The lieutenant didn’t answer and shrugged his shoulders. You could tell from his frown that he too loved his battery’s horses. A sudden crash and howl signalled the start of the French shrapnel fire. They heard the shells burst but saw nothing. The main valley was clearly under fire. Kroysing’s down there, thought Bertin dull. It doesn’t matter any more. Finally, a splintered tree loomed up before them and what looked like a wall of earth or a rock. Breathing heavily, Bertin said: ‘It’s downhill a bit on the right. There were no canisters or carbines here.’ He pushed forwards and disappeared from view. ‘Schanz,’ the others heard him calling. ‘Lieutenant Schanz!’
A groan seemed to answer from the void – or was it an echo? The remaining seven men entered the former battery with bated breath. They flashed their torches around, and the white beams of light pierced the fog ahead. The stone and earthworks of the shelters had been blown sky-high. Strands of barbed wire hung across the pathway from what had once been trees. The twisted corpses of dead men lay all around. A direct hit had toppled heavy gun number four and its mounting. The gunners’ dugout, which had fallen in or been torn apart, gaped like a dripstone cave. A blood-drenched swamp had formed by the entrance. The next gun seemed undamaged, though its breech mechanism was missing. The ammunition dump behind it had exploded and flattened a second dugout. The other two guns must have been engulfed in a rain of shells. Number one with its barrel lowered looked like an animal broken at the knees.
‘The French have been here,’ said the infantry corporal, flashing his torch around and lifting up a flat steel helmet.
‘So it would seem,’ said Lieutenant von Roggstroh tightly. They found gunners lying on the floor, two armed with shovels, one clutching a ramrod in his fists. ‘Where’s our guide?’
‘Here,’ called the sergeant, flashing his torch on Bertin, who was kneeling on the floor. Beside him lay an outstretched corpse, stabbed in the chest and apparently shot too, clutching a pistol in his right hand by the barrel like a club. Bertin kept feeling the man’s pulse. His soft, blonde hair still felt alive, but Lieutenant Schanz’s eyes were sightless now. Bertin peered myopically at his face. ‘Take the lamp away,’ he said. ‘I can see him without it.’
‘Not every man gets to see such a clear picture of his future,’ said Lieutenant Roggstroh.
Bertin said nothing. He closed the dead man’s eyes carefully with his fingertips, as if he might hurt him. His heart was full, but he was speechless and numb. ‘Does this make any sense?’ he wondered out loud. And inside he thought: didn’t we all believe in a father in heaven, and then when we grew up in some kind of rational conception of life? And now this? What’s the point? ‘Why did things have to turn out like this?’ he said. ‘He enjoyed life so much.’
Piercing groans came from all sides. There was a stifled scream from one of the dugouts and whimpering from the shattered gun. ‘My leg!’ someone screamed in a Silesian voice. ‘You lot are crushing my bones, goddammit.’
A man they’d taken for dead, propped against a timber near where the screams had come from, clasped his head in his hands and stuttered out a little of what had happened. He’d been hit on the head with a gun butt. Brown devils had suddenly broken in. They must have dragged their dead and wounded back with them. Even before that – the air was full of shells. The medics in their dugout had been the first to get it. The lieutenant had fought on until the end. Then the gunner had got hit on the head and that was all he remembered.
‘He’s lying there now,’ said Lieutenant von Roggstroh. ‘What a lovely night it’s going to be.’ Then he ordered his men to gather up the dead and help the wounded as far as possible. ‘We’d better set up here,’ he said.
Bertin was suddenly freezing. ‘I think,’ he said hesitantly, ‘that I’d best get back now.’
The lieutenant looked at him. ‘What do you actually do in the ASC? That sapper was right. You should apply for a transfer. You could make something of yourself with us.’
‘I don’t think I’ll ever voluntarily apply for anything again,’ said Bertin. ‘You shouldn’t kick against the pricks.’
‘So, you’re a Bible reader,’ said the lieutenant with a hint of contempt. ‘Well, make sure you get home safely. You certainly shouldn’t get lost.’ Bertin hesitated. He wanted this young man’s approval, and so he said that an ASC man’s lot was not an easy one. ‘I know,’ said the lieutenant, ‘but men like you need to take responsibility rather than disappearing into the masses.’
