Heinrich P. lives with his wife Hetti, née Irms, in a single-family house in a settlement of company houses with a denominational background. He has two sons, Wilhelm and Karl, and is on the point of buying a small car. H.P. is an amputee (having lost one leg below the knee), not disobliging but a bit edgy, for which his explanation is “worrying about new acquisitions.”
Now in this geographical triangle dark hair is by no means rare; as far as can be visually ascertained and superficially assessed, it is on an average the most common, as the Au. was able with his own eyes to convince himself. But there was a family legend, a family pride, that was hawked around as the phrase “the famous Pfeiffer hair”; a woman with “Pfeiffer hair” was somehow considered favored, blessed, at any rate beautiful. Since, according to Heinrich P.’s information, the investigations within the Tolzem—Werpen—Lyssemich triangle uncovered numerous cross-connections with the Gruytens and their ancestors (not with the Barkels, they had been city-dwellers for generations), it is not impossible, in the Au.’s view, for Leni to have acquired this Pfeiffer hair by way of some such cross-connections. Now we want to be fair: seen objectively—from a barber’s point of view, as it were—A.’s hair was undeniably handsome: thick, dark, naturally wavy. The fact that it was wavy was in turn cause for numerous speculations, because Pfeiffer hair—like Leni’s!—was smooth and straight, etc., etc.
We may take it as objectively proved that from the very day of his birth too much fuss was made over this Alois. Quite in accord with Pfeiffer practice, a virtue was swiftly made of necessity, and he was regarded as “our gypsy,” but only until 1933, from then on he counted as “classic Mediterranean”; the Au. considers it important to note that A. was in no sense a Celtic type, it being easy to take this mistaken view since Celts often have light eyes and dark hair. A. simply lacked—as we shall see later—Celtic sensibility and imagination; if he really must be placed in a racial category, the only description he merits is: substandard Teuton. He was shown around, held up, and for months—probably years—described as “cute”; even before he could speak with reasonable articulation fantastic careers were being dreamed up for him, artistic ones mostly, he was weighed down with high expectations: sculptor, painter, architect (writing did not enter the family’s field of speculation until later. Au.). Everything he did was added to his credit a few sizes too large. Since, naturally, he was also a “cute altar boy” (we imagine that his first name makes any mention of denomination unnecessary), aunts, cousins, etc., already saw him as a “painter-monk”; perhaps even as a “painting abbot.” There is evidence (by way of the Lyssemich innkeeper’s wife, Mrs. Commer, now aged sixty-two, as well as her mother-in-law, Grandma Commer, now eighty-one, whose good memory is extolled throughout the village) that church attendance rose steadily as long as A. was altar boy in Lyssemich, i.e., during the years 1926 to 1933.
“Would you believe it, sometimes we went to Crystalation on weekdays as well as Sundays, it was just too cute to see that dear little boy” (Grandma Commer; what religious exercise was meant by “Crystalation” is something we have not yet been able to ascertain. Au.).
A number of interviews had to be conducted with Mr. Pfeiffer and his wife Marianne, née Tolzem. Suffice it to say that the P.s’ milieu was “one degree above that of their son H.: a slightly larger row house and the car already in the garage. P., Sr., now retired, still drags his leg. Since the P.s are eager to supply information there was no difficulty at all in gathering material on A. from his parents; everything he ever produced is kept, like relics, in a glass showcase. Among the fourteen drawings on display, perhaps two or three were not too bad: colored pencil drawings of the countryside around Lyssemich, the extreme flatness of which—variations in level of twenty to thirty feet (such as depressions caused by streams), unavoidable even on plains, are quite a sensation—seems to have provided a constant motivation for A. to draw. Because the sky in these parts always comes down to the earth, a fertile earth, A.—whether consciously or unconsciously could not, of course, be ascertained—looked for the secret of light to be found in Dutch painting, a secret that on two or three of the sheets he had approached, taking (with some originality) as a source of light the Tolzem sugar factory, shifting it closer to Lyssemich and hiding the sun in its white steam. The P.s’ claims that there had been hundreds of these drawings could not be verified, merely noted with skepticism. A few elementary woodworking jobs done by A.: a cactus bench, a jewelry box, a pipe stand for his father, and an enormous lamp (fretwork), left—to put it mildly—an embarrassing impression. Other objects on display were: some half-dozen respectable sports diplomas—track and field, swimming—a citation from the Lyssemich Football Club. A mason’s apprenticeship begun by A. in Werpen and discontinued after six weeks was described by Mrs. P. as his “practical training” that “came to naught because of the intolerable rudeness of the foreman, who failed to understand his suggested innovations.” In a nutshell: quite obviously A. was considered by others and by himself to be destined for “higher things.”
