A Time to Love And a Time to Die

It had been raining for days. The snow was melting. A month earlier it had been three yards deeper. The ruined village, which at first had seemed to be nothing but charred roofs, had silently, night by night, risen higher out of the sinking snow. Window frames had crept into sight; a few nights later the archways of doors; then stairways that led down into the dirty whiteness. The snow melted and melted, and with the melting came the dead.

They were old dead. The village had been fought over several times - in November, in December, in January, and now in April. It had been taken and lost and taken again. The snowstorms had come and covered the corpses, sometimes within hours, so deep that the medical corpsmen often could not find them - until finally almost every day had thrown a new layer of white over the devastation, like a nurse stretching a sheet over a bloody, filthy bed.

First came the January dead. They lay highest and came out at the beginning of April, shortly after the snow began to slip. Their bodies were frozen stiff and their faces were grey wax.


Translated from German by Denver Lindley