Short Story: Exiles

Lieutenant Wilhelm Weishaupt was the commander of a very small platoon—five soldiers, guarding a border tripoint that had not seen military action for, depending on how you counted it, either sixty-odd years or nearly a century. He loved his job. It was, perhaps perversely for a military position, relaxing, affording a lot of time to go out strolling along walls older than the Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs, looking over the hills, dales, and rockslides, honest and free in his fatigues beneath the sky.

            The Bundesheer had seen better days to be sure, but that was a long time ago, and besides, any way of thinking that considered going out and raping and pillaging the western Balkans ‘better days’ than standing and watching the birds was a way of thinking that Lieutenant Weishaupt wanted absolutely no part of. This was one of many border forts that had been built in Carinthia and the Tyrol throughout the period when the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation had been a world power. It was one of if not the only one of these forts that still served any military function whatsoever, and Lieutenant Weishaupt was keenly aware that his platoon, 1444 Squadron, existed basically as window-dressing, one of the army’s token ‘romantic’ settings, reminders of days gone by. It was like joining the Foreign Legion and shipping out to Djibouti.

            He had heard from Sergeant Sturmvoraus that 1444 Squadron was getting a sixth soldier sometime soon—new meat, a Private Wildermann who had joined the army at the absolute minimum legal age in order to escape her home situation and get enough money to have at least a fighting chance of getting through some university in Germany. She (Private Wildermann was a she) had taken the train down to Arnoldstein and would probably report for duty at the fort shortly.

            Falling into this reverie, considering the nature of this platoon and its assignment, Lieutenant Weishaupt felt almost ridiculous. He had gone through surprisingly tough training and several tours of duty as an enlisted man, built himself up into somebody who had on several occasions been described as at least moderately badass, and his first command role was ‘guarding’ Austria’s tripoint with two other EU countries, Slovenia and Italy. The only reason the command still existed was that somebody in the Austrian government was apparently a hopeless romantic who had read a lot of Boys’-Own-type war stories growing up. Lieutenant Weishaupt thanked God for this person (or, perhaps, these people). At thirty-two he was already the sort of man to put greater value on birds and the watching thereof than on cans of whoop-ass and the opening-up thereof. Mellowed young, his old age would be long.

Not only was this his first command role, it was also very likely to be his last. His predecessor as captain of 1444 Squadron, Richard Scholl, had been given this post at the age of thirty and held it until his retirement twenty-eight years later. Weishaupt had been here for three years and was looking forward to at least another two decades. Nothing ever happened here except for the passing of seasons and occasional personnel turnover, and that was just the way he liked it.

At about fifteen-hundred hours on this late spring day Sergeant Sturmvoraus brought him word that the ‘new meat’, as Sturmvoraus called Private Wildermann, had arrived and was waiting to be shown to the commander of the platoon.

            ‘Thank you, Sergeant Sturmvoraus,’ said Weishaupt. ‘Is Private Wildermann in the main mess?’

            ‘Yes, sir.’

            ‘Good. You may go now.’

            ‘Yes, sir.’

            Weishaupt took the old stone spiral stair down from the walls into the main hall of the fort, where the new recruit sat at the foot of a long wooden table. A loud clock was ticking in some nearby room.

            Private Wildermann was very young, seventeen years old. She had just got out of school, brilliant, highly commended, and made a beeline for the army straightway because otherwise she would never be able to afford university, especially in Germany, and would have to keep living at home. What was wrong with Private Wildermann’s home Lieutenant Weishaupt did not know. He hoped to get to know her, as he tried to know everybody under his command, and so at some point he would probably learn her story, but for now she was simply the new girl, tabula rasa as far as he was concerned.

            ‘You are Commander Weishaupt?’ she asked.

            ‘I’m…I’m Lieutenant Weishaupt, yes,’ he replied. ‘I take it you’re Private Wildermann?’

            ‘Yes, sir. Private Wildermann. Born 23 December 1988 in Leoben, Styria.’ She handed Weishaupt a slip of paper headed ‘Rekrut Hildegard Theresa Wildermann, Österreich Bundesheer’. It had a very brief biographical capsule and the note that Wildermann had only undergone very basic training because it had been decided early in the process that she was to be sent to Arnoldsteinfort and this was, as Weishaupt spent so much time reflecting on, generally considered a very cushy assignment. ‘Know, Oberleutnantmeister,’ said Wildermann, ‘that I only intend to do the one year of military service that would be mandatory were I male. I intend to study at the University of Jena in Thuringia, Germany, and…’

            ‘Wait.’ Weishaupt held his hand up. ‘First of all, you’re being way too formal for my comfort. Second of all, the mandatory military service for men is six months, not a year. Third of all, my rank is Leutnant. There’s no such rank as Oberleutnantmeister. And my name is Wilhelm Weishaupt. I’ll call you Hildegard if you call me Willy. Or you could be like Heinz Sturmvoraus and insist on ‘Lieutenant Weishaupt’ and I’ll call you ‘Private Wildermann’ if you’re comfortable. But I’d really prefer…’

            At this, the new meat seemed to perk up considerably. ‘All right, Willy!’ she chirped. ‘You can call me Hildy.’

