We go back to the huts. I think of the letter that I must write tomorrow to Kemmerich’s mother. I am freezing. I could do with a tot of rum. Müller pulls up some grass and chews it. Suddenly little Kropp throws his cigarette away, stamps on it savagely, and looking around him with a broken and distracted face, stammers, “Damned shit, the damned shit!”

We walk on for a long time. Kropp has calmed himself; we understand, he saw red; out there every man gets like that sometime.

“What has Kantorek written to you?” Müller asks him.

He laughs. “We are the Iron Youth.”

We all three smile bitterly, Kropp rails: he is glad that he can speak.

Yes, that’s the way they think, these hundred thousand Kantoreks! Iron Youth! Youth! We are none of us more than twenty years old. But young? Youth? That is long ago. We are old folk.