Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

Will that satisfy you, Christoph? he wondered. You’re soft. Your enemy’s scalp means nothing to you, but it means something to me. It won’t be tonight or the day after tomorrow, but we’ll get it. And then we’ll make Bertin a lieutenant in your place. He resisted the temptation to look through his brother’s notebook, wrapped his effects up in the leather waistcoat, undressed, got into bed and turned out the light.

DURING THE NIGHT and towards morning, when the captive balloons’ eyes were shut, the field kitchen staff tried to creep up on the infantry positions. They’d find some cover and distribute from there the warm food the men had long done without: thick bean soup with scraps of meat, bluish barley stew, yellow peas and ham – all packed in heat-retaining tin containers, which the food carriers lugged down the final stretches to the trenches. The operation had its dangers. A soldier with warm soup in his belly fights better, and causing privations that might break the men’s morale was part of the civilised nations’ machinery of war. Advance batteries lay in wait for the field kitchen staff. Sometimes they miscalculated but usually they didn’t, and their actions were always disastrous.

In the early morning around 6.30am, when the ground mist, which had long since turned into autumnal morning fog, parted for a moment, the French at Belleville caught sight of Captain Niggl’s ASC men at work. They had known for a long time that the Germans were expanding their positions behind the lines and had marked the presumed locations of these bases on their maps. For weeks, the Germans had been planning the push that would reclaim Douaumont village and Fort Vaux. They’d been saving up ammunition, improving their approach roads and preparing their field batteries for the advance. The construction of the German front had many advantages, but flexibility wasn’t one of them. Communication between the artillery and the observers in the infantry, especially those in the forts, was handled much better, more quickly and more intelligently by the French. A couple of minutes after the suspected field kitchen was discovered, shrapnel burst over the area in the gathering fog, whipping down on the ASC men, who scattered in panic. Only eight men were injured in all because the French made the mistake of rapidly moving their fire further forward on to the huge depression that opened out to the south from Douaumont, and through which the food carriers should indeed have run. Nonetheless, the company returned at 9.30am instead of 8am, and that hour and a half was nerve-racking for Niggl.

He’d been so happy, so pleased with Feicht, who really had turned things round in a most satisfactory manner with his idea about the army postal depot, the accompanying letter and all the rest of it. He could now calmly wait for the lieutenant to make his next move. He’d even metabolised the increase in work, worry and to and fro caused by the arrival of his first two companies. Douaumont was now rammed with men, and so his Bavarians could no longer complain, since more and more ASC battalions shared their fate. The Somme battle hadn’t just ripped half the batteries out of the Meuse east bank sector like eye teeth from a jaw (whether one believed this or not); it had also stolen away entire infantry squads – how many, no one knew – which were to be replaced with ASC men and Landwehr. It all sounded preposterous, for what were the ASC men to do there? Niggl knew full well what: they were to relieve the infantry regiments of the heavy lifting and reinforcing of the supply lines in the rear positions. It was a fine mess that meant his men were chased across the field like hares and his casualty list had trebled. They’d got off lightly this time. Sergeant Pangerl had taken a bullet in the backside, five men had been more or less badly injured and were looking forward to being sent home, and two others looked as if they might be finished with their grey uniforms for good – joy unconfined. This all ran through the captain’s mind, as he tossed and turned in his bed trying to catch up on his morning’s sleep. He had lice and missed the warm bath he’d always been used to as an officer in a foreign country. At home in Weilheim he seldom bathed. Now the dreadful suckers were tormenting him as if he were a common soldier. It was already 10.30am when he eventually fell asleep. His cell, as he called it, was pretty dark even during the day. He had a host of unclear, largely unpleasant dreams, and any refreshment his slumbers might have brought vanished thanks to the way he was woken up.

If a shell hits the roof you’re sleeping under, the noise of the impact wakes you – or you never wake again. If it falls near you, however, 50m to your right or left, the dreadful howl of its approach bores into your soul first. You spend five faltering heartbeats still dazed but wide awake waiting for the blast, and that fraction of a minute saps your vitality. At exactly the same time as the recent attack, a second 40cm mortar battery fired at Douaumont, but this time on to the opposite corner of the pentagon. The first shot landed some 30m to the right of the fort on the disintegrating slope. Herr Niggl slept through its approach, though his subconscious was on high alert. This was the first sign of attrition and exactly what the attacker wanted. He was awoken by the burst and thunder of the explosion, which shook the fort’s foundations from the side. Train crash , he thought still half asleep. I’m on the Augsburg to Berlin sleeper on my way to an official meeting about awarding Hindenburg the freedom of Weilheim . Then he woke up. He wasn’t on the sleeper train; he was in the most accursed place in Europe. That had been a heavy-calibre weapon, a repeat of recent events. The French really were gunning for them. There wouldn’t be a minute’s peace from now on. It was all kicking off now. This was the final hour.

‘Oh, most holy Saint Aloysius, pray for me now and in the hour of my death,’ he cried. ‘I shall go to Hell impenitent. My soul will burn forever. Bring a priest. I must confess!’

And then, oh yes, oh Jesus, down it howled, dragging a trail of hellish screaming in its wake. It was the devil, whinnying and hissing. Where, oh where would it strike? He dove under the bedclothes. A blaring and crashing, an echo rolling through the fort’s corridors and tunnels, signalled relief. It had landed further off this time, in the northeast wing by the sound of it, the sapper depot where his enemy lived. Limbs aquiver and sweating from every pore, Niggl huddled in his bed, listening to the men’s shouts and the clatter of their boots running past his door.

‘Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Alois Niggl,’ he told himself. ‘It’s too much to hope that the French will have carried off the second brother too. No one gets that lucky.’

His hair fell in his eyes. An irksome fly drank his sweat. At last, the clerk Dillinger rushed in to report a direct hit on the sapper depot: nuffink damaged. Smoothing his hair over his forehead, the captain calmly asked if Lieutenant Kroysing had been informed of the company’s recent losses – if he was in fact in the fort.

Dillinger answered both questions in the affirmative. The lieutenant had just been called into a meeting with the airfield commander when the first one struck. Although everyone knew there must be a second, the lieutenant nonetheless set off and what was more took a short cut across the inner courtyard, which was littered with great fat shell splinters. There could so easily have been an accident.

‘We’d never have got over that,’ said the captain, adding that the orderly room should try to find a Catholic chaplain to bestow spiritual consolation on the men in their time of need. Dillinger’s face lit up; the orderly room would get on it straight away. The division currently holding the sector was admittedly from Saxony and Protestant, but such difficulties could be overcome with a bit of ingenuity.