Fifteen Words

by Monika Jephcott Thomas

  ‘What do you need, sir?’ Thomas’s voice was breathless, not from fear, but from the thrill of success.

  Max looked over his shoulder and could see in the light from the smouldering city Thomas’s face brimming with pride, delighted at being able, at last, to follow the example of the brave doctor in the bunker, return the favour and assist him for once.

  ‘What do you need, sir?’

  Max looked again at Thomas with utter despair. He couldn’t help it, but he wished he hadn’t. He wished that look of pride and accomplishment had been the last thing on Thomas’s face, but Thomas saw the look in Max’s eye and he mirrored it. The look that said, there’s an Ivan right behind you and…

  The shots sounded louder at night. Everyone jumped. Thomas – Maria’s Little Sweetheart, her Lovey, her Little Husband – fell and the bag was returned to the truck, a little further inside this time.

  They marched on. Well, not so much marching anymore, but shuffling. They crossed the river Oder on the bridge which was littered with the debris of a fierce battle – a battle the Germans had lost, a quick scan over the corpses there told Max that.

  ‘Halt!’

  Like wind-up toys the men at the back continued shuffling into those who had stopped up ahead already.

  Halt? Thought Max, are they messing with us? It had been so long since they had been allowed to stop that he doubted it could be true, doubted stopping was ever something any of them would do again in their lives, no matter how painful moving had become.

  But no, stop they had. He craned his neck about to see what was happening up front.

  He saw his CO – the one that had delivered him the news of his Iron Cross at the convent, the one Beatrix had been flaunting herself so unsuccessfully in front of – he saw him taking off his long warm leather coat. The Soviets had ordered him to hand it over. They were ordering everyone to hand over their topcoats, their watches and their laces. What the hell did they want with laces?

  Max started to shiver and he thought it was his body’s anticipation of being without an overcoat, but it wasn’t. It was fear. He was trembling again because he believed that they were asking them to hand over their belongings only now because it was time to die.

  A Russian appeared at his side. Took his coat, demanded his watch. Max found solace in handing over the five deutschmark piece of tat on his wrist and keeping his pocket watch inside his tunic. Ivan looked at the wristwatch with disdain.

  Tick tick tick tick.

  The watch ticked so loudly, you could even hear it here on the bridge with the wind rushing through your ears. Max always hated that about it. But what did you expect for five deutschmarks? Ivan chucked the watch back at him in disgust and demanded his laces.

  You can have my trousers, Max thought as he bent down and got a good whiff of himself, why don’t you have my trousers, you bastard, they’re full of shit now anyway.

  The Russian took the laces and moved on to Horst behind.

  Time started to speed up here on the bridge. Max had a strange desire to stay here forever, not just because it was such a relief to be standing still, but because what was coming next, he felt certain, was a bleak death.

  ‘Look!’ Edgar nudged Max. He was pointing to the road on the other side of the bridge.

  Hundreds of German soldiers were being marched towards them. Just as tattered and sore as their own sparse unit. The sum of what was left of Hitler’s great fortress against the Bolshevists. Six days and nights they had been herded about and Max counted around twenty of his group left from the seventy or so that started this futile trek. More empty trucks arrived beyond the bridge and Max knew then that this wasn’t their time to die. They were being loaded up and shipped on somewhere else. He saw that some of his comrades ahead of him had realised this wasn’t the end of the line too, realised they would be needing something to replace the stuff Ivan had just taken from them after all, so they were crouching down and stripping the coats from the corpses, pulling off boots from stiff-ankled feet. Max spotted a motorbike lying in the dirt with a leather jacket still wrapped around the handle bars where the owner had hung it before they were attacked. He was glad he didn’t have to take it from a dead man. Looking at the rest of his unit stripping the bodies, they seemed to him to have acquired his detached clinical attitude to cadavers. As he swiped the jacket and hurried back to his place in line, one of his lace-less boots slipped off. He cursed his captors silently and ferretted around in his tunic for his pocket watch. He unclasped the chain from it and slipped it through the offending boot.

