by Gert Ledig
He stopped and waited.
‘Captain?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why is our resistance futile?’
‘You’re surrounded! The Russians are already in Emga!’ He caught an approving nod from the Lieutenant, and realized too late that he hadn’t stuck to the truth. He started to sweat.
‘Wait a minute,’ he heard someone call. After a time came the question:
‘Waldmüller! Are they threatening you?’
The voice seemed familiar. One more sentence and he’d be able to place it.
‘No,’ he called back.
‘Waldmüller, don’t talk nonsense! I know you’re not talking freely!’
The Captain was startled. He had made out the Major’s voice. How did he come to be in the trench? The Major was supposed to be in Podrova. He looked imploringly at the Russian and said vaguely: ‘I just want to stop further bloodshed.’
‘Waldmüller,’ shouted the Major, ‘if they’re threatening you – we’ve got a Russian Captain here. I’m prepared to exchange captives.’
‘I’m not being threatened!’ the Captain shouted promptly. He mopped his brow. His hand was soaked.
‘Find out his name,’ said Trupikov quietly.
‘What’s the Captain called?’
‘We don’t know. He’s with the platoon that are holding you.’
‘Zostchenko,’ murmured the Lieutenant.
‘The officer’s wounded. Negotiate an exchange. You against the Russian!’ called the Major.
The Captain was in despair. Peace, which had beckoned to him moments ago, was already receding into the distance.
‘Surrender,’ ordered Trupikov angrily.
‘The Russians won’t accept your suggestion!’ called the Captain with relief. ‘It’s futile anyway. I advise you . . .’
‘Waldmüller! I hear you . . .’
‘Major!’ He no longer had any idea how he might persuade him.
‘Can’t understand,’ he heard the Major say. Abruptly he asked: ‘By the way, Waldmüller, have you given the Russians the secret of the dugout?’
‘Major . . .’ The Captain remembered the sketch. His hands were shaking.
‘I want an answer!’
Lieutenant Trupikov inspected his pistol with interest.
‘Major!’ cried the Captain, at his wits’ end. ‘Talk it over with the men!’
‘That’s all, Waldmüller. You have my sympathy. Enough.’
The Lieutenant smiled: ‘Come.’ They made to stand up, but immediately bullets whistled past their ears, and they had to crawl back. German bullets, thought the Captain. Did God really not want to do a deal?
9
Sonia Shalyeva was running along a hollow. The air smelled of gunpowder. The grass on either side was burned, and at the deepest point of the dip she saw a dead man. He lay right across the path. His bandaged arms were pointed up at the sky. He had fallen off the back of a lorry. Not one of the soldiers rushing past had paid him any attention. In spite of her quilted uniform, which was too thick for the warm morning, she felt a shudder.
Beyond the slope, the path crossed a railway line. Some Red Guards carried on down the path, others turned right or left and went along the tracks. She asked for directions to the dressing-station to which she had been detailed. A commissar pointed down the tracks, turned and rushed on his way.
She walked over railway ties for a while, and asked a Red Guard if this was the way to the hill. The man told her she was almost there. There was shelling in the woods, and she walked faster. A group of Cossacks came riding along the rails. They yelled something she didn’t understand, and cracked their whips in the air. Runners passed her, and wounded men tottered to the rear. The earth shook with the detonations. There was drumfire over the German front.
Gradually, the distance between the rail ties grew too great for her stride, and she was forced to walk on the sharp ballast stones. Her feet started to burn. But the line seemed unending. Finally, she reached a clearing, a green meadow pocked with black craters. The blockhouse there was the dressing-station she had been told to report to. All round stood Red Guards in white bandages. Some were lying quietly on the grass, others were groaning and crying. She saw grey colourless faces, and filth-encrusted uniforms. Sweat poured down her face, and her hair dropped into her eyes. She made her way across to them, with a little difficulty. She mustn’t show any weakness. When she recognized one of the Siberians, she asked him: ‘Have you seen Captain Zostchenko?’
‘No.’ The man was lying in the grass, facing the sky. Blood ran over his lips.
She asked aloud: ‘Is there anyone else here from Zostchenko’s battalion?’
Six said they were.
‘Have you seen the Captain?’
