Holding a lit candle and treading on silent, yielding bodies, the padre pushed his way through to the door that separated the building’s two rooms. In the sooty smoke rising from the brick fireplaces he read a few passages from the Bible and delivered a brief sermon about the only path left open now: the path to heaven. His words fluttered bashfully into the oppressive silence. His face burned from the concentrated gaze of the eyes that stared at him from out of the gloom, wide-open eyes that had seen the truth. He couldn’t help them any more. He was scraping the bottom of the barrel. In a numb stupor, Peters was wading through a thick mire of misery, from which individual images rose up now and then like toxic bubbles. Only rarely did one of these – and not even always one of the most terrible – remain with him. One that did was the picture of the two dead Romanians left lying on the street in Gumrak not far from the circular stone fountain basin where corpses had been piled up like logs. Every day, their rigid bodies were mutilated a bit more by passing traffic until finally they were squashed flat, steamrollered like the two naughty boys under the philosopher Diogenes’ barrel in a picture-story by Wilhelm Busch.[1] Or the image of the bodies that had been heaped up to make a set of steps into the tall cattle trucks on the sidings and which he had to climb every day. Also etched indelibly on his memory was the face of a young soldier who had sunk to his knees in front of the sentry outside the station building and begged to be let in. The next morning he was still there, bent double and slumped over to one side. The last tears he had cried still clung to his frozen, dead cheeks like pearls of ice.
Through the houses and the foxholes, through the bunkers of the POW camp on the outskirts of the village and through the barracks and tents attached to the field hospital out there in the balka, Padre Peters wandered wraithlike, a shadow of his former self. Time and time again, he encountered individuals who were eager to open up to him and who clung to his paltry words with desperate faith and hope. But this was nothing but a crazed hope for the earthly miracle that Hitler had failed to deliver, and which God was now expected to perform. By now Peters was already too weak to try to disabuse them of this blasphemous misconception. His conscience barely even registered a twinge of shock as he heard himself promising them that the miracle would come to pass. He lied like a doctor telling a dying patient that he’ll rally and recover. And as he did so, Peters preached and prayed and baptized. Yes, incredibly he was still baptizing people! One soldier lay there with a wound in the small of his back that refused to heal. He asked Peters to baptize him. He also requested that his father should not be told about it, or he’d be angry. Peters baptized him with the full panoply of religious ritual, including a candlestick with a baptismal candle. But his heart remained dark. The other soldiers looked on with a mixture of emotion, embarrassment and solicitousness. After several days, when he found the soldier again in a hole somewhere (the house where he had been convalescing had collapsed one night), he was dead. The stub of the candle was still by his head.
As the few healthy men remaining increasingly took refuge in camaraderie, instilling courage into one another through the dreadful hours of the night with songs and stories and dirty jokes, all to hide their dread of dying, Peters retired to his bunker, which was covered with pieces of railway line and never saw so much as a glimmer of daylight, and which rocked like a little boat on the open sea whenever bombs rained down. There he would idle away his time in daydreams, undisturbed by the frequent comings and goings of others. They’d feel their way down the clay steps and acclimatize themselves to the darkness before sinking down in a corner, where they’d lie exhausted; after several hours, they would either leave or remain lying there, dead. Peters, too, would doubtless have wasted away here had it not been for Corporal Brezel.
Corporal Brezel – now there was a real character! The very first day after his arrival in Gumrak, Peters had screwed up his courage and climbed the freestanding, wobbly ladder to the top floor of the station building. After proceeding through a dark passageway filled with axes and severed horses’ legs, he emerged into a small, improbably clean attic room. A wizened little man with a crumpled face and a flowing mane of hair rose from behind a table strewn with papers and photographs and, with a mixture of soldierly stiffness and urbane politeness, bade him take a seat. That was Corporal Brezel, a poet in civilian life, but for the time being the custodian of a small group of Russian prisoners whose duties included cleaning-up operations and foraging dead horses for the field kitchen. In return, the Russians were given the horses’ legs, their only source of food, while the men at the abattoir sometimes put by a bit of tongue or liver for the corporal. As a sideline, though, sitting up here in his lofty perch while bombs and shells exploded all around, the corporal was also, at the behest of his staff officers, writing the history of his division. This was a commendable task, in so far as the division in question was clearly about to become extinct. Brezel proudly showed the padre his draft chapters and the photographs he’d collected: snaps of exercises and inspections, head-and-shoulders portraits of officers in full dress uniform, and bathing scenes from beaches on the Bay of Biscay. In addition, oblivious to everything that was going on down below, he penned verses about whatever took his poetic fancy: the nerve-jangling drone of the ‘sewing machines’, the searchlights playing in the night sky above the airfield, the riot of colour unleashed by the rising sun. And all the while he was so happy and positive that even Peters found himself momentarily jolted from his state of lethargy by the sight of this bizarre poetic idyll, like that famous painting by Spitzweg seen through a distorting lens.[2]
Two days after their first encounter, Brezel appeared in Peters’s bunker with a cheery ‘Top of the morning to you, Padre!’ While the corporal had still been in bed, a shell fired from across the Volga had smashed through the window of his attic room, pierced the wall close to where he lay sleeping and exploded somewhere down on the street. ‘God gave a merciful sign and his servant heeded the warning,’ said Brezel when wrapping up his story. After this incident, he had brought his divisional history to an abrupt conclusion, summarily released his Russian prisoners, for whom there was no more food anyhow, and, furnished with the material for a new poem, had left his room to take a stroll.
From that day forward, he lived in Peters’s bunker, gladly performing the duties of a sacristan and making sure the place was neat and tidy. He foraged wood for the little stove, carried out the dead and cadged petrol from passing lorries for the thirsty home-made lamp he had fashioned out of a tin can and a piece of rag. They would use its dim, guttering flame to eat by (when they had some food), to melt snow with and to catch lice. And Padre Peters took refuge from the horror that skulked in the dark corners of the bunker by reading the white pages of his Bible in the small circle of light it cast. The words flickered before his eyes. His strength was at an end.
Brezel was the person who ensured that they didn’t starve to death.
He was always on the alert. He kept an eye out when the Russian auxiliaries came to the tower with their horse-drawn sleigh to collect water. Wounded men and shady freebooters tended to gather there, hanging around in the hope that one of the emaciated nags might keel over and die. And when the Russians weren’t looking they’d even help things along a bit, toppling the horse and falling upon it like wolves. Brezel, who despite his highly strung artist’s temperament stood his ground manfully, emerged triumphant, his blood-stained sidearm still in his hand and waving a hunk of meat covered with shaggy horsehair, which he braised for hours on the stove. As he did so, he composed poems on the faithful look in horses’ brown eyes.
1
‘picture-story by Wilhelm Busch’ – the cautionary tale ‘Diogenes and the Naughty Boys of Corinth’ (
2
‘that famous painting by Spitzweg’ –