Read Not I for Free Online Page B

and stood up, put on his helmet, and raised his head above the top of the foxhole. “Well, is there anything?” I asked. “Perhaps Corporal Fest could take the trouble to get up here himself,” he barked again. As I, forcing down the last piece of bread, made ready to do so,I saw his knees suddenly go limp. “Sergeant Major, what is it?” I shouted and grabbed him by the shoulder. When there was no answer, I repeated my question. Suddenly Mahlmann sagged down with his face against the wet side of the foxhole. I carefully turned him over and saw a small sharp-edged bullet hole in the middle of his helmet. When I pushed his gas mask behind his neck and raised his head, several rivulets of blood coursed in short spasms down the lifeless face soiled by the damp earth.
    Sergeant Major Mahlmann was dead. But his demise didn’t move me. How easy it would have been for him, I told myself, to dispense with the court-martial against me or to say one comradely word. But he had never been capable of that. At no time have I ever forgotten what went through my head as I saw him lying beside me, motionless, his mouth open, the darkening trails of blood on his face: sometimes, I thought, even if only rarely, the right man gets hit. I should feel a little pity for him, I reproached myself beside the dead man in the hole. But I could muster nothing of the sort.
    Minutes passed. As the noise of battle which had intermittently intensified died down I jumped out of the hole in one bound, was at the edge of the woods in five steps and, as bullets struck the trees around me, ran without stopping to a nearby tree-lined depression which led to the farmhouse. About fifty paces from the building the inhabitants had put up a shelter, which was now deserted. Exhausted as I was, I lay down, but was unable to sleep. Instead, I ate the iron ration I had taken from Sergeant Major Mahlmann before leaving the foxhole.“At least you’ve done me one good turn!” I thought. I did not know that I would not eat again for the next six days.
    After that, crouching low, I crawled over to the farmhouse, whose four wings enclosed a large yard. The room behind the small window, which I came on just before the nearest corner, had been emptied. Yet a few steps farther, when I came to the end of the wall and carefully looked around it, I almost bumped into an American GI, who was holding his submachine gun at the ready and instantly started shouting, “Hands up! Come on! Hands up, boy!” He took the rifle and all my equipment from me, including the map case. “What’s that?” he asked, and when I replied that it was just books, he said, “We’ll check that!” Then, with a great deal of hysterical shouting, he led me across the yard. The tiled room, whose door he pushed open, had evidently served the owners as a parlor. The GI pushed back his helmet and ordered, “Sit down! And don’t move!” Without taking his eyes off me, he opened all three doors, behind which I made out about twenty American soldiers, and shouted something incomprehensible into each room.
    The lieutenant who entered shortly after that spoke perfect German, with a slight Palatinate intonation, so I asked him whether he came from the Mannheim area. But he hardly looked up from my paybook and retorted that he hadn’t made the journey from Milwaukee to the Rhine to make conversation with a Nazi. He inspected the map case, looked thoughtfully at the Goethe and Hölderlin poems, at the collections of quotations, and whatever else had been found on me. After glancingbriefly at a few pages he threw the books onto the nearby pile of rubbish, where bits of wall plaster, scraps of fruit, empty meat cans, and other junk was heaped up. “All over!” he said. And when I wanted to know what exactly, he barked, “Everything!” and “No conversation, my boy!” Finally, the map case flew onto the refuse.
    Before the lieutenant started the interrogation that was evidently coming, I plucked up all