The Young Lions Part 28

"The water, too," Hardenburg said without hesitation.

Christian put the water cans beside the ration boxes.

Hardenburg went to the rear of the car, where there were rolls of bedding strapped against the metal. He took out his knife. With three swift slashes he cut the leather thongs holding them onto the car. The canvas rolls dropped open into the dust. One of the officers started to speak angrily in Italian, but the Major silenced him with an abrupt wave of his hand. The Major stood very erect in front of Hardenburg. "I insist," he said in German, "upon a receipt for the vehicle."

"Naturally," Hardenburg said gravely. He took out his map. He tore off a small rectangular corner and wrote slowly on the back of it. "Will this do?" he asked. He read aloud in a clear, unhurried voice. "Received from Major So and So ... I am leaving the place blank, Major; and you can fill it in at your leisure ... one Fiat staff car, with driver. Requisitioned by order of General Aigner. Signed, Lieutenant Siegfried Hardenburg."

The Major s.n.a.t.c.hed the paper and read it over carefully. He waved it. "I will present this at the proper place," he said loudly, "in the proper time."

"Of course," Hardenburg said. He stepped into the rear of the car. "Sergeant," he said, sitting down, "sit back here."

Christian got into the car and sat down beside the Lieutenant. The seat was made of beautifully sewn tan leather and there was a smell of wine and toilet water. Christian stared impa.s.sively ahead of him at the burned brown neck of the driver in the front seat. Hardenburg leaned across Christian and slammed the door. "Avanti," he said calmly to the driver.

The driver's back tensed for a moment and Christian saw a flush spreading up the bare neck from below the collar. Then the driver delicately put the car in gear. Hardenburg saluted. One by one, the three officers returned the salute. The private who had been sitting beside the driver seemed too stunned to lift his hand.

The car moved smoothly ahead, the dust from its spinning wheels tossing lightly over the small group on the side of the road. Christian felt an almost involuntary muscular pull to turn around, but Hardenburg's hand clamped on his arm. "Don't look!" Hardenburg snapped.

Christian tried to relax into the seat. He waited for the sound of shots, but they didn't come. He looked at Hardenburg. The Lieutenant was smiling, a small, frosty smile. He was enjoying it, Christian realized with slow surprise. With all his wounds and with his company lost behind him and G.o.d knows what ahead of him, Hardenburg was enjoying the moment, savoring it, delighting in it. Christian couldn't smile, but he sank back into the soft leather, feeling his racked bones settling luxuriously in his resting flesh.

"What would have happened," he asked after awhile, "if they had decided to hold onto the car?"

Hardenburg smiled, his eyelids half-lowered in sensuous enjoyment as he spoke. "They would have killed me," he said. "That is all."

Christian nodded gravely. "And the water," he said. "Why did you let them have the water?"

"Ah," Hardenburg said, "that would have been just a little too much." He chuckled as he settled back in the rich leather.

"What do you think will happen to them?" Christian asked.

Hardenburg shrugged carelessly. "They will surrender and go to British prison. Italians love to go to prison. Now," he said, "keep quiet. I wish to sleep."

A moment later, his breath coming evenly, his b.l.o.o.d.y, filthy face composed and childlike, he was sleeping. Christian remained awake. Someone, he thought, ought to watch the desert and the driver who sat rigidly before them, holding the speeding, powerful car on the road.

Merse Matruh was like a candy-box in which a death had taken place. They tried to find someone to report to, but the town was a chaos of trucks and staggering men and broken armor among the ruins. While they were there a squadron of planes came over and dropped bombs on them for twenty minutes. There were more ruins and an ambulance train was spilled open, with men shouting like animals from the twisted wreckage, and everybody seemed intent only upon pressing west, so Hardenburg ordered the driver into the long, slowly moving stream of vehicles and they made their way toward the outskirts of the town. There was a control post there, with a gaunt-eyed Captain with a long sheet of paper mounted on a board. The Captain was taking down names and organization designations from the caked and exhausted men streaming past him. He looked like a lunatic accountant trying to balance impossible accounts in a bank that was tottering in an earthquake. He did not know where their Division Headquarters were, or whether they still existed. He kept saying in a loud, dead voice, through the cake of dust around his lips, "Keep moving. Keep moving. Ridiculous. Keep moving."

When he saw the Italian driver he said, "Leave that one here with me. We can use him to defend the town. I'll give you a German driver."

