Iron Gustav (25 page)

‘Yes, there were days when you could have killed anyone just for coughing.'

‘Coughing?' said the lieutenant grimly. ‘Just because he was alive! Yes, that was a time. And things are no better now, let me say.'

‘But the Herr Lieutenant still looks cheerful.'

‘Yes, I look like it,' said the lieutenant indifferently. ‘I want to ask you something, Corporal. Last autumn, in September or October, my regiment went into action over twenty times in the same small sector. We called that hell-hole the “Rotting Appendix”. It was really horrible and stank to high heaven. It was the remains of an old trench in one of our abandoned positions, no longer of the least use, but those above happened to have it on their plans. It didn't even have proper dugouts, it wasn't deep enough. Almost every day it got shot to bits but we had to go into it day after day, and it cost us hundreds of men – in the end it was given up for good and it made no difference. But if that was the case, why all those sacrifices?'

Hackendahl blinked. ‘If the Herr Lieutenant starts asking questions …' he said slowly. ‘You do what is ordered. It's no good thinking too much. That only makes life more difficult.'

‘No, no!' said the lieutenant hastily. ‘Look here, Corporal – what's your name, by the way? Hackendahl? Well, look here, Hackendahl, you'll have had a different sort of upbringing from me, but it all comes to the same thing everywhere – have you ever known anyone you could really love and admire? Think it over. A really great man whom you knew personally or had heard of, and who didn't think of himself or was vain? You see, you don't know one either. People like that are said to have lived once upon a time but not now. Everything
we believe in, everything we worship, is now dead, in the past, no longer exists …'

The lieutenant looked towards Hackendahl. He no longer saw him, and he said: ‘But when you're young you must have something to love and admire, something that's worth sacrificing yourself for. When you're young you don't want to live by bread alone. You want something more – something quite different.'

He fell silent again. Hackendahl looked attentively at the cheerful face. He had admired the lieutenant's casual manner; now he saw that he too had his troubles, and indeed not such very different troubles.

‘When the war came, when Germany was in danger and we all stood together, then we thought we had this something. How enthusiastic we were, how happily we went into the trenches – we had something worth dying for. And then – quite suddenly – everything became grey, gloomy, depressed … just as in that small trench for which sacrifice upon sacrifice was made in vain. In vain! We didn't want to make vain sacrifices. If there's sense and reason in the whole there must be sense and reason in the parts. Don't you think so?'

‘I don't understand much about it,' said Otto. ‘I was happy because I had a job. Before that I had none.'

‘You see, just like me! But the job must have some sense, mustn't it?'

‘I don't know, Herr Lieutenant. I never thought about it. But I could imagine – when we're under fire, for instance, and the telephone wire's broken – the officer saying that a message must be delivered in the rear and I'd take the envelope containing the message and see that it arrived safely without knowing whether the message was really important or not.'

‘Yes,' said the lieutenant after a while, ‘that wasn't stupid, Corporal. You could see it that way too.'

He was silent for a long time. To the east and west the guns now rumbled incessantly. But where the two men were it was still quiet – hardly did a bullet whistle over them or a machine-gun begin to rattle. Then it went quite quiet again.

‘And yet,' continued the lieutenant, speaking rather doubtfully, ‘to be only a blind messenger! We had hoped for something more.'
He grew animated. ‘And a messenger to whom? We know where we stand here – but what about those at home? Have you been on leave? But of course you must have been, if you were here from the beginning. Do you remember the embarrassed, eager faces? How they always wanted you to talk about the war? And how puzzled they became when you couldn't speak about anything except mud and cold and hunger? They wanted to hear about heroic deeds. Yes, heroic deeds! And think of their embarrassment when they saw how you hated going back to the Front. How frightened they were in case the beloved son or brother might turn out to be a coward. And how they tried to give you fresh courage. Corporal, the people at home have no idea what's at stake.'

‘And what is, if I might ask, Herr Lieutenant?'

‘Why, we are. We, the younger people! Because we're the real Germany. So as to find a reason for living, so as to have a life worthy of being lived! That's what's at stake, Corporal. You and me!'

