The Constant Soldier

by William Ryan

  I will never regret what I did

  and what happened from love

  Judith turned to him and brought his ear close to her mouth.

  ‘Take me home.’

  And later, while they lay in her bed, holding on to each other in case they might lose one another in its narrow space, she told him her secret.

  §

  On the last day, not long before the train arrived at a yard filled with ambulances and efficient women, they saw another train – a long line of snow-roofed cattle trucks, halted in a siding to allow them to pass slowly by. The stationary wagons had no windows, only small slits high in their wooden sides from which steam rose into the frozen air. The slits were blocked by rusted iron bars, garlanded with barbed wire. From some of them – not all – thin, blood-streaked hands ignored the wire to reach out, as if looking for something their owners couldn’t see. The hands moved like weeds in a turgid sea, slowly, back and forth. And even over the sound of their own train’s rolling wheels he could hear the music of the people inside – a groaning dissonance.

  On top of one of the cars a guard stood, his rifle slung over his shoulder, his chin buried into a fur-lined coat. He was smoking a cigarette that poked out from his upturned collar, its glowing tip bright against the white of the sky behind him.

  At first he didn’t seem aware of the train as it slowly passed. But then he looked across, squinting against the flat sun – examining it. His chin coming out of its hiding place so that Brandt could see the kindly eyes and a plump lower lip.

  Somehow, they caught each other’s eye.

  The guard looked across the small space between them and smiled. His teeth were broken and yellow. His eyes glittered. He appeared to be on the point of laughing merrily. The guard’s smile grew even wider and then he inclined his head towards the truck beneath him, as if inviting Brandt to look for himself.

  Then he winked.

  And then he was gone.

  2

  IT WASN’T CERTAIN how Brandt had been injured. No one else from his unit had been on the train and no one knew anything about him. This wasn’t so unusual, it seemed – no one was certain what was happening at the Front these days. That disappointed him. He’d hoped someone had known – that there had been some point to it all.

  He’d no memory of the Soviet attack – the one which the other men from the train remembered so clearly. He remembered only that they had been in retreat for months but that they had held the Russians, more or less, at the Dnieper. They’d been hoping for a quiet Christmas – a chance to make sense of things, to dig in deeper. To make themselves a little more comfortable. But the Ivans had only been gathering their strength. He must have been blown up in the early stages of the new offensive – by a shell or a bomb or a rocket. Or maybe all three. Certainly, the doctors spent enough time picking shrapnel out of him, taking him apart, putting him back together. For weeks he lay on his back, seeing the frozen steppe he’d left behind in the cracked white ceiling above him. And, when the morphine took its hold – seeing other things as well.

  The months came and went. Easter passed by and, slowly, he became a little more solid – in his own mind at least. He was alive.

  He knew he was lucky. The rest of the battalion had been surrounded near Korsun. Some of them must have got out – some always did. But he heard nothing from anyone. Perhaps they had just been swallowed up by the winter snow.

  Perhaps he was the last of them.

  §

  When he was sufficiently recovered to sit outside, and it was warm enough, the nurses found a uniform for him. It wasn’t new but he didn’t mind that it probably belonged to a dead man – he was long past being squeamish about such things. They ordered duplicates of his combat badges and his medals and a nurse with a permanent frown was kind enough to sew the badges on so that everyone could see he’d done his duty.

  An older, one-armed man came and spoke to the patients about his career as a bootmaker, and how having one arm was in many ways an advantage. He spoke with his head bowed, looking at the floor in front of him. They listened politely, understanding his reluctance to meet their gaze.

  §

  Another time a priest came to visit and sat with Brandt in the gardens, speaking to him about God’s infinite wisdom and how his sacrifice might have been for a greater purpose. Brandt let him talk. When, eventually, the priest ran out of words, he turned to him and asked the question that had been in his mind for some time.

  ‘Father, I used to be a soldier – and now I can’t be any more. You could say one life has ended and another has begun. How should I live this new life of mine, do you think?’

  The priest looked at him in surprise, as if the answer were obvious. As if that was what he had been talking about for the last however long it was.

  ‘Why, in Christ, of course.’

  ‘As a good man, you mean? I should resist evil, then? In all its forms?’

  The priest looked uncertain, turning to see if they could be overheard. He opened his mouth to speak, then thought better of it.

  ‘There’s no need to say anything, Father. I think I understand.’

  The priest didn’t stay long after that.

  §

  Brandt wrote to his father. His father was a medical man, so he spared him none of the details. His father had been a surgeon in the first war so there was little chance of him being shocked by the injuries themselves. Obviously, no one liked such things to happen to their own son, but Brandt was alive, more or less. His father would take comfort from that.

  §

  The act of writing home brought to mind the pressing dilemma of what to do when he was discharged. The army no longer needed him, they only wanted healthy flesh for the graves to the east, and hammering nails into leather for the rest of his life didn’t appeal. He considered picking up the student life that had ended so abruptly – but the thought of returning to Vienna and the university brought with it so many memories and emotions that he soon discarded the idea. There was nothing for him in Vienna. He thought about going somewhere else – a different university – but he was too old now. Not so much in years – twenty-five was still young enough – but in other ways.

