Meanwhile, the telephone was also buzzing in the shed that served as a station building at nearby Vilosnes-East. It was definitely buzzing, but no one heard it. After an exhausting day’s work, the railwaymen who ran it by, older men from the Landwehr, were sleeping the sleep of the righteous. They had a sort of arrangement with the ASC men that their sentries would wake them if anything happened. But did the ASC sentries hear the desperate clamouring of the old telephone? No one was sleeping nearby. The railwaymen liked to be comfortable. Both they and the ASC men preferred the roomy barracks on the other side of the station. There were dugouts in the hillside to be used in case of air raids, but the men had to be woken in plenty of time to reach them. The telephone buzzed and squawked. Where the hell was the sentry from Barkopp’s working party? Did he want to consign his sleeping comrades to eternity if that bloody aeroplane did fly over?
Bertin, with his rifle, was still between the tracks deep in thought – not so far away that he couldn’t hear, but too distracted to be alarmed. He was full of self-pity in that moment. If he’d had any sense, he have been like the other grown-ups in the company and wouldn’t have trusted the sergeant major back in the barracks yard in Küstrin. He’d have let himself be transferred to the east rather than insisting on making a voluntary pilgrimage west. That way he’d have remained the decent lad he used to be and he’d have been able to do his duty just as well in the east. But he’d been afraid of the east, hadn’t he? In the east there was the threat of lice, snow and cold, uncivilised towns, horribly degraded roads, and in the towns lots of Jews – Eastern European Jews with nasty habits, steeped in an embarrassing, over-the-top kind of Judaism designed to make him, Bertin, feel as uncomfortable as possible. He’d been honest enough to admit that to himself and he admitted it now too. He just felt the punishment was a bit harsh for such a small misdemeanour. Why should a Jew not be able to admit that he didn’t like certain other Jews, but did very much like the Prussian military: its discipline and order, its spruceness and drills, its warrior dress and spirit, the military might of its proud traditions and its invincible strike power? Hadn’t he been brought up to feel like that?
And now, after two years of service, here he stood a miserable thief of bread for the hungry. In such circumstances a Berliner would joke that something was a bit fishy. A lot of things had been revealed as a hoax in the last two years, for example the idea that it was sweet and honourable to die for the Fatherland. Well no, actually, it was always nasty and awful to sacrifice a young life before it had come to anything. But sometimes, by God, it was necessary. You couldn’t just leave women, children and old men to be overrun by brown barbarian hordes, such as the Mongols and Tartars who had repeatedly attacked the his Silesian homeland. Well, Mr Bertin, he told himself, you’ve been a sheep with your Prussian patriotism, you’ve behaved like a wee laddie going off on an adventure and failed to noticed that you were in fact in the service – and in the noose – of the enemy of all people: naked force, the adversary incarnate. It was a bit late to be discovering this. In the meantime, he’d sunk to the level of the plundering Bashkir nomads held up in horror in the history books of his childhood. For they had only plundered food from the Silesian peasants and townspeople because they were hungry and needed to put food on their own tables. Bertin Bashkir – what a slap in the face!
And then he heard the ringing. He jolted awake and was back in the present. Pushed the shed door open, flashed his torch around: no one there. Grabbed the receiver from its cradle and listened: air raid alarm, pass it on! A sudden, glaring memory of the five wagons of explosives. Fifty living men dependent on his watchfulness. Get a move on!
Bertin bounded like a hare over the rails and sleepers. Shoving his gun aside, he stormed into the railwaymen’s barracks. ‘Get out! Air raid alarm!’ He left the door open so the air would help to rouse the sleeping men and rushed out again to wake his comrades. He had no fear for himself. He was alive with sensations, engulfed in the excitement of this extraordinary night. He stood in the doorway, heard Sergeant Barkopp curse the draught and banged on the floorboards with the butt of his musket, cruelly driving out the last vestiges of sleep: there was a reason why a certain private had once blissfully slept through an air raid alarm. Back then, there had been 150m between the men and the ammunition; now there were just 30m.
