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

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      He says no. ‘If we wanted to give morphia to everyone we’d need buckets of the stuff —’

      ‘Only give it to officers, then, do you?’ snarls Kropp.

      I step in quickly and the first thing I do is give the orderly a cigarette. He takes it. Then I ask him, ‘Are you allowed to give shots at all?’

      He is annoyed. ‘If you think I can’t, what are you asking me for – ?’

      I press a few more cigarettes into his hand. ‘Just as a favour —’

      ‘Well, OK,’ he says. Kropp goes in with him, because he doesn’t trust him and wants to see him do it. We wait outside.

      Muller starts on again about the flying boots. ‘They would fit me perfectly. In these clodhoppers even my blisters get blisters. Do you think he’ll last until we come off duty tomorrow? If he goes during the night we’ve seen the last of the boots —’

      Albert comes back and says, ‘Do you reckon —?’

      ‘Had it,’ says Muller, and that’s that.

      We walk back to camp. I’m thinking about the letter I shall have to write to Kemmerich’s mother tomorrow. I’m shivering, I could do with a stiff drink. Muller is pulling up grass stems and he’s chewing on one. Suddenly little Kropp tosses his cigarette away, stamps on it like a madman, stares round with an unfocused and disturbed look on his face and stammers, ‘Shit! Shit! The whole damned thing is a load of shit!’

      We walk on for a long time. Kropp calms down – we know what was wrong, it’s just the strain of being at the front, we all get that way from time to time.

      Muller asks him, ‘What did Kantorek say in his letter?’

      He laughs. ‘He calls us “young men of iron”.’

      That makes the three of us laugh, though not because it is funny. Kropp curses. He is happy to be able to talk again —

      And yes, that’s it, that is what they think, those hundred thousand Kantoreks. Young men of iron. Young? None of us is more than twenty. But young? Young men? That was a long time ago. We are old now.

      II

      I find it strange to think that at home in a drawer there is the first part of a play I once started to write called ‘Saul’, and a stack of poems as well. I spent so many evenings on them – we all did things like that – but it has all become so unreal to me that I can’t even imagine it any more.

      When we came out here we were cut off, whether we liked it or not, from everything we had done up to that point. We often try to find a reason or an explanation for this, but we can never quite manage it. Things are particularly confused for us twenty-year-olds, for Kropp, Muller, Leer and me, the ones Kantorek called young men of iron. The older men still have firm ties to their earlier lives – they have property, wives, children, jobs and interests, and these bonds are all so strong that the war can’t break them. But for us twenty-year-olds there are only our parents, and for some of us a girlfriend. That isn’t much, because at our age parental influence is at its weakest, and girls haven’t really taken over yet. Apart from that, we really didn’t have much else; the occasional passion for something, a few hobbies, school; our lives didn’t go much further than that as yet. And now nothing is left of it all.

      Kantorek would say that we had been standing on the very threshold of life itself. It’s pretty well true, too. We hadn’t had a chance to put down any roots. The war swept us away. For the others, for the older men, the war is an interruption, and they can think beyond the end of it. But we were caught up by the war, and we can’t see how things will turn out. All we know for the moment is that in some strange and melancholy way we have become hardened, although we don’t often feel sad about it any more.