His face is broken and full of furrows.
My mother has always been sickly; and though she has only gone to the hospital when she has been compelled to, it has cost a great deal of money, and my
father's life has been practically given up to it.
"If only I knew how much the operation costs," says he.
"Have you not asked?"
"Not directly, I cannot do that—the surgeon might take it amiss and that would not do; he must operate on mother."
Yes, I think bitterly, that's how it is with us, and with all poor people.
They don't dare ask the price, but worry themselves dreadfully beforehand about it; but the others, for whom it is not important, they settle the price first as a matter of course.
And the doctor does not take it amiss from them.
"The dressings afterwards are so expensive," says my father.
"Doesn't the Invalid's Fund pay anything toward it, then?" I ask.
"Mother has been ill too long."
"Have you any money at all?"
He shakes his head:
"No, but I can do some overtime."
I know. He will stand at his desk folding and pasting and cutting until twelve o'clock at night.
At eight o'clock in the evening he will eat some miserable rubbish they get in exchange for their food tickets, then he will take a powder for his headache and work on.
In order to cheer him up a bit I tell him a few stories, soldiers' jokes and the like, about generals and sergeant-majors.
Afterwards I accompany them both to the railway station.
They give me a pot of jam and a bag of potato-cakes that my mother has made for me.
Then they go off and I return to the camp.
In the evening I spread the jam on the cakes and eat some.
But I have no taste for them.
So I go out to give them to the Russians.
Then it occurs to me that my mother cooked them herself and that she was probably in pain as she stood before the hot stove.
I put the bag back in my pack and take only two cakes to the Russians.
NINE
We travel for several days.
The first aeroplanes appear in the sky.
We roll on past transport lines.
Guns, guns. The light railway picks us up.
I search for my regiment.
No one knows exactly where it lies.
Somewhere or other I put up for the night, somewhere or other I receive provisions and a few vague instructions.
And so with my pack and my rifle I set out again on the way.
By the time I come up they are no longer in the devastated place.
I hear we have become one of the flying divisions that are pushed in wherever it is hottest.
That does not sound cheerful to me.
They tell me of heavy losses that we have been having.
I inquire after Kat and Albert.
No one knows anything of them.
I search farther and wander about here and there; it is a strange feeling.
One night more and then another I camp out like a Red Indian.
Then at last I get some definite information, and by the afternoon I am able to report to the Orderly Room.
The sergeant-major detains me there.
The company comes back in two days' time. There is no object in sending me up now.
"What was it like on leave?" he asks, "pretty good, eh?"
"In parts," I say.
"Yes," he sighs, "yes, if a man didn't have to come away again.
The second half is always rather messed up by that."