“Ah,” he exclaimed, “they’ve sent you to us!”
“Yes.”
Willi laid the letter aside, pushing it under a telephone: he had opened the window, and there was a breeze from the sea.
“Let’s see,” said Willi, “if the first lieutenant is available.” He knocked on the door, someone called out—reluctantly, it seemed to me—“Come in!” Willi opened the door and into the darkened room announced my arrival. A croaky voice said, “Very well—show him in.” I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.
The window was covered by a blanket, and I could vaguely make out a bed with a long, gray figure lying on it, a cupboard, a table, and a few unidentifiable pictures on the walls.
I felt enormously heartened by the way this man immediately stood up as I entered. That may seem trivial to you, but, believe me, when one’s been a soldier in this army for many years, always having to deal with so-called superiors, one develops an infallible instinct for the forms of human relationships. If you knew how many of your friends—I need only think of my own, or take any pleasant young man who you’re sure would never hurt a fly—if you knew how he used to behave toward so-called inferiors, I believe you would blush with shame on his behalf …
Your brother was the first officer I ran across in five years of whom I can claim that he moved with complete confidence on the narrow borderline of simultaneous authority and humility, as befits a superior. No doubt you’re familiar with the other kind, those pipsqueak lieutenants: totally ignorant, brainless, and not even competent in their military, let alone soldierly, craft, sustained solely by the authority of their two shoulder straps and, last but not least, of their elegant boots. And you may grasp the extent of the uniform’s demonic power from the fact that this huge army relied exclusively on this idiotic perversion of values, for even before 1943, the original illusory conception had proven as void and insubstantial as a wizened toy balloon lying trampled on a fairground.
Try to imagine any one of your brother’s many contemporaries or classmates—leaving aside Schnecker—any one of them, I say, a nice kind man whose behavior is invariably decent and blameless, and I tell you: in the barracks he’s a swine! And that army carted its barracks all across Europe …
That’s how X and Y were: X, who today stifles his bitterness over his temporarily obsolete career with American cigarettes and vague political aspirations, meanwhile getting together regularly with his former comrades to reminisce about how they used to “show them a thing or two”; and Y, who is grimly preparing himself to become a district attorney or a high-school teacher—either of which occupations offers enough scope for bullying creatures even more defenseless than soldiers: children and the poor.
IV
Your brother, as I said, got up from his bed for me. I need hardly describe him to you: tall and slim, with a slight stoop at that time, his blue eyes full of sadness, his uniform bare of any decorations. He was about my age, twenty-five or -six, and, although it may seem ridiculous to you, a first lieutenant’s star on that figure seemed to me fraught with ominous significance. A first lieutenant on that tiny base in the dunes, with a garrison of twenty-five men, the commander of a bastion which at that stage of the war could well have been entrusted to a sergeant: there must be some story behind that.
He repeated my name in his rather husky voice.
“You will remain here,” he said after looking me briefly in the eyes. “I need an orderly; my present one is going on leave tomorrow. Do you understand?”
“Yessir,” I said.
“Good. Please have yourself briefed. You will share telephone duty with the stretcher bearer. In addition, you will be required to make two bicycle trips a day to company headquarters. And then”—he was silent for a moment and looked at me again—“you will have noticed on the way here that we are in a mousetrap, and no one is allowed to leave it other than on duty without my knowledge. There’s no such thing as time off. Do you understand?”
“Yessir,” I said.
“Good. Please have the orderly explain all practical matters to you.”
His eyes met mine again. I took this for a silent dismissal, saluted, and left.
