March's return to Globus

March’s return to Globus is both a physical search for evidence and a struggle against the conviction that the evidence has vanished. After driving through a landscape marked by Germany’s eastward conquest, he leaves the autobahn near Kattowitz, recognizes a disused railway, and finds scorched bricks among the grass. Their existence challenges his own despair that nobody will believe what happened there, even as the approaching search party makes clear that finding proof is not the same as securing its survival.

The road back

The return takes place against the remembered spectacle of the 1939 invasion of Poland. March sees the road as the route down which the German Tenth Army had advanced: in his mind, old newsreels replay horse-drawn artillery, tanks, and marching troops. The victory had seemed easy, and the crowds had cheered. The memory gives the journey a historical direction: the road to Globus passes through a landscape shaped by the conquest whose consequences March is trying to establish.

An exit sign points toward Gleiwitz, identified as the town where the war began. Further on, the road carries a different kind of monument. A Totenburg stands on a bare hilltop, its four granite towers enclosing a bronze obelisk. March sees the weak sun reflected in the metal, while the narrator describes dozens of such memorials stretching toward the Urals, dedicated to Germans who had died, were dying, and would die in the conquest of the East. The stately memorials and deserted highways turn the landscape into evidence of a continuing imperial project, not merely a backdrop to March’s private search.

Leaving the autobahn

Jaeger is exhausted and says he cannot drive much longer. March replies that they are nearly there. After another twenty kilometers, past the factory chimneys of Kattowitz, March tells Jaeger to leave the autobahn. They continue past corrugated-iron sheds, scattered trees, and steel tracks until March recognizes a disused railway line and tells him to stop. The abandoned track is the practical landmark that confirms they have reached the place March sought.

The discovery comes after March has confronted the possibility that the site itself is gone. He thinks that there is nothing left at Globus, not even a brick, and that nobody will ever believe it. More painfully, he acknowledges that part of him cannot believe it either. The thought marks the journey’s crisis: the danger is not only that evidence has been destroyed, but that the absence of visible proof has begun to weaken March’s own certainty.

The brick and the pursuit

At the base of a sapling, March notices a red streak almost hidden from view. He picks up a brick pitted with yellow lichen, scorched by explosives, and crumbling at its corners. It is nevertheless solid. When he scrapes the lichen away with his thumb, carmine dust gathers beneath his fingernail. As he bends to put the fragment back, he sees more pieces in the pale grass: first several, then dozens, then what appears to be a hundred. What had seemed to be a completely erased site yields physical remnants, small and damaged but real.

The bricks answer March’s immediate doubt without resolving the larger problem of proof. They establish that something survived at Globus, but the narrative offers no assurance that others will accept what the fragments mean. The distinction between existence and belief has governed March’s thoughts on the road; now the discovery gives that conflict a tangible form. The brick can be held and examined, yet its significance remains vulnerable to the destruction of the site and the denial surrounding it.

Jaeger left behind

Before the search party reaches him, March tells Jaeger to take out his handcuffs, give him the key, and attach himself to the steering wheel. He apologizes. The exchange ends the pair’s shared journey by making Jaeger’s continued presence in the car incompatible with March’s next move. Jaeger responds with an expression of distress, but March proceeds with the separation.

After walking for a little over five minutes toward the birch woods, March hears a helicopter and looks back. A dozen cars have joined the Mercedes on the road, and a line of black figures is beginning to move toward him. He turns forward and continues walking. The return therefore ends not in safety but in renewed pursuit: March has recovered a material trace of Globus, while those searching for him close in behind. The movement away from the road echoes the larger tension of the scene, in which evidence has reappeared but its witness remains exposed.