Also displayed in a showcase at the P.s’ were a few dozen poems by A. which the Au. prefers to pass over in silence: there was not one, not one line, which even began to approach the expressive power that Erhard Schweigert had been known to possess. After quitting his apprenticeship, “Alois threw himself heart and soul” (P., Sr.) into a career that for one of his character, which was weak at the best of times, turned out to be disastrous: he wanted to become an actor. A few successful appearances on the amateur stage in which he played the leading role in The Lion of Flanders have left behind in the P. showcase three newspaper clippings in which he received “unqualified praise”; the fact that it was one and the same critic writing for three different local papers under differing initials has to this day escaped the P.s’ notice. The reviews all have the same wording—except for a few minute variations (“unqualified” is once replaced by “unalloyed,” another time by “undisputed”). The initials are B.H.B., B.B.H., H.B.B. Needless to say, the acting also came to naught, because of people’s failure to understand A.’s “intuition”; also because of their envy of his “wonderful good looks” (Mrs. P.).
Among the P. family’s proudest relics are a few specimens of printed prose which, slightly faded, gilt-framed, adorn the top shelf of the glass case and were shown to the Au. by Mrs. P. with the remark: “Just look, in print, that’s true talent, you know, and think of the money he might have made with it.” (This mixture of loftiest idealism and blatant materialism is typical of the P.s. Au.).
I. Forward March!
Eight months have passed since the war began, and still we have not fired a single shot. The long cold winter was utilized for rigorous training. Now spring is here, and we have been waiting many weeks for orders from the Führer.
In Poland there were battles while we had to keep the Watch on the Rhine; Norway and Denmark were occupied without us being allowed to be there; some have already claimed that we will spend the whole war in our native land.
We are in a small village in the Eifel hills. On May 9 at 16:30 hours comes the order to march to the West. Alert! Messengers run, horses are harnessed, everywhere packs are being readied, a farewell word of thanks to the people with whom we have been quartered, the girlies have red-rimmed eyes—Germany is marching to the West, toward the setting sun, be on your guard, France!
The battalion gets under way that evening. In front of us are troops, close behind us others follow, and on the left-hand side of the road an endless stream of motorized columns overtakes us. We march through the night.
Dawn is but a glimmer and already the air is quivering with the thunder of German aircraft as they roar away overhead to bid good morning to the Western neighbor. And still the motorized troops overtake us. “German troops crossed into Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg at dawn and are now continuing their westward advance”—for the benefit of the marching column, someone has called out this special bulletin as he drives by. There is a burst of en
thusiasm, we wave to our brave comrades of the Luftwaffe as they continue to fly past overhead.
II. The River Meuse 1940
The Meuse is not a river. It is a single stream of fire. The heights along both banks are hills spewing fire.
Every bit of natural cover is made use of in this countryside that is so ideally suited for defense. Where Nature has proved inadequate, technology has stepped in. Everywhere machine-gun nests, at the foot of the cliffs, between crevices in the cliffs, deep in the cliffs. Tiny chambers, bored into the cliffs, hollowed out of the rock, lined with concrete, and towering above them a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot roof, hundreds of feet high, of centuries-old massive rock.
III. The River Aisne 1940
A hundred and twenty Stuka engines roar their song of iron! A hundred and twenty Stukas thunder across the Aisne!
But not one finds its target.
Nature has spread a protective blanket of thick ground-fog over the Weygand Line.
It’s your turn, unknown foot-soldier, today it is up to you to prove the superiority of your rigorous training. Your victory drive must break the toughest resistance.
When you descend from the heights of the Chemin des Dames, remember the blood that has flowed here.
Remember the thousands who passed this way before you.
It is up to you—soldier of 1940—to complete their task.
Have you not read on the memorial stone: “Here stood Ailette, destroyed by the barbarians”? What criminal mentality deludes your foes, in whose eyes you—a human being fighting for his right to live—are once again a barbarian?
In the early morning of June 9 our division stands ready for the assault. Comrades of a sister regiment have the task of attacking in our sector. We have been posted as divisional reserve.
Alert! Get going!
It is four in the morning. Dazed with sleep, one man after another crawls out of the tent. A lively bustle ensues.
IV. A Hero
The story of this hero is an example of fearless courage and the uncompromising willingness of German officers to risk their own lives. It has been said that an officer must have the courage to show his men how to die. But every soldier, the moment he enters the battle arena and grasps the enemy by the throat, concludes a pact with Death. He casts out fear from his heart, tenses all his resources like a bowstring, his senses suddenly become unnaturally acute, he throws himself into the arms of capricious Fortune, and he feels, without realizing it, that Fortune favors only the brave. The fainthearted are carried away by the example of the brave, and the model of a single man who sets an example of fearless courage kindles the torches of dauntless courage in the hearts of the men around him. Such a one was Colonel Günther!
V.
