Wilhelm Pahl had been listening carefully, both legs stretched out, thankful for the delay. The tear in his sole under the ball of his left foot gaped, and the right sole was worn through under his big toe. Convinced he’d distracted his friend, Karl Lebehde surveyed the bald patches with his small, glittering eyes. Surreptitiously, he took hold of the rusty nail. Early that morning he’d attached a wooded handle to it made from an elder branch.
‘From nowt comes nowt,’ repeated Pahl meanwhile. ‘That’s why I’ve got to get going and come to the aid of the Party Comrades at home. The signs from Russia says it’s time, which is why I asked you to do this to me. I thought it would be easy. But when I first tried to step on some rusty barbed wire, I noticed immediately that the first step is the hardest. I just didn’t realise how hard. Laugh if you like, Karl, but I’m starting to wonder if it wouldn’t be better if I did it myself after all. It’s like shaving. If someone else cuts you, it hurts more.’
Karl Lebehde smiled. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Do it yourself if you want.’
Wilhelm Pahl sat hanging his head with his back to the wall of the shell crater wearing an agonised expression that made his friend feel very sorry for him. ‘We’re so weakened,’ he said. ‘No fat on our bodies, and the constant cold and stupor, and the lice don’t let you sleep at night, and there’s no hot water to do washing in – it’s a pile of shit, Karl.’ He closed his eyes. ‘If it weren’t for you doing the rounds of the field kitchens I wouldn’t have had the strength to get up in the morning for ages now. Ow!’ he screamed suddenly, ripping his eyes open. ‘What are you doing?’
Karl Lebehde pointed to the spike in Pahl’s shoe. ‘It’s all over,’ he said gently. ‘It’s a good centimetre inside you, my son. Don’t move for the next five minutes. The rest is in the hands of the dear Lord, who created blood circulation.’
Pahl went belatedly pale and shuddered. ‘Good that it’s over,’ he said. ‘You handled that well. I feel a bit funny, but it had to be done. I’d thought it through and… People who find it easy don’t really know what they’re letting themselves in for. At the same time it was really nothing. The cause of the proletariat is worth a bigger sacrifice than that.’
‘The colour’s coming back to your face, Wilhelm. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is not cheap,’ Lebehde joked. ‘And tonight you’ll tell old Barkopp you stepped on some barbed wire…’
‘I asked him for new shoes or boots the other day for the third or fourth time. He just grinned. “New boots.”’
‘And if you can’t walk tomorrow morning, you’ll be put on barracks duty and you’ll have to scour the muck out of that lice-infested hut with Naumann II.’
‘I will be able to walk tomorrow. It doesn’t hurt that much any more. Do you think it’s bad enough?’
‘Don’t worry about that. It’ll start to fester like nobody’s business in two or three days’ time. And if the doctor tells you off for not reporting sick earlier, Barkopp will have to explain that we men in the working parties are such orphans we don’t even have a paramedic to look after us. And that’s nothing but the truth. Besides you don’t feel much pain in your toes if they’re nearly freezing off.’ And he yanked the nail out of the wound, looked at it, threw away the elder wood shaft and hammered the iron spike into the splintering ice sheet with his heel. ‘Don’t you betray us now, little fella,’ he murmured.
Wilhelm Pahl’s normal colour was returning. His face was still grey but not quite as bloodless as before. Cautiously, he tried to get up and walk; he could. He’d hobble a little, partly from the wound and partly for the benefit of the sergeant and later the doctor. The two men climbed out of the shell crater, shivered in the wind and tramped off to look for shells.
‘And you really do want to take Bertin back to Germany with you?’
Pahl nodded. He had to grind his teeth as a twinge of pain ran through him. ‘Haven’t you noticed how he’s slowly going to pieces? He can’t take much more. And I’ll eat the sole of my shoe if he doesn’t make a very useful Comrade when he’s awoken from his stupor.’
‘Hold on for a bit, Wilhelm, and you won’t have to eat any shoe soles, neither roasted nor boiled, because you’ll be living it up. Apparently, there’s a really good leg doctor at the field hospital in Dannevoux. I’m a regular at the kitchen back door there, and if I let the kitchen NCO know that you’re a friend of mine, they’ll feed you up good and proper.’
