‘Dawn comes. In the distance we see a station. It gives renewed hope. As we press on, field gendarmes approach on their horses and stop us in our tracks. Why? The village is already packed with wounded men. A gendarme officer comes and says, “You’ll have to turn back, comrade.” He recognises me by my cockade. For I’d managed to salvage my cap as well as my shirt. I’m unable to say anything. I’m seething with anger; I could scream out of sheer sorrow. The men sit numb in the grass and fall silent.
‘The gendarmes have left. We go back over the embankment and make our way through. Me, the ensign and another man. We arrive at the station. And there it is – a hospital train! With a steaming locomotive! We charge into a carriage. What joy! Everything is forgotten. A few medical orderlies give us coy looks and scurry past. The beds are occupied, but there’s still plenty of space between the rows of bunks. For all those at the edge of the village, who are sitting in the grass and bleeding. The chief doctor appears. “I’m afraid I can’t take you, Lieutenant. I’ve already given the numbers to rear headquarters, and I can’t exceed that figure.” Well, that was just too much. Whipping out my revolver, I cry in desperation, “Anybody who tries to get us off this train will be shot dead.”
‘At that moment the locomotive pulled out of the station. We alighted here in Haumont.’
•
Schlump was not a born racketeer. Since his visit from the gendarme he’d lost all enthusiasm for wheeler-dealing. He reckoned, moreover, that with the ten thousand marks he’d sewn into the lining of his jacket he was rich enough. Now he planned to do something else in his spare time: he started reading. In a small stationer’s he’d found a book that had been badly bound and printed on poor-quality paper. But he was captivated by its contents. It was a compilation of love letters that Mirabeau wrote from prison to his dear Sophie, on whose account he had been locked up. Schlump was spellbound by the French eloquence, with its indestructible belief in life, and felt as if he’d somehow been part of this love and its torments. He went for evening strolls on his own, behaving as if he were head over heels in love himself, although he had no idea who he was in love with, or what made him happy and unhappy.
Schlump was so caught up in himself that he didn’t notice the sweet flowers blossoming around him, any of which would have been glad to offer him up their perfume. In his house lived a young Walloon girl with black hair and large brown eyes, fresh rosy cheeks and beautiful teeth. She had a strong but lovely body, and small feet with slender ankles. The girl came from a nearby village and attended to the inhabitants of the house: two elderly people and Schlump. Every Saturday he left four francs on the table for her, which she refused to accept to begin with, even though she was as poor as a church mouse.
The window in Schlump’s bedroom gave on to a cramped, ugly courtyard, which the girl crossed back and forth as she went about her business. In the courtyard, a ladder against one wall reached up to his window, possibly because there was nowhere else to put it. Once, when Schlump was standing pensively by the window, she stopped and asked him if he was all right. He said he was, then enquired rather absent-mindedly but politely how she was. She shook her head sadly and left.
Schlump forgot to ask the girl why she was so unhappy. A few weeks later she came to his room and set about her chores. He was deep into the love letters and didn’t even want to look up. Pointing at his book, she said with irritation, ‘Toujours vos poésies!’ Schlump laughed and asked whether she didn’t like love letters. She said no, and was about to leave, but stopped at the door. Keen to appear polite, Schlump asked her if she’d ever been in love herself. ‘Oh yes!’ she sighed.
‘When?’
‘Now.’
‘I see. Am I right in thinking you have a sweetheart but you can’t speak to him?’
‘Yes, that’s exactly the problem.’
‘You’re not even allowed to write to him?’
‘No, I am. Every Sunday I go to the border of the military district and he comes. We chat for a while, then he gives me a letter, and I . . .’
‘You give him a letter too?’
‘The thing is, monsieur, I cannot write as well as he does, and I always feel ashamed when I give him my sorry letters. Someone like you who reads so much, I’m sure you’re very good at writing letters.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that, but it wouldn’t be of much use to you anyway. Or do you want me to write the letters for you?’
