The shelling has ceased, I turn towards the crater and beckoning to the others.
They take off their masks.
We lift up the wounded man, one taking his splinted arm.
And so we stumble off hastily.
The graveyard is a mass of wreckage.
Coffins and corpses lie strewn about.
They have been killed once again; but each of them that was flung up saved one of us.
The hedge is destroyed, the rails of the light railway are torn up and rise stiffly in the air in great arches.
Someone lies in front of us.
We stop; Kropp goes on alone with the wounded man.
The man on the ground is a recruit.
His hip is covered with blood; he is so exhausted that I feel for my water-bottle where I have rum and tea.
Kat restrains my hand and stoops over him.
"Where's it got you comrade?"
His eyes move. He is too weak to answer.
We slit open his trousers carefully.
He groans.
"Gently, gently, it is much better–––"
If he has been hit in the stomach he oughtn't to drink anything.
There's no vomiting, that's a good sign.
We lay the hip bare.
It is one mass of mincemeat and bone splinters.
The joint has been hit.
This lad won't walk any more.
I wet his temples with a moistened finger and give him a swig.
His eyes move again.
We see now that the right arm is bleeding as well.
Kat spreads out two wads of dressing as wide as possible so that they will cover the wound.
I look for something to bind loosely round it.
We have nothing more, so I slip up the wounded man's trouser leg still farther in order to use a piece of his underpants as a bandage.
But he is wearing none.
I now look at him closely. He is the fair-headed boy of a little while ago.
In the meantime Kat has taken a bandage from a dead man's pocket and we carefully bind the wound.
I say to the youngster who looks at us fixedly:
"We're going for a stretcher now–––"
Then he opens his mouth and whispers:
"Stay here–––"
"We'll be back again soon," says Kat,
"We are only going to get a stretcher for you."
We don't know if he understands.
He whimpers like a child and plucks at us:
"Don't go away–––"
Kat looks around and whispers:
"Shouldn't we just take a revolver and put an end to it?"
The youngster will hardly survive the carrying, and at the most he will only last a few days.
What he has gone through so far is nothing to what he's in for till he dies.
Now he is numb and feels nothing.
In an hour he will become one screaming bundle of intolerable pain.
Every day that he can live will be a howling torture.
And to whom does it matter whether he has them or not -