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I remember the day when we were drafted out[32]. His mother, a pleasant, stout woman, saw him off at the station. She was crying all the time, and her face was puffy and swollen. This embarrassed Kemmerich, because she was the least composed of all of them, practically dissolving in fat and tears. What’s more, she picked me out, and kept grabbing my arm and begging me to keep an eye on Franz when we got out here. As it happens, he did have a very young face, and his bones were so soft that after just a month of carrying a pack he got flat feet[33]. But how can you keep an eye on someone on a battlefield?

‘You’ll be going home now,’ says Kropp. ‘You would have had to wait at least another three or four months before you got leave.’ Kemmerich nods. I can’t look at his hands, they are like wax. The dirt of the trenches is underneath his fingernails, and it is bluey-grey, like poison. It occurs to me that those fingernails will go on getting longer and longer for a good while yet, like some ghastly underground growths, long after Kemmerich has stopped breathing. I can see them before my eyes, twisting like corkscrews and growing and growing, and with them the hair on his caved-in skull, like grass on good earth, just like grass – how can all that be? Muller leans forward. ‘We’ve brought your things, Franz.’ Kemmerich gestures with one hand. ‘Put them under the bed.’ Muller does as he says. Kemmerich starts on about the watch again. How can we possibly calm him down without making him suspicious?

Muller bobs up again with a pair of airman’s flying boots, best quality English ones made of soft yellow leather, the sort that come up to the knee, with lacing all the way to the top – something really worth having. The sight of them makes Muller excited, and he holds the soles against his own clumsy boots and says, ‘Are you going to take these with you, Franz?’

All three of us are thinking the same thing: even if he did get better he would only be able to wear one of them, so they wouldn’t be any use to him. But as things are it would be a pity to leave them here – the orderlies are bound to pinch them the moment he is dead.