Hardenburg spoke gently to the Italian. The Italian began to cry, but he got out of the car, and stood next to the Captain with the long sheet of paper. He took his rifle with him, but held it sadly near the muzzle, dragging it in the dust. It looked harmless and inoffensive in his hands as he stared hopelessly at the guns and the trucks and the tottering soldiers rolling past him.

"We will not hold Matruh forever," Hardenburg said grimly, "with troops like that."

"Of course," the Captain said crazily. "Naturally not. Ridiculous." And he peered into the dust and put down the organization numbers of two anti-tank guns and an armored car that rumbled past him, smothering him in a fog of dust.

But he gave them a tank driver who had lost his tank and a Messerschmitt pilot who had been shot down over the town to ride with them, and told them to get back to Solum as fast as possible, there was a likelihood things were in better shape that far back.

The tank driver was a large blond peasant who grasped the wheel solidly as he drove. He reminded Christian of Corporal Kraus, dead outside Paris long ago with cherry stains on his lips. The pilot was young, but bald, with a gray, shrunken face, and a bad twitch that pulled his mouth to the right twenty times a minute. "This morning," he kept saying, "this morning I did not have this. It is getting worse and worse. Does it look very bad?"

"No," said Christian, "you hardly notice it."

"I was shot down by an American," the pilot said, wonderingly. "Imagine that. The first American I ever saw." He shook his head as though this was the final and most devastating point scored against German arms in all the campaigns in Africa. "I didn't even know they were here. Imagine that!"

The blond peasant was a good driver. They darted in and out of the heavier traffic, making good time on the bombed and pitted road alongside the shining blue waters of the Mediterranean, stretching, peaceful and cool, to Greece, to Italy, to Europe ...

It happened the next day.

They still had their car and they had siphoned gasoline out of a wrecked truck along the road, and they were in a long, slow line that was moving in fits and starts up the winding, ruined road that climbs from the small, wiped out village of Solum to the Cyrenaican escarpment. Down below, the fragments of walls gleamed white and pretty about the keyhole-shaped harbor, where the water shone bright green and pure blue as it sliced into the burned land. Wrecks of ships rested in the water, looking like the deposit of ancient wars, their lines wavering gently and peacefully in the slight ripples.

The pilot was twitching worse than ever now and insisted upon looking at himself in the rearview mirror all the time, in an effort to catch the twitch at the moment of inception and somehow freeze it there to study it. So far he had not been successful, and he had screamed in agony every time he fell off to sleep the night before. Hardenburg was getting very impatient with him.

But there were signs that order was being restored down below. There were anti-aircraft guns set up about the town, and two battalions of infantry could be seen digging in on the eastern edge, and a General had been seen striding back and forth near the harbor, waving his arms about and delivering himself of orders.

Certain armored elements had been held out of the column that stretched back as far as the eye could reach. They were being a.s.sembled in a reserve area behind the infantry and small figures could be seen from the height pouring fuel and handing up ammunition to the men working in the turrets.

Hardenburg was standing up in the rear of the car, surveying everything keenly. He had even managed to shave in the morning, although he was running a high fever. His lips were cracked and covered with sores, he had a new bandage on his forehead, but he looked once more like a soldier. "This is where we stop them," he announced. "This is as far as they go."

Then the planes had come in low from the sea, the drumming of their engines drowning out the slow roar of the armor on the climbing road. They came in regular, arrow-like formation, like stunt-fliers at a carnival. They looked slow and vulnerable. But somehow, no one was firing at them. Christian could see the bombs dropping in twisting, curling arcs. Then the mountainside was exploding. A truck deliberately toppled over above them, and went crashing ponderously into the ravine a hundred meters below. One boot flew in a long, tumbling curve out from it, as though it had been thrown out from the truck by a man who was resolved to save the first thing that came to his hand from the wreck.

Then the bomb hit close by. Christian felt himself being lifted, and he thought: It is not fair, after having come so far and so hard, it is not at all fair. Then he knew he was hurt, except that there was no pain, and he knew that he was going to go out and it was quite peaceful and delicious to relax into the spinning, many-colored, but painless chaos. Then he was out.

