Арнольд Цвейг: Outside Verdun

They’d not had a good childhood together. The big brother was five years older than the younger one and always felt disadvantaged, something he bitterly resented, as is normal among brothers.

But the company wanted to avoid an investigation at all costs. They were clearly very anxious about it, and so, most unusually, the court martial didn’t get in touch. ‘That’s why they’ve put me at Chambrettes-Ferme,’ finished Kroysing. ‘They’re hoping the Frogs will do them a favour and consign the whole business to the files. For nine weeks, I’ve been watching every single face that fetches up in this lousy hole…’

Bertin sat there, his face shadowed and flecked by the beech leaves above him. Something inside him laughed with joy. It was good that he had come here. Here was someone about to be mired in brutality, and he could reach out a hand and pull him out. ‘So what can I do?’ he asked simply.

Kroysing gave him a grateful look. He just wanted him to transport a few lines, which he would give him next time, to his mother. ‘Your post is above suspicion, isn’t it? When next you write home, put my letter inside yours and then get it put in a postbox at home. My mother will then telegraph Uncle Franz and the ball will be set in motion.’

‘Done,’ said Bertin. ‘We’ll soon know when we’ll be back here again. That sounded like an announcement. Did you hear it?’

‘Fall in!’ came the call from below.

‘Better we’re not seen together again,’ said the Bavarian. ‘I’ll sit down and write the letter immediately. Thank you so much! Hopefully, I can pay you back sometime.’ He shook Bertin’s hand, and there was a gleam in his brown, wide-set, boyish eyes. Stiffly, he touched his hand to his cap and then disappeared between the trees, nearly stumbling on the cat, which was prowling around in the irrational hope of a second sausage end.

Bertin stood up, stretched his arms, inhaled deeply and looked happily around him. It was wonderful here. The felled trees were beautiful, as were the white shell holes, the limestone, and the terrible high-calibre shell splinters, which were stuck in the ground like serrated throwing knives. He ran like a young boy down to the solitary gun, where his comrades were already standing in their tunics and haversacks, and Sergeant Böhne was lining the detachment up to march off. Bertin had found someone like himself, had forged a bond, perhaps even a friendship. He laughed off muttered comments from his comrades, who said there would be trouble on the way back just because he had slept so long. They said they’d keep a better eye on him when they came back the day after tomorrow. The day after tomorrow, then, Bertin thought, taking his place for the count off.

The Bavarian sergeant was also lining his men up to march off. He waved and shouted, ‘See you the day after tomorrow.’ His greeting reached everyone, but Bertin knew whom it was really meant for.

IN THE MIDDLE of the night, Christoph Kroysing ducked out of the entrance to the dugout, which had once been the Chambrettes-Ferme cellars, straightened up and took a couple of steps. His silhouette was slim and boyish against the light sky. His hands were in his pockets and he didn’t have a belt or a cap on. His lank hair, still neatly parted, flopped across his right eye. He was entirely used to the dreadful Walpurgis Night that howled above his head. Steel witches hurtled towards the ground; long-range guns rattled and banged like trains; every four or five minutes, tonnes of metal from the heavy mortars ripped the air with a desolate gurgle. The screech and whistle of small field grenades mixed with the roar of 15-centimetre shells, which, being the army’s main weapon, arched steeply through the air from three or four different types of gun. And in response came the banging, roaring and pounding of the French 7.5s, 10s, 20s and the dreaded 38s, which spat at the flank of the Germans’ positions and trenches from the impregnable Fort Marre on the other side of the Meuse. It must be all go at the front. In the small section just about visible from Hill 344 behind the Douaumont ridge, the fighting divisions had been trying to exterminate each other with hand grenades, machine guns, and bare steel, and the aftermath was now subsiding. The Germans had advanced a few paces between Thiaumont and Souville, but the French had held firm, and the German artillery was now hammering their position, and they in turn were hammering the German artillery to give their infantry a break. It was the normal back and forth of the fronts, and Christoph Kroysing often thought that there would be no end to it until the last German and the last Frenchman limped out of the trenches on crutches to finish each other off with pocket knives or teeth and finger nails. For the world had gone mad. Only an orgy of madness could explain this stamping on the spot amid squirting blood, rotting flesh and cracking bones. They had been taught in school that people were rational beings, but that idea was a pedagogical swindle that should be buried – together with the bearded gentlemen who had the cheek to teach school children and who ought simply to be clubbed to death with human bones. ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself.’ ‘God is love.’ ‘The moral law within us and the starry heavens above us.’ ‘It is sweet and honourable to die for the Fatherland.’ ‘Justice and law are the pillars of the state.’ ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men of good will.’ Well, he’d always been of good will and now he was here.

