No Man's Land (83 page)

‘What the hell,' says one of the two men wearily, ‘better your feet than your head. Who knows what you'll get when you're back at the front. I don't care what they do to me, so long as I get sent home. Having a club foot's better than being dead.'

The other one, a young man like us, doesn't want to. The next morning the old man has them brought down and argues with them and bullies them for so long that they both agree after all. What else can they do? They are just the poor bloody infantry and he's top brass. They are brought back chloroformed and with plaster casts on.

*

Albert is in a bad way. They take him away and amputate. The whole leg from the upper thigh downwards is taken off. Now he hardly ever speaks. Once he says that he will shoot himself the minute he can lay his hands on a revolver.

A new hospital transport train arrives. Our room gets two blinded soldiers. One of them is very young, a musician. The nurses never use knives when they feed him; he's already grabbed one once out of a nurse's hand. In spite of these precautions, something still happens. The sister who is feeding him one evening is called away, and leaves the plate and the fork on the side table while she is gone. He gropes across for the fork, gets hold of it and rams it with all his force into his chest, then grabs a shoe and hammers on the shaft as hard as he can. We shout for help and it takes three men to get the fork out. The blunt prongs had gone in a long way. He swears at us all night, so that none of us can sleep. In the morning he has a screaming fit.

Again there are empty beds. One day follows another, days filled with pain and fear, with groans and with the death rattle. Even having a Dying Room is no use any more because it isn't enough; men die during the night in our room. Things just go faster than the nurses can spot.

One day, though, our door is flung open, a hospital trolley is rolled in, and there sits Peter on his stretcher, pale, thin, upright and triumphant, with his tangle of black curls. Sister Tina pushes the trolley over to his old bed with a broad smile on her face. He's come back from the Dying Room. We had assumed he was long since dead.

He looks at us. ‘What about that, then?'

And even Josef has to admit that it is a new one on him.

*

After a while a few of us are allowed out of bed. I am given a pair of crutches, too, so that I can hobble about. But I don't use them much; I can't bear the way Albert looks at me when I walk across the ward. His eyes follow me with such a strange look in them. Because of that I often try to slip out into the corridor – I can move more freely there.

On the floor below us there are men with stomach and spinal wounds, men with head wounds and men with both legs or arms amputated. In the right-hand wing are men with wounds in the jaw, men who have been gassed and men wounded in the nose, ears or throat. In the left-hand wing are those who have been blinded and men who have been hit in the lungs or in the pelvis, in one of the joints, in the kidneys, in the testicles or in the stomach. It is only here that you realize all the different places where a man can be hit.

Two men die of tetanus. Their skin becomes pale, their limbs stiffen, and at the end only their eyes remain alive – for a long time. With many of the wounded, the damaged limb has been hoisted up into the air on a kind of gallows; underneath the wound itself there is a dish for the pus to drip into. The basins are emptied every two or three hours. Other men are in traction, with heavy weights pulling down at the end of the bed. I see wounds in the gut which are permanently full of matter. The doctor's clerk shows me X-rays of hips, knees and shoulders that have been shattered completely.

It is impossible to grasp the fact that there are human faces above these torn bodies, faces in which life goes on from day to day. And on top of it all, this is just one single military hospital, just one – there are hundreds of thousands of them in Germany, hundreds of thousands of them in France, hundreds of thousands of them in Russia. How pointless all human thoughts, words and deeds must be, if things like this are possible! Everything must have been fraudulent and pointless if thousands of years of civilization weren't even able to prevent this river of blood, couldn't stop these torture chambers existing in their hundreds of thousands. Only a military hospital can really show you what war is.

I am young, I am twenty years of age; but I know nothing of life except despair, death, fear, and the combination of completely mindless superficiality with an abyss of suffering. I see people being driven against one another, and silently, uncomprehendingly, foolishly, obediently and innocently killing one another. I see the best brains in the world inventing weapons and words to make the whole process that much more sophisticated and long-lasting. And watching this with me are all my contemporaries, here and on the other side, all over the world – my whole generation is experiencing this with me. What would our fathers do if one day we rose up and confronted them, and called them to account? What do they expect from us when a time comes in which there is no more war? For years our occupation has been killing – that was the first experience we had. Our knowledge of life is limited to death. What will happen afterwards? And what can possibly become of us?

*

The oldest man in our room is Lewandowski. He is forty, and has been in the hospital for ten months already with a serious stomach wound. Only in recent weeks has he made enough progress to be able to limp around a little, bent double.

For the past few days he has been very excited. His wife has written to him from the little place away in Poland where she lives, that she has managed to get enough money together to pay for the journey to come and visit him.

She is on her way and might turn up any day. Lewandowski has lost his appetite, and even gives away sausage with red cabbage when he has only eaten a couple of mouthfuls. He is forever going round the room with his letter, and all of us have read it a dozen times already, the postmark has been inspected God knows how often, and there are so many grease stains and fingermarks on it that the writing can barely be deciphered any more. The inevitable happens: Lewandowski gets a fever and has to go back into bed.

He hasn't seen his wife for two years. She had a baby after he left, and she's bringing it with her. But Lewandowski has something quite different on his mind. He had been hoping to get permission to leave the hospital when his old woman came, for obvious reasons; it's all very nice to see someone, but when you get your wife back after such a long time you want something else altogether, if at all possible.

