I nod.
"Yes, Kat, we ought to put him out of his misery." He stands still a moment.
He has made up his mind.
We look round — but we are no longer alone.
A little group is gathering, from the shell- holes and trenches appear heads.
We get a stretcher.
Kat shakes his head.
"Such a kid – " He repeats it
"Young innocents–"
Our losses are less than was to be expected — five killed and eight wounded.
It was in fact quite a short bombardment.
Two of our dead lie in the upturned graves. We merely throw the earth in on them.
We go back.
We trot off silently in single file one behind the other.
The wounded are taken to the dressing-station.
The morning is cloudy. The bearers make a fuss about numbers and tickets, the wounded whimper.
It begins to rain.
An hour later we reach our lorries and climb in.
There is more room now than there was.
The rain becomes heavier.
We take out waterproof sheets and spread them over our heads.
The rain rattles down, and flows off at the sides in streams.
The lorries bump through the holes, and we rock to and fro in a half-sleep.
Two men in the front of the lorry have long forked poles.
They watch for telephone wires which hang crosswise over the road so low that they might easily pull our heads off.
The two fellows take them at the right moment on their poles and lift them over behind us.
We hear their call
"Mind—wire—," dip the knee in a half-sleep and straighten up again.
Monotonously the lorries sway, monotonously come the calls, monotonously falls the rain.
It falls on our heads and on the heads of the dead up in the line, on the body of the little recruit with the wound that is so much too big for his hip; it falls on Kemmerich's grave; it falls in our hearts.
An explosion sounds somewhere.
We wince, our eyes become tense, our hands are ready to vault over the side of the lorry into the ditch by the road.
Nothing happens—only the monotonous cry:
"Mind—wire,"—our knees bend—we are again half asleep.
FIVE
Killing each separate louse is a tedious business when a man has hundreds.
The little beasts are hard and the everlasting cracking with one's fingernails very soon becomes wearisome.
So Tjaden has rigged up the lid of a boot-polish tin with a piece of wire over the lighted stump of a candle.
The lice are simply thrown into this little pan. Crack! and they're done for.
We sit around with our shirts on our knees, our bodies naked to the warm air and our hands at work.
Haie has a particularly fine brand of louse: they have a red cross on their heads.
He suggests that he brought them back from the hospital at Thourhout, where they attended personally on a surgeon-general.
He says he means to use the fat that slowly accumulates in the tin-lid for polishing his boots, and roars with laughter for half an hour at his own joke.
But he gets little response to-day; we are too preoccupied with another affair.
The rumour has materialized. Himmelstoss has come.
He appeared yesterday; we've already heard the well-known voice.
He seems to have overdone it with a couple of young recruits on the ploughed field at home and unknown to him the son of the local magistrate was watching.
That cooked his goose.
He will get some surprises here.
Tjaden has been meditating for hours what to say to him.