the last to go. “Heathen,” she chirps, but shuts the door all the same. We have won.
★★
At noon the hospital inspector arrives and abuses us. He threatens us with clink and all the rest of it. But a hospital inspector is just the same as a commissariat inspector, or anyone else who wears a long dagger and shoulder straps, but is really a clerk, and is never considered even by a recruit as a real officer. So we let him talk. What can they do to us, anyway———
“Who threw the bottle?” he asks.
Before I can think whether I should report myself, someone says: “I did.”
A man with a bristling beard sits up. Everyone is excited; why should he report himself?
“You?”
“Yes. I was annoyed because we were waked up unnecessarily and lost my senses so that I did not know what I was doing.”
He talks like a book.
“What is your name?”
“Reinforcement-Reservist Josef Hamacher.”
The inspector departs.
255
