Whereas I had nothing to do but keep an eye on our two packs, your brother didn’t have a minute’s peace. At the last moment the transferees’ clothing and equipment had to be replenished, and men who had suddenly been taken violently ill had to be persuaded that they were in fact fit; men about to go on leave had where feasible to be replaced. Above all, the transferees had to be assembled as soon as possible in Pochelet so they could attend divine service.
The Catholic divisional priest arrived by car shortly before four and, in view of the general chaos, was accommodated in our quarters. I had to endure his company for half an hour, until the arrival of the first penitents, to whom I offered the use of my room while they waited. Meanwhile your brother told me to clear the living room for the celebration of Holy Mass and the administering of the Sacraments. So I found myself alone with the priest for a while. He had the smooth, rosy skin befitting a staff officer in France, and the mild and obliging manners of a wine salesman. When I threw out a few remarks about war, corruption, and officers in general, he gently rotated one hand in the other, felt constrained to remove his cigarette from his lips, and, with a bland expression, said, “Yes, there is much wickedness in the world.”
We were interrupted when the first penitent knocked at the door, saluted stiffly, and came in.
I couldn’t help muttering to myself, “Ave, Caesar, morituri …”
The priest looked at me with a smile. He finally abandoned his cigarette and said, “Well, well, a Latin scholar!”
His gentle look was a signal for me to leave the room.
Out in the garden, all was quiet. Mild autumnal warmth was interspersed with cool air, the sky was blue, and the cottages of Pochelet slept behind their high hedges and fences. Your brother had driven over to Larnton, to try to talk some sense into a young soldier apparently overcome by violent cramps.
Preparations were complete, all the other transferees were ready, and divine service was expected to begin punctually at five. The Protestant clergyman was due any minute.
I strolled slowly along behind the company buildings as far as the crossroads and for the first time entered the Pochelet tavern. It was a single-story, flat-roofed building, a typical outdoor summer restaurant, with its wooden walls and garden chairs. The big room was deserted; through the open door to the kitchen I could see the landlady and her husband at their evening meal. She was a pretty, blonde woman, with a barmaid’s cold beauty. Still chewing, she emerged from the kitchen, gave me a friendly smile, and handed me the bottle of white wine I had requested and for which I didn’t yet know how to pay.
“Give me another,” I said with a laugh. “Then I won’t have to bother you again at your supper.” She gave a cautionary little smile, hesitated half teasingly, but then, having made up her mind, reached in under the bar and brought out another bottle.
I sat down at one end of the room, aware of that terrible despair in abandoned places of entertainment that creeps toward one from each corner. There was a smell of dust, of summer dust.
I couldn’t possibly miss the departure: the road outside the window would bring the men from Larnton and the northern bases right past my nose.
I had a whole hour in which to forget the girl’s face, to say good-bye to France, and to drown the soft, pink, well-preserved corpselike face of the priest.
That yellow wine is the most exquisite of all; it is like honey and fire, like light and silk, and it’s my belief that God caused it to grow in order to keep alive the memory of Paradise in this depressing den of vice that calls itself human society. The more I drank, the more I became conscious of a serenity such as I had never known, a serenity amounting almost to wisdom. It is wonderful to drink oneself to sleep, to sink into the arms of that kindly brother of Death.
I remember being able to persuade that cool but sweetly smiling woman to let me have two more bottles in exchange for my watch.
I woke up to find myself on a foul-smelling truck, closed my eyes again in horror, and finally became fully awake at the railroad station in Abbeville, beside a troop train on the point of departure. Your brother’s laughing face was bent over me.
“He looked,” I said, “he looked like a wine salesman …”
“Sure, sure,” he said quietly. “Come on, now, get up.”
I got to my feet and was assigned by him to a column of fourteen men in the process of being incorporated into a company on the troop train.
We traveled across France, past the shining vineyards of the Rhineland, through central Germany, Saxony, Silesia, Poland. The railroad stations became ever more gray and dismal, the soldiers ever more desperate and cynical. Gradually we started meeting trainloads of wounded, trainloads of prisoners; the ragged population of the occupied territories crowded around our train. The last of our French matches were bartered for eggs, blankets from French houses transformed into butter, parts of equipment exchanged in the darkness of ghostly railroad stations for bacon or tobacco, for even during the transport our rations remained miserably inadequate.
The weather had turned cold, it being now almost the middle of October, and we dragged our long greatcoats through the dirt of Ukrainian stations where tractors were being hurriedly loaded for shipment back to Germany, or where we were held up to allow a transport of severely wounded soldiers to pass along the blocked section.
I didn’t see your brother that often. Sometimes, during a brief halt, he would come to our car and chat with us, and on rare occasions, during a longer stop, we found an opportunity to take a stroll together. We never spoke of the past. It was an overcrowded, inadequately locked chamber whose bolts must never be touched.
Sitting side by side next to the buffer stop of a siding or on a damp stack of railroad ties, we tried to feel our way toward the mystery that was awaiting us, that neither of us knew: the front line. For the farther we were hauled into this dark land, the clearer it became that nothing we encountered here would be comparable to the kind of war we had been experiencing in France. Here anything wearing a gray uniform was filled with a frightening urge to get as far to the rear as possible.