An aeroplane sped eastwards above them, braving the bitter cold. A young French sergeant, bent over the cockpit with his camera ready, peered through the dry morning light. He didn’t miss the two ants trudging across the abandoned field; he could’ve taken them out with a rifle. But his remit for that day was to photograph Vilosnes-East station, which was being used for ammunitions transport. Of course that was only part of his remit and it would take him further afield. The loops of the Meuse, and the slopes and valleys of the hills also repaid photographing – and later bombing based on the photographs. Jean-François Rouard, a young painter, was in no sense a bloodthirsty person. He would have much preferred to be sitting in a well heated atelier in Montparnasse or Montmartre, helping the further development of French painting, which had gone in new directions since Picasso and Bracque. But as he was now a soldier he had to make the most of these barren war years. Even once pull a bomb release handle and hear and see freight cars blown to bits. Below was his target for that day. He sighted it with his sharp eyes, clicked the shutter and the plates, adequately exposed, fell into the container. The line of Dannevoux roofs up against the tiny wagons on the railway track would look quite odd in the picture. That was because of the perspective in aerial photography, which had its own rules, as yet untested, and offered great possibilities to cartographers. Painting wouldn’t benefit. He knew that. But from a military and aeronautical point of view, the Sivry-Vilosnes-Dannevoux triangle, with the loops of the Meuse and its bridges, was a tough nut to crack. The airman given the job of torpedoing the ammunitions train at night would have to bloody well watch out.
CHAPTER FOUR
A winter walk
A MAN’S POWERS of resistance are limited. However, it often takes a while for him to realise that; others usually notice first. Certain types who retain a sort of nostalgia for suffering from their childhood sometimes astonish the world with their martyrdom and heroic endurance. When they break, however, they break completely – it comes as a surprise because their intellectual and spiritual capabilities have been eroding away imperceptibly.
A man was strolling along the road from Vilosnes to Sivry, enjoying the soft of golden light of a late February noontime. He grinned quietly to himself and whistled along with the sparrows, yellowhammers and tits. He had a job to do of course; he wasn’t just walking about enjoying the charms of nature. It was too cold for that, for the frost was relentless. The nature of this happy man’s business was clear from the objects in his right hand: an oval French hand grenade and a long, mushroom-shaped shell fuse of pure brass. ‘Take these to Herr Knappe,’ the bewhiskered Sergeant Barkopp had told Private Bertin. ‘He can have a sniff at them. Mind you hold them up the way I’ve given them to you. You know why.’ Private Bertin did know why. The fuses were awkward customers. They’d explode on you if you changed their position such that the needle inside fell forwards or backwards of the angle at which the damned thing had lain since it was fired or thrown. At first, Private Bertin walked along with the two deadly objects in his right hand. The frost bit into his immobile fingers, and a glove was no help. After a while, Private Bertin started to think this was stupid. Besides, he wanted to be able to swing his arms and jot down any ideas or lines of poetry that might occur to him on such a lovely, clear day. Suddenly, he decided to shove the two explosive machines in his trouser pockets, one in the right and one in the left, making sure that up stayed up and down down. But what if he slipped and fell? The road beside the Meuse was frozen solid and icy, making a slip possible. And he had to cross the river at Sivry on a lo
ng wooden bridge, a pontoon bridge to be precise, resting on boats and often pretty slippery. But what the heck? Private Bertin wanted to have warm hands and to feel free and to be as comfortable as possible. Between leaving Sergeant Barkopp and reaching Sergeant Knappe he wanted to open up as a private person. It was a wonderful thing to be alone. All a person needed was to be able to walk and dream.
