Read Online The Train Was On Time by Heinrich Böll - Free Book Online

rations were always for two weeks, no shortage of grub. Eating was the only break in the monotony, that and catching fish and chasing mosquitoes … those fantastic swarms of mosquitoes, I don’t know why we didn’t go out of our minds. The sergeant major was like an animal. Filth poured from his mouth all day long, those first few days, and his eating habits were foul. Meat and fat, hardly any bread.” A terrible sigh was wrenched from his breast: “Any man who doesn’t eat bread is a hopeless case, I tell you. Yes.…” Terrible silence, while the sun stood golden and warm and fair over Przemysl.
    “My God,” he groaned, “so he seduced us, what else is there to say? We were all like that … except one. He refused. He was an old fellow, married and with a family; in the evening he used often to show us snapshots of his kids, and weep … that was before. He refused, he would hit out, threaten us … he was stronger than the five of us put together; and one night when he was alone on sentry duty, the sergeant major shot him. He crept out and put a bullet through him—from behind. With the man’s own pistol; then he yanked us out of our bunks and we had to help him throw the body into the marshes. Corpses are heavy … I’m telling you, the bodies of dead men weigh a ton.Corpses are heavier than the whole world, the six of us could scarcely carry him; it was dark and raining, and I thought: This is what hell must be like. And the sergeant major sent in a report that the old fellow had mutinied and threatened him with his weapon, and he took along the old fellow’s pistol as proof—there was one bullet missing from it, of course. And they sent his wife a letter saying he had fallen for Greater Germany in the Sivash marshes … yes; and a week later the first food truck arrived with a telegram for me saying our factory had been destroyed and I was to go on leave; and I didn’t even go back to the emplacement, I just took off!” There was a fierce joy in his voice: “I just took off! He must have hit the roof! And they first interrogated me in the office about the old fellow, and I gave them exactly the same story as the sergeant major’s. And then I was off … off! From the battery to the section in Ochakov, then Odessa and then I took off.…” Terrible silence, while the sun still shone, fair and warm and gentle; Andreas felt an appalling nausea. That’s the worst, he thought, that’s the worst.…
    “After that I never enjoyed anything again, and I never will. I’m scared to look at a woman. The whole time I was home I just lay around in a kind of stupor, crying away like some idiot child, and my mother thought I had some awful disease. But how could I tell her about it, it was something you can’t tell anyone.…”
    How crazy for the sun to shine like that, Andreas thought, and a dreadful nausea lay like poison in his blood. He reached for the blond fellow’s hand, but the man shrank back in horror. “No,” he cried, “don’t!” He threw himself onto his stomach, hid his head in his arms, and sobbed. It sounded as if the ground would burst open, and above his sobbing the sky was smiling, above the army huts, above all those huts and above the towers of Przemysl on the River San.…
    “Let me die,” he sobbed, “I just want to die, then it’ll be all over. Let me die.…” His words were stifled by a choking sound, and now Andreas could hear him crying, crying real tears, wet tears.
    Andreas saw no more. A torrent of blood and dirt and slime had poured over him; he prayed, prayed desperately, as a drowning man shouts who is struggling all alone out in the middle of a lake and can see no shore and no rescuer.…
    That’s wonderful, he thought, crying is wonderful, crying is good for you, crying, crying, what wretched creature has never cried? I should cry too, that’s what I should do. The sergeant cried, and the blond fellow cried, and I haven’t cried for three and a