Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

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.

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 depot.

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.