Outside Verdun

by Zweig, Arnold; Rintoul, Fiona;

  Captain Lauber sat crestfallen at one end of his sofa and at the other sat Major Niggl, full of concern. An armchair was pulled up for Major Jansch, a rare visitor, and he was given a glass of cherry brandy and offered a cigar. Indeed no, Captain Lauber wasn’t smoking that day either. He didn’t feel like it. He’d received dreadful news from the Dannevoux field hospital via the brigade headquarters: the plane that wreaked havoc on Damvillers station had smashed up Dannevoux field hospital beforehand. Definitely a breach of international law. Of course the French would maintain it had been an accident if representatives of the Red Cross raised a complaint. They’d punish the airman or replace him, and they might not even do that. But that wouldn’t bring back Lieutenant Kroysing, who had been killed with a number of other wounded. Major Niggl nodded his head sympathetically. His little pale eyes were full of deepest condolences as they sought the captain’s dark eyes. Surely not the Lieutenant Kroysing he’d fought beside at Douaumont, he asked. And Captain Lauber nodded. Of course it was him; there was only one lieutenant of that name in the army. And there weren’t many officers of his calibre. He’d had high hopes for him and expected him to go far. It was from such tempered steel that the bonds had been forged that held the front together. Such men guaranteed the nation’s future: affable, always ready to listen to the men’s concerns, relentless in the pursuit of duty, completely and utterly committed. And to think how happy they’d been that the lad had escaped unharmed from that lice-infested pile of rubble that was Douaumont and had come through that mess on 14 December without serious injury, and now a stupid aerial bomb had landed on his head and killed him off. Well, today was a black day. Today the world felt like a speck in his eye. This war in the air reduced war to a kind of trade for mechanics, photographers and hurlers of bombers – it was time to abolish it and replace it with something more sensible, something that didn’t mean it was always the best men who got destroyed. It was a great and wonderful thing to defend the Fatherland, to use intelligent means and brave men to prevail against an intelligent and brave opponent. He used to have joking quarrels with his friend Reinhart about whether the heavy artillery had spelt the end of that. But when it came to this flying business, there no was point in wasting breath. It wasn’t proper; it was bloody idiotic – be done with it. So, Lieutenant Kroysing was gone too; maybe it would be his turn next. That would be fine by him. Let the next airman crack his skull the way his little boy cracked walnuts at Christmas. But until then one had carry on working, do one’s duty, look neither right nor left. His two visitors got up. Major Niggl shook the Swabian’s hand, all innocence. He and Lieutenant Kroysing had not always seen eye to eye, he said. That could happen among comrades. But that he’d now been taken from them was enough to make a man spew, and he hoped that his friend Lauber would soon recover from the knock and take a more cheerful view of the world.

  Shaking his head and almost bowing, he walked to the door and went out to where the two horses were tethered, nuzzling one another trustingly, the neck of one laid against the other’s mane. Open-mouthed with admiration for his friend Niggl, Major Jansch followed him out into the open air. For many decades to come, he recalled that feeling whenever he met the Bavarian.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The legacy

  IN AN EMPTY barracks, words echo uncomfortably. For that reason, it’s best to speak in a hushed voice. During the morning, Private Bertin was informed by Sergeant Barkopp himself that he was to pack his things and return to the company. Private Lebehde went with him; he wanted to help him. The things that had happened the previous night, whose consequences were visible that morning, made the two men want to stick together. It was a beautiful day outside; the march to Etraye-East would be tiring but enjoyable. Lebehde the inn-keeper and Bertin the lawyer had spread Bertin’s coat out on one of the bunks and folded the arms in accordance with army regulations, and now they were rolling it up into a sausage that was as tight and even as possible: no wrinkles, no knots. Both men had been on sentry duty and looked pale. The news about the havoc the enemy aircraft had wreaked had been brought to them by the railwaymen around 8am. Both of them had scarcely begun to digest the fact that Wilhelm Pahl was no longer in the world. Bertin shook his head inwardly as he performed his tasks and sometimes he actually did shake it to the surprise of uninitiated observers. A banner kept running through his head upon which nothing was written but three words: Pahl and Kroysing… Pahl and Kroysing… had he looked more closely, he’d have observed within himself a child’s amazement at the immense forces of destruction available to life on earth. Kroysing and Pahl… Pahl and Kroysing… A peculiar world, an extremely funny world.

