As he moves through “The silver of the Prussian days/ The crimson of the Prussian nights” he comes across a huge tough Major in the railway station, swigging alcohol and holding at pistol point a German rail official, forcing him to reroute trains into his trap. “What did you do in peacetime?” He was a lecturer in literature. They are soon talking about the Enlightenment:

Old Rus, the Mongols, Europe and
Unbuttoning, throwing off his hat,
He’s turning sensitive, subtle, kind,
As though a deep inhaling burst,
Some tight hoop around his chest,
He speaks even of Germany
With understanding, with sympathy

but he keeps his revolver trained on the German railwayman. The next scene is again of looting, and ends with Soviet soldiers wondering whether to shoot a boy left in a pram (“He’ll grow and put a helmet on/ Deal with him now, d’you think?”), citing the official order “Blood for Blood” – but in the end they don’t. In another dramatic scene the poet tries, but fails, to prevent the senseless killing of a German girl who is misidentified as the wife of an SS man by two of his soldiers, brutal or vengeful for different reasons and in different ways. The victim is described at length:

.?.?.?understanding
She screamed. Down in the snow she fell
She froze up, curled into a ball
Like a little animal
Lying motionless and pale?.?.?.

The bullets fly, and the poet drives on. Throughout, his mind is full of sensitive, sensual scherzos that tempt him to indulge his lusts; at the same time he is haunted by “the worm of self-­analysis”. It ends with himself, the narrator, in what amounts to a more quiet rape scene, and when the German girl says “Don’t shoot me”, it is he who has the soul-loss.