Lothar talks about MvR
Event ID: 326
25 September 1916
Source ID: 10
“On the 25th, Lother arrived, quite unexpectedly… …We lose ourselves in old times and everything is friendly and bright again. Once, Manfred shot five ducks dead in a blind hunt – they were swimming on the Weistritz. But they were only tame ones. But there was no punishment because he told the truth straight away. And another time, when we were wandering through the forest, Manfred suddenly stood on a footbridge over black water. He says to Lothar, as if it were a matter of course: ‘Watch out, you, I’m going to fall into the water.’ Immediately afterwards, he disappeared into the truly pitch-black flood. ‘That was a good scare, remember?’ Lothar remembers, he laughs so hard that the glow of his cigarette starts to dance; it’s already dim in the room. ‘Of course,’ he says, ‘we went to the mill because he didn’t smell good.’ ‘Yes, yes, he had to be bathed, with lots of soap.’ “And then, the journey home. An hour’s journey back – and Manfred had nothing on his body but the shirt the miller’s wife had borrowed and the cadet’s coat over it, and he was barefoot.” ‘It didn’t even give him a cold.’ I always want to sit and talk to Lothar like this, but tomorrow he has to leave again. But this day still belongs to us, and sometimes we’ve chatted into the night. “Once we really wanted to put you boys to the test of courage, Ilse and me. There was a rumour that I once hanged someone on the floor of our house and now it was haunted, remember, Lother?” “It was so nice and scary for us boys. At night, there was shuffling and rumbling on the floor upstairs and you could hear groaning – the housekeepers said so…” ‘Manfred was really keen to experience this haunting, so we had your bed, Lothar, and Manfred’s carried to the spot…’ ‘We had taken a big stick to bed with us; Manfred said he wanted to light the ghost home.’ ‘The ghost – that was us, Ilse and I, we had quietly crept upstairs and rolled chestnuts across the floorboard.’ “I heard it first, I was wide-eyed with excitement. ‘Manfred’ I shouted, ‘Manfred! He was fast asleep. Eventually he woke up and I heard him sit up in bed.” “I can tell the rest better, because it was about our skin. He got out of bed in one jump and ran at us with a swinging bat. I had to switch on the light quickly, otherwise we would have been beaten.” ‘Manfred was fourteen at the time.’ ‘No, thirteen.’ Lothar laughs heartily. The next day I took him back to the railway…”
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