Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

Bertin had a flash of illumination. ‘Am I speaking to Lieutenant von Roggstroh?’ he asked.

‘Ah, you see,’ said the lieutenant with satisfaction, ‘you haven’t forgotten me. But now you must tell me your name.’ Bertin told him and asked to be excused if he had done anything wrong, explaining that he really was in the field gun depot by chance and didn’t know how it operated. ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said the lieutenant. ‘You’re the last of the Mohicans, and I’m going to put you in for an Iron Cross just as surely as we were together in that dreadful howitzer emplacement on the Mort Homme. I always knew you weren’t really cut out for the ASC.’ Bertin flushed and protested nervously that the field gun depot had simply struck him as the safest place and he didn’t deserve a medal for being there. ‘Of course,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Exactly. Have you ever heard of anyone getting an Iron Cross because he deserved it? Goodbye, my young hero. See you at five or half past.’ Thinking he might now venture a question of his own, Bertin asked if the French had advanced very far. ‘They got what they needed,’ said the lieutenant evenly. ‘We’ll take a look at the damage tomorrow. See you later.’ And he hung up.

Bertin sat there for a moment, dazed, then he replaced the receiver. Had the black coffee agitated his system or was he trembling with joy? He had thought the mean spiritedness that pervaded the battalion had extinguished any spark in him. But it must simply have hidden it, for he was alight now. What would the battery have done if he had fled too? Four guns with no ammunition were about as much use as four sewing machines. They’d have had to be hauled out of their emplacements and sent back, assuming the horses could manage it, and would’ve been no use that night, the next day or perhaps forever. He had prevented that, and it hadn’t just been chance and because he wanted a comfortable billet; it was also down to clear thinking on his part. Bertin strutted round the room in grim elation. He was master of an entire ammunitions depot, of all the shrapnel, cartridges and shells, of the telephone, grassy mounds and burn, and he’d just helped hold the front. Everyone did things their own way. They’re welcome to give me the Iron Cross, he thought. The war won’t be over tomorrow. What had poor Vehse said just 24 hours before he was hauled away in that blood-soaked tarpaulin? ‘That’s your answer to the peace initiative…’ Yes, it seemed the French didn’t go a bundle on imperial pronouncements… But happily there were lieutenants who held firm, and their words carried weight. No sense hiding your light under a bushel. On 27 January, the Kaiser’s birthday, Herr Graßnick would have to call Private Bertin out of the line again, but this time he’d be rasping out a congratulatory speech. Pretty good going for a skilled craftsman from Kreuzberg to have two sons in the newspapers because they’d got the Iron Cross.

At nightfall, Sergeant Schultz opened the hut door and walked in with Privates Strauß and Fannrich to find Private Bertin cosied up by the stove, puffing on his pipe.

‘You’ve certainly made yourself at home,’ marvelled Strauß.

‘What the hell are you doing in my den?’ asked Schulz in amazement.

‘I thought it was the safest place,’ said Bertin confidently. ‘They can’t drop shells here.’

Schulz took off his coat. ‘Oh, can’t they,’ he joked. ‘My dear man, if they had raised that damned long-range gun over there, which gave us such an untimely pounding today, just a fraction higher, you and the whole kit and kaboodle would have been blown to kingdom come.’

Bertin sat down on a bunk, nonplussed. ‘Really?’ he said.

Fannrich nodded, pouring fresh water on the coffee grounds. ‘You can depend on it,’ he said.

Crestfallen, Bertin tried to defend himself by saying he’d made himself useful.

‘By making coffee,’ said Strauß.

‘By negotiating with field gunners,’ countered Bertin.

Schulz swung round to interrogate him about what had happened. ‘Thank God you kept your head,’ he said, relieved. ‘Who knows what would have happened to me. But you’ll have to report at Gibercy now. If Susemihl gives you any trouble, put him on to me.’

