The Cherries of Freedom by Alfred Andersch

In Denmark, there it was again, at my side, whispering, a shadow that I covered with my body as I lay in the heather on the lookout as the tanks approached me. And when I picked up a pebble on the beach at Hobro and skimmed it out across the Mariager Fjord, it hissed the words "desertion" and "freedom" on the waves before it sank.

But that night on the plains of the Arno, the thought no longer needed to say a thing. It bided in silence. It had become the night and the bridge and my pipe. Things do not say anything. They simply are.

It was perfectly clear and straightforward.

I heard them approaching from a long way off, voices, a laugh, a shout, the clatter of guns and wheels. A sergeant at the front called out to me: "What's going on? How much more of this crap?" The squadron drew to a halt behind him. The sergeant was drunk; the NCO beside him was drunk; the reconnaissance squad behind them, to which I belonged, was sober.

"Another fifty kilometres, sir," I said. "We'll be on the Aurelia soon-"

"Fuck," he yelled, "another fifty kilometres. So what's this Rosalia?"

"The coastal road. The squad will rest over for the day five hundred metres past a village called Ravi. The military police will show you where to cross the river. The bridges are all down." "Right," he said, suddenly sober. "Don't we have the Luftwaffe any more?" He gave the sign to drive on. "Get your bike from the truck and then come up front!"

Permission had been given to move in a more relaxed manner, and the squad had removed their steel helmets, unbuttoned their combat jackets, then rolled up their sleeves. I could see their faces and their hair as they drove past. The night had rendered their hair dark and their faces evenly light, and only if one of them had blond hair did it gleam in the moonlight. They moved on at a steady pace, though now and then one of them would have to brake because he'd been travelling too fast. Their faces were dulled and their eyes were fixed on the column, but their expressions were not yet weary. Since the vanguard leaders and NCOs were drunk, they drove erratically but quickly, lurching from one side of the road to the other but somehow always managing at the last moment to keep out of the ditches. The soldiers maintained an unchanging distance between themselves and the drunks up ahead, and the squad remained intact as it moved.

I was sick and tired of every man jack of them, my so-called comrades in arms. I couldn't stand the sight of them. The worst was that they were always there. The fellowship of comrades in arms meant you never had a moment to yourself. Fellowship meant that you could never close the door behind you and be alone.

Until two days previously, most of them had believed that Hitler would be victorious. They had believed it until the hour when we were set down in Carrara and learnt that the division was being sent to the front line, in five night-time drives. At that point, the front was still south of Rome, and the enemy-their enemy, not mine-was preparing to break through at Nettuno and Cassino. But we did not know that. All we knew was that we had to be put out at Carrara, north of the Arno, because the railways from there down to Rome were no longer usable. We knew that we could not be seen on the roads in daytime, not on any roads on the Italian peninsula, because the enemy air forces-their enemy, not mine-now had a free hand from Syracuse to Bolzano, and no aircraft of the German Luftwaffe dared show itself in the Italian skies by day.

The strategic situation of the 20th and 21st Luftwaffe Field Divisions was that they were fully equipped and semi-motorised, and had tanks and tactical artillery at their disposal. They had been thoroughly trained for mobile warfare for a year, in Belgium and Denmark. The units consisted of youthful squads fired by conviction, and they had just been put into a theatre of war where the forces of the Western powers had just victoriously achieved a breakthrough. At the very moment when these divisions arrived on the scene, the general staff of the southern front knew that Rome and central Italy were lost. I do not know what tactical operations Field Marshal Kesselring had originally had in mind for these divisions; it may even be that he planned to use them to launch an offensive (something he would never have dreamt of if he had still had access to aerial reconnaissance)-but when they arrived, he had no alternative but to use them to cover the retreat. For that reason, he kept all the invaluable heavy and medium weaponry on the Arno, and those he ordered south on rapid night-time marches were merely the "mounted squadrons"-infantry sections of the regiments, armed with carbines and light machine-guns. By so doing, within three days he lost two powerful divisions of a kind Germany scarcely possessed any more at that date; for the units were caught as an American armour division (from Texas; its emblem was a red bull's head on a black field) fanned out in the course of its advance on Viterbo and Grosseto, and they were taken prisoner with hardly a shot being fired by either side.

