Group Portrait with Lady (17 page)
Read Group Portrait with Lady Online
Authors: Heinrich Boll
Among the P. family’s proudest relics are a few specimens of
printed
prose which, slightly faded, gilt-framed, adorn the top shelf of the glass case and were shown to the Au. by Mrs. P. with the remark: “Just look,
in print
, that’s true talent, you know, and think of the money he might have made with it.” (This mixture of loftiest idealism and blatant materialism is typical of the P.s. Au.).
I. Forward March!
Eight months have passed since the war began, and still we have not fired a single shot. The long cold winter was utilized for rigorous training. Now spring is here, and we have been waiting many weeks for orders from the Führer.
In Poland there were battles while we had to keep the Watch on the Rhine; Norway and Denmark were occupied without us being allowed to be there; some have already claimed that we will spend the whole war in our native land.
We are in a small village in the Eifel hills. On May 9 at 16:30 hours comes the order to march to the West. Alert! Messengers run, horses are harnessed, everywhere packs
are being readied, a farewell word of thanks to the people with whom we have been quartered, the girlies have red-rimmed eyes—Germany is marching to the West, toward the setting sun, be on your guard, France!
The battalion gets under way that evening. In front of us are troops, close behind us others follow, and on the left-hand side of the road an endless stream of motorized columns overtakes us. We march through the night.
Dawn is but a glimmer and already the air is quivering with the thunder of German aircraft as they roar away overhead to bid good morning to the Western neighbor. And still the motorized troops overtake us. “German troops crossed into Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg at dawn and are now continuing their westward advance”—for the benefit of the marching column, someone has called out this special bulletin as he drives by. There is a burst of enthusiasm, we wave to our brave comrades of the Luftwaffe as they continue to fly past overhead.
II. The River Meuse 1940
The Meuse is not a river. It is a single stream of fire. The heights along both banks are hills spewing fire.
Every bit of natural cover is made use of in this countryside that is so ideally suited for defense. Where Nature has proved inadequate, technology has stepped in. Everywhere machine-gun nests, at the foot of the cliffs, between crevices in the cliffs, deep in the cliffs. Tiny chambers, bored into the cliffs, hollowed out of the rock, lined with concrete, and towering above them a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot roof, hundreds of feet high, of centuries-old massive rock.
III. The River Aisne 1940
A hundred and twenty Stuka engines roar their song of iron! A hundred and twenty Stukas thunder across the Aisne!
But not one finds its target.
Nature has spread a protective blanket of thick ground-fog over the Weygand Line.
It’s your turn, unknown foot-soldier, today it is up to you to prove the superiority of your rigorous training. Your victory drive must break the toughest resistance.
When you descend from the heights of the Chemin des Dames, remember the blood that has flowed here.
Remember the thousands who passed this way before you.
It is up to you—soldier of 1940—to complete their task.
Have you not read on the memorial stone: “Here stood Ailette, destroyed by the barbarians”? What criminal mentality deludes your foes, in whose eyes you—a human being fighting for his right to live—are once again a barbarian?
In the early morning of June 9 our division stands ready for the assault. Comrades of a sister regiment have the task of attacking in our sector. We have been posted as divisional reserve.
Alert! Get going!
It is four in the morning. Dazed with sleep, one man after another crawls out of the tent. A lively bustle ensues.
IV. A Hero
The story of this hero is an example of fearless courage and the uncompromising willingness of German officers to risk their own lives. It has been said that an officer must have the courage to show his men how to die. But every soldier, the moment he enters the battle arena and grasps the enemy by the throat, concludes a pact with Death. He casts out fear from his heart, tenses all his resources like a
bowstring, his senses suddenly become unnaturally acute, he throws himself into the arms of capricious Fortune, and he feels, without realizing it, that Fortune favors only the brave. The fainthearted are carried away by the example of the brave, and the model of a single man who
sets an example of fearless courage
kindles the torches of dauntless courage in the hearts of the men around him. Such a one was Colonel Günther!
V.