Later, he opened his eyes. Something was weighing him down and he pushed against it, but there was no use. There was the yellow smell of cordite and the bra.s.sy smell of burned rock and the old smell of dying vehicles, burning rubber and leather and singed paint. Then he saw a uniform and a bandage and he realized that it must be Lieutenant Hardenburg, and Lieutenant Hardenburg was saying calmly, "Get me to a doctor." But only the voice and the tabs and the bandage was Lieutenant Hardenburg because there was no face there at all. There was just a red and white pulpy ma.s.s, with the calm voice coming somehow through the red bubbles and the white strips of whatever it had been that held the side of Lieutenant Hardenburg's face together. Dreamily, Christian tried to remember where he had seen something like that before. It was hard to remember because he had a tendency to go out again, but finally it came back to him. It was like a pomegranate, roughly and inaccurately broken open, veined and red and with the juice running from the glistening, ripe globules past the knife down onto the shining ivory plate. Then he began to hurt and he didn't think about anything else for a long time.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN.

"THEY a.s.sURE ME," the voice behind the bandages was saying, "that in two years they can give me a face. I am not under any illusions. I will not look like a motion-picture actor, but I am confident it will be a serviceable face."

Christian had seen some of the serviceable faces that the surgeons patched onto the wrecked skulls delivered to their tables, and he was not as confident as Hardenburg, but he merely said, "Of course, Lieutenant."

"It is already almost definite," the voice went on, "that I will see out of my right eye within a month. By itself that is a victory, even if it was as far as they could go."

"Certainly, Lieutenant," Christian said in the darkened room of the villa on the pretty island of Capri, standing in the winter sunlight of the Bay of Naples. He was sitting between the beds, with his right leg, bandaged and stiff in front of him, just touching the marble floor and his crutches leaning against the wall.

The case in the other bed was a Burn, an armored-division burn, very bad, and the Burn merely lay still under his ten meters of bandage, filling the high-ceilinged cool room with the usual smell, which was worse than the aroma of the dead, but which Hardenburg could not smell, because he had nothing left to smell with. An economically-minded nurse had realized this fortunate fact and had placed them side by side, since the hospital, once a vacation spot of a prosperous Lyons silk manufacturer, was being crowded more and more every day with the surgically interesting products of the fighting in Africa.

Christian was in a larger hospital down the hill, devoted to the common soldiers, but they had given him his crutches a week ago, and he now felt like a free man.

"It is very good of you, Diestl," said Hardenburg, "to come and visit me. As soon as you get hurt people have a tendency to treat you as though you were eight years old, and your brain goes to rot along with everything else."

"I was very anxious to see you," Christian said, "and tell you in person how grateful I am for what you did for me. So when I heard you were on the Island, too, I ..."

"Nonsense!" It was amazing how much the same, clipped, precise, snarling, Hardenburg's voice was, although the whole faade that had shielded the voice was now gone. "Grat.i.tude is out of order. I did not save you out of affection, I a.s.sure you."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"There were two places on that motorcycle. Two lives could be saved that might be useful somewhere later on. If there was someone else there who I thought would be more valuable later, I guarantee I would have left you."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian, staring at the smooth, white, unfeatured bandages wrapped so neatly about the head that he had last seen red and dripping on the hill outside Solum, with the noise of the British planes dying away in the distance.

The nurse came in. She was a motherly-looking woman of about forty, with a kindly, fat face. "Enough," she said. Her voice was not motherly, but bored and business-like. "The visit is over for the day."

She stood at the door, waiting to make sure that Christian left. Christian stood slowly, taking hold of his crutches. They made a sodden, wooden noise on the marble floor.

"At least," said Hardenburg, "I will be able to walk on my own two feet."

"Yes, Sir," Christian said. "I'll visit you again, if you are agreeable, Lieutenant."

"If you wish," said the voice behind the bandages.

"This way, Sergeant," said the nurse.

Christian tapped his way out clumsily, because he had only recently learned how to handle the crutches. It was very good to be out in the corridor, where you could not smell the Burn.

"She will not be too disturbed," Hardenburg was saying through the white m.u.f.fling wall of bandage, "by the change in my appearance." He was talking about his wife. "I have written her and told her I was. .h.i.t in the face and she said she was proud of me and that it would alter nothing."

No face, Christian thought, that is quite a change in appearance. But he said nothing. He sat between the two beds, with his leg out, and his crutches in their accustomed place against the wall.

Now he came to visit the Lieutenant almost every day. The Lieutenant talked, hour after hour, through the white darkness of the bandages, and Christian said, "Yes, Sir," and "No, Sir," and listened. The Burn still smelled just as badly, but after the first few gagging moments each time, Christian found himself able to bear it and even, after awhile, to forget it. Locked in his blindness, Hardenburg talked calmly and reflectively for hours on end, slowly unwinding the tissue of his life for his own and Christian's benefit, as though now, in this enforced and brutal holiday, he was taking inventory of himself, weighing himself, judging his past triumphs and errors and mapping out the possibilities of his future. It grew more and more fascinating for Christian, and he found himself spending half-days in the evil-smelling room, following the spiraling, oblique uncovering of a life that he felt to be more and more significantly locked with his own. The sickroom became a combination of lecture room and confessional, a place in which Christian could find his own mistakes clarified, his own vague hopes and aspirations crystallized, understood, categorized. The war was a dream on other continents, an unreal grappling of shadows, m.u.f.fled trumpets in a distant storm, and only the room with the two swathed and stinking figures overlooking the sunny, blue harbor, was real, true, important.

