And then the small railway followed the course of the Theinte, and to its right disappeared the road to Ville and the approach to the ravines of Fosses wood. From the left above Chaumont little Sergeant Süßmann nodded, no longer a sergeant, his clever monkey’s eyes shining in his singed face, and then the puffing locomotive came upon Artillery Lieutenant von Roggstroh wafting past with his boyish face and short, straight nose; and Bertin suddenly understood that he too must have been killed, which was hardly surprising. But rising above the hills like a gigantic pillar of smoke, lit by a reddish glow, was the figure of Sergeant Christoph Kroysing, waving from Chambrettes-Ferme where the French had long since installed themselves. God, God, thought Bertin, snuggling into the crates of explosives and wondering why young Kroysing had that strange form, like a candle flame, sharp and snapped off at the top. Of course – he recalled the balloon observers who’d been shot down and the two columns of smoke that had then unravelled against the sky. Then a ghostly aeroplane crossed the sky, the pilot’s back covered in a handful of dark bullet holes. Poor young lad with his handsome tanned face.
On the right, they’d reached some ruined trees with disintegrating tops – what was called Thil wood. Suddenly, shells were exploding among them. Dark red flames, yellow lighting. Bertin got a real shock. He had slept through the gunfire. But before he could jump down from his crates of explosives, the sapper on the wagon furthest back reassured him that the gunfire was 150m to the right and would stay there. The Frogs couldn’t get any closer however hard they tried – God damn them.
Still feeling somewhat wary, Bertin remained present and alert, but only a couple of rounds of machine gun fire broke the silence and the even chug-chug-chug of the doughty locomotive. He leaned back again and surveyed the black bulk of the land stretching off to his right. Over there was the road to Azannes and Gremilly. There by a fire that didn’t really exist, a red shell flame, crouched the young farmworker Przygulla, blowing on the flames and warming his hands. His mouth hung open as always because of the growths in his nasal cavity, and his fish eyes looked questioningly at clever Herr Bertin, who proved so much more stupid than Przygulla, when his belly was slit open and Private Schamm carried him into the medical dugout dying like a little child. Yes, said, Lieutenant Schanz, we lads from the Prussian school have to go through some pretty stiff tests before we see sense.
Bertin shuddered, buttoned his coat tighter and put his collar up.
The train stopped for a moment. The line branched off here to Romagne in a continuation of the section that the Schwerdtlein party had constructed with the Russian prisoners during the Great Cold. The sapper had to carry on alone with his wagons into unpleasant territory. The front part of the train, with Bertin and his four wagons, went round the corner into the darkness.
Bertin looked back at the three sapper wagons. Stalking over to meet them was a tall, lean figure in breeches and puttees, who revealed his wolf’s teeth as he laughed and waved his long hand in goodbye. In the end, thought Bertin, he really did choose to haunt Douaumont. ‘Not as unpleasant as you might think, my new state,’ he heard Eberhard Kroysing’s deep voice purr from the distance. ‘I decided to skip the whole air force bigwig business and go straight for that pile of rubble. You won’t forget me, will you, my little joker?’ No fear of that, thought Bertin.
Then he jumped up as the train braked with a jolt. From a dugout cut into the hillside a railwayman appeared and took Bertin’s papers. He said the dugout was called Romagne-West and that Bertin could wait in the warm and cruise back to his depot around 5pm with the empty wagons. Below, in the harsh light of an acetylene lamp, a little stove pumped out heat and there was the smell of coffee. Bertin was handed a mugful. He asked how long this new system had been needed. Since the French had gradually shot the old train station at Romagne to pieces, came the reply. During one of their fireworks displays that big-nosed Berliner had been taken out, that capable sergeant from the Railway Transport Office: had Bertin known him? Of course, replied Bertin. Anyone who had anything to do with the railway had known him. He was the soul of the whole operation and the railway transport officer’s right-hand man. So he was gone? Poor Pelican! That night seemed to belong to the dead. It would be better not to ask after anyone else, for example Friedrich Strumpf. It felt bloody spooky to be leaving this place alive.
And so goodnight.