The enemy fights grimly, with cunning and, when trapped, to the last man. He almost never surrenders. We are fighting blacks from Senegal, in their element here, masters of bush warfare. Marvelously camouflaged behind tree roots, behind artificial or natural screens of leaves, dug in wherever a path or a more open part of the forest lures on the attacker. The shooting is at close range, almost every shot finds its mark and almost always fatally. The tree-snipers are almost invisible too. Often they allow the attacker to pass by in order to finish him off from behind. It is impossible to eradicate them, they plague the reserves, dispatch riders, headquarters, artillerymen. Long since cut off, half starved, they continue for many days to shoot down single soldiers. They lie, stand, or sit huddled against a tree trunk, often still wrapped in a camouflage net, lying in wait for their prey. Whenever it is possible actually to detect one of them, the savage is usually already aware of this, and he merely drops like a sack from above to vanish like lightning into the undergrowth.
VI.
Onward, we must not dally here, not here of all places. The battalion is marching without cover through the valley. Who knows whether the enemy is ensconced on the
slopes to right or left—ever onward! It is like a miracle, no one impedes our advance. The villages have been looted and destroyed by the wave of retreating French.
“Over there you can see the Chemin des Dames,” a comrade next to me says in a low voice—his father had been killed in the Great War. “That must be the Ailette hollow, that’s where he was wounded as a ration runner.”
A broad highway leads across the Ailette hollow to the broad dominating heights above the Chemin des Dames. To the right and left of the highway there is hardly a single spot of ground that was not repeatedly torn up by shells during the Great War. Nowhere is there a tree of any size with a proper trunk. In 1917 there were no more trees here at all, everything had been blown to pieces. In the intervening years the roots have sprouted again, and every tree stump has become a bush.
VII.
Every few moments we look at the time. A last check, a last sighting. Final directions—and a shot rends the silence. Attack! From the edges of the forest and from behind lines of bushes, the German cannons blaze forth. Slowly the rolling gunfire rumbles up the slope of the opposite bank of the Aisne. The entire valley of the Aisne is shrouded in a cloud of smoke so that at times we can observe very little. When the firing is at its peak, the sappers bring up the rubber rafts and convey the infantry across. Heavy fighting begins for the crossing of the Aisne and the canal. Toward noon the heights on the far side have been reached, despite the enemy’s desperate resistance. Observation is now no longer possible from our post. The advance observer and the two radio operators have already gone on ahead this morning with the infantry. In the afternoon the observation post and the firing position also receive orders to take up new positions. The hot sun beats down. After a short
time we reach the Aisne. The new observation post is to be set up on Height 163.
The Au., all too self-conscious when it comes to the production of prose, must refrain from comment.
If we add up all the
factual
particulars on A. and reduce all the
nonfactual
ones to a kernel that would correspond to the factual ones, he may well have had the makings of quite a good Phys.-ed. teacher who could have taught drawing on the side. Where he did in fact end up after a few abortive careers is long since known to the reader: in the army.
Now it is well known that in the army, as anywhere else, one never gets something for nothing, most certainly not when one is obliged to pursue the career of noncommissioned officer, the only one open to A., who “had to quit school at fourteen” (H., Sr.). And at this point it is only fair to say that the seventeen-year-old A., who volunteered first for the Labor Service, then for the genuine article, is beginning to see the light. In letters to his parents (all in the showcase for everyone to inspect) he writes as follows: “This time I really do want to stick it out, come what may, and no matter how difficult other people may make things for me I don’t want to be always putting all the blame on them, so please, Mum and Dad, when I’ve started a career don’t go right away looking at its summit.” That is not badly expressed and is an allusion to a remark of Mrs. P.’s who, the first time Alois came home on leave in uniform, already saw him as “military attaché in Italy, or something.”
