In the final months of the First World War, a young woman begins a search for two British soldiers missing in battle. Harrowed by lack of any official confirmation of their fate, she must discover it for herself; they are her lovers. Yet even as her quest yields clues, there is something she cannot know: one of them wrote a letter that was never sent, a letter meant for her but taken by the advancing German Army. Its pages contain a bitter secret as well as answers to the questions at the centre of her torment: Can there be any hope? Should she hold on? Should she wait for their return?
Knowing only worry, anguish and wretched distress, the stricken woman begins to unearth details of the carnage that has enveloped her men, a gradually increasing knowledge that forces her to glimpse the brutal realities of the fighting as both sides continue the battle - millions of young men. One is the German officer who took the letter. He is determined to deliver it, for the pages he now carries have become his burden, his debt of honour to a worthy enemy. Just how far will he go?
In the final months of the First World War, a young woman begins a search for two British soldiers missing in battle. Harrowed by lack of any official confirmation of their fate, she must discover it for herself; they are her lovers. Yet even as her quest yields clues, there is something she cannot know: one of them wrote a letter that was never sent, a letter meant for her but taken by the advancing German Army. Its pages contain a bitter secret as well as answers to the questions at the centre of her torment: Can there be any hope? Should she hold on? Should she wait for their return?
Knowing only worry, anguish and wretched distress, the stricken woman begins to unearth details of the carnage that has enveloped her men, a gradually increasing knowledge that forces her to glimpse the brutal realities of the fighting as both sides continue the battle - millions of young men. One is the German officer who took the letter. He is determined to deliver it, for the pages he now carries have become his burden, his debt of honour to a worthy enemy. Just how far will he go?
The officer, an unusually tall man filthy and exhausted by battle, sat slouched upon the fire-step holding a letter that was short, clear and tragic. His face and hands were slick and sticky with sweat, fingers blackened at their tips by mud trapped under the nails, and his uniform was ripped after struggling through the enemy’s barbed wire. His appearance to those going about their business up and down the captured trench was one of extreme fatigue, but this was nothing special. He was just one more soldier who had survived the fighting.
The officer was holding the letter with dirty fingers that trembled because of Death’s close proximity and his reaction to it, but the dirt was of no importance because the ink upon the letter’s pages had already been smudged by his translator – not all the words, just the odd one here and there. The letter was not addressed to him, neither was he the author, but now that he’d read it – or, more accurately, had listened while his translator read it haltingly to him – now that he knew the letter’s contents, this battle-weary German oberleutnant considered very sad its message and meaning, for the words were penetrating in their clarity, and haunting in their intensity.
The oberleutnant had taken the letter from a British sergeant killed in the fight-through. This man lay sprawled upon the duckboards of the trench just a few metres away. Now, glancing to that body so still and lifeless, holding the grubby pages, the living man knew immediately that the woman to whom the sergeant had written his letter could have no peace, would know no calm, without knowledge of the words her sergeant had set down for her. Unless she read that letter, she would know nothing but pain and the turmoil of unanswered questions, such was the letter’s power and the implication of the words the dead man had written. Peace for her would be impossible without knowledge of the emotions expressed so eloquently by her lover, the sergeant, in the last hours of his life.
The oberleutnant holding the letter was a volunteer conscript in the Kaiser’s Army and a senior lieutenant. Sitting within the newly captured trench, recovering his nerve, he looked up at a warming sky now clear of the morning’s earlier mist. Midday was still some hours away. He felt exhausted, could feel the extreme level of his fatigue, and understood this for what it meant, its dangers. Exhaustion, he knew, would affect his ability to react quickly, think clearly, make correct decisions. He hoped he could somehow force his mind to deliver the level of alertness demanded by battle, since the lives of his men depended always to a very great extent on his reasoning.
Examining his hands, he noticed one was bloody, the other not. The oberleutnant wondered why. He wondered whose blood it was. Zimmermann’s, probably … Yes, it would be Zimmermann’s blood, of course, left upon him when he’d dragged the other soldier, Winkler, away from his friend who had been shot dead. The oberleutnant had dragged Winkler away from the corpse and pulled the soldier through the breach in the tangled British wire: this had been paramount if they were to cross it before they too were killed.
Now, the battle won, the oberleutnant sat hunched and bent in the manner of the very weary, forearms on knees, letter dangling as he stared beyond the duckboarded trench floor – through it – at nothing at all within the world below. His face shone with sweat below blond hair smeared to a sort of brown by perspiration, the cause of it a steel helmet now removed. There was no claustrophobic gas mask – not for this attack – and thank God for that: masks were prone to misting up so you couldn’t see properly, and what you couldn’t see very often killed you in this war.
It was 1918 and the month was April: spring in Europe, spring in French Flanders where lay the trench system in which the oberleutnant sat. The British had prepared it for a defence that had proved unsuccessful, though they’d held the place for many days longer than anyone had thought possible.
Beside the oberleutnant sat a gefreiter, a private soldier. Of similarly dishevelled appearance, this was the translator who had read the sergeant’s letter aloud, having laid aside his rifle the better to concentrate on the pages when his zug (or platoon) commander had passed them to him. At their feet just metres away, the letter’s author remained as he had been when Death had met him: lying on his side, one arm forward as though indicating a point further up the trench where a large part of one earth wall had been blown inward across the duckboards.
From the other side of that pile of splintered timber, spilled earth and torn hessian sandbags, another soldier approached. Of medium height and solid build, he was a heavy man with a round face that displayed an alert, ferret-like manner accentuated by dark eyes almost black. He was the kompanie’s hauptmann, a captain and the top man, commander of the two seated soldiers and two hundred others besides.
Glimpsing the killed British sergeant, this newcomer noted the rank upon the dead man’s tunic: three chevrons, broad and wide, sewn on each sleeve of grubby serge. He noted, too, the body’s utter, absolute stillness. Only death could bestow that: this was the hauptmann’s grim thought. Well, at least the Britischer was intact and not dismembered, decapitated or simply obliterated as some of his own men had been during three consecutive assaults on this position, this trench network, caught in the open by deadly British shelling and even deadlier British rifle and machine-gun fire, before they had at last reached their objective and taken it.
It was the seated oberleutnant – the tall man with the letter – whom the hauptmann sought, and to find him he had had to negotiate much of the messy chaos of the newly overrun British position: bodies and abandoned equipment, also the last of the wounded being helped or stretchered away to the aid station even as the first of the newly dead were being heaved aside to clear the place for defence.
