Innocent Soldier (9780545355698)

by Holub, Josef

  Brief reflection.

  “Fine, but?”

  “Of course! We have to steal horses.”

  Luckily, it seems horses are more plentiful in Vilnius than unattached loaves of bread. In stables, sheds, barns, outhouses, even under lean-tos, there they are. The city is full of Cossack and other Russian cavalry regiments. There are even more horses than turnips.

  Konrad Klara has no objection to this type of theft. It’s not crime, to his way of seeing it, but an act of war. We would merely be confiscating enemy soldiers’ horses. No dishonor attaches to that.

  On the same night, we try to break out. It’s not quite as bright as previously. The moon is behind clouds, so the snow is a little less luminous, though for our purposes it still looks pretty bright. Anyway — it’s either or. We don’t have any other choice. With heavy hearts, we eat with the old woman one more time. Some grain porridge and a piece of bread. Then we kiss her on both cheeks. Like a mother.

  We find a couple of good horses, not far away. They’re standing in an open paddock. It’s easy to lead them out. There’s a big bundle of hay in front of them, so they’re not going to be hungry, either. They’ve already had their dinner. That’s good, because who knows when they’ll get their next meal. We can’t see any saddles. Too bad. But it would be dangerous to hunt around for too long. Any moment, someone could come out to see to them and catch us.

  I take the smaller of them. I talk to it softly and soothingly. Then I try out the seat. As a boy, I often rode bareback. Konrad Klara doesn’t find it quite so easy. He’s only ever had saddled horses between his thighs. But he can manage, too.

  We ride cautiously to the edge of town. A patrol is just galloping past. The Cossacks are talking together casually and calmly. The next patrol is just on its way. So go! We sidle through between them. First slowly, then very fast. We’re in luck. We’re spotted and followed. But our head start is enough. Eventually, the pursuers give up the chase. The dim night swallows and hides us.

  35

  Ice-cold days and nights follow.

  The same hunger gnaws at us, and the same merciless cold plagues us. We get lost in this vast, almost uninhabited country. God grant that the direction is more or less right. We steer by the sun and stars. There are no excitements. No skirmishes, no acts of heroism, no encounters with Cossacks, just the one continuing struggle for our bit of life, for a warm place to sleep, food for us and for the horses. Just hope and courage to put off the end as long as possible.

  On his own, neither of us could cope. We are fortunate to have each other. Fortunate that some baffling chance brought us together.

  “You’re like a brother to me,” enthuses Konrad Klara.

  “Well…” I laugh. “But not as wellborn as you.”

  “Drop the wellborn!”

  We have one object in mind. To get home. Home isn’t so far now. With every step, it’s a little closer. Maybe another six hundred miles or so. But a few either way don’t matter.

  We’ve left Russia behind. In Polish territory, things are in slightly better condition. The big hunger and the perpetual cold seem to be past. There are farms dotted about here, with barns and stables. The nights are bearable dug into the straw or with the animals in the warmth of the stalls. The Poles are hospitable and help us where they can. Life becomes a little more humane.

  The Russians haven’t delayed. They didn’t encounter any resistance, so they quickly rode on. After Napoleon. Past us, at some stage.

  We’re looking for the farm with the golden blond girl. The place where we spent the night and breakfasted on the march out here. I get shivers when I even think of it. The good food, and, well, the girl too.

  We ride across a moor. This could be the place where I had my terrible bellyache. It’s not such a dangerous place this time of year. Step off the path, and you don’t risk your life. You don’t sink into the marsh because it’s all frozen. Now the forest ought to stop. The farm with the blond girl ought to be farther out in the plain. Of course, everything looks different in winter. And birch woods are birch woods. So it’s not easy to find that one farmyard pressed into so much emptiness. Even so, we keep on looking. It could be here, it could be there, it could be anywhere.

  The moor is finished. But the farm with the straw-blond girl isn’t at the end of it. So it must have been a different moor. The birches and swamp holes and snowy places all look the same.

  Evening is advancing. We worry we might have to spend the night in the open.

