Kroysing leant against the broad parapet and contemplated the hedge-lined meadows below, the streets, the railway line to Luxembourg and the local line he’d come up on that morning from Azannes. A sudden wild anger gripped him at the false peace in this fat, stinking world. God knew he wasn’t the sort of man who begrudged others their pleasures just because things were less pleasant for him. But when he thought how he’d crawled out of Douaumont at 4am and then crossed an insane landscape of leprous craters only to spend an hour admiring the view like a lovesick schoolboy, he felt like peppering the place with grenades.
From a small door in the citadel’s large keep a sergeant emerged with a folder under his arm and his cap perched casually on his cropped head. A local would have recognised him by the cigar at the corner of his mouth as the lawyer Porisch, traipsing back down to the town in his soldier’s garb after interrogating a prisoner. When he saw the officer, Porisch took the cigar from his mouth, clasped the folder close and saluted with a sullen lift of his head. His round, bulging eyes sought the lieutenant’s. Kroysing waved him aside contemptuously; he almost felt like snarling at him and sending him back.
In the meantime, Corporal Sieck had taken pity on the man from the front and sent an orderly to the judge advocate’s quarters with the note, although Kroysing had only asked for it be put on his desk. Judge Advocate Mertens often didn’t turn up at his unlovely office until 11am. There was no telephone connection to his quarters. He didn’t want to be bothered when he was off duty. He’d discovered French painting and with the help of the musical Herr Porisch and various books of reproductions and art histories was feeling his way from Bastien-Lepage back to Corot and forward to Manet and the impressionists. The name Kroysing meant nothing to him. ‘Came from the front. Hasn’t much time,’ the note also said. C.G. Mertens was a polite man who didn’t like to keep people waiting. He hoped Porisch would be able to bring him up to speed quickly. As he ate his breakfast, it dawned on him that the Kroysing files related to a sergeant. So it’s a company commander wanting a nice day out in Montmédy, he thought. It often took Professor Mertens a while to marshal his thoughts.
One minute after 10am, Eberhard Kroysing loped up the old-fashioned stairs two to three at a time. He’d expected a fat, comfort-loving military official and was initially thrown by the sensitive scholar in gold-rimmed spectacles with a head reminicent of Field Marshal Moltke’s. Instead of marching into the room and aggressively confronting this bastard from behind the lines, he suddenly felt he had to be polite. It was clear from the quiet gaze in the man’s blue eyes that no ill-will towards his brother or anyone else had emanated from this office. Eberhard Kroysing could be very charming, as plenty of girls could testify. He formulated his request in gentle words. With his head to one side, C.G. Mertens listened to the sapper lieutenant’s deep voice, which seemed to resonate in his chest.
So this wasn’t a company commander exploiting a pretext but a brother of Sergeant Kroysing against whom charges had been brought several months previously. Judge Advocate Mertens knew nothing more specific as the case had not got past the preliminary investigation stage. Mertens was from north Germany and separated ‘s’ from ‘t’ when he spoke in the typical Plattdeutsch manner, which struck Kroysing, who was from Franken in the south, as rather spinsterish.
‘The state of affairs is being managed by my assistant, Herr Porisch, a former student of my father’s as I’ve discovered. I tell you this, lieutenant, because Herr Porisch wears the uniform of a sergeant and any confusion would be most embarrassing.’
You clown, thought Eberhard Kroysing. Who’s your father and what’s it got to do with me? Be better if you looked after your files. Aloud he said, ‘We were all something else before, Judge Advocate. I, for example, was a mechanical engineer at the Technical University in Berlin Charlottenburg, or “Schlorndorf” as we students called it. But now we have new skins and want to do the best we can.’
Herr Mertens didn’t answer. He rang a bell and said, ‘Please tell Herr Porisch to join this meeting’ to the orderly standing to attention in the door.
Well, well, thought Eberhard Kroysing, as Porisch entered the room, round eyes protruding from his round face, a cigar in his left hand, his right playing an imaginary piano. It’s a good thing I didn’t flatten him. ‘We’ve already met,’ he said, as they were introduced.
‘Fate did indeed provide a preview,’ Porisch agreed.
‘Sometimes a preview doesn’t lead anywhere,’ said Kroysing, ‘but I’d now like some information about my brother’s case.’
