‘The sickness of our people, the moral sickness, can no longer be affected by the existence or otherwise of Captain Niggl. I was in Belgium with our Rhinelanders when force was used against neutrality and justice. What I saw, what our men proudly carried out in the name of service and duty, was murder, robbery, rape, arson, desecration of churches, every vice of the human soul. They did it because they were ordered to and they were delighted to obey, because their souls – even German souls – were in the possession of the devil’s joy of destruction. I saw the corpses of old men, women and children. I was there when small towns were burnt to the ground in order to terrify a people weaker than us so that they wouldn’t impede us as we marched through. As a German, I was shaken with horror; as a Christian, I wept bitter tears.’
‘The franctireurs resistance fighters shouldn’t have kicked off then,’ said Kroysing darkly.
‘Who can prove that they did?’ Father Lochner stood up and paced from one corner of the room to other. ‘We maintained that they did, and the Belgians denied it. We are accuser, accused and judge in one person. We didn’t allow a neutral investigation – so much the worse for us. But there is a man in Belgium with an indomitable conscience, and as a Catholic and a member of a religious order I’m proud to call him a prince of our Most Holy Church. His name is Cardinal Mercier, and he repudiated the franctireurs story in the strongest terms. And the soldier in you must agree with me when I say that even if Belgian civilians did join the fight, which no one has admitted, our actions in Belgium were the vilest heathenism. That was no war between Christian nations, but a barbaric assault on a Catholic country. My esteemed friend, do you really believe that this can end without permanent damage being done to our German soul? The murder of thousands of innocent people. Thousands of houses burnt down. Residents driven into the flames with kicks and rifle butts. Priests hung in bell towers. Villagers herded together and massacred with machine guns and bayonets. And the stream of lies we unleash to cover it up. The iron face we show to the better informed world so that our own poor people may cling to the delusion that the Belgian atrocities are a fairytale. My dear mannie,’ he said in Rhenish, ‘we have besmirched our souls like nae ither civilised folk. How do you propose to rebalance that with your Niggl? We shall be very sick men when this war ends. We shall need a cure such as cannot yet be foreseen. Of course, the other nations can’t talk. The Americans with their Negroes. The British with their Boer War. The Belgians in the Congo, and the French in Tongking and Morocco. Even the honest Russians. But that doesn’t give us carte blanche, and so I say to you: assign this matter to the Lord, safe in the assurance that Herr Niggl…’
‘…will sign,’ the Lieutenant broke in, unmoved. ‘You see,’ he began, filling the deep brown bowl of his full-bent pipe for a long smoke, ‘you see, Father Lochner, you’ve risked saying what you have because you understand me. Your courage is to your credit, I like your openness and I’m impressed by your knowledge. But overall I feel sorry for you. Why? Because you are trying to maintain a fiction – an important fiction, I concede. But here’s a nasty truth about the Christian nations and Christian codes of behaviour for you. I don’t know if we had any reason to call our Reich Christian in peacetime. As a future engineer, I serve commercial enterprise and am entirely dependent on people who have money to build machines and pay workers’ wages, and it’s not up to me to decide whether capitalism and Christianity can march side by side. But what is clear is that they do march side by side all over the world and no priest has yet taken his own life over it. Your expedients of poverty, chastity and obedience change nothing. That’s just shirking – or worse. Let’s leave peace to one side, then. But I find it disturbing that you maintain that this war here, this little project that we unleashed two years ago, has anything to do with Christianity. I know what you’re going to say’ – and he waved the priest’s objection aside – ‘you keep alive such remnants of Christianity as our people are able to digest in your soul so you can give them comfort in their despair, which is more than anyone else can give them – the same comfort in the same despair that poor Private Bertin gave to my brother when no Christian soul was moved by his fate, to get back to the topic in hand. We live in nice, clean heathen times. We kill with every means at our disposal. We don’t scrimp, sir. We use the elements. We exploit the laws of physics and chemistry. We calculate elaborate parabolas for shell-fire. We conduct scientific investigations of wind direction the better to discharge our poisonous gases. We’ve subjugated the air so that we can rain down bombs, and as surely as my soul lives, I would hate to die such a dirty, cowardly death. In half an hour when we go to eat, each of us will put a steel pot on his baldy skull’ – and he leant his long head forward with a smile and pointed to his thinning hair – ‘and then we’ll proceed into the joyful world of unvarnished reality and European civilisation. What was that quote we heard the other day from our educated schoolboy Süßmann who’s already been dead once? “Nothing is true, and everything is permitted.” Where we’re going that phrase applies, and there’s no quarter for the phrase: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you!” That tells you all you need to know. For just as water always seeks the lowest point, the human soul will sink as far as it can go as a group with impunity. That’s heathenism, sir. And I’m an honest adherent. And if I survive, which isn’t in the stars, I’ll make sure that my entire family are equally honest heathens. In the conflict between truthfulness and Christianity, in 1916, I choose truthfulness.’