  Wolves howl. Must be a whole pack of them. We should be wary of them. They’re starved. In that condition, they will attack men and horses. We’d better ride around the wolves. But where exactly are they?

  Ahead of us, there’s something dark among the trees. The wolves? It’s something bigger. Maybe a shelter for us, or something we can make a fire out of. Then we find nothing but a broken sleigh. No horses. Probably the driver was drunk and steered the thing into the trees.

  We’re curious and ride up to the sleigh. The wolves unwillingly withdraw.

  We’re aghast with horror. There’s an almost naked man lying on the sleigh. Konrad Klara is the first to recognize him.

  It’s Krauter. He’s curled up on the driver’s bench, pale and dead, bent double, and frozen through and through. He’s lying dressed just in his shirt. Even the shoes have been taken off him. What’s left of the wealth he stole? He’s left with not even a pair of pants to cover his nakedness.

  Strange. I’m not happy that Krauter’s dead, but I do feel some relief. All of a sudden my hatred is gone. Krauter can’t terrorize me anymore. Not with filthy puddles, thousands of balls of dung, and worn-out boots. He’s lost all the power he had over me. Seeing him lying there, motionless in the sleigh, so far from any idea of life, I almost feel a little sorry for him.

  We tip Krauter in the snow, and cover him over with the wreckage of the sleigh. Because of the wolves. It’s all we can do for him.

  Konrad Klara sighs. I wonder what he’s thinking? Is he so affected by those frozen remains that were once alive? Or would he like to know what happened to his lovely Arabs?

  We ride on silently into the breaking evening. I can’t think of anything but the sergeant. I turn several times to look behind me. No, he really isn’t following us anymore. It’s just the wolves howling.

  The horses change direction slightly and then put on speed. Can they smell a stable? That’s right. Not much longer, and we see sparkling lights across the snow. There’s a farm in front of us.

  Thanks be to God.

  We are kindly made welcome, can eat our fill, and even sleep in real beds. What more could we ask for? Nothing.

  The farmer speaks excellent German. We learn from him that there aren’t any Cossacks around at the moment, and that it’s Christmas Day.

  36

  With a small quantity of bread and meat, we ride off early the next morning. It’s still bitterly cold. Apparently unusual for Poland, such an icy winter. Your breath freezes right away and hiding my face in the fur doesn’t help much. My eyes can’t take the white glare. The best thing is to let my eyelids drop. An occasional blink to check that we’re still going in the right direction. Everything else we can leave to the horses. They too, have white beards. Their breath puffs out like clouds of smoke. The unusual frost over Poland seems to want to go on forever.

  The farm with the girl with the blond braids must be somewhere else. We give up the search, and head due west. Toward home.

  In the middle of January we reach Hohensalza. There we learn that the rest of the Wurttemburg army assembled here and set off home a week or two ago.

  We are terribly tired and take three days to recover from our exertions. One night, the Cossacks are suddenly there. This time we are properly taken prisoner. At least the Russians don’t do anything to us, they don’t even take away our horses. But we are detained in the town for another two weeks.

  Konrad Klara says the Cossack units aren’t interested in small fry like
us. They’re desperate to get Napoleon. They feel if they don’t catch him, the war will never stop. Anyway, we don’t present any sort of threat to them.

  So we are finally allowed to go on.

  There is a rumor going around that Friedrich the fat king of Wurttemburg has already distanced himself from Napoleon. What good to him is an ally who can’t win his wars anymore? Napoleon has become a liability. Our king wants nothing to do with such a weakling. What he wants now is to hang on to the crown he got from Napoleon. To do that, he must enter into an alliance with someone powerful. Napoleon no longer qualifies. So, all of a sudden, he is against Napoleon. Initially, secretly. After all, one never knows.

  The king of Wurttemburg has already been in talks with the czar of Russia. The czar’s mother is his sister. That makes everything much easier. Konrad Klara puts me in the picture about all this stuff.

  “What a fickle bunch!” I say. It’s something our head farmhand used to say a lot. But it probably doesn’t apply here, because Konrad Klara sends me an offended look.

