Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

The minutes passed. The men in the trenches stared ahead, eyes popping. Surely they’d advance from over there, there in front. Could they hear them now? See them? Was there any point in waiting to be slaughtered with no artillery and the heavy weapons beyond use? The Fatherland couldn’t expect any more of them than what they’d already withstood. Singly and in groups they threw their rifles away and waded out into the sludge and fog, into the shredded, blown-down barbed wire entanglements, slithering and stumbling in the shell holes, hands as far as possible raised above their heads. ‘Kamerad,’ they shouted into the fog. ‘Kamerad!’

Kamerad – that word would be understood. He who shouts ‘Kamerad’ and raises his hands is surrendering and will be spared. He who abuses the word consigns himself and many of his fellows to death. Kamerad – now they appeared from the fog in their sky blue coats, slithering and stumbling, with assault packs and bayonets. Under their steel helmets, their faces were black, coffee-coloured, light brown: France’s colonial regiments from Senegal, the Somali coast and Morocco. And elsewhere were the Bretons, the southern French, the Parisians from the boulevards, the farmers from Touraine. France was mother to them all. They all knew they would be defending basic freedoms if they liberated French soil from the invaders. In no sense did they play the part of dashing warriors as they climbed out of their storm positions cursing and laughing, teeth darkly clenched, pale with determination. But they were fully engaged in the task ahead, these intelligent soldiers of France. They too had been told: just one more push and that’ll be it. They let the German prisoners through in silence and pushed them back towards the reserves at the rear, and then they crossed the German line and advanced on their objectives, with Fort Douaumont and Fort Vaux at the centre. They pushed into all the valleys and overran the wooded slopes from Lauffée to Chapître wood, from the Thiaumont line to Ravin de la Dame, from Nawe wood to the stone quarries of Haudraumont. On the German’s left wing, the trench systems named after Generals Klausewitz, Seidlitz, Steinmetz and Kluck were lost, in the centre the Adalbert line and everything that had once been called Thiaumont, and on the right wing the ravines, positions and remnants of woodland between the village of Douaumont and Pepper ridge. The three French divisions pushed deep into the land, stormed the German military Reserve’s dugouts and positions, lashed out at the batteries with bare steel, finally exacting revenge for months of shell raids and shrapnel rain. The question was: would they succeed in breaking right through the German defences?

The front held at several places in the sector. On the escarpment north of the village of Douaumant, in Caillette wood, east of Fumin and in the Vaux hills the German clung to their ground and threw themselves at the French with hand grenades and such machine guns as were undamaged. The fighting lasted all day, then night fell. The German’s resistance boosted their prestige, but it made no sense. The next morning the French artillery restarted their terrible games, and the Germans had nothing to set against them. Two days previously the French had been fewer in number than the German artillery; now they dominated the field, placed their long-range guns on Douaumont’s eastern slope and decimated the casemates of Vaux with wild salvoes. They combed Caillette wood with fire, clearing gateways for their infantry, and smashed the fortifying outworks of Vaux. The field batteries advanced on the German flank, obtaining a foothold on Douaumont’s steep eastern slope and cutting all rearward communications in much the same way that a doctor amputates a smashed arm hanging by strands of muscle and skin. Go back, German soldiers, you’ve done enough . In some places it took the French just two hours to conquer what they’d planned to take in four, in others it took four days. They took 7,000 German soldiers prisoner and killed and wounded three times that many. You have done enough for your 53 Pfennigs a day, German soldiers, and for the Briey-Longway iron ore basin. In the impenetrable fog, you gave the last of your strength to fulfil orders, not questioning whether they made sense or not. Men from Poznan, Lower Silesia, the Mark, Westphalia, Pomerania or Saxony: peace is all you need and now you have it – the peace of the dead. Protestants, free thinkers, Catholics, Jews: your bloated corpses will surface in the clay and fog of Verdun and then disappear again into our national pasts. You’ll be ungratefully forgotten, and the memories of those who were once your comrades will hardly be disturbed by even the palest reflection of your suffering . But what was to become of Douaumont?

Since the 23rd a column of smoke from the shell explosions had been hanging over Douaumont like a large black flag.

IN THE DAYS before the decisive move, the Fosses wood detachment marched out in the morning and back in the afternoon with the regularity of a pendulum. To stop the mud getting into their boots, the men tied their bootlegs closed with string and so managed to march with confidence. Relaying railway sleepers higher up isn’t the most pleasant work in the world but it isn’t the dirtiest either, not by a long shot. And the lack of visibility took the danger out of it. Now that the air had turned to milky soup, the Frogs sensibly refrained from peppering it with shrapnel. A certain someone had predicted what a hard blow the transfer from Wild Boar gorge back to Steinbergquell depot would be for Bertin. You could see how disgruntled the men were by their puckered brows and tightly drawn lips, and by the way they stared straight ahead while their legs wrestled through the thick mush on the roads. It squelched and sucked, crackled and gurgled, and squirted up past the ASC men’s knees if they were too lost in thought to test the ground with their sticks and carelessly stepped into a sludge-covered hole. For days the pendulum swung undisturbed. But that day… They were already at Ville height when a dull rumble wafted over to them. Far behind, out of sight, a really heavy gun had bellowed after weeks of deceptive silence. While they were still listening and looking at one another, something started up behind, battering down like rain on a wooden roof, faraway and frightful: a barrage from Verdun just like in the worst months of summer – the French! They set off apprehensively on the march home. The air seethed and clamoured behind the horizon as they entered the barracks. The noise followed them into the kitchen, and they listened to it as they washed their canteens and hours later at their evening meal. At bedtime, Private Bertin thought about Kroysing, Süßmann, that poor, pitiable scoundrel Niggl, and the Saxons in their water-logged trenches, and he sighed heavily and turned over.

The noise swelled during the night rather than slackening off, and a wild clanging cascade was hammering down behind the hills by the following morning. The men heard it as they marched out and the German reply: a shot every two minutes. There were no shells. They shook their heads as they went about their work in the morning but found themselves back in the barracks before lunchtime. There was almost a sigh of relief in the ranks when the order came in the early afternoon: all working parties suspended, all men to stand by to unload ammunition. Naturally, the company had to wait a good two hours to be assigned its task. The men chatted and exchanged thoughts, and then finally two engines shunted a line of wagons up the track, maybe 40, maybe 50 – the ASC men lost count. The men spat into their hands as they were split into groups and set to it. Men who knew the ropes climbed into the open wagons and with a practised grip lifted on to their shoulders a wicker basket from which either a long or a squat 15cm shell stuck out like a bundle of spears in a quiver. Carefully balancing the unaccustomed weight, the men from the working parties trudged along the slippery boarded walkways. They groaned as they heaved the shells down from their shoulders and stacked them between grassy hillocks – the heaviest of them weighed 85 pounds. They recovered on the way back, rubbing their joints in preparation for the next steel load. Even before night fell, miners’ lamps were hung in the wagons, and their dim glow illuminated from below the faces of the three men between the sliding doors. And as they bent and lifted, while a constant stream of men passed them, presenting their shoulders to receive their loaded baskets, carrying on and then disappearing into the gathering twilight, they looked to Bertin like the labourers of destiny doling out to mortal men their allotted burdens. Men were just a number here, a shoulder and two legs. The tramp of hobnailed boots banished any thoughts coursing through their minds. When the last wagon had been emptied at almost 11pm, sturdy Karl Lebehde had carried exactly the same as Bertin who was much less strong and Pahl who was almost a hunchback.