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We lie down, disappointed, and wonder whether to break into our iron rations[73 - iron rations – неприкосновенный запас] or not. But we don’t want to risk being left without. So we try to get a bit of shut-eye instead.
Kropp breaks a cigarette in two and gives me half. Tjaden describes his local speciality, broad beans cooked with bacon. He is scathing about people who try to cook it without the right chopped herbs. But the main thing is that the ingredients have to be cooked together – the potatoes, beans and bacon must not, for God’s sake[74 - for God’s sake – не дай Бог], be cooked separately. Somebody grumbles that he will chop Tjaden into the right herbs if he doesn’t shut up at once. And then it is quiet in the big room. Only a couple of candles flicker in the necks of empty bottles, and the gunner spits from time to time.
We are already dozing a bit when the door opens and Kat appears. I think I am dreaming: he is carrying two loaves under his arm, and a blood-stained sandbag full of horsemeat in his hand.
The gunner’s pipe drops out of his mouth. He feels the bread. ‘Straight up, it’s real bread, and still warm.’
Kat doesn’t say another thing. He has the bread and that is it; nothing else is of any importance. I’m quite sure that if he were dropped in the desert he would get a meal of dates, roast meat and wine together within the hour.
He gives Haie the brief command, ‘Chop some wood.’
From under his coat he brings out a frying-pan, then he takes a handful of salt and a chunk of fat from a pocket – he has thought of everything. Haie gets a fire going on the floor. Its crackling can be heard all through the empty factory. We scramble out of bed.
The gunner isn’t sure what to do. He wonders whether or not to congratulate Kat, so that maybe he will get a share too. But Katczinsky doesn’t even notice him – he might as well be invisible. So he wanders off, swearing.
Kat has the knack of cooking horsemeat so that it is really tender. You mustn’t put it straight into the pan or it will be too tough. It has to be parboiled in a little water beforehand. We sit around in a circle with our knives, and fill our bellies.
That’s Kat. If there were some place where something edible could be found only in one particular hour in the year, then he would turn up precisely during that hour as if led there by some kind of inspiration. He’d put on his cap, go out, make a bee-line for it, and find it.
He can find anything – camp stoves and firewood when it is cold, hay and straw, tables, chairs – but above all he can find food. No one understands how he does it, and it’s as if he conjures it out of thin air. His masterpiece was four cans of lobster. Mind you[75 - mind you – имейте в виду, заметьте], we would really have preferred dripping[76 - dripping (зд.) – топленое сало] instead.
We’ve sprawled out on the sunny side of the camp. It smells of tar, summertime and sweaty feet.
Kat is sitting next to me, because he enjoys a chat. We had an hour of saluting practice this afternoon because Tjaden gave a major a sloppy salute[77 - sloppy salute – небрежно поприветствовать]. Kat can’t get over this. ‘Watch out, lads,’ he says, ‘we’ll lose the war because we are too good at saluting.’
Kropp pads across to us barefoot, with his trousers rolled up. He has washed his socks and lays them out on the grass to dry. Kat gazes at the sky, lets off a really loud one, and says dreamily by way of commentary, ‘Every little bean, my boys, makes you make a little noise.’
He and Kropp start to argue. At the same time they manage to bet a bottle of beer on the outcome of a dogfight that is going on between a couple of planes above us.
Kat will not budge from a point of view that he, old soldier that he is, sums up with a little rhyme: ‘Equal rations, equal pay, war’s forgotten in a day —’
Kropp, on the other hand, is more philosophical. He reckons that all declarations of war ought to be made into a kind of festival, with entrance tickets and music, like they have at bullfights. Then the ministers and generals of the two countries would have to come into the ring, wearing boxing shorts, and armed with rubber truncheons, and have a go at each other. Whoever is left on his feet, his country is declared the winner. That would be simpler and fairer than things are out here, where the wrong people are fighting each other.
The idea appeals to us. Then the conversation moves on to drill.
An image comes into my head. Bright midday sunshine on the parade-ground at Klosterberg barracks. The heat is hanging there and the place is quiet. The barracks seem dead. Everything is asleep. All you can hear is the drummers practising – they have set things up somewhere and are practising without much skill, monotonously, mindlessly. What a trio: midday heat, the parade-ground and drummers practising.
