Officer Factory. Hans Hellmut Kirst

is to be carried through to the bitter end, provided no decisive alteration of strategic considerations demands a change of plan.

      Alteration of strategic considerations “hardly came into it, for there wasn't an officer in sight and the sentries were all dozing in their various corners. But down in the basement of the Kommandantur sat the poor little love-sick maidens of the communications center.

      The events of the night before had been all round the barracks by the late afternoon. Cadet Weber had learnt certain details from the man in charge of the sports equipment. This man had received his information from a corporal in the kitchen. He in turn was a close friend of the clerk in the orderly room, and the latter was himself a close friend of the raped corporal in person. In short, first-classes addresses, relatively accessible. To the rescue then!

      “Right, come on," said Cadet Rednitz, sounding the advance.

      Mösler and Egon Weber followed him excitedly, holding their bottles by their necks and swinging them like hand-grenades. They crouched low as they hopped across the concrete road of the barracks and disappeared into the Kommandantur, determined to take the communications center and the girls by storm.

      When they got there, however, they found others there before them.

      Captain Feders, Section H's tactics instructor, sat enveloped in thick clouds of cigarette smoke, thinking, writing and smoking, in a state of complete exhaustion. He tried to concentrate on his class's subject for the following day: transport of an infantry battalion by rail. But utterly without success. And sleep wouldn't come to him.

      The night seemed to be filled with a dull roaring, as if of distant aircrafts, or trains running continuously on the other side of the hill. But he knew this was an illusion. The darkness all about him was empty save for the wreathing cigarette smoke, the bare walls of the room and the floor-boards which let in the cold. No sound reached his ears—none of the sounds of the life around him: the breathing of a thousand sleeping men, their groans and muffled heart-beats under the bed-clothes, the gurgling of water-pipes, the scraping of the sentries' boots, the panting somewhere or other of a couple of lovers. He knew that all this was there, but heard none of it.

      Captain Feders, the tactics instructor, was one of the cleverest brains in the training school, the sort of man who could never help trying to tie people up in knots, and who was always being tempted into sarcasm, being a great scoffer and fond of debunking for its own sake. Whenever he sensed that he had any sort of audience he wore a permanent, cold, ironical smile on his face. But when he was alone, as now, he was a tired man with a haggard face, whose eyes showed him to be tortured and desperate.

      He listened anxiously, wanting to hear something only in order to prove to himself that what his reason told him was there really existed. He drew at a cigarette—he heard that. He blew smoke out of his mouth—he heard that too. His wife lay in the bedroom. She must have been tossing about restlessly, pushing the blankets away, breathing noisily—but however hard he listened he heard nothing.

      “It’s as if everything were dead," said Feders to himself” Everything seems to be decaying."

      Marion, his wife, had been called up for military service like all the other women in the barracks. The previous officer in command of the training school had arranged for her posting to Wildlingen-am-Main, simply as an act of generosity. He saw to it that the couple got a small apartment in the guest house, for Frau Marion Feders knew how to exercise her charm.

      The present commanding officer, Major-General Modersohn, tacitly accepted the situation. It could hardly be supposed that he would allow it to continue indefinitely. For Modersohn didn't seem to recognize such a thing as private life, and certainly not at his training school. This suited Feders, particularly in the circumstances, though he hadn't the strength to tell his wife openly.

      He forced himself to concentrate. He wanted to hear her, in order to realize again—over and over again—what a desperate senseless business it all was. But he heard nothing. He got up, went over to the door that led into the bedroom, opened it and switched on the center light.

      And there lay Marion, his wife, with her short, bright blonde hair. The bedclothes had slipped from her strong, sunburned shoulders, and he noted the clean sweep of her hips and the magic of her skin glistening with the sweat of sleep.

      “Are you coming to bed?" she asked, blinking, and rolling over on to her back.

      “No," he said.

      “Why don't you?" She was so sleepy that her lips hardly moved.

      “I just wanted to get a book," said Feders, picking up a book that lay on the bedside table. Then he turned his head abruptly, put out the light and left the room.

      He returned to his desk and stood in front of it for a while. He put the book aside and stared at the harsh light, at the billowing clouds of smoke from a couple of dozen cigarettes, and beyond, into the darkness which seemed to lie in wait for him. And in that moment it finally became clear to him that life—his life at any rate—was rotten and useless. Hardly worth bothering to do away with.

      The moon rose higher. The hard silhouette of the barracks melted in the pale frostiness of the night, until all outlines disappeared. Roofs seemed to become flatter; roads merged with patches of lawn into an indeterminate greyness, and it was as if the walls of the place simply sank into the earth. A flat uniformity seemed to absorb everything.

      The thousand human beings there were now lost to the world. Hardly a man among them was not sunk deep in oblivion. Even the sentry dozed wearily. He had lost almost all sense of his surroundings by now. The utter emptiness all about him was like some infinite extension of his own state of mind. The most comfortable of all worlds to guard would have been one in which all life was extinct.

      As the hours slipped by they stripped the sentry of all personality; of his vague emotions, his cautious appetites, his rare flickering of purpose, and his overwhelming despondency. He merely patrolled his beat: a mechanical being with a brain that was already asleep.

      The hills above Wildlingen-am-Main on which the barracks now stood had once been covered with vineyards, where, barely two centuries ago, a wine had been bottled under the label “Wildlinger Galgenberg." A dry, fruity, full-bodied wine, so the connoisseurs said. But then times had changed for the worse, and people turned from wine to schnapps, which made them drunk more quickly.

      Then, however, times had become great and heroic again, as the newspapers and radio stations never ceased to proclaim. The German people, it was said, had once again become conscious of their great and glorious traditions. And so one fine morning in the year 1934 a truck drove up on to the hills. Army officers, engineers and officials looked, nodded, and gave the word. Wildlingen was found worthy to become a garrison town, a decision which caused great joy to the citizens of Wildlingen, who liked to serve the nation, particularly when they were well paid for doing so.

      Two years later the barracks was built, and soon afterwards an infantry battalion moved in, and money started rolling into the pockets of the citizens of Wildlingen. Tears came into their eyes when they beheld their valiant soldiers. And the birth-rate rose astonishingly.

      When war came the infantry battalion was replaced by an infantry reserve battalion. Otherwise there was little change. The brave citizens no longer wept from emotion, but the birthrate continued to rise, for procreation and death proved themselves effective partners.

      In the second year of the war the barracks above Wildlingen were transformed into Number 5 Officers' Training School, whose first commanding officer was Major-General Ritter von Trippler, later killed at the eastern front. The second commanding officer, Colonel Sänger, fell victim to a prosecution for a misappropriation of Wehrmacht property. The third commanding officer was Colonel Freiherr von Fritschler and Geierstein, who was relieved of his duties for demonstrable incompetence and given a post in the Balkans, where he was highly decorated. The fourth commanding officer was Major-General Modersohn.