This army had never recovered from the shock of that first disastrous winter. The wounded with whom we spoke were waiting tensely for the train to move on, farther back, without stopping. Every minute in this country seemed wasted; all they wanted was to get farther back from the front, not only quickly but also as far back as possible. It was painful to listen to their illusions on the subject of Germany. Would that country, now also dirty, mangled, wretched, and starving, where barracks had become prisons and hospitals had become barracks—would that country live up to their dreams?
A week later we stopped at a fair-sized station said to be not far from the headquarters of Army Group South. Here, after being fed miserable rations (supplied in France) throughout the journey, we were suddenly provided with an excellent meal: there was some good soup, plenty of meat and potatoes, and at the end a distribution of candies, schnapps, and cigarettes.
There was even champagne, and I was lucky enough, when lots were drawn, to win a whole bottle that we had been meant to share. It was very cold, the stove in our car glowed, and I can well remember opening the train door a crack and, while I looked out, drinking up the bottle as I absent-mindedly filled and emptied, filled and emptied, my mug, at the same time breathing in the icy air. I felt stupefied.
Having enjoyed all those delicacies, we suddenly found ourselves being unloaded, and after lining up, we started out on a long, wearisome march to the nearest airfield. That was in the afternoon.
Next morning, while it was still dark, we launched our first attack.
What a glorious ring there is to those words: to launch an attack! It sounds like a fanfare, seems to tell of keen young warriors who—in obedience to the stratagems of war—can barely suppress the song on their lips as they attack, attack with exultant hearts.
We, by contrast, had deplaned in early-morning darkness and had to suffer grievously for our premature insobrie
ty. Crammed tightly together in trucks, half suffocated by weapons and packs, we had been driven toward the front line and spent a further two hours in strange houses in a strange village. Each sound coming from the nearby front triggered new fears, it being impossible to relate such sounds to anything one had previously experienced. Thus I was scared over and over again by the sudden high-pitched bark of an antitank cannon that seemed to be positioned right behind our building. Each time I believed that Russian tanks were at our door, and each time I experienced mortal fear.
The light in that little room where we all huddled together had gone out, and when things finally quieted down I simply leaned back in the darkness, searching among shoulders, legs, heads, and weapons for a bit of space, and closed my eyes. A vile stench filled the room. Apparently a barrel of pickled cucumbers had begun to ferment and had burst; the floor was awash with a disgusting, reeking liquid, and our groping hands kept touching the soft, nauseating objects strewn around. I smoked incessantly, if only to keep down my nausea; no one said a word. We had imagined it all quite different, not quite so bad and not so terribly sudden.
It was still dark when we were ordered outside, where to my joy I recognized your brother’s voice. The little yard was packed with soldiers, as I could see when the red flash from a cannon briefly illuminated it. A company: that word represents so many living souls, so many destinies, yet how much did a company amount to on this front!
Your brother explained, briefly and seriously, that he would be in command of us, that we had been ordered to seal off a breach. Truly a task for novices! It was appallingly difficult to organize the company in the dark, to hand over the groups and platoons to their respective leaders. I was called out by him and could tell by the grip of his trembling fingers when he grabbed me by the sleeve that he too was scared.
“You stay with me,” he said huskily.
Well before dawn we left the village, guided by a sergeant from the staff of the regiment to which we had been assigned. Oh, what a long way we still had to go to reach the actual front! A relief, at least, to have earth under one’s feet. In front and behind, seemingly all around us in fact, were gun flares and detonations. It would have been impossible to determine the battle line from these indications. The sergeant knew nothing for certain either. Who did! He told us in a whisper, as we marched along, that a whole battalion had been taken by surprise here, some of them killed, some taken prisoner; a few survivors had managed to escape. It was still uncertain whether the Russians had occupied the position, or whether, surprised by their own success, they had merely withdrawn with booty and prisoners to their own positions.
Strangely enough, those constant detonations didn’t bother us much. What was terrible was the dark silence lying ahead of us, and we had to march into that darkness until we met resistance or reached the old positions. It was our job to determine the actual battle line, if possible to reoccupy the old positions and hold them.
There were four of us in the lead: your brother and the sergeant in front, while I followed with a corporal. Sometimes when I think back to those days, I believe that war is an element. When a man falls into water he gets wet, and when a man moves around at the front, where infantrymen and sappers dig themselves into the ground, he is in the war. That atmosphere is an acid test: there are only good fellows and bad; all intermediate categories either fail or rise to the occasion.
My instinct told me: the NCO walking beside me was a bastard. He was a coward, saturated with fear and abandoning himself to it without resistance. The way he flung himself to the ground when your brother or the sergeant softly passed on the command was enough to tell me that he would be capable of anything. There was something uncontrolled, something brutish, about the way he immediately hurled himself down and hugged the earth. The sergeant was very calm; he radiated a quality that can only be called courage, a spiritual aura stronger than fear.
Meeting no resistance, not even from rifle fire, we reached the line; on both sides was a lively exchange of fire, while ahead of us there still seemed to be that dark, silent cotton batting that was going to absorb us.
