Suddenly Sister Kläre pushed through the circle of seated and standing men, radiantly white in her apron and starched head covering. She whispered a couple of figures to the medical officer, which she read from her chart, a long slip of paper that trembled in her hands. The doctor nodded at most of them, frowned at a couple and shook his head angrily at a few: ‘The devil is our stubborn flesh,’ he said. ‘Our accursed organic state that we’ll never fully understand. And redemption, if I may speak bluntly, is and remains death. As long as flesh lives it suffers, and our tricks for deadening pain turn out to be a swindle when the chips are down.’
And, guess what? At that, the adversaries of a moment ago suddenly united in protest. ‘Impossible!’ they almost shouted.
Death, wheezed Father Lochner fiercely, was a gigantic folly that had first been brought into the world by sin. It crushed everything under its clumsy feet. It had trampled Novalis into his grave and destroyed thousands of fresh talents and new beginnings.
Yes, agreed Kroysing, it was a point of honour with soldiers never to have a good word to say about death. In the trenches, death was the ultimate treachery and desertion. A man who died left the Fatherland and the cause in the lurch, so to speak. He couldn’t help it if war was eternal and men were imbued with an inextinguishable desire for conflict, and all warrior religions had to take that into account. Given the choice, he at any rate would prefer to roam the earth as the Wandering German, like the Wandering Jew, plunging into every conflict and joining in every victory.
Pahl’s pale eyes lit up. That was fine so long as there were an idea behind it, if it were about liberating a vast, productive section of humanity from oppression, exploitation and injustice. It was for those kinds of ideas that the fighting spirit should travel the earth, building a new platform so that future generations would have a better starting point and every Pahl, Bertin and Kroysing would be able to fulfil their talents to the benefit and redemption of humanity.’
‘There it is again,’ said Kroysing. ‘Redemption.’
But Bertin, pale and trembling, said that if anything were the devil it was the use of violence, trampling people underfoot in a murderous, silencing frenzy. Death wasn’t evil. Death had wonderful, alluring depths – to lie down as your ancestors had lain down, to understand nothing, answer nothing, ask nothing. It was the business of murder that was infernal, the thousands of ways of achieving extinction, the executioner’s axe crashing down. If everyone’s life ran out as a candle burns down, then there would be nothing to say against death. But if an individual – or a whole generation – had his life and rights ripped out from under him like a chair wrenched from him by a stronger person, then we should combat that with all available means, join the fight and ally ourselves with those who, like ourselves, were under threat.’
The man’s gone mad, thought Sister Kläre. He’s talking himself into trouble. ‘Bed rest!’ she cried. ‘Time for quiet!’
The men muttered. They wanted to hear more. The man was right. Everyone had the right to live.
‘You’ll make yourself very popular with the Prussians with those opinions,’ said Father Lochner sharply but with respect.
‘If you’re against violence, then you must be against life, young man,’ added the medical officer. ‘I’m afraid your indignation is blinding you to the facts of life. People create suffering; it’s the first thing they do. Before birth, during birth, after birth – it’s all the same. A baby makes its way into the world by force, or more correctly, is thrust into it when its time comes. There’s force, pressure, blood, screaming. That’s how a young hero appears – you, me, all of us. And if these basic facts mean anything to you, how does he reply? What does he do to greet existence?’
‘We scream?’ asked Bertin. ‘We scream furiously, rebelling against our delivery?’
No one listening knew why he was so eager to hear the answer.
The doctor had an inscrutable smile on his face. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, speaking slowly in the silence, ‘if you’ll be satisfied with my answer. You want me to verify the revolutionary principle, and I will in a certain way. But it’s not very appetising and it’s bound be too much for you. In order to make a newborn baby cry, we slap it. Blows are the first thing it experiences. That’s the only way to get it to take its first breath.’
A couple of soldiers laughed appreciatively. Blows created a bit of atmosphere.
‘And yet,’ continued the doctor, ‘even that isn’t the beginning, the first utterance. For as the baby passes through the gateway into the world, it suffers fear; how much remains to be established. And in order to express that fear, it shits. That’s how it greets life. The name for this calling card is “meconium”, young man. I knew you wouldn’t like it. It’s not very heroic, is it, this revolutionary act? But our nation retains the memory of it one of our vulgar expressions for mishap.’
