A Kiss for the Enemy (27 page)

‘Schmidt's reported the incident and the approximate casualties –'

‘Our horses are suffering enough from this campaign,' said Toni, ‘but at least we don't go in for the “
arme blanche”.
And I'm glad of it. Men make war. Let them pay for it.' He climbed into a staff car beside the driver. The man was in a state of something like ecstasy.

‘That was quite a battle, wasn't it,
Herr Hauptmann
!'

‘It was a massacre. Now shut up and watch where you're going. We don't want another cracked sump.'

‘Well,' said Kaspar von Arzfeld, ‘Rudberg is certainly having an interesting war.' He had read out excerpts from Toni's letter to the silent Marcia and Lise.

‘It all sounds rather horrible.'

‘War is a harsh business. Soon we shall have news of another campaign.' For a telegram had arrived two days earlier;

‘Lieutenant von Arzfeld wounded but recovering well. Will be granted sick leave on discharge from hospital probably in March.'

The nature of the wound was not normally disclosed in such telegrams but Kaspar had got busy on the telephone from District Headquarters, and had returned the following evening with a grave face, touched with a certain relief. Frido was in hospital in Poland. He had been wounded in Southern Russia.

‘Unfortunately Frido has lost his left foot – the lower left leg has been amputated. He was lucky to survive. The vehicle in which he was travelling drove over a Russian mine.'

Marcia and Lise were appalled. But by winter, 1941 the hospital at which they were working was beginning to fill with cases evacuated from the east, and they had no difficulty in imagining other and grimmer injuries. Frido without his left foot would still be Frido, gentle, enquiring Frido. Some of the men they tended would never be recognizable. Marcia, too, was able to give voice to a sentiment which Kaspar von Arzfeld could not entertain without offending his traditions –

‘It ought to mean, at least, that he won't have to go back.'

‘Frido will be distressed at any wound that prevents him serving his country,' said Kaspar sternly.

‘Of course. Still, it would be awfully nice if he didn't have to go back, wouldn't it?'

And when Kaspar went to bed that night he reflected on Marcia's words.

‘What a strange girl,' he thought. ‘Her ways are not our ways, she only thinks of individuals' small happinesses, not of the destiny of nations! All women are to some extent like that, but this one –'

He told himself for the hundredth time, with understanding, that Marcia's position was intolerably difficult. How could one expect her to understand that to a German officer it was the darkest of fates to be prevented from serving in the hour of the Fatherland's peril? He ruminated on Marcia's words as he undressed and knelt to pray beside his cold bed. He was fond of her.

‘It would be awfully nice if he didn't have to go back.' He
saw, as so often, in his mind's eye the face of his eldest son, who had loved this girl. He sighed, and thought again of Frido, committing him to Divine protection. He prayed to be saved from self-indulgence, from putting self and family before ideals. But –

‘Yes,' he whispered to himself, ‘yes, it would be – good – if he did not have to go back.'

It was not until April, 1942, that Frido eventually reached Arzfeld on his eagerly awaited sick leave. There had been ‘complications' after the original amputation; a battle against gangrene, narrowly won. When he eventually arrived Lise wept for joy: but in the privacy of her room came other tears, of anxiety, of distress for her beloved brother.

For Frido was not only terribly thin. He was like a shell from which the inner creature had been anaesthetized and extracted. Outwardly, in spite of what he quietly assured them had been excellent treatment in hospital (‘I haven't had such luxury for years!') he was pale, drawn, praeternaturally silent. Lise, who had always been close to Frido, found that she could establish no contact with him. He seemed without animation and so uninterested in life around him that Lise several times found herself wondering whether his brain had been affected.

His manner to Marcia was so ‘correct' as to be chilling. She thought, on his first evening home, that she could discern a possible reason – a political, a general rather than a personal reason. By tacit agreement the international situation, the whys and wherefores of the war, were seldom discussed at Arzfeld, and Marcia was grateful for the delicacy with which they shielded her from this. It now appeared, disconcertingly, that Frido only showed life if talk turned to the war. He seemed unable to leave the war alone. On that first evening he stared straight at Marcia after supper. His habitual expression was now so grave that he almost looked accusatory. His father and sister, at least, would have been surprised to learn that as he looked at Marcia his blood was, once again and most painfully, on fire. His words were cold.

