1916

by Goldleaf83

"Death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. [I] will simply try to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war."—Erich Maria Remarque

2. Chapter 2: Schultz

Now all roads lead to France

and heavy is the tread

of the living; but the dead

returning lightly dance.

—Edward Thomas, "Roads" (1916)

ooOoo

September 25, 1916

Gefreiter Hans Schultz propped his lean, six-foot frame against the sandbagged wall of the trench, smoking a cigarette. He was hungry, as he almost always was these days, but there would be no food until the dinner mess—and that was nothing to look forward to. Rations would be uninteresting at best, most likely short as well, and badly cooked as always: Schultz shared the general opinion that their mess cook would serve their cause best if he cooked for the other side. Tonight there would be sauerkraut, no doubt, and bread; maybe beans too. It would be nice to have sausages or cheese, but that was rare and Hans wasn't counting on it. Sweets were even rarer, unless someone had received a parcel from home and was willing to share.

Well, whatever the rations would be tonight, they were still at least two hours away. The taste of smoke would just have to satisfy him until then.

He stared up at the leaden sky, where the low-lying clouds hung and swirled, fogging the view just a few feet from their trench. Droplets of fog beaded his uniform; the sodden air had soaked right through, dampening all the layers right down to his skin. The clammy wet made the dry heat of the cigarette doubly welcome.

I am so tired of war, he thought for the thousandth time in the past two years.

Maybe the ten thousandth. But who was counting?

And if he hadn't reached ten thousand yet, he would eventually. The war had no end in sight.

Hans was highly aware of the irony that he had volunteered for military duty: he had enlisted as a musketier at the beginning of the war. Granted, he would almost certainly have been conscripted soon had he waited, given the huge push to increase the size of the German army back in the summer of 1914. But it had seemed like an adventure at the time and the right thing to do: to serve and protect his Fatherland. So he knew that he had in some sense asked for this, and that was a decision he would always regret.

Hans had been in the fighting since the very beginning. As the German army had moved swiftly into Belgium on its way to France, he had been with the troops that laid siege to Liège in the first battle of the war. He and his comrades had expected the battle to take a mere two days—the Belgians would see that the Germans had the superior force and were simply on their way to ensure that France did not invade Germany. Belgium itself was not of particular interest: Germany simply needed passage through it to outflank the threatening French army. Eleven days of fighting later, Hans had discovered that he did not enjoy battle, though he did all he could to protect himself and his comrades and to carry out the orders they were given. Oberleutnant Kammler had been in charge of the unit back then and had proved himself a good leader despite his youth: Hans and the other men learned to trust Kammler at Liège.

But that combat had been only their first. Kammler had led them in the battle of Ardennes just a few days later. That was a two-day battle, the first time they had engaged the French, and it had been a decisive victory. But Hans's memories of that battle still left a bitter taste in his mouth.

No one had really understood the new war at that point, least of all the men fighting it. Hans remembered all too well how he and his comrades had undertaken the back-breaking work of digging trenches for the very first time. They had been rudimentary, shallow structures by later war standards, but the entrenchment had provided a very welcome shelter when bullets and artillery started flying. The fighting had been fierce, but thanks to the hard marching that had gotten the German army in place, Hans and his comrades had possessed better position than the French.

Hans still remembered how he had learned to be grateful for his field gray uniform that first day of the battle, given how brilliantly the French had stood out in the forest in their bright red pantaloons and blue jackets. Full of their élan vital, believing that they possessed such gallantry that they would inevitably win, the French had attacked. Schultz had watched as they charged straight at the German line, rifles with bayonets pointing forward as they ran. . .

. . . straight into the machine gun fire from Hans's platoon. The blue jackets had blossomed with red to match the pantaloons as the hail of bullets mowed the Frenchmen down. "It is so easy," Kammler had muttered grimly, crouched by Hans, watching. "Like target practice, with such brightly painted bull's eyes."

At that moment, Schultz had remembered the statue of Death in the Cathedral of Trier: a skeleton with a scythe that he had seen on his one trip to the Rhineland city. He had never expected to act in that capacity himself, to take on Death's role and reap the souls of men with gunfire.

