The Collected Stories of Heinrich Boll (79 page)

“You’re as strong as ever in syntax, it seems.”

“Stronger, I hope. I’ve had plenty of time to practice. You fellows saw to that.”

They both fell silent, and I knew that your brother was standing there, his hands clasped behind his back, calmly looking Schnecker in the eye.

“Listen to me carefully,” Schnecker resumed. “I have been at great pains to clear your name with the regiment and to see that the old affair is forgotten and you’re put in command here. That sissy will probably be spending six months in the hospital again and then go on leave and arrive back here with a brand-new stomach ulcer. There were some nasty types who would have liked to see you take orders from a junior lieutenant. I prevented that.”

“I wouldn’t have cared.”

“Why do you think I did that for you?”

“To set a trap for me.”

The captain gave a devilish laugh. “There couldn’t have been any better trap for you than the mousetrap of Larnton! You could have grown old there. But no”—he raised his voice—“you can’t think of anything better to do, on the very first day, the very first day, than to send in almost word for word the same report that was the original reason for your being found unfit to command a company. You can think of nothing better to do than worry about margarine, bread, and sugar for your men. It really does look as if you were out to create difficulties.”

“I can’t think of anything more important here than the bread, margarine, and sugar for my men. Unfortunately I cannot improve the fortifications at my own expense. That would probably be the next priority.”

“You are simply making yourself ridiculous. And, furthermore, on the very first day, another of your requests to be transferred to Russia. Don’t worry—the Russian front still needs so many officers that your turn will come.”

“What are you going to do with my report about the rations?” your brother asked quietly.

“I shall tear it up.”

“No, you won’t!” your brother shouted, and I could hear them moving toward each other.

“Then I’ll wipe my ass with it!” shouted the captain furiously.

“Here”—there was a brief pause—“here,” he cried again, “look at this, read this scrap of paper. It was found yesterday on a carrier pigeon shot down in the sector of our first company. ‘The morale of the troops is bad, and the troops are hungry.’ Needless to say, it is extremely flattering for me as battalion commander, in the eyes of the regiment and
the division, when a carrier pigeon that must have been released in my sector bears a message of that kind. That is indeed extremely flattering, and on top of that you also produce your idiotic report that”—he gave his voice a sarcastic undertone and was obviously quoting—“the troops believe they are constantly being done out of small but regular quantities of fat, sugar, and bread; that the quartermaster sergeants declared that, on the basis of the quantities they received, they were simply unable to issue the prescribed rations; and that”—his voice became shrill—“this naturally served further to undermine the low morale of the quartermaster sergeants, for where there was an actual shortage of one ounce it was easy enough to pilfer two ounces. Oh, all that’s just great for me!”

“The question is whether it’s untrue.” Your brother’s voice was calm again.

“Untrue! We’re not here to seek the truth, which anyway doesn’t exist. We’re here to win the war.”

“And apparently that can only be done by constantly gypping hungry soldiers, right?”

This was followed by a terrible silence, and they must have moved even closer together.

“I daresay you believe,” came Schnecker’s hoarse voice at last, “that I am eating your men’s margarine and sugar myself, don’t you?”

Your brother said nothing.

“Do you believe that? I said, Do you believe that?” His voice seemed to be exploding with rage.

“Not directly, of course.”

“Indirectly, then—right?”

“Now you listen to me.” Your brother’s voice was very calm. “This paymaster is not only a fool, he’s also a bastard. You wouldn’t deny that?”

“Of course not. But there’s no way I can get rid of the fellow.”

“You don’t have to. You just have to make him watch his step. And you can’t do that, of course, because you depend on him for your extra supplies of booze, to which, of course, you’re not entitled either. You see, you need to get drunk every day. I know—on a captain’s pay one can get good and drunk three times a month at the most—I know that too. And then, of course, you need women. You’re a good-looking fellow, a ladies’ man, as they say. There you are, then. There’s no way you
can get at the paymaster. Those fellows are businessmen; in other words they’ve covered themselves in every possible direction. And you know I’m right, don’t you?”

The terrible part was that I couldn’t see anything, and now I couldn’t hear anything either, and at that moment, lying out there under the window sill, I realized that eavesdropping is horrible.