‘Well, since I was last here, our war has become world war. Goodbye to any hopes of peace in our time!'

‘You've been here since this Russian business started,
Frido,' said his father. ‘You were here briefly last July before you went east, remember?'

‘I didn't mean that. I meant that now we are also at war with America. We are at war, simultaneously, with the largest land power on earth and the two largest maritime powers. To say nothing of the greatest industrial power in the world. Rather a lot for Germany to take on, don't you think?'

Kaspar disliked the turn of the conversation. ‘America is chiefly concerned with Japan,' he muttered. ‘There's no question but that they forced war on Japan. I can't imagine why.'

‘I have no doubt,' said Frido flatly, ‘that there will, nevertheless, be some effort available for use against Germany. Anyway, England now has America and American production behind her. It is a different situation from that a year ago. Completely different.'

His father nodded judiciously. Frido's voice was unexpressive as he continued.

‘It will be a long war. A very long war. Fought to the death.' Marcia looked at him.

‘He does not hate us,' she thought. ‘He can't hate anybody. But he is in despair.'

Frido had thought for a long time about how much he properly should say to his father about the war. His mind, always ambivalent about the whole business, had been entirely made up by what he had experienced on the Eastern Front. There was now so much that was loathsome, so much that made him shudder as his mind ranged over it, that he had at first decided only to produce a few soldierly reminiscences, perhaps to discuss the ‘general military situation', insofar as an intelligent but very junior officer and an elderly colonel of the Reserve could do so. Kaspar von Arzfeld was, of course, avid to hear all he could. Second only to his joy at welcoming his younger son was his eager anticipation of hearing at first hand something of the Russian campaign. ‘How I wish I could see it!' he had grumbled to the girls a hundred times: he had fought in Galicia in the First World War. Now Frido would enable him to see it. This far, Frido had anticipated and would oblige.

But Frido had other memories, dreadful, disturbing memories which it had been his instinct to keep from his father.
He felt that the simple patriotism, the traditional habits of mind of the old colonel could be so confused, so shaken by some of Frido's tales that there might be a collapse of confidence between them. Frido feared that Kaspar, outraged by some of the things Frido had seen and could recount, would tell himself, ‘The boy's exaggerating!' It would be easier to avoid excessive frankness, simpler to put certain unspeakable things from his mind, to play a part – a straightforward, modest part – and to tell his father (accurately as far as it went) only the sort of things Kaspar wanted, eagerly, to learn.

Frido, lying in hospital, slowly getting accustomed to the idea of one day being fitted with a replacement leg, managing his crutch, exercizing himself conscientiously and laboriously in the small park beside the hospital – Frido had decided against this prudent course. His relationship with his father had always been a little stiff. He loved and revered Kaspar, but he had always feared him – feared, at least, his disapproval, his incomprehension. Frido had felt himself less satisfactory than Werner, as a von Arzfeld. Yet he wholly respected his father's standards of morality. And there had come a moment, in hospital, when Frido had said to himself – ‘Of course I can – I must – speak to my father of
these things.
There can be little hope for mankind, and surely none for Germany if I cannot speak to such a man of
these things.
But it will be hard.' He had felt happier thereafter. He felt he had resolved upon a small, hesitant step down a long, dark passage.

‘It looks to me,' said Kaspar, ‘as if your old comrades are soon going to be pushed off on another big adventure. Southward.'

He was standing over one of the many maps which adorned his study table. Frido was sitting in a chair, pale, crutch beside him, sufficiently attentive. He had given to his enthralled father a full account of the fighting in Southern Russia at the tail end of 1941. After their triumphs in the Ukraine, after the capture of Kiev and the great encirclement of Soviet troops in the Kiev cauldron, after the crossing of the Dnieper river, the German ‘Army Group South' had advanced south and east towards the Sea of Azov. Field Marshal von Rundstedt's
command formed thus the northern arm of yet another giant pincer. The southern arm of that pincer was the Rumanian army, advancing eastward from Bessarabia, moving across a great, empty landscape where often for days on end no enemy troops were to be seen.

