Making History

MAKING SMOKE

The Frenchman and the Colonel’s Helmet: I

‘You are impossible to live with, Adi,’ laughed Hans Mend, shrugging his shoulders with exaggerated good grace to concede the argument. ‘From now on, whatever you say goes. Black is white. The sun rises in the evening. Apples grow on telegraph poles. Denmark is the capital of Greece. I promise not to disagree with you again.’

‘The truth is never welcome,’ said Adi superbly, putting the book away and jumping to retain his stride as they walked together along the duckboards.

Whenever you argue with him, Hans thought, he pulls out that wretched Schopenhauer. Die Welt ales Wile und Foretelling, The World as Will and Idea. It contained all the answers, it seemed. Above all it contained Adi’s favourite word, Weltanschauung.

‘The fact is this,’ said Adi. ‘I was reading the propaganda leaflets that the British use for their own troops.’

‘But you don’t speak English!’

Adi shifted uncomfortably. To be reminded that there was anything he could not do displeased him. ‘Rudi translated for me,’ he growled.

‘Ah, of course!’ Rudolf Gloder’s English was, like everything else about him, entirely without fault.

‘The point is that the British in their pamphlets represent us Germans as barbarians and Huns.’

‘Us Germans.’ If Weltanschauung was Adi’s favourite word, then this was his favourite phrase. ‘We Germans believe…’

‘We Germans will not accept…’ And Adi himself a Wienerschnitzel. But that’s ‘them Austrians’ for you, thought Hans.

‘Of course they say that,’ he said. ‘It’s propaganda. What do you expect? Extravagant compliments?’

‘That is not the issue. They are lies, naturally, but they are psychologically sound lies. They prepare the British soldier for the terrors of war, they preserve him from disappointment. He arrives at the Front and he sees that his enemy is indeed brutal, that war is certainly hellish. His leaders were right. This war will be a hard struggle. So Tommy digs down with added resolve. And what does our own propaganda tell the hopeful German boy, newly enlisted? That the British are cowards and can be crushed easily. That the French are lacking in discipline and for ever on the brink of mutiny. That Foch, Petain and Haig are fools. These are lies, but they are not psychologically sound. When our men arrive at the front they soon find out that the French are in fact deadly disciplined, that Tommy is far from a coward. Conclusion: Ludendorff is a liar, headquarters are nothing but rogues and conmen. They begin to disbelieve the great phrase on the posters in Berlin, Der Sieg wird unser sein. The thought that this too might be a lie grows in their minds. Perhaps, they think, victory will not be ours. Result: a sapping of the will and low morale. Defeatism.’

‘Maybe,’ said Hans uncertainly. ‘But you believe that victory is assured.’

‘The belief is the point!’ Adi pounded his fist into his hand, his eyes bright with excitement. ‘The will creates the victory! Defeatism is a self-fulfilling prophecy! You do not create the will to win by telling bad lies that are easily found out. We will win if we will the winning. There is nothing we Germans cannot achieve if only we believe. Nor is there any depth to which we cannot sink when we lose our faith. There can be no room for doubt. A solid wall of belief is what we need, strong enough to defend our Germany against the enemy without and the cowardly incursions of the pacifists and shirkers within. Unity, only unity. If your own side does not believe your propaganda what hope is there that the enemy might?’

‘That’s why you beat up that corporal?’

A few days earlier Adi had startled everyone by picking a fight with a hulking corporal from Nuremberg. ‘The war is a swindle from first to last,’ this corporal had said. ‘It’s not our war, it’s a Hohenzollern war. It’s a war of aristocrats and capitalists.’

‘How dare you talk like that in front of the troops!’ Adi had screamed, hurling himself upon him. ‘Liar! Traitor! Bolshevik!’

Adi was a lance corporal, yet he had no respect for rank in and of itself. He had been offered a promotion years earlier, but there was no provision for promoting a regimental runner above the rank of Gefreiter, so Gefreiter he had remained.

This full corporal, this Obergefreiter, had driven his gorilla fist into Adi’s face time and time again, but to no avail. A lack of will perhaps. An incorrect Weltanschauung. In the end he fell into the mud, blood oozing from his nose and mouth, while Adi stood over him, sides heaving, lips flecked with creaming spittle.