"Gretchen will be very valuable to me," Hardenburg was saying, "after the war. Gretchen, that's the name of my wife."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian, "I know."

"How do you know? Oh, yes, I sent you to deliver a package."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"She is quite handsome, Gretchen, isn't she?"

"Yes, Sir. Quite handsome."

"Very important," said Hardenburg. "You would be amazed at the number of careers that have been ruined in the Army by dowdy wives. She is also very capable. She has a knack for handling people ..."

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"Did you have an opportunity to talk to her?"

"For about ten minutes. She questioned me about you."

"She is very devoted," said Hardenburg.

"Yes, Sir."

"I plan to see her in eighteen months. My face will be well enough along by then. I do not wish to shock her unnecessarily. Very valuable. She has a knack of being at home wherever she finds herself, of being at ease, saying the correct thing ..."

"Yes, Sir."

"To tell you the truth, I was not in love with her when I married her. I was very much attached to an older woman. Divorced. With two children. Very attached. I nearly married her. It would have ruined me. Her father was a laborer in a metal factory and she herself had a tendency to fat. In ten years she will be monstrous. I had to keep reminding myself that in ten years I expected to have Ministers and Generals as guests in my home and that my wife would have to serve as hostess. She had a vulgar streak, too, and the children were impossible. Still, even now, thinking of her, I feel a sinking, weak sensation. Have you ever been like that about a woman?"

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

"It would have been ruinous," said the voice behind the bandages. "A woman is the most common trap. A man must be sensible in that department as in anything else. I despise a man who will sacrifice himself for a woman. It is the most sickly form of self-indulgence. If it were up to me, I would have all the novels burned, too, all of them, along with Das Kapital and the poems of Heine."

And another time, on a wet day, with the Bay outside the window gray and hidden in the sweep of winter rain ..."After this one is over, we must leap into another war. Against the j.a.panese. It is always necessary to subdue your allies. It is something that is left out of Mein Kampf, perhaps, out of shrewdness on the author's part. And after that, it will be necessary to permit some nation, somewhere, to grow strong, so that we can always have an enemy who will be quite difficult to beat. To be great, a nation must always be stretched to the limits of its endurance. A great nation is always on the verge of collapse and always eager to attack. When it loses that eagerness, history begins to tap out the name on the tombstone. The Roman Empire stands as a perfect example for any intelligent people forever. The moment a people changes from, 'Whom shall I hit next?' to 'Who will be the next to hit me?' it is on the road to the dust-heap. Defense is only a coward's anagram for defeat. There is no successful defense to anything. Our civilization, so called, which is merely a combination of laziness and an unwillingness to die, is the great evil. England is the dessert on the Roman dinner. It is never possible to enjoy the fruits of war in peace. The fruits of war can only be enjoyed in further war, or you lose everything. When the British gazed around and said, 'Look what we have won. Now let us hold onto it,' an empire slipped through their fingers. It is always necessary to remain barbarians, because it is the barbarians who always win.

"We Germans have the best chance of all. We have an elite of daring and intelligent men, and we have a large, energetic population. It is true that other nations, say the Americans, have as many daring and intelligent men, and a population that is at least as energetic. But we are more fortunate, for one reason, and we shall conquer because of it. We are docile and they are not and probably never will be. We do what we are told and so we become an instrument in the hands of our leaders that can be used for decisive acts. The Americans can be made an instrument for a year, five years, but then they break up. The Russians are dangerous, merely because of their size. Their leaders are stupid, as they always have been, and the energy of the people is canceled out by ignorance. It is only the size that is dangerous, and I do not believe it to be crucial."

The voice spun on, like the voice of a thoughtful scholar in a university library, reading from a well-loved book that had almost been memorized by the reader. The rain hit the window in soft, wet spurts, obscuring the harbor. The Burn in the next bed lay without moving, deep in its frightful smell, deep past hearing or caring or remembering anything.

