Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

JUDGE ADVOCATE CARL Georg Mertens was the son of a famous German lawyer, a man whose Commentary on Civilian Law had provided clarifications of the utmost importance and formulations that were now standard. The book was known simply as Mertens, and its author had been received several times by the Kaiser. The son grew up in the shadow of his father’s distinctions. He was an outstanding scholar and became professor of legal history fairly young. His passion was more for cultural history than for the law, but only an idiot would have spurned the advantages that the name Mertens brought in the German legal world. In the beginning, he had believed in the war and gone into the field with enthusiasm. Disillusionment ensued. He reconnected with his peaceful tendencies and accepted a transfer to a court martial, albeit somewhat hesitantly. He loved books and suffered greatly from the lack of good music. He appointed a Jewish lawyer with a gift for the piano as his assistant so he could play duets with him. When he discovered the small town of Montmédy’s museum with its pastels and paintings by the Lorraine painter Bastien-Lepage he felt compensated for a great deal. He read a lot, improving his French through the novels of Stendhal. His days in Montmédy passed in a leisurely way. Into this quiet scholarly life, little touched by the scant legal duties in Montmédy, walked Sapper Lieutenant Eberhard Kroysing and he turned it upside down.

He appeared one morning shortly before 9am in his threadbare uniform, Iron Cross, first class and steel helmet, carrying incongruous new maroon leather gloves, and demanded to speak to the judge advocate himself. Because of the ambivalent attitude all those behind the lines have towards soldiers from the front, the clerks looked rather shamefaced as they said they were sorry but the judge advocate didn’t start work until just before 10am and his deputy, Sergeant Porisch, had not yet returned from interrogating a French prisoner.

Kroysing laughed. ‘Nice life you have here by the sounds of it. Mind the Frogs don’t get you in the neck sometime – the ones who aren’t in prison, I mean.’

He hid his anger. If you wanted to get your way in the jungle behind the lines, you had to accept the habits and customs of the drones who worked there. And Eberhard Kroysing intended to get his way. He wanted to see his brother’s file. At the same time, he was filled with deep mistrust towards each and every being in the area. They were all birds of a feather who flocked together unless someone forced them apart. These legal eagles would undoubtedly have more sympathy for the guilty parties in Christoph’s company, the acting lieutenants and sergeant majors, than for Eberhard Kroysing, who had come to disturb their peaceful idyll.

The clerk, Corporal Sieck, who had taken a bullet in the chest and got the Iron Cross at Longwy at the end of August 1914, felt sorry for the tall, scrawny man. Sieck assured him that Judge Advocate Mertens would be there at 10am on the dot and asked if he’d like to have a look at the museum or the citadel in the meantime. Kroysing gave the rather talkative, bespectacled clerk a scornful look. ‘Till 10am, then. Put a note on the judge advocate’s desk: Lieutenant Kroysing asking for information. Hopefully your filing cabinet is in order.’

He saluted and left. It was a long time since he’d spent an hour wandering the streets of a town. He constantly wanted to shake his head. Nothing here was shot up. It was a peaceful provincial town: small shops, small cafés. The civilian life led by respectable citizens carried on, then. Kroysing went into the shops and spent money: handkerchiefs, chocolate, cigarettes, writing paper. The people who served him were reserved and taciturn. Let them hate us as long as they fear us , he thought in Latin, as at last he did climb the steep slope to the citadel to take another look at the undamaged countryside shimmering in the summer light. He marvelled at the Latin language, which could express this in three words where other languages needed many more.

Kroysing leant against the broad parapet and contemplated the hedge-lined meadows below, the streets, the railway line to Luxembourg and the local line he’d come up on that morning from Azannes. A sudden wild anger gripped him at the false peace in this fat, stinking world. God knew he wasn’t the sort of man who begrudged others their pleasures just because things were less pleasant for him. But when he thought how he’d crawled out of Douaumont at 4am and then crossed an insane landscape of leprous craters only to spend an hour admiring the view like a lovesick schoolboy, he felt like peppering the place with grenades.

From a small door in the citadel’s large keep a sergeant emerged with a folder under his arm and his cap perched casually on his cropped head. A local would have recognised him by the cigar at the corner of his mouth as the lawyer Porisch, traipsing back down to the town in his soldier’s garb after interrogating a prisoner. When he saw the officer, Porisch took the cigar from his mouth, clasped the folder close and saluted with a sullen lift of his head. His round, bulging eyes sought the lieutenant’s. Kroysing waved him aside contemptuously; he almost felt like snarling at him and sending him back.

In the meantime, Corporal Sieck had taken pity on the man from the front and sent an orderly to the judge advocate’s quarters with the note, although Kroysing had only asked for it be put on his desk. Judge Advocate Mertens often didn’t turn up at his unlovely office until 11am. There was no telephone connection to his quarters. He didn’t want to be bothered when he was off duty. He’d discovered French painting and with the help of the musical Herr Porisch and various books of reproductions and art histories was feeling his way from Bastien-Lepage back to Corot and forward to Manet and the impressionists. The name Kroysing meant nothing to him. ‘Came from the front. Hasn’t much time,’ the note also said. C.G. Mertens was a polite man who didn’t like to keep people waiting. He hoped Porisch would be able to bring him up to speed quickly. As he ate his breakfast, it dawned on him that the Kroysing files related to a sergeant. So it’s a company commander wanting a nice day out in Montmédy, he thought. It often took Professor Mertens a while to marshal his thoughts.

One minute after 10am, Eberhard Kroysing loped up the old-fashioned stairs two to three at a time. He’d expected a fat, comfort-loving military official and was initially thrown by the sensitive scholar in gold-rimmed spectacles with a head reminicent of Field Marshal Moltke’s. Instead of marching into the room and aggressively confronting this bastard from behind the lines, he suddenly felt he had to be polite. It was clear from the quiet gaze in the man’s blue eyes that no ill-will towards his brother or anyone else had emanated from this office. Eberhard Kroysing could be very charming, as plenty of girls could testify. He formulated his request in gentle words. With his head to one side, C.G. Mertens listened to the sapper lieutenant’s deep voice, which seemed to resonate in his chest.

So this wasn’t a company commander exploiting a pretext but a brother of Sergeant Kroysing against whom charges had been brought several months previously. Judge Advocate Mertens knew nothing more specific as the case had not got past the preliminary investigation stage. Mertens was from north Germany and separated ‘s’ from ‘t’ when he spoke in the typical Plattdeutsch manner, which struck Kroysing, who was from Franken in the south, as rather spinsterish.

‘The state of affairs is being managed by my assistant, Herr Porisch, a former student of my father’s as I’ve discovered. I tell you this, lieutenant, because Herr Porisch wears the uniform of a sergeant and any confusion would be most embarrassing.’