Outside Verdun

by Zweig, Arnold; Rintoul, Fiona;

  The Kroysing case had opened his eyes. Then from somewhere or other he’d heard a report – disputed and denied – that the Germans had also committed arson and murder when they invaded defenceless little Luxembourg, which had almost been an ally. This news had awakened the historian in C.G. Merten, who doesn’t believe any statement until he has checked his sources. Luxembourg was close by and he had the use of an official car. He’d spent many Sundays and weekdays in the areas of Luxembourg where the Germans had broken through, first in uniform and then in civilian clothes. At first he only saw ruins and rubble, which could have been caused by military action. But he began to find the iron silence of the local mayors and residents disturbing. They obviously thought he was a spy. But he found the information he sought among the crude ironwork crosses in the churchyard, adorned with offensively ugly porcelain medallions of the departed created from photographs. A great many of these worthless memorials were from August and September 1914… In Arlon he had finally met a reasonably friendly American professor, who was travelling through the ravaged area, escorted by an officer, as a delegate of the American Red Cross. His job was to collect information to counteract the incredibly skilful horror stories with which Reuters and the British press were bombarding right-thinking American citizens, in particular American Jews who were fond of Germany. It took Professor Mertens four hours, from 9pm until 1am, to convince Professor Mac Corvin that unlike other German scholars he’d remained loyal to the truth. Then Professor Corvin opened his heart. In Luxembourg alone over 1,350 houses had been burnt to the ground and at least 800 people shot. In Belgium and northern France, the same methods had brought much worse results. The newspaper correspondents might have exaggerated certain details, but the reports were basically true.

  Still in deep shock from this, Professor Mertens then had to deal with the case of Corporal Himmke from the Montmédy field bakery, which seemed to confirm his worst fears. While drunk, the man had boasted about his heroic conduct during the battle of the Marne when the village of Sommeilles was burnt down. He and two comrades had burnt six people alive, a grandmother, mother and four grandchildren, who had taken refuge in the cellar of their house. In his naïvety, this blabbermouth had thought it would help if he could prove that what he’d said was true and call witnesses to show that the men had been ordered to burn the village in terms that put little value on the lives of the peasants and their womenfolk. Judge Advocate Mertens saw it that way too and conducted the investigation with a certain hidden fervour. But the officers from Himmke’s unit who were to attend the court martial saw things quite differently, and the communications inspectorate, as the highest authority, backed them up. The man wasn’t to be punished because he’d committed a crime, though they did condemn his crime, but because he’d boasted about it, with the result that the unsavoury matter became widely known, bringing Germany’s conduct of the war into disrepute.

  ‘We all know that all kinds of unpleasant things went on,’ said one officer privately, ‘but that that bastard should talk about it – he definitely deserves a good thumping for that.’ And a couple of days later when Himmke was collecting the rest of his things from the bakery at nightfall, he was taken from his Landsturm escort by some unknown cavalrymen, and the following day he appeared in the Montmédy garrison hospital having been beaten to a pulp. What was that? It was war. From the point of view of legal history – and at this Mertens, who was warmer now, smiled to himself – there were two strands to justice: inviolate legal certainty, which came from outside, and the laws of revenge and retribution, based on the best interests of a given fighting unit or group. The two were cunningly interwoven such that to the outside world a façade of European civilisation was formally maintained, while behind it raged the impulses and passions that the process of civilisation was intended to control. The Bible and the human conscience demanded one sort of justice. Several other sorts were permitted by contemporary professors and current conditions. Elements of legal practice that countries had surreptitiously allowed before 1914, but had been ashamed of and disclaimed, now shamelessly reigned, though they were still disclaimed, and there seemed to be no restraining power to punish the abuses and put a stop to them. There was gruesome evidence of this in the story of the Belgian deportations, which had upset the European public in recent months, and Judge Advocate Mertens with them, in the punishment camp in Montmédy citadel, the Kroysing case, the submarine war – everything. Hundreds of thousands of civilians arbitrarily removed to Germany to provide slave labour for the law and peace breaker. Hopeless protests from neutral states against these abductions, conducted in the style of Arab slave traders or African rulers, designed to benefit German industrialists and army units short of men. Dark rumours about hundreds of deaths caused by shell fire, malnutrition and disease in the concentration camps. Was that commendable? How could you square that with German culture, with the polished performances of classical dramas put on in the theatres of Berlin, Dresden and Munich?

