Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

As the men marched out that night in the deepest gloaming, Herr Simmerding and Herr Niggl met at the back of the column. Although Captain Niggl was a half bottle of Bordeaux to the good, he found the reek of alcohol off his company commander discomfiting. It wasn’t that he disapproved of Dutch courage. He drank himself and so did everyone in the army. They tramped along beside each other in virtual silence. Eventually, Niggl began to feel sorry for the other man with his hunched shoulders and pinched neck. They too were close compatriots. The Simmerding family lived all along the north shore of the lake. And so, in an undertone, he asked how he was doing after the shock earlier at midday. Fine, grunted Simmerding. Niggl said that was good, because he had every reason to feel fine. Sergeant Major Feicht had now sorted out the unpleasantness to do with young Kroysing’s effects.

‘Really,’ said Simmerding, with a wild, fleeting glance at the man on his right. ‘Sorted it out, has he? Ha, ha! Has Feicht brought young Kroysing back to life then? Got him out of his coffin, blown new air into him and put him back in the ranks? Because that man in there will be satisfied with nothing less.’

‘Simmerding,’ said Niggl soothingly, not allowing Feicht’s anxious tone get to him, ‘pull yourself together. All is by no means lost.’

Simmdering came to a halt. His clenched fists stuck out from the wide arms of his coat. ‘All is not lost! All has long since been lost! I’m sick of this whole business with Christoph Kroysing, if you really want to know! Sick to here—’ he raised his hand to his mouth. ‘I could kick myself for having got caught up in sending him to Chambrettes and that game with the files – your game.’

‘No one forced you, Acting Lieutenant Simmerding,’ said Niggl coolly. ‘Make sure you don’t fall too far behind your company. And say a couple of Ave Marias during the night.’

What a lily-livered specimen , he thought contemptuously.

Passed down from the front, the same warning resounded over and over again: ‘Watch out, wire below. Watch out, wire above.’

WHEN LIEUTENANT KROYSING came home that night and turned on the light, his whistling abruptly stopped. He was always happy to get back to the welcoming vaults of the fort – welcoming vaults! He laughed to himself at the expression. He appreciated its irony, which came from the extent to which the world was distorted. The hours spent on the winding uphill route from the infantry positions, the rude presence of mind, born of repeated experience, needed to evade the French shells – it all meant he felt positively happy as soon as he heard his steps echoing off the stone walls. That’s why Lieutenant Kroysing was whistling. He broke off in the middle of the most beautiful part of the Meistersinger overture. Kroysing looked in astonishment at the surprising postal gift on his table and the folded note between the oil paper and the string. Uh-huh , he thought scornfully, who goes there?

He swung his steel helmet on to the coat stand, carefully hung his cape and gas mask under it, threw his belt with his dirk and heavy pistol and his torch on to the bed and sat down beside them to take off his puttees and mud-caked shoes. In other circumstances, he’d have rung and woken his batman, sleepy Sapper Dickmann, who only had one virtue: he could fry schnitzel and make coffee like no one else. But he wanted to be alone with this package. While he was bent over undoing his laces and putting on his house shoes, he didn’t let it out his sight for a second, as if it might disappear just as suddenly and magically as it had wafted in. Yes , he thought, this was a victory. Victory number two, won by fearlessly advancing, constantly upping the ante and exploiting the enemy’s weakness – precise knowledge of the terrain. The tactical instructions applied to Lieutenant Kroysing’s private war with Captain Niggl were bearing fruit. Funny, he pondered, I never for one moment thought that this could be one of the welcome packages from home that sporadically reach us. I’ve got my teeth some way into Captain Niggl .

He read the accompanying bumph signed ‘Feicht, Sergeant Major’ and written in Feicht’s best handwriting, examined the wrapping paper suspiciously and nodded knowingly. There was nothing to prove that the package had really been sent back by the army postal service. Asterisks and curved lines might convince a schoolboy. However, nothing proved the contrary either. The conspiracy against the young lad had been carried out by shrewd and experienced soldiers. They weren’t so easily unsettled. They’d parried his strike splendidly and hung the clerk Dillinger out to dry in the customary manner. If he fell for it and demanded that Dillinger be punished, the clerk would definitely be sent to prison, but as recompense for his silence he’d be off on leave in the next round. A wolf like Kroysing wasn’t about to be seduced by such tricks. His steady grey eyes looked through the wall at his target, the captain. He wasn’t finished with him. He pulled out his knife, slit the string with an audible rip and opened the package. Enclosed in the soft brown leather waistcoat he knew so well lay all that remained of Christoph on earth. It had without a doubt been shared among his enemies as booty: watch, fountain pen, purse, the little snake ring, a wallet, a notebook, his smoking things.

Breathing heavily with his balled fists pressed into the table, Eberhard Kroysing looked at his younger brother’s effects. He hadn’t been a good brother to him – definitely not easy to put up with. We don’t love our younger siblings. We want our parents’ love all to ourselves. We don’t want to share our domain. We want to be the sole object of their affection. As we can’t push aside siblings that are born later, we subjugate them. Hell mend them if they don’t obey. The nursery can be a mini hell. It can. Boys are very inventive and instinctively know how to wage war inconspicuously. That’s how it is – and not just in the Kroysing household. If the parents intervene, it just makes it worse for the weaker ones. In his case, it carried on until the bonds of home loosened and the brothers began to move in different circles. A cool indifference had then crept into the older brother’s attitude towards the younger. Only much later in the university holidays did he suddenly realise that his little brother was growing into a man with a good heart – a potential friend. Then the war started and he’d been turned into a savage again, and just when he was hoping that they’d both get leave by Christmas at the latest and be able to enjoy the festivities with their parents, it was too late. A couple of scoundrels had let the French finish the young lad off to spare themselves a bit of unpleasantness. He’d get his own back on the Frogs, but here and now written on the walls of this monk’s cell were the words: ‘too late’. ‘Too late’ on the ceiling and the window, ‘too late’ on the floor. ‘Too late’ hung in the air. Nothing was more natural for men at war than to believe in kingdom come, life after death, a reunion on the other side. The fighting man’s simple, forward-driven mind couldn’t grasp that those who were carried off had disappeared forever; his imagination couldn’t deal with it. The enemy had to live on, so that victory was eternal. And a brother had to live on so you could make up for all the bad and evil things you’d done in your youth.

Kroysing grabbed the little watch, wound it and set it. It was half eleven. From the distance came rumbling and crashing. It must be from the Fort Vaux area, where fighting was constantly flaring up and the French were improving their positions. Nonetheless, the tick of the watch was audible in the quiet room. The young lad’s heart couldn’t be made to tick again. But at least he had already made an offering to the dead boy. And he would pursue Niggl until he confessed. Then Judge Advocate Mertens would take up the case and deal with Niggl, and his machinations would all have been in vain. He’d thought about it and made up his mind. He could cheerfully have spat on the retired civil servant before witnesses, slapped his face or wrung his neck. But duelling was forbidden in wartime, and however satisfying it might have been to haul that fat, trembling lump in front of his gun, the legal route was the only possible one and actually the more effective. He would totally and utterly destroy Herr Niggl. Even if Niggl survived, he’d take no pleasure in his life. He’d be a social outcast, dishonoured by his years in jail. He’d be dismissed from his post and, as the bureaucrat’s life was all he knew, he and his family would starve. Perhaps he’d open a little stationery business in Buenos Aires or Constantinople. But wherever the German officer corps had connections he’d be a dead man, despised by his wife and hated by his children.