Bertin wanted to say that he had taken on a great responsibility, but it was impossible to explain this to the lieutenant in the short time available. He went to have a final look at his neighbour Schanz. His chest was riddled with black holes, but his blonde head lay upon the earth like that of a man asleep. ‘I’ll remember your face, Paul Schanz,’ he whispered to him. He remained by his side for a few silent moments, arms hanging. Then he pulled himself away, told the lieutenant he was ready to leave, was dismissed, about turned, climbed carefully over the dead and pushed off into the fog. In 20 minutes, the engulfing fog had wiped out the world, isolating any human figure. Bertin shuddered. He was cut off from where he’d been and where he was going. As he trudged on, bent over like an old man, using his torch sparingly, he felt exhausted, near the end of his strength. He’d had enough. He must put in for leave. He could claim 10 days. He’d taken four days in June, and so the battalion owed him six. Tomorrow, or the day after at the latest, he’d put in a request. From time to time, he stopped, cupped his hand round his ear and listened to the dull thuds from the area around the Vaux ridge, Hardaumont and the Hassoule ravine.
There is a natural human tendency to drift to the left when finding their way in the dark or blindfold. The detachment of 100 rifles quickly succumbed to this law as it made its way out of Wild Boar gorge on to open ground, marching in single file in a long column, sappers at the front. Those with the longest legs inevitably ended up at the head of the column. And in the impetuous heart of one of those tall men burnt the desire to lay his hands on his goal – whether that was the fort or the man who’d escaped from it, he didn’t yet know. It wasn’t long before Lieutenant Kroysing was all alone. He hadn’t noticed that the column of men behind him had lost its way and drifted to the left; and to the left of Wild Boar gorge lay not Douaumont but the rear. He, Eberhard Kroysing had an internal guide and one in front of him too: the schoolboy Süßmann, who, having travelled back and forth between the fort and the construction squad, knew the hollow and the surrounding area like his way to school. Kroysing could barely see him but he constantly heard him rattling his equipment or shouting out: ‘Shell hole on the left!’, ‘Watch out, railway lines!’, ‘Dud on the right!’, ‘Look out, stakes!’, ‘Shell hole on the right!’, ‘Firm ground half right!’ The wee man splashed on, and Kroysing waded after him, his eyes boring into the impenetrable yellow-grey fog that grew darker with each passing moment. His hand was clenched round the butt of his pistol. His senses ran ahead of him, ripping aside the accursed blanket of fog, and his heart thumped as he imagined tearing it to shreds and sinking his clenched teeth into that which eluded him: all the forces of resistance. This mad world had conspired against him. The phrase ‘we thought we could pull the stars down out of the sky’ came back to him. He didn’t know what had first made him think of it, but it was true – or perhaps more correctly false. They should have pulled the stars down out of the sky, along with all its ghosts of superstition and residual spirituality. This blanket of cloud, which had left them high and dry at the crucial moment, proved it. To the devil with you, he thought, as he listened out for Süßmann and at the same time turned to catch the clatter of the Saxons behind. They’d achieved nothing. It was all a pile of shit. If you couldn’t command the weather, couldn’t devise some instrument to blow away this kind of spray and achieve visibility, then you were nothing and you shouldn’t start a war. Certainly, people knew how to create fog, but clearing it was another matter. Could he hear the Saxons or couldn’t
he? Was this silence an hallucination? Would the bloody French batteries over there in Caillette wood defeat this final desperate attempt as well?