The barrack windows are empty and dark. Battledress trousers[78 - Battledress trousers – солдатские штаны] are hanging out of a few of them, drying. You look enviously across at the barracks, where the rooms are cool —
Oh, you dark and musty platoon huts, with your iron bedsteads, chequered bedding and the tall lockers with those stools in front of them! Even you can turn into objects of longing; seen from out here, you can even take on some of the wonderful aura of home, you great rooms, so full of the smells of stale food, sleep, smoke and clothes!
Katczinsky describes them in glowing colours and with great fervour. What would we not give to be able to go back to those rooms. We don’t dare to think any further than that —
You rifle drills, first thing in the morning! ‘How do you break down a standard-issue rifle?[79 - How do you break down a standard-issue rifle? – Из каких деталей состоит винтовка стандартного образца?]’ You PT sessions in the afternoon! ‘Fall out anyone who can play the piano! Right turn! Report to the kitchens for spud bashing[80 - spud bashing – чистка картофеля]!’
We wallow in our memories. Then Kropp laughs suddenly and says, ‘Change at Lohne!’
That was Corporal Himmelstoss’s favourite game. Lohne is a station where you have to change trains, and so that anyone going on leave[81 - on leave – в отпуск] did not get lost when he got there, Himmelstoss used to practise changing platforms with us in the barracks. We were supposed to learn that you reach the connecting train in Lohne by way of an underpass. Our beds represented the underpass and everyone had to stand to attention on the left-hand side. Then came the order ‘Change at Lohne!’ and everyone had to scramble as quickly as possible under the bed and out the other side. We practised that for hours on end…
Meanwhile the German plane has been shot down. It plummets, with a trail of smoke behind it like a comet. Kropp has lost a bottle of beer on it, and pays up with ill grace.
‘I’m sure Himmelstoss is quite a quiet chap as a postman,’ I say, once Kropp has got over his disappointment. ‘So how come he is such a bastard as a drill corporal?’
The question gets Kropp going again. ‘It isn’t just Himmelstoss, there are loads of them. As soon as they get a couple of stripes or a pip or two they turn into entirely different people and start behaving as if they chew iron bars for breakfast.’
‘So it’s the uniform that does that?’ I ask.
‘More or less,’ says Kat, and settles himself down to develop the point. ‘But the real reasons are a bit different. Look, if you train a dog so that it only eats potatoes, and then after a while you offer it a chunk of meat, it’ll still grab it because it’s in its nature. And if you offer a man a bit of power, the same thing happens; he’ll grab it. It’s instinctive, because when it comes down to it, a man is basically a beast, and it’s only later that a bit of decency gets smeared on top, the way you can spread dripping on your bread. The main thing about the army is that there is always somebody with the power to give orders to the rest. The bad thing is that they’ve all got far too much power: a corporal can harass a private, a lieutenant can harass an NCO or a captain can harass a lieutenant so badly that it can drive him mad. And because every one of them knows it, they all get used to the idea. Just take the simplest example: we’re on our way back from the parade-ground and we’re dog tired. Then comes the order to sing. Well, the singing isn’t too lively because we’re all happy if we can still carry our rifles without dropping them. And the next thing we know, the company is about-turned and we have an hour’s punishment drill. On the march back we get the order to sing again, and this time we sing. What’s the point of the whole thing? The man in command has got his way, because he’s got the power to do so. Nobody’s going to blame him – quite the reverse – he gets a reputation for being strict. And that’s just a trivial thing – there are plenty of other ways for them to mess you about. So I ask you: whatever a man is in civilian life, what sort of job could he possibly find where he could get away with that sort of behaviour without getting a punch on the nose for it? The only place he can do it is in the army. See what I mean – it always goes to their heads. And the less they had to say for themselves in civvy street[82 - in civvy street – на гражданке], the more it goes to their heads now.’
‘They do say that discipline is necessary…’ Kropp puts in casually.
‘They can always come up with reasons,’ growls Kat. ‘And that might be true. But you mustn’t mess people about. And you just try and explain it to a locksmith, or a stable lad[83 - stable lad – батрак], or a labourer, try and explain it to the poor bloody infantry – they’re the majority out here, after all. All they see is that they get messed about, and then they get sent up the line, and they know perfectly well what’s necessary and what isn’t. I tell you, it’s amazing that the ordinary soldier sticks it here at the front at all. It’s amazing.’
