All Quiet on the Western Front Read Free Page A

to give it, then?” I ask him.
    He is annoyed. “If you don’t think so, then why do you ask?”
    I press a few more cigarettes into his hand. “Do us the favour——”
    “Well, all right,” he says.
    Kropp goes in with him. He doesn’t trust him and wants to see. We wait outside.
    Müller returns to the subject of the boots. “They would fit me perfectly. In these boots I get blister after blister. Do you think he will last till tomorrow after drill? If he passes out in the night, we know where the boots——”
    Kropp returns. “Do you think——?” he asks.
    “Done for,” said Müller emphatically.
    We go back to the huts. I think of the letter that I must write to-morrow to Kemmerich’s mother. I am freezing. I could do with a tot of rum. Müller pulls up some grass and chews it. Suddenly little Kropp throws his cigarette away, stamps on it savagely, and looking around him with a broken and distracted face, stammers “Damned shit, the damned shit!”
    We walk on for a long time. Kropp has calmed himself; we understand, he saw red; out there every man gets like that sometime.
    “What has Kantorek written to you?” Müller asks him.
    He laughs. “We are the Iron Youth.”
    We all three smile bitterly, Kropp rails: he is glad that he can speak.
    Yes, that’s the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.

IT IS STRANGE to think that at home in the drawer of my writing table there lies the beginning of a play called “Saul” and a bundle of poems. Many an evening I have worked over them—we all did something of the kind—but that has become so unreal to me I cannot comprehend it any more. Our early life is cut off from the moment we came here, and that without our lifting a hand. We often try to look back on it and to find an explanation, but never quite succeed. For us young men of twenty everything is extraordinarily vague, for Kropp, Müller, Leer, and for me, for all of us whom Kantorek calls the “Iron Youth.” All the older men are linked up with their previous life. They have wives, children, occupations, and interests, they have a background which is so strong that the war cannot obliterate it. We young men of twenty, however, have only our parents, and some, perhaps, a girl—that is not much, for at our age the influence of parents is at its weakest and girls have not yet got a hold over us. Besides this there was little else—some enthusiasm, a few hobbies, and our school. Beyondthis our life did not extend. And of this nothing remains.
    Kantorek would say that we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. We had as yet taken no root. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it. We, however, have been gripped by it and do not know what the end may be. We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.
    Though Müller would be delighted to have Kemmerich’s boots, he is really quite as sympathetic as another who could not bear to think of such a thing for grief. He merely sees things clearly. Were Kemmerich able to make any use of the boots, then Müller would rather go bare-foot over barbed wire than scheme how to get hold of them. But as it is the boots are quite inappropriate to Kemmerich’s circumstances, whereas Müller can make good use of them. Kemmerich will die; it is immaterial who gets them. Why, then, should Müller not succeed to them? He has more right than a hospital orderly. When Kemmerich is dead it will be too late. Therefore Müller is already on the watch.
    We have lost all sense of other considerations, because they are artificial. Only the facts are real and important for us. And good boots are scarce.
    Once it was different. When we went to the district commandant to enlist, we were a class of