  37

  In the first days of February, we cross the frontier into Wurttemburg at Mergentheim. We are back in the kingdom, very nearly home.

  I get such a ticklish feeling in my head and a tugging feeling in my chest. It’s not like getting the butterflies before some great event, because I can’t bring myself to feel happy at all. I am back again and must soon confront my farmer. That frightens me the most.

  It’s completely different with Konrad Klara. He’s looking forward to being back at Lammersdorf, to seeing his mother and father and siblings — to being home, in a word.

  I turn it around and around in my head: Where is my home? With the farmer, who doesn’t want me? I no longer feel connected to my village or to the land.

  A thread of melancholy dangles from my head down into my belly. Really just on account of Konrad Klara. I know something is coming to an end. With the two of us. Soon each of us will go his own way. One without the other. He in his wellborn world, I in my simple world, in some stable or attic. Perhaps I should take Konrad Klara’s head in my arms one more time, and tell him there is no one in the world whom I like as much as him. Words alone are not quite enough, he ought to be made to feel it as well. Clutch his hair, or something. But that would be a little more than crazy. The lieutenant count and me! In Russia it was like this, and now it’s like that. I don’t trust myself. My head is cooking.

  The border guard takes us to the nearby barracks.

  Our homeland doesn’t offer us much in the way of a welcome.

  A little first lieutenant demands Konrad Klara’s saber. But of course he doesn’t have one. Hasn’t had one for some time. Then he’s taken away, as if he’s under arrest. And I’m led off in the opposite direction.

  We’re parted. Konrad Klara tries to say something to me, but the little first lieutenant pushes him away without a backward glance.

  I could weep.

  I’m in an empty stall, sitting next to a couple of ragged soldiers. They look at me curiously. Wearily, one of them asks me: “Russian campaigner?”

  “Yup! You, too?”

  He merely nods apathetically.

  I feel so lonely without Konrad Klara.

  Later, I’m thoroughly interrogated by a trim little staff captain. How and where I had been in Russia, under what colonels I had served, why I hadn’t fought on to the end, why I had fled from the enemy, what I had been doing to get back so late? The last of the Russian campaigners had been back for weeks already.

  I ask him where in Russia he had been.

  He gets hopping mad at me and yells: “One more piece of your cheek, and I’ll have you arrested!”

  I suppress my anger and answer calmly: “The Cossacks took me prisoner just at the end.”

  “That you should not have permitted,” he scolds me.

  “What should I not have permitted? If I may ask the question, sir.”

  “To let yourself be taken prisoner!”

  “I didn’t let myself be taken prisoner. My lieutenant and I were taken prisoner.”

  “That comes to the same thing, and it’s not good. His Majesty hates cowards, and he punishes everyone who was imprisoned.”

  “Oh, and why is that?”

  “What do you mean by your question? I warned you not to be cheeky!”

  After a period of silence, the staff captain adds: “His Majesty the king likes only victorious troops.”

  A boiling rage takes hold of me. Is that the reward for taking part in the most murderous war there has ever been? For a year of terrible hardship and privation? But I don’t say so. I expect that would be an insult to the crown and high treason.

  I could leap at the throat of that staff captain. And then at that of His Highest, Fattest Majesty.

  I ask after Lieutenant Count Lammersdorf That doesn’t concern me and, anyway, he doesn’t know, says the staff captain.

  I am led back to the stalls. The other veterans see my fury.

  “Calm yourself,” a man urges me, with dirty rags wrapped around his feet, which he keeps scratching.

  “Frostbite — itches like fury,” he says, noticing my look.

  From him I learn that of more than fifteen thousand Wurttemburg troops who set off to Russia with Napoleon’s proud Grande Armée, only three hundred have come back alive. Most of them are done in, with frozen fingers and toes, and no use for anything anymore. There are even said to be cannibals among them, men who ate their dead comrades. Fifteen thousand have been hacked to pieces, clubbed to death, frozen, starved, or drowned.

  “That’s the price we pay for a crown for our Fat Majesty,” remarks the man with the frozen feet. “But of course I never said that, and you didn’t hear me,” he adds quietly, looking about him cautiously.

