“Let’s get out of here,” said Karl von Doder.
Too late. Time, like rapids, was carrying them along. Over on the other side of the river, small clouds were rising, a few dozen, white and shimmering. Our cannons, thought the fat count, that’s them, our Kaiser’s artillery, yet even before he had finished the thought, more clouds rose from where the musketeers were standing, tiny but countless ones, for a moment still sharply divided from each other, then quickly mixing together into a single cloud, and now the noise came rolling, and the fat count heard the shots ring out, the steam of which he had just seen, and next he saw the enemy’s horsemen, who were still advancing on the river, perform the strangest trick. Swaths were all at once cut in their ranks, one here, another right next to it, one at some distance. While he was still straining his eyes to grasp what he was seeing, he heard a noise like nothing he had ever heard before, a screaming from the air. Franz Kärrnbauer threw himself from his horse; surprised, the fat count watched him rolling through the grass and wondered whether he shouldn’t do the same, but the horse was high and the ground was covered with hard stones. Now Karl von Doder did it first. Only he didn’t jump in one direction but in two, as if he hadn’t been able to decide and had taken both opportunities.
At first the fat count thought that he must have been dreaming, yet then he saw that Karl von Doder was indeed lying in two places: one part to the right of his horse, the other to the left, and the one on the right was still moving. A disgust of monstrous proportions overcame the fat count, and then, to crown it all, he remembered the goose that Franz Kärrnbauer had shot dead days ago; he thought of how he had seen its head explode, and comprehended that he had been so shocked because that event had heralded this one, against the current of time. In the meantime the question of whether he should get off his horse or not had been rendered irrelevant; his horse had lain down, just like that, and when he hit the ground sideways, he noticed that it had begun to rain again, but it was not the usual rain, not water, that made the earth spray, rather invisible flails were threshing the ground. He saw Franz Kärrnbauer crawling on his belly, he saw a horse’s hoof lying in the grass with no horse attached to it, he saw Konrad Purner riding down the slope, he saw that the smoke was now coiling around the ranks of imperial soldiers on the other side of the river too, which he had just a moment ago still been able to make out so clearly. They were gone. In just one place the wind swept away the thick smoke and revealed the men crouching between their pikes, who now stood up, all at the same moment, and with raised weapons walked backward like a single man—how did they make their movements correspond so perfectly? Apparently they were backing away from the cavalry, which was now coming through the water after all. The river seemed to be boiling, horses were rearing, horsemen were falling, but other horsemen reached the riverbank. The water had turned red, and the pikemen walking backward disappeared in thick smoke.
He looked around. The grass stood calmly. The fat count struggled to his feet. His legs obeyed him, only he couldn’t feel his right hand. When he held it in front of his face, he noticed that a finger was missing. He counted again. Indeed, four fingers, something was wrong, one was missing, it was supposed to be five, it was four. He spat blood on the ground. He had to go back into the forest. Only in the forest was there cover, only in—
Shapes assembled themselves, colorful surfaces emerged, and as it became clear to the fat count that he must have fainted and was now coming to, a painful memory seized him, rising as if out of the void. He thought of a girl he had loved at the age of nineteen; at that time she had laughed at him, yet here she was again, and the knowledge that they would never be reunited filled every fiber of his being with sadness. Above him he saw the sky. Far and full of frayed clouds. Someone bent down over him. He didn’t know him—yes, he did know him, now he recognized him.
“Stand up!”
The fat count squinted.
Ulenspiegel drew back his arm and slapped his face.
The fat count stood up. His cheek hurt. His hand hurt even more. The missing finger hurt most of all. Over there lay what was left of Karl von Doder, next to that lay two horses, and nearby was the dead Konrad Purner. Fog hung in the distance, flashes flaring in it. Horsemen were still trotting closer, a swath opened up and closed again—that must have been the work of the twelve-pounder. Horsemen were swarming along the river and impeding each other and brandishing whips, horses were splashing into the water, men were bellowing—but he could tell only by the fact that their mouths were moving, he could not hear them. The river was full of horses and people, more and more of them made it to the riverbank and disappeared in the thick smoke.
Ulenspiegel set off, the fat count following him. The forest was only a few paces away. Ulenspiegel began to run. The fat count ran after him.
The grass sprayed up beside him. Again he heard the scream from earlier, ringing through the air, ringing next to him. Something hit the ground and rolled toward the river with a roar. How can anyone live, he thought, how can anyone stand it when the air is full of metal? At that moment Ulenspiegel threw his arms outward and hurled himself, chest first, onto the meadow.
The fat count bent down over him. Ulenspiegel lay motionless. The back of his cowl was torn, blood was flowing out, he was already lying in a pool of it. The fat count backed away and started to run, but he stumbled and fell down. He struggled to his feet, ran again. Someone was running next to him, the grass was again sprayed up by bullets—why were they shooting in this direction, why not at the enemy, why so wide of the mark, and who was running here at his side? The fat count turned his head.
“Don’t stop,” Ulenspiegel hissed.
They ran into the forest. The trees stifled the thunder. The fat count wanted to stop, he had stabbing pains in his chest, but Ulenspiegel grabbed him and pulled him deeper into the underbrush. There they crouched down. For a while they listened to the cannons. Ulenspiegel carefully took off the torn cowl. The fat count looked at his back: the shirt was smeared with blood, but there was no wound to be seen.
“I don’t understand it,” said the fat count.
“You have to tie off your hand.” Ulenspiegel tore a strip from the cloak and wrapped it around the fat count’s arm.
Even then he sensed that all this would have to be told differently in his book one day. He would not succeed in any description, for everything would elude him, and the sentences he would be able to form would not match the pictures in his memory.
And indeed: that which had happened did not even appear in his dreams. Only occasionally did he recognize in what seemed utterly different dream events a distant echo of those moments when he had come under fire at the edge of Streitheim Forest near Zusmarshausen.
Years later he questioned the unfortunate Count Gronsfeld, whom the Bavarian Elector had had summarily arrested after the defeat. Toothless, weary, and coughing, the former commander of the Bavarian troops named the names and places, he described the strength of the various units and drew deployment maps so that the fat count managed to some extent to account for roughly where he had been and what had befallen him and his companions. Yet the sentences refused to fall into line. And so he stole others.
In a popular novel he found a description he liked, and when people urged him to recount the last battle of the great German war, he told them what he had read in Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus. It didn’t quite fit, because that passage was about the Battle of Wittstock, but it didn’t bother anyone, no one ever raised any questions. What the fat count could not have known, however, was that Grimmelshausen, though he did experience the Battle of Wittstock firsthand, had himself been unable to describe it and instead had stolen the sentences of an English novel translated by Martin Opitz, the author of which had never witnessed a battle in his life.