by Gert Ledig
The Major drummed on the window glass with his fingertips. ‘Do you think the company in the trenches are any better off?’
‘Yes, yes I do,’ the Runner said loudly, as though afraid he might be ignored. ‘I can dig in there. I don’t need to go through the mortar fire. From here – back to the trench – that’s the worst. Please, would you relieve me, sir.’
The Major thought: I know what he means. You can’t get used to it. It’s like jumping from a great height into shallow water. You can stand the swimming. But what about the leap?
‘I’ve heard that sort of thing before,’ he said. He sounded cold. He didn’t want to let himself be caught off guard. Neither by himself, nor by the man on the other side of the desk.
But the Runner persisted. ‘It’s unfair.’
The Major watched the replacements emerging from the village huts. One of them was already by the well. A flushed, red face, with protruding teeth. A bearing that didn’t inspire much confidence. Just a silly swagger. Certainly one of those the Runner would lead to perdition.
The voice behind the Major said: ‘What would be fair is if there was a new man every day.’ The Major thought: fair? Killing children isn’t fair either. ‘Or at least once a week,’ said the Runner.
The Major realized he wasn’t very interested. He ducked out of the conversation: ‘I can’t concern myself with every individual.’
‘The Captain says it was your orders that I was to keep doing it.’
‘My orders? He can choose someone else any time he likes.’
‘Yes sir. But he says orders are orders.’
The Runner was starting to irritate him; the way he was talking, it was as though there was only him in the world. ‘I’ll have a word with the Captain,’ said the Major. He still didn’t move. A group of men had clustered round the well. The Adjutant was numbering them off. The replacements were busy with their packs. They were carrying too much. They would only need a fraction of what they had, and not for long. At his back, the Runner made a movement. Perhaps he had moved closer to the window? The Major didn’t care. He continued drumming on the window with his fingertips. Twice hard, twice lightly. Always in the same rhythm.
The Runner cleared his throat.
‘Was there something else?’ asked the Major. He wished he had sent the Runner out with the Adjutant.
‘I can’t go back in the position.’
The drumming stopped.
‘I can’t,’ said the Runner. ‘I’m sick.’
‘Sick?’ The Major turned round. The lie was evident on the Runner’s expression.
‘I can’t move my legs any more. The joints are inflamed. Someone else will have to take the paper and the replacements to the Front.’ He had laid the piece of paper with the copy of the divisional orders on it down on the table, and was clenching his fists. As though he had something hidden in his hands. His face and the clay stove seemed to be made of the same substance. He was silent while the Major looked at him.
‘Get out!’
The Runner didn’t move. Scraps of speech drifted over from the well: the Adjutant.
‘Take the report!’
The Runner put out his hand and reached for the piece of paper. Not proper obedience, just a movement. The Major looked at the grey face. There were tears on it. The Runner turned about. Silently he left the room.
The voice behind the desk was gone. The Major reeled slightly as he walked back to the window. Let the Runner whinge. The replacements formed up outside in a marching column. The Adjutant raised his hand. The Runner walked up, mopping his eyes. One or two were laughing nervously. The Runner shook his head. Through the grimy window, it all looked like a film. The sound had failed. It was silent. The Runner had been crying. With rage? Or was it something else? Now the sound came back on.
‘Break step – march!’ commanded the Adjutant. It echoed as though from a gorge. The Runner walked out on to the village street, and the column jerked along after him. The men, the well – everything dissolved before his eyes. Why couldn’t he cry? Tears were comforting. The Major saw the window glass, nothing more. The glass reflected a stranger’s grimacing face. His own face.
2
The Runner left the village with the replacements. Their new leather harness creaked. A horse whinnied near the last huts of the village. The cemetery lay there abandoned. The cart with the bodies was gone. No trace of the alarming passengers.
The column behind the Runner were quiet. The Front up ahead, enclosed in gloomy forests, was similarly quiet. Night pushed itself along the horizon. Always at twilight there was silence from the Front, as it got used to the darkness. The Runner knew that. With his left hand, he batted aside a fly that had followed him from the edge of the village. His right hand was still making a fist. It clutched the paper he had taken unnoticed from the Major’s desk.
