All quiet on the Western FrontRemarque, Erich Maria
History
All quiet on the Western Front
Remarque, Erich Maria
War stories; World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
Kat and I do a little patrolling through the houses. In very short
time we have collected a dozen eggs and two pounds of fairly fresh
butter. Suddenly there is a crash in the drawing room, and an iron
stove hurtles through the wall past us and on, a yard from us out
through the wall behind. Two holes. It comes from the house
opposite where a shell has just landed. "The swine," grimaces Kat,
and we continue our search. All at once we prick up our ears, hurry
across, and suddenly stand petrified--there running up and down in a
little sty are two live sucking pigs. We rub our eyes and look once
again to make certain. Yes, they are still there. We seize hold of
them--no doubt about it, two real young pigs.
This will make a grand feed. About twenty yards from our dug-out
there is a small house that was used as an officers' billet. In the
kitchen is an immense fireplace with two ranges, pots, pans, and
kettles--everything, even to a stack of small chopped wood in an
outhouse--a regular cook's paradise.
Two of our fellows have been out in the fields all the morning
hunting for potatoes, carrots, and green peas. We are quite uppish
and sniff at the tinned stuff in the supply dump, we want fresh
vegetables. In the dining-room there are already two heads of
cauliflower.
The sucking pigs are slaughtered. Kat sees to them. We want to make
potato cakes to go with the roast. But we cannot find a grater for
the potatoes. However, that difficulty is soon got over. With a
nail we punch a lot of holes in a pot lid and there we have a grater.
Three fellows put on thick gloves to protect their fingers against
the grater, two others peel the potatoes, and the business gets going.
Kat takes charge of the sucking pigs, the carrots, the peas, and the
cauliflower. He even mixes a white sauce for the cauliflower. I fry
the pancakes, four at a time. After ten minutes I get the knack of
tossing the pan so that the pancakes which are done on the one side
sail up, turn in the air and are caught again as they come down. The
sucking pigs are baked whole. We all stand round them as before an
altar.
In the meantime we receive visitors, a couple of wireless-men, who
are generously invited to the feed. They sit in the living-room
where there is a piano. One of them plays, the other sings 'An der
Weser.' He sings feelingly, but with a rather Saxon accent. All the
same it moves us as we stand at the fireplace preparing the good
things.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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