If, finally, we apply the always desirable pinch of compassion, as well as a minimum of what might be called fairness, and take into account A.’s deplorable upbringing, we see that
he was not so bad after all, and the farther he got away from his family the better he became, since among strangers there was no one to see him as a future cardin- or admiral. When all is said and done, he managed after a year and a half in the army to get as far as corporal; and even taking into account that the imminent war was favorable to careers, there is not much to be ashamed of in that. When France was invaded he was made a sergeant, and it was in that capacity, the “bloom” still on him, that in June ’41 he attended the Gruyten anniversary party.
Reliable details about Leni’s rekindled pleasure in dancing that evening are not available, only rumors, whispers, both of a mixed nature: benevolent, spiteful, jealous, old-maidish; assuming that between eight in the evening and four in the morning dance music was played some twenty-four to thirty times, and Leni left the ballroom with A. after midnight, it is likely—if we average out the rumors and whispers—that Leni took part in twelve dances; however, of these assumed twelve dances she did not dance most or
almost
all with Alois, she danced them all with him. Not even with her father would she consent to a token dance once around the floor, not even with old Hoyser—no, she danced only with him.
Photos on display in the P. showcase, in addition to a medal and a combat pin, reveal the A. of those days to have been one of those shining-eyed fellows who were eminently suited in wartime not only to adorn the covers of illustrated weeklies but also to publish in such weeklies prose of the type quoted, in fact even in peacetime. According to all that Lotte, Margret, and Marja knew of him (both directly as well as filtered through Leni’s meager information), and according to the Hoyser statements, we must picture him as one of those lads
who, still shining-eyed after a twenty-mile march, machine rifle (loaded, safety catch released) at the chest, unbuttoned tunic from which the first medal dangles, enters a French village at the head of his platoon in the firm conviction of having captured it; who, after convincing himself with the aid of his platoon that there are neither partisans nor courtesans hidden in the village, has a thorough wash, changes his underwear and socks, and then voluntarily marches eight more miles through the night (not sufficiently intelligent first to make an intensive search in the village for a bicycle that might have been abandoned—perhaps he was just intimidated by the deceptive signs saying
LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT
); alone, undaunted—off he marches, merely because he claims to have heard that in the little town seven miles away there are some women; a few whores, no longer young, as it turns out on closer inspection, victims of the first German sex-wave of 1940; drunk, exhausted in the wake of considerable professional activity; after the medical orderly on duty has disclosed a few statistical details to our subsidiary hero and allowed him to have “a quick look, no obligation” at the pitifully old-looking women, he marches the eight miles back again, mission uncompleted (and only
now
does it occur to him that even the tiresome search for a concealed bicycle would have been worthwhile), ruefully calls to mind his first name with its attendant obligations and, after a march of altogether thirty-four miles, sinks instantly into a deep, short sleep, before waking, possibly “doing a bit of writing” in the gray dawn, and marching off again to capture more French villages.
It is with him, then, that Leni has danced an estimated twelve times (“You’ve got to hand it to him: he was a fantastic dancer!” Lotte H.), before letting herself be carried off, shortly before one in the morning, to a nearby castle moat that had been turned into a park.
Needless to say, this event has given rise to much speculation, theorizing, polemicizing, and analysis. It was a scandal, almost a sensation, that Leni, who had the reputation of being “unapproachable,” should slip off “with
him”
of all people (Lotte H.). If we average out, as it were, the opinions and feelings expressed over this event, as we did in order to determine the frequency of dances, we arrive at the following result in our opinion poll: more than 80 percent of the observers, participants, and those in the know attributed material motives to A.’s seduction of Leni. In fact, by far the majority believes in some connection with A.’s aspirations toward an officer’s career; his idea had been—so they say—to catch Leni for the sake of the financial security it would give him (Lotte). The entire Pfeiffer clan (including a few aunts, but
not
Heinrich) were of the opinion that Leni had seduced Alois. Most likely neither assumption is true. Whatever A. may otherwise have been, he was not calculating in a materialistic sense, and in this he was refreshingly different from his family. It is to be supposed that he fell head over heels in love with Leni in the radiance of her second blooming; that he was sick of his tiring and somewhat squalid adventures in French bordellos, that Leni’s “freshness” (Au.) sent him into a kind of ecstasy.