It is going badly with Albert.
They have taken him and amputated his leg.
The whole leg has been taken off from the thigh.
Now he will hardly speak any more.
Once he says he will shoot himself the first time he can get hold of his revolver again.
A new convoy arrives.
Our room gets two blind men.
One of them is a very youthful musician.
The sisters never have a knife with them when they feed him; he has already snatched one from a sister.
But in spite of this caution there is an incident.
In the evening, while he is being fed, the sister is called away, and leaves the plate with the fork on his table.
He gropes for the fork, seizes it and drives it with all his force against his heart, then he snatches up a shoe and strikes with it against the handle as hard as he can.
We call for help and three men are necessary to take the fork away from him.
The blunt prongs had already penetrated deep.
He abuses us all night so that no one can go to sleep.
In the morning he has lock-jaw.
Again beds are empty.
Day after day goes by with pain and fear, groans and death-gurgles.
Even the Death Room is no use any more, it is too small; fellows die during the night in our room.
They go even faster than the sisters can cope with them.
But one day the door flies open, the flat trolley rolls in, and there on the stretcher, pale, thin, upright and triumphant, with his shaggy head of curls sits Peter.
Sister Libertine with beaming looks pushes him over to his former bed.
He is back from the Dying Room.
We have long supposed him dead.
He looks round:
"What do you say now?"
And Josef has to admit that it is the first time he has ever known of such a thing.
Gradually a few of us are allowed to get up.
And I am given crutches to hobble around on.
But I do not make much use of them; I cannot bear Albert's gaze as I move about the room.
His eyes always follow me with such a strange look.
So I sometimes escape to the corridor;—there I can move about more freely.
On the next floor below are the abdominal and spine cases, head wounds and double amputations.
On the right side of the wing are the jaw wounds, gas cases, nose, ear, and neck wounds.
On the left the blind and the lung wounds, pelvis wounds, wounds in the joints, wounds in the kidneys, wounds in the testicles, wounds in the intestines.
Here a man realizes for the first time in how many places a man can get hit.
Two fellows die of tetanus.
Their skin turns pale, their limbs stiffen, at last only their eyes live —stubbornly.
Many of the wounded have their shattered limbs hanging free in the air from a gallows; underneath the wound a basin is placed into which drips the pus. Every two or three hours the vessel is emptied. Other men lie in stretching bandages with heavy weights hanging from the end of the bed.
I see intestine wounds that are constantly full of excreta.
The surgeon's clerk shows me X-ray photographs of completely smashed hipbones, knees, and shoulders.
A man cannot realize that above such shattered bodies there are still human faces in which life goes its daily round.
And this is only one hospital, one single station; there are hundreds of thousands in Germany, hundreds of thousands in France, hundreds of thousands in Russia.
How senseless is everything that can ever be written, done, or thought, when such things are possible.
It must be all lies and of no account when the culture of a thousand years could not prevent this stream of blood being poured out, these torture-chambers in their hundreds of thousands.
A hospital alone shows what war is.
I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow.
I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another.
I see that the keenest brains of the world invent weapons and words to make it yet more refined and enduring.
And all men of my age, here and over there, throughout the whole world see these things; all my generation is experiencing these things with me.