The Cross of Iron (34 page)

‘Go right ahead,’ Dorn said. He adjusted his glasses and was all attention.

‘It don’t cost anything to ask,’ Steiner said. He lowered his voice, and the flippancy disappeared from his tone. ‘Is there anything one can do to help oneself forget?’

Dorn’s thin face became grave. He looked away from Steiner and his glance lingered on the wine goblets. They were part of a precious table service; more than once in the course of the evening he had marvelled that things of this sort existed in Russia. Carefully, he picked up one of the thin-stemmed glasses, drank the remaining wine, and raised it to the candlelight. He turned it swiftly between his fingers. The polished crystal sparkled. Then he put it down on the table and met Steiner’s eyes. ‘There’s the answer,’ Dorn said. ‘Live and be alive, see and be seen, and a few other things—but you know that yourself.’

The conversation at the table had revived. The men were growing boisterous now. Anselm filled his glass and turned to Steiner: ‘What did the old man want of you?’

‘Nothing in particular. I had to finish my report.’

They spoke disparagingly of Stransky for a while. ‘We’ll see to him,’ Anselm boasted. ‘Just wait till he’s been here a few weeks; we’ll trim him down. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about him for the next two weeks. What’s the name of the place they’re sending you to?’

‘Gursuf,’ Steiner replied.

Anselm sighed enviously. ‘Must be some hot women there, eh?’

‘Maybe, I don’t care. I want to recuperate.’

Launched now on their favourite topic, the men talked about women through the next few bottles. Later they began to sing. When the general boisterousness had reached its height, Steiner went out of the house. Slowly he strolled along the dark road, taking deep breaths of the clear night air. After a while he heard footsteps behind him. He turned and recognized Dorn, who came up quickly and stopped. ‘Am I in the way?’ he asked.

Steiner suppressed a rude reply and thrust his hands into his pockets. ‘Hardly. What brings you out?’

‘I needed a little air.’

They walked side by side back toward the house. ‘We might sit down for a while up there,’ Steiner said, indicating the hill that rose up behind the house. Half-way to the top they dropped to the ground and looked silently down at the buildings. The men’s loud singing reached their ears. Steiner closed his eyes.

Im Feldquartier auf hartem Stein 
*

Streck’ ich die müden Glieder 

Und sende in die Nacht hinein 

Der Liebsten meine Lieder.

As he listened to the time-honoured soldier’s song, he felt a beneficent tiredness that neutralized all the bitterness within him and restored a profound sense of peace. The mild night air stirred memories, aroused nostalgia and a rare gladness. For the first time he felt pleasure at the thought of two weeks of rest in the Crimea. An impatience to be there took hold of him. To see the sea stretching before him—he could hardly wait. Again he gave ear to the singing. Hollerbach’s tenor rose distinctly above the voices of the others:

Vielleicht werd’ ich bald bei dir sein, 

Annemarie.

Vielleicht scharrt man schon morgen ein 

Die ganze Kompanie, die ganze Kompanie.
*

The song ended. The two men sat together in silence. In the sky the stars sparkled, and the houses lay bedded down among the still trees, sleeping. They slept, and everything was strangely close and vast. Steiner looked down below and the song ran through his head, the song and the men who sang it. The predatory Nazi hordes, the Huns and barbarians—his comrades. When Dorn suddenly gripped his arm, he started up. ‘What’s the matter?’

He knew at once and hunched his head between his shoulders. An ear-splitting roar filled the air, mounting with incredible speed, and seconds later the deafening detonation shattered the night air. Several more shells followed, striking somewhere in the vicinity, but the two sitting on the hill did not stir. They sat close together, their eyes fixed at the houses huddling under their straw roofs. At last Dorn turned his head and looked back. ‘That was close,’ he said softly.

The brief flurry of shelling seemed to have done no damage. But the air still hummed with the ugly buzz of splinters, until they pock-pocked into the ground. Dorn’s body jerked at the sound. He felt as if a fragment of hot, shattered steel had penetrated his own flesh, and frantically ran his hands over his legs and chest. ‘Our evensong,’ Steiner said. His words restored Dorn to his senses. He shook his head over his own nervousness. ‘One never gets used to it. Did you hear those splinters ? A gruesome sound.’