On this front of the Atlantic coast, my dear sir, a very special kind of warfare was being carried on, the war against boredom. Try to imagine a front extending from Norway to the Bay of Biscay and facing no opponent other than the sea. And this front was equipped like any other where each day saw wounded and dead, men screaming and dying, men horrifyingly mute. But here everything was completely frozen. Night after night, thousands of soldiers stood on guard waiting for an enemy who never came and whose coming some of them positively craved. Year after year, night after night, thousands stood there facing the sea, that monster which is eternally the same, eternally the same, comes and goes, comes and goes, is always smiling, always smiling with a serenity fit to induce a man to plunge headlong into it. An eternal smile; the sea, even when storm-tossed, always had something like laughter about it, wild laughter devoid of mockery, but still laughter. The sea was laughing at us, that was it. There stood the guns, mortars, machine guns; rifles by the hundred thousand lay there on parapets or were lugged back and forth by plodding sentries. Nothing. Year after year the same. Every evening a password to be memorized plus the various flare signals, hand grenades placed in readiness—hand grenades against the sea! During the day, instruction in the use of guns, mortars, machine guns, and other weapons, and drill on the road behind the dunes, year after year. Year after year. During the day, almost eight hours’ duty, and at night at least four hours’ sentry duty. The never-ending battle against the sand that relentlessly penetrated the farthest, most inaccessible crack of every weapon and never failed to be discovered by some bored corporal’s eye. And somewhere beyond the horizon, far, far, incredibly far away, there was an enemy in whom it was impossible to believe—far, far away, an enemy from whom the sea seemed to have learned its laughter. All that lay like a pall of apathy over even the most idyllic little bays, driving us to drink.
Some of the men had been at it since 1940. But even those who had known it only for a few months were beginning to show signs of despair. Despair is the hope of the flesh, my dear sir. There is a kind of despair that, even if it exists only in the mind, is a wild, sensual pleasure. Despair has something of the substance of a movie. One drinks it, it is sweet, sweet, so sweet that one wants to drink up a whole sea of it, but the more one drinks the thirstier one becomes, the more convinced that this thirst is unquenchable, that perhaps here on earth one is already in hell, for hell might somehow be that perpetual thirst. Despair is terrible, despair is the hope of the flesh, and one might feel tempted to pray: Lead us not into despair.
Even a person like your brother, who was always assured of the consolations of his faith, whose strength was such that he could have spent his whole life walking along a knife edge, ultimately to leap from its utmost point into eternal bliss—even a person like your brother was feeling the gnawings of this despair when I arrived. During the first few days I was there, I observed in the melancholy expression of his eyes a vague something that almost reminded me of a person about to go berserk. Often, while he was on the phone talking to that schoolmaster, there was a quiver in his voice as if he were at breaking point, about to cry out: Nitwit, nitwit, nitwit! Incorrigible nitwit!
Well, I was as weak as he was strong. And I was no longer accustomed to any kind of hardship. I had brought off the seemingly impossible: in the uniform of an ordinary soldier I had managed to lead a life to my own liking. My firsthand experience of the war dated from 1940, when I had felt the urge for closer acquaintance after spending two years in barracks undergoing training as an infantryman. After those six weeks of campaign, I had had enough of war. Dust and dirt and heat, permanently painful, burning feet, blood, and a lot of hysteria, and, to crown it all, the worst part: helping those repulsive banners of the Nazis to invade the garden that was France. Not for me. Just four days before the
Armistice I was wounded in southern France, on the border of Burgundy. I recovered, hung around for months in a military hospital, and, by bluffing a bit with my school French, contrived to have myself transferred to Paris. In those days a wounded soldier was still a hero. Having succeeded in getting to Paris, I made the most of my illness in order, as we used to say, to maintain the position.
To some extent I had been looking forward to this new tour of duty on the coast, the way one always starts out looking forward to something new. But after a few days I was on the brink of despair.
The futility was appalling. There stood the men every morning with their machine guns or mortars, drilling, drilling, in the sand dunes, practicing the movements they had ceased to master because they had been practicing them for too long. They were personally acquainted with almost every grain of sand. And every morning the same, every night the same, and always only the one enemy, the sea; all around them, minefields, empty buildings. And not even enough to eat. Not even enough to eat to keep up their strength. Food is an essential part of war. Every sensible officer knows that. The waging of war knows no romanticism; there is no place anywhere for so-called ideas or emotions. A soldier who is permanently hungry is capable of the worst, and he is fully justified in obtaining whatever food he can. The rations were simply ridiculous, my dear sir. I know you aren’t aware of that. How often have I carried postcards from the men that said, “Alive and well, thanks for the parcel. Heinrich.”
