‘It’s all very sad,’ he said to Bertin, ‘but what can you do? We were obviously meant to smoke Willy the Eldest’s cigarettes.’ And he sat down on the bunk next to where Bertin was lying, pulled out the iron box inscribed on the back with ‘Fifth Army, Christmas 1916’, awarded himself a cigarette and adeptly removed the portrait of the crown prince from its embossed setting with his new pocket knife. It was easily done. ‘It looks better without it,’ he said. ‘Where all is love, Don Carlos cannot hate,’ he added. He didn’t know where the lines were from, but Bertin recognised them as Schiller’s Don Carlos. ‘Listen to the peace and goodwill outside,’ he supplied.
Outside the guns were thundering. It was Christmas night, an emotional time for the Germans, but they thought they’d best dilute such indulgent emotions with a dose of virile brutality. The German guns distributed steel Christmas presents, and the French replied in kind. Peace on Earth, sang the gospel. War on Earth, thundered reality. And so it went on as the year lurched to a close. Under beetle-brow heavens the wind blew ever colder, and weather pundits predicted frosts from the east, heavy cloud and starless nights. When Private Bertin took his evening stroll before bedtime and looked up at the sky with his myopic eyes, he could find no hope of an early peace reflected there no matter how hard he tried. In a couple of days they’d be writing 1917. The war was approaching its fourth year. He’d heard nothing further from Kroysing or about his Iron Cross from Lieutenant von Roggstroh – only depressing news from his wife and parents. There was no pleasure in living any more or in being a soldier. It was just a question of getting through, of curling up into a small, ugly ball in the hope of going unnoticed. Shoulders bent, he made his way back to the refuge of his comrades. Human warmth still came free.
CHAPTER FIVE
Professor Mertens resigns
A SNOWLESS NEW YEAR’S EVE afternoon, short and bleak, weighed on the streets of Montmédy. The French prepared for the celebrations and did their shopping furtively and without pleasure, making the bustle in the officers’ messes and soldiers’ billets seem all the more cheerful. Candles would burn once more on the Christmas trees from the Argonne, a great deal of diluted alcohol would be served and men would sit round tables singing stirring, sentimental songs. The year 1916 must be brought to a close befitting the heroic status it was sure to enjoy in the annals of the German nation.
That’s what was going through Sergeant Porisch’s mind, as he stood in his braided Litevka looking down with almost maternal concern on the gaunt, lined face of his superior. The judge advocate lay on the sofa with a blanket pulled up round his chin, and as Porisch took his leave of him with a file of papers under his arm, he said: ‘Can I help you with anything else, Judge?’
‘Yes, Porisch, you can. Please give my excuses for tonight to the officers’ mess. I’d just be in the way. And I’d be grateful if the doctor, Herr Koschmieder, would look in on me again tomorrow about noon after everyone has slept it off.’
Porisch nodded, satisfied. He almost congratulated his superior on his sensible behaviour. Instead he tapped the orange folder on the table. ‘Should I take this away with me?’
‘Leave it there, Porisch. I may have another look. Will there be much gunfire at midnight?’
Porisch blew out his cheeks. ‘The inspector general has expressly forbidden it, because it’s a waste of ammunition, but if I know the Bavarians they’ll fire a few blank cartridges. After all, it’s their custom, and you can’t change people with an order.’
Mertens closed his eyes in silent agreement, then he looked up at his subordinate, pulled his arm out from under the blanket and gave him his hand. ‘Quite right, Porisch. People don’t change or if they do it’s so slow the likes of us can’t wait that long. In any case, thank you for your help and I wish you as good a New Year as possible under the circumstances.’
Porisch thanked him, feeling almost moved, returned his good wishes and left. Afterwards, he’d maintain he could still feel Mertens’ small-boned scholarly hand in his great mitt years later.
As the door clicked shut behind Porisch, Mertens breathed a sigh of relief and his dark-ringed eyes lit up for a moment. Porisch was a decent man who meant well, but he was a human being, and Professor Mertens had had enough of that species. That particular animal’s flat, flesh-coloured face with its holes leading behind the mask to the inside gave him the creeps: the mouth cavity, the nose vents, the wedge-shaped depths from which the eyes stared – to say nothing of the ears, receivers of noise but never of understanding. It was a wretched thing when a man had so completely lost respect for his own species that he no longer saw any point in life – his own or other people’s. What was he to do then?
A new year was beginning – what a gruesome prospect. He’d seen in 1914 and 1915 in an orderly manner with his Landwehr company in northern Poland, surrounded by sparkling snow, full of hope for an early peace, believing in a vastly improved post-war Europe. The following year he’d been home on leave, and there had been much solemn debate over punch and pancakes in the quiet, candlelit home of Herr Stahr, a king’s counsel and his father’s last surviving boyhood friend. The house had already experienced death, as the youngest son had just been killed. And the composure with which the family bore their pain, the dignity they drew from their terrible loss, afforded a glimpse of the enormous obligation the heroic deaths of this generation of young men would place on those left behind. ‘So many noble dead dug into the foundations of this new Reich,’ said the tipsy, white-haired old man as the New Year bells rang out from the cathedral, the Memorial church, St Matthew’s and St Ludwig’s – all the churches of western Berlin. ‘They’ll have a job proving themselves worthy of it.’ And they drank to the freer, less prejudiced Germany they were sure would be the reward for the terrible sacrifices the nation had made. And Professor Mertens had believed it all.
