“Well, then, I’d like to pay. I’ll take the rest of the bottle along, if I may—who knows whether there’s anything available out there?” I pointed toward the coast.
“There are some taverns there too,” she said indifferently, shrugging her shoulders, “but if you like …”
She went to the counter, and it seemed to me she did so merely in order to avoid touching my hand, for in taverns like that the money isn’t paid formally at a cash register but simply passes from hand to hand. She gave me my change and said coolly, “Goodbye, sir.” I was alone. It was good to know that she had said: I’m always here. I sat down, stretched out my legs, ate, drank, and smoked. After finishing half the bottle, I stood up, adjusted my pack, called in the direction of the door leading to the rear, “Goodbye!” and left.
The road was uneven and tiring; there wasn’t a soul in sight, just meadows with streams trickling away into them, shrubs, clumps of willows, until finally in the distance I made out a straight row of trees that seemed to indicate the coast road. I took another breather, smoked a cigarette under that dull gray sky, and then walked toward the pale, bluish silhouette of the row of trees …
III
I promise not to become too garrulous. Nothing of what I am telling you is irrelevant if you happen to be interested in your brother’s fate, in the part played by Schnecker and, to some extent, in my person. I can no longer keep silent. Fear and dread have taken hold of me since I have had to cast a brief but enlightening glance behind the rosy façade of the German “restoration” and “restitution,” a glance into Schnecker’s face. The face of an average person.
I forgot to tell you that I don’t care for the sun. There are times when I believe I hate it. If I were to worship any of the idols of ancient or primitive peoples, I would choose to join those somber-minded tribes who offer tribute to the sun as a devil rather than those who venerate it as a god. I don’t hate the light—I love light shining in the darkness—but that harsh summer sun, sheer light, that is something cruel.
The highway I soon reached was flanked only on the right by a row of trees whose shadow fell on open country, a meadow covered by lush, shoulder-high grass. It was only later that I discovered that all the meadows on both sides of the road were mined; left and right, grass and flowers grew with a luxuriance I had never seen before. A few fir saplings were dotted about. For three years no hand had been able to mow or care for those meadows, and no cattle had been able to browse in them.
Somewhere up ahead I had caught sight of a building at what seemed to be an intersection in the shady forest; but that bright sunshine not only dazzled me, it induced in me an almost demoralizing physical pain. The distance seemed endless, although it couldn’t have been more than three hundred yards. After five minutes I reached the building. Another tavern. Scattered about the fir forest were attractive little modern houses, and along the road some other houses. At the intersection stood a little signpost that said BLANCHÈRES. The tavern bore a newly painted sign saying BUVETTE À L’ORIENT. I stepped inside and right away, without looking around, put down my pack and began to wipe the sweat off my face again.
As I gradually came to from my exhaustion, I found myself looking into a terrible face, which was smiling at me. I am sure you don’t know about those creatures that live on the other, the seldom described side of war. Our patriotic literature has no room for reality.
The broad face was heavily coated with powder, the large, pale-blue eyes were bleary, below the eyes were terrible bags. It was the Blanchères tavern’s landlady. She, too, played a major role in your brother’s life: she washed his laundry, which was so important to him, and she washed it thoroughly and was cheap.
“Hello, soldier,” she said to me in a surprisingly deep voice. “Have a seat,” she added.
“Good afternoon, madame,” I said.
“Oh,” she cried, “I’m not madame, I’m mademoiselle!”
“Good afternoon, mademoiselle,” I said.
“What’ll you have?”
I had sat down on one of the chairs near the door.
“Beer, please, if you have any.”
So far I had seen only her head, and automatically assumed her to be fat. It was a shock, when she now approached me, armed with a bottle of beer and a glass, to see that she was as skinny as an old hen, frighteningly ugly.
“Santé!” she said, without moving away. “You’re new here?”
“Yes,” I said, “I’m on my way to company headquarters.”
“Oh, with that heavy pack?”
“Yes.”
