He takes it.
"Are you usually allowed 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.
Muller 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," says Muller emphatically.
We go back to the huts.
I think of the letter that I must write tomorrow to Kemmerich's mother.
I am freezing. I could do with a tot of rum.
Muller 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 here every man gets like that sometime.
"What has Kantorek written to you?" Muller 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.
TWO
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, Muller, 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. Beyond this 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.