The Sleepwalkers (54 page)

When the first grey light of dawn came cold and leaden Huguenau noticed the tufts of grass at the lip of the trench and a few daisies that
had survived from last year. So he simply crawled out and made off. He knew that he might be picked off at any moment by the English, and that similar attentions would be paid to him by the German outposts; but the world lay as if under a vacuum glass—Huguenau could not help thinking of a glass cover over cheese—grey, worm-eaten and completely dead in a silence that was inviolable.

Bathed in the limpid air that heralds the spring, the deserter made his way unarmed through the Belgian landscape. Haste would have served him little, prudent caution served him better, and weapons would not have protected him at all; it was, one might say, as a naked man that he slipped through the armed forces. His untroubled face was a better protection than weapons or hurried flight or forged papers.

For the Belgians were suspicious fellows. Four years of war had not improved their disposition. Their corn, their potatoes, their horses and cows had all had to suffer. And when a deserter came to them looking for sanctuary they examined him with twofold suspicion, lest he might be one of the men who had beaten on their doors with a rifle-butt. And even if the fugitive spoke passable French and gave himself out as an Alsatian, in nine cases out of ten that would have availed him little. Woe to the man who strayed into a village merely as a fugitive timidly imploring help! But a man who came like Huguenau with a ready jest on his lips, with a beaming and friendly face, found it easy enough to have beer smuggled to him in the barn, or even to sit with the family of an evening in the kitchen and tell tales of the Prussians’ brutality and violence in Alsace; such a stranger was welcomed and got his share of the hoarded provisions; with luck he might even be visited in his bed of hay by one of the maids.

It was still more advantageous, of course, to get into the parsonages, and Huguenau soon discovered that he could manage this by way of the confessional. He made his confessions in French, skilfully grafting an account of his miserable plight on to the admission of his sin in breaking his oath of allegiance. To be sure, the results were not always pleasant. Once he hit upon a priest, a tall lean man so ascetic and passionate in appearance that Huguenau almost shrank from presenting himself at the parsonage on the evening after confession, and when he
saw the severe figure busy at spring work in the orchard he felt inclined to turn tail. But the priest came quickly towards him. “Suivez-moi,” he said harshly, and led him indoors.

For nearly a week Huguenau stayed there on meagre rations with a bed in the attic. He was given a blue blouse and set to work in the garden; he was awakened for Mass and permitted to eat in the kitchen at the same table as his silent host. Not a word was said of his escape, and the whole affair was like a penance that sat but ill on Huguenau. He had even made up his mind to quit the relative security of his asylum and continue his dangerous flight, when one day—eight days after his arrival—he found a suit of civilian clothes laid out in his attic. He was to accept the suit, said the priest, and he was free to go or to stay as he chose; only he could no longer be boarded there, for there was not sufficient food. Huguenau decided to go on farther, and as he embarked on a lengthy speech of thanks the priest cut him short: “Haïssez les Prussiens et les ennemis de la sainte religion. Et que Dieu vous bénisse.” He lifted two fingers in benediction, made the sign of the Cross, and the deep-set eyes in his peasant face gazed with burning hate into a distant region inhabited, presumably, by Prussians and Protestants.

When Huguenau quitted that parsonage it became clear to him that he had to think out a definite plan of escape. Formerly he had often enough hung about in the neighbourhood of various corps headquarters where he passed without comment among the other soldiers, but that had now become impossible. He was really depressed by his civilian clothes; they were like an admonition to return to the work-a-day world of peace, and that he had donned them at the command of the priest seemed now a lapse into stupidity. The priest’s offer was an unauthorized interference with his private life, and he had paid dear enough to secure his private life. Besides, even if he did not regard himself as belonging to the Kaiser’s forces, yet as a deserter he had a peculiar, one might almost say a negative connection with them, and in any case he belonged to the war and he did not disapprove of the war. For instance, he had not been able to stomach the way in which men in the canteens abused the war and the newspapers, or asserted that Krupp had been buying up newspapers in order to prolong the war. For Wilhelm Huguenau was not only a deserter, he was a man of business, a salesman who admired all factory-owners for producing the wares that the rest of the world used. So if Krupp and the coal barons bought newspapers they
knew what they were doing, and had a perfect right to do it, as much right as he had to wear his uniform as long as he pleased. There was no reason, therefore, why he should return to that background of civilian life which the priest with his suit of clothes had obviously destined for him, nothing to induce him to return to his native country in which there were no holidays, and which stood for all that was commonplace.