“Then wait a bit.” She looked up at an old-fashioned clock hanging over the bar. “Just wait; the orderly from over in Larnton will be here any minute.” She pointed down the road that led off to the left, whereas according to my instructions I should have walked straight on for another half mile or so. “He comes at four and has a bicycle. He’ll take your pack. He’s a nice fellow. You’re joining the infantry, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. I was surprised at how well informed she was. I looked at the clock: it was a few minutes to four.
Her eyes were almost bursting with curiosity. The main occupation of such creatures is to collect tidbits of news. They are just as garrulous and observant as their sisters of the other kind: the devout churchgoers. She continued the conversation as promptly as a skilled journalist embarking on an interview.
“Your sergeant is a good man,” she said; “the CO is a swine. You’ll see. And that one down there”—she pointed, presumably to a base—“is an angel. He is,” she added firmly, as if I had been about to contradict her.
“Oh?” I merely said, dryly.
“Where’ve you come from?” she went on with hardly a break, the curiosity in her eyes now coupled with a kind of impertinence.
“From Paris.”
“Ah,” she cried again in her rough voice. “Where love reigns supreme!” I said nothing.
“Almost all of them nice fellows, your company,” she prattled on. “In fact, the infantry’s fine anyplace. Poor and fine, that’s what I always say …”
All this time my eyes had been fixed on the road, which looked to me like a haven of peace and shade. It was bordered by dense pine forests that were flecked with pale, sandy patches heralding the proximity of the dunes. On either side of the road, at irregular intervals, stood charming little houses, but it was a while before I noticed that this whole area too was marked off by mine fences and mine warnings. So that explained this graveyard silence.
“How about giving me one?” she suddenly asked, looking at my pack of cigarettes.
“Oh, excuse me!” I said.
“You’re certainly generous with your tobacco—let’s see what you’re like in a couple of weeks!” I had said nothing although she had taken two cigarettes. “Tobacco is as scarce as hen’s teeth hereabouts.” To my relief I at last saw a cyclist in uniform rapidly approaching out of the shadowy depths of the avenue. He was carrying his rifle in the regulation manner, with its strap across his chest.
“Ah,” she cried, “there he is! Willi!”
She stepped outside and waved to the approaching soldier, whose face I could now plainly see. He was a pale, middle-aged man; his fair mustache, narrow and sparse, looked as if it was stuck onto his upper lip. He was wearing his cap, too, like a new recruit, and there was something eager about his expression.
He dismounted, propped his bicycle outside the door, and came in.
“Hello there,” he said.
“Hello,” I answered.
Willi looked enviously at the girl’s cigarette, then at me, climbed onto a bar stool, and asked, “Did you manage to get some more cigarettes on the black market?”
“No,” she said, “I’m supposed to get some tomorrow, cheap, seven francs each.”
“What about that one?”
She pointed the lighted cigarette at me. I had already fished out my pack and was offering it to Willi. He gave me a surprised look, laughed sho
rtly, and said, “Thanks a lot—you must’ve come straight from home, but then they don’t have that much there either …”
“No,” I said, “but are you that short here?”
“I’ll say we are,” he said. “You’ll find out. We wait every day with our tongues hanging out for our three rationed cigarettes, but they’re gone in an hour, then the butts, and then another twenty-three hours’ craving.”
“Want a drink?” asked the girl.
“Yes, please, Cadette, a beer.”
“Here’s to you,” he said. “To your cigarettes, buddy …”
I paid when he did, seeing that he had quickly downed his beer and wanted to be off; I stepped up to the counter beside him as he put on his cap again. “D’you think you could take my stuff along?” I asked.
Assuming a rather ponderous expression, he looked first at my pack and bag and then said, “Mind you, it’s a pretty wobbly old bike, an old rattletrap, but okay”—he made a great show of squaring his shoulders—“I wouldn’t let a fellow soldier kill himself for nothing. So you’re joining our outfit?”
“Yes,” I said, “third company.”
