His Deeds:

Drafts" From His Book

Western Front:

 

 

 

 

Excerpt from Chapter 1:

Approaching Munchen Hauptbahnhof (Munich Central Railway Station) by S-Bahn from Munchen-Pasing, the train passes Munchen Laim, Hackerbrucke and Donnersbergerbrucke before going underground to Marienplatz and Central. A short drive from Donnersbergerbrucke station after crossing the bridge leads to the suburb of Laim, where I was born on 6 July 1922 and where in 1992 I revisited St Rupert's, Das Katholische Pfarramt (Catholic Parish Church), to see its massive and impressive christening font where I had been baptised.

My father was a coppersmith by trade and worked for the railway repair shop in Munich. In those days there was a big demand for such a trade, especially from the railways, as all steam engine vital parts were made from copper or brass. Father learnt his trade as an apprentice to his uncle at the beginning of the new century, and it was just at that time that the new Rathaus (Town Hall) was being built on the Marien Platz in Munich. His uncle had part of the contract to make and install the 'Glockenspiel' in the tower where every day at 12 noon and again at five in the evening the medieval Knights rotate on their duel ride on the upper platform, followed on the lower tier by the Cooper's Guild figures performing the Barrelmaker's dance. Since copper was the material used in creating and making the characters, my Father had a hand in the installation of what has become a tourist attraction now known all over the world. Father told me that when the job was finished and the machinery switched on for the first trialthey discovered the knights were too tall to go through the arches so they all had to be dismantled and made shorter.

Before World War I, Father served his military service in an artillery regiment in the city of Augsburg where he met my Mother and they were married. Mother came from a farmer family in Mertingen near Donauw"rth, about three or four stations out of Augsburg. Her maiden name was Schretzmeier. Fortunately my Father was not called up for military service when the war started as his trade was required by the railways. Mother, at that time was in domestic employment with the Diesel family as an apprentice cook and remained with the family long after Rudolf disappeared in the Channel on a ferry trip to England. (Rudolf Diesel being the inventor of the diesel engine). It was never established whether he jumped or was pushed though it was known that, despite his revolutionary invention, Rudolf was in dire financial strife when he disappeared.

After the First World War living conditions were grim. Wages were low, food expensive and very hard to get which was a direct consequence of the harsh conditions imposed on Germany by the infamous Treaty of Versailles. In order to improve himself Father went to night school run by the railway technical college in Freimann, a suburb of Munich, and eventually managed to join the staff of the Bavarian State Railway. This, unfortunately, or fortunately, depending which way one looks at it, involved being posted to various stations on the rail network, mainly to gain experience. My brother Wilhelm was born in 1920 and I must have been about eighteen months when Father got his first posting to Freilassing, a station on the Austrian border just outside Salzburg. I remember very little of our stay there except vaguely that we lived in a house in the middle of a forest and was told there were lots of witches roaming the woods at night. That scared me quite a bit but I suppose they only told me that to stop me exploring on my own.

In 1925 Father got his second posting, this time to Offingen on the main line from Munchen to Stuttgart. From then on my memory is quite clear on some of the exploits my brother and I got up to. One I vividly remember is when he found a pair of scissors and cut off my blond curls which Mum was so proud of. Perhaps Willi was jealous or maybe he just enjoyed what he was doing. Anyhow, I guess I was lucky he didn't include my ears in his artistic work.

The house we lived in was next to the railway line but some distance from the station. Schnuttenbach, the little village nearest to us was across a wheat field and was only accessible by a roundabout way which meant my brother and I had very few playmates and after Willi was sent to boarding school in 1926 there were even fewer. I played all sorts of imaginary games with home-made toys - there weren't many toys in those days - and the few things we had were pretty crude. I wasn't allowed to go near the rail tracks so spent a lot of time on the front door just watching the trains go by. I was always on the look-out for other interesting things I could do and remember the belting I got one day when I found the paint tin in the basement and started painting the walls wearing my Sunday best outfit. Mum wasn't too pleased about that and Dad looked pretty grim too.

