Dreams of Innocence

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Later Johannes would think of it both as the first and the last day of his life.

  From the battery with which they were stationed, they could see the Moselle, its waters swirling with autumn rain, winding its way through the landscape. Closer to, there were the French trenches, their soldiers almost visible on a clear day to the naked eye.

  But it was not what he could see which first imprinted itself on Johannes’s mind. It was the smell, the smell of his own dug-out, a vile odour of putrefaction, of rotting bodies, of blood, of stale human sweat. Of fear mingled with the high whiff of disinfectants, of chloride and creosote. Only the whistle of bullets, the rattle of machine guns, the burst of fire which sent the earth flying could wipe out that smell. It permeated the very bread they ate.

  On his first day in the sodden mass of the trench, he sank back during a lull in the firing only to find that his hand was resting on the remains of a corpse, its limbs being gnawed by an army of fattened rats. The bile rose in him. He retched. The soldier at his side, seeing his white face, laughed eerily. ‘You’ll soon get used to that. Too soon.’

  He proved right. The din of bombardment, the explosions, the uproar, were such that they numbed one into a leaden stupor. Johannes began to think that the only difference between himself and the dead was that he was impelled to scratch. He was suddenly prepared to do anything to avoid remaining for too long in this open grave. By the end of his fourth week, he was volunteering for each and every action, no matter how perilous. Action swept the mind clear of all reflection, obliterated the vermin, the slugs and beetles and lice which fed on living and dead alike. It worked as an intoxicant, produced a waking delirium which became for Johannes the very condition of war.

  The battery commander had noticed Johannes’s keen eye, had seen the quick drawings he executed during the lulls in battle. He sent him to the observation post, situated in a little pocket near the crest of the hill above their trench. Field glasses glued to his eyes, Johannes would bark out any movements he saw in the opposite line, or in the devastated French town beyond.

  On his third day, he saw a company of French soldiers moving through the town towards the front line. ‘Range twenty-three hundred,’ he cried to the telephonist, heard the number echoed, then within seconds the zing and whine of cannon, of artillery. A cloud of dust obstructed his vision. When it cleared, he saw the commotion of scattering soldiers, the dead and wounded on the ground, faceless. The enemy.

  ‘Direct hit,’ the telephonist shouted. The men cheered.

  Johannes heard his own voice raised in a triumphal cry. His heart was beating wildly, his palms were moist, and as his fellows thudded him on the back, he felt the thrill of a hunter who has found his prey. Intoxicated.

  But it wasn’t enough. He wanted more. Thoughts still occasionally rumbled at the back of his mind. Thoughts of home, of Bettina, of his father, of injustices suffered, of the living beings who were now corpses. The thoughts had to be wiped out.

  He told his sergeant he spoke French, volunteered for a patrol, reconnaissance. He could understand, see, report. Hans and two other men came with him. They stole out in the dead of night across no man’s land through a recent break in the barbed wire, flattening themselves into the mud when the flares burst and illuminated the ghostly stretch of land. In the light of one of these flares, he saw an arm by his side. Just an arm, with a German eagle tattooed on it.

  They rushed on, on into the shelter of a little wood, skimming soundlessly between devastated trees, bayonets at the ready. Where the trees cleared into meadow, they heard voices. They stopped, held their breath. Automatically, Johannes registered the words. Ammunition was being moved. When? The men had grown silent. He could feel their wariness. A twig cracked. They had been heard. Johannes raced forward, Hans just behind him. A bullet whistled past them, then another. Two men. Mere shadows. Johannes lunged his bayonet into the first, twisted it. Flesh resisting, giving way. He fell with the effort, his limbs entangled with the Frenchman’s. For a split second in the dim light he made out the outline of a face, eyes wide, curly haired, delicate. Like a woman.

  He shivered, registering the fact. Then he leapt up, pulled his bayonet from the dead body. His senses felt almost painfully alert. A wonderful clarity filled him, an electric stillness not unlike that which followed the act of love.

  He saw Hans standing over the second splayed body. He clapped him on the shoulder, pulled him away. They ran, their feet slipping through the mud, back into the shelter of the blasted wood.