Now, glimpsing the two seated soldiers and the dead sergeant whose lifeless arm still pointed at the tumbled pile of earth over which the hauptmann had just clambered, he paused to turn and inspect that heap: brown clods of damp, broken earth, mostly. He saw splintered wood among the mess, and a single, large sheet of corrugated iron, bent and crumpled by explosion. He saw nothing more among that unlucky result of a direct hit by an artillery shell fired by his own side. There was nothing to explain what the sergeant might have been trying to indicate. There was nobody there now.
Glancing again to the two upon the fire-step, the hauptmann saw his arrival had not yet been noticed. Seeing the letter, he understood immediately that the pages held by his senior lieutenant must be in English, for he recognised the second man as one of the kompanie translators. The translation must have been an intense sort of affair, he thought, for his tall, blond oberleutnant was silent and introspective, and the gefreiter beside him equally so. The captain himself spoke good English, and he could read the language, too, but not the oberleutnant.
The hauptmann studied his platoon commander carefully, noting especially the eyes in the grimy, hawk-like face which, instead of carrying their usually penetrating stare, were now blank and unfocused within the slack, expressionless face.
The hauptmann had been forced to pick a careful path through the detritus of battle for more than a hundred metres. At many points the walls were ruined: shattered timber and spilled earth, thick planks of shoring snapped like so many matchsticks and occasionally complicated by frames of barbed wire tossed into the trench by powerful artillery bombardment. Burst sandbags lay everywhere, and abandoned rifles, too, some broken. Discarded helmets and packs were scattered among the unmoving, lifeless bodies of the newly dead. There were many of these. There were many newly dead.
The part of the defences at which the sergeant’s arm seemed to be pointing – the closest collapsed trench wall – had forced the hauptmann briefly above ground in order to climb over it. There he had glimpsed smoke rising from several points along the horizon, distant markers of the progress of the great German offensive that continued to push the British Army back toward the sea. Two of the fires seemed large: wide columns of thick, pitch-like black smoke churning upward into the warm spring sky. Fuel depots, probably. The smoke from other places formed thinner lines of dirty grey that unravelled as they rose, bending lazily at the whim of the breeze.
Flanders was burning.
Where the hauptmann stood there was no smoke, but in the fields behind where his men had shaken out into formation to begin their attack, their observation balloon had been shot down, and in that area the grass was still afire. In the newly captured trench, though, there was no smoke at all, only dust smelling of expended explosive. The air was hazy with this dust, a consequence of the shelling that had pounded the British before the attack. It coarsened and polluted the warm mid-morning air, desiccating it so that sometimes to draw breath was to parch the throat.
Hauptmann Schiller could smell that dust. He could taste the cordite from the expended small-arms ammunition, too, and smell the corpses of the newly killed and the long since dead. These last – mostly German soldiers lost in a previous attack repulsed by the British – had been heaped by the defenders of the trench into piles. Their stink varied according to age: mostly it came from the days-old dead, but sometimes the whiff of stomach gas indicated the torn gut of a more recently killed man. Not all the bodies were ruptured. Many were intact and appeared to be merely asleep, displaying no obvious wounds at all, killed cleanly by bullet or shell splinter that had left no sign. Yet only a lucky few had died like this: Schiller knew most would have suffered.
The hauptmann did not dwell on these things. He did not dwell on death. He was accustomed to its presence and almost immune. More worrying was the very high number of casualties. Many of these he had known personally. All he had at least greeted. They had fought with him in the east against the Russians, and they had fought with him here against the British. Now, at Foncquevillers where the defenders had held on for days, they had died: some during the first attack of four days ago, others in the second. Who knew the number today when victory had finally become theirs? The fighting was only just done, and Schiller’s second-in-command was still moving among the men to fix the number lost.
Schiller tried to block these thoughts, forcing his mind to recall instead the success of the wider German offensive pushing ahead on both flanks: the fires were sign of it. His own regiment had made no advance at all because of the spectacularly stubborn British defence here at Foncquevillers. Well, he thought, the place was theirs now. Fresh German units would already be moving up to leapfrog this captured village and push ahead. The trench was finally theirs, and Foncquevillers with it.
Around Schiller, busy survivors bustled up and down the duckboards intent upon essentials: ammunition resupply, re-fortification, first aid. Some of these men he knew quite well: Nettermann from Essen – he was in love with a girl there – and young König with his somewhat dumpy build. He was glad they had come through the attack. He saw also the new man, Winkler, much matured in recent weeks. Winkler was quickly becoming a valued member of the kompanie.
Pausing in his purpose, still not seen by the oberleutnant and his translator, Schiller was startled to discover he was panting heavily. Why? Could it be the tainted air or the exertion of the hand-to-hand fighting? Surely not: that was already twenty minutes past. Yet his breathing remained as if he were still in the fight, or still running desperately over those final few metres of no man’s land toward the breach in the Tommy wire. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and made an effort to control his breathing. Just nerves, he told himself: you could put it all down to that.
He looked around. The British sergeant was not the only corpse. There were other British, all with outturned pockets searched and looted of cash and valuables. Soldiers were stacking discarded weapons: rifles, bayonets, clubs and the short spades some preferred to use as cleavers, emptying the floor of the trench to aid free passage. There were more weapons than there were bodies, for some had belonged to wounded already stretchered away to aid stations. Now the kompanie had begun the grim task of carrying away the corpses: their own dead first, the British later. Usually, the soldiers used fastened belts as a web to support these bodies, only gripping a killed man’s wrist or ankle if the broken, dangling limb risked snagging an obstacle. They straightened legs and arms wherever they could. It was a respect born naturally of shared hardship and danger: deference for the dead.
Such suffering! This trench with its walls, duckboards, fire-step and dugouts had become an open graveyard carved into the land as an interminable line, a long, narrow slash excavated first by hand, then reinforced over months using sandbags, wood and iron. Intended to protect life, the construct had become a pit of agony in which the final fighting had been bitter and intense. Schiller reflected on it. He knew activity would be similar everywhere across this position taken less than an hour ago by his own battalion and eight more – almost seven thousand men. All would be busy with this work of carrying away the dead. And there were many.
