Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

The following day at 2pm, Private Bertin reported to his orderly room ready to march. It’d been thought important to smarten him up. He’d been given a belt, which held the lad together, and one of those grey oil-cloth caps with a badge and a brass cross that until then had been lying around in some Prussian warehouse or other.

It’s hot in France at the end of August. Acting Sergeant Major Glinsky wanted to sleep, but he couldn’t deny himself the pleasure of bestowing a parting blessing on Private Bertin. Open-collared and looking replete, Glinsky blinked as he circumambulated Bertin’s rigid figure. Everything was in order: grey trousers tucked into blackened boots, infantry tunic, rucksack packed impeccably, one boot to the right and one to the left under the rolled-up coat and folded blankets. He sat down astride a chair, all friendliness. He knew and Bertin knew that if the order had taken him to a village behind the lines, the company would have tried to snatch him back even though he’d been requested by name. But it took him to the front, and life is ruled by chance. If the sappers wanted this particular man as a telephonist, they were most welcome to him. The company had no contact with the sappers and therefore didn’t know who had made the request. Cooperation between the two units happened exclusively through the artillery depot – an arrangement that was jealously guarded – where nothing was known of what had happened to the Kroysing family.

‘At ease,’ said Acting Sergeant Major Glinsky. ‘You’re an educated man, so I need not waste words.’ ( Oh no, thought Bertin, he’s buttering me up. What’s he planning? ) ‘You have many mistakes to atone for, so we hope you’ll make a good fist of things.’

Bertin adopted a military bearing and said: ‘Yes, indeed, Acting Sergeant Major.’ But even as he spoke these obedient words, he resolved to get a little dig in by mentioning the hospital leave to Billy that Glinsky had refused him.

‘It’s quite a nice little perk to spend 14 days at a switchboard,’ Glinsky continued chummily. ‘Just make sure you come back to us in one piece. Your post will be sent on. I assume we have your home address?’

Ah, though Bertin, almost amused, he’s scratching around now, poor soul . Because what he meant by this last question was: who should receive the bad news should anything happen to him? Bertin acted daft and looked unconcerned. ‘Yes, indeed, Sergeant Major,’ he said cheerfully and waited for his moment.

‘It must be a good friend of yours who got you this nice little posting,’ Glinsky went on, winking confidentially. ‘Sergeant Süßmann, wasn’t it?’

This question had a sting to it as well – the insinuation was that a Jew always looks out for another Jew, at least that was the opinion men like Glinsky had of Jews.

But this was Bertin’s cue. ‘No,’ he said, looking evenly into Glinsky’s eyes – those sleepy, grey bulldog eyes. ‘I assume it was Lieutenant Kroysing from the sapper depot at Douaumont who arranged it.’

That hit the mark. Still riding on the chair, his mouth fell open. ‘What’s the lieutenant’s name?’ he asked.

‘Kroysing,’ Bertin repeated readily. ‘Eberhard Kroysing. He’s the brother of a young NCO who met his maker in mid-July.’

‘And he’s in command at Douaumont?’ Glinsky asked, still stunned.

‘Certainly not, Sergeant Major,’ Bertin answered. ‘Only of the sapper unit attached to it.’

He didn’t need to say more. Glinsky was quick on the uptake. There had been something funny about the transfer of the Bavarian ASC men to Douaumont (which, naturally enough, had got about), and this explained it, albeit in the most unsettling and unclear way. His expression darkened. ‘Forward march!’ he snarled suddenly. ‘Dismissed! You’ll have to work out how to get there yourself.’

Bertin about-turned and left the orderly room feeling very satisfied. He’d long since worked out how to get where he was going: with the drivers who brought the short, fat 21cm shells to the howitzer guns in the Ornes valley.

(Naturally, no one knew why the 1/X/20’s rations improved so much after Bertin left: butter and Dutch cheese, big chunks of meat at lunch – magic! And this wonderful state of affairs lasted fully five days. On the sixth and seventh, it tailed off, and on the eighth the old menu took hold again as if nothing had happened: gristle in ‘barbed wire’, dried vegetables and the turnip jam known as Fat for Heroes.)

At 2.10pm, Bertin laid his rucksack down on the wooden floor of the telephone room at the artillery depot, so that his new duties could be explained to him. The telephonists from the Steinbergquell ammunitions depot were all very pleasant. They’d been worried for days that one of them would have to provide leave cover for the operator at Wild Boar gorge; they knew the score. That someone else now had to go out to that dreadful place where shells were always falling filled them with gratitude.