‘Yes, monsieur, do that. Draft me a letter and I’ll come and pick it up tomorrow morning.’
Schlump laughed; he thought it was hilarious to write love letters for a pretty young girl. But he relished the challenge. He felt that he ought to write something straight from the heart, something that would suffocate him if it weren’t expressed. So that evening he sat down to compose the letter. He failed to notice that he was lifting material straight from Mirabeau, as if it were from the depths of his own soul. What Schlump found difficult was to strike the right tone. For he had to write as if all these glowing words were issuing from the coy heart of a very young and very pretty girl (he’d asked her to show him one of her sweetheart’s letters so he could gauge just how much their hearts had become intertwined. But she didn’t want to; she blushed and just said that they loved each other very much).
She picked up the letter the following day. That afternoon she thanked him and seemed quite happy. A few days later she came again, and after that she visited with increasing regularity. Schlump wondered how she found the time to keep going to the border of the military district. He challenged her, and she said her sweetheart was now at the pharmacy, but they couldn’t talk to each other or people would start gossiping.
All this fervent writing was of little help to Schlump, however. It offered no clue as to who he was actually in love with. On the contrary, it just stoked the fire even more, without showing him the water that could have extinguished this blaze. This was a blissful period, full of the feelings of love, and all Schlump was lacking was a loved one to make him immeasurably happy or unhappy.
For this reason sober reality never deserted him. One day the order came through that he was being relieved. He had to settle all his accounts and at four in the morning march to Bohain, where he was to report to the postal censor’s office. This took Schlump by surprise. Maybe, he pondered, something’s come to light about the falsified banknotes, or my act of heroism in the soldiers’ club when we saw off that fat major.
Schlump’s last few days were up. A paymaster from the head exchange bureau had come to settle up, and at three o’clock the following morning Schlump got up to set off on his march. With everything already packed, he took his kitbag and went downstairs. He had to pass through a small room to get into the street. Opening the door, he discovered Gabriele, the beautiful Walloon girl, in her nightdress. Out of the blue she embraced Schlump, kissed him and then started crying so intensely that he became worried. After what seemed like ages she eventually managed to utter a few words: ‘Vous l’avez trouvée? Have you found it?’
‘Found what?’
‘La bague! The ring!’
‘No!’ said Schlump in astonishment.
She dashed up to his room, as quietly as a cat, and brought something back down: a copper ring, finely worked, with a green heart. With tears in her eyes, Gabriele stood by the light, which shone through her nightdress, and smiled at him. All at once Schlump saw how beautiful she was. His kitbag clattered to the floor as he took her in his arms, and he was as sweet to her as one can imagine, thinking back to the ardour of one’s youth, the ardour that was ablaze inside him.
‘What about the love letters?’ he asked a few hours later. ‘Oh, I’ve kept all of them,’ she whispered to his breast. The candle flickered slightly, casting inquisitive and wanton patterns of light on her body.
That morning Schlump couldn’t march off before eight.
•
Schlump was travelling south-west. He was still full of longing as he thought about the beaut
iful Walloon girl, still able to feel her kisses. But he knew, too, that she was not the one he’d been longing for.
He chatted to comrades returning from the Front and those who were on their way there. Beside him sat a man who’d deserted from his company because he’d had enough of the endless squalor. This man was fed at the collection points that distributed the donations arriving from Germany, moving from one to the next. He’d sold all his equipment in Belgium, where each piece of kit had its fixed price. ‘Now I’m going back to my company. I’ll join in again for a while, I mean, I’ve eaten my fill several times and done nothing for a few weeks. The sergeant’ll bite my head off, but nothing more will come of it. I mean, they’re delighted if we come back at all. What could they do to us anyway? It doesn’t get any worse than the trenches, does it?’
