Through all the noise he heard the engine approaching in the darkness, despite Lieutenant Flachsbauer’s snoring. (The poor man wrapped himself up in sleep as though it were a thick quilt. His bride was seriously ill with septic appendicitis. It was an almost hopeless case, and he’d become suspicious, as soldiers do in hospital, and thought it wasn’t her appendix but septicaemia in another organ.) What a healthy racket the anti-aircraft guns were making! Out of bed. Yank the window open; white ribbons streaking across the night sky. Flashes as the anti-aircraft guns opened fire. A black-red puff of bursting shrapnel, then a second. He heard the aircraft engine very clearly through the frantic rattle of the machine guns. Kroysing peered up, half leaning out of the window; nothing but sky, ribbons of light and a couple of stars. A figure almost as tall as himself ran past underneath and returned a couple of seconds later. A muffled voice almost as deep as his own cried out to him: ‘Kamerad, take cover!’ And the man disappeared. Kroysing paid him no mind. This visit would be on little Bertin’s watch. Wasn’t he on guard duty? Of course he was. It was nearly 11pm, and he had number two. Well, that boy had a cool head. Kroysing had seen how he handled different kinds of situations. He would wake the barracks up.
But hadn’t the sound above him changed? It certainly had. It was fractionally louder and getting closer. He couldn’t see much out of this bloody window, which faced Dannevoux. And was it appropriate for an old soldier with an injured leg to go running out into the night against doctor’s orders? A little sobered, Kroysing straightened his pyjamas and was about to go back into the room. But what was that? That guy up there just kept heading downwards. Was he still dreaming or what? Had his dream spooled on and flipped over, as sometimes happens? This is a field hospital, a voice screamed inside him. You can’t drop your bomb on our beds.
He listened intently and suddenly the realisation struck him like a bullet to the heart that the guy must have made a mistake. He was going to blow the field hospital to pieces by accident and it would happen any second now if the anti-aircraft guns didn’t take him out.
Bring the devil down, you morons! Shoot, you lazy bastards, shoot!
Suddenly, the engine cut. Had they got him? They’d got him! Kroysing dropped his arms in relief. No more comradeship with the airman. Hostility ruled the world.
And then, as he stood in the darkness clutching the window in his pale pyjamas, the experienced soldier in him who’d seen it all before heard a faint whistling – the wilful whistling and shrill shriek of a falling bomb. The inescapable drone of fate lay within that sound: I’m coming to snuff out life and ignite fire… The plane had glided down with its engine cut, now it thundered back up. Fire from Heaven was a good thing, in the hands of Prometheus, benefactor of mankind. Watch how I crash as ordered, I, the hammering thunderbolt, obedient destroyer. A bomb takes nearly six seconds to fall the 180m this one had to travel. But it wasn’t falling on a leaderless sheep pen. A man, who suddenly had two healthy legs, tore open the door of men’s ward 3 and yelled: ‘Air raid! Get out!’ After the men, the woman. He grabbed the door handle. Empty – the room glaringly bright, the window half open. And as ward 3 erupted in screams and the electric light blazed on, a figure appeared at the end of the corridor, and just before the crash Kroysing heard death’s messenger clamouring above the roof. In a furious frenzy, he grabbed the water jug by Kläre’s bed, totally beside himself, and hurled it up at the ceiling, into death’s ugly mug: ‘You cowardly bastard!’ Then the explosion above his head ripped him to bloody shreds.
Flames, flames. The bomb had landed in the corridor right between room 19 and ward 3. Seven or eight of those who’d fled had simply collapsed in a heap. Flying all around were corrugated iron, splintered beams, burning wood and flaming tar paper, and almost in a single moment the entire outermost wing of the barracks flared up like a bonfire. With fists and kicks and their whole bodies the wounded fought their way out through the furthest of the three doors despite their bandages. From beneath the poisonous, choking fumes of the billowing black and white smoke came the shrill screams and primaeval whining of men who’d collapsed and been crushed, and the ghastly howls of those licked by flames. Those who’d been killed outright by splinters from the bomb were lucky.
In bed, surrounded by burning floorboards, lay the body of Pahl the typesetter. Only his body: his clever head, of which the workers had such desperate need, had been crushed by the explosion like a hen’s egg under a horse’s hoof. It had got him in his sleep this time, just as it could so nearly have got Bertin nine months previously but hadn’t, to his and Karl Lebehde’s astonishment. This time he’d slept through the noise. By the time the noise started to wake him, he was already gone. There would be nothing left of him. For his brain and crushed skull had been spurted somewhere, and his disfigured body would be reduced to ashes by the slow, tenacious blaze, as would his bed and that entire section of the barracks. In the meantime, the medical officer, Pechler the bath attendant, the night watchmen and orderlies had rushed over. A bit of luck, thought the medical officer, as he pulled the fire extinguisher from its bracket and let the hose unfurl – a bit of luck that it had hit ward 3 with all the minor cases. In ward 1, no one would have been able to escape. Wrapped in blankets, the occupants of the burning wing crowded into the safe side of the courtyard and the southern terrace with its deckchairs.
The chief nurse did a roll call to get an idea of how many were missing and who they were. Streams of carbon dioxide from the red canisters were already hissing on to the blaze, and men with minor injuries helped the telephonists to pull the hose out further. The bath orderly, in his capacity as a water supply expert, soon had a sharp jet raining down on the burning timberwork, dashing the debris aside and sending the ruins flying into the air. ‘Watch out, roofing!’ cried one of the rescued men for whom the disaster had quickly become exciting entertainment.
Sister Kläre lay on the matron’s bed, passed out. It was a mystery why this woman who normally had such presence of mind had been shocked to the core like that. No doubt she’d been overcome by belated horror at her miraculous escape from death. That corner had suffered the worst. No one had been rescued from there. No, not true: Lieutenant Flachsbauer had survived. The explosion from the bomb that had crashed through the roof into the corridor and set the floorboards on fire had spared him. It had only shaken him wide awake, warning him that something was happening. He’d climbed out of the window as the hut went up in flames above him. He’d lowered himself down the outer wall. He’d been very calm and phlegmatic and hadn’t got as much as a splinter in his skin. That was what happened, he thought, when you didn’t give a monkey’s about life, when it made you sick, because a wee lassie at home had got some old quack of a woman to abort a baby that wasn’t yours. As if any of it mattered: pregnant or not, a baby by Mr X or Mr Y, trouble from the parents or people talking. All that mattered was to be alive, to continue to breathe, to have eyes to see, ears to hear, a head to think, a nose to smell, even if all you smelt were tar fumes and burning flesh. A miracle that he’d been saved, really and truly. He must write to that silly little goose immediately the following afternoon and make it clear to her that she should get well, for God’s sake, and not give a toss about anything else.