He looked to the sky and listened. A very faint singing could be heard, unmistakable and evil. A searchlight had already swung upwards from the Sivry area, its chameleon tongue, broader at the top, licking for insects. A second joined it, apparently from behind the main railway station at Vilosnes, then a third from Dannevoux. And then the anti-aircraft guns started yelping. They boomed out from behind the hill on the other side of the railway, and heavy machine gun fire clattered from the side of the hill. Shafts of light swung across the sky. Dark puffs of red shrapnel burst around the plane and bullets ripped towards it. Watch out, Froggie! We’ll punch holes in your wings or arms, engine or heart, petrol tank or lungs – it’s all one to us. You must be brought down before those terrible Easter eggs of yours can be sent crashing to earth. A flock of inadequately clothed ASC men trotted past in the moonlight towards the dark hollows of the dugouts. Most of them tried to push through to the back where it was safest, but the railwaymen were already there, smoking cigarettes. The ASC men had to take cover further forwards.
One man stayed outside: Bertin. He had to stay and see what happened. Sergeant Barkopp barked at him good-naturedly to come inside as it was about to rain. Bertin, shading the visor of his cap with hand, stayed where he was, saying there was time yet. Where was the Frenchman? Had he cleared off to Stenay, where the crown prince was supposed to have his headquarters? Woe betide you, Frenchie, if you take out a certain someone before he has arranged my transfer to the Lychow divison court martial.
One thousand two hundred metres up in the air, Jean-François Rouard leant out of the cockpit and peered down with his night binoculars. The landscape beneath him was completely different from in daytime. The silvery light of the moon is a poetic lie. Beneath him lay a shrouded, grey expanse, and he could barely make out the course of the Meuse. He shouldn’t have let himself in for a bombing raid so soon. On the other hand, orders were orders and he had to stop taking childish photographs sometime and get down to the real business. There were four pointed bombs hanging from the belly of his plane. They looked like sleeping bats hanging head downwards from the eaves of a barn. He couldn’t wait to get rid of them. God in heaven, where was that bend in the Meuse and the target valley with the railway tracks? He flashed his torch over his time sheet, map and watch: still straight on. He didn’t hear the shrapnel bursting in the noise of the engine, but he saw it when he leant out of the cockpit again searching for some sign that would bring this paralysing uncertainty to an end – the hot, wild confusion of his first night-time bombing raid. If the time sheet was right, they should fly on for two seconds and then downwards to get a better aim, and then a jerk of the lever, and to hell with the mess he’d be creating. Life was one big mess, you just had to accept that and make sure you hit the target. Perhaps he’d get hit himself. There, a light ahead on the left, a bright speck on the ground. Probably someone stumbling along between the tracks. He tapped the pilot’s left upper arm, and he changed course almost imperceptibly.
Below a witches’ Sabbath had reached its peak. Guns crashed. Shells howled up and burst. Machine guns rattled out their violent worst. Searchlights groped around. The hum of the plane’s engine and propeller grew more distinct. Bertin was trembling with excitement. He was pressed into the entrance of the dugout, all his senses alert. The mad frenzy of battle tearing the night to shreds engulfed his soul. Madness gripped him. A few hours earlier he’d been attacking violence up at the hospital and now he was in raptures over it. How is that possible? he wondered. Could the two go together? Didn’t you need to be a sergeant major to tremble with bliss, as he was now doing, at the volley of explosions and the air man up there, chasing
his target undeterred, which included Bertin? Have I become a savage as well as a thief? he wondered. Did I even need to become one? Haven’t I always been one? Didn’t I bully my little brother, just as Glinsky bullied me. Didn’t I throw a weaker and worthier person than myself to the ground and rape them, just as Jansch did with me? I mean my wife. I mean Lenore.