  Well, you could square anything, it seemed. Fur coats and no knickers, his Auntie Lottchen used to say when she saw her little nephew’s neat desk, then pulled out his messy desk drawer. The punishment camp in the citadel had been set up in retaliation for the abuse of German prisoners of war that certain correspondents were supposed to have observed in France and as a way of applying counter pressure. The French government had denied the reports, and the German military administration had believed the reports blindly and ordered one of the courtyards in Montmédy citadel, which was about three-quarters the height of a man, to be covered over with barbed wire and used for French prisoners. They had to bend over double to move about. It was unwatchable.

  Mertens, who as a judge advocate was not without influence, had tried to have the camp closed down, but in vain. First, he was told, the French must learn how to treat Germans properly. The idea that information should be checked had entirely disappeared. When he asked if there was any proof, they just shook their heads. With his Moltke-like face, he was seen as an old traditionalist who was obviously overworked and had better grab some leave. No worries, he was going to grab some— the only question was how. The world exuded horror and could only become more horrific, because it no longer contained any cleansing, atoning force: no church, no prophets, no reflection or repentance – and no notion that such things were needed. The world was inordinately proud of its own existence, and it would remain so in peacetime, if peace ever came. He, Mertens, had to go. He was a stain on this world that was so gloriously in agreement with itself. There was a level of shame that was deadly, because it didn’t come from one event or action, but from the very source of one’s existence: the era, the nation, the race – call it what you will. Plenty of people would pass from life to death in cities large and small this New Year’s Eve in the normal course of things – why not him too? There was no shame in standing and falling for the civilisation you loved, silently and with no fuss. He just wasn’t sure how to do it.

  He stood up, feeling better now. He was a man who needed clarity. He lit the shaded lamps, the candles on the piano and the night light. He drank a glass of the French liqueur he kept for visitors, then a second. It tasted good. He collected together the things he’d laid out earlier. He took his matt black service revolver, a modern pistol, from his open desk drawer and placed it on a silver platter beside the poisonous sleeping pills he’d gradually accumulated. In Germany, you could only get them with a doctor’s prescription. Citizens had more freedom in France, even when it came to death. As a Prussian officer, it was his duty to choose the weapon. If he was going to die, he should do it properly. But as an intellectual man, averse to violence and destruction, he preferred poison. As his father’s son, he had paid his father far too much regard while he was alive, silently conforming to his wishes. Should he pay him regard one last time and do as convention demanded? Or should he perform this last of all human actions as he saw fit? To ask the question was to answer it. If he had paid his father less regard, be
en less the well-behaved son, been less sensitive to the rough and tumble of life, had engaged with the world as vigorously as many of his boyhood friends had done, then who knew what his life might have been like and if he would now be facing the silence of eternal rest. Great was Diana of the Ephesians and Cybele the Great Mother, but great too was the consolation provided by music, the mysterious source of existence that was expressed both in the remarkable ratios of planetary orbits and in the simple metrics and proportions of harmonies, through which the unknown could be measured. Vibration and gradation were all. Physicists said everything could be reduced to movements in the unknown ether, in its force fields, which themselves could transform masses and solids into pulsating, substanceless and therefore spiritual matter. Then why not into something akin to music? Why not into music itself? Wasn’t there something in those remarkable sequences of resonant air, vibrating strings and complex interrelationships that went beyond noise and air? Didn’t we see behind the secrets of advanced mathematics when we lost ourselves in music? Physics had a great future, he sensed, though he understood little of it. The physicist Einstein, raised in Switzerland but whom he’d known in Berlin, had changed our world view, freeing it from the physical and introducing with his spiritual concepts a new way of thinking, akin to that of Husserl in Göttingen. And he loved music. Perhaps music and the solace it provided led us to an existence more real than our earthly existence of flesh and nerves, making us aware, through the physical instrument of the ear, of a wider universe, the other stars and better worlds that Shakespeare, pointing to the night sky, had described as ‘patines of bright gold’ that move ‘like an angel sings’. Be that as it may, he knew how he was going to move: while making music. He would put a sleeping draught on the piano and drink it when he felt like it. It would be a sort of deathly refreshment, and then he would pass into a world of unknown consonances and harmonies, through the portal of those he loved the most, because they were dark and ambivalent, but also modern and glorious: Brahms’ quartet in A minor.

