To Die in Spring Read online

  Walter leaned forwards and before he could make out the faces of the two men sitting there at a table in a pall of cigarette smoke, he saw the gleam of the gorgets on their chests, like polished silver. Empty beer mugs stood in front of them, as well as plates with the remains of food and a basket containing an untouched white loaf. They wore field uniforms, buttoned to the throat, and according to their collar patches they held the rank of Hauptscharführer. One of them was greying at the temples, and the other, thinner, who was missing three fingers on his right hand, drew on the stub of his cigarette and said, ‘So, what are you staring at, like a great cow? Can’t you say hello? Out you come, all of you!’

  Walter shut the hatch, buttoned up his coat and hissed, ‘Guard dogs!’ Paul spat on the floor. They all straightened their waist belts and forage caps. When they stepped into the public room through the swing door, the boy had disappeared; his book, The Last of the Mohicans, lay on a barrel. The recruits saluted dutifully and stood to attention, waiting. By now the secret military policemen had put on their caps with aluminium braid; the thin one wore white gloves, the missing fingers stuffed with fabric. Two sub-machine guns leaned against the bench at the head of their table below a painting of the Madonna with flaming heart.

  Flies buzzed in the embrasure of the window, and the greying man took a pair of glasses from his pocket, pointed them at Harry and said, ‘Pay book and travel orders.’ There was a matchbox beside his plate, and Walter could see that it was printed with the same motif as the poster they’d passed in the corridor; beneath the broad shadow of a man it said, in bright yellow writing, ‘Pst! The enemy is listening!’

  Harry took out his neck pouch, stepped up to the table and said, ‘Reporting for duty, sir. We’re out collecting food.’

  The officer frowned. There was a dark green wooden box, scratched at the edges, on the bench beside him. He nodded Harry back into rank and opened his pay book, which contained no entries yet, apart from his personal details. In the photograph Harry had pomade in his hair and was wearing a civilian suit and tie. A gold-coloured Storck sweet wrapper slipped from between the book’s pages. ‘Does that mean you have no travel orders?’

  ‘We’re only food collectors,’ Paul chimed in; the officer jutted out his chin and brought the flat of his hand down on the table.

  ‘Do you think I’m deaf or something, private? You’ll speak when I tell you to speak – has no one taught you that?’ He studied the boys through narrowed eyes. Beside the two officers’ beer mugs were smaller glasses painted with gentian flowers, also empty. The grey-templed officer ran his thumbnail through the gaps in his teeth and pointed at Ole with the little finger of the same hand. ‘Which company?’

  Ole swallowed hard and said hoarsely, ‘Respectfully, sir, we haven’t been assigned yet. We’ve come from the shortened basic training in Hamburg-Langenhorn, forty recruits, Scharführer Vatteroth.’

  ‘Weapons? Vehicles?’

  ‘K98 carbine, stick grenades and handguns. Two Vomag transporters.’

  ‘Quarters and march direction?’

  Walter, standing next to Ole, turned his foot on his heel, nudging him, but Ole reached out and pointed vaguely: ‘A kilometre north of here, in the Waffen-SS workshop warehouse. When it’s dark we’re moving on to Graz, or more precisely to Adelsried, where we’ll be assigned to different divisions. We’re really only collecting the food for our platoon.’

  The officer with the stuffed glove, who had been taking notes, put his notebook away and opened a silver case that held oval cigarettes. ‘And we’re supposed to believe that, are we? How stupid do we look?’ He tapped one of his cigarettes firmly on the case. ‘You’re all well behind the front lines, where there shouldn’t be a troop transport anywhere around. You aren’t wearing helmets or insignias, and you have no passes or marching orders. We don’t even have a sick note, and it isn’t at all clear to me how you could have ended up in this dump, given your supposed direction of travel.’ The flame of a match reflected in the metal half-moon that hung at his chest. ‘Have you come to visit Grandma?’

  The recruits all grinned – no one answered – and the greying man looked at his watch, a black chronometer for pilots, and put on his gloves. ‘Right, then, comrades,’ he said, ‘we’re going to check your statements. They’d better be correct: no one can hide from us, not even at their grandmother’s house. If not, you’ll find yourself hanging from the nearest tree quicker than you can say “desertion”. Now get out of my sight!’

