Outside Verdun

by Zweig, Arnold; Rintoul, Fiona;

  ‘Then I’ll take up the chase alone and hunt him until he drops. As long as we both live, there will be no let-up and no mercy, even if I have to drag him from his orderly room or his bed or some latrine he’s crawled into. A man who kills one Kroysing has to face the other’s pistol or pitchfork, and that’s the end of him. And now go and see your comrade. What’s he called?’

  ‘Pahl,’ Bertin replied. ‘Wilhelm Pahl. It would be nice if you could look out for him. Goodnight.’

  When Bertin had left the room, Lieutenant Mettner turned on to his back. ‘You’ll destroy that young man, my dear Kroysing, if he acts as a witness against a captain.’

  ‘May I turn out the light?’ asked Kroysing politely in reply.

  Mettner smiled, not at all offended. ‘Please do, my dear Kroysing. That lucky fellow Flachsbauer has been asleep for a while.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  Suffering flesh

  ‘HOW NICE THAT he’s got a visitor,’ said Sister Mariechen, who was on duty in ward 3 – minor cases. And her small blue eyes twinkled amiably as she greeted Bertin. ‘He simply doesn’t want to get better. He seems preoccupied. Tell him it was really nothing. Now hold the fort for me a moment,’ she said, ‘and I’ll get you some nibbles.’ And with a maternal shake of the head, she bustled out of the dismal ward to have a chat with Sister Annchen and Sister Louise in the kitchen.

  Fourteen of the 18 beds were occupied, and Pahl’s bed was next to the window. Three electric light bulbs hung over the central passageway. The one furthest away was turned on and shaded by a blue bag. ‘Come and sit next me, my friend,’ said Pahl weakly. ‘They’re all asleep and the old bird’s gone out. We might not get another chance to speak privately.’

  Bertin felt moved as he looked at Pahl the typesetter’s strangely alien face as though he’d never seen it before. He looked like one of the executed men in those big depictions of the Deposition from the Cross from the Middle Ages – pallid and extinct. There was a frizz of grey-brown stubble on his cheeks that emphasised his stubborn brow, squashed nose and remarkably bright eyes. The thin moustache above his lips repeated his eyebrows and underlined the set of his mouth. He’d pulled his blanket up round his chin, such that his short neck was hidden from view and all that remained of his familiar form was a face etched with pain.

  ‘Everything’s fine here,’ said Pahl. ‘The people have been quite decent so far, and the food is edible. But I absolutely cannot get over what they did to me, nor will I until the day I die.’

  Bertin shook his head sympathetically. Wilhelm Pahl really wasn’t the man he’d been. What had happened? Exactly what had happened to nearly all the ‘minor cases’ over the past year: slish-slash, the doctor had chopped off his big toe – it was high time, he’d said. The blood poisoning had already spread to the middle of his foot. They’d laid Pahl on a scrubbed table, tied him and held him down, and then operated. ‘I was fully awake, my friend, completely conscious. They showed no mercy or compassion.’ To the contrary. The medical officer had yelled at Pahl the typesetter for kicking up a fuss over such a trifle and had told him he’d be lucky to get off that lightly, since his leg was swollen and discoloured below the knee and if they had to take more off there wouldn’t be any chloroform for that either. Happily, the first intervention was enough. But – and the medical officer could not get over this – Pahl was not getting better. He took an iron hold of himself when the bandages were being changed, ground his teeth and didn’t say a word, but his whole body trembled and he nearly passed out. Some kind of inner turmoil was how Dr Münnich, the medical captain, explained his unusual condition to his assistants and the more intelligent orderlies and nurses when the word ‘malingering’ was mentioned. A psychic trauma, he called it, for which the ground had obviously been laid by childhood experiences connected with his deformity. But for his recovery to make better progress he would have to regain his lust for life and direct his will, which clearly had not dissociated itself from the experience of pain, forwards.

