One thousand two hundred metres up in the air, Jean-François Rouard leant out of the cockpit and peered down with his night binoculars. The landscape beneath him was completely different from in daytime. The silvery light of the moon is a poetic lie. Beneath him lay a shrouded, grey expanse, and he could barely make out the course of the Meuse. He shouldn’t have let himself in for a bombing raid so soon. On the other hand, orders were orders and he had to stop taking childish photographs sometime and get down to the real business. There were four pointed bombs hanging from the belly of his plane. They looked like sleeping bats hanging head downwards from the eaves of a barn. He couldn’t wait to get rid of them. God in heaven, where was that bend in the Meuse and the target valley with the railway tracks? He flashed his torch over his time sheet, map and watch: still straight on. He didn’t hear the shrapnel bursting in the noise of the engine, but he saw it when he leant out of the cockpit again searching for some sign that would bring this paralysing uncertainty to an end – the hot, wild confusion of his first night-time bombing raid. If the time sheet was right, they should fly on for two seconds and then downwards to get a better aim, and then a jerk of the lever, and to hell with the mess he’d be creating. Life was one big mess, you just had to accept that and make sure you hit the target. Perhaps he’d get hit himself. There, a light ahead on the left, a bright speck on the ground. Probably someone stumbling along between the tracks. He tapped the pilot’s left upper arm, and he changed course almost imperceptibly.
Below a witches’ Sabbath had reached its peak. Guns crashed. Shells howled up and burst. Machine guns rattled out their violent worst. Searchlights groped around. The hum of the plane’s engine and propeller grew more distinct. Bertin was trembling with excitement. He was pressed into the entrance of the dugout, all his senses alert. The mad frenzy of battle tearing the night to shreds engulfed his soul. Madness gripped him. A few hours earlier he’d been attacking violence up at the hospital and now he was in raptures over it. How is that possible? he wondered. Could the two go together? Didn’t you need to be a sergeant major to tremble with bliss, as he was now doing, at the volley of explosions and the air man up there, chasing his target undeterred, which included Bertin? Have I become a savage as well as a thief? he wondered. Did I even need to become one? Haven’t I always been one? Didn’t I bully my little brother, just as Glinsky bullied me. Didn’t I throw a weaker and worthier person than myself to the ground and rape them, just as Jansch did with me? I mean my wife. I mean Lenore.
Where was he now? Low pine trees, greyish green under the dull blue Brandenburg sky. The clearing between Wilkersdorf and Tamsel. Yellow sand and fields waist-high in rye. He was in the uniform of a warrior, which he’d been wearing for three months by then, and he had to prove his manhood because she’d refused him under that clear sky. He’d gone for her and pressed her down into the moss by the shoulders. She struggled furiously. He’d forced himself on her and frightened her as he’d earlier frightened a boy who’d tried to follow them. Had that rape, and all the misery, pain and unpleasantness that followed, been a manly act? No, it had been the act of a sergeant major. Crushing someone instead of winning them over, throwing them down instead of seducing them, ordering them about rather than persuading them – that was how a sergeant major behaved. Tons of steel, volleys of explosions, desolate swathes of poisonous smoke, careening mounds of earth, cracking joists, howling and whistling bursts of splinters and shells: they were all the result of a kind of exasperated weakness. Anyone could press a button. On 14 July, he, Bertin, had not pressed the button. But on 15 July, do truth the honour…
Bertin clung to the dugout post. Suddenly he felt sick and dizzy. The outlines of the wagons standing calmly on the tracks not 40m away, treacherously quiet in the treacherous moonlight, swam in circles before him. But before the sergeant could ask him what was wrong, a dull thud shook the hill above their heads, then a second. Splinters of stone fell from roof. The anti-aircraft fire doubled in intensity. The machine guns grew frantic. But the roar of the propeller was still there, though more distant. The railwaymen sat against the wall, and the ASC men further forward in the darkness. Bertin the sentry, suddenly completely exhausted, crouched beside them on the wooden edge of the wire bed. Excited chattering until the conclusion was finally drawn that it had been a lot of noise about nothing. He’d missed the ammunitions wagons and been disorientated by the counter fire. He must’ve dropped his bombs somewhere on the ridge behind or in front of Dannevoux. From the sound of it, the second bomb had probably ripped a hole in the hill path.
Bertin stretched his aching knees slowly. Only half an hour more of sentry duty and he could go to bed and spend four hours wrapped up in his blankets like a chrysalis undergoing metamorphosis. His second round from 4am to 6am might be restorative, with bird song, sunrise and a chance to pull himself together. But this last half hour would be hard. His limbs were trembling. He hurriedly lit his pipe and felt better, letting the men’s talk wash over him. Sergeant Barkopp pushed off to bed: tomorrow was another day – and an off-duty one at that. Bertin carried on smoking, in contravention of the rules, as he made his way out of the shelter with Karl Lebehde and Hildebrandt, who was on sentry duty after him, and stumbled across the rails past the ammunitions wagons towards the middle of the valley. Karl Lebehde stopped, turned and peered up at the hillside. A flickering red glow. An old barn or pile of wood was burning up there, said the tall Swabian. A bomb must have hit it. Karl Lebehde said nothing, wagged his head on his short neck, looked round again and finally went to bed. Bertin shivered. His musket suddenly felt like it weighed nine pounds. It had been a long, exciting day, and around midnight nature said: enough! But he was still on duty. That couldn’t be helped. His bulging pockets dragged at this shoulders.
CHAPTER FOUR
A tile falls from the roof
LIEUTENANT KROYSING, IN bed by the outer wall of his room, was already fast asleep. Only a tiny spark of consciousness connected him to the earth’s surface; his reality in that moment was that of a dream. He was flying, he, Flight Lieutenant Kroysing, was flying over the Channel. He was surrounded by roaring: from the sea, the wind and the thrum of his engine. The North Sea heaved beneath him. But its waves couldn’t hurt him and neither could the long-range guns on the ships below: their shells fell back down, yelping and powerless. In his dream, the missiles climbed towards him, pointed end first, hovered for a moment, bowed before him and hurtled back down. The cheeky little machine gun bullets were another matter. They flew up at him like bees and settled on his wings, making curves and star shapes, and transforming his plane into a butterfly. But it wasn’t like other butterflies. It was a huge death’s head moth, a bomber that threatened cities. Beneath him lay an English city full of English people, with a layout similar to Nuremberg. There was the castle where Alfred the Great had lived with Christopher Columbus – they were going to drop a bomb on its chimney. His hand was already reaching for the bomb release handle. Then a shell burst beside that hand and with a start Eberhard Kroysing woke up.
Noise filled the lieutenants’ ward. It seemed that an aircraft was actually paying a visit to the station down below. For all the batteries and M.G.’s in the area were letting rip at it. At first he wanted to jump out of bed and alert the barracks. But then he felt ashamed of that impulse, for this was a hospital not a… He couldn’t follow this thought to its conclusion. Sitting bolt upright, all ears, he tried to imagine the enemy – the enemy, who was really a comrade. Just you wait, old chap, he thought. In three months, I’ll knock you out of the sky and pay you back for this night-time visit with pleasure.