Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

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.

In bed, surrounded by burning floorboards, lay the body of Pahl the typesetter. Only his body: his clever head, of which the workers had such desperate need, had been crushed by the explosion like a hen’s egg under a horse’s hoof. It had got him in his sleep this time, just as it could so nearly have got Bertin nine months previously but hadn’t, to his and Karl Lebehde’s astonishment. This time he’d slept through the noise. By the time the noise started to wake him, he was already gone. There would be nothing left of him. For his brain and crushed skull had been spurted somewhere, and his disfigured body would be reduced to ashes by the slow, tenacious blaze, as would his bed and that entire section of the barracks. In the meantime, the medical officer, Pechler the bath attendant, the night watchmen and orderlies had rushed over. A bit of luck, thought the medical officer, as he pulled the fire extinguisher from its bracket and let the hose unfurl – a bit of luck that it had hit ward 3 with all the minor cases. In ward 1, no one would have been able to escape. Wrapped in blankets, the occupants of the burning wing crowded into the safe side of the courtyard and the southern terrace with its deckchairs.

The chief nurse did a roll call to get an idea of how many were missing and who they were. Streams of carbon dioxide from the red canisters were already hissing on to the blaze, and men with minor injuries helped the telephonists to pull the hose out further. The bath orderly, in his capacity as a water supply expert, soon had a sharp jet raining down on the burning timberwork, dashing the debris aside and sending the ruins flying into the air. ‘Watch out, roofing!’ cried one of the rescued men for whom the disaster had quickly become exciting entertainment.

Sister Kläre lay on the matron’s bed, passed out. It was a mystery why this woman who normally had such presence of mind had been shocked to the core like that. No doubt she’d been overcome by belated horror at her miraculous escape from death. That corner had suffered the worst. No one had been rescued from there. No, not true: Lieutenant Flachsbauer had survived. The explosion from the bomb that had crashed through the roof into the corridor and set the floorboards on fire had spared him. It had only shaken him wide awake, warning him that something was happening. He’d climbed out of the window as the hut went up in flames above him. He’d lowered himself down the outer wall. He’d been very calm and phlegmatic and hadn’t got as much as a splinter in his skin. That was what happened , he thought, when you didn’t give a monkey’s about life, when it made you sick, because a wee lassie at home had got some old quack of a woman to abort a baby that wasn’t yours . As if any of it mattered: pregnant or not, a baby by Mr X or Mr Y, trouble from the parents or people talking. All that mattered was to be alive, to continue to breathe, to have eyes to see, ears to hear, a head to think, a nose to smell, even if all you smelt were tar fumes and burning flesh. A miracle that he’d been saved, really and truly. He must write to that silly little goose immediately the following afternoon and make it clear to her that she should get well, for God’s sake, and not give a toss about anything else.

Twenty minutes after the bomb had fallen, drivers arrived at the scene of the blaze from the Headquarters at Dannevoux with men from the large billets there, sappers with picks and axes and infantrymen with spades. The front part of the men’s ward and the nurses’ rooms across the corridor could still be saved, though they’d be too water-logged and full of debris to be used.

The second bomb… A solitary rider on the way to Dannevoux had stopped, rigid with shock, and turned in his saddle as white arcs cut across the dome of the sky and the deafening play of the guns and rifles began. Father Lochner, under his wide-brimmed hat, was admittedly quite convinced he was in no danger up there. His fear was for the others, the ASC men down below, who didn’t belong to his division but whom he’d intended to visit before Easter. Apparently there were a couple of Polish Catholics among them.

Suddenly, a shrapnel case hurtled to the ground beside him. ‘Watch out!’ it said. This nice little show, which mere mortals had cribbed from the magnificence of God’s thunderstorms, was not without its dangers. For a precious second, Father Lochner remained undecided as to whether he should spur his gelding on and gallop over to Dannevoux or turn back and take refuge in the hospital for a few minutes until the attack was over.

Unfortunately for him, he did neither. He stopped where the road forked, sorely tempted to take the one that led downhill and shelter against the hillside in the round black shadows cast by the summit. The gelding Egon, much wiser than his master, pulled impatiently at the reins; he wanted to go. This dark field surrounded by banging frightened him. A horse has a long back to protect if things fall from the air, and the rider had no sooner given him the direction than he flew down the muddy path at a canter. Father Lochner had a job bringing him to a standstill when they reached a point that deceptively seemed to offer cover. For the horse, ears laid back, wanted to bound off as behind him the hill began to roar and flash. Across the road, down the slope – he just wanted away. (It was because of his nervous disposition that the heavy machine gun company had exchanged this otherwise lovely animal for a more placid one.) Lochner, a fearless man with a heart both kind and wise, held the trembling horse by its bridle and spoke to him soothingly, looking to the sky when he jerked his neck up. And there he saw the body of the aeroplane in the glare of the searchlights, barely 100m above him, roaring over the hill large and white, the curve of its belly, the pale cross of its wings, the circle of its insignia, its struts: it all appeared before the eyes of the solitary priest with ghostly clarity, as the Frenchman prepared to complete his attack, ascend and veer away.