Father Lochner regarded him fearfully. He said nothing, lifted the piece of paper from the desk, folded it and went to the door, where he turned. ‘I wish, Lieutenant, that I might one day be allowed to relieve your soul of its bitterness.’
‘See you in half an hour,’ said the heathen Kroysing.
CHAPTER SIX
The slip of paper is returned
AS THE EVENING’S last red flashes paled to smoky brown in the west, three men and a boy in steel helmets stood by Douaumont’s southern exit, called the “throat”, and eyed the pitted landscape bending away from them in troughs and mounds. They looked bold in their metal headgear, like mediaeval warriors, which was exactly how young Bertin felt. He held his head high and was filled with mettle; the coming hours would transcend all others in his life. To their left below Hardaumont, some sort of pond gleamed like a glowing log. Otherwise, the landscape was a world of churned earth floating in the violet evening haze. The three men and the boy inspected the sky. To the east, rose a large, wide crescent moon the colour of brass, enveloped in a halo. It was waxing. The boy – Sergeant Süßmann, the most experienced of them all – pointed to it with his thumb. ‘There’ll be a new moon in three days, and that’ll be the end of the good weather.’
Father Lochner, the heftiest of them in his cloak, asked if the dark nights presaged attacks.
‘Something much worse, Reverend,’ answered Süßmann. ‘Rain.’
‘It could cheerfully hold off for another month,’ muttered Kroysing behind them. ‘We’re nowhere near ready.’
‘It could but it won’t,’ said the youngster. ‘The land is very unobliging towards its conqueror,’ and he laughed at his own joke.
The four men, so unalike in rank and experience, made their way slowly down the slope. Their eyes had adjusted to the gloaming, and they easily picked out the well-trodden paths. Each had a stick. The two officers were wrapped in their cloaks, and the two men had hooked their coat tails back. A damp chill hung over the field, and it would get colder as the night wore on. Süßmann knew the area like his way to school in Berlin and led the party. An excited Bertin followed him, and Lieutenant Kroysing took up the rear behind the priest.
‘That was once a trench,’ said Süßmann, as they changed direction and headed for the patch of ground where the village of Douaumont had once stood with its imposing houses and a church. Now it was indistinguishable from the jagged earth all around. And that earth was beginning to smell; it breathed a sweetish, putrid odour
on the four men that became scorched, sulphurous and sick. In his even, boyish voice, Süßmann warned that they’d have to duck under the barbed wire that covered the hillside all the way to the fort. He also read the smells. They came from shallow graves, stale faeces not properly dug in, the poisoned gas shells that had soaked the soil here, incendiary shells and piles of rotting tins in which leftovers had been lazily dumped. He explained to Bertin that the smell was much worse when it was sunny and windy. Then it got mixed up with the dust and the stench of this whole pulverised, putrefying area that stretched 2.5km to the French lines and the same distance again to the girdle of forts at Verdun. Their route, he continued, cut diagonally across the switch position known as the Adalbert line, where things became more dangerous. The former road between the villages of Douaumont and Fleury ran dead straight to the front and was a huge temptation both to the French field artillery and their targets – relief troops, stretcher bearers, orderlies, anyone on two legs.
