‘They do say that discipline is necessary…’ Kropp puts in casually.
‘They can always come up with reasons,’ growls Kat. ‘And that might be true. But you mustn’t mess people about. And you just try and explain it to a locksmith, or a stable lad[83], or a labourer, try and explain it to the poor bloody infantry – they’re the majority out here, after all. All they see is that they get messed about, and then they get sent up the line, and they know perfectly well what’s necessary and what isn’t. I tell you, it’s amazing that the ordinary soldier sticks it here at the front at all. It’s amazing.’
Everyone agrees, because we all know that it is not till you are actually in the trenches that parade-ground drill disappears, and that it starts up again before you’ve gone back a mile behind the lines, no matter how big a piece of nonsense it might be, like saluting or formation marching. Because there is one unbreakable rule: a soldier has to be fully occupied all the time.
But now Tjaden turns up, red in the face. He is so worked up that he is stuttering, but he still gets the words out, grinning all over his face: ‘Himmelstoss is on his way here. He’s been sent to the front.’
Tjaden really detests Himmelstoss, because Himmelstoss decided to teach him a lesson in his own special way back in the barracks. Tjaden wets the bed – when he is asleep at night it just happens. Himmelstoss insisted that it was pure laziness, and wouldn’t be persuaded otherwise, so he came up with a method of curing Tjaden that was really typical of the man.
He hunted out another bed-wetter from one of the other barracks, a man called Kindervater, and put him in with Tjaden. The barracks where we did our training had the usual arrangement of bunks, one bed above the other, with the bottom part of each bed made of wire-mesh. Himmelstoss arranged things so that the pair of them were together, one on the top and the other on the bottom bunk. The one underneath, of course, had a really raw deal[84]. To compensate, they had to change places for the next night, so that the one from the bottom bunk got the top bunk, and could get his revenge. That was Himmelstoss’s idea of self-help.
It was mean-minded, but logically it was sound. Unfortunately it didn’t work, because the basic premisses were wrong: it wasn’t laziness that made either of the two men do it. Anyone could see that by looking at their sickly complexions. The whole business ended with them taking it in turns to sleep on the floor. The one doing that could easily have caught his death of cold —
Meanwhile Haie has come and sat down beside us. He gives me a glance with his eyes twinkling, and rubs his great paws thoughtfully. He and I shared the best day of our army career. It was the night before we had to go off to the front. We had been assigned to one of the newly formed regiments, but before that we had been ordered back to the garrison for kitting out, not to the recruiting depot though, but one of the other barracks. The morning after that we would be leaving very early. That evening we set out to get even with Himmelstoss. We had sworn weeks before that we would. Kropp had even gone so far as to declare that after the war he would try for an administrative job in the postal service, so that later on, when Himmelstoss was a postman again, he could get to be his boss. He painted a rosy picture of how he would clobber him. That was the real reason that Himmelstoss never managed to grind us down: we always counted on the fact that we’d get him sometime, by the end of the war at the latest.
Meanwhile we wanted to give him a damned good hiding. What could they do to us if he didn’t recognize us and if we were off early next morning anyway?
We knew what bar he spent his evenings in. To get from the bar back to the barracks he had to go down a dark lane without any buildings. We lay in wait for him there, hiding behind a pile of rocks. I had a quilt-cover with me. We were trembling with anticipation, wondering if he would be on his own. At last we heard his footsteps – that was a sound we knew very well indeed, we’d heard him often enough in the mornings, when the door would fly open and he would bellow, ‘Out of bed!’
‘On his own?’ whispered Kropp.
‘On his own.’ Tjaden and I crept round the pile of rocks.
We could already see the light reflected off his belt-buckle. Himmelstoss seemed to be a bit tipsy and he was singing. He went past without noticing a thing.
We got a firm grip on the quilt-cover, moved forward quietly, slipped it over his head from behind and pulled it downwards, so that he stood there as if in a white sack, unable to move his arms. The singing died away.
The next moment Haie Westhus was there. He pushed us aside with his arms spread out, just so that he could have the first go. With great delight he took up a stance, raised his arm like a railway signal, his hand as big as a shovel, and gave the white sack a wallop that would have felled an ox.
Himmelstoss lost his balance, rolled half-a-dozen yards and started to yell. We’d thought of that as well, and brought a pillow with us. Haie squatted down, put the pillow on his knee, grabbed at where he guessed Himmelstoss’s head to be and shoved it into the pillow. The noise was stifled right away. Haie let him take a breath from time to time, and what came from his throat then was a wonderful, high-pitched shriek that soon got cut off.
Now Tjaden unbuttoned Himmelstoss’s braces and pulled his trousers down. Meanwhile, he held a cane carpet-beater[85] between his teeth. Then he stood up and moved into action.
It was a wonderful sight: Himmelstoss on the ground, Haie bending over him, holding the man’s head on his knees, with a fiendish grin on his face, his mouth wide open with delight, and then the twitching striped underpants, and the knock-kneed pair of legs which, trousers around the ankles, were performing spectacular movements with every blow that fell; and Tjaden, who showed no signs of tiring, standing over him like a woodcutter. In the end we literally had to pull him away, so that we could have our turns.
At last Haie pulled Himmelstoss to his feet again, and gave a private performance as the final act. He drew his right arm so far back before clouting him that it looked as if he was trying to pluck stars out of the night sky. Himmelstoss went down. Haie picked him up again, lined him up and gave him a second magnificently aimed wallop with his left hand. Himmelstoss howled, and fled on all fours. His striped postman’s backside shone in the moonlight.
We made ourselves scarce[86] as fast