Niggl had nothing against Jews. He didn’t know many, but those who lived in his area gave no cause for complaint, and the Bavarian army had never had any problems with its Jewish officers. He knew that some Prussians had a bit of a thing about them, as did the Austrians. In Bavaria, it was really only the journalist Dr Sigl who went on about the Jews, and he was actually much more vehement against the Prussians. Personally, Niggl had had much worse experiences with Protestants, but he didn’t mention that to his friend Jansch out of politeness. But what difference did it make to him if a squaddy had to march back disappointed and go back on guard duty instead of getting on the leave train? It wouldn’t do the man any harm. After all, things hadn’t been particularly pleasant for Niggl in Douaumont.
A bleak November afternoon hung over the roofs of the village of Damvillers, and drizzle fell in front of the windows of the battalion headquarters. The lamps had been on for a while in the ground floor orderly room. The personnel were eagerly awaiting the 10 men from the First Company due to go on leave, who were to be led in by Herr Bertin. But instead of Bertin, in came Corporal Niklas, who also belonged to the first. He sat down by the stove in his spruce tunic looking quietly pleased. Things had been arranged like this so that the men in Moirey, especially Bertin himself, didn’t suspect anything, because only 10 men ever went on leave, never 11. This way the joke was bound to come off. The men going on leave would definitely be there by 4pm. They would all be champing at the bit as they had to get the train in Damvillers then catch their connection to Frankfurt in Montmédy. Well, it wouldn’t hurt them to dash about a bit. They’d have 10 days to relax at home with mother afterwards, and the Prussian mindset did require that every blessing be paid for with a little hardship.
Captain Niggl started when he peered through a crack in the door and caught sight of Private Bertin, the only man who wouldn’t be going on leave but would be returning to his company. He’d seen that face before. It hadn’t been as pale as it was now in the lamplight with the weight of disappointment; it had been browner and fresher and it had been at Douaumont. This man, standing there rigid while the sergeant major drily informed him that the battalion had not authorised his request, belonged to his oppressor Kroysing’s gang. Back then, he’d run around with that little sergeant, Sußmann or Süßmann – another Jew. Perhaps there was something to this business about the Jews. Perhaps clever Herr Jansch was right about that too, and he, Niggl, the retired civil servant, had been too trusting. He’d have to think about it. In any case, this man had to go. He might know a lot, a little or nothing, but he couldn’t be allowed to wander about talking. That was the law of self-preservation, which was in fact a necessity that knew no law. Niggl would keep his eye on this man, make a note of his name. First, however, he must find out where the scoundrel in chief was. If he was still missing, as Captain Lauber had told him he was, to his genuine distress, then it was time to start clearing up and get rid of the rest of those in the know. It was quite right that this man wasn’t going on leave, and he shouldn’t go until it was his proper turn. That could be spring or it could be summer, and a lot could have happened by then. Captain Niggl, with his reluctantly sociable expression and his shrewd little eyes, had got a lot out of the spectacle that Herr Jansch had supplied; thank you, my friend. Did you notice perchance how the man swayed a little as stood there, my friend? Won’t do a stuck-up, four-eyed sort like him any harm – what was he called again? Bertin. Bertin? Was that right? Unpleasant looking chap, Herr Bertin, with his sticky-out ears. The sort you see in police mugshots. Retired civil servant Niggl had seen some criminals in his time, but he didn’t want to say anything against his friend Herr Jansch’s First Company. Perhaps the Jews really were the ones to watch. He’d mull it over before their next meeting and perhaps join the Pan-German Union, because it really had become necessary to stand up to the Free Masons and campaign for all-out U-boat warfare.
