Making History

REWRITING HISTORY

Sir William Mills (1856-1932)

Gloder sat alone at his desk waiting for darkness to fall. In front of him was a letter announcing his official award of an Iron Cross, First Class, Diamond Order. He smiled at it once more and then pushed the paper from him, towards the top of the desk. Everything was going so wonderfully well, so entirely beyond what he felt he could have managed by the force of will alone. Gloder was not a fanciful man, not a man given to belief in the power of an unaided providence, nor in the ineluctability of an individual’s ordained fortune. Gloder was a balanced man, he believed that somewhere between the two, between will and fate, existed the space in which a man might construct his future from the materials granted by destiny.

Rudi believed himself also to be a generous man, one who, on recognising the talents he had been born with, had instinctively known that they were not his alone, to be wasted on cheap pleasure or crude self-advancement. Since he could remember, he had known that he must use his gifts to lead his fellow men, the vast mass of whom had none of his insight and knowledge nor a tenth of his powers of endurance, concentration and thought.

In another man, such certainty might be regarded as arrogance, monomania even. In Rudi, they could be interpreted as a kind of humility. There were few men, none certainly in this hell of war, to whom he could explain this. He had once tried to write it down.

‘Picture a man,’ he had written, ‘whose hearing is so acute that no sound escapes his ears. Every whisper, every distant roar, comes clear to him. Such a man must either be driven mad in the frenzy of noise that constantly assaults his brain, or he must devise ways of listening, ways of dividing the barrage of noise into patterns that he can understand. He must turn all these world sounds into coherent form, into a kind of music.

‘So it is with me: I see, hear, feel and know so much more than the generality of my fellow man that I have devised a system, a general music of the world that would be incomprehensible to anyone else, but which gives shape and structure to all that I understand. Every second of every day, new sensations and insights feed into this music and so it grows.’

He did not think it overweening or unrealistic to describe himself as so far above the common run of man. There were, of course, men he had met with sharper academic intellects. Hugo Gütmann, for example, had read more and was quicker in ways of abstract philosophical thought than Rudi. But Gütmann had no sense of people, no skill with the stupid, no ability (carrying on this musical metaphor) to sink himself into the rougher tunes of humanity, the swinging Bierkeller songs of the enlisted man or the sentimental ballads of the bourgeoisie. Besides, Gütmann was dead. There again, Gloder had met men more skilled in mathematics and the sciences than he could ever be, but such men had been devoid of any sense of history, imagination or fellow feeling. He had encountered poets, but such poets had no relish for facts, for figures or for the logical procession of pure ideas. Philosophers he had known or read, deep in their mastery of the abstract, yet such men had no knowledge of hunting the stag or setting the plough. What is the use of fixing the four hundredth decimal place of pi, or nailing the ontology of the human, mind, if you cannot exchange talk with a countryman on the best time to bring down a herd from the high pastures or stand easily with a friend picking out whores? For that matter, what use is the common touch that allows you access to the hearts and minds of the masses, if you cannot also weep at the death of Isolde where human love stretches out into the finest point of pure Art and then attenuates further into spirit and transcendental nothingness? Such was Gloder’s view.

He stood and went once more to the door that communicated with his little bedroom. Hans Mend was stretched out on the bed, his dumb eyes staring hard at the ceiling as though he were trying to recall a lost childhood memory or calculate a difficult sum.

Gloder refused to berate himself for the stupidity of having left his diary in an unlocked drawer. The time one wastes in self-recrimination is better spent in learning. The mistake had not been fatal and would never be made again. Indeed, it might be turned to advantage. From now on his new diary (the old smouldered in the grate) would be a document that would welcome discovery.

Rudi could also feel a kind of satisfaction in the intensity of Mend’s shock and betrayal. Such a deep sense of hurt could only come from one who had invested his whole heart and soul in a belief in Hauptmann Rudolf Gloder and his great worth. Mend was among the less stupid of the enlisted men, and if such a man could have sunk himself so entirely in worship, then how much more so would the Neanderthals in the other ranks?