Schlump got out at Bohain. The postal censor’s office was in a large red house not far from the station. He reported to the captain, who kept him standing to attention and didn’t bother to turn round, but told him to report to Corporal Jolles. Jolles gave him a stack of postcards with red ten-pfennig stamps, and pointed to a room where two men were sitting with their own piles of cards. All the postcards were in French and in poor handwriting. They were from peasant women telling their sons or husbands at the Front that the red cow had come into milk again, that the calf was pregnant, and that everyone was in good health. They hoped this dreadful war, this catastrophe, would soon be over and that they could all be together again soon. Schlump read through his cards; each one said the same thing. He put his mark on them then passed them on.
He soon got used to his new surroundings. Corporal Jolles was a good-natured chap from Cologne, who became Schlump’s friend. They led an easy, comfortable existence. In fine weather they could hear the rumble of cannon from the Front in the west, a reminder that every day thousands of young men were losing their lives in the most grisly ways. You had to train yourself to banish such thoughts.
Schlump got up at eight in the morning. He was billeted in one of those simple workers’ houses which just had a parlour and a kitchen. In each of these two rooms was a bed. On the bed in the parlour was an elegant eiderdown. This was where Schlump slept. And in the kitchen, in the wide bed with its colourful cover, slept the dutiful, gentle married couple. The door between the rooms stayed open day and night. Around half past eight Jolles would pop in – he lived a few doors up, just before the road led into the cemetery – and call out, ‘Hey, Schlumpy old chap, let’s have a coffee!’ They would drink coffee or hot chocolate at Jolles’s house, and at nine they’d walk to work through the little gardens behind the houses. At eleven o’clock Jolles came into his room (he’d arranged for Schlump to have his own tiny office) and sat on the table to consult about lunch. Schlump fetched a bottle of schnapps from a little wall-papered cupboard and offered his friend a cigar. At twelve they went off to eat. There was a small mess where the food was first-rate, for Jolles had excellent contacts. He knew the men who worked in the rear-echelon butcher’s, he knew those who worked in the rear-echelon bakery, and the clerks in the stores. Everywhere he got his hands on the best things. A French woman cooked French cuisine for Jolles and Schlump; a German cook looked after the orderlies, the record office and the clerks. The captain ate in the officers’ mess with another captain and an old major. The arrangement was perfect; the war could go on for as long as it liked.
After lunch they relaxed until three o’clock. Around this time they’d have a small snack – a cup of hot chocolate and fresh strawberries delivered by the cemetery gardener. Then they’d do another couple of hours’ work in the office, after which came the most important part of the day: the evening. Supper took place at Jolles’s house, consisting of all the delicacies that Jolles could rustle up, and which he often prepared himself with great culinary skill. All his suppliers had to part with their very best titbits for this special celebration. A small table was set up by the door, covered with a white tablecloth, club chairs were fetched, and an exquisite bottle of wine produced: a white Bordeaux or a red Burgundy. Sometimes they invited a few actors who were in the area making life more tolerable for the officers. These would be quite happy to come and clown around for the friends in return for a decent supper.
Jolles loved wine as much as life. He was around fifteen years older than Schlump, with red hair, and he had no luck with women. They’d often chat until late in the night and their paradise was lacking nothing – well, almost nothing. And Schlump would occasionally find the one tiny element that was lacking.
That is how they lived through the summer, without a care in the world.
•
Every morning when Schlump stepped out of the front door he said hello to Louise, the pretty girl who’d be sweeping the two steps in front of her house. Her mother was dead; her father left for work very early and came back home late in the evening. She’d billeted an ancillary worker in her front room, an old boy with a red face and a shag pipe in his mouth, who was hugely proud of his beautiful young landlady. He’d close one eye whenever he bragged about her to his aged colleagues. There was no doubt that they were all jealous of him on account of Louise.
Louise wore blue stockings and a terribly short skirt. She was as blonde as they came and had the most magnificent blue eyes, which matched her stockings. She thanked Schlump each day for his greeting, and whenever he looked into her eyes he was reminded of home. She’d often come over, browse his books and talk at length with his landlady, who was also blonde and not old, but very ugly.
