After the young widow’s visit, the one whose surrounding fields had earlier been battered by the now defunct anti aircraft installation, the Lieutenant announced the boys would be planting potatoes for the war effort. A mule-drawn cart soon arrived accompanied by a cheerful man from Belgium, in brown fatigues, who demonstrated how the appalling, wrinkled and quartered potato pieces were to be deposited in the warming soil. Wielding a sturdy spade, he started right in just a few feet outside the compound. Most boys just nodded, smiling.
“You’ll want to avoid broad daylight for this, in view of our American friends,” he said in the general direction of the Lieutenant, who had so far not bothered to share news of strafings of farmers’ fields and rural roads by U.S. fighter planes diving out of the cloud cover these days.
Anna’s eyes came to rest on the letters KG on the visitor’s rumpled clothing. She wondered how ironic he was feeling referring to “our American friends”. Weren’t they his friends? Slapping the mule on the flank, the PoW waved goodbye, and “Heil Hitler” said the Lieutenant.
Eddie was cleaning his nails with a pocketknife in front of the galley. He shook his head. “Always so ostentatious, that man,” he said. “People will notice when he stops.”
“Stops what?” said Motz.
“When he stops saying ‘Heil Hitler’ any day now. Though I can’t say I’m worried…” said Eddie.
“Oh good,” said Motz, “why worry?”
In the hour after “Soup”, between dusk and dark, all one hundred and thirty-seven boys set off once more with their spades, dragging supplies of seed potatoes behind them, wrapped in a recent edition of DER VOELKISCHE BEOBACHTER. On returning some forty minutes later, they were met by the PoW with more mutilated potatoes and a message.
“Mrs. Göttke wants me to tell you that the seed potatoes have been treated with a chemical,” he said. “She’s the grandmother, and I’m sure she always tells the truth.” He winked and disappeared.
Hansi rushed into the latrines, stuck his finger down his throat and re-emerged pale, but smiling as usual.
Lilly came up with two sizeable bread crusts from the little gray sack behind the galley door.
Hansi was always hungry, always sleepy, and usually just mouthed the words whenever the group was singing, his voice in raging mid-change.
“If you need any help in the galley, just call me —” he would remind them, an offer more liverwurst-driven than a quest for female company.
Still, during the hours spent in the air raid shelter at night, protective arms would reach around his shoulders.
“Hansi, let go of Monika’s proud breasts,” someone would yell in the dark, followed by Hansi’s innocent giggles, hugely pleased with the unthinkable flattery. And promptly someone would intone, “Haben Sie schonmal im Dunkeln geküsst?” with a thunderous chorus claiming, “Ja!” They had all experienced kisses in the dark.
Feet were sticking out of a barrel kept on its side next to the latrines, as Anna and Monika passed with the bread basket the next morning.
“What exactly are you doing in there?” Anna enquired of the feet.
“Be still,” came a voice, “I’m contemplating the future.”
“Whose future exactly?” asked Anna, tugging at the boots.
“That bird’s, the planet’s, mine, take your pick —”
“And?” Anna squatted next to the feet. “Have you any insights to share with us?”
“The very idea of a future is an illusion, a fata morgana, a myth, and a fraud. It never really happens. We’re all living in the PAST, a fact cleverly concealed by changing fashions, and the Ministry of Propaganda is behind it all. And now I have to fix my bike and follow the rest of them to dig the latest style in trenches. Did you know philosophy smells like herring? Heil Hitler,” and Motz disappeared.
Anna couldn’t remember early April feeling so warm in other years, with pussywillows bursting forth down the path, and birds singing and trilling about eternal hope. They sat in the one small grotesquely misshapen tree at the other end of the compound. This was where people went for a private talk, or a smoke, except for the Corporals, who chose to smoke and talk behind the galley, out of sight. The Lieutenant would simply close the door to his office for privacy.
Anna was crouching on the galley floor, clearing ashes out beneath the cauldron, when she heard voices outside the drafty window.
“Lieutenant took all the push-pins off that map this morning.”
“Huh? His own idea, or…?”
“Haven’t the foggiest, but Ivan is poised at the Oder, and that gets close to whistling distance. Who’s going to stop him?”
“Don’t look at ME, and you and I know that these boys aren’t going to stop anybody for fifteen minutes. Where’s their support going to come from? Who’ll back them up, their granddads?”
“Yup, that’s who. At HQ last night, that was the last word. They’re rolling.”
“There’s a crack army unit north of here. They fight like the dev—”
“Oh God, the poor bastards.”
The door slammed as Lilly entered the galley and the voices trailed off.
“You look awful,” said Lilly, “like you had seen a ghost.”
“Yes,” said Anna, “a ghost.”
It has been raining all afternoon. Lotte peeks in the door of the mess hall, looking for help with the soup kettle, but instruction period isn’t over.
A pull-down map shows mechanically detailed images of a Soviet tank, class T34. The Lieutenant, brandishing a wand, in closing, points to the slightly slanting underbelly to identify the precise target.
“Remember,” he says, “we see them and hear them long before they notice us, big, clumsy buses that they are. So we let them get nice and close — DON’T FIRE EARLY, or you’ll lose your, your —” Ulli could swear that he sees the Sergeant, back in the office, roll his eyes.
“—only chance,” Axel finishes helpfully.
The Lieutenant grimaces. “Your cover,” he says.
Gus, closest to the door, turns to Lotte.
“What is it?” he whispers.
“We need someone with a penis,” Lotte croaks, pointing to the galley , “that thermos weighs a ton!”
Hansi put up his hand.
“What if they don’t come with tanks — what if they race up with a hundred thousand horses instead? I couldn’t shoot a horse —”
“Um, no horses. They’re coming with their 19th Guards tank division, that’s a fact, and we’re going to stop them right HERE,” said the Lieutenant emphatically, as though demonstrating a point of choreography.
“Well, in that case, Heil Hitler,” intoned Eddie, pleasantly.
“Maybe we should bike straight up to them and stun them with our haircuts? I hear they’re bald,” mumbled Motz.
“What happens when we run out of bazookas?” asked Gus, rubbing his hands down the side of his pants.
“You mean IF we run out,” corrected the Lieutenant. “That won’t happen. We’ll deposit supply in key positions, so we’ll all have access, if necessary. We’ll get to that later. Dismissed.”
Chairs scraped across the floor and Lotte’s volunteers rushed out the door.