The Runner left the village with the replacements. Their new leather harness creaked. A horse whinnied near the last huts of the village. The cemetery lay there abandoned. The cart with the bodies was gone. No trace of the alarming passengers.
The column behind the Runner were quiet. The Front up ahead, enclosed in gloomy forests, was similarly quiet. Night pushed itself along the horizon. Always at twilight there was silence from the Front, as it got used to the darkness. The Runner knew that. With his left hand, he batted aside a fly that had followed him from the edge of the village. His right hand was still making a fist. It clutched the paper he had taken unnoticed from the Major’s desk.
The Adjutant’s message to the company was in his pocket. He would throw it away later.
There was a field-kitchen installed on the edge of the forest. The co-driver was feeding fresh wood into the furnace. A few embers spilled out. The lid of the cauldron was open. The steam smelled of nothing in particular.
The forest came out confidently to meet the path. But its trunks melted away. Only a few twigs plucked at the Runner, brushed against his shoulder. He unclenched his fist to smooth out the piece of paper. He looked over his shoulder, just in case.
One of the men had broken away, and was trying to get to the head of the column.
The Runner balled up the paper in his hand again. It needed to be darker. The tree with the hanged man was coming soon. He switched to the other side of the track. The row of men made no move to follow him. They stayed on their side, and they would be in for a fright. He smiled unpleasantly.
The hanged man dangled on a long rope, as though he’d been pulled out of the water. It was already too dark to make out his features. They had switched him round only a week ago. His predecessor had been a Commissar, this one was just a simple soldier. When parties of them were found in the forest, they were shot, stragglers were hanged. They seemed to know that. Usually they kept one last bullet for themselves. That accelerated the procedure.
The first in line leaped aside in terror. He almost ran smack into the corpse. The Runner tittered. The rest of them were alerted, and made a shy detour round the body. Their first corpse, oh me oh my.
It was getting darker and darker. The sky turned bruise-black. A telegraph was ticking away in the bushes, but the Runner couldn’t see anything. Sounds wafted over from the artillery emplacements in the forest. He pulled the report out of his pocket, tore off a corner of it, and let it flutter to the ground.
The remains of the cart with the mouldered leather harness loomed across the path like a ghost. No one noticed the paper flutter to the ground. It wouldn’t be long before he’d got rid of the rest of it. Pieces of the report kept fluttering off into the dark, into oblivion. That was part of his plan. Before long, he had just one tiny bit left. He rolled it up between his fingers, and flicked it away, anywhere. A spent rifle bullet whined feebly through the treetops and knocked against a trunk. The Front seemed to be coming to life.
The soldier behind him caught him up at last. He was panting, as if he was carrying a box of ammunition as well as his rifle and groundsheet.
‘I’m a baker,’ he said.
A spray of tracer fire clattered into the boughs. The Runner pulled on his steel helmet, which thus far he’d carried on his belt. The voice at his side said nothing. Then after a while, it began again:
‘’m’ baker!’
‘Yeah,’ said the Runner. He wondered if it was his name or his profession.
‘I wanted to get in with the field bakery,’ the voice explained.
‘That’d be nice,’ replied the Runner. He thought about bread. Fresh bread, still warm from the oven. He wasn’t hungry. He thought about starched aprons, a tiled kitchen, a floury warmth.
‘Back home, I’ve got my own bakery with my own mill,’ the voice went on. And then, sounding very sorry for itself: ‘I was cheated.’
‘We’ve all been cheated,’ said the Runner. His voice was drowned out by the whistle and hiss of a shell that detonated in the forest.
‘Keep going!’ shouted the Runner, but the men had all flung themselves to the ground. The baker was stretched out as well.
‘Get up!’ the Runner yelled furiously. He thought: What have I let myself in for; this shower would rather creep along on all fours. A minute passed, and finally they were all up. They went on.
‘A bakery with a mill,’ the voice next to him resumed. A parachute flare opened out over the forest. Its bright illumination pierced through the ragged treetops. For half a minute they were running through white light.
The Runner turned to look the voice in the face: a row of protruding teeth, and an expression of stupidity. Then night drew its curtain once more.
‘I’ll see you come out of it with something too,’ wheedled the voice. ‘A word from you . . . I’m sure you know who to talk to. The place for me’s in the field bakery. Everyone should serve where he’s most useful.’ The last sentence swollen with false conviction. ‘I don’t know anyone.’ The Runner gestured irritably. He realized he still had in his hand the piece of paper from the Major’s table. ‘Fall back. We need to keep distance, it’s about to get dangerous.’ He wanted to be alone. The shadow obediently fell back. He was able to think, and to smooth out the paper. The Major wouldn’t miss it. He only collected bits of paper like that in order to destroy them. He knew what was written on it by heart. A vehicle blocked the path. Wounded men were being picked up. He tripped over a stretcher. Someone swore. He dropped the paper. It took him a while till he found it.
