“He didn’t suffer… He died at once. A dozen bullets, chest, belly… They were experienced marksmen, shooting at almost point-blank range…”
Chest, belly — carnal words, they lacked for Brigitte their full human density. “I’m glad,” she said, “that his face was spared…” And she saw he was going to hurt her again, but what more could there be?
“On his face there was nothing but great astonishment.”
Brigitte smiled, as though half released. The astonishment of ceasing to be, mystery and mystery’s end, she too wanted that. Unintelligible words broke in on her. “What? What did you say? I didn’t quite…”
“I said he was killed by our own men, he and the rest of his tank crew.”
“Our own men? What men?”
“The others!” the soldier said with hatred. “The killers. Oh yes. They exist. Maybe they have to… That tank crew was noted for its bad attitude, do you understand? Well, I didn’t understand, but I did afterward. They’d been sacrificed; they weren’t supposed to come back. But they did come back, that sometimes happens. So an elite squad shot them down between the lines…”
These words burned slowly and unforgettably into Brigitte’s mind. There was no astonishment.
“Fraülein, it’s even happened to generals…” “Yes, yes, I understand, and I am very grateful you told me the truth… The truth…” Our own men, the others, the killers…
Time is in shreds and the soldier’s letters were in shreds. Brigitte could reread only some torn fragments.
“…We were working back through villages burned out during the retreat. As though the land had been killed off. A few people were still living in cellars, they were afraid of us and kept their raped women hidden, but sometimes they’d come out and scrounge for food; and creatures who once were women were still offering themselves. S said we ought to put them out of their misery, but he threw them some bread… The bread fell into the mud, where they scrabbled for it. A desert is what we have made — that may not be the truth, but that’s what I saw. M explained the strategy behind the retreat. He’s the only one who thinks and speaks; he tells us that next we’re going to beat America, now that the Führer’s goals have been met in Russia… And how are we going to beat America, I ask? He’s counting on secret weapons, scientific warfare. He talks about the stratosphere without knowing what it is — as though it were some sort of magical immensity set aside for the most devastating weapons. He’s obstinate and brave, with an unformed intelligence inside a rather noble skull. No experience upsets him. The Führer knows what he’s doing, and thus our defeats become transmuted into brilliant feints. M is aware of my ‘doubts’ and said to me: I hope you will be killed for the Fatherland because I respect you.
“…Once my tank ran over some living men. They were hiding under the snow, lying in wait for us perhaps, the machine swerved as it accelerated and they screamed like mice being crushed. Our treads were clogged with bleeding flesh and we left a red trail on the snow. I had to see it all, since I’m the observer. I’ve seen them finish off wounded men — our men — for lack of stretchers to take them away. The important thing was that they shouldn’t be able to disclose anything about our units’ movements. In any case, that’s how M explained it, approving orders he deems harsh but wise. ‘War,’ he said, ‘lifts man above himself.’ ‘Would you like such an end for yourself?’ I asked. ‘And why not,’ he replied, ‘better than falling into the hands of Jews and Jew lovers…’ He means it too. I respect him; I think I hate him. I’ve seen prisoners lined up to be shot one by one by a Feldwebel because they wouldn’t tell what they could not know about enemy plans. Some of them got down on their knees and talked, making things up. M said laughing: ‘We’ll liquidate these liars a little later…’ He loves to remind us that the Russians never signed the Geneva convention regarding POWs, too bad for them. Then what about our prisoners? M has an answer for that too: I’ve no pity to waste on cowards, I have pity only for the unlucky ones, but they must face up to the law of nature: Vae victis! The powerful races will only triumph by accomplishing nature’s law. His logic is seamless, like a paranoiac’s.
