Twenty minutes after the bomb had fallen, drivers arrived at the scene of the blaze from the Headquarters at Dannevoux with men from the large billets there, sappers with picks and axes and infantrymen with spades. The front part of the men’s ward and the nurses’ rooms across the corridor could still be saved, though they’d be too water-logged and full of debris to be used.
The second bomb… A solitary rider on the way to Dannevoux had stopped, rigid with shock, and turned in his saddle as white arcs cut across the dome of the sky and the deafening play of the guns and rifles began. Father Lochner, under his wide-brimmed hat, was admittedly quite convinced he was in no danger up there. His fear was for the others, the ASC men down below, who didn’t belong to his division but whom he’d intended to visit before Easter. Apparently there were a couple of Polish Catholics among them.
Suddenly, a shrapnel case hurtled to the ground beside him. ‘Watch out!’ it said. This nice little show, which mere mortals had cribbed from the magnificence of God’s thunderstorms, was not without its dangers. For a precious second, Father Lochner remained undecided as to whether he should spur his gelding on and gallop over to Dannevoux or turn back and take refuge in the hospital for a few minutes until the attack was over.
Unfortunately for him, he did neither. He stopped where the road forked, sorely tempted to take the one that led downhill and shelter against the hillside in the round black shadows cast by the summit. The gelding Egon, much wiser than his master, pulled impatiently at the reins; he wanted to go. This dark field surrounded by banging frightened him. A horse has a long back to protect if things fall from the air, and the rider had no sooner given him the direction than he flew down the muddy path at a canter. Father Lochner had a job bringing him to a standstill when they reached a point that deceptively seemed to offer cover. For the horse, ears laid back, wanted to bound off as behind him the hill began to roar and flash. Across the road, down the slope – he just wanted away. (It was because of his nervous disposition that the heavy machine gun company had exchanged this otherwise lovely animal for a more placid one.) Lochner, a fearless man with a heart both kind and wise, held the trembling horse by its bridle and spoke to him soothingly, looking to the sky when he jerked his neck up. And there he saw the body of the aeroplane in the glare of the searchlights, barely 100m above him, roaring over the hill large and white, the curve of its belly, the pale cross of its wings, the circle of its insignia, its struts: it all appeared before the eyes of the solitary priest with ghostly clarity, as the Frenchman prepared to complete his attack, ascend and veer away.
Few people see the bomb that kills them before if falls, but Benedikt Lochner from the Order of St Francis, Catholic chaplain on the western front, was one of those few. A road was nearly as good a target as a railway line, and that was why the little painter Rouard yanked the lever when he got a clearer view of the area the plane was crossing. And Lochner saw it. In the beam of the searchlight he saw a bright drop detach itself from the dreadful monster, as if it were sweat or dirt, and fall. And he fell to his knees. He knelt at his horse’s feet with his hand clasped round his small silver cross. The aeroplane had long since vanished into the night. With his eyes firmly closed, while his horse Egon chewed and stretched his neck out above him, he filled the space inside his chest with prayer: that the Father in Heaven preserve him, that the Virgin take him into her gracious protection, that the Son of God, who had suffered so much, shelter and receive his soul. ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,’ cried his inaudible voice and then it spooled frantically into that great old prayer made up of snatches from the Holy Scriptures that is called ‘Our Father’. He didn’t pray in Latin, as was his habit. German words welled up inside him and drowned out the shrill approach of the falling bomb. And as he prayed, he saw pictures from his childhood of the majesty of the Trinity enthroned on painted clouds, the Father, bearded and in flowing robes, his hands spread in a blessing, to his right the Son, and above their heads doves with halos. And when he got to the line, ‘And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors’, a red blaze crashed down in front of him. A good 12m from him, Rouard’s hanging bat had burst a hole in the road surface, sending mounds of earth rolling downhill and scattering cascades of splinters all around. They hit the dead wall of the hillside with as much force as the trembling flesh of the man and the horse. Lochner was struck in the chest, the horse in the neck and leg. A scream was the last thing Lochner heard – it wasn’t clear if it came from him or the animal, which now collapsed on top of him. Their gasps and groans and blood intermingled.
