by Roy Jacobsen
The youngest of the brothers was a baker. In 1968 his elder brother died of cancer and in the summer, five years later, one of the baker’s nieces, who studied in Paris, came home on holiday with a Frenchman in tow; they were going to get married as soon as the opportunity arose, straight after her finals presumably, to judge by the looks she sent him.
That summer, as usual, there were some family events to celebrate, a baptism or a wedding or an important birthday, and at some point during this warm black Ardennes night, which they spent in the garden, as tradition prescribed, the niece introduced the baker to her French boyfriend, and the boyfriend to the baker, and announced that her fiancé was a historian and in the midst of a thesis on the war in the Soviet Union.
“Interesting,” the baker said with a nod, slightly flattered.
Then his niece asked:
“Do you remember where you were, Uncle?”
He looked at her, perplexed.
“Remember – what do you mean?”
Apart from his own six children, she was the one of his brother’s children he appreciated most, not least because she was his godchild. Then she repeated the words which were to change his life:
“Do you remember where you were?”
“I was in the Sixth Army, my dear!’ he said, dumbfounded. “Of course I remember!’
But saying this, he realised that the term didn’t mean anything to her at all, that neither she nor anyone else in the family, including his wife and children, had any idea what the Sixth Army was, and that this silence which by tacit collective agreement had shrouded these matters for decades did not conceal knowledge of something painful and unmanageable but rather total ignorance. Not even when the Frenchman showed his bewilderment and awe at standing face to face with a living miracle did the niece realise what she had said.
This made such a strong impression on the baker that he decided on the spot to relive the second half of his life. And once again he came home from Russia with head injuries, but this time he didn’t go for long walks beneath the beeches to summon up the courage to hand over a letter he carried, he went straight to his parents with the news he had received on the train between Dnipropetrovsk and Kiev, the report that his third brother had fallen too, on the Upper Don, he had lost a leg and both arms, but had lived long enough to be able to dictate a letter to the army chaplain Arno Kumbel – here it is.
After that he served for two years in Normandy, deserted during the Ardennes offensive, and spent a couple of years in an English P.O.W. camp, as he had done in his first life. Then he returned home and resumed his old profession, he baked bread and Fladenbrot and Schwarzwälderkirschtorte and in the weeks before Christmas sculpted lovely marzipan figures and in addition contributed to every special occasion with culinary tours de force which took the family’s breath away. But now he didn’t hold back over the war. As soon as anybody asked how he was, he told them the truth, that he still heard the sound of tanks in broad daylight and had the Katyusha rocket launchers’ orange-red flashes stamped on his retinas as soon as he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He told them that he, a rank-and-file soldier, had happened to be in the General Command of the Sixth Army and had seen a tactical map on one of the tables and that on it the south-eastern front resembled a funnel, that the Sixth Army was positioned inside that funnel, in the spout, so to speak, and he had immediately realised that this was not going to end well, the Russians only had to cut off the “spout” and the whole army would be enclosed, and that is what he had told his comrades when he went back to his unit, “We’re trapped in a funnel,” he had said, “We are doomed,” but then the commanding officer had accused him of subversive activity – “You could never trust Belgians” – “It’s not subversive activity,” he said, and it was only thanks to the fact that we were engaged in battle night and day that I escaped with a reprimand…
He repeated this whenever anyone asked, plus a whole load of other things, occasionally even when no-one asked, he told his children and nephews and nieces what he had experienced, at birthday parties and weddings and communion gatherings and Christmas celebrations, about how and where his brothers were killed, what he thought about the old and the new Germany, and he also got his elder brother to break his silence, and when he, the brother, died in 1968 and the baker was the sole survivor, he began to look forward to the day when his favourite niece and godchild would come home on holiday with a French historian who would listen to his story about the Sixth Army and use it in a thesis written at the prestigious Sorbonne.
