This Shasta hadn’t. Arno continued:
“It’s like the old adage: ‘Wenn Du in den Rohren sitzt, scheid Pfeifen’ (= When you’re sitting in the reeds, cut pipes). Meaning: when you are at the front, familiarise yourself with Death, because being a soldier is about killing and being killed. That’s my philosophy. You then, what do you say to your men? ‘Everything is going well, this is like a holiday’…?”
“No, of course not,” Shasta said sullenly.
They were joined by Wistinghausen. He poured himself a mug of wine and took a cigarette from the packet on the table. “What are you talking about?” the Captain asked as he sat down.
“About literature,” Arno said.
“Oh damn,” said the Captain. “I’ve never read a book. At least not novels. I haven’t got the stamina needed to plough through 300 pages. Then again, I like poetry. Like this…”
The Captain had a far-off look in his eyes as he recited: “Tell it to no one but the wise, / the crowd will only jeer: / the living thing I praise, / that longs for death by fire.”
“Who wrote that?” Dion said. “Was it you, Captain?”
“No,” he said. “It’s Goethe.”
They asked for more. The Captain took a long drag from his cigarette, stubbed it out and recited the whole poem: “Blissful Yearning”, in German, “Seelige Sehnsucht”. He quoted:
It was a sombre poem about dying, about the meaning of dying, about having a spiritual, eternal, divine ideal so that when you die you find this spiritual element.
They four men sat in silence. Arno wasn’t really Mr. Death; they all knew Mr. Death. They were all living in the Valley of the Shadow of Death. The poem was about Dying and Becoming – Stirb und Werde – as became clear in the last verse. The material world is less real than the astral world, the world where the soul lives on after death. That was the gist of Goethe’s poem.
They sat and drank, still saying little. They had time for this. The city was mopped up. And they had broken out of Hube’s Pocket, some feat. And Mr. Death hadn’t called on any of them.
Wistinghausen had the sudden urge to reward his platoon commanders with a visit to Battalion HQ. So he left the others sitting with their empty mugs, walked over to Company HQ, picked up the receiver of the field telephone, cranked the handle and called the Major himself. Major Eberhardt Wolf, Chief of Battalion Wolf, duly OK’d the visit.
So, a while later, with Dion at the wheel, Wistinghausen, Shasta and Arno drove in the company Kübelwagen a few blocks through the city to Battalion Staff Headquarters. In a grand house, a two-story, detached villa, they were received by the Major. He was a little fat, slightly rounded but exuberantly vital.
“8th Company!” he exclaimed to Wistinghausen, Arno, Shasta and Dion when they had greeted him. “A fine unit, one of my best. Join me at the table.”
This was something! They got a better meal, served in a room with wallpaper and curtains. The whole thing seemed unreal to these front-pigs. The decorated room, without a sign of war. The food, served on china instead of slopped into scratchy mess-tins. This they weren’t used to. Sausage and potatoes; this simple but formal meal was luxury to them. Then more wine and spirits were served. Arno wondered wryly if they had not indeed all met with Mr. Death after all!
Shasta had soon had enough, asked to be excused, and went away to a side room to rest. But Dion, Arno and Wistinghausen stayed, listening to the Major’s stories about the campaign in France in 1940. Back in those glory days, Wolf had been Commander of a Panzer Grenadier Company. He told them of abandoned villages, food sitting on kitchen tables which told of hasty escapes, and the wreckage of a French tank, big as a house.
“Char B,” Wistinghausen said, “60 tons.”
The Major nodded and thanked him for the enlightenment. Then he lit a cigar and plunged them back into his memories of the town of Arras. He took it in 1940 he said. Just how accurate his recollections were was hard to say; perhaps it was the drunken chatter of a drunken man temporarily relieved of the burden of trying to get a whole battalion out of a death trap. In any case, of the Arras parks the Major said:
“There were parks. Fancy parks. Parks through which yellow and red birds flew, calling loudly in the splendour of the morning parks with fragrant flowering trees, shrubs and green lawns, paved walkways, ponds and bridges with ornamented railings and avenues of trees whispering in the evening sunshine.”
Puffing on his cigar Wolf reflected wistfully for a while, then he continued:
“In Arras, there are green gardens and sandstone houses slumbering in the midday sun; there’s a haze in the distance, an echo in the streets, laughter under the arches, shade in the square and whisperings in the gardens, rustlings in the poplars and the murmour of the surrounding wheat fields.
“There are houses made of yellow brick and brown sandstone, even grey sandstone, and houses with plastered façades and whatnot. A river flows through the city, the scent of water weed rises from the stream and wafts over the city, enchanting the urban space in the freshness of the scents.
“There are streets with galleries and deserted squares in the noontide emptiness; there are copper-clad spires, narrow alleys and bridges high between the houses; there are rows of houses along the avenues, palaces with pastel-colored façades, lazily dreaming away the day’s sunny hours and waiting for the evening’s pleasant coolness.”
As for Battalion Wolf, it had been set up in southern Germany in the autumn of 1942. Then, in the spring of 1943, it was inserted on the Eastern Front, in the retreat through Ukraine and during Manstein’s counteroffensive. The Battalion was held in reserve during the titanic Battle of Kursk. During the renewed retreat after this battle it became extremely useful as a “fire brigade unit” with emergency sallies to seal gaps in the front and such like. And this operational pattern – fighting retreat, retrograde defensive, “Shield and Sword” – would be repeated by Battalion Wolf during Operation Bagration, the Russian offensive in Belarus in June, 1944.
Because the meal with its Commander was scarcely real. War was real.
18
Point 31
After a week of relative quiet in the cleared city, the battalion was sent back to Germany to be re-equipped. The evidence of the British bombing campaign was disturbing, but a wide-eyed girl or a lonely young widow could make a man forget. In May they went east again, to Belarus, where they had to resist the onslaught of the Russian Operation Bagration. Previously Battalion Wolf had fought in Ukraine with the Southern Army Group; now it was under the command of AG Mitte in the central part of the Eastern Front.
In 1944 the southern wing of the Soviet advance rolled on through western Ukraine and beyond, into Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. But still, in the spring and early summer of that year, the Germans occupied traditional Russian territory in the form of Belarus, situated between Russia proper and Poland. In the summer of 1944 the Red Army would make a main effort here, amassing over 150 divisions. The German AG Mitte only had some 38 Divisions by this time. So when the attack began, on June 9, AG Mitte was hammered. Waves of Russians died, but still they kept coming, and Germans died too.