  As the weeks grew into months, Johannes became known as a man without fear. He threw grenades with a deadly accuracy, getting as close to the enemy as possible. Twice, after raids, bathed in sweat and blood, he carried wounded mates back to their camp. He was promoted to corporal, awarded medals, became something of a local hero. There were many like him. Men who seemed not to understand danger, who took on perilous missions as if they were going out for a loaf of bread. Death drew them with its warm smell.

  Johannes understood nothing of it, didn’t question it, didn’t think. Action was like an eagle’s flight in high mountain air. Intoxicating. Yet strangely peaceful.

  In the gaps between action, he played tarok with his mates, jotted random undated notes in his diary. Time had ceased to exist, apart from the routine of the trench. He also drew, painted small chaotic images in livid colour, violent forms which replicated the splintered life around him, the explosions, the shell bursts, the fractured bodies. And exorcised them. Anything to escape that smell, that sense of slow decomposition, or the tedious hours of respite spent in those concrete underground shelters as close and airless as tombs.

  Later, when his ordinary mind began to work again, he would think that he painted to exorcise war.

  From home, he had had almost no correspondence - a note from Klaus wishing him well and carrying Bettina’s best regards; a letter from his friend Gert in Berlin. He looked at them blankly and then crumpled them up, turning to smile inchoately at Hans, to exchange a few words. The two of them spoke little, but were always together, the tall agile corporal always shadowed by the stockier youth.

  Sometimes the latter, when they were back at the rest camp, would hum slow melodious wordless songs, while Johannes drew. In his jacket pocket, next to his chest, Hans kept a stark jagged image Johannes had penciled of him. Johannes began to think of him as the only aspect of Germany worth saving, a wild forest flower, simple, modest, almost hidden by the rampant, more aggressive vegetation, but so pure in form and detail and colour that it far outvalued the rest.

  They took their ten-day leave together, not enough time to go home where Johannes in any event had no desire to go. Instead they travelled to Ludwigshafen, tramped along the borders of the Rhine, gazed at fairytale castles, ate bread and cheese in fields so peaceful they seemed to belong to a different world. A small riverboat took them slowly to Mainz, meandered along the graceful curves of the river.

  The wonder Johannes read in Hans’s eyes made him feel mellow, gave him a hope he couldn’t quite name, as if here lay the proof that the cut and thrust and noise of what he had always acerbically understood as the nature of male relations were not the norm, but merely a distortion. With Hans, Johannes grew kind. Even when they returned to the front, that kindness, that mellowness, persisted.

  At the end of February in the midst of a freak snow fall, they were moved further up the line. Johannes didn’t know why. None of them had much inkling of the direction the war was taking. Life - and death - centred in their own little sector. Days passed, distinguished only by the disappearance of men and the arrival of replacements. He had stopped reading the newspapers. The print, with its blatant talk of victories, its crass disparagement of the enemy, bore no relation to what he experienced.

  To arrive at their new position, they had to plod for miles through a communication trench. Then they were out in the night air, tramping through a wood, stumbling over tree stumps, avoiding the pools of boggy water which filled the
shell holes. Thin flakes of snow had covered the earth with spots of eerie white. Johannes was mesmerized by the filigree delicacy of that whiteness. He stooped where it had gathered more thickly to feel its coolness, picked up a handful. And then in front of him, he heard the blast of an explosion, shouts.

  He fell to the ground, pulling Hans down beside him, shouting to the others. Clods of earth fell on their heads, rubble, the whip of a branch. Then silence. He looked up. In front of him the mine had deposited a boot, thick with fresh blood, a foot still trapped within it. He leapt up shuddering. So much death. He had thought himself inured. But the lace of that snow against that reddened boot filled him with horror. He met Hans’s shocked eyes, stumbled on, a cloud of despair suddenly settling on his shoulders like an evil omen.

  In their new dug-out, he was moved to machine-gun duty, Hans at his side, tending to the gun, to the flow of ammunition. The action of the machine-gun dispelled his despair. Corpses became impersonal again, distant targets in a boy’s game. Battle seemed as natural an occurrence as the rising and setting of the sun.