Life got a bit more exciting when we moved to the main station building where there were more interesting things to see and do. I could watch the trains go past by simply looking out the window. The platform was right outside our living room so there was always quite a bit of activity as all the prospective travellers assembled outside our window waiting for their trains. Mum must have been pretty au fait with the timetable as she used to shut it to keep out the nosey faces. I watched lots of trains, including the 'Orient Express' which thundered through the station twice a week. It must have been very important as it had absolute priority on the line and all other trains had to wait on side lines to let it pass. It was a shiny dark green train with golden stripes in the middle of each carriage with 'Wagon Lit' written along the centre of them. I didn't know what that meant, but then I couldn't read yet, though it wouldn't have helped if I could since it was French. I was told that was where people slept and it puzzled me that people got into trains to go to sleep instead of looking out the windows. Unfortunately some trains did not fare so well.

I remember one terrible accident where two express trains or 'Schnellzge' collided head on at full speed in dense fog killing 120 people and injuring many more. The impact made the carriages of both trains rear up like giant snakes and crush on top of each other, spilling and squashing the passengers. It all happened near the cottage we had lived in before moving to the station. I was most upset when Mum wouldn't allow me to go down there to have a closer look; it wasn't proper for little children to watch that, she reasoned. Besides, the Army was there and had the area cordoned off.

Another incident I remember was one foggy morning when Hubler the stationmaster went to find out why a signal light was not working. On the way back he was knocked down by a train and cut to pieces. Poor chap; I remember him well. He had a huge blister on his lower lip which they said was a birthmark, though I didn't know what that meant. I used to get his afternoon beer from the Bahnhof Wirtschaft (railway cafe) and his sudden demise was a sad blow for me because I looked forward to that little errand each day. I asked Dad when Hubler was coming back and he said he didn't think he would be back for quite some time...

Offingen was an industrial town. It had a large woodchip processing plant and a huge paper manufacturing complex as well as a large felt factory, consequently there were lots of activities in the railway goods yard. I spent a lot of time down there as the yard was full of exciting things to watch, such as timber logs being unloaded and debarked by teams of workers, then loaded on to horse-drawn trailers to be taken to the woodchip mill and stacks of felt bales waiting to be loaded on to rail wagons. The big paper manufacturing complex was just in the process of being dismantled and stripped of all machinery, including its huge boilers which were being transported slowly along the road on wooden rollers, to be loaded on to railway carriages - part of the Versailles Treaty imposed reparations. I suppose they were destined for France, or some other European country.

The only drawback was after all the workmen and their horses had left in the evening I had to go down with a little cart and bucket and collect what the horses had left behind. It didn't do much for my ego but a lot of good for the garden. Quite often after coal was unloaded by teams of labourers with shovels amidst plenty of noise and dust, I had to make a few additional trips to the yard to collect the coal which fell between the wagons and the horse carts. Mum used it to keep the potbelly stove going in our living room and in the 'Wohnzimmer' (best room of the house) on the very rare occasions when she made that room accessible for use that was mainly on holidays like Christmas or Easter or perhaps when we had visitors. For the rest of the year it was only a show room to be kept nice and tidy and most of the time locked up.

Mum took me on a train trip early one morning. We went to see my Grand-Mother in Mertingen. Granny was sick in bed. That was the only time I ever saw her. She died a few months later. The farm was run by my oncle and his wife. I clearly remember the dunny and huge dungheap in the yard, right outside the front door. They had about 25 cows and three children as well and they all lived in the big house together, of course the cows had their own sleeping quarters seperated from the kitchen by a sort of a washroom cum Laundry. All the bedrooms were upstairs, right over the 'moo's dormitary. (natural central heating!!!)

