The Constant Soldier

by William Ryan

  Brandt faced them – the Leica in his hand, the weak, misty sun behind the steward as it should be. It seemed to Neumann that everything and everyone was somehow imprecise. The world was blurred – the soft light washing its colours out. He wasn’t even sure that he was real himself. He’d stabbed the old man twice in the stomach with a forty-centimetre bayonet. He hadn’t even been trying to escape from the train when Neumann had come across him. But, by then, Neumann was killing everyone. There was no thought in it – just a determination to clear up a mess.

  ‘Isn’t the photograph missing something?’ Jäger stood to Brandt’s side, observing them. His voice had a bitter edge to it that boded trouble. Neumann didn’t care. It was hard enough to open his mouth to breathe, let alone speak.

  ‘We have our guns,’ said Beltz, still cheery.

  ‘Not them – but what about the dead beaters? Shouldn’t they be part of the tally?’

  Neumann felt very tired. Someone close by him sighed. He could hear another person walk away.

  ‘Ignore Hauptsturmführer Jäger,’ the Commandant said, just when Neumann had become certain he would say nothing. ‘I will explain to him later how German officers should behave.’

  Jäger’s response was a harsh laugh and, from the other side of the bus, it was joined by more innocent children’s laughter. The Hitler Youth who had come to help serve the officers.

  It seemed very out of place.

  41

  BRANDT SAT in one of the armchairs in the sitting room at the farm. They had been positioned beside the low window that overlooked the valley by his mother, many years before – one for her and one for his father. The view took in most of the reservoir – from the dam at the northern end to where it disappeared from sight amongst the higher southern slopes. Even in the daylight, it was hard to make out where the reservoir ended and the land began, now that snow had fallen on its frozen surface. Immediately beneath the window, the white fields and farms of their neighbours fell away towards the road that ran along the reservoir’s edge while, to his left, from where he was sitting, Brandt could see the lights of the SS hut. He thought about Agneta sleeping in the freezing bunker, ice on the walls. He prayed she dreamed of happier times and that in her dreams the sun shone and its heat warmed her shoulders.

  He sighed and turned his attention to the other side of the valley. The Red Farm stood over there, in the darkness, close to the tree line that marked the end of the higher fields – where the shoot had taken place earlier in the day. The memory was still raw. He closed his eyes and ran his hand over his stubbled scalp, then pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling his taut skin stretch at its scars as he did so. He recognized the sound of his father’s footsteps coming down the staircase. He heard him cross the sitting room – the matching armchair, alongside his, sighing as it took his weight. Brandt didn’t need to open his eyes to know that he was already aware of the killings. He heard him reach for his pipe where it stood on the windowsill, then fill it with tobacco. He listened as his father opened the door of the small iron stove that warmed the room, heard him tear a page out of the ancient medical magazine that stood waiting beside it. He would roll the page into a taper now and use the flame from it to light his pipe.

  Perhaps his father wouldn’t say anything – perhaps they’d sit there until the last of the light disappeared. They might even be able to convince each other that it was a companionable silence. He opened his eyes and glanced across. He could see the distress in his father’s downturned mouth. Maybe it would simply pass – like the muscled, dark clouds that had moved across the sky before the last of the sun had disappeared.

  Perhaps it was just as well that his mother was no longer alive. His memory of her was fragmented and, he suspected, unreliable. Occasionally, something he saw or heard would bring with it a vivid image of her. He’d be able to see each crease that formed around her eyes when she smiled, the dimples that had dented her round cheeks. The green and blue flecks in her wolf-grey eyes. He would have liked to have seen her one last time before she’d passed on. To have a fresher memory. To be able to recall the soft warmth of her hand small in his. To remember what they spoke about. She would have understood what he was doing with the SS. He would have been able to explain it to her.

  His father cleared his throat. ‘I heard they shot three prisoners in the woods today, over near the Red Farm,’ he said. ‘I heard you were there. Were you?’

  ‘I was – I saw it.’

  His father nodded.

  ‘I heard Weber shot one of them – a Jewish prisoner.’

  His father gave a hacking cough, as if to get something foul out of his throat.

  ‘He thought it was part of the sport,’ Brandt said, hearing the anger in his voice – at the banal, half-hearted evil Weber represented, at himself for being a part of it.

  ‘He boasted about it in the village,’ his father said. ‘Ernst heard him. He came to tell me.’

  ‘How is Ernst?’

  Brandt listened to himself. Did he think he could avoid the conversation by asking about his uncle’s health?

  ‘He’s well enough.’

  His father tapped the bowl of his pipe empty into the ashtray beside him, reaching for his pouch to refill it.

  ‘I didn’t think Weber was capable of something like this.’

  ‘I think it was a misunderstanding, not that I want to defend him.’

  ‘He shot a man for sport, how could that have been a misunderstanding?’ his father said.

  Brandt considered this. The problem – the terrible reflection of the times they lived in – was that Weber probably hadn’t even thought before he’d fired.

  ‘Others were shooting and he shot as well. He didn’t know it was wrong.’

