Арнольд Цвейг: Outside Verdun

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 someone 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.

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.

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.