  I am taken to Ludwigsburg on a baggage cart. There I am inspected by a regimental surgeon. “Extraordinary,” he remarks. “Most astonishing! Nothing wrong with the man, except undernourishment. Give him decent food for a few days, and he’ll be able to serve.”

  I am immediately given a pale blue uniform. Corporal’s uniform. How do they know I’m a corporal? I didn’t tell anyone. Nor did anyone ask me. Someone must have made a record of the fact that I was promoted in Moscow. Was it my lieutenant? Probably. It’s almost the only way it could have happened. How else would they know about it in Ludwigsburg?

  If only I knew where Konrad Klara is, I’d feel so much better.

  “The king needs soldiers again,” is the word in the barracks. “Apparently, Napoleon wants another army from him.” Even officers are talking like that, when they think no one’s listening. “And where’s the army going to come from?”

  I am assigned to a new company of infantry. That’s why I’ve been given such an impractical uniform. I could spend all day washing it, because that pale blue stuff always looks dirty. The boots are good. They hardly pinch at all, and once I’ve worn them in a bit, they’ll be very comfortable. In any case, my toes aren’t cold.

  Shiny new six-pounder cannons are in the armory shed. I don’t have to scrub them. Sergeant Krauter is no longer around, and a corporal isn’t given scrubbing duties. And the dung balls in the barracks yard can stay where they are, too. Involuntarily, I sniff at my fingers, but they don’t smell.

  I wouldn’t mind resting for a while, but I don’t suppose I will get the chance.

  Anything that can crawl and hold a rifle is spatchcocked into the new regiment. It’s all the manpower the king has. Everything was finished in Russia. All the horses and cannons, and the soldiers too.

  So my meeting with my farmer is put off from week to week. I don’t really mind, because at the thought of him, I get hot and cold shivers. What will the farmer say when he sees me? He can’t have any idea that I’m among a mere three hundred survivors.

  Sometimes I go crisscrossing the vast barracks yard, look here, take a peek in there, stroll around the officers’ quarters. But I don’t see any Konrad Klara. He would be in a different
barracks. Too bad! I hope he hasn’t fallen ill.

  A little scrap of spring is shining from the heavens. The air is fresh and light, young and clean and new. Everyone ought to feel happy that the winter is over, and everything is ready to begin again. What a beautiful world it is! No more cannon thunder, no broken bodies by the roadside, no puddles of filthy water, no glittering, murderous cold.

  But my heart feels anything but light. So much of Russia is still attached to it. If only I knew why, and how I could shake it off.

  And then I’m thinking about Konrad Klara a lot.

  38

  It’s snowing again, but it’s barely worth mentioning. The cold doesn’t hurt.

  Life is bearable. I have decent clothing, hot soup, enough bread, the occasional piece of meat. At night I can sleep tolerably well, without being woken up all the time by dead bodies. I’m told I sometimes scream like a banshee in my sleep. But that’s almost under control. I’m living in a well-regulated world now. Every day, Russia moves a little farther away. But I don’t expect I shall ever be rid of it entirely.

  New recruits arrive in the barracks. They seem to be getting scrawnier and more beardless all the time. I have to help train them. Because there are almost no more sergeants, and those six-pounders don’t go off by themselves. It seems I shall be a sergeant very soon, in spite of my youth — and my staff captain doesn’t know my true age, either. Curious. They say our fat king has learned a new tune. We returned Russian campaigners are not cowards after all. Because he needs every man jack whose fingers and toes haven’t been frozen off in Russia.

  Among my recruits is a puny fellow who comes from near my farmer. He’s astonished that my name isn’t Feuchter, but Bayh. And he’s even more surprised to find me still among the living. Where the village scuttlebutt reported that I’d been taken out of the lists of the living by a cannonball at Borodino. That’s what this young recruit tells me. My farmer hasn’t been right in the head since his only son, Georg, suddenly died of quinsy, common or garden quinsy. That was too much for the farmer, and he isn’t quite there anymore. That’s what the recruit from my village says.