"In several ways," Hardenburg was saying, "this wound of mine was a fortunate occurrence." It was another afternoon, still and dreamlike, with the sun late in the sky, and the entire landscape deep blue, water, air and mountains transparent and luminous outside the window. "Somehow, I was not very lucky in the Army-and this wound will mean I will not be tied to the Army any more. Somehow, I was never in the right spot in the Army. As you know, I was only promoted once, while men who had gone to school with me were promoted five times. There is no use complaining. It has nothing to do with favoritism or merit. It is merely a question of where you happen to be at certain moments. At a particular headquarters when the General there is given a lucky command. At a particular place in the line when the enemy attacks. How the despatches are worded on some mornings and who chances to read them that morning and how he is feeling at the moment ... Well, it was becoming clear I was not lucky in that direction. Now they will not send me back into the Army. It is bad for the morale to have men commanded by an officer with a maimed face. Perfectly sensible. You do not march a company through a military cemetery before an attack if you can help it. Simple discretion. But a wounded face will be of value later, just the same. I intend going into politics. I had intended doing it later, through the Army, but I will save twenty years this way. Positions of leadership when the war is over will only be open to men who can prove they have served the Fatherland well on the battlefield. I will not have to wear my medals on my lapel. My face will be my medal. Pity, respect, grat.i.tude, fear-my face will produce them all. There will be a world to be governed when this is over, and the Party will find my face as good a symbol as any to represent them in other countries.

"The idea of my face does not disturb me. When they take the bandages off I am going to get up and look at it in the mirror. I am quite certain that it is going to be horrible. Horror should not annoy a soldier any more than the sight of a hammer annoys a carpenter. It is sentimental to pretend that horror is not the tool of the soldier, just as the hammer is the tool of the carpenter. We live off death and the threat of death and we must take it calmly and use it well. For the purpose of our country we need an empty Europe. It is a mathematical problem and the equalizing sign is slaughter. If we believe in the truth of the answer we must not draw back from the arithmetic which solves the equation.

"Wherever we go everyone must realize that we are quick to kill. It is the most satisfactory key to dominion. Eventually I came to enjoy killing, as a pianist enjoys the Czerny which keeps his fingers limber for the Beethoven. It is the most valuable equipment in any military man, and when an officer loses it he should ask to be cashiered and returned to civilian life to take up bookkeeping.

"I have read some of your letters to your friends back home and I have been revolted by them. You are much older than I am, of course, and have been exposed to a great deal of Europe's nonsense, and I see your letters are full of talk about the great days of peace and prosperity for all the world that will come when the war is over. That is all very well for women and politicians, but a soldier should know better. He should not want peace, because peace is a buyer's market for a soldier, and he should know that prosperity can only be unilateral. We can be prosperous only if all Europe is a pauper, and a soldier should be delighted with that concept. Do I want the illiterate Pole, drunk on potato alcohol in the winter mud of his village, to be prosperous? Do I want the stinking goatherd in the Dolomites to be rich? Do I want a fat Greek h.o.m.os.e.xual to teach Law at Heidelberg? Why? I want servants, not compet.i.tors. And failing that, I want corpses. It is only because we are still part politicians, we Germans, selling ourselves to the world for an outdated and unnecessary vote of confidence, that we talk like that. In ten years we can display ourselves as what we are-soldiers, and nothing more, and then we can dispense with this nonsense. The soldier's world is the only real world. Any other world is something off the shelf of a library-rhetoric and old bindings. Flabby wishes and banquet speeches at a table at which all the guests have fallen asleep. Ten thousand shelves of books cannot stop one light tank. The Bible has been printed a billion times, perhaps, and a single patrol of five men in an armored car can break the ten commandments fifty times in a half hour in a Ukrainian village and celebrate that night over two cases of captured wine.

"War is the most fascinating of all pursuits, because it most completely fits the final nature of man, which is predatory and egotistic. I can say it because I have given my face for it, and no one can accuse me of loving it safely from a distance and for its rewards alone.

"I do not think we are going to lose this war, because we cannot afford to. But if we do lose it we will lose it because we were not harsh enough. If we announced to the world that for every day of war, we would kill one hundred thousand Europeans, and kept our promise, how long do you think the war would last? And not Jews, because everyone is used to seeing Jews killed and everyone is more or less secretly delighted with us for our efficiency in that field. And the supply of Jews is not inexhaustible, no matter how generously we compute grandmothers. No. Europeans, Frenchmen, Poles, Russians, Dutchmen, English prisoners of war. We should print the lists of names with photographs, on good paper, and drop them over London instead of bombs. We are suffering because our conduct is not yet as mature as our philosophy. We kill Moses, but pretend to tolerate Christ, and we risk everything for that brainless pretense.

