I walked slowly through town, on the lookout for a café where I wouldn’t have to salute anyone: this stupid saluting spoiled all cafés for me. I looked at all the girls I passed, I turned round to look at them, at their legs even, but there wasn’t one whose voice would not have sounded like marriage. I was desperate. I thought of Leo, of the girl in Cologne, I was on the point of sending her a telegram; I was almost prepared to risk getting married just to be alone with a girl. I stopped in front of the window of a photographer’s studio, so I could think about Leo in peace. I was scared for him. I saw my reflection in the shop window—my tie undone and my black boots unpolished. I raised my hands to button up my collar, but then it seemed too much trouble, and I dropped my hands again. The photographs in the studio window were very depressing. They were almost all of soldiers in walking-out dress; some had even had their pictures taken wearing their steel helmets, and I was wondering whether the ones in steel helmets were more depressing than the ones in peaked caps when a sergeant came out of the shop carrying a framed photograph: the photo was fairly large, at least twenty-four by thirty, the frame was painted silver, and the picture showed the sergeant in walking-out dress and steel helmet. He was quite young, not much older than I was, twenty-one at most; he was just about to walk past me, he hesitated, stopped, and I was wondering whether to raise my hand and salute him, when he said, “Forget it—but if I were you I’d do up your collar, and your tunic too. The next guy might be tougher than I am.” Then he laughed and went off, and ever since then I have preferred (relatively, of course) the ones who have their pictures taken in steel helmets to the ones who have their pictures taken in peak caps.
Leo would have been just the person to stand with me in front of the photo studio and look at the pictures; there were also some bridal couples, first communicants, and students wearing colored ribbons and fancy fobs over their stomachs, and I stood there wondering why they didn’t wear ribbons in their hair; some of them wouldn’t have looked bad in them at all. I needed company and had none.
Probably the chaplain thought I was suffering from lust, or that I was an anticlerical Nazi; but I was neither suffering from lust nor was I anticlerical or a Nazi. I simply needed company, and not male company either, and that was so simple that it was terribly complicated; of course there were loose women in town as well as prostitutes (it was a Catholic town), but the loose women and the prostitutes were always offended if you weren’t suffering from lust.
I stood for a long time in front of the photo studio. To this day I still always look at photo studios in strange cities; they are all much the same, and all equally depressing, although not everywhere do you find students with colored ribbons. It was nearly one o’clock when I finally left, on the lookout for a café where I didn’t have to salute anyone, but in all the cafés they were sitting around in their uniforms, and I ended up by going to a movie anyway, to the first show at one-fifteen. All I remember was the newsreel: some very ignoble-looking Poles were maltreating some very noble-looking Germans. It was so empty in the movie that I could risk smoking during the show; it was hot that last Sunday in August 1939.
When I got back to barracks, it was way past three. For some reason the order to put down groundsheets at three o’clock and spread out mess kits and neckties on them had been countermanded; I came in just in time to change, have some bread and liver sausage, lean out of the window for a few minutes, listen to snatches of the discussion about Ernst Jünger and the other one about the female form. Both discussions had become more serious, more boring; the orderly and the office clerk were now weaving Latin expressions into their remarks, and that made the whole thing even more repulsive than it was in the first place.
At four we were called out, and I had imagined we would be loading boots from trucks onto railway cars again or from railway cars onto trucks, but this time we loaded cases of soap powder, which were stacked up in the gym, onto trucks, and from the trucks we unloaded them at the parcel post office, where they were stacked up again. The cases were not heavy, the addresses were typewritten. We formed a chain, and so one case after another passed through my hands; we did this the whole of Sunday afternoon right through till late at night, and there were scarcely any dead minutes when we could have had a bite to eat. As soon as a truck was fully loaded, we drove to the main post office, formed a chain again, and unloaded the cases. Sometimes we overtook a “Must I Then” column, or met one coming the other way; by this time they had three bands, and it was all going much faster. It was late, after midnight, when we had driven off with the last of the cases, and my hands remembered the number of mess kits and decided there was very little difference between cases of soap powder and mess kits.