  The boys clicked their heels, saluted and went back into the kitchen, where they scooped what was left of the soup out of the pot and into their buckets and tied the bags of bread to their belts. Their burden was heavy; Walter used his cap as a grip, the others did the same, and they left the pub in silence and crossed the street to walk in the shelter of the stable walls. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky now, and in front of the church the first crocuses gleamed in the sun, white and purple.

  ‘Christ, they were a pair,’ said Ole, after they’d left the village behind. ‘Sticklers for the rules. I’d like to meet them in civilian life, over a barrel of beer. Why did you kick me?’

  Paul and Harry were already in the tunnel; startled bats fluttered out from under the arch and Walter looked around. ‘Well, because telling the truth didn’t seem like such a great idea,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘Those guys wore SS uniforms but they were riding Wehrmacht motorbikes. And they had a radio telephone and foreign cigarettes.’

  The rope loops creaked and their bucket banged against Walter’s calves when Ole came to an abrupt standstill. ‘Why? What’s that supposed to mean? Do you think they were working for the other side or something? Bastards like that, here in Bavaria?’ He rubbed his nose. ‘Oh, nonsense. No spy would dare come so far behind the lines. All that gear might just have been looted from prisoners or downed pilots.’

  Walter shook his head. ‘My workmate, a master milker who snuffed it last year, was in the military police as a volunteer. He even had the Iron Cross. Those guys know exactly which soldiers are passing through their territory, or else they wouldn’t be military police. Weaponry, troop strength, vehicles, where they sleep and where they’re headed – guys like that don’t need to ask questions. They’d have had it all radioed in before we even set off.’

  Ole opened his mouth but didn’t say anything. The rattle of engines came from somewhere behind the houses and barns, and he and Walter both looked back towards the village. The hawk was still sitting in the belfry, cleaning its feathers, but the square in front of the pub was empty apart from the woman in the apron. She was fondling the coat of a little dog and letting it lick her hands; Walter and Ole stepped out of the underpass into the narrow road striped by the shadows of the hop poles and hurried to catch up with the others.

  Harry, with a cigarette between his lips, sparked his lighter. ‘I’d marry her,’ he said over his shoulder to Paul. ‘I would. We’re not first cousins, you know. So there’d be no wonky kids. We like chatting too, and she wrote to me at the barracks about getting married. But now I’m working for Himmler . . . The wife of an SS man is supposed to be at least five foot three, he said. My little one would have to stretch a bit, she’s only five one and a half.’ He reached behind him and gave Paul the cigarette. ‘Well then, I’ll just marry a tall woman and we’ll lead a double life, like in that film Romance in a Minor Key. Have you seen it?’

  Paul said he hadn’t and took a deep drag. Cobwebs floated through the air, which stank of brackish ditch water, and it was probably because of the direction of the wind that they didn’t hear the aeroplane sooner. It was a single-engine fighter-bomber, silvery grey, and soup slopped out from under the lids as they set their buckets down and dropped the poles to press themselves against the willows. They could see the numbers on the plane’s fuselage, could see a white star in a black circle, and the pilot up in his glazed cockpit – who had, of course, spotted them long ago – raising a hand.

  He actually seemed to be w
aving, so that for a wink of an eye they could almost believe that the bombs released a little ways from them were meant for quite a different target. But they didn’t fall vertically, of course. They spun shimmering in the spring breeze and almost collided before, a fraction of a second after the boys had thrown themselves into a ditch, they detonated on either side of the road, deafening them. All Walter saw of the explosion before mud splashed over his face, his cheek in the rotten grass, was Paul’s open mouth distorted in a scream. Soil spraying up from the field darkened the sky and the hop poles whirled into the air before plummeting back to the road like a rain of spears, silently.

  The loaves slipped against the back of his neck. Something brushed his leg. A piece of shrapnel lay smoking on the edge of the ditch, dark purple, and when he straightened up again the shaft of his right boot flipped open. But apart from a scratch his calf was uninjured, and the others had clearly been lucky as well. The buckets lay in the field, crushed like tin cans. The recruits stood back up, knocking lentils and dirt off their coats with their caps among the heads of the willows, which the shock had torn from their trunks. Everyone was as pale as a ghost; they were breathing with their mouths open, and Walter, still halfway in the ditch, retrieved a loaf and tried to wipe it clean with his sleeve. It was yellow with catkin dust.

