Free The Road Back by Erich Maria Remarque Page A

when I had him as good as in my hand already."
    Frau Homeyer is not to be comforted. "There'll be trouble about it, I know. That Binding man has such a terrible temper."
    "But what do you take me for?" asks Willy, beginning to feel really slighted. "Do you think I let so much as a mouse see me? I'm no novice, you know. This makes just the tenth I've swiped now. A jubilee bird, you might say. We can eat him in perfect comfort, and your Binding won't know one thing about it." He shakes it affectionately. "You certainly will taste good! Do you think I should boil him or roast him?"
    "Do you imagine I would eat one little bit of it?" cries Frau Homeyer beside herself. "You take it back at once."
    "I'm not quite balmy," explains Willy.
    "But you stole it!" she laments desperately.
    "Stole it?" Willy bursts into laughter. "That's a nice thing to say! Commandeered, this was. Boned. Picked up, if you like. But stolen? When a man takes money, then perhaps you can talk of stealing, but certainly not when he just bags a little bit of something to eat. In that case we would have stolen a lot in our time, eh, Ernst?"
    "Sure, Willy," I say. "He just ran out to meet you, I dare say. Same as the one at Staden that belonged to the O.C. No. 2 Battery. Remember? And you made fricasseed chicken for the whole company out of it. Half and half— to one hen add one horse—that was the recipe, wasn't it?"
    Willy beams and pats the stove plate with his hand. "Cold!" he says disappointed, and turns to his mother. "Haven't you any coal, then?"
    Frau Homeyer cannot speak for agitation, she can only shake her head. Willy reassures her with a wave of the hand. "Never mind, I'll scrounge some tomorrow. Well make do for the moment with this old chair here—it's pretty wobbly, you see, not much good for anything any more really."
    Frau Homeyer looks at her son uncomprehendingly. She snatches the chair and then the fowl out of his very hands and makes off with it to milkman Binding's.
    Willy is righteously indignant. "So, off he goes and sings no more!" he says sadly. "Do you understand that, Ernst?"
    I understand well enough that we may not take the chair—though up the line we once burned a whole piano to make a dapple-grey horse come tender; and that at home here we must not yield to every involuntary twitching of our fingers—though out there everything eatable was looked on as a gift from God and by no means as a problem in morals—perhaps I can understand that also. But that a fowl that is already dead should be taken back to where the merest recruit knows it can only cause a lot of unnecessary trouble —that seems to me just plain madness.
    "If it isn't the custom, then we must starve, that seems to be the way of it, eh?" says Willy, quite nonplussed. "And to think we might have been having fricasseed chicken inside half an hour, if only we'd been on our own with the boys! And I meant to serve it with white sauce, too!"
    His eye wanders from the stove to the door and back again. "The best thing for us to do would be to make ourselves scarce," I suggest. "Looks to me as if there's a strafe brewing."
    But Frau Homeyer is back again already. "He isn't at home," she says out of breath, and, all excitement, is about to open her mind further when suddenly she notices that Willy has put on his things. Immediately it all is forgotten. "You aren't going away already?"
    "Just for a little bit of a patrol, mother," he says, laughing.
    She starts to weep. Willy, rather embarrassed, slaps her lightly on the shoulder. "I'll be back all right. Well always  be coming back now. A bit too often, perhaps, I shouldn't  wonder——"
    Side by side, our hands in our pockets, we set off at a swinging pace down Castle Street. "Shouldn't we collect Ludwig?" I ask.
    Willy shakes his head. "No, let him sleep. That's better for him."
    The town is disturbed. Motor-lorries filled with sailors go roaring through the streets. Red flags are flying.
    Bundles of handbills are