‘If you had some water for me, Comrade!’
‘Have you seen the Captain?’
‘No!’
‘No . . . no . . . I think . . .’
She was ashamed of her questions, and turned towards the house. Maybe someone in there would know something.
When she opened the door, she found herself staring into a slaughterhouse. She felt she was choking, and unable to move. A doctor in a bloodied apron came up to her.
‘Comrade, I’ve been waiting for you for an hour. At last a woman’s hand!’ He pushed an apron into her arms.
In a toneless voice, she asked: ‘Do you have any news of Captain Zostchenko?’
‘Please . . . don’t make any difficulties, comrade. I need you urgently!’ He simply tied the apron on to her.
She saw a table covered with an oilcloth. Instruments glittered in a bucket.
‘Next!’ He didn’t even give her a moment to look around. Rough hands hoisted a body on to the table.
‘I’d be happy if you just held their hands,’ said the doctor. ‘Just the mere presence of a woman works wonders.’
She reached for the wounded man. The soldier had a blood-soaked bandage round his head. A medical orderly peeled it off him like peeling a fruit. The dried blood tore like paper. She stood at the head end of the table, and found herself staring at a pulsing white mass.
‘Do you see the splinter?’ asked the doctor.
She didn’t see anything. Only blood and brains.
A silver needle prodded into the jelly. It puffed up, and collapsed again. She felt sick.
‘I’ve got it,’ said a faraway-sounding voice. She closed her eyes.
‘That’ll do.’
By the time she opened her eyes again, the orderly was putting on a fresh bandage. Let me go, she wanted to ask. But her voice failed. The room started to spin. She planted her feet apart on the ground.
‘Next!’
The next man had no hands.
‘Take his head!’ ordered the doctor.
This time she shut her eyes right away. She tried to picture Zostchenko. The stable light flickering. The horse whinnying. ‘He’s gone,’ he said. She opened her eyes in alarm.
‘I said he’s gone!’ the doctor turned impatiently to the orderly. The man was no longer breathing.
‘Next!’
‘Are you wounded?’ asked the doctor.
‘I’m sick!’
‘Sick?’
The orderly said: ‘He hasn’t even got a temperature!’
‘Has he got a temperature, comrade nurse?’
She laid her hand on the soldier’s brow. She thought: he’s feverish, I’m feverish, we’re all feverish. The soldier was still young, and she looked into his eyes.
‘You must rejoin your unit. You must go back to Captain Zostchenko.’ And she said: ‘He needs every man.’
‘Yes, comrade!’ The soldier turned over, and reeled away, as though drunk.
‘Next!’ said the doctor, tired.
She wanted to swap places. If she’d been on the other side of the table, she would have been able to look out of the window. But she couldn’t move. The floor was covered with wounded men. The only space was on her side. She stared at the oilclot
h. The soldier on the table had a jaunty little moustache, and he was drunk.
‘I can’t feel anything,’ he said cheekily.
The orderly pulled off the bloodstained trousers. He looked in alarm at his superior, and then across to her.
‘Bandage him, quickly,’ said the doctor.
‘What’s the matter?’ the wounded man asked. Before she could do anything to prevent it, he had pulled himself upright. An animal scream came out of his mouth as he saw the wound. His feet drummed on the table. He raged, roared, wept. His spittle foamed. Then he suddenly collapsed. His features relaxed. He seemed years older. The moustache looked false. He wouldn’t try it on with a woman again. He passively allowed himself to be bandaged up and carried outside.
‘Next!’
They pushed him on to the table like a board. He lay wrapped in a canvas sheet. Under the sheet, his body reached only as far as his upper thighs. The orderly moved the bucket with the tools to the place where his feet should have been.
When she saw what they were about to do, she looked away. Once again, her thoughts concentrated on Zostchenko. It was the little attic room in Leningrad. He was sitting next to her, stroking her hand. She could feel his tenderness to her now. She felt a bitter surge of melancholy. They would never be together again like that. Life lay ahead of her like a grim road leading to a dump . . .
A shell came down in the clearing. The tools jingled together in the bucket. A saw was scraping.
‘Now the other one,’ said the doctor.
Another shell exploded. The earth shook. The beams ground together. Smoke came in through the open window, and the saw scratched on, as though nothing existed except this hut, and men with too many bones.