Four men opened their mouths to speak then shut them again. Objections flared within Bertin: hadn’t reason and intellect been applied to alleviate the natural pains of childbirth through obstetrics? But he didn’t feel he could say that. The doctor had struck a commanding tone that must be allowed to fade away. And so the group fell back respectfully to let the doctor through. As he left, he turned round one last time: ‘I hope that what we’ve been discussing won’t go beyond the four walls of this room,’ he said.
‘It’s not a room,’ laughed Sister Kläre. ‘It’s a miserable barracks. Throw a trouser button on to the roof and watch it collapse.’ And with that she followed him out.
The others followed her example and began to leave. Pahl shook Bertin’s hand as they said goodbye. Bertin, looking pale, said he was on guard duty that night, as was Lebehde, and so they’d better get back pronto. ‘Get your guard duty over with, my friend, and come and see me again soon,’ said Pahl almost tenderly. ‘You really stuck it to them, my friend. You and me together: we’ll shake that baby up.’
Lebehde made a mental note to advise Bertin on the way home to be more careful, although he was less surprised than the rest by his outburst. It was an accident waiting to happen after everything he had been through and seen.
‘Wait for me outside, Lebehde,’ said Bertin. ‘I’d better go and calm my lieutenant down or he’ll bite my head off the next time I visit him.’
As Bertin made his way slowly out of the room with Kroysing on his arm, he apologised, saying he didn’t understand why he’d flared up like that. Priests had always infuriated him before, but it was the first it had happened for a while.
‘You’re a right one,’ snarled Kroysing. ‘It seems you’re not as daft as you look.’
They had reached the corridor. The door to the broom cupboard opened and Sister Kläre came towards them. ‘You’re quite a ball of fire,’ she said, looking at Bertin. ‘You’d better tone it down and sharpish. I’m going to be making a telephone call on your behalf this evening.’ And she nodded and went off down the corridor.
Kroysing stopped and pressed his fist into Bertin’s shoulder painfully hard. ‘There is going to be a redemption, then,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘Yours, I mean.’
CHAPTER THREE
Bread for the hungry
LEBEHDE THE INN-KEEPER, disguised as a Landstürmer, his grey oilcloth cap with its brass cross tipped over his forehead, a leather belt round his hips, handed Private Bertin a long rifle, infantry issue 91 with an improved lock, at one minute to 10. ‘Right, my friend,’ he said a little shiftily, ‘take this shooter and have a ball.’
Both men were wearing their overcoats. Lebehde’s stuck out oddly at the hips. As they walked a little way together towards the barracks where the Barkopp working party was billeted, Lebehde explained in passing why: he’d taken the liberty of feeling the gigantic paper bags in the French freight cars and had been very pleasantly surprised. ‘Have a taste,’ he said holding something hard and sharp-edged in front of Bertin’s mouth.
Bertin bit in to it cautiously. It was white bread, a hard old roll.
He looked at Lebehde in astonishment. He nodded solemnly. ‘White bread, my lad. For the French prisoners in Germany, so they don’t starve. The Red Cross provides it. But it doesn’t provide for our wives. We have to sort that out ourselves.’ Lebehde tapped his pocket. ‘I’ve got a whole load of it.’
‘This rock hard stuff?’ asked Bertin.
‘Listen, lad,’ said Lebehde kindly, ‘dunked in coffee and fried up with a wee bit of butter and artificial honey it’ll make great French toast. And if your wife can get hold of some of raisins and whisk those in and bake it in a mould, it’ll make a better pudding than the Easter bunny himself could wish for. It’s great quality wheat. Ask the Kaiser’s wife and if she’s in a truthful mood, she’ll tell you she hasn’t had wheat that good for ages.
And chatting away in this vein, Karl Lebehde grabbed the door handle. But then he swung round and whispered: ‘If you hadn’t sorted out that lot up there, I wouldn’t have let on about this, because there have been too many times recently when you didn’t share your tin of fat with us.’
Stunned, Bertin made his way back in his jackboots, shouldering his gun, to his beat between the two sidings at the tiny station of Vilosnes-East.
