Kat takes a piece of the coffin lid and puts it under the shattered arm, and we wrap the bandages from all our field dressing packs[107] around it. There isn’t anything else we can do at the moment.
My head is throbbing and buzzing in the gas-mask, it is nearly bursting. Your lungs get strained, they only have stagnant, overheated, used-up air to breathe, the veins on your temples bulge and you think you are going to suffocate —
A grey light trickles into our shell hole. Wind sweeps the cemetery. I haul myself up to the edge of the hole. Lying in front of me in the dirty light of dawn is a leg that has been torn off, with the boot on it still completely undamaged – I see it all perfectly clearly in a moment. But now, a few yards away, somebody is standing up; I clean the goggles, and because I am agitated they mist over again at once, but I stare across – the man over there isn’t wearing his gas-mask any more.
I wait for a few seconds longer – but he doesn’t collapse, he looks around cautiously and takes a few steps – the wind has dispersed the gas, the air is clear – and gasping for breath I rip my mask away from my face too, and my knees give way[108]. The air pours into me like cold water, my eyes feel as if they could burst from my head, the wave sweeps over me and plunges me into darkness.
The shelling has stopped. I turn back to the crater and wave to the others. They scramble up and tear off their masks. We pick up the wounded man, one of us holds the arm with the splint on it. And in a group we stumble away as quickly as possible.
The cemetery has been blown to pieces. Coffins and corpses are scattered all around. They have been killed for a second time; but every corpse that was shattered saved the life of one of us.
The fence has been wrecked, the rails of the field railway[109] on the other side have been ripped out and bent upwards, so that they point to the sky. Someone is lying on the ground in front of us. We stop. Kropp goes on alone with the wounded man.
The man on the ground is a recruit. He has blood smeared all over one hip; he is so exhausted that I reach for my flask, which has tea with rum in it. Kat holds back my hand and bends over him. ‘Where did you cop it, mate?[110]’
He moves his eyes, too weak to answer.
Carefully we cut away his trousers. He moans. ‘It’s OK, OK, it’ll soon be better…’
If he’s been hit in the stomach then he mustn’t drink anything. He has thrown up, and that is a good sign. We expose the hip area.
It is just a pulp of torn flesh and splintered bone. The joint has been hit. This lad will never walk again.
I wet my fingers and run them across his forehead, then give him a drink. Some life comes into his eyes. It’s only now that we realize that his right arm is bleeding as well.
Kat spreads out two field dressings as wide as he can, so that they cover the wound. I look around for some cloth, so that I can tie it up loosely. We haven’t got anything, so I cut more of the wounded man’s trousers away so that I can use a piece of his underpants as a bandage. But he isn’t wearing any. I look at him more closely. It’s the blond lad from earlier on.
Meanwhile Kat has fetched a couple more field dressings from the pockets of dead soldiers, and we place them carefully on the wound. The lad is looking at us with a fixed gaze.
‘We’ll go and get a stretcher now.’
But he opens his mouth and whispers, ‘Stay here —’
Kat says, ‘We’ll be back in a minute. We’re going to get a stretcher for you.’
It is impossible to say whether he understands or not; he whimpers like a child behind us as we go: ‘Stay here —’
Kat looks all round and then whispers, ‘Wouldn’t it be best just to take a revolver and put him out of his misery?’
The lad is not likely to survive being moved, and at the very most he’ll last a couple of days. But everything he’s been through so far will be nothing compared to those few days until he dies. At the moment he is still in shock and can’t feel anything. Within an hour he’ll be a screaming mass of unbearable agonies, and the few days he still has left to live will just be an incessant raging torture. And what difference does it make to anyone whether he has to suffer them or not?
I nod. ‘You’re right, Kat. The best thing would be a bullet.’ ‘Give me a gun,’ he says, and stops walking. I can see that he is set on it[111]. We look around – but we’re not alone any more. A small group is gathering near us, and heads are appearing out of the shell holes and trenches.
We bring a stretcher.
Kat shakes his head. ‘Such young lads —’ He says it again: ‘Such young, innocent lads…
Our losses are not as bad as might have been expected: five dead and eight wounded. It was only a short barrage. Two of our dead are lying in one of the re-opened graves; all we have to do is fill it in.
We go back. We trot along silently, in line one behind the other. The wounded are taken to the dressing station[112]. The morning is overcast, the orderlies scurry about with tags and numbers, the wounded whimper. It starts to rain.
Within an hour we reach our truck and climb aboard. There is more room on it now than there was before.
The rain gets heavier. We open up tarpaulins and put them over our heads. The drops drum down on top of them. Streams of rain pour off the sides. The trucks splash through the holes in the road and we rock backwards and forwards, half asleep.
Two men at the front of the truck have long forked poles[113] with them. They watch out for the telephone wires that hang down so low across the roadway that they could take your head off. The two men make sure they get them with their forked sticks and lift them over our heads. We hear them shouting, ‘Mind the wires![114]’ and still half asleep we bob down and then straighten up again.
The trucks roll monotonously onwards, the shouts are monotonous, the falling rain is monotonous. It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead men up at the front of the truck, on the body of the little recruit with a wound that is far too big for his hip, it’s falling on Kemmerich’s grave, and it’s falling in our hearts.
From somewhere we hear the sound of a shell-burst. We snap to, our eyes wide open, our hands ready again to heave our bodies over the side of the truck into the ditch by the roadside.
But we don’t hear any more. Just the monotonous shouts of ‘Mind the wires!’ – we bob down – we’re half asleep again.
V
It’s a nuisance trying to kill every single louse when you’ve got hundreds of them. The beasts are hard, and it gets to be a bore when you are forever pinching them between your nails. So Tjaden has rigged up a boot-polish lid hanging on a piece of wire over a burning candle-end. You just have to toss the lice into this little frying-pan – there is a sharp crack, and that’s it.
We’re sitting around, shirts on our knees, stripped to the waist in the warm air, our fingers
field dressing pack – индивидуальный перевязочный пакет
my knees give way – у меня подкашиваются ноги
field railway – временная железная дорога
Where did you cop it, mate?
I can see that he is set on it – Я вижу, что он решился
dressing station – пункт первой медицинской помощи
forked pole – палка с рогулькой на конце
Mind the wires! – Осторожно – провода!