Schiller glanced again to the two on the fire-step, the tall oberleutnant and his shorter translator. The reading had clearly affected them. The officer, whose name was Goettner, continued to gaze unseeingly at the duckboards, and the gefreiter too. Neither man seemed aware of Schiller’s presence, so he moved closer, forcing a cheerful note into his greeting. It took effort:
‘Hallo, Rudi!’
‘Herr Hauptmann!’
Goettner stood quickly, his translator too, both men bracing stiffly to display respect. Rudi Goettner, the letter still clutched in one hand, was startled: he liked Schiller, but the manner of the greeting was surprising, for his hauptmann had never before used his first name. Dismissing the translator who disappeared gratefully along the trench, the two officers looked at each other in silence: mutual acknowledgement of what they had endured, of what they had survived, of what had happened here. They weighed and remembered the enormity of victory’s price, their silence in contrast to the noise of work continuing up and down the position: subdued chatter, the scrape and clang of entrenching tools, the thud of sandbags being dropped into position as the soldiers sought to modify and fortify the rear of the trench, the side that was now their front and the direction from which counterattack might come.
Schiller fished in his tunic to produce a flint lighter and hinged cigarette case of polished silver, thin enough to fit any pocket. The clamshell case was strong and protected the smokes. It was dented in one corner. The lighter was ordinary.
Schiller lit two and passed one to Goettner, who thought probably these were the only cigarettes in the entire kompanie still holding their correct shape: usually they were flattened and bent, sometimes even broken – battle smokes, the soldiers called them, and it was why some preferred a pipe. Few came from families wealthy enough to bestow silver cases upon their sons.
The two officers sat down upon the fire-step, the chatter of other soldiers reaching them over the distant booming of cannons supporting the German advance, deep and continuous. Content with his tobacco, Schiller removed his steel helmet to reveal black hair receding early and cropped short, a widow’s crown approaching. His skin where the helmet had sat was wet with sweat. Schiller used a hand to wipe it dry. He was careful with the movement of that hand, as if there were still hair for the fingers to arrange. He put the helmet down beside him on the fire-step. He spoke:
‘Well, Rudi, once again we make it through. I’m glad.’
Schiller meant what he said, and Goettner, understanding, nodded agreement. He exhaled a stream of smoke through tightened lips, the use of his first name still surprising to him. There was a further silence, both men reflecting, both officers still absorbing the gravity and pain of the morning.
‘Your zug, Rudi? Your platoon. What casualties among the men?’
‘My sergeant is still checking, Herr Hauptmann. We lost Zimmermann in the breach, moving through … I was with him when it happened. Schulze, too, before that – before we reached the wire. Lehmann was wounded there. Same place. Oppelt is missing. We don’t know where he is … still looking. Kraus took a bayonet once we were through to the trench. But ribs only … deflected. He was lucky. They’ll be all right, those two – Lehmann and Kraus – they’re at the aid station. But we really mixed it with these Tommies when we got here … It was quite a fight.’
And Goettner gestured to the trench, his cigarette leaving a trail of smoke in the dusty air as he paused to consider and weigh the battle now won. He was speaking in disconnected bursts, a signal of nerves still ragged. He continued:
‘About half the kompanie coming through the breach alongside us, the kompanie on my flank – Third Kompanie – they were with us here during the fight … They took more casualties than we did. We lost only Kraus, and him to the bayonet. Nobody shot. Quite incredible. But the men from Third Kompanie lost several killed.’ Another pause, then: ‘Our replacements broke, Herr Hauptmann, all of them. They ran, and maybe some of them got hit. We don’t know. My sergeant is still checking, as I say … It’s too soon to know numbers.’
Schiller grunted acknowledgement. He said:
‘Well, there would’ve been more if we’d been first to the wire, so thank God for the Fifth ahead of us. But the others were hard hit – our other zugs. We’ve lost more than twenty percent, I think. And Helmut is gone. Killed. His sergeant’s got the platoon now – Knauer – I’ve told him he’s in charge.
Momentary silence while they considered this particular loss. Helmut Bochmann had been a likeable fellow and a good platoon commander. Effective, dependable, and with a solid zug, you could count on Bochmann’s men.
‘Ja, the Fifth …’ Goettner reflected on the regiment that had led the attack. They’d had to cut the wire, the Fifth, and their casualties had been terrible. Goettner’s men had passed soldiers dead or still dying upon that wire as they moved through the breach. He drew on his cigarette, his tone bitter as he breathed out and said: ‘Well, thank God for them, as you say, Herr Hauptmann. Rather the Fifth than us.’ He took another pull, holding the smoke in his lungs and remembering. After some seconds he added: ‘Those replacements, Herr Hauptmann … This was too much for them. They’re not fully trained, not ready. They ran. We let them go …’
Another pause in the exchange, Schiller weighing the fact. The replacements were very young. Boys, really. He continued to smoke quietly, watching without seeing the work along the trench, soldiers fortifying the captured position or clearing bodies. He glanced to the sergeant – the dead Britischer. Somebody had already dragged the corpse roughly aside so the living might more easily pass. He said:
‘How many prisoners, Rudi?’
‘Five, Herr Hauptmann. Four of them wounded, including a corporal who will probably die. One unharmed. Nettermann dug him out.’ Goettner gestured to the collapsed trench wall that had buried the soldier up to his neck in broken timber and clods of exploded earth.
Nettermann … Ja, thought Schiller, he had seen Nettermann just a minute ago, could put a face to the man’s name, something not always possible with so many in the kompanie. He was a solid, dependable soldier, Nettermann, a crack shot and a thoroughly reliable man who had been with the kompanie for years, somehow surviving the fighting in Russia, and now surviving it here in France, too. More than once Nettermann had saved men with a single shot accurately aimed when others were missing their mark.
‘That letter, Rudi … Your translator was here to read it, I think. Was it his?’
Schiller indicated the dead sergeant.
‘Ja, Herr Hauptmann. It was his … Sergeant John Luke Winterman. It was his letter.’
Goettner passed the pages across. Schiller’s English was good: he could speak, read and write the language with considerable fluency. Goettner watched Schiller apply himself to the words, pages in one hand, cigarette in the other, smoking as he read and expelling the stuff in a stream through one side of his mouth, turning his head slightly to do so but still keeping his eyes upon the words.
When Schiller finished the second page, he looked up and said:
‘Well, I think this was love, eh, Rudi? I think this Sergeant Winterman really loved this woman, Christine.’
