The Whistlers' Room

by Alverdes, Paul; Creighton, Basil; Mayhew, Emily

  Pointner had been wounded in one of the first fights with the English, and after that had lain for a week or two in a field hospital. From there one morning he found his way, in the midst of a crowd of lightly wounded cases, and quite contrary to regulations, into an emergency hospital train and got back to Germany. He was clothed in a long-skirted hospital garment of blue and white striped cotton, with felt slippers on his feet. On his head he wore an English sniper’s cap, which he had brought with him on the stretcher as booty and had never surrendered. Speechless as he was, with face and neck bandaged up to the eyes, and with no papers either, he was taken for an English prisoner throughout the journey and treated as such. Even the memory of this threw him into a rage. Certainly, the simplest thing would have been to cast away the khaki cap, but to this he could not bring himself. Rather than that he remained a Britisher in his own despite, passed over unwelcomed and unbeflowered, and left on one side in his stretcher shedding tears of rage. It was not till later that he succeeded in making himself understood.

  Nevertheless, in spite of peremptory orders, he still kept the cap safely in a lower shelf of the cupboard which served as the retreat for a different article. Now and then when neither doctor nor nurse was expected to come in, he took it out. With care he polished the badge and the chin strap till they shone, and had a long look at it, turning it about meanwhile in his delicate hands, where the whites of the nails were turning from snow white to a bluish tinge.

  III

  Kollin, the second whistler, was a volunteer and Prussian pioneer. He had round and very bright blue eyes, set close together in a thin long face, and a hooked nose that increased its air of fearlessness. Kollin suffered keenly under his disablement, for he was ambitious and had set his heart on promotion. He often examined his wound with despairing impatience in a little pocket-mirror, and angrily shook his head when compelled to find that there was no alteration to be seen. Many a morning, after dreaming that he was cured, he woke to find himself entirely recovered and free from his disablement. He seemed to breathe freely again in the normal way, and got up at once to prove it to his comrades with his eyes shining. But it did not last long. Even before the doctor’s visit he had to admit that his breath began to fail him, and that everything was as before.

  Kollin’s passion was numbers and number games. In warm weather, too, he sat all day long outside on the terrace with Pointner, bent over the chessboard and surrounded by a group of silent spectators. He hung a long while over each move, and as he hovered with slightly trembling hands over the board, he seemed to be cogitating a second game in the recesses of his mind. Now and again he made notes on a piece of paper. Pointner, whose moves were made with rapidity and who loved to rap down his pieces with a smart report, looked out meanwhile over the park as though bored and indifferent. He made himself acquainted with the alteration on the board without more than a lightning glance over his shoulder; but all the same his flushed cheeks grew darker as the threat of checkmate drew nearer and nearer. He still, however, made a few more moves with a hand as light as though they followed of themselves; and a disdainful and superior gesture made it very clear that reservist Pointner was not to be caught so simply. He would have dearly liked now and then to whistle a tune just to show that he had every reason to be content, but he was no more able to whistle than the other whistlers; but at least he could purse up his lips to show that he meant to, and produce a tiny sound that recalled the cheery chirp of a finch. Even while he did so he was already avoiding the eyes of the onlookers, who were unable any longer to hide their glee over the progress of the game. Suddenly, when Kollin was about to draw the noose tighter and turn his careful preparations into leisurely triumph, he broke out. With short round movements from the wrist, like the pats of a cat, he sent the pieces flying in all directions. At the same time, reddening with anger and shame, he got up with a final contemptuous gesture to signify he would have no more of it, pulled his cap down over his fair hair, and stumped off into the park without looking round. Kollin smiled grimly and shrugged his shoulders. Then he gathered up the chessmen and put them back as they were, in order to demonstrate to the onlookers that the inevitable progress of the game could not have ended otherwise than in his own conclusive victory. But usually they, too, had lost interest and gone away one after another, leaving Kollin alone with his aggrieved reflections. Pulling out his notebook he wrote down exactly how the game had gone. “White,” he wrote, and then in brackets: “Reservist Pointner gives up.” After his death there was found among his papers an exact account of every game played in the whistlers’ room. In the course of two years he had played fifteen hundred and eighty-nine games, and of these he had won seven hundred and one. The rest had been broken off by his opponent in desperate straits.

  The next morning, at latest, after a game had been broken off in this way, Pointner always set out the chessboard before breakfast had even been brought in, and sat waiting in silence beside it. Kollin meanwhile went on reading an old newspaper; but soon he was unable to endure the pleasures of anticipation or to attend to what he read, and laying the paper aside he silently took his seat at the board. Sometimes on such mornings Pointner prevailed on himself to sit out his defeat.

  IV

  The third whistler, a boy of seventeen, was called Benjamin. He had been christened so in a field hospital close up to the line on the west front. One October morning, just as it was getting light, a so-called char-à-banc arrived there. It was a vehicle with two long benches opposite each other, the whole enclosed within a square covering of grey tent-cloth that came closely down on all sides. As could be seen, it belonged to a Westphalian battery which had been put out of action the day before.