He shivered and pulled his father’s long-fringed travel rug back up under his chin. The deep green hues of the soft Scottish wool merged with the sleepy cosiness of the twilit room. He no longer had beliefs or hopes. During the past year, all his illusions had been shattered; the whole beautiful sham, so wonderfully embellished by poets and so pitilessly blasted by the philosopher Schopenhauer, to reveal the agonised world underneath, was gone. If Schopenhauer himself, son of a Danzig salesman, hadn’t been such a nagging old woman, filled with unbridled hate of everything he was not, he could have been a great source of comfort. As it was, he was no use to anyone; his gifts sparkled and faded into the night like the fireworks the Bavarians lit on New Year’s Eve, and his wonderful phrases left nothing behind but emptiness and the desolate night.
Mertens sat up. His eyes, seeking the light switch, glided over the orange folder, a splash of light on the black table. His eyelids twitched, and there was an unpleasant taste in his mouth. He sank back. It was that business there that had started it all. The pathetic little case of Sergeant Kroysing had been the catalyst, a minor catalyst but enough for someone like Mertens, who perhaps already harboured concerns. But now it wasn’t about individual cases. Man’s whole dubious existence stood ready to be sentenced before the spiritual jury of a man who, guided by his father, had spent his first four decades searching for truth and justice. Things had become so bad that he couldn’t hear certain words without coughing and feeling sick, above all the German word for nation: Volk. If you said the word Volk over and over to yourself – Volk, Volk, follow, follow, follow – you ended up with nothing but herds following. You should follow, you must follow, and never mind whom. Aristotle had known that, and Plato had known it even better. People were zoon politikon, political animals: what else could that definition mean but that they were condemned forever to wretched dependency? Except that for the two Greeks and their scholars in Europe this fact of nature laid a great moral imperative upon individuals and intellectuals to improve this deplorable state of affairs, to create balance through wisdom and insight, to convert and reform humanity through moral duty and kindness, patience an
d self-control. Churches and intellectuals worldwide had ceaselessly tried to fulfil this duty since the renaissance of reason in the Italy of Lorenzo the Magnificent, triggering religions, reformations, revolutions – with the result that in this war the pinnacle of our development had become blindingly clear. The spirit of Europe was prancing about in uniforms, and there were only nations, peoples, Völker, standing there in the scarlet, black and white of their sacred egomanias, and civilisation served at best as a technology for killing, a means of whitewashing, as a phrase to justify the conquering zeal that had rendered the world too small for Alexander the Great. At least the Romans had paid for their conquests with a paltry 500 years of peace and a world civilisation. How would they pay? With goods and lies.
Carl Georg Mertens’ heart felt like a soft clump hanging in his chest. He threw the blanket back and, shivering slightly, walked through his rooms, which had been put at his disposal by headquarters after expelling the owner. How long had this house been here? More than 100 years for sure. When it was new the names of Goethe, Beethoven and Hegel had shone over Germany, and Europe stood in the shadow of Napoleon I, who had at least atoned for the devastation caused by his campaigns through comprehensive political and legal reforms. Now, 100 years later, conquests brought nothing but moral disintegration, obliteration of all individual values, an ardent wearing down of the moral culture that had revived since the Thirty Years’ War. He wondered what his father would have made of this war, of its unanimous glorification by Germany’s intellectuals – a war they knew nothing about but that they were all resolved to whitewash and falsify, to distort until it fitted with their view of the world. Lawyers and theologians, philosophers and doctors, economists and history teachers, and above all poets, thinkers and writers, spread deceit among the people with every word they said and wrote in the newspapers. They rushed to confirm that which was not and disputed that which was, were naïve and ignorant, putrid with self-assurance, and didn’t make the slightest attempt to establish the facts before giving the benefit of their views.
Professor Mertens was a short-sighted man but he could see well in the dark. He went to his wardrobe and put on a warm dressing gown and slippers, then he wandered through the three rooms that until now had been his billet, opening and closing drawers. He searched his desk for a particular object, eventually found it and put it to one side, looked in the bedroom for things he might need and laid them out. There was no point in maintaining illusions in the last hours of a year when his eyes had been opened, even with regard to his dearest and most firmly held values, for example about his father. Would the venerable Gotthold Mertens, descendant of protestant pastors and Mecklenburg officials, have rejected the illusions established by the Fatherland to conceal and justify all the horrors brought by its lust to conquer? Of course not. Let’s not kid ourselves. At the outbreak of war, the great man would have rallied the young men and sent them into battle. Throughout the first year of the war, operating from a deep sense of justice, he would have championed Germany’s actions as a necessary mission. In the second year, he would have invoked his country’s destiny, called for stout hearts and endurance in the face of a holy necessity, certain that he was fulfilling his duty, dealing with reality and promoting the survival of the nation. And if his son, who now knew how things stood, had then set out what he knew, what was the best Gotthold Mertens might have done? Said nothing in public and approached his former pupil the Imperial Chancellor in private. Then he would have given up in the face of the Army Command, taken comfort from past glories and dark allusions to the spirit of European legal history, whose aim was to tame the passions, establish inalienable civil rights, provide peaceful citizens with security, improve public morals, and promote intellectual enlightenment and the cultural heritage that alone made life worth living. But he, his son, no longer believed in all these wonderful claims and illusions. A sapper lieutenant had opened his eyes. During the past half year, he’d learnt to look more closely, and his suspicions had grown. And now he knew more: the gaps had been filled in by that same sapper lieutenant and by his murdered brother in the shape of two brief reports.