I was very tired and wanted to throw myself on the bed fully dressed, but once again there was a great stack of bread and cans of liver sausage, jam and butter, on the table, and the others insisted it be distributed; all I wanted was the cigarettes, and I had to wait till everything had been divided up exactly, for of course the Pfc left the cigarettes to the last again. He took an abnormally long time about it, perhaps to teach me moderation and discipline and to convey his contempt for my craving; when I finally got the cigarettes, I lay down on the bed in my clothes and smoked and watched them spreading their bread with liver sausage, listened to them praising the excellent quality of the butter, and arguing mildly as to whether the jam was made of strawberries, apples, and apricots, or of strawberries and apples only. They went on eating for a long time, and I couldn’t fall asleep. Then I heard footsteps coming along the passage and knew they were for me: I was afraid and yet relieved, and the strange thing was that they all, the office clerk, the orderly, and the three probationary teachers who were sitting round the table, stopped their chewing and looked at me as the footsteps drew closer. Now the Pfc found it necessary to shout at me: he got up and yelled, calling me by my surname, “Damn it, take your boots off when you lie down.”
There are certain things one refuses to believe, and I still don’t believe it, although my ears remember quite well that all of a sudden he called me by my surname; I would have preferred it if we had used surnames all along, but coming so suddenly like that it sounded so funny that, for the first time since the war started, I had to laugh. Meanwhile the door had been flung open and the company clerk was standing by my bed; he was pretty excited, so much so that he didn’t bawl me out, although he was a corporal, for lying on the bed with my boots and clothes on, smoking. He said, “You there, in twenty minutes in full marching order in Block 4, understand?” I said “Yes” and got up. He added, “Report to the sergeant major over there,” and again I said “Yes” and began to clear out my locker. I hadn’t realized the company clerk was still in the room. I was just putting the picture of the girl in my trouser pocket when I heard him say, “I have some bad news, it’s going to be tough on you, but it should make you proud too; the first man from this regiment to be killed in action was your roommate, Corporal Leo Siemers.”
I had turned round during the last half of this sentence, and they were all looking at me now, including the corporal. I had gone quite pale, and I didn’t know whether to be furious or silent. Then I said in a low voice, “But war hasn’t been declared yet, he can’t have been killed—and he wouldn’t have been killed,” and I shouted suddenly, “Leo wouldn’t get killed, not him … you know he wouldn’t.” No one said anything, not even the corporal, and while I cleared out my locker and crammed all the stuff we were told to take with us into my pack, I heard him leave the room. I piled up all the things on the stool so I didn’t have to turn around; I couldn’t hear a sound from the others, I couldn’t even hear them chewing. I packed all my stuff very quickly; the bread, liver sausage, cheese, and butter I left in the locker and turned the key. When I had to turn around, I saw they had managed to get into bed without a sound; I threw my locker key onto the office clerk’s bed, saying, “Clear out everything that’s still in there, it’s all yours.” I didn’t care for him much,
but I liked him best of the five. Later on I was sorry I hadn’t left without saying a word, but I was not yet twenty. I slammed the door, took my rifle from the rack outside, went down the stairs, and saw from the clock over the office door downstairs that it was nearly three in the morning. It was quiet and still warm that last Monday of August 1939. I threw Leo’s locker key somewhere onto the barrack square as I went across to Block 4. They were all there, the band was already moving into position at the head of the company, and some officer who had given the “united effort” speech was walking across the square; he took off his cap, wiped the sweat from his forehead, and put his cap on again. He reminded me of a streetcar conductor who takes a short break at the terminus.
The sergeant major came up to me and said, “Are you the man from staff headquarters?” and I said “Yes.” He nodded; he looked pale and very young, somewhat at a loss; I looked past him toward the dark, scarcely distinguishable mass. All I could make out was the gleaming trumpets of the band. “You wouldn’t happen to be a telephone operator?” asked the sergeant major. “We’re short one here.” “As a matter of fact I am,” I said quickly and with an enthusiasm that seemed to surprise him, for he looked at me doubtfully. “Yes, I’m one,” I said, “I’ve had practical training as a telephone operator.” “Good,” he said, “you’re just the man I need. Slip in somewhere there at the end, we’ll arrange everything en route.” I went over toward the right, where the dark gray was getting a little lighter; as I got closer, I even recognized some faces. I took my place at the end of the company. Someone shouted, “Right turn—forward march!” and I had hardly lifted my foot when they started playing their “Must I Then.”
WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER
It was just getting light when we reached the German border: to our left, a broad river, to our right a forest; even from its edges you could tell how deep it was. Silence fell in the boxcar; the train passed slowly over patched-up rails, past shelled houses, splintered telegraph poles. The little guy sitting next to me took off his glasses and polished them carefully.
“Christ,” he whispered to me, “d’you have the slightest idea where we are?”
“Yes,” I said, “the river you’ve just seen is known here as the Rhine, the forest you see over there on the right is called the Reich Forest—and we’ll soon be getting into Cleves.”
“D’you come from around here?”
“No, I don’t.” He was a nuisance; all night long he had driven me crazy with his high-pitched schoolboy’s voice. He had told me how he had secretly read Brecht, Tucholsky, and Walter Benjamin, as well as Proust and Karl Kraus; that he wanted to study sociology, and theology too, and help create a new order for Germany, and when we stopped at Nimwegen at daybreak and someone said we were just coming to the German border, he nervously asked us all if there was anyone who would trade some thread for two cigarette butts, and when no one said anything, I offered to rip off my collar tabs, known—I believe—as insignia, and turn them into dark-green thread. I took off my tunic and watched him carefully pick the things off with a bit of metal, unravel them, and then actually start using the thread to sew on his ensign’s piping around his shoulder straps. I asked him whether I might attribute this sewing job to the influence of Brecht, Tucholsky, Benjamin, or Karl Kraus, or was it perhaps the subconscious influence of Jünger that made him restore his rank with Tom Thumb’s weapon. He had flushed and said he was through with Jünger, he had written him off; now, as we approached Cleves, he stopped sewing and sat down on the floor beside me, still holding Tom Thumb’s weapon.
“Cleves doesn’t convey anything to me,” he said, “not a thing. How about you?”
“Oh yes,” I said, “Lohengrin, Swan margarine, and Anne of Cleves, one of Henry the Eighth’s wives.”
“That’s right,” he said, “Lohengrin—although at home we always ate Sanella. Don’t you want the butts?”
“No,” I said, “take them home for your father. I hope he’ll punch you in the nose when you arrive with that piping on your shoulder.”
“You don’t understand,” he said. “Prussia, Kleist, Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, Potsdam, Prince of Homburg, Berlin.”
“Well,” I said, “I believe it was quite a while ago that Prussia took Cleves—and somewhere over there on the other side of the Rhine there is a little town called Wesel.”
“Oh, of course,” he said, “that’s right, Schill.”
“The Prussians never really established themselves beyond the Rhine,” I said, “they only had two bridgeheads: Bonn and Koblenz.”
“Prussia,” he said.
“Blomberg,” I said. “Need any more thread?” He flushed and was silent.
The train slowed down, everyone crowded round the open sliding door and looked at Cleves. English guards on the platform, casual and tough, bored yet alert: we were still prisoners. In the street a sign: “To Cologne.” Lohengrin’s castle up there among the autumn trees. October on the Lower Rhine, Dutch sky; my cousins in Xanten, aunts in Kevelaer; the broad dialect and the smugglers’ whispering in the taverns; St. Martin’s Day processions, gingerbread men, Breughelesque carnival, and everywhere the smell, even where there was none, of honey cakes.
“I wish you’d try to understand,” said the little guy beside me.
“Leave me alone,” I said; although he wasn’t a man yet, no doubt he soon would be, and that was why I hated him. He was offended and sat back on his heels to add the final stitches to his braid; I didn’t even feel sorry for him: clumsily, his thumb smeared with blood, he pushed the needle through the blue cloth of his air force tunic. His glasses were so misted over I couldn’t make out whether he was crying or whether it just looked like it. I was close to tears myself: in two hours, three at most, we would be in Cologne, and from there it was not far to the one I had married, the one whose voice had never sounded like marriage.
The woman emerged suddenly from behind the freight shed, and before the guards knew what was happening, she was standing by our boxcar and unwrapping a blue cloth from what I first took to be a baby: a loaf of bread. She handed it to me, and I took it; it was heavy, I swayed for a moment and almost fell forward out of the train as it started moving. The bread was dark, still warm, and I wanted to call out “Thank you, thank you,” but the words seemed ridiculous, and the train was moving faster now, so I stayed there on my knees with the heavy loaf in my arms. To this day all I know about the woman is that she was wearing a dark headscarf and was no longer young.