This incident had resulted in a loss of popularity amongst the newer men, despite Adi’s Iron Cross, Second Class and his reputation as scrounger of food and supplies, First Class. The old sweats, Ignaz Westen-kirchner, Ernst Schmidt, Rudi Gloder, Hans himself, they still felt great fondness for the bloody-minded Austrian. But he was trying to a fellow, no doubt about that. Life would be more comfortable without him. More comfortable, but more dangerous perhaps, for he knew no fear.

They were nearing the main communication trench now, nicknamed the Kurfurstendamm after Berlin’s main shopping street. Adi slowed up.

‘I remember the first time I was ever deloused,’ he remarked, apropos of nothing.

‘October, four years ago,’ said Hans promptly. He raised his eyes past the Ku’damm and the forward trenches, across no man’s land towards Ypres. ‘Four years ago and four miles away. We’ve come full circle, Adi. A mile a year. Quite an achievement. Quite a war.’ He raised a defensive hand to his face in haste. ‘That’s not Bolshevism, I promise you! Just a foolish remark.’

To his surprise, Adi smiled with genuine glee. ‘Don’t worry, I never hit friends.’ Kameraden. Another favourite word.

‘The Lord be praised. I value this face.’

‘I can’t think why.’

Heavens, thought Hans. That was almost a joke.

‘No, in fact that was not the first time,’ Adi continued. ‘The first time ever I was deloused was in Vienna nearly ten years ago. They called it an Obdachlosenheim, but it was in fact a disgusting and humiliating prison. The pension money from my family had run out, no one was buying my paintings. I had no choice but to throw myself upon the mercy of the state.’

Hans shuddered slightly. Adi almost never spoke of his home or his background. When he did there was often an inconsistency and an overuse of melodramatic language that led many to suppose him a fantasist or a liar. ‘Throw myself upon the mercy of the state’ indeed! ‘Line up in a doss-house’ was all he meant. Bless him.

‘How terrible for you.’

Adi shrugged off the sympathy. ‘I made no complaints. Not then, not now. But I tell you this, Hans. Never again. Never again.’

‘Never again? Never again?’ A cheerful voice behind them. ‘That doesn’t sound like our beloved Adolf!’

Rudi Gloder came up between them and clapped a hand to the shoulder of each.

‘Herr Hauptmann.’’ Adi and Hans snapped to a salute. Gloder’s steady succession of promotions in the field from Gefreiter to Obergefreiter, Stabsgefreiter and Unteroffizier, had been swift and inevitable. That he had crossed the Great Chasm and made it to Leutnant, Oberleutnant and now Hauptmann had surprised only those who had never fought and lived alongside him. Some men are born to rise.

‘Cut that out,’ said Rudi shyly. ‘Only salute when other officers are watching. So tell me, what is this talk of never again?’

‘Only this, sir,’ said Adi. ‘Hans and I were talking about the Frenchman and the Colonel’s helmet.’

Hans was astonished at the fluency of the lie. So fast and so natural. That Adi did not wish to talk to anybody about his less than glorious past in Vienna was natural. That he should be most reluctant in front of Gloder of all people, that too was to be expected. Adi was more resistant to Rudi’s charms than the others were. Hugo Gütmann, their old adjutant, he had actively loathed Gloder, but then Gütmann was a Jew and Rudi had never been afraid to show his contempt for him, indeed had once called him to his face an aufgeblasene Puffmutter. Adi had no time for Gütmann either, even though it had been Gütmann who had so energetically pushed through a recommendation for his Iron Cross. So it was certainly not loyalty to Gütmann that caused Adi to be less impressed than most by Rudi’s radiant personality. Nonetheless, immune or not, it was strange to lie so easily and casually to a Kamerad…strange and a little disturbing.

‘The Frenchman and the Colonel’s Helmet?’ said Rudi. ‘It sounds like the title of a cheap farce.’

‘You haven’t heard?’ Adi sounded surprised. ‘One of the men watching the enemy trenches this morning saw Colonel Baligand’s Pickelhaube, his best Imperial lobster-tailed helmet, being waved triumphantly backwards and forwards on the end of a rifle. They must have captured it in the raid on Fleck’s dug-out last night.’

‘French bastards,’ said Rudi. ‘Child-molesting shits.’

‘I was saying to Mend here, sir. We must get it back.’

‘Certainly we must get it back! It is a question of the pride of the regiment. We must retrieve it and return with a trophy of our own. These piss-blooded children of the Sixth have to be shown how real men fight.’

