhus and me because he sensed our unspoken defiance.
One day I had to make his bed fourteen times. Every time he found some fault with it and pulled it apart. Over a period of twenty hours with breaks, of course I polished an ancient and rock-hard pair of boots until they were soft as butter and even Himmelstoss couldnt find anything to complain about. On his orders I scrubbed the floor of the corporals mess with a toothbrush. Kropp and I once had a go at sweeping the parade-ground clear of snow with a dustpan and brush on his orders, and we would have carried on until we froze to death if a lieutenant hadnt turned up, sent us in, and given Himmelstoss a hell of a dressing-down. Unfortunately, this only turned Himmelstoss against us even more. Every Sunday for a month I was put on guard duty, and he made me room orderly[46] for the same amount of time. I had to practise On your feet! Advance! Get down![47] with full pack[48] and rifle in a sodden ploughed field[49] until I was nothing but a mass of mud myself and I collapsed, and then four hours later I had to present myself for inspection to Himmelstoss with all my gear spick and span[50], although my hands were raw and bleeding. Kropp, Westhus, Tjaden and I had to stand to attention without gloves in freezing weather, with our bare fingers on the barrels of our rifles, with Himmelstoss prowling around us waiting for the slightest movement so that he could fault us. I had to run eight times from the top floor of the barracks down to the parade-ground at two in the morning in my night things, because my underpants were protruding half an inch more than they should over the edge of the stool where we had to lay out our kit. Himmelstoss as duty corporal ran beside me and trod on my feet. At bayonet practice[51] I was regularly paired with Himmelstoss, and I had to use a heavy iron weapon while he had a handy wooden one, so that it was easy for him to beat me black and blue[52] around the arms. However, I once got so furious that I rushed blindly at him and gave him such a clout in the stomach that it knocked him flat. When he tried to put me on a charge the company commander just laughed and told him to be more careful; he knew Himmelstoss of old, and didnt seem to mind that hed been caught out. I got to be first class at climbing on the assault course[53], and I was pretty nearly the best at physical jerks[54]. We trembled just at the sound of his voice, but the runaway post-horse never broke us down.