The sergeant’s hearing was fantastically accurate. From among all those sounds, small and large, he pinpointed the one: that of a Very flare pistol being discharged. He dropped instantly to the ground, the signal for us to hiss the command to those behind us so we would no longer be visible in the brilliance of the silver flash.
At each flare I would try to recognize something, but there was only the dark, black earth, with many, many indistinct mounds that could just as well have been plowed furrows as crouching men.
My God, how often have I wondered at the immensity of the power that—despite cowardice and fear—induces millions of men to stagger passively on toward death, as we were doing that night.
We reached the old positions, meeting no resistance and suffering no losses. For the first time we trod in the dark on corpses; for the first time we prepared ourselves for a potential enemy lying in wait for us eighty or a hundred yards away. Everything had to be done incredibly fast. Before daybreak the platoons had to be at their battle stations, the rest of the men in their positions, and contact had to be established with the units on our left and right that had not fallen back.
Perhaps this so-called front is imagined as a straight line, drawn with a ruler on a map by a general-staff officer. Actually it is a very tortuous affair, receding and projecting, a highly irregular snake that adapts to the terrain or is forced by enemy pressure onto unfavorable ground.
How much we had to do in a single hour if daylight was to find our defenses prepared! On the right, no contact could be established. A corporal and two men sent out to look for the nearest German sentry on the right never came back: we never heard or saw anything of them again. Another patrol, accompanied by your brother, moved a bit farther back and discovered that we had advanced much too far on the right. The whole line had to shift and adjust, and all that in total silence, in the dark, in a terrain pockmarked by shell holes. Corpses lay all around—Germans and Russians; weapons, parts of equipment …
The company battle station was located almost in the center of the sector, slightly to the rear. There were two bunkers, each with space for three men. Telephone communication had been cut off. Try to imagine the state of mind of a telephone operator who has been sitting for three years in a hotel room in France, connecting the banal chitchat of the various staffs: now he is in Russia, in a situation fraught with danger, and has been ordered to repair and check the telephone line, half an hour before dawn.
The sergeant was a quiet, slight man, pale and unshaven. The usual decorations dangled casually from his chest. His job done, he stayed on with our group long enough to smoke a cigarette. We hardly spoke, but when he stood up to say goodbye he said with a smile—it sounded almost like an apology—“I’m due to go on leave tonight.” He slung his machine pistol on his back, shrugged his shoulders, and shook hands all around; then he drew aside the blanket that shielded the bunker toward the rear.
The next moment he lay dead at our feet.
The shell struck the escarpment of the trench; the dark sky seemed to collapse—the light had gone out. The corporal screamed like a madman; and when, covered with clods of earth and fighting down my fear, I raised myself forcibly, I touched a bleeding body, my hand sank into a foul, wet mass, and I screamed too. Meanwhile your brother had drawn the blanket across again, and switched on his flashlight, revealing a ghastly sight. The legs of the dead sergeant stuck out from under the blanket, into the bunker, and the corporal’s right leg had been severed below the knee. Our cigarettes were still alight: your brother held his between his lips.
“Bandage him,” he told me, his face pale. He stepped outside.
The artillery barrage continued. We became familiar with the sound of Russian mortars, the horrible whine of the heavy artillery shells that seemed to be driving death before them. While the earth trembled all around us, I bandaged the whimpering corporal. Wi
th some vague notion of making a tourniquet, I rashly tore off my suspenders—the next day I would have taken his since by then he no longer needed them, whereas for me there were occasions later when the lack of them almost cost me my life. I made a tourniquet around the stump and wrapped gauze and rags, as many as I could find, over the bleeding wound. When I tried to leave the bunker, the wounded man clung to me, but I had made up my mind to die under the open sky and I pushed him away.
Outside, the darkness was lit up by brief red flames; it looked as if fire were leaping from the earth, fire instantly to be covered by darkness again.
That short barrage seemed to go on forever. I thought the entire eastern front must be in turmoil, a giant offensive under way. Actually it lasted—your brother had checked it on his wristwatch—seven minutes and was comparatively harmless. The company’s casualties were four dead and seven wounded.
We were all totally exhausted after the rigors of the train journey, the march, the flight, and again the journey by truck—and now this concentrated encounter with the front. But we were to learn that there was no longer any such thing as sleep, although there were hours when one simply sank into oblivion, slept as if dead, was dragged to one’s feet, stood sentry or was sent off to one of the other platoons as a dispatch runner.
In those first nights—during the day it was hardly possible to move outside our sector—I invariably lost my sense of direction. There I would lie, stretched out on the earth, darkness all around, waiting for a flare to go up that would allow me to recognize some landmark that would tell me whether I had to crawl forward, backward, or sideways. Sometimes, when I eventually crawled off, I was aware in that singing, cold silence of something eerie, something indescribable, like an invisible, inaudible, yet palpable breath: the proximity of the enemy. I would know then that I was quite close to the Russian positions, and often a hoarse whisper or call, a terrible, alien laugh, confirmed that I was not mistaken.
The Collected Stories of Heinrich Böll Page 65