VIII

I know the barracks at the training camp out on the moors. This was where Himmelstoss decided to educate Tjaden. But I recognize hardly any of the people; as usual, there have been lots of changes. I remember seeing one or two when I was here before, but only in passing.

I carry out my duties mechanically. I spend most evenings at the Soldiers’ Club. There are newspapers there, but I don’t read them. There is a piano, though, and I like to play it. Two girls serve us, one of them quite young.

The camp is surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence. If you get back late from the Soldiers’ Club you’re supposed to have a pass. Mind you, if you get on to decent terms with the sentries you can slip through anyway.

Every day we practise company manoeuvres on the moors, amongst the juniper bushes and the silver birches. It’s all perfectly bearable, as long as you are not too demanding. You run forwards and throw yourself down, with your breath blowing the flowers and stalks of the heathland plants this way and that. Seen from that close to the ground, the sand is as pure as if it were in a laboratory, made up out of many tiny little grains. You get a strange urge to dig your fingers into it.

But best of all are the woodlands, with the birch trees at the edges. They are constantly changing colour. The trunks may be shining and dazzlingly white, with the pastel green of their leaves waving between them, silky and airy; and then in the next moment it all changes to an opalescent blue, with silver coming in from the edges and dabbing the green away; but then all at once it can deepen almost to black at one point, when a cloud crosses the sun. And this shadow flits along like a phantom between the trunks, and suddenly they are pale again, as it passes further across the moors to the horizon – and now the birch trees are like ceremonial banners, their white trunks standing out against the red-gold flame of their changing leaves.

I often become completely absorbed in this interplay of the most gentle lights and translucent shadow, so much so that I nearly miss some of the commands – when you are on your own you start to look at nature, and to love it. And I haven’t many contacts here, nor do I want any, beyond normal day-to-day living. You don’t get to know other people well enough for anything more than a chat and a game of cards in the evenings.

Next to our barracks is the big POW camp for Russian soldiers. It is separated from us by wire fencing, it is true, but the prisoners still manage to get over to us. They behave in a very shy and nervous manner, even though they are mostly big and bearded; because of this, they seem to us like meek and mistreated St Bernard dogs.

They creep around our barracks and raid the rubbish bins. Heaven knows what they find there. Our own rations are short and, more to the point, not very good, with things like turnips cut into six pieces and boiled, or carrot-tops that are still dirty. Brown-flecked potatoes are a great luxury, and the best we get is a watery rice soup which is supposed to have strips of beef in it. But they are cut so thinly that you can’t even find them.

In spite of this it all gets eaten, of course. On those occasions where someone is really so well off that he doesn’t need to wolf down everything he’s got, there are other men right beside him who are happy to take it off him. Only the absolute dregs that can’t be reached with a spoon are washed out and dumped into the garbage vats. Sometimes they are accompanied by a few turnip peelings, mouldy crusts of bread and all sorts of other refuse.

This cloudy murky water is what the POWs are after. They scoop it greedily out of the stinking vats and carry it away in tins under their tunics.

It is odd seeing these men – our enemies – at such close quarters. Their faces make you stop and think, good peasant faces, broad foreheads, broad noses, broad lips, broad hands, shaggy hair. They really ought to be ploughing or harvesting or apple-picking. They look even more good-natured than our own farmers from over in Frisia.

It is sad to watch their movements, to see them begging for food. They are all pretty weak, because they get just enough to keep them from starving. We have nowhere near enough to fill our own bellies – they have dysentery, and many of them show us their blood-stained shirt-tails, covertly and with nervous glances. Their backs and their heads are bowed, their knees bent, they look up at you with their heads on one side when they stick their hands out and beg, beg in those gentle, soft bass voices redolent of warm stoves in comfortable rooms back in their homeland.

Some of the men kick them so that they fall over – but only a few do that. Most don’t hurt them, they just walk past them. Occasionally, when they are especially persistent, it is true, you do lose your temper and give them a kick. If only they wouldn’t look at you the way they do – how much misery there can be in two little spots that you could cover with your thumbs, their eyes.

In the evenings they come across to the barracks to trade things. They will exchange anything they have for bread. Sometimes they are successful, because they have good boots, whereas ours are poor. The leather of their high boots is wonderfully soft, like suede. The farmers’ sons among us, who get butter and so on sent to them from home, can afford them. The price of a pair of boots is between two and three loaves of army-issue bread, or one loaf and a small salami.

But nearly all of the Russians have already handed over the things they had long ago. Now they only have shoddy stuff to wear and they try to barter little ornaments and carvings that they have made from bits of shrapnel or from the copper driving bands of shells. These things don’t bring much in, of course, even though they have taken a great amount of effort to make – they’ll go for nothing more than a couple of slices of bread. Our country people are hard and crafty when they are bargaining. They hold the piece of bread or the sausage right under the Russian’s nose until he goes pale with greed, he rolls his eyes, and he’ll agree to anything. Our men pack up their booty with all the ceremony they can muster, then slowly and carefully they cut themselves a hunk of bread from their own supplies, take a piece of the good, hard sausage with every mouthful, and get stuck into it, as a reward to themselves. It is annoying watching them having their evening meal, what you’d really like to do is clout their thick heads. They seldom share anything. To be fair, people just don’t get to know each other well enough.

I’m often on guard duty over the Russians. In the darkness you can make out their figures as they move about like sick storks, like huge birds. They come right up to the wire-netting and put their faces against it, with their fingers in the mesh. Often many of them will stand together. And they breathe in the winds that blow across from the moors and the woods.

Only rarely do they speak, and then only a word or two. They behave more humanely, I could almost think in a more brotherly manner towards one another, than we do here. But perhaps that is because they are unhappier than we are. And yet the war is over as far as they are concerned. Still, just waiting for the next bout of dysentery is no kind of life either.

