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Before we set off to see Kemmerich we pack his things up for him – he’ll be glad of them on his way home.

The clearing station[30] is very busy. It smells of carbolic, pus and sweat, just like it always does. You get used to a lot of things when you are in the barracks, but this can still really turn your stomach. We keep on asking people until we find out where Kemmerich is; he is in a long ward, and welcomes us weakly, with a look that is part pleasure and part helpless agitation. While he was unconscious, somebody stole his watch.

Muller shakes his head, ‘I always said that you shouldn’t take such a good watch with you, didn’t I?’

Muller is a bit bossy and tactless. Otherwise he would have kept his mouth shut, because it is obvious to everyone that Kemmerich is never going to leave this room. It makes no difference whether he gets his watch back or not – the most it would mean is that we could send it back home for him.

‘How’s it going, then, Franz?’ asks Kropp.

Kemmerich’s head drops back. ‘OK, I suppose. It’s just that my damned foot hurts so much.’

We glance at his bed-cover. His leg is under a wire frame, which makes the coverlet bulge upwards. I kick Muller on the shin, because he would be quite capable of telling Kemmerich what the orderly told us before we came in; Kemmerich no longer has a foot. His leg has been amputated.

He looks terrible, yellow and pallid, and his face already has those weird lines that we are so familiar with because we have seen them a hundred times before. They aren’t really lines at all, just signs. There is no longer any life pulsing under his skin – it has been forced out already to the very edges of his body, and death is working its way through him, moving outwards from the centre, it is already in his eyes. There in the bed is our pal Kemmerich, who was frying horse-meat with us not long ago, and squatting with us in a shell hole[31] – it’s still him, but it isn’t really him any more; his image has faded, become blurred, like a photographic plate that’s had too many copies made from it. Even his voice sounds like ashes.