CHAPTER SEVEN
CHRISTIAN found it hard to keep his mind on the moving picture. It was a fairly good picture, too, about a detachment of troops in Berlin for one day in 1918 en route from the Russian Front to the Western Front. The Lieutenant in the picture was under strict orders to keep his men together at the station, but he understood how much they wanted to see their wives and sweethearts, after the ferocious battles in the East and the fatal battles-to-come in the West. At the risk of court-martial and death, he permitted them to go to their homes. If any one of them failed to get back to the station on time, the Lieutenant's life would be forfeit. The picture followed the various men. Some got drunk, some were tempted by Jews and defeatists to remain in Berlin, some were nearly persuaded by their wives, and for a while it was touch-and-go whether the Lieutenant would survive the gamble. But finally, in the nick of time, the last soldier made the station just as the train was pulling out, and it was a solid band of comrades who started towards France, having vindicated their Lieutenant's faith in them. The picture was very well done. It cleverly demonstrated that the war had not been lost by the Army, but by the faint-hearts and the traitors at home, and it was full of touches of humour and pathos.
Even the soldiers who were sitting in the troop theatre all around Christian were moved by the actors playing soldiers in another war. The Lieutenant was a little too good to be true, of course, and Christian had never come across one quite like him. Lieutenant Hardenburg, Christian thought dryly, could profit by seeing this picture a few times. Since the one day of relaxation in the brothel in Paris, Hardenburg had grown more and more rigid with the lengthening of the war. Their regiment had had their armour taken from them and had been moved to Rennes. They had been stationed there, as policemen, more than anything else, while the war with Russia had started and all of Hardenburg's contemporaries were winning honours in the East.
One morning Hardenburg had read that a boy with whom he had been at the officers' school – they all called him Ox because he was so backward – had been made a Lieutenant-Colonel in the Ukraine, and Hardenburg had nearly exploded with fury. He was still a Lieutenant, and even though he was living well, in a two-room apartment in one of the best hotels in the town, and he had an arrangement with two women who lived on the same floor, and was making considerable money blackmailing illegal operators in meat and dairy products, Hardenburg was inconsolable. And an inconsolable Lieutenant, Christian thought grimly, made for an unhappy Sergeant.
It was a good thing Christian's leave was beginning tomorrow. Another unrelieved week of Hardenburg's snapping sarcasm might have driven Christian to some dangerous act of insubordination. Even now, Christian thought resentfully, when he knows I'm leaving on the seven o'clock train for Germany in the morning, he's put me on duty. There was a patrol scheduled for midnight to round up some French boys who were dodging labour service in Germany, and Hardenburg hadn't picked Himmler or Stein or any of the others for it. That nasty, thin grin, and, "I know you won't mind, Diestl. Keep you from being bored your last night in Rennes. You don't have to report till midnight."
The picture faded out on a close-up of the handsome young Lieutenant smiling tenderly and thoughtfully at his collected men as the train sped west, and there was real applause from the soldiers in the hall.
The newsreel came on. There were pictures of Hitler talking and the Luftwaffe dropping bombs on London and Goering pinning a medal on a pilot who had downed a hundred planes, and infantry advancing against a burning farm building on the road to Leningrad.
One of the men on the screen fell. It was hard to tell whether he was taking cover or had been hit, but he didn't get up, and the camera passed over him. Christian felt his eyes growing wet. He was a little ashamed of himself for it, but every time he saw these films of Germans fighting, while he sat safe and comfortable so far away, he had to curb a tendency to cry. And he always felt guilty and uneasy and was sharp-tempered with his men for days afterwards. It wasn't his fault that he was alive while others were dying. The Army performed its intricate functions in its own way, but he couldn't fight off the sense of guilt. And even the thought of going home for two weeks was flavoured by it. Young Frederick Langerman had lost a leg in Latvia and both sons of the Kochs had been killed and it would be impossible to avoid the measuring, contemptuous stares of his neighbours when he came back, well-fed and whole, with one half-hour of semi-comic combat outside Paris behind him.
The war, he thought, had to end soon. Suddenly his civilian life, the easy-going, thoughtless days on the snowy slopes, the days without Lieutenant Hardenburg, seemed unbearably sweet and desirable. Well, the Russians were about to cash in, and then the British would finally see the light, and he would forget those boring, silly days in France. Two months after it was over people would stop talking about the war, and a clerk who added figures in the quartermaster's office in Berlin for three years would get as much respect as a man who had stormed pillboxes in Poland, Belgium and Russia. Then, Hardenburg might show up some day, still a Lieutenant… or even better, discharged as unnecessary. And Christian could go off alone in the hills and… He smiled sourly as he recognized the recurrent, childish dream. How long, he wondered, would they be likely to keep him in after the armistice was signed? Those would be the really difficult months, when the war was over and you were just waiting for the slow, enormous machinery of the Army's bureaucracy to release you.
The lights went up and Christian moved slowly out among the crowd of soldiers. They all looked middle-aged, Christian thought bitterly, and like men who suffered from frailty and disease. Garrison troops, contemptuously left in a peaceful country while the better specimens of German manhood were out fighting the nation's battles thousands of miles away. And he was one of them. He shook his head irritably. He'd better stop this or he'd get as bad as Hardenburg.
There were still some French men and women on the dark streets and they hastily stepped down into the gutter as he approached. He was annoyed at them, too. Timidity was one of the most irritating qualities in the human character. And it was a more or less needless and unfounded timidity, which was worse. He wasn't going to hurt them and the entire Army was under the strictest orders to behave correctly and with the utmost politeness to the French. Germans, he thought, as a man stumbled a little stepping down from the kerb, Germans would never behave like that if there were a foreign army in Germany. Any foreign army.
He looked at his watch. He still had twenty minutes before having to report to the orderly room. There was a cafe open across the street and he suddenly needed a drink.
He opened the door. There were four soldiers drinking champagne at a table. They were red-faced and they had obviously been drinking a long time. They had their tunics unbuttoned and two of them needed a shave. Champagne, too. Certainly not on a private's pay. Probably they were selling stolen German Army weapons to the French. The French weren't using them, of course, but there was no telling what might happen finally. Even the French might regain their courage. An army of blackmarket merchants, Christian thought bitterly, dealers in leather and ammunition and Normandy cheese and wine and veal. Leave them in France another two years and you wouldn't be able to distinguish them from the French except by their uniforms. The subtle, shabby victory of the Gallic spirit.