Goettner agreed: ‘Certainly, Herr Hauptmann. He loved her, no doubt. But it seems the woman did not know how much. She did not understand. Perhaps a quarrel …’
Silence for a time, both men casting uneasy glances at the body of the British sergeant now killed, the man who had so carefully and so recently composed the words they had just read. Their glances were those of guilty men, for to read a letter so private, so intimately open, a letter so obviously a plea for understanding of the circumstances of this war, an appeal for patience, tolerance and for fidelity, too, all of it expressed in a mere two pages … Well, to have knowledge of these emotions was to feel guilt at being party to the author’s death.
Abruptly, Schiller flicked the stub of his cigarette into the muck at his feet, rose from the fire-step and moved to the corpse. Still holding the pages, he stooped to place fingers upon the sergeant’s lifeless eyelids, which he closed. He looked briefly into the face: there were grazes caused by the Britischer’s fall to the duckboards; the blood was still drying. Standing, he returned to his seat upon the splintered planks, a better place to sit than anywhere else.
‘So, Rudi … Love …’
A nod from Goettner, who did not reply.
Finding himself much affected by the letter, Schiller raised its second page to read aloud, translating the words to German so that Goettner would comprehend:
‘Wait for me!,’ he read to his oberleutnant, ‘Only wait for me, Christine! I feel sure I will return to you, and let this be my promise: When the war does end, we shall marry immediately (if you will still have me) …’
The hauptmann looked up, searching Goettner’s eyes for understanding.
‘What do you think of that, eh, Rudi? What do you make of it? Is she still waiting for him, our sergeant over there?’ He gestured to the body. ‘He was not at all confident of this lover of his, not certain of her devotion. Perhaps he did not know if she understood his commitment to her.’
Schiller continued with his musings:
‘Makes you wonder whether they were already engaged, whether it might have already happened. Then maybe something occurred to upset things. The letter does not say. Well, even if she did know of his intention to marry, our sergeant was worried.’
Schiller paused to consider, then finished without humour, just a sad shake of the head and a further glance to the sprawled corpse:
‘It’s going to be a very long wait for her now …’
Schiller stopped to watch Goettner carefully, not for any reaction to his question of what he might think, but rather for sign of strain or cracking nerves, for Schiller had not expected to find Goettner sitting so apparently disconsolate upon the fire-step, listening to the translation of a love letter composed by his enemy. He knew the man well – knew all his zug commanders well – and he expected better of Goettner, had expected to find him working among his men, exhorting them to sustained vigilance and readiness as he usually did.
Had the letter touched a nerve? Schiller was almost certain that no romance awaited Goettner’s return to Graudenz, his home in West Prussia. There was only some girl whom he fancied and occasionally spoke about, given enough wine or beer, but no overtly romantic entanglement. So why would he be so obviously affected by a letter that could hold no personal meaning for him? Schiller examined his officer carefully, watching for any momentary flicker of expression that might indicate dent or breach in the self-mastery required of all the regiment’s officers. But there was nothing. Goettner remained the rock he always was.
Schiller repeated his question:
‘So, Rudi, what do you think?’
‘I think you are right, Herr Hauptmann. He was not sure, that sergeant. It’s a very sad letter – tragic – and the more so now because the man is dead. How many of our own men might have written similar letters, I wonder?’
Goettner was meeting Schiller’s stare with a gaze so calm, so steady as he replied, that Schiller became unnerved. He fired off another question, holding up the pages of the letter to make clear his meaning:
‘Well, if the woman in England never reads this, how will she know anything? She cannot. She will go through life without ever being reassured of her sergeant’s love – its depth. If they had quarrelled, she would need that. She would need the reassurance.’ This with another gesture to the body sprawled close by.
The conversation paused. A work party struggling awkwardly with a corpse along the duckboards acknowledged the seated officers with grim nods, sufficient under the raw circumstances of recent battle: parade-ground formality had no place here in the frontline where discipline was a given, for were it not so, who would fight? Their rifles slung, the party continued on. These men were not using belts for their load, instead gripping the dead man by wrists and jackboots, and doing their utmost to keep the hanging head from dragging. Goettner recognised neither the carriers nor the face of the bloody, helmetless head hanging down. None was from his zug, so he refocused his thoughts on Schiller’s questioning.
The dilemma he and Schiller faced was no simple thing. On the contrary, it was complicated by the respect each army held for the other, respect that had been displayed on countless occasions. Though the fighting was vicious, prisoners and wounded were shown mercy almost without exception, the soldiers of both armies recognising that the culture and values of the opposing sides were so similar as to make hatred of one soldier for another all but impossible on an individual level. The nations warring on the Western Front comprised peoples who were almost kin.
Goettner chose his words carefully as he spoke:
‘It’s the kind of letter that should be delivered, Herr Hauptmann. It needs to reach her …’ Goettner fished in his tunic to retrieve the envelope, a messy thing smeared red across the address handwritten in black ink, illegible because of the sergeant’s blood. Only a few characters of the last line could be made out. The flap of the envelope remained neat and clean: the sergeant had not sealed it. Goettner passed it to Schiller, who examined the address, deciphering the only word he could make out.
‘Camden …’ Schiller said. ‘That would be Camden … It’s a borough of London.’
Schiller returned the pages and bloody envelope to Goettner, who folded and replaced them in their envelope. He pocketed the missive.
‘Well, Rudi,’ Schiller sounded weary as he rose from the fire-step. ‘Enough of this. Let us think awhile about what we will do. Meanwhile, there are things to take care of. Maybe Tommy will counterattack. I must check further up the trench.’
Schiller was still watching Goettner for sign of nerves. None. He continued:
‘Our orders are to hold position until twenty-one hundred. The relief will arrive then, though probably it will be late as usual. We’ve a rest village allocated to us in the rear, well back from the line. When we get there we’ll have four days’ rest.’
Schiller saw Goettner’s ill-concealed dismay. He shook his head:
‘No, Rudi. I’m afraid not. I wanted longer, of course. I asked for it. But the answer is no. Four days is all they will give us. Pass the word along: food and sleep in a nice, quiet village. Maybe girls, too … It will motivate the men to stay on their toes. Do it now, will you? Probably the British don’t have the strength for any counterattack, but you never know. Let’s be ready, just in case.’
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---oOo---
Four days … Not enough: they needed more. The men marching with Schiller through the night were weary beyond description. One had only to consider their drawn, unshaven faces, cheeks sucked-in for lack of good food and sufficient rest, red-rimmed eyes staring dully from within expressionless faces under the bobbing, coalscuttle helmets. The intensity of the recent fighting had sapped their energy.