But when the day came he couldn’t see the Frenchman anywhere and, after imbibing some Dutch courage, he approached his niece and asked her straight out: “Where’s your Frenchman?” “Which Frenchman?” she asked. “The one you’re marrying,” the baker said. “The one who’s so interested in the fate of the Sixth Army?” “I would never consider marrying anyone who’s so obsessed with the war, Uncle. Surely you can understand that,” she said, kissing him on the cheek.
There and then the baker decided to stick to his first life after all. And the day after the summer family gathering he went over to see his niece and the Frenchman, who were staying with her mother, his brother’s widow, and they received him warmly, the niece both relieved and ashamed, for by now the Frenchman had made her aware of her ignorance: “I’m so sorry, Uncle,” she said. “How could I say something so stupid? Pierre says you’re heavensent…”
“Yes, you see…” the baker said after sitting down and being served a bottle of Diekirch, for although he was Belgian and proud of it he preferred Luxembourg beer, “we were trapped in a funnel…”
The Feldmarschall’s Conscience
1
All time machines go backwards, for man has more memories than visions, more habits than foresight, Markus maintains, so whenever he casts his mind hither or thither, the choice is simple, it has to stop somewhere between eleven and half past eleven on the evening of 27 November, 1942, in the sleepy rat trap of a town called Novocherkassk to the south of the Don Basin, a focal point he comes back to again and again, only to get the same answer to his two burning questions; now he will soon be in conversation with Feldmarschall Erich von Manstein, which will turn his already devastated life upside down.
Markus Hebel, an amateur inventor and technical genius, whom the Wehrmacht valued and decorated but didn’t promote, had arrived from Rostov on November 21 with the very best of intentions, that is, with four railway carriages brimful of communications equipment and strict orders to set up, double quick, an H.Q. for the General Staff of the newly established Army Group Don, a creation Hitler was expecting miracles from, miracles he desperately needed.
The work had been going on day and night, but because of a lack of staff, especially people with technical expertise – who came in dribs and drabs from Rostov, Taganrog and Starobelsk – and an innate reluctance on the part of the head of the Cossack Guard to speak Russian, which would soon change, a series of major and minor problems had arisen that sapped Markus of his energy and good humour. So when at noon on November 26 his people lined up outside the dismal railway station in Novocherkassk to receive the arriving General Staff, he was on the verge of a breakdown, the breakdown which was to last for the rest of his life and influence his thoughts and deeds until the moment God carried him off in one incomprehensible fell swoop.
General Manstein, who only a few months previously had been promoted to Feldmarschall, was the first to step out into the blinding snowstorm and down the semi-rotten wooden slats which the frost had turned into icy concrete slabs and, unruffled by the howling weather, he immediately took stock of the place with his imposing presence. He was wearing battledress with burgundy General Staff stripes down the legs of his trousers and bore the Crimea Shield medal like a twinkling star on his right breast pocket, the most illustrious of all the General’s honours. The second-in-command, Oberst Busse, came close on his heels; this was the man who was to follow Manstein like a supportive shadow through the entire hell on earth whi
ch awaited them, and also sacrifice years of his life after the war defending his superior officer against the charges levelled at him, crimes against humanity.
Next to emerge was the Chief of Staff, General Schulz, with Markus’ new superior officer, A.D.C. Oberstleutnant Stahlberg, behind him Oberst Eismann, the Head of Intelligence, and the usual procession of technical and military experts who are part of any well-oiled war machine – radio operators and signallers, engineers and drivers, cooks and skivvies – there was even a company of joiners amongst them, which showed some foresight, to patch up the lamentable buildings in Novocherkassk.
Markus had seen Manstein several times before, he had also talked to him, very briefly, during the Kerch campaign earlier the same year, and it was with considerable relief that he had received the news that the General would now be taking over command of the Eastern Front, the most traumatic of them all, for once you have been forced into the service of this barbarism, you prefer, naturally enough, to carry out your duties in relatively civilised ways and especially under a High Command which had the greatest chance of getting you out alive.