Lewandowski has talked about all this for hours with us, because there are no secrets in the army. Nobody bothers about it, anyway. Those of us who are already allowed out have told him about a few perfect places in the town, gardens and parks where nobody would disturb him. One man even knew of a small room.

But what use is all that now? Lewandowski is confined to bed and miserable. All the joy will go out of his life if he has to miss out on this. We tell him not to worry and promise that we will sort the whole business out somehow.

His wife appears the next afternoon, a little crumpled thing with anxious, darting eyes, like a bird's, wearing a kind of mantilla with frills and bands. God alone knows where she can have inherited the thing.

She murmurs something quietly, and waits shyly by the door. She is shocked to find that there are six of us in the room.

‘Come on, Marya,' says Lewandowski, swallowing his Adam's apple dangerously, ‘you can come on in, nobody's going to hurt you.'

She walks round the room and shakes hands with each one of us. Then she shows us the baby, which in the meantime has dirtied its nappy. She has a large, beaded bag with her and she takes a clean nappy out of it and neatly changes the child. This gets her over any initial embarrassment, and the two start to talk to each other.

Lewandowski is extremely fidgety and keeps looking across at us miserably with his bulging round eyes.

The time is right. The doctor has done his rounds, and at most a nurse might stick her head into the room. One of us goes outside again nevertheless – to make sure. He comes back in and nods. ‘No sign of man nor beast. Just tell her, Johann, and then get on with it!'

The two of them talk in their own language. The wife looks up, blushing a little and embarrassed. We grin amiably and make dismissive gestures – what is there to worry about? To hell with the proprieties, they were made for different times. Here in bed is Johann Lewandowski the carpenter, a soldier who has been crippled by a bullet, and there is his wife – who knows when he will see her again, he wants to have her and he shall have her, and that's that.

Two men stand guard at the door to intercept and occupy any nurses that might happen to come past. They reckon to keep watch for about a quarter of an hour.

Lewandowski can only lie on one side, so someone props a couple of pillows against his back. Albert gets the baby to hold, then we all turn round a bit, and the black mantilla disappears under the covers while we play a noisy and vigorous game of cards.

Everything is fine. I'm holding a damn good hand with all the high cards in clubs which has just about beaten everyone. With all this going on we have almost forgotten Lewandowski. After a time the baby begins to howl, although Albert is rocking it backwards and forwards despairingly. There is a bit of rustling and crackling and when we glance up, as if we were just doing so casually, we see that the child has the bottle in its mouth and is already back with its mother. It all worked.

We now feel like one big family, the woman is bright and cheerful, and Lewandowski lies there sweating and beaming.

He unpacks the beaded bag, and out come a couple of good sausages. Lewandowski takes the knife as if it were a bunch of flowers and saws the meat into chunks. He makes a sweeping gesture of invitation towards us all, and his little crumpled wife moves from one of us to the next, and laughs, and shares out the meat – she looks positively pretty as she does so. We call her ‘mother' and she likes that, and plumps our pillows up for us.

*

After a few weeks I have to go to physiotherapy every morning. There they strap up my leg and exercise it. My arm has long since healed.

New hospital transport trains arrive from the front. The bandages are not made out of cloth any more, they are just white crêpe paper. There is too much of a shortage of proper bandage material out there.

Albert's stump heals well. The wound has practically closed. In a few weeks' time he will be sent to be fitted for an artificial leg. He still doesn't talk a lot, and he's much more serious than he was before. Often he breaks off in mid-conversation and just stares into the distance. If he hadn't been with the rest of us he'd have put an end to it long ago.

But now he is over the worst. Sometimes he even watches while we play cards.

I'm given convalescent leave.

My mother doesn't want to let me go again. She is so weak. It is all even worse than last time.

Then I'm recalled by my regiment, and go back to the front. Leaving my friend Albert Kropp is hard. But in the army you get used to things like that.

ERICH MARIA REMARQUE

HE FELL IN OCTOBER

from
All Quiet on the Western Front

translated by Brian Murdoch

I
T'S AUTUMN
. There are not many of the old lot left. I am the last one of the seven from our class still here.

Everyone is talking about peace or an armistice. Everyone is waiting. If there is another disappointment, they will collapse, the hopes are too strong, they can no longer be pushed aside without exploding. If there is no peace, then there will be a revolution.

I have been given fourteen days' rest because I swallowed a bit of gas. I sit all day in a little garden in the sunshine. There will soon be an armistice, I believe in it too, now. Then we shall go home.

My thoughts stop there and I can't push them on any further. What attracts me so strongly and awaits me are raw feelings – lust for life, desire for home, the blood itself, the intoxication of escaping. But these aren't exactly goals.

If we had come back in 1916 we could have unleashed a storm out of the pain and intensity of our experiences. If we go back now we shall be weary, broken-down, burnt-out, rootless and devoid of hope. We shall no longer be able to cope.

No one will understand us – because in front of us there is a generation of men who did, it is true, share the years out here with us, but who already had a bed and a job and who are going back to their old positions, where they will forget all about the war – and behind us, a new generation is growing up, one like we used to be, and that generation will be strangers to us and will push us aside. We are superfluous even to ourselves, we shall grow older, a few will adapt, others will make adjustments, and many of us will not know what to do – the years will trickle away, and eventually we shall perish.