Graeber stared out into the red Russian evening. A few crows were flapping about like dark rags. Steinbrenner was the perfect product of the Party. He was perfectly healthy, in perfect physical training, perfectly devoid of any thoughts of his own, and perfectly inhuman. He was an automaton, for whom polishing a gun, exercising, and killing were all the same. "You sent the announcement of Hirschland's death to his mother, didn't you?" Graeber asked,
"Who says so?"
"I know it."
"You know nothing at all. How could you know?" "I found out. That was a fine joke."
Steinbrenner laughed. He had no ear for irony. His pretty face beamed with satisfaction. "You think so too? Just imagine the expression on that old woman's face! And nothing can happen to me. Hirschland will be careful not to say anything. And even if he did, it was simply a mistake! Could happen any time." Graeber looked at him closely. "You have nerve," he said. "Nerve? That doesn't take nerve. Just a sense of humor." "You're wrong. It takes nerve. Anyone who does a thing like that always dies himself soon after. That's well known."
Steinbrenner laughed aloud. "Drivel! That's an old wives' tale!"
"It's not an old wives' tale. Anyone who does that summons his own death. That's an established fact."
"Oh, listen," Steinbrenner said. "You don't mean you believe that yourself?"
"I do believe it. So should you. It's an old Germanic belief. I wouldn't like to be in your boots."
"You're crazy!" Steinbrenner stood up. He was no longer laughing.
"I knew two people who did something similar. Both were killed shortly after. Another was lucky. He only got shot in the balls. Naturally it made him impotent. Perhaps you'll get off as cheaply as that. Then naturally there won't be any twins or triplets. But of course someone else could always take care of that for you. In the Party the only important thing is purity of blood—not the individual."
Steinbrenner stared at Graeber. "Man, what an unfeeling ass you are!" he said. "Have you really always been like that? Besides, that's all drivel, drivel with gravy on it!"
For a minute longer he stood there waiting. Then he walked off. Graeber leaned back. The front was rumbling. The crows flew about. Suddenly it seemed to him as though he had never been away.
He had sentry duty from midnight until two o'clock. His route lay around the village. The ruins stood out black against the fireworks of the front. The sky shook, brightening and darkening with the muzzle flashes of the artillery. His boots groaned in the tough mud like damned souls.
The pain came upon him swiftly and surprisingly and without any warning. He had not been thinking of anything and had been in a stupor as on the days of his journey. Now suddenly and without transition pain cut through him as though he were being torn to ribbons.
He stood still and waited. He made no move. He waited for the knife to begin to turn, to become torment and realization of torment, to acquire a name and with the name to become localized and accessible to reason and solace or at least to stoic acceptance.
It did not come. Nothing was there but the clear pain of loss. It was a loss forever. Nowhere was there a bridge. He had had it and it was lost. He listened inward. Somewhere there must still be a voice; an echo of hope must still linger somewhere. But he found nothing. There were only emptiness and nameless pain.
It is too early, he thought. It will come back, later, when the pain is past. He tried to conjure it up; he did not want it to tear itself away; he wanted to hold onto it, even if the pain became unbearable. It would come back if he only persevered, he thought. He whispered names and tried to remember. Shrouded by mist Elisabeth's distracted face> appeared. It was the way it had been when he had last seen it. All her other faces were blurred; this one alone became clear. He tried to picture Frau Witte's garden and house. He could do it, but it was as though he were striking the keys of a piano that gave no sound. What has happened? he thought. Perhaps she has had an accident. Perhaps she is unconscious. Perhaps at this very moment the house is caving in. Perhaps she is dead.
He tore his boots out of the mud. The damp earth sighed. He realized that he was sweating.
"That's going to tire you out," someone said.
It was Sauer. He was standing in the corner of a ruined stall. "What's more it can be heard for at least a kilometer," he went on. "What are you trying to do, setting-up exercises?"
"Sauer, you're married, aren't you?"
"Of course. When you have a farm you have to be married. Without a woman a farm's no good."
"Have you been married a long time?"
"Fifteen years. Why?"
"What's it like when you've been married for such a long time?"
"The questions you ask, man! What should it be like?"
"Is it like an anchor that holds you? Something you think about all the time and want to get back to?"
"What do you mean, anchor? Of course I think about it. I've been thinking about it all day, if you want to know. It's time for spring sowing and planting! You get silly in the head just thinking about it."
"I don't mean your farm. I mean your wife."
"They go together. I've just explained it to you. Without a woman a farm's no good. But what do you get from it? Nothing but worry. On top of that here's Immermann always trying to tell you that the prisoners of war lie in bed with every woman who's alone." Sauer blew his nose. "It's a big double bed," he added for some mysterious reason.
"Immermann doesn't know what he's talking about."
"He says that once a woman has found out what a man is she can't hold out for long without one. She's sure to find another for herself."
"Oh, crap!" Graeber said, suddenly furious. "That damned Communist thinks everyone's the same. There's no greater nonsense in the world!"
