Westerhall

I. The Order

DIRECTIVE · Departmento Munitorum, Strength Section · Sector Staff · 954.M41

"The consolidation is hereby ordered. No queries are foreseen."

On the note Mellrich, 951.M41: rejected. Execution: the Commissariat within the formation.

Joska Fehrenbach wrote his reports before anything happened.

It was a habit from his third year of service, when he had been posted to a regiment that did nothing but write its reports in advance, and he had never shed it. The evening before, he wrote down what would happen, neatly, dated, in the hand they had taught him at the Schola, and the next day he read through to see whether reality had matched the report. Mostly it had. The cases in which it had not he entered in a second notebook, which he showed to nobody and which in twenty-four years had grown hardly thicker than his thumb.

Report number one lay finished on the folding table on the morning of the order. Consolidation initiated. Course unremarkable. Obedience of the formation complete. Measures by the Commissar not required.

The damp of Vennmoor stood in the tent as in a vault. It crept along the tent walls, it hung in the cap he wore because it was regulation, and in the first week it had warped his service book, which now looked like a piece of peat. Eleven days he had now been with the Cities, and in eleven days nobody had greeted him and nobody had shunned him. They had assigned him a place at the edge of the Roll of the Fallen, beside the carts, from which he saw everything and from which nobody saw him, and at the crowd's response he had caught himself moving his lips along, once, and had closed his mouth and scolded himself for it. Outside lay the landing ground, a strip of tamped earth in the steam, and along the edge of the strip stood the town halls of the Cities in a row, eight of them, with their lamps put out and, in the rear hatch of the foremost, a woman hanging washing on a line as though the strip had stood there for years.

"Commissar." Trooper Wetzel stood in the flap, with a wet shoulder and an envelope in his hand. "From the Section, by courier. And the file."

He laid both on the table and remained standing, like a man waiting for the answer to a question he does not want to ask. Fehrenbach sent him out. He tore the envelope open, standing, and read the directive once. It was short. It was two sentences, with a file number and a stamp, and they were, like everything from that Section, set down in the expressionless hand that one has when one has learned that every word may one day become an argument. The consolidation is hereby ordered. No queries are foreseen.

Then he opened the file.

It was thin. It consisted of a table, a count sheet and a note. The table bore the name of an Ordinat, Bessel, who had drawn it, as the head said, in seven days, with a ruler and neatly, with no line omitted. Phase one: Westerhall. The city tank to Battle Group Centre. The twelve Leman Russ in four quarters to North and South, two each. The Guild, one hundred and thirty-two, to Battle Groups South and North. The wagon train, two hundred and forty-four, to an assembly point at the landing ground. They had found a line for the wagon train, thought Fehrenbach, and he read it twice, and both times it was tidy.

The note lay beneath it.

It was older, the sheet more yellow, the ink soaked in deeper, and it was written in the small, exact hand of a man who had filled in a great many forms. Assignment not executable. The formation numbers three thousand eight hundred and thirteen heads; the directive covers one thousand seven hundred and thirteen. Grounds: Annexes A to C. Signed Halbach, Ordinat, Mellrich Distribution Station, 951.M41. On it stood a stamp, red, across the margin. Rejected. Beneath it a file note of the Assessment Office: Relieved. Transferred to the archive of the Section. Assessment: taken into account.

There were three annexes, the drafts of a table on which someone had worked line by line, and they were every bit as good as Bessel's, except that in the third draft they stopped where Bessel's table went on. He leafed through them. Between Annex C and the count sheet, fastened with a paper clip, hung a bundle of narrow slips, each in the same small, round hand, with no file number, no sender, one figure to a slip, with a date and a single word. Buckets, sixty-four. Buckets, seventy. Buckets, sixty-eight. There were thirty or forty. He did not count them.

The Section's registry had not removed them. That struck him. A registrar who files a note objects to every attachment without a form, and here someone had left the slips hanging, perhaps through negligence, perhaps because they were not his.

The vox set in the tent crackled. "Fehrenbach, Gehlen here."

Chief Commissar Eckhard Gehlen spoke as he always spoke, in the voice of a man sitting in a warm room. He had been Fehrenbach's superior since the year Fehrenbach signed his first report, and in all that time he had never given him an order he had not first, kindly, justified. "You have the directive?"

"I have it, Chief Commissar."

"And the table?"

"The table too."