With the next shells, she heard the detonation. Two, three, four furious blows clawed at the house. The door was torn off its hinges. Smoke burst in. The soldiers outside, like animals, pressed in, looking for somewhere to shelter.
‘Calm!’ ordered the doctor, without stopping what he was doing. A cat hopped on to the window sill. Its back arched. It was looking for the proximity of humans.
‘Is his pulse still beating, Comrade Nurse?’
She couldn’t feel anything. Only cold, bony hands. One of the thin fingers had a ring on it. More and more soldiers kept pushing into the room. They jolted each other, crowded round the table, and trod on the wounded men on the ground. Every one was seeking shelter under a roof that could no longer provide it.
The orderly shouted: ‘Stay outside, you idiots!’
A deafening crash. Dazzling light pulsed through the room. The orderly was sent spinning. The saw stopped.
‘Comrade Nurse!’
She only saw how everyone crouched. The cat jumped over the bodies on to the table. Dust particles whirled through the air, settled on the oilcloth, on her lips, on the tools in the bucket.
‘Comrade Nurse, help the Sergeant!’
She let go of the icy hands, stooped to the bucket. A further rending crash. The table went over. Screams. Her hands groped into space. Her feet stepped on bodies, on faces. She plunged outside. The grass under her feet felt soft like cottonwool. The meadow was insanely green. She dropped under the nearest tree, and began to cry. Perhaps for Zostchenko. She felt she had abandoned him. She cried for herself, because she loved him.
10
Mortar shells had been bursting for half an hour in the trench by the foxhole and on the dugout of Schnitzer’s surrounded platoon. They went up from the Red Army controlled sap outside the former company HQ, tipped at the apex of their flight like steel shuttlecocks, and exploded with eerie precision just at the entrance. There was no longer any dead ground, and the depth of the trench was no use: they were rats in a trap. It didn’t seem possible that the Russians could have seen the deep dugout. There was nowhere from where one could see into it, and there were no bodies on the rim of it. A fiendish chance was directing the rifle-grenades, and Major Schnitzer thought he knew its name: it was Captain Waldmüller. In actual fact, though, it was the Russian hand-grenade which had been flung, not into the Captain’s shelter, but over the perimeter of the trench. And there was something methodical about the operation of this chance. It had snuffed out Corporal Schute like a candle flame in the wind.
The Runner left the Corporal to lie where he was, and barricaded himself into the dugout. He left just a crack open. That way he could see into the trench a little way. He pressed himself against the passage that led down into the foxhole, and peered out.
The foxhole was proof of the fact that the blocking position had seen better days. One day when the combat engineers had relieved the trench platoon, they had found a sign: Villa Foxhole. If it had still been in its original place, it would almost have been a guarantee of quiet and security. But the manner in which it was found practically bespoke the opposite. The combat engineers saw that the trench was not very deep. They began to dig straight away, and saw that the labyrinth of the blocking position had simultaneously served as a mass grave. Under just a hand’s breadth of soil, they started to encounter bodies. Their shovels bit into mouldering flesh, scraped bones, smashed through skeletons. By the light of flares, they encountered a skull with a Russian helmet adhering to it. A skeleton held together by a lichenous belt. Thousands of little flies swarmed through the trench. Whoever wasn’t wearing a gasmask got lungfuls of putrescence. The blocking position had turned into a pit of pestilence. Ghostly shadows flung shovelfuls of stinking muck over the parapet like maniacs. They were like divers who had gone down into a sunken wreck, and stared at each other through its deadlights and portholes. The mass grave had three distinct layers. The engineers had to wear gloves where they couldn’t reach with their shovels. And in between these layers, someone found the half-rotted piece of wood bearing the legend VILLA FOXHOLE. Written by one of the bony hands that had been shovelled over the parapet. So there must have been days here when they had leaned against the trench walls with their shirts off, smoked cigarettes, talked about leave, and lit fires against the midges. But that was a while ago.
