Discreetly accompanied by the confidential papers that drew this rather accurate portrait of her, Nurse (First Class) Erna Laub, usually well provided with money, looked for jobs just behind the front lines — the sort of posting her colleagues did their best to evade with the help of their connections (in violation of a draconian rule) and even of their amorous liaisons. Laub’s only known liaison occurred in Breslau, with a twenty-six-year-old flying ace who was distinguishing himself on the eastern front. After his sorties over the Red Army munitions depots, this handsome Siegfried, an occasional drug-taker, easily obtained a twenty-four-hour leave from his chiefs in order to attend a concert with Erna and end the night in the arms of this yielding statue. He only tore himself away, still ravished by that embrace, to meet a somewhat unaccountable bullet during a nighttime rumpus in the city itself. Suspicion fell on some Polish workers, who were executed without fuss. A few days later, the deceased’s elite squadron was destroyed in its magnificently camouflaged and isolated hangars by Russian bombs of breathtaking precision. Placing fatherland above friendship, Nurse Erna Laub wrote to denounce the careless talk of a certain officer who drank too much, slept with the first women who came along, and talked about his exploits to all and sundry, neglecting, in short, the most elementary precautions. In view of his service record, the culprit was merely demoted and transferred from the air force to a disciplinary infantry unit, where the soldiers lasted an average of forty-five days. Such a courageous show of patriotism on the part of Erna Laub further bolstered the trust in which she was held, and soon after she was appointed head nurse to Army General von G, recovering from a serious fracture to the skull. This task she fulfilled with “matchless devotion,” though the patient died from rampant septicemia four days after beginning his convalescence… It happened at the spa town of Bad Schanden, in Erzgebirge. The view of lofty ranges and white mists framed by the window was so restful, so invigorating, that General von G felt he was coming back to life. The nurses offered him the first cup of some hot, delicious coffee — a gift from the field marshal — while he talked to them innocently about his mountain-climbing youth, his explorations in Anatolia, his fallen sons, and the execution of a pack of Jews at Tarnopol, carried out by those nasty little bandits of the Reprisals Brigade, the worst soldiers in the world! He explained that the Slavs’ very name had derived in ancient times from the Latin slavus, slave — proof of the immemorially servile nature of these tribes from the Asian steppes. Leavening erudition with wit, the general went on to discuss the alternative etymologies peddled by philosophers with more imagination than sense. These would have “Slav” derive from slovo, the Slavonic for verb; or slava, glory, also in Slavonic — for to cap it all, the slaves aspire to the word, they lay claim to glory! Erna Laub implored him several times not to overtax himself by talking; as dusk fell, she injected him with a sedative. “He is saved,” she repeated, “this great man of war! And such a dazzling conversation-alist!” The fever attacked the next morning. The head nurse offered herself for a transfusion, but she was not of the same blood group… The bereaved family sent a miserly one hundred marks to the nursing staff.
Two American parachutists isolated at the top of the Fourth Field Hospital developed a hatred of Erna Laub, marching in and out of their garret several times a day. Privately they called her Old Lace, after the play Arsenic and Old Lace. Torn between hope and fear, they listened to the throb of battle beyond the horizon. The abrupt silence of the guns plunged them into such despondency that Old Lace, noting the rise in their temperatures, fixed them with a gimlet eye straight out of the Last Judgment. She was standing by the door, thin in starchy white, and to them she looked like a Prussian death’s-head. The latch clicked into place behind her. “Our number is up,” said the young man from Arkansas to the young man from Illinois, without specifying whether he meant them personally, the nearby fighting, or global war. “See that poison look on her face?” Old Lace returned to administer some tablets. Bending toward the ear of the young man from Arkansas, she asked, in English, “Speak French?” The parachutist bit back an expletive, and said, “I understand a bit, un peu.” Old Poison Lace was whispering, unbelievably, “Courage, you have won, gagné la bataille. Elite division kaput, comprenez?” “Ja,” stammered the prisoner, he thought he was dreaming, and gaped admiringly at the austere visage that now looked nothing like a death’s-head. The nurse put a finger to her lips.
“Not possible,” protested the young man from Illinois, “you must be nuts…” But he’d seen the finger on the lips. “She’s great, amazing, what a woman! What chumps we’ve been!” Their temperatures returned to normal. Meanwhile, in the mess, Captain Gerhard Koppel and Heiderman the medical officer were debating the prisoners’ fate with Erna Laub. “I vote we get rid of them quietly,” said Dr. Heiderman. “There’s a circular that gives us the right… You know that if Altstadt falls, there’s not enough transport for all of our wounded…” Captain Koppel objected that the circular had been overruled by a subsequent order from the divisional chief, in the interests of intelligence. Erna Laub proved to have some political acumen after alclass="underline" “Besides, precisely if the town falls, such captives will indirectly serve to protect the population…” She backed this up, tactfully, with: “Anyway, you can always decide at the last moment. It’ll only take two minutes.” If there is a last moment, even lasting two minutes, and anyone around to decide anything at all…
The thought of the last moment passed through their three minds, stirring up unconfessable anxieties and expectations. Koppel admitted that the local situation was getting worse, but that the general situation would improve, despite appearances. You never knew with this model officer whether he believed what he was saying or if he said what must be believed. “Berlin stands fast, and the enemy’s plans will be foiled in time; the outlying bits of territory we are losing are as insignificant as the bomb damage, which is really a golden opportunity to rebuild… Between ourselves, let’s face it, many of our venerable old piles were crying out to be demolished long ago. The justifiable respect in which they were held were a brake on modern urban development… And what we shall erect in their place will be equally historic…” He gave the final tug to his glove with a little laugh. Straight and supple, agreeably blond, he might have been a life-sized cutout, soul included, from a military fashion magazine. Was he as genuinely steeped in high official stupidity as he appeared? Or did he put on his stupidity in the morning after his cold shower, along with his uniform, well brushed by an orderly? Was it part and parcel of his contempt for others, did it afford him a secret pleasure in deriding the cowardly? Koppel continued: “We only need a few weeks more to perfect a new technology of warfare… England will be destroyed when she least expects it. In future the real war will be a war of scientific inventions…”