  The piano they’d put in the house for him came from Paris. It was old and some notes were a little tinny but on the whole the sound was soft and warm. He made his drink with hot water from a vacuum flask, stirring it slowly as he thought about his nephew, to whom he’d bequeathed most of his worldly goods, and about the humble library in a small university at the foot of a little visited range of hills where he’d spent some happy months, which was about to become an important seat of learning for legal history and the development of legal theory through the priceless bequest of the Mertens library. A lot of other things went through his mind too, for example that with a little more knowledge and skill he could have rigged up the stove to give off carbon monoxide, removing any need for action on his part. Next time, he smiled. Then he opened the piano score for the Brahms quartet and began to play. The music echoed softly in the quiet house and out through its rustic windows, and a passer-by occasionally looked up or stopped for a moment before the damp, icy weather drove them on.

  Mertens’ fingers flew over the keys, a blissful smile lit his face and he moved his head, his whole body, in time to the rhythms of the overture. His heart filled with inexpressible joy. The man who had brought these sounds into being, before they were inked on the page, was a stout, long-haired cigar smoker with a beard and a snub nose, but an angel had clearly possessed him – for this to have sounded within him, his soul must have been lovelier than Rembrandt’s or Grünewald’s most splendid creations. It was indescribable, other-worldly, the highest joy, a revelation scribbled down for 16 strings of gut stretched on a hollow wooden frame – a dance of blessed spirits performed by 10 fingers that soon would hang rigid and numb. But for now they played. All the sweetness of a spring breeze rippling over a meadow of flowers was there in those notes, as well as the dark, putrid source from which the flowers, like the soul, sprang. This music was the world all over again, but better, flawless, free from the terrible savage urges of our animal nature, which smother everything that is light and pure. How good it felt to bring it to an end, to leave and go through the unknown portal into the unknown land on the wings of the only joy that had never let him down. He drank from his glass, to which he’d added a sweet liqueur, and began the second movement. The deep solemnity of farewell… his fingers slid lightly over the keys, his ear caught every note, his mouth was set and grave. The earth curved away from him; all the people and trees rose up from a mountaintop, but he didn’t see them. Swaddled in the swirling atmosphere, he saw himself on the edge of space, which began above his head and stretched unbroken to the planets. A musician sensed such things. Writers, too, had a sense for what was behind their backs, above their heads and beneath their feet. Had he ever heard as clearly as today? And then the master, in the midst of his wonderful art, bowed before the genius of a young Austrian named Franz Schubert, quoting one of his songs entitled ‘Numbness’: ‘I search the snow in vain/For the trace of her steps…’ Which trace of which steps did a man seek when, the numbness finally over, he softly opened that last of all doors and set upon a new path, leading to new meadows and new towns built of spiritual materials by unknown residents, of gratitude, service and kindness, of valiant solitude, genial companionship and the joy of giving – everything that was great and noble in the human soul and that might just as well, or even better, exist within a Negro savage as within the emperor Napoleon or the philosopher Nietzsche? It felt good to be tired, tired of life and death, tired of being and not being, tired of what lay above and what lay below, tired of colour and the absence of colour… The opening of the minuet required a certain effort from the player, but then a threshold was crossed and the dance of the ghost-lit sylphs was consummated. It didn’t matter if the player’s fingers obeyed him in the allegro. The meaning was clear before the notes were struck, before the opening and progression. But it seemed only natural that Maestro Brahms, pot-bellied with a cigar butt in the corner of his mouth, should come to the aid of his pupil and passionate admirer C.G. Mertens, take a seat at the piano in his black frock coat and apply his soft hands to playing his own music as it was meant to be played, while Mertens rested for a moment. Was it any different from Socrates sitting and drinking with his friends? A solemn sweetness surrounded Mertens’ heart. The spirits of the strings danced a silver, moonlit minuet, caressed by a night breeze, on a hilltop, scented by seaside pines. Foothills and coves swayed before him… ‘and their heads began to sink onto the upholstery/a young man came – I can remember…’ He walked, grave and lovely, from behind the gathered bedroom curtain supported by two slender, flute-playing women, and Maestro Brahms looked at him questioningly and said in Latin: ‘You have loved justice and hated iniquity and so…’ What does he mean? thought Mertens in alarm. I’m not dying in exile! No one could fall asleep more blissfully than I am doing in this armchair.

