by Irwin Shaw
“Wherever we go everyone must realize that we are quick to kill. It is the most satisfactory key to dominion. Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven. It is the most valuable equipment in any military man, and when an officer loses it he should ask to be cashiered and returned to civilian life to take up bookkeeping.
“I have read some of your letters to your friends back home and I have been revolted by them. You are much older than I am, of course, and have been exposed to a great deal of Europe’s nonsense, and I see your letters are full of talk about the great days of peace and prosperity for all the world that will come when the war is over. That is all very well for women and politicians, but a soldier should know better. He should not want peace, because peace is a buyer’s market for a soldier, and he should know that prosperity can only be unilateral. We can be prosperous only if all Europe is a pauper, and a soldier should be delighted with that concept. Do I want the illiterate Pole, drunk on potato alcohol in the winter mud of his village, to be prosperous? Do I want the stinking goatherd in the Dolomites to be rich? Do I want a fat Greek homosexual to teach Law at Heidelberg? Why? I want servants, not competitors. And failing that, I want corpses. It is only because we are still part politicians, we Germans, selling ourselves to the world for an outdated and unnecessary vote of confidence, that we talk like that. In ten years we can display ourselves as what we are—soldiers, and nothing more, and then we can dispense with this nonsense. The soldier’s world is the only real world. Any other world is something off the shelf of a library—rhetoric and old bindings. Flabby wishes and banquet speeches at a table at which all the guests have fallen asleep. Ten thousand shelves of books cannot stop one light tank. The Bible has been printed a billion times, perhaps, and a single patrol of five men in an armored car can break the ten commandments fifty times in a half hour in a Ukrainian village and celebrate that night over two cases of captured wine.
“War is the most fascinating of all pursuits, because it most completely fits the final nature of man, which is predatory and egotistic. I can say it because I have given my face for it, and no one can accuse me of loving it safely from a distance and for its rewards alone.
“I do not think we are going to lose this war, because we cannot afford to. But if we do lose it we will lose it because we were not harsh enough. If we announced to the world that for every day of war, we would kill one hundred thousand Europeans, and kept our promise, how long do you think the war would last? And not Jews, because everyone is used to seeing Jews killed and everyone is more or less secretly delighted with us for our efficiency in that field. And the supply of Jews is not inexhaustible, no matter how generously we compute grandmothers. No. Europeans, Frenchmen, Poles, Russians, Dutchmen, English prisoners of war. We should print the lists of names with photographs, on good paper, and drop them over London instead of bombs. We are suffering because our conduct is not yet as mature as our philosophy. We kill Moses, but pretend to tolerate Christ, and we risk everything for that brainless pretense.
“When we overcome remorse we shall be the greatest people in Western history. We may do it without that, but in the meanwhile we are dragging a hidden anchor.
“I tell you these things because you’re going back to the Army and I am not. I have had a chance these last months to think all these things out and I can use disciples. After the last war it took a wounded Corporal to save Germany from its defeat. After this war it may take a wounded Lieutenant to save Germany from its victory. You can write me from the front and I can lie back here while my face mends and feel that I have not been useless. I am younger than you, but I am far more mature because I have not done a thing since I was fifteen years old without relating it to my purpose. You have drifted and modified and sentimentalized and it has kept you in inconclusive adolescence. The reasonable modern man is the man who has learned to press things immediately, in a single step of logic, to their reasonable conclusions. I have done that and you have not, and until you learn to do so, you will be a child in a room full of grownups.
“Killing is an objective act and death is a state beyond right and wrong. I can kill a nineteen-year-old Lieutenant two months out of Oxford and leave three dozen Germans to die on a hill with exactly the same calculations, because I know these things. Each contributes as he can, all thirty-seven of them by dying in a particular way and at a particular time that I find convenient or necessary. I will weep over none of them, unless I am watched by a company who will be encouraged to die the same evening by my tears.
“If you think that I admire the German soldier you are wrong. He is better than other soldiers because he can be hammered harder without wearing through and because he will permit himself to be trained more thoroughly because he lacks imagination. But his courage is a trick that is played upon him, like any other soldier’s courage, and his victory will mean no more beer for him than before, and no less labor, and he does not know these things. An army finally is no more than the function of its numbers multiplied by the quality of its leaders. Clausewitz said that, and for once he was right. The German soldier is not responsible either for the fact that there are ten million more like him, or for the fact that he has the most gifted men in Europe guiding him. The birth rate of Central Europe takes care of the first and accident and the ambition of a thousand men takes care of the second.
“The German soldier has the good luck that at this balancing moment in history he is being led by men who are a little mad. Hitler falls into fits before the maps at Berchtesgaden. Goering was dragged from the sanitarium for dope addicts in Sweden. Roehm, Rosenberg, all the rest, would make old Dr. Freud rub his hands in Vienna if he peeked out and saw them waiting in his anteroom. Only the irrational vision of a madman could understand that an empire could be won in ten years merely by promising to institutionalize the pogrom. After all, Jews have been murdered for twenty centuries without any important result. We are being led against the sane and reasonable armies of men who could not deviate from the rules if they burst a kidney in the effort, and we are being led by men exalted by opium fumes and by gibbering Corporals who picked up their lessons in military affairs from serving tea in a trench to a broken Captain twenty-five years ago at Passchendaele. How can we expect to lose?
