Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [85]
Burmaster turned his head left. "Getting older with each passing day is the natural order of the universe, wouldn't you say, Rolf?"
Rolf Quast walked beside Burmaster. He had become accustomed to Burmaster's jovial prattle, and only occasionally encouraged him with a grunt, which Quast did just then.
"Well, then, I have reversed the natural order, because I appear to be getting younger with each day." Burmaster held up a hand to prevent Quast from interrupting, as if there were a chance of that. "You ask, 'How can that be, Heinz? Such cannot be the case, Heinz,' you protest."
Quast also wore a four days' growth of beard. His eyes were heavily bagged, and his earlobes had sunk with age and the wattles under his chin swung with each step. Quast and Burmaster were bringing up the rear of a double-file column of Home Guards, a hundred reserve soldiers walking at a desultory pace, their captain in front, bent over a city map, trying to study it while walking along, the map tilted toward the orange light from a burning building they were passing. Red Army shells fluttered overhead, sounding like tearing cloth. The moon appeared briefly, but then high clouds and low smoke obscured it once more.
The handle of Burmaster's entrenching tool was knocking his knee, so he yanked it along the belt where it hung next to his bread bag, which contained a fist-sized chunk of black bread. Before each time Burmaster bit into the bread, he tapped it against the side of his boot so the beetles would crawl out. Most of the bugs anyway, he hoped. Burmaster was usually too hungry to be particular about a few bread bugs. In the rucksack on his back was a blanket and a Bible and nothing more. The Pan- zerfaust was his only weapon.
He said, "I was too old for the Great War, Rolf. I tried to enlist, but the army wouldn't take me. Nor the navy. I lied about my age, but the recruiting sergeants saw the wrinkles around my eyes and laughed me away. And this was thirty years ago."
Rolf Quast cleared his throat, which Burmaster took as an invitation to continue. "But, as you can plainly see, I am not too old for this war. Hence, I must be getting younger."
Quast harrumphed pleasantly.
Burmaster added, "I don't doubt that Germany shall see yet another war in my lifetime, but by then I will be an infant, and too young to fight."
Quast asked, "How old are you, Heinz?"
"Sixty-six."
"Two years older than me. We are both too old to be lugging antitank rockets around the city, I'd say. You ever fired one before?"
Burmaster followed the column to one side of the street to avoid a crater. "We didn't have enough of them to waste them on training. So our instructor made us point them at a wood mock-up of a British Matilda, and pretend to pull the trigger, and yell out 'Shoosh' to imitate the sound of the launch. Then the instructor would call out 'Boom' to show I'd hit the tank. I'm a good shot, apparently." He tapped the Panzerfaust affectionately.
The column of old men wound its way along Pleger Street, dodging some mounds of rubble, having to climb over others. British bombers had dropped fire canisters on the neighborhood, and they had landed haphazardly, igniting dozens of buildings along the street, sparing others. This was not the first time Pleger Street had been hit, and so some of the fires had to content themselves with devouring buildings that had already been tossed by high explosives while other fires worked away on apartments that had been inhabited until the air-raid sirens of two hours ago.
The fires marked the Home Guard column's way, each blaze casting brilliant, dancing light out over the rubble and ruin, which then threw black shadows further on. The guardsmen marched from light to dark to light again. They lingered when they passed through each pool of warmth, and the column stretched and compressed, stretched