Luxurious that care wasn’t. Willi’s seat was hard, and the car packed with soldiers getting away from action for a while. The stink of so many bodies that hadn’t washed lately would have bothered Willi… had he noticed it. He fell asleep almost as soon as the train started rolling. The hard seat and crowding bothered him no more than the thick fug. He’d slept in plenty of worse places. Nor was his the only snore rising to the low ceiling-far from it.
When he woke, he was back inside Germany. The train was rolling through countryside that hadn’t been bombed or shelled. It looked abnormal to Willi. He’d been at or near the front too goddamn long. He wanted to say something to somebody about it, but he had no friends sitting close by. Half a dozen soldiers in the car were still sawing wood, too. He kept his mouth shut. It wasn’t as if he didn’t have practice. When Awful Arno ordered you around, biting your tongue became a matter of self-preservation.
A few of the towns through which the train rolled showed bomb damage. The locals probably thought they’d survived disaster. They didn’t know how lucky they were. If they stayed lucky, they wouldn’t find out.
More chain dogs came through the cars at a stop, checking people’s papers. Willi showed his without hesitation. Why not? They were good. Farther back in his car, the military policemen caught somebody whose papers weren’t good, or who didn’t have any. They dragged the poor bastard away. “I can explain,” he kept saying. If he couldn’t, he’d landed in more trouble than he knew what to do with.
Willi had zwieback and a tube of butter in his pockets. Hoping the dining car would give him something better, he made his way to it. The stew was cabbage, potatoes, and tripe rubbery enough to use as a tire retread. The coffee was German ersatz, not spoils taken from French houses. It tasted bad and had next to no kick. All things considered, butter smeared on crackers might have been better.
Because the train traveled slowly and made many stops, he took almost a day to cross the country and get to Breslau. People got on and off. Some of them were civilians. Some of the civilians were women. Hearing women talking in a language he could understand was a treat he’d forgotten.
Breslau was a city of bridges, set right in the middle of the Silesian plain. It was also a city of many smokes. There was coal nearby, and iron, so factories worked round the clock. And it was a city of many Jews. Willi had known that before, but he hadn’t thought about it one way or the other. Riding the streetcar out to his folks’ block of flats, he got his nose rubbed in it. The yellow stars on the clothes of people on the street leaped out at him. No yellow stars on the streetcar passengers, though. Public transport was for Aryans only.
No one sat near him. People stood up instead, as far away as they could. He realized he really could use a bath. He was a little embarrassed, but only a little. If they couldn’t figure out he was just back from the front, too bad.
Even if he was ripe, his mother squealed and almost squeezed the breath out of him when he knocked on the door. “Why didn’t you wire that you were coming?” she demanded.
“I thought I’d surprise you,” he said.
“Think? You didn’t think.” But Klara Dernen didn’t sound angry. “Now where am I going to get my hands on a nice, fat hen?” She winked. “There are ways that don’t cost ration points. Magda owes me. If she’s got one, or knows where to get one…”
“Sure, Mutti,” Willi said. You could always find a way around rules you didn’t like, whatever they happened to be. He’d seen that.
A hot bath! When was the last time he’d had one? He couldn’t remember. It had been a while, though. He put on civilian clothes when he got out of the tub. The pants were too big through the waist, but all his shirts felt tight at the shoulders. He was in better shape than he had been before the Wehrmacht got him.
His younger sister, Eva, and his kid brother, Markus, both squealed when they got home from school. They told him about Russian air raids and running for the cellar. “That’s just like fighting, huh?” Markus said.
“Pretty much.” Willi left if there. Markus was only thirteen. The war would be over-the war had better be over-by the time he got old enough to fight.
Sure enough, Mother got her fat hen. She’d make a better chicken stew than the thumb-fingered soldiers who cooked in the field. It filled the flat with a savory smell. Father came home not long before the stew was ready. Herbert Dernen worked in a factory that had made clocks before the war and was turning out gauges and dials for panzers and planes these days.
He’d fought in France in the last war. After a long, measuring look at Willi, he slowly nodded at whatever he saw. “Well, son, now you know” was all he said, and it seemed more than enough.
“Now I know,” Willi agreed. No, they needed not another word on that score.
Father understood. So did other men of his generation, and other soldiers on leave. Willi couldn’t find anyone else in Breslau who did. He felt like a stranger, or maybe even a Martian, in his home town. That didn’t stop him from seeing-and kissing, and doing his best to feel up-the girls he’d been friendly with before conscription called. But they were either like his brother and thought they knew all about war because some bombs had fallen here, or they wanted him to explain what the fighting in France was like.
And he couldn’t. If you hadn’t done it, you’d never get it. In that, it was more like screwing than anything else. He said so once. He thought it would get his face slapped. Instead, it got him laid. Even afterwards, though, he couldn’t tell sweet Susanna what shooting and being shot at and getting shelled and bombed were like. They weren’t like anything.
He couldn’t tell her about the camaraderie, either, not in any way that would make sense to her. But, when his leave was up, a big part of him was glad, or at least relieved, to head west once more. He was a real, for-sure Frontschwein, all right. God help me, he thought, but it was true. uc Harcourt had just found a good place to crap when the sniper got him. It really was perfect. The bushes screened him from sight-or he’d thought so, anyhow. And the leaves were young and soft and green. This side of a goose’s neck, you couldn’t get a better substitute for paper.
He dug a little hole with his entrenching tool. He undid his belt, dropped his pants, and squatted. The shot rang out. “Aiii!” he howled, and sprang straight up. If the Olympics had a record for a high jump from a squatting position, he broke it by thirty centimeters.