“If I had epilepsy or if I had been treated once for amnesia or paranoia I would have higher hopes for my success in Europe in the next thirty years, and I would serve my country better …”
The doctor was a gray-haired man. He looked seventy years old. He had pouches under his eyes of wrinkled purple skin, like the flesh of swamp flowers, and his hands shook as he poked harshly at Christian’s knee. He was a Colonel and he looked too old even for a Colonel. There was brandy on his breath and the small, watery spurts of his eyes suspiciously searched Christian’s scarred leg and Christian’s face for the malingering and deception the doctor had found so often in thirty years of examining ailing soldiers of the Army of the Kaiser, the Army of the Social Democrats, and the Army of the Third Reich. Only the doctor’s breath, Christian thought, has remained the same over the thirty years. The Generals have changed, the Sergeants have died, the philosophies have veered from north to south, but the Colonel’s breath bears the same rich freight by a dark bottle out of Bordeaux that it did when Emperor Franz Josef stood beside his brother monarch in Vienna to review the first Saxony Guards on their way into Serbia.
“You’ll do,” said the Colonel, and the medical orderly busily marked down two ciphers on Christian’s card. “Excellent. It doesn’t look so good to the eye, but you can march fifty kilometers a day and never feel it. Eh?”
“I did not say anything, Colonel,” said Christian.
“Full field duty,” the Colonel said, peering harshly at Christian, as though Christian had contradicted him. “Eh?”
“Yes, Sir,” said Christian.
The Colonel tapped the leg impatiently. “Roll down your trousers, Sergeant,” he said.
He watched Christian stand up and push his trouser leg down into place. “What was your profession, Sergeant, before the war?”
“I was a skiing instructor, Sir.”
“Eh?” The Colonel glared at Christian as though he had just insulted him. “What was that?”
“Skiing, Sir.”
“Eh,” said the Colonel flatly. “You will not ski with that knee any more. It is for children anyway.” He turned away from Christian and washed his hands, with meticulous thoroughness, as though Christian’s bare pale flesh had been unutterably filthy. “Also, from time to time, you will find yourself limping. Eh, why not? Why shouldn’t a man limp?” He laughed, showing yellow false teeth. “How will people know you have been in the war otherwise?”
He scrubbed busily at his hands in the large enamel sink that smelled so strongly of disinfectant as Christian went out of the room.
“You will kindly get me a bayonet,” Hardenburg said. Christian was sitting at his side, looking at his leg, stretched, still stiff and dubious, out in front of him. In the next bed the Burn lay, lost as always in his silent Antarctic of bandage and his tropical and horrible smell. Christian had just told Hardenburg that he was leaving the next day for the Front. Hardenburg had said nothing, but had merely lain still and rigid, his smooth, swathed head like a frightening and morbid egg on the pillow. Christian had waited for a moment and then had decided that Hardenburg had not heard him. “I said, Lieutenant,” he repeated, “that I was leaving tomorrow.”
“I heard you,” Hardenburg said. “You will kindly get me a bayonet.”
“What was that, Sir?” Christian asked thinking: It only, sounds like bayonet because of the bandages.
“I said I want a bayonet. Bring it to me tomorrow.”
“I am leaving at two o’clock in the afternoon,” Christian said.
“Bring it in the morning.”
Christian looked at the overlapping, thin lines where the bandage crossed over itself on the round, smooth surface, but there was no expression there, of course, to give him a clue to what Hardenburg was thinking, and as usual, nothing was to be learned from the everlasting, even tone of the hidden voice. “I don’t have a bayonet, Sir,” he said.
“Steal one tonight. There is no complication there. You can steal one, can’t you?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“I don’t want the scabbard. Just bring me the knife.”
“Lieutenant,” said Christian, “I am very grateful to you and I would like to be of service to you in every way I can, but if you are going to …” He hesitated. “If you are going to kill yourself, I cannot bring myself to …”
“I am not going to kill myself,” the even, muffled voice said. “What a fool you are. You’ve listened to me for nearly two months now. Do I sound like a man who is going to kill himself?”
“No, Sir, but …”
“It’s for him,” Hardenburg said.
Christian straightened in the small armless wooden chair. “What’s that, Sir?”
“For him, for him,” Hardenburg said impatiently. “The man in the other bed.”
Christian turned slowly and looked at the Burn. The Burn lay quiet, motionless, communicating nothing, as he had lain for two months. Christian turned back to the equal clot of bandage behind which lay the Lieutenant. “I don’t understand, Sir,” he said.
“He asked me to kill him,” Hardenburg said. “It’s very simple. He hasn’t any hands left. Or anything left. And he wishes to die. He asked the doctor three weeks ago and the idiot told him to stop talking like that.”
“I didn’t know he could speak,” Christian said dazedly. He looked at the Burn again, as though this newly discovered accomplishment must now somehow be apparent in the frightful bed.
“He can speak,” Hardenburg said. “We have long conversations at night. He talks at night.”
