Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

This is it, thought Bertin, his breath catching. Who would have thought it possible?

‘Dearest Mother,’ Eberhard Kroysing read, ‘forgive me for writing to bother you with my troubles this time. Up until now, I’ve made my situation sound rosier than it is. We were brought up to tell the truth and never to shrink from pursuing what is right; fear God more than people, you used to say. And although I no longer believe in God, as you well know, that doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten everything that was ingrained in us as children. In April, I wrote a letter to Uncle Franz describing to him how our NCOs misuse the men’s rations and live it up at their expense. Uncle Franz knows how important an unblemished sense of justice is to the men’s morale. Things are what he would call a bloody scandal. My letter was opened by our censor. Papa will explain to you why a court martial investigation was then started, and not of the NCOs but of me, and why our battalion doesn’t want this investigation to go ahead. As a result, I’ve been shifted on a permanent basis to the most dangerous place there is. If you only knew, dear mother, how much it pains me to write this. Now you’ll be sick with worry and sleep badly, imagining me already in the ground. Don’t believe it is so, dear mother. I appeal to your clever heart. I’ve been living here for two months in the cellar of a big farmhouse, and nothing has happened to me yet. You can tell from that how little chance there is that something will happen. But it can’t last forever or I might come a cropper after all. Please therefore wire Uncle Franz immediately. He must get me brought before the court martial in Montmédy as a matter of urgency. He must give the court martial my exact address, because I suspect Captain Niggl has had me declared “whereabouts unknown” or some funny business like that.’ (‘Well spotted, lad,’ muttered the older brother as he turned the page.) ‘He mustn’t allow himself to be fobbed off. He must phone the court martial immediately and support me to the hilt. He doesn’t have to worry. I’m exactly the same as I was two years ago when I volunteered. My sense of responsibility simply wouldn’t allow me to look on in silence. I’ve tried to rope Eberhard in, but he’s extremely busy – you know where he is and what he’s doing – and as an officer he shouldn’t be getting involved in my business. I haven’t heard from him for a couple of weeks. And I’m not sending this letter to you directly but through the good offices of an ASC private and scholar whom I got to know today. Act quickly and prudently, dear Mama, guiding light of our family, as you always do. You’ve had a hard time with us. But when we’re back and there’s peace, we’ll understand what life is worth, how good it is to be home, and what we have in each other. Because a great deal has turned out to be lies, much more than you realise, much more than ought to be. We’ll all have to start again to spare the world a repeat of what we’ve seen here with our own eyes, done with our own hands and suffered with our own bodies. But the mutual love between parents and children – that has proved durable and dependable, and that’s where I’ll finish. Always your loving son, Christoph. PS: Give Papa a big kiss and tell him he can write to me himself.’

The audience of two was silent. The faint rumble from the daily artillery fire rattled the closed windows. ‘If you think about it,’ said Eberhard Kroysing, ‘if you really think about it, we are no closer to the earth’s surface than the author of this letter – with one small difference that Captain Niggl is soon going to know all about.’

Suddenly, Bertin ducked. A brief, wild howl. Then a shattering crash nearby that echoed dully against the walls. Then a second. ‘This all helps,’ smiled Kroysing.

CAPTAIN NIGGL— AFTER the march-in he’d lain down to sleep with a mixture of elation and disgust on an iron bed, which, to his eternal relief was tucked under a white-washed vaulting of reassuring thickness. ‘Safe wee billet, Douaumont, isn’t it?’ he kept saying to the garrison commander’s adjutant in his outmoded Bavarian accent. At least there was a good cart load of cement above his head. If he managed to sleep here for two weeks he’d definitely get the Iron Cross, first class and become a great man in Weilheim for the rest of time – and not just in Weilheim. Such were his thoughts. He’d convinced himself that the men of the Third Company, who were billeted in an enormous vaulted casemate in the same wing and had received hot coffee, bread and tinned dripping after their night march, would sleep reasonably well on their three-high wire bunks and sacks of wood shavings and that their first duty the following morning would be to scour out their new quarters.

But first thing in the morning, the French sent him and his men a warning not to confuse this place with the previous one. While searching for a latrine, Privates Michael Baß and Adam Wimmerl ended up in a large courtyard open to the south that it was better not to enter at certain times. While they were still looking for somewhere to squat, a long-range battery, with which the garrison was very familiar, fired its first shell of the morning and blew them to bits. This caused a great deal of alarm, and struck the captain as an omen. It weighed heavily on him. Much weighed heavily on him. The air was bad, and the tunnels in this wing, unlike those in the other wings, were jet black with soot. The electric wiring had been newly laid. A side tunnel was completely sealed by a wall, which, though fairly new, consisted partly of old debris and boulders. The echoing vaults really were no fun, and the duties the company had been assigned were unpleasant: blasting operations while the French and German artillery exchanged fire; night-time spadework during which talking and smoking were forbidden, although the French front lay nearly 3km to the other side the fort. The commandant, a polite and taciturn Prussian captain from the Münster area, wasn’t a promising drinking buddy, much less the infantry officers, stationed here with a relief battalion, the radio operators and telephonists. The artillery lieutenant in charge of the armoured turrets was somewhat more affable. But when Niggl appeared in the towers, he pulled his head in nervously like a turtle, and the artillery officer hated that. Niggl hadn’t yet spoken to the sapper officer under whose command the Third Company was working. The sergeant majors had been in touch, and the lieutenant had inspected the men. But Captain Niggl had the right to expect the lieutenant to visit him first.

This happened. One morning between 10am and 11am, while the captain was writing an overblown letter to his wife, there was a knock on his door and the sapper lieutenant entered. Captain Niggl’s room was exactly the same as the lieutenant’s own, except that, as already mentioned, it faced one of the other sides of the moat, the north-west. This meant the entire length of the fort, some 300m, separated them. The lieutenant almost had to duck as he entered, and he rose tall and thin in the light from the window. Captain Niggl had turned his left side to it so that his writing hand didn’t cast a shadow on the paper. The captain was delighted to see the lieutenant and stood up to greet his visitor. But the visitor’s first words took his breath away. The sapper lieutenant asked that he kindly be allowed to introduce himself: his name was Kroysing, Eberhard Kroysing, and he hoped that he and the captain would work well together. As he uttered these harmless-sounding, official words, his eyes searched Herr Niggl’s face. A career in the civil service engenders self-control. Herr Niggl politely offered his visitor a seat, but his inner eye was scanning the threatening outlines of some shadowy connections.