ON A HOT August morning Lieutenant Pieter Bach, a slim, tanned thirty-year-old commander of a German motor infantry company, was lying in the grass on the east bank of the Don and looking up at a cloudless sky. After a long advance across the steppe and the difficulties of a night-time river crossing, Bach had bathed and put on clean underwear. He at once felt a sense of peace. He was, of course, used to abrupt changes in his sense of himself and the world; there had been more than one occasion during the last year when, worn out by the heat and the roar of engines, longing for a drink of water—even from a filthy swamp—he had suddenly been transported into a world of cool cleanliness, a world where he could bathe, enjoy the smell of flowers and drink cold milk. He was no less accustomed to the reverse, to exchanging the peace of a village garden for the iron stress of war.
Accustomed as he was to such changes, Bach was still able to enjoy this moment. He was able to think calmly, without any of his usual irritation, about the nitpicking criticisms that Preifi, his battalion commander, had made during a recent inspection, and about his difficult relations with Lenard, the SS officer who had recently joined their regiment. None of this troubled him; it was as if he were remembering the past rather than thinking about what would determine his life today and tomorrow. He knew from experience that the capture of a bridgehead was always followed by a halt of three or four days, while more forces were brought over the river and preparations were made for the next attack. This impending period of rest seemed blissfully long. He did not want to think about his soldiers, about his still unwritten report, about their lack of ammunition, about the worn tyres of his company’s trucks, and the fact that he might be killed by the Russians.
His thoughts turned to his recent period of leave. He had failed to make the most of it and it would be a long time before he was allowed home again. In spite of this, he felt no regrets. Back in Berlin, he had felt a strange mixture of pity and contempt for other people—even for close friends, even for his own mother. He was irritated by their excessive concern over everyday hardships, even though he understood that their lives were not easy and that it was entirely natural for them to want to talk about such matters as air raids, ration cards, worn-out shoes and the shortage of coal.
Soon after returning to Berlin, he had gone to a concert with his mother. He had barely listened to the music at all; instead, he had studied the audience. There were a great many old people and hardly anyone young—just one skinny boy with very large ears and an ugly seventeen-year-old girl. The sight of the men’s shiny jackets and the wrinkled necks of the old women had been depressing; it was as if the concert hall smelled of mothballs.
During the interval, he had greeted a few people he knew. He had spoken to Ernst, a well-known theatre critic; his son, a former schoolmate of Bach’s, had died in a concentration camp. Ernst’s hands were shaking and his eyes watering; and he had a sclerotic blue vein bulging out on his neck. He was evidently having to do his own cooking; he was like an old peasant woman, his fingers brown from peeling potatoes.
He spoke with Lena Bischof—the ugly, grey-haired wife of Arnold, one of his gymnasium comrades. She looked slovenly; there was a wart with a coiled hair on her chin and she was wearing a crumpled dress with a ridiculous bow tied at the waist. Lena told him in a whisper that she had pretended to separate from Arnold, since his grandfather was a Dutch Jew—not that this had ever been of any significance to him. Until the start of the Russian campaign, Arnold had lived in Berlin, but in November he had been sent to work in the east, first to Poznan and then to Lublin. Since then Lena had not had a single letter from him. She did not even know if he was alive—he had high blood pressure, and sudden changes of climate could be the end of him.
After the concert was over, the audience quietly went their separate ways. There were no cars waiting outside on the street. The old men and women just shuffled hurriedly away in the dark.
The following day he saw Lunz, a friend from his student days with a withered arm. He and Lunz had once wanted to start a journal together, intended for people of culture: professors, writers and artists. Lunz was exhaustingly verbose, but he did not ask Bach a single question about the war and Russia; it was as if there were nothing more important in the world than the fact that, as a member of the elite, Lunz was entitled to superior rations and was living well.
Bach turned the conversation to more general topics—and Lunz replied reluctantly, in a whisper. Either there were now few things that interested him or he no longer trusted Bach. To Bach it seemed that people who had once been strong, intelligent and interesting now emanated an aura of quiet horror, as if they had been stacked away in a storeroom to gather dust and cobwebs. Their knowledge was now outmoded and their moral principles and scrupulous honesty were no longer of any use to anyone. They had no future and they had been left behind on the shore. And it had seemed all too likely to Bach that, when the war was over, he too would become one of these “former people.”39 It might have been better to end his days in a camp—instead of becoming one of the living dead, he’d have died with a sense of exaltation, knowing he had stayed true to the struggle.