  For a moment nothing stirred. Then a man without a tunic, in mud-caked breeches, climbed down backwards and very circumspectly out of the caravan. Last came his left arm, bent up to the level of his chest in a superfluously large makeshift splint. “Vice-Quartermaster Joseph,” he reported to the doctor who at that moment came out of the entrance with sleeves rolled up and a brown rubber apron over his white overalls. “Vice-Quartermaster Joseph, of so-and-so regiment, with eleven severely wounded men of his battery.”

  These eleven sat dazed and fevered, or hung rather, with sunken heads, since there was no room to lie, along both benches inside the char-à-banc. Some clung fast to each other, and none moved when the covering was thrown back and the bearers came up with stretchers. One after another they were carried out. The last was a boy who, as he was carried in, his blood-stained coat on the arms of an immense Army Medical Corps non-commissioned officer, suddenly cheered up and tried to say something. Mean-while he described wide circles with his hands across the sky which now began to show its cloudless blue, and raised his eyebrows and blew out his cheeks; he seemed, too, to wish to convey certain numbers. But not a sound proceeded from his throat. “To be sure,” said the doctor in a deep quiet voice, laying a finger gently under his chin, “to be sure, it is Joseph and his brethren, and you must certainly be Benjamin. I’ll put you all together in the best ward we have.”

  None the less they were no sooner in their beds than they began dying. On the very same day five of Joseph’s brethren were wound in the sheets they could warm no longer and carried out. But the boy was called Benjamin from then onwards.

  And next it seemed that he, too, would never get back to Germany. The doctor forbade him meat or drink. But during the night the house in which they were was set on fire by a shell from a long-range gun, and Benjamin, who lay under a blanket on his palliasse, was strapped on a stretcher and taken out naked—for the unexpected stream of wounded that day had exhausted the supply of nightshirts. In this manner he reached another house, but owing to the disorder that followed upon the sudden shelling and the outbreak of fire, the prohibition did not catch him up even on the next day. Thirst tortured him, and with raised hands he begged a cup of the soup that was being taken round to the rest of the room. He had scarcel
y attempted to swallow a sip of it before he felt as though someone gripped him by the throat with both hands. In horror he sprang right up out of bed and tore his mouth open as far as it would go. But do as he might—throwing his head about on all sides with his chest convulsively distended, and striking out at last with arms and shoulders as though swimming in the water, and turning wildly round and round where he stood—he could not succeed in inhaling the least breath of air. Finally, while his comrades shouted for help, he raged over and over on his bed without uttering a sound, and then rising once more to his feet fell forward senseless.

  Often he told the whistlers in after days how he stormed death with all the strength of his soul and actually reached his goal. There, at a stroke, he had lost all desire for breath, and, hovering without weight in the void, had felt light and airy as he never felt before in his whole life. At the same time music rang out in a melody that he could never convey; but certainly no musician in the world could ever hit on notes like those. After that, he would conclude, he might well say it was good to die. The whistlers listened with earnest faces and nodded their heads; they did not doubt it. To anyone else Benjamin never said a word of all this; nor of all that he still had to go through in that hospital.

  He was awoken by sudden merciless pain. At once the music ceased and his agony returned; but just as he tried to renew his struggles the cool air streamed like water into his lungs. He began to breathe once more, and once more felt that he had weight and was lying on his back; and this, too, he felt as a happiness.

  Later he was told that the doctor happened to be on his way to visit other cases nearby, and hurrying in at the cries for help, arrived in the nick of time to catch Benjamin in his arms. As he had not his case of instruments with him he had pierced Benjamin’s throat with his pocket knife.

  After this Benjamin began to recover very quickly. But it seemed that his being still had a hankering after the experience that had already cost so dear. One morning, not long afterwards, just as the doctor attended by his orderlies was carefully cleaning the wound, the artery on the left side of the throat burst, as though it had been too long dammed, and shot the blood in a crimson arch out of his mouth. The vein had been severed by the bullet, but a piece of sinewy flesh which had likewise been shot through had clapped itself like a piece of plaster over the torn artery and for the time arrested the flow of blood.

  Benjamin was beyond all terror as the hot torrent surged over his hands that he put up in astonishment to catch it. He looked into the doctor’s face. Then he felt himself bent down backwards, and while his head hung down over the edge of the table the knife began burrowing after the vein in his extended throat. Meanwhile, at every beat of the heart, the blood was forced up like a pulsing fountain and fell back on his face, blinding his eyes with a gleaming scarlet veil. But the effect was to make him feel more and more light-headed, and the faint click of the needle, as he was stitched up, made an almost cheerful impression on him. It sounded like the clicking of knitting needles and caused him no pain. Then it ceased and the blood, too, came to a stop. A sponge was passed lightly over his eyes; he was slowly raised up and saw before him the doctor’s white face, bespattered with blood right to the roots of his beard. He held an instrument of shining steel in his hand, and playfully pinched Benjamin’s nose with it. “Well,” he said quietly, “there you are again, my son.”