Franz Porisch showed what a good memory he had. The dossier against Christoph Kroysing, sergeant in the military Reserve, had been referred to his unit, a Bavarian labour battalion stationed near Mangiennes, several months previously, at the end of April. However, as the investigation of the accused and the accusations made couldn’t possibly have taken so long, the battalion had twice been asked to return the files. Both times the battalion had replied that it couldn’t comment on the whereabouts of the files as the Third Company had in due course passed them on to Kroysing’s replacement unit at Ingolstadt.
‘To his replacement unit in Ingolstadt?’ repeated Eberhard Kroysing stiffly. He sat squarely on his chair with his hands on his thighs. He looks like Ramses with his hooked nose, thin lips and those eyes that are about to scorch my little Porisch, thought Professor Mertens, who was starting to find his tall guest rather captivating.
‘Relato refero,’ replied Porisch. ‘I’m just repeating what we were told. About 10 days ago, the file came back to us through official channels along with other reports. It was marked “Accused killed in action” with the date and the company’s official seal. Shortly thereafter the battalion called us to confirm the news and ask whether we intended to close the file. Naturally, we said yes, as a closed file is the sort of file everyone likes.’ It then occurred to him that the man sat there was the brother of the accused, who had been killed in action and was therefore dead. Dropping his cigar in the ashtray in shock, he jumped up, bowed and stammered: ‘My condolences, by the way. My sincere condolences.’
The judge advocate rose and reached his hand across the desk to express his condolences too. Eberhard Kroysing looked from one man to the other. He’d have liked to smash both their faces in, as he put it to himself. These men had effectively aided and abetted a murder with their sloppiness. Then he pulled himself together, half rose from his chair, accepted Mertens’ limp, scholarly hand and asked without further explanation if he could see the file. Sergeant Porisch jumped out of the door, ready to be of service. And as Mertens watched Kroysing in silence so as not to upset his feelings, Kroysing froze and thought: Christel wasn’t imagining things, and the ASC man at the funeral wasn’t lying. They murdered Christel; they let the Frogs sort it out for them. To Ingolstadt! That beautiful town full of bridges. While Christel was sitting in Chambrettes-Ferme waiting to be relieved, for a hearing. Cut off from God and the world. And I, bastard that I am, left him to deal with it all alone. A dozen villains conspiring against little Christel.
Then he had in his hand the thinnest file that could ever have made it to a court martial: a couple of pages, beginning with a report from Field Censor’s Office V and Christel’s letter to Uncle Franz, written in his brother’s fine, familiar hand, a couple of pages from a company report (exonerating the NCO corps), a statement from the replacement unit in Ingolstadt to the effect that Chr. Kroysing (currently in the field) had last been brought there in February and been assigned to Niggl’s ASC battalion at the beginning of March. There was a long pause and then a note from mid-July from the field hospital at Billy: ‘Brought in seriously injured’. And the next day: ‘Buried Billy with two other NCOs, cross no. D 3321’.
It was very quiet in the room. Its pale grey sterility was enlivened only by a bookcase, an old engraving on one wall of Napoleon III, glazed and in a gilt frame, and a picture on the desk of the famous Professor Mertens, whom Eberhard Kroysing didn’t know. Fr
om outside came the sound of fifes and drums, a company from the Montmédy recruitment depot marching on the practice ground. His heart thumping, Kroysing read his brother’s letter, the clear, angry sentences, full of complaints about the injustice of the world; he couldn’t sleep because of the wrongs visited on his men. I mustn’t get upset, thought Kroysing. Good that these strangers are watching, that I have to control myself. Would’ve made a good company commander, Christel, and a useful citizen later. And, closing the folder, he asked the gentlemen if anything in it had struck them as odd.
Mertens leafed through the folder, then passed it to Porisch. Neither found anything unusual. It often took a long time to ascertain the whereabouts of a man who had been shifted about ‘up front’. That was exactly why the courts were so slow. ‘Exactly,’ said the sapper lieutenant, his face very alert and his voice excessively polite. ‘And you couldn’t know about the slight catch in this whole thing: that my brother was killed at Chambrettes-Ferme less than one mile away from his company, and that it was the company itself that stuck him there at the beginning of May with no relief until the day he was so fortunately killed.’
The two lawyers looked at him in surprise. Then it would be hard to understand, noted the judge advocate softly, why the file was sent to Ingolstadt. Porisch was a quicker thinker. ‘Time is always of the essence,’ he said in his hearty voice. ‘Stick in with the orderly room chaps.’
