Resistance by Owen Sheers Read Free Book Online Page A

hundred? More, probably. After all, he’d carried on firing through their retreat too, left and right, right and left, cutting up the surf, planting reefs of bullets on which the Allied soldiers foundered and drowned.
    He was a slight boy, Otto. Pale with deep black hair. Thin wrists. But strong enough to swing that machine gun, left and right, right and left. His physique made Albrecht aware again of the perverted nature of this war. That a boy as slim, as small, as birdlike as Otto could kill so many men. Halfway through that morning Albrecht had caught his face, motionless under his helmet, lit by the narrow slit in the bunker and dirty like today except for the white tributaries of tear marks mapping down his cheeks. By the evening these were covered with dirt too and he’d looked as he did now. Open eyes, unblinking. Impassive. Something inside him had broken, stretched, and snapped. One bullet in the thousands had been a bullet too far. Albrecht had seen it before, but never so cleanly. Never such a clean fracture of the soul. And never such a silent break either. Silent ever since. Sebald had looked him over and passed him fit, but no one had yet pushed him to speak. There was no need. They’d all seen what he’d done that day and they were all grateful for it; grateful he’d done it and grateful it was him who had, not them.
    Albrecht took a last drag on the cigarette, studying Otto’s profile as he did so. He would take Otto. A strange choice perhaps, but for all his silence he’d proved himself an efficient soldier in the fighting since. And in the more intimate company of a patrol, it was just possible he might be nurtured back to voice. He’d passed his watershed, his own tidemark. He’d stepped through the looking glass and was therefore probably, despite his temporary muteness, more stable than many of the other privates who, as yet, appeared to be functioning normally.
    So, Steiner, Sebald, Klepper, and Schütze Mann. Private Mann. Albrecht couldn’t help acknowledging to himself the appropriateness of the English translation. He flicked the cigarette stub from his fingers and ground it into the soil with the toe of his boot, like a dancer powdering the points of his shoes. Placing his hands on the fence before him he took a deep breath and then regretted it. The burnt rubber from the burning bicycle still hung in the air. The tailof the marching infantry was passing behind him. The slow ones. The blistered ones. The broken souls with broken soles.
    Albrecht was looking for his final note. The note to set against Otto that would complete the melody of his patrol. The answer to Otto’s silence. That was how he would, once again, lift the pressure of his choice. How he would decide which man’s life he would alter. How he would choose whom he would save or sacrifice, depending on what this patrol held in store for them. A young private gave him his answer, provided the counterpoint as he hoped one of them would. He was sitting in a circle with others, resting against an upturned British ammo box, and as Albrecht’s eye passed over him, he laughed. And there, in that laugh, he made his own fate, decided his future. That laugh, as he took an offered cigarette from another soldier, was the note that met and answered the silence of Otto Mann.
    The private’s name was Ehrhardt, Private Gernot Ehrhardt. Another replacement like Steiner. Just this morning Albrecht had seen him bayonet a British soldier as they took a gun position south of this village. The British soldier was old. Not old like Albrecht, but old like Albrecht’s father had been old. Grey hair, a rheumy eye. Ehrhardt had bayoneted him with force, with anger, in textbook style. And now here he was laughing. Was that any more cause for concern than Otto’s silent stare? Albrecht didn’t care. He’d seen Ehrhardt laugh before, many times since he’d joined the company, and he wanted him with them for that laugh. For that ability to prevent