Tony was the oldest of their three children maybe five or six years older than I was. Mary, the second one was my brother's age and the youngest one was just a baby and I can't remember her name. Mum had two more brothers, one was killed in the first war on the Passchendaele-Ypres front in Flanders the first hour he got posted there and the other was lucky enough to come back home and was now working on a farm nearby. As an ironic twist of fate Tony, the oldest boy, was serving in the Augsburg artillery garrison when the war (W.W.ii) started with Poland. He was killed in the first week he got there. Mary, according to what my Father told me, married comfortably into a large farm in Buttenwiesen, a village near Mertingen. Her younger sister was not so fortunate. After the Americans left the village in 1945 they also left her pregnant. She was only 19 at the time. I was told she had a baby-girl. My American 'relation', I suppose!!

Of course the best time I had was when my brother was home on school holidays. We went down to the goods yard on the weekends when everything was at a standstill and had the whole place to ourselves. We played in the empty wagons, using the brake cabooses on the end of some of the goods carriages as imaginary train engines but of course this activity came to an end when Dad found out we'd loosened the brake wheel and it started to roll down the slope to crash on to another car. We were put under house arrest for a few Sundays after that, though it wasn't really that bad as we had to go to church so were always dressed in our Sunday best with washed face and hands, thus ruling out play in the goods yard anyway.

Our house on the station had no front or back yard except for a small area across the road where Dad cultivated a small garden. No place outside was private so the moment you stepped out the front door you were on railway property. In a seperate building at the end of the house, about 10 metre from our living room windows were the public toilets and on a hot day one never dared to open the window on that side of the house otherwise the whole house was immediately filled with the smell of carbolic fumes, the stuff they used to disinfect the urinals.

The toilets were of cesspit construction and had to be emptied frequently. That in itself was a special occasion for me, very exciting to watch when the cesspit 'engineer' with his horse-drawn barrel cart arrived to do his precision job. I clearly remember one particular occasion when I stood on the other side of the barrel and watched through the spokes of the wheels how the operator ladled out and emptied the stuff into the aperture on top of the barrel with the touch of an expert, not spilling an ounce but he must have been distracted or maybe he spotted me standing there as all of a sudden the contents of the large ladle came oozing down on top of me.

I was never allowed to watch him again after that! That was one occasion when Mum had to open the windows but this time she was more concerned for the stink to go out, not the smell to come in, while she attempted to get me cleaned up. There was no bath in the house and the only hot water was from the cooking range in the kitchen so it must have been a tiresome task since the communal clothes washing facility across the road was not available to her for some days yet.

I remember the day Father went on a trip to Munich and decided to take me with him. We left on the early morning commuter train to Neu-Offingen and boarded the express train to Munich with very few stops in between. It was very exciting sitting on the wooden bench by the window listening to the clacking noise of the wheels making contact with the track expansion joints and stretching my neck to watch the telegraph posts sweep by. I was fascinated by the wires flowing in continuous up and down motion from post to post past the window only to disappear on going through a station. But the excitement became a bit too much and I fell asleep and when Dad woke me it was about midday and we were in Mnchen Hauptbahnhof which was crowded. The air stank from burned off coal belching from the parked steam engines. I hung on to Dad's hand knowing he wouldn't get lost as he was born and brought up in Munich and walking along the platform I was sure he could see people's heads whereas I could only see trousers and swishing skirts. We crossed a few platforms and boarded another train for a short trip to what Dad said was the Ostbahnhof.

Outside the station square was what looked like a single railway carriage in the middle of the street with a stick coming out of the roof and a wheel on its top resting on a wire above. "That's a Trambahn" Dad said. "It runs on a rail track in the street, and the stick is there to bring the electricity down from the overhead wire to make its motor run." I couldn't see anything coming down the stick and was really puzzled, even more so when the conducter pulled it by the attached string and swivelled it round from one end of the vehicle to the other which caused a big spark when the wheel made contact with the wire again. 'Clang, clang' went a bell followed by a whining noise from its electric motor and the street car moved off along the street. I was staring at the the car until it was out of sight hoping to see a few more sparks.

There was another street car there, also on rails but with two horses up front and a uniformed Kutscher with a heavily bearded face stood on a platform in front holding a big wheel. Ah, I knew that, brake wheel, I observed to myself. Dad paid some money to the Schaffner and we stepped aboard and waited for more people to join us. The vehicle was open on both sides so it was the Schaffner's job to make sure everyone was seated before he pulled a string hanging from the roof which shook a bell on the Kutscher's platform. My eyes were glued on the Schaffner's activity so missed what the Kutscher did to the horses to make them move.