The lieutenant fell silent. His teeth chattered – it was very cold. And one dared not make the slightest movement in that damned crater or else the French would hear and at once throw hand grenades into it.

‘Corporal!'

‘Yes?'

‘It's horribly cold.'

‘Yes, sir.'

The lieutenant looked at his watch. ‘Anyway, it's past eleven. Six more hours – and then it'll be dark and we can go back. We can stick it till then.'

‘Of course.'

They no longer spoke of the moon or Verey lights. They must get back that night. Must.

The lieutenant broke a slab of chocolate in two and handed half to Otto. ‘There, that's chocolate I got on leave. They gave it to me as a parting gift of the greatest value. I find they make rather too much fuss at home about their turnips. Well, we won't worry! I've just been on leave and I haven't quite got used again to the life here. When were you last on leave?'

‘I haven't had any leave yet.'

‘What
do you mean – no leave? Not from this position, I suppose. If you've been at the Front since the beginning of the war you must have had two or three leaves already.'

‘No, I haven't had any leave at all.'

‘But, man, that's impossible.' The lieutenant sat up so abruptly that Hackendahl had to push him down and say warningly: ‘Be careful, Herr Lieutenant.'

‘Oh, yes … But it's impossible. More than two years at the Front and always on the Western Front too! That right?'

Otto nodded.

‘Well, it's impossible. There must be something wrong somewhere.' He looked at Otto. ‘No. Iron Cross and two stripes – nothing wrong there.'

‘No, nothing. The opportunity didn't present itself.'

The lieutenant pondered. ‘Wait. What's your name?'

‘Hackendahl.'

‘Oh, yes – Hackendahl. That's why your name seemed so familiar. I've heard of you. They say …' He broke off and looked at Otto, almost embarrassed. Otto returned the glance with a faint smile.

‘I can guess what they say,' he said. ‘There's a chap in the Fifth who doesn't want any leave – he must be cracked. That's what they say.'

The lieutenant looked relieved. ‘That's so. But you really don't look as mad as that, Corporal.'

‘I'm not mad at all. I'll go on leave one day but it hasn't got to that yet.'

‘What do you mean, to that yet? But perhaps I'm enquiring about your private affairs.'

‘They're private but they can be discussed. After all the Herr Lieutenant has spoken to me about his private affairs too, in a manner of speaking …'

‘Well, fire away, Hackendahl! I'm curious to know what could make a man forgo his leave for two years.'

‘Nothing wonderful, Herr Lieutenant. In spite of what they say. It's only that – well, when I was at home I was a weak kind of fellow, without courage or a will of my own. However, I've now realized that I'm not that sort of fellow after all.'

‘I
should say not!'

‘But someone made me so, a certain person who broke my spirit from the very beginning. And as a result I did something dirty, Herr Lieutenant. I have a girl, and we have a child who is now more than four years old. I'd sworn to Gertrud a dozen times that I'd marry her – the last time was before I went to the Front. But I didn't marry her and only because I daren't own up about it to my father and ask him for my papers.'

‘Oh,' said the lieutenant, ‘so it was your father who broke your spirit. And now you daren't face the girl, eh?'

‘Herr Lieutenant, Gertrud's never said a word to me. It's my father I daren't face.'

‘But, Hackendahl, you can't be afraid of your father still – a man like you who has proved himself a hundred times in action. You're quite different now from what you were two years ago. Is your father really such a tyrant?'

‘Not at all, Herr Lieutenant. Fundamentally he's a good man, but anyone who isn't like him or doesn't do and think in his way he treats as an enemy and really hates. He imagines he's doing heaven a service by making life hell for him. And he regarded me – his son – in the same sort of way, as if I were a kind of enemy, and a bad one.'

‘I know people like that,' said the lieutenant eagerly. He'd been moved by the corporal's story. Memories came back to him – he heard the droning sound of the grown-ups' Bible-reading when he was a child. ‘I knew that kind of thing too,' he had called out, and then began to relate: ‘Last time I went on leave I stayed with an uncle, a landowner. Not much hunger there, they provide for themselves. They don't need ration cards – they're called self-supporting. You must have heard of it.'