Private Bertin set off on the main road to Moirey. The dark grey around him matched how he felt inside. To his right and left stretched sodden land; inside him beat a desolate, sodden heart. The rain speckled his face, and cold water trickled down between his chin and upturned collar, soaking his neckband. It wasn’t physical exertion that had left him so tired that he thumped down on the puddle edges. He’d completed his allotted day’s work of railway construction in a swamp between Gremilly and Ornes, where new field railways were required because of the new position of the front. Warm at heart and gaily anticipating his leave, he had happily helped to bind brushwood bundles and lay a causeway through the alder wood, along which the rails would run. They’d worked up to their ankles in mud, but it hadn’t bothered him; he was going on leave and would be with Lenore the following evening and have six days of being human again in her beloved presence. He’d eaten quickly, almost without appetite, hurriedly cleaned his equipment, rolled up his blankets and buckled them on to his rucksack, which he’d packed the night before, and presented himself in the orderly room neat and clean-shaven. They’d sent him to Damvillers with the other nine men without a word of warning, although they knew what was going on. They’d even made him leader of the little detachment, responsible for answering any questions about where they were going and why from any field police conducting checks or curious officers. And then they had dropped him into the abyss. Diehl, a long-faced clerk with black eyes, had tried to warn him at battalion headquarters with much shaking of his head and closing of his eyes, but it had been in vain. They’d played this trick on him out of sheer nastiness – whoever was behind it. The decision must in any case have come from the major, Herr Jansch, that measly editor of Army and Fleet Weekly. From him had come the decree that there were to be no exceptions in the Prussian army and no one was to go on leave twice in one year. It sounded good, harsh but fair, but it was just a pretext. Anyone who knew how things worked here knew how many favoured laddies got sent home two or three times a year. It wasn’t always called leave. Usually it was called travelling on duty, helping to ensure the safe transport of boxes and cases whose contents were well-known. If only a certain Metzler, who’d helped him secure his wedding leave in the summer, had been in the orderly room. But he’d long since been drafted into the infantry. Goethe said we shouldn’t complain about villainy because the Almighty’s hand was still at work in it. And it had to be suffered through to the end. The orderly room wouldn’t bother to suppress a grin when they saw someone back from leave so soon. And one or other of his chums in the barracks would be sure to throw in a crack. He couldn’t even go to sleep and get over his grief that way; he had to go on guard duty, which meant long, hard hours walking back and forth in the night rain with lots of time to think. He was filled with grief as he trudged along the main road – the same one where the crown prince’s car had sped so elegantly past a few weeks previously— it was an impersonal kind of grief, grief at a system that had revealed its true colours to him, lonely Private Bertin, in the same way that those cigarettes chucked out of a window had shown the system’s true colours. All the suffering, privations and sacrifices that the common solder constantly had to endure were amplified by these petty slights and unnecessary humiliations. He had performed his duty faultlessly for its own sake; nothing could be said against him. Furthermore, he’d volunteered time and again for difficult duties, and, as was fitting, had kept that to himself. And if the company had refused his request point-blank, he would have been disappointed but would have accepted it in the light of the general need. But those men had staged a nasty little scene and humiliated him for their own satisfaction. He’d seen that the door leading from anteroom into the orderly room was ajar and had noticed the gap widening a little and eyes and part of a nose appearing. And that was intolerable. That was below the belt.
The wind whistled through the branches of the trees and shrubs. The road dipped and ran along the edge of a steep slope. Below was the sparsely lit train station at Moirey, and those must be the barracks to its right, black against the dark sky. He’d b
etter pull himself together now and present an indifferent face to the world, drink the bitter dregs. What an idiot he had been back in June when he left his young wife on the nice, clean platform at Charlottenburg and got into the train that would bring him back to this camp. Back then he’d sat down in the compartment with the feeling that he was going home, back to where he belonged. Well, he’d seen through that now. Lieutenant Kroysing and Lieutenant Roggstroh had been right! He didn’t belong here, didn’t fit in with this sleazy lot. Well, he only had to apply for a transfer and new horizons would open up. But that wouldn’t do either. Even in this moment of anger and bitterness he admitted that to himself. Thick glasses are still thick glasses, and no one should throw himself into danger on a whim unless he’s prepared to die. He was and remained condemned to be in the ASC. And like a condemned man he had to cling to the railing as he climbed the slippery wooden steps that led to the orderly room. He was sweating beneath his heavy rucksack, and his neck was freezing from the rain.
