Irwin Shaw - The Young Lions

Christian went to the shop on Tauentzienstrasse and bought a small garnet brooch. He held it in his hand, thinking of how it would look at Mrs Hardenburg's throat. He grinned as he realized he didn't know her first name. The brooch cost 240 marks, but he could cut down on his other expenses. He found a small boarding-house near the station that was cheap and he left his bag there. It was dirty and full of soldiers. But he wouldn't be spending much time there, anyway.

He sent a telegram to his mother, telling her that it was impossible to get home on his leave, and asking if she could lend him 200 marks. It was the first time since he was sixteen that he had asked her for money, but he knew his family was doing very well this year, and they could spare it.

Christian went back to the boarding-house and tried to sleep, but he kept thinking of the morning and sleep would not come. He shaved and changed his clothes and went out. It was five-thirty in the afternoon, still light, and Christian walked slowly down Friedrichstrasse, smiling as he listened to the bustling snatches of German spoken on all sides. He shook his head gently when he was solicited by girls on the corners. He noticed that they were spectacularly well-dressed, real fur-pieces and smartly designed coats. The conquest of France, he thought, has had a beneficial effect on one profession, at least.

As he walked pleasantly among the crowds, Christian had a stronger feeling than ever before that the war was going to be won. The city, which at other times had appeared so drab and weary, now seemed gay, energetic and invulnerable. The streets of London this afternoon, he thought, and the streets of Moscow are probably very different from this. Every soldier, he thought, should be sent back on leave to Berlin. It would have a tonic effect on the entire Army. Of course, and he grinned inwardly as he thought it, it would be advisable for every soldier to be supplied with a Mrs Hardenburg when he got off the train, and a half-bottle of vodka. A new problem for the quartermaster.

He bought a newspaper and went into a cafe and ordered beer.

He read the newspaper. It was like listening to a brass band. There were triumphant stories about thousands of Russians being taken, stories of companies that had defeated battalions in the North, stories of armoured elements that lived off the land and the foe, and made week-long sorties, without communications of any kind with the main body of the Army, slashing and disrupting the enemy's crumbling rear. There was a careful analysis by a retired Major-General who cautioned against overoptimism. Russia would not capitulate, he said, in less than three months, and the wild talk of imminent collapse was harmful to morale at home and at the front. There was an editorial that warned Turkey and the United States in the same paragraph, and a confident assertion that, despite the frantic activities of the Jews, the people of America would refuse to be drawn into a war that they saw very clearly was none of their business. There was a story from Russia about how German soldiers had been tortured and burned by Soviet troops. Christian hurried through it, reading only the first line in each paragraph. He was on leave now, and he did not want to think about things like that for the next two weeks.

He sipped his beer, a little disappointed because it seemed watery, but enjoying himself, with his body weary and satisfied, his eyes occasionally leaving the paper to look across the room at the chatting, bright couples. There was a Luftwaffe pilot in the cafe, with a pretty girl, and two good ribbons on his chest. Christian had a fleeting moment of regret, thinking how much dearer this place and this holiday must seem to a man who had come down from the embattled skies than to himself, who had merely come from the police barracks, the double bed of Corinne's corporal, from the sharp tongue of Lieutenant Hardenburg. I must go and talk to Colonel Meister in the War Office, he thought, without conviction, about the possibilities of being transferred to a unit in Russia. Perhaps later in the week, when things are more settled…

The week passed in a riotous haze for Christian. The city around him, the millions going to and fro, the clang of tramcars and buses, the placards outside the newspaper offices, the Generals and politicians in their gleaming uniforms who sped by him in the long armoured cars, the shifting hordes of soldiers on leave and on duty, the bulletins on the radio of miles gained and men killed in Russia – all seemed to him shadowy and remote. Only the apartment on Tiergartenstrasse, only the wild pale body of Lieutenant Hardenburg's wife seemed substantial and real. He bought her a pair of ear-rings, sent home for more money and bought her a gold chain bracelet, and a sweater from a soldier who had carried it back from Amsterdam.

She had got into the habit of calling him demandingly at any hour of the day or night at the boarding-house where he was living, and he forsook the avenues and the theatres and merely lay on his bed, waiting for the phone to ring downstairs in the grimy hall, waiting to rush through the streets to her.

Her home became for him the one fixed place in a shadowy, reeling world. At times when she left him alone, waiting for her in her apartment, he roamed restlessly through the rooms, opening wardrobes and desk-drawers, peering at letters, looking at photographs hidden between books. He had always been a private man and one who had a deep sense of others' privacy, but it was different with her. He wanted to devour her and all her thoughts, possessions, vices, desires.

The apartment was crammed with loot. A student of economics could have pieced together the story of German conquest in Europe and Africa merely from the things tucked away carelessly in Gretchen's apartment, brought there by the procession of rigid, shining-booted, beribboned officers whom Christian occasionally saw delivering Gretchen in heavy official cars as he peered jealously out of the window to the main door below. Apart from the rich profusion of bottles that he had seen the first day, there were cheeses from Holland, dozens of pairs of French silk stockings, bottles and bottles of perfume, jewelled clasps and ceremonial daggers from all parts of the Balkans, brocaded slippers from Morocco, baskets of grapes and nectarines flown from Algiers, three fur coats from Russia, a small Titian sketch from Rome, two sides of smoked Danish bacon hanging in the pantry behind the kitchen, a whole shelf of Paris hats, although he had never seen Gretchen wear a hat, an exquisite worked-silver coffee urn from Belgrade, a heavy leather-topped desk that an enterprising Lieutenant had somehow shipped from a captured villa in Norway.

The letters, negligently dropped on the floor or slipped under magazines on the tables, were from the farthest reaches of the new German Empire, and although written in the widest variety of literary styles, from delicate and lyric poems from young scholars on duty in Helsinki to stiff, pornographic memorials from ageing professional military men serving under Rommel in the Western Desert, they all bore the same burden of longing and gratitude. Each letter, too, bore promises… a bolt of green silk bought in Orleans, a ring found in a shop in Budapest, a locket with a sapphire stone picked up in Tripoli…

The amazing thing about her was that only three years before she had been a demure young schoolteacher in Baden, instructing ten-year-old children in geography and arithmetic. She had been shy, she told Christian. Hardenburg had been the first man she had ever slept with, and she had refused him until he married her. But when he brought her to Berlin, just before the beginning of the war, a photographer had seen her in a night club and had asked to take her picture for some posters he was doing for the Propaganda Ministry. The photographer had seduced her, in addition to making her face and figure quite famous as a model for a typical German girl, who, in the series of photographs, worked extra hours in munitions factories, attended party meetings regularly, gave to the Winter Fund, cleverly prepared attractive menus in the kitchen with ersatz foods. Since that time she had risen dizzily in the wartime Berlin social world. Hardenburg had been sent off to a regiment early in his wife's career. Now that he had seen the situation at home, Christian understood better why Hardenburg was considered so valuable in Rennes and found it so difficult to get leave to return home.