All Quiet on the Western Front Read Online Free PDF

sandbag full of horse-flesh in his hand.
    The artilleryman’s pipe drops from his mouth. He feels the bread. “Real bread, by God, and still hot too?”
    Kat gives no explanation. He has the bread, the rest doesn’t matter. I’m sure that if he were planted down in the middle of the desert, in half an hour he would have gathered together a supper of roast meat, dates, and wine.
    “Cut some wood,” he says curtly to Haie.
    Then he hauls out a frying pan from under his coat, and a handful of salt as well as a lump of fat from his pocket. He has thought of everything. Haie makes a fire on the floor. It lights up the empty room of the factory. We climb out of bed.
    The artilleryman hesitates. He wonders whether to praise Kat and so perhaps gain a little for himself. But Katczinsky doesn’t even see him, he might as well be thin air. He goes off cursing.
    Kat knows the way to roast horse-flesh so that it’s tender. It shouldn’t be put straight into the pan, that makes it tough. It should be boiled, first in a little water. With our knives we squat round in a circle and fill our bellies.
    That is Kat. If for one hour in a year something eatable were to be had in some one place only, within that hour, as if moved by a vision, he would put on his cap, go out and walk directly there, as though following a compass, and find it.
    He finds everything—if it is cold, a small stove and wood, hay and straw, a table and chairs—but above all food. It isuncanny; one would think he conjured it out of the air. His masterpiece was four boxes of lobsters. Admittedly we would rather have had a good beef steak.
    We have settled ourselves on the sunny side of the hut. There is a smell of tar, of summer, and of sweaty feet. Kat sits beside me. He likes to talk. Today we have done an hour’s saluting drill because Tjaden failed to salute a major smartly enough. Kat can’t get it out of his head.
    “You take it from me, we are losing the war because we can salute too well,” he says.
    Kropp stalks up, with his breeches rolled up and his feet bare. He lays out his washed socks to dry on the grass. Kat turns his eyes to heaven, lets off a mighty fart, and says meditatively: “Every little bean must be heard as well as seen.”
    The two begin to argue. At the same time they lay a bottle of beer on the result of an air-fight that’s going on above us. Katczinsky won’t budge from the opinion which as an old Front-hog, he rhymes:
    Give ’em all the same grub and all the same pay
    And the war would be over and done in a day
.
    Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.
    The subject is dropped. Then the conversation turns to drill.
    A picture comes before me. Burning midday in the barrack-yard. The heat hangs over the square. The barracks are deserted. Every thing sleeps. All one hears is the drummers practising; they have installed themselves somewhere and practise brokenly, dully, monotonously. What a concord! Midday heat, barrack square, and drummers beating!
    The windows of the barracks are empty and dark. From some of them trousers are hanging to dry. The rooms are cool and one looks toward them longingly.
    O dark, musty platoon huts, with the iron bedsteads, the chequered bedding, the lockers and the stools! Even you can become the object of desire; out here you have a faint resemblance to home; your rooms, full of the smell of stale food, sleep, smoke, and clothes.
    Katczinsky paints it all in lively colours. What would we not give to be able to return to it! Farther back than that our thoughts dare not go.
    Those early morning