Uniforms, too, needed attention. They were torn and filthy, the men’s jackboots scuffed and scratched. Only their rifles remained clean.
In Schiller’s view, they needed at least ten days, and this had been requested, though not by him. In truth, it had been their battalion commander who had asked for the additional rest, the Herr Major himself making a personal representation to regimental headquarters. His reward had been a sharp and immediate dressing-down by the regiment’s commanding officer, a man clearly as weary as the rest of them, but also quite capable of taking umbrage at his major’s impertinence: ‘Not my decision, Herr Major. The order comes from Division, you understand.’ The CO was clearly annoyed: Who the hell was this man, this mere major, to query anything coming down from Regiment, let alone Division with its gaggle of rung-climbing brass hats?
Now, leading his kompanie through the night on the first leg of the route to the rear, Schiller cursed roundly under his breath: Clueless armchair warriors! What did they know of the realities of this fight? Next to nothing. Their war was all maps and theoretical rates of movement, calculated battle schedules and marvellous manoeuvres, often impossible to execute. Schiller resented greatly the pressure coming down on him, his men, and indeed on everybody in the frontlines on account of High Command’s constant need to feed ever more men into the wider offensive so that their plans might succeed.
It was raining. Around him as he led the way, the land was all shell-torn fields and pasture with knots of battered, blasted trees broken so terribly by high explosive that little remained of them save the trunks of some, others still showing the stumps of what had once been branches, now blown off and lying twisted and splintered on the ground. This was no man’s land. More accurately, it had been no man’s land until today’s attack when it had been taken. It remained dangerous, a place of devastation dotted with obstacles and pitfalls for the unwary: deep and puddled craters, decomposing cattle and horses, sometimes teams of these animals long dead but still in harness to the ruined chassis of whatever they had been hauling when the shells had struck, now rotting food for maggots. There were bodies, too, of course. Soldiers’ bodies.
Schiller picked a path. The rain was steady and the temperature low enough for many in the marching column to don trench coats against the wet that made them cold. The squelch of boots and the drumming of rainfall against helmets, packs, rifles and cloth: these were the sounds filling Schiller’s ears. They were utterly familiar.
Crossing this ground that was now theirs, few in the column attempted conversation. The day had been hard and they were tired. Also, they were subdued by knowledge of comrades killed and still scattered round about, hidden by the dark. They had seen the killing, and now they tried to forget everything the previous four days had brought to this place.
Yet to forget was impossible, for they were forced to breathe in air foul with the smell of death despite the rain, and many thanked God that they could not see the bodies still present, still out there on the shell-scarred fields, those men who had belonged either to their own unit or to their sister formation, the Fifth Regiment, who had led the rush to the wire in their final, successful, attack.
At the point of the march, Schiller was charting a route around and between the shell holes and corpses, maintaining an even and unpressured pace. He remembered how things had been during the hours immediately following the attack, when parties of stretcher bearers had darted here and there across these dangerous fields. Brave groups of four men apiece, the bearers had been leery of snipers and the occasional shell lobbed by the big, long-range British guns. They’d been carrying casualties who would not live if they waited for nightfall to hide their passage, doing what they could to get the badly wounded out while life still remained. Forced by daylight to move quickly, they’d arrowed across the open ground, their goal the safety of the Siegfriedstellung’s fortifications, those deep trenches from which they had launched their attack and behind which lay the field hospital.
That afternoon, Schiller had used field glasses to watch those stretcher bearers, waiting with the others for the British counterattack that never came. Once, while he was watching, he saw a carrying party and its load blown to bits by a random, unlucky shell: all dead, all gone. Such waste! Ja, they were heroes, those soldiers, performing their duty despite the risks. They cocked a snook at danger, and did their best to save life anyway.
Marching, Schiller remembered it all, and he recalled the British sniper, too, whose murderous marksmanship was far worse, far more hatefully concentrated than any random artillery shell could ever be. The hidden killer had begun to pick off the bearers at random from around midday, his position taking a good few hours for the Germans to locate and fix while more lives were lost and other men wounded. Then, a fighting patrol had scaled a trench ladder and used ditches, shell craters and natural folds in the ground to hide from the sniper’s view while they made their approach, mostly crawling until they were close enough to rush the marksman before he could switch his aim. There had been no shortage of volunteers for this particular mission, Schiller remembered. Snipers were vermin best exterminated.
The march continued, the darkness and soaking rain hiding Schiller and his men who relied on hearing more than vision as they moved, each soldier following the sound of the man in front: squelching mud, drumming droplets, the soft metallic click and chink of rifle sling, bayonet, entrenching tool and other military hardware. Beyond this could be heard the booming cannons of both sides, deep and distant but behind them now, the flash and flicker of a duel unseen. Ahead, only the shoulders of the man in front, a vague shadow seen through the downpour.
Marching, leading the way, Schiller could feel his fatigue as something physical – a burden, a load – the result of too little sleep, and he was glad of the straightforward simplicity of his current task. He could use his compass without needing to be alert for enemy patrols, knowing there would be no skirmish. Also, the British artillery had for the time being ceased its random shelling of this particular ground, perhaps to conserve ammunition. Even so, shell craters loomed everywhere as deep pits best avoided, with sides steep enough to cause a sprain or worse, and holding puddles of decomposing filth collected at their bases. In the darkness, Schiller could pick them out as pools of denser black. He plotted a path around them.
Thus moved the column, the men’s pace brisk and steady. The rhythm became routine, allowing Schiller’s thoughts to drift. He found himself assessing his officers, their morale and readiness: only two, now, with Bochmann killed. Well, Bochmann’s sergeant, Knauer, was capable enough. He would look after things. As for the officers, Goettner was by far the more experienced and dependable, Schiller’s most senior man.
Rudi Goettner had been a continuous presence in the kompanie since joining directly from officer training back in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of war. Back then, he’d been the kompanie’s most junior officer until, over time, the others had been either killed, wounded or promoted out to command kompanies of their own. Schiller himself hadn’t known those officers. He’d taken command of this unit only in October, six months ago when the regiment had still been in Russian Poland. He’d replaced a man shot during the regiment’s final days there, and Goettner had been of enormous assistance helping him get to know his new command.