At the same time, he clapped a hand to the wounded part. It came away bloody. Sure as hell, he’d got shot in the ass. Trousers still at half mast, he rolled behind a big, thick elm. Bullets could penetrate an amazing amount of wood, but he didn’t worry about that. All he wanted was to keep the lousy Boche from seeing him any more. Besides, that last bullet had penetrated him.
He pulled up the khaki trousers. He didn’t bother with the belt. Holding the pants up with one hand, he hobbled back to the encampment. He’d never tried walking with a wounded gluteus maximus before. It wasn’t one of the experiences you sought out for the sake of having it.
Lieutenant Demange greeted him with the sympathy he’d come to expect: “The hell’s the matter with you? You look like you just tried to hump a donkey, only the donkey didn’t like it.” Wordlessly, Luc turned around to display the bloody seat of his pants. Demange didn’t care. “If you’re on the rag, couldn’t you find a pad?”
“Fuck you!” Luc snarled. Enough was too much.
“That’s ‘Fuck you, sir!’ ” Demange said easily. “All right, go on back and have somebody patch you up. Welcome to the club, if it’s worth anything to you.” A German had shot him in 1918.
“Not a goddamn thing.” Luc made his slow way back to the aid station.
A male nurse who smelled of garlic and cologne gave him a shot of novocaine and a tetanus shot, then sutured the wound and bandaged him. “It’s only a crease, not through-and-through,” the fellow said. “You can go back to your unit. They’d skin me alive if I wasted a cot on you.”
“Thanks one hell of a lot,” said Luc, who’d hoped for some leave. “What do I do when the numbing wears off? It’ll hurt even worse then, on account of the stitches.”
Plainly, the male nurse was about to say it wasn’t his problem. Whatever he saw on Luc’s face made him think twice. Instead, he handed over a vial of white pills. “Codeine,” he said. “It won’t make things stop hurting, you understand, but it can take the edge off. And it constipates you. You won’t need to go into the bushes so often for a while.”
“Oh, hurrah,” Luc said in distinctly hollow tones. Then he asked, “You have any pants around here that aren’t all bloody?” If he waited for the quartermasters to issue him a new pair, he’d keep wearing these for God knew how long. But if he could manage things informally…
Sure as hell, the nurse said, “Some poor con stopped one with his face. I don’t know why they bothered bringing him back. He wasn’t breathing by the time he got here-I know that.”
The dead man had bled a little on his trousers, but nowhere near so much as Luc had on his. The pants were loose and too long, but a belt and some sewing would fix that. The people at the aid station, or maybe the stretcher-bearers, had already emptied the poor guy’s pockets. No surprise there. They’d missed an aluminum-bronze franc. Luc added the inheritance to his small store of cash.
When he got back, Lieutenant Demange said, “Fucking took you long enough. I thought they were cutting off your cheek, like the old lady in that story.”
Luc had run across Candide. He was surprised Demange had; the veteran seemed unlikely to read anything that didn’t have photos of naked girls in it. You never could tell.
“So you’ll sleep on your stomach for a while, eh?” Demange went on.
“I guess,” Luc answered. “Got any other good news for me, or are you through?”
“Well, I was gonna have you lead a raid on the Boches tonight…” Demange raised an eyebrow to see how that went over. Luc looked back at him without expression. He didn’t jump up and down and yell and scream, the way Demange obviously wanted him to. The older man made a disgusted noise. “Ah, fuck off. You’re no goddamn fun.”
“Poke somebody you’ve never nailed before, if you want to watch him pitch a fit. In the meantime, let me bum a butt off you.”
“What? You get your own shot off, then you want a replacement?” But Demange pulled the ever-present pack of Gitanes out of his tunic pocket and handed Luc one.
In due course, the novocaine wore off. When it did, the wound started hurting worse than it had when Luc first got it. The spot where he got the tetanus shot was sore, too, and it made him feel feverish. He took two codeine pills, then two more. Instead of leaving him sleepy and dopey, they made him feel as if he’d just had four cups of strong coffee. He wanted to do something, even if he couldn’t figure out what.
The Germans solved that. They pulled a trench raid of their own, a couple of hundred meters off to the left of Luc’s position. He ran to the Hotchkiss gun and fired off strip after strip of ammo at the Boches as they fought and as they retreated. Joinville couldn’t feed the machine gun fast enough to suit him. The piece’s cooling fins glowed a dull red. But it was a reliable piece of machinery. No matter how hot it got, it kept working.
Luc stayed awake all through the night. When the sun came up the next morning, he saw five dead Germans not far in front of the French lines. The regimental commander was a lieutenant colonel named Jacques Soupault. He had a mean, skinny face, a hairline mustache, and greasy black hair combed straight back. His eyes were black, and cold as a corpse’s. All that notwithstanding, he folded Luc into an embrace, brushed cheeks with him, and made him a sergeant on the spot.
“Without your promptness, the enemy attack might well have succeeded,” he said. “Prisoners we took couldn’t talk about anything but ‘that damned machine gun.’ At least three men called it the same thing.”
By then, Luc was desperately tired. He’d already taken more codeine, to try to keep himself going and to ease the pain in his backside. “Thank you, sir,” he muttered, hoping Soupault would dry up and blow away. The drug wasn’t hitting him so hard this time.
At last, the officer left. Lieutenant Demange grinned at Luc. “See? You should get shot more often.”
“You’re trying to make me lose my temper again,” Luc said. “Take another crack at it after I grab some sleep.”
“Yeah, you were bouncing off the walls, all right,” Demange said. “I dunno what kind of dope the doc gave you, but whatever it was, I want some, too.”