Hans still wasn't sure which he hated most: the memory of slaughtering the oncoming French for the first time, or suffering the first major loss in their unit. Near the end of the second day, as the French began to retreat, Kammler had been hit by artillery shell fragments that had pierced his leather pickelhaub. Recalling Kammler's head wounds, Hans reached up to touch his new steel stahlhelm. The polished leather pickelhaub represented tradition, and Hans had thought he looked very dapper in it when his uniform was new. But after seeing so many comrades with head injuries that the leather helmets couldn't save them from, Hans was more than happy with the dark new "coal scuttle" helmets of steel that could stop bullets and shrapnel—at least some of the time. A head injury could be bad, but much better than having no head, or only half of one.

Such a helmet might have saved Kammler from injury in the Ardennes, Hans thought. He recalled how, unsure if Kammler was still alive and with no stretcher bearers nearby to help him, he had hoisted the officer on his back to carry him to get medical help. He hadn't gone more than a few steps before being knocked off his feet: a shell landed just where he had been standing not fifteen seconds earlier, throwing up earth and tearing apart a tree that just missed landing on the two of them. Kammler had been hit with yet another shrapnel fragment, in his back. It would have hit Hans if he hadn't been carrying the Oberleutnant.

They had both come so close to dying, so close. . . .

That was the moment when Hans fully understood that he might not survive the war, however short (or long) it might be.

Hans had succeeded in carrying Kammler behind the lines to stretcher bearers. They had pronounced the officer still alive and had taken him on to the medical aid station, and Hans had returned to the front line to rejoin their unit and watch the final French retreat. Kammler had never returned. Hans had heard that it had taken six months for their Oberleutnant to recover from his injuries, and then he had been assigned other duties.

In the two years since then, their unit had moved around the western front, part of the "living wall" that protected the Fatherland from the would-be Entente invaders. Here above the Somme River, Schultz and his comrades had dug more trenches, deeper trenches, dugouts far deeper that were reinforced with sandbags and even iron beams at times; they had lined the trenches with logs from trees they had chopped down from French forests, floored them with duckboards, and had strung cables for communications and wires for electricity.

And many, many times, they had manned the machine guns and protected their lines from the oncoming French. Eventually from the British too, who had been so willing to go on violent offensives that had destroyed the French villages that the Germans had defended. Hans had been proud to know that his side had taken the villagers behind the lines to safety from the ferocious British assaults on them and had even helped repair damaged houses and buildings when the fighting died down.

It was the British on the other side of Niemandsland here in the Somme now. Hans grimly acknowledged the appropriateness of the nickname with which someone had christened the strip of land between the opposing trenches: no man who valued his life ventured into that strip of land if he could possibly help it. Trees, greenery, fields: anything once living there had long since been blasted away by shells, particularly since the battle had started in full force here at the end of June. Churned-up mud, shell holes filled with stagnant water, line after tangled line of barbed wire, some of it horribly decorated with the bits of men that had tried getting across it in earlier attacks. Sometimes men from one side or the other, those who no longer valued their lives, climbed over the trenches into No Man's Land, counting on the snipers and gunners from the other side to end their suffering.

It worked, and then they were no longer men. Just corpses, to add to the ever-growing heap.

Just under two hundred meters separated the two sides of No Man's Land at this point of the front, so it was possible to hear the British from time to time, when the guns were quiet, when they sang in the evenings, bored in their trenches, or when orders were shouted for morning inspection. Unteroffizer Steuben had worked in London before the war, so he knew English and could translate what was said. He even sometimes shouted back taunts and suggestions at the opposing troops, egged on by all his fellow Landsers here in the German side. It could provide quite good entertainment. Hans had even been picking up some English from Steuben: he liked the sound of the words, their feel in his mouth as he spoke them. Some of them were even quite close to some German words, as though the languages were cousins in some way. Like the Kaiser and the English king. . . .

Sometimes orders required expeditions into No Man's Land: twice Hans had been put on teams to reconnoiter the landscape and gain intelligence on the British positions after heavy bombardments designed to drive the British back. Both missions had been at night, hiding their crossing from any snipers. Hans had survived both of those dangerous raids and considered himself lucky. The two glimpses of the temporarily abandoned British trenches had also given him an appreciation of the solid building of his own trench: having entrenched first, his side had the high ground, whereas the British trenches lay lower and had far more watery muck in them than his own. The water there had been stagnant, foul-smelling, as though it had never dried since the war began. Remembering that horrible British trench, Hans patted the moist but sturdy wood- and sandbag-reinforced wall of his own trench, not regretting the days of back-breaking labor it had taken to construct it—and reconstruct it at times when it had gotten hit by shells. It had filled ankle-high with water over the duckboards a few times when it had rained long and hard, of course—and this year had been very wet—but because it was on high ground it would dry and drain eventually. The last area Hans had been posted in had not had a wood duckboard "floor" for the trench to keep them dry, so Hans was grateful for this one. Soaked boots and wet feet were the curse of any soldier spending his rotation of days in the trenches. No man wanted to have the flesh of his feet literally rot off his bones.