Goettner interested Schiller, though this interest carried with it a conundrum that had as its root Goettner’s natural and very obvious qualities of leadership. The oberleutnant seemed to have discovered his natural niche – his life’s calling – among the chaotic madness of this war that threatened to consume all. To Schiller’s eyes, Goettner thrived within battle’s deadly grasp. No order was ever too daunting, no odds ever so great they caused him to waver. The man simply refused to be stalled in his determination to overcome, to win through. Goettner was unstoppable, holding within his heart the warrior spirit of one who accepted death’s inevitability and, indeed, seemed to be enamoured of the idea of bringing forward the day of its arrival, something that worked in his favour because it enabled him to face down fear. To Schiller’s eyes, Goettner relished the challenge of armed conflict as something wonderful.
Such qualities were diametrically opposed to those of Schiller himself, who was anything but a natural leader. Yet he was competent enough, the product of a thorough selection and training process that had seen fit to commission him and bestow promotion over time to the rank of hauptmann. Now he led almost two hundred soldiers, his kompanie.
The differences between the two men therefore lay not in their ability to lead, but more in the fact that Schiller’s own style of leadership had needed careful encouragement and much polishing by the military system to bring it out before he was ready to exercise it. Schiller had had to study leadership, learning the intangible quality of the thing by committed observation of the example of others. He had needed time, training and much development. By contrast, Goettner’s leadership was innate.
Another difference between the two was Schiller’s religion. Schiller was a Jew, and Europe’s widespread suspicion of the Jewish people had carried over from the previous century, remaining even in this time of war. Additionally, Schiller was better educated than Goettner, and sophisticated too, carrying with him a great love of music, art and other things cultural.
So, Schiller was in no way inferior to Goettner as a patriot carrying the Kaiser’s commission. Indeed, one significant area in which Schiller’s leadership skills surpassed those of Goettner was in the field of individual analysis. Here, his abilities were nothing less than spectacular. Schiller observed keenly and conscientiously all men under his command, including Goettner, calculating and recording the internal, personal forces driving the individual onward or holding him back.
It was precisely this skill that was allowing Schiller to make comparisons between himself and Goettner as he led his men through the rainy night. He did it objectively. Principally the differences were physical, for where Goettner was tall and muscularly lean, Schiller was of medium height and heavy with it, so that he bore the hardships of infantry life with more difficulty than did Goettner. Still, Schiller knew his skills in personal analysis more than compensated for this shortcoming when it came to motivating and guiding the men. Goettner’s penetrating stare, remarkable in its instinctive assessment of the probable intentions of those falling under its lens, might have been an advantage natural to the oberleutnant, yet its power fell short of Schiller’s meticulous measuring of individual capability through observation over time.
Such were Schiller’s thoughts and worries concerning Goettner, though there was no conflict at all between the two, no suspicion or distrust, no lack of mutual respect or confidence of either man in the abilities of the other. Schiller and Goettner worked well together and with the rest of the kompanie, too. Nevertheless, from time to time Schiller thought Goettner might do a better job of leading the men – all the men – than Schiller himself was doing. Certainly, he knew Goettner would be promoted to hauptmann very soon, and probably posted out if he survived long enough in this current fighting that was claiming so many, so quickly. Either way, Schiller knew he would miss the man despite jealousy of his natural skills, a jealousy Schiller strove always to hide, usually successfully.
Both these men – both officers – were natives of West Prussia, but from different towns. A few months short of his twenty-third birthday, Schiller was younger than his oberleutnant by almost a full year, though this gap made no difference in a war that quickly aged all men. Certainly, it was not enough to bestow upon Goettner any advantage of manipulation of Schiller to his own ends. In origin, age and military training the two held much in common, yet it ended there, for besides their physical differences and styles of leadership, Schiller was a career officer who had enlisted as a professional soldier directly from school, the year before war broke out. Goettner, on the other hand, was a volunteer who would quit when the war was over.
So, their lives held different objectives, and because of this there was an underlying unease, slight, hidden and never verbalised, never brought into the open for discussion or resolution, yet nonetheless ever-present as something tacit and suppressed.
Schiller’s apprehension was complicated by the fact that he had been forced to lie about his religion in order to achieve his goal of commissioned rank. The Prussian Army that had driven the emergence of the German Empire in 1871 barred Jews from becoming officers, and even though the commissioning laws changed as they applied to the reserves when war broke out in 1914, Jews remained outlawed from holding commissioned rank in the professional German Army. Therefore, because of this one lie so necessary to his life’s goal yet so utterly unforgiveable were it ever to be discovered, Schiller held his rank illegally.
Schiller thought about it as he marched. He thought about the lie but chose to ignore it, shutting it out as he always did. Instead, he directed his thoughts to the changes wrought upon himself and Goettner by the war and the fighting, alterations forced upon all who were exposed to battle. Earlier in the war, at the end of his first year of it, Schiller had not considered himself much changed other than having become physically and mentally tougher. Yet a brief home leave had alerted him to the fact that the unconsciously rewrought Schiller might well have become a personality very different from how he saw himself, for his family now seemed nervous of him. They kept their distance, sometimes even physically pulling back a centimetre or two when he approached to speak – a sort of startled jump – and it was surely not they who had changed.
Well, it wasn’t surprising, really. One had only to look at the men around, none of whom was past his mid-twenties and most still teenagers. Their faces were set hard against all things, and their eyes mirrored the horrors they had witnessed over the months or, for some, the years.
Schiller pondered the battle just over, four days that had become the latest in the regiment’s string of brutal encounters, first with the Russians, now the British.
Their attack that morning had followed two earlier assaults against this part of the line where the enemy had stubbornly refused to yield. Four days ago, in the afternoon, two regiments had launched the first offensive: five thousand men supported by tanks, armoured newcomers to the battlefield. Hoping to punch through the British defences, the flaw had been the artillery: it had lifted its bombardment too soon, leaving the defenders ample time to man their fire-steps and ready themselves. Displaying impressive fire discipline, the British had held back until the attacking regiments were less than three hundred metres away, when they had let loose a concentrated volley at such a rapid rate that Schiller had thought them under the whip of machine guns. Many at the tip of the advance had fallen in mere seconds – so many there had not even been time for the attack to appreciably falter: it had simply stopped, and well short of the objective, too. The British had followed up by calling down artillery upon survivors who had been forced to use the cover of shell holes until nightfall when, abandoning their dead, they had withdrawn to their own lines, carrying their wounded with them.
