THIRTY-ONE
Bloch remembered little about how he had reached his own lines and been evacuated away from the front. He had avoided being shot by his own side, he recalled that much. A collapse into an officer’s arms. Alcohol forced between his lips. Then a café in a shattered street, hardly a wall standing, the floor tiles covered with straw to soak up the blood. Then an ambulance transfer to the building where he was now, something approaching a normal hospital. It was close to a railway; he had heard the clank and huffing of the trains through the night. It was said the wounded were always moved back to Germany after dark. That the sight of the maimed might be bad for civilian morale at home.
The men in Bloch’s immediate vicinity seemed lightly wounded, although the infantryman next to him was a Pfeifer – a whistler – who had received a throat wound. It was most likely the type of wound that would take him home. He hoped so. He wouldn’t last five minutes in a trench dugout making an irritating noise like that. Someone would finish the job the Tommies had started.
Bloch shuffled up in bed and took in more of his surroundings. The rectangular room was subdivided by wooden screens, either to shield the badly wounded from the lightly injured, or officers from other ranks. The enormous floor-to-ceiling windows were crisscrossed with blast tape. There were dark coloured squares and oblong panels on the heavy wallpaper, the phantom remains of portraits and landscapes that had once graced the spaces. Two enormous chandeliers, mostly intact, were still in place. He supposed they were too difficult to remove for safe storage. It was, he would imagine, a former dining room. From hosting sumptuous dinners to collecting the deformed and the damaged, it was quite a fall from grace for such an elegant space.
He ran his hands over his face, wincing as he touched unfamiliar protuberances beneath the bandages that masked the centre of his face. His tongue found the gaps in his previously perfect teeth. They were enormous, like canyons. His left hand had the little finger splinted and strapped to its neighbour. At least he could hear now, although occasionally there were high-pitched whistles, of the kind that Pfeifer was making, but seemingly generated from within his cranium.
A Frontschwester, one of the front-line nurses, strode past and he shouted for her. She looked down at the porcelain container in her hand and indicated, with a wrinkle of her pretty nose, she needed to dispose of something within it first.
He watched her go, a tall, broad-shouldered girl with, beneath her cap, corn-coloured curls. The Feldpuffordnung – the widely circulated, semi-official guide to setting up a field brothel – suggested that there was no need for any such facility if there was a hospital staffed with Red Cross nurses nearby. This, part of him thought, was a terrible slander. On the other hand, he had heard all the dugout tales of comely Frontschwestern using unconventional means to nurse a man back to health or raise morale.
The thought caused an unfamiliar movement against his leg and he shifted uneasily when the nurse returned, as if she could see through the blankets that covered him. She examined the piece of card pinned above his bed and asked: ‘How can I help, Unteroffizier Bloch?’
A thick Swabian accent, also strangely erotic. He was beginning to see how such stories about nurses’ behaviour could arise.
‘Is something funny?’
‘No, forgive me. I was just thinking . . . you remind me of my girlfriend back home. Hilde.’
‘That’s odd,’ she said solemnly.
‘What is?’
‘You must be, oh, the hundredth man today to tell me that.’ She smiled and the tops of her cheeks bulged, like tiny, rosy apples. ‘I apparently look like every Olga and Heidi and Karin and Erna—’
‘I’m sorry. I bet you do remind us soldiers of all those girls.’
‘Only because I am a woman. Any German woman would remind you boys of home. I can’t blame you. This war . . .’ the sentence tailed off. ‘And you soldiers aren’t too fussy.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘My name is Nurse,’ she said, although not in an entirely unfriendly way. ‘Now what was it you wanted?’
‘Where am I now, exactly?’
‘A chateau to the north of Menin. Now Field Hospital Number 19. Is that all?’
‘A mirror.’
She shook her head, as if he had asked for the moon. ‘Why on earth would you want that?’
He touched his face. ‘To see what they’ve done to me.’