§

It had been a matter of some annoyance to the original troops of the Regiment List that, depleted as they had been by four years of fighting, they now found themselves saddled with the Sixth Franconian Infantry Regiment, an unwelcome excrescence. These newcomers, to the veteran Bavarians’ way of thinking, were feeble and half-hearted weaklings in need of greater discipline and courage.

‘I asked the Major’s permission to go alone on a raid tonight,’ said Adi. ‘It’s in Sector K, north of the new French battery there. I know the place backwards. After all they were our trenches not so long ago. I took messages there regularly. But the Major said…’ here Adi brought off a creditable impersonation of the regiment’s present adjutant (the Jew Gütmann had been killed leading an assault earlier in the year) ‘…he said that he “couldn’t possibly sacrifice a man in the cause of such reckless adventurism”, so I don’t know what we can do now.’ He looked expectantly at Gloder, and Hans could swear there was an undertone of challenge to Adi’s voice.

‘Major Eckert is, of course,’ said Gloder, ‘a Franconian. Hm. This needs thinking about.’

Hans looked at Adi carefully. The pale blue eyes were gazing with excited expectation into Rudi’s face. Hans was puzzled. Was he angling for new permission to go on a raid? He must know that a Hauptmann cannot overturn the orders of a Major. For that matter, Hans could not imagine when Adi had asked Eckert’s approval for such an action. They had been together nearly all day. Perhaps when Hans had gone to the latrines for his morning turn-out. It was very odd.

‘If I had a crack at it,’ said Adi wistfully, ‘do you think Eckert would overlook the insubordination? I’d just love to..,’

‘You can’t disobey a direct order,’ said Rudi. ‘Leave it with Papa. I’ll think of something.’

Mend was tasting his first foul mug of ersatz coffee the next morning when Ernst Schmidt approached, in a state of uncharacteristic excitement.

‘Hans! Have you heard? Oh God, it’s too terrible.’

‘Heard what? I’ve only just got up, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Look then. Take a look!’

With shaking hands, Ernst thrust a pair of field-glasses under the other’s nose.

Hans took up his helmet and went grumbling forward to the nearest trench ladder, easing his head slowly above the parapet line. The usually taciturn Ernst Schmidt must be losing control, he thought to himself.

‘Three o’clock! To the left of the flooded shell-hole. There!’

‘Get down, you fool! Do you want to get us both shot?’

‘There! Can you see? Oh God, the ruin of it…’

Suddenly, Hans saw.

Gloder lay face up, his sightless eyes staring at the risen sun, his ivory throat open and scarlet pools of jellied blood spread down his tunic like frozen lakes of lava. A metre or so beyond his outflung fist, Colonel Maximilian Baligand’s grand ceremonial lobster-tailed Pickelhaube stood, spike upwards, as if the Colonel himself, buried underground, were wearing it still. Over one shoulder, in casual Hussar style, hung the richly braided mess-jacket of a French brigadier.

A movement in the foreground caught Hans’s attention. Slowly, centimetre by centimetre, from the direction of the German lines, a man was crawling on his stomach towards the body.

‘My God,’ whispered Hans. ‘It’s Adi!’

‘Where?’

Hans passed the field-glasses over to Ernst. ‘Damn it, if we start up any covering fire, the French will spot him for sure. Get down, we’ll use periscopes. It’s safer.’

For twenty minutes they watched, in silent prayer, as Adi wormed his way towards the wire.

‘Careful, Adi!’ Hans breathed to himself. ‘Zoll fur Zoll, mein Kamerad.’

Adi edged his way along the main roll of wire between himself and Rudi until he came to a section marked with tiny fragments of cloth, a coded doorway left by the wiring parties. This entrance safely negotiated he resumed his belly-down journey to the body.

Once he had got there—

‘What now?’ said Ernst.

‘Smoke!’ said Hans. ‘Now he’s there, we can put up smoke between him and the enemy forward trenches. Quick!’

Ernst bellowed for smoke pistols while Hans continued to watch.

Adi, lying face down, seemed to be blindly feeling the wound in Rudi’s back.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Perhaps Rudi isn’t dead!’

‘Of course he’s dead, didn’t you see his eyes?’

‘Then what’s Adi doing?’

Hans couldn’t see for his view of body was obscured by Adi rising on all fours.