So he remained in the base lines. He turned southwards, avoiding towns and calling at villages, came through the Hennegau and penetrated to the Ardennes. The war by that time had lost much of its formality, and deserters were no longer closely hunted—there were too many of them, and the authorities did not want to admit their existence. Still, that does not explain how Huguenau got out of Belgium undiscovered; one can attribute it rather to the somnambulistic sureness with which he picked his way through the dangerous zone; he walked along in the clear air of early spring, walked light-heartedly as if under a glass bell, cut off from the world and yet in it, and he was untroubled by reflections. From the Ardennes he crossed into German territory, coming out on the bleak plateau of the Eifel where winter still prevailed and it was difficult to make headway. The inhabitants did not bother about him, they were surly, silent people, and they hated every extra mouth that sought a share of their scanty provender. Huguenau had to take to the train and break into his savings, hitherto untouched. The serious issues of life threatened him again in a new and different guise. Something had to be done to secure and prolong his holiday.

The little town lay girdled by vineyards in a tributary valley of the Moselle. The heights above were crowned by woods. The vineyards were all in trim, with the vine-stocks set in straight lines interrupted at places by outcrops of reddish rock. Huguenau observed with disapproval that many of the owners had not weeded their plots, and that the neglected patches stood out like rectangular yellow islets among the reddish grey soil of the others.

After the last days of winter in the Eifel highlands Huguenau had come down all at once into the real springtime. Like a promise of inalienable order and comfort the sun radiated gay well-being and light security into his heart. Any anxiety that might have lurked there could be thrown
off. It was a satisfaction to him to see in the forefront of the town the stately District Hospital with its long façade lying in the morning shadow, he approved the fact that all its windows were open as if it were a southern sanatorium, and he found it pleasant to imagine the light spring airs blowing through the white wards. He approved, too, the large red cross marked on the roof of the hospital, and as he passed by he cast a benevolent glance at the soldiers in their grey hospital uniform, who were convalescing, some in shadow and some in the sun of the garden. Across the river lay the barracks, recognizable by its style of architecture, and a building resembling a monastery which he later discovered to be the prison. But the road sloped down towards the town in a friendly and comfortable manner, and as Huguenau passed through the mediæval town gate, a small fibre case in his hand just like the case of samples he used to carry, it did not even ruffle him that his entry reminded him strongly of similar entries into Württemberg towns which once upon a time—and how long ago it seemed—he had visited on his business rounds.

The streets, too, were so old-fashioned that they reminded him of his compulsory day of rest in Nürnberg. Here in Kur-Trier the war of the Palatinate had not raged with such ruthlessness as in the other regions west of the Rhine. The old fifteenth- and sixteenth-century houses were still intact, and so was the Gothic Town Hall in the market-place, with its Renaissance outworks and the tower before which stood the old pillory. And Huguenau, who had visited many a lovely old town on his commercial rounds, but had remarked none of them, was seized by a novel emotion which he-could not have given a name to or traced to any known source, but which made him feel curiously at home in this town: if it had been described to him as an æsthetic emotion or as an emotion springing from a sense of freedom, he would have laughed incredulously, with the laughter of a man who has never had even an inkling of the beauty of the world, and he would have been right, in so far as nobody can determine whether it is freedom that opens the eyes of the soul to beauty, or beauty that gives the soul its vision of freedom, but yet he would have been wrong, for there was bound to be even in him a deeper human wisdom, a human longing for that freedom in which all the light of the world has its source and that finally creates the Sabbath that hallows life; and since this is so and cannot be otherwise, a gleam of the higher light may well have fallen on Huguenau in that very moment
when he crawled out of the trench and shook himself free of human obligations, a gleam of that light which is freedom and which entered even into him and for the first time dedicated him to the Sabbath.