But as 1941 drew towards its close the Wehrmacht had to admit failure over a large part of the immense front, a front extending more than one thousand miles from north to south. Fresh Russian armies had been drummed up from the eastern regions of the Soviet Union. Field Marshal von Bock's Army Group Centre, inadequately equipped for winter warfare, freezing, famished, confronted huge counter-attacks, and barely hung on to their positions facing Moscow. The emphasis of the high command, after much acrimony and vacillation, was now on the south: on the Crimean peninsula, the great industrial areas of the Donets, Kharkhov, Rostov, the Don.

‘The Russians counter-attacked, Father, as you know. Immense counter-attacks, huge masses of men advanced from the east against our forces who were battering their way southward into the Crimea.'

Kaspar nodded, ‘Von Manstein,' he murmured.

‘Exactly. And then the whole of our Panzer Group was sent south and we, in turn, attacked the northern flank of the Russians who were threatening Manstein. But there were enormous gaps throughout the southern front, Father. A lot of Russia is like the sea …' Frido talked on, the ‘popular' map of the Eastern Front spread on the table beside him. His father nodded, following every move, digesting his son's impressions, asking a quiet question now and then.

‘The weather broke in mid-October, of course,' Frido said. ‘None of us could believe the high command expected decisive results from offensives started so late in the year. On the Central front it even started snowing in October! And the mud! My God, the mud! We've got no decent winter equipment, whether against the mud, water or ice. Men are suffering from frostbite in very large numbers – ears, noses, toes – and so forth. Frostbite kills, father.'

Kaspar sighed. An experienced soldier, all his instincts were against criticism. Organizing the supplies of a great Army
was inevitably more complex than even the most intelligent youngster generally supposed.

‘At least our battle equipment, I imagine, was superior to anything the Russians could bring against us?' he said.

‘Not at all. Their best tanks – their T34s – are better than ours.'

‘
Better
than ours?'

‘Certainly. And whether you're talking of machine, man or beast, the Russians are better prepared for the winter. They understand it.'

Some Soviet units, Frido said, hardly fought at all, their morale suddenly cracked, their only desire surrender. Others held out with extraordinary, chilling tenacity. Their endurance of hardship was something the German soldier, himself no weakling, found a perennial miracle.

‘They live on grass if they're cut off from food. They survive in holes in the snow.'

Kaspar looked again at the map. He had, more recently, heard a good deal of which Frido, hospital patient or convalescent, could hardly be aware.

‘Well,' he said, ‘at least the winter's now past. As I say, I think your old comrades will soon be on the move again, south. That's what I believe.'

‘You mean the Caucasus? It's been rumoured for some time,' said Frido quietly. ‘It's mad, of course.'

‘My son –' said Kaspar von Arzfeld sternly.

‘Mad. I agree that it looks as if that's where we'll go next. And it's mad.' Frido stood up, took his crutch and started swinging his body about the room.

‘Oh, we'll advance through the Caucasus all right. That's not the point. What comes after? When the Army is already so extended that a strong Russian thrust – a really strong Russian thrust – anywhere, could tear the whole front open.' In a low, unemotional voice, his eyes wide open, remembering, Frido started describing some of the Russian winter attacks.

‘The more he talks the better for him,' his father thought.

‘They attacked on one occasion across the frozen Don. We saw this great mass of men move down toward the far bank. Our artillery opened up and we heard a fearful wailing and
screeching. Then they started coming towards us again, flowing towards us like the sea, and we could see that it was, in most cases, the second wave who had simply taken the places of the first. We saw them climbing over the men in front, yelling and laughing. Laughing! It was a horrible sound, amid all that blood and pain. I don't think there can have been a sober man there. They were drink-mad, insensible.