English Translation

-7- 104 of the tanned skin that looked at the dead. I had to scare away Mihe the great thought; what could the wild shooter have to do with the dead Serb or have in common? I had completely forgotten my anger and walked silently beside him. Before we came to the post, the black corporal stretched out a Serbian recognition mark to me on the flat hand, which he had apparently taken from the dead. "What is his name?" The note was written in cyrillic script and I deciphered the name with difficulty. He repeated it carefully and kept the note carefully in his wallet. Only after a while did the strange futility of his action come to my consciousness and I asked: "Why did you take the badge from him? If you bury him, you won't know his name!" My voice sounded too loud to me. He shook his head and said calmly, "He doesn't need this anymore." - - - For weeks we marched to the foreign country hi- no, fighting was no longer possible. We waded through the knee-deep mud of the rhinestones 5h guns and broken wagons, unshaped horse cadavers stretched their stiff legs into the air and in the road ditch lay dead people who had left the fleeing army behind. We went through Turkish villages and cities, saw mosques and bazaars, little girls of sight in short days and lovely widths: Panties ran away screaming in front of us, we wrestled with merchants in red furrows, and talked like tumults of vision with heads and hands; we marveled, shaking our heads, small, wood-clad lodges, nested side by side like honeycombs, saying that these were the rooms of a harem; we sat with our involuntary friends at the campfire, which we had lit out of the poles of his fence in front to his house, and watched as he did his. white, long, fine hands warmed on the flame; it became winter and we came to people who lived as in a thousand and