The file behind him was getting out of order. One man walked into him. Others shouted: ‘Runner, Runner!’ He lined them up again, and found himself getting out of breath. For safety’s sake, he shoved the piece of paper in his pocket. In the event of a checkpoint, he could claim he was carrying it in case of emergency. Of course that was also forbidden, but they didn’t mind quite so much. Thousands of such bits of paper came out of nowhere. He had never seen it happen, but he was sure they were dropped from aeroplanes. Sometimes they were seen caught in the treetops, or on the shingle roofs of the village huts. Most of them were scattered over the swamps, where they were no good to anyone. There were blue ones and pink ones. Both carried the same message.
COME OVER TO OUR SIDE, COMRADE! THIS PASS GUARANTEES YOU LIFE AND LIBERTY! On the back side of it was something in Cyrillic. He couldn’t make it out. One man in the company had translated it. It didn’t sound bad. ‘Anyone who produces this form is a deserter. He is entitled to privileged treatment, life, liberty, and passage home at the war’s end.’ No one in the company took it seriously. The Runner didn’t really either. And in spite of that, most of them had one of these ‘passes’. This one here came from the Major’s table. The assault on the log-road would take place without the Runner.
The business with the report was taken care of. No one would ever find the scraps of paper. There was another flare up in the sky. Through the foliage overhead, the Runner watched it slowly subside. He wondered how far there was to go. But there already was the shadow of the railway embankment. A machine gun started rattling away. It was as if the embankment had only been waiting for him. As on command, the sentry nearest him fired back. The next man joined in. Fire ran down along the tracks like a burning fuse. Hissed and crashed. The rail seemed to be shaking with fever. From down in the dip, a second machine gun suddenly opened up. Everything was popping and banging, it was like a New Year celebration. Further off was the firework of the flares. And suddenly, the noise collapsed in on itself like a house of cards. Silence. Just one ricochet whistling though the air. It seemed to have taken off vertically, and wouldn’t be back.
‘Time for a cigarette,’ the Runner said to the men. They stood around him. The little luminous red dots glowed. Each time someone drew, vague features became visible. From the heights opposite, a few shots clacked over at them.
‘All right then,’ said the Runner, and tossed his cigarette end under the trees. The file whisked off along the embankment, with the Runner in the lead.
There was some traffic on the path. Men carrying crates of ammunition squeezed past them. Another Runner overtook them. At the dressing-station, there were some black clumps on the ground. Dead men. His column didn’t make a squeak. Behind a canvas drape was the whitish gleam of a carbide lamp. It smelled of carbolic and quicklime. Far off in the forest, a battery was firing. In the reddish sheen of the detonations as they flickered over the night sky, the Runner for a second glimpsed the outline of the height, the pylon, the scorched earth of the slope, the cratered field. The enemy was sending out breathless bursts of machine-gun fire. High-explosive shells drenched the rails like a thunderstorm. Finally, they broke off, with a vicious satisfaction, as if to say: There’s more where that came from.
The slope began. The Runner clambered on to the embankment, ducked his head, and started to run up the hill. The trench-mortar detonations were like falling rocks. At once he was in the thick of it, the file of replacements following him likewise. But he was only thinking about himself. An inner voice called out: ‘Drop!’ He lay on the deck. It decreed: ‘Run for all you’re worth!’ He ran. His legs obeyed his instincts. The height was like an erupting volcano. Stones, earth and sand clattered over him, a lava rain of incandescent splinters. Sudden quiet. Nothing. Just a fluorescent screen, hanging in the air.
He stood upright, and didn’t dare throw himself down. His life depended on a single movement. The sense that there were a hundred rifle muzzles aimed at him in the darkness made him tremble. His teeth chattered. The fluorescent screen grew brighter all the time.
‘Drop,’ whispered the voice of temptation. He couldn’t even breathe. The only part of him to move were his eyes. They tried to penetrate the darkness, to see the rifle muzzles that were pointing at his chest. The beam of the fluorescence flickered, it was like a headlamp. Other than the pylon, he was the only upright thing on the hill. The replacements were hunkered down in the shadow somewhere. The beam wouldn’t go out.
