Officer Factory. Hans Hellmut Kirst

the General looked at this picture something approaching warmth came into his eyes, and the severity of his expression was replaced by a look of distant sadness.

      This was a picture of Lieutenant Barkow, who had been buried the day before.

      Lieutenant Krafft was also unable to sleep that night. However, it wasn't his conscience that kept him awake, but Elfrida Rademacher.

      “I hope no one saw you come," said Krafft rather nervously.

      “What if they did?" replied Elfrida with apparent indifference, sitting down beside him on the bed. She thought she knew what men liked—cheerfulness, brightness, and above all no fuss and bother.

      “What will the other girls you live with say?"

      “Just what I say about them when they don't sleep in their own beds. Nothing at all."

      Krafft listened to the night, but there seemed no risk of being disturbed except by Elfrida, who now began to take off her clothes.

      Krafft found the moral atmosphere prevailing in these barracks really quite remarkable. The remarkable thing was that such an atmosphere should be possible in the domain of a man like General Modersohn.

      “They haven't invented a cure for it yet," said Elfrida, pulling her petticoat up over her hips. She did this as if it were the most natural thing in the world, which, Krafft reasoned, seemed to show that she'd had a certain amount of practice.

      He found it difficult to make this girl out. It was true that everything had been quite simple from the beginning, completely uncomplicated, delightfully straightforward. But Krafft could sense that she wasn't quite what she pretended to be. He was always catching himself thinking about her. Well now, he said to himself, it was possible that she wasn't so much seeking pleasure for herself as wanting to do him a favor. There was a suspicion of charity about the whole thing.

      “Haven’t you any misgivings?" asked Krafft.

      “Why should I have?" she replied. “We like each other. That's quite enough."

      “Quite enough for me certainly," said Krafft. “But what if Captain Kater finds out how you're spending your nights? After all, he's officially responsible for you and the other girls."

      Elfrida began to laugh. It was a completely frank laugh and dangerously loud at that. “This fellow Kater is the last person who can afford to set himself up as a guardian of morality!"

      “Have you had some sort of experience with him then?" asked Krafft, noting with astonishment that the idea made him slightly unhappy.

      Elfrida paused for a moment. She straightened up slightly, before turning her dark eyes on him and saying: “I’ve been here for two years now, ever since this training school was started. I'm living here with more than forty other girls in a special separate corridor of the headquarters building—we even have our own entrance, in fact. All day we work in the stores and in the workshops. We are women civilian employees called up for military service. We come into contact with men day after day; there are a thousand of them all round us. So it's hardly surprising that from time to time we feel the need to spend our nights with them too."

      “Well, all the same, I'm glad you selected me from the thousand or so others."

      “I did so for a number of reasons," said Elfrida, taking off her stockings. “First because your billet and mine are in the same building, which makes matters a lot easier. Then because the two of us work in the same place, in the headquarters company, which makes it easier for us to arrange to spend our free time together. And then there's another reason, Karl, a by no means unimportant one—I like you. That doesn't necessarily mean I love you. I'm against big words like that, and anyway they've become very small in these times of ours. But I do like you very much, and that's the only reason I'm doing what I am doing. In any case Captain Kater has no place on my list which isn't all that big—and he never will have."

      Almost hurriedly, Elfrida stripped off her brassiere. Krafft looked at her longingly, burning with desire and wanting to stretch out his hands and seize hold of her at once, but she pushed him away and looked at him almost sadly.

      “I’m not exactly a model of virtue," she said, “I don't need to tell you that. But I don't want you to think that my being here and the ease with which everything has developed between us is all just a matter of course. There's more to it than that."

      Her breath was coming in short gasps and he misinterpreted the sign. “Come on 1 " he said impatiently.

      Elfrida shook her head.

      “There’s more to it than just that," she repeated with a slight huskiness in her voice. “I feel something almost like fear. I know it sounds silly to say that, but from the very first I had the feeling that we only had a short time together. Don't laugh at me, Karl. I know nothing can last for long in this war. Everything comes and goes; one loves and is unfaithful, wants to forget and is forgotten. All right, one has to accept that. But it isn't just that, not this time."

      “Come on," he repeated, and put his arms round her.

      And so he never heard her when she said: “I’m afraid for you."

      “It just goes to show," said Captain Kater, thoughtfully. “One doesn't hesitate to do one's duty, yet how is one rewarded? With misunderstanding! One finds oneself in trouble! And all because a certain person likes to think of himself as the last of the Prussians and to attach more importance to military regulations than to ordinary human qualities."

      Captain Kater was sitting in the far corner of one of the rooms at the back of the officers' mess, with the soft light from a standard lamp shining full on to his moonlike face. A well-rounded bottle of red wine stood before him, while opposite sat Wirrman, the Judge-Advocate. Both looked worried, and stared morosely at the bottle of red wine, which deserved happier faces, being one of the noblest Pommards ever ripened in the sunshine of France. Kater still had a few more cases in the cellar, but he was tortured by the fear that he wouldn't have the chance to enjoy them.

      For the General seemed unwilling to leave him in peace. In his own eyes, Kater was a good-hearted fellow and a successful organizer. But Modersohn seemed unable to appreciate that sort of quality. There probably wasn't another man like Modersohn in the entire Wehrmacht; and yet he of all people had to be the commanding officer of the training school at which Captain Kater had the headquarters company!

      “The General seems a very self-willed man," said Wirrmann, using the formula with the utmost circumspection so that it seemed free of both provocation and reproach.

      This was typical of Wirrmann's tactics. He was always very careful in his choice of words, nearly always sticking pretty close to protocol. But the underlying tone made it clear to Kater how Wirrmann was thinking.

      Judge-Advocate Wirrmann, seconded to training-school inspection duty, an experienced lawyer and trustworthy servant of the Reich, a naked sword of justice with more than two dozen death-sentences to his credit, he of all people had been humiliated by Modersohn as if he were no more than some incompetent petty official. And in front of all the other officers too! Kater could hardly help seeing in Wirrmann a potential ally.

      “Between ourselves," said Kater, leaning forward confidentially, the General isn't only self-willed—there's simply no telling what he'll do. Though I say so with respect, he seems utterly unappreciative of the joys of living. The finest wines, the best cigars, mean nothing to him, nor does he cheer up in the slightest at the sight of a pretty girl—"

      “But you can't help noticing the interest he takes in certain young officers," interjected Wirrmann. And he smiled knowingly as he said this—a smile, as he thought, of extreme subtlety and of the greatest gentleness, as if he imagined himself to have lifted a sad corner of the truth.

      Captain Kater choked, so that the wine spilled