The next morning he reported sick. He’d felt strange during the night, gone hot and cold and been plagued by weird thoughts. He definitely had a fever; his temperature when he was examined was 37.4 degrees. Not all that high, said the young doctor, but as Bertin was an educated man he decided he should spend a night in the infirmary, as the sickbay was called. Ah, thought Bertin, as he stood to attention, so if I were a waiter or a typesetter I’d be thrown out on my ear and sent back to work despite my disappointing temperature, and have to catch my death of cold before I’d be counted sick. Were health and sickness also class-dependent? Comrade Pahl certainly thought so.
During the whole day, which he spent relaxing, sleeping and writing – he had to explain to his wife that his request had been denied – during that whole day in the clean and peaceful domain of Schneevoigt, the hospital sergeant, it didn’t occur to him that he’d never had a thought like that before. Something had started to shift inside him – though unfortunately not quickly enough to save him from further harm. For little predatory creatures possess a good sense of smell, even in the jungle of human society, and always like to pick on wounded prey.
CHAPTER TWO
Rallying cries
THE INEXORABLE, WRETCHED grind outwardly continued over the next weeks. Each day, the work parties set off before dawn, damp and stiff, to build the crucial field railways in the rain: sometimes in the swampy woodland around Ornes, sometimes in the undulating country of Fosses wood. They were subject to continual harassing fire, and a smattering of shells would explode dusky red at sunrise, and it didn’t matter if there were four or eight of them, the splinters were enough to take out Private Przygulla one morning at Gremilly, slashing open his stomach not 30m from where Bertin lay flat in the mud. Then in Fosses wood a while later they witnessed a German plane above their heads roaring down in a forced landing. After a panting 10-minute run, the ASC men lifted the dying pilot, whose back was riddled with bullet holes, from his seat. Scarcely had they hidden him behind the nearest furrow along with his assistant and the most important pieces of equipment when a shell set the great rickety bird alight – exciting moments in those grey and gruesome weeks. The nights drew relentlessly in, and the bleak dark, cold and wet gripped the men, undermining their spirits – they seemed to hang like feeble flies in a powerful spiders’ web, grey on grey. When they pulled their blankets over their heads at night, because the wind whistled through the barracks and the little smoking stove, fuelled by wet wood, created more coughing than warmth, Bertin lay among them, almost indistinguishable from them, and Lebehde the inn-keeper and Pahl the typesetter no longer needed to complain that he was a stuck-up prig because he chose to shove a thing made out of meerschaum in his gob when he smoked a pipe. No, Private Bertin hadn’t smoked a meerschaum pipe for a while – metaphorically speaking. They realised that when Sergeant Kropp saw an opportunity to play the big man with him.
Since the beginning of October, the depot command had ordered the NCOs to give the men from the outside working parties a day off in rotation so that they could attend to themselves and their things and didn’t become entirely squalid. Lieutenant Benndorf had brought the measure in and enforced it strictly, much to the annoyance of the units working within the depot and their NCOs. So, when Sergeant Kropp, a bad-tempered farm boy from the Uckermark, found Private Bertin sleeping in the barracks one afternoon when everyone else was on duty, the colour rose in his sallow face and he said he was going to report him for evading duty. Bertin, knowing he was innocent, laughed and turned on to his other side as the clod Kropp marched off.