  That day Lebehde’s freckles stood out particularly clearly on the pale skin of his round face. His thick fingers rolled the coat up with peerless precision. ‘I imagine they might dig a mass grave in Dannevoux cemetery tonight for the men from last night. They won’t take up much space now.’

  ‘A load of flaky skin,’ said Bertin senselessly. ‘To the earth it’ll just be flaky skin.’ In his mind he saw a confused mess of white and charred bones, skulls with no jaws and jaws with no skulls, the skeleton of a foot lying in a ribcage. Pahl had exceptionally small hands for an adult, Kroysing exceptionally large ones. ‘Do you think they’ll put the lieutenant with the men?’ he asked.

  ‘Hmm,’ replied Lebehde. ‘The way I see it, yes, they will. The medical officer is a sensible man, and one grave is less work than two. And at the Resurrection the angel on duty will be able to sort them out. You’re lucky,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘You’re getting out of here, which is the best thing you could do.’

  Bertin shrugged his shoulders and hung his gaunt, wasted head. He felt guilty that he was leaving his comrades in the lurch. He couldn’t deny that he had a bad conscience.

  Meanwhile, Lebehde contemplated their handiwork: the long tube of coat. Even the Kaiser wouldn’t be ashamed to buckle that to his pack. Then with Bertin’s help he bent it round the rucksack – they had to keep an iron grip on the ends as they did so – and slung the right strap round it, while Bertin slung the left one round. He’d always been surprised that Bertin hadn’t cleared off well before now, he said in the meantime.

  ‘But you’re my company,’ murmured Bertin, as he secured the upper coat strap round the middle of the sausage.

  Lebehde looked at him wide-eyed. What good had his staying there done them or anyone else in the world? And who had asked him to invest so much in their comradeship?

  Bertin stepped back, shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at his rucksack, his head to one side. That was how he’d always felt, he said slowly, and after a pause he added that he had no explanation for it. He didn’t say anything about his inability to change things once he’d got himself into them; Lebehde wouldn’t think very highly of that.

  Lebehde helped himself to one of Bertin’s cigarettes, which he’d been going to leave him anyway. He said he thought those kinds of feelings were inappropriate. A man encumbered by those kinds of feelings could wind up in Hell’s kitchen. ‘Wilhelm,’ he said suddenly, ‘would have understood that very well. Feelings are for toffs. Sometimes I think they’ve standardised all our feelings for their own ends. Let me tell you something, my friend. What’s important for the likes of us is to think. The more we think, the more clearly we see things, the better it’ll be for us. I take it you’re not offended by me including you with us, Comrade?’

  Bertin wasn’t offended. To the contrary, he was deeply moved and greatly satisfied by his inclusion.

  ‘All afternoon I’ve been asking myself where we went wrong, Wilhelm and I. Where was the mistake in our calculations? And I said to myself: we shouldn’t have jumped so far ahead. You and I, we’re sitting here safe and sound with our heads intact and ready to use. But for Wilhelm all that’s left is a mass grave, and the workers of Berlin will have to get on without him. And it’s a comfort to know that they will get on without him. It would have gone quicker with Wilhlem, no doubt
about it. That boy had a good head on his shoulders, and he did what a man could, even if he was a bit careless in his choice of parents, and he knew that the bosses wouldn’t give anything away, and that we would hand them a box of cigars in return for a match. And yet, you see, he miscalculated, as events have shown. Where did he go wrong? Can you answer me that?’

  Bertin had started folding his blankets, which had to be strapped under the flap of his rucksack. He was reluctant to answer Lebehde’s question, because his thoughts were of Pahl the living man, his way of smiling, his fondness for a well-turned phrase, for the newspaper quarter in Berlin with its machine rooms and great rolls of white paper held together by wooden battens, for the smell of printer’s ink, the aroma of paraffin from the freshly printed sheets; his fondness for Sunday outings to Treptow, to the Müggelsee, for the high banks of the Havel by the Great Window in Wannsee, the silvery green pine trees of the Mark. How could he possibly identify the mistake in Wilhelm Pahl’s calculations that had cost him his life? Were there actually any calculations?

