I looked at him with my knees pressed together and my chin on my hands and my elbows on my knees. There was a hole in one of my long black stockings and the skin showed very white through it. Then I heard the old man talking again.
“I saw her once. I saw her in Bonn. It was the day they unveiled the statue of Beethoven. I think it was the last time she came to Germany but I may be wrong. I saw her as clear as anything. A stout old lady, very short she was. Oh, she was a brown dumpling with her yellowish face and the big pouches under her eyes. People said she got the pouches because she took to drink after her husband’s death. People will say anything and believe more. All those Hanoverian princes had pouches under their eyes. You know she was his grandmother, I suppose?”
“Do you mean” – I was almost afraid to say it – “do you mean the Kaiser?”
He nodded, his head steadied, then he nodded again. “They said she was the only person who could do anything with him. He was much younger then, of course. Everyone said how handsome he was. A face carved out of marble, one fool newspaper said. People will call a prince handsome even if he looks like an adenoid. When I was young they called Franz-Joseph handsome. So is a block of wood with hair growing out of it. The Kaiser is a spoiled brat. What I remember is his fool’s mouth with that imbecile moustache sticking up on either side of it like the horns of a cow. How many nations have been ruined by spoiled brats! But at least this one was afraid of his grandmother. Our wonderful All-Highest was afraid of that dumpy old woman in black.” He chuckled. “Would you like to know what I saw happen that day in Bonn?”
“Of course, Grandfather.”
He chuckled again. “Well, you see, when they pulled the cord and let the drapery fall off the statue, Beethoven’s back was to the balcony where the royal party was and of course the Kaiser thought himself insulted and began shouting. What a nation of shouters Germany has become lately, to be sure. The Kaiser was in a tantrum. But you’d never guess what happened next. The old Queen always carried a small ivory fan and now she took the fan and slapped the Kaiser’s wrist with it. ‘Be quiet, you bad-mannered boy,’ she said. ‘What else would Beethoven do but turn his back on a bad-mannered boy?’ He stepped back and blushed like a tomato and never another shout came out of him that afternoon. He was bowing and scraping to her. Oh, that old woman should have lived forever.”
I have often wondered whether Grandfather really did witness this scene or even whether it actually happened. He would never have said anything he did not believe to be true, but he had reached the age when men are apt to believe that things they were told when they were young were things they themselves had seen.
Grandfather had never asked more of life than what he assumed was his due as an honest Christian and a competent scholar. He had grown up in a time when most people in our part of the world knew exactly where they stood at any period of their existence. They understood what was to be admired and what was to be despised and if they were in a profession like his, they knew how much they would be earning twenty or thirty years later if they worked hard. They knew how much to spend and how much to save, and when their working days were over they knew their pensions would be paid in money worth what it had always been.
All this was gone now and Grandfather knew it. His sadness was not for himself but for his loved ones who would have to live in the chaos left by the war. He had married in early middle age and his wife had been eighteen years younger than he. She had died bizarrely a few years before the war. She had accompanied him on an archaeological holiday in Asia Minor and while they were poking about in the ruins of Ephesus she walked on a viper and the snake had struck her and she died of it. His two sons had been killed in the army, the younger one fighting the Canadians in Flanders, the older by the French in the Champagne. His other daughter, my Aunt Toni, had married a Frenchman who had been one of Grandfather’s favorite students. This man had obtained a post in the University of Poitiers, but when the war came there were no more letters from France. Early in 1915 one of Grandfather’s friends who held a chair in the University of Basel wrote to say that he had received a letter from Toni saying that her husband had been killed on the Aisne and that she herself had been interned as an enemy alien.
Grandfather taught me Latin by word of mouth and this reminds me of the night when there was an air raid and in the far distance we heard the thudding of bombs. At that very moment a storm broke out with a great roar of wind and the sound of the explosions was lost in the thunder and wind. Later they told us that a French plane had crashed in the Black Forest and that the pilot had been taken to a hospital. He was very young and had been horribly burned and he screamed all the way through the streets. Now with the wind shaking the house and the thunder crashing, Grandfather began talking to himself in Latin. I heard him say something I did not understand, but it had a sombre resonance like the tolling of a bell. When he realized I did not understand he translated it into German, “And in a rush of wind the gods left the city.” He was silent for a time and so was I, for I was listening for more bombs and was afraid. Then he spoke again: “I wonder where the gods are going? To America? I think not, because America is only an extension of ourselves. Perhaps they will go to China. It will be interesting to see what they do there.”
He was silent again. An old man, a small boy, and the war.
Grandfather was not famous and never had any ambition to be so. He was just a retired professor of Philology proud to have studied under Mommsen and to have read a few kind words written about one of his monographs by Wilamowitz-Moellendorf. Probably he was a dull lecturer on principle, because he believed it wrong to let emotion interfere with anything scientific. Yet for all his heavy beard and his mane of gray hair – when younger and heavier he had looked a little like Brahms – when I knew him he was closer in spirit to a small, enquiring boy than to anyone his own age. He used to talk sometimes of rebirth and I thought he meant the resurrection of the body but after a while I knew he was talking of something larger than that.
