II

There was one thing, however, to be told of the eldest of the three that could not be varied, and this was that a shell splinter had smashed his jaws and his larynx. His name was Pointner, and he was a peasant’s son from Bavaria. He had been for over a year in the whistlers’ room, and his case was the worst of the three. He had got blood-poisoning and slowly, almost imperceptibly, his condition became hopeless. He often had to be in bed, with a high temperature, and then there was little he could be tempted to eat. Though well grown and well nourished when he left home, he was now as lank as a young boy. But nothing vexed him so much as when some of the convalescents from other wards picked him up like a child in their arms and offered to carry him about. A dark flush came into his cheeks, and he spat and scratched in rage and hit out unsparingly on all sides with his fever-wasted hands. He was ashamed of weighing so little. Nobody who saw him now would have guessed that he had been a butcher by trade, a master of all the secrets of the slaughter-house and an adept at making sausages. To be sure his time for that was over.

Perhaps Pointner had been once of a hot-blooded and even truculent disposition. He had a photograph of himself as a reservist on the cupboard beside his bed in a highly decorated frame of silver metal. This frame was composed of two gnarled oak trees, whose branches, through which ran broad scrolls bearing inscriptions, were gathered together along the top and bore the crown of a princely house; at their base amid the mighty roots was entwined a bunch of all kinds of swords, flags, rifles and cavalry lances. Between the oaks, however, reservist Pointner was to be seen, his cap, beneath which a love-lock protruded, set rakishly over one ear, and two fingers of the right hand stuck between the buttons of his tunic. In his left was jauntily held a cane bound with a plaited band from which depended a knot. His jaw was unusually strong and prominent, and this gave an aggressive turn to his short stature and the amiable expression of the upper part of his face. “Reserve now has rest,” was written on the photograph, and it was lightly tinted in bright colours. Nevertheless reserve had not had rest and the aggressive jaw had disappeared, and a small boneless and retreating chin had taken its place. It gave his face, with the always slightly parted lips and the white gleam of the upper teeth—which had escaped unscathed—beneath the straw-coloured moustache, a childlike and weak expression. And indeed the alteration in Pointner was more and more marked, though the old hot blood still sometimes came uppermost and made him dangerous.

Pointner had been wounded in one of the first fights with the English, and after that had lain for a week or two in a field hospital. From there one morning he found his way, in the midst of a crowd of lightly wounded cases, and quite contrary to regulations, into an emergency hospital train and got back to Germany. He was clothed in a long-skirted hospital garment of blue and white striped cotton, with felt slippers on his feet. On his head he wore an English sniper’s cap, which he had brought with him on the stretcher as booty and had never surrendered. Speechless as he was, with face and neck bandaged up to the eyes, and with no papers either, he was taken for an English prisoner throughout the journey and treated as such. Even the memory of this threw him into a rage. Certainly, the simplest thing would have been to cast away the khaki cap, but to this he could not bring himself. Rather than that he remained a Britisher in his own despite, passed over unwelcomed and unbeflowered, and left on one side in his stretcher shedding tears of rage. It was not till later that he succeeded in making himself understood.

Nevertheless, in spite of peremptory orders, he still kept the cap safely in a lower shelf of the cupboard which served as the retreat for a different article. Now and then when neither doctor nor nurse was expected to come in, he took it out. With care he polished the badge and the chin strap till they shone, and had a long look at it, turning it about meanwhile in his delicate hands, where the whites of the nails were turning from snow white to a bluish tinge.