He had seen Maria Forster every day. There was a similar sense of unease in her home; there too the air was full of discontent and resentment. Bach had not seen her father, who was working until late at night in the General Staff, but he had thought to himself that, were he a Gestapo officer, he would have no trouble divining the man’s secret thoughts; his family were constantly making fun of army ways, laughing at the ignorance of newly appointed field marshals and prominent generals and telling jokes about their wives—and there could be no doubt about who had first told them these stories.
Maria’s mother, who had studied literature as a young woman, said that Frau Rommel and Frau Model were grossly uneducated. They spoke incorrect German; they came out with the crudest of slang; they were rude, boastful and ignorant, and it would be utterly inconceivable to let them loose at an official reception. They ate like the wives of petty shopkeepers. They had grown fat; they didn’t take part in any sporting activities and had almost forgotten how to walk. As for their children, they too were rude and spoilt; they were doing badly at school and all they really cared about was alcohol, boxing and pornography. In short, Frau Forster was full of rage and contempt. Nevertheless, Bach had a feeling that, should a field marshal’s wife want to become friends with her, Frau Forster would gladly forgive her her ignorance, her large, fat hands, and even her incorrect pronunciation.
Maria was no less discontented. She thought that art in Germany had fallen into decay—actors had forgotten how to act and singers had forgotten how to sing. Books and plays were a semi-literate mixture of bad taste, sentimentality and Nazi bloodlust. The subjects were always identical and, when she picked up a new book, she felt she was reading for the hundredth time something she had first read in 1933. The art school where she both taught and studied was in thrall to deadly boredom, ignorance and conceit. The most talented people were not allowed to work. German physics had lost its greatest genius, Albert Einstein, but much the same had happened, if to a lesser degree, in every other realm of art and science.
Once, when he and Lunz were drinking together, Lunz had said to him, “Obedience, blind stupidity and the ability to change one’s spots—these are the civic virtues now required of a Berliner. Only the Führer has the right to think, not that he has any great love of thinking—he prefers what he calls intuition. Free scientific thought has been trashed. The titans of German philosophy are forgotten. We have abandoned all shared categories; we have renounced universal truth, morality and humanity. All art, science and philosophy now begin and end with the Reich. There is no place in Germany for bold minds and free spirits. Either they have been neutered, like Hauptmann, or they have fallen silent, like Kellermann.40 The most powerful of all, like Einstein and Planck, have simply soared into the air and flown away.41 It is only people like me who have remained stuck in the swamp, in the reeds.” At this point Lunz had stumbled. “Only please forget all this. Don’t tell anyone, not even your own mother, what I’ve just been saying. Do you hear? You probably can’t even begin to imagine the vast, invisible net that envelops us all. It catches everything in its mesh—the most casual words, thoughts, moods, dreams and looks. A gossamer net woven by iron fingers.”
“You talk as if I was born yesterday,” Bach had replied.
Lunz had drunk a lot that evening and couldn’t hold back. “I work at a factory,” he said. “Up above the machine tools are huge banners with slogans: ‘Du bist nichts, dein Volk ist alles.’42 Sometimes I think about this. Why am I nothing? Am I not Volk? And you too? Are you not Volk? Our era loves grand statements—people are hypnotized by their apparent profundity. What nonsense they are. Das Volk! It’s a word the authorities love. They make out that das Volk is extraordinarily wise. But only the Chancellor understands what das Volk truly wants—that it wants deprivation, the Gestapo and a war of aggression.” And then, with a little wink, he went on, “Another year or two, you know, and you and I will crack too. We too will make our peace with National Socialism, and we’ll wish we’d seen the light a bit sooner. It’s the law of natural selection—the species and genera that survive are those that know how to adapt. After all, evolution is simply a process of continual adaptation. And if man stands at the top of the ladder, if he is the king of nature, it’s simply because the human beast is more adaptable than any other brute beast. He who fails to adapt perishes. He falls from the ladder of development that leads to divinity. But you and I may be too late—I may find myself in prison, and you may be killed by the Russians.”