Lieutenant Kroysing waved his long hand. ‘Bravo. And then along came death – as Wilhelm Busch says.’ The three men all knew the spare poetry and drawings of the eccentric humorist Wilhelm Busch, which depicted life’s cruelties with equanimity.
Judge Advocate Mertens would have preferred to concentrate on the French painter Corot, whose poetically transfigured landscapes greatly appealed to him. But something untoward had happened here in his sector with his help – an irregularity with apparently fatal consequences. His pale face flushed and he requested both gentlemen’s attention: had he understood everything correctly? He repeated the facts just established. ‘If that is the case,’ he added quietly, ‘we cannot consider the matter to be closed. We shall have to pursue our enquiries.’
‘Forgive me,’ said Porisch, ‘but if that is so, then a new offence has been committed, which requires a new file. We must bring charges for the deliberate killing of Sergeant Kroysing by— yes, by whom?’
All three were silent, suddenly realising how murky the incident was. Who would be charged? Was there evidence against anyone? What had actually happened? At what point had a criminal intention come into play? The exigences of service meant Sergeant Kroysing had to stick it out at Chambrettes-Ferme, just as Lieutenant Kroysing was sticking it out at Douaumont and tens of thousands of German soldiers were sticking it out in the trenches at the front. The war was a tireless consumer of men, each of whom was bound to his place by orders. Who could prove that the order that fettered young Kroysing had the murderous ulterior motive of extinguishing his ‘case’? A misdemeanour on the part of the Third Company could be proved. But they could probably talk themselves out of it by saying that an inexperienced clerk had sent the files to Ingolstadt in good faith, where they had been expecting Sergeant Kroysing to turn up at any moment on a transport, as he was clearly absent from his company. The three men went over it all, talking back and forth. Sergeant Porisch’s head was cleared of Brahms’ sonatas, and Professor Carl Mertens forgot about Corot. Their attention was taken by the emerging fuzzy outlines of a wrong, possibly a crime. The guilty parties were well protected, covered by the demands of duty. How could they get to them? Well, they had to and they would. In any case, Lieutenant Kroysing now saw that he could count on these two men and the legal machinery behind them. He suddenly felt very strong.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, looking gratefully from one to the other with a warm glow, a release almost, in his grey eyes, ‘thank you. We’ll rock this baby until it falls out of its cradle. I can already smell the need for a confession. Without a confession from the perpetrators, we cannot rehabilitate my brother. And I want to do that. I owe it to my parents and Uncle Franz, if not to the poor lad himself, who won’t really give a damn, however much it pained him to go to his grave. I still have a last letter from him, which I haven’t yet been able to read for technical reasons. Perhaps that voice from the grave will tell us who our adversaries are. And then I’ll take care of the confession. How, I don’t yet know. There is also a witness still alive. My brother asked an ASC man for help the day before he died. Unfortunately, I’ve so far neglected to find out his name. But I can easily dig it out. It seems my men were working on the railway with those same ASC men. We’re neighbours in a way – everything revolves around the old man of Douaumont, where I live.’
Sergeant Porisch’s eyes widened. ‘Are you stationed at Douaumont, Lieutenant?’ He fell back into official parlance with the shock of it. ‘Can a man survive there?’
‘As you see,’ Eberhard Kroysing replied.
‘Isn’t it under constant attack from the French?’
‘Not always,’ answered Kroysing in his deep voice.
‘But there’s a constant stream of wounded and dead there, isn’t there?’
Kroysing laughed. ‘You get used to it. Nothing’s happened to me yet.’
‘The likes of us can’t imagine what it must be like there.’
‘Not great from your point of view, wonderful from mine. A fabulous stretch of churned up wasteland and old Douaumont right in the middle like the battered carapace of a giant turtle. We sit underneath and crawl out the neck hole to play in the sand. Pretty much. Besides, you probably imagine it’s much more uncomfortable than it actually is. It’ll hold out a bit longer, old Douaumont.’
‘Under high-angle fire,’ said Porisch softly.
