Арнольд Цвейг: Outside Verdun

When Outside Verdun was first published in 1935, Arnold Zweig was living in Palestine. As a Jew and a prominent socialist writer, he had been forced to flee Germany when Hitler came to power. In the novel he can be seen to take account of various factors that had arguably contributed to the installation of the Nazi regime. When we find Bertin’s company commander, Captain Niggl, for example, imagining that the source of his misfortunes is a conspiracy of Jews and freemasons, then we are being given a pretty clear reminder of the scapegoating impulse that lay at the roots of Nazi ideology. And in his accounts of battlefield experiences Zweig systematically undermines the myths that had grown up in post-war publications and in public memory around the Battle of Verdun in particular and around the notion that the German army had been undefeated in the field. But true to the spirit of his psychological investigation of anti-Semitism in Caliban , Zweig does not caricature the human types that he recognises as posing a threat to civilised standards of behaviour. Instead he tries to understand their personality and motivation. In Eberhard Kroysing and his loyal and resourceful corporal Süßmann, he depicts two figures who have, to all appearances, successfully adapted to the physical conditions of the war of attrition, and it is the precise ways in which they have adjusted their attitudes and expectations to the conditions of the battlefield that contributes most to the process of disillusionment undergone by the idealistic intellectual Werner Bertin.

The town of Verdun on the Meuse was protected by an elaborate system of outlying fortresses. When the Germans advanced from the north in the closing days of February 1916, one of these forts, the Douaumont, fell into their hands. It had been left lightly defended because the French command was not confident in its ability to withstand the most powerful German artillery fire, and the tiny group of German sappers who found their way inside it had advanced more rapidly than either side had expected and took the defenders completely by surprise. The German success, then, was a piece of sheer good luck, as Süßmann explains to Bertin in Zweig’s novel, but it was publicly celebrated as a grandiose military exploit nevertheless. Moreover, the legend of the Douaumont grew over time because it became a major forward operational base for the Germans in their turn and therefore came under repeated heavy bombardment over a period of months until the French succeeded in recapturing it in October 1916. Aerial photographs of the time show it to have been progressively reduced to a flattened ruin.

This is the terrain to which Kroysing and Süßmann have adapted their lives and their outlook. They can laugh at the heroic legends put about by the Supreme Command, as they do at the naive insistence of Bertin – a Parsifal in squaddy’s boots, as Kroysing calls him – on inalienable principles of justice. The experiences of battle have stripped Kroysing of any illusion that official bulletins will be anything other than a tissue of lies, and he does not hesitate to have an entire company of service corps transferred to the Douaumont, to his patch, in order to take revenge on those he holds responsible for his brother’s death. Outside Verdun we are truly ‘on the fringes of humanity’, as Zweig puts it in his title for Book 4.

Just as in The Case of Sergeant Grischa , where Zweig had explored the social dimensions of a modern nation at war, here too he presents the socially conditioned mentalities that have been imported into wartime situations from civilian life in Wilhelmine Germany. It is above all the nature of industrialised warfare that he progressively exposes through the experiences of his protagonist, a form of war that is dependent on the continual supply of goods and armaments to railheads near the front, on an extensive labour force that attends to the physical and practical needs of the military forces, and on a substantial bureaucracy that organises and oversees the distribution of material and labour. The petty officiousness to which Bertin finds himself subjected thrives most readily among the military bureaucrats, epitomised in the figure of the retired civil servant Captain Niggl and the battalion commander Major Jansch, by profession a journal editor and nationalist ideologue. For Niggl, and for others who are numbered among Bertin’s oppressors, the war has brought enhanced status, as well as enhanced pay, and the opportunity to lord it over others, without apparent restraint.

The system of oppression to which Bertin finds himself exposed makes those moments when he can escape from it all the more enticing. His naïve belief that, despite all indications to the contrary, his army service must be helping to support a just cause is supplemented by a boyish spirit of adventure, which comes to the fore when he is allowed to roam in the landscape behind the front and to visit Kroysing and Süßmann in their quarters. What ultimately strips away his illusions is not the conversations that he has with them about the vicissitudes of military fortune, but the first-hand encounter with the reality of the battlefront that they also enable him to experience. Bertin is allowed to accompany Kroysing’s sappers when they move up to the front line and to witness the conditions in the forward trenches for himself, and Zweig’s description of his responses is worth quoting here verbatim. Peeping over the breastwork as the artillery barrage builds, Bertin experiences a moment of elation at the destructive potential unleashed around him. But when he ducks into the dugout where the crack troops are resting, he also makes a discovery that thoroughly undermines the heroic expectations he has brought with him thus far. It is the discovery that being on duty here is much the same as being on duty in his own company of military labourers:

The faces of the sappers, gunners and Saxon riflemen made him feel almost sick. Until now he had garlanded them with splendid delusions, draped them in noble titles. But no illusion could hold out here. The men in this boarded clay grave were just lost battalions, the sacrificed herds of world markets, which were currently experiencing a glut in human material. Crouched on a plank under the earth 200m from the enemy and yawning suddenly from exhaustion, he saw that even here the men were just doing their duty – nothing more than that.

The earth rumbled above him, chunks fell from the walls, dust rained down from the timbers and as the infantrymen calmly carried on smoking their cigarettes, he wondered hesitantly how he had come to see this truth. It hurt! It robbed you of the strength to endure life. Surely it couldn’t be the same everywhere else as in his own company.

The rest is attrition. The Douaumont is vacated under French pressure, Kroysing vanishes temporarily in the fog of war while vainly attempting to rally troops for a counteroffensive, and in the aftermath of that episode Bertin is confronted with a series of unnerving horrors: a blinded man mechanically addressing an imaginary doctor, a devastated field battery, and the corpse of a schoolfriend. In the course of his duties he is at the mercy of the institutionalised malice of his superiors and is assigned to the dangerous and fatiguing task of searching for unexploded shells. Progressively the novel registers the arbitrary destruction of the people Bertin has come to know. Both Pahl, the character most closely associated with the possibility of resistance against the war, and Kroysing, a defiant warrior and a fervent nationalist to the last, are killed in an air raid on the hospital where they are recovering from wounds. Süßmann, meanwhile, has died a particularly pointless death as a result of an accident during weapons training, and his last message makes clear the dichotomy between fond illusion and disillusionment that remains difficult for Bertin to resolve to the very end of the novel. Tell my parents it was worth it, Süßmann says, and tell Kroysing it wasn’t.