What was Schnecker doing, for God’s sake? Was he sitting there slumped in his chair, or was he standing, pistol in hand, ready to shoot your brother at any moment? I lay there as if dead, not daring to stir or crawl away …

Again came your brother’s voice. “You must try to see my point,” he said. “I can’t imagine anything worse than cheating a soldier out of his rations or his sleep. After all, we in our officer’s uniforms represent the power that compels these men to submit to being killed or being bored to death. That burden is quite enough for me. I wouldn’t like the added responsibility of making them suffer more hunger than is provided for by the system.” He fell silent again; then after a while his voice continued, heavier and more somber than before. “In a way it’s too bad that I’m going to die—otherwise I’d look forward to writing a philosophical treatise on the ounce after the war.”

Now I realized that Schnecker had been standing there grinning all the time, his arms folded. He burst into a peal of laughter, as if a pent-up flood were being released.

“Who would have believed it?” he said in a strong, firm voice. “And from the lips of someone wearing the uniform of a German officer! Who would have believed it?” Again that ringing laughter.

“Come now”—I could tell from his voice that he was tightening his belt and straightening up—“let’s get back to business. For all I care, the report can go to regimental headquarters. For all I care, make yourself ridiculous, make yourself a laughingstock for the sake of three ounces of margarine, for the sake of three ounces that has to be withheld. And another thing: did you have to pick the rudest bastard in the battalion for your orderly and sit here boozing with him in the afternoon while you were both still on duty?”

Your brother was evidently looking at him in silence; then he laughed. “Oh, of course,” he said, “that’s right—it was four-thirty when you arrived. I leave it to you to file a counterreport.”

After hearing the captain get into his car, I crawled back into the shelter of some nearby bushes, stood up, and hurried off toward the forest that blocked the view of the sea. Leaning against the trunk of a fir tree, I looked out over the waves as they rolled slowly in. It was very quiet, the air was soft, and there was nothing in sight but the water and the stretch of sand in front of it that was slowly, very slowly being covered by the tide; the barbed wire that had been drawn along the tide line was the only reminder of the war.

A painful sadness, such as I had never known before, welled up in me. There is no justice, I thought; there is no such thing as an ounce. The ounce is a fiction, an ounce is nothing, and yet they say: It is an ounce! And on this nothing, on this ounce, they all grow rich. They all grow rich solely on the ounce, so it must be something, that ounce. That’s why there have to be so many poor, victimized people, because an ounce is so little and so many ounces are needed to make a rich man rich; that’s why there have to be all those millions of gray, gaunt figures obediently marching across Europe with their rifles on their backs, just so the rats can get fat on their only tasty food—the ounce. There must be vast numbers of those figures that can be stuffed into a freight car designed to hold “40 soldiers or 8 horses”—simply because the horses are bigger than the soldiers, bigger and more valuable.

I was twenty-five at the time, sir. I was no innocent, I was a trooper like all the rest; I believed in nothing but the sausage on my bread, as we used to say, in wine and tobacco. At least, I believed that was all I believed. But where did that unutterable sadness come from, weighing down my heart like lead, paralyzing me so that I felt too tired even to put my hand in my pocket to dig out matches and cigarettes?

I had been fifteen when the swastika was suspended like a huge black spider in the sky over Germany.

Now I wished I could travel across the sea, far, far away to another world where there were no uniforms, no policemen, no war; but I was trapped in this cage called Europe. There was no escape: starting from this coast I could travel eastward for thousands of miles, eastward to the end of this insane continent, all the way to Vladivostok, and there would be no life anywhere.

In that hour I would have sold all the rest of my life to sink into the arms of that girl who had said, “I’m always here”—and who hadn’t been there after all.

As dusk fell, I crept back home, lay down on my bed, and abandoned myself to the sluggish tide of a leaden despair that left no room even for desire. Not a sound was to be heard in our cottage. From the barracks I could hear faint singing. I was incapable of thinking or doing anything, I was at the end of my tether.

Two days later we were already on our way to Russia.

When I woke up next morning, everything was normal. From the direction of the company kitchen I could hear the men whose job it was to take coffee to their barracks. In your brother’s room all was quiet. It was seven o’clock. I got up, went into our own little kitchen, set the frying pan on the electric hotplate, put some fat in it, took the loaf of bread out of the drawer, and began to slice it. As the fat melted, I beat up the eggs in a cup with some cream and stirred them around in the pan. Then I prepared the tray, putting two plates, cups, and knives on it, and went off to the company kitchen.