The next morning infantrymen would arrive from their position nearby shaking their heads at the size of the holes an aerial bomb could make and saying, good heavens, it’s taken out a field chaplain this time. And then they would calmly get out their canteens and knifes and cut off the tenderest parts of Egon the gelding’s flesh to make a delicious roast for their evening meal.
CHAPTER FIVE
The survivors
MAJOR JANSCH PACED round his office, very pale, with slippers on his feet – thick felt slippers as there was a draught through the floor. He’d blanched in fury and hissed at his batman Kuhlmann that he was going to transfer him back to his unit because his cocoa was too hot. He’d blanched in fury and trampled on a spider because it had the temerity to cross his path. He’d blanched in fury… The orderly room beneath him was in no doubt as to his state of mind; if his friend Niggl didn’t come and mollify him no one would dare to go near him that day. No one perhaps except Corporal Diehl, the primary school teacher from Hamburg. He was in restrained high spirits for the same reason that Herr Jansch was beside himself. For Diehl had learnt that the world was not always as evil and nasty and it sometimes seemed. Even in the Kaiser’s army, the weak sometimes found succour. Such a miracle encouraged backbone. If necessary, Diehl would venture into the lion’s den.
But it wasn’t necessary. Outside the spring weather looked moody and changeable. But Herr Jansch didn’t notice. His indignation prevented him from noticing. First, there had been a dreadful air attack the night before. Damvillers station had suffered a service breakdown, and you could see why. Even in his cellar, Major Jansch had heard the two bombs crashing down. And furthermore, it had been proved that the Jews were omnipotent. Even in the Kaiser’s army. Even if they knew how to act powerless for a year or two. When it suited them, off they floated. And just when an honest German thought he’d backed them into a corner, they pressed a button and a Hohenzollern appeared through a secret door to play the rescuing angel of Judas, disappearing with his charge as the orchestra struck up the march from Handel’s Messiah: ‘Daughter of Zion, rejoice’.
Jansch pressed his chin into the collar of his Litevka, tugged at his long moustache with both hands, bit into a raspberry flavoured sweet and cut a deep shaft in his world view. He’d always known the Hohenzollerns weren’t up to much. They were erratic people, those descendants of the Burgraves of Nuremberg, and their blood was far too mixed for them to produce men of steady character, true sovereigns and rulers. Again and again, this inborn mushiness broke through the little bit of toughness and character they had painstakingly cultivated in Berlin and Brandenburg. All of them had signed despicable peace treaties, all of them had made bad bargains, and all of them had had dealings with Jews. After Frederick the Great it had got worse, not better. The Guelphic and French blood that had produced him had only really been properly felt in his descendants. Wilhelm II and especially his son, grandson of the English woman, they had been the business. When Frederick III succumbed to cancer of the throat after 99 days – his father had told him this – the citizenry mourned in its entirety, but Old Prussia secretly breathed a sigh of relief: that bearded liberal would only have let the country down. And then, barely two years later, that which ought never to have happened happened: Bismarck’s dismissal. A logical chain ran from that act of betrayal to the overthrow of the Old Prussian constitution, which, as the Pan-German Union admitted through clenched teeth, seemed inevitable now, and right in the middle of a war. A man who could chase out the Iron Chancellor as though he were a disloyal lackey deserved that Bethmann-Hollweg, that chancellor made out of philosophy papers, and the rubbish that came out of his mouth every time he opened it. So much for the father, but the son wouldn’t improve things, wouldn’t rescue the situation, however much he seemed to applaud the Old Germans. That frivolous man always did the opposite of what might have been expected, as the present example showed. Such things came back to roost. Any reasonable man could see that, even in sunglasses at midnight. Those people were played out.