"When we overcome remorse we shall be the greatest people in Western history. We may do it without that, but in the meanwhile we are dragging a hidden anchor.

"I tell you these things because you're going back to the Army and I am not. I have had a chance these last months to think all these things out and I can use disciples. After the last war it took a wounded Corporal to save Germany from its defeat. After this war it may take a wounded Lieutenant to save Germany from its victory. You can write me from the front and I can lie back here while my face mends and feel that I have not been useless. I am younger than you, but I am far more mature because I have not done a thing since I was fifteen years old without relating it to my purpose. You have drifted and modified and sentimentalized and it has kept you in inconclusive adolescence. The reasonable modern man is the man who has learned to press things immediately, in a single step of logic, to their reasonable conclusions. I have done that and you have not, and until you learn to do so, you will be a child in a room full of grownups.

"Killing is an objective act and death is a state beyond right and wrong. I can kill a nineteen-year-old Lieutenant two months out of Oxford and leave three dozen Germans to die on a hill with exactly the same calculations, because I know these things. Each contributes as he can, all thirty-seven of them by dying in a particular way and at a particular time that I find convenient or necessary. I will weep over none of them, unless I am watched by a company who will be encouraged to die the same evening by my tears.

"If you think that I admire the German soldier you are wrong. He is better than other soldiers because he can be hammered harder without wearing through and because he will permit himself to be trained more thoroughly because he lacks imagination. But his courage is a trick that is played upon him, like any other soldier's courage, and his victory will mean no more beer for him than before, and no less labor, and he does not know these things. An army finally is no more than the function of its numbers multiplied by the quality of its leaders. Clausewitz said that, and for once he was right. The German soldier is not responsible either for the fact that there are ten million more like him, or for the fact that he has the most gifted men in Europe guiding him. The birth rate of Central Europe takes care of the first and accident and the ambition of a thousand men takes care of the second.

"The German soldier has the good luck that at this balancing moment in history he is being led by men who are a little mad. Hitler falls into fits before the maps at Berchtesgaden. Goering was dragged from the sanitarium for dope addicts in Sweden. Roehm, Rosenberg, all the rest, would make old Dr. Freud rub his hands in Vienna if he peeked out and saw them waiting in his anteroom. Only the irrational vision of a madman could understand that an empire could be won in ten years merely by promising to inst.i.tutionalize the pogrom. After all, Jews have been murdered for twenty centuries without any important result. We are being led against the sane and reasonable armies of men who could not deviate from the rules if they burst a kidney in the effort, and we are being led by men exalted by opium fumes and by gibbering Corporals who picked up their lessons in military affairs from serving tea in a trench to a broken Captain twenty-five years ago at Pa.s.schendaele. How can we expect to lose?

"If I had epilepsy or if I had been treated once for amnesia or paranoia I would have higher hopes for my success in Europe in the next thirty years, and I would serve my country better ..."

The doctor was a gray-haired man. He looked seventy years old. He had pouches under his eyes of wrinkled purple skin, like the flesh of swamp flowers, and his hands shook as he poked harshly at Christian's knee. He was a Colonel and he looked too old even for a Colonel. There was brandy on his breath and the small, watery spurts of his eyes suspiciously searched Christian's scarred leg and Christian's face for the malingering and deception the doctor had found so often in thirty years of examining ailing soldiers of the Army of the Kaiser, the Army of the Social Democrats, and the Army of the Third Reich. Only the doctor's breath, Christian thought, has remained the same over the thirty years. The Generals have changed, the Sergeants have died, the philosophies have veered from north to south, but the Colonel's breath bears the same rich freight by a dark bottle out of Bordeaux that it did when Emperor Franz Josef stood beside his brother monarch in Vienna to review the first Saxony Guards on their way into Serbia.

"You'll do," said the Colonel, and the medical orderly busily marked down two ciphers on Christian's card. "Excellent. It doesn't look so good to the eye, but you can march fifty kilometers a day and never feel it. Eh?"

"I did not say anything, Colonel," said Christian.

"Full field duty," the Colonel said, peering harshly at Christian, as though Christian had contradicted him. "Eh?"

"Yes, Sir," said Christian.

The Colonel tapped the leg impatiently. "Roll down your trousers, Sergeant," he said. He watched Christian stand up and push his trouser leg down into place. "What was your profession, Sergeant, before the war?"