Herr Mauch, as he was called, a greyhaired and moustachio’d Landsturm man, was the orderly of the department. It was his duty to perform the heavier bodily labours. He stood by when patients were moved from one bed to another, or bathed. He washed the dead and conveyed them into the cellar, where a postmortem was sometimes carried out. Also he went to and fro with the commode when required, and had charge of the various vessels that ministered to necessities. He was the first to appear every morning, making a jovial entry to each room with a clinking wire basket in which he collected the glass bottles, making very knowing comments the while. He wore a peakless service cap with the Landwehr cross on the badge, and an old pair of service trousers, also the regulation canvas tunic and a large apron. He laid great stress on being a military personage, although the source of his never-failing good spirits was in having, as he said, got hold of a fine job that protected him from being called up and sent to the front. For this reason he carried out every part of his duties with the utmost preciseness.
He was none the less frank in his admiration of his wounded companions-in-arms, and loved to address them as “old soldier” or even as “corporal.” There was nothing he delighted in more than the most bloodthirsty adventures from the battles on all fronts; and these alone could sometimes delay him on his round with the bottle-basket. For a wounded soldier was often disposed for a talk at early dawn, and then he would set down his receptacle for a moment and spur the narrator on with enthusiastic exclamations and encouraging questions as to the fierce slaughter of one enemy after another. “On, on to battle! For battle are we born! for battle are we ready!” he hummed with a defiant look while he collected the rest of the bottles and betook himself to the next room. The few civilian patients, on the other hand, who now and then came under his care, he treated with scorn. “For you,” he used to say when one of them addressed him as Mauch, “for a shirker like you, I am Herr Mauch!” Hence the soldiers, too, always called him Herr Mauch, though they addressed him familiarly with “thou.”
His usual haunt was the bath-house of the hospital. Here he looked after all his various utensils in a bustle of soda and soapsuds, cleaned boots, made sundry lists and held himself in readiness in case he was needed. For the most part he sat upon his perambulatory chair with an air cushion for upholstery on its lid. Here he carried on a secret traffic in supernumerary bottles of beer, as he called them, from the hospital stores, for he stole like a crow. On occasion a leave certificate was to be had through him, and indeed all kinds of bartering transacted.
“God damn me!” said Herr Mauch with jovial astonishment when Benjamin with trembling hands had undone his clothes. Then he put down his cup. “God damn me, Corporal, you’ve got the Turkish music.” By this was to be understood the severest form of venereal disease. “How on earth did you get that?”
Benjamin knew no more than he did. He had never been with a woman in his life. “Help me, Herr Mauch,” he brought out in a voice that almost failed him, and almost fell backwards over the edge of the bath he was sitting on. But Herr Mauch could do nothing of the sort. No, he couldn’t help him there, he said. It must be reported to Doctor Quint, otherwise it would end in the other fellows getting it too.
Benjamin staggered out. As he knew of no other place where he could be undisturbed, he shut himself in a closet and stood squeezed in a corner with dry eyes, while his teeth chattered and shudders shook his whole frame. Whatever else had happened in him and around him had been within his comprehension and he had accepted it. But now he had come to the end. So he resolved to die.
When he had actually pulled out the tube from his neck, so that the little opening in which it was placed might speedily close up, he was aware of a soft chirping sound above him, and looking up over the top of the partition wall that separated the one compartment from the next, he saw the anxious face of Harry Flint of Gloucester. A moment later the door was forced and Herr Mauch rushed in with a loud cry and hauled him out. Harry had seen Benjamin vanish, and noticed his tottering steps and distraught expression; and when Benjamin did not return within a reasonable time, he stole softly into the neighbouring compartment, climbed upon the window ledge, and from there looked down over the partition.
Doctor Quint, to whom Herr Mauch had meanwhile reported the matter, was even paler than usual. The first thing he did was to take hold of the halfunconscious Benjamin and insert a new tube with considerable force through the opening which was indeed already closing up. Then he pulled the spy-glass from his forehead and examined Benjamin’s spots through a powerful microscope, and at once his face became more and more serene. “Scabies,” he then said quietly. “Prurigo, a perfectly normal prurigo, my boy. You must go straight across to the Ritterburg. In three days you’ll be clean again.”
Tears fell fast down Benjamin’s cheeks. His chin worked convulsively to and fro; he was shaken with violent sobs and he laughed for joy. Doctor Quint turned about on his revolving stool. “Idiot!” he bellowed in a terrible voice. “Blockhead! Child-murderer! I’ll have you court-martialled and shot.” But Herr Mauch had already bolted through the door.
Thus it was that Benjamn got to the Ritterburg without being allowed, owing to the risk of infection, to return to his comrades first.
