A few days later we are sent to evacuate a village. On the way we meet the fleeing inhabitants trundling their goods and chattels along with them in wheelbarrows, in perambulators, and on their backs. Their figures are bent, their faces full of grief, despair, haste, and resignation. The children hold on to their mothers’ hands, and often an older girl leads the little ones who stumble onward and are forever looking back. A few carry miserable-looking dolls. All are silent as they pass us by.
We are marching in column; the French certainly will not fire on a town in which there are still inhabitants. But a few minutes later the air screams, the earth heaves, cries ring out; a shell has landed among our rear squad. We scatter and fling ourselves down on the ground, but at that moment I feel the instinctive alertness leave me which hitherto has always made me do unconsciously the right thing under fire; the thought leaps up with a terrible throttling fear: “You are lost”—and the next moment a blow sweeps like a whip over my left leg. I hear Albert cry out; he is beside me.
“Quick, up, Albert!” I yell, for we are lying unsheltered in the open field.
He staggers up and runs. I keep beside him. We have to get over a hedge; it is higher than we are. Kropp seizes a branch, I heave him up by the leg, he cries out, I give him a swing and he flies over. With one bound I follow him and fall into a ditch that lies behind the hedge.
Our faces are smothered with duckweed and mud, but the cover is good. So we wade in up to our necks. Whenever a shell whistles we duck our heads under the water. After we have done this a dozen times, I am exhausted.
“Let’s get away, or I’ll fall in and drown,” groans Albert.
“Where has it got you?” I ask him.
“In the knee I think.”
“Can you run?”
“I think—”
“Then out!”
We make for the ditch beside the road, and stooping, run along it. The shelling follows us. The road leads towards the munition dump. If that goes up there won’t be so much as a bootlace left of us. So we change our plan and run diagonally across country.
Albert begins to drag. “You go, I’ll come on after,” he says, and throws himself down.
I seize him by the arm and shake him. “Up, Albert, if once you lie down you’ll never get any farther. Quick, I’ll hold you up.”
At last we reach a small dugout. Kropp pitches in and I bandage him up. The shot is just a little above his knee. Then I take a look at myself. My trousers are bloody and my arm, too. Albert binds up my wound with his field dressing. Already he is no longer able to move his leg, and we both wonder how we managed to get this far. Fear alone made it possible; we should have run even if our feet had been shot off;—we would have run on the stumps.
I can still crawl a little. I call out to a passing ambulance wagon which picks us up. It is full of wounded. There is an army medical lance-corporal with it who sticks an anti-tetanus needle into our chests.
At the dressing station we arrange matters so that we lie side by side. They give us a thin soup which we spoon down greedily and scornfully, because we are accustomed to better times but are hungry all the same.
“Now for home, Albert,” I say.
“Let’s hope so,” he replies, “I only wish I knew what I’ve got.”
The pain increases. The bandages burn like fire. We drink and drink, one glass of water after another.
“How far above the knee am I hit?” asks Kropp.
“At least four inches, Albert,” I answer. Actually it is perhaps one.
“I’ve made up my mind,” he says after a while, “if they take off my leg, I’ll put an end to it. I won’t go through life as a cripple.”
So we lie there with our thoughts and wait.
In the evening we are hauled on to the chopping-block. I am frightened and think quickly what I ought to do; for everyone knows that the surgeons in the dressing stations amputate on the slightest provocation. Under the great business that is much simpler than complicated patching. I think of Kemmerich. Whatever happens I will not let them chloroform me, even if I have to crack a couple of their skulls.
It is all right. The surgeon pokes around in the wound and a blackness comes before my eyes. “Don’t carry on so,” he says gruffly, and hacks away. The instruments gleam in the bright light like marvelous animals. The pain is insufferable. Two orderlies hold my arms fast, but I break loose with one of them and try to crash into the surgeon’s spectacles just as he notices and springs back. “Chloroform the scoundrel,” he roars madly.
Then I become quiet. “Pardon me, Herr Doctor, I will keep still but do not chloroform me.”
“Well now,” he cackles and takes up his instrument again. He is a fair fellow, not more than thirty years old, with scars and disgusting gold spectacles. Now I see that he is tormenting me, he is merely raking about in the wound and looking up surreptitiously at me over his glasses. My hands squeeze around the grips, I’ll kick the bucket before he will get a squeak out of me.
He has fished out a piece of shell and tosses it to me. Apparently he is pleased at my self-control, for he now sets my leg carefully in splints and says: “Tomorrow you’ll be off home.” Then I am put in plaster. When I am back again with Kropp I tell him apparently a hospital train comes in tomorrow morning.
“We must work the army medical sergeant-major so that we can keep together, Albert.”
I manage to slip the sergeant-major two of my cigars with