"Then you know what is required of you. Execution, discipline, reporting. You are the man on the spot. The battle groups have been informed." He paused, and Fehrenbach heard paper rustle. "You will have read the note of this Ordinat, I take it."

"I have read it."

"Then read the deadlines too. He took three weeks not to execute what Bessel called executable in seven days. That was not humanity, Fehrenbach. It was slowness."

He said it kindly. Fehrenbach looked at the slips in his hand and found that he had taken them without noticing.

"Queries?" said Gehlen.

"None, Chief Commissar."

"It is on the sheet." The line hissed, then it broke off.

He sat down. In twenty-four years of service he had watched three regiments dissolve, and he knew, like a smell, the moment in which a formation became a sum, and it was always the same: the people stood there in good order and obeyed, and he wrote it in his report. He pushed the slips back under the clip. One stayed in his hand, and he noticed only when he read report number one once more, and put the slip, without thinking, into the service book. Obedience of the formation complete.

Outside the first bell rang, round and warm, into the silence over the landing ground, and then the second, and he counted along, as he had learned to in eleven days, to eight.

II. The Dismantling

REPORT NO. 2 · Commissar Fehrenbach · Dismantling of Westerhall · written in advance on the previous evening

The parts of the city leave the landing ground in good order, to Battle Groups North, Centre and South. Obedience complete. Incidents: none.

There was no incident, and that was what occupied him on the third day.

The dismantling began at sunrise, after the bells. Bessel's table gave the hour to the minute. The sun came up red and steaming over the treetops of Vennmoor, which surrounded the landing ground in a single dark ring, and the people of Westerhall had been up since half past three without anyone demanding it, and now stood in rows before their town hall, fallen in as for a roll call that was not in the regulations. The Guild in grey jackets. The crews of the Leman Russ in overalls. The women and children of the wagon train behind a cord that had been drawn so that they should not get in the way, and which nobody crossed.

He stood with Wetzel at the edge, beside the commissar's vehicle, his hands behind his back. On the other side of the ground the detachments of the battle groups were halted, three officers with clipboards and a dozen soldiers each, standing there with the exactness of people who had been told there was nothing to fear. Colonel Lenhart of Battle Group Centre was a plump, rosy man who looked as if the service had been offered to him against his will and he had accepted it out of politeness. He nodded to Fehrenbach. Fehrenbach nodded back.

The burgomaster stepped out of the rear hatch.

He had seen Gunda Amstutz often in the eleven days, always in motion, always with the face of a woman who does three things at once and is already planning the fourth, and he had never seen her stand still. She stood still. She climbed down the ladder, took from the foot of the ladder a sheet that the Weibel handed her, and read it out, loudly, without emphasis, so that it could be heard across the whole ground: the directive, sentence by sentence, with file number and stamp. She read the second sentence slowly. No queries are foreseen. Then she folded the sheet and put it in her pocket.

"The Council does not object," she said. "We are soldiers of the Imperium."

Behind the rows of Westerhall, at the town hall of Torgelow, stood the Landammann and said nothing. He was thin, with the twine on his spectacles, his hands behind his back, and he held his head a little lowered, as if listening to someone who had not yet begun to speak.

"Muster call," said the burgomaster.

He knew the word. He had heard it on every evening of those eleven days, in the tram shed, in the tent of the Cities, and had never known what was important about it. "Westerhall stands at four hundred and forty-three," she said, in the calm tone in which one names the time, and then she said the names of the parts, the Guild, the first quarter, the second, the third, the fourth, the town hall, the wagon train, and from every row came a word, the same one, loud and simultaneous: Here. It sounded as if someone were taking something in his hand that would soon be taken from him, and testing its weight.

He counted. There were four hundred and forty-three. He could have sworn to it without counting.

Then the ground came apart.

He had expected it to grow louder. He had waited for shouts, for an order that was not obeyed, for a man who refused to take a step, and had he intervened on the spot, he would have done so with relief. Nothing came. The Guild divided into two halves, exactly through the middle, without anyone calling out who was to go right, and went apart in two columns, after the clipboards of the officers. The crews climbed into the Leman Russ, six in one direction, six in the other, and their engines started, in a long chain, so that the earth shook. The women and children went behind their cord to the edge of the ground, where the assembly point stood, a long tent with a table in front of it, at which a trooper sat with a list.