‘Hearing them isn’t so bad. It’s worse to feel them. I’ve been wounded five times and never had a bullet hit me yet. Shell splinter every time. Damn the stuff.’

‘You’ve had lots of luck,’ Dorn remarked.

Steiner glanced around. ‘A few more holes in the landscape,’ he commented. ‘In another month this area will look like the surface of the moon. It’s a good thing the earth is so patient.’

‘It certainly is,’ Dorn nodded soberly. ‘It really is patient, the good old earth.’

Steiner smiled. ‘Sentimental, Professor?’

‘Perhaps.’ Dorn clasped his arms over his knees. ‘Perhaps I am sentimental, but to me the earth is a creature like ourselves. She endures us and our unreason as a mother endures her sorrows.’

‘Go on,’ Steiner said teasingly. ‘I like the topic. The patient earth.’ He closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Though she does become impatient sometimes, doesn’t she?’

‘When we carry on too rottenly,’ Dorn said, looking up at the stars, ‘she shakes her broad back and seas pour over the continents, islands sink and volcanoes come to life.’

‘A nice image,’ Steiner said. ‘Go on.’

Before Dorn could continue, a band of light appeared among the trees down below. Someone had opened the door. Steiner recognized the silhouette of Schnurrbart on the threshold, who took a few steps away from the house and looked around, apparently searching. ‘They’re getting worried about us,’ Dorn said.

‘I expect so.’ Steiner stood up and called out in reassurance. Schnurrbart went back inside. When the door closed and the darkness flooded back, Steiner turned to Dorn again. ‘And what do human beings do then?’

‘Human beings?’ Dorn laughed bitterly. ‘They climb upon mountain peaks or hide in caves and wait in terror until old Mother Earth has calmed down again. Then they return and work heroically to save the lives and property of the victims so that a little later they can take away the same lives and property in far more bestial fashion.’

Steiner chuckled. ‘Wonderful, Professor—pour it out. After all, we are the only creatures who know precisely what we are about.’ ‘So we are, and how proud we are of it. But the earth endures our pride just as she endures our laughter and our tears. Not that anyone thinks about her; we have so much more important things to do. We dig holes and fill them up again; we build cities and burn them to ashes; we create life and kill it; and we talk about God and think of ourselves.’

He fell silent. Steiner turned on his side and looked at him as though he were meeting him for the first time. ‘I did not know,’ he said slowly, ‘that we had so much in common, Professor. But you’ve left one thing out. Do you know what I mean?’

‘I know,’ Dorn replied. ‘It endures us patiently because it is obedient to the meaningful laws of creation as we are obedient to the meaninglessness of our human laws. But if that were not the case, who would be able to say what is human and what divine.’

‘That’s it,’ Steiner said. ‘That is our comfort.’ Impulsively he laid his hand on Dorn’s arm. ‘We must talk more when I come back.’

‘When you come back,’ Dorn said. Down below, in the house, the men had started singing again. Steiner hummed the melody under his breath. Then he stood up and drew Dorn to his feet. They stood in silence for a few minutes longer, looking out over the dark hills.

‘By himself, a man is scrap-iron,’ Steiner said roughly.

Dorn nodded. As they walked down the hill, Steiner kept his hand on Dorn’s shoulder. His hand was still there as they entered the house.

After Steiner left the bunker Stransky returned to the table and dropped heavily into a chair. His face was burning with shame, and every time he recalled how Steiner had turned his back and walked out the door, his hand flew to his throat which felt almost choked with humiliation. His helpless rage was all the greater when he realized that he could not undertake any serious punishment of Steiner without arguing with Brandt. A succession of wild plans ran through his head, to be dropped each in turn as soon as he began to think them out seriously. After a while he began to regret his passion. How could he possibly have let himself go like that ? He lit a cigarette and forced himself to reason calmly. In his three years as an officer in the Wehrmacht he had often run into resistance, and had broken it by the usual methods. But an episode such as the one he had just been through was something he would have thought impossible in the army. Taken by surprise, he had bungled the thing, had failed to hold Steiner down, as he should have done, there and then. Now, of course, it was too late. The bold-faced brute would not fail to cover himself by obtaining support from Brandt. Perhaps he was already on his way back to see the regimental commander.

