Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

The next morning he reported sick. He’d felt strange during the night, gone hot and cold and been plagued by weird thoughts. He definitely had a fever; his temperature when he was examined was 37.4 degrees. Not all that high, said the young doctor, but as Bertin was an educated man he decided he should spend a night in the infirmary, as the sickbay was called. Ah, thought Bertin, as he stood to attention, so if I were a waiter or a typesetter I’d be thrown out on my ear and sent back to work despite my disappointing temperature, and have to catch my death of cold before I’d be counted sick . Were health and sickness also class-dependent? Comrade Pahl certainly thought so.

During the whole day, which he spent relaxing, sleeping and writing – he had to explain to his wife that his request had been denied – during that whole day in the clean and peaceful domain of Schneevoigt, the hospital sergeant, it didn’t occur to him that he’d never had a thought like that before. Something had started to shift inside him – though unfortunately not quickly enough to save him from further harm. For little predatory creatures possess a good sense of smell, even in the jungle of human society, and always like to pick on wounded prey.

THE INEXORABLE, WRETCHED grind outwardly continued over the next weeks. Each day, the work parties set off before dawn, damp and stiff, to build the crucial field railways in the rain: sometimes in the swampy woodland around Ornes, sometimes in the undulating country of Fosses wood. They were subject to continual harassing fire, and a smattering of shells would explode dusky red at sunrise, and it didn’t matter if there were four or eight of them, the splinters were enough to take out Private Przygulla one morning at Gremilly, slashing open his stomach not 30m from where Bertin lay flat in the mud. Then in Fosses wood a while later they witnessed a German plane above their heads roaring down in a forced landing. After a panting 10-minute run, the ASC men lifted the dying pilot, whose back was riddled with bullet holes, from his seat. Scarcely had they hidden him behind the nearest furrow along with his assistant and the most important pieces of equipment when a shell set the great rickety bird alight – exciting moments in those grey and gruesome weeks. The nights drew relentlessly in, and the bleak dark, cold and wet gripped the men, undermining their spirits – they seemed to hang like feeble flies in a powerful spiders’ web, grey on grey. When they pulled their blankets over their heads at night, because the wind whistled through the barracks and the little smoking stove, fuelled by wet wood, created more coughing than warmth, Bertin lay among them, almost indistinguishable from them, and Lebehde the inn-keeper and Pahl the typesetter no longer needed to complain that he was a stuck-up prig because he chose to shove a thing made out of meerschaum in his gob when he smoked a pipe. No, Private Bertin hadn’t smoked a meerschaum pipe for a while – metaphorically speaking. They realised that when Sergeant Kropp saw an opportunity to play the big man with him.

Since the beginning of October, the depot command had ordered the NCOs to give the men from the outside working parties a day off in rotation so that they could attend to themselves and their things and didn’t become entirely squalid. Lieutenant Benndorf had brought the measure in and enforced it strictly, much to the annoyance of the units working within the depot and their NCOs. So, when Sergeant Kropp, a bad-tempered farm boy from the Uckermark, found Private Bertin sleeping in the barracks one afternoon when everyone else was on duty, the colour rose in his sallow face and he said he was going to report him for evading duty. Bertin, knowing he was innocent, laughed and turned on to his other side as the clod Kropp marched off.

That day, 12 December, didn’t just stick in Bertin’s mind but in that of the entire world. When the army communiqué was pinned to the black tarboard wall in the orderly room after the washing-up was done, a growing group of men immediately gathered in front of it and read the badly printed text out in excited undertones: it contained the word ‘peace’. Germany was suing for peace! She had staunchly held her enemies at bay for two and a half years, and a week to 10 days previously her infantry had occupied the Romanian capital of Bucharest after bitter exchanges: no need to fear, therefore, that this salutary step would be misunderstood. Canteen in hand, Bertin peered at it myopically, listened, asked questions and just stood. This was… this was the most important day of his life. His chest heaved in a sigh of relief that was for the world. Sadly, it only lasted until he had fully understood the wording of the imperial communication. The statement lacked the key phrase by which practically any halfway grown-up person could tell whether the proposed steps were serious or not: the return of Belgium and compensation for the devastation inflicted. With a bit of goodwill, such details could be dealt with in due course. The main thing was to get the enemy to the negotiating table. Private Bertin certainly couldn’t be accused of lacking goodwill. Nonetheless, the wings of his hope shrivelled like wilted leaves and folded back in… He kept rereading the communication but no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t find a single phrase which the enemy powers could respond to without humiliating themselves. After the odd enthusiastic shout of ‘Listen to that!’ or a more disgruntled ‘Hold on, Otto!’, the ASC men had nearly all slouched off, talking in undertones. A bandy-legged Bavarian gunner from the depot staff with a cigarette behind his right ear and a brimless cap tilted over his left, turned to Bertin before leaving: ‘None too keen on it, are you, comrade? Me neither.’ Then he checked there were no NCOs or clerks in the vicinity and finished by asking if anyone had any idea what kind of fresh shit those fatheads in Berlin imagined they were going to drum up with this peace initiative.

Bertin left too, feeling pensive, almost sorrowful. The white sheet of paper flashing on the orderly room wall looked stranded in the pale afternoon light. And after nightfall when his comrades from the Fosses wood party had erupted into the barracks and there had been a fierce debate about the news, they too eventually arrived at a not dissimilar position of disgust and scepticism. And Bertin, struck by this consensus among Bavarians, Berliners and Hamburgers, wondered at his initial surge of joy. He felt Pahl’s eyes on him and Karl Lebehde’s questioning looks. Hiding a certain embarrassment, he told them about Herr Kropp’s oafish behaviour and said Kropp was sure to get the brush-off from his superiors. Pahl and Lebehde exchanged a glance. It was on the tips of their tongues to tell him to deal with the report immediately and inform the depot orderly room about it, but neither of them did so. Their friend Bertin was the sort of man who only learns from experience. After all, he’d fallen for the peace initiative.

When Bertin had gone off to write another letter home, the two squaddies were left sitting opposite one another at the narrow end of their table near the window, now darkening in the early December dusk. The barracks were full of the muffled sounds of a large group of men, their tobacco smoke and murmured chat. Tunics and canvas jackets had been hung out to dry between the beds, and tarpaulins were stretched across the ventilators. A load of freshly washed handkerchiefs was drying on the long, black stove pipes that followed the angles of the walls to the windows, where, carefully sealed, they opened to the outside. Lebehde had on a brown wool tanktop and green-striped slippers, and Paul wore his grey lace-up shoes and a grey cardigan. They looked like family men determined to finish a task before home time: darning socks in Lebehde’s case and answering a letter in Pahl’s.