There were no tears. He saw a girl, perhaps eight, hanging on the jacket of an old Guildsman, and the man bent down, took the child's hand from his sleeve, held it for the length of a breath in his own and set her down on the ground, as if putting down something he would pick up again later. He said something. Fehrenbach did not understand it through the noise of the engines, but he saw the lips move, briefly, in the shape of two words, and the child answer, with one.

The words had needed time to reach him. The Cities stand. He heard them at the other end of the ground, from a woman in overalls to a man in a grey jacket, and at a third place, between a Weibel and a trooper of the battle group who did not know at all what he was to answer, and they answered him all the same. Still. All the parts of this city said it, as they went, in every direction, like people saying farewell at a door and not calling it that. It was not provided for in the regulations. He had no grounds to forbid it, and he searched, without wanting to, for some.

A councillor came up to his vehicle. She was around fifty, with a grey braid that hung out from under her helmet, and she had a way of approaching people that showed she had been dealing for thirty years with crews who had sat too long in the fighting compartment. Agnes Zumbrunn led the second quarter. She put her flat hand to the rim of her helmet in greeting.

"Commissar," she said. "Where do we assemble, if it goes wrong?"

"Nothing goes wrong."

"Of course not." She nodded, with a face in which nothing moved. "We know it anyway."

She went to her tank. He watched her climb up, throw the braid over her shoulder with one hand and vanish into the hatch, and the engine of her vehicle started and could no longer be told apart in the line.

In the evening he copied out report number two as he had written it in advance, and put the date beneath it. Then he took the second notebook from his pocket, in which stood the things that did not belong in the report, and entered: Muster call: four hundred and forty-three. Departure: six groups. Nobody objected. He looked at the last sentence for a long time. Then he wrote a word in front of it and struck it through, so that only the date remained and a line that looked like a finding.

III. The Jungle

VOX LOG · Battle Group Centre · Day 5 and Day 6

Day 5, 06:10 North to Centre: advance as planned, two quarters on the causeway. 06:41 South to Centre: Guild in position on the western edge, no enemy contact. 07:15 Centre to North and South: please report.

Day 5, 07:20 to Day 6, 17:00: static.

The causeway was a log causeway, as wide as the town hall, made of tree trunks that sappers had laid across the bog thirty years ago, and it bore the city tank of Westerhall with a long, wet groan that Fehrenbach felt in his teeth.

He rode in the commissar's vehicle, ten lengths behind the town hall, with Wetzel as driver and report number three on his knees. Course of engagement as planned. No mutiny, no unauthorised action. Measures not required. To the right and left of the causeway stood Vennmoor, a thicket of roots that looked like cables, and fern that reached to the roof edge of the vehicle, and from the ground rose a steam that smelled of iron and of something sweet that Fehrenbach did not want to place. Over everything lay a light like the light in an aquarium. Battle Group Centre rolled along the causeway in a line, Chimeras in front, town hall in the middle, supplies at the rear, and Colonel Lenhart sat in the foremost vehicle and spoke into his vox, with the contentment of a man whose timetable is working out.

At twenty past seven the vox went silent.

It went on hissing, even and dense, a sound like rain on tin, and out of the hiss no voice came any more. Wetzel turned the dial. He turned it as one turns a tap that will not shut off, and said at last: "Commissar, it is on all channels."

"Then it is on all channels."

He had expected it, in the part of his head in which one expects the things one does not write in advance. He got out, went forward past the vehicle, and from the head of the column Lenhart called to him, without annoyance, with the calm of a person who feels under no obligation to get excited: "Vox interference, Commissar. The bog. We are maintaining visual contact."

There was no visual contact. One saw a stretch of causeway ahead and a stretch behind, and to left and right the fern.

They halted. It was the first mistake, and it was not recognised as one. Lenhart sent out a scouting party, six men, into the fern to the north, and they went in, in single file, and the fern closed behind them. Fehrenbach counted them. He looked at his watch. They had not come back after forty minutes, and after an hour the colonel sent a second squad, and it came back after twenty minutes without having seen the first, with silent faces. The sergeant said: "We found the boots."

"The boots."

"Six pairs. Side by side, at the edge of a creek, laced. As if set down."

There were no bodies. There were no traces of fighting, no casings, no bloodstain, only six pairs of boots and, in the peat beside them, prints, flat and broad, too many, which led into the water and did not come out again. Fehrenbach had the boots brought to him and set them side by side on the causeway, and he stood in front of them for a while, with his hands behind his back, and nobody said anything.

