The colonel emptied the entire cylinder of his revolver but only managed to put holes in the fabric of the fuselage. Describing loops in the sky, the airplane vanished over the rooftops in the last rays of the sun as they broke through a gap in the clouds. It was obvious he would be back, since the mystery of his appearance remained unsolved. Ahlberg ordered a cannon to be hauled to the very top of the town hall tower. Fifteen men, crying “heave ho!”, carried out the command even before supper.
The artillerymen loaded the cannon as they were ordered to, and waited. The fuse was not lit till the following day, between the soup and the main course. There was a crash. The cannon recoiled, the town hall shook to its foundations, brick dust came crumbling down the chimney flues. Missing its target, the shell sailed over the rooftops and smashed into the snowy wilderness at the end of Salt Street. It destroyed the underground mine galleries there and left a hole that was as deep as the town hall was high.
The airplane taunted the colonel. Time and again it appeared out of the blue, only to soar upward at the last minute, before the very noses of the artillerymen. The cannon was hurriedly reloaded and fired again. The aircraft, its undercarriage in shreds, went spinning halfway across the sky, trailing clouds of smoke as black as pitch, and crashed into the brick rotunda of the municipal gasworks. There was an explosion, and gas lighting went out across the entire town.
“The enemy’s occupied the mine, there are soldiers everywhere, they’re sending civilians back to their homes!” exclaimed Stanisław the butler as he burst into Loom’s study without being summoned.
“Did I ring for you?” Loom asked caustically. He raised his head above the accounts he was poring over by the light of a candle, amid shadows dancing from one corner to another. And he pointed to the door.
Having fired the cannon twice, Colonel Ahlberg waited calmly for the enemy staff. He could not be accused of giving up the town without firing a single shot. He also found time to inspect his own ranks, which were white with plaster and black from soot. He gave orders for the depot to be opened and for the men to put on dress uniform. When the surrender was signed he went to his quarters and released the safety catch of his revolver.
“The end at last,” he laughed.
“Bang!” went the gun.
But it was not yet the end. It turned out that the dress uniforms had no buttons. Someone had cut them off with a knife, leaving only the loops. In the meantime Ahlberg’s head had already fallen on the arm of his chair, mouth agape, eyes staring. Consternation ensued, and no one was there to take charge — aside from the enemy commander, who smiled sarcastically as he issued marching orders. The Stitchings uhlans were taken into captivity, pulling together the sides of their braided jackets and holding up their pants.
THE CRATER THAT THE ARTILLERY SHELL HAD MADE AT THE END of Salt Street drew crowds. The townspeople stared down into the gaping depths; the bottom was filling with water in which clouds were reflected. As the soldiers set up checkpoints they included the crater as part of the town and put up barbed wire to fence it off from the snowy emptiness of the fields.
For the entertainment of the foreign officers a wooden stage was quickly installed in the officers’ mess. The show reminded the audience — which enjoyed the lights, the ostrich feathers, the band — of a procession of cavalry mares along the principal avenue of the capital.
“Look at her on the left,” the officers would say in German, handing one another their field glasses. Every number was given a standing ovation. Evening after evening the place was packed. The coarse guffaw of drumrolls set the rhythm for the self-assured trombones, the trumpet announced that life was beautiful, while the violin, barely keeping up, wept drunkenly that it was too fleeting. For the band, hastily assembled from the firemen’s brass and the Gypsy fiddles, played without rehearsing.
The officers hung about in the mess from early morning waiting for the show; they read the wartime press with a sneer and, taking a napkin and an indelible pencil, sketched out maps that were covered with jumbled arrows pointing east and west, north and south. In Corelli’s café, where the glass display case filled with frosted cakes ran the whole length of the room, pink-faced, chubby-cheeked one-year volunteers worked on forgetting their recent Latin and algebra lessons. They got drunk on the surprises that life brings, as they sat at the marble-topped tables greedily eyeing women over their glasses of mint-flavored liqueur. The blind pianist hunched over his keyboard spread the tinselly brilliance of Viennese waltzes through clouds of bluish smoke.
The rank and file, meanwhile, were sitting at heavy tables in the tavern drinking juniper vodka, or wandering the streets armed and in their pickelhaubes. In light of the price of gold and silver thread, and the number of yards of velvet required for the facings, and ribbon for the stripes, the need for a new uniform design without facings or braid had proved an urgent matter right from the beginning of the war. At that time private soldiers did not live long, and what they left behind was in any case thoroughly stained, torn, destroyed. Loom sold the army gray-green fabric to make uniforms for the soldiers who later made a racket outside his window and got on his nerves. At night, when the shouts would carry across the whole town, he would toss and turn, wishing sudden death upon the soldiers. But they were not in the least afraid of death, for they were cheery grenadiers with staunch hearts to whom life seemed everything that they could possibly have desired and that it hardly ever actually is. They cared not the slightest for the people of Stitchings or for Loom himself, a military supplier whose name they had never even heard.
The streetcar line built with the manpower of the German army formed an equilateral triangle joining the train station, the brothel, and the barracks. It was only then that the grenadiers stopped freezing to death drunk in snowdrifts. The electric streetcar, brought in by rail on an open platform car, was war booty and still bore the traces of Russian inscriptions. It was kept in motion by a steam turbine taken from Neumann’s factory — electric current flowed through cables that hung above the streets. In compliance with an ordinance from the German authorities, day and night municipal workers cleared snow from the tracks so the streetcar could run.
Those same authorities sent a platoon of fifteen men to remove Colonel Ahlberg’s cannon, the one that had shot down the airplane. But the cannon had gotten stuck on the town hall tower, wedged in in such a way that a wall would probably have had to be taken apart to shift it. Or it could be cut up with metal saws, wheels and barrel separately, declared some artillery officer. Instead of the cannon, they brought down from the tower the bronze bell, its tongue carefully wrapped in rags, and transported it out of town on the same railroad platform. That imperfect ordinance, with a mouth too wide and a barrel in which the shell thrashed about on a tether, needed to be melted down in an ironworks and turned into a suitable instrument, one capable of performing con brio, as the hundred and first field gun of its caliber, its assigned part in the dazzling score of the war.
Left prey to foreign forces, Stitchings filled with stories that previously no one had ever heard or wanted to hear. In the house of pleasure, in the downstairs parlor, at night officers in jackets unbuttoned in contravention of the regulations fell madly in love, sang, and laughed; during the day the other ranks were let in through a side door and took the creaking stairs to the second floor. They thronged the poorly lit corridor, wreathed in cigarette smoke, grasping metal tokens in their sweaty palms. Madame complained about them in French and wrung her hands, because they were never willing to turn in their knives at the door, and bloody scuffles were forever breaking out on the staircase. After living through the stormwinds of artillery fire, they had grown wild and impudent from the closeness of death.