Markus spent the afternoon convincing his new commander, Stahlberg, that the work on the technical installations at H.Q. was on schedule, and the Oberstleutnant expressed his satisfaction, was encouraging and friendly in his own punctilious way, and all that remains to be said is that Markus was given orders to report to the General personally, he got up and dutifully went over to the map room which was fitted out how he knew from the Crimea Manstein would want it to be, and found the General there alone, actually an ominous sign, as the General was in the habit of conveying tragic news to his subordinates in private, the death of close members of the family for example, and Markus had not only his Nella and his two daughters at home in Clervaux to worry about but also two brothers in France, not to mention a son somewhere on the Eastern Front, a volunteer, completely against Markus’ own wishes and orders, his name was Peter and he was only twenty-one.
Markus greeted him as hesitantly as a raw recruit, and also incorrectly, since of course the General was entitled to be addressed as Feldherr, or Feldmarschall, or Generalfeldmarschall, so he corrected his mistake only for it to be brushed aside with a forbearing gesture.
“General will do. Or just Manstein, that’s how I sign my name.”
Nonetheless this sparse display of joviality still struck a worrying note, Markus reflected, for even though the General was well-known for his biting sense of humour, his refined streak of self-irony and a not insignificant touch of sentimentality (which was mostly used at funerals, remembrances and otherwise on occasions when there could be no doubt about the genuineness of people’s feelings, which by the way never clouded his analytical mind), he was not the kind of General to treat matters of etiquette lightly, accept sloppiness or any un-German conduct in his ranks.
Their previous conversation, the only one they had ever had, to be honest, had taken place on the Kerch peninsula, in the eastern Crimea, and had proceeded more or less as follows. With a superhuman effort lasting a whole day, Markus had excelled himself by keeping a running tally of all the positions of every one of the armoured and infantry divisions throughout the whole attack, including details of the enemy’s faltering retreat, thereby demonstrating an impressive command of the situation, which the General had taken note of, with the result that when victory was a fact and Kuban lay there like a ripe apple on the other side of the glistening strait, he had, in passing, asked the Leutnant where in the Reich he came from, the General couldn’t quite place his dialect.
“I’ve got two passports, Herr General,” Markus had answered.
“I hope by God one of them is German,” Manstein said. “Please get rid of the other one.”
“That is not within my control, Herr General.”
“I’m not talking about official channels, young man. But about what you have inside here.”
He nodded towards Markus’ uniform and tapped a nicotine-yellow forefinger on his chest, but did not explain whether he was referring to a visible antipathy towards the National Socialist view of the world or only wanted to urge the Leutnant to overcome the layers of quivering fear which he presumed enveloped him.
“I understand, Herr General.”
“Where in all the world do they have such a despicable system that allows people to hold two passports?”
“In the East Cantons of Belgium, Herr General. But I am of German descent. Bad Münstereiffel. The Rhineland.”
He didn’t mention his marriage to a woman from Luxembourg and his present abode in the same place. And that was that. A trivial exchange of words in the rush of victory, between the Reich’s most legendary general and a nonentity without rank, or almost, from a nation without borders and a time that cannot be defined by clocks or calendars or the sun’s steady path through eternity. But when they met again, less than six months later, it was natural for the General to take up this thread, if only to show that once he has seen a face he never forgets it, and this became the start of the most important conversation in his life, this was how Markus, with closed eyes, presented it to his young friend Robert, his attentive but also extremely critical conversation partner throughout this story, which ought to be of benefit to the material, as Markus is hardly a more credible witness than anyone else; since memory can play tricks on anybody, particularly when events of the nature recounted here are presented. It is 23.30, German time, 26 November, 1942 in the devastated town of Novocherkassk in the Russian Steppes.
“Oh, there you are, Hebel. Have you still got two passports?”
“No, Herr General.”
“Good. Only spies have two passports. Don’t you agree?”
