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

It’s no use. Thoughts buzz round in my head in complete confusion – I hear my mother’s warning voice, I see the Russians leaning against the wire-netting, with their beards blowing in the wind, I get a bright and wonderful picture of a canteen with comfortable chairs, then of a cinema in Valenciennes [231] Valenciennes – Валансьен (город во Франции) , and then, horrible in my tortured imagination, of a gun barrel, grey and unfeeling, following me around silently wherever I try to turn my head: sweat is breaking out from every pore.

I am still lying in the hollow I found. I look at my watch; only a few minutes have passed. My forehead is wet, there is dampness all round my eyes, my hands are shaking and I’m coughing quietly. It’s nothing more than a bad attack of fear, of common-or-garden cold terror at the prospect of sticking my head out and crawling on.

All my tense readiness melts into the desire to stay lying down. My limbs are glued to the ground, I try to move, but I can’t – they just won’t come away from it. I press myself into the earth, I cannot move forwards, and I decide to stay where I am.

But right away a new wave comes over me, a wave of shame, of regret, and yet still one of self-preservation. I lift myself up slightly to have a look around. My eyes are stinging and I stare into the darkness. Then a Verey light goes up and I duck down again.

I am fighting a crazy, confused battle. I want to get out of my hollow in the ground and I keep on slipping back in; I say to myself, ‘You’ve got to, it’s to do with your mates, not some stupid order,’ and straight after that: ‘So what? I’ve only got the one life to lose.’

It’s all because of that leave, I tell myself bitterly by way of an excuse. But I don’t believe it myself, I just feel horribly drained. I raise myself up slowly and stretch out my arms, then raise my back and prop myself half on the edge of the shell hole.

Then I hear sounds and get down again. In spite of the thunder of the guns you can pick out suspicious noises completely clearly. I listen – the sound is coming from behind me. It is our soldiers moving through the trench. Now I can even hear muted voices. From the sound of it, it might even be Kat speaking.

Suddenly a surprising warmth comes over me. Those voices, those few soft words, those footsteps in the trench behind me tear me with a jolt away from the terrible feeling of isolation that goes with the fear of death, to which I nearly succumbed. Those voices mean more than my life, more than mothering and fear, they are the strongest and most protective thing that there is: they are the voices of my pals.

I’m no longer a shivering scrap of humanity alone in the dark – I belong to them and they to me, we all share the same fear and the same life, and we are bound to each other in a strong and simple way. I want to press my face into them, those voices, those few words that saved me, and which will be my support.

I slip warily over the edge, and snake forwards. I creep along on all fours; things are going well, I fix the direction, look about me and take note of the pattern of artillery fire so that I can find my way back. Then I try to make contact with the others.

I am still afraid, but now it is a rational fear, which is just an extraordinarily enhanced cautiousness. It is a windy night, and the shadows move back and forth in the sudden flashes from the gunfire. By this light you can see too much and too little. Often I freeze suddenly, but there is never anything there. In this way I get quite a long distance forward, and then turn back in a curve. I haven’t made contact. Every few feet closer to our trench makes me more confident, but I still move as fast as I can. It wouldn’t be too good to stop one just at this moment.

And then I get another shock. I’m no longer able to make out the exact direction. Silently I crouch in a shell hole and try and get my bearings. It has happened more than once that a man has jumped cheerfully into a trench, and only then found out that it was the wrong side.

After a while I listen again. I still haven’t sorted out where I am. The wilderness of shell holes seems so confusing that in my agitated state I no longer have any idea which way to go. Maybe I am crawling parallel with the trenches, and I could go on for ever doing that. So I make another turn.

These damned Verey lights! It feels as if they last for an hour, and you can’t make a move, or things soon start whistling round you.

It’s no use, I’ve got to get out. By fits [232] by fits – урывками and starts I walk my way along. I crawl crabwise across the ground and tear my hands to pieces on ragged bits of shrapnel as sharp as razor-blades. Often I get the impression that the sky is becoming lighter on the horizon, but that could just be my imagination. Gradually I realize that I am crawling for my life.

A shell hits. Then straight away two more. And then it really starts. A barrage. Machine-guns chatter. Now there is nothing in the world that I can do except he low. It seems to be an offensive. Light-rockets go up everywhere. Incessantly.

I’m lying bent double in a big shell hole in water up to my waist. When the offensive starts I’ll drop into the water as far as I can without drowning and put my face in the mud. I’ll have to play dead.

Suddenly I hear their shellfire give way. Straight away I slip down into the water at the bottom of the shell hole, my helmet right on the back of my neck and my mouth only sufficiently above water to let me breathe.

Then I remain motionless – because somewhere there is a clinking noise, something is coming closer, moving along and stamping; every nerve in my body tenses up and freezes. The clinking noise moves on over me, the first wave of soldiers is past. All that I had in my head was the one explosive thought: what will you do if someone jumps into your shell hole? Now I quickly pull out my small dagger, grip it tight and hide it by keeping my hand downwards in the mud. The idea keeps pounding in my brain that if anyone jumps in I’ll stab him immediately, stick the knife into his throat at once, so that he can’t shout out, there’s no other way, he’ll be as frightened as I am, and we’ll attack each other purely out of fear, so I have to get there first.

Now our gun batteries are firing. There is an impact near me. That makes me furiously angry, that’s all I need, to be hit by our own gunfire; I curse into the mud and grind my teeth, it’s an outburst of rage, and in the end all I can do is groan and plead.

The crash of shells pounds against my ears. If our men launch a counter-offensive [233] counter-offensive – контрнаступление , I’m free. I press my head against the earth and I can hear the dull thunder like distant explosions in a mine – then I lift my head to listen to the noises above me.

The machine-guns are rattling away. I know that our barbed-wire entanglements are firm and pretty well undamaged; sections of them are electrified. The gunfire increases. They aren’t getting through. They’ll have to turn back.

I collapse into the shell hole again, tense almost to breaking point. Clattering, crawling, clinking – it all becomes audible, a single scream ringing out in the midst of it all. They’re coming under fire, the attack has been held off.

It’s got a little bit lighter. Footsteps hurry by me. The first few. Past me. Then some more. The rattle of the machine-guns becomes continuous. I am just about to turn round a bit when suddenly there is a noise and a body falls on to me in the shell hole, heavily and with a splash, then slips and lands on top of me —

I don’t think at all, I make no decision – I just stab wildly and feel only how the body jerks, then goes limp and collapses. When I come to myself again, my hand is sticky and wet.