From then on nothing happened that could have been reported. The bog made no sound. At regular intervals, every ten minutes, one heard deep in the fern a dull knocking, as of a hammer on wood, which stopped when one listened to it. The sky turned grey. The heat stood. By the evening of the fifth day Battle Group Centre had not left the causeway, and no man had fallen who could be counted.

In the night Wetzel sat beside him on the running board of the vehicle, his cap in his lap, holding the dead vox set in his arm like something he was supposed to guard. "Commissar," he said after a long time, "may I ask where the others are?"

"No queries are foreseen."

"It is not a query," said Wetzel. "I just don't know where they are." He said it politely. Fehrenbach looked at him from the side, a boy of twenty-two whose skin the bog had turned grey, and noticed that he did not know what to answer him, and that this too was why he kept silent.

On the morning of the sixth day the post at the rear was missing.

It had been a double guard, two troopers from the rear guard, who were to be relieved in the night and who had not been relieved, because nobody found them. At the rear stood the guard vehicle, its door open, and in the footwell lay a cup in which the tea still had a skin. Lenhart gave the order to dig trenches. He gave it twice, because the first time nobody heard, and it was the first time Fehrenbach had heard him speak loudly.

At midday the burgomaster climbed out of the hatch of her town hall and stood beside his vehicle. He had hardly seen her in the two days. She stood there a while, with the impatience in her shoulders that he knew in her, and looked into the fern.

"You have losses, Commissar," she said.

"I have reports."

"Where are North and South?"

"The connection has broken off."

"Then they are alone."

"They are on operations."

"Then they are alone," she repeated, without altering her tone, as one says the same word to a child once more so that it remembers it. He turned his head and saw that she was looking at him, without reproach, with the eyes of a woman who is counting what belongs to her and cannot make it add up. "Two quarters on each side," she said. "My Guild in two halves. I do not know where they stand."

"Nobody knows that."

"They do." She said it quietly. "They know it themselves."

He did not understand what she meant, and did not ask. It was not in the table.

In the evening, when the light over the bog turned red and the drifts of steam dissolved into streamers, he wrote out report number three. He had written it in advance, and he read it, word for word, with the pen in his hand, and found it unusable. Course of engagement as planned. There was no course of engagement. There was no enemy that could have been named, and there were eight men fewer than had stood there on the morning of the fifth day, and not one who had fallen.

He set the words Course of engagement at the head of a new line and stopped. In twenty-four years he had never begun a report whose end he did not know.

Behind the town hall of Westerhall the burgomaster stepped onto the landing of the stern ladder, beneath the bell, and reached for the mallet.

IV. Westerhall

BELL OF WESTERHALL · Stern wall of the town hall, iron bell-frame, four bolts

Inscription: WESTERHALL · WHOEVER HEARS, COMES. Weight: eighty-one kilos. Tone: round and warm.

The first stroke went out across the bog as if it had been a stone dropped into still water.

Fehrenbach heard it standing, in his hand the service book from which he had wanted to strike a line, and he heard it in his teeth before he had it in his ear. Then came the silence that follows a bell stroke and stretches, and it stretched over Vennmoor, in a circle that reached to the edges of the thicket, and the steam seemed to stand still for the length of a breath. Then the second stroke, after a pause long enough that the first could still be heard dying away. Then the third.

The burgomaster stood on the landing of the stern ladder, legs apart, and struck with the iron mallet that hung at the bell, calmly, without haste, once every fifteen seconds, as one counts a pulse. She did not look at it. She looked into the fern.

"What are you doing there?" Colonel Lenhart came running along the causeway, the face that had been rosy now red, his cap pushed to the back of his head. "Burgomaster, I demand that you stop that!"

"I am calling," she said. She struck.

"That is not part of the directive!"

"No."

He turned round, and Fehrenbach saw the end of the thought in his face before he spoke it. "Commissar. I call on you to intervene. That is unauthorised action in combat."

"I am examining it," said Fehrenbach.

"What is there to examine?"

"Whether it is a breach." He heard himself speak, in the dry, expressionless tone he kept for file notes. "The directive regulates the assignment of the parts. It does not regulate how often a town hall rings its bell."

Lenhart opened his mouth. He closed it. He was a man who was not bad, and who no longer had a timetable, and who in this second, one could see, was looking for the next timetable, and Fehrenbach pitied him, in an official way that he would not have allowed himself had he been alone. "Ten minutes," said the colonel at last. "Then we'll see."