The other times Hans had crossed into No Man's Land had been during the rare, brief, informal ceasefires that had allowed men from both sides to gather the remains of the dead. Hans had undertaken that sad, grim, ghastly task with a heavy heart each time—but the one thing worse than grave duty was leaving the bodies (or the parts of bodies) to putrefy without burial, simmering the water of No Man's Land into a horrid soup of nauseating stench.

Just once, Hans recalled, the trip into No Man's Land had been different. That was early on, a day that stood apart from all others: December 25, 1914. Though really, it had started the day before: on Christmas Eve they had shared sweets and even lit the candles on some little pine trees sent as gifts, as Weihnachtsbaum. While they were singing their carols, the English had sung back from the other side of No Man's Land, and they had traded songs back and forth for the evening. The next morning their officer back then—what was his name? Ah, Leutnant Fromm, that was it. Fromm had made a truce with the English to gather the bodies in their section of No Man's Land, to give them proper burial. During that sad duty, Hans had struck up a kind of conversation with an English soldier, as best they could given the language difference between them. They had shared sweets, showed each other pictures, and eventually been joined by the other men on both sides, as a kind of camaraderie grew. They were all cold and tired, and lonesome for home and family and a real Christmas. One very young German soldier, Gutermuth, who was a pet of everyone in Hans's unit, had even mischievously gotten out a make-shift football. They had kicked it around a little between themselves and even with the English soldiers, though the shell-pocked landscape made playing an actual game impossible. As twilight drew near, the English officer had saluted Fromm and taken his men back down to their trench, and Hans and his comrades had gone back to theirs. But the truce had held through the rest of the day, and there was little shooting from either side for a few days afterwards.

Then their unit had been rotated to the back lines for a rest, and when they were sent back to the front line trenches it was to a different area. Word had percolated through their unit that orders had come down from the upper levels that no truce was to be allowed again. Hans had needed no explanation: he intuitively understood why. He had even been relieved that they had been sent elsewhere. He did not want to shoot the Englishmen whose hands he had shaken and whose children and wives and sweethearts he had seen pictures of. Knowing who was on the other side of a gun sight made pulling the trigger nearly impossible.

Not that any Christmas truce was likely at this point in the war. Anger and hatred ran deep on each side for all they had suffered at the other's hands. Hans had seen his comrades maimed with horrendous wounds, had seen them die—or not die, which could be even worse at times. Many of his original comrades were no longer with him, having been shuffled out through injuries, death, or occasional promotions. Most of those that remained were hardened and bitter, hating the English and the French who had slain and maimed their friends. Hans himself was long past caring enough to hate. He remembered the boys he had met nearly two years ago. They had not been evil. They probably hated him by this point: they had suffered the same kinds of losses—or even worse, since Germany had begun to employ gas against its enemies last year. Of course the English were retaliating now, using gas against the Germans. Hans just wanted it all to end. Life in the trenches was no adventure, and he wanted to go home and live in peace, away from the roar and danger of the battlefront.

He had no hope of that. Hans sighed and took another drag on his cigarette, drawing the smoke deep in his lungs and swirling the smoke around in his mouth. It tasted good, smelled good: the sharp acrid tobacco momentarily covered over the rotting stink of the battlefield, giving him a fleeting break from the omnipresent reek. Somehow the fog seemed to amplify the smells just as much as it made all surfaces slippery.

