It is my mother who says that. She says: “With the gas and all the rest of it.” She does not know what she is saying, she is merely anxious for me. Should I tell her how we once found three enemy trenches with their garrison all stiff as though stricken with apoplexy? Against the parapet, in the dugouts, just where they were, the men stood and lay about, with blue faces, dead.
“No, Mother, that’s only talk,” I answer, “there’s not very much in what Bredemeyer says. You see for instance, I’m well and fit———”
Before my mother’s tremulous anxiety I recover my composure. Now I can walk about and talk and answer questions without fear of having suddenly to lean against the wall because the world turns soft as rubber and my veins become brimstone.
My mother wants to get up. So I go for a while to my sister in the kitchen. “What is the matter with her?” I ask.
She shrugs her shoulders; “She has been in bed two months now, but we did not want to write and tell you. Several doctors have been to see her. One of them said it is probably cancer again.”
★★
I go to the District Commandant to report myself.
163
