Арнольд Цвейг: Outside Verdun

There are other novels in which Zweig explores the social and political dimensions of the First World War. He shows us the life of the home front in the early months in Young Woman of 1914 (1932), focusing on the situation of the fiancée that Bertin left behind with an unwanted pregnancy, and the political machinations in occupied Eastern Europe in The Crowning of a King (1937). Indeed, he continued to add volumes to the cycle he called ‘The Great War of the White Men’ after the Second World War in East Berlin, where he settled in 1948 and where he died in 1968. But it is in Outside Verdun above all that he brings his reader face to face with experiences that challenge and undermine any attempt to glorify the war. It contains his most penetrating depictions of the effects of protracted warfare on the personalities and the outlook of the people directly involved, and it allows the reader to accompany the naïve young protagonist Bertin on his journey to deeper self-knowledge as well as to an awareness of the conflicting aspects of human nature that the war has brought into the open.

Not that Outside Verdun brings the reader to anything as neat as a firm conclusion. On the closing pages, Bertin is shown to be still wrestling with the conflicts he has witnessed and with the question of how he should position himself in relation to them. The date of the final scene, in which he and his wife have come to visit Kroysing’s grieving parents, is June 29th, 1919, the day after the Versailles Treaty had been signed – with all the associations of subjugation that that event carried in the eyes of the German population, and thus also the associations of betrayal on the part of the politicians who accepted its terms. For his readers in 1935, Zweig did not need to spell out the poignancy of that moment. But here, too, his novel distinguishes itself from the common expectations we might have of a war novel. By contrast with Remarque, who tells us how the life of his protagonist was snuffed out on a day when it was reported that ‘all was quiet’ on the western front, Zweig takes leave of Bertin in a post-war world in which he, and all of German society with him, will be facing difficult choices.

THE EARTH WAS a disc flecked yellow-green and drenched in blood. Above it, like a mousetrap, hung the unrelentingly blue sky, imprisoning humanity within the misery its animal nature prescribes.

The battle had been at an impasse since mid-May. Now, in mid-July, guns were still pounding the valley between the village of Fleury and Fort Souville. Volleys of explosions rolled back and forth; billows of poisonous smoke, dust clouds, pulverised earth and flying chunks of stone and masonry darkened the air, which was riddled with steel splinters and whistling bullets. At night, the area behind the front blazed and roared with gunfire; by day, the blue skies throbbed to the rattle of machine guns, bursting hand grenades, and the howls and whimpers of lost men. Time and again, the summer wind blew off the dust from the assaults, dried the storm troopers’ sweat as they climbed from their dugouts, eyes and jaws fixed, and carried away the moans of the wounded and the last gasps of the dying. The Germans had been on the attack here since the end of February. This war between Europeans, which had been raging for two years, might have originated in the south east of the continent, but it was nonetheless France – her people, her land, her army – that bore the brunt of the devastation. There might be bitter fighting at this very moment in Bukovina, on the rivers Adige and Isonzo, but the combat was at its wildest on the banks of the two French rivers, the Somme and the Meuse. And the battle that raged by the Meuse was about possession of the fortress at Verdun.

Escorted by Bavarian infantrymen, a troop of French prisoners marched along the main road leading from the former village of Azannes to a surviving train station at Moirey. It was hard to march between fixed bayonets as prisoners of an opponent who had shown just how cheap life was to him – his own as much as the enemy’s – during the invasion of Belgium and France. In Germany, people were starving. Everyone knew that. In Germany, prisoners were maltreated. It said so in the all the newspapers. For the French it was terrible to think that they should have fallen into the hands of the Germans precisely now, at the eleventh hour. Soon the Germans would have to call the whole thing off, because the force of the Franco-British attack on the Somme would knock the stuffing out of them. Still, these prisoners had escaped from hell fire with limbs intact. If they behaved themselves, they’d get through a few months in prison too, even if it did make them want to puke to be led away like a herd of cattle. The ravines and what had once been woods, now a mass of shell craters, were behind them, as were the Meuse hills and the descent to Azannes. The landscape here was still in one piece, so to speak. Beneath them to the right flowed a stream. Around them rose the rounded, green hilltops of the Lorraine countryside. If only they could have a drink. Heat, dust and sweat tormented the 40 or 50 marching men from the Fourth Infantry in their blue-grey tunics and steel helmets or twin-peaked caps.

As they turned a corner on the left side of the road, they spotted two big troughs, each with a jet of clear water gushing into it. Men from the German Army Service Corps (ASC) were washing pots and pans there. The Frenchmen raised their heads, straightened up and quickened their pace. The Bavarian guards knew about thirst too. They’d give them time to drink or fill their canteens. Both armies were really only bitter enemies in battle. In any case, word had long been out among the French that the ASC men were unarmed non-combatants, reservists from the Landsturm too young or too old for battle, harmless folk.

On the slope above the road, black against the blue sky, was an extensive hutted encampment with steps leading down. Waves of ASC men ran over. They wanted to see the spectacle, and it was lunchtime. Well, the more hands, the quicker everyone would get a drink. A blue-grey clump of thirsty men surrounded the troughs. Brown faces, all bearded, reached up; dozens of arms stretched out; there were mugs, pots, pans. Men dunked their faces in the translucent water, which shimmered and rippled at the bottom of the troughs. This French water, the last they’d swallow for a long time, tasted so good in their parched throats. It restored them. The ASC men understood immediately. They filled their pots and pans and helpfully took them down the line. German and French aluminium and tin clinked amicably together; white and pale grey fatigues framed the Frenchmen’s dark tunics.

‘Look lively,’ shouted the NCO in charge of the platoon. ‘Get a move on!’ This was an unplanned stop. But he wasn’t really serious. No one was in a hurry to return to their unit at the front if it was dug in at Douaumont. The men who’d quenched their thirst moved slowly away from the trough, dried their dripping beards and reformed in the middle of the road. Their eyes shone more brightly now. After two years of war, a certain mutual respect, liking even, had built up between the Germans and the French at the front. It was only to the rear, beginning with the lines of communication, that considerable numbers of people laboured to whip up hatred and anger lest the human material get infected with war weariness.

An ASC private named Bertin, recognisable from a mile off by his full, shiny, black beard, watched with satisfaction as one of his NCOs, a book seller from Leipzig called Karte, offered one of the Bavarians a cigar, holding out his trench lighter and pumping the Bavarian for information in his Saxon dialect. Hauling a container of water, Bertin pushed through the swarm of men, shouting a word or two to his comrades Pahl and Lebehde, and trotted to the end of the line, where people were vainly trying to elbow past those in front. Like drifting brown animals, a herd of strange yet familiar creatures, the men swore and pleaded in guttural tones, their necks straining from their open coats. They greeted the three men who’d come to take care of them with grateful eyes.