His thoughts came thick and fast. The street followed the Meuse, an idyllic river, lined with trees and bushes and frozen solid. From the far bank, came the occasional clear, metallic rattle of gunfire or an explosion – both far off. The left bank was known as ‘Hill 304’ and ‘Mort Homme’; on the top the French and Germans faced each other with hand grenades. However, a recent report had said that the Frogs were bombarding Romagne, as the railway station there rankled with them. Whatever, Romagne still glimmered back there somewhere, and the men from Bertin’s working party could still buy fat substitute and chocolate there. Those 30 or so men were starving, like the entire army. When the two-wheeled limbers had been blown to bits somewhere on the way to Etraye and there were dead horses lying about, infantrymen, sappers, gunners and ASC men had rushed towards their still-warm carcases from craters and dugouts all around and used knives to tear the spare flesh from their skeletons, then carried the meat triumphantly back to their small iron stoves in buckets and canteens to roast. But that paled into insignificance compared with one company excursion this side of Etraye when the occupants of the large barracks had feasted on roast meat from a forbidden and much more disgusting source. There was a knacker’s yard down there a few kilometres to the rear, which gave off a dreadful stench all day long. Long dead horses with bloated stomachs were burnt there for manure, glue and grease, and their hides were used for leather. Eating their flesh was forbidden. But, guess what, it was eaten, for the cold kindly kept it fresh and the ASC men preferred a stay in hospital with meat poisoning and attendant torments to their regular lives. Hence the bonds of comradeship had long since frayed away; anyone who got a food package now was best advised to eat it as quickly as possible, because he wouldn’t find it in his rucksack or bed or wherever he’d hidden it when he got back from work. That’s how life was now, and it somehow had to be endured. It wouldn’t last much longer though. A miracle had happened in the meantime. By all accounts, Russia was no longer heading towards a crisis; it had collapsed. The German attacks had taken their toll. The Russians had had enough. They were making democratic demands, and that was the beginning of the end. Of course pessimists such as Halezinsky, know-alls such as Lebehde and scardy cats such as good, old Pahl maintained that the French, British and Japanese military missions would now get the upper hand in Russia and step up hostilities. But the Russians wouldn’t be so stupid. They’d tell their allies to get stuffed and throw down their arms. Yes, they’d all be home by Easter, and if not by Easter then by Whitsun. Private Bertin smiled to himself thinking about it as he stumbled over the deep frozen ruts in the road.
The Meuse now lay before Bertin. He had half a mind to walk across the ice so he didn’t have to go the long way round to the bridge. Surely he’d be able to slide over very easily on his hobnailed boots. ‘Skidding’ they called it at home in Kreuzberg. Ha, ha, ha, he thought, where are Goethe and his friend Klopstock now? He really felt like putting on a pair of skates and sweeping through the meadows and alder trees, rapturously free, composing poems in praise of ice skating. The French would get a bit of a shock if someone came sweeping straight into Verdun in a great arc! Surely they’d be chivalrous enough to let him go on his way unharmed. But he walked obediently along the river’s edge to the wooden bridge and sticking close to the hand rail crossed into another command, a completely different zone. As he crossed, he tossed some twigs on to the ice, and there was a dull echo deep beneath the surface as they bounced. On the other bank, a square of ice had been cut away and you could see the black water moving past, icy and silent.
Since the dismantling of the Steinbergquell depot, Sergeant Knappe had been living in a barracks at the bottom of a gully overgrown with bare bushes and trees, and was in charge of the field gun ammunition. His eyes widened in astonishment when Private Bertin nonchalantly handed him the two explosive devices to examine. Bertin must be off his head, he muttered as he carefully carried them through to the testing tent, which was kept apart from the ammunition, telling Bertin to disappear for half an hour. Bertin longed for a heat and some hot coffee and he soon got them from Knappe’s assistants, a couple of artillerymen. Little Herr Knappe had always been thin, but his cheeks had never been as hollow as they were now, and his goatee beard had grown appreciably. They’re starving here too, thought Bertin, as he said goodbye. You can see it. But Herr Knappe’s emaciation was actually due to quite different reasons than hunger: love of his country and despair. He was an excellent design engineer and using a couple of pictures from newspapers had designed one of those all-terrain combat vehicles with caterpillar tracks instead of wheels that the Entente alliance had been using recently. He had sent the drafts to the Supreme Army Command and had received, through Colonel Stein, a scornful reply: such toys could happily be left to the enemy. Let them crawl into those iron dustbins and bring their coffins with them. German infantrymen had no need of such vehicles and the ammunitions expert should get on with his job and leave the rest to the Supreme Army Command. This grieved Herr Knappe, and ever since then he’d been sleeping badly and had lost his appetite and interest in playing chess; where would it all end?
Half an hour later, Private Bertin, now warmed up, reported back to him. The hand grenade was gone, but Knappe handed him the fuse by the tips of his fingers. ‘There,’ he said simply. ‘Drop it in the water from the bridge. But watch out it doesn’t turn round, lad, or you’ll have drunk your last cup of coffee on this earth.’
