Innocent Soldier (9780545355698) (19 page)

“Does he now?” That’s all I want to say.

That’s awful! At first I laugh unpleasantly. Then I become thoughtful and sad. I once respected the farmer like a father. But he disappointed me dreadfully. I can’t forget that. Of course he deserves to be punished. Even without a royal judge, he’s been sentenced. But I feel sorry for him, just the same.

Barely two months later, I move off to war again, on my king’s orders. We’re going north, it appears, first to Wurzburg. There, our regiments are to rendezvous with Napoleon and his new army No one quite knows whom the general is fighting this time. Perhaps against the Russians again, or perhaps against his erstwhile allies, the Prussians. One never knows, with Napoleon.

We move slowly northward. We don’t seem to be in any particular hurry.

On the second evening, we’re camping in a small village.

The staff captain and his two lieutenants are quartered in the castle. So that they can eat properly and sleep in a bed for the night. That’s what is fitting for officers.

I want to take a look around the place. There are no enemies here. After all, we’re still in our own kingdom. My
six-pounder is securely sheltered, cleansed from the dust of the road, covered against rain or snow, and the sentries have been fixed. So I might as well have a little look-see.

The village has one street. Simple, old, little houses on it. I’m sure they all belong to the castle. I don’t see a church, just a pub, the “Stag.” There’s a lot going on there. Maybe they have decent wine. Not the sort of swill that sours everything between your mouth and your waterworks. I’ll try a quarter liter.

Half the artillery is squeezed into the small low-ceilinged room. A fug in the air that’s really not breathable. The soldiers are coughing and sounding off about war and women. What else are they to talk about? There is only war. The wine’s no good, either. A waste of the fine evening. I’d rather take a turn in the village or have a look at the castle.

The castle is easy to find. Just past the last of the houses, there’s an alley of ancient lime trees and hidden at the end of it a big dark fortress with two turrets and lots of bay windows. A falcon sails out over the battlements. It all looks almost sinister. A dried-out moat and a mossy drawbridge. I wonder if it still pulls up? If the sun were shining, the old gray walls might be something like beautiful.

Three boys and a pretty half-grown-up girl come across the bridge. They wait to see who the new arrival is.

“Oh, it’s not an officer, just a sergeant,” says the girl
with disappointment. But I hear her just the same. After that the children speak French. It’s rude of them. I don’t understand what they’re saying.

“No,” I say to them. “I’m not one of your guests. I just wanted to take a little look at the castle courtyard. But it isn’t necessary.”

I am on the point of turning back, because the noble house intimidates me.

The children come nearer. They’re talking to me again.

“You’re welcome to come over the drawbridge,” the girl tells me. “Don’t be afraid. It’s lasted three hundred years already. And you can have a look around the courtyard too. If you like.”

My boots clatter over the planked bridge.

The girl and the older of the boys look familiar to me in some way. Nonsense, of course. Where would I have seen them before? I have never been here before. Even so.

The little boy is curious. He stares at me, takes me by the thumb, shakes it. “Have you got lice or bedbugs?” he asks boldly.

The girl pulls him away and gives him a scolding: “Don’t be so naughty!” To me she says apologetically: “He doesn’t mean it badly. He asks that of every soldier who ever comes here.”

“That’s all right.” I set the girl at ease. “I don’t have
any lice anymore. But a few months ago, I had a whole fur coat full of them.”

“Just like my brother,” the little fellow blurts out. “He had a fur full of lice. When he got back from Russia.”

“Quiet!” the girl says to the boy.

Suddenly, I feel all hot and dizzy. I need to stop still. Is it possible? Of course it’s possible. That’s why the two children look familiar to me. The resemblance to Konrad Klara.

Hoarse with excitement, I ask: “Am I in Lammersdorf here?”

“Yes, of course,” says the little fellow confidently. “Of course you are.”

“And might your brother’s name be Konrad Klara?”

This time the girl answers: “How do you know that?”

The children talk among themselves in great agitation. And in French.

The little boy takes my thumb again: “Then you must be the first people.”

The girl pushes him away.

“Don’t be so naughty,” she scolds him, and she says apologetically to me, “He’s referring to Adam and Eve.”

“Our brother Konrad Klara has talked about you so much!” the children blurt out.

The older ones push me through a gate in the tower
into the yard, with the little ones toddling along on either side of us.

All together, they chorus: “Adam and Eve is here!”

A confused echo bounces back off the walls. Doors bang.

“Who’s there?” A man’s low voice. Then a woman’s: “Who’s there?”

Suddenly, the inquiring voice of Konrad Klara from a window nearer the top: “Adam Neve?”

“Hey, Konrad Klara!” I shout back, and I give myself a fright, because there’s so much joy in my voice.

There’s silence for a while. The three artillery officers peep out at the door, but then quickly disappear again. Probably they’re just eating their dinner.

The children grab me by the arms again and drag me across the yard. The little one is clutching my thumb. They all want to ask me things, and chatter to me.

All at once, I’m not frightened of the noble house anymore.

Doors open and shut. People stream out into the courtyard.

A couple of torches are lit.

“Father and mother,” says the girl. I am dragged over to a man and a woman. The man holds out his hand. Konrad Klara’s father, surely. The woman looks at me long. Konrad’s mother? I would think so. She comes very
close to me, her eyes testing mine. It takes her a long time in the falling darkness. I think she would like to throw her arms around me.

But suddenly, Konrad Klara is standing in front of me. He is pale and gray-looking. Only his eyes look animated, flashing with joy.

“You should be in bed,” his mother says anxiously.

