Time For My Furlough

Ah yes! It was still nice to be on furlough even though I have no parents anymore and all my siblings are in service with other people. I really wanted to see my brother but he could not get off. With the ambulance they had no time to go on furlough now. He wrote that he wanted to come but it would have been too late. I had already left because I wanted to spend a few days in Vienna too.

Well, now I am back again. It is peculiar, I never believed before what strange thoughts one gets during furlough about the war. One looks at things with totally different eyes. Of course, the real misery one sees only in the hinterland. There the heroism looks completely different. And without wanting to, one comes to the conclusion that the war is nothing else but a business in which the poor people have to pay the bill. The same here as on the other side. And now I understand the words that Pernauer once said. It really seems to be that way.

In the hinterland all kinds of hardships and annoyances and almost nothing to chew. How they treat the war refugees...as if they had not already lost everything, their homeland, belongings and property. Our Salzbugians are not aware of these things and can not even appreciate the full meaning of Homeland. All the things you find out here in the hinterland, you feel like vomiting. Why don't they just realize it is all for nothing and just make peace?

With such thoughts I returned to service and a few hours later had to go out on action. Nothing helped. The twenty kronen that I gave to the medic were just wasted. I wanted to shirk going out on action and just could not think of anything better than to stick my thumb between the yawl and the stabilizing float when I brought the officers on board. It pinched my thumb really bad. Now I cried out and lamented something awful and ran to the medic in a hurry. I showed him my injury and induced him with ten kronen to paint my whole hand with iodine and in order to have him wrap the bandage up to my elbow I turned over ten kronen more.

With my arm in a sling I marched over to report that I could not go out with them. But oh, how I miscalculated. The Second unwrapped my bandage, took out his pocket-knife and scratched the iodine off my thumbnail. He laughed and said, "Well, if everyone would be as healthy as you...you just better come along."

Confounded and abandoned! Now I have one bad thumb which really hurts very much, twenty kronen gone to the dogs and the ridicule that the whole crew has bestowed on me. "You having lots of pain?" one after the other asked. Pfui Teufel!