Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

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.

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.