  *

  Most of the boys, wrapped in blankets and tarpaulins, were still asleep when the transports drove into the tunnels near Adelsried at dawn. Aside from the natural caves, running with spring water, these consisted of wide tunnels dug deep into the mountain, supported with steel and concrete pillars and lit by electric light. Barking echoed inside; horses and donkeys, some saddled or loaded with luggage, dozed along the greyish-white limestone walls where canisters and boxes of ammunition, rolled-up tank tracks and bags and cases full of food were stacked. Signs hung under the arches, and among the trucks and cars parked on marked areas rough wooden steps led to lofts full of bunk beds.

  Even though it was early, there was a great deal of work going on. The pecking sound of chisels or pickaxes sounded from the caves, and the clatter of typewriters from behind hardboard partitions. Mechanics were repairing an officer’s car with light-blue standards and blood-smeared windows; doctors and nurses were treating the wounded, who lay on straw in a passage off to the side; and Russian prisoners in dusty uniforms carried baskets full of rock out of the tunnels and emptied them on the slope beside the entrance, where a guard was rolling a cigarette.

  From here one could look out over the forested valleys to Graz, a few steeples in the rosy morning haze, and after the new arrivals had washed by a trough – turpentine soap hung above it on wires – Scharführer Vatteroth led them into a dining hall; a big cave lit by two or three bulbs.

  Even though countless soldiers and a few civilians were sitting at the long tables, there was little noise in the room save the scratch of knives and spoons on tin plates and the occasional murmur. Some people were cooking in the cave too, but the prevailing smell was not so much grease and acorn coffee as sweat, pus and urine. Hardly anyone wasn’t wearing a bandage, and there were few bandages that didn’t need changing. Sticks and crutches leaned against the glimmering rock walls.

  As they began to eat, the boys looked furtively at the unshaven, haggard and only slightly older men, who stared straight ahead – big-eyed, exhausted and dispirited. Many of the men chewed their mouthfuls with their lips pulled back and their teeth bared, as if taking care lest hard bread might touch their gums or palates. No one spoke or took any notice of the new arrivals in their clean uniforms, or only insofar as they expressly ignored the fact that they were being watched, which introduced a harsh quality into their faces, a ferocity that might have had something to do with shame. One of them, stretching his neck and closing his eyes, groaned briefly and then collapsed back mutely into himself.

  The vault behind the food counter was black with soot. The hash-slinger, an amputee, was playing with a kitten, holding out his empty trouser leg to it and pulling it away when the creature tried to claw it. He was sitting on a stool, supervising the women at the stoves: foreign workers, apparently, because whenever they called out to each other Walter didn’t understand a word. Bubbles burst in porridge steaming in a pot, fat sausages were frying in a big pan, ham was hanging from the chimney, and golden fish too, but none of that was meant for the ordinary soldiers. For them, coffee substitute was ladled from buckets into mugs, and each portion of food – a half loaf of bread, a tube of cheese and a slice of artificial honey – had to be shared between two men.

  ‘This should ensure the final victory,’ Fiete murmured, and followed Walter along the narrow passageway full of potato sacks into the open air, carrying their breakfast.

  On the plateau above the valley stood a howitzer, camouflaged with blankets and shrubs; Walter and Fiete sat down on its ammunition boxes and loosened the straps. The sun rose and the haze of early morning fled; only a few scraps of mist still hung on the blackly wooded hills, lightened here and there by the pale green crown of a tree. Between the trees stood guards with carbines in the crooks of their arms; prisoners in striped uniforms scraped the bark from felled fir trees.

  ‘Just look at this landscape.’ Fiete dipped his bread in his coffee substitute and winked at Walter. ‘Coffin wood all the way to the horizon.’