The moment itself had been almost entirely comic.

‘An entertaining read, I trust?’ Rudi had said from the doorway, choosing his moment to place the remark, as a comedian chooses the precise instant to drop his punchline.

Hans jumped to his feet in stark panic like a schoolboy caught reading the filthy sections in the Greek Anthology.

‘Don’t you know that it is impolite to read a man’s diary without asking permission first?’

Poor Hans had stood there for what had seemed like a full minute, his mouth working and his face white with outrage and fear. In reality, Rudi knew, they had faced each other for no more than three seconds, but time misbehaves on these occasions. Even under such pressure, Rudi had taken a moment to consider the works of Henri Bergson and the operation of interior time.

He had crossed over to Hans during this short moment and picked up the diary from the desk quite calmly.

‘I must apologise for any lack of artistic merit herein, my dear Mend,’ he had said in the tones of a tired gentleman-scholar. ‘The pressures of wartime, you know. It is not always possible to achieve the first style of literary elegance in the cannon’s mouth. I see that you are not in the least impressed.’

He had taken the diary, valuable tree-calf leather as it was and, his back to Mend all the while, dropped it into the fireplace, sprinkled paraffin all over and set a match to it. ‘A harsh critical judgement,’ he had sighed, still without turning to look at Mend, whose laboured breathing he could plainly hear behind him, ‘but no doubt a fair one.’

He stirred the burning pages with the tip of a highly polished boot and then turned to see Mend advancing on him, Luger in hand.

‘Devil!’

Mend’s voice rose no higher than a hoarse whisper.

‘I am not, I hope,’ said Rudi, ‘unduly attentive to the petty rules and protocols that bedevil our lives here. I do. feel bound to point out however, that the use of sidearms is reserved for the officer class. Rifles for men, pistols for officers. A foolish custom no doubt, but I feel one must cleave to these traditions, however regretfully, lest indiscipline break out like typhus all around us.’

‘Don’t worry, Hauptmann,’ spat Mend. ‘This pistol is for you.’

The look of puzzlement on Mend’s face as he had squeezed the trigger was comical and — Rudi was not inhuman after all — rather pathetic.

‘Kaput,’ said Rudi, tapping the holster that contained his working Luger.

Mend stood foolishly in the centre of the room, the trigger repeating its dull springing smack as his finger pulled and pulled. At length he dropped the pistol on the floor and stared at Rudi as if he were in a dream, all the fury drained from his face.

Without a word, Rudi approached, both arms stretched out in front of him like a sleepwalker, or perhaps like a French Marechal preparing to offer a formal parade-ground embrace. His thumbs found Mend’s neck without resistance and pressed inwards on the throat with ease.

Mend said nothing and his body made no move to protect itself. He had not the wit to bluster out a curse or scream for help. All the while his eyes, flooded with tears, were fixed on Rudi’s. The look in those eyes might have been disconcerting, shaming even, were it not for the passivity — no, more than passivity — the longing, submissive welcome that was written there. The ganglions and sinews of his throat were soft and yielding as a woman’s breasts. In the moment of dying, his eyes protruded beyond their well of tears, but with the last forced breath they shrank back like swollen mud bubbles that have not enough force of marsh gas inside them to burst out.

Rudi had laid the body on his bed, closed and locked the connecting door and then run from his office, clattering along the corridor, envelope in hand, huzzahing and bellowing with laughter.

‘Look what Stabsgefreiter Mend left on my desk!’ he had cried, bursting into Eckert’s office. ‘Where is he? When was he here? To the messenger the first nip of brandy!’

§

Eckert had remembered Mend arriving with the afternoon bag some two hours previously.

‘But never mind him,’ said the Major. ‘Congratulations to you, Hauptmann Gloder! And may I be permitted to say that never have I enjoyed more the privilege of endorsing such a recommendation? I know that this goes for the Colonel also.’

