The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (74 page)

“Want a drink?” asked the girl.

“Yes, please, Cadette, a beer.”

“Here’s to you,” he said. “To your cigarettes, buddy …”

I paid when he did, seeing that he had quickly downed his beer and wanted to be off; I stepped up to the counter beside him as he put on his cap again. “D’you think you could take my stuff along?” I asked.

Assuming a rather ponderous expression, he looked first at my pack and bag and then said, “Mind you, it’s a pretty wobbly old bike, an old rattletrap, but okay”—he made a great show of squaring his
shoulders—“I wouldn’t let a fellow soldier kill himself for nothing. So you’re joining our outfit?”

“Yes,” I said, “third company.”

“Right, third, that’s us. Okay, let’s get your stuff loaded.”

Feeling very envious, I watched him sail off. Fortunately the road was shady. On the left was dense forest, starting at Cadette’s house and bordering the road, and to the right side of the smooth asphalt road stood a few houses, apparently still occupied. Next to one of them some soldiers’ washing was hanging on a line: shirts, underpants, and the kind of socks—gray with horizontal white stripes—that are scattered over half the world. I hurried along, for, in addition to some nervousness about my new duties, I also felt a certain curiosity. There was always something exciting about a transfer. I still hadn’t caught sight of the sea, but on the map shown me by the sergeant at battalion headquarters, the dot indicating the company’s orderly room had been very close to that stirring dot-and-dash line marked “Main Battle Line—High Tide Line.” I was impatient to see the sea again after three years.

Five minutes later the forest came to an end. On both sides of the road, those lush meadows again, and at last, beyond a gentle rise, I saw the house beside a sandy path. It looked quite charming, like a rich man’s comfortable weekend cottage. To the right of the road was another tavern, a kind of summer café built of wood with a covered veranda; in the background, more buildings; then, for the first time since noon I saw sergeants’ stars again among corporals’ braid—a bunch of soldiers standing around a field kitchen—and all romantic notions of a lovely summer on the Atlantic coast vanished. I saluted a few sergeants who were standing by a shed watching the food distribution, and finally I reached the orderly room.

After walking up a few steps, the first thing I saw was my pack lying on the floor. There was a pervasive, musty smell of heat and dry timbers. I heard voices, among them Willi’s calling out “Here!” someplace where mail was evidently being distributed. I entered the room that had a sign saying F
IELD
P
OST
O
FFICE
No.—. Well, that was the number I was to see so often on the postcards I later accepted here for your brother and took to Larnton. For you too that number must be unforgettable.

After completing the ritual of saluting at the door, I immediately heard a voice speaking in a Saxonian accent. I looked in that direction and saw a first lieutenant whose curly coal-black hair was cut in a rather fancy style, and my first impression was that the little red ribbon of his Iron Cross set off his glossy hair to a T. He looked about forty, and he too had a mustache, a black one, and at the sight of that black mustache it crossed my mind how magnificently that black in turn set off the silver of his Assault Medal.

“Aha,” said this person on catching sight of me, not as if he were bawling me out but rather in a reproachful, schoolmasterly tone, and indeed half an hour later I learned that he was a schoolteacher. At the same time I became aware of the not unfriendly face of a first sergeant, still young, and the impassive countenance of a clerk who looked pleasant enough.

So, “Aha,” said this person, “here we have the lord and master who feels too weak to carry his pack for a distance of half a mile—right?”

With his last words he opened his eyes wide, giving them a theatrical glint, and looked at me challengingly.

“Sir!” I said, standing to attention. “I could see no point in letting my comrade ride an empty bicycle while I carried the pack that I had already lugged all the way from Crutelles.”

“All the way from Crutelles!” he repeated sarcastically. The topkick burst out laughing.

“Don’t laugh, Fischer,” the first lieutenant snapped at him. “These goddamn intellectual bastards who’ve been on special assignment for years are a cheeky bunch.” Then he turned to me. “So you, a Pfc, take the liberty of thinking, using your head, if I have understood you properly—hm?”

I had become so accustomed to quasi-civilian manners that I almost nodded and said, “That’s right.” I suppressed it and uttered the regulation “Yessir.”

“I see. And weren’t you taught the opposite, that you’re not supposed to use your head—hm?”

“No,” I replied, “in my last unit I was sometimes required to use my head.”

“Well!” he said, surprised, and for a moment he looked like a boxer on the receiving end of a well-placed blow. But suddenly he bellowed,
“There’ll be none of that here, d’you hear me? No more thinking, understand? No more using your head, get it?”

“Yessir,” I said.