The stroke came every fifteen seconds. The bog carried it.

After eight minutes the first call came out of the fern. It was a voice, high, rough, like that of a person who had not spoken for a long time, and it said no name, it said only one word that Fehrenbach did not understand. Then the thicket broke open, on the north side, and a man climbed over the edge of the causeway, wet to the hips, with a heavy bolter over his head, which he had kept dry like a child. Behind him came three, then seven. They had peat in their hair. They said nothing. They drew up in a row in front of the town hall, their weapons on the ground, and the burgomaster struck once, and one of them said, without looking up: "Guild. Twelve men."

It had not been orders that had led them here. He had understood it at once, and he understood it again when from the south side a wagon rolled out, a tarpaulin wagon on tracks, water dripping from it, with children in the rear hatch who looked at him as if he were a sign at the roadside, and the driver, an old man with black hands, stopped at the edge of the row and did not get out. He said not a word. He raised his hand to his helmet, flat, and the burgomaster struck.

From the south a captain of Battle Group South came on foot along the causeway, black to the belt, with a face that had not slept for a long time, and reported to the colonel, without a salute, that the Guild of Westerhall had left his position on the western edge, without orders, at dusk, at a signal that none of his people had heard. "That is mutiny, Colonel."

"I know what it is," said Lenhart. He looked across at Fehrenbach, and quickly looked away again. "The commissar is examining it."

They came all evening. They came singly and in groups, from the north and from the south, over the causeway and through the fern and out of the water, the Guild in benches, three and four men to a weapon, and they came not from one direction and not at a time that a plan could have set. The Leman Russ came last. One heard them long before one saw them, a grinding and snorting in the thicket that drew nearer, and then the first pushed through the fern, its turret black with peat, torn undergrowth on its tracks, and on the turret stood, upright, with a grey braid, the councillor of the second quarter. She looked at Fehrenbach. She nodded.

Whoever hears, comes. The words stood on the bell. He had read them in eleven days, in passing, on the bronze, as one reads a sign, and had never tried to understand them. They were three words, and they were unmilitary in every respect. He had taken them for a saying.

The burgomaster no longer struck alone. He had noticed it only when it grew dark: her arms were shaking, and a Guildsman stepped onto the landing and laid his hand beside hers on the handle, without her looking round, and she let go, and he struck, in the same rhythm, every fifteen seconds. After him came another. After the other a woman from the wagon train, with a child on her hip, who lifted the mallet with one hand. He did not count them. There were perhaps twenty who relieved one another into the night, and not one stroke was missed.

At half past nine the burgomaster stepped before the rows that had formed around the town hall, in the light of three lamps, and said what she had said three days before, in the same calm tone: "Westerhall stands at four hundred and three."

He had expected no answer. A word came, from hundreds, loud and simultaneous: Here.

He stood at the edge of the lamps and counted. There were four hundred and three, to the head, and he wrote nothing down. Councillor Zumbrunn, who had left the turret, stepped up beside him without looking at him. "Nothing went wrong, Commissar," she said. He wanted to answer, and the tone in which she had said it held him back, and he stood, his hands behind his back, and heard the stroke go on across the bog, into the night, to anyone who might still need it.

V. The Decision

REPORT FORM 14-M · Unauthorised Leaving of Assignment · To be completed by the Commissar within twelve hours

Offence: ____ Persons involved: ____ Witnesses: ____ Measure: ____

A commissar who omits the report is treated like the persons involved.

He had taken the form out of the service book in the evening and had not touched it until morning.

The deadline had been running since nineteen hundred. Twelve hours, that meant seven o'clock, and at five thirty he had laid the sheet on the folding table and filled in the heading, date, name, rank, in the hand they had taught him, and then put the pen aside, because in the line Offence there had to be a word that he did not want to write. He knew what belonged in the line Measure. It stood in the regulations, one paragraph further down, in a language that needed no adjectives. In twenty-four years he had written it twice.

Wetzel brought tea. He set it down beside the sheet, did not look at him, and went away again.

At six Fehrenbach climbed the stern ladder of the town hall. There was no sentry in front of it. In the council chamber it smelled of cabbage and wet wool, and between the benches people lay on coats, children and old people and two men of the Guild with bandaged heads, and nobody looked up. The burgomaster sat at a board on which the remains of a chalk exercise still stood, in front of a mug she did not touch, and she looked at him without getting up.