Somewhat sobered by the little bearded man’s stern tone and serious eyes, Bertin trotted off. On the bridge, he did as he’d been told, but as the water closed over the accursed thing, his thoughts darted off in a completely different direction. The gunners, who knew the area well, had given him a piece of news whose importance none of them could have understood. There was a relatively unscathed village on the hills above Vilosnes-East – what was it called again? It was called Dannevoux. And the barracks on the perimeter above the railway tracks, where the Barkopp working party loaded and unloaded its wagons and which you could just see from the Meuse, formed the large Dannevoux field hospital. There in the immediate vicinity lived Eberhard Kroysing. Bertin would have to go and see him, shake him by the hand and find out how much of him had emerged healthy and unbroken from the darkness of the December battle. His comrade Pahl had been sent there three days ago with blood poisoning in the foot, and that would provide a good excuse for his superiors. Visiting Pahl could easily be passed off as his soldierly duty – a duty to which Eberhard Kroysing had always attached such importance. A good day, a good walk, a welcome hand grenade, a nice chat over a cup of coffee.
BOOK EIGHT
The eleventh hour
CHAPTER ONE
The blessed island
THE BATTLE FOR Verdun had been fought and lost, but nobody said that. The German communiqués had revised the aims of the operation, invented the ‘battle of attrition’ and recast the truth, and there were a lot of big kids who believed this fairytale. Raw materials and supplies essential for life were stretched to the utmost, diluted and mixed with substitutes. But what had just about sufficed in the second winter of the war failed in the third. Not enough butter, not enough meat, not nearly enough bread, although it had been ‘extended’ with bran and potatoes; hardly any pulses or fresh vegetables, no ham, almost no eggs, and no noodles, millet, oatmeal or semolina delivered from abroad. Leather was running out, as were linen and woollen cloth; you only got clothes if you had a ration coupon, and they were often made with unsatisfactory new materials. When fruit and sugar disappeared into the jam factories, notices were put up encouraging children to collect fruit kernels fo
r their oil. For the same reason, sunflowers were planted, and linseed and beechnuts crushed. Wool to darn stockings and thread to mend shirts were precious goods hunted down by anxious housewives. And just as plant compounds and chemical mixtures appeared in tins and tubes as sham food, so paper masqueraded as clothes, twine, bags and shoelaces. Newspapers and cookery books were full of recipes for conjuring up tasty dishes out of insipid mixtures of potatoes, turnips and brine. No vitamins, no carbohydrates, no protein and still fully fit for work – that’s what the physiologists and doctors preached in order to secure final victory in a war that had long since been lost. Germany was trying to triumph over the whole world, all reason and the course of history and development in the last century. That diabolical instrument of war, the British blockade, was at last being countered – so said the powers that be – with something equally effective: the torpedoing of all cargo ships on the seas. In half a year, Britain would sue for peace. And the nation believed this. Unaccustomed to measuring their rulers’ speeches against reality or demanding accountability for spilt blood and the wasted years of their lives, the people worked in the factories, fields and cities, sent their children to be soldiers, washed themselves with clay soap and paper towels, travelled in unheated railway carriages, froze in lukewarm flats, sunned themselves in the glow of future glories and unverified reports of victories, mourned their dead, spied on the healthy and patiently allowed themselves to be ridden into destruction.
There was still a last streak of smoky red in the evening sky, as Bertin climbed up to Dannevoux field hospital, with Sergeant Barkopp’s permission, to find out how Pahl was getting on (but above all to see Eberhard Kroysing again). From the rear, a minor road wound up the hill to the plateau, then past some barbed wire and wooden fencing to the hospital offices. Several wings enclosed a large open square, and the barracks loomed like a headland above a plain. It was outside visiting hours, and Bertin was greeted curtly and told he should kindly keep to the prescribed times displayed on the gate. After much explaining and a bit of toing and froing he was finally admitted through a back door at the top of a small wooden staircase. It led into a white corridor that clearly went through the section for seriously ill patients. Bertin’s heart contorted with anxiety, and the groaning he heard pierced his thin layer of self-protection. The smell of iodoform and lysol wafted towards him. When a nurse squeezed past him with a covered bucket, the sudden proximity of pus and rancid bodily fluids nearly made him sick. Through an open door, he glimpsed thick, white bandages, a row of beds, a leg suspended in a pulley, the backs of two nurses. He might have grasped then the full terrible significance of it all, but instead he closed up like a mussel caught in an unwelcome current of water and carried on looking for men’s ward 3, which he found at the end of the second long corridor on the left, and on the right room 19.
Outside Verdun Page 35
