by Owen Sheers
Albrecht put the cigarette back in his mouth, found his matches, and lit it. Drawing the smoke deep into his lungs he cast his eye over the exhausted soldiers heaped about the cottage. Its two gutted windows were streaked with soot around their sills, ravaged and dark against the white walls. They reminded him briefly of Ebbe’s cried-out eyes at a party years ago, the mascara smeared over her pale cheekbones as he held her, the scent of lavender hanging heavy and sweet above them.
So which five? Who would make up the patrol? Albrecht found these decisions harder every time. Not so much because of the new faces he didn’t know, the characters that were still uncharted territory to him, but more because of the older ones he did. The men he’d fought with, the men to whom he was joined by the shared loss of other men. He had made too many of these decisions over the last three years, and now he was incapable of considering them without seeing their consequences spiralling into the future before him. The sentry he’d posted in the evening only to find him dead in the morning. The six men he’d ordered to advance into a street in Stalingrad, four of them returning minutes later carrying a fifth between them. He no longer thought as a soldier because he had been a soldier. He had seen too much. And now he had to choose again. Which of these men would he take? To which of them would he grant an alternative future? What that future was, he couldn’t say. A few more weeks alive perhaps? The lucky wound that would send them home? The bullet or shrapnel splinter that ends it all tomorrow? Whatever it was, at least it wasn’t London. They’d be sending no patrols there for weeks, maybe months, he was sure of that.
It was ridiculous, as Albrecht knew full well. There were a thousand other vagaries beyond his own decisions that held more sway over the spun threads of these men’s lives. Blocks of wood pushed across a table in Berlin. Arrows drawn on a map pinned to the wall at the new Southern UK Headquarters. The Führer’s toothache. A general’s capricious fit of arrogance. The trembling crosshairs of a sniper’s sights settling over an Adam’s apple. All of these held more potency than anything Albrecht could do or command. But as he cast his eye over the vestiges of his company he still felt the edge of fate biting into his shoulders, the thousands of possible alternatives offered up to these men in this moment’s thought.
The telegram threw up another choice too. If he was assigned to this patrol, then who would lead the company? That question, he knew, held the balance of more than just five men’s lives in its answer. But it was also not for him. He could leave that choice to old Hertz, the battalion commander. Major Hertz who made this kind of decision in his sleep, who never saw anything other than the broadest of consequences emanating from them. Old Hertz, probably the most successful battalion commander in the regiment. Albrecht need only focus on the five then. The five names this telegram had demanded, like an ancient god requesting five sacrificials for its altar. So, the same question. Which five? Who would he take with him?
He pulled on the cigarette again, felt the heat of its slow ember creep nearer his knuckle. The column of infantry was still passing. They would always be passing, Albrecht thought. Always a column of boys marching on tired feet, staring at the hairline of the man in front of them with tired eyes and even more exhausted minds. He turned his back on them to face his own men.
He would need a wireless operator. That was a relief. That was one choice made for him. There was only one operator in the company. They’d have to find another from somewhere, but that wasn’t his problem. If it was a patrol, Albrecht needed him, no question. He looked over the men and found the solitary operator. Crouched at the corner of the cottage, sitting back on his haunches unwrapping a ration of biscuits, his steel helmet tipped back to release a tuft of short blond hair. A new boy, a replacement. Steiner … He couldn’t remember his first name. Young. The defence of Normandy had been his first action. He’d held up well. Or so Albrecht had been told. He hadn’t seen it himself, but the reports were good. Steiner then. That was one.
They’d need a medic too. A good one if Albrecht could help it. Again he felt a sense of relief at another easy decision. The company had two medics at the moment. Sebald and Weiss. He’d take Sebald. He’d been with the company much longer. Always in the thick of it, weaving his stumbling, ducking run through the battlefield to answer the cry they’d come to know too well: “Medic! Medic!” He deserved the break. And he was calmer. Weiss swore too much as he worked. Albrecht was sure he didn’t know he was doing it, but he did. It unnerved the men. Just yesterday in a back street in Eastbourne he’d watched Weiss fumble inside a man’s groin for the end of a severed artery. As he groped deeper inside the wound his swearing got louder and faster. The man’s cries kept pace, getting more and more frantic, which in turn wound Weiss up another notch until the two of them were caught in a tangled race of damns and shits and fucks. Suddenly, with Weiss’s hand still up to his wrist inside the wound, the blood gulping around it like a thick red tongue, the man won the race and fell silent. His eyes flicked wide and he stopped, mouth open, like a windup toy reaching the end of its coil. So Weiss would stay. He hoped they’d find a good replacement for Sebald. They’d need one. But there was no way Albrecht was taking Weiss on a patrol, however short it might be.
He made a mental note of their names. Steiner, Sebald … Steiner, Sebald … repeating them as if they were the start of a forgotten childhood chant and he was searching for the next name in the list. As if the choice had already been made for him and all he had to do was remember the sequence, the roll call, rather than create it himself.
Steiner, Sebald …
He didn’t have to move. From where he stood he could see the whole company, or what was left of it. Just sixty-seven men. More than fifty short of full strength.