“And what’s more, remember that a soldier never allows himself to be separated from his pack.” He turned his cheap, fiery gaze away from me, toward the topkick, and asked brusquely, “Where’ll we put him?” The topkick pulled a list out of a drawer, and the first lieutenant turned his Storm Trooper eyes back to me (I later found out that he really had been a platoon leader with the Storm Troopers in his hometown). “What training have you had?” he asked me. “I mean military, of course.”

“Rifleman,” I said, “sir, and telephone operator.”

“Balls,” he said furiously, “we have enough telephone operators, never enough riflemen.”

“It’s Larnton’s turn for replacements,” said the topkick.

“Good. We’ll send him to Herr Schelling. Anything else? Tomorrow’s schedule is clear, ammunition to be taken to the base for live firing. Okay?”

“Yessir,” said the topkick.

I flung open the door, stood at attention, and stepped aside for the schoolteacher. He did not deign to look my way again.

“For Chrissake!” cried the topkick when the sound of footsteps outside had died away. “I could’ve hugged you when I heard you were from the Rhineland!”

He shook my hand; I looked into his face and felt glad. He pointed to the clerk, who was watching us with a smile.

“Schmidt,” he said, “at least Schmidt’s from Berlin. We do have a few fellows from Berlin, but otherwise they’re a bunch of yokels.”

I handed him the envelope containing my papers, which I had closed and sealed myself. The clerk opened it, read and sorted the papers, the topkick asked me how things were at home, when I had last seen Cologne, his home town, and when I’d been on leave.

Soon after that he left for supper, and I was alone with the pleasant clerk. I asked him about the general atmosphere, the daily routine, exchanged a few mutual, skeptical observations about the war and the company commander, and fifteen minutes later I found myself walking back along the same road. Again I stopped by Cadette’s, again I had a beer and gave her a cigarette.

Then I walked down that avenue that had so fascinated me. I still hadn’t caught sight of the sea—from the orderly room it had been hidden by the forest; besides, I had been looking at the first lieutenant’s pale-gray uniform.

But it was bound to come soon now. The road ran like a narrow ribbon between the minefields, and I felt as if I were running straight into a trap. On both sides stood attractive little houses, their gardens run wild; then the road opened up, and on the left there appeared a fair-sized, completely pillaged building that looked like a school. At last I saw the pale strip of beach … There was hardly any water to be seen, the coast being so flat at that point that at low tide the sea receded for more than half a mile. In the distance—indescribably far away, it seemed—I saw a pale, broad tongue, the narrow wave of foam that the sea pushes ahead or drags behind itself, and beyond that an equally narrow strip of gray: the water. And otherwise only sand, sand, and the pale sky that was also burned gray. I felt an uprush of disappointment at having landed in a dry infinity, for when I pulled back my gaze from the distance into which it had plunged, all I saw close by, too, was sand, dunes sparsely covered with grass, and among them the ruins of houses that had obviously been dynamited—and more sand …

And nowhere was there the bunker I had expected to find. Fortunately a soldier with a rifle was standing on a dune next to a spiked barrier across the road; a concrete path led up to him. I followed it. The steel helmet and the muzzle of the rifle grew bigger and more distinct, and on reaching the top I discovered a strange little colony. It looked almost like a fishing village where the nets are hung up to dry in the evening. These were camouflage nets covering guns and barracks, and the wooden huts were part of the famous Atlantic Wall in the summer of 1943 at a strategically vulnerable point. I walked toward the sentry, and when I asked him where I could find Lieutenant Schelling, he pointed with a bored expression to a hut slightly higher up, but before I had reached it, he called after me, “By the way, it’s
First
Lieutenant, bud; don’t get it wrong!”

“What?” I asked.

“He’s a first lieutenant—not that he cares, but that’s what he is. You might as well know.”

I was amazed to find a first lieutenant heading a platoon. In 1943, officers were pretty thin on the ground, and it seemed extraordinary to me that this tiny base, which could, if necessary, have been in the charge of a sergeant, should be under the command of a first lieutenant.

The first person I saw as I entered the hut was Willi. He was alone, reading a letter.

“Ah,” he exclaimed, “they’ve sent you to us!”

“Yes.”

Willi laid the letter aside, pushing it under a telephone: he had opened the window, and there was a breeze from the sea.

“Let’s see,” said Willi, “if the first lieutenant is available.” He knocked on the door, someone called out—reluctantly, it seemed to me—“Come in!” Willi opened the door and into the darkened room announced my arrival. A croaky voice said, “Very well—show him in.” I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

The window was covered by a blanket, and I could vaguely make out a bed with a long, gray figure lying on it, a cupboard, a table, and a few unidentifiable pictures on the walls.