            This change in Wildermann’s—Hildy’s demeanour briefly threw Weishaupt for a loop. Then he realised that this was probably how she really was and she had just been overly formal and stiff as a precaution due perhaps to having had very tough officers in training or something.

            ‘So,’ said Hildy awkwardly. ‘What’s done around here in, uh, in Arnoldsteinfort? Drills, practises, reveille, what sort of…?’

            ‘Bird-watching, mainly,’ said Weishaupt.

            ‘I beg your pardon?’

            ‘I said bird-watching.’

            ‘Yes, I heard you, but…seriously?’ Weishaupt nodded. Hildy laughed. ‘That’s brilliant!’ she said. ‘Oh, I knew I’d love this when they told me I was coming out here.’

            ‘This platoon and this posting exist because of some suit in Vienna’s romanticism,’ said Weishaupt. ‘It’s intended to give a very few incredibly lucky people who the army has nowhere else to put good memories and a taste of what nineteenth-century frontier guard duty was allegedly like.’

            ‘Somehow I doubt things were like this in the nineteenth century.’

            ‘Yes, I said allegedly, Hildy.’ Weishaupt leaned forward intently. ‘So where are you from? What’s your story?’

            ‘I’m from Leoben, as it says on my papers,’ said Hildy. ‘If you don’t know where that is, it’s about an hour’s drive north-west of Graz. As for why I’m here…’ She hung her head. ‘My father is not a very kind man and has a hard time telling the difference between ‘family’ and ‘potential threat’ to the authority he thinks he has. He’s…’ She shook her head. ‘You understand?’

            ‘Let me tell you a secret that only the soldiers at Arnoldsteinfort know, Hildy,’ said Weishaupt. ‘I wasn’t born in Austria, I was born in Russia, into one of the families of utter and absolute diehards among the Volga Germans. We moved to Austria when I was fourteen. That’s not the secret. The secret is that while we were living in Tsaritsyn, growing up, there was scarcely anybody in my life other than my immediate family who did not regularly beat the tar out of me.’

            ‘Tsaritsyn?’

            ‘Yes. I refuse on principle to call it Stalingrad or Volgograd.’

            ‘Willy, forgive me, but child abuse is a bit different, qualitatively, from bullying, no matter how severe.’

            ‘Yes, I know that. And I’m sorry, Hildy.’ Weishaupt sighed, leaned back, and looked up at the vaulted stone ceiling, dappled with light from the high window-slits. ‘The point is…really, Hildy, in these lethargic times…people don’t volunteer to join the Bundesheer unless there’s something that they really feel the need to get away from.’

            ‘That’s a jolly thought,’ said Hildy with a tone of slightly bitter sarcasm.

            ‘It is, actually!’ said Weishaupt. He stood up and went over to a leaded window, the only one in the hall that was not simply a slit under the eaves, and looked out over the bare hill bordering Slovenia and the wooded hill bordering Italy. ‘This is a place of voluntary and beautiful exile from a cynical world.’

            ‘Yes,’ said Hildy, ‘well, in university I intend to catalogue that cynical world.’

            Weishaupt turned to her, and pursed his lips. ‘History?’ he asked.

            She shook her head. ‘Geography. Human geography.’

            Weishaupt emitted a short peep of breath. ‘That could work out well for you, though,’ he said. ‘This world is corrupt. But not everything is necessarily so.’

            ‘It occurs to me,’ said Hildy, ‘that I am lucky to have been assigned to 1444 Squadron.’

            ‘Yes, very lucky,’ said Weishaupt. ‘This platoon has never had more than seven soldiers at any time and usually we only have four or five. The bare minimum that we aren’t disbanded. Currently we have me and you, Sergeant Sturmvoraus, Corporal Bernhardt, Private Heidemann, and Private Schlick. That is to say—Willy, Hildy, Heinz, Franziska, Klara, and Jacob.’

            ‘And…can you introduce me to Franziska, Klara, and Jacob?’ asked Hildy. ‘I believe I already met Heinz—Sergeant Sturmvoraus—whoever.’

            ‘Klara is asleep,’ said Weishaupt.

            ‘But…it’s three-twenty in the afternoon.’

            ‘She stayed up until eight in the morning.’

            ‘May I ask why?’

            ‘Trying to catch a rat in the barracks.’

            ‘And did she catch the rat?’

            Weishaupt grinned with obvious pride in this little garrison here, the place and duty that he found beautiful because inconsequential. ‘Yes, she caught that rat, all right. That’s Private Klara Heidemann for you.’ He extended a hand to Hildy. ‘Take my hand,’ he said. ‘Come on. I’ll introduce you to Jacob and Franziska.’