  BOOK SEVEN

  The great cold

  CHAPTER ONE

  Pelican

  THE EARTH WAS a stone disc under a sky of ice.

  Winter had bitten across the whole continent and now held people and objects in its pitiless grip. In Potsdam, for example, where Frau Bertin’s parents were able to heat two rooms in their villa, the thermometer had registered 34 degrees below zero one night. But that was little help to their son-in-law. In France, particularly in the Meuse hills, the cold was less extreme: 17 degrees below, but it was still plenty. Since the beginning of January, the company’s gods and demigods had all returned from leave and been rather depressed by the reception they’d received from various quarters and by the changes that had taken place. Having already been dismantled and reinstated once, the depot was now dismantled again, this time for good. It was relocated to Mureaux Ferme wood, a dense, undamaged woodland behind a hill, which meant a new railway line was required to connect this sheltered spot to Romagne station. By the time that would have been done, the French airmen would long since have spotted, photographed and reported the clearings in the wood with predictable conseque
nces, so that the whole facility would have to be moved again – chop, chop – this time to the gorges near the village of Etraye, but that was still some way off; work first began on the standard-gauge railway.

  Under Sergeant Schwerdtlein’s reliable direction, a construction squad of heavy labourers was transferred from Romagne to work opposite the Mureaux Ferme men. He lived in a stone house and didn’t see the company on weekdays or on Sundays. At daybreak, in a heavy frost, the ASC men loaded one lorry with the heavy 6m full-size rails, another with oak sleepers and a third with loose chippings, before climbing on top of the cargo to travel to their place of work. The lorries were then unloaded – the heavy rails dug into the men’s collarbones – the ground levelled, the sleepers laid and the rails set in place. The screwing in place of the ‘joints’ with fishplates and nuts was the job of the Württemberg sappers, Landsturm men who had come from Damvillers, and they performed this duty with sober exasperation. For the greater part of the day, they all helped the Russians, who were preparing the track. The Russians? Absolutely. Russian prisoners, over 70 men in all, had been attached to the ASC men, and no one knew where they were billeted. Gaunt men in earthen coloured coats, patient and quick on the uptake, they were guarded by men from the Prussian Landsturm, if possible ones with a smattering of a Slavic language. And did we already say that Private Bertin was part of the Schwerdtlein working party too? As it was not a congenial working party, it’s hardly worth mentioning. However, there he was, more patient than ever, apathetic even, no longer hoping for an Iron Cross, but with the demeanour of a man who has escaped death twice in a row. He’d spent five days in the Karde working party, which was in charge of a small testing station in the cartridge tent for shells damaged in the bombardment. On the sixth day, he was sent to Romagne in the morning, and at midday one of the shells burst, killing his bed neighbour, Biedenkapp, a farmhand from Upper Hesse and father of three. And only two days later, an aeroplane had dropped its load on Steinbergquell depot, and although it only destroyed the officers’ latrines, the barrage of shell splinters perforated the outer wall of barracks 2 at the narrow end where only Private Bertin ever slept. Such coincidences made a man think and promoted patience, especially as rumour had it that the same aeroplane had visited Montmédy as well and taken out a high-ranking military official – or possibly several. Happy, then, was the man who could sleep safely in Romagne at night and warm himself up working with a pickaxe during the day. The frozen clay was as hard as marble and could only be broken into small fragments the size of mussel shells. In this terrible cold, the men sometimes warmed themselves by a fire, which the weakest of the Russians were allowed to tend. An undamaged copse of deciduous trees stood outlined against the sky. The new railway line’s course was marked by felled trees, blown-up roots and a levelled ridge. By the time the men had removed 10cm of frozen crust and reached the softer clay underneath, the sun would be setting. In the night, the earth froze again to a depth of 10cm, and the next day the game restarted.