As Peters walks in, a few of the men lift their heads. A whisper goes around the tent: ‘It’s the padre, the padre!’ – ‘You see, didn’t I tell you? I said he wouldn’t forget about us on Christmas Eve!’
‘Thanks for coming, Padre!’
‘What news is there, Padre? Tell us! Is it true our tanks are still in Kalach?’ In front of one of the lamps, Padre Peters hangs a colourful poster showing the infant Jesus in the manger. Next to it he sets up the record player he’s brought with him. What should he say to the men? He knows how things stand.
‘Let us put our faith in God,’ he says solemnly. ‘His Will be done!’ Saying this, he sits down under one of the lamps and starts reading them the Christmas story. His voice, pure as freshly fallen snow, fills the tent. Silence descends. Only the steady, rambling delirium of a severely wounded soldier and the uneasy drone of aircraft overhead form a backdrop to words lost in the mists of time, but which now bring childhood memories flooding back:
And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn…
Silent tears run down grime-encrusted, frostbitten faces. For a few minutes, the men who are lying here in abject misery forget the pain, the hunger and the cold. And now from the gramophone comes the sound of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. The soaring notes of the organ resonate around the marquee. The padre has put the loudest needle he can find on the playing arm to try to drown out the din of aircraft engines, which is increasing by the minute. Suddenly a roaring sound rushes through the air, and their hearts stop beating for several moments. Wummmmp! The earth shudders, the tent poles shake and the lamps flicker wildly. And once again – ssischschsch… wummp! That was a close one! And now the noise reaches a terrible crescendo of howling intensity. Bomb splinters tear and hum through the canvas at the top of the tent, which pitches and shakes like it’s caught in the eye of a storm. There follow moments of fearful, helpless tension… then a collective sigh of relief. So, they’ve got away with it again! The aeroplane engines die away, and the powerful notes of the organ soar upwards in triumph. Padre Peters goes along the lines of wounded men. Here and there he squats down, asking questions and offering words of encouragement and consolation. An NCO who had had both of his feet amputated just the day before is keen to tell his story.
He stopped being a churchgoer many years ago, he confides, clutching the padre’s hand in his frost-cramped hands. ‘Thank you,’ he stammers, ‘thank you so much… for coming to visit us.’ After a long pause, he begins again: ‘The thing with me and religion, that’s going to change after this war is over, let me tell you. My God, we’ve come to understand the value of it here, right enough. Maybe it’s a lesson we could only learn here. And we’ve only come to appreciate the true meaning of home here, as well.’
The padre packs up his things and prepares to do his rounds of the bunkers. That’s where the really seriously wounded have been put, the men with inoperable head and stomach injuries who will be dead by tomorrow or the next day, and finally relieved of the burden of human suffering. It’s bitterly cold down in the bunkers. The medics can ill afford to waste the scarce fuel available, which is vital for sustaining the living, on those already marked for death. Under the gaze of their knowing eyes, the padre finds it impossible to offer any easy words of solace. He listens to the last wishes, and promises to convey the last greetings, of those who are still conscious and lucid – and there are many, very many of them – before joining them in prayer and giving them communion. The wine keeps threatening to freeze, so he warms the chalice in his hands. He cradles the head of a recruit from the last detachment of replacement troops in his hand as he offers him the Host and wine. He’s still a boy, flung straight from school into this living hell. His body is swollen tight as a drum skin. Shrapnel from an exploding shell ripped through his abdominal wall. The beatific, omniscient smile he bestows on Peters renders the padre small and immeasurably humble.
‘It’s good that I don’t have to go on the attack any more, Padre!’
For a moment, his shadowed, sunken eyes blaze in triumph. Then they grow large, and in a clear, cold, already unearthly voice, which only serves to remind the padre of his own mortality, the patient’s waxen face joins the cleric in intoning the words of the Lord’s Prayer:
‘For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory…’
Then veils fall over the young man’s eyes; he goes rigid and his disfigured body weighs heavily in Padre Peters’s arms… A short distance away from the marquee, a smaller tent has been erected. It is dark inside. The padre stumbles over men’s bodies. He strikes a match – corpses! They’re being stored here until the ground thaws again and is ready to claim what rightfully belongs to it. Peters is about to turn and go when a quiet voice from the corner says, ‘Padre, please!’
The padre spins round and lights another match. In the corner, surrounded on all sides by cadavers, sits a slightly built little man, shivering with cold beneath multiple layers of coats and blankets. Stretched out in front of him is a heavily bandaged leg.
‘Padre, please… a cigarette!’
Peters lights a candle stub and sits down by the solitary watchman over the dead.
‘What are you doing here, then?’ the padre asks.
The young man swallows nervously a couple of times before replying, ‘I’m here because I… because of self-mutilation! But…’ – by this stage he is almost shouting – ‘it’s not true. I didn’t do it!’
‘Now look here, lad,’ the padre says earnestly. ‘Today’s Christmas. Think on that… and think of your mother. Don’t lie, now. You shot yourself in the leg, didn’t you?’
The young soldier looks fearfully at the padre; his mouth is half-open and his lips are trembling. And then his face crumples and he buries his head in his arm and starts weeping uncontrollably, whimpering and keening like a child. The padre gently strokes his hair.
‘I can’t take it any more!’ the boy sobs. ‘Can’t go on like this… It’s terrible… I don’t want to die… I want to go home! Mum… oh, Mum!’
His halting speech dissolves once more into whimpering sobs. Abruptly, he lifts his head and brings his face up close to the padre’s, his hand digging into his shoulder.
‘They’re going to shoot me, aren’t they? They’re going to shoot me!’
The padre feels an icy grip seize his heart. What should he say? Yes, that’s what they’re going to do…
‘We’re all in God’s hands, my boy,’ he answers. ‘Everything that He does is for the good of mankind. None of know if we’ll survive this ordeal. But we’ve been shown one certain way to escape all our suffering: the way to heaven.’
And the padre begins to pray with the physically and mentally damaged individual. The young man keeps staring at his lips, and he repeats the words haltingly. Does he know what he’s promising?
The padre walks on through the night. From the battalion command post to the front line closest to the enemy is a distance of seven hundred metres. During the day it’s impossible to traverse this area, which is as flat as a billiard table, because it’s in the enemy’s sights. But at night it’s feasible. Just a single machine gun sends the odd staccato burst of fire over the open land. He finally makes it to the shelter of the trenches, and warms himself in the first of the bunkers. In the rough clay wall here, someone has hacked a hole, where a couple of logs are ablaze. The acrid smoke is unbearable. The men have had to crouch down close to the floor just in order to breathe. On the wall, cut from a piece of green tarpaulin, is the silhouette of a Christmas tree. The gramophone is cranked up and from it comes the sound of the Dresdner Kreuzchor singing German Christmas carols. The padre squats in front of the fire and opens a book. His eyes are watering from the thick smoke, and large embers fall on the pages. He reads them Selma Lagerlöf’s Legends of Christ.[2] The men’s eyes shine white in their soot-blackened faces.
2
Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940) was a Swedish writer and the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature (1909). Her short-story collection