LITMIR.BIZ

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We limped back across the North Sea, sinking lower all the time. I thought we’d get home in one piece, but it was not to be. Most of the casualties came when we hit the trees. The observation officer, an elderly chap named Hildmann – the staff captain just now put me in mind of him – was killed. While he was alive I didn’t ever give Hildmann a thought, but after he was dead I realized how much I owed to him. He’d looked after me right through all the training flights and on our first war missions over England. After a man is dead you can’t say thank you.’

      ‘And Hennig was with you?’

      ‘He survived, the insolent little swine.’

      ‘And he’s married Lisl Wisliceny, I hear.’

      ‘Yes, a flashy ceremony – Frau Wisliceny arranged it all, of course – and a big reception in the Adlon afterwards.’

      ‘Mama wrote me a letter.’

      ‘Mama had to go: Frau Wisliceny is her best friend. She’s a fine woman. Yes, Mama went, but Papa was in Friedrichshafen with the airship people.’ Peter said it with satisfaction. He was pleased that his father had found a reason to stay away from the wedding of the hateful Hennig.

      ‘Did you want to marry her?’

      ‘Lisl? Yes, once I did. Or at least I thought I did. But then, as I realized the way in which she was playing a game with me and Hennig – playing us off one against the other – I didn’t love her any more.’

      ‘They’re all pretty girls, the Wislicenys.’

      ‘I was close to Inge once…’ He turned suddenly. ‘By God! I’ve just thought of something. If America has declared war, Mama is an enemy alien. They might make us resign our commissions, Pauli.’

      ‘You’re a selfish pig, Peter. Instead of worrying about your commission you should be worrying about poor Mama. She must be feeling terrible about it. Let’s pray she’ll not be sent to an internment camp like the English civilians have been.’

      ‘Yes, of course, you’re right. I should have been thinking of her. But it will affect us, too, Pauli. It could make things very difficult for both of us.’

      A light tap came and the office door opened immediately. A man stepped inside, a formidable figure, a captain, fortyish, with hard grey eyes and a mouth like a rat trap. He nodded to Peter and without any preliminaries asked Pauli for his papers. Pauli knew it was the end for him as soon as he saw the metal gorget at his neck. A Feldgendarmerie officer complete with Bavarian-style shako, and sword hung with ornamental knot. ‘You are absent without leave, Leutnant Winter. You have absented yourself from your post while on active service. From the front line …It’s a death-penalty offence. I suppose you know that?’ A slight Bavarian accent: it wasn’t the voice or the manner of a career soldier, but there was that touch of informality that professional policemen use to make apprehended men amenable. Pauli guessed that he’d once been a senior police officer in Munich or some such town.

      Pauli didn’t reply. He knew what was expected of a Prussian officer. He stood rigidly at attention, as he’d stood for so many hours on the parade ground at Lichterfelde. He’d known, deep down, that it was going to happen, and now it had happened. His guts were churning, but in some ways it was a relief. Now all he had to do was face his punishment. He’d always been better able to face the consequences than to worry about them.

      He had plenty of time to think about what he’d done. He was held for two nights in the cells at Divisional HQ before facing his court-martial. But for his colonel, Pauli would probably have faced a firing squad. It was the colonel – prematurely aged from sending so many youngsters into battle – who gave such a glowing account of Pauli’s bravery and devotion to duty. It was the colonel who put such emphasis on Pauli’s extreme youth, and it was the colonel who arranged that Leutnant Brand did not appear in person.

      But Brand’s written deposition was carefully worded. He must have spent many hours upon the document, and he covered every eventuality, even to the extent of finding the military policeman with whom Pauli had spoken at the crossroads.

      The verdict was inescapable.

      The sentence came like a slap in the face, but Pauli didn’t flinch. Six months with a Punishment Battalion. Everyone knew that a spell with a Punishment Battalion was intended as a deferred death sentence. Such units were used only where the fighting was most bitter and the personnel were considered expendable. But the one consolation was that his Field Post Office address didn’t reveal what had happened, so his parents believed he was simply transferred to another regular infantry regiment.

      And thus it was that Pauli endured the worst of the fighting of that year, so that afterwards some men did not believe that he could be a veteran of so many infamous fields of battle. But he did not survive the year unharmed. Though his skin was intact, his soul was hardened – ‘as hard as Krupp steel,’ he sometimes claimed after a few drinks. He had learned to suffer without complaint, to hurt without whimpering, and to kill without emotion.

      And yet, paradoxically, there were aspects of him that stayed unchanged. Outwardly he remained genial, careless, clumsy Pauli. He was too anxious to please ever to become really sophisticated. And now more than ever he relished the simple pleasures of life. Unlike his brother, Peter – who was austere, cultivated and brimful of ambition – Pauli served his sentence and went back to active duty asking no more than to sit down now and again to a big bowl of beef stew, smoke twenty cigarettes a day and have an extra half-hour in bed on Sunday morning.

      1918

      ‘The war is won, isn’t it?’

      Leutnant Pauli Winter had never been in no-man’s-land like this before. He’d never known it in the full foggy raw light of morning. Like all the other front-line infantry, he’d come here only at night, on patrols to mend the great jungle of rusty barbed wire, which was constantly damaged by shell and mortar fire, or to raid the enemy trenches. Always under cover of darkness.

      Until now his world had consisted only of narrow trenches and dark dugouts. The sky, seasonally grey, azure, or black with rain clouds, had been only a narrow slot framed by the muddy edges of the trench parapet. No one in his right mind raised his head above the parapet to stare across at where the unseen English inhabited their own subterranean dominion.

      It was impossible to remember all the stories he’d heard about no-man’s-land. There were stories about fierce animals that were said to live out here, skulking in their warrens and emerging by night to feast on the dead and dying. And certainly some of the noises they’d all heard encouraged the belief. Other soldiers’ stories said there were men living out here in this great churned-up rubbish tip. Deserters of all nationalities were said to have formed a community, a bandit gang, who lived deep in the ground, stole money, watches and personal possessions from the bodies that littered the ground, and fed upon stores plundered from both sides of the line. It was all nonsense, of course, but hugging the ground out here, the barrage whistling overhead, the earth stinking of cordite, faeces and decomposing flesh, made such yarns seem only too likely.

      But today was March 21, 1918, the start of the great attack that was going to break the British-held front line and end the war with a victory for the Kaiser. Pauli and two of his company – his runner and his youthful sergeant major – were crouched in a shell crater about a hundred metres in front of the German lines. The rest of his company were similarly hidden nearby, and so were other ‘Storm companies’ crouching unseen in no-man’s-land all along the front line.

      The three men had their hands clamped over the sides of their heads to protect their eardrums against the deafening roar of the German guns. The preparatory bombardment had been going on for nearly five hours. Now it was nine-forty and the guns would stop, and in the pearly light Pauli would lead his men into the attack.

      ‘Nothing could have lived

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