  ‘They are some extravagant laces,’ Edgar mumbled, half worried for his friend if the Russians saw him with a silver chain fastening his boot, half jealous that he had nothing to tighten his own yet.

  Max looked at the boot. It did look absurdly decadent now. So he scraped up a hand full of mud from the damp ground and smeared the chain until it was camouflaged.

  ‘Get up!’ Edgar tugged at Max’s collar.

  Their captors were coming down the line again, telling them to get moving, herding them onto the trucks.

  An image of Erika smoothing down the lapels of his brand new uniform when he and Edgar were first posted to the Western Front on the Rhine flashed behind his eyes. They had come back after a few months almost as neat as the day they had left, although their insides had begun to be dishevelled in ways they could never repair.

  On their way to the Rhine they had bounced about involuntarily in the back of the truck that took them from the base across to the front line. They looked at each other’s shiny faces mildly amused by the discomfort for the first twenty miles or so, then they began to focus on the world outside. Until then Edgar and Max had been not only cocooned from real life in the small pond of a student’s existence, but cocooned from the war in the untouched city of Freiburg. Now the quaintness of the country they thought they knew began to crumble before their eyes. First it was just a few houses here and there reduced to rubble from rogue bombs, an improvised grave or two by the side of the road, but then the truck had to slalom around the dead horses and cows and they were driving through a whole town destroyed by the firestorms that had raged there. And another. And another. Where once the landscape was town separated from town by great plains of picturesque countryside, the towns were now plains of debris and the countryside populated by dust-covered trees. There were no towns and no rural beauty anymore, just hours and hours when all they saw was wasteland. Max and Edgar watched it all from the back of the truck and as the roads got progressively worse, full of craters from the bombing, they were bounced around so furiously their heads hit the ceiling of the truck, that initial amusement long gone. What would have been a relatively short journey took hours longer as detours had to be made around blocked roads and detonated bridges being frantically rebuilt by German engineers. The sights silenced Max’s mind as a great snowfall does a city. They joined convoys hundreds of trucks long; passed through colossal collections of military equipment. Where does it all come from, Max wondered, all this gear, and all these men?

  They slept in a big empty house that night. Found themselves blankets and mattresses and fell asleep easily. But before he did Max wondered who had owned the house. It must have been some very wealthy people, but where were they now? Had they donated it? Or had they been kicked out? Half an hour later and Max’s eyes snapped open at the sound of artillery. All the new recruits got up drowsily and looked out of the windows. The sky was full of Christmas trees. Intense cascades of light pouring down the darkness, green and red flares, incendiary sticks fizzing through the sky and landing on the timbered buildings of the Rhenish towns, getting the firestorms going.

  Max was aware that for the first time in his life he was in immediate danger of death, but strangely he didn’t feel scared. He had to admit, if only to himself, it was a titillating feeling not without a thrill. He studied Edgar’s face at the window illuminated by the fireworks outside to check he wasn’t peculiar in enjoying this buzz.

/>   Their field hospital was set up in a museum less than a mile away from the Eastern bank of the Rhine where the fighting was raging.

  The fighting was raging.

  People said that about fighting. That it was raging. It was just something you said. Max didn’t realise until the day they arrived at the front that that was exactly what happened. The air was full of rage down there. Rage from the sergeants at their incompetent units, rage from the enemy towards the Nazis invading their home, rage from the wounded toward the foreigners that maimed them, toward their leaders for conscripting them, toward themselves for being so careless. That titillating thrill was soon stamped into the mud on the bank, drowned in the black river, blasted into the air with the grey matter from an uncovered head.

  Max and Edgar quickly exchanged their peaked caps for metal helmets and kept their gas masks with them at all times.