When he looked back on that whole period, he realised that, oddly enough, his art books had helped to sharpen his sense of the authentic. Painters’ creations don’t lie. Their absolute devotion to what is real, their powerful desire to reveal form, in the landscape as much as in figures, had simply made him more sensitive to the embellishments, calculated lies and biased quarter truths that people made do with day after day, month after month, in politics as in the army bulletins. But he could no longer make do with that. Faced with the incredible he had begun to investigate. And once his eyes had been ripped open he couldn’t shut them again. Until he reached a point where it became blindingly clear to him that he couldn’t go on. Until his disgust with the whole business knocked him over – literally. His life did not have many roots. He had no interest in women or the usual male enjoyments and distractions. His father had both replaced such pleasures for him and devalued them. He had loved travelling, but after the destruction of this war there wouldn’t be many places a German could go without feeling ashamed. He had thought himself to be in the service of the intellect and truth but had seen them abused and defiled. Only music remained to him, and that tragic existential force was no longer enough to keep him going. Beyond the soft lit walls of the concert hall, a world of barbarism began; beneath the alluring strains of 50 violins and cellos echoed the groans of the exiled, the slain and the dispossessed, and he would never again be able to look at a conductor’s raised baton without thinking of all the compliant minds that studiously marched in time with the lies fed to the public, all those who heard the beat and followed. Followed, followed, Volk, follow, follow.
When Sergeant Kroysing’s case first came before him, he was initially surprised, then scandalised. He wasn’t deterred by its difficulties. He believed amends could be made; it would be difficult, but not impossible. For about a fortnight now, he’d known it wouldn’t be possible. The letters forwarded by the sapper lieutenant hadn’t given him the necessary leverage, and then he vanished after the fall of Douaumont. His unit provisionally reported him missing, as the fort’s garrison had been blown to bits in October. Subsequent weeks of searching ended hopefully: Lieutenant Kroysing was alive. There had been a confirmed sighting in a dugout in the Pepper ridge lines. The sapper commander had received Kroysing’s report and knew where he was. Until a fortnight previously when those German lines also fell in the fresh French attack. Since then there had been no sign of him. The last news of him had come from one of his NCOs, who had seen him disappearing into an ice-covered shell hole during a French bombardment. Lieutenant Kroysing was again missing, but this time the tone was hopeless. Hard to see how he could have reached safety in an area under continual French machine-gun fire. No, the Kroysing brothers were dead, and justice was unattainable even for an individual within his own nation. What hope was there then among nations? None. ‘None,’ said Judge Advocate Mertens under his breath in the darkening room, and he heard the strings of his piano vibrate slightly with the echo of that terrible word.
Yes, C.G. Mertens had grown ears. He no longer believed people’s claims or their denials. They did not give the complete picture. No one cares to admit that a loved one’s case is hopeless – not metaphorically but literally. And this wasn’t about a beloved person but about the prerequisite for all that one loved: the homeland, the land of one’s birth, the Fatherland, Germany.
This clean-shaven man, with his scholarly head and fine gold-rimmed spectacles, shivered. Headquarters had installed an ugly but efficient little coal stove in the black and white stone fireplace, the same sort as currently heated many a German home. Mertens pulled his armchair nearer to the reddish glow flickering through the vents in the nickel-plated door, sat down and warmed his splayed hands. He relaxed back into the low padded chair. Meaningless scraps of verse ran through his mind from poets who were still alive or whose wor
k has been much discussed when, as a young student, he began to suck up the joys of knowledge and intellectual life: ‘…it will not be long/Till neither moon nor stars/But only black night stands above us in the sky… The crows are cawing/And flapping homewards towards the town/The snow is near at hand / Happy is he that has a home still… We listen gratefully to the rustle of the wind/Gleams of sunlight flicker through the leaves/And we look up and listen as one by one/The ripe fruits patter to the ground…’
He didn’t have a home any more. Why kid himself? He could have chosen another day to resign once and for all. But now was as good a time as any. No one would disturb him until midday tomorrow. And if the officers went on the lash, as they usually did, probably not then either. Koschmieder, the doctor, was fond of saying that a man who really needs a doctor will send for him two or even three times. As there was no need to worry about medical bills behind the lines, officers became ill just to pass the time. He’d have time to consider his options and reach a decision.
Outside Verdun Page 30
