‘Gaudeamus igitur. Iuvenes dum sumus – Let us be happy while we are young.’
In Latin, Herr Heidelberg barrelled out the thirteenth-century student drinking song, as he marched up and down the row of beds.
The cheery Rhinelander was back under their care again. Ellen smiled, glad to see him. They had patched him up previously, sent him out – and now he was back. This time not seriously injured but more emboldened. Now a real hero. Twice injured.
He grabbed her around the waist. She knew the others encouraged him about how ‘the Irische Frau petter likes de sauerkraut den de spud!’
‘Now ve valzer,’ he said as he kept singing, this time something about ‘The Fatherland most beautiful’.
The men clapped and shouted. Despite their professed aversion to ‘Dutchmen’. Herr Heidelberg, with his larger-than-life good humour was, to a man, universally liked.
‘Frau Ellen, you dance mit me!’ they now called out, mimicking this broth of a man who was tearing the heart out of her, with his erratic swinging-about. Eventually he finished grinding out the ‘Vaterland’ song and put her down.
‘I vill not forget you in Der Vaterland, Frau Ellen, danke, danke,’ he got out in one gasp. When the war was won, he would go home, see his mountain, the Königsstuhl, and his river, the Neckar.
She bade him well, the road to Heidelberg be short before him and to ‘Keep up the dancing!’
He drew himself up, portered out his chest, clicked his heels and saluted her.
When next Ellen saw him, a Confederate cannon had torn a hole as big as his fist through that great-barrelled chest.
Herr Heidelberg would not rest under the ledge of the Königsstuhl, nor hear the murmuring Neckar flow. It would be a pit in Virginia – in Virginia’s bottomless pit.
She resolved not to let his last resting place be unmarked and so fashioned a St Brigid’s Cross out of some reeds.
His death had affected her more than most. He reminded her of Roberteen, a neighbour’s son who had once taken a shine to her back in the old days. A simpleton of a boy but devoted to her. Now, this simple boy-in-a-man’s uniform had wanted only to sing and dance with her, like she was some fresh-faced Fräulein. Wanted, with such undisguised glee, to go back home to see his river and his mountain.
This war was wearying her – its relentless savagery, its unremitting death-dealing. Day after day, night after night, it was the same. Was there ever to be an end to it, so they could all go home? Or did every last one who strapped on a sword, or shouldered a musket, have to die? Until only one was left standing – and he the victor? But of what – a land of no young men, neither North nor South? A land of widows and mothers and sweethearts made barren by war.
America would become a country of old women. Revert to being an unpopulated wilderness. Unless … the slaves, the blacks with no souls, but liberated by the destruction, made it rich again. And that, she knew, would depend, on whatever the last soldier standing would be – North … or South?