  On four panels at his post, Johannes painted a detailed rendition of the lay-out of enemy territory. The painting made it real for him. It also provided his fellows with a constant source of amusement. A map for idiots, they termed it, but it was a gentle form of joshing. One by one they would come to him during rest times and ask for a rendition of themselves for girlfriends, mothers. Sometimes, Johannes complied.

  The seasons passed: summer increased the stench but was preferable to the mud of winter and spring. The back-up trenches grew more sophisticated, complex rabbit warrens of concrete, where the officers would occasionally ask him to paint a replica of some dreamed of natural world on their walls. Each move to a new location, each brief leave, was a relief, breaking for a short while the repetitive motion of the machine gun which had begun to monopolize even his sleeping hours.

  In the early Spring of 1916, the site of their newly extended line was even more oppressive than usual. There were no hills, only flat barren fields growing an excrescence of barbed wire between themselves and the enemy. On their first night in their new position, Johannes, Hans and two recent arrivals were ordered off into listening posts amidst the barbed wire of no man’s land.

  They set off through the darkness, two by two in separate directions, running, crawling, zigzagging, cutting their way, the shells whizzing over their heads until they took shelter in one blasted hole and then another, ever closer to the enemy line.

  At last, when they found a hole so close that they could see the French rifles. They leapt into it, waited. The explosions grew less frequent, the night quieter. They listened.

  And then the howl came, an agonized cry of pure pain, drilling into their souls. The youth beside Johannes trembled. He put a hand on his shoulder to calm him. But the howl returned, naked, piercing, reproaching them all with its agony, marking the hours of the night like a discordant church bell. It turned everything about them to stillness, so that its pain was uncannily audible, unique, individual. By the time the sky began to lighten, Johannes could bear it no more. The cry was an indictment of them all, of this whole wretched war, of the system that had brought it into being.

  Leaving the youth, Johannes ran in the direction of the injured man, easily tracing his cry in the ominous quiet to a position in the field some 100 metres back. As its tones grew closer, there was a sudden burst of shell fire: his own movement had broken the hypnotic spell the howling voice had cast.

  Johannes started to zig zag wildly. Sweat poured out of him. And then he saw him, saw the man hanging on the barbed wire, as if on a crucifix, pinned to it by the force of a blast, blood draining out of him. Johannes felt an answering howl rising in him, his voice becoming a sheer jagged edge of pain. ‘Hans, Hans, Hans.’

  His friend’s face was a pale mask, already a death’s head. Then, his eyes fluttered open. The horror in them burned into Johannes’ entrails. He started to clip wildly at the wire, trying to cut him free, cutting a portion of the wire with him, the tears clouding his vision. Finally, he managed to heave Hans onto his shoulders. Stumbling, tripping, he pulled him along. The battle blared over their heads, the shells coming from all directions. And then there was a blinding flash of brightness like fireworks exploding in uncanny profusion, blue, yellow, green red.

  And then nothing.

  Out of that nothingness, vague pale shapes gradually began to emerge. It was as if his eyes, all his powers of perception, were glued behind a milky screen. Fluttering ghostly forms came towards him and then swam away into a dreamy vastness. Sometimes their lips moved, but he couldn’t distinguish their sound.

  Then the sounds came into focus. They said incomprehensible things, but soothing in their tone. Once he thought he might be in heaven, a creamy distant place of gently floating images. There were other sounds, too, not soothing these, but moaning, crying, like distant children in the dark. He couldn’t touch them. He tried, reached towards them, but the effort was too great. He was bound. He was tied to a smooth boulder, his legs and arms splayed. His father’s face railed at him, punishing, spitting out shells which exploded inside him, burning, painful, leaving the odour of charred flesh.

  On the day when Johannes realised that his limbs wouldn’t respond to his command, everything else suddenly came into jarring focus. He was in a hospital ward. The walls of vomit green were flanked by beds, each of which held a grey-blanketed moaning figure. He was one of them. One of his legs was in plaster; bandages covered his chest, his arm. He couldn’t move his head. There was an acute pounding at his temples and behind his lids when he closed his eyes.

