The German Dead Come Home

NOT LONG THEREAFTER, ALBINA, looking through her larder and cupboards, noticed a dearth of staples, things they could not produce themselves. She needed sugar, flour, salt and coffee, a drink they had become overly fond of; she needed flannel for Michael’s bed, and she had to see the seamstress who still made most of their clothing. She decided to drive next morning to Katharinenstadt where she could buy such things.

Alexander objected to her ambitious request to make the trip alone.

“I cannot leave here for the next three days,” he pleaded, “I expect three foals and a load of feed to come. I just can’t get away and leave Klaus with everything. Wait a couple of days, so I can go with you. I don’t like you alone on the road.”

“There is nothing to it. The road is safe and fairly well maintained in summer. I won’t break an axel, I promise. You know very well that I am only going from village to village,” she protested. She twirled about a couple of times and sang out to tease him: “Schaffhausen, Basel, Zug, Orlovskaya, Ober-Monjou, Katharinenstadt! It is as if I am on a Dorfstrasse, village street, all the time.”

Turning serious again, she said, “I will stay with my parents overnight and can easily accomplish the whole thing in two days. Can I leave Michael with you and Annie? That would make it easier.”

“Of course you can,” said Alexander, defeated, “although I don’t like this one bit.”

Annie was a bright teen girl, daughter of a neighbor, who came often to help with Michael when Albina had work to do.

Albina came to him, her eyes nacreous with love, “You are the best man. I could not have found a better one in the whole world.”

Mollified, he put his stamp of approval on the enterprise by telling Klaus that she needed a buggy the next day. She left shortly after daybreak. Klaus Grünfeld had put two matched gray mares between the Stränge of her small landau, a delicate carriage, because the weather was warm and sunny and promised to hold for the day, and he brought the conveyance to her front door out in the street.

Albina had dressed smartly for a beautiful day in sophisticated Katharinenstadt. She wore a long-sleeved maize-colored dress that set her hair ablaze. Against the morning chill and the dust of the partly unpaved road she had covered herself with a tight-fitting, long jacket of umber silk. She felt urbane and chic in her attire, ready to enter the city.

With a friendly, “Thank you, Klaus,” Albina entered the landau, clicked her tongue and flicked her buggy whip encouragingly, sending her team into a slow trot down the broad street. As she progressed through the village she returned many greetings and friendly calls from her neighbors. Everyone was about early, performing chores, getting their wagons ready to go into the fields or to market. She would not be alone on the road to Katharinenstadt.

Once out of the village she urged the grays into a faster trot, which the animals liked, as they were rested and full of vigor and the load in the small landau was light. Moving at this fast pace she made good time reaching Orlovskaya by noon. This was more than two thirds of the way, and she decided to give the winded horses a rest while having lunch with friends.

By a stroke of luck Franz Eckheim and his wife Erika were both at home that day and while the women chatted in the kitchen, getting das Mittagessen, noon meal, ready, Franz watered and fed the horses. The Eckheim children were grown and had left town and so, living alone, the older couple was glad of the company. They told Albina that they, too, had thought of leaving Russia, but had not yet found the courage to rid themselves of their belongings, changing their entire life.

“We are older now, lacking in energy and enthusiasm to do it all over again,” they admitted.

Albina lingered slightly longer than she had intended. However, her horses once more moved out energetically, and shortly, by mid-afternoon, she reached Katharina’s Thor, her parents’ house, outside the city.

Everyone was delighted to have her drop in on so unexpected a visit. After greetings and hugs, Albina asked if her mother would go shopping with her in town, so she could leave early next morning for home. Victoria was delighted. Holger put a team of his own fresh horses before the landau and the women were off.

They were barely in town when they saw groups of crying women and sober-faced men hastening toward the big Lutheran church.

“Great God in heaven, what is going on here?” cried Victoria, looking perplexed at her usually staid citizens. The women inquired into the general unhappiness, trying right and left to engage persons for clarification of the dramatic situation. Yet they only received a shouted, “The caskets are at the church. They came home a while ago.” However, this made no sense to mother or daughter. What caskets? Who had died? Why was the whole town abroad at once? Usually the Russian authorities allowed no assembly of German groups, no matter how small. What was different today?

They made little progress through the streets, with people hastening hither and yon, crossing at will without looking. Their carriage was swept up in the throng and soon they found themselves by the church grounds. The large plaza was filled with hundreds of people of all ages, sobbing, calling out names. Loud cries of anguish could be heard soaring above the crowd’s din. They were cries, filled with such pain and hurt that only screams could carry the message.