‘Oh, it’s child’s play, comrade’ they explained. ‘You’ve got your eight switches for the stations in front and behind of you – for the sapper depot, the next exchange and the artillery group – and your new comrades will show you how to use the plugs in two minutes. And it’s not dangerous at all because if the cable gets shot up, other men have to go out to mend it.’ They kindly didn’t tell him that as the newcomer he might have to run to the sapper depot and tell them that the cable had been shot up.

‘And there are men from your part of the world nearby – Upper Silesians,’ said the telephonist Otto Schneider.

Bertin wasn’t particularly attached to men from his part of the world. He had more in common with Bavarians and men from Berlin and Hamburg. He only took an interest in one Silesian regiment: the 57th, which was on active service and where his little brother served. The day before yesterday, he’d received another letter from his mother. The fear that Fritz Bertin might be no more pulsated behind her faint handwriting. The lad had already been wounded once the previous autumn.

About 3pm, a message was sent up that the short 21cm shells had been loaded up. Bertin swung his rucksack on to one shoulder, took his knotty stick in his hand and ran downstairs, cheerfully parrying the curious, mocking shouts from his closer friends in the Third Company. Oddly enough, everyone was in clover that day; those who were staying behind were glad to be staying behind, and Bertin was glad he was going.

The Silesian gunners, bony men with strained faces, didn’t stand on ceremony. ‘Chuck your pack on top of the pots and let’s get going, lad,’ they said with their hard r’s and high-pitched vowels. Bertin hid his disappointment. He hadn’t bargained with having to help push the loaded trucks. But as he looked in some annoyance at the stubby, pointed shells lying there like chubby babies, he realised something: Glinsky had made no impression on him – he was neither confused nor worried. Something quite new and brilliant!

The track that formed the gunners’ route forked off to the east in the middle of a desolate valley floor. Wild Boar gorge opened off the the right, they said. It was the third one along and quite narrow, easily recognisable by all its greenery. He’d find it. Despite his rucksack and tunic, Bertin walked very quickly. For the first time, he found himself alone under the open sky in the flashing sunlight. Death might crash down upon him at any moment from the summer air. He had to summon all his courage. He cursed his stupidity for following this order simply because he wanted Eberhard Kroysing to have a good opinion of him. Footprints everywhere between the shell holes. Who wouldn’t get lost here? Sweat stuck to the lenses of his glasses, and his hands shook as he cleaned them. The deathly silence frightened him; every sound that wafted over the ridge frightened him; when a plane appeared up above, he felt like throwing himself to the ground – he was too short-sighted to make out if it was German or French. He scurried on, teeth clenched on his pipe, pursued by his humpbacked shadow, just as one of his forebears might have dragged his wares from farm to farm in the mountains of Austrian Silesia in the time of the empress Maria Theresa. He counted the openings in the land ahead: one was already behind him, there was one opposite and two shimmered in the sunlight ahead. He looked at his watch as if that might help him. His heart thumped wildly on account of his load and from loneliness. If he hadn’t been thoroughly used to crushing his internal demons, he would’ve turned round and not carried out his orders. He rested briefly at the edge of the next shell hole, drank a couple of slugs of lukewarm coffee from his canteen, relit his pipe and forced himself to breathe calmly. At last he was steeped in solitude – as he’d longed to be. He cursed himself and called himself an ass. He was like a peasant from the countryside blundering about in the bustle of city traffic for the first time. The peasant is frightened of the cars, trams and hurrying people and doesn’t dare to ask his way. He feels like he’s fallen to earth from the moon and when he finally does open his mouth, he finds he’s already at his destination. Bertin narrowed his eyes and shaded them with his hands. That there, diagonally to the right, could be the opening of Wild Boar gorge. He set off at a trot, bounding up the hillside then slowing down on the valley floor. A tangle of green beckoned to him. The chopped and scattered remains of felled trees with terrible butchered trunks covered the slope to his right. Pale, yellowed leaves covered the branches and bisected crowns. A profusion of young shoots, dried rose hips and beech saplings that soared like flag poles pushed through them above shell holes as white as bones. A German bombardment must have caused this. The slope was open to the north. The southern side had been similarly ravaged by the French. There the mown down trees had larger, greener leaves and were piled up horizontally.