That day, 12 December, didn’t just stick in Bertin’s mind but in that of the entire world. When the army communiqué was pinned to the black tarboard wall in the orderly room after the washing-up was done, a growing group of men immediately gathered in front of it and read the badly printed text out in excited undertones: it contained the word ‘peace’. Germany was suing for peace! She had staunchly held her enemies at bay for two and a half years, and a week to 10 days previously her infantry had occupied the Romanian capital of Bucharest after bitter exchanges: no need to fear, therefore, that this salutary step would be misunderstood. Canteen in hand, Bertin peered at it myopically, listened, asked questions and just stood. This was… this was the most important day of his life. His chest heaved in a sigh of relief that was for the world. Sadly, it only lasted until he had fully understood the wording of the imperial communication. The statement lacked the key phrase by which practically any halfway grown-up person could tell whether the proposed steps were serious or not: the return of Belgium and compensation for the devastation inflicted. With a bit of goodwill, such details could be dealt with in due course. The main thing was to get the enemy to the negotiating table. Private Bertin certainly couldn’t be accused of lacking goodwill. Nonetheless, the wings of his hope shrivelled like wilted leaves and folded back in… He kept rereading the communication but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t find a single phrase which the enemy powers could respond to without humiliating themselves. After the odd enthusiastic shout of ‘Listen to that!’ or a more disgruntled ‘Hold on, Otto!’, the ASC men had nearly all slouched off, talking in undertones. A bandy-legged Bavarian gunner from the depot staff with a cigarette behind his right ear and a brimless cap tilted over his left, turned to Bertin before leaving: ‘None too keen on it, are you, comrade? Me neither.’ Then he checked there were no NCOs or clerks in the vicinity and finished by asking if anyone had any idea what kind of fresh shit those fatheads in Berlin imagined they were going to drum up with this peace initiative.
Bertin left too, feeling pensive, almost sorrowful. The white sheet of paper flashing on the orderly room wall looked stranded in the pale afternoon light. And after nightfall when his comrades from the Fosses wood party had erupted into the barracks and there had been a fierce debate about the news, they too eventually arrived at a not dissimilar position of disgust and scepticism. And Bertin, struck by this consensus among Bavarians, Berliners and Hamburgers, wondered at his initial surge of joy. He felt Pahl’s eyes on him and Karl Lebehde’s questioning looks. Hiding a certain embarrassment, he told them about Herr Kropp’s oafish behaviour and said Kropp was sure to get the brush-off from his superiors. Pahl and Lebehde exchanged a glance. It was on the tips of their tongues to tell him to deal with the report immediately and inform the depot orderly room about it, but neither of them did so. Their friend Bertin was the sort of man who only learns from experience. After all, he’d fallen for the peace initiative.
When Bertin had gone off to write another letter home, the two squaddies were left sitting opposite one another at the narrow end of their table near the window, now darkening in the early December dusk. The barracks were full of the muffled sounds of a large group of men, their tobacco smoke and murmured chat. Tunics and canvas jackets had been hung out to dry between the beds, and tarpaulins were stretched across the ventilators. A load of freshly washed handkerchiefs was drying on the long, black stove pipes
that followed the angles of the walls to the windows, where, carefully sealed, they opened to the outside. Lebehde had on a brown wool tanktop and green-striped slippers, and Paul wore his grey lace-up shoes and a grey cardigan. They looked like family men determined to finish a task before home time: darning socks in Lebehde’s case and answering a letter in Pahl’s.
But Lebehde wanted to ask Pahl for advice, and as always Pahl was happy to give it. Pahl had a lot on his mind too… Lebehde said that the Böhne working party had started a new track that day, which was to lead to the ruins of Chambrettes-Ferme. (Pahl and a couple of other men had for weeks been in Corporal Näglein’s auxiliary squad in another, less exposed area among the many ravines of Fosses wood.) The idea was to hide two 15cm howitzers among the ruins and then build the crucial narrow-gauge railway. And guess who had appeared while they were working? Little Sergeant Süßmann. Today of all days, he’d come sauntering out from the emplacement behind Pepper ridge with his little monkey’s face and restless eyes. How many times had Bertin asked the sappers from Ville about him and his lieutenant, and got no information? Well, there he was, and now the game had taken a new turn; now he was asking questions and sending greetings, and telling everyone how they had survived the Douaumont debacle relatively unscathed, but had been pretty much stuck on the far right wing of Pepper ridge not far from the Meuse since then. They were cheek by jowl with the French and were pelting them with heavy mines, and all their communications to the rear had been shifted westwards and they couldn’t even get their post from Montmédy as they’d done before. Lieutenant Kroysing therefore had a favour to ask of Bertin: to forward a letter to the court martial in Montmédy and a parcel to a post office within the Reich.
Outside Verdun Page 26