Grandfather lived long enough to see the soldiers marching home in good order after their defeat and I was standing beside him on the sidewalk with the silent people watching. Now you must understand that Freiburg was always a quiet city, a gracious city close to France and Switzerland, with no heavy industry or conflicts between capital and labor. It was the only place I knew and for me it was the center of the world. The soldiers marched in their worn, patched, and muddy uniforms and broken boots and the crowd had pity for them. But suddenly a man in the rear began to shout, “Nein! Nein! Nein! – Feige!” I felt a shiver pass through the crowd and this was ugly, for many of these watching people had lost sons and husbands and lovers and these returning, beaten soldiers at least were still alive, but to call them cowards was shameful. The man in the rear continued his shouting and I looked at him and his face was crazed. He was shaking his fist at the soldiers and a few in the crowd were with him. I heard a woman say, “He had four sons and they were all killed.” But when I looked at Grandfather, and heard the murmur increasing in the crowd, his face frightened me. It was not merely that his face was emaciated with hunger but that the last dregs of hope had been drained out of it.
“These people will obey orders again,” I heard him mutter. “When the orders are given, yes, they will obey them again. They have learned nothing and they will forget nothing.”
For the next three days Grandfather was so withdrawn that he seldom answered when we spoke to him and barely tasted the few morsels of food that were his portion. I had the feeling that he had gone away from us into what was left of himself and that his immediate surroundings meant nothing to him any more. On the third night there was a beautiful sunset and I pointed out the window to the spire of the Minster. He opened his eyes and looked at the spire and I heard him murmur, “Yes.” A little later he stirred out of his immobility and went to bed and Mother and I had nothing to say to each other. Mother rose and went into his room and came back and said, “He’s asleep
.”
He was still asleep the next morning when Mother left for the hospital. I had nothing to do because in the state of everything at the time the schools were closed. About ten in the morning I tiptoed into Grandfather’s room and saw him motionless on his back, his beard spread out over the coverlet. I touched his forehead and it was cold and I knew he had died in his sleep.
My desolation was something I cannot describe, but later when I saw him in his coffin, all the lines of struggle and disappointment wiped away in a white calm, I felt a serenity and knew that in the end each one of us is alone with something that may be infinity. His life had been lived as best he could live it. It had been all his own at the beginning; it had been shared with many others for many years, it had been all his own at the end. This was the first time I ever saw a dead man and it came to me that this kind of death has nobility and that all of us should be allowed to look like this when we die and not to be mangled or shredded to death as happens in war, or recorded as a statistic as tends to happen now. “The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away, blessed be the name of the Lord.” What this line means, dear Stephanie, has been taken away from nearly all the people alive today and I think that all the material things that the machines have given to people have not made up for the loss of it.
Mother was white and silent but not distraught. She tried to reach my father by telephone but the system had broken down. The whole country had broken down though it did not carry a single visible scar from the war. We heard that the Emperor had fled to Holland. We heard there was no government at all. We heard many things I forget. There was a quiet funeral service for Grandfather in a corner of the Minster attended by Mother and me and a few old people who had known him. Then he became a memory and I used to wonder what God said to him when He received him. And so, for me, the first great fantasy of our century came to an end
FOUR
Now we had to learn what total defeat in war can mean.
Hunger turned into starvation, for the victors kept up the blockade until a few frightened, outraged men in stiff collars and frock coats signed a peace treaty which most people today believe guaranteed the even greater fantasy that obsessed the world twenty years later. Actually I don’t think it provided anything more than the excuse for it.
We had known, of course, that the naval crews in the great port cities of the north had mutinied just before the Armistice was signed and that they had shot and killed some of their officers and arrested some others. We learned that returning soldiers had shot at the sailors and that in the northern cities the hunger was terrible.
Every day I searched through the railway yards with my sack collecting coal; so did dozens of other boys. I went into the woods hunting for beechnuts or anything edible I could find. In the winter the influenza came and many hundreds died of it in our city alone. My mother also came down with it and for a few days her situation was serious, but she had great resolution and her longing to keep alive for her husband may have been what pulled her through. There was no chance of his coming home for a long time because his ship had sailed out with the rest of the fleet to surrender to the British and was anchored in the bleak waters off northern Scotland where winter nights are so long that in December and January there are only a few hours of daylight.
“Anyway,” I remember Mother saying, “your father will not be hungry because the English have plenty of food.”
“But will they give him any?” I asked her. “They don’t give us any.”
Mother managed a smile. “That is because we aren’t living with them, dear, and they can’t see how hungry we are. But your father and the other sailors are living with them. The English are not barbarians. They will give them food.”