Steiner, Sebald …
It was like making a recipe, finding the right combination of characters, experience. He had a young soldier and an older medic. He needed another older soldier now. A keystone man around which the patrol could gather and form. A foundation stone.
Alex. Sergeant Alex Klepper. He wasn’t much older than Steiner but he may as well have been. One of the few, along with Albrecht, who’d been with the company since the Russian campaign. Albrecht looked for him now and saw him lying flat out, his head resting beside a flowerbed at the side of the cottage. Stretched out like that he covered the ground from the cottage wall to the picket fence so the other men had to step over him to pass round to the back of the house. Alex was a steady soldier. Big enough to carry the MG 42 for days on end if he had to. So, Steiner, Sebald, Klepper … He was making progress. Almost there.
Who was he fooling? He knew he’d yet to make a real decision, a real choice. The first two had chosen themselves, and if he was honest with himself Albrecht always knew he was going to take Alex. Alex from Bavaria who had so often saved his skin, who had so often laid himself on the line for the sake of Albrecht and the company. Albrecht didn’t want Alex going into London. He’d do it again. Put himself in the line of fire. He wouldn’t survive that city, Albrecht was sure of it. And they were so close now. Let someone else take that bullet. Someone who hadn’t come all the way just to fall at the final fence.
Time was running out. Any minute now they’d be on the move again, packing up and pulling back off the line. He must choose the five men now, let them know they wouldn’t be retiring with the rest of the company. Otherwise it would come as an even greater blow, once their bags were packed, once they’d set their minds on the idea of rest, even if only for a few days.
Steiner, Sebald, Klepper …
He looked over the faces of the men again. Filthy most of them. Bloodied. Eyes closed. There was hardly a wrinkle between them. He searched out the few older heads, but there was no point. These men would be needed in the company. And what counted as older now anyway? A man who had been with them a couple of months? A few weeks even? On this accelerated scale of maturity, Albrecht, at thirty-three, knew he was practically a geriatric. Lucky enough to have survived this far, but not enoug
h of a Party man to have risen any further, away from the fighting units. No, Alex and Sebald would be his two experienced soldiers on the patrol. That would be enough.
Then Albrecht saw Otto. Unlike most of the company he was still standing, rifle slung over his shoulder, holding his helmet against his stomach, his hands resting over it like a pregnant woman waiting at the bus stop. The dirt on his face stopped short of his hairline, just above his eyebrows where his helmet had previously sat; a sharply defined tidemark of battle, a festival mask of grime. His eyes showed in it like those of a blacked-up minstrel singer. Wide, unblinking. He was looking away from the marching infantry behind them, out towards the skyline where the rising columns of smoke met the descending clouds of an English autumn.
As far as Albrecht knew Otto had not spoken for the past fortnight. Not a word since the defence of Normandy. They’d shared the same bunker on the beachhead. Otto had manned the machine gun. Albrecht seemed to remember this was a mistake. He’d only been covering for another man when the attack began. Otto was not usually the machine gunner. But once it started there was no chance for him to leave his post. The waves of men seemed endless. Most of the Allied tanks sank or were knocked out by their own camouflaged Panzer divisions, but the men kept coming. A desperate, ancient pulse of men. It was as if an entire generation was being emptied onto the beaches before them. And so Otto had fired that machine gun all day and into the night. Until both his hands were burnt on the metal handles. Until its barrel glowed orange like the end of Albrecht’s cigarette when he took another pull. Fired it constantly, sweeping it left and right, right and left. How many men had Otto killed that day? Five, six hundred? More, probably. After all, he’d carried on firing through their retreat too, left and right, right and left, cutting up the surf, planting reefs of bullets on which the Allied soldiers foundered and drowned.
He was a slight boy, Otto. Pale with deep black hair. Thin wrists. But strong enough to swing that machine gun, left and right, right and left. His physique made Albrecht aware again of the perverted nature of this war. That a boy as slim, as small, as birdlike as Otto could kill so many men. Halfway through that morning Albrecht had caught his face, motionless under his helmet, lit by the narrow slit in the bunker and dirty like today except for the white tributaries of tear marks mapping down his cheeks. By the evening these were covered with dirt too and he’d looked as he did now. Open eyes, unblinking. Impassive. Something inside him had broken, stretched, and snapped. One bullet in the thousands had been a bullet too far. Albrecht had seen it before, but never so cleanly. Never such a clean fracture of the soul. And never such a silent break either. Silent ever since. Sebald had looked him over and passed him fit, but no one had yet pushed him to speak. There was no need. They’d all seen what he’d done that day and they were all grateful for it; grateful he’d done it and grateful it was him who had, not them.
Albrecht took a last drag on the cigarette, studying Otto’s profile as he did so. He would take Otto. A strange choice perhaps, but for all his silence he’d proved himself an efficient soldier in the fighting since. And in the more intimate company of a patrol, it was just possible he might be nurtured back to voice. He’d passed his watershed, his own tidemark. He’d stepped through the looking glass and was therefore probably, despite his temporary muteness, more stable than many of the other privates who, as yet, appeared to be functioning normally.