  They were doctors now. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t seen a lot of blood, some horrible injuries or the insides of people before. It’s just that they hadn’t seen the insides exploding from men running towards them; they hadn’t had to assess and treat patients whilst French soldiers shot at them from the ominous concrete ulcers of the Maginot Line. The French had been forced to build a city of bunkers on their side of the Rhine, a futuristic looking canker on what used to be some beautiful lowlands. As the German’s tried to advance across the river the gun slots of the Line would spew out round after round at the bridge or the boats. Max and Edgar were told it was their job to rescue the wounded from the water and treat them back at the relative safety of the field hospital. They were presented with long poles made of bamboo with metal hooks lashed to the end as if they were about to head out on some bizarre Oriental fishing trip.

  ‘You can use them to get the men nearest the bank out of the water,’ stuttered their troop commander as he hurried away back towards the museum.

  ‘Where’s he going?’ Edgar asked. ‘Shouldn’t he be leading the attack?’

  ‘Commander Kohl?’ a private piped up. ‘You must be joking. Right now he’ll be hiding himself in his office pretending he has some urgent phone calls to make to Berlin. And funnily enough those calls will last just until today’s attack stops. If it ever stops.’

  ‘Oh, marvellous,’ Edgar scoffed.

  ‘Yep. He’s the talk of the town, our brave Commander Kohl.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ Edgar said, ‘that very tiny part of town where cowardice is revered, eh?’

  The private and Edgar shared a nervous laugh.

  In this new paradigm Max was groping around in, he wasn’t sure what constituted cowardice. He had no idea what bravery was here. In a nightmare like the one he watched from the river bank, just staying may well be described as brave. But he had a pretty good idea of what bravery wasn’t, he thought, looking at Commander Kohl’s military VW car scuttling off to the museum.

  ‘OK,’ Max exhaled and looked at his tall friend holding his long hooked pole like an affable Grim Reaper. ‘Let’s get to work.’

  Some of the fish they caught that day were vocal in their gratitude for the assistance in getting out of the water since their broken limbs made it difficult to swim. Others were silent, inert. Bloated blue bodies that had been dead for hours.

  Little wooden rowing boats crammed with soldiers were constantly pushing off from the bank and trying to make it to the other side, trying to force the French back. Occasionally one boat would make it, but for every one that did, three or four would be sunk.

  Seeing this, Max had to draw on his memories of Tante Bertel and douse his fears with the aura of her courage that night outside the theatre when he was sixteen.

  ‘We need a boat,’ he said slinging his bamboo pole to ground. ‘We need to get to the casualties in the middle of the river, or they’ll be dead by the time they reach the shore.’

  Edgar looked at the rain of artillery pouring over the water. Thought about how rowing into that was suicidal. Saw how Max was already commandeering a boat. And went to support his friend.

  As Edgar and Max rowed out into the Rhine, the Germans pounded the Maginot Line with artillery fire over the doctors’ wide-eyed heads. This caused the French to go on the defensive, slide its gun slots shut for a while. A rare vacuum of peace followed, pierced only by the occasional cry for help from the water and the rocking-chair creak of the wooden boat. For those few seconds the raging stopped and the doctors looked at each other like victims of shell shock. Max saw Erika sitting where Edgar was. The churned up waters of the Rhine became the mirror smooth surface of Lake Schluchsee where they spent their gleaming summers together.

  ‘Help,’ Erika cried. ‘Get me out of here!’

  ‘Help,’ a soldier cried. ‘Get me out of here!’

  The desperate shouts of men yanked him quickly back from the green conifer clad hillsides around the lake to the sepia scab of his present and the young doctors began to fill their boat with as many casualties as they could before rowing back to shore.

  ‘Are we in danger of sinking ourselves with all these men in here?’ Edgar asked, pulling in another anyway.

  ‘Yes we are,’ Max shouted over the racket of resumed artillery fire, straining to pull in a gored gunner who had fallen from the sky. ‘But the fewer times we have to come back out here the better, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’m with you there, buddy.’