Albina handed Victoria the reins and jumped to the pavement; she moved, being pushed by the crowd more than she walked, toward the church. Suddenly the forward movement stopped and through a break in the crowd she saw many simple pine caskets, over a hundred perhaps, with women and men in agony kneeling beside them.

Beside her she noticed a middle-aged woman with a sad but calm face.

“Please, tell me what has happened here. I just came in from Schaffhausen and I do not understand.”

The woman looked at her pityingly, “So you have come to share our pain. These are the caskets of the young men and fathers of our area that the Tsar threw against two fortified positions. Almost every man in the assaults died. These are just the men from Katharinenstadt, Basel, Zug and yes, from Schaffhausen. Never mind the other dead men from the meadow side. We don’t know yet how many died from over the Volga, on the Bergseite.”

Albina cried out in terror, “Oh Lord, preserve us!” Now she, too, was filled with a frenzy to know. She knew so many of the young men who had been pulled from their homes. They were her contemporaries. She had known them in school, known them through her cousins, her brother and her sister.

She squeezed between kneeling bodies, crying faces and caskets, until she had a clear view of a few of the caskets. Tears streamed down her cheeks until she could hardly see. She wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, using the long sleeve of her gown, and saw that at the head of each pine box was a little metal tag noting a name and a number.

For a long moment she stood motionless, taking in the confused scene with people rushing from casket to casket in search of their beloved. It became instantly clear to her that she could do nothing here but become a hindrance to families looking for their sons and fathers.

She turned, making her way slowly back to the carriage and her anxiously waiting mother. She was not the only one turning from the heart-wrenching scene. A large, florid man walked only a few feet from her in the same direction. His big, red face was a masque of hate and anger.

He noticed her looking at him. His eyes were bulging with ill-contained fury, and his anger made him finally burst out, “They are nothing but butchers, these Roosians! These caskets and bodies have been collecting some place for God knows how long. We heard that there was a train loaded with bodies coming into Saratov and brought them home. Otherwise the Russians would have brought them here, one by one, in the dead of night so we would not know the horrible total. Ha!” he laughed a terrible laugh, “and these are bodies of those they cared to pull off the battle field. Those behind enemy lines, who knows?”

He spat and, clenching his huge, meaty hands into enormous fists, he walked away. Albina found Victoria and jumped into the carriage. She threw her arms around her worried mother and cried, “Mother, let us go away from here. Let us go home from this place of death and agony.” She took the reins firmly into her hands, urging the team forward and, gaining ground, little by little she extricated the carriage from the tightly packed crowd.

Once she gained the open road she told Victoria, still crying inconsolably, the terrible things she’d seen and heard.

“A few citizens were alerted by a good Russian man that a strange train had come to Saratov. With sealed compartments it had been put on a little-used outside track. The man said that a fellow worker, thinking it carried supplies, had broken open one of the sealed doors and, instead, found countless pine boxes.”

Albina automatically, competently, corrected the left horse, which had fallen into a hobbling canter.

“What kind of caskets,” asked Victoria, her face troubled. She still could not comprehend the scene she’d seen.

“Mother, this was a whole train with dead Russian and German soldiers from this area. As soon as the Vorsteher in Katharinenstadt heard about the train he dispatched runners to tell the people about it, and soon a huge crowd departed for Saratov. The police tried to stop them from entering the train station, but Germans and Russian serfs alike fought them with their bare hands. Everyone was incensed that their dead were sitting in rail wagons. They were infuriated that no one had been notified to bring them home for burial.”

“God preserve us,” Victoria said. Albina had stopped crying. Leaving Katharinenstadt, they saw the steppe’s horizon in the east hung with rosy, silvery clouds. Yet neither woman noticed the beautiful phenomenon. Instead, their heads were turned toward each other as they tried to decipher the significance of their experience in Katharinenstadt. Victoria, her face creased with sympathetic pain for the families of the fallen, commented on the violent grief of the scene. Lately her age had begun to show. For her hair, matronly gathered in the back of her head, was run through with hundreds of silver threads.

“You said there were hundreds of caskets. How could there be so many deaths from just this area?”

“Yes, it must be an uneven war we are fighting. The pine boxes by the church did not contain the remains of the Russians fallen in the same battles. Those had been taken off the train per force by hundreds of serfs and workers. It is true, Mother, our Tsar, notwithstanding his own German wife, has sold out the Germans who have helped settle this empty, unproductive land.”

They arrived at Katharina’s Thor without knowing how they had gotten there. Holger, with a groom, came to receive them. Albina, reduced to childhood by his familiar, protective figure, flew sobbing into her father’s embrace.

“Now, now, my child, what has made you so upset,” he said, but looking at his equally upset wife he began to worry.

“Victoria, what has happened to the two of you? Have you been robbed? Threatened? Hurt?”