The Adjutant’s message to the company was in his pocket. He would throw it away later.
There was a field-kitchen installed on the edge of the forest. The co-driver was feeding fresh wood into the furnace. A few embers spilled out. The lid of the cauldron was open. The steam smelled of nothing in particular.
The forest came out confidently to meet the path. But its trunks melted away. Only a few twigs plucked at the Runner, brushed against his shoulder. He unclenched his fist to smooth out the piece of paper. He looked over his shoulder, just in case.
One of the men had broken away, and was trying to get to the head of the column.
The Runner balled up the paper in his hand again. It needed to be darker. The tree with the hanged man was coming soon. He switched to the other side of the track. The row of men made no move to follow him. They stayed on their side, and they would be in for a fright. He smiled unpleasantly.
The hanged man dangled on a long rope, as though he’d been pulled out of the water. It was already too dark to make out his features. They had switched him round only a week ago. His predecessor had been a Commissar, this one was just a simple soldier. When parties of them were found in the forest, they were shot, stragglers were hanged. They seemed to know that. Usually they kept one last bullet for themselves. That accelerated the procedure.
The first in line leaped aside in terror. He almost ran smack into the corpse. The Runner tittered. The rest of them were alerted, and made a shy detour round the body. Their first corpse, oh me oh my.
It was getting darker and darker. The sky turned bruise-black. A telegraph was ticking away in the bushes, but the Runner couldn’t see anything. Sounds wafted over from the artillery emplacements in the forest. He pulled the report out of his pocket, tore off a corner of it, and let it flutter to the ground.
The remains of the cart with the mouldered leather harness loomed across the path like a ghost. No one noticed the paper flutter to the ground. It wouldn’t be long before he’d got rid of the rest of it. Pieces of the report kept fluttering off into the dark, into oblivion. That was part of his plan. Before long, he had just one tiny bit left. He rolled it up between his fingers, and flicked it away, anywhere. A spent rifle bullet whined feebly through the treetops and knocked against a trunk. The Front seemed to be coming to life.
The soldier behind him caught him up at last. He was panting, as if he was carrying a box of ammunition as well as his rifle and groundsheet.
‘I’m a baker,’ he said.
A spray of tracer fire clattered into the boughs. The Runner pulled on his steel helmet, which thus far he’d carried on his belt. The voice at his side said nothing. Then after a while, it began again:
‘’m’ baker!’
‘Yeah,’ said the Runner. He wondered if it was his name or his profession.
‘I wanted to get in with the field bakery,’ the voice explained.
‘That’d be nice,’ replied the Runner. He thought about bread. Fresh bread, still warm from the oven. He wasn’t hungry. He thought about starched aprons, a tiled kitchen, a floury warmth.
‘Back home, I’ve got my own bakery with
my own mill,’ the voice went on. And then, sounding very sorry for itself: ‘I was cheated.’
‘We’ve all been cheated,’ said the Runner. His voice was drowned out by the whistle and hiss of a shell that detonated in the forest.
‘Keep going!’ shouted the Runner, but the men had all flung themselves to the ground. The baker was stretched out as well.
‘Get up!’ the Runner yelled furiously. He thought: What have I let myself in for; this shower would rather creep along on all fours. A minute passed, and finally they were all up. They went on.
‘A bakery with a mill,’ the voice next to him resumed. A parachute flare opened out over the forest. Its bright illumination pierced through the ragged treetops. For half a minute they were running through white light.
The Runner turned to look the voice in the face: a row of protruding teeth, and an expression of stupidity. Then night drew its curtain once more.