“Mama,” he protests.

“He is very ill,” says the father. “Russia took everything out of him. But he’s slowly getting better. It’s taking its time.”

Konrad Klara doesn’t look well. I’m sad he’s ill, and at the same time happy that I’m with him. I would like to show him that I like him. That he’s more to me than a fellow soldier in a long and ugly war. But I don’t know how to go about it. I could pat him on the back, or ruffle his hair, or embrace, or squeeze him to me very hard. How I wish I could do that. Well, of course I can’t. The very thought makes the blood shoot into my head. It’s not seemly, in front of his parents, his brothers and sisters, the servants.

Then I stop having to worry about such considerations.

Konrad Klara comes right up to me, grabs my hot ears, and pulls my head to his chest.

I feel so good, I forget the noble world all about me.

Then I come back to myself. Of course I don’t want to show him how soft my soul is, and to keep him from noticing, I stammer back as dryly as I can: “Hey, Your Wellborn! Konrad Klara! Is that you? You don’t seem to stink anymore.”

There’s deep silence. Did I say something wrong?

Then Konrad Klara laughs, and his parents laugh, and his brothers and sisters laugh, and all the servants and maids all around laugh.

“He’s taking a laughing cure!” his mother says happily.

It’s a wonderful evening, the most wonderful of my life.

The next day, as I move off to war with my six-pounder, I get the strange idea that I was really born yesterday, and that I’m probably not Adam Feuchter at all, but Konrad Klara’s brother.

Word gets around that the frail young sergeant with the six-pounders is a real Russian veteran.

They mean me.

I am gawked at, because I was in Moscow and because I have survived.

I am asked over and over again what this Russia place is really like.

“It’s as big as the starry sky,” I reply. “It stretches out farther than you can see, and it weighs heavy on your soul! But before you get to Russia, there’s Poland, and in Poland there’s the most beautiful girl in the world, with the loveliest straw-gold braids.”

Josef Holub was born in 1926 in Neuern, a town in the Bohemian Forest. The region where he lived was populated primarily by ethnic Germans, though it was part of Czechoslovakia. In 1938, when Holub was twelve years old, Adolf Hitler ordered the German Army to invade the “Sudetenland,” as the Nazis called the region. The Sudetenland was just one part of Hitler’s plan to create a so-called “Greater Germany” by annexing parts of other countries with large German populations. Less than a year later, Hitler’s aggressive tactics forced France and Britain to declare war against Germany. Soon, all of Europe was embroiled in World War II.

As a boy, Holub wanted to be a teacher, so he was proud to be accepted into an elite boarding school in Germany that specialized in training students to be teachers. The school was run by the Nazi Party, though, and he quickly discovered that unwavering obedience to the
Führer
was much more important than learning mathematics or literature. Much later, Holub reminisced about his high school experience, “The principal of this academy ran the school like an absolutely miserable military barracks. I was later sent into the military and was overjoyed to discover that life in the German army — which certainly wasn’t easy — was almost pleasant in comparison to my life in high school.”

Holub was only seventeen years old when he was conscripted into the German army. While a soldier, he was taken prisoner by American and French forces and sent on extremely dangerous mine-clearing detail. He managed to escape, and eventually made his way back to his family in the Bohemian Forest. The war ended shortly there after, but as part of the peace negotiations, the Czechoslovakian government demanded that all Germans be expelled from the country. Holub had to leave his home once again, this time for good.

With no job and no place to go, Holub spent almost a year earning his living by smuggling goods and people across the Czech-German border. He wanted to finish his education, but he did not have the money for tuition. Eventually he managed to get a job at the post office in a small town in southwest Germany. Slowly, his life began to return to normal. He married, had three children, built a house, and became a director in the postal administration.

As a young man, while the memories of the war were still fresh, Holub wrote a book about the friendship between a German boy and a Czech boy who are forced apart after the Nazis take over their town. At the time he wrote the book, in the early 1960s, the “Cold War”— the stand-off between communist Eastern Europe and democratic Western Europe — was intensifying. Communist Czechoslovakia was viewed by West Germany as a hostile country, and Holub
found there was no interest in a book about Czech-German friendship. So he put the manuscript in a drawer and didn’t look at it for almost thirty years.

But in 1989, the Communist governments in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, and East Germany were toppled by democratic reform movements. People around the world watched as East and West Germans, laughing and weeping, scrambled over the Berlin Wall to be reunited. Only a short time later, Holub took his old manuscript out of the drawer and sent it to a publisher. He received an offer to publish right away.

With the success of his first book, he realized that he had more stories to tell. So, at the age of sixty-four, he started a new career as a children’s book author. He has since written six books and won many awards.

Q:
What made you decide to become a writer?

A:
From the time I was a child, I have always read a lot. So I developed a feeling and a love for language from a very young age. Once you have a feel for language, the next step — wanting to work with words yourself — is not far off. Almost every person is full of stories and ideas that are just waiting to be turned into words.

Q:
What inspired you to write
An Innocent Soldier
? Is Adam Feuchter based on a real person?

A:
I am the honorary director of the community archive in the town where I live in Baden- Württemberg, Germany. A few years ago, I stumbled across some papers in the archive about a young man from our village, Grab, who was conscripted into the Württemberg division that went to Russia with Napoleon’s army. He was one of the very few soldiers who returned home alive from the campaign. (Of 15,000 Württemberger soldiers, only 300 returned.) This person fascinated me and inspired me to write the novel. So I then poked around and read and researched in libraries until I had a more or less complete picture of Napoleon’s extraordinary campaign in my head.