Schiller’s kompanie had lost one man in five during the slaughter of that first day; other units lost as many as one in three.
Next day, replacements and a third regiment, the Fifth, had arrived to beef things up, so that some seven thousand men had torn into the British just after dawn of the third day. This time – yesterday morning – the artillery had used gas along with high explosive and airburst shells to pummel the objective, and they had not lifted their fire until a newly launched observation balloon reported casualties in the front ranks from their own artillery. With deadly determination, the attacking troops had charged, storming the British trenches after hacking paths through the tangled barbed wire, gaining the forward line and forcing the defenders back. Yet this victory was short-lived. A determined counterattack caught the Germans low on ammunition. They had withdrawn the way they had come, under fire the whole way and taking steady casualties that came close to equalling the numbers lost on Day One.
More replacements arrived, youngsters barely old enough to shave, yanked early from their training camps, shoved into the three regiments and hurled into the cauldron of the third attack at dawn this morning. Many had broken. They had turned tail and run, unable to cope with the terror they had been ordered to face with insufficient training. It was the courage and overwhelming strength of the others – the veterans – that had won through, for the British defenders had been reduced from an already understrength regiment of three thousand to a mere sixteen hundred by the attacks of the previous days, though the assaulting soldiers had not known these numbers at the time. With just one thousand holding the forward trenchline, Schiller’s and the other attacking regiments had outnumbered the defence by almost five to one. The attack had succeeded.
All this had occurred around just one village, Foncquevillers, just one point in a very great offensive that was Germany’s biggest yet: three quarters of a million men, sixty-six hundred artillery pieces, three thousand mortars, three hundred and fifty fighter aircraft, all mounting an uninterrupted line of attack over a front of a hundred and forty kilometres aimed at encircling the British Army and, if it did not then surrender, annihilating it before wheeling in a carefully planned manoeuvre to fall upon the French and force their surrender too.
There was very great pressure of time, though, on this massive attack codenamed Operation Michael. The Americans had landed and were busy organising at the ports: one million fresh troops. The first of their divisions had already gone up the line to gain experience. Germany’s current efforts to defeat the British Army – their enormous breakout in which Schiller’s regiment was a mere speck – had therefore to achieve its objective before the United States Army was fully ready to do battle. Were this to happen, Germany faced certain defeat.
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In the rest village, the soldiers relaxed, drinking.
Schiller and Goettner sat together, a little aside from the main group, these men who had made it through. All were recovering, nerves still strained in the first hours of their recuperation. They were doing their best to forget, warmed by April sunshine that had vanquished the rain of the previous night. Drink and women were uppermost in the minds of most: things guaranteed to provide salve for the soul, the former already easing memory of the past four days, the other a longed-for possibility.
Schiller and Goettner had eaten. They had bathed and shaved, too, Schiller tucking a clean blouse into filthy trousers worn under an equally filthy tunic; he would pass his laundry to a batman when the regiment’s rear echelon caught up and delivered clean clothes packed with the rest of their kit. Goettner, sitting opposite, had not changed. His uniform was still grubby from head to toe. Schiller thought the man probably carried no spare blouse in his pack, whereas he himself liked to carry one as a mark of self-respect and status for moments like this, when they were still separated from their gear. Well, laundry wasn’t a priority right now, and nobody really cared who was clean and who was not.
There was a bottle of cognac upon their table. Glasses, too.
Schiller sipped, watching without seeing the kompanie’s survivors in their celebration of life. He was absorbed in his memories of the three successive attacks. Both he and Goettner were much shaken, though neither showed it. Nerves stretched taut as violin strings by what they had endured, and tauter still by the prospect of battle still to come, their minds jumped randomly from one remembered image to the next: mutilation, death, men falling to the British fire, wounded who groaned or remained mysteriously silent. And the enemy, the terrified British, eyes wide with fear as Schiller’s men swarmed the trench and killed them, their look of terror changing to shocked gratitude when allowed to live and be taken prisoner.
It was because of these images that the kompanie drank, trying to forget. Yet they remembered everything with crystal clarity.
Eventually Schiller said:
‘That letter … We must do something about it.’
He waited for Goettner’s reply, pretending to look absently about him. The arrival of the remnants of three regiments had transformed this village where sat Schiller and Goettner, and other villages too. So many men … They had energised this part of Flanders. Around the soldiers, all was peaceful. The village held a church, a main street with a small estaminet to supply liquor, a handful of houses and a single road leading in and out. Schiller’s feldwebel, the company sergeant-major, had quartered the men in barns beyond the last of the village buildings. The officers, though, and the senior NCOs – the sergeants – were in better luck: the town major, military administrator of the settlement, had allocated them homes in the village itself, ordering the families living there to take good care of their temporary guests.
When all this had been accomplished, when all were quartered, the men packed into the village estaminet, transforming the tiny establishment into a noisy, jolly place wreathed in tobacco smoke and reeking of sweat and newly spilled wine and beer. Inside and out, drinkers stood, or sat at tables holding glasses and bottles they emptied almost as quickly as the proprietor and his waiter could replace them. The intention of every man was to drink his fill before he slept. There was bellowed conversation. There were ribald songs sung at a shout, and guffaws of forced laughter at dark humour born of the trenches. The soldiers drank, determined to do everything within their power to put behind them what they had seen, what they had survived.
Goettner, when he had considered Schiller’s observation about the letter, replied:
‘Ja, we must do something. It has been bothering me, Herr Hauptmann. I don’t want to keep it.’
Schiller sipped again, watching Goettner across the table. The oberleutnant was pacing himself, it seemed, controlling his drinking, making the day last. Such a difficult attack, yesterday’s. Who could forget the burning observation balloon, exploding to turn the dawn sky a cruel red? Who could forget their advance to the wire, Tommy bullets hissing and zipping angrily about them, missing some but finding the flesh and bone of others? And all those bodies, all those men of the Fifth … Who could forget them, horrible to see as they dangled on the wire where the breaches they had made had cost them their lives? Schiller remembered Goettner hovering over a man felled there, face down and already dead, his friend kneeling uncomprehendingly beside him, urging him to get up. Goettner had dragged the kneeling man to his feet and propelled him forward to the trench itself and the desperate fight within, discharging his pistol left and right at pointblank range, helping his men who were hacking and stabbing and punching and bayoneting a determined enemy fighting back with equally desperate determination. So many dead …
Schiller shook his head to banish the images, sipping and switching focus to their more recent march through the night just past, five kilometres rearward to the second line. Thank God for the waiting motor transport! Tired men had clambered gratefully aboard lorries that had carried them a similar distance to their third and rearmost line, then beyond, all the way to this village, their four-day refuge almost twenty kilometres from the fighting. Yes, thank God for the transport. It had saved exhausted men a long march along roads jammed with troop columns and supply convoys loaded with munitions and food. Cannons, too, as the artillery moved up to match the line’s advance.
