The nervous, anemic Dr. Heiderman nodded eagerly in approval, having no other course. But he was sick with foreboding, and it showed; Koppel’s gaze slid over him with polite disdain. “Erna will address herself to me concerning the two parachutists as soon as the evacuation order has been given.” “And if you should be absent, Captain?” The nurse put just enough stress on the word absent to imbue it with the notion of death. A good officer never knows when he may be putting on his gloves for the last time. If you happen to be killed tonight, Captain? Koppel deemed it a reasonable, if distasteful, query; he affected to ignore the doctor. “In that case you yourself will be the judge, Erna, do whatever you think best.” Dr. Heiderman’s trim mustache quivered pitifully, and Koppel saw chaos begin. What connection is there between the muffled buzz of a bell, a cravenly quivering upper lip, and the immense disorder closing over one’s head? The futility of it all was blinding, especially the futility of refusing to look things squarely in the face. Koppel, old chap, you’ll be killed one of these evenings, sooner rather than later, and it’ll be for nothing. Your resolve not to be taken alive serves no purpose whatsoever. The scientific inventions will come afterward, if at all; too late for you, too late for everything. As he was leaving, Koppel turned once, intending to say, “Execute the prisoners!” — and let a few more of those who will kill me meet their end before I do! But the disorder was already taking effect. Koppel shrank from letting a woman perceive the clouding he felt at the back of his own eyes. He did not say the words he wanted to say. Dr. Heiderman let out a sigh. “Asthmatic, are we?” the captain said insultingly, with the unspoken thought: “You’ll be killed too, you repulsive coward!” That’s defeat all over: you feel it as the tooth feels the cavity, it poisons your very breath. The monstrous disorder was rising, drowning out the sounds of water faucets, bells, motors in the courtyard, injured men groaning, and ideas as sonorous as the smash of a boxer’s fist. Koppel pulled off his gloves, just for the sake of pulling off his gloves, made the nurse and the doctor sit down again, and listened to himself speak.
“I’m waiting on the miracle of our technical genius. We may shortly be in a position to blow up half the planet. From what I hear, the tests are proceeding with considerable success…”
A door banged, a furious voice shouted, “Erna! For God’s sake get over here, are you deaf? You too, Doctor, on the double.” The bell was still vibrating. When all is lost, a mindless bell will keep on ringing through whitewashed basements, and glasses will stand empty on tables long after our mouths have rotted… Quick march! Tonight Koppel was expected to lead a special unit, reduced to a third of its strength, into the breach opened by the sacrifice of the elite division. Away he strode like a energetic sleepwalker. Under the arch at the entrance of the former tourist hotel, he saluted the last batch of mangled bodies from the division. Blood-soaked men were stretched out against the embankment of the road as if it were a litter. Repulsive stretchers moved hurriedly back and forth carried by medics with dark rings under their eyes. The workers of the last day! In the center of the courtyard, like a hatless white-maned puppet stuffed with the sawdust of dignity, the chief medical officer was directing the traffic in person. “Immediate surgery, I’ll be there in five minutes, this one to the barn, nothing doing, this one simple: amputation — don’t give me a hard time; this one’s a problem, check him later, get a move on Loschek, no not him, the other one! You there, phone the auxiliary hospital and say I refuse — I refuse — to take the sixty they want to send! No! What are you saying? Idiot! To the cemetery, that’s right. Short of bandages, are you? Anesthetics? I don’t give a… Tell Herr Brückmeister from me, if he hasn’t supplied them by six o’clock, I’ll have him court-martialed… Watch out, gently. Immediate double amputation, Yes, Doctor… Blithering idiots! Can’t you see he’s dead! Not my line of business!” With sarcasm: “Forgotten the difference between fainting and death, have you, young man? What do you mean, no Herr Brückmeister? He’s deserted? The dog, the stinking dog!”
This was neither the place nor the job for a chief medical officer, and he was courting reproof from his superiors. To the colonel approaching through the crush of stretchers and bearers, he addressed a lugubrious salute and looked away. The colonel’s crimson head, squat on his shoulders, suggested the onset of apoplexy. If you want to establish order here, honorable Colonel, try not to burst like a skin full of beer and shit. As for your reproofs, your dressing-downs, your orders, I wipe my a… with them. The colonel was speaking to him confidentially; the doctor caught sight of a gaping, mud-smeared thigh, a pearly gleam of femur deep inside… “No. I’m the boss here. A written order, in writing please! Bring on the badly wounded ones, over there! Idiots! Wake up, man, keep ’em moving… I’ll see you in the operating room…” The red-faced colonel was gazing glassily at another, green-faced colonel being stretchered past. “What’s wrong with him?” “The colonel has been eviscerated, Colonel…” “Quite so, quite so. Keep up the good work.” Above the milling of vertical and horizontal bodies stood huge white clouds. The chief medic ran to the courtyard entrance and with one glance took in the clouds, the banks of the road lined with pale beeches, and the multitude of the wounded emitting what sounded like a harmonious chorus of pain. The white coat and white mane were seen to charge, flailing, at a truck: “Go to blazes! You can’t unload them here! No more! Full up!” A hum was floating on the air: Planes, planes! Hurry up!
Nurse Erna contemplated the chaos from an upstairs window in the officers’ wing. There was Koppel disappearing around the corner with small reluctant steps, on the way to his destruction, no doubt about it! The red-faced colonel was climbing back into his tiny green car, with a boa constrictor painted in yellowish gray on it; swallowed by a boa. A truck blocked his path, the colonel emerged from the boa’s stomach waving a stubby arm: no one saw or heard him. The muffled noise of the alert continued to crackle obstinately through the halls because a plane suddenly appeared, skimming the treetops. Erna picked up the internal telephone: “Turn off that stupid racket, you morons! It’s useless.” She recognized the enemy insignia on the monster’s underwing. It ground sinisterly over their heads, ignoring the Fourth Hospital, but seconds later a slow explosion made the remaining windowpanes vibrate loudly (the less glass there is, the more noise it makes). The heavenly thunderbolt had scored a bull’s-eye on the motor fleet reserved for their evacuation. She looked at her watch. It was time for the kid’s dressing.
The blinded boy endured his darkness fairly well, but he still had a suppurating wound in the groin, threaded with catheters which were torture to replace. “Is that you, Erna?” he asked in an imposingly quiet voice. “It’s not just for show out there, right? Talk to me. I can hear all the sounds. I feel so much better, you know. I was thinking about you. What’s going on?” “Nothing new, Tony… Here, drink this.” The scarred and voided sockets no longer tortured him. Without the bandage, his head was hideously alluring: thick chestnut locks swept the domed forehead, the nose was straight, the mouth full and serious, but the outsize hollows of the eyes, pale as gold in places, devastated a face condemned to the night. “If only I could believe in God!” she thought. She would give the blind boy a final, pacifying injection, as soon as she could arrange it. “Let Tony sleep, let him sleep for good.” If she still loved anyone in this world it was him, this big kid lost in the dark between nothingness and the bitter drink of life to come… His file, penned by someone with a twisted sense of humor, read: “twenty-two years old… draftsman… outstanding performance in the field.”