One day a rumour spread that five men—from one of the groups in our platoon—had paid a visit to the widow and, in an orgy of spirits, celebrated Eros.
The rumour reached the company commander, who immediately ordered the platoon leader to carry out an investigation and, if necessary, punish the offenders as a warning and deterrent to others—“the honour of the Wehrmacht must be upheld”—the widow had no honour!
The eleven-man-strong sinful group stood formed up in front of the platoon headquarters—ready to receive their sentence—but somewhat downcast and embarrassed.
Lieutenant B… struck his stick hard against the ground and stepped forward in front of the line. He had brought out his “Germanic gaze,” which rested sharply and disapprovingly on the transgressors.
“Five men against a widow—that is against the regulations, gentlemen!” he began. “Would the five noble knights be so kind as to step forward in front of the line?”
Silence for a moment. Then the group leader remarked timidly: “We didn’t do it—Untersturmführer!”
“No, I’ll be damned if I believe that—it must have been the widow who did it all? Marius! Run over and fetch the lady—then she can be allowed to identify the culprits!”
It worked! The five guilty men chose to step forward voluntarily.
The whole embarrassing affair was concluded with a stern reprimand.
That evening B… took a couple of extra schnapps, in the awareness of having made a significant contribution to raising morale in Rastovichza.
“It’s really a job for a priest and not for an honourable soldier,” B… remarked. “You could always try to get a bit of absolution from the Catholic padre, since you so bravely supported him in the act—don’t you think that’s an idea?”
“I rather think they’ll damn me down to the blackest hell—priests are a bad lot, Marius—especially the Catholic ones. I don’t intend to have any sins absolved either; I’ll take them with me to the grave.”
“Don’t you believe in a God?”
“Believe or believe—well, we all believe in something, whether we call ourselves free thinkers or whatever else. It is simply in human nature to lean on some kind of faith. Perhaps it is a sign of weakness, but that is how it is.”
“Do you then believe in the Nazi theory that the only form of life that exists after death is the life that continues through our children and grandchildren?”
“Undoubtedly our qualities, and in some cases also our thoughts and ideals, live on through our descendants—but to build one’s entire worldview on that line of thinking seems to me too naive and too unsatisfying. What do you yourself believe in?”
“I have often thought about these problems without getting any closer to solving them. There are three main actors in the great drama—the Catholic Church, the Evangelical Church, and then the devil himself. They all call each other heretics and interpret the Bible in their own ways, in the way that best suits their own demands—isn’t that right?
Just look at the church at home in Denmark—there we have a score of different sects that wage a knife fight against each other over how a sincere Christian ought to believe, and each sect loudly proclaims, quite tastelessly, that they alone are saved.
But what, then, is the right thing? How can anyone expect us to take a position on all these theories when even the world’s scholars are at each other’s throats over the questions!”
“For God’s sake—don’t think about things like that! There’s a shortage of space in the mental hospitals!”
“That is quite true—the way the devil interprets the Bible is shamelessly taken up by those gentlemen priests and defenders of Christianity, as long as it suits their purpose.
How else would you explain that all the priests in England proclaim every Sunday across the country that God is fighting for their cause—and that Germany’s priests pray from the pulpit for God to bless Germany’s weapons, while on the soldiers’ belt buckles you can read: ‘Gott mit uns’—which is in such glaring contradiction to the entire spirit of the Bible as anything could be.
Do you remember how the English archbishop denounced the Bolsheviks when they attacked Finland in 1939, calling them barbarians of humanity and enemies of Christianity—and today the Bolsheviks are England’s good allies, all the country’s priests swinging their censers and praying to God for communism?
Don’t you see the parody? Swindlers and hypocrites all of them!”
“Thus people have always been like this—it must lie in our nature. Everything we imagine ourselves to be—what we call culture and Christianity—is only a thin layer of polish, and beneath it lurk the animal instincts whose foremost characteristic is selfishness—look around you in the world!”
“A meagre result for Christianity after several thousand years of activity. Well, the Church does indeed count among its leading men some of the most terrible criminals history can show—and yet—how strange—kings, emperors, kingdoms and peoples have perished, but the Church still stands—it has survived all the storms of time!”
“Well—now we’ve had enough of your philosophy, Marius. There have also been priests who were in line with what has happened today—have you read Troels Lund: Daily Life in the North, where he describes the priests and their way of life in old times?”
“Yes—I have read it quite carefully.”
“Can you remember where he mentions the priest, Mr. Hans from Holmens Church—he gave a sermon based on the text of the day, a text he had made himself, and it went: Love makes strong—it lifts both shirt and undershirt!”
“That was a gentleman with a sense of realism—he could have preached to the soldiers today!”
And then the conversation drifted onto other subjects.