A sudden volley of shots broke out, with shouts and screams. A raid! Hans jerked his head to the right, coming fully alert: he was certain the fray was just a few turns down the trench. He swiftly stubbed out and pocketed the remaining half of his cigarette, simultaneously grabbing his rifle. Maurer materialized out of the fog, coming up from their dugout, rifle also at the ready, with Leutnant Esser shouldering past him, pistol drawn, to take point. The three of them took the first two turns of the firebays and traverses fast, then slowed, checking carefully around each corner, ready to give each other covering fire if English invaders had overcome the guards. As they crept silently down the trench corridor to the next dogleg turn, Hans could hear groans and pants ahead of them: probably the struggle had happened just around the next corner. Listening, Hans was seized with anger: it was daylight! Raids happened under the cover of night; one expected them then and was on guard for them. Today the fog must have emboldened the English into thinking they could spy under its cover.

Esser signaled Hans and Maurer: they would all move on the count of three. Hans watched Esser's hand, his own guts tightly coiled, clenching his rifle tightly. Would this be the day he had long feared, when English bullets would find their final home by burying themselves in his body?

Esser held up one finger: Eins . . . zwei . . . drei! They burst round the corner—and found a tableau of three men, with only one man conscious: a British officer kneeling over a fellow British soldier. One German soldier—Schultz recognized him as Kalb, who was new to the unit—lay against the wall of the trench, bleeding from two wounds, one in his right arm, the other his right leg.

The officer looked at them and drew in his breath sharply, then carefully rocked back on his haunches and raised his hands just as Esser snarled, "Hände hoch!" The Englishman dropped his pistol, which thwapped into the chalky mud of the firestep by his knees.

Esser ordered him to stand and step back, gesturing with his pistol. The English officer obeyed, not taking his eyes off them.

"Schultz, search him; get whatever weapons he has!" Esser ordered.

Hans moved forward with care, fully aware that Esser and Maurer were covering the English officer and therefore doing all he could to not block their aim. He did not wish to become a hostage or a shield for the enemy officer—who, he couldn't help noticing, was quite young, in his early twenties, even younger than himself. The officer remained still as Hans checked for other weapons. He found a knife and confiscated that, then picked up the mud-caked pistol from the ledge. He bent down to check the English soldier on the ground, then looked up at the man's officer, shaking his head. The officer took a deep breath and released it, raising his chin slightly. But Hans thought he saw the man's jaw tremble slightly. This was no trivial loss for him.

"Good," Hans thought. "At least this is an officer who values his men's lives."

"Schultz, go get aid for Kalb," Esser ordered next, his aim steady and his eyes hard. "Maurer and I will keep an eye on this fellow."

ooOoo

Two hours later, Hans Schultz watched as the English officer ate a plate of sauerkraut and bread down in their dugout. The dinner had been as bad as Hans had feared, and the English officer didn't seem to find it any more appetizing than Hans did, although they had both cleaned their plates of course. Maurer had taken the dishes away, and Hans was momentarily alone with the prisoner, though Nussbaum was on guard at the top of the exit to the trench. Esser was outside conferring with Steuben, who had served as translator in the initial interrogation of the prisoner.

Hans studied the officer, who seemed at this point quite cool and relaxed. He had a long face with the mustache that officers on both sides seemed to favor, and fair hair that was parted just off center, on the left side.

The officer seemed to be studying him as well. "What is your name?" he asked, in English.

"Name": that was a word Hans knew from Steuben's informal English lessons. Who better to practice his rudimentary English on than this man?

"Gefreiter Schultz," he answered, tapping his chest to ensure the officer understood.

The officer smiled briefly. "I am Captain Fisher. Er, according to your translator, 'Hauptmann' Fisher."

"Fischer?" Hans inquired, miming putting bait on a hook and casting a rod.

Fisher laughed. "Yes. I mean, 'ja'." He reached for his pocket and Hans abruptly sat up, alert. But Fisher did nothing more alarming than pull out a twisted paper. "You provided dinner. It is only polite that I provide the dessert," Fisher said, unwrapping the paper and holding out the contents.

That was more English than Hans could follow, but it was easy enough to see what Fisher was offering: licorice! It was tempting . . . but could it be poisoned? Fisher did not look like a poisoner—but then what did a poisoner look like?

Fisher apparently understood the skeptical look on Hans's face. "It's safe. I say, you pick the piece you want me to eat, and then you can choose whichever one you want." While Hans only picked out a few of the words, the hand gestures that accompanied the speech made the meaning clear enough. Guardedly, Hans picked out one piece at random and offered it to the officer, who took it and popped it into his mouth. Hans watched for a moment. An anise odor rose up to his nostrils from the sugared stickiness on his hand. Finally, he reached and took one of the treats for himself. He carefully set the soft chewy piece into his mouth, and in just a moment savored the dark spicy flavor that tasted of boyhood and home.

