Unlikely Warrior (12 page)

“Sugar and spices are put under loose floorboards or behind a removable brick in the masonry. It’s worth checking behind the pictures and wall hangings, too.

“With a little patience, a wagon isn’t so difficult to construct, either. When the natives can’t take them along, they usually dismantle them and hide the axles and wheels in the attic or the barn or else distribute them in different neighbors’ gardens.”

Haas wrapped it up with “All this, my lad, is known as plundering, perfectly official at the front.”

Once we had scraped together various foodstuffs, the questions of a serviceable container and a fire to cook our booty still remained. Our mess kits usually served well enough for pots, and if we needed something bigger, a steel helmet came in handy. Whenever possible since my first experience with the raw horsemeat, I tried to have a frying pan either on a nearby vehicle or attached to the back of my wireless box.

When we weren’t quartered in houses, the cooking fire sometimes presented a bit more of a problem. Even in the bunkers or trenches, we still managed quite well by bringing in an iron stove from the next village or by cutting part of the bottom out of an iron bucket.

But it was during those long marches in rain and snow that the official rations were the worst and our hunger the greatest. On one of our wire-patching tours, Haas showed me an ingenious solution. We were just passing a deserted artillery position where mortar shells lay all around the shot-up cannon. Haas seemed to be looking for something in particular. Shortly, he broke open a crate and showed me the long, round packages lying inside.

“Do you know what’s in those rolls?” he asked me.

“Sure,” I said, proud to know the answer for once. “Those are the booster charges, gunpowder to make the shells fly faster.”

“Right,” said Haas, with a mysterious little smile. He pulled the heavy packing paper away from one of the charges, laying free the contents, which looked like black spaghetti. “These little babies burn like the devil.”

He filled his tin cup with cold coffee from his canteen and placed it deftly on top of two small, well-spaced rocks. Lighting one of the pieces of gunpowder spaghetti with his lighter, he held it between the two rocks, keeping the hot white flame continually under his cup. The giant sparkler burned for a few seconds, and he immediately lit another. With only three or four, he quickly brought his coffee almost to the boiling point.

After this impressive demonstration, I kept a constant supply of those booster charges in my wireless box. Again and again, on icy night marches or during days of endless rain in the trenches with water up to my ankles, Haas’s trick helped me to a hot cup and renewed strength.

Sometimes, when we hadn’t even matches or a lighter in working order, we fetched the Russian lighters from the pockets of dead enemy soldiers. These consisted of a large flint, a piece of file, and a little cotton batting. With the first two items, a little practice, and a great deal of huffing and puffing, one could eventually produce sparks strong enough to catch on fire.

But for now, in our village, we were relatively well-off, and the peaceful days continued.

Russia, February 4, 1944

My dear, good old Mutti,

Papi described so vividly in his letter the way you already let him know at the iron steps when there is mail from me that I’ve made up my mind to write even more often. You’ll get very spoiled, though, when I’m in a quiet position. Then, when I cannot manage to write for two or three weeks, you will start having silly ideas right away.

But, on the other hand, I can imagine you so well there at home, wandering around the house, going past the usually empty mailbox from time to time, and then looky there! Suddenly there is something inside, and from whom? From me.

And so, for the next ten minutes you don’t have the feeling of being thousands of kilometers away from your obnoxious son, and what’s more, you are reassured that I still haven’t taken off for the beautiful beyond. But you can be sure I haven’t the slightest intention of doing that. After all, I’m only nineteen, and I never was the dumbest!

Soon there will be dry meadows and sunshine for which I already long so much. Nevertheless, I would rather be spending this time in the Vienna Woods or some other lovely place near you. Till next time, many loving kisses,

Your Boy

February 5, 1944

My dear Mui,

I just wrote you yesterday, but all four of my comrades are sitting here so cozily, writing by the light of the sunflower oil lamp, that I was prompted to do the same. To be sure, there isn’t much room at the small table, but one can find a tiny edge.

Pretty soon we’ll have spent five full days in this village, twenty kilometers behind the front, with absolutely nothing to do but become human beings again. That feels very good, especially since the last weeks have been so exhausting and agitating.

For the moment it is quiet and warm around me; my belly is full, I’m slept out, and that feels good, very good! I hope this situation will keep up for a nice long time. Every day one becomes a little livelier here, but one’s thoughts become dumber. There is a little town with a small railroad station two kilometers away, and I hear the trains whistling all the time. Then feelings something like homesickness come over me, especially when so many wounded and furloughers are going home. You write that you want to take my favorite things out of my room in case of bombing. I don’t know if that is really worth the bother, since I don’t have such valuable things anyway, and what I love most is the room as a whole. The only thing might be a book.

Maybe it won’t come to bombing that quickly in Vienna. I still hope that it won’t happen at all. It is very calming for me here to think that everything at home is okay. I notice how it is with the fellows from the West, who never know for certain whether their homes are still standing.

My dear Mui, don’t have any silly ideas. It’s not worth it, and if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. There is nothing to be done, and as much as I can, I take good care. What’s more, it’s mostly just wounds, and one can live fine with those.

Many kisses, Your Boy

On our sixth day in the same village, Haas, Baby Schmidt, and I went up to the field kitchen. The menu that day was a particularly unsavory stew. I noticed a young sergeant and a gray-haired older soldier sitting on a horse wagon. From the looks of the shiny rifles, brand-new bread bags, and clean laundry sacks lying next to them, I guessed they must have just arrived straight from Germany.