The mild glow of the spring night spread along the valley to the river. On top of the steep slope to the right, out of sight, sat Dannevoux field hospital. The earth stuck to his boots, but the damp air was pleasantly soothing compared to the smoke and stink of the barracks. Vilosnes-East station! It was there that Acting Lieutenant Graßnick’s labour company from Serbia had alighted and marched behind him in a kind of dream, past the muzzles of the Bavarian field guns almost stumbling into range of the French guns. A year had passed since then, slightly longer even – and what a year! He looked back on it the way he must have looked back on himself as first-year schoolboy when he left school: a moustached teenager in slacks, schooled in dancing, looking down on a trusting little squirt in short trousers. And he wasn’t even sure if the year was over. But Sister Kläre had promised to telephone someone for him tonight. He was no longer as naïve as he had been when he first met her, when she was ironing in Kroysing’s room, for example. From snippets he’d heard, it seemed there had been something going on between that lovely woman and the crown prince, which of course put a different light on things. Well, why not? Adults’ private lives were their own business. The crown prince was not well liked in the army. He refused to endure the hardships that hundreds of thousands of men were commanded to endure in his name. He paid the price for that. Packets of cigarettes were left lying in the mud on the Moirey-Azannes road. But he was also meant to be gallant and incapable of being unkind to a woman with whom he’d been on intimate terms. If Sister Kläre took up his cause, things looked promising – thank God. Even if that poisonous little toad Major Jansch stood on tiptoe and spat as far as he could, he wouldn’t reach this particular bowl of soup.
Bertin felt hopeful as he climbed over switches and sleepers on his beat between the two trains: on his right were the five closed rectangular freight cars full of damp powder, damaged shells and collected duds, on his left the open wagons of the bread train covered with large tarpaulins. He shoved his hands in his pockets and strolled on. He was glad of the chance to think for a couple of hours. He was damned if he understood what had happened up there. Like any soldier, he often grumbled. Grumbling went together with discipline. But never before had he lost his temper like that in front of strangers and superior officers to the point where Pahl had congratulated him and the medical officer had asked everyone not to repeat what he’d said outside ward 3. What was happening to him? He was 28 years old but he felt about 100. He’d gone to war full of enthusiasm for Germany’s cause, thrilled that he’d experience the Glory Years, worried only that he might miss it because of his physical infirmities. And now, barely two years later, all his hopes had turned to ash. The world around him was bleak and leering, and violence ruled – the plain and simple violence of the fist. It wasn’t the justice of the cause that held sway but the size of the boot. This war was a stamping of boots: German boots kicked French boots, Russian boots German boots, Austrian boots Russian boots, Italian boots Austrian boots, and the British, with their lace-up shoes that were sturdier than them all but more elegantly cut, helped out where they could, sticking in a few kicks of their own – and he understood that. Now American shoes had appeared, and the world had become a madhouse. Everything from peacetime had been swept aside. The world was now run by sergeant majors and you were a lucky man if you survived in it.
Sunk in such thoughts, Werner Bertin reached the bread cars, which were sealed with grey and brown tarpaulins. He pulled up the open flap on the middle car and felt inside. Fantastic! The papers bags had been slit on one side and some of the contents were already gone. Bertin, the sentry, hurriedly stuck his hand in and began to fill his coat pockets, hunching his shoulders guiltily and glancing round. But there was only the moon to see him, small and faraway, shining down through a hole in the mist high up in the sky on to the wisps of fog in the valley.
Bertin was wearing gloves so he didn’t need to put his hands in his pockets, the deep sack-like bags of thick lining material inside his coat. The next day he’d send the rolls to Lenore with that recipe Karl Lebehde had magicked up. Things weren’t good at home. How could they be? And it seemed they weren’t any better elsewhere in Germany – or so he’d heard. His last few weeks’ post had given him a great deal of food for thought, only he didn’t have the time to think. But today he did, and his thoughts turned to his brother-in-law, David, a future musician, who had sent his sister bitter letters of complaint about their parents from the training camp, because they’d knowingly let him participate in the whole swindle. ‘We’re forced to do things that can only be done voluntarily, and to round the whole dirty trick off we’re called volunteers though we’re slaves.’ David was sharp young man, thought Bertin, and not just when it came to musical notation and the five-line staff, which he’d once called Beethoven’s telegraph wires. The news from his brother, Fritz, wasn’t very joyful either: the regiment had left Romania again and was now inexplicably stationed in the Adige valley in the South Tyrol, which was bad news for all concerned, including the Italians. The old Kaiser Franz Josef had died, and his successor, Karl, had, as they said, betaken himself to the front, but the bulk of the task still fell to the Prussians (who might be from Bavaria, Württemberg or Hessen). In short, there was little to gladden Frau Lina Bertin’s heart – to the contrary. At least soon she wouldn’t need to worry about her eldest son, even if little Fritzel was undeniably her favourite. Sister Kläre, a grateful reader, was going to make an important call that night. She might already have done it, in which case Frau Bertin could soon put her mind at rest.