‘You’d better drop now,’ determined the voice of temptation. The flare went out, and he sprang forward with relief. Like a blind man, he went smash into the concrete. His hand groped in shards of glass, and his knee was full of burning pain. Something looming and dark – one of the pylon supports – threatened to fall on top of him. But it didn’t fall, and he stopped for breath in the lee of the concrete shelter.
With the line of men who were trailing along after him, he couldn’t pay a visit to the hole under the foundations of the mast. He was a convict. Got out of jail. Wherever he might stop and look for shelter, he was followed by a gang of other convicts, who were using his escape route. The only thing open to him was to plunge forward into the darkness again.
It was easier, going downhill. Gravity helped him. He was like a ball, bounding down the slope in great leaps. A clattering as of wooden clogs on an iron bridge accompanied him: rifle-grenades feeling for him. A branch whipped across his face. He was already in the brush down in the hollow. His feet no longer obeyed him. In the shrubbery he defecated, like a man able to think of his body again, once he has done his duty. He always defecated in the same place, and there was never a time he couldn’t do it. In that respect, he was like a dog. A drumming of sixty feet came down after him. A locomotive of human bodies, driven by fear and panic. He had trouble getting them to stop. It surprised him there was no one missing. They crossed the overgrown hollow together. Twigs and thorns pierced the uniforms, and dug into the skin. They reached the beginning of the trench. Bullets buzzed like bees through the foliage.
The Runner said: ‘Wait here till I come for you!’ He normally ran the last stretch to the shelter, even though there was no evidence of mortar fire here. With relief, he pulled aside the metal cover at the entrance, pushed his way through the crack, and took a breath, before lifting aside the ancient piece of sacking.
The smell that greeted him was like poison gas. Even before he could see the enemy, he smelled him. The disinfectant clung to their uniforms, whether they were living or dead.
‘A deserter,’ announced the Sergeant, with an expression on his face as though he had personally pulled him out of the enemy lines.
The Russian soldier sat on the bench facing the table, and the Captain was pressing against the other side of the table. They fixed one another, as though each waiting for the other to pull out a knife. The Russian had slitty eyes, bitten fingernails, and he was scared. His cropped hair stuck straight out from his scalp.
Finally the Captain broke the silence: ‘We’re not getting anywhere like this. This man is disturbed!’ He scratched his head, and decided: ‘I’m going to draw a diagram!’ He paid no attention to the Runner. With the aid of a piece of paper and a pencil that he usually chewed on, he wanted to learn where the Russian mortars were situated. No success. The man gazed silently at the piece of paper, and shrugged his shoulders. The smell of his uniform infested the shelter, which stank as it was, of sweat and shit. The Sergeant raised his hand. ‘Maybe he’ll understand this better?’ he asked, and slapped the round stubbly skull.
‘No,’ said the Captain, ‘don’t hit him!’ He looked at him. The Russian soldier smiled, without understanding.
The Sergeant rapped against his holster: ‘Here’s something he might understand better.’
The Captain appeared to give up: ‘He doesn’t know anything. Can’t be helped.’
Smiling, the other fished a few shreds of tobacco out of his trouser pocket, tore off a corner of the diagram, and rolled himself a cigarette. He pinched the end together, to keep the tobacco from spilling out, leaned forward over the candle, and began to smoke.
‘Does that shit taste good?’ asked the Sergeant sarcastically.
The soldier beamed: a broad, childlike or peasant beam. He looked at the faces of his enemies, and thought they were not unlike his own, different faces, but just as fearful and suspicious. Their desires were as reduced as his: a bit of food, warmth, an end to suffering. Suddenly a change came over his face. He looked perplexed, as though he had to say thank you for the consolation he hadn’t received, the blow on the skull, the gesture with the pistol. He spread out his arms. They seemed to want to take in everything. The barrier position, the plateau, the sector of the Front, the whole land, presently covered in darkness.
The candle flame shrank. The Captain jumped. The Russian sat silently on his plank bench and smiled. But a change had taken place.
‘They’re planning to attack,’ the Sergeant blurted out. In his mind’s eye, he could already see figures rising up out of the trenches, a play of shadows and abeyances, a swarming human wall following a hail of explosives.
‘My kingdom for an interpreter,’ said the Captain, reaching back to his days as a schoolmaster, as though he might find some security there.
‘He’d better go to battalion headquarters,’ said the Sergeant.
