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They passed through several
towns, without plundering them, in orderly fashion, but not arrogantly at all,
smiling at the children and young women, and every so often they crossed paths
with soldiers on motorcycles flying along the road, sometimes heading east and
sometimes west, carrying orders for the division or the corps general staff.
They forged ahead of the artillery. Sometimes, when they reached the top of a
hill, they gazed east, toward where they imagined the front to be, and they
didn't see anything, just a landscape slumbering in summer's last splendor.
Toward the west, however, they could make out the dust cloud of the regimental
and divisional artillery as it strove to catch up with them.

On the third day of traveling, Hans's
regiment turned onto another dirt road. Just before nightfall they reached a
river. Past the river rose a forest of pines and poplars, and past the forest,
they were told, was a village where a group of Poles had taken a stand. They
assembled the machine guns and mortars and shot up flares, but there was no
response. Two assault companies crossed the river after midnight. In the forest
Hans and his comrades heard the hoot of an owl. When they came out on the far
side, they spied the village, like a black lump set or encrusted in the
darkness. The two companies divided into several groups and continued their
advance. At fifty yards from the first house the captain gave the order and
they all went running toward the village and one or two even seemed surprised
when they found it was deserted. The next day the regiment continued eastward,
along three different roads, parallel to the main route taken by the larger
part of the division.

Reiter's battalion came upon a
detachment of Poles occupying a bridge. The Germans demanded the surrender of
the Poles. The Poles refused and opened fire. After the battle, which lasted
scarcely ten minutes, one of Reiter's comrades returned with a broken nose,
which bled copiously. As he told it, after he had crossed the bridge he had
walked on with ten soldiers to the edge of the forest. Just at that moment, a Pole
dropped from a tree branch and began to beat him with his fists. Naturally,
Reiter's comrade didn't know what to do, because in the worst or best of cases,
call it the most extreme of cases, he had imagined being attacked with a knife
or a bayonet, if not shot, but he had never imagined being punched. When the
Pole hit him in the face, he felt anger, of course, but stronger than anger was
the surprise, the shock of it, which left him powerless to respond, whether
with his fists, like his attacker, or with his gun. He just stood there and
took a blow to the stomach, which didn't hurt, and then to the nose, which half
stunned him, and then, as he fell, he saw the Pole, the hazy silhouette of the
Pole, who instead of taking his gun, as someone more intelligent might have,
tried to run back into the forest, and the silhouette of one of his companions
shooting at the Pole, and then more shots and the silhouette of the Pole
falling riddled with bullets. When Hans and the rest of the battalion crossed
the bridge there were no enemy bodies lying by the side of the road and the
battalion's only casualties were two lightly wounded soldiers.

It was around this time, as
they walked under the sun or the gray clouds, enormous, endless gray clouds
that brought tidings of a fall to remember, and his battalion left behind
village after village, that Hans imagined that under his Wehrmacht uniform he
was wearing the suit or garb of a madman.

One afternoon his battalion
encountered a group of general staff officers. Which general staff? He didn't
know, but they were general staff officers. As his battalion marched along the
road, the officers had gathered on a hill very near the road and were gazing at
the sky, across which at that moment a squadron of planes was flying east, maybe
Stukas, maybe fighter planes; some of the officers pointed with their index
finger or with their whole hand, as if they were giving the planes the Heil
Hitler salute, while a few steps away, another officer, seemingly lost in
thought, watched as an orderly carefully laid out refreshments on a folding
table, refreshments that he unpacked from a large black box, like a special box
from some pharmaceutical company, the kind of box that holds dangerous
medicines or medicines that haven't been thoroughly tested, or even worse, like
a box from some scientific research center where glove-wearing German
scientists pack away something with the power to destroy the world and Germany
too.

