LITMIR.BIZ

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upon to interrogate the prisoners or sort through the personal effects of the British dead before the things were sent back to the intelligence officers. Two days, three at the most. A sergeant from the South Wales Borderers had virtually admitted it to him.

      The soldier took the oilskin packet and stumbled over his rifle butt, striking his helmet against the low doorway as he hurried up the steps and out along the trench. Pauli watched him without comment: Pauli, too, was inherently clumsy. He, too, stumbled up the steps more times than not. Why were some people like that, no matter how hard they tried. Pauli would have loved to be adroit and elegant, but he couldn’t even dance without stepping upon his partner’s feet.

      As the antigas flap on the door swung back, a heavy smell of fresh cordite and the stink of the latrine buckets came into the dugout. Oh well, it was a change from the steady smell of unwashed bodies and putrefaction that was the normal atmosphere down here.

      ‘What’s the time?’ From one of the wooden bunks built into the far wall a figure swung his legs to the floor and then slowly emerged from the blanket that cocooned him. Alex Horner – Pauli’s close friend at the cadet school – had found himself attached to the same regiment. Both boys had hoped to be assigned to one of the better Prussian units – cavalry, guards, or dragoons – instead of this collection of conscripts. But they were together, and that was the one consolation in the whole miserable, tormented existence they led.

      ‘Next time I’m in Wertheims department store, I’ll get you a watch with an illuminated face,’ said Pauli sarcastically.

      ‘Well, that might be a long time,’ said Alex. He rubbed his chin to decide whether he needed a shave badly enough for the company commander to admonish him. He decided to risk it: seventeen-year-old chins did not show much stubble per day. Leutnant Alex Horner was already acquiring the look of the Prussian officer. A duel at cadet school had left him with a sabre cut along his jaw, and the lice-infested conditions here on the front line required him to have his head almost shaved. But he was not yet the austere, unbending Prussian figure: he smiled too much, for one thing, and his nose was pert and upturned, the sort of nose more often to be seen on farmers’ daughters than on Prussian officers.

      ‘It’s three-thirty-two,’ said Pauli.

      ‘What a terrible time to be awake.’

      ‘Stand-to in fifteen minutes.’ At dawn the front-line trenches had to be manned, because it was the best time for the British to attack. But, since the trenches were full of infantry, it was also a good time for the British to strafe them with a barrage of mortar shells.

      Alex Horner groped on the floor to find his cigarettes. Together with the matches, he found them in his steel helmet. Unlike most of the soldiers, Alex Horner couldn’t sleep with his helmet on his head. When he’d got his cigarette lit, he tied up the laces of his boots and buttoned up his woollen cardigan, his jacket, and the overcoat in which he’d been sleeping. He moved slowly, as a man does when drunk. Stress, lack of rest, and the stodgy food so lacking in protein made them all a bit robotic.

      ‘If only the army had not disbanded their airships…’ said Alex. He put some eau de cologne on a dirty handkerchief and wiped his face with it.

      ‘Well, they have,’ said Pauli, who’d heard Alex’s sad story a hundred or more times.

      ‘My application was completed and approved. The physical exam would have been no more than a formality. I’m a hundred per cent fit; you know that, Pauli.’

      ‘I know,’ said Pauli. He couldn’t be too rude to his friend; they both needed someone to complain to. In the absence of any other sympathetic friends they told each other the same stories over and over again.

      ‘I’d be flying by now.’

      ‘Perhaps you could transfer to the Naval Airship Division.’

      ‘They’d never allow that, you know they wouldn’t.’

      ‘I’ll talk to my brother when I see him. Perhaps he could arrange something for you.’

      ‘I even bought those books on engine repair and maintenance.’

      ‘Airships are dangerous. My brother, Peter, was shot down.’

      ‘You talk to him. Perhaps if I was prepared to go in as a midshipman…’ They both knew that there was no possible chance that he’d be permitted to transfer to the navy, but by common consent they talked of it often.

      ‘Have you got your pistol belt and the flashlight? It’s time to go, Alex.’

      ‘It’s the monotony that gets me down. We’ll stand to and freeze for an hour; then we’ll spend ages while the captain inspects every rifle barrel.’

      ‘Not this morning; this is Easter Saturday. Wake up, Alex! We’re assigned to check the sentries and then be at the old supply line when the wiring party returns.’

      Alex nodded, but he didn’t abandon his moaning. ‘Then, when the breakfast is coming, the British will mortar the communication trenches and those fools will drop our breakfast into the mud, the way they did three times last week. On Monday I only got a bread roll and half a cup of coffee.’

      ‘Don’t you ever think of anything else but food and drink, Alex?’

      ‘What else is there?’ It was Alex’s ‘morning moan’. Pauli had got used to his friend’s bad moods, which came immediately after waking. In another hour he’d be his normal cheery self again. Until then he needed to moan. ‘I suppose the planes will come over any time now.’

      ‘It’s too early. The attacks last week were planes coming back from patrol. The English patrol planes go out at dawn and come back about half an hour later. Perhaps the English pilots will stay in bed for Easter.’

      ‘Where are our planes?’

      ‘The British believe they must enter our airspace every morning. They say it keeps up their fighting spirit. They send the infantry patrols over to our trenches for the same reason. They are frightened that their soldiers will lose their appetite for the war unless they are sent often to fight us.’

      ‘Is that what you find out when you speak with the prisoners?’

      ‘They make no secret of it.’

      ‘Is Leutnant Brand on duty this morning?’ Alex asked, making the inquiry sound as casual as possible, and yet the imminent encounter with the dreaded Leutnant Brand was uppermost in the thoughts of both young men.

      ‘Yes, he’s duty officer.’

      ‘Jesus Christ!’ Alex rubbed his beard again and regretted not shaving, for Leutnant Heinrich Brand was a tyrant, a cruel man who lost no opportunity to make the lives of his junior officers a misery. Brand was thirty-two years old, the son of a baker in a village near the Austrian border. He’d entered the Bavarian cavalry as a boy and risen to the rank of Feldwebel by 1914. It was a rank beyond which he would never have been promoted except for the coming of the war. By the end of December 1914 he was a senior NCO in the regimental training camp. But it was on the Eastern Front, in the fighting of early 1915, that he saved the life of his commanding officer. Attacking Cossacks cut his cavalry regiment to pieces as they retreated through woodland that became marsh and then an open piece of ground that gave the Russian cavalry a chance to demonstrate their superior skill and reckless courage. Brand got the Iron Cross and a commission for that day’s hard fighting. But the same officers who applauded Brand’s bravery did not want to share their mess with this coarse-accented villager, and Brand soon found himself amongst strangers. And this time he was not even in the cavalry.

      It was dark and cold, and there was rain in the air. The wind was singing in the massed barbed wire that filled no-man’s-land. As Pauli and Alex plodded their way along the duckboards which made a slatted floor for the deep trench, both were thinking of Brand. The Leutnant saved his particular hatred for these two products of the Prussian army’s most exclusive officer-cadet school. Brand envied them. He would have given almost

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