A Soldier Experiences A Tree

“Old Oak” a pencil drawing by Hans Krükel

During a field exercise, a soldier noticed an oak tree that he had decided to draw because of its pronounced growth. The next Sunday off duty he went out with drawing pad under his arm and drawing pens in his pocket.

It was still early in the day. The soldier’s boots slammed hard on the pavement of the quiet morning streets. Soon he had the stone-desert of the urban garrison behind him. A few more suburban streets interspersed with green, then he stood in front of the forest, the wide, silent forest.

The man hesitated to enter. A wave of the spicy scent of pine struck him. It was a different world than the one he just came from. He held his breath. – And while it pushed him away with a whistle, he pushed away the haste of the big city at the same time. The chest rose and fell low. He walked calmly into the ceremonial hall.

He felt at one with himself and with the world around him. He knew both, himself and the nature surrounding him, moved from the same center.

Now he no longer needed to arm himself against anything outside of him, because everything here belonged to him. It was around him and in him. The murmuring and whispering in the branches and the depths, it was in his chest. The flooding and shimmering of the colors, the light and the shadows, he had it as an image in him. The strong and delicate forms of the trees and grasses, he did not need to make an effort to look at them. The law, by which they were, was his own. His eyes and ears were turned inward. And yet everything found its way in, the closest and the most distant, the grass and the trees, the birds and squirrels, the lake and the sky, the fog and the morning sun, the twittering and the rustling, a whole magical world of sounds and shapes.

And that was what was deeply delighting for the soldier: he clearly and consciously experienced all of this as an unalterable order.

A singing and clinking awoke in the distance, came closer, swelled to rustling chords. Did it begin in the whisper of the twig, in the song of the birds, or in the chest of the man?

Figures grew out of the ground, as if chiseled by an artist’s hand, worthy of a world full of beauty.

Picture panels filled areas of a space that could not be surpassed in simple form and yet as rich in forms as the forest.

There stood the soldier’s oak, which he wanted to undertake to capture with a pen on a piece of paper. Now he knew how to draw it, not as a game of lines, as he saw it before, no, as he experienced it today, now, as the law of the Creator, which was his own. With a pencil on paper? Yes, with pencil on paper, that was his firm will, he wanted to write down the divine law in the tree.

Stop, my dear, exclaimed the God, you don’t have me that easy – and he withdrew from him just as the soldier was preparing to put the first line on the paper.

There stood the oak, a tree like any other, made of trunk, branches and foliage, with pitted bark, gray and green, a tangle of light and shadow. Where was the divine about it?

There sat the poor man, a king, who had lost his kingdom.

Now he had to choose. Would he take up the fight or would he give up? He chose to be a soldier. He went on to battle, to battle with God. No sooner would he end the struggle than until he forced God to accept him as a tool. It wasn’t presumptuous what made him act like that. He wanted just to serve, to write down the eternal law for the brothers, so that they could better find the way to their own experience. That was his God-service that Sunday.

After giving himself an account of what he had done, he went to work. He used all weapons, the will and the imagination, the conception, and the conscious mind. He gathered everything at one point, at the point where the tip of his pen touched the paper. With all his tense forces he now began to create the oak. He performed the creation anew in her. Powerful from the roots, he let them grow into the trunk, the branches, twigs and leaves. And how he brought her to life, he lived with her for hundreds of years. He was with her in rejoicing with the sun, in wrestling with the wind, in the years of rich food and in the years of hunger.

With the finest of senses he felt how the branch here had to turn backwards to give out, in order to move on desperately back and forth to all the more beautifully fit into the whole. 

Nothing could grow as it wanted. One thing had to go along with the other. It was often tough. Many a twig would have liked better to move in a different direction. No, serve the whole, demanded the law of the tree.

The artist did not forget what apparently violated the law, the withered branches and the branches infested with malformations and gnawing, which had to perish because they did not have sufficient vitality or succumbed to an alien force.

Deeper and deeper the soldier penetrated into the essence of his work. He could just as easily have sat on a bare rock by the sea or in a quiet room. He had not looked at that tree in front of him for a long time. He created it out from himself. Was he still the maker himself? Or did he create in him and out of him what was common in the eternal law of creations? Yes, overwhelmed by the will of the soldier, he had entered the human breast. Man and God had become one. One in the work that was now completed.

– H.K.

Source: SS-Leitheft 8. Jahrgang – heft 3, 1942 p. 25-26, Translated by Karl Jægerlund