Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

Kroysing shook his fist. ‘Scoundrel! Up with volunteers! They’re in the best Prussian tradition and a matter of honour for sappers. Didn’t you ever learn about Sapper Klinke and the Dybbøl trenches at school? “My name’s Klinke, and I open the gate,” wrote your countryman Fontane, and he should know.’

They both laughed, as Süßmann added: ‘Poets can do anything.’

‘Nothing against poets,’ warned Kroysing. ‘Here’s ours.’

Sure enough, there was a shy knock and Bertin entered, rather wet and with filthy boots. They commended him on his timely arrival. Kroysing offered the visitor a glass of brandy so he wouldn’t catch cold, got up to greet him and gave him something to smoke: Dutch pipe tobacco. Kroysing wandered across the narrow room in his padded waistcoat of slightly worn black silk to wash his face, and as he was drying it, he told Bertin about his delicate conversation with Captain Niggl. Bertin cleaned his rain-splattered glasses. In the pipe smoke, his myopic eyes could barely pick out Kroysing’s face and the flapping towel. He told them he hadn’t been able to sleep after the letter opening. Its contents had stayed inside him, spoken in the voice of the – he swallowed – dead man, which, curiously, he remembered extremely well. What kind of a man was Niggl that he could simply disregard an exceptional young lad such as Christoph?

Kroysing pulled on his tunic and slid past the visitors and furnishings into his seat by the table at the window. ‘A very ordinary man,’ he said in his deep voice. ‘One of x millions, a workaday scoundrel, so to speak.’

‘And what do you plan to do with him?’

‘I’ll tell you,’ replied Kroysing. ‘First, I’ll put him under pressure. The surroundings, this atmospheric mole heap of a fort and the Frogs will help me there. Next step: I get him to sign a paper confessing that he kept my brother at Chambrettes-Ferme until he was killed – in order to forestall the court martial investigation.’

‘He’ll never sign,’ said Süßmann.

‘Oh yes, he will,’ replied Kroysing, looking up. ‘I’m curious myself as to how it will happen, but it will happen. I feel like an adolescent boy again, full of drive and vengeance. That’s the only time you can really hate properly and persecute people for months. Perhaps the war has uncovered the ancient hunter in us, who drinks evening tea from his enemy’s skull. After two years of it, it’s no wonder.’

‘Do you call that a good thing?’ asked Bertin, shocked.

‘I call anything good that extends my life and finishes the enemy off,’ said Kroysing brusquely, carefully marking the locations of the new mine throwers with a green pencil; he’d already used blue for the German positions, red for the French and brown for the area’s contours. ‘This isn’t a girl’s school,’ he continued. ‘The lie about the spirit of the front and the comradeship of war may be fine, and it may be necessary to keep the show on the road for those behind the lines and our enemy over there. Supreme self-sacrifice, you know. Very inspiring for war correspondents, politicians and readers. In reality we’re all fighting to have as much as possible in our own domain. It’s a battle of all against all. That’s the right formula.’

‘I’ve often felt that,’ said little Sergeant Süßmann drily.

‘Exactly.’ Kroysing blinked at him. ‘We all have, if not as keenly as you. And anyone who hasn’t felt it, hasn’t been to war.’

‘Do you really believe,’ said Bertin with a secret sense of superiority and the trace of a smile, ‘that the drive for honours, for a career—’

‘Rubbish,’ said Kroysing. ‘Our own domain, I said, and our own domain is what I meant. Domain can mean different things to different people – every man has his own thumbprint. Some collect medals and give their hearts to metalsmiths. Others want to carve out a career and swoon with delight when they get ahead. But the great mass of people just want dosh. They loot French houses or share out dead men’s effects. Our friend Niggl just wanted a quiet life.’

‘And what does the lieutenant want deep down inside?’ asked Süßmann, pulling a funny monkey face.

‘Not telling, you cheeky monkey,’ laughed Kroysing. ‘You may assume that I want to be feared among my clansmen.’ And he added more seriously: ‘Never before has anyone spat in my soup the way that man has.’

They were silent for a moment, then Bertin said diffidently: ‘I must be abnormal then. I want nothing more than to perform my duties as an ASC private to the best of my abilities and for there to be an honourable peace soon so I can go back to my wife and my work.’

‘Wife,’ mocked Kroysing. ‘Work. Honourable peace. You’re in for a shock, and anyway you can find someone else to believe that— what was that?’

All three of them sat up straight as pokers and listened. A lacerating howl descended on them from the clouds, a dreadful sound; then a primordial crashing and rolling smashed through the rooms – not as near as they’d feared. ‘Up and have a look,’ called Süßmann.

‘Stay put,’ commanded Kroysing. There was running in the corridor outside the door. He picked up the telephone. ‘Ring me immediately you get news.’ The telephonist’s voice was still shaking with fear. Kroysing surveyed his guest with satisfaction. Bertin was surprised at himself: he felt the same wild delight he had when he chased across the shelled area with Böhne and Schultz. Sergeant Süßmann’s hands shook as he said that it could only have been a long-range 38cm or a 42cm, a German one that had fallen short. The telephone rattled; highest calibre, direct strike to the western trenches, reported the exchange. Extensive damage to the outer walls. Kroysing thanked them. Out of the question that the 42cm was so far out. Three thousand metres too short – no way. Even with the dunderheads back there.

‘Watch out,’ he warned. ‘Number two.’ This time all three of them ducked. Süßmann slid under the table. No one breathed. The splintered air screamed behind the lump of steel, getting closer, close, there. Red and yellow flash at the window. Thunder blast in the room. Plaster and paintwork on the table. The electric lamp went out. The men’s chairs shook beneath them. ‘Strike,’ said Kroysing calmly. The crash above their heads had been brighter and wilder than before, and had boomed louder too.

‘No harm done,’ said Süßmann, jumping up entirely without shame as if he were the only one who’d responded proportionately. Kroysing stated that unless he was very much mistaken the strike had taken down the armoured turret in the north-west wing. He asked to be connected to the turret. The other two watched expectantly as his face broke into a satisfied smile. ‘Damnable nation, the French. They can shoot but they can fortify too. The turret took a direct hit and withstood it. A new calibre, according to the NCO, a mortar heavier than the 38cm from Fort Marre. A new type, then, probably ordered in for the Somme.’

‘And they’re rehearsing it on us,’ said Süßmann, while Kroysing tried to speak to the turret again. This time the exchange reported that the turret had been temporarily evacuated on account of the gases from the explosion. It hadn’t been entirely spared. It could no longer be turned. ‘As long as that’s it,’ said Kroysing, hanging up. And then he sent Süßmann and Bertin off with emergency lights to see how the ASC men were coping with the incident.

They didn’t have to go far. The tunnel in front of the Bavarians’ casemate was filled with the ASC men’s cursing, wailing and crying, as they crouched down or struggled to get away. Their NCOs, brandishing torches, only just managed to stop them rushing out into the courtyard. At the entrance to the intersecting corridor, faintly illuminated by the daylight, stood Captain Niggl, his bottom lip between his teeth, bare-headed and in slippers, with his Litevka unbuttoned. Acting Lieutenant Simmerding pushed through to him, while Sergeant Major Feicht tried to calm down the men at the back of the corridor in his hoarse voice. The men were hopping mad, panted Simmerding. They didn’t want to stay in this place. They were unarmed reservists, not frontline soldiers. They’d no business here.