“No, Herr General.”
There was a silence, and Markus saw this abrupt “no” in response to a good-humoured throwaway remark from his superior as a spontaneous flight of fancy, which in the world of reality he would hardly have dared to utter, no matter how exhausted he was, for Markus was no heroic resistance fighter in the wrong uniform, neither in his own nor in anyone else’s eyes; he had learned this truth the previous summer when the German troops captured the whole of the Crimea apart from one single town, Sebastapol, “the armoured monster” as Manstein called it, the most formidable garrison on earth, where Fort Inkerman was blown up during the attack by order of the Soviet commanding officer, with the result that thousands of civilians and wounded soldiers who had sought refuge in caverns under the fort (which in more peaceful times served as a storage area for the champagne factories in the Crimea, and now functioned as an ammunition warehouse) were buried under the rubble, before the eyes of the incredulous invading army.
From the start of the campaign Markus had cherished a forlorn hope that an opportunity to desert would present itself, to “go over” to the “enemy” and from there help to put a stop to this German madness, which had also ruined his own country, but that hope vanished here at Inkerman for good, amid swarms of flies and a stench as unbearable as a gas attack. It was here that he changed into a German soldier with one passport and one heart, to put it bluntly, a resolve which was stiffened when he realised that the Russians’ incredible fighting spirit in the Crimea was partly due to Stalin’s reluctance to evacuate his decimated armies; only a few high-ranking officers were shipped out at the last minute, while civilians, lower ranks, the wounded, partisans and rank-and-file soldiers were sacrificed, taken prisoner by the Germans or falling victim to a ritualistic suicide instigated by their own officers in the hour of defeat.
With Sebastopol’s fall, however, the deafening roar was followed by a strange silence, the whole of the Crimea was in Manstein’s (i.e. Hitler’s) hands, and a golden, hellenistic peace settled over the peninsula. Markus clambered half-naked over the cliffs near Balaclava, swam in the Black Sea and drank wine with his comrades late into the deep tropical nights which in the summer months caress the Crimea’s beautiful south coast. But, with this silence, civilisation returned to him, his ambivalen
t nationality, if it can be expressed in those terms, although not strongly enough to undermine his resolve to cling to his German identity with a loyalty and readiness for self-sacrifice which shocked him in moments of clarity, but which as a rule he didn’t allow himself to dwell on, less and less the further east the campaign went. However, he maintained a streak of his anarchic defiance, a last vesitige of dignity, as he called it, and maybe it was from here that his gruff “no” to the General’s light-hearted remark about spies with two passports stemmed, at least that was Robert’s view.
“So that’s why you’ve never risen higher through the ranks than your own son,” Manstein said with annoyance. “Who is only half your age.”
“My son, Herr General?”
“Yes…”
The Feldmarschall drew a hand over his face and paused, got up from the chair and stood motionless in front of the map hanging to the left of the blackout curtains, or the “map sketch”, where only positions and rivers and infrastructure had been marked in, so no topographical data, which for this section of the front was redundant in any case, it being blessedly flat in all directions. “That’s why I summoned you, Hebel,” the General continued with his back to him. “To tell you your son is serving in the Sixth Army, on General Paulus’ staff. He’s fine, from what I gather, with more or less the same function as you have here. In that respect you’ve definitely had a good influence on him.”
Markus felt his backbone straighten and the blood leave the roots of his hair at the very thought of having this information thrown into his face, however true it might be, while his eyes scanned the map upwards, to where the rivers Don and Volga bent towards each other like the tips of two funnels, or two rusty spearheads, or two arthritic knees; the German armies filled the Don knee to the west and the Soviet armies the Volga knee to the east. Paulus’ Sixth Army had crossed the Don during the summer near the village of Kalach, on the kneecap, had crossed the flat land between the two rivers and besieged Stalingrad on the west bank of the Volga where the remains of the Soviet forces were still holding out.