"Honour bright, it wasn't, Herr Lohkamp.
I didn't even smell it!"
"You don't even know what it is, I suppose?" said I, filling a glass.
"No?" she replied, licking her lips. "Rum.
Stone Age Jamaica."
"Excellent!
Then how about a glass?" "Me?" She started back. "This is too much, Herr Lohkamp!
This is heaping coals of fire on my head.
Here's old Stoss goes and mops up all your cognac on the quiet and then you treat her to a rum on top of it!
You're a saint, Herr Lohkamp, that's what you are!
I'll see myself in my grave before I touch a drop of it."
"You're quite sure, Matilda?" said I, making to drink it myself.
"Well, all right, then," said she swiftly, seizing the glass. "One must take the good as it comes.
Even though one doesn't understand.
Good health!
It's not your birthday, I suppose?"
"More or less, Matilda.
A good guess."
"No, not really?" She seized my hand. "Many happy returns!
And lots of dough, Herr Lohkamp. . . .
Why, I'm all of a quiver. . . . I must have another to celebrate that.
I'm as fond of you as if you were my own son!"
"Very good."
I poured her another glass.
She tipped it down, and, still singing my praises, she left the workshop.
I put the bottle away and sat down at the table.
The pallid sunlight through the window shone upon my hands.
A queer feeling, a birthday—even though it means nothing.
Thirty years. . . . I remember the time when I thought I should never reach twenty—it seemed so far away.
And then. . . .
I took a sheet of paper from the drawer and began to reckon.
Childhood, school—an unresolvable complex of things and happenings—so remote, another world, not real any more.
Real life began only in 1916.
I had just joined the Army—eighteen years of age, thin and lanky. And a snotty sergeant-major who used to make me practise, on-the-hands-down, over and over again in the mud of the ploughed fields at the back of the barracks . . .
One evening my mother came to the barracks to visit me; but she had to wait for me over an hour, because I had failed to pack my kit the regulation way, and as punishment had been ordered to scrub out the latrines.
She offered to help me, but that was not allowed.
She cried, and I was so tired that I fell asleep as I sat there beside her.
1917.
Flanders.
Mittendorf and I bought a bottle of red wine at the canteen. . . .
We intended to celebrate.
But we never got so far, for early that morning the English bombardment began.
Koster was wounded about midday; Meyer and Deters were killed during the afternoon.
Then, with nightfall, just as we thought things were quietening down, and were about to draw the cork, gas came over and filled the dugouts.
We had our masks on in good time, but Mittendorf's was defective, and by the time he knew it, it was too late.
He ripped it off, but before a new one could be found he had swallowed so much gas he was spewing blood.
He died the next morning, green and black in the face.
1918.
That was in hospital.
A fresh convoy had come in a few days before.