Everyone agrees, because we all know that it is not till you are actually in the trenches that parade-ground drill disappears, and that it starts up again before you’ve gone back a mile behind the lines, no matter how big a piece of nonsense it might be, like saluting or formation marching. Because there is one unbreakable rule: a soldier has to be fully occupied all the time.
But now Tjaden turns up, red in the face. He is so worked up that he is stuttering, but he still gets the words out, grinning all over his face: ‘Himmelstoss is on his way here. He’s been sent to the front.’
Tjaden really detests Himmelstoss, because Himmelstoss decided to teach him a lesson in his own special way back in the barracks. Tjaden wets the bed – when he is asleep at night it just happens. Himmelstoss insisted that it was pure laziness, and wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise, so he came up with a method of curing Tjaden that was really typical of the man.
He hunted out another bed-wetter from one of the other barracks, a man called Kindervater, and put him in with Tjaden. The barracks where we did our training had the usual arrangement of bunks, one bed above the other, with the bottom part of each bed made of wire-mesh. Himmelstoss arranged things so that the pair of them were together, one on the top and the other on the bottom bunk. The one underneath, of course, had a really raw deal[84 - raw deal – несправедливое отношение]. To compensate, they had to change places for the next night, so that the one from the bottom bunk got the top bunk, and could get his revenge. That was Himmelstoss’s idea of self-help.
It was mean-minded, but logically it was sound. Unfortunately it didn’t work, because the basic premisses were wrong: it wasn’t laziness that made either of the two men do it. Anyone could see that by looking at their sickly complexions. The whole business ended with them taking it in turns to sleep on the floor. The one doing that could easily have caught his death of cold —
Meanwhile Haie has come and sat down beside us. He gives me a glance with his eyes twinkling, and rubs his great paws thoughtfully. He and I shared the best day of our army career. It was the night before we had to go off to the front. We had been assigned to one of the newly formed regiments, but before that we had been ordered back to the garrison for kitting out, not to the recruiting depot though, but one of the other barracks. The morning after that we would be leaving very early. That evening we set out to get even with Himmelstoss. We had sworn weeks before that we would. Kropp had even gone so far as to declare that after the war he would try for an administrative job in the postal service, so that later on, when Himmelstoss was a postman again, he could get to be his boss. He painted a rosy picture of how he would clobber him. That was the real reason that Himmelstoss never managed to grind us down: we always counted on the fact that we’d get him sometime, by the end of the war at the latest.
Meanwhile we wanted to give him a damned good hiding. What could they do to us if he didn’t recognize us and if we were off early next morning anyway?
We knew what bar he spent his evenings in. To get from the bar back to the barracks he had to go down a dark lane without any buildings. We lay in wait for him there, hiding behind a pile of rocks. I had a quilt-cover with me. We were trembling with anticipation, wondering if he would be on his own. At last we heard his footsteps – that was a sound we knew very well indeed, we’d heard him often enough in the mornings, when the door would fly open and he would bellow, ‘Out of bed!’
‘On his own?’ whispered Kropp.
‘On his own.’ Tjaden and I crept round the pile of rocks.
We could already see the light reflected off his belt-buckle. Himmelstoss seemed to be a bit tipsy and he was singing. He went past without noticing a thing.
We got a firm grip on the quilt-cover, moved forward quietly, slipped it over his head from behind and pulled it downwards, so that he stood there as if in a white sack, unable to move his arms. The singing died away.
The next moment Haie Westhus was there. He pushed us aside with his arms spread out, just so that he could have the first go. With great delight he took up a stance, raised his arm like a railway signal, his hand as big as a shovel, and gave the white sack a wallop that would have felled an ox.
Himmelstoss lost his balance, rolled half-a-dozen yards and started to yell. We’d thought of that as well, and brought a pillow with us. Haie squatted down, put the pillow on his knee, grabbed at where he guessed Himmelstoss’s head to be and shoved it into the pillow. The noise was stifled right away. Haie let him take a breath from time to time, and what came from his throat then was a wonderful, high-pitched shriek that soon got cut off.
Now Tjaden unbuttoned Himmelstoss’s braces and pulled his trousers down. Meanwhile, he held a cane carpet-beater[85 - cane carpet-beater – камышовая выбивалка для ковров] between his teeth. Then he stood up and moved into action.
