We could imagine them as theatrical directors, but not as the high priests of a sacrificial ceremony at the altar of the highest human values, despite the fact that the immensity of the hecatombs they had to manage lent them a macabre solemnity. But even if a terrible seriousness covered their mundane, petit bourgeois features, like the shadow of a scaffold, the bare emptiness of their faces deprived them of any grandeur.
In other words: we easily believed their determination to sacrifice their sons en masse, but not the holy passion that would have lent true greatness.
Two German field marshals they said we should particularly admire were Hindenburg and Ludendorff. We always confused one with the other, and as a result they fused into a pair of twins we called “Hindendorff and Co.” or “the brothers Ludenburg.” They reminded us of the uncle and nephew who made deliveries to our house and whom we could never tell apart, the owners of the large grocery store and slaughterhouse Dobrowolski & Dobrowolski, who were constantly roiled in petty jealousies and yet despite all discord were united in business. Just like the grocers, Hindendorff and Ludenburg shared the same profession, and their irksome but indissoluble partnership had made them scarcely distinguishable from each other. And just as we were never sure whether Uncle August Dobrowolski or Nephew Stefan was behind the wheel of the delivery truck that rolled through the garden gate once a week, always equipped with new, brightly colored advertisements for household items, imports, sausages, and smoked meats from Dobrowolski & Dobrowolski, or which of them was the larger one with the bell scraper and which was the pink-fleshed baldheaded one, we never succeeded in differentiating the paternal, iron sternness of the Generalfeldmarschall, his well-known patriarchal face troubled with the monumental pathos stemming from the harvest of lives and his eyes ringed dark with worry, from the scornful, overly competent expression in the small, budlike mouth of his chief of staff.
We observed them in profile, with stomachs protruding and knees angled forward, holding a field marshal’s baton or a cigar that emitted a fine fuse of smoke, greeting the parading battalions or departing trains encrusted with troops, weapons, oak leaves, lady Samaritans serving coffee, mothers and brides, and wagons where we could make out the load capacity 6 horses or 42 men, and over that: Berlin — Paris, or Leipzig — St. Petersburg, which we involuntarily completed with the words and back.
Or else the men themselves, the commanders of the army, boarding a special train, seated en face, their faces pressed into a stiff, double-chinned dignity, casually saluting, hands in tight nappa-leather gloves raised to the covered spiked helmet, and then presenting a staff officer frozen at attention two miserly leather fingers to be shaken in absolute obedience.
That was the pose we found most revealing, as the two men descended from the train, their short legs carefully searching for the next step, dressed in the opulently red-brocaded breeches that were gathered below the knees in bulbous leather gaiters that reminded us of the parchment wrap used for serving fried chicken legs, staring pompously ahead, necks rigid, past the troops standing at attention.
We found them colossal in a strangely buoyant, cloudy way. Their cigar-smoker stomachs didn’t seem to pull them down but to propel them forward. The sight of them always brought to mind the happy silly couplet from “The Aviators’ March”: In der Luft, in der Luft fliegt der Paprika / auf zum Himmel, Himmel, Himmel, hipp hurra! — because we always expected them to suddenly float off the train step and soar over the train cars, into the cheery shrapnel-clouds of the blue sky, while the befuddled staff officers held tightly onto their helmets and gaped at them with open mouths like fairgoers surprised to see the balloon lady carried off by a gust of wind while clutching her colorful inflated cluster. Perhaps then the strained satisfaction would finally break loose and spread roguishly across their faces, merry and optimistic like the happy end of some droll fairy tale. Because as it was, when they stepped out of the train, harnessed by an iron sense of duty, shackled to the earth, they displayed a bombastic sullenness: their swollen and corseted bulges tugged against their moorings like captive hot-air balloons that make their anchor lines work all the harder the closer they come to the ground — up to the last stretch, which is accomplished through what might be called a mutual understanding about weightiness, so that the landing occurs with an impressive sense of ceremony. The caption of this particular picture reinforced this idea: Their Excellencies were greeted by an escort.
And once on firm ground, these balloons, which were the color of pea-sausage, churned and billowed with a mistrustful glance at the honor guard, to keep themselves at a safe distance, possibly afraid that the saw-teeth of helmet spikes and bayonets might tear open their envelopes. A platoon commander marched behind them with drawn saber, as if on guard to make sure no one had the mischievous idea of uncorking their excellencies’ shoes from the leather spats so all their hot air would come hissing out.
We had to be careful not to allow the comical aspect of such impressions to distract us from the very serious side of these German field marshals. Their pomposity, which was both amplified by what was funny about their puffiness, and at the same time defused by the dozily comfortable, feather-bed-and-pillow quality of their well-padded, ponderous, and broad-hipped figures, was downright misleading.
Because we merely had to imagine this honor guard barking three hurrahs and then starting up one of their foot-stomping, manically clipped songs — songs that subtly drew us into their grinding rhythm, stirring us in a bad way — and right away all the horrors of this war were present once again: the swarms of iron termites awakened and jolted into action, the highly explosive larvae crawling toward us out of their trenches in the cratered fields, dangerously primed and ready for detonation at any minute, while in the background, streams of columns flowed in to fill the underground reservoir.
Then the scenery quickly darkened; the cheerful white fluffs in the sky gave way to a stormy, leaden gray that loomed overhead and threatened catastrophe — gathering towers of darkness, magically lit from beyond the black depths of the horizon, gaping wide open in the mythical drama of some primal hour. Like dark-purple cloud gods, the brothers Ludenburg climbed out of the hissing iron caterpillars of their special trains and descended to the waiting hosts, charged with an elemental voltage, their legs rooted in the Leiden jars of their spats, their hands strictly insulated in their nappa-leather gloves, as if the slightest contact with the earth might set off shocks that could destroy the world. The spikes on their helmets spewed secret codes to the lightning bolts that lay ready and waiting. Iron hailstones crackled inside their dagger scabbards. The bags under their eyes were heavy with a menacing gloom. We now knew why they were always sniffing at their mustaches with such disgust, as if they — one crimped, broad, and brushy and the other short and bristly — carried some repulsive odor: they sensed the acrid uncertainty of their existence.
And their officers were the angels that proclaimed their will to the divisions: the triple “Hurrah!” of the troops was like a trumpet blast, a signal that the larvae-men would pour over the earth by the hundred thousand, that the lightning bolts would smite the ground, thunder would roll, missiles would come raining down … This was no longer merely a struggle to overcome a foe: it was a mythical event, a violent impregnation: blinding impacts would light up for a fraction of a second, while the mole-crickets prepared the earth, sinking their teeth into it, devouring it, exploding it and themselves in giant fountains, churning it and plowing it and finally fertilizing it with their own remains in the name of the deity who had called down the iron rain.