Captain Endrigkeit sat in the back of the lorry in a black mood, incessantly grinding his lower jaw beneath his dense moustache. He felt incomplete somehow; during the upheavals of the previous day, his pipe had gone missing. Finally, with a sigh, he lit a cigar and proceeded to sullenly push it from one corner of his mouth to the other. Just an unsatisfactory stopgap.
Breuer still found himself totally bemused by the day’s frantic events. What had possessed the man to shoot himself? He kept turning this thought over in his mind. Was it simply due to the stupid standing orders, or was there something else? Maybe he just wanted to have done with the war, and found a way out for himself. But what kind of solution was that? And what could you write to his wife, at home with several young children? ‘Fallen in battle for the Führer and the Reich?’ No, that wasn’t an option. Suicide was tantamount to desertion, and the dependants of soldiers who’d taken their own life didn’t receive any widow’s pension… No, that was no way out, it was nothing but cowardice and egotism!
Via a series of hairpin bends, the road wound its way down a gorge to a river crossing. When they got there, they found the area choked with vehicles. With the aid of a divisional pennant repurposed into a traffic paddle, which Breuer – with no official authorization – carried with him in the car to deal with traffic problems, they nosed their way amid much yelling and cursing to the front of the queue.
‘What day is it today?’ enquired Breuer absent-mindedly when they were underway once more. In all the confusion of the past few days, he’d lost all sense of time. Lakosch glanced at his watch.
‘It’s the twenty-fourth since about an hour ago,’ he replied.
The twenty-fourth… Breuer felt his mouth go dry and a tightening sensation in his throat. He had an irrational, superstitious fear of this day. It was a curious story, whose origins went back to his schooldays during the Weimar Republic. At the grammar school he’d attended in his home town, the seat of a knightly order in medieval times, there’d been this master who taught them German and gymnastics. Herr Strackwitz was a man of medium build in his forties with a carefully groomed centre parting, a pince-nez perched in front of his cold blue eyes and an old duelling scar on his left cheek, which turned a livid scarlet when he got angry. He usually came to school dressed in a suit of green Loden cloth, sometimes – in defiance of a ban on political symbols – with the brightly polished badge of the ‘Stahlhelm’ organization in the lapel, and with woollen gaiters and walking boots on his slightly bandy legs. Strackwitz was quite popular among the boys, despite – or perhaps precisely because of –his regime of strict discipline. At the beginning of every gymnastics lesson, he would get the class to form up in single file and march around the schoolyard a couple of times.
The courtyard would ring with the sound of high boys’ voices belting out the words of ‘We’re off to conquer France…’, or an old Austrian nationalist song adapted for the current political situation:
The other teachers at the school would shake their heads and close their classroom windows.
Every year, the boys celebrated the emperor’s birthday ‘in secret’ in their classroom in front of a lectern decorated with the old imperial naval ensign. This was, after all, an old, long-established grammar school, which saw its principal role as bringing to bear all the patience and indulgence it possibly could to getting the ignorant and arrogant offspring of the East Prussian landed aristocracy to pass their school-leaving exams. As the son of a middle-ranking civil servant, Breuer was on the very bottom rung of the school’s social ladder. Strackwitz was always present on these occasions, as the guest of honour. As a state official, he was careful not to take a leading role in the festivities, but it was well known that the pupils who put themselves forward to deliver speeches at these parties could count on at least a grade 2 for German in their next reports. Sometimes, Senior Master Strackwitz, who was rather too fond of a drink, would arrive at school considerably the worse for wear, and then the boys would have a field day. His customary strictness evaporated and he would let them take all kinds of liberties during the lesson. Only when the boys became too boisterous would he wag his finger benignly and warn them he’d ‘have to keep a tighter rein on them’ next time. On such days, he’d give them some truly inspirational talks, recounting his experiences in the First World War.
‘So, boys,’ he would customarily end his addresses on these occasions, ‘I hope I’ll see you all again in my machine-gun company when the next war comes!’ Saying this, he’d shake everyone’s hand firmly and give them a penetrating stare through his pince-nez.
Several years then elapsed. Breuer was already a student by this time. One night he had a terrible nightmare. He and the boys from his year were gathered together in a dimly lit room; at the front of the classroom, notebook in hand, stood Senior Master Strackwitz.
‘The examinations are over. Now you’re off to war!’ he announced curtly. ‘And so as to leave you in no doubt, I’m now going to tell each of you which day you’re due to die.’
Breuer was gripped with horror. He wanted to scream, but his throat felt like it had been sewn shut. Strackwitz opened his notebook and began, calmly and methodically, as if he were announcing the results of a test, to read out the boys’ names, with a date attached to each of them.
‘Abel… Arnold… Von Batocki… Brandes…’ This was it, here it came! Breuer felt the urge to run away, to close his ears, but some powerful force kept him rooted to the spot. ‘Breuer…,’ – a searching look struck him through the lenses of the teacher’s pince-nez – ‘the twenty-fourth of…’ Breuer let out a dreadful, piercing scream. He woke up, bathed in sweat.
Ever since then, Breuer was on tenterhooks every time the twenty-fourth of the month approached. He tried to suppress the feeling, but in vain. He cursed himself for being a fool, no better than a superstitious old washerwoman, but all to no avail. When the day came around, though he was normally anything but cowardly, he’d instinctively go out of his way to avoid placing himself in any particular danger. And most likely as a natural consequence of precisely this lack of self-confidence, something unpleasant would generally befall him on the twenty-fourth of the month. Breuer had always been extremely careful not to reveal this curious weakness to anyone else.
So, today was the twenty-fourth once more! Today, the Eleventh Corps would be withdrawing east across the Don through a narrow corridor. The Russians would do their utmost to hamper this retreat and make life as difficult as they could for them. Weather-wise, the day promised to be clear and bright. The Soviet Air Force would fly sorties round the clock, bombing and strafing the German columns as they tried to pull back, and attempt to destroy the two bridges over the river. Would this be the day his number came up? A debilitating sense of fear took hold of him. No, it couldn’t be the end today, he couldn’t go now. He still had things to do… His life wasn’t complete yet! From somewhere deep within he was assailed by a feeling of guilt, an intangible, indefinable guilt that had not been assuaged.
‘Look, there’s an air raid happening up ahead!’ said Captain Endrigkeit. ‘They must have a forward base behind the ridge.’