Time Shelter

0.

1939/2029

The troops are assembled and waiting. The first shots will be fired by the ship Schleswig-Holstein at the military depots on the Westerplatte Peninsula near Danzig. It has long been in the works, they have been waiting for the right moment, some anniversary. Everything will be precisely re-created hour by hour. There is a minor preliminary debate over the exact minute, some claim the beginning was at 4:44 a.m., others at 4:48 a.m. The war will claim its first casualty, the Polish sergeant Wojciech Najsarek. The Luftwaffe will support the attack by air . . . Several submarines will be waiting in the Baltic Sea.

I know what will happen. With a million and a half troops at the ready, it only takes a single shot, and . . . the tanks will roll through the trees, the old ship will start showering rounds, the hidden machine gun nests will be revealed and will start cutting everything down with a rat-a-tat-tat—the first body will be torn apart, aaah, someone has switched the blanks with live ammunition, the other side will return fire . . . the howling of crazed foxes, frightened crows, signal flares that slice the sky, everything has been waiting, everything has been building up, only to open the floodgates now . . . I know from somewhere that on the first day about twenty will be killed, four from the Polish and sixteen from the German side, and in the end—millions . . .

The largest-ever military reenactment, life-sized, with a million and a half extras as soldiers from the Wehrmacht, positioned along the whole sixteen-hundred-kilometer border with Poland, sixty-two divisions, fifty-four of them in full combat readiness, twenty-eight hundred tanks, two thousand warplanes (old Junkerses or Stukas have been tuned up), artillery installations wait hidden in the forest, submarines, battleships, a flotilla of destroyers, a flotilla of torpedo boats.

We are re-creating this war so as to end all wars, someone will say on the radio, and this absurd tautology will unleash everything.

Tomorrow was September 1.

–1.

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