Эрих Мария Ремарк – All Quiet on the Western Front / На Западном фронте без перемен. Книга для чтения на английском языке (страница 11)

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 working on the knee. Haie has a particularly splendid species of louse: they have a red cross on their heads. Because of that he maintains that he brought them back from the military hospital in Tourhout, where he claims they were the personal property of a senior staff surgeon[115]. He also wants to use the grease that is very slowly accumulating in the tin lid to polish his boots, and roars with laughter for a good half-hour at his own joke.

But today nobody takes much notice. We have something else far too important on our minds.

The rumour turned out to be true. Himmelstoss is here. He turned up yesterday, and we have already heard his familiar tones. Apparendy he was a little bit too vigorous with a couple of recruits on the training field. He didn’t know that one of them was the son of the chairman of the district council[116]. That did for him.[117]

He is in for a surprise. For hours Tjaden has been running through the things he wants to say to him. Haie keeps looking speculatively at his gigantic paws and winking at me. Beating up Himmelstoss was the high point of his existence; he told me that he still dreams about it. Kropp and Muller are having a discussion. Kropp has managed to nab a mess-tin full of lentils for himself, probably from the sappers’ kitchens. Muller gives it a greedy look, but gets a grip on himself and asks, ‘Albert, what would you do if all of a sudden it was peacetime?’

‘There’s no such thing as peacetime,’ replies Albert curtly.

Muller persists. ‘Yes, but if… what would you do?’

‘I’d bugger off out of it[118],’ grumbles Kropp.

‘ Course[119]. And then what?’

‘Get blind drunk,’ says Albert.

‘Don’t talk rubbish, I’m being serious —’

‘Me too,’ says Albert, ‘what else would there be to do?’

The idea interests Kat. He claims a portion of Kropp’s lentils, gets his whack, then he ponders for a long while and offers the view ‘Well, you could get drunk, of course, but otherwise it would be off to the nearest train – and home to mother. Bloody hell, Albert, peacetime…’

He grubs around in his oilskin wallet for a photograph and passes it around proudly. ‘My missus.’ Then he stows it away and curses: ‘Lousy bloody war…’

‘It’s all right for you,’ I say, ‘you’ve got your wife and your lad.’

He nods. ‘That’s true, and I have to make sure they’ve got enough to eat.’

We all laugh. ‘There won’t be any problem there, Kat, you’d just requisition something.’

Muller is hungry and says he still isn’t satisfied with the answers. He shakes Haie Westhus out of his daydreams of beating up Himmelstoss. ‘Haie, what would you do if the war ended?’

‘What he ought to do is kick your arse from here to kingdom come[120] for talking about that sort of thing here,’ I put in. ‘Where did you get the idea anyway?’

‘Where do the flies go in winter?[121]’ is Muller’s brief answer before he turns to Haie Westhus again.

Haie is suddenly finding it all a bit difficult. He puts his freckled head in his hands: ‘You mean, when there isn’t any more war?’

‘Dead right.[122] You’ve got it in one.[123]’

‘Then there’d be women around again, wouldn’t there?’ Haie licks his lips.

‘That as well.’

‘Christ almighty,’ says Haie, and his expression softens, ‘the first thing I’d do is pick myself up some strapping great bint[124]

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