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Muller asks him, ‘What did Kantorek say in his letter?’

He laughs. ‘He calls us “young men of iron”.’

That makes the three of us laugh, though not because it is funny. Kropp curses. He is happy to be able to talk again —

And yes, that’s it, that is what they think, those hundred thousand Kantoreks. Young men of iron. Young? None of us is more than twenty. But young? Young men? That was a long time ago. We are old now.

I find it strange to think that at home in a drawer there is the first part of a play I once started to write called ‘Saul’, and a stack of poems as well. I spent so many evenings on them – we all did things like that – but it has all become so unreal to me that I can’t even imagine it any more.

When we came out here we were cut off, whether we liked it or not, from everything we had done up to that point. We often try to find a reason or an explanation for this, but we can never quite manage it. Things are particularly confused for us twenty-year-olds, for Kropp, Muller, Leer and me, the ones Kantorek called young men of iron. The older men still have firm ties to their earlier lives – they have property, wives, children, jobs and interests, and these bonds are all so strong that the war can’t break them. But for us twenty-year-olds there are only our parents, and for some of us a girlfriend. That isn’t much, because at our age parental influence is at its weakest, and girls haven’t really taken over yet. Apart from that, we really didn’t have much else; the occasional passion for something, a few hobbies, school; our lives didn’t go much further than that as yet. And now nothing is left of it all.

Kantorek would say that we had been standing on the very threshold of life itself. It’s pretty well true, too. We hadn’t had a chance to put down any roots. The war swept us away. For the others, for the older men, the war is an interruption, and they can think beyond the end of it. But we were caught up by the war, and we can’t see how things will turn out. All we know for the moment is that in some strange and melancholy way we have become hardened, although we don’t often feel sad about it any more.