Picture, if you can, a man who spends eight hours a day on duty plus four hours a night on sentry duty, living on a pound of bread, two spoonfuls of jam, an ounce of margarine and, at midday, a quart of soup made from water and cauliflower in which, for a hundred and fifty men, a quarter of a skeleton of a scrawny cow has been boiled after being stripped by the mess cook of its last vestiges of meat and fat. Maybe you think that’s a lot. It’s nothing when a man is fighting boredom.
Well, we found ways to help ourselves. We kept back ammunition and exchanged it for bread with overfed marines and gunners who could find the time to go rabbit-hunting. In that area the navy had its own farms, and at night, whenever we were off duty, we would sneak out onto the potato fields, eluding the sentries who were guarding the crops with cocked rifles, and in the darkness we would grub around in the soil, like wild boar, to fill up our sacks. And don’t believe we had any romantic notions about exposing ourselves to the risk of being shot at, for the sentries did fire whenever they caught sight of us.
So you can add hunger to boredom, and just remember that your brother fought for three years on this front.
On the morning of the third day, as I awoke, the stale air fell like lead into my lungs. The room was full of smoke; the stretcher bearer had, as always, fallen asleep at the phone, his stupid head lying in a flattened tin can that we used for an ashtray. Naturally, as the latest arrival, I occupied the less desirable of the two bunks, the upper one, and, not yet used to the low ceiling, I would absent-mindedly sit up every morning and bump my head painfully against the ceiling. I looked at my watch: it was six-thirty. So once again he was an hour late for his wake-up duty.
The soldiers were stubborn, fighting tooth and nail for every minute of sleep. And they had every right, for they never had a single night of unbroken sleep, and what can be more ghastly than to be wrenched night after night out of profound sleep?
The night sentries were allowed to go off duty at 6:00 a.m., unless it happened to be high tide, which always meant an intensified state of alert. If they wanted, they could grab some extra sleep until seven-thirty before getting ready to go on duty again. In order not to leave the coast totally unguarded during the next two hours, a single so-called day sentry was posted for the entire base. This sentry had to stand on higher ground, was equipped with an alarm signal, and had to leave his post at 8:00 a.m. to take part in the day’s regular duties. It was the orderly’s job to wake that sentry. And you can take my word for it that not a single one of the night sentries, even if he happened to be lying in the bunk next to the day sentry, would have lifted a finger to wake him. It was the orderly’s job, and if the orderly failed to do so, too bad: then the base was left unguarded, and the Tommies or the Yanks could come if they ever had a mind to do so.
So the base was left unguarded. During the first three days I took all this fairly seriously. I really did think the British were coming, and when I woke up in the morning around that hour—which was unquestionably the most favorable for a potential attack—I had a vision of landing barges gliding silently up onto the beach, their troops leaping from the bow … and Hurrah!
So I jumped up, poked the stretcher bearer in the ribs, and said, “Get up, you have to wake the sentry!”
That stretcher bearer was one of the stupidest fellows I have ever met. He was middle-aged, forty-two years old, with crinkly hair and a thick, impenetrable skull and tiny, drink-sodden eyes. He was almost always asleep, and not only could he hardly write German—in his mouth even the spoken language became a very limited means of communication.
“Ah,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “I sleeping, I goddamn sleeping, first time happen.”
“Okay,” I said, “first time happen, but get going now, it’s time.” He fumbled for a slip of paper lying under the telephone, held it up close to his eyes, and silently committed the name to memory. Then he put on his cap to leave, but I knew that he often woke up the wrong man—more than once we had barely saved him from being beaten up by his victim—so I took the slip and repeated aloud, “Pellerig, Bunker 4, first bunk left of the door, lower.”