Before he went over to Jolles’s in the evening, Schlump used to chat with Louise. Then she’d stand for ages by her door and Schlump could see her white arms shimmering in the night as he drank wine outside Jolles’s house.
One evening Schlump didn’t go up to see Jolles. Pretty young Louise was showing him her lovely little garden that was behind the house and protected by a high wall. Then the two of them went into her tiny kitchen, which the delightful child had turned into a neat and cosy nest. She was as clean as a cat; her little white bed stood against the wall and smelled of fresh linen like a young girl. Her father was already asleep in the room upstairs; all was quiet. The door to the garden was open, allowing the dark-blue night to breathe in its intoxicating dreams. The crickets chirped noisily, as if trying to deafen any eavesdroppers; a soft, gentle wind picked up outside and breezed in, wafting her hair around his mouth.
Louise stood up, closed the door and turned on the light. The spell was broken. ‘I wanted to show you my books,’ she said, pointing to a row of lovely old leather-bound volumes with faded gold edges. They were tomes from Voltaire’s time, the sort of books you can often buy cheaply on the banks of the Seine in Paris. Schlump picked out a volume and leafed through it: Les Contes by Lafontaine. There were brown marks all over the paper, betraying the book’s age. The tales in rhyme were illustrated by engravings by Doré, who was peerless in picturing love. Schlump and Louise sat together on a chair and started reading.
They read the story of the girl whose greatest desire is to hear the nightingale sing through the night. Schlump had Louise explain the words he didn’t understand or wanted to hear her utter. Then they looked at the wonderful illustration that Doré had put beside it: the mother looks in horror through the door at the balcony where the daughter is asleep; next to her, the father pacifies his wife, a mischievous expression of understanding on his face. For the wanton girl is lying there with her lover in broad daylight, and they’ve pushed back the covers to get some cool air. In the girl’s hand is the nightingale she caught during the night.
Pretty young Louise gave a brief shudder then turned out the light, for she didn’t want Schlump to see her blushing. But now the crickets outside were chirping so loudly that their noise filled the room, and the flowers had given off so much perfume that the two young people fancied they could hear the nightingales singing. Their hearts were thumping and their youth magicked them into a paradise created by sheer ecstasy, in which thousands o
f nightingales poured out their bittersweet love songs.
•
Around midnight, a deep, faint hum struck up far away to the west. It came ever closer, rising in volume, and finally the factory sirens in the town snarled into action, wailing like tortured devils. The two lovers awoke, and in her terror, young Louise let her nightingale fly away. ‘Des aéroplanes anglais, English planes!’ The good child sprang out of bed and threw something over herself (for she had copied the lovers in the tale). Schlump gathered up his clothes and both of them hurried into the cellar. ‘What if my father comes?’ she exclaimed. ‘And the old man!’ Schlump stuttered. ‘He’s practically deaf, the old man, but my father . . . Oh God!’ Poor Louise looked around in horror and helplessness. In the corner was a large chest, which must have been around two metres long. They’d brought it down so her father could sleep upstairs. They removed the heavy lid and Schlump climbed in.
Inside the chest was an eiderdown. Schlump felt warm and cosy. Through the gaps in the wood he could see Louise. She’d hidden his clothes and lit the candle that was always on hand in the cellar. She squatted beside the chest, holding the candle. But her father didn’t come, the sirens lowered their shrill screams to a deep bass and eventually fell silent altogether. Pretty Louise began to stare vacantly into space. She blew out the light, opened the chest and climbed in to join Schlump, as daintily as a fairy. ‘I’m not going up into the kitchen yet,’ she said. ‘The planes might come back.’
‘But what if your father can’t find you?’
‘Oh, he’ll think I’m with the neighbour. We bored a hole through the cellar wall, so you have to talk as quietly as possible.’
Schlump Page 19