Victoria had gathered her composure, “Let us go inside, mein Lieber. We will explain. It takes time and will be painful.”

While Albina still clung to her father, Victoria picked up her skirt, which swept the ground, and strode firmly into the house. Without pausing she went into the drawing room, her most favored room in the house. She had decorated this room with an elegant but cozy décor, creating a space with a feeling of calm and peace.

She went to a sideboard, opening the carefully carved double doors, extracting from its interior a bottle of heavy red Bordeaux wine. She selected three glasses from a display case and then, considering, produced a fourth. By now Holger, still holding Albina’s hand, had joined her in the room. He gently pressed Albina to rest herself on a delicate but comfortable settee.

“You might as well call Manfred in here. He is entitled to hear what we have to say.”

Manfred was their current farm manager. He was a tall, blond, rawboned man, more Swedish looking than German, and very competent. Obediently Holger went outside and asked Manfred to join them. Victoria, dispelling her nervous energy and grief by keeping busy, had opened the bottle of wine, pouring it into the four glasses. She never noticed that the goblets were very full indeed. Perhaps that had been her design from the beginning.

Manfred felt slightly uncomfortable at first, not knowing what this meeting was about; however, after everyone was seated with a glass of Bordeaux in their hands, he relaxed.

“Tell them what you saw today at the Lutheran church, Albina,” prompted Victoria and Albina, recollecting the scenes and acts she had seen, told of the horrid accounts strangers had given, told of the poor, shoddy pine boxes and the crying people kneeling in front of them.

All through her account tears moistened her face. “Dear God, this is unbelievable,” cried Holger, “over a hundred you say, just from this small area in one battle?”

“And that’s not counting the Russian soldiers or those left behind enemy lines,” completed Victoria.

They sat in silence, each person trying to understand the enormous tragedy of the Lower Volga. Suddenly Albina jumped from her seat.

“Oh, my. In all my sadness I have forgotten my errands. I have not accomplished anything I came for. Now I will never make it back tomorrow.”

“Be calm and let me think for a while,” said Holger.

But before he could come up with a solution to her dilemma, Manfred intervened. “I can ride to Schaffhausen and tell your husband what has befallen our city. We have a horse that likes to race with lots of stamina and I can be there by noon.”

“Good idea,” Holger agreed. “We will need Alexander to come here anyway. There will be funerals for days to come of many brave young men we know, and we will pay our respects at every one of the burials.”

That night Albina slept fitfully. She kept dreaming of battles among the crowd, and high above them Alexander rode on a horse. He looked so splendid, wearing the cuirass of a knight, the silver on his bridle and saddle shining to outdo the shimmering cuirass. He looked remarkably like the picture of St. Michael adorning a stained glass window in the Catholic church. In her dream she thought, “Take off the cuirass and throw it away. Oh, Alexander, you are a target for all evil because you shine so.”

Although it was only a dream, she was terribly afraid for her man, for even dreaming she knew that no one standing out in a crowd like this would be safe. While she dreamed that a dark horde of men marched closer and closer, Alexander’s horse flew toward the masses and Alexander prepared for battle, drawing up a shield. Mercifully she awoke the moment the darkness closed in about her beloved. She sat up in the bed of her youth, sweating and trembling, and began to pray: “Dear God, my Savior, do not allow this to be an omen for our lives.”

After praying for a while, her heart felt light and she went about getting ready for the day. By nightfall the next day Alexander reached Katharina’s Thor. He’d ridden the distance, holding his small son in his arms, riding out as soon as Manfred had brought him the message.

Albina snatched her child from his arms and, pressing him to her heart, felt safe for the first time since the previous day. All through the day messengers had arrived, telling of funerals and wakes. Pastors and priests coordinated the hours and days when and where the rites would be performed, and the families notified their closest friends and relatives.

It had been decided that the family would stay closely together, attending the burials as one. After a week of funerals, sadness and regret, the family returned to Katharina’s Thor, drained of emotions, tired to death.

That week they had buried two twenty-year-old cousins, a friend of the family and father of four, a nephew, a young uncle to Victoria’s children with a wife and two children, and two schoolmates of Albina’s. They also had attended the burials of neighbors from Norka and, most painful of all, the sad service for Reinhart Döring’s grandson, Albert.

“I need to go home,” Adela told Alexander a day later. “I cannot stay one day longer in this city of death and sadness.

“We shall go home as soon as I can gather our supplies, and not a moment later,” he said.

This reasonable announcement brought Albina back to her mundane everyday concerns. “Yes, you are right, I need to see the seamstress and buy fabrics.”

They went to the city, rushing to complete their transactions, and were on their way early the next morning.