We are surrounded.
It is not easy to surrender, fog and smoke hang over us, no one would recognize that we wanted to give ourselves up, and perhaps we don't want to, a man doesn't even know himself at such moments.
We hear the explosions of the hand-grenades coming towards us.
Our machine-gun sweeps over the semicircle in front of us.
The cooling-water evaporates, we hastily pass round the case, every man pisses in it, and thus we again have water, and are able to continue firing.
But behind us the attack crashes ever nearer.
A few minutes and we are lost.
Then, at closest range, a second machine-gun bursts out. It is set up in a crater alongside us; Berger has fetched it, and now the counterattack comes over from behind; we are set free and make contact with the rear.
Afterwards, as we lie in comparatively good cover, one of the food-carriers reports that a couple of hundred yards distant there lies a wounded messenger-dog.
"Where?" asks Berger.
The other describes the place to him.
Berger goes off either to fetch the beast in or to shoot it.
Six months ago he would not have cared, he would have been reasonable.
We try to prevent him.
Then, as he goes off grimly, all we can say is:
"You're mad," and let him go.
For these cases of front-line madness become dangerous if one is not able to fling the man to the ground and hold him fast.
And Berger is six feet and the most powerful man in the company.
He is absolutely mad for he has to pass through the barrage; but this lightning that lowers somewhere above us all has struck him and made him demented.
It affects others so that they begin to rave, to run away — there was one man who even tried to dig himself into the ground with hands, feet, and teeth.
It is true, such things are often simulated, but the pretence itself is a symptom.
Berger, who means to finish off the dog, is carried away with a wound in the pelvis, and one of the fellows who carry him gets a bullet in the leg while doing it.
Muller is dead.
Someone shot him point-blank in the stomach with a Verey light.
He lived for half an hour, quite conscious, and in terrible pain.
Before he died he handed over his pocket-book to me, and bequeathed me his boots — the same that he once inherited from Kemmerich.
I wear them, for they fit me quite well.
After me Tjaden will get them, I have promised them to him.
We have been able to bury Muller, but he is not likely to remain long undisturbed.
Our lines are falling back.
There are too many fresh English and American regiments over there.
There's too much corned beef and white wheaten bread.
Too many new guns. Too many aeroplanes.
But we are emaciated and starved.
Our food is bad and mixed up with so much substitute stuff that it makes us ill.
The factory owners in Germany have grown wealthy; — dysentery dissolves our bowels.
The latrine poles are always densely crowded; the people at home ought to be shown these grey, yellow, miserable, wasted faces here, these bent figures from whose bodies the colic wrings out the blood, and who with lips trembling and distorted with pain, grin at one another and say:
"It is not much sense pulling up one's trousers again–––"
Our artillery is fired out, it has too few shells and the barrels are so worn that they shoot uncertainly, and scatter so widely as even to fall on ourselves.
We have too few horses.
Our fresh troops are anaemic boys in need of rest, who cannot carry a pack, but merely know how to die.
By thousands.
They understand nothing about warfare, they simply go on and let themselves be shot down.
A single flyer routed two companies of them for a joke, just as they came fresh from the train—before they had ever heard of such a thing as cover.
"Germany ought to be empty soon," says Kat.
We have given up hope that some day an end may come.
We never think so far.
A man can stop a bullet and be killed; he can get wounded, and then the hospital is his next stop.
There, if they do not amputate him, he sooner or later falls into the hands of one of those staff surgeons who, with the War Service Cross in his button-hole, says to him:
"What, one leg a bit short?