He looked up to find the English officer smiling at him in satisfaction. "Thank you," Hans said carefully, returning the smile.

The officer's eyebrows arched. "You're welcome," he said, retwisting the paper then sliding it over toward Hans. "Keep the rest. So, you speak English?"

"I talk—speak?—English . . . a little?" Hans answered haltingly, summoning each word with difficulty. He held up his hand with his finger and thumb just a minute space apart.

"Better than my German," laughed the officer. "Now if you knew Latin, we could have a real conversation. I could make old Powles proud, using all that Latin he drummed into my head at Eton. Or French, of course. But I'm afraid I sadly neglected German."

All that was far beyond Hans, although he tried to look intelligent, as though he understood what Fisher was saying.

"Given how today has gone, I suppose I should have practiced more at games. Rugby at least—that gets you down in the mud. I was better at cross country races. Though perhaps the best preparation would have been playing hide-and-go-seek with my little brother. He sent me a letter yesterday. He's hoping the war will last another two years, so he'll be able to get in it. Can't say I share that hope for him. Seems to me that the past two years have been plenty. No end in sight, though, for you or for me, eh, Schultz? Here, would you like to see his photograph?"

Hans had missed most of this as well: Englishmen seemed to speak very quickly. But he had picked out "brother" and "letter" and "photograph," so he nodded. Fisher pulled out a well-worn leather wallet from inside his jacket pocket and plucked out two photographs that he slid across the table to Hans. Picking them up, Hans saw in the top picture a younger version of the man across from him, with a still younger boy next to him. The second was a picture of a young woman in a white lace dress, with dark eyes and a cloud of dark hair wreathed with flowers, as though for a ball.

"Sister?" Hans hazarded. Another easy word to remember, so close to schwester.

"No! Nein!" Fisher choked with laughter. "My fiancée—my sweetheart."

"She is . . . pretty?" Hans remembered how the men of his unit had made Steuben teach them one evening all the English words they would need to court English girls. The chances of meeting any had seemed small, but they had all laughingly agreed that it was good to be prepared for such encounters in any language.

"Yes, very pretty. We met at a ball three years ago."

Hans's brow furrowed. A ball . . . "Einem Ball?"

"Yes—a dance. You know, to waltz? You must know 'The Blue Danube'?" Fisher put his arms out as though holding a young lady dance partner and swayed in his seat, humming a few notes of "An der Schönen Blauen Donaum," the first four notes low and slow, followed by two higher pairs of half notes: "Laa laa laa laa, la la! La la!"

Hans chuckled and nodded. He handed both photographs back to Fisher, who held them both for a moment, his eyes soft, before he put them away in his wallet and back in his jacket pocket.

"You are—luck," Hans told him.

"Lucky," Fisher corrected him, stressing the last syllable but shaking his head. "I certainly thought so up till about two hours ago. Now . . . I'm not so sure."

Unsure what to make of that set of words, Hans settled for nodding again. Just then they heard Esser and Steuben coming back down into the dugout. Fisher pushed the paper of licorice, still on the table between them, still closer to Hans, who pocketed it after only a momentary hesitation. As the officer and translator entered, Fisher looked up at them, then he and Hans rose to their feet as they saluted the English officer, and he returned their salute.

"We will escort you to the rear guard support trenches," Steuben said, in English. He turned to lead the way, and Esser gestured to Fisher to follow.

Fisher looked at Hans. "Good luck to you, Gefreiter Schultz," he said, looking directly into Hans's eyes, then he turned and followed Steuben up the steps to the trench. Hans picked up his rifle and followed Esser, emerging into the dark of night. A fine mist was falling; it was not quite rain but more than fog. Hans slid slightly leftwards on the wet duckboards. He could hear the whine and boom of artillery a mile or two down the line, but their section was quiet. No doubt Fisher's comrades and commanders on the other side of No Man's Land were wondering what had become of him and his subordinate and their mission, holding their fire to give him any chance they could.

Fisher had halted, looking up at the sky, though there was nothing to see: the weeping sky hid the stars and the moon. All was darkness, except for the small lantern, covered on three sides, that Steuben held low to light their feet.