“Right, third, that’s us. Okay, let’s get your stuff loaded.”
Feeling very envious, I watched him sail off. Fortunately the road was shady. On the left was dense forest, starting at Cadette’s house and bordering the road, and to the right side of the smooth asphalt road stood a few houses, apparently still occupied. Next to one of them some soldiers’ washing was hanging on a line: shirts, underpants, and the kind of socks—gray with horizontal white stripes—that are scattered over half the world. I hurried along, for, in addition to some nervousness about my new duties, I also felt a certain curiosity. There was always something exciting about a transfer. I still hadn’t caught sight of the sea, but on the map shown me by the sergeant at battalion headquarters, the dot indicating the company’s orderly room had been very close to that stirring dot-and-dash line marked “Main Battle Line—High Tide Line.” I was impatient to see the sea again after three years.
Five minutes later the forest came to an end. On both sides of the road, those lush meadows again, and at last, beyond a gentle rise, I saw the house beside a sandy path. It looked quite charming, like a rich man’s comfortable weekend cottage. To the right of the road was another tavern, a kind of summer café built of wood with a covered veranda; in the background, more buildings; then, for the first time since noon I saw sergeants’ stars again among corporals’ braid—a bunch of soldiers standing around a field kitchen—and all romantic notions of a lovely summer on the Atlantic coast vanished. I saluted a few sergeants who were standing by a shed watching the food distribution, and finally I reached the orderly room.
After walking up a few steps, the first thing I saw was my pack lying on the floor. There was a pervasive, musty smell of heat and dry timbers. I heard voices, among them Willi’s calling out “Here!” someplace where mail was evidently being distributed. I entered the room that had a sign saying FIELD POST OFFICE No.—. Well, that was the number I was to see so often on the postcards I later accepted here for your brother and took to Larnton. For you too that number must be unforgettable.
After completing the ritual of saluting at the door, I immediately heard a voice speaking in a Saxonian accent. I looked in that direction and saw a first lieutenant whose curly coal-black hair was cut in a rather fancy style, and my first impression was that the little red ribbon of his Iron Cross set off his glossy hair to a T. He looked about forty, and he too had a mustache, a black one, and at the sight of that black mustache it crossed my mind how magnificently that black in turn set off the silver of his Assault Medal.
“Aha,” said this person on catching sight of me, not as if he were bawling me out but rather in a reproachful, schoolmasterly tone, and indeed half an hour later I learned that he was a schoolteacher. At the same time I became aware of the not unfriendly face of a first sergeant, still young, and the impassive countenance of a clerk who looked pleasant enough.
So, “Aha,” said this person, “here we have the lord and master who feels too weak to carry his pack for a distance of half a mile—right?”
With his last words he opened his eyes wide, giving them a theatrical glint, and looked at me challengingly.
“Sir!” I said, standing to attention. “I could see no point in letting my comrade ride an empty bicycle while I carried the pack that I had already lugged all the way from Crutelles.”
“All the way from Crutelles!” he repeated sarcastically. The topkick burst out laughing.
“Don’t laugh, Fischer,” the first lieutenant snapped at him. “These goddamn intellectual bastards who’ve been on special assignment for years are a cheeky bunch.” Then he turned to me. “So you, a Pfc, take the liberty of thinking, using your head, if I have understood you properly—hm?”
I had become so accustomed to quasi-civilian manners that I almost nodded and said, “That’s right.” I suppressed it and uttered the regulation “Yessir.”
“I see. And weren’t you taught the opposite, that you’re not supposed to use your head—hm?”
“No,” I replied, “in my last unit I was sometimes required to use my head.”
“Well!” he said, surprised, and for a moment he looked like a boxer on the receiving end of a well-placed blow. But suddenly he bellowed, “There’ll be none of that here, d’you hear me? No more thinking, understand? No more using your head, get it?”
“Yessir,” I said.