‘You can’t see anything because of the dressings. And there is bruising. Swelling, too. Wait a few days. You don’t look too bad.’
‘I’d say it was an improvement.’ Hauptmann Lux, turned out as if for the Kaiser’s birthday parade in dress uniform with medals, stepped from behind her. He had a canvas bag slung over his shoulder that he placed at the foot of the bed. ‘Staff Nurse? Do you mind?’
She gave a small curtsy and left. Lux stared at him for a few moments before speaking.
‘Well, Bloch, I’ve seen worse.’ He took off his gloves, leaned in and parted the sharpshooter’s lips, as if inspecting a horse. ‘I’ll have the section dentist sent over. That is one area in which we have the advantage of the enemy. They don’t bring dentists to the front. Mind you, have you seen their teeth? Probably a waste of time.’
Bloch found it hard to share in the joke. A few less dentists, a few more snipers wouldn’t go amiss, he thought.
‘Now, do you feel strong enough to report?’
Bloch thought he meant for duty, but he then realized that Lux wanted a verbal account of his action. ‘Of course, sir.’ He took a sip of water and gave a concise but detailed recap of his adventures from the moment he went out into no man’s land with the Patrouillentrupp until his return almost twenty-four hours later. Lux listened in silence for the most part, interrupting only when Churchill appeared and cursing when Bloch described the bombardment that firstly ruined his aim and then brought down the church tower.
‘Remarkable. I owe you an apology, Bloch.’
‘Sir?’
‘I did not know about the artillery barrage in that sector. Nobody did. Or I would not have sent you out. That is the trouble with this army. The right hand does not know what the left is doing and neither of them have a clue what the air force is up to. You know those idiots bombed one of the British casualty stations the other day? I think they thought the red crosses on the roof were target markers.’ He shook his head in despair. Such folly led to tit-for-tat raids; before they knew where they were, the Red Cross symbol would be meaningless. ‘But you did well. And the sergeant you eradicated for his uniform? That counts as half a kill. Twenty-nine and a half points. No Iron Cross, I am afraid, but perhaps some leave once you feel well enough? How does forty-eight hours sound?’
Not long enough, Bloch thought. With military rail traffic given priority it could take that to get back to Düsseldorf. ‘That’s very generous, sir.’
Perhaps he could arrange for Hilde to meet him half-way? That might be possible. He would write as soon as this stuffed shirt had gone.
‘Don’t mention it. And I have something else for you.’ He reached down into the canvas bag and brought out an object swaddled in soft cloth. He handed it over. Bloch unwrapped it. It was a telescopic sight, although the distal end was enormous, almost the size of a saucer.
‘What is it?’
‘The new Voigtl?nder illuminated night sight,’ Lux said with pride, as if he himself had crafted it. ‘We have permission to undertake field trials. With and without atropine as a mydriatic.’
Atropine eye drops – extracted from deadly nightshade – were used to dilate a sniper’s pupils, increasing the amount of light to reach the retinae. The disadvantage was that the user became very susceptible to glare and losing his night vision altogether. It also caused blurred vision and heart palpitations if you weren’t careful. Bloch was not an admirer.
He peered through the eyepiece and moved the sights so that the cross hairs rested squarely in the middle of his superior’s face. ‘Heavy,’ he said.
‘It’s worth it, believe you me.’
‘I’ll need a new rifle, sir.’
‘Of course. And ammunition. No more homemade efforts, Bloch. The new Spitzgeschoss mit Stahlkern round is armour piercing. A fresh Mauser Gewehr rifle, those bullets and the scope and I’m sure that Iron Cross will be yours any day now.’
‘I’m sorry about Churchill, sir.’
‘Ach, do not worry about that. You’ve proved a special kind of man can get behind enemy lines and back again, with the right planning. You missed him this time. There’ll be another. Eh, Bloch? We’ll get him next time.’
But Bloch didn’t answer. He was too busy looking at the damaged stranger reflected in the unforgiving glass of the telescopic sight.