  There certainly were, said Lebehde. Wilhelm hadn’t lost his toe by chance, but thanks to meticulous planning and a sharpened nail that had been carefully made to rust.

  Bertin received this news open-mouthed.

  They hadn’t told him about it at the time – they could talk about why until the cows came home, but, said Lebehde, there wasn’t much point now and so it would be better to skip it. Wilhelm had wanted it done, and Lebehde had stuck the thing in, and so it was him who’d started it and he shared responsibility for how it had turned out.

  Bertin was amazed at himself. Eberhard Kroysing had suffered the same fate as his brother. He would never see him again, and he would never see Pahl again, who had had himself maimed, nor Father Lochner – and what had become of Sister Kläre? It was far too much for one person, who only had two ears and one heart, and whose soul was still preoccupied by all the things that had been going through his mind when he was on sentry duty. He would need time, a lot of time, to make sense of it all. He looked at his dirty fingernails and finally asked whether Lebehdhe required people to factor chance into their calculations, because air men didn’t usually drop bombs on hospitals and so it must have been chance that directed the bomb.

  Lebehde immediately said that he did. It wasn’t that he required it. The cause required it, as the facts demonstrated. It required absolute vigilance, for the opponent was ruthless and exploited even the smallest advantage, to say nothing of big advantages. They had underestimated their opponents – the capitalist world order and its wars – and now the goose was cooked.

  ‘Listen, my friend,’ he whispered confidentially, ‘you made all kinds of pretty speeches against violence up there, but did violence listen? Not a bit of it! It struck and made us into survivors. Perhaps that teaches us a thing or two. And if I hadn’t neglected to pay due attention to my profession, which I should have done, I might have realised it sooner. For what does a good inn-keeper do? You’re thinking he sells beer and cheers people up. If you like. But calling time and throwing out troublemakers – once they’ve settled their bill – is also part of his job, and I’ve always been a stickler for decency and good behaviour. And so I have used force for the collective good. Do you follow?’

  And because Bertin thought too long, he shook his broad head. ‘But carry on speaking out against violence by others. The fewer bouncers there are for my competition, the better it is for me, especially as I’ve always got to be my own bouncer. The longer this war lasts, the more stupid the world will become. But an order backed up by a gun – everyone understands that. That’s what a certain Lebehde has learnt, and now he’s going to head back to Germany as quickly as he can. I’ll be out of here before the month is out.’

  And that was why he thought it was quite right and the best thing for the cause that Bertin was pushing off to the court martial and to the east where there were no air attacks. Bertin had learnt first hand what the score was. And now he’d have an important position and learn more. The question for the future was whether it was possible to eradicate the great injustice in society. A man who worked in a court sat behind the bar where right and wrong were dished out. He was very happy about this change in Bertin’s career. ‘For what could you have written in the newspapers that would have been of any use? A load of crap. And how long would you have been able to carry on speaking to the workers while the war was going on? Three months at most. Then they would have got you by the collar and thrown you out, and the whole mess would have started again. No, my friend, you scarper off to your quiet little corner right away, keep your eyes peeled, keep your gob shut and try to reduce injustice. Wanna hear how it went when we see one another again after the war. Holzmarkstraße 47, Berlin East. I’ll give you a nice glass of Patzenhofer beer on the house and I imagine you’ll meet some people. And now get going. I’ll represent you at the funeral. And while the priest is babbling on, I’ll have a consultation with myself and try to work out how to create the force that will eventually make all force redundant.’

  They shook hands, a thick hand and a thin one. Karl Lebehde had a chin that was twice as strong as his, Bertin noted with surprise, and his narrow mouth sat embedded between it and his nose, giving him the look of a painting or bust of one of the great commanders.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Full circle

  PRIVATE BERTIN WAS nobody’s chump now. He didn’t even consider walking to Etraye-Ost. Wasn’t that what horse-drawn and engine-powered lorries were for? It was one of the laws of life for the soldier that it was better for someone else to get his boots dirty than to get your own boots dirty because no one would clean them for you. And the drivers were always happy to have a passenger for company. Bertin was a monosyllabic passenger compared with many others, but the carter, a Frisian from Oldenburg who’d grown up with horses and always worked on the land, had a concept of conversation more akin to a city dweller’s idea of silence.