The enemy fights grimly, with cunning and, when trapped, to the last man. He almost never surrenders. We are fighting blacks from Senegal, in their element here, masters of bush warfare. Marvelously camouflaged behind tree roots, behind artificial or natural screens of leaves, dug in wherever a path or a more open part of the forest lures on the attacker. The shooting is at close range, almost every shot finds its mark and almost always fatally. The tree-snipers are almost invisible too. Often they allow the attacker to pass by in order to finish him off from behind. It is impossible to eradicate them, they plague the reserves, dispatch riders, headquarters, artillerymen. Long since cut off, half starved, they continue for many days to shoot down single soldiers. They lie, stand, or sit huddled against a tree trunk, often still wrapped in a camouflage net, lying in wait for their prey. Whenever it is possible actually to detect one of them, the savage is usually already aware of this, and he merely drops like a sack from above to vanish like lightning into the undergrowth.
VI.
Onward, we must not dally here, not here of all places. The battalion is marching without cover through the valley. Who knows whether the enemy is ensconced on the slopes to right or left—ever onward! It is like a miracle, no one impedes our advance. The villages have been looted and destroyed by the wave of retreating French.
“Over there you can see the Chemin des Dames,” a comrade next to me says in a low voice—his father had been killed in the Great War. “That must be the Ailette hollow, that’s where he was wounded as a ration runner.”
A broad highway leads across the Ailette hollow to the broad dominating heights above the Chemin des Dames. To the right and left of the highway there is hardly a single spot of ground that was not repeatedly torn up by shells during the Great War. Nowhere is there a tree of any size with a proper trunk. In 1917 there were no more trees here at all, everything had been blown to pieces. In the intervening years the roots have sprouted again, and every tree stump has become a bush.
VII.
Every few moments we look at the time. A last check, a last sighting. Final directions—and a shot rends the silence. Attack! From the edges of the forest and from behind lines of bushes, the German cannons blaze forth. Slowly the rolling gunfire rumbles up the slope of the opposite bank of the Aisne. The entire valley of the Aisne is shrouded in a cloud of smoke so that at times we can observe very little. When the firing is at its peak, the sappers bring up the rubber rafts and convey the infantry across. Heavy fighting begins for the crossing of the Aisne and the canal. Toward noon the heights on the far side have been reached, despite the enemy’s desperate resistance. Observation is now no longer possible from our post. The advance observer and the two radio operators have already gone on ahead this morning with the infantry. In the afternoon the observation post and the firing position also receive orders to take up new positions. The hot sun beats down. After a short time we reach the Aisne. The new observation post is to be set up on Height 163.
The Au., all too self-conscious when it comes to the production of prose, must refrain from comment.
If we add up all the factual particulars on A. and reduce all the nonfactual ones to a kernel that would correspond to the factual ones, he may well have had the makings of quite a good Phys.-ed. teacher who could have taught drawing on the side. Where he did in fact end up after a few abortive careers is long since known to the reader: in the army.
Now it is well known that in the army, as anywhere else, one never gets something for nothing, most certainly not when one is obliged to pursue the career of noncommissioned officer, the only one open to A., who “had to quit school at fourteen” (H., Sr.). And at this point it is only fair to say that the seventeen-year-old A., who volunteered first for the Labor Service, then for the genuine article, is beginning to see the light. In letters to his parents (all in the showcase for everyone to inspect) he writes as follows: “This time I really do want to stick it out, come what may, and no matter how difficult other people may make things for me I don’t want to be always putting all the blame on them, so please, Mum and Dad, when I’ve started a career don’t go right away looking at its summit.” That is not badly expressed and is an allusion to a remark of Mrs. P.’s who, the first time Alois came home on leave in uniform, already saw him as “military attaché in Italy, or something.”
If, finally, we apply the always desirable pinch of compassion, as well as a minimum of what might be called fairness, and take into account A.’s deplorable upbringing, we see that he was not so bad after all, and the farther he got away from his family the better he became, since among strangers there was no one to see him as a future cardin- or admiral. When all is said and done, he managed after a year and a half in the army to get as far as corporal; and even taking into account that the imminent war was favorable to careers, there is not much to be ashamed of in that. When France was invaded he was made a sergeant, and it was in that capacity, the “bloom” still on him, that in June ’41 he attended the Gruyten anniversary party.
Reliable details about Leni’s rekindled pleasure in dancing that evening are not available, only rumors, whispers, both of a mixed nature: benevolent, spiteful, jealous, old-maidish; assuming that between eight in the evening and four in the morning
dance music was played some twenty-four to thirty times, and Leni left the ballroom with A. after midnight, it is likely—if we average out the rumors and whispers—that Leni took part in twelve dances; however, of these assumed twelve dances she did not dance most or almost all with Alois, she danced them all with him. Not even with her father would she consent to a token dance once around the floor, not even with old Hoyser—no, she danced only with him.