Far removed from speculations of this nature, Huguenau engaged a room in the hotel in the market-place. As if to assure himself that he was still on holiday, he set out to have a jolly evening. The Moselle wine was not rationed and in spite of the war had retained its quality. Huguenau treated himself to three pannikins full and sat long over them. There were citizens all round at the various tables; Huguenau was an alien among them, and here and there hasty questioning glances were directed at him. They all had their business and their preoccupations, and he himself had nothing. None the less he was happy and contented. He was himself amazed: no employment and yet happy! so happy that he found pleasure in recapitulating to himself all the difficulties that would incontestably arise should a man like himself, a stranger without identification papers and without any connections in the town, attempt to set up business and obtain credit. It was extraordinarily funny to imagine the fix he would be in. Perhaps the wine was responsible. Huguenau, at any rate, as he climbed into bed with a somewhat addled head, did not feel like a worried commercial traveller, but like a merry and light-hearted tourist.

When Gödicke, a bricklayer in the Landwehr, was unearthed from the ruins of his trench, his mouth, gaping as if for a scream, was filled with earth. His face was a blackish blue, and he had no discernible heart-beat. Had not the two ambulance men who found him made a bet about his survival he would simply have been re-buried immediately. That he was fated to see the sun again and the sunny world, he owed to the ten cigarettes which the winner of the bet was due to receive.

He could not be said to have revived under artificial respiration, although both men toiled and sweated over him, but they carried him off and observed him closely, abusing him from time to time because he so obstinately refused to solve the riddle of his life, the riddle of his death; and they were tireless in shoving him under the doctors’ noses.
So the object of their bet lay for four whole days in a field hospital without moving and with a blackened skin. Whether during this time a dim flicker of infinitesimal slumbering life began to glimmer and was fanned with pain and anguish through the wreck of the body, or whether it was a faint and ecstatic pulsing on the verge of a great beyond, we do not know and Gödicke of the Landwehr could not have told.

For it was only piecemeal, half a cigarette at a time, so to speak, that the life returned to his body, and this slow caution was both proper and natural, since what his crushed body demanded was the utmost immobility. For many long days Ludwig Gödicke must have fancied himself the child in swaddling-clothes that he had been forty years before, constricted by an incomprehensible restraint and feeling nothing save the restraint. And if he had been capable of it he might well have whimpered for his mother’s breast, and as a matter of fact he soon did begin to whimper. It was during the journey, and his whimpering was like the incessant mewling of a newly born child; nobody was willing to lie next to him, and one night another patient even threw something at him. That was during the time when everyone believed that he would have to die of hunger, since it was impossible for the doctors to find a way of introducing nourishment into him. That he went on living was inexplicable, and the Surgeon-Major’s opinion that his body had nourished itself on all the bruised blood under the skin was scarcely worth calling an opinion, let alone a theory. The lower part of his body in especial was terribly injured. He was laid in a cold pack, but whether that alleviated his sufferings at all could not be determined. But it was possible that he had ceased to suffer so much, for the whimpering gradually died away. Until a few days later it broke out again more strongly: it was now—or one may imagine that it was—as if Ludwig Gödicke were recovering his soul only in single fragments, and as if each fragment came to him on a wave of agony. It may be that that was so, even though it cannot be proved; it may be that the anguish of a soul that has been torn and pulverized into atoms and must join itself together again is greater than any other anguish, keener than the anguish of a brain that quivers under renewed spasms of cramp, keener than all the bodily suffering that accompanies the process.