Rudi had grinned bashfully and given a small, modest gulp. ‘Sir, you are too good to me. All of you, far too good to me. I hope, grand strategy allowing, I may be allowed to invite as many officers and men as can be spared to a celebration this weekend? Chez Le Coq D’Or? This award belongs to the regiment and the regiment should be rewarded. Officers and men alike.’

‘You’re a good fellow, Gloder,’ said Eckert, ‘but may I suggest that while your comradely relationship with the other ranks does you nothing but credit, too much fraternisation doesn’t quite do in an adjutant? Especially,’ he added with an arch smile, ‘in an adjutant in line for promotion?’

‘Herr Major!’ Rudi drew in his breath in amazement.

‘Well, well! It’s no secret that Staff Headquarters have had their eye on you for some time. Now, I know what you’re going to say…’ Eckert put up a hand to stop Rudi’s protest, ‘…you want to stay at the front, you want to be with the men. All very fine, but the fact is intelligent men with proven experience are sometimes more useful behind the lines.’

§

Towards the end of the day Gloder had climbed the stairs to his rooms. He had enquired earlier at the trenches for Mend but been told that he was absent, assumed to be on duty up the line somewhere. Messengers, after all, were never easily accounted for. So Rudi had returned, late in the evening, shoulder blades sore from congratulatory pats on the back, and given out two bottles of schnapps to the men in the guardroom before retiring for the night.

He sat now at his desk therefore, the connecting door to the bedroom open and Mend’s stiffening body still staring upwards to the ceiling with grave concentration.

‘Dear, faithful Hans,’ said Rudi. ‘Your lamentable curiosity has deprived you of the chance of witnessing my greatest hour of glory. In a few weeks I shall be Major Gloder, darling of the Staff. My days will be spent in a princely chateau, eating chocolate and moving little tin men around on maps until this foolish war is over. For the meantime, leave me in peace. I am rewriting my diary.’

At three in the morning, Gloder rose stiffly from his labours and went downstairs and into the kitchens. All was quiet as he slipped from the back door and into the yard outside.

Rudi found a wheelbarrow and pushed it round to the side wall under his window. The nearest guard on watch duty would be around the other side of the fermier, almost certainly, if the kindly gift of celebratory schnapps had done its work, fast asleep in a drunken stupor.

Upstairs again, Rudi slid open his desk drawer and rummaged inside. Next he went through to the bedroom, slung the dispatcher’s satchel about Mend’s shoulders and picked up the body, carrying it easily to the open window. He let it fall just next to the wheelbarrow beneath. Bones snapped like dry twigs as the corpse, now rigid in death, thumped into the ground.

§

Wheeling his stiff, jagged cargo through the night and towards the duckboards of the Kurfurstendamm, Rudi felt like some miller selling sacks of flour in an old country village. He began to whistle softly to himself the rippling melody of Schubert’s arrangement of Die Schone Mullerin.

He arrived at Mend’s dug-out, picked up the body and carried it in.

‘Who’s there?’ mumbled a voice in the dark.

‘Just me,’ said Rudi, calmly. ‘Returning a drunken Hans to his bed.’

‘Thank God, sir. I thought it was reveille.’

‘Not for another two hours. Go back to sleep. I’ll just dump him in his bunk and be gone.’

One of the broken legs stuck out sideways, but after a little effort the body was made to lie naturally enough on the bed.

Rudi left the dug-out and raised the heavy wooden wheelbarrow over his head onto the parados in front of him. He climbed up after it, wedging his feet in sandbags and, once at the top, turned to look down at the entrance to the dug-out below.

It seemed an awful waste, he thought to himself. But then, war is an awful waste. Everyone knows that. He would write, he told himself as he took the Mills bomb from his pocket, the most beautiful and poetic letters to all the parents.

As he ran back towards the fermier he thrust the wheelbarrow from him and sent it spinning away into the darkness.

Its moment of crashing into a hedge coincided exactly with the thunderous detonation of high explosive behind him.