When Hans didn’t answer, he wrote of his own call-up. He wrote of heavy fighting, and being made an officer. He described the shattering noise of his unit’s nightly artillery bombardments, and about mornings of feeling like a stranger pulling another stranger out of bed. He wrote about the kind of courage he wanted to possess: cool and detached, free from physical excitement. He hadn’t achieved it, he wrote, though his bunk-mates believed that he had.

He wrote of becoming a company commander at Riga. He wrote about his envy for those in the Flying Corps. He asked if Hans remembered the exhibitions before the war when all those sportsmen turned in their Mercedes so they could kill themselves in the air instead.

He told Hans that he’d sent many more letters than Hans had received: unwritten, happy, sad, chatty, and fearful.

It wasn’t until he quoted two lines from Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer—It will come, it will come / The time with which one can fall in love!—that Hans answered.

He sent a packet. On top was a Simplicissimus cartoon called “Barbarian Girls,” in which happy maidens pored over a map of London marked “Zeppelin Targets.” One girl boasted, “And here our flyers will destroy St. Mark’s Square with bombs,” and another responded, “My God! The poor pigeons.”

In a note beneath the cartoon Hans thanked him for his letters. He’d heard from Lasker-Schüler and Veidt, and both were well. Paul had been a steady correspondent. He thanked Murnau for his concern. He said there was no need to apologize or to castigate oneself. He asked if Murnau had written to his parents. He closed with a new poem:

The hours go slowly.

Awake. Dig trenches and softly sing.

Dream of country; of happiness and going home.

Patience becomes duty. Waiting becomes action.

Across the German earth, the claxon of bells.

The snow of a dreary winter coats the shoulder,

layers the moth-eaten cap.

At the bottom of the packet, he’d wrapped some chocolate. On the wrapping he’d written: Saved this for you.

Murnau heard nothing again for a month. He was lounging in his dugout, his back to a quilt he’d hung for insulation, reading a months-old magazine by candlelight, when he was handed a dispatch. He was too bored to read it. Eventually he finished his leafing around and picked it up. Some kind of lorry-load could be heard roiling past in the mud outside. The dispatch read: Hans Ehrenbaum was killed in action in Russia on July 28th. It was from his commanding officer, whom Hans had asked to notify Murnau in the event of his death. The other lounging lieutenant left the dugout when he realized Murnau had received bad news. That day Murnau’s company was standing down, waiting to be resupplied. He was temporarily relieved of his duties. He remained in the dugout.