It was a wonderful sight: Himmelstoss on the ground, Haie bending over him, holding the man’s head on his knees, with a fiendish grin on his face, his mouth wide open with delight, and then the twitching striped underpants, and the knock-kneed pair of legs which, trousers around the ankles, were performing spectacular movements with every blow that fell; and Tjaden, who showed no signs of tiring, standing over him like a woodcutter. In the end we literally had to pull him away, so that we could have our turns.
At last Haie pulled Himmelstoss to his feet again, and gave a private performance as the final act. He drew his right arm so far back before clouting him that it looked as if he was trying to pluck stars out of the night sky. Himmelstoss went down. Haie picked him up again, lined him up and gave him a second magnificently aimed wallop with his left hand. Himmelstoss howled, and fled on all fours. His striped postman’s backside shone in the moonlight.
We made ourselves scarce[86 - make ourselves scarce (разг.) – смылись, свалили] as fast as we could.
Haie looked around, and said with an air of grim satisfaction, though a bit oddly, ‘Revenge is as good as a feast.’
In fact Himmelstoss should have been pleased: his principle, that we should train each other, had borne fruit[87 - have borne fruit – дал плоды] – when we used it on him. We had been dutiful pupils, quick to pick up his methods.
He never found out whom he had to thank for the whole thing. Anyway, he got a quilt-cover out of it; when we went back half an hour later to look for it again it was nowhere to be found.
That night was the reason that on the following morning we were able to set off in a reasonably cheerful state of mind. And because of that, some old goat was so moved that he referred to us as ‘young heroes’.
IV
We’ve been ordered up the line on wiring duty. The trucks turn up for us as soon as it starts to get dark. We scramble aboard. It is a warm evening, the twilight is like a blanket wrapped around us, and we feel comforted by this protection. It brings us closer together; even Tjaden, who is usually a bit stingy, gives me a cigarette and lights it for me.
We stand next to one another, packed tighty[88 - packed tighty – плечом к плечу], and no one can sit down. We aren’t used to sitting down anyway. At last Muller is in a good mood again; he is wearing his new boots.
The engines rev up, the trucks rattle and clatter. The road surfaces are worn out and full of holes. No lights are allowed, and so we run into the holes and nearly get thrown out of the truck. That possibility doesn’t bother us much. What would it matter – a broken arm is better than a hole through the belly, and plenty of us would actually welcome a chance like that to get sent home.
Alongside us, long columns of munition trucks are moving up. They are in a hurry and keep on overtaking us. We shout out jokes to the men and they answer us.
We make out a wall, which belongs to a house set a little way back from the road. Suddenly I prick up my ears. Can it be true? Then I hear it again, perfectly clearly. Geese! A glance towards Katczinsky; a glance back from him; we understand each other.
‘Kat, I think I can hear a candidate for the cooking-pot —’
He nods. ‘We’ll do it when we get back. I know my way around here.’
Of course Kat knows his way around. I bet he knows every drumstick on every goose for miles.
The trucks reach the firing area. The gun emplacements are camouflaged with greenery against air reconnaissance[89 - air reconnaissance – воздушная разведка], and it all looks like a military version of that Jewish festival where they build little huts outdoors. These leafy bowers would look peaceful and cheerful if they didn’t have guns inside them.
The air is getting hazy with smoke from the guns and fog. The cordite tastes bitter on the tongue. The thunder of the artillery fire makes our truck shake, the echo rolls on after the firing and everything shudders. Our faces change imperceptibly. We don’t have to go into the trenches, just on wiring duty, but you can read it on every face: this is the front, we’re within reach of the front.
It isn’t fear, not yet. Anyone who has been at the front as often as we have gets thick-skinned about it. Only the young recruits are jumpy. Kat gives them a lesson. ‘That was a twelve-inch. You can hear that from the report – you’ll hear the burst in a minute.’
But the dull thud of the shell-bursts can’t be heard at this distance. Everything is swallowed up in the rumble of the front. Kat listens carefully. ‘There’ll be a show tonight.’
We all listen. The front is restless. ‘Tommy’s[90 - Tommy – прозвище солдат вооруженных сил Великобритании] already firing,’ says Kropp.