“And what’s more, remember that a soldier never allows himself to be separated from his pack.” He turned his cheap, fiery gaze away from me, toward the topkick, and asked brusquely, “Where’ll we put him?” The topkick pulled a list out of a drawer, and the first lieutenant turned his Storm Trooper eyes back to me (I later found out that he really had been a platoon leader with the Storm Troopers in his hometown). “What training have you had?” he asked me. “I mean military, of course.”
“Rifleman,” I said, “sir, and telephone operator.”
“Balls,” he said furiously, “we have enough telephone operators, never enough riflemen.”
“It’s Larnton’s turn for replacements,” said the topkick.
“Good. We’ll send him to Herr Schelling. Anything else? Tomorrow’s schedule is clear, ammunition to be taken to the base for live firing. Okay?”
“Yessir,” said the topkick.
I flung open the door, stood at attention, and stepped aside for the schoolteacher. He did not deign to look my way again.
“For Chrissake!” cried the topkick when the sound of footsteps outside had died away. “I could’ve hugged you when I heard you were from the Rhineland!”
He shook my hand; I looked into his face and felt glad. He pointed to the clerk, who was watching us with a smile.
“Schmidt,” he said, “at least Schmidt’s from Berlin. We do have a few fellows from Berlin, but otherwise they’re a bunch of yokels.”
I handed him the envelope containing my papers, which I had closed and sealed myself. The clerk opened it, read and sorted the papers, the topkick asked me how things were at home, when I had last seen Cologne, his home town, and when I’d been on leave.
Soon after that he left for supper, and I was alone with the pleasant clerk. I asked him about the general atmosphere, the daily routine, exchanged a few mutual, skeptical observations about the war and the company commander, and fifteen minutes later I found myself walking back along the same road. Again I stopped by Cadette’s, again I had a beer and gave her a cigarette.
Then I walked down that avenue that had so fascinated me. I still hadn’t caught sight of the sea—from the orderly room it had been hidden by the forest; besides, I had been looking at the first lieutenant’s pale-gray uniform.
But it was bound to come soon now. The road ran like a narrow ribbon between the minefields, and I felt as if I were running straight into a trap. On both sides stood attractive little houses, their gardens run wild
; then the road opened up, and on the left there appeared a fair-sized, completely pillaged building that looked like a school. At last I saw the pale strip of beach … There was hardly any water to be seen, the coast being so flat at that point that at low tide the sea receded for more than half a mile. In the distance—indescribably far away, it seemed—I saw a pale, broad tongue, the narrow wave of foam that the sea pushes ahead or drags behind itself, and beyond that an equally narrow strip of gray: the water. And otherwise only sand, sand, and the pale sky that was also burned gray. I felt an uprush of disappointment at having landed in a dry infinity, for when I pulled back my gaze from the distance into which it had plunged, all I saw close by, too, was sand, dunes sparsely covered with grass, and among them the ruins of houses that had obviously been dynamited—and more sand …
And nowhere was there the bunker I had expected to find. Fortunately a soldier with a rifle was standing on a dune next to a spiked barrier across the road; a concrete path led up to him. I followed it. The steel helmet and the muzzle of the rifle grew bigger and more distinct, and on reaching the top I discovered a strange little colony. It looked almost like a fishing village where the nets are hung up to dry in the evening. These were camouflage nets covering guns and barracks, and the wooden huts were part of the famous Atlantic Wall in the summer of 1943 at a strategically vulnerable point. I walked toward the sentry, and when I asked him where I could find Lieutenant Schelling, he pointed with a bored expression to a hut slightly higher up, but before I had reached it, he called after me, “By the way, it’s First Lieutenant, bud; don’t get it wrong!”
“What?” I asked.
“He’s a first lieutenant—not that he cares, but that’s what he is. You might as well know.”
I was amazed to find a first lieutenant heading a platoon. In 1943, officers were pretty thin on the ground, and it seemed extraordinary to me that this tiny base, which could, if necessary, have been in the charge of a sergeant, should be under the command of a first lieutenant.
The first person I saw as I entered the hut was Willi. He was alone, reading a letter.