  Back on the bank, as they unloaded their catch Max watched an officer bellow in the ear of an infantryman sitting in the mud with his back against the boat he was supposed to be getting into. The soldier was a teenager still, but looked even younger as he bawled with his fists at his mouth, tears making clean streaks on his dirty face.

  ‘You will get in this boat and you will fight for your country or you will be shot for disobeying orders, do you hear me, soldier?’

  ‘I can’t do it. I can’t go out there,’ the kid howled.

  Max thought about rushing over, diagnosing him with a medical condition and piling him into the truck with the rest of the casualties, but an explosion on the felled bridge nearby sent a more pressing casualty his way.

  Raging.

  Raging red like an enormous newborn baby, stripped of his clothes by the blast, stripped of his skin by the fire, screaming having just been slapped by the midwife of war. If this soldier survived he would be reborn like everyone around him – perhaps the red colour would calm eventually but the rage never would.

  Max and Edgar may have returned from the Western Front with a promotion to NCO for their bravery in the river that day; they may have returned with the added tinsel to denote the promotion on their freshly laundered uniforms; they may have smiled as they greeted Erika at Freiburg station, their exteriors all shiny and re-varnished, but underneath the rot had already set in.

  What would she say if she saw me now, in a corpse’s jacket, my pocket watch broken to lace up my boots, shit in my trousers?

  Max flushed with embarrassment as if she was standing right there on the bridge before him.

  An image of Jenny brushing off the shoulders of his tunic and feeling the cuffs to make sure once again they were properly dry before she let him leave the convent a week ago blew through his mind and was carried on the wind down the Oder and all the way out to the glacial Baltic Sea before he had even registered it.

  ‘Take care,’ Erika had ordered Edgar before they left for the Rhine, ‘of him and you. And if you come back dead, I’ll kill you’.

  Fifteen words. Most of which made no sense. And yet they said it all.

  He had felt his insides torn then when he had first left her yet she was only a few hundred miles away in Freiburg. This time was worse, all the way over in Breslau on the other side of the country. And now he was being taken away to God knows where. Another country most probably and he had no way of telling her. In the truck he clutched the bag of letters to his chest as he used to clutch his teddy bear when he was a child. He didn’t dare continue his search through it yet, just in case these vindictive S
oviets thought it was something worth stealing, like his doctor’s bag. Luckily they had no idea these letters were, to him and his men, far more medicinal than any ointment or drug ever could be.

  Erika had tried to imagine that the sunlight streaming down on their row in the lecture hall was warming. But it was November.

  She shivered.

  All the light did was blind them, so they had to squint and shield their eyes for the first few minutes of Professor Hass’s lecture until the Earth shifted a little more in a favourable direction.

  As the sunlight moved on, Erika could appreciate the vision that was Hass: complementing the frost in his hair and on the lawn outside he wore a white linen suit, a colour men rarely wore in the USA let alone the musty halls of German universities. And isn’t white usually a colour associated with summer, thought Erika, imagining herself in her favourite summer dress and Max in the tennis shorts she liked to see his hairy calves emerging from, extending and flexing as they carried their paddle boat uphill all the way to Lake Schluchsee, a hellish haul in summer heat, but worth every second when they spent the rest of those burnished days out on the water, just the two of them? OK, there were many other couples, groups and families out on the lake in those days too, but if she lay back and put her feet up on the bow in just the right spot to block them out, her point of view told her this was their own private lake as was the conifer-clad land beyond where they reigned supreme.

  She shivered.

  As bright as that sunlight was, it could not warm the earth any longer. Hass, she thought therefore, must be like one of those arctic animals whose fur miraculously changes from tawny brown to snowy white as the winter comes, to camouflage themselves from predators. But what predators could someone as erudite and esteemed as Professor Hass have to fear? And if he really did want to be inconspicuous, why was he so openly challenging the government’s euthanasia program: