He pulled on the cigarette again, felt the heat of its slow ember creep nearer his knuckle. The column of infantry was still passing. They would always be passing, Albrecht thought. Always a column of boys marching on tired feet, staring at the hairline of the man in front of them with tired eyes and even more exhausted minds. He turned his back on them to face his own men.
He would need a wireless operator. That was a relief. That was one choice made for him. There was only one operator in the company. They’d have to find another from somewhere, but that wasn’t his problem. If it was a patrol, Albrecht needed him, no question. He looked over the men and found the solitary operator. Crouched at the corner of the cottage, sitting back on his haunches unwrapping a ration of biscuits, his steel helmet tipped back to release a tuft of short blond hair. A new boy, a replacement. Steiner … He couldn’t remember his first name. Young. The defence of Normandy had been his first action. He’d held up well. Or so Albrecht had been told. He hadn’t seen it himself, but the reports were good. Steiner then. That was one.
They’d need a medic too. A good one if Albrecht could help it. Again he felt a sense of relief at another easy decision. The company had two medics at the moment. Sebald and Weiss. He’d take Sebald. He’d been with the company much longer. Always in the thick of it, weaving his stumbling, ducking run through the battlefield to answer the cry they’d come to know too welclass="underline" “Medic! Medic!” He deserved the break. And he was calmer. Weiss swore too much as he worked. Albrecht was sure he didn’t know he was doing it, but he did. It unnerved the men. Just yesterday in a back street in Eastbourne he’d watched Weiss fumble inside a man’s groin for the end of a severed artery. As he groped deeper inside the wound his swearing got louder and faster. The man’s cries kept pace, getting more and more frantic, which in turn wound Weiss up another notch until the two of them were caught in a tangled race of damns and shits and fucks. Suddenly, with Weiss’s hand still up to his wrist inside the wound, the blood gulping around it like a thick red tongue, the man won the race and fell silent. His eyes flicked wide and he stopped, mouth open, like a windup toy reaching the end of its coil. So Weiss would stay. He hoped they’d find a good replacement for Sebald. They’d need one. But there was no way Albrecht was taking Weiss on a patrol, however short it might be.
He made a mental note of their names. Steiner, Sebald … Steiner, Sebald … repeating them as if they were the start of a forgotten childhood chant and he was searching for the next name in the list. As if the choice had already been made for him and all he had to do was remember the sequence, the roll call, rather than create it himself.
Steiner, Sebald …
He didn’t have to move. From where he stood he could see the whole company, or what was left of it. Just sixty-seven men. More than fifty short of full strength.
Steiner, Sebald …
It was like making a recipe, finding the right combination of characters, experience. He had a young soldier and an older medic. He needed another older soldier now. A keystone man around which the patrol could gather and form. A foundation stone.
Alex. Sergeant Alex Klepper. He wasn’t much older than Steiner but he may as well have been. One of the few, along with Albrecht, who’d been with the company since the Russian campaign. Albrecht looked for him now and saw him lying flat out, his head resting beside a flowerbed at the side of the cottage. Stretched out like that he covered the ground from the cottage wall to the picket fence so the other men had to step over him to pass round to the back of the house. Alex was a steady soldier. Big enough to carry the MG 42 for days on end if he had to. So, Steiner, Sebald, Klepper … He was making progress. Almost there.
Who was he fooling? He knew he’d yet to make a real decision, a real choice. The first two had chosen themselves, and if he was honest with himself Albrecht always knew he was going to take Alex. Alex from Bavaria who had so often saved his skin, who had so often laid himself on the line for the sake of Albrecht and the company. Albrecht didn’t want Alex going into London. He’d do it again. Put himself in the line of fire. He wouldn’t survive that city, Albrecht was sure of it. And they were so close now. Let someone else take that bullet. Someone who hadn’t come all the way just to fall at the final fence.
Time was running out. Any minute now they’d be on the move again, packing up and pulling back off the line. He must choose the five men now, let them know they wouldn’t be retiring with the rest of the company. Otherwise it would come as an even greater blow, once their bags were packed, once they’d set their minds on the idea of rest, even if only for a few days.
Steiner, Sebald, Klepper …
He looked over the faces of the men again. Filthy most of them. Bloodied. Eyes closed. There was hardly a wrinkle between them. He searched out the few older heads, but there was no point. These men would be needed in the company. And what counted as older now anyway? A man who had been with them a couple of months? A few weeks even? On this accelerated scale of maturity, Albrecht, at thirty-three, knew he was practically a geriatric. Lucky enough to have survived this far, but not enough of a Party man to have risen any further, away from the fighting units. No, Alex and Sebald would be his two experienced soldiers on the patrol. That would be enough.
Then Albrecht saw Otto. Unlike most of the company he was still standing, rifle slung over his shoulder, holding his helmet against his stomach, his hands resting over it like a pregnant woman waiting at the bus stop. The dirt on his face stopped short of his hairline, just above his eyebrows where his helmet had previously sat; a sharply defined tidemark of battle, a festival mask of grime. His eyes showed in it like those of a blacked-up minstrel singer. Wide, unblinking. He was looking away from the marching infantry behind them, out towards the skyline where the rising columns of smoke met the descending clouds of an English autumn.
As far as Albrecht knew Otto had not spoken for the past fortnight. Not a word since the defence of Normandy. They’d shared the same bunker on the beachhead. Otto had manned the machine gun. Albrecht seemed to remember this was a mistake. He’d only been covering for another man when the attack began. Otto was not usually the machine gunner. But once it started there was no chance for him to leave his post. The waves of men seemed endless. Most of the Allied tanks sank or were knocked out by their own camouflaged Panzer divisions, but the men kept coming. A desperate, ancient pulse of men. It was as if an entire generation was being emptied onto the beaches before them. And so Otto had fired that machine gun all day and into the night. Until both his hands were burnt on the metal handles. Until its barrel glowed orange like the end of Albrecht’s cigarette when he took another pull. Fired it constantly, sweeping it left and right, right and left. How many men had Otto killed that day? Five, six hundred? More, probably. After all, he’d carried on firing through their retreat too, left and right, right and left, cutting up the surf, planting reefs of bullets on which the Allied soldiers foundered and drowned.
He was a slight boy, Otto. Pale with deep black hair. Thin wrists. But strong enough to swing that machine gun, left and right, right and left. His physique made Albrecht aware again of the perverted nature of this war. That a boy as slim, as small, as birdlike as Otto could kill so many men. Halfway through that morning Albrecht had caught his face, motionless under his helmet, lit by the narrow slit in the bunker and dirty like today except for the white tributaries of tear marks mapping down his cheeks. By the evening these were covered with dirt too and he’d looked as he did now. Open eyes, unblinking. Impassive. Something inside him had broken, stretched, and snapped. One bullet in the thousands had been a bullet too far. Albrecht had seen it before, but never so cleanly. Never such a clean fracture of the soul. And never such a silent break either. Silent ever since. Sebald had looked him over and passed him fit, but no one had yet pushed him to speak. There was no need. They’d all seen what he’d done that day and they were all grateful for it; grateful he’d done it and grateful it was him who had, not them.