"You must report, Commissar."

"I know."

"We did not know there was a form."

"You knew."

"Yes." She said it without a pause, without apology. She had grey rings under her eyes and no time to hide them. "Write that I ordered it. All of them came on my order. I struck the bell, and they obeyed."

"You gave no order."

"I did."

"The bell is not an order, Burgomaster. That is not in any regulations." He had said it before he knew what he was saying by it, and she smiled, barely, with one corner of her mouth. "It does not have to be true," she said. "It has to go on the form."

He went out without answering.

On the causeway the sun stood green between the drifts of steam. He looked at his watch and saw that it was five past seven. He stepped up to the vehicle against which the colonel was leaning, his cap in his hand, with the bearing of a man who is early for the first time in his life. Lenhart looked at him. He looked at his watch. He looked away again.

"Deadline," said the colonel, "elapsed."

"Yes."

"I did not count it."

Fehrenbach took it for an offer and did not accept it. He stood there, and noticed that he still had in his hand the pen he had meant to leave lying on the table.

The fire began towards midday.

It came from everywhere and out of the ground. He heard it first in the earth, a dull knocking, now dense instead of at intervals, like the hammer of a smith in a hurry, and then the impacts came, on the causeway, in the water, in the fern, behind the vehicles, out of the foliage without muzzle flash, so that one had the feeling that the jungle itself had something against them. He saw nothing. He saw splinters of tree trunks leaping from the causeway, and peat rising in black fountains, and men lying behind wheels and firing into the green, without a target.

Then he saw the Cities.

He had read the doctrine on paper, on the way here, in a Commissariat booklet on the customs of the Askerholders, and it had struck him as a trifle: the Guild covers the vehicles, the quarters move out, the city tank is the anchor and the meeting point. There was nothing in it that a person could not just as well have had in a table. But he saw it now, on the causeway, in the steam. The Guild formed a ring around the town hall, bench beside bench, the barrels outward, without anyone having told it to. The three tanks of Westerhall's quarters that were still mobile broke out of the ring and drove into the fern, at an angle, in the direction from which the knocking came, and the Guild fired after them to cover their backs. He had never before seen a formation fire as if every weapon were the eye of a single body.

It lasted three hours. In the fourth the causeway began to speak.

It was a grinding, deep beneath the town hall, as of a millstone turning, and the trunks groaned, one after another, and the tarpaulin wagons of the wagon train, which had crowded together behind the town hall, scattered, the children in the hatches with white faces. Two wagons stopped. Fehrenbach saw an impact strike into the first, a single one, and the wagon went down with the people in it, and the second followed, and the number he thought was eighteen, without his having counted.

The causeway broke under the stern of the town hall.

He saw the town hall tilt. It went slowly, like an old house stooping, first the stern wall downward and then the lower hull, until the entire hull stood at an angle that was not to be found in the regulations, and peat and water rose along the tracks. The Guild stood at the edge, bench by bench, with open mouths, and nobody ran towards it. One could not run towards it. The causeway was gone.

The commander's hatch stayed closed. The burgomaster had not left the town hall, he knew that, as one knows the weather without anyone saying it.

On the landing of the stern ladder, already in the water, a man stood and struck the bell.

He struck it with the mallet, with both hands, in the rhythm they had had since yesterday, every fifteen seconds, and the town hall sank, and the bell sank with it, until the peat water reached the bronze and the tone in the middle of the stroke became a dull, round sound that went once more through the ground, and then nothing.

The fire stopped.

When it grew dark Agnes Zumbrunn stepped before the rows that had formed at the edge of the broken causeway, in the light of two lamps. She had taken off her helmet. She looked over the heads, calmly, with the exactness of a person who is counting what belongs to her, and she said what the burgomaster would have said, in the same tone, only without the name that should have stood before it.

"We stand at three hundred and five."

"Here," they said.

Fehrenbach stood at the edge and did not count.

VI. The Minutes

REPORT NO. 6 · Commissar Fehrenbach · Engagement at Vennmoor, Causeway

Text written in advance: none.

Report Form 14-M: not completed, deadline elapsed.

He had not written report number six in advance, and it was the first time he had been without the date.

