‘You’re horrible, Kroysing,’ said Sister Kläre. ‘You always have to spoil everything. Haven’t I got enough on my plate looking after your filthy wounds? Can’t I spend five minutes soothing my soul with God’s creation without one of you butting in? The next war! There won’t be another war! If anyone threatens to go to war again after this massacre, our womenfolk will beat them to death with their brooms.’
‘Let’s hope so, sister,’ said Posnanski with conviction.
‘There won’t be another war,’ said Bertin, nodding. ‘This is the last one. Our rulers can fight the next one on their own. We men won’t be there.’
‘Quite right!’ cried Sister Kläre, wiping away a tear with the back of her index finger. She had been thinking of her husband, Colonel Schwersenz, a once proficient staff officer who had been sinking ever deeper into depression since the winter of 1914 and was now being cared for by her mother, the elderly Frau Pidderit, in a small hunting lodge in Hinterstein valley in the Bavarian Allgäu. Only the medical officer knew Sister Kläre’s story and real name. She was generally thought to be the plucky wife of a captain somewhere on the Eastern front, and there were whispered rumours about a flirtation with a very high-ranking personage.
Kroysing, towering above them all, his mouth set in a sarcastic line, shrugged his shoulders: ‘Then we have the honour of living through the funeral of the last war. It didn’t really have a very long career, war – a mere 5,000 years. It was born in the time of the Assyrians and ancient Egyptians, and we’re putting it in its coffin. The world has been waiting for us. The people who ran the Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War and the Napoleonic Wars didn’t know what they were doing. We folks from the 1914 war are the ones to sort it out – we of all people.’
‘That’s right,’ said Sister Kläre and Bertin in defiant unison. However, Bertin couldn’t help but see a grave and them all as grave diggers standing round it, spades in hand: Kroysing, the nurse, the fat judge advocate, and he himself, outlined against the cloudy sky, hacking at clods of earth. Below them bulged a bloated belly and a plump, hairless face with a grin across its chubby cheeks beneath its closed eyes – perhaps portentous, perhaps a sign of contentment at its own demise.
Meanwhile, Sister Kläre closed first the shutters then the window. ‘Now put the light on and then you can go,’ she said.
They all blinked as the light bounced off the walls. ‘We’d all like to thank you for your kind hospitality,’ said Judge Advocate Posnanski, bowing over Sister Kläre’s long, strong hand, calloused by work. A strand of ash blonde hair escaped from her nun-like head covering. Beneath it shone her beautifully set eyes. Her alluring, tender lips were obdurately closed. Hell of a lovely little thing with her Madonna face and pert lips, thought Kroysing. Very likely she did have a thing with the crown prince. He felt the need to improve his standing with her. ‘What would I get, sister—’
‘You’d get nothing,’ she interrupted, eyes flashing. ‘You’d get a punch on the nose.’
‘—if I dished up something extra nice for you? Allow me to introduce you to my friend Werner Bertin…’ – Sister Kläre stopped in the middle of the room, her lips slightly parted and her hands outstretched as if to push him away – ‘… author of the much-read novel Love at Last Sight.’
Sister Kläre’s trained eyes took in Bertin’s grey-brown face, drawn cheeks, bristly chin, the rim of slack, dirty skin above his worn and muddy lice-infested collar. When he laughed in embarrassment, she saw he had a gap in his teeth and a broken front tooth and that he was going bald on top. And yet there was something about his eyebrows, his forehead, his hands, which suggested that Kroysing wasn’t joking. This man had written that tender love story! ‘It’s you,’ she said quietly, offering him her hand. ‘I can’t believe it. And my friend Annemarie in Krefeld wrote to me three months ago to say that she had met the author and he was a Hussar lieutenant and a charming man.’
Bertin laughed in disgust at this, and Posnanski and Kroysing laughed at his disgust, and they all left Sister Kläre’s nun’s cell like a cheerful party breaking up. Now she could sleep in the room again, she said, adding that Bertin should visit her the next day when she would be off duty.
‘Well be in touch,’ said Posnanski, bringing the memorable meeting to a close.
CHAPTER FIVE
Counterproposal
THE BLACKBIRDS WERE singing as Judge Advocate Posnanski got out of his car at Montfaucon castle. After some thought, he had decided to let the package with Private Pahl’s shoes in it disappear without trace so as not to complicate his request for Private Bertin to be transferred to the Lychow division court martial of the Eastern Group. But he could have spared himself these reflections. Sometimes documents such as his request took weeks to arrive, other times only days. This one was passed very quickly from the Western to the Eastern Group, where it was eyed suspiciously in the ADC’s office and a query scrawled across it in blue penciclass="underline" was ASC battalion X/20 in a position to give up any of its men? That meant: kindly say that you are not in a position to do so. As well as the usual hostilities, the transfer of the Lychow division to the Russian front played a decisive role in this. The rivalry between the fronts was gathering momentum. The new Supreme Command had not been able to change this, and the two staffs rejoiced – General Schieffenzahn’s word – only in each other’s setbacks.
When the imposing folio sheet with the teal and violet seals of the two quarrelling army groups was placed in front of Major Jansch, he first removed a yellow sweet from his mouth and stuck it to the edge of a saucer on his right. When he realised that behind the polite, typewritten text lay an attempt to wrest one of his men from him, and furthermore this particular man, he gave a hiss of fury that made his clerk Diehl’s blood run cold. However, the blue-pencilled query, whose meaning Jansch immediately divined, calmed him down. ‘Take this down,’ he said to Diehl, standing up and striding round the room with his hands behind his back as Bonaparte was said to have done. Eventually, after many improvements and deletions, he dictated the following text: ‘Returned to sender with the following remarks: the battalion’s First Company occupies the area between Mureaux-Ferme and Vilsones-East, and its working parties large and small are scattered across it. The company is so weakened by casualties and illness that it cannot countenance the departure of a single healthy man fit for work if there is no replacement. The battalion proposes that Private Pahl, currently in Dannevoux field hospital, should, when recovered, be detailed for the required duty at the court martial. P., a typesetter by trade and exceptionally able, knows how to use a typewriter and is unfit for anything but office work due to the loss of a toe.’ He felt the distinguished gentlemen had miscalculated.