About 8am, freshly shaved and having shared a good breakfast with little Strauß, Private Bertin of the ASC finally received his travel papers in the orderly room: railway warrants, ration card, delousing warrants, identity card. In his identity card it said that he was to report for duty with the court martial of the Lychow division at Mervinsk. He would find out where Mervinsk was – and how to get there – at the Schlesischer train station in Berlin. Because it was a long journey, he was even authorised to take an express train. The arrears of his wages and his ration money, calculated exactly, were handed over to him in brand new five and ten mark notes; he waived his share of the accumulated canteen money and donated it to the gas worker Halezinsky. The clerk Querfurth with his goatee beard made a note of this. Then they shook hands. ‘All the best, Kamerad,’ said Querfurth. ‘Look after yourselves,’ replied Bertin. And he was amazed to find he had a lump in his throat. It had been a lousy company. For nearly two years he’d been drilled and treated in an increasingly unjust and malicious way, but nonetheless it was his company, a surrogate mother and father, wife and work, home and university. It had fed and clothed him, instructed him and brought him up, it had been a second parental home where the state was the father and Germania the mother, and now he had to leave it and go out into an unknown, uncertain world. A man’s eyes might almost fill with tears at the thought. Main thing was nobody saw.
Nobody did see. And when, half an hour later, the shoogly little train on the Meuse line set off taking him to Montmédy, a tanned ASC man stuck his head out of the window and watched the land behind him, which had shaped him in sunshine and rain, summer and winter, day and night, becoming smaller and smaller. What had little Süßmann’s last words been before he died? ‘To my parents: it was worth it. To Lieutenant Kroysing: it wasn’t.’ The truth lay somewhere between those two poles, but as a wise man had once noted, not in the middle.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Swansong
IT WAS THE height of June, and the suburb of Ebensee near Nuremberg sparkled in the glow of summer. Here the city touched the old pine and beech woods at the foot of the Franconian part of the Jura hills. Schilfstraße in Ebensee was lined with small villas. From a nearby café came the sound of dance music, modern American tunes called things like the foxtrot or the shimmy.
Two young people strolled along like lovers by the white fence that separated the pavement from the front gardens. The young man was wearing a slightly worn summer suit in a blue-grey material of a cut from before the war. His neck with its prominent Adam’s apple rose up from the open collar of a white shirt. His thin cheekbones, slightly sticky out ears and longish hair looked much less out of place in a conventional suit than in uniform. His small eyes peered searchingly through the thick lenses of his new, stronger spectacles. ‘Number 26,’ he read from the fence opposite. ‘It’s 28 so it must be the next one. Lene, I’m frightened. I’m not sure I can go in.’
Lenore, in a pale yellow summer dress that came just past her knee, laid her hand protectively on his. ‘You don’t have to do it. No one’s forcing you, Werner. You came here of your own accord. Look over there, the flag’s at half mast.’
Werner Bertin looked into the garden of Number 28. A white painted flagpole towered there, and a black, white and red flag hung motionlessly from it. This flag, which for four years he’d seen flying in various countries, from buildings in Skopje and Kaunas, in Lille and Montmédy, in every German street, and which was soon to disappear, had been hoisted in mourning between the cherry tree and the two pine trees on the right and left of the lawn, and scarcely a breeze moved its folds. ‘At last someo
ne who marks this day,’ he said. ‘I’m sure now that it’s that house. Can you read what it says on the sign?’
If she shielded her eyes – her wide-brimmed hat hung from her arm – Lenore could decipher the brass sign from across the road: ‘It says Kroysing.’
A gaunt man, very tall, with his hands behind his back, came down the path that led from the house to the street, looking as though he often trod that route deep in thought. He appeared for a moment at the fence in a black coat, stiff white collar and black tie, turned round and disappeared round the other side of the house.
Werner Bertin pressed Lenore’s hand. ‘That’s him. Eberhard Kroysing was his double. If only that incessant tootling would stop!’