  In blank astonishment, Bertin realised that fate – or coincidence, if you preferred – was taking him down the same road that he had travelled when he first arrived in the Verdun area, from Vilosnes-East, where they had been detrained, through Sivry-Consenvoye, then left through the woods where the signpost still stood that read: ‘Not under enemy observation’. And then uphill and back down through the beech trees, which formed muddled green thickets on either side of the road. It was almost exactly a year since a marching solider had opened a letter from his bride-to-be here that said she was pushing through his marriage leave; and at that moment the first heavy gun had sent a shell roaring up into the air like some kind of primaeval forest dragon. Spring had been more advanced that year, and the winter had not been so bitterly cold. But looking at it from the outside that was the only difference.

  The feeling that everything was repeating itself reached its zenith in the orderly room when Sergeant Major Duhn informed him rather drily that he was to go to Romagne-West that night with four wagons of explosives, picking up three wagons of flares and light ammunition from Damvillers sapper depot on the way. That meant he had the right to sleep through the afternoon if he wanted, and that’s what he did after he’d had a look round the depot and camp. The Etraye depot, which was built into the valley in tiers, was a lot more difficult to run than old ‘Steinbergquell’ on the road to Moirey, but it was also harder to shoot to pieces. Bertin bumped into a lot of old acquaintances; one minute he was shaking Halezinsky’s hand, the next Sergeant Böhne’s. In the field gun ammunition section, he looked for Strauß, that clever little lad from the Mosel valley, and when he found him, Strauß, who was deeply depressed by the long winter and the seeming impossibility of peace, squealed with delight and congratulations. Bertin had a refreshing three hours’ sleep on Strauß’s bed, ate a dinner of roast horse meat from the private kitchen of the moustachioed ammunitions expert Schulz, borrowed a coat so that he didn’t have to unbuckle his beautifully rolled up coat, and reported to the orderly room and then at the d
epot.

  The moon was in a completely different position in the sky to the day before when the little narrow-gauge train moved off. Strauß had also pressed a blanket on Bertin. He sat on a sort of recliner made of smoothly planed crates of explosives, with his cold meerschaum pipe between his teeth. Almost in dismay, he felt the helix come full circle: the narrow-gauge railway ran through the sheltered terrain to Damvillers, where the sappers attached their wagons. And then, metre by metre, rail by rail, the train slid back into the past, into what was dead and gone, taking with it a man bundled in blankets, who no longer knew if he was awake or asleep, who kept forcing his eyes open only for them to close again. Bertin had stumbled down this road in October when Major Jansch cancelled his six days’ leave. This was where the crown prince’s car had taken the bend and disappeared from view. Wilhelm Pahl, earmarked to die in a bomb raid, had spent the night in those dugouts when air raids made the camp unsafe in July and August. Wasn’t that him stepping out of the dark and bowing, his hands crossed over his chest, a spectre made of smoke, smiling wryly because he was now under ground? All around ghosts wafted up, whitish trails of smoke, the souls of dead men. Poor little Vehse, good-natured little Otto Reinhold, Wilhelm Schmidt, the illiterate farmhand from the Polish borderlands, and Hein Foth, the ship’s stoker from Hamburg who had such terrible lice. Over there had stood the cartridge tent where they’d worked so hard and argued so vociferously. It wasn’t there any more, but the ghost of it was, built of grey air against the dark grey sky. Above it a pennant made of Sergeant Karde’s blown-off leg fluttered merrily and a couple of dead ASC men formed a grinning guard of honour by the door, because the inspection tent for damaged ammunition had later stood on the same spot awaiting the blast that destroyed it. Up on the right the abandoned camp’s barracks still loomed against the night sky. But where was the field gun depot and the bubbling brook that flowed through it? There was a pond there now, and the new barracks of a delousing station or laundry crouched in the valley.