On the eighth day they moved. He saw it from the commissar's vehicle, on the causeway that the sappers of Battle Group Centre had patched with logs in a single night, while the remains of Westerhall went in a line to the landing zone: the Guild, sixty-four men, in grey jackets, the three Leman Russ with their crews, the tarpaulin wagons that could still be driven, with the children in the hatches, and among them, on foot, the councillor with the grey braid. Nobody spoke. There was a sound he had not expected, a grinding of footsteps on wet wood, so dense that later he never quite lost it from his ear.

A girl walked beside his vehicle, perhaps eight, with a spoon in her belt, and she looked up at him several times before she spoke. "Are you the one who did the dividing?"

"I am the commissar."

"The old Guildsman says you did not forbid the bell." She considered. "He says that's a lot."

Fehrenbach did not answer. He rode, at a walking pace, beside a child who was a touch too serious for her age, until the line closed in front of him and the girl vanished into the crowd.

In the evening there was the Roll of the Fallen.

He stood at the edge, by the carts, as on every evening before, and this time nobody told him where to stand. He counted the names along, without wanting to, and there were five; when he had come, he had heard three. The Landammann climbed onto his crate, in his hand the book that he did not open, and spoke the names, one after another, without emphasis, in the same voice: Halmstadt, Gerrinsfurt, Ulmersfeld, Brendeck. He said the fifth as he had said the others. "Westerhall is read. Her bell hangs no more. Her name rests until sunrise."

"It rests," they said, and Councillor Zumbrunn said it first and loudest, in a voice that was cracked and straight.

Fehrenbach had his hands behind his back. He did not move his lips.

The vox set in the tent was working again, since the forenoon, as clearly as if nothing had ever been. At ten o'clock Gehlen called. "Phase one is complete, Fehrenbach," he said, in the warm voice. "Westerhall is dismantled. That was the task. Phase two, Hohenwart and Lindgrund, consolidated into one formation, in fourteen days."

"Westerhall has gone under, Chief Commissar."

"It is dismantled. I read that as a success." There was a rustle. "I expect your report. And the form."

"The report I will send. The form I will not."

It stayed quiet. "That is a breach."

"I know."

"You know what it entails."

"Yes, Chief Commissar." He looked at the table, on which the sheet lay, the line Offence empty, a ring of peat water on one corner. "The deadline has elapsed. There is nothing left to report."

Gehlen said something that he did not understand, then the connection broke off, and Fehrenbach sat in the tent, in which after eighteen days everything smelled of bog, and noticed that he was not trembling. He had expected it. He took a new sheet and did not copy out what he had written in advance. He wrote, in the hand they had taught him, a word at the head that was not in the regulation: Minutes.

On the sixth day, at twelve minutes past five in the afternoon, the burgomaster Gunda Amstutz had the bell of her town hall struck. Within four hours the parts of the city, which had been distributed among three battle groups and were without vox contact, assembled at the causeway: the Guild, three quarters, the wagon train. They came because they heard the bell. Nobody ordered it. The burgomaster counted the city and arrived at four hundred and three.

On the seventh day the city held the causeway for three hours against an enemy whom the author did not see. The causeway broke at sixteen twenty. The burgomaster remained in the town hall, with its crew. A citizen struck the bell until the water reached it. Lost are one city tank, nine Leman Russ, one hundred and twenty soldiers and eighteen from the wagon train. Three hundred and five survive, of them seventy-nine soldiers.

Westerhall no longer stands. No queries are foreseen. The author raises none.

He read it once, without a pen in his hand, and signed it. It was six lines shorter than the report he would have written in advance in the evening, and it contained not a single assessment. He had never written a text in which so little stood and which was so clear.

Then he took the slip from the service book.

He had pocketed it, without noticing, on the first day, from the bundle between Annex C and the count sheet: a narrow strip in a round hand that was not his. Buckets, seventy. He held it in the light of the lamp. Then he took the pen and wrote on a second strip, in his dry hand: Westerhall, three hundred and five. He laid the two together and fastened them with a clip to the minutes, without file number and without a form, and it would be objected to, in the registry of the Section, by a registrar who did not like attachments without a form.

Wetzel took the envelope without asking. He went out into the steam, and Fehrenbach heard him stop outside.

Then he opened the second notebook. On the page for the third day the line with the struck-through word still stood, and beneath it what the councillor had asked: Where do we assemble, if it goes wrong? He wrote the answer beneath it, in the hand he otherwise kept for findings, and it was so short that it needed no room. There, where it rings.

When it grew light the first bell rang. It was the bell of Kaltenau, somewhat brighter than the one he had heard for seven days, and he counted along, to seven.