  Since they stopped being able to drink warm cow’s milk out of the bucket, or eat cream and curd with stewed fruit, Fiete had grown thinner, paler too, and some of the other men called him ‘the pianist’ because of his delicate hands; but the square-bashing in basic training had sharpened the mockery in his blue eyes, and his hair, although cut short, still stuck out in every possible direction. ‘So who’s going to find you if you disappear into these forests? Disappear until it’s all over, I mean.’

  One of the camouflage blankets slipped and wind whistled in the gun barrel, whose top third was white from all the chalk marks recording downed planes. Fiete had said those last words half into this bowl, wearily, as if in passing, but Walter still looked round cautiously; no one was sitting anywhere near them. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ he whispered. ‘Do you want to run away?’

  Crows, great flocks of them, were flying eastwards, and Fiete broke off a piece of artificial honey. ‘Why,’ he answered, ‘don’t you? Would you rather die in battle, in the mud, just before the end of play? Or be taken prisoner by the Russians and spend the rest of your life in a mine at forty below?’ He put the sweet substance in his mouth and winked at Walter. ‘I promised Ortrud children, my friend. At least three . . .’

  Walter chuckled. ‘Well, congratulations. But you can’t give her those children if you’re brought before a court martial,’ he replied, and squeezed some cheese onto his bread. ‘Just wait a while – you don’t know where we’re going to be deployed. They might need us here, at base.’

  But Fiete rolled his eyes. ‘O sancta simplicitas, as my Latin teacher would say. They’ve got enough cripples and prisoners to deal with here already, Ata. They didn’t drag us across the whole of the Reich just so that we can peel potatoes behind the front. We’re fresh fodder, and we’ll be fed to the enemy if we don’t skedaddle – don’t you see that? Or don’t you want to see it?’

  Walter bit into the grey bread, accidentally grating his teeth. ‘You can take your snooty Latin and grease your hair with it,’ he said, chewing. ‘You don’t know what will happen. It could all be completely different.’

  ‘Different how?’ his friend insisted, and took a sip of his acorn coffee. ‘Are the Russians going to make us blinis? That same Latin teacher, as you might recall, also taught us PE, five classes a week of horrible bullying along with cross-country running and boxing, and because he didn’t like me I was always sure to get opponents who’d beat me black and blue. You couldn’t do a thing with strength, there, Ata, only weakness. So I gave up on sport and allowed myself an hour down at the harbour, you remember?’

  ‘Very clearly. And what was the result? You got
thrown out of secondary school.’

  Fiete lit a cigarette and gestured dismissively. ‘And if I hadn’t been, what would I have learned? Lots of crap about Teutonic heroes. We’re in for it, believe me. The war’s lost. We’d do best heading off through the mountains to Bavaria. The Yanks’ll be there soon. Being locked up by them wouldn’t be so bad . . .’

  The treetops rustled, and Walter thoughtfully shook his head. ‘You don’t know that,’ he said. ‘The Yanks put people against the wall too.’

  At that moment the roll call whistle of their Scharführer rang out through the corridors. They drained their coffee, buttoned up their coats and ran to the part of the cave where they had arrived. There, where the typewriters still clattered, stood a truck – a battered Krupp that had just brought in some injured men, about twenty in all. Most of them were half-naked and meagrely bandaged, and they lay on bloody stretchers along the cave walls. Some were unconscious, and the greyish yellow of their faces seemed a foretaste of the terrible things to come; others groaned quietly or constantly shook their heads, wordlessly moving their lips.

  Carbines on their backs, marching packs and helmets stacked by the tips of their boots, the new recruits lined up behind the Krupp. An old machine gun with a pan magazine was mounted on top of it, and its gunner, in his dirty uniform, with goggles and field glasses dangling in front of his chest, smoked a cigarette and watched them wearily. There was dust even in his eyebrows and stubble, his lips were barely visible, but in his dark eyes, which had doubtless seen more than the young men could imagine, there seemed to be a hint of pity. He turned his face away and took a deep breath.

  The Scharführer waved Walter, Harry and Jörn Asmussen forward and gave them their papers. As they had done their driving tests in basic training, they were to help in the supply unit. The others, who were still chewing their last mouthfuls, had to go and sit on the truck, and the Scharführer himself climbed into the front, beside the driver, hung his arm out of the side window and tapped his hand on the door.