As from a great distance he heard his batallion commander's voice: "Brave, with exemplary morale, and unshakeable fighting spirit our comrade, cut off from his unit,entirely dependent on himself, and absolutely determined to return to his troop eliminated an important enemy base and thus managed to fight his way through to his own lines."

Attention had been paid to the field grey moral code.

The decorated soldier, however, recalled once again how he, frightened to death, had blindly fired with his machine gun and had thrown his last hand grenade, and he felt once again how the immidiately following deathly silence had weighed him down.

The commander's handshake fetched him out of his paralysing recollections. Automatically he saluted and stepped back into the ranks. There, hidden by his comrades in front, he touched his chest and caught himself looking at his hands in order to make sure that no traces could be seen there. The cross styled out of metal on the uniform or simply made out of wood sticking in the ground did it not always symbolize suffering, wounds, death?

When the soldier, only a few days later, sank to the ground after having been shot in the breast just above the medal, he again received a cross. This time it was the other one, the wooden one lacking in lustre and indicating finality. And the small black cross, painted in the middle, had only just the shape in common with the decoration awarded to him, nothing else, but it had become the official identification of the dead soldier who had been given a place in that huge army of those who all over the world had become heroes under their uniform crosses as the law commanded it after having been denied as the law commanded it to live their lives and to bear their crosses.

Translated from German into English by Rainer Blaschke

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© 2002 Hans-Werner Ecker