Bach could remember this conversation clearly. It had made him uneasy. He had thought and felt the same as Lunz and had not contradicted him. “We are the last of the Mohicans,” he had replied. Yet he had said this with a frown. Once again he had felt irritated. Mixed up with Lunz’s thoughts was a troubling, humiliating sense of impotence. Lunz’s thoughts belonged to a world of shabby old-fashioned clothes, of frightened whispers, of old people’s eyes glancing anxiously at windows and doors. And they went hand in hand with the most primitive envy. The envy he had sensed in Maria, and, still more, in her mother’s carping and grumbling—an envy of those who live their lives centre stage, of those who can exhibit their paintings, who go hunting with Göring, who receive invitations to Goebbels’s villa, who fly to congresses in Rome and Madrid and are lauded in the pages of the Völkischer Beobachter.43 Were Colonel Forster to be promoted to some important post, his family’s spirit of revolt might evaporate only too quickly.
Bach had left Berlin deeply dispirited. He had so longed for his weeks of leave—for peace and quiet, for time to talk with his friends, to sit and read in the evenings, to speak freely to his mother about his innermost thoughts and feelings. He had wanted to tell her about the unimaginable cruelty of war, about how it felt to live every hour in total subordination to the coarse, brutal will of a stranger. This, he had wanted to say, was a greater torment than the fear of death.
Instead, he hadn’t known what to do with himself when he got home. He had felt depressed and unsettled. He had felt irritated when he talked to people and he had been unable to read more than a few pages at a time. Like the concert hall, the books all smelled of mothballs.
As he left Berlin on his way east, he felt a sense of relief, even though he had no desire to go to the front and didn’t in the least wish to see either his soldiers or his fellow officers.
He had returned to his motor infantry regiment on 26 June, two days before the start of the summer offensive. Now, on the quiet bank of the Don, he felt as if that had been only a few days ago. Since the offensive began, he had lost all sense of days, weeks and months. Time had become a hot, dense, motley lump, a confusion of hoarse screams, dust, howling shells, smoke and fire, marches by day and by night, warm vodka and cold tinned food, fractured thoughts, the cries of geese, the clink of glasses, the rattle of sub-machine guns, glimpses of white kerchiefs, the whistle of Messerschmitts, anguish, the smell of petrol, drunken swagger and drunken laughter, the fear of death, and the screeching horns of trucks and armoured personnel carriers.
There was the war, a huge smoking steppe sun—and a few distinct pictures: a bent apple tree laden with apples, a dark sky pierced by bright southern stars, the glimmer of streams, the moon shining over blue steppe grass.
This morning Bach had come back to himself. He was looking forward to these three or four days of rest before the final breakthrough that would take them to the banks of the Volga. Calm, sleepy, still able to enjoy the cool touch of the water, he looked at the bright green reeds and his slim, tanned hands and thought about his weeks in Berlin. He needed to link these two opposite worlds—worlds separated by an abyss yet existing side by side in the cramped space of a man’s heart.
He rose to his full height and stamped his foot against the ground. He felt as if he were kicking the sky. Behind him lay thousands of kilometres of a strange land. For years he had thought himself robbed, spiritually beggared, one of the last Mohicans of German freedom of thought. But why had he set such store by his former way of being? Had he really ever been so spiritually rich? Now, as the smoke and dust of the last few weeks yielded to this clear awareness of an alien sky and a vast, equally alien but now-conquered land underfoot, he felt in every cell of his body the sombre power of the cause in which he was implicated. He could feel, it seemed, with his skin, with his whole body the furthest reaches of this alien land he had crossed. Perhaps he was stronger now than in the days when he glanced anxiously at the door as he whispered his secret thoughts. Had he truly understood what the great minds of the past would have made of the present day? Were those great minds now aligned with this resounding, triumphant force or were they on the side of those whispering old men and women who smelled of mothballs? And was it even possible that there was a smell of mothballs about the whole nineteenth century, the century whose faithful son he had considered himself to be? Perhaps those who had known the charm and poetry of the eighteenth century had looked on his beloved nineteenth century as cynical and atrocious?
Bach looked round; he could hear approaching footsteps. The duty telephonist hurried up to him and said, “Lieutenant, the battalion commander’s on the phone. He wants to speak to you.”
The telephonist glanced at the river and let out a barely audible whistle. So much for his chance of a swim in the river—he had already understood from his friend, the battalion telephonist, that their halt was now over. They were to prepare to move on.