Fine, thought the Runner, back to headquarters. He forgot he’d meant never to go that way again, that he hated the plateau. Now he would manage to get away from the offensive. A present from fate. He smiled contentedly. The enemy soldier smiled too. There was nothing in the world that didn’t make sense. As he had always thought. God and a just world. The Sergeant’s voice dribbled in his ear. He didn’t listen. He already saw himself running across the plateau with the prisoner, avoiding the danger. The woods would give them shelter. The Sergeant’s face loomed towards him. A hand patted him on the shoulder.
‘I’ll take him back, you’re tired.’
The Sergeant’s voice was soothing and soft.
The Runner saw the Captain sitting in his place, swimmily saw the smile of the enemy soldier.
‘No,’ he protested.
‘Yes, yes,’ said the Sergeant.
Suddenly the Runner had a vision. He saw the Sergeant leaving the shelter with the enemy soldier. They trotted out into the pitch-black night. The Sergeant had drawn his pistol, the prisoner responded to the merest pressure on his back. A sentry in the trench challenged them. ‘I’m taking him back to battalion headquarters,’ the Sergeant replied. Their shadows advanced along the saps, and brushed the bushes in the hollow. They stumbled up to the plateau. The Sergeant made the prisoner walk along in front of him. A long, long way. They walked through mud, craters, over sand. They got smaller . . .
‘I brought some replacements from the battalion,’ the Runner heard himself say. But the Sergeant had already left the shelter with the prisoner.
It was dark as it always was, in the hole under the concrete underpinning. The Corporal was crouching between his two comrades. They lay wrapped in mouldy blankets on the wet earth. Their breathing rattled. The cold night wind blew through the entry. The Corporal was on watch, and, because he was tired, he lit his pipe. Everything on the plateau was quiet. There was no dull shell crump. The hammering of rifle fire was silent. The Corporal cocked his ear, but no mortars came thundering through the night. Time crept on. He waited. The unfamiliar silence irked him. It was as though there was electricity in the air.
The Corporal stood up, and stumbling over his two comrades made his way to the exit. Slowly he pushed himself through the hole. A light breeze riffled his hair. The pylon overhead was humming. A bit of steel that shells had ripped out of its mooring left a black shadow in front of him. The wind carried a sound from the enemy positions. As though a lorry was trying and failing to get up a hill. Far left, silent sprays of tracer drifted through the night. A rain of sparks that fell into the water and went out. Only afterwards could he hear the thump of their firing.
The Corporal reached for his flare pistol. There was fresh dew on its leather holster. The lock clicked. He stretched out his arm, and pulled the trigger. A dull thud. The flare hissed away, and a second later, it was a shooting star over the barrier position. A comet flying towards the enemy trench. There, its parachute opened. In the harsh magnesium illumination, the Corporal saw he hadn’t aimed high enough. Instead of illuminating the plateau, the fluorescent screen hung over the hollow. Ahead of him were the dead positions. Nothing stirred, not a breath of life. A graveyard in moonlight. Tree stumps like gravestones. A pool of water like an ornamental lake without water lilies. The labyrinthine windings of the trenches. The vegetation like a cemetery wall. The fluorescence sank further. On the ground, the light gradually sputtered out. The Corporal rested his submachine gun on the parapet, and waited. He took off the safety catch. The pylon was humming. His wristwatch ticked. Suddenly out of the darkness came the sound of shuffling feet. He straightaway pressed the gunstock to his shoulder. As a flash of fire passed over the hill from the artillery positions, he saw a figure. A soldier in enemy uniform was advancing towards him.
Even before the light faded, the Corporal had pulled on the submachine-gun trigger.
‘Don’t shoot, comrade!’ came a yell.
Immediately, the Corporal swung the muzzle up in the air. The soldier in front of him crumpled to the ground. Unendurable silence. The Corporal felt sweat beading on his brow. His hands shook. Suddenly the voice of the Sergeant asked out of the darkness:
‘Is he dead?’
‘Yes.’
The Sergeant climbed out of his crater hole, and walked up to the Corporal, who felt tempted to lower his sights a second time.
‘Who was that?’ asked the Corporal.
‘Just a prisoner.’
‘Handy human shield, I suppose.’
The Sergeant was now standing directly in front of the Corporal, and could make out the submachine gun. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said after an awkward silence, but he took a step to the side, just in case. ‘Good night,’ he called out, uncertainly. Then he rounded the base of the pylon, and vanished into the blackness.
The Corporal fetched the shovel to cover the Russian’s body with soil. The pylon hummed in the wind. The tractor noise from the enemy trench was no longer audible. Back in his hole in the ground, the Corporal lay down on the earth and chewed his fingernails in anguish.