Mission accomplished for von Hermann’s division.
Lakosch sat agonizing over a letter. In front of him lay a pile of banknotes. This time, he’d decided to send his mother all his ready cash. After all, what was he supposed to do with money out here? There wasn’t anything to buy. Lieutenant Wiese, meanwhile, had his nose in a book that Padre Peters had brought him. It was Tolstoy’s Resurrection. First Lieutenant Breuer was playing the mouth organ. Every time he picked up the little instrument, he remembered his leave-taking that time, during his last spell of leave, at the blackout-darkened station in the small town in East Prussia he called home. His young son, Joachim, seven years old, had shyly pressed the little brown cardboard box into his hand at the last minute. ‘Take it with you, Daddy, so you can play music in Russia and make the soldiers happy. I can’t play it!’ ‘Go on, take it!’ his wife whispered to him. ‘Otherwise he’ll cry his eyes out.’ Smiling, Breuer had taken the box and slipped it into his greatcoat pocket. And there it had lain, forgotten, until now, the dark days leading up to Christmas. One evening, he’d pulled it out and tried playing it. And now nothing on earth could have persuaded him to part with the shiny little instrument.
He was playing an étude by Chopin. He only knew it by the title ‘Tristesse’. It was a favourite of his. He had it at home on a record, sung by a tenor in French:
The wartime winter of 1940–41 in Paris. From every café and bar came the sound of chanteuses singing this melancholic air and weeping. But for German soldiers back then, life was still a bed of roses. All past now, gone for ever… Lieutenant Wiese hummed along softly with the melody. The lamp swayed gently on its thin wire. Its flickering glow flitted over the decorations on the bunker wall, momentarily illuminating the golden light radiating down from joyous heaven onto the tranquil Madonna in Grünewald’s picture. The run-up to Christmas…
Herbert and Fröhlich were marking crosses on scraps of paper they kept shielded from one another’s view with their hands; they were playing the game ‘battleships’, which only required a pencil and a piece of paper. You could while away whole days like this. Herbert fired a new salvo: ‘A3… D7… G5’ and Fröhlich announced the result: ‘Miss… Miss… Hit on a battleship.’
‘Aha,’ growled Herbert, ‘so that’s where the beast’s lurking! Right, next go I’ll finish him off!’
From outside came a droning sound, growing in intensity. Fröhlich sat up and listened. ‘Great – they’ve got the supply flights up and running again! That means tomorrow’s food in the bag!’
Herbert, too, raised his head for an instant. ‘Nah, it’s a sewing machine!’ he said.
‘Crap,’ replied Fröhlich dismissively. ‘They’re Ju 52s,[1] no question! You’re always hearing sewing machines, Mr Misery-Guts!’
‘I’m telling you it’s a sewing machine!’ shouted Herbert. ‘Even a child could tell that! Why do you always have to be such a smart-arse?’
He threw down his pencil and stood up. As if to prove him right, from the distance came two thuds, in quick succession. The bunker walls shook slightly and bits of clay showered down from the roof.
‘Calm down now, gents!’ Breuer intervened. ‘What’s up with you two?’
‘It’s true though, Lieutenant! He always has to have the last word. You can’t say anything now without being gainsaid and insulted. It’s getting on my wick, it really is!’
Herbert was on the verge of tears.
‘Pull yourself together, for heaven’s sake!’ said Breuer. ‘Do you think it’s easy for any of us, just sitting around here and waiting?’
In his heart of hearts, he had to concede the corporal was right. With his desperate optimism, which he’d wrapped around himself like protective armour, Fröhlich could sometimes be truly insufferable. And his absurd air of superiority even managed to rile people far less touchy than Herbert.
When the argument began, Lieutenant Wiese had clapped his book shut and left the bunker. Breuer now followed suit. These incessant little tiffs were very wearing. Outside, he found the lieutenant gazing up at the black sky, which was filled with the steady drone of transport planes. Breuer went up to him but did not disturb his reverie. Above the airfield, a flare went up, showering a cluster of red stars to earth as it burst.
Suddenly Wiese spoke, as if to himself. ‘It’s so desolate. This wilderness… no trees, no bushes, not a house or a hill, just this endless white expanse… it’s like a shroud. The only thing for your eye to light on is a horse’s cadaver here and there… We’re imprisoned in a coffin of ice and snow, surrounded by the unknown… I can’t take it any more. The stench of death about this place will be the end of me.’
‘Not you as well, Wiese, surely?’
Breuer was genuinely shocked. Time and again, it had been his much younger comrade’s aura of calm, cheerful equanimity that had pulled him out of the slough of despond.
‘Wiese!’ he said. ‘You can’t go giving up on us now, lad! What’ll become of the rest of us if even you lose heart? Why do you think old Endrigkeit likes to come and smoke his pipe around us? And the same goes for Fackelmann, and Engelhard and Peters… Even Dierk, who makes out he can’t stand you, eh? It’s because they’re looking for a bit of home in our company. Because they want to forget the war for a few minutes, that’s why! In this whole sorry mess, our bunker’s become a haven of peace. And that – you can take my word for it – that’s all down to you. You’re our keeper of the flame, Wiese. It mustn’t go out.’
Wiese threw up his hands in despair.
‘The flame, hmm…,’ he said sadly. ‘It’s the last glowing ember of coal, about to go out. We’re dying, Breuer, slowly but surely. The war, this primitive existence, is devouring us. The filth, the lice, our pitiful scratching around for a bite of food – and then there’s the homesickness, Breuer! We’re two thousand kilometres from home. We can’t cope with it any more – psychologically, I mean. This fighting’s pointless. Just go and take a look down in the bunker at how everything’s slowly falling apart on your wonderful “island of peace” – comradeship, altruism… More and more we’re ceasing to behave like human beings, whether we want to or not.’ His voice grew bitter. ‘Schiller called war a gift, you know? A beautiful gift! What’s the use of a test if you know right from the outset that you’re going to fail? Christ, if only we knew what the point of it all was!’
Breuer laid his hand on his friend’s shoulder.
‘You know when you read to us recently,’ he told him, ‘that passage out of Goethe’s Faust: “He serves me, but still serves me in confusion/ I will soon lead him into clarity”. That was really well chosen. It gave us new heart. One day we’ll know what the point was, too.’
1
Ju 52s – the Junkers 52, a large tri-motored monoplane, was originally designed as a passenger plane for Lufthansa but at the outbreak of war became the Luftwaffe’s standard transport workhorse, deployed in all theatres of the conflict. Dating from 1931, it was already an obsolescent type by the 1940s and its rather quaint appearance, with its three engines and its corrugated metal skin, earned it the affectionate nickname