If you wanted to look south and west, you had to be prepared to take a small risk. Kroysing knew of a hole in the Ferme’s ramparts, a kind of seat, which he called his loge. It took scarcely a minute to scramble through the brickwork, but he might of course get hit. So what! He ran over and was soon squatting in his lair, where he caught his breath and laughed a little.

The vague brightness of the moonless, starry night was becoming ever more transparent, and his ear gradually adjusted to the myriad sounds of war. The gulleys towards Douaumont were under heavy attack. Rifle and machine gun fire whipped the length of the Pepper ridge. On the rubbish tip that was the village of Louvemont red flames flew up and died down, and only then did the detonation come. Out of sight down below, field kitchens were trying to come through, as were ammunition trucks and working parties with rolls of wire, posts, entrenching tools – horses, lorries, men. No, the Frogs were no longer scrimping on ammunition. In the valley to the left, dark red bushes of fire had broken out. A few hundred metres further on, where you couldn’t see anything, was a much used field track that led to Herbe Bois.

On the southern edge of Vauche wood, where the military road ran up to Douaumont, a chain of little volcanoes thundered and flared, new ones erupting all the time, and over Douaumont itself, over his brother Eberhard and his men, hung a great clinging red mist – the never-ending belching of the chimney that was Verdun. The army’s backbone was being pounded to bits there. Red and green flares flew up on the horizon, turning the infantry’s cries for help into a jaunty fireworks display. The French army’s white star shells floated slowly down, spreading a soft light – excellent for shooting each other by. Christoph Kroysing knew it all well: the Chemin des Dames, the Loretto Heights, the sugar factory by Souchez – all the sweet things associated with the war of 1914-15 when he was still an infantryman, putting his life on the line for the Fatherland. Now he was more inclined to watch. His little, rat-infested loge here in the shattered brickwork suited him just fine. The great arc of the horizon spread out before him, flashing and flickering, lighting up like a bolt of lightning and going black again. Despite the natural dampening caused by distance, the full ferocity of the roaring and clamouring reached him, overlaid by the thunder of German guns. The Fosses wood, Chaûmes wood and Vavrille batteries were working at full strength. Half-naked gunners, support troops, observers in the trees, telephonists at their apparatus: this was the night shift. He knew them all, those bloody shell-smiths. The next day, the new battery would settle in nearby, drawing French counter-fire into this quiet valley. Shame about that scrap of wood that was still standing. Shame about all the men who would meet their end here. Shame about Christoph Kroysing himself, who, at 21, was forced to accept that man’s brutality and his instinct for survival were as vital as war and harder to escape. He leaned on a ruined wall, half crouching, half sitting, his hands cupping his lean, boyish face, which was framed by floppy hair. This is what it looks like outside Verdun, he thought. In all these weeks, things have hardly changed. The front line has been pushed forwards slightly, and we could cover the ground we’ve won with corpses. But that was what it was like at the Somme too, where the French and British were stage managing the same kind of hoax. There was a sudden boom on Hill 344. Bright lights flashed, fiery red on smouldering white. Perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to sit outside much longer. At least he wouldn’t go to sleep feeling as hopeless as he had the night before, haunted by the scum who snooped through his post, checking what he’d written to Mother and Father. No, he was alive again. He had his bottle back and he felt clearer in his head than ever before. They hadn’t reckoned with the camaraderie of decent men in the army. Tomorrow or the day after, his comrade Bertin would return. The letter he had written that afternoon with his trusty fountain pen was already crackling in his tunic pocket above his heart. He’d have to be very careful for a couple of days. Then a mighty hand would reach down and remove Christoph Kroysing from this rat hole. Because even if the gods had abdicated and those who ran the world seemed to have turned into clockwork maniASC, there were men everywhere in the German army, individuals and groups, who wanted to put an end to injustice, who would be incandescent with rage if it were proved to them that brutality, self-interest and treason began right behind the foremost trenches.