This idea aroused a sudden suspicion. Suppose Brandt or Kiesel were behind the whole business. He recalled Triebig’s telling him that the sergeant had been ordered to report to regiment at six o’clock. The longer he pondered the matter, the more convinced he became that the whole incident had been pre-arranged. Perhaps they wanted to trap him, in order to get rid of him as battalion commander. He smiled grimly. If that were the case, that pair had underestimated him, underestimated him sorely. He must try to turn the point of their weapon against them—and he would find a way. Above all he must find out everything there was to know about Steiner’s background and personality. He made a note. Then he began to undress. Long after he had blown out the candle he lay on his cot with hands clasped under his head, gazing into the darkness.

* In bivouac, on stony ground 

I stretch my weary limbs, 

and into the night 

I send my songs for my sweetheart.

Perhaps I will be with you soon, Annemarie, 

perhaps by tomorrow they’ll be dumping in the grave 

the whole company, the whole company.

TOWARD NOON, TWO days later, Steiner reached his destination, after a long ride in the heavily-laden back of a truck. He stood somewhat dazed on the cobbled pavement, watching the truck rattling away down the road. Now that he was no longer cooled by the wind of its motion, he could feel how searing hot the sun was. The heat was doubly unpleasant because of the heavy camouflage suit he wore over his uniform. Fetscher had thought it best for him to take all his stuff with him—one never knew. Fetscher had also swapped his Russian tommy-gun for a German one. ‘As long as you’re on leave,’ he had said self-importantly. ‘Any MP would arrest you on the spot if he saw you carrying that thing. You’re going back to rear-echelon, don’t forget that, my boy.’ He was right, of course, and so Steiner had set out with his pack loaded and festooned with all the regulation equipment.

He slung the straps of his pack over his shoulders and stood for a few minutes longer with an air of perplexity. The street was still and deserted. Apparently the inhabitants of the little resort kept to their houses at this time of day. The houses, which lined both sides of the street, were set among gardens of tropical lushness. The village lay at the foot of a mountain slope which seen from this point seemed almost vertical. On his right the restless sea gleamed with the same blueness as the sky. Low pines and tall palms bordered the pebbly white beach, and out of the water gigantic rocks rose like petrified fountains above the white surf. Steiner tore his eyes away from the peacefulness of it and set out down the street. He soon came across a soldier lounging about under the arch of a garden gate. He was dressed only in shirt and trousers. When Steiner spoke to him, he barely moved his head. But he was awake enough to point out the way to the Divisional Rest Home. It was only a short distance away, a huge building close to the beach, with tall windows and marble pillars in the facade, set in the midst of spacious grounds. The flat roof was shaded by a large grove of pines. As Steiner approached the door opened. A sergeant and a Red Cross nurse came out. Steiner sauntered toward them. He did not like the sergeant’s leathery face, nor his brand-new uniform with the knife-like creases in the trousers. He was only too familiar with that type from back in the barracks.

The sergeant scrutinized Steiner from top to toe. ‘What do you want?’ he asked.

Steiner thrust his thumbs under his pack straps and stared coolly at the man. ‘Do you mean me?’ he retorted.

The leathery forehead flushed. Steiner ignored the angry sergeant and looked at the nurse. She had a pretty insipid doll’s face with bright, watery eyes.

‘Who do you think you are?’ the sergeant bellowed. ‘What are you doing here?’

Steiner grinned. ‘Looking for a room with running water, central heating and a view of the ocean. Anything of that sort available, my man?’

The sergeant gaped at him, while the nurse giggled foolishly. Steiner reached into his pocket and handed the sergeant his papers. The man turned through them for a moment, and the expression on his face slowly changed. When he handed them back, there was embarrassment in his voice. ‘You might have said so right off. How’s a fellow to tell who’s inside one of those damned monkey-suits you’ve got on.’ He turned to the nurse. ‘Where can we put him? All the rooms are taken.’

‘Is he to stay here?’ she asked in surprise.

‘Yes. Master Sergeant Steiner—two weeks leave.’ He laughed irritably. ‘The devil only knows how they figure it. We always receive our men by groups, each group to stay ten days. The whole place is filled up.’

Steiner was growing impatient. ‘You must have a closet empty. Otherwise I’ll look for private quarters.’