‘I’ll see you come out of it with something too,’ wheedled the voice. ‘A word from you . . . I’m sure you know who to talk to. The place for me’s in the field bakery. Everyone should serve where he’s most useful.’ The last sentence swollen with false conviction. ‘I don’t know anyone.’ The Runner gestured irritably. He realized he still had in his hand the piece of paper from the Major’s table. ‘Fall back. We need to keep distance, it’s about to get dangerous.’ He wanted to be alone. The shadow obediently fell back. He was able to think, and to smooth out the paper. The Major wouldn’t miss it. He only collected bits of paper like that in order to destroy them. He knew what was written on it by heart. A vehicle blocked the path. Wounded men were being picked up. He tripped over a stretcher. Someone swore. He dropped the paper. It took him a while till he found it.
The file behind him was getting out of order. One man walked into him. Others shouted: ‘Runner, Runner!’ He lined them up again, and found himself getting out of breath. For safety’s sake, he shoved the piece of paper in his pocket. In the event of a checkpoint, he could claim he was carrying it in case of emergency. Of course that was also forbidden, but they didn’t mind quite so much. Thousands of such bits of paper came out of nowhere. He had never seen it happen, but he was sure they were dropped from aeroplanes. Sometimes they were seen caught in the treetops, or on the shingle roofs of the village huts. Most of them were scattered over the swamps, where they were no good to anyone. There were blue ones and pink ones. Both carried the same message.
COME OVER TO OUR SIDE, COMRADE! THIS PASS GUARANTEES YOU LIFE AND LIBERTY! On the back side of it was something in Cyrillic. He couldn’t make it out. One man in the company had translated it. It didn’t sound bad. ‘Anyone who produces this form is a deserter. He is entitled to privileged treatment, life, liberty, and passage home at the war’s end.’ No one in the company took it seriously. The Runner didn’t really either. And in spite of that, most of them had one of these ‘passes’. This one here came from the Major’s table. The assault on the log-road would take place without the Runner.
The business with the report was taken care of. No one would ever find the scraps of paper. There was another flare up in the sky. Through the foliage overhead, the Runner watched it slowly subside. He wondered how far there was to go. But there already was the shadow of the railway embankment. A machine gun started rattling away. It was as if the embankment had only been waiting for him. As on command, the sentry nearest him fired back. The next man joined in. Fire ran down along the tracks like a burning fuse. Hissed and crashed. The rail seemed to be shaking with fever. From down in the dip, a second machine gun suddenly opened up. Everything was popping and banging, it was like a New Year celebration. Further off was the firework of the flares. And suddenly, the noise collapsed in on itself like a house of cards. Silence. Just one ricochet whistling though the air. It seemed to have taken off vertically, and wouldn’t be back.
‘Time for a cigarette,’ the Runner said to the men. They stood around him. The little luminous red dots glowed. Each time someone drew, vague features became visible. From the heights opposite, a few shots clacked over at them.
‘All right then,’ said the Runner, and tossed his cigarette end under the trees. The file whisked off along the embankment, with the Runner in the lead.
There was some traffic on the path. Men carrying crates of ammunition squeezed past them. Another Runner overtook them. At the dressing-station, there were some black clumps on the ground. Dead men. His column didn’t make a squeak. Behind a canvas drape was the whitish gleam of a carbide lamp. It smelled of carbolic and quicklime. Far off in the forest, a battery was firing. In the reddish sheen of the detonations as they flickered over the night sky, the Runner for a second glimpsed the outline of the height, the pylon, the scorched earth of the slope, the cratered field. The enemy was sending out breathless bursts of machine-gun fire. High-explosive shells drenched the rails like a thunderstorm. Finally, they broke off, with a vicious satisfaction, as if to say: There’s more where that came from.
The slope began. The Runner clambered on to the embankment, ducked his head, and started to run up the hill. The trench-mortar detonations were like falling rocks. At once he was in the thick of it, the file of replacements following him likewise. But he was only thinking about himself. An inner voice called out: ‘Drop!’ He lay on the deck. It decreed: ‘Run for all you’re worth!’ He ran. His legs obeyed his instincts. The height was like an erupting volcano. Stones, earth and sand clattered over him, a lava rain of incandescent splinters. Sudden quiet. Nothing. Just a fluorescent screen, hanging in the air.
