Арнольд Цвейг: Outside Verdun

Could’ve been worse, the company thought, and Bertin thought so too, as he bounded back to his place between docile little Otto Reinhold and Pahl the typesetter like a terrier let off the lead. Reinhold nudged him with his elbow and gave him an imperceptible smirk.

‘Company – attention! Fall out!’

Four hundred and thirty seven men about turned and stomped off to enjoy their free evening. No one wasted a word on what had just happened. They had underwear to wash, trousers to mend, dinner to eat, letters to write or cards to play. They could do what they wanted now. Be human, free. Werner Bertin strolled back to the barracks more slowly than the rest. Perhaps he felt a bit down-hearted. He decided to lie down for half an hour and then take his beard over to Naumann (Bruno), the barber. Off with it. Enough of standing out – basta.

From among the group of NCOs still standing together, Herr Glinsky’s expressionless, bulging eyes fell on Bertin. To the right, above the hills at Kronprinzeneck and forward towards Romagne hung sausage-shaped captive balloons, shining gold in the evening light.

THE JULY NIGHT lay heavy on the 3 rdplatoon’s barracks where some 130 men slept after a hard day’s graft. Stacked three high on wire netting and sacks of wood shavings, they rolled from side to side, groaning, sweating and scratching themselves without waking. The company was riddled with lice. The men had left the delousing station at Rosenheim clean and as if new-born, and before they moved into the grimy barracks here they’d cleaned up Prussian style, jettisoning cartloads of their predecessors’ rubbish. But the yellowish lice had waited patiently in the seams of the yellowish sleeping bags for their moment – and this was their moment. Lice are like bosses and fate: you can fight them but in the end you pretty much have to come to terms with them.

From the outside, the long barracks seemed to be cloaked in darkness. Dr Bindel, a civilian doctor in uniform, had got the company carpenter to install ventilation flaps in the roof, using plans drawn up by Private Bertin and Schnee, a medical NCO. Non-soldiers would probably have thought it impossible to sleep there and wake refreshed. But they would’ve been wrong. It was possible to sleep there, as 130 men proved. The rats that zipped happily along the passageways could confirm it too, for they never woke anyone, except when they bit into their big toe. In any case, the rats preferred to be under the barracks rather than up in the land of the living. It was safer below.

There were two glimmers of light in the barracks. Bertin was still reading, and by his head a stearin candle stuck on a tin holder burned, protected by his tunic, coat and rucksack. Some four men away and one level up, Pahl the typesetter was smoking a cigar. He smoked in order to think undisturbed, and his thoughts centred on Private Bertin.

The comrade down below wasn’t reading because he wanted to. He had to play the writer again and was reading proofs. The first galleys of a new book that was being printed in Leipzig had arrived for him in the field post that evening. He’d shown the wide-margined columns of print, set in a clear font by reputable printers, to his comrade Pahl, who after all was in the business. Evenings and nights were the only times Bertin could check his text for printing errors and mark them up with the traditional squiggles in the margins. He’d thought he wouldn’t be able to concentrate after the stupid business with the inspection earlier, but he’d be getting a delivery like this every day now, so he’d reconsidered. Pahl knew only too well how important commas and colons were to writers, and how they chased down unnecessary repetitions. Bertin was quite right to keep his sentences in order, although he had other demands on his time now. The Germans were avid readers at the moment. They even read young authors – especially those. There hadn’t been so many new writers for more than a century. Bertin’s novel Love at Last Sight, which was typeset in the lovely Breitkopf font, had been unexpectedly reprinted that spring, and the royalties had greatly helped his wife. That much Pahl the typesetter knew from dinnertime chats. Pahl was very interested in the technical side of printing: the familiar names of the typefaces, whether it was better to set type manually or use a machine, the correction process. But he was much more interested in the author – admittedly for his own very particular reasons. As he lay there puffing on his company cigar, he mentally evaluated his comrade Bertin’s aptitude for the boxing match that surely lay ahead of him. Before bedtime, Pahl had received a hint from Sergeant Böhne, an affable type who’d been a postman before the war and was a Party sympathiser, as to what might happen the following morning. Pahl’s thoughts moved slowly one step at a time. It had awakened something within him to watch his comrade standing all alone at the centre of the company in the barracks yard with Graßnickian phrases raining down on him. Karl Lebehde was right. Bertin had shaved his beard off just a few hours too late – trust an innkeeper to understand the ways of the world. But it didn’t do to scoff at a typesetter’s musings either. For they drew on a thorough knowledge of the military order, which was based on a thorough knowledge of the social order…

In Pahl’s view, the whole point of human society was to ensure that there were always enough workers available at the lowest possible wages, so that the workers didn’t share in the profits of their endeavours and couldn’t themselves sell what their skills produced, but were nonetheless loyal servants of the manufacturing process. To achieve this in peacetime, various conditions had to be put in place and maintained. In wartime, things simplified themselves nicely: anyone not working full out ended up in the trenches and had a hero’s death to look forward to. Pahl had grasped this early on and resisted all attempts by the newspaper house back home to claim him back. He’d stood down in favour of married colleagues, having carefully weighed up whether the comparative freedom of the labour company was more tolerable than the slavery of the newspaper house. Let someone else pump out the dirty stream of lies to the nation that helped prolong the war.

Wilhelm Pahl saw himself as a product of the pressures and counter pressures of the class system. He’d come into the world with an ugly body and a squashed face. That’s fate, although mountain sunshine and exercise – that’s to say, wealthy parents or better social welfare – might have improved his physical condition. He was one of six children of Otto Pahl, a turner. He finished primary school – a royal Prussian primary school in Schöneberg – where his smart mind attracted attention early on. With his aptitude for thinking and learning, he could have gone far if he’d had wealthy parents or if social provision had been better. But being Pahl the turner’s son, he left school at the age of 14, and an apprenticeship at a printers was the best that a good reference from his teacher could secure for him. He couldn’t become an explorer or a natural historian, so he turned his attention to the circumstances of his own existence early on. It was too late to change his parents’ financial position; he therefore joined those who wanted to reconstruct society. He went to the Workers’ Party school and became a conscious component of the masses to which the future (due to the pressure being exerted by the masses) must inevitably belong. To keep the masses fenced in, society used them. Every year, in Germany and elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of society’s have-nots were shoved into uniform and drilled, building on the work done in schools, to make them useful and ready to shoot themselves in the shape of other workers – entirely against their own interests. In peacetime, this was just a possibility; in wartime, it was a ghastly and shockingly stupid reality. It goes without saying that Pahl the typesetter hated the army and everything it stood for. He despised war, which he saw as the spawn of the masses’ endless stupidity. At the same time, he understood war. It was essential to society’s struggle for world markets. It allowed tensions within states to be redirected to the outside and meant that armies of proletarians, who might rise up against the ruling classes tomorrow, were busy slaughtering each other on the field of honour today.