The eerie quiet was broken only by the sound of rats scattering. On the barbed wire that they now walked alongside fluttered scraps of material and paper blown over by the wind. At one point shortly before they left the trenches behind and turned in a different direction, a formless black mass hung from the barbed wire. Shortly thereafter, the four men met a couple of panting soldiers and exchanged a few words with them. They were guides running at a trot up to Douaumont to bring down the relief battalion. The regiment had thought the deathly quiet so suspicious it had brought the normal departure time forward by one and a half hours. The trenches, Bertin suddenly realised, were occupied. Those little things sticking up must be steel helmets. After 30 paces, they jumped behind a steep wall, a switch position. To their right stood a figure peering to the south. He radiated tension, and the new arrivals felt the pressure. They breathed more heavily and were tempted to stay put with their backs leaning against the cool earth instead of descending into the flat, mist-wreathed field. Süßmann and Bertin were half a minute ahead of the other two. Mists came in from the Meuse, Süßmann explained, and sometimes caused gas alarms. Better one too many than one too few. Over to the left was Thiaumont farm and further forward lay the Thiaumont line, a dark ridge etched on the night sky. This trench was thinly populated. Bertin suddenly realised how nerve-racking it must be to be responsible for what could happen and how that responsibility must weigh on the couple of officers and staff sergeants in the battalion command. They obviously wouldn’t have that sense of security that still coated daily business at Douaumont. His cheerful mood evaporated; for the first time since he was a boy he felt hostility in the air.
He’d seen all kinds of things. He’d got used to handling military equipment on a daily basis. Dead men were no longer a novelty, neither were exploding shells or aerial bombs. Furthermore, he’d been listening to the war reports for two years. The idea that war exists was as familiar to him as his uniform. But as he himself had no enemies, felt no desire to destroy and was not filled with racial hatred when he thought of the French, the struggle and intensity of war was missing from his world view. Only now did he feel it physically, and it constricted his chest. Hordes of men were lying in wait, peering at one another through the night in order to kill one another. Way over there, a French soldier with a flat steel helmet on his head was pressed against a trench wall looking northwards with a view to shooting at and perhaps killing him, Bertin, as he advanced. Over there in the dark, just the same as here, the issue of an order could turn a knot of men into assault troops, throwing themselves against the lines, always ready to strike the first blow. They weren’t glad to go or keen to die, but when ordered to do so they mounted an attack upon the bodies of their enemies. We’ve come far, he thought bitterly, we Europeans of the year nineteen hundred and sixteen. In the spring of 1914, we met these same French, Belgian and British people at peaceful sporting gatherings and academic symposia. We were delighted when German fire engines rushed to France to help with a mining disaster or French rescue parties appeared in Germany. And now we’re organising murder parties. Why aren’t we ashamed of this trick?
Eberhard Kroysing and the priest, now rather pale, came round the corner. ‘Move on,’ said Kroysing nervously. ‘I’m think there’s going to be a bit of a to-do tonight.’
Young Süßmann sniffed the air like a hunting dog. ‘Not here,’ he said confidently. He scaled the trench parapet, walked upright alongside the barbed wire entanglement and led Bertin through the narrow alleyways that zigzagged across the steel network. The barbed wire entanglement was very wide and very new. ‘ASC job,’ Süßmann said, as a kind of compliment to Bertin. To their left was a ridge of high ground. They kept to the valley and hurried across the shelled areas, avoiding the broad road, which shimmered palely in the dark despite its parlous state. Their path then turned once again. In front of them, white in the distance, flares rose in the haze, shooting straight up or hovering in milky cascades. Telephone lines sometimes ran near them, but their well-trodden path constantly changed direction, though always heading downhill and to the south. They kept alongside earthen walls, trench walls, sometimes waist-high, sometimes neck-high. Then with the suddenness of an electric discharge, shots cracked at the front, wild as whiplash, and machine gun fire rattled. For a moment, Bertin stood watching the chains of red flashes as they traversed the valley, then a fist pressed his helmet against a mound of earth. Something whistled over their heads like scuttling rats and clattered down out of sight spraying them with loose earth.
‘A dud,’ said Süßmann beside him.