You can hear the guns clearly. It is the British batteries, to the right of our sector. They are starting an hour early. Ours never start until ten on the dot[91 - on the dot – ровно, точно].
‘What’s up with them?’ calls out Muller. ‘Are their watches fast or something?’
‘There’ll be a show, I tell you. I can feel it in my bones.’ Kat shrugs his shoulders.
Three guns thunder out just beside us. The gun flash shoots away diagonally into the mist, the artillery roars and rumbles. We shiver, happy that we’ll be back in camp by tomorrow morning.
Our faces are no more flushed and no paler than they usually are; they are neither more alert nor more relaxed, and yet they are different. We feel as if something inside us, in our blood, has been switched on. That’s not just a phrase – it is a fact. It is the front, the awareness of the front, that has made that electrical contact. The moment we hear the whistle of the first shells, or when the air is torn by artillery fire, a tense expectancy suddenly gets into our veins, our hands and our eyes, a readiness, a heightened wakefulness, a strange suppleness of the senses. All at once the body is completely ready.
It often seems to me as if it is the disturbed and vibrating air that suddenly comes over us with silent force; or as if the front itself is sending out its own electricity to put those unconscious nerve endings on to the alert.
It is the same every time. When we set out we are just soldiers – we might be grumbling or we might be cheerful; and then we get to the first gun emplacements, and every single word that we utter takes on a new sound.
If Kat stands in front of the huts and says ‘There’s going to be a show’ then that is his own opinion, nothing else. But if he says it out here, then the same words are as sharp as a bayonet on a moonlit night, cutting straight through the normal workings of the brain, more immediate, and speaking directly to that unknown element that has grown inside us with a dark significance – ‘There’s going to be a show’. Perhaps it is our innermost and most secret life that gives a shudder, and then prepares to defend itself.
For me, the front is as sinister as a whirlpool. Even when you are a long way away from its centre, out in calm waters, you can still feel its suction pulling you towards it, slowly, inexorably, meeting little resistance.
But the power to defend ourselves flows back into us out of the earth and out of the air – and most of all it flows out of the earth. The earth is more important to the soldier than to anybody else. When he presses himself to the earth, long and violently, when he urges himself deep into it with his face and with his limbs, under fire and with the fear of death upon him, then the earth is his only friend, his brother, his mother, he groans out his terror and screams into its silence and safety, the earth absorbs it all and gives him another ten seconds of life, ten seconds to run, then takes hold of him again – sometimes for ever.
Earth – earth – earth – !
Earth, with your ridges and holes and hollows into which a man can throw himself, where a man can hide! Earth – in the agony of terror, the explosion of annihilation, in the death-roar of the shell-bursts you gave us that massive resurgence of reconquered life. The madness, the tempest of an existence that had practically been torn to shreds flowed back from you into our hands, and so we burrowed deep into you for safety, and in the speechless fear and relief of having survived the moment, our mouths bit deeply into you!
With the first rumble of shellfire, one part of our being hurls itself back a thousand years. An animal instinct awakens in us, and it directs and protects us. It is not conscious, it is far quicker, far more accurate and far more reliable than conscious thought. You can’t explain it. You are moving up, not thinking of anything, then suddenly you are in a hollow in the ground with shrapnel flying over your head; but you can’t remember having heard the shell coming or having thought about taking cover. If you had relied on thought, you would have been so many pieces of meat by now. It was something else, some prescient, unconscious awareness inside us, that threw us down and saved us without our realizing. But for this, there would long since have been not a single man left alive between Flanders[92 - Flanders – Фландрия или Фламандский регион Бельгии] and the Vosges[93 - Vosges – Вогезы (горный массив на северо-востоке Франции)].
We set out as soldiers, and we might be grumbling or we might be cheerful – we reach the zone where the front line begins, and we have turned into human animals.
We move into a rather scrappy wood. We pass the field kitchens. Just beyond the wood we climb down from the trucks and they go back. They will be picking us up again before first light tomorrow.
Mist and smoke from the artillery is chest-high over the meadows. The moon is shining on it. Troops are moving on the roadway. The steel helmets give a dull reflection in the moonlight. Heads and rifles stick out from the white mists, nodding heads and swaying rifle barrels.