  ‘Boy,’ said Pahl, ‘it’s unbelievable that there are such things in the world, that people can inflict so much pain on you, that the pain can go right through you to your heart and brain and back again… It doesn’t really fit with the world of blue skies and bogus sunshine and birds singing to order that we’ve all been sold. But it fits with a society that’s harder than hard. It fits with the situation of the oppressed classes. With how a man can be condemned from birth to toil and go without, even if he has great gifts that could benefit humanity…’ He stopped talking and closed his eyes. ‘The slaughterhouse,’ he said shaking his head, ‘is always there, it’s just that now in war time we see it everywhere. We’re conceived for the slaughterhouse, brought up to it and trained for it, and we work for it, and then eventually we die in it. And that’s what’s called life.’ His breathing grew heavy, and he put his waxen hands on the bed cover. Bertin instinctively looked for the red lacerations from the nails. A couple of tears seeped out from under Pahl’s right eyelid. My God, thought Bertin, and I had tears in my eyes earlier over a bowl of soup. ‘We must stop supplying the slaughterhouse,’ Pahl continued in a low voice, while around him the others snored, ‘starting with the one we can see all around us.’

  ‘So far as that’s in our power,’ agreed Bertin cautiously.

  ‘It’s in our power alone. Only the victims of injustice can stop injustice. Only the oppressed can put an end to oppression. Only men who’ve been shelled can bring the shell factories to a standstill. Why would those who profit from the torment want to abolish it? No reason.’

  Bertin was glad to be able to distract Pahl from his sorrows by contradicting him. A sensible man would willingly give up one-third of his power in order to be able to enjoy the remaining two-thirds in peace, he said. But Pahl said no. That had never happened. Everyone preferred to grasp hold of three thirds and be killed for it. And so the proletariat would be forced into a reckoning with the capitalist class.

  Pain hardens you, Bertin thought. Aloud, he said there were some very decent capitalists.

  And in a whisper Pahl rejected this objection. First the world had to be rid of collective injustice. ‘If you had a finger hacked off, you’d spend your whole life wanting to abolish finger hacking. It’s good to get this all off my chest. This place is full of butchers and pious old women, and the patients only think about next lunchtime’s soup and whether the nurses are sleeping with the doctors or officers. Sometimes it drives me nuts. The ruling class certainly has finished us off.’

  Bertin stole a glance at his watch. Pahl noticed and said he should go: duty required sleep. ‘That game old bird will be back in a minute, so we’d better decide quickly what we’re going to do.’ Would Bertin allow himself to be requested if Pahl could get him a job somewhere when he’d recovered and was back at work? He’d be able to work his way up from typesetter to copy editor, and it was a secure job as no administration could afford to ignore newspapers, whose job it was to titivate the national mood morning, noon and night.

  Bertin looked away. This tormented man was so sure of his cause and so convinced he’d be able to spirit Bertin away. Bertin asked if he hadn’t perhaps underestimated the difficulties.

  ‘No,’ said Pahl impatiently. ‘And once you’re in Berlin, perhaps you’ll come and talk to a works gathering or a members’ meeting. And then maybe you’ll write me up a few leaflets that’ll get the ammunitions factory workers thinking. Agreed?’

  Bertin looked into the drawn, waxen face of Pahl the typesetter, now more than ever a cripple and resolved to resist evil. For a moment he bridled inside and wondered why they were all drawn to him: Kroysing from the right, Pahl from the left. Why did no one leave him in peace to listen to his own inner voice? He suddenly clenched his fist and thought, Let me come to myself!

  But Pahl misunderstood the gesture. ‘Good,’ he whispered. ‘Bravo!’

  Sister Mariechen came up behind them, and Bertin stood up. ‘See if you can fix it, Wilhelm,’ he s
aid with a smile.

  ‘Come again soon,’ said Pahl with a similar sort of smile.

  And Bertin thought how much better he looked when he was smiling. The nurse waved a little package at him: a ham sandwich as a thank you, she explained.

  ‘No one could resist that,’ said Bertin. ‘I’ll eat it on my way down.’