  He smelled her before he saw her, the lulling fragrance of ferns, of apple green soap. A woman. Bettina, he thought dimly. How long had it been since he had felt a woman, heard that soft rustle of a skirt? His eyes fluttered open.

  ‘Good morning, Corporal Bahr. A very good morning. We are better today, aren’t we?’ A hearty, cheerful voice. Not Bettina, no, but cool fingers on his wrist, and when he looked up, grey eyes, a curling smile.

  He tried his disused voice. ‘Where am I?’

  ‘You are, that is the first thing.’ A laugh. The delicious sound of crystal tinkling. ‘And very lucky you are to be, too. Another few millimetres, and the shell would have travelled into that main artery there,’ she pointed to his neck, ‘and my voice would have come to you to the trilling of harps.’

  She waited for her words to take effect and then hurried on. ‘Where you are is the military hospital in Strassburg. And what you are is a hero, like all my boys here,’ she made a sweeping gesture with her hand. ‘Now, in a few moments, the doctor will be round and we’ll see to that dressing. And if the pain is too bad, we’ll give you a little more morphine, so you can just rest and get all better. Alright? Just call for Matron Kanzel.’

  Johannes smiled, his face aching with the effort. She looked like an angel, he thought, with that stiff blue dress and that funny little hat perched on her smooth blonde head. He closed his eyes.

  And then with a sudden stabbing pain it all came back to him in a swift series of unrelated fragments, things he didn’t remember registering, things he didn’t want to remember. The trench with the rats rustling through it, the dead resting in its niches; the thunderous din, a clamour of screams and shells; his bayonet piercing that resisting flesh, pushing, pushing; the massed mutilated bodies by that concrete bunker, like so many dismembered dolls, piled up one on top of the other in their different uniforms, their limbs intermingled in a parody of love. And that scream… No, no, Johannes opened his eyes abruptly. The doctor, the relief of a living presence.

  Johannes stayed at the military hospital in Strassburg for some three months. For a good half of that time, he had no clear sense of what was dream, what was memory, and what was the passage of the present. The morphine deadened the pain, but induced such a heightened state of cerebral sensation, that life needed little of the stimulus of actuality to take on hallucinat
ory acuteness.

  The merest pressure of the matron’s fingers was enough to induce a sense of bliss; the disappearance of the man in the next bed, a state of panic, in which the figure of Hans, pinned to barbed wire, loomed larger than life. Days and nights rolled into each other in a time out of time not so unlike what he had experienced at the front.

  As his wounds began to heal, the plaster come off, and the doses of morphine grow smaller, an empty depression set in. The only talk in the ward was of the movement of troops, of victories and heroism here, of defeat and scabrous cowardly enemies there. He learned of the sinking of the Lusitania, the Zeppelin raids in Britain, the Austrian victory at Lemberg.

  But what did these victories mean? It should now be clear to everyone, he thought, that Germany was nothing other than a bloated octopus, its rapacious tentacles grasping for power, in Europe, in Africa, obliterating its young in its blind pursuit. Like all the other states engaged in this war to end all wars. And it had gone on for almost two years already. He had a sense of utter hollowness, a lack of purpose which nothing seemed to fill except a hatred for his own febrile body, the dizziness which still overcame him when he walked, the wretchedness of his weak flesh.

  One day when a blaze of sunshine illuminated the ward, matron brought him his sack. In it he found his diary, his colours, pens, a sheaf of drawings which he could not remember executing. He gazed at images of frenzied excitement, gathered troops, men with guns, barbed wire, dismembered and bloody bodies. The energy of the images filled him with a kind of incredulity. How could they have risen from his hand? Hurriedly he put them away. Then, balancing a piece of paper on his tray, he began to sketch unthinkingly, automatically. The men in the beds around him, their sallow, shocked faces, their stumbling gait, like blinded creatures, whom gravity had betrayed. He tore the paper up, covered his eyes, rubbing them, rubbing.