Iron Gustav

  ‘I won’t do it, Eugen. I’d rather drown myself.’

  ‘Don’t say that, miss. That’s a sin,’ said Frau Pauli.

  Eugen took the old woman by the shoulders. ‘Get out, Frau Pauli,’ he said, pushing her from the room. ‘We’ll fix this up between ourselves, all this about drowning. No, I won’t make a row, I’ll be as soft as soap. I’m like that, I don’t beat girls, do I, Evchen?’

  The woman had gone and they were alone. No, there was no row – only sobbing and tears – and tears meant nothing in such a house. No other sound.

  Eva felt as if she were oppressed by a nightmare from which she ought to wake up and yet could not – a bad dream, ever darker, ever more desolate – the place across the road, the negotiations with Frau Pirzlau, the other girls who treated it as a joke and were put in a good humour by the new arrival, whom they laughingly rigged out.

  And then, standing at the corner of the Lange and the Andreas Strasse. Standing there in torment, knowing that his eyes were on her. It had started to snow and the men were in a great hurry. They were all in a hurry as they passed the woman who was so ridiculously got up in a feather boa dyed green and a large hat trimmed with feathers …

  Then the shrill pimp’s whistle from the doorway – the signal to accost some man who seemed all right to Eugen. And his sudden appearance, his blows because she hadn’t accosted the man after all. And his blows when she did accost someone but unsuccessfully. And her feeble attempt to run away, whereupon he fetches her back, almost breaking her arm …

  And how in the end she succeeded and took a man to her room, with the other girls poking their heads round the doors and nodding encouragement. And how repulsive life was. Everything, yes, everything one had ever learned about cleanliness and purity a lie. And how she must go back to her corner right away …

  And how in the evening she was involved in a quarrel with another girl who claimed that corner as her own, and how Eugen thrashed the other girl this time … with people hurrying by indifferently – life going on and nothing really changed … And how the other girl came back with her fellow – it was dark by now – and Eugen getting into a quarrel with him. And how she wandered away slowly, away round the corner … And, once she was safely round the corner, she ran. Ran on and on, into the town.

  She had to make haste – he might be following. In her conspicuous finery she passed a hundred policemen and fifteen of the special branch but none noticed her, for she had a goal to reach …

  She entered the dark Tiergarten and, to start off with, threw the hat and feather boa behind a bush. Quieter now, she went hurrying down the Bendlerstrasse until she arrived at the Königin-Augusta-Ufer. This was her goal.

  She sat down on a wet seat under a leafless chestnut. What an impression a successful song can make! She had come all this way when it was only five minutes’ walk from the Lange Strasse to the River Spree. But the whole afternoon that song had haunted her. ‘In the Landwehr Canal there floats a corpse …’

  The words had not seemed to her at all ghastly or horrible, but rather ordinary. In the Landwehr Canal there floats a corpse. It often happened and people were singing about it, laughingly. Not horrible – only needing a little courage …

  That was why she had hurried so. This was the Landwehr Canal they had made the song about.

  She sat there for a long time. At last she stood up – it was not so easy now. Already she was conscious of reluctance. And her reluctance increased as she went down the dark passage to the river, where she could hear a chill splashing, as if rats swam there. Yet surely a corpse ought to be indifferent to rats. Nevertheless she descended more and more hesitantly. But, however hesitant her progress, at last she came to the bottom step.

  She was standing on a small brick platform. The water was high, almost lapping her feet. She bent down. She couldn’t see the water, only the reflections from the lights on the bridge. Now is the moment to fall in, she thought.

  But she did not let herself fall. Frightened, she drew back from the darkness which gurgled below her feet, and stood there, waiting.

  People were passing over the bridge but nobody saw her, nobody shouted ‘Help, help! She wants to drown herself’, which would have given her strength to make the leap she was frightened of. To make the leap with the expectation of being saved.

  And when, after a long wait, she tested the water with her foot and felt the icy cold seep into her shoe, all was decided. She could not.

  Slowly she went back up the steps. Previously she had hurried, had been almost happy, for she was parting from life – life was over. But that dream was ended. Now she was returning, broken. Nothing had changed, life flowed on without end. Slowly she walked through the dark Tiergarten, through the dark town. Only at the approach of dawn dared she go into the more familiar places. He would be asleep now … And at last she had slunk to Gertrud Gudde, of whom he knew nothing. There, perhaps, she would be allowed to stay in safety. She was allowed. ‘Gladly,’ Gertrud Gudde had said, returning from the butcher’s.

