It is a warm evening and the twilight seems like a canopy under whose shelter we feel drawn together.
Even the stingy Tjaden gives me a cigarette and then a light.
We stand jammed in together, shoulder to shoulder, there is no room to sit.
But we do not expect that.
Muller is in a good mood for once; he is wearing his new boots.
The engines drone, the lorries bump and rattle.
The roads are worn and full of holes. We dare not show a light so we lurch along and are often almost pitched out.
That does not worry us, however.
It can happen if it likes; a broken arm is better than a hole in the guts, and many a man would be thankful enough for such a chance of finding his home way again.
Beside us stream the munition-columns in long files.
They are making the pace, they overtake us continually.
We joke with them and they answer back.
A wall becomes visible, it belongs to a house which lies on the side of the road.
I suddenly prick up my ears.
Am I deceived?
Again I hear distinctly the cackle of geese.
A glance at Katczinsky—a glance from him to me; we understand one another.
"Kat, I hear some aspirants for the frying-pan over there."
He nods.
"It will be attended to when we come back.
I have their number."
Of course Kat has their number.
He knows all about every leg of goose within a radius of fifteen miles.
The lorries arrive at the artillery lines.
The gun-emplacements are camouflaged with bushes against aerial observation, and look like a kind of military Feast of the Tabernacles.
These branches might seem gay and cheerful were not cannon embowered there.
The air becomes acrid with the smoke of the guns and the fog.
The fumes of powder taste bitter on the tongue.
The roar of the guns makes our lorry stagger, the reverberation rolls raging away to the rear, everything quakes.
Our faces change imperceptibly.
We are not, indeed, in the front-line, but only in the reserves, yet in every face can be read: This is the front, now we are within its embrace.
It is not fear.
Men who have been up as often as we have become thick skinned.
Only the young recruits are agitated.
Kat explains to them:
"That was a twelve-inch. You can tell by the report; now you'll hear the burst."
But the muffled thud of the burst does not reach us.
It is swallowed up in the general murmur of the front: Kat listens:
"There'll be a bombardment to-night."
We all listen.
The front is restless.
"The Tommies are firing already," says Kropp.
The shelling can be heard distinctly.
It is the English batteries to the right of our section.
They are beginning an hour too soon.
According to us they start punctually at ten o'clock.
"What's got them?" says Muller, "their clocks must be fast."
"There'll be a bombardment, I tell you. I can feel it in my bones."
Kat shrugs his shoulders.
Three guns open fire close beside us.