Where was he now? Low pine trees, greyish green under the dull blue Brandenburg sky. The clearing between Wilkersdorf and Tamsel. Yellow sand and fields waist-high in rye. He was in the uniform of a warrior, which he’d been wearing for three months by then, and he had to prove his manhood because she’d refused him under that clear sky. He’d gone for her and pressed her down into the moss by the shoulders. She struggled furiously. He’d forced himself on her and frightened her as he’d earlier frightened a boy who’d tried to follow them. Had that rape, and all the misery, pain and unpleasantness that followed, been a manly act? No, it had been the act of a sergeant major. Crushing someone instead of winning them over, throwing them down instead of seducing them, ordering them about rather than persuading them – that was how a sergeant major behaved. Tons of steel, volleys of explosions, desolate swathes of poisonous smoke, careening mounds of earth, cracking joists, howling and whistling bursts of splinters and shells: they were all the result of a kind of exasperated weakness. Anyone could press a button. On 14 July, he, Bertin, had not pressed the button. But on 15 July, do truth the honour…
Bertin clung to the dugout post. Suddenly he felt sick and dizzy. The outlines of the wagons standing calmly on the tracks not 40m away, treacherously quiet in the treacherous moonlight, swam in circles before him. But before the sergeant could ask him what was wrong, a dull thud shook the hill above their heads, then a second. Splinters of stone fell from roof. The anti-aircraft fire doubled in intensity. The machine guns grew frantic. But the roar of the propeller was still there, though more distant. The railwaymen sat against the wall, and the ASC men further forward in the darkness. Bertin the sentry, suddenly completely exhausted, crouched beside them on the wooden edge of the wire bed. Excited chattering until the conclusion was finally drawn that it had been a lot of noise about nothing. He’d missed the ammunitions wagons and been disorientated by the counter fire. He must’ve dropped his bombs somewhere on the ridge behind or in front of Dannevoux. From the sound of it, the second bomb had probably ripped a hole in the hill path.
Bertin stretched his aching knees slowly. Only half an hour more of sentry duty and he could go to bed and spend four hours wrapped up in his blankets like a chrysalis undergoing metamorphosis. His second round from 4am to 6am might be restorative, with bird song, sunrise and a chance to pull himself together. But this last half hour would be hard. His limbs were trembling. He hurriedly lit his pipe and felt better, letting the men’s talk wash over him. Sergeant Barkopp pushed off to bed: tomorrow was another day – and an off-duty one at that. Bertin carried on smoking, in contravention of the rules, as he made his way out of the shelter with Karl Lebehde and Hildebrandt, who was on sentry duty after him, and stumbled across the rails past the ammunitions wagons towards the middle of the valley. Karl Lebehde stopped, turned and peered up at the hillside. A flickering red glow. An old barn or pile of wood was burning up there, said the tall Swabian. A bomb must have hit it. Karl Lebehde said nothing, wagged his head on his short neck, looked round again and finally went to bed. Bertin shivered. His musket suddenly felt like it weighed nine pounds. It had been a long, exciting day, and around midnight nature said: enough! But he was still on duty. That couldn’t be helped. His bulging pockets dragged at this shoulders.
CHAPTER FOUR
A tile falls from the roof
LIEUTENANT KROYSING, IN bed by the outer wall of his room, was already fast asleep. Only a tiny spark of consciousness connected him to the earth’s surface; his reality in that moment was that of a dream. He was flying, he, Flight Lieutenant Kroysing, was flying over the Channel. He was surrounded by roaring: from the sea, the wind and the thrum of his engine. The North Sea heaved beneath him. But its waves couldn’t hurt him and neither could the long-range guns on the ships below: their shells fell back down, yelping and powerless. In his dream, the missiles climbed towards him, pointed end first, hovered for a moment, bowed before him and hurtled back down. The cheeky little machine gun bullets were another matter. They flew up at him like bees and settled on his wings, making curves and star shapes, and transforming his plane into a butterfly. But it wasn’t like other butterflies. It was a huge death’s head moth, a bomber that threatened cities. Beneath him lay an English city full of English people, with a layout similar to Nuremberg. There was the castle where Alfred the Great had lived with Christopher Columbus – they were going to drop a bomb on its chimney. His hand was already reaching for the bomb release handle. Then a shell burst beside that hand and with a start Eberhard Kroysing woke up.
Noise filled the lieutenants’ ward. It seemed that an aircraft was actually paying a visit to the station down below. For all the batteries and M.G.’s in the area were letting rip at it. At first he wanted to jump out of bed and alert the barracks. But then he felt ashamed of that impulse, for this was a hospital not a… He couldn’t follow this thought to its conclusion. Sitting bolt upright, all ears, he tried to imagine the enemy – the enemy, who was really a comrade. Just you wait, old chap, he thought. In three months, I’ll knock you out of the sky and pay you back for this night-time visit with pleasure.