  ‘Reward for your good deed,’ said Pahl.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Man and justice

  THE STAFF OF the ‘West of the Meuse’ Army Group were each week reduced to despair by the breadth of Judge Advocate Dr Posnanski’s knowledge and his propensity to share it. How were they to know that their billet of Montfaucon had provided the poet Heinrich Heine with an opportunity to lampoon his colleagues Fouqué, Uhland and Tieck in ‘Mistress Joanna of Montfaucon’? Posnanski, in his graciousness, didn’t expect that others might be educated in these matters too, but no one likes to be made to look like an ignorant boor, and less tolerant men than Lieutenant Winfried, the general’s ADC, found the judge advocate’s blethering rather offensive. ‘I’ve got nothing against Jews,’ Brigadier-General von Hesta (whose family had migrated from the Hungarian to the Prussian service in 1835) growled on one occasion. ‘Nothing at all, so long as they knuckle down and keep their gobs shut. But when they worry away at this book stuff like a dog in a sandpit – out with them.’ Should Dr Posnanski learn of such remarks, the corners of his mouth, much wider apart than those of most men, would twitch, he’d close one of his eyes, look heavenwards with the other and drily note: ‘That’s what comes of letting newcomers into the ways of the Mark. Let them play the Prussian as long as the likes of us have. They weren’t there at Fehrbellin, they fought on the other side from Mollwitz to Torgau, and I didn’t see them at Waterloo either – and that little chicklet wants to say his piece.’ Indeed, his friends admired in him a certain philosophical calm, which came from an understanding of how slowly civilisation progresses and that people absorb that progress at a snail’s pace. ‘If I thought life under our changing moon would always remain as it is now, I’d breakfast on rat poison tomorrow and greet you in the evening from the fourth dimension.’

  He said this one morning to Lieutenant Winfried. They were sitting in the cellar dugout of the Mairie in the village of Esnes, both on urgent business. It was to do with the relief of the division – a weighty matter. As Hill 304 and Mort Homme could testify, the Lychow Army Group had done its duty, and when it returned to the Russian front that had been its home since the start of the war, as it was about to do, it would be able to inscribe certain names from the Battle of the Somme in its group register. While in France, it had bored a couple of tunnels in the rock – the Raven, Gallwitz, Bismarck and Lychow tunnels – and it would be leaving the ‘West of the Meuse’ sector in excellent condition. For as everyone knew, from the infantry to the general staff, who were inclined to make up their own minds about army commanders, General von Lychow asked a lot of his men but nothing unnecessary. Yes, Old Lychow still enjoyed the confidence of the men. And when the French took the left bank of the Meuse in August 1917, and those tunnels were full of dead Germans, a number of the officers around the crown prince expressed the view that it wouldn’t have happened under Lychow…

  The two men were occupied with completely different matters. While Lieutenant Winfried was to inform His Excellency of conditions in the sector that was to be evacuated next, Posnanski was to investigate a break-in at the provision stores in Esnes; responsibility for it was being passed back and forth among units, and no one wanted to admit it was them. ‘From the point of view of who’s hungry, it was all of them,’ said Posnanski earnestly, ‘but the main culprit was probably the name of the place. Because although that’s not how the French say it, our men pronounce it “Essen”. And having said the German word for food, they want to have some.’

  ‘Posnanski,’ groaned Winfried, ‘have you no sympathy?’

  ‘I do indeed. For example with my clerk Adler who’s quaking with fear in case he is sent to be medically re-evaluated for active service.’

  ‘Is he going to be re-evaluated? God help him.’

  Posnanski’s bald, knobbly head bobbed in concern: ‘It’s a shame because he was a good lawyer and it’s a double shame because he had training. I suppose I’ll have to find another one.’

  ‘There’s plenty of choice,’ said Lieutenant Winfried. He was studying the battle history of a particular battalion whose commander was to be put in charge of the rear guard.

  ‘Less than people think. I require certain moral aptitudes, and they don’t grow on trees.’

  ‘Seek and ye shall find,’ murmured the ADC, trying to decipher some reports written in half rubbed-out pencil: 12-18.XII.16, extremely critical days…

  ‘I hope you know how the quotation continues,’ said Posnanski, getting ready to go.

  ‘How?’ said Winfried, his pale eyes meeting the dark grey ones of his stout friend.

  ‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you.’

  Winfried laughed. ‘Right. Have a private word with Sergeant-Major Pont. I’ll be in reserve.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Posnanski cheerfully. ‘And as you’re in such a giving mood, when can I have the car for a little official trip? I’m hearing strange noises from the Dannevoux field hospital.’

  ‘Laurenz Pont is the man for that.’

  ‘Good afternoon, then,’ said Posnanski expansively.