Bertin gave the moustachioed technician a disappointed look. He would’ve liked to stay. ‘Herr Susemihl won’t give me any trouble,’ Bertin snapped. ‘Lieutenant von Roggstroh from the Royal Guard Artillery will see to that. By the way, if he asks for me, please explain why I left.’

‘Why would he do that?’ said Schulz impatiently. ‘Did you find some rum or something?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Bertin, standing up. ‘Why, have you got some?’

‘Get a move on, man, or it’ll be dark before you’re back with your company.’

Despite Bertin’s confidence, it soon became clear that the ammunitions expert with the little twirly moustache knew the world better than he did. When he finally pitched up at Gibercy, Susemihl, who was in charge, gave him a bit of a ticking off. Bertin defended himself calmly, and his composure and the lieutenant’s name did make some impression. But the elation he’d felt as he made his way back home in the dark to the massive troop tents of the camp evaporated. Nothing in particular happened, but his elation shrivelled up to be replaced by a terrible exhaustion. Perhaps he’d expected too much, and that was why he was disappointed. Or perhaps the constant confusion within the company – the familiar traffic of countermanded orders and revoked decisions – weighed on his soul.

They buried the dead at Gibercy, with a fifth coffin added to the previous four – the salesman Dagener had died of his wounds. In the murk of the shortest day, battered by wind and rain, the column trudged over to Damvillers, received orders from the battalion issued by a sallow and angry Major Jansch, and marched back to Moirey to dismantle the Steinbergquell depot. At the depot, the men piled ammunition, planks, trench props, barbed wire and tarpaulins, all dripping with icy sludge, on to lorries and took them back to Damvillers. They stayed there for a day in draughty huts, before driving the same heavily laden lorries back to Moirey to carry out orders to set the depot back up on exactly the same spot as before. Out of the muck, into the muck, muttered the ASC men bitterly. And so it was that they spent Christmas and New Year in the same barracks they’d been chased out of with so many casualties. At Christmas, Herr Susemihl gave a speech under a tree covered in lights, stuttering on about the peace the enemy didn’t want. And then Herr Pfund distributed the Christmas presents he’d procured in Metz – blunt pocket knives, hankies with red borders, apples, nuts and a little tobacco – and the deceit radiating from his shining eyes and from the gifts themselves gave the more discerning men the creeps. And if the crown prince hadn’t given each of his brave Verdun campaigners a curved steel case filled with cigarettes or cigars, which fitted comfortably into the pocket and was enamelled in black and adorned with the donor’s portrait, it might have been a pretty miserable Christmas. But that all paled into insignificance when they returned to the half-empty barracks where the second half of the company including Bertin’s squad was now billeted. A couple of candles burned in canteen lids, and the men lay around in silence or talking quietly. Quite a number of comrades were missing, and unlike the ones who’d left before because they were reassessed for active service or had been claimed for work at home, these ones wouldn’t be heard from again. They’d been part of the men’s lives. They’d argued with them and made up again, and now little Vehse, poor Przygulla and that kindly soul Otto Reinhold lay buried in French soil and would be replaced in the New Year, this time from Metz. But they couldn’t be replaced, and their ghosts slid invisibly among their comrades and fellow skat players, evaporating only very slowly. And yet no one spoke of them, just as no one spoke of the daily routine unless something irksome or funny happened. Everything the men had experienced, and that the world had experienced during this war, slid beneath the layers of their consciousness into the deeper chambers of the mind, where sooner or later it would spit and rage. But the men needed to concentrate in order to deal with the demands placed on them each day and on the surface they showed only the usual permitted feelings and emotions, above all affection for their families. If they felt sorry for themselves or mourned their dead comrades, they did so obliquely in the general gloom. It was with such nuances of feeling that Halezinsky the gas worker looked at a picture of his wife and children with tears rolling down his Slavic face from his brown eyes. Only Lebehde the inn keeper carried on making punch cheerfully on his own from rum, tea and sugar, and its spicy aroma soon filled the room.