Abruptly, Fisher lashed out, dashing the lamp to the soaked ground. It went out, leaving them in darkness. Hans heard what sounded like boots hitting flesh, and grunts, then Esser fell back against him, both of them tumbling down onto the duckboards.

"Get him!" Esser roared, pushing himself back up and off Hans. He drew his flare gun and shot it into the air. The flare whistled upward, brilliantly illuminating the night around them. Hans blinked twice to adjust his eyesight and saw Fisher's boot heels just disappearing over the sandbags of the parapet into No Man's Land.

Hans picked himself up just as Maurer came charging down the communication trench, rifle in hand. Steuben was still on the ground.

"Maurer! Schultz! Shoot him! We cannot let him return to the English trenches with whatever information he has gleaned!" Esser hissed.

Hans and Maurer mounted the firestep. They weren't by the machine gun nest with its extra protection, which meant they had to be careful or they themselves would be picked off by enemy snipers. Maurer, their most experienced sniper, knew how to be careful. On the other hand, those same enemy snipers would be trying to avoid shooting Fisher, wanting to give him his best chance to work his way across the foul pits and mire of No Man's Land and back to his own trench and comrades. Hans carefully set his rifle, unable to avoid breathing in through his mouth and nose the foul smell of the chalky mud that covered the sandbags it rested on.

"Kill him! Or we're done for!" Esser snarled.

The flare had faded, and it had spoiled Hans's night vision. He heard Esser snap orders to Steuben, who was back on his feet, to get a message to the artillery for a light flare rocket. Steuben's uneven footsteps retreated—clearly he was limping. Esser cursed the delay, then he loaded another charge in his flare gun and sent it up.

Surveying the territory in front of him, Hans saw nothing in the brief ten seconds of light. Could Fisher already have gotten away? How could he have gotten through the tangle of barbed wire?

"Look left," Maurer murmured. "He'll make for wherever they cut through this afternoon."

Of course he would. But would he be able to find it in the dark?

Hans realized that he was hoping the English officer would make it away from them. He wanted Fisher to go home to his little brother, to marry his lovely fiancée. And yet. . . .

If Fisher made it back to his lines, what chance would Hans himself have of ever seeing his own family or finding a pretty girl for himself?

A large bang and whistle announced that Steuben had gotten his message through. The star shell burst into flame and, suspended on its parachute, lit up No Man's Land like a strangely colored miniature sun. But still, as Schultz scanned the area, he couldn't see what he was looking for.

"There!" Esser said. He had gotten up on the firestep right behind Schultz and Maurer, and he thrust his arm between them, pointing. Squinting, Schultz could make out Fisher's figure, covered with mud, just beyond the tangle of barbed wire, working his way forward toward his own lines on his belly.

"Fire!" Esser ordered.

Schultz did not dare disobey but he lifted the nose of his gun ever so slightly. His rifle and Maurer's exploded almost simultaneously.

To his amazement, Fisher stood up and began to run, an uneven lope that was hard to track.

"Damn it! Shoot him! Kill him!" Esser yelled in their ears.

Did he dare miss again? Schultz heard Maurer's rifle fire as he closed his eyes and pulled his own trigger, feeling the recoil of the gun into his shoulder.

He opened his eyes immediately. In the weird light of the floating flare he could see Fisher still on his feet as he pirouetted once, took two swaying steps, then twirled one last time before falling face forward. The muck splattered and made a sickening sucking gurgle. Then silence. The light hung on, slowly descending, but nothing moved in No Man's Land.

Schultz tried to wipe sweat from his upper lip, but only succeeded in spreading the reeking mud across his mouth. He licked his lips by mistake then tried to spit the filthy taste out, but the muddy film lingered on his tongue. Maurer climbed down to the duckboards. He tugged on Schultz's jacket, and Schultz followed suit.

"Good shooting," Esser said to them, releasing a pent-up breath. He turned and walked toward their dugout. Schultz and Maurer trudged behind him.

But once at the door, Schultz sat down on the firestep rather than follow them inside. He thought of the photographs in Fisher's pocket, the fetid muck of No Man's Land gradually leaching in and drowning the images of the handsome officer, the young boy and the beautiful girl. The taste of the tainted mud was still unbearably foul in his mouth. Wiping his hand on his jacket, Schultz slipped his hand in his own pocket and felt there the twisted paper of licorice. Mechanically he drew it out, selected a piece, and bit into the spicy sweet black candy. He held it in his mouth, sucking hard on it, trying to let the taste fill him, to wipe out everything else.