  If the truth were told, he hadn’t much enthusiasm for the life that faced him. Most of the time, the mere thought of another day’s existence had him swallowing bile.

  Even if he could find a job, he wasn’t sure he had the physical or mental strength to move to somewhere he didn’t know. Not least because the American and British had bombed the larger German cities to rubble and were now moving on to the smaller ones. The closer the Allies advanced the worse it would become. They’d be bombing hamlets by the time the war ended. Aside from the danger, the destruction meant that finding a place to live would be almost impossible – so many houses had been bombed out that people were camping in the parks in some places, or sleeping in air-raid shelters. In his condition, he needed a roof over his head. And then there was the food problem, the soldiers who knew better told him. The ration wasn’t enough and in the cities it was hard to supplement it from other sources if you didn’t have connections – and he didn’t. Even if he did, it was clear his soldier’s pension wouldn’t go far.

  And then, after all that, there was the likelihood of more bombing.

  It wasn’t that he was afraid of dying. He was afraid of the pain that might go with another injury, but to a large extent he was reconciled to his mortality. He’d been living in expectation of death for so long he wondered whether, now that he was safe, a part of him missed the fear. Dying, in his experience, was easy enough. And after you were gone, few people cared that much. Not past the first week or so, anyway. They just carried on with their own existence. With his injuries, the likelihood was his future would be difficult – at best, bearable. But it would be, as he’d said to the priest, a new life – something different. He would make the best of it – live virtuously, if such a thing were still possible in a world like this.

&
nbsp; He would make amends.

  §

  So he decided to go back to the village. It was the place where everything had begun, after all.

  3

  ANOTHER TRAIN JOURNEY. This one to the south-eastern reaches of the Reichsgau of Upper Silesia – to home.

  The first train, when it arrived, was full. Brandt’s heart sank when he saw the passengers’ bodies pressed flat against the windows and the flushed faces of those already crammed into the carriage. He wasn’t sure if he was strong enough to push his way on. Nor whether he had the endurance to stand for the six hours this stage of the journey would take. But when the passengers saw him – with his empty sleeve and his still raw, torn, patched-together face – a seat was found for him. It was done quietly, without fuss – and without reference to him.

  The strange thing about the whole business was that no one looked at him and no one spoke to him. What discussion could there have been, anyway? You fought, you were broken and now you have returned. So what? At least he got a seat out of it. And when the guard forced her way through, looking for tickets, it turned out he needn’t have bought one. Not that he had. The army had been kind enough to send him home, at least.

  §

  He must have fallen asleep at some point. There wasn’t much air in the carriage, it was warm and the rhythm of the train had lulled him. He remembered how his head had become heavy and his eyes had closed of their own accord.

  He hadn’t dreamed about the woman from the cafe for months – not since they’d stopped giving him morphine, and possibly even before that. Yet here she was, sitting opposite him – in the same train, except it was now empty but for the two of them. She wore a tweed skirt, beneath which her legs were crossed. He could see the shape of her ankle above her shoe, remembered his lips kissing her there – just there. Remembered how she’d laughed and twisted, claiming she was ticklish there – just there.

  He raised his eyes to meet hers. Grey, amused. Her lips, fuller than he remembered, were shaped by a small, secret smile – as if she knew something that he did not. She tilted her head backwards, an appraising angle – her nose raised as if to sniff him out.

  He opened his mouth to speak to her – to ask where she had been, what had happened to her. To tell her that there was still a part of him that—. She raised a long finger to her lips to stop his words.

  She looked out of the window, at the countryside they passed through. It was different now, he saw. There were bodies in each ploughed furrow – hundreds of naked corpses cluttering the fields.

  She turned back to him, shaking her head – a tear rolling down her cheek. He could smell burning flesh.

  He awoke with a start. Someone was pushing at his knee. He looked around him, disorientated by all the people who had suddenly appeared in the carriage, by the empty yellow fields the train passed through. He was shivering.

  The other passengers looked at him sideways from round eyes and he wondered what he might have said.

  §

  Germany had seen better days, that much was clear. The cities had been flattened and what was left standing looked as though it stood out of stubbornness alone. The train stations were broken and scarred, the rubble pushed into mounds wherever there was space for it, bricks stacked in incongruously neat piles. Yet, somehow, everything was still carrying on – he couldn’t imagine how. No one looked as though they’d slept and only those with Party badges as if they’d eaten recently – and even they didn’t look as though it had been more than once or twice. Everyone’s clothes seemed to have been handed down from a larger sibling and no one appeared to have the energy to wash any more. But still they stood and still they moved.