Near the orderly and the
officer who watched as the orderly arranged the refreshments on the table was
another officer, this one in a Luftwaffe uniform, his back to everyone, bored
with watching the planes fly overhead, who held a long cigarette in one hand
and a book in the other, a simple operation but one that seemed to demand untold
efforts, because the breeze on the hill where everyone stood was constantly
fluttering the pages of the book so that the officer was unable to read and had
to use the hand that held the long cigarette to keep the pages from fluttering
(or ruffling or flipping), which only managed to make the situation worse,
because the cigarette or the cigarette's ash unfailingly scorched the pages or
the breeze scattered ash across them, which bothered the officer no end,
causing him to bend his head and blow, very carefully, because he was facing
into the wind and when he blew there was a risk the ashes would fly into his
eyes.

Near this Luftwaffe officer,
but sitting in two folding chairs, were a couple of old soldiers. One of them
looked like a general of the land forces. The other seemed to be dressed as a
lancer or hussar. They looked at each other and laughed, first the general and
then the lancer, and so on, back and forth, as if they had no idea what was
happening or as if they understood something that none of the general staff
officers stationed on the hill knew. Three cars were parked at the bottom of
the hill. Next to the cars, the drivers stood and smoked, and in one of the
cars was a woman, lovely and elegantly dressed, who bore a strong resemblance,
or so Reiter thought, to the daughter of the Baron Von Zumpe, Hugo Halder's
uncle.

The first real battle in which
Reiter took part was on the outskirts of Kutno, where the Poles were few and
poorly armed but showed no inclination to surrender. The clash didn't last
long, because in the end it turned out that the Poles did want to surrender and
the problem was they didn't know how. Reiter's assault group attacked a farm
and a forest where the enemy had concentrated the remains of its artillery. As
he watched the group leave, Captain Gercke thought that Reiter would probably
be killed. For the captain it was like seeing a giraffe go off in a pack of
wolves, coyotes, and hyenas. Reiter was so tall that any Polish conscript, even
the clumsiest, would surely target him.

Two German soldiers were killed
in the attack on the farm and five others were wounded. In the attack on the
forest, another German soldier was killed and three more were wounded. Nothing
happened to Reiter. That night, the sergeant who commanded the group told the
captain that far from serving as an easy target, Reiter had somehow frightened
the other side. How? asked the captain, by shouting? by cursing? by his
ruthlessness? maybe he had frightened them because in combat he was
transformed? transformed into a Teutonic warrior without fear or mercy? or
maybe a hunter, the primal hunter inside all of us, wily, fast, always a step
ahead of his prey?

To which the sergeant, after
thinking a moment, replied no, it wasn't exactly that, Reiter, he said, was different,
but actually he was the same person as always, the person everyone knew, what
happened was that he had gone into combat as if he wasn't going into combat, as
if he wasn't there or the quarrel wasn't with him, which didn't mean he failed
to follow orders or disobeyed orders, it wasn't that at all, nor was he in a
trance, some soldiers, paralyzed by fear, go into a trance, but it isn't a
trance, it's just fear, anyway, he, the sergeant, wasn't sure what it was, but
Reiter had something evident even to the enemy, who shot at him several times
and never hit him, to their increasing dismay.

The 79th Division kept fighting
on the outskirts of Kutno, but Reiter didn't take part in another skirmish.
Before the end of September the whole division was transferred, this time by
train, to the western border, to join the rest of the 10th Infantry Corps.

From October 1939 to June 1940
they didn't budge. Ahead was the Maginot Line, though they couldn't see it from
where they lay hidden in forests and orchards. Life grew calm: the soldiers
listened to the radio, ate, drank beer, wrote letters, slept. Some talked about
the day they would have to march straight for the concrete fortifications of
the French. Those who listened laughed nervously, told jokes, swapped stories
about their families.

One night someone told them
that
Denmark
and
Norway
had
surrendered. That night Hans dreamed of his father. He saw the one-legged man,
wrapped in his old military cloak, staring out at the Baltic and wondering
where the
island
of
Prussia
had hidden
itself.

Sometimes Captain Gercke came
to talk to Hans for a while. The captain asked whether he was afraid of dying.
What kind of question is that, Captain? said Reiter, of course I'm afraid. When
the captain heard this, he gave him a long stare and then said in a low voice,
as if talking to himself:

"You goddamn liar, I don't
believe you, you can't fool me. You're not afraid of anything!"