  § VI

  While Gertrud Gudde talked to Eva, undressed the half-frozen woman and laid her in her still almost warm bed, and while Eva Hackendahl’s despair dissolved into uncontrollable tears, and while both women discussed how they were going to live together, police registration, moving things and ration cards – while all that was going on, Corporal Hackendahl lay in a shell hole between the French and German lines. The shell hole was quite close to the French – not more than thirty metres away – but thank heavens it was so deep that the enemy couldn’t see him. The German trenches were about a hundred and twenty metres distant, and that was bad, because he wanted to return to the German lines, and couldn’t do so before nightfall.

  Otto Hackendahl, if it were a consolation, had the consolation that he was not alone – a second man lay there, a Lieutenant von Ramin. They had met here for the first time. The lieutenant was attached to a company which had assisted Otto’s regiment in an attack; this attack had been repulsed and only by crawling into the nearest shell hole had the lieutenant and Otto been able to avoid being taken prisoner. And then an infernal barrage had broken loose, thus making a return to their own positions impossible. Day broke …

  A bitterly cold day, the sky obscured by low-hanging clouds. Thank God, thought Otto. Not aeroplane weather, anyway.

  Lying there, he could see only the sky and the pit they were in. It was not advisable to look over the edge – they fired pretty smartly from both trenches. Now and again he heard a word of command from the French side, and sometimes someone laughed. It’s easy for them to laugh, thought Otto. I feel damned cold. And I’ll be colder still by the evening.

  To distract himself he listened to the firing, which had reawakened with dawn. Slowly the artillery got into its stride. There was a loud report. Our mortars starting! Sometimes only the field guns were to be heard, but for the moment they weren’t working in his direction. Let’s hope we’ll leave the French in peace for a bit today. We’re properly in the trap, the officer and I …

  He looked towards the lieutenant, who lay curled up at the bottom of the crater, reading old letters. Sensing Otto’s gaze he lifted his head and asked: ‘Well, Corporal, what are you thinking of?’ He had a cheerful, open face and Otto liked his way of speaking.

  ‘I’m thinking, Herr Lieutenant, it would be a good thing if the trench over there didn’t get peppered today.’

  ‘I don’t believe there’ll be much happening,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Both sides got their bellyful last night. Are you damned cold, too?’ he enquired with great feeling.

  ‘Terrible! My boots are absolutely rotten. I haven’t had my feet dry for weeks.’

  ‘My boots are sound, but my feet are like ice just the same,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Got anything to drink, Corporal?’

  ‘Yes, Herr Lieutenant, my flask’s half full of cherry brandy. But I thought we’d better save it for later on – we won’t be getting away before night. And a stimulant will
come in handy then.’

  ‘Before night! You saw how bright the moon was – and then these damned Verey lights. I’m not so sure we shall get away tonight at all.’

  ‘It looks like snow,’ said Otto hopefully.

  ‘Snow!’ The lieutenant was contemptuous. ‘It’s been looking like snow for days. But who can say when it’s really going to snow in a damned winter like this one. No, no, Corporal, you save up your cherry brandy for later. Don’t worry about me, I’ve got some schnapps.’

  ‘Yes, Herr Lieutenant, that’ll warm you.’

  Otto, listening to the shelling, tried to guess the calibres, the trajectories, the position of the guns. Nothing calmed you so much when you felt nervous or anxious. You forced yourself to concentrate and thereby almost forgot the anxiety about yourself. Now and then he heard conversation in the French trenches; they seemed to be quite cheerful in spite of the recent attack.

  ‘Swine!’ said Lieutenant von Ramin suddenly, quite loud. ‘Did you hear that, Corporal? One of them’s got some hot coffee. What damned beastliness to tell us about it too.’

  ‘We usually make our coffee about this time,’ said Otto.

  ‘Yes,’ said the lieutenant, almost laughing. ‘When you’re in the trenches you curse ’em and wait only for the moment to get out. And now we’re both heartily longing for a damp, louse-ridden dugout.’

  ‘You never know when you’re well off,’ agreed Otto, ‘till you’re worse off.’

  ‘True. But I’d rather put it this way – however badly off you are you can always be worse off. How long have you been in it, Corporal?’

  ‘From the beginning. The very first day, Herr Lieutenant.’

  ‘You were lucky, then. You went through the first enthusiasm, the advance. I came straight from school into the trenches. All the bloody mud in bloody Champagne. You ever been there, Corporal?’

  ‘Yes, at Dormoise Valley, Herr Lieutenant.’

  ‘Why, man, we were there too. So you can guess how a boy felt, chock-full of enthusiasm and high-falutin ideas, straight from his school desk into mud and filth and lice. And the men so irritable and depressed …’

  ‘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 th
e 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.’