Tidings - Ernst Wiechert

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– Lord . . .”

      But he was already far away under the dark trees from which the snow fell on his brow, a hunted man and a deserter, and later when shame began to burn in him, he could not find the road again, the crimson road where blood had dyed the snow, where snow fell into the staring, open eyes of the children.

      Time passes, people say, but for the baron Erasmus time stood still. A frozen time, and it froze on that road under the gnarled willow trees which stood like ghosts at the edge of the road. Time froze with the dead, the dead took it in their twisted hands and did not give it back again. Baron Erasmus had failed in the hour which fate offered him. He failed, and now time has expelled him from its quiet, constantly progressing march, and he sits there leaning against the rock and sees the sun travel, sees how the clouds sail above him and beyond him, and he is left behind, as the frozen victims were left behind, though he ran away, yes, just because he ran away.

      His hair is nearly white now, and sometimes in the morning when he glances into the small looking glass, he feels as if he had paid with his hair. But he knows that one has to pay with one’s heart, not with the hair on one’s head.

      He chose this place in the wood because from here he can overlook part of the road in the valley. It is the road that leads to the castle, and he who wants to come up to the brothers must walk along it. He sees how the trucks of the victors leave a cloud of white dust behind them, or he sees a cyclist or now and again a single wanderer who carries something on his back. But no van comes loaded with furniture, no children run at the sides of the wheels, and he imagines that those whom death and frost have spared can only arrive in this manner; just as in his homeland they have always moved from one estate to another, when by chance they had to change masters.

      He remains there until night draws near. The moorland grows dark, the wood, the road. Wild ducks fly in the glowing evening sky over the peat bog, and the reed warbler begins to call. The first, white, misty cloud appears above the reed patches, the day shrouds itself in darkness, the evening star mounts above the horizon.

      Then he gets up, sighing, a tall, thin, bent man, and returns to his room in the forester’s house, where his brother is waiting for him, so that they can go together for a little while to the sheepfold where the other brother lives, the third and youngest, of whom the song of their childhood said: “But the third, the youngest lad, was so sore, oh, sore at heart.”

      But when Erasmus remembers these verses, he shakes his head gently. For the third, this youngest one, has faced the consequences. He did not miss the hour. He did not run away across the field. And when they sit on the trunk of the alder tree or on the doorstep of the shepherd’s hut, Erasmus glances out of the corner of his eye at this youngest brother and asks himself why this face is so gloomy and frozen instead of beaming with happiness, with the happiness of him who has exclaimed, “Ad sum! Here I am!”

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      “Time passes,” people say, and Aegidius is the only one who experiences it mornings and evenings. He cannot see any field from the moorland, but he feels that the meadows are being mown now and that the grain is ripening. He does not hear the real bird call of the day and of the night, nor the call of the lapwings nor the hooting of the owls. Waking and sleeping he only hears the voice of the corn crake, which used to fill the harvest nights in his home country. That inexhaustible, warning call to praise God, the harvest, and the daily work. The call to the tune of which the scythes were sharpened in the crimson dawn while dew still covered the sleeping earth.

      He does not mourn for men, but for the earth, for the lost fields on which thistles will now be growing, for the wheat that falls out of the ears, and for the hands which have nothing to do, neither to sow nor to reap. Empty hands which idly hold a pine branch when he stands at the edge of the wood gazing into the veiled distance toward south or southwest to where the land slopes away and where the fields of Franconia or the blessed Wetterau are ripening in the sunshine.

      He is the only one of them who now and again leaves the moors for a day or even for a few days. Jakob managed to get him a bicycle for some jewelry, a well-worn vehicle rattling in all its spokes, but for Aegidius it means just as much as a carriage and four, and on it he roams through the plains at the foot of the mountain range wherever they are making hay. There are only a few large estates, mostly the property of some lord of the manor; and there he sits under one of the apple trees which line the road, or on the bank of a ditch near the bushes, his hands clasped around his knees, and watches the machine as it goes through the field wet with dew, or the scythes as rank on rank the scented grass falls over them in level swathes.

      The farmhands in these fields are not so happy as they were in his home country, where harvesttime was still half pagan. Most of the young people he sees wear ragged, dirty uniforms without badges, and most of them glance at him suspiciously as he sits hour after hour beside the ditch watching them. The country is full of pillagers, people from all nations who sit workless in the camps and for whom other people’s lives and property mean as little as they meant for their deposed taskmasters.

      For Aegidius it does not matter to whom this land belongs, and still less that it does not belong to him. Only work matters to him, and he likes to gaze at a man who drives a mowing machine or handles a scythe, and if he were not so shy he would ask someone to let him use a scythe.

      At the edge of one of the large estates where they have been mowing the grass for days on end, he can at last get up and lend a hand. Something has gone wrong with the machine at his feet and the bailiff, a short, quick man who always scolds in a loud voice, showers a hail of curses on the driver, who bends over the sparkling blades. “I wonder if I can help,” says Aegidius politely and walks around the machine. He does not listen to the hostile question as to who he may be, and after a while he asks for a wrench. It is not difficult for him to find what is wrong, and while he screws on a new nut, he tells the bailiff that he must watch to see that this is always screwed up tight, because it has to bear the main weight of the whole machine.

      Aegidius does not hear exactly what the bailiff answers; but it strikes him that he speaks politely, and when he draws himself up, wiping the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his coat, a woman is standing near the machine, in a cotton frock and with a large straw hat shading her sunburned face. She looks at him in a friendly way, says, “Thank you,” and nods at him.

      The horses begin to pull again, the grass is mown, and Aegidius’ eyes follow the machine as it drives along the edge of the high grass evenly and quietly. “Machines cannot be put in order by scolding,” he says, turning again to the woman.

      He only really looks at her now, and is a little taken aback by her majestic appearance as she stands here in the meadow, a formidable figure. He tries to think of a gentler expression, but does not find one. She is as tall as he, but broader and more powerful. Only her large, friendly, blue eyes under her broad hat are kind and moderate her rather overpowering size.

      He walks back with her to the road, where her dogcart is waiting for her, and they start a friendly, rather reserved conversation. She is the mistress of these fields and meadows since her husband was killed in Russia, and she has a lot of trouble with the bailiff and the farm hands.

      Everything has changed, not only the times, but with the times men and conditions. In answer to her cautious question Aegidius said that he was but a looker-on. “I have got to cycle almost seventy kilometers to be able to look at fields, but I do not regret that. I cannot sit up there on the moors all day long with folded hands.”

      “Where is that – up on the moors?” He tells her, and when she asks for his name, he tells her that too. She knew his cousin and the castle, and she looks at him out of the corner of her eye. “Will you come and have a cup of coffee with me?” He thanks her politely; he has to start on his way home now. His brothers are waiting for him, and in a few words he tells her about them. With her eyes on the ground she draws shapes in the dust of the road with the stick she carries. “I am sorry,” she says in a low voice, which is remarkably gentle for her heavy build.

      A fleeting smile crosses his face, and then he looks back at the meadows where the distant machine now creeps through the high

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