The date was 29 June 1919. As was the case every Sunday afternoon, people were dancing in the garden pubs and cafés. On the calendar, the day was called ‘Peter and Paul’ day after the two apostles. That day Germany was celebrating the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which had taken place the day before. The war was definitively over, and the blockade would soon end too. Soon Bertin and Lenore, and old Herr Kroysing too, would no longer look so pinched. It was a day on which the terrible bloody wounds of the last four years had been declared healed. At the same time, Bertin wished Germany would take it more seriously, be more considered, more collected, more shaken. You felt something of that among the bourgeoisie: there was the flag flying at half mast between black pine trees. But the people danced. They didn’t worry about it. No one noticed that a new page had been turned in the earth’s destiny. Germany danced. Things could only get better. The shotguns had been thrown into the corner. Everyone was piling into work. People just wanted to forget, rejoice and immerse themselves in the hot days of early summer. After all the years of hardship, grief and horror they had the right to go a bit mad.
The young writer and his wife were on their way to southern Germany to recover in the glorious light of the landscape they loved. But before they disappeared into the mountains, Bertin had decided to look up the two Kroysing brothers’ parents. He wanted to tell them how their sons had died, how miserable and pointless their deaths had been, so they might understand it was not some noble lie or bogus heroic sacrifice that had deprived them of the sons who would have supported them in their old age, but brutality and sheer, stupid chance. He’d have to be careful but as a writer he knew how to use words. The poor people shouldn’t be left under any illusions. Instead they should be made to join those who wanted to do away with nationalistic jingoism and only allow war against true predators.
And now the flag was flying at half mast, and the man who looked like Eberhard Kroysing as an old man reappeared, his stony face set in bitter lines, walked up to the garden fence, spotted the young couple across the road, shrugged his shoulders grimly, turned and headed back to the house. From the doorway above the front steps an old woman emerged with a handkerchief in her hand. She dabbed her eyes with it, a habit that had clearly become ingrained. ‘Alfred,’ she cried in a dark voice that held the echo of tears shed long ago, ‘it’s time for tea.’
The old public official nodded to her, climbed the steps and disappeared inside with her. The windows facing the direction of the music were banged shut. The summer’s day sparkled over the red roof of the house, Peter and Paul day, the coming harvest. The corner of the black, white and red flag was almost touching the gravel that surrounded the white mast in a small, yellow circle in the middle of the lawn.
‘I can’t do it,’ said Werner Bertin decisively. ‘Come on, let’s go to the woods. We’re not here to rub salt in old wounds. The government of the republic, once we have a constitution, will expose the truth. Besides, those two won’t forget or let other people forget.’
Deep in her heart, Lenore Bertin didn’t agree with Werner’s decision to shirk this duty. If you decide to do something, you should do it, she thought doubtfully. But he was so irritable at the moment that she didn’t want to disagree with him. He really belonged in a sanatorium, but he wouldn’t hear of it. And so there was nothing left for a wise woman to do but follow the man she loved, who had held out so bravely and still had complete trust in the wisdom of governments, that beloved, foolish boy, that savage heart, into the woods over there, where the magnificent leafy treetops formed a border between the sky and the earth.
‘This meadow,’ said Bertin, putting his arm round her, ‘could be held against two companies from here with one machine gun. They’d never get over that stream down there. And the edge of the woods would make a great emplacement for an anti-aircraft battery.’
The meadow shone blue with lady’s smock and crane’s bill. At the edge of the woods, flashes of sunlight played on the grey tree trunks. ‘That,’ said Werner Bertin dreamily, leaning against his wife’s shoulder, ‘is exactly what the woods at Verdun looked like when we arrived, only much thicker.’
‘If only you could leave those woods behind,’ said Lenore tenderly. She secretly feared it would be a long time before her friend and husband found his way back from those enchanted woods and their undergrowth into the present, into real life. The war worked on within him, burrowed and seethed, clashed and shrieked. But from the outside – she sighed – no one, thank God, could tell.
Like any other pair of lovers, they wandered off into the woods, through the shadows and the bright greenery, and her yellow summer dress shone through longer than his blue-grey suit.
