"You ought not to send your things to me, Mother.
We have plenty to eat out there.
You can make much better use of them here."
How destitute she lies there in her bed, she that loves me more than all the world.
As I am about to leave, she says hastily:
"I have two pairs of under-pants for you.
They are all wool.
They will keep you warm.
You must not forget to put them in your pack."
Ah! Mother! I know what these under-pants have cost you in waiting, and walking, and begging!
Ah! Mother, Mother! how can it be that I must part from you? Who else is there that has any claim on me but you.
Here I sit and there you are lying; we have so much to say, and we shall never say it.
"Good-night, Mother."
"Good-night, my child."
The room is dark.
I hear my mother's breathing, and the ticking of the clock.
Outside the window the wind blows and the chestnut trees rustle.
On the landing I stumble over my pack, which lies there already made up because I have to leave early in the morning.
I bite into my pillow. I grasp the iron rods of my bed with my fists.
I ought never to have come here.
Out there I was indifferent and often hopeless;—I will never be able to be so again.
I was a soldier, and now I am nothing but an agony for myself, for my mother, for everything that is so comfortless and without end.
I ought never to have come on leave.
EIGHT
I already know the camp on the moors.
It was here that Himmelstoss gave Tjaden his education.
But now I know hardly anyone here; as ever, all is altered.
There are only a few people that I have occasionally met before.
I go through the routine mechanically.
In the evenings I generally go to the Soldiers' Home, where the newspapers are laid out, but I do not read them; still there is a piano there that I am glad enough to play on.
Two girls are in attendance, one of them is young.
The camp is surrounded with high barbed-wire fences.
If we come back late from the Soldiers' Home we have to show passes.
But those who are on good terms with the guard can get through, of course.
Among the junipers and the birch trees on the moor we practise company drill each day.
It is bearable if one expects nothing better.
We advance at a run, fling ourselves down, and our panting breath moves the stalks of the grasses and the flowers of the heather to and fro.
Looked at so closely one sees the fine sand is composed of millions of the tiniest pebbles, as clear as if they had been made in a laboratory.
It is strangely inviting to dig one's hands into it.
But most beautiful are the woods with their line of birch trees.
Their colour changes with every minute.
Now the stems gleam purest white, and between them airy and silken, hangs the pastel-green of the leaves; the next moment all changes to an opalescent blue, as the shivering breezes pass down from the heights and touch the green lightly away; and again in one place it deepens almost to black as a cloud passes over the sun.
And this shadow moves like a ghost through the dim trunks and rides far out over the moor to the sky—then the birches stand out again like gay banners on white poles, with their red and gold patches of autumn-tinted leaves.
I often become so lost in the play of soft light and transparent shadow, that I almost fail to hear the commands. It is when one is alone that one begins to observe Nature and to love her.
And here I have not much companionship, and do not even desire it.
We are too little acquainted with one another to do more than joke a bit and play poker or nap in the evenings.
Alongside our camp is the big Russian prison camp.
It is separated from us by a wire fence, but in spite of this the prisoners come across to us.
They seem nervous and fearful, though most of them are big fellows with beards—they look like meek, scolded, St. Bernard dogs.
They slink about our camp and pick over the garbage tins.