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

I’m often on guard duty over the Russians. In the darkness you can make out their figures as they move about like sick storks, like huge birds. They come right up to the wire-netting and put their faces against it, with their fingers in the mesh. Often many of them will stand together. And they breathe in the winds that blow across from the moors and the woods.

Only rarely do they speak, and then only a word or two. They behave more humanely, I could almost think in a more brotherly manner towards one another, than we do here. But perhaps that is because they are unhappier than we are. And yet the war is over as far as they are concerned. Still, just waiting for the next bout of dysentery is no kind of life either.

The home guardsmen who are in charge of them say that they were more lively at the beginning. There were the kinds of dealings and conflicts between them that you always get, and apparently fists were raised and knives used to come out. Now they are dulled and indifferent, and most of them don’t even masturbate any more because they are too weak, although usually it is so bad that you get whole barracks at it at the same time.

They stand by the wire; often one staggers away, and then another one quickly takes his place in the line. Most of them are silent; only a few beg for dog-ends [218] dog-end – окурок .

I watch their dark figures. Their beards blow in the wind. I know nothing about them except that they are prisoners-of-war, and that is precisely what shakes me. Their lives are anonymous and blameless; if I knew more about them, what they are called, how they live, what their hopes and fears are, then my feelings might have a focus and could turn into sympathy. But at the moment all I sense in them is the pain of the dumb animal, the fearful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men.

An order has turned these silent figures into our enemies; an order could turn them into friends again. On some table, a document is signed by some people that none of us knows, and for years our main aim in life is the one thing that usually draws the condemnation of the whole world and incurs its severest punishment in law. How can anyone make distinctions like that looking at these silent men, with their faces like children and their beards like apostles? Any drill-corporal is a worse enemy to the recruits, any schoolmaster a worse enemy to his pupils than they are to us. And yet we would shoot at them again if they were free, and so would they at us.

Suddenly I’m frightened: I mustn’t think along those lines any more. That path leads to the abyss. It isn’t the right time yet – but I don’t want to lose those thoughts altogether, I’ll preserve them, keep them locked away until the war is over. My heart is pounding; could this be the goal, the greatness, the unique experience that I thought about in the trenches, that I was seeking as a reason for going on living after this universal catastrophe is over? Is this the task we must dedicate our lives to after the war, so that all the years of horror will have been worthwhile?

I take out my cigarettes, break each one in half and give them to the Russians. They bow, and then light them. Now little points of red are glowing in some of their faces. I find this comforting; they look like little windows in the houses of some village at night, revealing that behind them there are rooms which are havens of safety.

The days pass. One misty morning another Russian is buried; a few of them die every day now. I happen to be on sentry duty [219] sentry duty – караульная служба when he is laid to rest. The POWs sing a chorale; they sing in harmony and it sounds as if they were hardly voices at all, but as if an organ were playing, far away on the moor.

The funeral is soon over.

In the evening they are standing by the wire again, and the wind blows across to them from the birch woods. The stars are cold.

By now I’ve got to know a few of them who can speak German pretty well. One of them is a musician, and he tells me that he had been a violinist in Berlin. When he hears that I play the piano a little, he fetches his violin and plays. The others sit down and lean their backs against the wire-netting. He stands and plays, and often he has that far-away look that violinists get when they close their eyes, and then he strikes up a new rhythm on the instrument and smiles at me.

Presumably he is playing folk songs; the others hum the tunes with him. They are like dark hills, and the humming is deep, subterranean. The voice of the violin stands out like a slim girl above them, and it is bright and alone. The voices stop and the violin remains – it sounds thin in the night, as if it were freezing; you have to stand close by – it would probably be better in a room – out here it makes you sad to hear it wandering about, all alone.

I don’t get any Sunday passes because, after all, I’ve just had a long leave. So on the last Sunday before I go, my father and my oldest sister come to visit me. We spend the whole day sitting in the Soldiers’ Club. Where else could we go? We don’t want to go to the barracks. In the afternoon we go for a walk on the moor.

The hours drag by; we don’t know what to talk about. And so we talk about my mother’s illness. It’s now definite that it’s cancer, she’s already in hospital and waiting for an operation. The doctors hope that she will get better, but we’ve never heard of cancer being cured.

‘Which hospital is she in?’ I ask.

‘In the Queen Louisa,’ says my father.

‘What kind of a ward?’

‘Public. We’ll have to wait and see what the operation will cost. She wanted to go into the public ward [220] public ward – отделение в государственной больнице herself. She said she’d have someone to talk to then. Besides, it’s cheaper.’

‘But then she’ll be with all those other people. I only hope she can get some sleep at night.’

My father nods. His face is drawn and full of lines. My mother has been ill a lot; it’s true that she has only ever gone into hospital when she was forced to, but for all that it has cost us a great deal of money, and my father’s life has really been taken up by it.

‘If only we knew what the operation will cost —’ he says.

‘Haven’t you asked?’

‘Not in so many words, you can’t really – you don’t want the doctor to turn against you, because he still has to operate on Mother.’

Yes, I think bitterly, that’s the way we are, the way poor people are. They don’t dare ask the price, and worry themselves half to death about it instead; but the others, the ones who can afford it, it’s perfectly natural to them to settle the price beforehand. The doctor isn’t going to turn against them in any case.

‘The dressings afterwards are so expensive, too,’ says my father.

‘Doesn’t the sickness fund [221] sickness fund – больничная касса pay anything towards it?’ I ask.

‘Your mother has already been ill for too long.’

‘Have you got any money, then?’

He shakes his head. ‘No, but I can do some more overtime.’

I know what he means: he’ll stand at his work-table until midnight and fold and glue and trim. At eight in the evening he’ll eat some of that far from nourishing stuff they get on their ration cards. After that he’ll take a powder for his headache and carry on working.

To cheer him up a bit, I tell him a few stories that come into my mind, army jokes and so on, where a general or a sergeant gets dropped in it.

Afterwards I see them both to the station. They give me a pot of jam and a parcel of potato pancakes that my mother managed to cook for me.