All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque [5]
Kemmerich signs with his hands. "Put them under the bed."
Müller does so. Kemmerich starts on again about the watch. How can one calm him without making him suspicious?
Müller reappears with a pair of airman's boots. They are fine English boots of soft, yellow leather which reach to the knees and lace up all the way -they are things to be coveted.
Müller is delighted at the sight of them. He matches their soles against his own clumsy boots and says: "Will you be taking them with you then, Franz?"
We all three have the same thought; even if he should get better, he would be able to use only one -they are no use to him. But as things are now it is a pity that they should stay here; the orderlies will of course grab them as soon as he is dead,
"Won't you leave them with us?" Müller repeats.
Kemmerich doesn't want to. They are his most prized possessions.
"Well, we could exchange," suggests Müller again. "Out here one can make some use of them." Still Kemmerich is not to be moved.
I tread on Müller's foot; reluctantly he puts the fine boots back again under the bed.
We talk a little more and then take our leave.
"Cheerio, Franz."
I promise him to come back in the morning. Müller talks of doing so, too. He is thinking of the lace-up boots and means to be on the spot.
Kemmerich groans. He is feverish. We get hold of an orderly outside and ask him to give Kemmerich a dose of morphia.
He refuses. "If we were to give morphia to everyone we would have to have tubs full---"
"You only attend to officers properly," says Kropp viciously.
I hastily intervene and give him a cigarette. He takes it.
"Are you usually allowed to give it, then?" I ask him.
He is annoyed. "If you don't think so, then why do you ask?"
I press a few more cigarettes into his hand. "Do us the favour---"
"Well, all right," he says.
Kropp goes in with him. He doesn't trust him and wants to see. We wait outside.
Müller returns to the subject of the boots. "They would fit me perfectly. In these boots I get blister after blister. Do you think he will last till tomorrow after drill? If he passes out in the night, we know where the boots---"
Kropp returns. "Do you think---?" he asks.
"Done for," says Müller emphatically.
We go back to the huts. I think of the letter that I must write to-morrow to Kemmerich's mother. I am freezing. I could do with a tot of rum. Müller pulls up some grass and chews it. Suddenly little Kropp throws his cigarette away, stamps on it savagely, and looking around him with a broken and distracted face, stammers "Damned shit, the damned shit!"
We walk on for a long time. Kropp has calmed himself; we understand, he saw red; out here every man gets like that sometime.
"What has Kantorek written to you?" Müller asks him.
He laughs. "We are the Iron Youth."
We all three smile bitterly. Kropp rails: he is glad that he can speak.
Yes, that's the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth. Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.
TWO
It is strange to think that at home in the drawer of my writing table there lies the beginning of a play called "Saul" and a bundle of poems. Many an evening I have worked over them-we all did something of the kind-but that has become so unreal to me I cannot comprehend it any more. Our early life is cut off from the moment we came here, and that without our lifting a hand. We often try to look back on it and to find an explanation, but never quite succeed. For us young men of twenty everything is extraordinarily vague, for Kropp, Müller, Leer, and for me, for all of us whom Kantorek calls the "Iron Youth." All the older men are linked up with their previous life. They have wives, children, occupations, and interests, they have a background which is so strong that the war cannot obliterate it. We young men of twenty, however, have only our parents, and some, perhaps, a girl-that is not much, for at our age the influence of parents is at its weakest and girls have not yet got a hold over us. Besides