I felt enormously heartened by the way this man immediately stood up as I entered. That may seem trivial to you, but, believe me, when one’s been a soldier in this army for many years, always having to deal with so-called superiors, one develops an infallible instinct for the forms of human relationships. If you knew how many of your friends—I need only think of my own, or take any pleasant young man who you’re sure would never hurt a fly—if you knew how he used to behave toward so-called inferiors, I believe you would blush with shame on his behalf …

Your brother was the first officer I ran across in five years of whom I can claim that he moved with complete confidence on the narrow borderline of simultaneous authority and humility, as befits a superior. No doubt you’re familiar with the other kind, those pipsqueak lieutenants: totally ignorant, brainless, and not even competent in their military, let alone soldierly, craft, sustained solely by the authority of their two shoulder straps and, last but not least, of their elegant boots. And you may grasp the extent of the uniform’s demonic power from the fact that this huge army relied exclusively on this idiotic perversion of values, for even before 1943, the original illusory conception
had proven as void and insubstantial as a wizened toy balloon lying trampled on a fairground.

Try to imagine any one of your brother’s many contemporaries or classmates—leaving aside Schnecker—any one of them, I say, a nice kind man whose behavior is invariably decent and blameless, and I tell you: in the barracks he’s a swine! And that army carted its barracks all across Europe …

That’s how X and Y were: X, who today stifles his bitterness over his temporarily obsolete career with American cigarettes and vague political aspirations, meanwhile getting together regularly with his former comrades to reminisce about how they used to “show them a thing or two”; and Y, who is grimly preparing himself to become a district attorney or a high-school teacher—either of which occupations offers enough scope for bullying creatures even more defenseless than soldiers: children and the poor.

Your brother, as I said, got up from his bed for me. I need hardly describe him to you: tall and slim, with a slight stoop at that time, his blue eyes full of sadness, his uniform bare of any decorations. He was about my age, twenty-five or -six, and, although it may seem ridiculous to you, a first lieutenant’s star on that figure seemed to me fraught with ominous significance. A first lieutenant on that tiny base in the dunes, with a garrison of twenty-five men, the commander of a bastion which at that stage of the war could well have been entrusted to a sergeant: there must be some story behind that.

He repeated my name in his rather husky voice.

“You will remain here,” he said after looking me briefly in the eyes. “I need an orderly; my present one is going on leave tomorrow. Do you understand?”

“Yessir,” I said.

“Good. Please have yourself briefed. You will share telephone duty with the stretcher bearer. In addition, you will be required to make two bicycle trips a day to company headquarters. And then”—he was silent for a moment and looked at me again—“you will have noticed on the
way here that we are in a mousetrap, and no one is allowed to leave it other than on duty without my knowledge. There’s no such thing as time off. Do you understand?”

“Yessir,” I said.

“Good. Please have the orderly explain all practical matters to you.”

His eyes met mine again. I took this for a silent dismissal, saluted, and left.

On this front of the Atlantic coast, my dear sir, a very special kind of warfare was being carried on, the war against boredom. Try to imagine a front extending from Norway to the Bay of Biscay and facing no opponent other than the sea. And this front was equipped like any other where each day saw wounded and dead, men screaming and dying, men horrifyingly mute. But here everything was completely frozen. Night after night, thousands of soldiers stood on guard waiting for an enemy who never came and whose coming some of them positively craved. Year after year, night after night, thousands stood there facing the sea, that monster which is eternally the same, eternally the same, comes and goes, comes and goes, is always smiling, always smiling with a serenity fit to induce a man to plunge headlong into it. An eternal smile; the sea, even when storm-tossed, always had something like laughter about it, wild laughter devoid of mockery, but still laughter. The sea was laughing at us, that was it. There stood the guns, mortars, machine guns; rifles by the hundred thousand lay there on parapets or were lugged back and forth by plodding sentries. Nothing. Year after year the same. Every evening a password to be memorized plus the various flare signals, hand grenades placed in readiness—hand grenades against the sea! During the day, instruction in the use of guns, mortars, machine guns, and other weapons, and drill on the road behind the dunes, year after year. Year after year. During the day, almost eight hours’ duty, and at night at least four hours’ sentry duty. The never-ending battle against the sand that relentlessly penetrated the farthest, most inaccessible crack of every weapon and never failed to be discovered by some bored corporal’s eye. And somewhere beyond the horizon, far, far, incredibly far away, there was an enemy in whom it was impossible to believe—far, far away, an enemy from whom the sea seemed to have
learned its laughter. All that lay like a pall of apathy over even the most idyllic little bays, driving us to drink.