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Authors: Peter Ho Davies
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out there only last week, draping their uniforms over the tank traps and wire like washing on a line. What he'd give to run into the surf now, strike out through the waves, blinking in the salt spray. He shouldn't have encouraged the men, of course. They were late back to barracks, but he was self-conscious of his new stripe, didn't want to seem a tyrant. Besides, it was the first truly hot day of the year, and now he's glad he let them.
When he turns back into the stockade he sees what's wrong at once. He, the boy, and Schiller are the only ones here. We're the first , Karsten thinks, sinking down. The sand, when he touches it, still holds the silken warmth of the long summer day, but when he pushes his fingers below the surface, the grains are chill and coarse.
He had thought himself such a good soldier these past four months, had taken to the army as if his whole life, all eighteen years, had been leading up to this. Already in their initial week of basic training he knew he could carry more, march farther and faster than the rest. He'd been working as a guide for
hunters and hikers in the Harz Mountains since the age of fourteen, and once he'd mastered the cadence of drill, the rest came easy. He'd hauled heavier loads for dilettante hikers-- yards of coiled rope, ice axes in April, and once the head of a buck, a hunter's trophy, the antlers gripped over his shoulders and the neck dripping blood down his back with each step.
He'd hurried back alone before nightfall to skin the carcass and lug home forty pounds of venison for his mother.
Even the petty disciplines of army life came naturally to him. He was used to taking orders. He'd been helping his mother run her pension in Torfhaus, at the foot of the Brocken, since his father's death. Officers, to Karsten, were just demanding guests to be placated with good service. The pension was small and poor, the furnishings more threadbare each season-
-a great comedown for his mother--but it was always her proud conviction that so long as they were sticklers for cleanliness and neatness, the place could preserve a kind of rustic charm. She taught him to polish the silver, and then to
iron and make beds with starched precision, all before he was ten, and he thanked her silently each morning at inspection.
He'd feared it might make him enemies, how easily it all came to him, but in fact it made him friends, admirers. It helped that he was generous with his comrades, teaching them his mother's tricks: dipping a rag in hot water before polishing shoes, kneeling rather than bending over to make a bed, ironing only the inside of shirts. They told him he should be an officer and he smiled shyly, though in truth he lacked the arrogance for command, was a natural NCO, the kind who fiercely mothers his men. They actually took to calling him Mutti for a time, and he told them, in return, they'd all make excellent chambermaids.
His barracks mates prized Karsten for one more skill as well. He'd picked up a smattering of French and English before the war. The latter from a season in Hull, where his
father had taken a job with a family of fishermen he'd worked with as a POW in 1919, until his mother, miserable among the enemy, as she called them, demanded they move back to Lubeck. The language had come back to Karsten in later years, chatting with skiers staying at his mother's place--from whom he'd also picked up some serviceable French--and
he'd kept it up watching American movies, Dietrich's especially, until the ban in '40. It was French his comrades wanted to learn, though--France was where they all yearned to be posted--in order to 'meet the mademoiselles'. He hesitated at first, until they accused him of holding out on them, of wanting all the girls for himself, so he'd taught them Je t'aime , pronouncing it hoarsely, then covering his embarrassment by making fun of their accents.
Schiller--he'd been one of their drill instructors then--had caught them at it and shaken his
When he turns back into the stockade he sees what's wrong at once. He, the boy, and Schiller are the only ones here. We're the first , Karsten thinks, sinking down. The sand, when he touches it, still holds the silken warmth of the long summer day, but when he pushes his fingers below the surface, the grains are chill and coarse.
He had thought himself such a good soldier these past four months, had taken to the army as if his whole life, all eighteen years, had been leading up to this. Already in their initial week of basic training he knew he could carry more, march farther and faster than the rest. He'd been working as a guide for
hunters and hikers in the Harz Mountains since the age of fourteen, and once he'd mastered the cadence of drill, the rest came easy. He'd hauled heavier loads for dilettante hikers-- yards of coiled rope, ice axes in April, and once the head of a buck, a hunter's trophy, the antlers gripped over his shoulders and the neck dripping blood down his back with each step.
He'd hurried back alone before nightfall to skin the carcass and lug home forty pounds of venison for his mother.
Even the petty disciplines of army life came naturally to him. He was used to taking orders. He'd been helping his mother run her pension in Torfhaus, at the foot of the Brocken, since his father's death. Officers, to Karsten, were just demanding guests to be placated with good service. The pension was small and poor, the furnishings more threadbare each season-
-a great comedown for his mother--but it was always her proud conviction that so long as they were sticklers for cleanliness and neatness, the place could preserve a kind of rustic charm. She taught him to polish the silver, and then to
iron and make beds with starched precision, all before he was ten, and he thanked her silently each morning at inspection.
He'd feared it might make him enemies, how easily it all came to him, but in fact it made him friends, admirers. It helped that he was generous with his comrades, teaching them his mother's tricks: dipping a rag in hot water before polishing shoes, kneeling rather than bending over to make a bed, ironing only the inside of shirts. They told him he should be an officer and he smiled shyly, though in truth he lacked the arrogance for command, was a natural NCO, the kind who fiercely mothers his men. They actually took to calling him Mutti for a time, and he told them, in return, they'd all make excellent chambermaids.
His barracks mates prized Karsten for one more skill as well. He'd picked up a smattering of French and English before the war. The latter from a season in Hull, where his
father had taken a job with a family of fishermen he'd worked with as a POW in 1919, until his mother, miserable among the enemy, as she called them, demanded they move back to Lubeck. The language had come back to Karsten in later years, chatting with skiers staying at his mother's place--from whom he'd also picked up some serviceable French--and
he'd kept it up watching American movies, Dietrich's especially, until the ban in '40. It was French his comrades wanted to learn, though--France was where they all yearned to be posted--in order to 'meet the mademoiselles'. He hesitated at first, until they accused him of holding out on them, of wanting all the girls for himself, so he'd taught them Je t'aime , pronouncing it hoarsely, then covering his embarrassment by making fun of their accents.
Schiller--he'd been one of their drill instructors then--had caught them at it and shaken his
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