(Excerpted from ‘The War Diary’ by Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Mike Mitchell; with permission from Seagull Books)
What will you do, God, if I die...I don’t go up to the air-raid shelter any more. The Tschörners are already dead and Ali went the next day. Our Ali. There라이브 바카라 no one left in our street any more. The days are so sunny. I’ve taken a chair out to the garden and I’m reading. I have firmly resolved to carry on reading when the bombs come. The Stundenbuch is already creased and smudged. It라이브 바카라 my only comfort. And Baudelaire! Bientot nous tomberons dans les froides tenebres, adieu vive clarte. I don’t need to look at the book any more. Yesterday, the biggest formation we’ve ever had came. The first flew on, the second dropped its bombs. The roar was so deafening I couldn’t breathe and I went down into the cellar after all, which is actually ridiculous in our little house since it wouldn’t even stand up to a little bomb, never mind a 100 kg bomb. They say things look terrible in the town and even out here it looks like the end of the world. I’m not afraid any more, only a physical feeling when the bombs drop, something clenches up inside me. But in my mind I’ve made my will. Perhaps it라이브 바카라 sinful just to sit and look at the sun. But I can’t go back down in the shelter any more, for hours, with the water running down the walls, and it gets so stuffy it almost makes you faint. You’re not allowed to talk because of the air but still the dull, mute masses in there are unbearable. I find the idea of perhaps perish- ing down there with the lot of them, like a herd of cattle, horrifying. At least in the garden. At least in the sunshine.
This morning Anderluh said we weren’t to leave the college when there라이브 바카라 a full-scale alarm any more. He라이브 바카라 behaving like a madman. Early on, he saw Wilma wearing her silver chain with the cross and was so furious he almost threw her down the stairs. At 7 o’clock tomorrow morning we all have to go to the fields outside Annabichl to dig trenches, ‘Klagenfurt has to be defended to the last man and the last woman’, he bellowed. Straight away I discussed what to do with Wilma. She can’t go, she has to look after her brothers and sisters. They’ve been bombed out and her라이브 바카라 mother라이브 바카라 in hospital somewhere, seriously ill. I’ll go myself and check out the situation, if necessary I’ll think up some excuse for her. But Issi, dear old Issi, com- forted me, we went to the edge of the woods again, and eventually we were even laughing. The ‘man taking cover’ was there again, crawling around twenty metres away from us like a startled weasel. When the low-flying planes strafed the trains, he kept popping his head up out of the bushes and shouting hysterically, ‘Cover, ladies! Take cover, ladies!’—and Issi, who nearly chokes once she really starts laughing, ended up gasping for breath and saying, ‘My, isn’t he well brought up!’ Then she told me the latest jokes she라이브 바카라 heard from their chemist라이브 바카라 shop and we ate cold potatoes. I’ll need to be on my toes tomorrow.
All the children were there for the digging but not a single teacher, not even Anderluh, needless to say. Naturally, the form prefects were in charge and, anyway, no one in the whole flock of sheep had any idea of the arrogance of these teachers, our supposed role models. I was so furious I just poked about in the hard ground with my spade a bit, I didn’t feel sick at all but I must have gone all white because after half an hour the girl next to me said, ‘Do you feel sick?’ I muttered something vague, all the time I was just thinking: It라이브 바카라 outrageous what they’re doing to us. These grown-ups, these high-and-mighty ‘educators’, who want to let us get killed. When the full-scale alarm came, a couple of the smaller ones started to get a bit agitated, no house and no cellar for miles around, and the factories nearby! Nearby was a wooden hut and a bombed-out market garden. My bike was there and I said I needed to sit down for a moment. Unfortunately for me, just before that a few of the older leaders from the Hitler Youth had come to check the trenches and they shouted ‘Carry on’. Despite that I left, I leant against the side of the hut and, as no one could see me very well, I jumped on my bike and rode off. The bombs were already falling when I reached Pischeldorferstrasse, I lay in an old crater in the meadow and rode on half an hour later, to Wilma라이브 바카라.