  ‘Explain that. Explain how he could not know it is wrong to kill a human being.’

  Brandt could hear the anger in his father’s voice but he was tired of all this. He was tired of his own anger as well. The anger was no longer useful to him.

  ‘He’s not exceptional – you must see how brutalized people have become. We have forgotten what’s right and what’s wrong. In the army you don’t think for yourself – you are directed by your superiors and the will and cohesion of the group in which you fight. Personal feelings of morality, right and wrong, pity, compassion – they all fall away. When everyone else is doing something, you end up doing it too – without thinking about it. Sometimes terrible things. It’s the same here. With the Party. With the farmers who use prisoners as workers. It’s almost as if . . .’

  Brandt stopped speaking. He realized he was talking about himself, not Weber. He looked across at his father. It was nearly dark outside now – it was difficult to make out his expression in what was left of the light. When his father spoke, he appeared to choose his words carefully.

  ‘I know something of war. From the last one.’

  ‘You were a doctor, Father. You saved men’s lives. I took them away.’

  There was a silence between them. Brandt knew it wouldn’t last.

  ‘What did you do? Out there – in the east? You did something, didn’t you?’

  His father’s voice was little more than a whisper.

  The glowing tip of Brandt’s cigarette now provided the only light in the room – just enough to remind him of his surroundings and to be grateful that he was sitting here in comfort and not up to his neck in snow in some trench overlooking the Vistula, his face frozen stiff as wood, cold piercing each pore. The Wound Badge in Gold hadn’t felt like much compensation when they’d pinned it on his chest – but sitting here, being warmed by an iron stove, in a comfortable chair and with an SS cigarette in his hand – well, he might not have both arms but he’d see the morning.

  ‘I asked a question.’

  ‘Do you really want to know the answer?’

  ‘Of course not. But that isn’t the point.’

  Brandt found his fingers had clenched tight enough that his nails were digging into his palm. He must
ask Monika to cut them for him.

  ‘If you’re asking about the Jews, I have nothing to confess. I saw things, of course. I took no part. I made my unhappiness clear by my silence, as did others. No one forced the matter. But I know some of the men in our unit went to the place where the Jews were being shot, and watched, and perhaps joined in. And I know that amongst themselves they shared around the photographs they had taken. Perhaps I should have said more, done something. But back then I was an ordinary private – with a political background that would have meant trouble for me. I kept quiet. I should have said something. I should have done something. Whatever the consequences.’

  ‘Thank God you weren’t involved in that. And what could you have done?’

  ‘Something,’ Brandt said. ‘But perhaps it’s not too late.’

  ‘Is the reason you’re working for them worth it?’ his father asked, indicating with a nod the direction in which the hut lay, further along the valley. ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘It’s worthwhile. Believe me.’

  His father said nothing in response, only turned towards him in the darkness, his head inclining forward as if he was expecting more – but Brandt allowed the conversation to lapse. The electricity was rationed now, and even when it was scheduled to be on, it often wasn’t, so they looked out across a dark valley. There were, however, two sources of light – the small power station attached to the dam was lit and, through the trees, the glow from the hut, where a generator kept the perimeter illuminated.

  ‘Father?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The Russians only stopped in the summer because they needed to regroup – not because of anything we were able to do. When the time comes – when they attack – when it’s a choice between staying and leaving, you must leave. Everything we did to the Russians will be done in return now.’

  42

  THE NEW YEAR was approaching but no one in the valley felt much like celebrating it. The change from one year to the next was a time to take stock and to look forward, but Brandt had the sense that people wanted the calendar to stop still at the end of nineteen forty-four, for the future to remain unknown and for the past to remain hidden. But that was impossible – the days marched on. Their fate, whatever it was to be, advanced a little closer.

  The mood in the village had been grim in the week that followed the Red Farm shoot – it was an unwelcome reminder of how close the mining camp was and how many had some connection with it. Then a man was hanged in the town at the bottom of the valley for saying the war was lost, alongside two partisans and a black-market profiteer, and that had made things even worse. His father had sighed and said things must be getting really bad if they were hanging the black marketeers.

  At night in the dark village – the blackouts were even more frequent now – the lightless houses were anything but silent. From behind the closed wooden shutters there came the sounds of hammering and sawing and urgent conversation. The smallest noise carried clearly in the still air. Bags were being packed, harness repaired, horses reshod and cabins built on carts to give protection on a long winter journey.

  The fear wasn’t limited to the Germans of the valley. The foreign workers and prisoners of war who worked for its farms and businesses all shared in the sense of foreboding. No one felt confident about the future. They lived in limbo, with a sense that each time the clock ticked it brought this halfway life one second closer to its end. The grim sense of an imminent conclusion seemed to reach up into the very sky itself – grey clouds moved towards the western hills slowly and relentlessly.

  And it was cold – bitterly and utterly cold.

  Brandt was busy. There were things that needed to be done – done urgently – and it didn’t help that the Volkssturm had been placed on higher alert. They now had to mount a guard on the valley road as well as the village bridge. Some of the men slept in the village hall rather than go home to their farms, only to turn round in the morning and come back again. Prisoners from the mining camp were brought down the valley to dig more defences. They left four of their number buried in one of the trenches they dug.