  As he climbed the narrow staircase, moving slowly in the gloom because of his extreme myopia and astigmatism, he steeled himself for the distressing interview to come. Waiting upstairs was his clerk Adler, once a barrister at the High Court in Berlin… he quickly pushed the thought aside. Odd how things happened in pairs. He’d had two enquiries from the same field hospital on two successive days. First, the medical officer wanted to complain about the shoes issued to a particular ASC private and asked how best he might do this; secondly, a wounded lieutenant asked for a interview regarding a serious miscarriage of justice committed against his younger brother, killed in action. As he grasped the handrail then make his way across the rubble-strewn courtyard, Posnanski marvelled at people’s inextinguishable need for justice. In the middle of a war, when civilisation had long since broken down and was about as dilapidated as that Mairie over there, people still railed, in defiance of the gross injustice all around, against incidents that might have screamed unfairness to the heavens in peacetime but now counted as little more than minor irregularities. And it was good that they did so. For that unswerving compulsion provided the only means of bridging the abyss of the war years and creating a world worth living in.

  ‘Good afternoon, Herr Adler,’ said Posnanski.

  Judge Advocate Posnanski’s uniform had a high collar, purple tabs, officer’s epaulettes and a dagger. His tunic strained almost as tightly round his stomach as did Colonel Stein’s, and he wore the same leather puttees round his calves. For these reasons, Bertin stood to attention in his presence, which rather turned Dr Posnanski against him.

  The medical officer, Dr Münnich, a man in his fifties with bristling grey hair and grey eyes, had cut his interview short by producing the shoes in which Private Pahl had been admitted to hospital: a hole in the middle of the left sole and the tip of the right one as good as gone. Dr Münnich had a tendency to flush, which made his duelling scars stand out. He spoke in a very controlled way but liked to tear the objects of his wrath up by the roots – which, as can be imagined, had made him a difficult but respected colleague in Liegnitz in Silesia in peacetime and wherever his division was stationed in wartime. He explained that he considered it unnecessary to increase the hospital population in this way and considered a battalion commander who allowed this to happen unnecessary and would like to make that clear to the gentleman. However, the division in question came under the ‘other bank’ – headquarters in Damvillers. How to bridge that gulf?

  Dr Posnanski smiled thinly. There had been tensions between the Eastern and Western Groups since His Exc
ellency von Lychow had stated that no captain under the command of the General Staff should have risked confining the attack to the right bank, even if experienced corps commanders had said that their Brandenburgers could manage it on their lonesome. This tart criticism, uttered on the evening of Pierrepont, had been instantly conveyed, as is customary among comrades, to the commander of the Eastern Group. He had merely sniffed contemptuously and asked what an Eastern front bunny rabbit like Lychow was meant to know about operations in France. Since then the two officers had been rather off with each other, had avoided meeting and enjoyed putting little difficulties in each other’s way. Dr Posnanski was generally considered to be a peaceable man, but he understood how power worked. If His Excellency Lychow happened to be in a good mood, then it would be easy to free his clerk Adler from the clutches of the murder commission. He’d just have to be transferred to a fighting regiment, the radio operators or telegraphists. If that happened straight away and with his Excellency’s blessing, then none of his well-meaning colleagues would have time to denounce him. If Posnanski introduced these boots in a joking way, they might amuse the great man, who could then forward them to the proud gentleman on the right bank with an appropriate dedication. And so Posnanski had the offending objects wrapped up and told the doctor he’d see to them. That done, he asked for somewhere to have a conversation with Lieutenant Kroysing undisturbed.

  Undisturbed would be difficult, explained the medical officer. Every corner of his barracks was in use. But then something occurred to him. One of his nurses, the most able as it happened, had asked for a room to herself when she joined them – just a little corner with a window and a bed, so that she could be by herself from time to time. And as she was actually a colonel’s wife and therefore enjoyed a certain influence, they had cleared out a room for her that the hospital orderlies kept their buckets and brooms in. A window was cut in the barracks wall, and Sister Kläre had gladly taken up residence. ‘She’s one of the quiet, warm-hearted ones, who’s been through a lot herself and therefore understands what other people need,’ explained Dr Münnich. As they were busy and it was all hands on deck, the small room would definitely be free. Luckily, the cold snap had broken a few days ago, as well it might have given the time of year, so the gentlemen wouldn’t freeze – there was of course no stove in the room.