Afterword
This novel fills the gap between the books Young Woman of 1914 and The Case of Sergeant Grischa, which, together with The Crowing of a King, was the original concept for a cycle of novels to be called The Great War of the White Men. The novel was sketched out in 1927, begun for the first time in 1928 and for the second time in 1930. Its publication was delayed by the confiscation of my manuscripts and my expulsion from Germany. The steady deterioration of my eyesight complicated final revisions to the freshly dictated manuscript. Unless even worse circumstances intervene, the novel The Crowing of a King will conclude the cycle and, much as each part stands on its own, complete an intended whole originally supposed to bear the subtitle of A Trilogy of the Transition.
For faithful help in reading the proofs of these books, I owe grateful thanks to my friends Lion Feuchtwanger and Hermann Struck amongst others.
Arnold Zweig
Haifa, Mount Carmel, spring 1935
Characters
In the order of their appearance
PRIVATE WERNER BERTIN, son of a Kreuzberg Jew, a young trainee lawyer and writer now of the German Army Service Corps (ASC).
PRIVATE WILHELM PAHL, from Berlin, a typsetter by trade and a socialist; also of the ASC.
PRIVATE KARL LEBEHDE, in civilian life a Berlin inn-keeper, now of the ASC.
COLONEL STEIN, an old cavalryman, commandant of the Steinbergquell ammunitions depot.
LIEUTENANT BENNDORF, acting captain and adjutant to Colonel Stein.
ACTING LIEUTENANT GRASSNICK, veteran of the Serbian campaign, in command of the labour company attached to the ammunitions depot; known to his subordinates as Panje of Vranje.
ACTING SERGEANT MAJOR GLINSKY, formerly an insurance agent.
PRIVATES OF THE ASC: HILDEBRANDT, a blacksmith; VEHSE, an upholsterer;
STRAUSS, a shopkeeper; FANNRICH and REINHOLD.
SPERLICH, an orderly-room clerk.
BRUNO NAUMANN, barber, a socialist.
IGNAZ NAUMANN, the company fool, formerly a packer in a warehouse.
DR. BINDEL, a civilian doctor in uniform.
CORPORAL SCHNEE, from the Sanitary Corps.
SERGEANT BÖHNE, once a postman.
SERGEANT SCHULZ, an ammunitions expert.
SERGEANT CHRISTOPH KROYSING, a Nürnberger, a young poet who stood up against injustice.
AXEL KROG, a Swedish war correspondent, a fervent admirer of France.
LEPAILLE, a French gunner.
WUERFURTH, a clerk.
CORPORAL NÄGLEIN, formerly a farmer.
CORPORAL ALTHANS
, a Reservist in possession of a permanent travel pass.
LIEUTENANT EBERHARD KROYSING, Christoph Kroysing’s elder brother, by profession a civil engineer, now a sapper and recipient of the Iron Cross, first class.
CAPTAIN ALOIS NIGGL, in civilian life a retired civil servant from Weilheim, Bavaria, now of the ASC and with ambitions for decoration.
MAJOR JANSCH, a Prussian from Berlin, embittered nationalist and anti-Semite, editor of Army and Fleet Weekly, now of the ASC.
LIEUTENANT PSALTER, formerly a headmaster in Neuruppen, now of the lorry park.
PROFESSOR CARL GEORG MERTENS, an eminent legal scholar, judge advocate of the court martial at Montmédy.
SEARGEANT PORISCH, Judge Advoate Mertens’ deputy.
LANCE CORPORAL SIECK, clerk to the judge advocate.
SERGEANT ERICH SÜSSMANN, a Berlin Jew, a schoolboy in years but a veteran in service.
OTTO SCHNEIDER, a telephone operator.
CORPORAL FRIEDRICH STRUMPF, a switchboard operator, once a park-keeper near Heidelberg.
SERGEANT-MAJOR LUDWIG FEICHT, formerly purser on a Bavarian lake steamer.
LIEUTENANT SIMMERDING, second in command in Captain Niggl’s company.
DILLINGER, orderly-room clerk.
LIEUTENANT PAUL SCHANZ, from Russian Poland, now of the artillery.
CORPORAL KARL KILIAN, from Baden, a switchboard operator, once a worker in a tobacco factory.
FATHER BENEDIKT LOCHNER, of the Order of St Francis, a broad-minded representative of the Catholic Church, now serving as field chaplain.
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