What discussions, Christian thought, must have chilled the Italian night air in this room, between the man who had no hands and no anything else left and the man without a face. He shivered. The Burn lay still, the covers shrouded over the fail frame. He hears now, Christian thought, staring at him, he understands every word we are saying.
“He was a watchmaker, in Nuremberg,” Hardenburg said. “He specialized in sporting watches. He has three children and he has decided he wants to die. Will you kindly bring the bayonet?”
“Even if I bring it,” Christian said, fighting to preserve himself from the bitter complicity of this eyeless, voiceless, fingerless, faceless suicide, “what good will it do? He couldn’t use it anyway.”
“I will use it,” said Hardenburg. “Is that simple enough for you?”
“How will you use it?”
“I will get out of bed and go over to him and use it. Now will you bring it?”
“I didn’t know you could walk …” Christian said dazedly. In three months, the nurse had told him, Hardenburg might expect to take his first steps.
With a slow, deliberate motion, Hardenburg threw back the covers from his chest. As Christian watched him rigidly, as he might watch a corpse that had just risen in its grave and stepped out Hardenburg pushed his legs in a wooden, mechanical gesture, over the side of the bed. Then he stood. He was dressed in baggy, stained flannel pajamas. His bare feet were pallid and splotched on the marble floor of the Lyons silk manufacturer.
“Where is the other bed?” Hardenburg asked. “Show me the other bed.”
Christian took his arm delicately and led him across the narrow space until Hardenburg’s knees touched the other mattress. “There,” Hardenburg said flatly.
“Why?” Christian asked, feeling as though he were putting questions to ghosts fleeing past a window in a dream. “Why didn’t you tell anybody you could walk?”
Standing there, wavering a little in the yellowing flannel, Hardenburg chuckled behind his casque of bandage. “It is always necessary,” he said, “to keep a certain amount of crucial information about yourself from the authorities who control you.” He leaned over and felt lightly around on the blanket covering the chest of the Burn. Then his hand stopped. “There,” a voice said from behind the icedrift of bandage above the counterpane. The voice was hoarse and lacking in human timbre. It was as though a dying bird, a panther drowning slowly in its own blood, an ape crucified on a sharp branch in a storm in the jungle, had at last accomplished speech with one final word. “There.”
Hardenburg’s hand stopped, pale yellow and bony, like a weathered and ancient x-ray of a hand on the white counterpane.
“Where is it?” he asked harshly. “Where is my hand, Diestl?”
“On his chest,” Christian whispered, staring fixedly at the ivory, spread fingers.
“On his heart,” Hardenburg said. “J—ust above his heart. We have practiced this every night for two weeks.” He turned, with blind certainty, and crossed to his bed and climbed into it. He pulled the covers up to where the helmet of bandage, like archaic armor, rose from his shoulders. “Now bring the bayonet. Don’t worry about yourself. I will hide it for two days after you have gone, so that nobody can aceuse you of the killing. And I will do it at night, when no one comes into the room for eight hours. And he will keep quiet.” Hardenburg chuckled. “The watchmaker is very good at keeping quiet.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Christian quietly, getting up to leave, “I will bring the bayonet.”
He brought the crude knife the next morning. He stole it at a canteen in the evening while its owner was singing “Lili Marlene” loudly over beer with two soldiers from the Quartermaster Corps. He carried it under his tunic to the marble villa of the silk manufacturer, and slid it under the mattress as Hardenburg directed. He only looked back once from the door, after he had said good-bye to the Lieutenant, looked back once at the two white blind figures lying still in the parallel beds in the tall-ceilinged rather gay room with the Bay shining and sunny outside through the high, elegant windows.
As he limped down the corridor, away from the room, his boots making a h
eavy, plebeian sound on the marble, he felt like a scholar who has finally been graduated from a university whose every book he has memorized and sucked dry.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“ATTENTION!” A VOICE called from the door, dramatic and alarming, and Noah stiffened rigidly in front of his bunk.
Captain Colclough came in, followed by the Top Sergeant and Sergeant Rickett, and began his Saturday inspection. He walked slowly down the scrubbed middle of the barracks, between the stiff rows of barbered and laundered soldiers. He peered heavily at their hairlines and the shine on their shoes, with a hostile impersonality, as though these were not men he was inspecting, but enemy positions. The blazing Florida sunshine struck in through the bare windows.
The Captain stopped in front of the new man, Whitacre.
“Eighth General Order,” Colclough said, staring coldly at Whitacre’s necktie.
“To give the alarm,” Whitacre said, “in case of fire or disorder.”
“Rip that man’s bed,” Colclough said. Sergeant Rickett stepped between the bunks and tore down Whitacre’s bed. The sheets made a dry, harsh sound in the still barracks.
“This is not Broadway, Whitacre,” Colclough said. “You are not living at the Astor Hotel. The maid does not come in here in the morning. You have to learn to make a satisfactory bed, here.”
“Yes, Sir,” Whitacre said.
“Keep your goddamn mouth shut!” Colclough said. “When I want you to talk I will give you a direct question and you will answer. Yessir, or Nosir.”