  Towards midday, however, Benjamin began to be very much afraid. He opened his eyes wide, yet he was unable to read the name-plate at the head of the bed opposite, though it was quite near and inscribed with large white letters on a black ground. He took this as a warning of death. Pulling his sheet over his head he prayed with hands together. After that for a long while he wept. Towards evening he felt slightly better; he wrote on a piece of paper asking if he would ever get better, and gave it to the orderly when he came with a drink for him. But the orderly made no answer; he only put his hand silently behind his back and the cup to his lips. It was a mixture of champagne, red wine, sugar and beaten egg.

  V

  Five weeks later he was driven through the park in a cab and stopped in front of the building in which was the whistlers’ room. On his head he had a cap without a badge, and he was clothed in a tattered tunic that was far too big for him. It had been given him for his journey to Germany. In addition he wore trousers of brown corduroy with a red piping. There were flowers in his buttonhole. He smelt very strongly of eau-de-Cologne, and he felt a little uneasy over it. For as he refused the cigars that the ladies pressed upon him in the station and also might not eat or drink, they insisted at least upon refreshing his face with sponges dipped in eau-de-Cologne. He did not like to resist, and as he was dumb and had to sit for half an hour with the other wounded soldiers in a long row on the platform till the cabs came, this refreshment was repeated time after time by one lady after another.

  It was Backhuhn who opened the door for him and helped him to alight. Backhuhn was a Silesian grenadier. A crossing shot had taken off his nose, and the doctors were in course of making him a new one by a recently devised method. To this end they had to start by grafting on the spot a few pieces of his own flesh with the skin and hair belonging to it. This superstructure had been incorporated most satisfactorily, and even beyond expectation, as they said, but for the time it was painful to look at, for it was as big as his two fists and towered up far beyond his forehead. In form and colour it resembled a fowl prepared for the oven, and hence the noseless grenadier had been given the name Backhuhn, or the roasting fowl. He was delighted with the name, for he was proud of the pains the doctor took over him, and wore his disfigurement as though it were a sort of decoration. From time to time he underwent a surgical operation, and the design was brought nearer to completion by stages that were often scarcely appreciable. Between whiles he was allowed to go about as he pleased.

  Backhuhn loved to slip up behind the servant girls of the clinic and to cover their eyes with his hands. Then he asked them who it was, and if they could not guess, he turned them swiftly about. “Do you like me? Can you bear me?” he asked them in his gurgling voice and grinned in their faces.

  Often they cried out in horror, threw up their hands and ran away. He, however, was delighted and sprang after them with uncouth gestures; and, in spite of all, they all got fond of him by degrees, for he was very big and tall, and he tried to make himself agreeable whenever he found an opportunity by his immense strength which was quite unimpaired.

  For a long while it was one of his privileges to greet new arrivals and conduct them in or help to carry them. He could not understand it at all when at last he had to be stopped; for he confidently expected the best results from the sight he presented, and never neglected to make them a little speech bearing thereon.

  “Look at me, comrade,” he said on this occasion to Benjamin, as he lifted him from the carriage. “I had no nose left, not as much as that, my boy, but now it’s all right. They give you back here whatever you’ve lost.”

  Benjamin was glad to have someone to help him along, for he could only walk with difficulty; and in this way he reached the bathroom where all newcomers were first taken.

  He felt embarrassed when he caught sight there of two nurses in long washing aprons with their sleeves rolled up, who were apparently waiting for him. For he had never known what it was to be given helplessly over to the hands of women for all that he needed doing to him. Also he was suddenly conscious that his whole body was caked with dirt and dried blood. He had been brought in in mud-soaked clothing, and, among so many severely wounded and dying cases, no one had had time to give him more than a hasty cleaning up. He was glad now he had not resisted the plentiful sprinklings of eau-de-Cologne on his arrival at the station, and expected every minute to see a bath orderly come along to relieve the nurses. But when these two put him on a chair and without ceremony began to undress him, a blush of shame overspread his face. At the same time he had the most intense longing to
explain the pickle they would find him in. He kept fast hold of his trousers with both hands when the younger of the two tried to pull them from his legs, and began addressing her in his voiceless fashion. Unfortunately she could not understand him, and no more could the other when, at his increasing signs of embarrassment, she held her ear close to his lips. Meanwhile they were not at all discouraged and made various joking guesses at his meaning; but to each he replied with despairing gestures. At length they assured him that they understood him and skipped laughing out of the room and came back again pushing in front of them a chair on wheels with a lid on its box-shaped seat. Benjamin turned away and shook his head; he was almost in tears. After that he let himself be undressed and hoisted into the tub without another word. They buckled a kind of chest-strap round him, like those that children learn to walk with, so that he should not fall this way and that, and then soaped and washed him, talking all the while and laughing at his weight. They put their warm hands pityingly round his poor little arms, as they called them, and told off the vertebræ of his spine and each of his ribs with the tips of their fingers. Benjamin, however, for very confusion made no response. Obediently he held out arms and legs and bent his back to be scrubbed just as they required of him and gave himself up to them like a dumb animal. After that they enveloped him in a warmed shirt, and putting him on a wheeled stretcher took him down the long corridor to the whistlers’ room. Kollin and Pointner were waiting for him at the open door, and Benjamin saw with delight that they, too, like him, had tubes in their necks.