CHAPTER XXVI
THEY no longer knew one another. They could not even recognize the uniforms. Often it was only by the helmets and the voices and the language that they knew they belonged together. The trenches had long since caved in. An irregular line of shell holes and bunkers was the front. It changed constantly. There was no longer anything there but rain and uproar and night and the light of the explosions and the flying mud. The sky had fallen. Stormoviks had shattered it. Rain poured down with it the star shells and the bombs and the grenades.
Searchlights harried the torn clouds like white dogs. Antiaircraft fire shattered through the uproar of the quivering horizon. Blazing airplanes came shooting down and the golden hail of tracer bullets flew after them in a sheaf that disappeared into infinity. Parachute flares hung in indeterminate space and disappeared as though in deep water. Then the drum fire began again.
It was the twelfth day. For the first three the line had held. The hedgehog bunkers had withstood the artillery fire without too much damage. Then the outer blockhouses had been lost and the line penetrated by tanks, but a few kilometers further back the tank defenses had contained the breakthrough. The tanks had stood burning in the gray of morning; a few lay overturned, their treads grinding for a while, like giant beetles lying on their backs. Disciplinary companies had been sent out to lay log roads and restore the telephone connections. They had been forced to work almost without cover. In two hours they had lost more than half their men. Clouds of bombers swooped low and unescorted out of the gray sky and attacked the hedgehog bunkers. On the sixth day the bunkers were out of action; they were no longer good for anything except cover. On the seventh night the Russians attacked and were repulsed. Then it began to rain as though the Deluge had come again. The soldiers were no longer recognizable. They crawled about in the sticky clay of the shell holes like insects that all had the same protective coloration. The company's position was now based solely on two ruined blockhouses with machine guns, behind which stood, a few grenade throwers. The rest of the men crouched in shell holes and behind fragments of ruined walls. Rahe held one of the blockhouses, Mass the other.
They held them for three days. On the second they were almost without ammunition; the Russia
ns could simply have marched through. But there was no attack. Late in the last twilight, a couple of German airplanes came over and dropped ammunition and food. The men dragged some of it in and ate. During the night reinforcements came. The work battalions had completed a log road. Weapons and machine guns were brought up. An hour later came a surprise attack without artillery preparation. The Russians suddenly bobbed up fifty yards in front of the line. Some of the hand grenades did not explode. The Russians broke through.
In the flickering of the explosions Graeber saw in front of him a helmet with white eyes beneath it, a mouth gaping open, and behind, like the gnarled, living limb of a tree, an arm drawn back to throw—he shot at it. seized a hand grenade out of the fumbling hands of a recruit beside him and threw. It exploded. "Unscrew the caps, idiot!" he shouted at the recruit. "Give it here! Don't try to pull them off!"
The next hand grenade did not explode. Sabotage, shot through Graeber's mind, sabotage by the prisoners, aimed at us now! He threw the next one and bent down and saw a Russian grenade flying toward him; he burrowed into the mud and felt the pressure of the explosion and a blow like a whiplash and a crack and mud that struck him' He reached back and shouted, "Come on! Quick! Give it to me!" and only when his hand remained empty did he turn his head and see that there was no longer any recruit there and that the mud on his hand was flesh. He worked his way down, searching, found a string of grenades, pulled the last two off, saw shadows clambering over the edge of the shell hole springing, running on; he crouched—
Caught, he though. Caught. Overrun. He crept cautiously to the edge of the shell hole. The mud protected him as long as he lay still. In the light of a parachute flare he saw that the recruit had been splashed all over, a leg, a naked arm, the shredded body. He had caught the grenade full in the stomach; his body had absorbed the explosion and shielded Graeber.
He remained lying with his head no higher than the edge of the shell hole. He saw a machine gun firing from the blockhouse to the right. Then the one on the left fired too. So long as they were in action he was not lost. They had this sector under crossfire. And there were no more Russians coming over. Apparently only a few had broken through. I must get behind the blockhouse, he thought. His head ached, he was half dazed, but in the back of his mind there was a thought, clear, limited, and sharp. This was what made thé difference between an experienced soldier and a recruit; in the recruit everything turned to panic and for that reason he was more likely to be killed. Graeber knew he could play dead if the Russians came back. It would be hard to spot him in the mud. But the nearer he could get to the curtain of fire from the blockhouse the better it would be later on.
He slid over the edge into the next hole, slipped down the side and got his mouth full of water. After a while he clambered on. In the next shell hole lay two dead men. He waited. Then he heard a hand grenade and saw an explosion near the left-hand bunker. The Russians had broken through over there and were attacking from two sides. The machine guns flickered. After some time the detonations of the hand grenades ceased, but the blockhouse went on firing. Graeber crept forward. He knew the Russians would come back. They would look for men in the big shell holes; he would be safer in a smaller one. He reached one and lay there. A heavy shower fell. The firing of the machine guns flickered out. Then the artillery began firing. A direct hit was scored on the blockhouse to the right. It seemed to fly into the air. Morning came wet and late.