‘That too,’ answered Lieutenant Kroysing lightly. ‘You get used to it. But if anything serious happens to me, I’ll appoint a successor or substitute and give you his name and address. This matter certainly shouldn’t suffer because of that. Thank you, gentlemen,’ he repeated, standing up. ‘Now I have a little private war to wage in the midst of this great war. But then all of us continue to pursue our hobbies if there’s time and it doesn’t affect our duties. In the final analysis, I’ve still got to pay the Frogs back for my brother. You might almost say,’ and his long, thin lips curled in a sneer, ‘that I’m ahead of the game on that one: some little exploding mines, you know, a bit of gas, a few canister bombs and finally the blockhouses in Herbesbois that we smoked out with flame throwers. They have a lot of respect for our uniform over there. But thus far I’ve just been doing my professional duty. Now it’s a bit more personal between me and them.’ He pulled on his left glove, put on his helmet, gave the judge advocate then the NCO his bony hand, pulled on his right glove and said: ‘Don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me for a while, gentlemen. If I don’t peg it, I’ll definitely be in touch.’ He then wished them a pleasant lunch and left.
The two men left behind looked at each other. ‘He’s quite a man,’ said Porisch, summarising both their thoughts. ‘I wouldn’t like to be in the shoes of the man who betrayed his little brother.’
Judge Advocate Mertens gave his soft, blonde, scholarly head a delicate shake. ‘Goodness gracious me,’ he said, frowning, ‘how men abuse each other.’
CHAPTER THREE
The demands of duty
LIEUTENANT KROYSING MOVED differently now on the stairs. He no longer jumped but walked, and with each step a plan took shape within him. He needed to proceed in a strictly official way, and that’s what he would do. If the demands of duty had allowed the ASC bigwigs to bring Sergeant Kroysing down, then they would allow Lieutenant Kroysing to force a confession. None of those fellows were men. They looked like men but they were hollow and made of tin. You only had to squeeze them a little and their guts came out. Lieutenant Kroysing looked very much at ease as he slammed the brown oak door shut and almost inaudibly – a sign of great contentment – hummed a tune unde
r his breath.
A lorry carrying two leather-clad drivers braked immediately when a gaunt officer in a steel helmet raised his maroon-gloved hand. The lieutenant was in luck. The lorry was from Lieutenant Psalter’s depot at Damvillers, had delivered express goods for transport to Germany by train and was returning practically empty. Two heavily laden men returning from leave sitting on their crates hardly counted. The only problem was that they couldn’t really offer the lieutenant a seat.
‘Would you care to sit next to me for two minutes, Lieutenant?’ asked the driver, an NCO from Cologne, judging by his accent. ‘We’ve still to pick up some post bags. Then we’ll be able to offer you a nice easy chair, Lieutenant.’
‘Easy chair, that’s a good one,’ laughed Lieutenant Kroysing. ‘Be keeping mothers’ letters warm, will I?’
The driver grinned. He seemed all right to Kroysing. He certainly wasn’t stationed in Montmédy. When the post bags had been loaded, Kroysing said he preferred to stay up front. These lorry drivers went everywhere. They knew all the roads, everywhere of any importance, the approaches to the firing line. They were seasoned men, as they say at sea, and although guarded with officers they were still prepared to chat, express opinions and have a laugh and a joke, all the while keeping their eyes on the light strip of road. Eberhard Kroysing roared with laughter, sometimes grinned to himself, rubbed his hands in glee and ripped his eyes open in astonishment, saying ‘already?’ when the lorry pulled up at the farm where Captain Lauber and the division’s sapper headquarters were installed.
‘A great laugh, Sergeant,’ said Lieutenant Kroysing. ‘And now it’s back to the serious business of life.’
People knew Lieutenant Kroysing here and were impressed by him. The branches of the armed services were small worlds of their own with their own languages and secrets, living side by side in combat units. A sapper lieutenant stood out among infantrymen like a goat in a flock of sheep, but within the structure of his own branch, which started with the broad base of the frontline companies, went through battalion, brigade and division staff, and culminated in the sapper general back at St Martin, he was as much at home and in his proper place as any animal in its herd. Kroysing was hungry. He’d already accepted a sausage and pork fat sandwich from the lorry driver, and he was very happy when Captain Lauber began by inviting him to lunch. Lauber ate with his staff and a few other officers from the area, who had set up a small mess in an empty apartment. They were purely technical troops, radio operators and anti-aircraft specialists, about a dozen men, all deeply preoccupied by their work, well trained and responsible. Captain Lauber, a swarthy man from Württenberg who had served longest of any of them, had established a few house rules. Talking shop at lunchtime was forbidden, as were politics. More than half a bottle of wine was forbidden. Everything else was allowed. Differences in rank didn’t matter, good manners were taken as read, and even staff sergeants were included – even Jewish ones.
Outside Verdun Page 9