“What?” He heaved himself around. “I thinking Brunswick.”
“No,” I said. “Brunswick has to go to the orderly room, he’s going on leave.”
“Okay.” He left.
I lit a cigarette, ran my fingers through my hair, and stepped out the door. It was wonderful outside. A cool, gentle wind came from the sea, whose foamy, lapping tongue had halted quite close to our hut, at the foot of a sand dune. It was high tide, the water was blue-gray, and there was a genuine smell of the sea. I stared at that endless surface, that grandiose plain of water, watched the seagulls, and shielded my eyes with my hand so as to savor the solitude. Perhaps I could make out a coast-guard vessel; it was always a pleasure to see the ocean enlivened by some rare vessel. The weather was overcast, the sun, behind me, lay wrapped up in a thick gray cloud. To the north, the view was hidden by the same pine forest that stretched from Cadette’s tavern all the way to the coast. I had been told that one could see the mouth of the Somme by walking to the edge of the forest. I decided to give it a try that afternoon during a free half hour. So somewhere to the northwest was England … one could sail across the sea, and suddenly an island would appear—England …
I kept my eye on Kandick, the stretcher bearer, and made sure he went into the correct bunker. Everything was silent; soft vaporous banks of morning fog lay above the dunes and huts. It was the only truly peaceful hour of the day here.
Suddenly a voice behind me said, “Good morning.” I turned, stood at attention, and saluted.
Your brother made a wry face. “Let’s not have any of that, please.” I had been embarrassed too, but somehow or other I had to respond to his greeting, and I had already spent too long in the prison of my uniform to allow myself the liberty of a simple “Good morning,” as one summer visitor to another. He noticed my embarrassment. “I know, that’s what you were taught. But it’s not appropriate here, and there’s no need, is there? If you like, you can say ‘Good morning’ to me. I’d be sorry if I’d offended you, but I think we understand each other …”
I looked aside. “The point is,” he went on, “I know that you find it repugnant—so do I.”
He took out a cigarette and lit it from mine, then sat down on a little bench outside the entrance to our bunker. Those first minutes in the morning, when one stepped outside, saw the sea, felt the wind and the glorious air, when everything was still silent—those first minutes were beautif
ul. But the specter of daily duty was too real, too deeply ingrained in our memory, for us to be able to linger over our pleasure. Monotony is the most effective weapon of modern warfare.
“You know,” he began again, “I’m told there are parents who greet their sleepy children in the morning with a snappy ‘Heil Hitler.’ There really are such people, just imagine.” His expression was somber. “Can you imagine anything more sickening?”
As I already told you, my despair had become greater after three days than that of your brother after three years. I am a weak person, I had no prop, no religion, only a very vague, ephemeral dream of a certain beauty and order. And yet on that particular morning we two were, I believe, on the same level with our despair. For three years he had swum alone against that sluggish tide of monotony and horror, I had leaped into that mire only three days before, and, filled with the same fear, we were both struggling against being swallowed up by it. We were each like a swimmer who, believing himself alone and lost in a vast body of water, suddenly looks around and finds someone at his side.
I looked at him. That remark about the Hitler salute was so daring that it put him completely at my mercy, at a time when one could be sentenced to death for even dreaming about lèse-majesté.
I said, “Sir, I believe we share the same opinion.”
At that moment, Kandick’s thick skull surfaced above the edge of the dune.
Your brother stood up to return to his hut because he wished to avoid rebuking Kandick for the five hundredth time for oversleeping.
I felt happy.
Until that evening we had no further conversation. I took over the phone while he and Kandick went on duty. That meant he went from one emplacement to the next, attended drill, while Kandick, on the alert for any possible injury during weapons practice, slept near the latrine—a portable outhouse standing somewhat higher up.
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 60