In truth, the change had already occurred on the early March afternoon when previously established units, six companies to be exact, assembled in orderly columns under Schuer’s single command, wearing their new pike-gray uniforms without stripes or chevrons, marched smartly on the Marbach highway to the Dammelberg. That is when, almost imperceptibly, many things changed in his life; thanks to some vision or realization, as it were, he found his ultimate vocation. They lit enormous fires, they sang as loudly and energetically as their throats would allow. Although his musicality, honed on several instruments, did not go to the point of his singing along with his men — he merely mouthed the words feelingly — Schuer unreservedly entrusted his body to the waves of shared sensual intemperance, while, his eyes blinded by the light of enormous fires, he observed the fields sunk in mist from the nearby river and the twilight-reddened walls and turrets of the imposing fortified castle of Landgraf, surveying simultaneously, as it were, the living, the historical, and the lifeless. The warm sensation of his left-behind but oft-missed wartime life returned generously to his limbs.
There were hardly any greenhorns among them. Almost all the men were officers, war veterans, athletic, strong, and healthy men who had survived their wounds and now wanted to study or to continue their scientific careers, which the war had interrupted.
Never again did he feel abandoned or alone with his wartime experiences.
He saw clearer than daylight that he hardly differed from these men in anything, and that was his good fortune.
He belonged, though in all probability had no individuality.
Or perhaps what liberal thinkers call one’s individuality in fact plays but a very small part in nature’s grand scheme. In itself, individuality probably isn’t worth a grain of rice. Among these wonderful men, individuality makes a difference hardly worth mentioning.
We are but samples, he thought with no small amount of fright.
In reality, the chosen ones of nature and divine Providence. Not only fit for reproduction — our dead would have been no less fit for that — but the most deserving of this purpose from a racial viewpoint, if one may put it that way, and all this has nothing to do with the individual soul or individual peculiarities. Who else should be multiplying if not these men who had withstood the crucible and survived.
What else could Providence have wanted when it so mercilessly destroyed our weaker mates.
This soul-stirring, painful realization overpowered him, though the great smoke and infernal noise might have played a part. In a nature suffused by divine Providence the theory of natural selection works more brutally than the power of Christian charity. Within decades, this brutal reality will turn Germany’s devastating defeat into a universal victory. And under the influence of this realization these magnificent men became for him like members of a blood alliance sworn to secrecy: the future of the nation may be entrusted to the contents of their loins.
He became alarmed at this pagan thought, but could not help thinking that the ancient God who cast off His Christian charity loved those whom He decimated.
Was not the treasure of the Holy Grail a secret code of advantageous racial characteristics, he asked himself, and he had no doubt about the answer.
Or rather, it seemed to him that God had taken off His Christian mask before him and would never again show His barbaric face to anyone. He shuddered to imagine seeing God face-to-face. Blessed be He, he would have said to himself, but right now he could neither pray nor express his gratitude; he could only think, very rapidly.
He was counting.
Altogether two generations, four at the most, and we’ll come out of this ignominy stronger than those who suffered fewer losses and who with their flawed individuals are now lording it over us. The enormity of this realization made him falter, he had to lean on someone, and an unknown mate standing next to him instinctively hugged him, held him up with his strong shoulders.
Among noblemen, behavior like this was not a matter of course.
He felt gratitude toward his mate and more profound love than toward any woman, or than the love he should feel as a Christian toward a helpful fellow being.
When the fires had burned down to smoldering embers, the beer was running low, or the men were becoming short-winded or somehow seized by sorrow over the lost war and terrible peace, and suddenly they felt surrounded by memories of their fallen comrades, they formed a huge circle, standing shoulder to shoulder, opened the slits of their pants, triumphantly and ostentatiously thrust forward their hips to honor the ancient Germanic custom of high-arced cross-pissing before setting out on their dangerous mission, which demanded much good luck.
Contrary to all his earlier vows to preserve his seed until the day he found the person worthy of it, whom he would marry, as was only proper, that night, for the first time since his demobilization, Schuer went with the other men to a brothel. He knew he was breaking his vows, but he excused himself on the grounds that he was doing so not for himself but because of the others. He did think of the Lüttwitz girl, the charming and educated Andria, but felt no special pangs on her account. He knew and no longer had any doubts that Willi had had to perish at his hand because of Providence, so that only the strong and mentally healthy would stay alive. He was repelled by the thought of having to marry a girl with a congenital hip dislocation just because of the obligatory propriety prevailing among his peers, and now, for the first time in his life, he accepted his revulsion. Willi was backing away from him, backing away and looking at him as he walked cheerfully with the others on the nighttime street, quietly dreading a future that he happened to be avoiding. I could not have done anything else then, and I cannot do anything else now. He no longer had to justify or feel ashamed about his natural revulsion at the cripple.
What happened to Willi hurt him more than what would happen to Andria, left to her fate.
That last lucid moment on the dirty face, its human flesh fried to a sooty black; that last look on his sweetly, trustingly shining face.
He felt that his terrific climax in a randomly selected woman was due to the tremendous strength and magical joy of belonging among survivors, and he ejaculated into her with a hitherto never experienced intensity.
He screamed and bellowed in the messy bed of the woman’s cubbyhole reeking with face powder and bleach, just as he had when being prepared for the removal of a bullet from his shoulder and the surgeon suggested that he not bite his lip, which would only damage more flesh, which he’d have to stitch up, that he not hold back but let all the pain pour out, but that he not move.
I told you not to move, Lieutenant, damn it.
In his infernal pleasure, his entire being was possessed by awareness of a power linking him to other people’s bodies. He knew well that neither the loins nor the unpleasant perfume of the cheap little woman from Marburg had anything to do with it. Because at the instant of ejaculation males freeze and do not move. Or rather, such a shattering gratification could have happened only in her, in such a depraved woman, whose hastily rinsed vagina was still sloppy with someone else’s seed — no denying that. The shock was so intense and so unprecedented, and he was drained for so many hours, that he wanted to know what had happened, or what was happening at times like this in the impassively functioning universe.