The passage where the Runner was now lying was a runnel cut diagonally into the ground. Narrow as a sewage pipe, and dark and damp. At the end was an entrance with a real wood door. A big lid off a chest, hung on leather hinges, and with Army Property! This way up! written on it. And behind the door, an anteroom. Incredible luxury. Perhaps an airlock. It was too narrow to serve for accommodation. But it was panelled with pine boards, and even lined with newspaper. If you were bored, you could read that the German armies were continuing their advance east, that Herr Maier had slipped away peacefully in his sleep, that eggs would be distributed again on Monday. But that must be a hundred years ago. The accommodation room was behind a further lid. There was room here for an entire platoon, but it was too low to stand up in. On the floor there was something that must once have been hay. Muddy boots and stagnant air had turned it to mouldering dung. On this dung there were now nine wounded men, among them Captain Zostchenko. Early that morning, there had been eleven. The Runner had lugged out the other two, and deposited them over the parapet. They had bled to death. From the living quarters, separated by a canvas sheet, there was an opening into the sleeping quarters. That had been wrecked by a direct hit from a shell. Twelve Russian soldiers had been taken in their sleep by the shell. It hadn’t been possible to remove the bodies. The rubble couldn’t be cleared, otherwise there was a chance the foxhole would have collapsed. No, right from the start, they hadn’t had too many illusions about this position. Not the Captain, who was now in Russian hands in the company HQ. Not the Sergeant, who had done a bunk to Emga. Not the NCO who was manning the machine gun. And least of all himself, the Runner. The shelter was like a dark tomb, filled with an infernal stench.
For that reason, and no other, the Runner had gone to lie in the passageway. If a rifle-grenade exploded at its mouth, he would turn his head away in a flash. It was still preferable to enduring the groans and cries of the wounded down in the hole. Outside the en
trance, the dead Schute kept adding to his collection of shrapnel. Each time, he moved, and it looked as though he was still alive, or maybe being electrocuted. Now he waved with his hand, now he flipped over, and his dead eyes confronted the Runner, as though to say: Well, what do you say now? There wasn’t really a whole lot you could say . . .
The pool in the Schutes’ garden probably wouldn’t get built now. Not unless Frau Schute married again, that is. She looked pretty young on the photo he’d seen of her. Her letter was in the dead man’s breast pocket. It was only a week old, and had already suffered from a bit of shrapnel. Pretty harmless letter, really. He wasn’t to worry about her, she was fine. Then something about the garden, about how hard it was to get a maid these days, and a room that mustn’t be allowed to be left empty . . . The lodger was very nice. And then: there were a lot of stories these days about soldiers going off with girls. She was liberal in that regard, life was too short. A sensible woman, Frau Schute. Modern views. Perhaps even a tad too modern. Various points in the letter had not been clear to the recipient; he, the Runner, had had to read it too. He also claimed not quite to see what was going on. But there was another letter as well, that Schute didn’t know about. ‘Here, read this,’ said the Battalion Adjutant. ‘You decide if Schute should get this or not.’ It was a neighbour writing with observations that people had made of Frau Schute’s relationship with her lodger. And that was very clear. The Runner had looked at the Adjutant and shaken his head. In all probability, the business would take care of itself. And that’s what had happened. A period of mourning, for public consumption. Firm, silent handshakes. Long faces. The lodger continued to be very nice. Life is short. Anyway. Hadn’t Schute himself? . . . No? Well, never mind. Where his wife was so accommodating. There were girls everywhere. A soldier’s life – a fun life! Big firework display on Hill 308. Commando raid against Russian bunker position. Corporal Schute right wingman. Green flares. Surprise firing. Machine-gun bursts. Run two hundred yards across open terrain. Hand-grenades. Life is short, Schute. Sure, with a strange man in the house, you’re bound to get tongues wagging. Mine-laying at midnight. Schute responsible for activating them. Russian machine guns spraying no man’s land. Use any available cover. With a live mine, your life is hanging by a thread anyway. You can be assured I’ll be accommodating. 0610: attack. Concentric charge. Go on, Schute, get out of that trench. Heart pulsing in your neck, lungs bursting. On – under the bullets. Arm the fuses. A man who is exempt from active service. Alarm at dawn. The Russians are in front of our lines. Hand-grenades out! Too late, they’re on us. Take the rifle-butt, the bayonet, the field-shovel. You must kill. For the sake of your wife, Schute! For a . . .