  At least Dresden was untouched. He spent the time until the next train arrived walking through its narrow streets, overhung by teetering medieval houses and history itself. He found himself in a bar with a mug of weak beer in front of him – no charge for the returning hero – and looked around him – at the other customers, at the people who passed by in the street outside. He wondered if they knew that all of this must come to an end. It didn’t seem so. The radio was still spewing out the same rubbish from behind the bar and the newspaper that had been left on the counter for the customers was nonsense from front to back. So no one had told them that the war was lost – that all they were doing in the east was delaying the end. But everyone knew, didn’t they? They must know by now.

  Back at the station, the train was filled with refugees – mothers and children making their way to the eastern Reichgaus, far away from the Allied bombers – and soldiers with a destination still further east. He wondered if the women knew any safety would only be temporary. The soldiers knew it. He could see it in their blank gazes and the way their mouths pinched tight around their cigarettes. The way they avoided looking at the crippled soldier they shared the carriage with.

  Brandt sat back and thought about the village. He hadn’t lived there for a long time – and he had changed, of course. But the village had changed as well. For a start it was German now, whereas it had been Polish when he’d left it and Austrian when he’d been born – although that was a different story. When his father had written to him, he’d dropped hints as to what kind of changes had come to pass:

  The Glintzmanns have moved away.

  He’d an idea what that meant – and it wasn’t good news for the Glintzmanns. How many Jews had been living in the village and its surroundings before the war? Brandt could think of six families off the top of his head and he was sure there would have been more. When the peace came, there would be a settling of accounts – of that he was certain. And not just for what had been done to the Jews.

  Pavel has come to work for me.

  Pavel, his father’s old friend, had owned one of the largest farms in the valley. His son, Hubert, had been Brandt’s childhood playmate and, more than that, Hubert had been engaged to Brandt’s sister before the war. But Pavel and Hubert were Polish and the valley was now part of Germany. Their land must have been given to ethnic Germans from the Balkans or further east – the Volksdeutsche. Otherwise why would Pavel Lensky have come to work for Brandt’s father? And what, Brandt wondered, had become of Hubert?

  The thing was, he might never have a chance to visit his home again, if he didn’t go now. He’d stay for a week or two. Maybe a month. He’d make his peace with his father. He’d visit his mother’s grave. He’d see people he hadn’t seen for a long time – old friends, relatives.

  But the Glintzmanns would be gone, of course. He wouldn’t be seeing the Glintzmanns on his visit.

  4

  THE STATION in the town beneath the valley hadn’t changed, as far as he could see. He looked around him as the train wheezed to a slow halt. Then made his way through the carriage to the door. A young woman opened it for him and passed down his suitcase. He thanked her but she didn’t smile or meet his eye. He was used to that by now and took no offence.

  He remembered the ticket office from before, with its white wooden panelling and the list of train times displayed in a brass frame beside its arched window. The last time he’d been here, his father had bought the ticket to Vienna from that same window – not knowing the train would end up taking his son halfway across Russia.

  The waiting rooms were the same and the platforms, turned a warm yellow by the summer sun, were also as his memory had preserved them – straight, clean and graced by evenly distanced benches that precisely matched their twins on the other side of the tracks. They didn’t have stations like this in Russia. Not any more, anyway.

  The stationmaster blew her whistle, there was a whooshing cloud of steam and then the engine began to move forward, the train squealing and clanking as it followed it.

  It was hot – he put his case down for a moment and wiped the sweat from his neck with the sleeve of his jacket.

  There were differences, of course – not least the fact that the stationmaster who stood, her flag under her arm, watching the train disappear, was a woman. He rem
embered a stout gentleman with silver buttons and a white handlebar moustache, the tips stained yellow by nicotine. He’d been a Pole and the woman was an ethnic German. From Romania, he thought when she spoke to him, offering to carry his suitcase.

  ‘No thanks, I can manage it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, her eyes examining his medals and badges – his empty sleeve.

  He nodded. He could manage his suitcase.

  ‘Thank you all the same.’

  §

  There were no longer any posters in Polish, of course. Not that there had been that many before. This area had always been largely German speaking, even before the war. A more pronounced difference was in the subject matter. Before, the posters had been full of smiling men and women, tins of food, cars and holiday destinations – bright colours and images of happiness. Now they were starker. Soldiers, bombs, aeroplanes, tanks, monstrous enemies and, of course, swastikas. Everywhere swastikas.

  ‘Are you going far?’ The stationmaster had followed him along the platform. ‘I could ask someone to give you a lift, if you’d like.’

  ‘It’s all right, my father is coming. I’ll wait outside for him. Thank you again.’

  He was surprised his father hadn’t been there to meet him off the train, but perhaps he’d been delayed. He walked out into the sunshine of a fine July afternoon, leant back against one of the columns that held up the entrance portico and pulled the packet of cigarettes from the top pocket of his tunic, manoeuvring one into his mouth. The railway woman watched him from inside the station. He watched her in return, wondering what was bothering her. He saw her coming to a decision, then walking towards him.

  ‘Is it all right if I wait here?’ he said, deciding to pre-empt her.

  ‘There’s a bench to the side. It’s in the shade. You’d be happier there.’

  Her voice was firm – the kind of voice you might use with a child who needed to be corrected.