Making History

MAKING WAR

Adi and Rudi

Dark enough at six in the morning, and with this fog, impenetrable. Yet Stower, the platoon commander, must choose such a moment for one of his speeches.

‘Men! The British front line runs between Gheluvelt and Becelaere with Ypres only five miles to the east. The Sixteenth has been given the task of smashing Tommy through the heart of his lines. We will not fail. Colonel von List relies upon us. Germany relies upon us.’

Private soldiers Westenkirchner and Schmidt peered through the gloom in the direction of Stower’s voice.

‘Germany hasn’t the faintest idea that we exist,’ Ignaz Westenkirchner said cheerfully.

‘Don’t talk like that,’ growled a voice between them.

Ignaz looked in surprise at the yellow-faced private to his right. At five foot nine, Adi — they all called him Adi — was slightly above the average height, but his frailty, sallow complexion and the slender set of his shoulders made him seem slighter and smaller than the others.

‘Your pardon, sir.’ Ignaz bowed his head in mock Junker style.

Forty-five minutes to go. Random fire had begun from the British lines, the fat, slapping noise sounding more comical than dangerous, like the farts of a grass-swollen bull.

Ernst Schmidt silently offered cigarettes around. Adi looked down at the carton and said nothing, so Ignaz took two.

‘Not even now?’ he said, in amazement. ‘With action so close?’

Adi shook his head and cradled his rifle closer to him. Ignaz remembered watching him on their second day of training, how Adi had fondled that rifle in just that way the moment it had been issued. Gazed at it with wonder and delight, as a woman stares at new silk underwear from Paris.

‘Never smoked at all then?’

‘Once,’ said Adi. ‘Occasionally. For social reasons.’

Ignaz met Ernst’s eyes and raised an eyebrow. It was hard to associate Adi with anything more social than the mess queue or the communal showers. Ernst, as usual, said and did nothing in reply to this offer of a shared joke.

That’s all I need with me, thought Ignaz, one puritan and one humourless lump of wood.

As if on cue, there came a low whistle from the west side of the trench and Gloder was upon them. Rudi Gloder at nineteen seemed fuller of life and richer in years than Adi and Ernst who were already half-way through their twenties. Cheerful, handsome and blond, Rudi’s sparkling blue eyes and generous wit charmed and delighted all the men of the company. He had already been given the rank of Gefreiter and no one resented his promotion. Those who heard tell of him, his prowess with the rifle, his way of making up witty songs, his concern for others, often decided to dislike him. ‘Musical, athletic, intelligent, funny, brave, modest and impossibly good looking, you say? I hate him already.’ The moment they met him of course, they succumbed to his charm with joy like everyone else.

‘I move amongst you,’ said Rudi squatting opposite Adi, Ignaz and Ernst, ‘with figgy coffee. Ask not how this miracle was wrought, only enjoy.’

Ignaz took the proffered flask with delight. The rich sweet liquor slid down his throat and, free of alcohol as it might have been, it intoxicated his senses as though it had been cognac. He lowered the flask and met Rudi’s dancing eyes.

‘Nothing is too good for my men,’ said Rudi in perfect imitation of von List. ‘For you my dear sir?’

Gloder took the flask from Ignaz and held it towards Adi. For a second their eyes met. The deep kitten blue of Rudi’s, the pale flashing cobalt of Adi’s.

‘Thank you,’ said Adi. The ‘thank you’ that means no,

Rudi shrugged and passed the coffee to Ernst.

‘Adi doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t swear, doesn’t go with women,’ said Ignaz. ‘There’s a rumour going round that says he doesn’t shit.’

Rudi put a hand on Adi’s shoulder. ‘But I’ll bet he fights. You fight, don’t you, Adi, my friend?’

Adi’s eyes lit up at that word. Kamerad. He nodded vigorously and pulled at his big moustache. ‘Certainly I fight,’ he said. ‘Tommy will know I was here.’

Rudi kept his hand to Adi’s shoulder a moment longer before releasing it.

‘I must move along,’ he said. ‘I have to tell you though, that a thought has struck me.’ He pointed to his head. ‘Our caps.’