Small was the room, and narrow was the bed. And yet two people successfully squeezed into them with surprising regularity. Even Lieutenant Kroysing’s long legs somehow slipped under the covers quite easily, although one of them was swathed in stiff bandages. Lieutenant Flachsbauer slept across the way blissfully alone.
‘Should I go and phone now?’
‘Why would you do that?’
The tinkle of a woman’s laugh: ‘Because I promised you that I’d phone tonight.’
‘The night is still long. It’s only just begun.’
The woman laughed again, a light, charming laugh, such as may never before have been heard under that flat roof. The glow from a wick floating in an ugly glass tumbler of oil played on the ceiling. It shone on Sister Kläre’s quiet eyes and across Kroysing’s forehead and the bridge of his nose. ‘We have to be sensible. Don’t forget your sweetheart is a maidservant, Lieutenant. She has to get a good night’s sleep and be up early. I need seven hours.’
‘Sweet maidservant. Couldn’t you make the call after 11?’
‘How about between 10 and 11? Okay, just before 11. And then you really have to hit the sack, all right?’ She sat up and looked at him sternly, her plaits hanging down, a laugh on her lips
. The exquisite line of her shoulders seemed to start beneath her ear lobes and flow down her arm, inviting caresses.
Kroysing let his long hand slide down her skin. ‘Kläre,’ he said. ‘Kläre.’
‘What is it, sweetheart?’
‘I’m so stupidly happy. Bertin in his entirety does not merit you taking your beloved leg out from under the covers and putting your foot on the cold floorboards.’
She stretched her leg out and wiggled her toes, and their shadows flickered on the wall.
How quickly does time pass on guard duty? As quickly as the guard wants. He can think about his own life, the movements of the stars or whatever he chooses as he paces back and forth. The one strange thing is how a veiled thought will sometimes know how to keep battering away inside his head until it finds a weak spot and breaks through. Bertin looked around happily, drinking in the moonlit night, the vast stillness and indistinct sounds wafting over. Somewhere very far away a lorry with iron tyres was driving past. If there was anything happening at the front, it was out of earshot, for the guns barely fired now and the rifle fire was swallowed by the steep ridge. It was so very light. He could make out every sleeper, the points over the way, baskets of broken shells and the gravel between the rails. Should he have filled his pockets with that stale, unsalted bread? Hadn’t Lebehde committed a serious crime by stealing goods he was commanded to guard? And had not Bertin now committed the same crime? A military offence of the first order – if it were discovered. At the same time, most officers would just laugh if someone accused him or someone else of such a crime. For what was the harm in stealing a little food in the middle of a war? War was one long, uninterrupted looting spree. They’d been thieving from the homeland and neighbouring nations for three years now, day and night, every second of every day. Stealing a little food did no harm. A soldier’s needs had to be met. An army needs a lot over the duration and as it doesn’t produce anything it has to steal. If it’s judicious in its stealing, it can last for a long time, but if it isn’t, if it’s too greedy, it won’t last. Just as Sergeant Major Pfund, who had suddenly disappeared a couple of days previously, had been sent back to Metz with a fat black mark against his name. For the winter of starvation had reached its peak. Major Jansch had been forced to cough up his hoarded supplies. He had sought and found a victim. Herr Pfund and his cunning Christmas purchases became: embezzlement. The result was the company had no money and couldn’t offer its men the same supplementary food as other canteens – cheese, pickled herrings and chocolate. The doctor had complained and the depot had complained, but these complaints were viewed very unsympathetically by Army Group East, and according to the postal orderly Behrend, a pair of dilapidated shoes had arrived with a snide letter enclosed – all most helpful for sending a sergeant major into the wilderness. A new man had been put in charge of the company about three days previously. Who was he? Sergeant Duhn, a quiet man with steady grey eyes, who didn’t draw attention to himself but had achieved the dagger and badges of the regular army that had been denied to pushy Glinsky. Lost in his own thoughts, Bertin hooked his thumb under his rifle sling and wandered the long stretch back to the bread wagons.
Outside Verdun Page 46
