by Pete Ayrton
‘Great, Kat.’
We are brothers, pressing one another to take the best pieces. When we have finished I smoke a cigarette and Kat has a cigar. There is a lot left over.
‘Kat, how about us taking a bit over to Kropp and Tjaden?’
‘Right,’ he says. We cut off a chunk and wrap it up carefully in newspaper. We were planning to take the rest back to our billets, but Kat laughs and just says, ‘Tjaden.’
I agree that we’ll have to take it all. So we make our way to the hen-run prison to wake up the pair of them. Before we go we pack away the feathers.
Kropp and Tjaden think we are a mirage. Then they get stuck in. Tjaden is gnawing away, holding a wing with both hands as if he were playing a mouth organ. He slurps the gravy out of the pot and smacks his lips. ‘I’ll never forget you for this.’
We walk back to the huts. There is the great sky again, and the stars, and the first streaks of dawn, and I am walking beneath that sky, a soldier with big boots and a full belly, a little soldier in the early morning – and beside me walks Kat, angular and slightly stooping, my pal.
The silhouettes of the huts loom over us in the dawn light like a black and welcome sleep.
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE
THE DEAD MAN’S ROOM
from All Quiet on the Western Front
translated by Brian Murdoch
WE OFTEN GET VOLUNTEER AUXILIARY NURSES from the Red Cross. They are well meaning, but they can be a bit on the clumsy side. When they re-make our beds they often hurt us, and then they are so shaken that they hurt us even more.
The nuns are more reliable. They know how to get hold of us, but we would really prefer them to be more cheerful. Some of them do have a good sense of humour, it’s true, and those are great. There is no one who wouldn’t do anything in the world for Sister Tina, a wonderful nurse, who cheers up the whole wing, even when we can only see her from a distance. And there are a few more like her. We’d go through hell and high water for them. We really can’t complain – you get treated like a civilian by the nuns here. On the other hand, when you think of the garrison hospitals, then you really start to worry.
Franz Waechter doesn’t regain his strength. One day he is taken out and doesn’t come back. Josef Hamacher knows what has happened. ‘We won’t see him again. He’s been taken to the Dead Man’s Room.’
‘What Dead Man’s Room?’
‘You know, the Dying Room—’
‘What’s that?’
‘The small room at the corner of this wing. Anybody who is about to snuff it gets taken there. There are two beds. It’s called the Dying Room all over the hospital.’
‘But why do they do that?’
‘So they don’t have so much work afterwards. It’s easier, too, because it’s right by the entrance to the mortuary. Maybe they want to make sure that nobody dies on the wards, and do it so as not to upset the others. They can keep an eye on a man better, too, if he is in there on his own.’
‘What about the man himself?’
Josef shrugs. ‘Usually he is past noticing much any more.’
‘Does everyone know about this?’
‘Anyone who has been here for a while finds out, of course.’
*
That afternoon Franz Waechter’s bed is made up again. After a couple of days they come and take the new man away. Josef indicates with his hand where he is going. We watch a good few more come and go.
Relatives often come and sit by the beds crying, or talking softly and shyly. One old lady is very reluctant to leave, but she can’t stay there all night, of course. She comes back very early on the following morning, but not quite early enough; because when she goes up to the bed there is already somebody new in it. She has to go to the mortuary. She gives us the apples that she had brought with her.
Little Peter is getting worse, too. His temperature chart looks bad, and one day a flat hospital trolley is put beside his bed. ‘Where am I going?’ he asks.
‘To have your dressings done.’
They lift him on to the trolley. But the nurse makes the mistake of taking his battledress tunic from its hook and putting it on the trolley with him, so that she doesn’t have to make two journeys. Peter realizes at once what is going on and tries to roll off the trolley. ‘I’m staying here!’
They hold him down. He cries out weakly with his damaged lung, ‘I don’t want to go to the Dying Room.’
‘But we’re going to the dressing ward.’
‘Then why do you need my tunic?’ He can’t speak any more. Hoarse and agitated, he whispers, ‘Want to stay here.’
They don’t answer, and move him out. By the door he tries to sit up. His head of black curls is bobbing, his eyes are full of tears. ‘I’ll be back! I’ll be back!’ he shouts.
The door closes. We are all rather worked up, but nobody says anything. Eventually Josef says, ‘Plenty of them have said that. But once you are in there you never last.’
*
They operate on me and I puke for two whole days. My bones don’t seem to want to knit properly, says the doctor’s clerk. There’s another man whose bones grow together badly and he has to have them broken again. It’s all pretty wretched.
Our latest additions include two recruits who have flat feet. When he is doing his rounds the chief surgeon finds this out and stops, delighted. ‘We’ll get rid of that problem,’ he tells them. ‘We’ll just do a little operation and you’ll both have healthy feet. Take their names, nurse.’
Once he has left, Josef – who knows everything – gives them a warning. ‘Whatever you do, don’t let him operate on you. That business is the old man’s medical hobby-horse. He’s dead keen on anyone he can get hold of to work on. He’ll operate on you for flat feet, and sure enough, when he’s finished you won’t have flat feet any more. Instead you’ll have club feet and you’ll be on crutches for the rest of your days.’
‘What can we do?’ asks one of them.
‘Just say no. You’re here to have your bullet wounds treated, not your flat feet. Think about it. Now you can still walk, but just let the old man get you under the knife and you’re cripples. He’s after guinea pigs for his experiments, and the war is a good time for him, just like it is for all the doctors. Have a look around the ward downstairs; there are at least a dozen men hobbling about after he’s operated on them. A good few of them have been here since 1914 or 15 – for years. Not a single one of them can walk better than he could before, and for nearly all of them it’s worse, most of them have to have their legs in plaster. Every six months he catches up with them and breaks the bones again, and every time that’s supposed to do the trick. You be careful – he’s not allowed to do it if you refuse.’
‘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 w
e 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
IT’S AUTUMN. There are not many of the old lot left. I am the last one of the seven from our class still here.