Further on, the mist clears. The heads turn into whole figures – tunics, trousers and boots come out of the mist as if from a pool of milk. They form into a column. The column marches, straight ahead, the figures become a wedge, and you can no longer make out individual men, just this dark wedge, pushing forwards, made even more strange by the heads and rifles bobbing along on the misty lake. A column – not men.
Light artillery and munition wagons move in from a side road. The backs of the horses shine in the moonlight and their movements are good to see – they toss their heads and their eyes flash. The guns and the wagons glide past against an indistinct background like a lunar landscape, while the steel-helmeted cavalrymen look like knights in armour from a bygone age[94 - bygone age – ушедшая эпоха] – somehow it is moving and beautiful.
We make for the equipment dump. Some of our men load the angled, sharpened iron uprights on to their shoulders, the rest stick straight iron bars through rolls of barbed-wire and carry them away. They are awkward and heavy loads.
The terrain gets more pitted. Reports come back to us from up ahead: ‘Watch where you’re going, there’s a deep shell hole on the left’ – ‘Mind the trench’ —
We keep our eyes wide open, and test the ground with our feet and with the bars before we put our weight down. The column stops suddenly; you bang your face into the barbed-wire roll that the man in front is carrying, and you swear.
A couple of shot-up trucks[95 - shot-up trucks – подбитые повозки] are in the way. A new order comes: ‘Pipes and cigarettes out!’ We are close to the frontline trenches.
In the meantime it has gone completely dark. We skirt around a little copse and our sector is there before us.
There is an indistinct reddish glow from one end of the horizon to the other. It changes constantly, punctuated by flashes from the gun batteries. Verey lights[96 - Verey lights – сигнальные ракеты] go up high above it, silver and red balls which burst with a shower of white, red and green stars. French rockets shoot up, the ones with silk parachutes that open in the air and let them drift down really slowly. They light up everything as clear as day, and their brightness even reaches across to us, so that we can see our shadows stark against the ground. The lights hang in the sky for minutes at a time before they burn out. New ones shoot up at once, everywhere, and there are still the green, red and blue stars.
‘Going to be a bad do[97 - Going to be a bad do (разг.) – Вот влипли],’ says Kat.
The thunder of the guns gets stronger until it becomes a single dull roar, and then it breaks down again into individual bursts. The dry voiced machine-guns rattle. Above our heads the air is full of invisible menace, howling, whistling and hissing. This is from the smaller guns; but every so often comes the deep sound of the big crump shells, the really heavy stuff, moving through the dark and landing far behind us. They make a bellowing, throaty, distant noise, like a rutting stag, and they go far above the howl and the whistle of the small shells.
Searchlights begin to sweep the black sky. They skim across it like huge blackboard pointers[98 - blackboard pointers – указка для школьной доски], tapering down at the bottom. One of them pauses, shaking a little. At once another is beside it, they cross and there is a black, winged insect trapped and trying to escape: an airman. He wavers, is dazzled and falls.
We ram the iron posts in firmly at set intervals. There are always two men holding the roll while the others pay out the barbed-wire. It is that horrible wire with a lot of long spikes, close together. I am out of practice at paying it out, and rip my hand open.
After a few hours we have finished. But there is still some time before the trucks are due. Most of us lie down and sleep. I try to as well, but it is too cold. You can tell that we are not far from the sea, because you are always waking up from the cold.
At one point I do fall into a deep sleep. When I wake up suddenly with a jolt, I have no idea where I am. I see the stars and I see the rockets, and just for a moment I imagine that I have fallen asleep in the garden at home, during a fireworks party of some sort. I don’t know whether it is morning or evening, and I lie there in the pale cradle of dawn waiting for the gentle words which must surely come, gentle and comforting – am I crying? I put my hand to my face; it is baffling, am I a child? Smooth skin – it only lasts for a second and then I recognize the silhouette of Katczinsky. He is sitting there quite calmly, old soldier that he is, smoking his pipe – one of those with a fid over the bowl, of course. When he sees that I am awake he says, ‘That made you jump. It was only a detonator, it whizzed off into the bushes over there.’
I sit up; I feel terribly alone. It is good that Kat is there. He looks thoughtfully at the front and says, ‘Lovely fireworks. If only they weren’t so dangerous.’
A shell lands behind us. A couple of the new recruits jump up in fright. A few minutes later another shell comes over, closer than before. Kat knocks out his pipe. ‘Here we go.’
