Sunk in such thoughts, Werner Bertin reached the bread cars, which were sealed with grey and brown tarpaulins. He pulled up the open flap on the middle car and felt inside. Fantastic! The papers bags had been slit on one side and some of the contents were already gone. Bertin, the sentry, hurriedly stuck his hand in and began to fill his coat pockets, hunching his shoulders guiltily and glancing round. But there was only the moon to see him, small and faraway, shining down through a hole in the mist high up in the sky on to the wisps of fog in the valley.
Bertin was wearing gloves so he didn’t need to put his hands in his pockets, the deep sack-like bags of thick lining material inside his coat. The next day he’d send the rolls to Lenore with that recipe Karl Lebehde had magicked up. Things weren’t good at home. How could they be? And it seemed they weren’t any better elsewhere in Germany – or so he’d heard. His last few weeks’ post had given him a great deal of food for thought, only he didn’t have the time to think. But today he did, and his thoughts turned to his brother-in-law, David, a future musician, who had sent his sister bitter letters of complaint about their parents from the training camp, because they’d knowingly let him participate in the whole swindle. ‘We’re forced to do things that can only be done voluntarily, and to round the whole dirty trick off we’re called volunteers though we’re slaves.’ David was sharp young man, thought Bertin, and not just when it came to musical notation and the five-line staff, which he’d once called Beethoven’s telegraph wires. The news from his brother, Fritz, wasn’t very joyful either: the regiment had left Romania again and was now inexplicably stationed in the Adige valley in the South Tyrol, which was bad news for all concerned, including the Italians. The old Kaiser Franz Josef had died, and his successor, Karl, had, as they said, betaken himself to the front, but the bulk of the task still fell to the Prussians (who might be from Bavaria, Württemberg or Hessen). In short, there was little to gladden Frau Lina Bertin’s heart – to the contrary. At least soon she wouldn’t need to worry about her eldest son, even if little Fritzel was undeniably her favourite. Sister Kläre, a grateful reader, was going to make an important call that night. She might already have done it, in which case Frau Bertin could soon put her mind at rest.
Small was the room, and narrow was the bed. And yet two people successfully squeezed into them with surprising regularity. Even Lieutenant Kroysing’s long legs somehow slipped under the covers quite easily, although one of them was swathed in stiff bandages. Lieutenant Flachsbauer slept across the way blissfully alone.
‘Should I go and phone now?’
‘Why would you do that?’
The tinkle of a woman’s laugh: ‘Because I promised you that I’d phone tonight.’
‘The night is still long. It’s only just begun.’
The woman laughed again, a light, charming laugh, such as may never before have been heard under that flat roof. The glow from a wick floating in an ugly glass tumbler of oil played on the ceiling. It shone on Sister Kläre’s quiet eyes and across Kroysing’s forehead and the bridge of his nose. ‘We have to be sensible. Don’t forget your sweetheart is a maidservant, Lieutenant. She has to get a good night’s sleep and be up early. I need seven hours.’
‘Sweet maidservant. Couldn’t you make the call after 11?’
‘How about between 10 and 11? Okay, just before 11. And then you really have to hit the sack, all right?’ She sat up and looked at him sternly, her plaits hanging down, a laugh on her lips. The exquisite line of her shoulders seemed to start beneath her ear lobes and flow down her arm, inviting caresses.
Kroysing let his long hand slide down her skin. ‘Kläre,’ he said. ‘Kläre.’
‘What is it, sweetheart?’
‘I’m so stupidly happy. Bertin in his entirety does not merit you taking your beloved leg out from under the covers and putting your foot on the cold floorboards.’
She stretched her leg out and wiggled her toes, and their shadows flickered on the wall.
How quickly does time pass on guard duty? As quickly as the guard wants. He can think about his own life, the movements of the stars or whatever he chooses as he paces back and forth. The one strange thing is how a veiled thought will sometimes know how to keep battering away inside his head until it finds a weak spot and breaks through. Bertin looked around happily, drinking in the moonlit night, the vast stillness and indistinct sounds wafting over. Somewhere very far away a lorry with iron tyres was driving past. If there was anything happening at the front, it was out of earshot, for the guns barely fired now and the rifle fire was swallowed by the steep ridge. It was so very light. He could make out every sleeper, the points over the way, baskets of broken shells and the gravel between the rails. Should he have filled his pockets with that stale, unsalted bread? Hadn’t Lebehde committed a serious crime by stealing goods he was commanded to guard? And had not Bertin now committed the same crime? A military offence of the first order – if it were discovered. At the same time, most officers would just laugh if someone accused him or someone else of such a crime. For what was the harm in stealing a little food in the middle of a war? War was one long, uninterrupted looting spree. They’d been thieving from the homeland and neighbouring nations for three years now, day and night, every second of every day. Stealing a little food did no harm. A soldier’s needs had to be met. An army needs a lot over the duration and as it doesn’t produce anything it has to steal. If it’s judicious in its stealing, it can last for a long time, but if it isn’t, if it’s too greedy, it won’t last. Just as Sergeant Major Pfund, who had suddenly disappeared a couple of days previously, had been sent back to Metz with a fat black mark against his name. For the winter of starvation had reached its peak. Major Jansch had been forced to cough up his hoarded supplies. He had sought and found a victim. Herr Pfund and his cunning Christmas purchases became: embezzlement. The result was the company had no money and couldn’t offer its men the same supplementary food as other canteens – cheese, pickled herrings and chocolate. The doctor had complained and the depot had complained, but these complaints were viewed very unsympathetically by Army Group East, and according to the postal orderly Behrend, a pair of dilapidated shoes had arrived with a snide letter enclosed – all most helpful for sending a sergeant major into the wilderness. A new man had been put in charge of the company about three days previously. Who was he? Sergeant Duhn, a quiet man with steady grey eyes, who didn’t draw attention to himself but had achieved the dagger and badges of the regular army that had been denied to pushy Glinsky. Lost in his own thoughts, Bertin hooked his thumb under his rifle sling and wandered the long stretch back to the bread wagons.