  Two ancient machine guns with Czech markings arrived at the village hall with a supply of ammunition that looked even older. And then Wehrmacht engineers appeared and filled the corridor that ran inside the dam from one side to the other with crates of explosive.

  The regional Party boss must have been concerned about morale because, two days before the New Year, all the local Volkssturm units were summoned to a rally in the town at the bottom of the valley. If anyone had asked Brandt he could have told them not to show the newsreel – but no one did. Brandt and the rest of the Volkssturm marched down from the village and sat in their allocated seats, numb with cold from the journey and then with shock, as black and white atrocities flickered across the screen. The narrator explained in detail what the Soviets had done to the population of the small East Prussian village – no horror was left undocumented, no image was too graphic.

  But the thing was, Nemmersdorf wasn’t so different from their village – the dead could have been their people; the houses, their houses. Brandt looked along the row and saw the emptiness and resignation in the older men’s pale faces. Afterwards some young fellow, younger than Brandt, anyway, wearing round glasses and a swastika armband over his leather coat, his dark hair slicked back, took to the stage. He spoke about wonder weapons and the necessity for faith in the all-seeing wisdom of the Führer. He told them the current situation was a test of the German people’s will, but that they would emerge triumphant. There was no applause when the speech finished.

  The snow whirled down around them as they marched back up the valley. He exchanged a glance with Uncle Ernst on several occasions – they didn’t need words. And then, when they were nearly back at the village and the blizzard was at its worst, a figure appeared, almost right beside them. No one else noticed the man. His face was obscured by the brim of his trilby, pulled low, and a scarf – but, for an instant, his eyes met Brandt’s and they recognized each other.

  It was Hubert.

  43

  THE FOOTSTEPS came as no surprise to Brandt. Monika had an instinct for when he couldn’t sleep.

  ‘I’m here,’ he called out – although he was sure she already knew. Her bare feet sounded soft on the wooden floorboards.

  She put a hand on the back of the armchair that faced him, leaning her weight on it and looking across the valley. She was barely visible in the dark.

  ‘Have you been awake for long?’ she asked.

  ‘Not too long.’

  He opened the pack of cigarettes on his lap, extracted one and leant forward to place it into her fingers, then took another and placed it in his mouth. The match was like a tiny explosion in the dark. She leant down to it – the flame washing her face with orange and yellow and turning her blue eyes black.

  ‘Worried about something?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘The hut?’

  Brandt was pleased. She had raised the very topic he had wanted to discuss but hadn’t known how to.

  ‘Yes.’

  Silence fell between them. He knew she was waiting for him to explain but he was in no rush. He had time. When their cigarettes were nearly finished, he took out two more. He weighed his options.

  ‘The women,’ he said, his voice sounding higher than usual. He paused and began again. ‘The prisoners, I mean. I told you about them before but I didn’t tell you that I knew one of them – a long time ago. Before she ended up in the hut. In Vienna. We were arrested at the same time.’

  Another silence fell between them. Monika would be analysing the new information, if he knew her.

  ‘This woman you knew before – were you in love with her?’

  A good question. You could rely on Monika to be direct.

  He thought back to that summer when they’d lived from breath to breath. Their relationship, in retrospect, seemed dreamlike – a wisp of a thing.
r />   ‘I didn’t get the chance to find out for certain, but I think so.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘As I said, we were arrested. I had to join the army – or be sent to a camp. I chose the army. I had no idea what had happened to her and there was no way of finding out. I couldn’t send a letter. There was no one I could trust to ask. I hoped she’d been treated leniently. As I was. Then I saw her here – at the hut.’

  ‘By chance?’

  ‘Completely.’ He could see Monika’s head shaking from side to side in the darkness. Disbelief? Amusement? Terror, even? ‘At first I wasn’t certain, but it is her. She doesn’t remember me. Or recognize me, anyway. I’ve changed, of course.’

  The tip of Monika’s cigarette glowed red.

  ‘Do you love her now?’

  A good question. How could he be sure?

  ‘Does it matter? Even if I’d never known her at all, it’s clear what I should do.’

  ‘But you did love her – and still do.’

  ‘Yes. I think so. Listen, Monika, when the Russians attack it’s likely there will be little resistance. It will be chaos. If I can keep them alive until then, five prisoners will be the last thing on anyone’s mind. If I get them out – I don’t think anyone will look for them.’

  ‘You can get them out, then.’

  Brandt noticed it was a statement rather than a question. He picked up the key that sat on the table in front of them and handed it to her.

  ‘The key to the bunker where they are kept.’

  She held it up, examining it in the faint light from her cigarette.

  ‘I also know how to turn off the electric fence, if that’s necessary – but it might not be. And I know how to kill someone, if that’s required. I have food for them. I have a place to hide them.’

  The tip of her cigarette glowed red once again.

  ‘Maybe they will be safer where they are. When the Russians arrive, they’ll be well looked after. Escaping might be more dangerous that staying.’