There an experienced hand smeared him at once from head to foot with a corrosive ointment of a greenish colour. The shirt, too, that was given him to put on was green, and the cotton gloves as well. Even the beds were green from the ointment, and the very wall paper of the room into which he was taken. For this reason it was called the hunters’ room and its occupants the hunters. There were half a dozen of them there together.
The oldest of them was a white-haired tramp who hated doctors. His bed was next to Benjamin’s. “They’re liars,” he informed him, and gratefully ate Benjamin’s rations, for Benjamin ate nothing the whole time he had to stay in the hunters’ room. “It is all rubbish they tell us about the little animals. It is in the blood, deep in the blood, and it comes out as the trees come out. For why should I get it otherwise every spring? But sometimes it stays till the autumn. Then it is against nature and something has to be done to check it.”
Benjamin scarcely listened to him. He looked down through the window into the yellowing garden of the Ritterburg. It was strictly shut off from the park, where anybody could walk about. There in the midst of a bevy of Ritterburg fräulein was a yellow-skinned fellow with black hair gleaming in the pale mid-day sunlight. He was called the Legionary, for he was a deserter from the Foreign Legion, who had got back through the lines to Germany. He had a wild face, beautiful and adventurous, and Benjamin began to lose himself in dreams of the amazing experiences that he seemed to be telling the girls around him.
XII
Not long after Benjamin’s return to the whistlers’ room, Doctor Quint carried out on him and Harry what he hoped would prove the final and decisive operation, and they had to lie in bed in great pain and with high fever. Kollin, the only one now left on his legs, entered on dreary days. Since Benjamin’s arrival, card games had taken their place beside the ever-beloved chess in the daily life of the whistlers, games that three or four could play. The excitement and the scoring they involved, and also the passionate discussion after the game was over, as to how everything had had to be, or might have been if this trump had been held back or that trick had been taken, had all been for Kollin the keenest joy. It carried him past his disappointment at being always a loser at cards, for he played a clever and cunning game, but in this as in all else he had no luck.
Now, however, the luck suddenly turned in his favour. Sitting alone at the table he shuffled and dealt to himself and two imaginary partners with the most exact precision. Then he turned his hand up and, sure enough, he had the game all in his hands, untakable solos and grands with all the aces and knaves as well. Time after time he jumped up, with the cards spread in his hand, and hurried over to Pointner’s and Benjamin’s beds to show them the
incontestable assurance of victory and luck. Pointner, who had suddenly begun to sink and could seldom now read his fairy tales, only waved a hand feebly and turned away, and Benjamin looked at him through a daze of narcotics with fevered, gleaming eyes, but did not know him. At last Kollin reported to Doctor Quint and begged him to do with him as with the two others, for they were his comrades. But Doctor Quint could not risk it yet in his case, and had to console him by holding out hopes for the future.
Thus passed monotonous days. Outside it snowed on and on, and sometimes a regimental band took up its position before the windows on a patch from which the snow had been shovelled, and played the usual rousing tunes. Harry Flint always showed the liveliest pleasure when at the close “Hail to thee in conqueror’s wreath” was played, for it had the same tune as the hymn in which God is prayed to save the gracious King of Great Britain. He sat up in bed, and, putting on a ceremonial and dignified expression, beat time with his finger.
Sometimes Sergeant Wichtermann had himself wheeled in on his chair and discussed the military situation with Kollin. He was very confident and prognosticated a speedy victory. He would then contemplate taking part in his regiment’s triumphal return from a carriage. Harry, meanwhile, pricked up his ears and sadly shook his head, but Kollin, too, who sat carving a set of chessmen that he intended as a present to Pointner, looked grave. He got up and took from his drawer a paper on which he had worked out in figures a statement of all the allied and enemy forces. He began to read it carefully through while he followed the rows of figures with his finger. There, for him, lay the answer to this question.
Harry and Benjamin had not been long on their feet again, with the hope that they might soon be quit of their tubes, when Pointner’s end came. Often he lay unconscious and slowly, without ceasing, turned his head this way and that, as though he were always wondering about something. His face had become small and peaceful like the face of a child, and his eyes, when he opened them, were always a deeper and deeper blue. But he opened them seldom now, and when he did the other whistlers collected at once round his bed and joked with him and he smiled and looked tenderly at them.
One morning early, when they were all still in bed, they heard him getting restless. He was rattling violently at the cupboard by his bed, and a glass fell with a crash to the floor. They made a light, and there sat Pointner upright in bed holding out the English cap to Harry. Harry jumped up and ran across in bare feet to prop him up; but Pointner had already sunk slowly back. His eyes were fixed on the ceiling, and he did not move again.
