“O my good sword, which I have received from heaven, I’m kissing you. / You shall not rest / before the earth is a garden, where the gods dream by a wonderful chalice.”
In the same spirit he liked the following. Heroism lived on, even in the Nordic countries in 1918, the time when Arno was born and Södergran wrote: “There you stand, / a hero with newborn blood. / Enraptured in tranquility, a bonfire of reflective ice, / as if the commandment of death wasn’t written for you: / Blessed waves bring your keel forward.”
This is me, Arno thought; enraptured in the peace of the moment. This is the model battle mentality: calm but loaded, mentally elevated but stoically collected. Living in apateia, completely calm, completely prepared for great deeds: “Mars helmets in the mist…”
Arno turned in his bed and looked towards the window. Pale light washed the floor from the full moon that had risen over the living and the dead in Tarnopol. “The moon knows…” Arno was half-drowsy, he was neither asleep nor awake. He was moonstruck, he was in a trance. He felt as if he were an “Operational Scout,” a mindful operator, whose programmatic philosophy and creed he would develop in full only after the war. However, as a budding Operational Scout he now said this, lost in a state of sublime inebriation:
“Plus or minus, one or zero, light or darkness. I no longer know what is what. Germany and Russia, Sweden and the USA, hallelujah. Advance, retreat. Everything is meaningless. Nothing exists. Only the act, only the battle. Only movement – which is a condition, a state of mind.
“Nothing exists. Only the act, only the battle. Das allein ist wahr.
“Nothing exists. And everything.
“Everything flows, everything flows together in blind harmony. And in the sky hangs a Junkers Ju 86 – hovering there, standing still, like a modern dragon Nidhogg with human corpses as scales.
“God’s light is within me, therefore I can’t die. I’m eternally divine, eternally saved, eternally existing. Plus and minus, one and zero. Shell cases on the ground and aircraft noise in the sky. A Junkers flying by, the round in the chamber and the helmet on the head. Stukas on their way and waiting as a state of mind.
“Battle is everything there is, battle is a condition. Everything is lit by burning magnesium in the sky, greenish glowing flares with small parachutes, they drift slowly to the ground. They’re dropped by planes, bombers, enemy planes. Or our planes: Junkers Ju 86 B3.
“Battlefield illuminated by burning magnesium. Battlefield illuminated by searchlights, directed towards the underside of clouds, creating a spooky light, unreal, surreal. And there goes a man forever, living there, thriving there, having a good time there. Outwardly committed, giving orders, signs and signals, but untouched in his heart of hearts. For movement is a condition, a state of mind.
“I thrive in the dark. Chasing shadows under the ersatz moonlight, with searchlights on low-scudding clouds – this is a feast, a virtual field-day.
“I get the urge to say, ‘I thrive in darkness but within me I have light.’ But this sounds pointless. I have both light and darkness within me. Everyone has it. But I’m one of the few who knows this. Me and Carl Jung.
“I’m not disordered chaos. I have a kind of order within me. I’m not prepared to be a lobotomised combat robot, with no face, no name. But besides that, right now I only live for the battle. I’m on the verge of becoming a war machine. Perhaps it’s risky. But I like living on this borderline.
“You have to live on the border, live on the edge. Living on the edge raises you mentally.
“Thus it is. For if someone said to me, ‘You’re skating the edge,’ I would answer: ‘I am the edge.’”
17
The Major
It was April 15. Arno and his men were still part of the garrison in Tarnopol. The city was now completely cleared. The last pockets of Bolshevik resistance had been searched and destroyed. This day Arno began by waking up in his quarters at about six o’clock, going to the yard and the morning routine in the latrine. It was a series of three outhouses. In addition, there was a sink with soap and water.
It was overcast and cold. There was snow in the air, a brief return of winter. At the other end of the yard sat the baggage train, with its field-kitchen. There Arno and the others got hot chicory coffee and crisp bread with turnip marmalade. They ate at a table in the lower floor of the quarters house, the company’s temporary cafeteria.
At 0700 Wistinghausen arrived with the orders of the day. He told them that the platoons would go on working separately this day. There was no need to muster the whole company today. Pankow gave them the details. Then Arno took his unit, mustered it and told them that they were to spend the day cleaning their weapons and thoroughly checking all their equipment. Arno finished his orders with:
“Bauer takes command of the platoon. I’ll be either in my quarters or in the mess on the other side of the street.”
Bauer obeyed. Arno returned to his quarters and slept for another hour. Then he went down and checked on them, even though Bauer was in charge. Men sat on the floor and on the bunks cleaning their weapons, polishing boots and sewing and brushing clothes.
Arno nodded to Bauer and said he would go to the mess, then steered his steps towards a building across the street, a deserted house where they had set up a makeshift officer’s club. It was just a dusty room in a deserted house but there were comfortable chairs and a table and it had been approved by Wistinghausen. The house was a four-story residential building with a brown-plastered façade pocked with strike marks around several broken windows upstairs. .
Having reached the building, Arno opened the front door, crossed the hall with its tiled floor, went upstairs, came to a corridor and went on to a room with stucco ceilings, pink walls, a threadbare carpet on the floor and a table with four chairs. He took off his cap, sat down and took a drink from a hip flask. Then he took out a deck of cards and played a game of solitaire.
He had just finished when Shasta and Dion arrived. Shasta was a postmaster in civilian life. Before his military career, Dion had been the owner of a fleet of trucks. Now he carried tin mugs and a bottle of wine. He poured some, they drank a toast. Smokes were offered around. A cracked porcelain plate was an ashtray.
“Rather fine as an officer’s mess,” Dion said.
“Indeed,” Shasta said. He and Dion were reserve officers and hadn’t spent much time on officer messes. They had been appointed officer cadets for their military service, having then been trained and eventually employed as reserve officers. Then they had gone off to war. Dion for his part had been in Baltikum in the spring of 1943. Shasta had fought in Ukraine with Battalion Wolf throughout 1943.
For the moment, though, nobody talked about the war. They asked Arno, the Sweden-born half-German, what he liked about Germany. Ernst Jünger, he replied.
With that the conversation took off. Shasta said that he liked the Jünger war book Storm of Steel. Dion, on the other hand, had read the relatively new novel On the Marble Cliffs. And he liked its fairytale-like atmosphere, its timeless mythic environment in medieval costume.
“But what about you, Mr. Tot,” Shasta said, “which Jünger book do you like best?”
“Mr. Tot…?” Arno asked.
“But you’re him, ain’t you,” Shasta said. “You were talking about death when you arrived at the Company in November last year.”
“True, I did,” Arno said and blew a puff of smoke. “I even think this Jünger guy has portrayed it. In Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis. Have you read it?”