Did I kill him? he wondered. Or was it Maurer? Or does it matter? He shut his eyes once again, but all he could see was Fisher doing his strange waltz with Death.

Schultz shook his head to clear it. "I see nothing," he whispered to himself. "Nothing."

ooOoo

Author's Notes:

I put a lot of research into this one. In case you're interested, here are some of the historical and cultural points on which I based Schultz's point of view, arranged to follow the story's order:

1. The epigraph is from "Roads," a poem by Edward Thomas. He was an English poet whose work flowered during his friendship with Robert Frost, who was living in Thomas's village in England in 1914. The two became close friends, taking many walks together. Thomas debated whether to volunteer for the war (he was well over draft age) or go to America. Frost, who had returned to the U.S., wrote his famous poem "The Road Not Taken" (1916) partly as a gentle teasing response to Thomas's inability to choose paths on their walks. Thomas ultimately chose to enlist and wrote "Roads" as a response to Frost. He was killed in action on Easter Monday, April 9, 1917, aged 39, shortly after his arrival in France; his body is buried there. His last book of poems was published in October of that year: it was dedicated to Robert Frost. In 1985, together with fifteen other Great War Poets including Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Edward Thomas was commemorated on a stone in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey in London.

2. If you Google "the statue of Death in the Cathedral of Trier," you can see an image of the statue that Schultz refers to.

3. Schultz's first commander, Oberleutnant Kammler, is a reference to the episode "The Rise and Fall of Sergeant Schultz" (Season 2, Episode 6). Promoted to general in World War II, Kammler comes to Stalag 13 and credits Schultz with saving his life when they were young soldiers, naming Liège and Ardennes as the battles in World War I when they served together. Reviewing the history, I discovered that those were the first battles of the war, which in turn means that Schultz was in the German army from the very beginning of the conflict. The city of Liège, in Belgium, was the site of the very first battle of the war, starting August 5, 1914, as the Germans tried to pass through Belgium to outflank the French; the Germans won the battle and occupied the city for the rest of the war, but the eleven days of strong Belgian resistance slowed them enough that their plans for invading France were seriously compromised. The Battle of Ardennes (August 21-23, 1914) was also a victory for Germany, though a costly one. But it cost the French more, as described in the story: although they fought fiercely, French casualties were much higher in most places and the battle ended in their retreat.

4. The pickelhaub on Klink's desk with its distinctive spike (so familiar to viewers of Hogan's Heroes) was not reserved just for officers as I had originally thought: it was the standard helmet design for all ranks of the German army, in use from 1895 until 1916. In some versions the spike could be replaced with plumes for full dress occasions; some artillery units had a ball instead of a spike. In the field during the first two years of the war, the shiny leather helmet was usually covered with a fitted cloth for camouflage. The spike proved to be dangerous in the trenches, offering a target for enemy snipers. The boiled leather offered little protection from shrapnel and bullets: large numbers of deaths from head injuries as a result of artillery fire prompted the armies of all nations involved to shift to steel helmets. In 1916, the Germans adopted the steel stahlhelm with its distinctive "coal scuttle" shape. It was so successful that the design was retained through World War II: the helmets Schultz and the other guards at Stalag 13 wear are all minor variants of this World War I type.

5. Schultz's view of the role of the German army as simply defending Germany—and the French civilians caught behind its lines too—would have been typical of the thinking of most German soldiers up to this point in the war. (That, at least, is what my research on the subject suggests.) While Germany had indeed invaded France, its troops believed that they were simply preempting an inevitable French invasion of Germany. The British willingness to use artillery to destroy occupied French villages in the Somme seemed barbaric to the Germans, who saw themselves as defending those villages and their people. (That said, German shells also damaged French villages just as badly on many occasions when villages lay on the front between the lines of battle.) By late 1916, however, morale began to fall as many German soldiers dispiritedly started to revise their understanding that their role in the war was truly defensive, as the German High Command made its more aggressive aims clear.

6. Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and King George V of England were first cousins. Both were the grandsons of Queen Victoria of England: King George was the son of Queen Victoria's son King Edward VII; Kaiser Wilhelm was the son of her daughter Princess Victoria.