Hackendahl nodded.

‘Yes, and when I left they asked me to take a packet of food to another uncle, his brother, who was a retired president of a provincial court of justice and lived in a town. “You'll manage it all right,” laughed my uncle. I didn't quite know what he was referring to unless he meant the size of the parcel, which I had to lug about the train and not lose sight of.' The lieutenant stopped for a moment; he
was thinking how annoyed he had been about all the bother it had caused him, yet glad at realizing the happiness such a parcel could bring. ‘Yes, so I took the parcel to the other uncle. I hadn't seen him for a long time and was startled to see how greatly he had changed. His face was shrunken and hardly bigger than a child's. It looked dreadful. And then his neck, his pitiful neck, with the skin hanging down in flaps! You must know, Hackendahl, that my uncle was one of those people with a Prussian sense of duty; he had got it into his head that he had to live on his ration cards and in consequence he was almost starving to death. “The government knows what it's doing,” he said, “and if it has worked out that one can live on one's rations then it can be done.” '

Lieutenant von Ramin saw himself sitting with his uncle, who fittingly entertained his young guest, pouring him a glass of wine – magnificent wine – for wine could be had without cards and the uncle was a rich man. But on a wooden platter by the side of the glass lay a slice of bread, such a thin little slice that one could almost see the grain of the wood through it. And on the bread was a bit of fat, a very meagre portion of egg and a miserable salted fish …

‘Eat, my boy,' the uncle said. ‘I hope you like it.' And his voice trembled. ‘I've already eaten.'

‘And I had thought,' said Lieutenant von Ramin, ‘that my parcel of food would be regarded as a godsend! But now I understood what my uncle in the country had meant when he said – “You'll manage it all right.” For I didn't manage it. “Do you want to corrupt a German judge into breaking the law?” shouted my rich uncle. “Get out of my house! How could I sleep at night if I myself broke the law? I have sentenced tens of thousands of thieves and cheats in my life and I should have sentenced them all unjustly if I myself was unjustly privileged.” And all the time he kept looking hungrily at the parcel. He must have suffered terribly, poor old man.'

‘One can understand him, though,' said Otto. ‘He was ashamed of weakening.'

‘You say that,' said the lieutenant angrily. ‘My mother said the same – he was a great man, he had died for an ideal! Because he did die, shortly afterwards, from a chill. No strength left. But he wasn't a
great man, Hackendahl, any more than your father is. It isn't great to starve to death for one's Fatherland. How did it benefit his country? He died for a false god, an idol, the sort of thing that savages worship. Something wooden, lifeless.'

Hackendahl was silent.

‘You see, Hackendahl, at first one is deeply moved to learn that so-and-so has died for an ideal, literally died, when he could have lived comfortably. But death isn't enough; you must die for something living, and the Prussian sense of duty is dead and has been a long time. It was born in a period more than a hundred years ago when people lived in the bitterest poverty and with nothing to guide them – they had to have some such standard of conduct. But all that was finished with long before the war. No, the old idols are done for. If this war is to have any meaning then something new and living must come out of it.'

Hackendahl said nothing.

‘I say it is good that Uncle Eduard died. And you ought not to be afraid to go on leave and see your father. Man, it's you who are living and he who is dead.'

‘I don't know,' said Otto Hackendahl in a low voice, ‘whether the Herr Lieutenant sees things correctly – a man is still a child to his father and mother. And I should prefer it to be done decently, without a quarrel. He's my father and not to be blamed for what he is.'

‘So you're afraid after all, Hackendahl,' said the lieutenant impatiently.

‘Of course I'm afraid. That's why I don't go on leave.'

‘You brood too much, man. You keep on imagining how you'll enter your father's room and what you'll say … But you know, Hackendahl, that when you're waiting for zero hour you imagine a hundred horrors, and every now and then you look at the time and then at the sky to see whether the Verey lights are going up – and to put it plainly you're in the hell of a funk. But when the moment comes you go over the top with a yell and you've forgotten all your terrors.'