‘What about them?’ said Ernst, speaking for the first time that morning.

‘It doesn’t strike you?’ said Rudi with surprise. ‘Well then, perhaps it’s just me.’

After he had gone, they waited half an hour more.

At seven, Stower blew on his whistle and the advance began. Too loud, too hurried, too chaotic to allow for fear or hesitation. A scramble of shouting and cursing and clambering and they were stumbling towards the British lines.

The Tommy machine guns opened fire at once. Somehow, in the early moments, Ernst and Adi had managed to lose sight of Ignaz. They struggled on, the two of them, towards what they knew was the origin of gunfire, the heart of the British trenches.

‘Stower’s dead!’ someone shouted ahead of them.

Suddenly, behind them, to the left and the right, new guns clattered and men either side fell, hit in the back.

‘Schmidt! Follow me,’ cried Adi.

Ernst Schmidt was bewildered. Utterly bewildered. This was an attack, this was supposed to be an attack. An attack forwards. On the British. Was it a trap? Were they now surrounded? Or had they, in this fog, walked round a hundred and eighty degrees, so that now the British were behind them? Ernst fell down under a hedge beside Adi and the pair of them wedged themselves into its meagre cover panting fiercely.

‘What’s going on?’ said Ernst.

‘Quiet!’ said Adi.

They lay there for what might have been, in Ernst’s confused mind, seconds, minutes or hours until, suddenly, compounding the unreality and taking the breath from him entirely, a man fell on them shouting. Ernst’s spectacles were squashed and cracked by the weight of him on his face. He screamed into the man’s stomach at the pain of buttons and brass clips that ripped into the flesh of his nose and cheeks.

I am to be smothered by a dying man, he thought. ‘Frau Schmidt, it is with sorrow that we report the loss of your son, suffocated by a corpse. He died as he had lived, in utter confusion.’

This then is war, the dead killing the dead.

Ernst had time for all these thoughts. Time to giggle at the inanity of it all. Time to picture his mother and father reading the telegram in Munich. Time to envy his brother’s choice of the navy. Time to feel fury at headquarters for their failure to come to his rescue. Surely they must have known this would happen. The war will not be over by Christmas, Ernst would inform his senior officers gravely, if this kind of thing is allowed to happen.

The next moment he was gulping for air, clawing at his collar and feeling for the ruins of his spectacles.

The man above him was not dead. He was an officer from a Saxon Regiment and fully alive. He had rolled over and was covering Adi and Ernst aggressively with a Luger. He stared at them and then gasped in astonishment, lowering his pistol.

‘Christ!’ he said. ‘You’re German!’

‘Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry Reserve, sir,’ said Adi.

‘List’s Regiment? Shit, I thought you were British!’

Adi’s response was to snatch the cap from his head and fling it from him. Then he grabbed Ernst’s cap and did the same. ‘Rudi was right,’ he said.

‘Rudi?’ said the officer.

‘A Gefreiter in our platoon, sir. It’s our caps. They’re almost exactly the same as Tommy’s.’

The officer stared for a second and then burst out laughing. ‘Fuck the devil! Welcome to the His Majesty’s Imperial Army, boys.’

Adi and Ernst gaped as the officer, a man of nearly forty years, a regular they supposed by his rough manner and language, beat his thighs and howled with laughter.

Adi shook him by the shoulder. ‘Sir, sir! What is it? What is going on? Are we surrounded?’

‘Oh you’re surrounded all right! Tommies ahead of you, Saxons to the left and Wirttembergers to the right! Jesus, we saw you ahead of us and thought it was a British counterattack. We’ve been pounding you into hell for the past ten minutes.’

Adi and Ernst stared at each other in horror. Ernst saw the beginnings of tears form in Adi’s china eyes.

‘Listen,’ the officer had calmed down now. ‘I have to stay with my men. I’ll try and pass the word, but there’s no damned communication here. Will you both volunteer to go back down to headquarters? Someone’s got to stop this madness.’

‘Of course we volunteer,’ said Adi.

The officer watched them go. ‘Good luck,’ he called after them and then added, in a whisper, ‘put in a good word for me with Saint Peter.’