The Boy Who Went to War Read Free Page A

Kaiser. It provoked a tongue-lashing from a shopkeeper, who told him to remove the monarchical colours. Erwin was deeply disturbed. Like his yeomen antecedents, he was a German Nationalist – a staunch believer in the old order, preferring Germany under the firm rule of the Kaiser. He had no time for the ‘red rabble’ who were attempting to sow the seeds of revolution. And he had no time for democracy.
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    Erwin was fortunate to have a job in the aftermath of the First World War. He had found employment as an art teacher at a jewellery school in the provincial town of Pforzheim shortly before August 1914. It was to Pforzheim that he now returned, along with the young woman who was shortly to transform his life. Marie Charlotte was bright, highly educated and physically striking.
    Although not conventionally beautiful, she could turn men’s heads, perhaps because she looked so unusual, with wide almond eyes and such uncommonly high cheekbones that throughout her life people would assume that she had Slav blood.
    In fact, she was a thoroughbred German like Erwin, but she hailed from very different stock. She was the daughter of a distinguished military family who had first won their spurs fighting alongside Napoleon during his 1812 invasion of Russia.
    The couple wedded in 1919 and Erwin resumed his job at Pforzheim’s jewellery school. It was a difficult time to be starting a new life: rioting, political assassinations and running gun battles were commonplace, and there were constant clashes between rival militia and paramilitary gangs.
    Amid such scenes, it was a miracle that a parliamentary democracy of sorts was born. By the summer of 1919, Germany had a constitution, a plethora of political parties and a democratically elected president. However, the constitution, drawn up in the city of Weimar, contained a defect that was to undermine the democratic process from the very outset. Article 48 allowed the president to rule by decree in times of trouble. President Friedrich Ebert was to use this prerogative on no fewer than 136 occasions – a worrying precedent for the country’s fledgling democracy.
    The young Aïchele couple had precious little money at this time. As Erwin was paid a pittance, he and his new wife had to live in a series of damp and inadequate rented lodgings, with no heating and many broken windows, which they had no spare money to repair. In the winter chill, Marie Charlotte was so cold that she would buy cheap, oven-hot bread buns and put them into her coat pockets to warm her hands as she walked home from the shops.
    In 1921, Marie Charlotte gave birth to her first son, a plump and healthy baby named Reiner. Three years later, Wolfram was born. The extra mouths further stretched their hard-pressed finances and the family subsisted on a diet of bread and potatoes. When Erwin began to make a name for himself as an animal artist, he supplemented his income by selling his paintings to the hunting fraternity. He had soon saved enough spare cash to employ Ilse, the first in a series of increasingly bohemian maids.
    The young Wolfram – he was just five years old – would clamber atop the kitchen cupboard, where an air vent provided a clandestine view into the bathroom. From this vantage point, he and his brother were able to spy on Ilse as she lay naked in the bath. Her unclothed body was not the only attraction for the young voyeurs. Ilse had arrived to take up employment at the Aïchele household accompanied by her pet snake and every time she had a bath she did so with the reptile coiled around her neck.
    Wolfram decided that he was going to marry her. Her hair was cut into a fashionable bob and she always wore the latest fashions. To his discerning young eyes, the exotic Ilse seemed to be a perfect choice of wife and he was most upset to discover that his affection was not reciprocated. Ilse soon left, to be replaced by a new maid named Clara.
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    Pforzheim was