The home guardsmen who are in charge of them say that they were more lively at the beginning. There were the kinds of dealings and conflicts between them that you always get, and apparently fists were raised and knives used to come out. Now they are dulled and indifferent, and most of them don’t even masturbate any more because they are too weak, although usually it is so bad that you get whole barracks at it at the same time.

They stand by the wire; often one staggers away, and then another one quickly takes his place in the line. Most of them are silent; only a few beg for dog-ends.

I watch their dark figures. Their beards blow in the wind. I know nothing about them except that they are prisoners-of-war, and that is precisely what shakes me. Their lives are anonymous and blameless; if I knew more about them, what they are called, how they live, what their hopes and fears are, then my feelings might have a focus and could turn into sympathy. But at the moment all I sense in them is the pain of the dumb animal, the fearful melancholy of life and the pitilessness of men.

An order has turned these silent figures into our enemies; an order could turn them into friends again. On some table, a document is signed by some people that none of us knows, and for years our main aim in life is the one thing that usually draws the condemnation of the whole world and incurs its severest punishment in law. How can anyone make distinctions like that looking at these silent men, with their faces like children and their beards like apostles? Any drill-corporal is a worse enemy to the recruits, any schoolmaster a worse enemy to his pupils than they are to us. And yet we would shoot at them again if they were free, and so would they at us.

Suddenly I’m frightened: I mustn’t think along those lines any more. That path leads to the abyss. It isn’t the right time yet – but I don’t want to lose those thoughts altogether, I’ll preserve them, keep them locked away until the war is over. My heart is pounding; could this be the goal, the greatness, the unique experience that I thought about in the trenches, that I was seeking as a reason for going on living after this universal catastrophe is over? Is this the task we must dedicate our lives to after the war, so that all the years of horror will have been worthwhile?

I take out my cigarettes, break each one in half and give them to the Russians. They bow, and then light them. Now little points of red are glowing in some of their faces. I find this comforting; they look like little windows in the houses of some village at night, revealing that behind them there are rooms which are havens of safety.

The days pass. One misty morning another Russian is buried; a few of them die every day now. I happen to be on sentry duty when he is laid to rest. The POWs sing a chorale; they sing in harmony and it sounds as if they were hardly voices at all, but as if an organ were playing, far away on the moor.

The funeral is soon over.

In the evening they are standing by the wire again, and the wind blows across to them from the birch woods. The stars are cold.

By now I’ve got to know a few of them who can speak German pretty well. One of them is a musician, and he tells me that he had been a violinist in Berlin. When he hears that I play the piano a little, he fetches his violin and plays. The others sit down and lean their backs against the wire-netting. He stands and plays, and often he has that far-away look that violinists get when they close their eyes, and then he strikes up a new rhythm on the instrument and smiles at me.

Presumably he is playing folk songs; the others hum the tunes with him. They are like dark hills, and the humming is deep, subterranean. The voice of the violin stands out like a slim girl above them, and it is bright and alone. The voices stop and the violin remains – it sounds thin in the night, as if it were freezing; you have to stand close by – it would probably be better in a room – out here it makes you sad to hear it wandering about, all alone.

I don’t get any Sunday passes because, after all, I’ve just had a long leave. So on the last Sunday before I go, my father and my oldest sister come to visit me. We spend the whole day sitting in the Soldiers’ Club. Where else could we go? We don’t want to go to the barracks. In the afternoon we go for a walk on the moor.

The hours drag by; we don’t know what to talk about. And so we talk about my mother’s illness. It’s now definite that it’s cancer, she’s already in hospital and waiting for an operation. The doctors hope that she will get better, but we’ve never heard of cancer being cured.

‘Which hospital is she in?’ I ask.

‘In the Queen Louisa,’ says my father.

‘What kind of a ward?’

‘Public. We’ll have to wait and see what the operation will cost. She wanted to go into the public ward herself. She said she’d have someone to talk to then. Besides, it’s cheaper.’

‘But then she’ll be with all those other people. I only hope she can get some sleep at night.’

My father nods. His face is drawn and full of lines. My mother has been ill a lot; it’s true that she has only ever gone into hospital when she was forced to, but for all that it has cost us a great deal of money, and my father’s life has really been taken up by it.

‘If only we knew what the operation will cost —’ he says.

‘Haven’t you asked?’

‘Not in so many words, you can’t really – you don’t want the doctor to turn against you, because he still has to operate on Mother.’

Yes, I think bitterly, that’s the way we are, the way poor people are. They don’t dare ask the price, and worry themselves half to death about it instead; but the others, the ones who can afford it, it’s perfectly natural to them to settle the price beforehand. The doctor isn’t going to turn against them in any case.

‘The dressings afterwards are so expensive, too,’ says my father.

‘Doesn’t the sickness fund pay anything towards it?’ I ask.

‘Your mother has already been ill for too long.’

‘Have you got any money, then?’

He shakes his head. ‘No, but I can do some more overtime.’

I know what he means: he’ll stand at his work-table until midnight and fold and glue and trim. At eight in the evening he’ll eat some of that far from nourishing stuff they get on their ration cards. After that he’ll take a powder for his headache and carry on working.

To cheer him up a bit, I tell him a few stories that come into my mind, army jokes and so on, where a general or a sergeant gets dropped in it.

Afterwards I see them both to the station. They give me a pot of jam and a parcel of potato pancakes that my mother managed to cook for me.

Then their train leaves and I walk back.

In the evening I spread some of the jam on a pancake, and eat a few. I don’t enjoy them. So I go out to give the pancakes to the Russians. Then it occurs to me that my mother cooked these herself, and that she was probably in pain when she was standing over the hot stove. I put the parcel back into my pack and only take two pancakes over to the Russians.