"Now we go to the Giesinger Kirche, to the Ostfriedhof," Dad said, "and I will show you where your Grandparents are buried." I was quite excited, because I had never met them before. I knew what they looked like from a photograph at home in the living room. Grand-dad was sitting on a horse and had a sabre on his belt and wore a stiff top hat plus a very long beard. He was in the Munich mounted police. Grand-ma wore a long dark skirt which trailed the floor and a white long- sleeved blouse with a tightly frilled collar up to the ears and had dark plaited hair.

The Trambahn stopped at the gates of the cemetery where we got off and Dad bought a bunch of flowers from one of the numerous sellers lined up at the entrance. It was a long walk down the gravel path to wherever Dad had in mind we were going and I hung on to his hand again, his other clutching the flowers. I had no idea what the place was all about. Finally he stopped in front of a huge stone with some writing on its face and put the flowers down and sprinkled some water from a little bowl on the ground. I asked Dad why Grand-ma and Grand- dad weren't there and he said they were but they were sleeping. I still thought they could have come since I'd had such a tiring day to get there, but didn't want to ask anymore questions as he didn't look too happy so I shut up and we quietly walked back to the entrance.

Outside there were quite a few automobiles. Dad said you could hire them to take you wherever you wanted to go but they were too expensive. I would like to have had a ride in one but instead we looked for the horse-drawn buggies, the Fiakers. Dad had some important talk with one of the Kutschers, and I was lifted up on to the wooden bench and he climbed and sat beside me. "We are going to see uncle Max who lives in Giesing" he said. Then there was a sharp 'clang, clang, clang' from somewhere behind followed by the whining motor and wheel clatter of a streecar as it overtook us on our left at some breath-taking speed. Just as well our horse was fitted with blinkers. We trotted on until we reached Onkel Max's street where the Kutscher brought his horse to a standstill with a hefty 'whoa' and an enormous pull on his brake ratchet. Dad lifted me down and paid the Kutscher who after a loud 'Grss Gott' and a slight tap on my head with his whip pulled out into the street again.

Onkel Max and Tante Emelie lived on the second floor of a tenement building and I remember him being bald headed and much older than Dad. I thought he was my Grand-dad and he wasn't too happy about that though Dad had a good laugh. They had three children, two boys and a girl but they were much bigger than me. Dad said he had to be back home again in the morning so we couldn't stay long. He had some beer with uncle Max and Tante Emelie gave me a Kracherl and a Brezel which wasn't the best thing to do as on our drive back to the Ostbahnhof in the buggy Dad had to ask the Kutscher to stop because I had to do a wee and he wasn't at all pleased that I did it into the spokes of the buggy wheel.

There were other relatives living in Munich at that time. Tante Amalia, Dad's sister, lived in the Schwanthaler Strasse on the way to Laim and there was Onkel Gustl (Gustav) who lived out in Sendlingen, way past the Sendlinger Torplatz, but Dad said it was too far to walk but he would take me there some other time. I was glad about that as I was too tired to walk anymore. I must have fallen asleep the moment we got on the train as I can't remember how I got home.

Quite often I visited the signal lamp cleaner who had his shed a little further on from the toilet block. His job was to collect all the signal lamps during the day, clean them and fill them with carbide and water and then take them back to the signals in the evening. He was an ex soldier from the war and told me how it had been in the trenches in Flanders. He was quite an inventive chap and one day he showed me how to make a bomb. He got a beer bottle, put some carbide in and filled it with water, closed it and put it outside in a trench where it exploded and one glass fragment hit me on the hand, nearly cutting off my thumb. I ran home and told Mum I had cut myself on a broken beer bottle, which actually was the truth. Anyhow, it didn't come as a surprise when my parents bundled me off in 1928 to join my brother at the boarding school in Algasing.

 

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