He stood upright, and didn’t dare throw himself down. His life depended on a single movement. The sense that there were a hundred rifle muzzles aimed at him in the darkness made him tremble. His teeth chattered. The fluorescent screen grew brighter all the time.
‘Drop,’ whispered the voice of temptation. He couldn’t even breathe. The only part of him to move were his eyes. They tried to penetrate the darkness, to see the rifle muzzles that were pointing at his chest. The beam of the fluorescence flickered, it was like a headlamp. Other than the pylon, he was the only upright thing on the hill. The replacements were hunkered down in the shadow somewhere. The beam wouldn’t go out.
‘You’d better drop now,’ determined the voice of temptation. The flare went out, and he sprang forward with relief. Like a blind man, he went smash into the concrete. His hand groped in shards of glass, and his knee was full of burning pain. Something looming and dark – one of the pylon supports – threatened to fall on top of him. But it didn’t fall, and he stopped for breath in the lee of the concrete shelter.
With the line of men who were trailing along after him, he couldn’t pay a visit to the hole under the foundations of the mast. He was a convict. Got out of jail. Wherever he might stop and look for shelter, he was followed by a gang of other convicts, who were using his escape route. The only thing open to him was to plunge forward into the darkness again.
It was easier, going downhill. Gravity helped him. He was like a ball, bounding down the slope in great leaps. A clattering as of wooden clogs on an iron bridge accompanied him: rifle-grenades feeling for him. A branch whipped across his face. He was already in the brush down in the hollow. His feet no longer obeyed him. In the shrubbery he defecated, like a man able to think of his body again, once he has done his duty. He always defecated in the same place, and there was never a time he couldn’t do it. In that respect, he was like a dog. A drumming of sixty feet came down after him. A locomotive of human bodies, driven by fear and panic. He had trouble getting them to stop. It surprised him there was no one missing. They crossed the overgrown hollow together. Twigs and thorns pierced the uniforms, and dug into the skin. They reached the beginning of the trench. Bullets buzzed like bees through the foliage.
The Runner said: ‘Wait here till I come for you!’ He normally ran the last stretch to the shelter, even though there was no evidence of mortar fire here. With relief, he pulled aside the metal cover at the entrance, pushed his
way through the crack, and took a breath, before lifting aside the ancient piece of sacking.
The smell that greeted him was like poison gas. Even before he could see the enemy, he smelled him. The disinfectant clung to their uniforms, whether they were living or dead.
‘A deserter,’ announced the Sergeant, with an expression on his face as though he had personally pulled him out of the enemy lines.
The Russian soldier sat on the bench facing the table, and the Captain was pressing against the other side of the table. They fixed one another, as though each waiting for the other to pull out a knife. The Russian had slitty eyes, bitten fingernails, and he was scared. His cropped hair stuck straight out from his scalp.
Finally the Captain broke the silence: ‘We’re not getting anywhere like this. This man is disturbed!’ He scratched his head, and decided: ‘I’m going to draw a diagram!’ He paid no attention to the Runner. With the aid of a piece of paper and a pencil that he usually chewed on, he wanted to learn where the Russian mortars were situated. No success. The man gazed silently at the piece of paper, and shrugged his shoulders. The smell of his uniform infested the shelter, which stank as it was, of sweat and shit. The Sergeant raised his hand. ‘Maybe he’ll understand this better?’ he asked, and slapped the round stubbly skull.
‘No,’ said the Captain, ‘don’t hit him!’ He looked at him. The Russian soldier smiled, without understanding.
The Sergeant rapped against his holster: ‘Here’s something he might understand better.’
The Captain appeared to give up: ‘He doesn’t know anything. Can’t be helped.’
Smiling, the other fished a few shreds of tobacco out of his trouser pocket, tore off a corner of the diagram, and rolled himself a cigarette. He pinched the end together, to keep the tobacco from spilling out, leaned forward over the candle, and began to smoke.