“Don’t go silently into that endless night
Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”
Dylan Thomas.
Wilhelm never knew his grandfather, Ernst, because his grandfather fell in the Great War. His father had survived but never stopped fighting that lost war.
Vati was twenty two when that war had started, twenty seven before it was over and lost.
When he, namesake of his grandfather, Ernst Wilhelm, first heard the shrill, inciting voice of the new messiah, he had the awful premonition that Germany would be drawn into war again. His father and all his peers soon came close to worshipping the new leader.
Ten million people had died in the Great War. He didn’t even want to think about how many of those were mere boys, eighteen, nineteen years old! He felt an intense sadness and fear when he thought how they were just like him, dreaming, planning, enjoying being young, then blown out as casually as the flame on a candle.
His fear of war grew by the day. When he was still very small he loved to play at war; now he just wanted to live, breathing and feeling the sun on his face.
The high-pitched voices of the Führer and his propaganda minister were constantly touching the still smarting bruises in the German psyche. It whipped those who had fought and lost the Great War into a frenzy and slowly but surely touched the hearts and minds of young people too.
Secretly he felt elated when a few people started warning against the frenzy created by the Führer and his party, but their objections were drowned by the roar of the majority. Nonchalantly the Leader annexed Austria, then Czechoslovakia. As easily as if he were on a shopping spree. Even more impressive was when he started abolishing the hateful decrees concocted by the Peace Treaty of Versailles one after the other and in the end contemptuously just tore it up.
Inevitably war breaks out and he is drawn into it.
It is even worse than he has expected it would be.
He fears and hates every moment of it.
Yet in the beginning it goes so well that he regains some hope. Perhaps the German army is going to finish the enemy off in just a few months, weeks perhaps. It appears that all resistance is crumbling. Everyone seems to be capitulating or running away from the awesome German war machine.
Yet his hope of little resistance soon seems futile.. As nation after nation is sucked into the war, resistance grows. Reluctantly he participates in a few skirmishes. For the first time in his life he sees healthy young people die. Without a sound they double over and fall dead on their faces.
Most of the time he shoots without actually aiming at anything specific. If the order comes to advance, he lingers till last, perspiration running down his face.
All around him others boast about their own bravery, the superiority of the German forces. A few of the older ones try to warn them against complacency. Yes, they say, we have the best soldiers and yes, our Wehrmacht has no equal, but you should hope and pray that America stays out of it this time. Remember, there are more than ten million people of German stock living in America. .
He feels totally excluded from all this enthusiasm and the bragging. Soon he earns himself the nickname of Wilhelm der Schweiger, William the Silent. He smiles feebly but thinks, They should rather call me Wilhelm der Feige, William the Coward. He feels tears pricking behind his eyelids and thinks, It is so strange to be scared of death; to love life so much that you will give anything for it? How it is possible, this desire to die in battle in the hearts of people barely eighteen?
Secretly a desire to be wounded grows in him. Not too badly, just so that he might become unfit for fighting and still be able to enjoy a good life after the war. He shudders at this thought, because he has seen the wounded. Some were screaming or crying like babies, others silently suffering with faces as white as those of corpses.
One of the older men in his group laughs and tells about guys who had tried to wound themselves during the Great War, some only to die from complications resulting from it. He tells how impossible it is to fake such a thing.
When the fighting dies down a bit, some start complaining about the boredom. He just listens, the fear and sadness in him never subsiding.
Then, suddenly, unexpectedly they are surrounded and all hell breaks loose. At first he thinks that they’ll just surrender, but the sergeant keep standing straight up in the middle of the attack, bellowing out orders like an enraged bull. To his right he sees a young man blown into pieces, hit by who knows what. Incessantly bullets and shrapnel hisses past his ears. He gets the nauseating stench of spilled blood. Without ceasing machine guns cackle like witches from hell.
Then comes the senseless order from the sergeant, “Advance!”
Is he mad? Advance straight into those cackling machine guns which can cut any man in two? Advance against those deadly marksmen from the open veld of Africa of whom Vati has told him that they can drill a hole right into the middle of your forehead at 800 hundred meters?
The next moment he is jerked upright: “Didn’t you hear? Advance and attack!”
He stumbles three paces forward then feels something hitting him high up in the left thigh and his left leg gives way under him. He falls on his face, blacking out as he goes down.
When he comes to, it is from searing, excruciating pain. As consciousness returns, the pain radiates out from the wound in his left thigh into his stomach, upper body, feet, and hands where the pain stings like red hot needles. He lapses into unconsciousness again and wakes up when the medic injects something into him. It must have been morphine, because even before he is put into an ambulance the pain has subsided.
“What has happened?” he asks the medic.
The older man smiles wearily: “You fought like tigers. Somehow we made a mistake, but you made them pay dearly. You are truly the bravest of men”
He looks up into the older man’s face, but sees only sadness in it.
The medic says: “Try to sleep. Later I’ll give you a shot of the painkiller again.”
When he awakes, he is already in a makeshift field hospital. A little later he asks someone about it and is told that it was put up in an abandoned Russian farmhouse.
After a few hours he feels the pain slowly coming back. It gets worse and worse until it feels as if a blade has been stuck into the wound and is turned round and round.
The medic tells him that they are experiencing difficulties to transport the wounded back home. He adds, looking even more drawn in the face, “ This war is a mistake.”
Days become weeks. He starts cursing. Silently at first, then louder and louder. He screams, cries without teras , he pleads with the medic, who is by now having blue circles around his eyes.
The medic tries to calm him, “Keep it up, comrade, perhaps the supplies will be here tomorrow!” Then he stalks off like a ghost.
The next day the medic, while trying to sterilize the wound and ease his pain, starts crying softly. His tears fall on the face of the wounded, too hot to cool the glowing fever.
“ Oh my God, little brother, why do we damn humans always have to make war? Why
in the name of God can’t we allow the sun to shine on others too?”
Red hot pain radiates out from the wound right through his body.
In a feverish nightmare he pushes the muzzle of his rifle into the weak mouth under the stupid little moustache. He laughs like a madman, but when the shot goes off like that from a canon, he is shocked to see that it has blown a hole right through Vati’s face.
Days later he starts to pray. In a simple and trusting way as when he was small.
“Oh, my sweet Jesus” he begs, “ Help me, heal me. Please, please, good and loving God!”
After hours and hours of suffering, he starts cursing, “You damn charlatan! Where are you? Did you rot in that grave?”
The next afternoon, with the weak wintry sun reflecting on the icy world outside, he knows that the end is near. He fights to keep his eyes open, sure that if he closes them, he is going to die. A new kind of coldness comes into his body, not the same as that which was the prelude to the burning red-hot fever.
Although it is still early in the day, he sees the light in the room fading. He tries to fight it off, to resist the dying of the light, the creeping cold that seems to comes from within. Again he tries to keep his eyes open as wide as possible, he opens his mouth to scream.
With his dying mouth wide open, he tries to articulate his fear and anger, “No...! No, my God! No…!”
From his mouth comes no sound.
Later the medic stands next to the dead man. The eyes are still staring emptily into space, the mouth wide open, frozen in a grotesque, petrified scream
He struggles to close the eyes..
He turns to walk away, then stops. His right hand comes up to the front of his cap, his
mouth struggling with words, “ Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!”
(1645 Words)
|
Print this short story
Show the next latest work