It was many months after the end of the killing before Father came home and I saw Mother sobbing in his arms. To me the scene was awful. His embrace of my mother was not even human, it was more like the reflex of an officer returning a salute. Almost immediately he broke from her and his eyes swept the little living room of our apartment. I suppose he saw me there but he gave no sign of recognition, and when I saw his face I froze with fear, for if this man was my father, then my father had the expression of someone who had stared into the face of a madman. I have told you, Stephanie, how disciplined he was and I have told you also how romantic he was. As a boy who knew what the word “discipline” means, but had yet to learn what the word “romantic” means, I understood with that quick insight of a teen-ager that this man could now become dangerous to others. Worse, I knew he had become dangerous to himself.
He stood in the center of our living room and I made myself small and watched from a corner. I saw his eyes fix themselves on the photograph of his ship rushing through the water with that great bow wave and her two squat funnels belching the black smoke and her huge guns elevated. For nearly a minute he stared at the picture while in my mind I saw the ship lurched over on the cold sea bottom with fish swimming through its insides and even through the barrels of those terrible guns.
Erect, his lean face taut, my father turned swiftly around. It was a movement which must have caused anguish to his wounded back, for he turned with his shoulders high and stiff as though he were at attention. I saw some gray hairs in his short, spiked naval beard. When he spoke his voice was like a cry of pain.
“Trudi!” he said in a high-pitched voice. “Trudi!”
“Lieber Gottfried, ich bin hier.”
“Our own men, Trudi! Our own sailors! The communists got to them. A miserable, crafty peasant from Silesia, a stoker in the Helgoland – he raised the Red Flag on his ship. I never liked that Helgoland class of battleships; the design was stupid, it wasted firepower. Twelve big guns but a broadside of only eight. I wrote a memo to the Kriegsmarine but they …”
“Du lieber Gott!” I thought. “Du lieber Christ!”
“The sailors put that damned stoker in command over my admiral. It started in the battle fleet, of course. The battle fleet only fought for a few hours in the whole war. It didn’t start in our scouting force because we fought often, but in the end it spread there too. That damned stoker! When I refused to surrender my personal weapon a sailor hit me in the face with an iron bar.”
I looked and saw the scar. It would be with him for the rest of his life.
“They put us in irons. German sailors did that to their own officers. In the end the soldiers had to come in and put them down. The soldiers didn’t betray because they’d been allowed to fight. When those damned politicians surrendered, where were our soldiers? On French soil, on Belgian soil, on Russian soil. The army was never defeated and the navy –”
My mother was pale and as she looked at him I knew she was feeling desperate.
But my father was obsessed and his voice became so high-pitched it frightened me.
“They never gave us a fair chance. If they’d let the navy out in the beginning we could have won the war in an afternoon. Our squadron went out often and we proved we were better than the English, but they kept the main battle fleet in harbor for nearly two years before they gave it a chance. If they’d let it out in the first week we’d have won the war. We proved it. We had better ships and superior firing efficiency. We had better shells and optical equipment and our ships could be hit again and again and still keep fighting. Every time we hit an English ship, it blew up. But by that time the English had many more ships. We nearly destroyed their battle-cruiser fleet at odds of five against nine. The fact speaks. When the English officer in Scotland examined my breech-locks he couldn’t believe what he saw. ‘We never had anything as good as this,’ he said.”
“Du lieber Gott!” I thought again.
Then he told us how they had scuttled the fleet at Scapa Flow.
“Exactly one week before those damned politicians signed that peace treaty. The shortest night of the year and in that sub-arctic place it was still bright enough to read a newspaper at midnight. Von Reuter had us over to the flagship in the anchorage that night and the English
didn’t notice a thing. He gave us the orders, we went back to our ships, and we gave the orders to the men and this time they obeyed us.”
He had been speaking as though Mother and I were not in the room, as though he had to prove something to God, perhaps.
“At exactly noon on the next day, the day of the summer solstice, with English warships all around us, the imperial ensigns rose to the mastheads of seventy-four German ships, and every one of those ships was sinking. There was nothing the English could do to stop us now. Our ships went down with their flags flying because our men remembered at last that they were Germans. The navy lost its honor in Wilhelmshaven because the men had been kept rotting for years and the communists got to them. That damned stoker, he’s still at large. But that day in Scotland our men saved the honor of Germany.”
No, Stephanie, mutinies never succeed in Germany unless the orders come from the top and then it’s not revolution, it’s a putsch.
I saw Father hunch down on the couch, thinner than I had ever seen him, his hands limp on his knees, and I knew that his balance had been shattered. The compartments that had divided his life and at the same time held him intact had cracked open like the steel compartment doors of his sunken ship. He would still believe that he loved his wife and might even believe that he loved me, but his true home had never been any house or apartment where Mother and I might live. It had been his profession and now his profession was gone. Now he was an officer with no men to command, a sailor with no navy to serve. As though we were not there, as though he were entirely alone and thinking of his sunken ship, I heard him hum a tune and I knew the words of it: “Auf einem Seemannsgrab / Da blühen keine Rosen.” As you don’t know the German language, Stephanie, that means “On a sailor’s grave no roses bloom.” I can’t imagine a sailor in the British or American navy singing a song like that. I’m German enough to be moved by it, especially as it was sung in the last war in circumstances far more heartrending.
Voices in Time Page 22