“…We directed a concentrated barrage on a small infantry tank whose motor had conked out forty yards away. It was a pitiful box of cardboard and steel with three men inside, one of them waving a dirty white rag. The sublieutenant was beside himself because we’d had a terrible attack of jitters as we were pulling back, one of those uncontrollable panics that comes over even the best soldiers now and then, like an electric shock to the nerves. G was yelling, ‘Ha, so they surrender do they, the dirty dogs, the cowardly curs!’ He wouldn’t listen to me, he looked completely out of his mind; normally, he’s a decent fellow, a flower gardener by trade. He ordered us to fire and we watched the tin can burn, the magazine blow up, I watched a blond twenty-year-old burning, half out of the turret. I told myself: Look at what you’re doing, you must look without blinking, you’re not allowed to close your eyes. I watched the flames leap to his blond hair, I watched his face twist like a paper mask tossed onto a bonfire. And I said to myself, When I’ve been killed, I want my pure Brigitte to meet this youth — because he will live again — and to love him for love of me…
“…I was thinking that there’s no natural law for mankind, whose natural law is human law. The tiger and the termite obey their natures; we must be true to ours, which is divine, that is to say a thinking, merciful nature…
“…The bodies of hanged men were dangling from telegraph poles, there were more swinging from the porch of the church. There were too many, they no longer frightened anyone. Fear results from a surprise inflicted on the imagination. Once the surprise has worn off, a hanged man seems perfectly simple, getting hanged becomes quite natural, you realize it’s only a few painful moments and that there are worse ways to die. We were talking about a rabbi. ‘He was lucky to swing so soon,’ says M, who is not personally cruel but accepts that others should be, so as to surmount their instinctive cowardice and face up to responsibility. The average man, in his view, has gone soft, domesticated by an ailing civilization, and will benefit from being trained to cruelty. (M does not consider himself an average man; he regards himself, so he told me, as a normal Aryan.) I questioned this, playfully, just to rile him a little — evoking the Aryans of India, who profess detachment from material things and nonviolence even toward animals. M broke out laughing: ‘If that’s what they teach you at the university, then the universities are overdue for disinfection, and the professors of Aryanism belong in Buchenwald, cleaning the latrines.’ That was mostly to annoy me back, I think, for then he was patient, explaining how the decadence of the Aryan races, weakened by Semitic infiltration, was the root cause of all historical calamities. The Aryan renaissance began with the Party. The more I talk with him, the more I have the impression of a dialogue with a systematic psychopath, and yet I have a humiliating compulsion to converse with him. Of the dozen men who constitute my circle of hell, he’s the only one who talks; I don’t know whether he thinks or merely repeats a series of memorized formulas. I am obsessed by the awful possibility of our souls being imprinted with a whole system of notions designed to prevent us from becoming conscious, smothering thought beneath ersatz thought.
“…There were more children than adults, probably as a result of earlier waves of deportation. The little girls were carrying their dolls, pitiful dolls. In the pathos of their silence and the pathos of their wailing lamentation these Jews exhibited two contradictory characteristics. I remained very calm, I wanted only to understand the victims. To understand means to identify. To understand rather than surrender to suffering, which amounts to no more than a carnal, emotional communion. I sought a communion of the spirit. At first, the silence seemed to me to be nobler than the wailing. Women tearing at their hair, old men chanting their prayers and pulling their white beards… I observed that the blows of rifle butts did not interrupt the rhythm of their lamentation. I understood that this was the rhythm of a lamentation echoing down through the centuries; that it is a community’s song of consent. I saw myself: a calm, rigid onlooker, like a disciplined lunatic. They were being herded into the boxcars. M assures me they will be destroyed in the most painless way possible, with cyanide gas, and recalls the Gospel’s injunction to separate the wheat from the chaff. Then he moves on to eugenics and human selection, look how stunted, sniveling, anemic, and infirm they are, how weepy the old men, how ugly the women! At this point F and W broke in, talking about the beautiful girls in Serbia and Holland… I’ll never forget the asphyxiated howls that came from inside the boxcars… The troops were in a good mood because a ration of brandy had been distributed. Many men felt that it was necessary to evacuate the populations of these little towns to make room for the folks from our bombed-out cities.