I pull myself together, and go with my sister to the slaughter-house to get a pound or two of bones.
That is a great favour and people line up early in the morning and stand waiting.
Many of them faint.
We have no luck.
After waiting by turns for three hours the queue disperses. The bones have not lasted out.
It is a good thing that I get my rations.
I bring them to my mother and in that way we all get something decent to eat.
The days grow ever more strained and my mother's eyes more sorrowful.
Four days left now.
I must go and see Kemmerich's mother.
I cannot write that down.
This quaking, sobbing woman who shakes me and cries out on me:
"Why are you living then, when he is dead?" — who drowns me in tears and calls out:
"What are you there for at all, child, when you –– " — who drops into a chair and wails:
"Did you see him?
Did you see him then?
How did he die?"
I tell her he was shot through the heart and died instantaneously.
She looks at me, she doubts me:
"You lie.
I know better.
I have felt how terribly he died.
I have heard his voice at night, I have felt his anguish — tell the truth, I want to know it, I must know it."
"No," I say, "I was beside him.
He died at once."
She pleads with me gently:
"Tell me.
You must tell me.
I know you want to comfort me, but don't you see, you torment me far more than if you told me the truth?
I cannot bear the uncertainty.
Tell me how it was and even though it will be terrible, it will be far better than what I have to think if you don't."
I will never tell her, she can make mincemeat out of me first.
I pity her, but she strikes me as rather stupid all the same.
Why doesn't she stop worrying? Kemmerich will stay dead whether she knows about it or not.
When a man has seen so many dead he cannot understand any longer why there should be so much anguish over a single individual.
So I say rather impatiently:
"He died immediately.
He felt absolutely nothing at all.
His face was quite calm."
She is silent.
Then she says slowly:
"Will you swear it?"
"Yes."
"By everything that is sacred to you?"
Good God, what is there that is sacred to me? —such things change pretty quickly with us.
"Yes, he died at once."
"Are you willing never to come back yourself, if it isn't true?"
"May I never come back if he wasn't killed instantaneously."
I would swear to anything.
But she seems to believe me.