Field Marshal Kesselring should not be reproached on this account. Quite the contrary: his mistake saved the lives of most of the soldiers in the two divisions….

Something or other had of course happened to my so-called comrades in arms since their arrival two days previously. I sensed it as they passed me in the night, in the pale light of the moon. During the march they were dull and worn by weariness, but nonetheless they were thinking of the armoured cars that had been left behind somewhere near Pisa. They were wonderful, bright new armoured cars, and now the soldiers had realised that there was to be no dazzling attack in the style of manoeuvres, following after the tanks with their long cannon. They were already at the stage where, from their cover, they would gaze after squadrons of American aircraft flying north with a kind of detached, aesthetic admiration. I do not know if they still believed in victory then. But at all events they were still willing to fight for it.

Should I choose not to desert for their sake? Remain with my unit in the name of camaraderie? The very idea was laughable. They were making it easy to bid farewell. My time in the unit was marked by a magnificent feeling of anarchism. I knew that, one way or another, they were headed for annihilation. I knew that I would not share in their destruction: either I would make it, or I would find some special form of destruction that was mine alone. There was no chance whatsoever of talking to even a single one of these "comrades"-I couldn't have been sure that I would not be denounced. I had to take the risk entirely on my own. If I had been able to take just one of the young men into my confidence, the ring of arrogance that encircled me would have been broken; as it was, I was possessed of that magnificent, anarchic, arrogant feeling. I presumed to judge not only the actions of Field Marshal Kesselring but also the attitude of the ordinary soldiers around me. I am sorry that, even now, I am unable to retract that feeling. Mine was the better assessment of the situation.

I have a very poor memory for names, and for that reason I am no longer in a position to put a name to certain soldiers I really ought to name at this point, because their objections to what I have said were substantial. I am, of course, myself the one who maintains that they objected-they themselves would say nothing, like that corporal who never said a word and never wanted any thanks whenever he deftly and swiftly put to rights, according to regulations, the backpack I was forever at bitter and silent loggerheads with. I did have lengthy conversations, on the other hand, with a soldier by the name of Werner, who was a dispatch rider like myself and wanted to study after the war. The two of us talked about literature and art, and I gave him potted historical overviews of the art of the regions we were passing through by night-as far as my own knowledge made possible. He had a taste for straying from the prescribed route. One morning, for instance, when the squadron was overcome with exhaustion and was breaking up into groups and single riders, he pointed to a mown wheat-field where the corn was already stacked in sheaves.

"We could easily have a couple of hours of sleep," he said, "and catch up with the others in the morning."

"But what about the planes," I objected. "We can hardly move on the roads in the daytime."

"Don't worry so much," he answered. "There are two of us. We'll make it."

We lay down on the sheaves, and covered ourselves with sheaves, and promptly fell asleep. Around ten we awoke from restless slumbers with a slight headache. Blinking, we looked up at the sky, which was full of the throb of aircraft, but far off in the distance, with not a plane in sight. We reached for our bicycles. The sun lambasted us with strokes of heat. The road was completely deserted. We were in the flatlands of marram grass, and a river flowed through them, with a makeshift bridge improvised across it. We had just made it to the bridge when we heard aircraft. We could not make out how close they were because tall trees limited what we could see. "Get the hell off that bridge!" a sapper who'd been put on watch yelled out. We rode across as fast as we could. Then we saw a string of Lightnings coming our way and threw ourselves into the roadside ditch, grabbing our helmets from our belts and covering our heads with them. We lay there breathing in the moist smell of earth and grass in the ditch and thinking: I hope they don't see our bikes. But the planes-or rather, the men in the planes-were after the bridge, and aimed their bombs at the stretch of road on the other side. We watched the smoke and earth blossoming up and breathed a sigh of relief. After the danger was over, we stayed there, lying in the ditch, for a long time. the heat had left us apathetic with exhaustion, and we were enjoying our enforced rest. "Come on. Let's get going!" Werner gasped after a while, and laboriously we got to our feet.