7. The Christmas Truce of 1914: this is a fairly famous incident from the World War I. It happened spontaneously and piecemeal in a number of places along the western front where cold and miserable young men on both sides momentarily put aside the national grievances that had brought them into the conflict. It did not occur everywhere: at least one German and two British soldiers were killed in combat that Christmas Day and some 250 others died, though many from previous wounds. The fraternization was generally disapproved by higher ranking officers for the reasons I have Schultz outline. In some places there was no more than a few hours' truce to recover the dead from No Man's Land; in others true camaraderie broke out as men from both sides shared and traded food, cigarettes, and personal mementoes, showed each other photographs from home, even in one case gave haircuts. Rumors of football (soccer) matches organized between the two sides in No Man's Land persist, although most likely there were very few of them, if any. Historians seem divided on this question: some primary sources suggest that some games were played, but some of those sources were composed after the war. The sources are British; German documentation is difficult to fine. Also, while some units may have kicked some make-shift balls around and perhaps even tried for a real game, in most places No Man's Land was already not suitable for a real match, given the shell holes and unexploded ordinance, even if in 1914 the landscape was not yet as badly damaged as it became the next year.

Christmas truces were much rarer in the later years of the war. Though there were sporadic localized truces in 1915, reflecting a live-and-let-live attitude among the soldiers, Allied Headquarters had issued specific orders against fraternization and even required artillery barrages to discourage communication across No Man's Land. By 1916 most soldiers were no longer interested after so many more of their comrades had died, horrendous new weapons (gas, flamethrowers, etc.) had been used against them, and civilians at home had died in Zeppelin bombings and attacks on ships like the Lusitania. In other words, the soldiers of 1914 hadn't yet learned to hate each other as they later would in the midst of the atrocities of an industrialized war. Thus, the 1914 Christmas truce represents a short and very temporary space of possible fraternization that was ruthlessly quashed in later years: a romantic mythologizing of the possibility of peace in the midst of the horrors of war.

8. One of the oddest discoveries I made was that mustaches were required for all members of the British services from the Crimean War (1853-56) until October of 1916, when the regulation was abolished. Photographic evidence suggests that this particular regulation was often ignored during the first two years of World War I, however, though also widely honored. I haven't been able to discover if the German military required them, but photographs of soldiers suggest that some wore them while others were clean shaven.

9. Captain Fisher as an Old Etonian: There is a famous, almost certainly apocryphal quotation from the Duke of Wellington in the early nineteenth cenrtury: "The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." This idea would have been much in the minds of the junior British officers in World War I. They were largely drawn from graduates of British public schools (which, by the way, are actually quite expensive private high schools). Eton College, one of the most famous and elite public schools, had 5,619 "Old Boys" (i.e. alumni) that served in the United Kingdom's armed forces. 1031 of them died, more than a fifth, nearly double the general mortality rate in the British army during the war. This casualty rate generally held across the lower officer ranks, especially the lieutenants: they were the ones who led the men "over the top" in charges toward the enemy and thus were often the first ones killed. Being young and socially privileged meant they were twice as likely to die.

10. How I'm handling language: German spoken by Germans to Germans is usually represented as ordinary English in plain type, though I've added in italics some actual German vocabulary for cultural flavor. I have put actual German words spoken as German to the English Captain Fisher in italics. Spoken English is also italicized as a sign that it is foreign to Schultz. I've tried to be consistent along these lines, but it was complicated. I hope the system makes sense to readers.

Translations of German words and phrases:

Niemandsland: No Man's Land

Landser: the nickname for a German soldier in World War I, the equivalent of "Tommy Atkins" (often shortened to "Tommy," plural "Tommies") for British soldiers, or poilu for French soldiers, or "doughboys" for American soldiers later in the war.

Weihnachtsbaum: Christmas tree

Eins . . . zwei . . . drei: one, two, three

Hände hoch: hands up

German rank equivalents:

Musketier: musketeer (yes, like the famous three!): the lowest rank of service in the German Imperial army. I've seen it frequently on pictures of World War I memorials as a common rank of German soldiers that were killed in action.

Gefreiter: private, first class

Unteroffizer: corporal

Leutnant: second lieutenant

Oberleutnant: first lieutenant

Hauptmann: captain