The sergeant was tall and thin, with a pale, narrow face. I couldn’t help noticing his long, tapering fingers that, in comparison to our grubby, grease-encrusted mitts, appeared impeccably clean and manicured. I took him for an intellectual.

As I filled my canteen with coffee substitute and Haas went back to refill his mess kit from the mobile kettle, the young sergeant said to me, “There are supposed to be two or three men left over from the Second Battalion’s signal squad. Any idea where I might find them?”

Haas laid his mess kit to one side, planted himself in front of the officer, saluted smartly with an impish smile, and shouted, in exaggerated imitation of the Prussian military style, “Obergefreiter [Lance Corporal] Haas, Funker Rauch, and Baby Schmidt—excuse me—Schütze [Private] Schmidt, Signal Squad, Second Battalion, Division 282 present!”

“At ease,” the officer said as he stood up and stretched out his hand with a friendly smile. “I’m Sergeant Konrad, your new superior, it seems. This is Private Moser,” he added, pointing to the older man. “He’s also a member of the new signal squad that I’m supposed to organize here.”

After we had dislodged the two infantrymen from our hut and installed Konrad and Moser in their place, a group with a certain feeling of belonging together began to form. Under Konrad’s direction, we cleaned and checked the few pieces of equipment.

Moser became my second man, the one who carried the box of batteries for the wireless. He really wasn’t good for much else. In World War I he had suffered a head wound and been reduced to a rather simple and lethargic state. He was about fifty years old but seemed older. In civilian life he had spent his days looking for grasses, roots, and herbs in the Austrian woods and mountains and selling them to special apothecaries.

Sergeant Konrad had a small travel chess set, and the two of us spent many hours deeply engrossed in games that carried us out of our surroundings and into the land of kings, queens, and castles. During these games we also became better acquainted. He was twenty-five and a native of Cologne. Even though he had been “with the firm” since the war’s beginning, he had managed to squeeze in a year of study in electrical engineering at the university. He never swore, never even making use of those popular vulgarities that were otherwise so common at the front. Like me, he was bored by team sports and loved long debates. Although never clearly expressed, it was somehow obvious that he wasn’t a Nazi.

The East, February 7, 1944

Dear Mutti,

We just received the accompanying airmail stamps. Be thrifty with them. Write just enough to cost a mark.

I’m still here with the detachment and it is quiet. As you can see by the other side of this page, I even feel like drawing again. It’s funny the way different feelings that one had forgotten in the trenches, feelings for something good or beautiful, slowly start coming back. Suddenly one is in a much better mood.

This drawing will give you some idea of the room we’re housed in (or at least an attempt). There is so much standing around here that I couldn’t get it all on the paper. To the left, the stove, which takes up a quarter of the room, the bed, and the chest all are the same in every house here. More tomorrow. Many kisses,

Your Georg

The longer the situation remained so peaceful, the more unsatisfactory the pig slop from the kitchen seemed. I began to hang around the kitchen area, and whenever a cow was slaughtered I would cadge a few bones, a piece of liver, or some brains that nobody else wanted.

I turned the bones into tasty soups, and the liver and brains were delicious breaded or fried with eggs. I began to see old Moser in a new light the day he showed up with a collection of roots, bulbs, and tiny leaves that he had managed to dig up God knows where in that wintry, muddy landscape.

He offered them as spices for my cooking, and they added immeasurably to the taste of various concoctions.

Haas also wanted to share in my meals and popped up from time to time with a chicken, eggs, or flour that he had brought from a neighboring village. He was especially proud of an amphora-like container filled with a delicious black plum puree that he produced toward the beginning of my culinary experiments.

That day the kitchen smells were particularly tantalizing, and Konrad, who thus far hadn’t participated in our home cooking, seemed, quite by chance, to find himself somewhat closer to the stove every five minutes.

Finally he said, “What is that you’re cooking?”

“Oh, not much, Herr Unteroffizier,” I answered, as though I hadn’t noticed what he was getting at.

“Hmmm, it smells really wonderful. Looks good, too.”

“It’s just garbage that the mess sergeant was throwing away—old bones, liver, stuff like that. It’ll probably be tough as leather.”

“Could I have a taste?” he then asked, looking a little embarrassed. After sampling, he pronounced, “Ummm, but it’s really delicious.”

He went on a while longer with more compliments until I gave him another taste. Then I let him have a small bowl of the chicken soup with little dumplings.

By the time we got to the last course, everyone was helping in assembly-line fashion, and the entire signal squad finally sat down to ten plum-puree crepes apiece.

I disrespectfully renamed our superior officer Konrad Pot-peeker. He admitted to me that he had a stomach ulcer and actually should be receiving a special diet that wasn’t, of course, available on the Russian front.

From that day on, whether times were turbulent or quiet, I could always depend on Sergeant Konrad’s approval (or command, if I wished to call it that) to repair nonexistent broken phone lines so that I could plunder the houses of the area for our gourmet meals.

Russia, February 9, 1944

Dear Mutti,

I think the peaceful time is past. The replacements are just arriving, and tonight or tomorrow we’ll be heading with them toward the front. It won’t be much fun, wading for twenty kilometers in deep mud, but the front is somewhat quieter for the time being. Ivan seems to have transferred his strong point to the north.

Here everything seems to be falling asleep. Only food and the most necessary ammunition are making it through to us. We haven’t received any mail for twelve days now, and then only airmail.

Yesterday we had a field church service that I found very satisfying. The atmosphere was strange: a little room in a riddled hut, with the sun shining through the roof and the wind blowing through the broken doors and windows. The far-off thunder of the cannons and the serious faces of the soldiers—by all means, a very unusual atmosphere.