‘A dud can still take you out,’ a voice grumbled in a neighbouring shell-hole. Then the two men heard excited whispering nearby, but couldn’t follow it, for the gruesome churning of the machine guns had started up again, German guns this time.
‘Lieutenant, I’ll stay here,’ Father Lochner groaned in Kroysing’s ear.
‘Bad idea,’ was Kroysing’s emphatic reply. ‘You’re right in the middle of the shrapnel zone.’
‘But I can’t manage it,’ moaned the priest. ‘My legs won’t go any further.’
‘Nonsense, Reverend,’ said Kroysing. ‘Just a little attack of nerves. A wee nip will cure that,’ and he offered him his canteen. The aroma of cognac wafted out as he uncorked it. ‘Have a drink,’ he added in a calm, maternal voice tinged with mockery. ‘Only healthy men have nipped from that bottle.’ With shaking hands, the chaplain grasped the canteen by its felt cover, put it to his lips and took two sips, then a third. The liquor felt hot in his stomach. ‘Watch out. It works,’ said Kroysing, hooking the canteen back on to his belt. ‘You should’ve taken your quota before.’ Then he noticed that under his wrap the chaplain was worrying a silver cross with one hand and handing him something white and folded with the other.
‘You’d better take this slip of paper,’ he said. ‘It could be dangerous for you if your enemy got hold of it.’
Kroysing jerked round to face him, wild-eyed under his steel helmet. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, taking the paper and stuffing it inside his leather puttee. ‘Thank you. That could easily have looked like blackmail. But you’ll pass my message on verbally, won’t you, Reverend?’
‘If we get back in one piece,’ answered Lochner, already more composed. ‘Schnapps is one of God’s gifts.’
Three things were required to wage war, Kroysing muttered in reply, still disconcerted by his own carelessness: schnapps, tobacco and men. And then he leant his long frame over the earthen slope; it really had been a dud. Gratitude is a great virtue, he thought. That was a colossal act of stupidity. With that scrap of paper in his hand, Niggl could easily have proven that I had him moved to Douaumont purely out of private revenge and that I put him under pressure to sign a declaration that was a pack of lies. I was skating on thin ice there – and he wiped the sweat away from under his helmet. ‘Are you okay now?’ he asked the priest.
‘I’m okay.’
‘Let’s go then.’
They crawled down the last 1,000m, stooping
for cover the whole way. When white flares shot up over the way, they halted unless they were in a particularly deep section of trench. Their narrow path, pitted with holes and buried in places from the gunfire, wound forwards through traverse trenches, giant mole heaps and smashed tunnels where black holes marked the entrances to the dugouts. Eventually, drenched in sweat, they caught sight of the backs of soldiers, boys really, and the curve of German steel helmets among the ridges of upturned earth. Suddenly, machine gun fire rattled near them. In a corner, smoking a pipe, sat a bearded sapper NCO, who’d been waiting for them.
‘Bang on time, Lieutenant,’ he grinned. ‘Everything’s fine here. The battalion is virtually set up. The officers are waiting for you in the big dugout.’ He spoke in an undertone and with a certain familiarity that didn’t seem to faze Kroysing. Then he frowned anxiously. ‘There seems to be a lot going on across the way. The Frogs are so bloody quiet. I think they’re listening to the racket of the relief troops arriving, and the new lot aren’t even in yet.’
‘Then we’ll have to blow some smoke in their eyes,’ answered Kroysing. ‘Father, why don’t you have a lie down? There’ll be a space in the next medical dugout. I’ll pick you up from the medical men later.’ He disappeared with the guide, and Lochner left with another man.
Bertin followed Süßmann through the deep, narrow cutting, above which the Milky Way hung like two balls of white smoke. Infantry men pushed past them, crawling out of dugouts and disappearing into others. In one place, some of them were using spades to widen a passage that incorporated a large shell hole further on. Everything was done wordlessly and as far as possible without a sound. In the former shell hole, a short, thick pipe such as Bertin had never seen before sat on a mount, and right beside it a newly dug tunnel slanted downwards. They sat down on two-handled wicker baskets filled with large shells: the lightweight mines.
Outside Verdun Page 20