The mornings were always peaceful. The whole little place had the atmosphere of a somewhat run-down summer camp. That morning the air was already warm, and the soldiers were standing outside their barracks, stripped to the waist and washing.

The topkick was sitting in the kitchen, discussing with the cook how to use up the rest of the cow. He was markedly cooler toward me.

“Please tell the CO,” he called out to me while I was filling my mess tin at the coffee urn, “that church services have been scheduled for this afternoon, both denominations, here. The outposts have been notified.”

“Yessir,” I replied.

The cook also threw me a suspicious glance. He hadn’t forgiven me for doing him out of his profit of five hundred francs on the cow, and he probably assumed I’d told your brother about it.

As I left the kitchen, Schmidt called across to me from the orderly room, “We need a dispatch runner for nine o’clock to pick up special orders from the battalion—would you be interested?”

I looked into Schmidt’s placid, amiable face. “Yes,” I said. All I could see was the pale face of the girl, and I imagined myself pressing my mouth onto her cheeks, her lips, and the little hollow at the base of her neck.

“Yes,” I repeated.

As I approached our quarters, I could already see your brother’s face, covered with shaving soap, at the window. It was seven-thirty.

Shortly after that, I carried coffee, bread, and eggs into the room and told your brother about the church services and that I had been ordered for nine o’clock to ride over to battalion headquarters.

“Yes,” he said as he put on his tunic, “there’s something in the air; maybe the cow will be our farewell dinner.”

“Do you really think so?” I asked doubtfully.

“Things look bad in Russia.”

We sat down. I poured the coffee and we spread scrambled egg on the bread, but first I lit a cigarette. It was the first real breakfast in a long time. The wide, low window toward the north was open, the air, cool yet soft, streamed into the room, and one could see far out over the water.

Your brother, like me, picked up the bread and promptly put it down again, swallowed a mouthful of coffee, and suddenly began to speak in a rapid, almost droning voice:

“I daresay you know that I was considered unfit to lead a company because the very first time I was put in charge of one, I decided to get to the bottom of all those discrepancies in the issuing of rations. You see, my first day as CO, each man was supposed to receive twenty-five ounces of butter. A straightforward calculation: ten men one package, that’s all. But oddly enough there was one package for every twelve men. At the time my company, including all subordinate units, consisted of a hundred and eighty men. That meant that, at fifteen times twelve men, somewhere along the line a pound and a half had gone astray. I immediately summoned my quartermaster sergeant, and his excuse was that deliveries had been short. In his presence I phoned the fellow in charge of provisions at battalion headquarters, and he admitted that he had had to short two packages per company because that was all he had received. So my quartermaster sergeant had already kept back one package; at least I had my hands on him—it’s always easy to catch the small fry. I still had to clarify how it was possible for the division to have short-shipped five pounds of butter for the five ration-drawing units of our battalion.

“I kept phoning those guys till they almost went out of their minds. I made them spend hours recalculating, and it turned out that each unit
had actually had to be shorted three pounds because the butter had turned rancid. Replacements were promised. After a phone bombardment of almost two days I finally had the battalion quartermaster on the hook with a shortage of two pounds. So far so good. Now just figure out how many battalions, sections, ration-drawing units, there are to a division. Oddly enough, for the next three days full rations were issued. Butter and margarine seemed to have lost their tendency to turn rancid. But I persisted. On the fourth day, a shortage again. This time, company and battalion quartermaster sergeants had clean hands. Wherever a shell explodes close by, people are scared, but farther back … Well, I had a phone. You can imagine how those fellows hated me; I was relentless. If one of the men told me something had gone bad, I contacted his superiors and asked whether this had been reported and whether the facts had been investigated. But I got nowhere. It didn’t work. The soldiers never received their full rations for more than four consecutive days. The funny thing was that I also became unpopular in my own company; the topkick and the sergeant were scared and thought I was crazy. Luckily I had won a few officers over to my side. I would phone, or write a report, every day if so much as a single ounce of jam was short. Well, the upshot was that I personally punched the divisional quartermaster in the nose: I need hardly tell you that fellow was fat as a bedbug in an overcrowded barracks. The officers let me down, saying it was futile to fight the administration, it was a clique, and so on.”