Walter Kempowski - All for Nothing

The driver and the front-seat passenger carried the dead general into a house in the Settlement, one of them holding his wobbling head steady. He’d been awarded the German Cross in gold. The women of the Settlement gathered outside the house, in fact entire families joined the crowd, and the foreign workers from the Forest Lodge came to see the dead general as well.

Drygalski shooed the foreign workers away. Really, it was the limit — such people wanting to feast their eyes on a dead German general. And he asked the women from the Settlement if they didn’t have anything better to do.

The question was: now what? Where did you bury a general? Maybe he should be taken home to where he came from?

And was it a hero’s death that he had died?

Furthermore, what would the troops ahead of them do without their leader? But surely there was more than one general?

Drygalski telephoned the office of the Party organization in Mitkau. But the Party wasn’t responsible, nor was the local headquarters, nor were the police. A pack of Hitler Youth boys arrived, but they weren’t allowed to see the dead general, however many of them gathered in front of the house where he lay. Drygalski made a little speech to them. He said they were being put to the test and must prove their mettle, and he gave them instructions: they were to march to Mitkau and report for duty there. There was plenty for young Germans to do these days. Once they had reported for duty everything else would follow. At last a car came to collect the body. The women folded their hands when invited to do so, and Drygalski the head trustee gave the Hitler salute with his arm outstretched.

The rumbling beyond the horizon, the way the ground shook. A noise of pounding and shaking, and you could tell some of the particularly violent explosions apart from one another. How many kilometres away was the front? A hundred and fifty? A hundred? Fifty? Still far off, anyway, but not as far off as all that.

And now a line of ambulances was coming along from Mitkau, driving slowly by, bearing the red cross depicted large and broad on their roofs and doors, one after another. The field hospital in Mitkau was being evacuated. A few horse-drawn carts were also trying to make their way along. And from time to time, dispatch riders raced towards them on their fast motorbikes.

Stand firm! Stand firm in the rising storm …

A solitary soldier fell out of the long column of ambulances and medical personnel.

When you leave, say softly, ‘See you!’ …

It was the one-handed pianist who had played hit songs so well at the Georgenhof with the violinist, only a few days ago, believe it or not.

He came over to the house, stopped and clicked his heels. He was just calling in quickly, he said, to see if they were all right. And was Fräulein Strietzel still here? If so it would be a good idea for her to leave with them; he was sure that could be fixed.

No, they told him, the violinist wasn’t there any longer; she must be in Allenstein by now. Or had she gone on somewhere else?

The soldier wore a Red Cross armband, and while cart after cart took the wounded away he told the women how wonderfully well organized it all was. The order had come to evacuate at once, and the severely wounded and those who had just had operations were immediately carried out of the local hospital, although medical instruments had to be left behind. The new and only recently installed X-ray equipment, for instance. Did the ladies have any idea, he asked, how much one of those devices cost?

He would never forget the few hours he had spent here, he assured them again, that evening at the Georgenhof. Then he bowed to Katharina and said, ‘Make sure you get away from here — you still have time.’

He turned to leave, and then came back again. He had one more question, he said; did they still have any of that fantastic liver sausage that he remembered? Now that everything was going down the drain … Yes, they did have some of it left, and some was cut off for him.

He waved back to them from the road with his one hand, jumped into the nearest ambulance and was gone. What a nice man!

*

The thunder of the guns was still coming from away on the horizon in the afternoon, but they couldn’t sit about in the hall for ever; there were things yet to be done. Maybe the curtains should be washed before they left, and the whole place thoroughly cleaned?

In spite of the general confusion, Dr Wagner had ventured to steal out of the town. Mitkau was teeming like an ant heap, everyone rushing round trying to escape, to get away … Not so fast, that had always been his motto; you don’t want to eat your food as hot as it comes out of the oven. Despite the snow, he had managed to get through to the Georgenhof. And here he was, sitting with Peter at the table, his glasses in need of cleaning, the ribbon of the Iron Cross on his lapel, eating bread and sausage. He had a right to be here, he was doing his duty. The school might be closed, but he was giving a German boy private coaching. No one could stop him doing that.

He was too old to be a reservist in the Volkssturm, although he still felt really young.

He had just been showing Peter what the barrage of drumfire meant; he had drummed on the table with all ten fingers, bringing the ball of his hand down on the table-top now and then to represent the heavy artillery. A soldier had to run about and double back like a hare. He had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeve to show his bare arm, and the long scar running down it. He had got that at the battle on the Chemin des Dames ridge in 1916. Your best chance was to jump into a brand-new crater, because where a shell has gone off once another isn’t so likely to strike in the same place. He explained terms like increased firing range and break in firing , and the expression battle of matériel was also mentioned. And, he added, not every bullet hits the mark.

The small atlas was lying on the table. They looked up the Chemin des Dames ridge, and then they tried to work out where the roar of the cannon was coming from. It must be up here somewhere.

Then the front door of the house opened, and in strode Drygalski, making more noise than necessary as he passed the startled Jago, marched straight into the hall, and shouted up the stairs, ‘Hello, is there anyone here?’ The dog’s hind paws slipped from under him as he scrabbled on the floor in his fright. Heil Hitler!

What were all those suitcases doing in the middle of the hall, he asked. ‘Were you ladies thinking of going away?’

He had had a dead general taken away — yes, it was all thanks to him — he’d been doing all the things that no one else thought of, he’d been on the phone for hours, shouting and keeping everything in order.

Now he set about climbing the stairs to Katharina, who leaned over the banisters with the key in her hand and asked — Heil Hitler! — ‘What is it?’

Auntie too opened her door. She had been busy sorting out her magazines, putting them neatly together in bundles and tying them up with string — ten years’ worth of issues, they were valuable items. What was going on, she wanted to know, Heil Hitler. Peter looked out of his room as well.

Drygalski hurried upstairs, stumbled over Peter’s clockwork railway in the darkness of the corridor, cried, ‘What sort of housekeeping is this?’ and kicked the carriages of the toy train out of the way. ‘It’s a positive pigsty!’

He brought the news that a married couple from the east had to be accommodated, which meant they were being billeted on the Globigs — ‘And at once! You have plenty of space here.’

The couple would be arriving with bag and baggage this afternoon, a room must be cleared for them. ‘And at once!’ Drygalski repeated. You couldn’t very well put such people up in a cowshed.