Then the captain would go talk
to other soldiers and his mood changed depending on the soldier he was talking
to. Around this time his sergeant was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class, for
valor in combat in
Poland
.
They celebrated by drinking beer. At night Hans left the makeshift barracks and
lay on his back on the cold grass outside to watch the stars. The chill didn't
seem to bother him much. He often thought about his family, about little Lotte,
who by then would be ten, in school. Sometimes, without bitterness, he
regretted having abandoned his studies so early, because he sensed vaguely that
he might have had a better life if he had kept at them.

At the same time, he wasn't
unhappy as a soldier and he felt no need or perhaps wasn't able to think
seriously about the future. Sometimes, alone or with his companions, he
pretended he was a diver, strolling along the bottom of the sea again. No one
noticed, of course, although if they had watched Reiter's movements more
carefully, something might have given him away: a slight difference in the way
he walked, the way he breathed, the way he gazed around him. A certain
prudence, each step premeditated, his breathing measured, a glassiness of the
corneas, as if his eyes were swelling from an insufficient supply of oxygen, or
as if, solely at these moments, all his sangfroid deserted him and he found
himself suddenly
unable to contain his tears, which meanwhile never quite spilled over.

Around this time, as they were
waiting, a soldier from Reiter's battalion went mad. He said he could hear
radio transmissions from the German side, and also, more curiously, the French.
This soldier's name was Gus-tav and he was twenty, the same age as Reiter, and
he had never been assigned to the battalion's communications team. The doctor,
a tired-looking man from
Munich
,
examined him and said that Gustav had experienced an episode of auditory
schizophrenia, which consisted of hearing voices in the head, and prescribed
cold baths and tranquilizers. Gustav's case, however, differed in one critical
respect from most cases of auditory schizophrenia: usually the voices the
patient hears are directed at him, they talk to him or berate him, whereas in
Gustav's case the voices simply issued orders, they belonged to soldiers,
scouts, lieutenants giving their daily reports, colonels speaking by phone to
generals, quartermasters demanding one hundred pounds of flour, pilots
delivering the weather report. The first week of treatment Gustav seemed to
improve. He went about in a slight stupor and he resisted the cold baths, but
he no longer shouted or claimed his soul was being poisoned. The second week he
escaped from the field hospital and hanged himself from a tree.

For the 79th Infantry Division
there was nothing epic about the war on the western front. In June, after the
Somme offensive, they crossed the Maginot Line with few surprises and participated
in the siege of a few thousand French soldiers near
Nancy
. Then the division was quartered in
Normandy
.

During the train trip Hans
heard an odd story about a soldier of the 79th who had gotten lost in the
tunnels of the Maginot Line. The section of tunnel he was lost in, as far as
the soldier could tell, was called the Charles Sector. The soldier, of course,
had nerves of steel, or so it was told, and he kept searching for a way to the
surface. After walking some five hundred yards underground he came to the
Catherine Sector. The Catherine Sector, it goes without saying, was in no way
different from the Charles Sector, except for the signs. After walking half a
mile, he got to the Jules Sector. By now the soldier was nervous and his
imagination had begun to wander. He imagined himself imprisoned forever in
those underground passageways, with no comrade coming to his aid. He wanted to
yell, and although at first he restrained himself, for fear of alerting any
French soldiers still hiding nearby, at last he gave in to the urge and began
to shout at the top of his lungs. But no one answered and he kept walking, in
the hope that at some point he'd find the way out. He left behind the Jules
Sector and entered the Claudine Sector. Then came the Emile Sector, the Marie
Sector, the Jean-Pierre Sector, the Berenice Sector, the Andre Sector, the
Sylvie Sector. When he got to the Sylvie Sector, the soldier made a discovery
(which anyone else would've made much sooner). He noticed the curious neatness
of the nearly immaculate passageways. Then he began to think about the
usefulness of the passageways, that is their military usefulness, and he came
to the conclusion that they were of absolutely no use and there had probably
never been soldiers here.