Sweat poured over his eyes and down to the corners of this mouth. ‘Süßmann,’ he called imperiously. ‘Süßmann.’ He was up to his knees in a muddy hole. He had to push his stick deep into the soggy ground, hold his pistol up high with his left hand and wrestle himself upright in order not to fall over. ‘Süßmann!’ Nothing. He groaned in anger, wiped the splatters of mud from his mouth with the back of his hand and listened. Was that a clattering he could hear far behind him? Was that someone calling way over there to the right? He realised that his undertaking had already failed. It had been madness to start it. The Saxons had been right. Now he was going to pay the price and come to a miserable end in a shell hole somewhere. And, bang, there was a crash above and a whistling cacophony descended: shrapnel. He couldn’t see it, thank God. It’s hailing, he thought with malicious enjoyment. Turn your collar up, Herr Kroysing! Yes, it was hailing. Thankfully, not in his immediate vicinity. Who could tell whether the French were firing too long or too short. Who indeed? An airman, of course. Airmen could tell. Airmen can do anything. They’re superior to their enemies, set above them, beings of a higher order, a step forward in the sluggish development of the vertebrate known as man. And as he stood there, literally rooted to the spot – for where should he go to escape the lead balls, as he couldn’t see them and could only hear their hissing and howling, their snapping and bursting – as his ankles were sucked deeper into the earth’s grip, the point of his walking stick became ever more embedded in the ground, water filled his shoes but didn’t quite penetrate his puttees, as he stood there like that, bent and tense like a pine marten about to jump, enlightenment filled his heart; the heavens weren’t the problem, it was the ground, the earth, this muck we’re born on and condemned to roam upon until we die and are reabsorbed by it. No, my love, he thought as he struggled to free his feet at all costs and trudge on. Do you know the only thing you’re good for? As a springboard, nothing else. We should kick you in the face and fly away. What a bit of luck that we invented the internal combustion engine, we masters of fire and explosions! And in that moment he reached a firm decision: he’d become an airman. Just wait until this mess was over and everything was cleared up, until an iron fist had knocked the French flat for daring to stick their nose into German territory, and a certain someone would throw in this sapper business and join the air force. Crawling around in the dirt was good enough for the likes of Süßmann and Bertin, men with no fighting instinct, no fire in their punches, old men. He, however, would metamorphose into a stone dragon with claws, a tail and fiery breath, which smoked little critters out of their hideaways – all the Niggls and other such creatures. He’d have a fragile box beneath him, two broad wings and a whirling propeller, and hey ho, up above the clouds he’d soar like a Sunday lark – admittedly not to sing songs but to drop bombs on the people crawling around below, to splatter them with gas and bullets as part of a duel from which only one person returns. He stretched up to his full height, grabbed his pistol in his fist and shook it at the air from which the shrapnel was hissing down.
BOOK SIX
Attrition
CHAPTER ONE
The imaginings of a Jew
THE WAR HAD reached its zenith. All the omens, which thus far had favoured the Germans, turned imperceptibly. For a people who had only recently formed into a nation state, the Germans had performed miracles. With his left arm, the Teutonic giant had held off the Russians, already bleeding from multiple wounds, while attacking the two finest fighting nations of the nineteenth century with his right: the British, who had defeated Napoleon, and the French, who under that same Napoleon had been the bane of the old armies. The giant’s right foot had kicked the warlike Serbs into seemingly irreversible submission, while his left had felled the Romanians with a blow to the kneecap. He had terrorised the Romans at the battle of Teutoburg forest, and now he thought the future belonged to him and he wanted to drag it into the present. Only a handful of people on the planet knew that the giant was soft in the head under his steel helmet, quite unable to grasp contemporary realities, and that, just like in a fairy tale, he would forgo that which was within reach out of greed for some other unquantifiable treasure.
That poor feeble head… The Saxon counter-attack the night after the disaster was as ineffective as that mounted by the Silesians and Brandenburgers, because every available rifle had already been thrown into the breaches. The men didn’t show their dejection. That would have been defeatism and would have poisoned the atmosphere. And the French attack was accorded only secondary importance in the highest quarters. The staff studied their mistakes, learnt from the French that the front zone could be moved and that a closer alliance between the infantry and the batteries had advantages, and perhaps regretted the decision taken at Pierrepont. But no one suspected that the French would not be satisfied with their success. The German staff were much too proud and self-important to suspect that. And yet the French sector commander was already preparing his next attack, and this attack was also destined to succeed because it was based on clear thinking and a proper assessment of the realities. They were going to storm the Meuse heights.