Around Schiller and Goettner at their table, the village was a contrast to all of that, a peaceful, bucolic place where the locals wandered about here and there, doing whatever villagers did. The war had not yet reached here. There was none of the damage wrought by artillery on other hamlets and towns, some of which had been reduced to little more than rubble.
Artillery … Schiller listened, cocking an ear. Yes, he could still hear it. The irregular, thumping rumble reached even this village so very far behind the line. Well, never mind. He was glad to be alive: alive with Goettner, alive with these other men now drinking their fill. Though many were gone, these at least still lived. It was enough.
Goettner was asking a question:
‘How to deliver it, Herr Hauptmann? How do we deliver the letter?’
Schiller met Goettner’s steady stare, sometimes so unnerving.
‘Where is it, Rudi?’
Goettner tapped a tunic pocket, then moved his hand to produce a steel hip flask from another. The thing was still smeared red from the sergeant’s blood. He passed it across the table to Schiller, who examined the trophy. There was an inscription: ‘Come back to me. Christine.’
Passing the flask back to Goettner, Schiller said:
‘Same girl. The man was carrying it as a keepsake. It’s the same woman, I think.’
‘Ja, Herr Hauptmann. Same girl.’
Silence for a while.
The same girl …
Goettner wondered if she was like his own sweetheart, his girl in Graudenz. He permitted himself brief memory of a visit home, his only visit in this very long war, ten days away from the line when the regiment had still been in Russian Poland.
His sweetheart …
He had promenaded her along the Lindenstrasse with its fine buildings, treed pavements and modern tramway. One afternoon, beside the river, there had been more than mere promenading, much more, and Goettner wanted to return to her, wanted to go home. He wondered what it might be like to win his sweetheart’s love on the same, very deep level as the British sergeant had won the love of his Camden woman.
Goettner’s thoughts were drifting, but not Schiller’s. He was mentally weighing the letter written by that sergeant. It had become something of an obligation, its delivery a debt of chivalry owed to an honourable enemy – both he and Goettner would expect similar were the situation to be somehow reversed, one of them lying sprawled dead in a trench somewhere, undelivered letter retrieved by the conqueror.
Schiller wondered at the Britischer’s love for his lady: What was it exactly, love? Who could explain it, understand it? Yet it was so. It existed as something perennial, something real. Love lived as a great motivator of men, a fundamental driving force of those fortunate enough to have found it, existing as perhaps their greatest inspiration.
‘If we try to get the letter delivered, Rudi, how will we do it? Prisoner-of-war camp? There is still a service operating for prisoners – a mail service.’
Goettner showed surprise at this. It seemed nonsense, for here were three countries doing their utmost to slaughter each other’s young men every day – France, Britain, Germany – and yet mail between prisoners and their families continued. It was difficult to believe.
Schiller expanded:
‘It’s a fact. A friend at Brigade told me he received a letter from a brother officer who’d gone missing. He wrote it as soon as the Tommies got him back to one of their camps … Even addressed it personally. That letter got through. It was still delivered. There’s a mail service for prisoners.’
A new sound joined the rumble of the distant artillery, distracting the drinking men. Goettner looked up. Around the officers, conversation within the main group died, all looking anxiously to the sky as four aircraft approached the village, black specks against the blue. British? German? Men moved quickly to disappear into the cover of houses: better safe than sorry. Someone produced binoculars for identification.
‘Ours,’ he shouted. ‘They’re ours!’
The wary slunk back from their holes, the revelry assuming a greater level of intensity and desperation. Schiller picked up the thread of his conversation:
‘We might also consider prisoner repatriation. We could hunt down a swap. It might be quicker … Goettner, are you listening to me?’
So, thought Goettner, the surname once again. Schiller had reverted to form.
‘I’m listening, Herr Hauptmann. Sorry. Those aircraft …’ And he poured more cognac. Schiller continued:
‘Sometimes they send the very seriously wounded to Switzerland: blind men, limbs lost, facial injuries, things like that. Especially captured medical personnel … There are prisoner exchanges. We could try the field hospital … Go there and ask, maybe get the letter back with the next batch. It’s not far from here. And we could go to the camp itself, check if anybody is likely to be sent across from where the prisoners are.’
‘There are only three more days, Herr Hauptmann. It’s all we have.’
Schiller’s reply was a grunt of disapproval. He said:
‘I will go. I’d only need a day for it. I’ll go tomorrow if you’ll trust me with the letter.’
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Winterman's Letter by Alan Thrush is a World War One tale that tackles a topic that often goes unexplored; the erasure of men and their individual story in a destructive conflict.
The war is coming to an end in 1918 and we follow several characters in and out of the trenches. On one side, Schiller and Gottenger from Germany are two older, more experienced soldiers trying to survive the remaining months of a losing battle. On the other, British soldier Rodrick Reynolds digs in as the American forces arrive to turn the tide. Finally, we have Rodrick's sister Christine who builds her own connections while assisting on the homefront.
At the centre is the titular letter, penned by a fallen British soldier and later discovered by the German side. This document is tied in closely with memorials to the unknown soldier. Many soldiers lost could not be recovered from No Man's Land and Winterman's Letter carries some strong resonance for the mourning that unfolded. As the chapters swap between the characters, we see constant references to the letter and the lack of information that hangs over the setting.
This thematic grounding is the book's greatest strength, though it does come at the cost of character depth. We do see some personal backgrounds and an epilogue that wraps everything up nicely, but each member of the story is fairly standard-fare. Schiller, Gottenger and Reynolds are all soldiers with heavy weights on their mind. They reflect on how they can survive the coming months without going much further in terms of depth. Christine's connection with a wounded soldier in a Camden hospital is also straightforward. Still, when the battle scenes heat up, the book features some visceral language that pulls the reader into the barrage of artillery.
If you're a fan of history and older conflicts, Winterman's Letter is a good diversion for those looking to go beyond the carnage of battle, though you should be prepared for some lesser elements where character work is concerned.