He was buried in the little soldiers’ cemetery behind the park. In the first row behind the coffin walked the three whistlers, for even Harry Flint, by the special intercession of Doctor Quint, was permitted, as an exception (so they called it), to go too. He wore for the first time the English cap.
Immediately behind them walked Herr Mauch. He had girded on a bayonet, and also procured himself a helmet which, being too big for him, fell sideways on his head at every step. On his arm he had the army medical corporal, Deuster, beside whom went Backhuhn, whose nose was now very nearly completed. The band played the Comrades’ Song, and Herr Mauch sobbed aloud into his helmet which he held before his moustache. Benjamin and Harry Flint were shaking too and looked with drawn faces to the ground. Kollin alone kept a calm face and dry eyes, but when his turn came to step in front of the heap of earth and scatter some of it into the grave, he put the spade aside and threw on to the coffin the chessmen that he had brought with him in his overcoat pocket.
A few weeks later he was wheeled into the operating theatre on a stretcher; for the final critical operation was now to be put to the test in his case too. But Benjamin and Harry waited in vain for his return. When they saw him again he was dead behind the white folding screen in Herr Mauch’s bath-house, where, when there was time, it was the practice to convey the dying: for it had been found that the sight of a dying man often had a dangerous influence on the others and drew them in his train.
And then the day came when Doctor Quint drew the silver pipes from the necks of the two survivors. The little mouth above the breast closed in one night and they could now breathe almost like other people.
“No longer whistlers,” Harry whispered. But they did not venture to show their joy. Arm in arm they walked along the garden paths and drew deep breaths.
One morning, when they were both lying on their beds in their clothes and sleeping, Herr Mauch came in with a sheaf of papers under his arm. “Get up, Harry Flint,” he called. “Get ready sharp. You’ve been exchanged and are going home. You must be dressed in half an hour. There’s still time to catch a train to-day to Rotterdam.” Therewith he threw a bundle of clothes on the bed. Harry slowly sat up and stared across in consternation at Benjamin. “No,” he said. “No. Not going away. Staying here.” Only by degrees he began to understand. Slowly a gleam lit up in his eyes, and do as he might he could not hide it. With trembling hands he pulled off his hospital uniform and put on the khaki one. It came from the disinfecting room and was faded and little but rags.
Then he sat down on his bed with his hands laid one on the other, and his bundle at his feet, just as he had sat the first time on the day of his arrival. Again and again he looked at Benjamin and Benjamin looked at him. They did not know what to say and became more and more embarrassed. When Herr Mauch knocked on the door they both stood up at the same time and blushed crimson. Then they stepped out quickly between the beds, met in a clumsy embrace, and kissed each other.
About the Author
Pauld Alverdes was a German writer and dramatist, born in Strasbourg in 1897. He was the son of an army sergeant who had published his own account of his experience of war. Alverdes was a member of the German youth movement, and at the age of just 17, he enlisted voluntarily just weeks after the outbreak of World War I. While on the Western Front, he was severely injured in the throat on the Somme. He spent several years recovering in hospital. This type of injury features in several of his works.
He began studying law at university, but then changed to study German and art history. He then settled in Munich where he worked as a freelance writer, also undertaking translation.
His book Die Pfeiferstube (The Whistlers’ Room) was first published in Frankfurt in 1929, and sold over a quarter of a million copies over the next two decades.
Many of his other works also centred on the experience of soldiers. In Reinhold Oder Die Verwandelten (Reinhold at the Front, published as part of the collection Changed Men), Alverdes describes the mortally wounded Reinhold, bound for a field hospital, choosing to return to his battery, to die there surrounded by his comrades.
In 1934, Alverdes and Benno von Mechow founded Das Innere Reich, which was the most important literary magazine officially published in Hitler’s Germany. Though Alverdes did align himself with the struggle for the restoration of Germany’s prestige, the magazine was controversial, and did publish a range of opinions, including pieces by writers who did not openly support the aims of the Third Reich.
Alverdes began writing for children in the late 1930s, publishing books and audio plays, and also adapting German folk tales. He died in Munich in 1979.
Dr. Emily Mayhew is a military medical historian specialising in the study of severe casualty, its infliction, treatment and long-term outcomes in 20th and 21st century warfare. She is historian in residence in the Department of Bioengineering, working primarily with the researchers and staff of The Royal British Legion Centre for Blast Injury Studies, and a Research Fellow in the Division of Surgery within the Department of Surgery and Cancer. She is based jointly in the Department of Bioengineering and at the Chelsea and Westminster campus. She is the author of The Reconstruction of Warriors, Wounded: From Battlefield to Blighty, 1914–1918 and A Heavy Reckoning: Life, Death and Survival in Afghanistan and beyond, 2007–2014.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 by Casemate Publishers
Introduction © by Emily Mayhew 2017
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