But things had not yet got to that point. In a hub like Damvillers, the officers’ messes still filled with bustling gentlemen every lunchtime. Many a new face appeared among them, for example that of Captain Niggl. Captain Niggl went about his business in an unassuming manner – his battalion’s headquarters and Third Company were now stationed in Damvillers – but he was in fact labouring under the burden of fame. Captain Niggl was a hero. He had loyally held out at Douaumont until the last moment at the head of his brave Bavarian ASC men. He was sure to be awarded the Iron Cross, first class. If his king’s military cabinet consented, he might also get an early promotion to major and receive a high Bavarian honour on King Ludwig’s birthday. Bets were being laid in the officers’ mess as to whether he’d receive his Iron Cross on 18 January, the order’s anniversary, or on 27 January, the Kaiser’s birthday. Portly little Niggl wandered among his comrades with an expression of reluctant sociability on his rather sunken face, but his shrewd eyes shone in triumph. His temples had turned grey, white even, but victory had been his. He had not signed, he had not allowed himself to be cowed by a big-mouthed lieutenant, that criminal who had now disappeared. He had bent but he had not broken. His wife and children and he himself would come through this business unscathed – the same was true of Feicht and the others. He ought to reward himself with a nice holiday: Christmas at home with the children, setting up the crib with the Baby Jesus, the shepherds, the ox and the donkey, retouching the gild on the star of Bethlehem. Of course certain papers remained in that shithole of Douaumont. Well, the Frogs could wipe their arses with them. He’d been tested and had passed the test. He padded through Damvillers, which he liked enormously, even in the rain, with a friendly, somewhat battle-weary air. Those he visited felt honoured. Major Jansch felt very honoured, as he visited him quite often.
Today, Jansch sat as usual in his living room at a big desk strewn with newspapers, files and large-format maps. It was very agreeable for Major Jansch to be admired by the hero of Douaumont, and Niggl’s eyes shone with admiration for the Prussian officer.
Editor Jansch was not much liked in Damvillers on account of his being a political know-all. But retired civil servant Niggl found his views fresh and astonishingly broad. Jansch asked him if had he ever heard about the Free Masons’ conspiracy against Germany. He certainly had not. And yet the Grand Orient de France lodge had incited the world against the Reich; otherwise Romania would not have been so stupid as to start a quarrel with world war victors. And what about the role of the Jewish press in spreading enemy propaganda, eh? Jewish journalists spent every day penning poison about the German Michael, especially that Jewish press baron Lord Northcliffe whose newspapers had inundated the world with made-up stories
about atrocities, particularly those supposedly committed in Belgium. The British had known what they were doing when they made that bastard a peer, and the Americans also had half a dozen such Jewish journalists, of whom Hearst was the most prominent. They were everywhere, those ink-spilling swine. He even had one in his company. He’d got himself the name of Bertin; no one knew how. He probably came from Lviv and was called IsaASCon a few years or decades ago. This Yid had now had the nerve to claim six additional days of leave that he supposedly hadn’t got in the summer. In the summer, he had in fact got married to some Sarah or other. He’d persuaded her to marry him, in that typical Jewish way, so he could exploit the regulations. He’d got his leave, but the minimum four days of course. And now he’d had the audacity to demand the missing six days under the pretext that he’d been in the field since the beginning of August. Phenomenal! Where should he have been? Instead of being grateful to the Prussian state for allowing him to wear its uniform, he pulls this trick of wanting leave twice in the same year thereby denying some comrade who hadn’t yet been home the same pleasure. Fortunately he’d come to the right man. The First Company had duly passed his request on, but with a note explaining how things stood. The little jumped-up egghead was hoping to receive his leave papers and travel pass today in the orderly room with the other men due to go on leave. No one had told him he was going to have to turn tail and march back disappointed, then go straight back on guard duty. That would give him time to ponder his insolence, because the Jews were insolent – unimaginably so. As long as those sorts of people enjoyed equal rights with their racial superiors and proper Germans, things would never improve in Germany for all her heroic deeds. This was Jansch’s confidential view, whether Comrade Niggl agreed with it or not.
Outside Verdun Page 25
