Эрих Ремарк - All Quiet on the Western Front / На Западном фронте без перемен. Книга для чтения на английском языке

Another night. The tension has worn us out. It is a deadly tension that feels as if a jagged knife blade is being scraped along the spine. Our legs won’t function, our hands are trembling and our bodies are like thin membranes stretched over barely repressed madness, holding in what would otherwise be an unrestrained outburst of endless screams. We have no flesh, no muscles now, we cannot even look at one another for fear of seeing the unimaginable. And so we press our lips together tightly – it has to stop, it has to stop – perhaps we’ll get through it all.

Suddenly there are no more close explosions. The shelling goes on, but it has drawn back a little, our trench is clear. We grab hold of our hand-grenades, heave them out in front of the dugout and then leap out. The constant artillery fire has stopped, but in its place there is heavy defensive fire from behind us. It is the attack.

Nobody would believe that there could still be human beings in this churned-up wilderness; but everywhere steel helmets are appearing from the trenches, and fifty yards from us a machine-gun has already been set up and starts to bark away.

The wire entanglements [162] wire entanglement – проволочное заграждение have been torn to bits. Even so, the wire is still holding up in places. We can see the attackers coming. Our big guns fire, machine-guns rattle, rifles crack. They are working their way across and on to us. Haie and Kropp start on the grenades. They throw them as fast as they can, and the grenades are handed to them ready primed. Haie throws them sixty yards, Kropp fifty – this has been tested and it is important. The men from the other side can’t do much until they are within thirty yards of us.

We recognize the distorted faces and the flattened helmets – it’s the French. They reach what is left of our wire and already they’ve clearly had losses. A whole line of them is wiped out by the machine-gun near us; but then it starts to jam, and they move in closer.

I see one of them run into a knife-rest [163] knife-rest – рогатка (заграждение из перекрещенных и скрепленных между собой деревянных бруса и кольев) , his face lifted upwards. His body slumps, and his hands stay caught, raised up as if he is praying. Then the body falls away completely and only the shot-off hands and the stumps of the arms are left hanging in the wire.

In the seconds when we turn to go back, three faces come up from the ground in front of us. Beneath one of the helmets there is a dark moustache and two eyes which are fixed on me. I raise my arm, but I can’t throw a grenade towards those strange eyes, and for one crazy moment the whole battle rages round me and round those two eyes like a circus, then the head looks up, there is a hand, a movement, and my grenade flies across and into them.

We run back, pull the wooden wire-cradles into the trench and toss primed grenades behind us, to ensure fire cover to the rear. The machine-guns are firing from the next post.

We have turned into dangerous animals. We are not fighting, we are defending ourselves from annihilation. We are not hurling our grenades against human beings – what do we know about all that in the heat of the moment? – the hands and the helmets that are after us belong to Death himself, and for the first time in three days we are able to look Death in the eyes, for the first time in three days we can defend ourselves against it, we are maddened with fury, not lying there waiting impotently for the executioner any more, we can destroy and we can kill to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to take revenge.

We squat down behind every corner, behind every wire-cradle, and throw exploding bundles at the feet of those coming at us before we get away. The blast of our hand-grenades strikes hard against our legs and arms as we run, stooping like cats, swept by the wave that carries us onwards, the wave that makes us cruel, makes us into highwaymen, into murderers, I suppose into devils, this wave which multiplies our strength in fear and fury and the urge to live, which seeks and fights for a way out for us. If your own father came across with those from the other side you wouldn’t hesitate to hurl a hand-grenade straight at him!

We’ve given up the front-line trenches. Are they still trenches at all? They have been shot to pieces, destroyed – there are just odd sections of trench, craters linked to one another by shallow communication alleys, groups of shell holes, nothing else. But the numbers of losses from the other side are increasing. They didn’t reckon on so much resistance.

It is getting on for midday. The sun bums down and sweat stings our eyes, and when we wipe it away on our sleeves there is often blood there, too. We make it back to the first of our better maintained trenches. It is manned and ready to withstand the counter-attack, and the men take us in. Our artillery gets going at full blast and makes an attack impossible.

The lines of men following us have to stop. They can’t move forwards. Their attack is cut to pieces by our artillery. We lie in wait. The shellfire lifts a hundred yards and we go over the top again. Right next to me a lance-corporal gets his head blown off. He runs on for a few paces more with blood shooting up out of his neck like a fountain.

It doesn’t come to hand-to-hand fighting. The others are forced back. We get back to our original bits of trench and then go on beyond them.

God, this turning! You get to the protection of the reserve trenches and you just want to crawl into them and disappear; but you have to turn around and go back into the terror. If we hadn’t turned into automata at this moment we would have just lain down, exhausted, stripped of any will to go on. But we are dragged along forwards again with everyone else, unwilling but crazed, wild and raging, we want to kill, because now the others are our deadly enemies, their grenades and rifles are aimed at us, and if we don’t destroy them they will destroy us.

The brown earth, the torn and mangled brown earth, shimmering greasily under the sun’s rays, becomes a backdrop for our dulled and ever-moving automatic actions, our harsh breathing is the rasping of the clockwork, our lips are dry and our heads feel worse than after a night’s hard drinking – and so we stumble onwards, while into our bullet-ridden, shot-through souls the image of the brown earth insinuates itself painfully, the brown earth with the greasy sun and the dead or twitching soldiers, who he there as if that were perfectly normal, and who grab at our legs and scream as we try to jump over them.

We have lost all feelings for others, we barely recognize each other when somebody else comes into our line of vision, agitated as we are. We are dead men with no feelings, who are able by some trick, some dangerous magic, to keep on running and keep on killing.

A young Frenchman falls behind, we catch up with him, he raises his hands and he still has a revolver in one of them – we don’t know if he wants to shoot or to surrender. A blow with an entrenching tool splits his face in two. A second Frenchman sees this and tries to get away, and a bayonet hisses into his back. He leaps in the air and then stumbles away, his arms outstretched and his mouth wide open in a scream, the bayonet swaying in his back. A third throws down his rifle and cowers with his hands over his eyes. He stays behind with a few other prisoners-of-war, to help carry off the wounded.

Suddenly in our pursuit we reach the enemy lines. We are so close behind our fleeing opponents that we get there at almost the same time as they do. Because of that, we don’t have too many casualties. A machine-gun barks out, but is silenced with a hand-grenade. All the same, those few seconds were enough for five of our men to get stomach wounds. With the butt of his rifle, Kat smashes to pulp the face of one of the machine-gunners, who hasn’t been wounded. We bayonet the others before they can get their grenades out. Then we gulp down thirstily the water they have been using to cool their gun.