‘Jesus, get down, you maniac!’ Hans whispered.

As if he had heard, Adi suddenly dropped flat again and lay motionless beside Gloder’s corpse.

‘My God! Has he been hit?’

‘We would have heard.’

‘He’s frozen up, then!’

Hans became aware of a gathering commotion in his own trench. He pulled back from the periscope and looked about him. Ernst’s alarm had alerted dozens of men. No, not men. Boys, most of them. A few had periscopes themselves and were relaying, in fatuous commentary, every detail of the scene. The others turned their big, frightened eyes on Hans.

‘Why isn’t he moving? He’s frozen. Has he lost his nerve?’

The sight of a man freezing up in no man’s land was a common one. One minute you were running and dodging, the next you were stiff as a statue.

‘Not Adi,’ said Hans as cheerfully as he could. ‘He’s recovering his strength for the homeward run, that’s all.’

He turned back to the periscope. Still no movement. ‘Everyone with a smoke pistol, get ready,’ he called.

Half a dozen men crept to the top of ladders, their pistols cocked back over their shoulders, cowboy fashion.

Hans wetted his finger and checked the wind before settling back to watch. Suddenly, with no warning, Adi was up, facing the enemy. He hooked his arms under Rudi’s and pulled him backwards towards the German lines, hopping backwards with bent knees like a Cossack dancer.

‘Now!’ shouted Hans. ‘Fire! Fire high and five minutes to the left!’

The smoke pistols clapped a polite round of applause. Hans watched Adi as the bombs fell beyond him and a dense curtain of smoke rose and thickened, drifting gently in the wind between him and the French forward trenches. Adi lurched on towards the home lines without a pause or backward glance. Perhaps he had been relying on the smoke screen, Hans thought. He trusted that we would know what to do. Perhaps he would have risked it anyway. Hans always knew Adi had the courage, but he would never have credited him with such brute strength.

‘What the hell is going on here?’ Major Eckert had stamped into the trench, moustache quivering. ‘Who gave orders to send up smoke?’

A young Franconian saluted smartly. ‘It’s Gefreiter Hitler, sir.’

‘Hitler? Who authorised him to issue such an order?’

‘No, sir. He didn’t order it, sir. He’s out there, sir.

In Niemandsland. Recovering Hauptmann Gloder’s body, sir.

‘Gloder? Hauptmann Gloder dead? How? What?’

‘He went out last night to rescue Colonel Baligand’s helmet.’

‘Colonel Baligand’s helmet? Are you drunk, man?’

‘No, Herr Major. The French must have taken it during Thursday’s raid up the line, sir. Hauptmann Gloder went to rescue it. He did too, and what’s more he pinched a brigadier’s mess-jacket as well. But then a sniper must have got him, sir.’

‘Good heavens!’

‘Sir, yes sir. And Gefreiter Hitler is out rescuing the body now sir. Stabsgefreiter Mend ordered us to protect him with smoke.’

‘Is this true, Mend?’

Mend stood to attention. ‘Quite true, sir. I believed it to be the best course.’

‘But damn it, the French might be led into the belief that we are attacking.’

Mend was too dazed and horrified to think clearly, but he managed a reply. ‘Respectfully, Herr Major, that can do little harm. All that will happen is that Franzmann will waste a few thousand valuable rounds.’

‘Well, it’s all very irregular.’

Not as irregular as you, you shithead schoolmaster, thought Mend, before giving himself up to more miserable considerations.

‘And where’s Hitler now?’

Schmidt bellowed the answer from behind his field-glasses. ‘He’s at the wire sir! Sir, he’s all right sir! He’s found the doorway. He’s got the body. And the helmet, sir! He’s even got the helmet!’

A great roar of delight went up from the men and even Major Eckert allowed himself a smile.

Hans, in his puzzled dismay, repeated and repeated to himself, Eckert knew nothing about it until just now. Eckert knew nothing. Adi never told Eckert about the Colonel’s helmet yesterday. Adi never asked him permission to go on a raid. Yet he told me and Rudi that he had. Why had Adi lied?

Hans walked slowly out of the trench just as Rudi’s corpse rolled into it. Adi followed, the Colonel’s helmet raised aloft in his right hand, the gold eagle stamped upon it flashing in the sun.

As Hans moved away, the cheering of the men grew and swelled inside him until it burst from his eyes in a flood of hot, disgusted tears.