Graeber succeeded in slipping through before the first light. Behind a disabled tank he came upon Sauer and two recruits. Sauer's nose was bleeding. A grenade had exploded close to him. The belly of one of the recruits was torn open. His intestines lay exposed. Rain was falling on them. No one had anything to bind him up with. Besides, it was useless. The sooner he died the better. The second recruit had a broken leg. He had fallen into a shell hole. It was incomprehensible how anyone could break his leg in that soft mud. In the burned-out tank, the middle of which had burst open, the black skeletons of the crew were visible. The torso of one was dangling outside. Only half his face had been burned away; the other half was grossly swollen, red and violet and split open. The teeth were very white like slaked lime.
A liaison officer got through to them from the bunker on the left. "Assemble beside the bunker," he croaked. "Are there others over there in the shell holes?"
"No idea. Are there any medics?"
"All dead or wounded."
The man crawled on.
"We'll get you a medic," Graeber said to the recruit into whose belly the rain was falling. "Or we'll bring you bandages. We'll come back."
The recruit made no reply. He lay pale-lipped, very small in the clay. "We can't drag you on this piece of canvas," Graeber said to the man with the broken leg, "not in this muck. Rest your weight on us and try to hop on your good leg."
They took him between them and stumbled from hole to hole. It took a long time. The recruit groaned when they threw themselves down. His leg twisted. He could go no farther. They left him behind a fragment of wall near the bunker and put a helmet on the wall so the medics could find him. Besides him lay two Russians; one no longer had à head; the other lay on his stomach and the clay under him was red.
They saw still more Russians. Then came their own dead. Rahe was wounded. He had an improvised bandage on his left arm. Three severely wounded men lay under a piece of canvas in the rain. There were no more bandages. An hour later a Junkers plane flew by and dropped a few packages. They fell too far forward, into the hands of the Russians. Seven more men joined them. Some others collected in the bunker to the right. Lieutenant Mass was dead. Sergeant Major Reinecke took over the command. There was not much ammunition left. The grenade throwers had been knocked out. But two heavy and two light machine guns were still functioning.
Ten men from the disciplinary company got through. They brought up ammunition and canned rations. They had stretchers and they took the wounded away. Two of them were blown into the air within a hundred yards. The artillery fire prevented almost all liaison during the morning.
At noon it stopped raining. The sun came out. It grew hot at once. A crust formed on the mud. "They'll attack with light tanks," Rahe said. "Damn it, where are the anti-tank guns? We've got to have some or we're finished."
The firing continued. During the afternoon came another Junkers supply plane. It was escorted by Messerschmitts. The Stormoviks appeared and attacked. Two were shot down. Then two Messerschmitts came down. The ,Junkers did not get through. It dropped its bales farther back. The Messerschmitts fought; they were faster than the Russians, but there were three times as many Russian planes in the air. The Germans had to turn back.
Next day the dead began to smell. Graeber was sitting in the bunker. There were still twenty-two men. Reinecke had assembled about the same number on the other side. The rest were dead or wounded. There had been a hundred and twenty.
He ate and he cleaned his weapons. They were covered with mud. He thought about nothing. He was now simply a machine. He no longer knew anything of an earlier time. He simply sat there and waited and slept and woke and was ready to defend himself.
The tanks came on the following morning. Through the night, artillery, grenade throwers and machine guns had kept the line isolated. Telephone connections had been re-established several times but they were always broken again. The promised reinforcements did not come. The German artillery was now very weak: The Russian fire had been deadly. The bunker had been hit twice more; but it still held out. It was really no longer a bunker; it was a chunk of concrete, wallowing in the mud like a ship in a storm. A half-dozen near misses had shaken it loose. The men fell against the walls when it pitched.
Graeber had not been able to bind up the flesh wound in his shoulder. He had found some cognac and poured it on. The bunker went on pitching and reverberating. It was now no longer a ship in a storm: it was a U-boat rolling on the bottom of the ocean with engines dead. Time, too, had ceased to exist. It, too, had been knocked out of acti
on. The men huddled in the darkness and waited. There was no longer a city in Germany where you had been living a couple of weeks before. Nor had there ever been a furlough. There was no longer an Elisabeth. All that had been simply a wild dream between death and death—a half-hour of delirious sleep during which a rocket had soared into the sky and died out. Only the bunker existed now.
The light Russian tanks broke through. Infantry accompanied them and followed them. The company let the tanks pass and caught the infantry in a cross fire. The hot barrels of the machine guns burned their hands. They went on shooting. The Russian artillery could no longer fire on them. Two tanks turned, rolled toward them, and fired. It was easy for them; there was no defense. Their armor was too heavy for the machine guns. The men aimed at the slits; but hitting them was pure chance. The tanks maneuvered out of range and went on shooting. The bunker shook. Concrete screamed and splintered.
"Grenades!" shouted Reinecke. He gathered a string of them together, hung them over his shoulder and crawled to the exit. After the next salvo he crawled out under cover of the bunker.
"Two machine guns fire at the tanks," Rahe ordered. They tried to give Reinecke cover as he started to crawl in a circle toward the tanks in an effort to blow off their treads with the combined force of all his grenades. It was almost hopeless. Heavy Russian machine-gun fire had set in.