Through all the noise he heard the engine approaching in the darkness, despite Lieutenant Flachsbauer’s snoring. (The poor man wrapped himself up in sleep as though it were a thick quilt. His bride was seriously ill with septic appendicitis. It was an almost hopeless case, and he’d become suspicious, as soldiers do in hospital, and thought it wasn’t her appendix but septicaemia in another organ.) What a healthy racket the anti-aircraft guns were making! Out of bed. Yank the window open; white ribbons streaking across the night sky. Flashes as the anti-aircraft guns opened fire. A black-red puff of bursting shrapnel, then a second. He heard the aircraft engine very clearly through the frantic rattle of the machine guns. Kroysing peered up, half leaning out of the window; nothing but sky, ribbons of light and a couple of stars. A figure almost as tall as himself ran past underneath and returned a couple of seconds later. A muffled voice almost as deep as his own cried out to him: ‘Kamerad, take cover!’ And the man disappeared. Kroysing paid him no mind. This visit would be on little Bertin’s watch. Wasn’t he on guard duty? Of course he was. It was nearly 11pm, and he had number two. Well, that boy had a cool head. Kroysing had seen how he handled different kinds of situations. He would wake the barracks up.
But hadn’t the sound above him changed? It certainly had. It was fractionally louder and getting closer. He couldn’t see much out of this bloody window, which faced Dannevoux. And was it appropriate for an old soldier with an injured leg to go running out into the night against doctor’s orders? A little sobered, Kroysing straightened his pyjamas and was about to go back into the room. But what was that? That guy up there just kept heading downwards. Was he still dreaming or what? Had his dream spooled on and flipped over, as sometimes happens? This is a field hospital, a voice screamed inside him. You can’t drop your bomb on our beds.
He listened intently and suddenly the realisation struck him like a bullet to the heart that the guy must have made a mistake. He was going to blow the field hospital to pieces by accident and it would happen any second now if the anti-aircraft guns didn’t take him out.
Bring the devil down, you morons! Shoot, you lazy bastards, shoot!
Suddenly, the engine cut. Had they got him? They’d got him! Kroysing dropped his arms in relief. No more comradeship with the airman. Hostility ruled the world.
And then, as he stood in the darkness clutching the window in his pale pyjamas, the experienced soldier in him who’d seen it all before heard a faint whistling – the wilful whistling and shrill shriek of a falling bomb. The inescapable drone of fate lay
within that sound: I’m coming to snuff out life and ignite fire… The plane had glided down with its engine cut, now it thundered back up. Fire from Heaven was a good thing, in the hands of Prometheus, benefactor of mankind. Watch how I crash as ordered, I, the hammering thunderbolt, obedient destroyer. A bomb takes nearly six seconds to fall the 180m this one had to travel. But it wasn’t falling on a leaderless sheep pen. A man, who suddenly had two healthy legs, tore open the door of men’s ward 3 and yelled: ‘Air raid! Get out!’ After the men, the woman. He grabbed the door handle. Empty – the room glaringly bright, the window half open. And as ward 3 erupted in screams and the electric light blazed on, a figure appeared at the end of the corridor, and just before the crash Kroysing heard death’s messenger clamouring above the roof. In a furious frenzy, he grabbed the water jug by Kläre’s bed, totally beside himself, and hurled it up at the ceiling, into death’s ugly mug: ‘You cowardly bastard!’ Then the explosion above his head ripped him to bloody shreds.
Flames, flames. The bomb had landed in the corridor right between room 19 and ward 3. Seven or eight of those who’d fled had simply collapsed in a heap. Flying all around were corrugated iron, splintered beams, burning wood and flaming tar paper, and almost in a single moment the entire outermost wing of the barracks flared up like a bonfire. With fists and kicks and their whole bodies the wounded fought their way out through the furthest of the three doors despite their bandages. From beneath the poisonous, choking fumes of the billowing black and white smoke came the shrill screams and primaeval whining of men who’d collapsed and been crushed, and the ghastly howls of those licked by flames. Those who’d been killed outright by splinters from the bomb were lucky.
Outside Verdun Page 48