So, Steiner, Sebald, Klepper, and Schütze Mann. Private Mann. Albrecht couldn’t help acknowledging to himself the appropriateness of the English translation. He flicked the cigarette stub from his fingers and ground it into the soil with the toe of his boot, like a dancer powdering the points of his shoes. Placing his hands on the fence before him he took a deep breath and then regretted it. The burnt rubber from the burning bicycle still hung in the air. The tail of the marching infantry was passing behind him. The slow ones. The blistered ones. The broken souls with broken soles.
Albrecht was looking for his final note. The note to set against Otto that would complete the melody of his patrol. The answer to Otto’s silence. That was how he would, once again, lift the pressure of his choice. How he would decide which man’s life he would alter. How he would choose whom he would save or sacrifice, depending on what this patrol held in store for them. A young private gave him his answer, provided the counterpoint as he hoped one of them would. He was sitting in a circle with others, resting against an upturned British ammo box, and as Albrecht’s eye passed over him, he laughed. And there, in that laugh, he made his own fate, decided his future. That laugh, as he took an offered cigarette from another soldier, was the note that met and answered the silence of Otto Mann.
The private’s name was Ehrhardt, Private Gernot Ehrhardt. Another replacement like Steiner. Just this morning Albrecht had seen him bayonet a British soldier as they took a gun position south of this village. The British soldier was old. Not old like Albrecht, but old like Albrecht’s father had been old. Grey hair, a rheumy eye. Ehrhardt had bayoneted him with force, with anger, in textbook style. And now here he was laughing. Was that any more cause for concern than Otto’s silent stare? Albrecht didn’t care. He’d seen Ehrhardt laugh before, many times since he’d joined the company, and he wanted him with them for that laugh. For that ability to prevent one side of his actions, his character, washing up against the rest of him.
Steiner, Sebald, Klepper, Mann, Ehrhardt.
Albrecht took out his notebook and pencil and wrote the names down in his clearest handwriting. Calling to one of the runners, he ordered him back to battalion headquarters to find these men’s records and to confirm battalion clearance for this request. In the meantime he’d get Alex to inform the men they’d been selected for a patrol. Once he had their records he’d find a motorbike to take him over to Southern Headquarters, where he hoped he’d discover exactly what choice he’d just made for them. Where they were going, for how long, and why. He also hoped he’d find out why he’d been chosen. Why an SS order to a Wehrmacht officer? Why a patrol when they were still only on the fringes of this country? He was a fluent English speaker. He’d studied here before the war, in Oxford and London. But whatever the reason for the patrol, it couldn’t be London, that’s what he told himself again. Not London, and therefore whatever their mission, it had to be good news for him and the men. Better news at least. Anywhere was better than London.
As if to confirm this thought another Panzer division came rumbling round the corner past the cottage accompanied again by more infantry. All of them were heading north, towards the capital. Albrecht turned and watched the sullen progression of the tanks once more. A dog, a scruffy Jack Russell, had appeared from somewhere. It leant back on its haunches and barked and snarled at the feet of the passing soldiers. One of them swung a lazy kick at its head and missed. Another, a few rows later, threw it the bitten end of a piece of salami. The dog snatched it from the air and lay down to chew on it, keeping one wary eye on the passing soldiers. French salami, bought just a few days ago, thrown to an English dog. Once again the speed of all this overtook Albrecht. The speed and momentum of this spiralling, unnatural world he had somehow found himself caught up in, like a man woken from a coma into a life no longer his.
“Of course they’ll be back. Don’t talk nonsense.”
Maggie spoke over her shoulder, still fussing with the kettle steaming from its spout on the front hob of her Rayburn. This was their third pot of tea. The other women murmured in agreement, nodding their heads at Mary, who sat at the end of the table, an anxious frown slanting over her eyes. Mary, who had finally said what they’d all been thinking. Maggie went back to the kettle, wrapping a cloth round its handle and lifting it in a smooth movement from the hob onto the sideboard. Just as William had got the first tractor in the valley so Maggie had got the first Rayburn, and she moved about it with the authority of a captain at the bridge of a ship. Sarah sipped at her tepid tea. One bird ticked away irregularly outside Maggie’s kitchen window like a one-finge
r typist taking the minutes of the day. It was left to Menna Probert, the other younger woman in the room, to break the silence.
“I don’t understand it. Jack’s got a whole field of mangels t’do this morning. He wouldn’t just leave that.”
Maggie glanced at Sarah. No, Menna didn’t understand, and Maggie was beginning to lose her patience. Bringing the pot of new tea to the table she sat down beside the younger woman, put her hand on her arm, and tried once more. And again all of them listened as Maggie attempted to explain the impossible to Menna, as she tried to paint a picture of an altered world sitting there in her kitchen that looked so familiar, so unchanged and unchangeable that it challenged every word she spoke.
When Sarah had got back from looking for Tom on the hill, she’d found Maggie waiting for her in the cobblestoned yard. The dogs had got to her first and were sniffing round her legs. Maggie ruffled their heads, shielding her eyes with one hand as she looked up at Sarah.
“Hello, Maggie,” Sarah had said, trying to sound as natural as possible but still unable to prevent her relief at seeing Maggie tinge her greeting.
