Арнольд Цвейг: Outside Verdun

Pahl the typesetter closed his eyes. He would’ve liked to go to sleep but couldn’t just yet. The truth of his theory excited him. The slightest sign that the proletariat saw through the clever differentiation created by uniforms and manners of speech made the military machine nervous. The devil alone knew what they’d made of that harmless sheep Bertin. In any case, the performance earlier clearly demonstrated that they intended to use his example to proscribe fraternisation with French prisoners. But Bertin had acted purely out of good heartedness, out of a decent, perhaps slightly sentimental sense of comradeship. He hadn’t been trying to condemn war itself. He was far too much the product of a higher education for that. Karl Lebehde had guessed that too. You had to hand it to Comrade Lebehde.

Now there would be nothing left for ‘comrade’ Bertin but to become a real Comrade. Wilhelm Pahl saw that, which was why he couldn’t sleep. He wanted to promote this outcome. Sergeant Böhne had confided to him that a new commando was to be sent forward early the following day. Two long-range guns were stuck in a valley between Fosses wood and Pepper ridge. They had to be removed the next day so that a new (Bavarian) howitzer battery could be installed there. Front-line commandos were normally drawn from the strong men in the first and second platoons, but tomorrow’s commando, unusually, was to be made up of the small, weak men in the 9th, 10th and 11th platoons, who had worked in the ammunitions tent until now. The recent offender, Bertin, belonged to the 10th platoon, Pahl to the 9th, and the sergeants and corporals who would have to go forward with them were the three platoon leaders.

‘See anything unusual in that, Pahl?’ Böhne had laughed. ‘If you were a veteran soldier, you’d spot it.’

Wilhelm Pahl wasn’t a veteran, but he’d spotted it anyway: this was an example of group punishment. The Prussian military sometimes liked to inflict disadvantages and unpleasantness on a whole group when one of its number was guilty of misconduct, so that the group would turn against the guilty party and make his life a misery. That was why Herr Glinksy had assembled the NCOs after the inspection.

In normal circumstances, for example at work, punishment wipes the slate clean. In the abnormal circumstances that pertain in the army of the class state, however, punishment marks the start of a man’s suffering. From now on, Bertin would always be in the wrong, slipping from one awkward situation to the next. It would be a gradual process, possibly with the odd break along the way, but however uneven the delivery of the knocks, as surely as copulation leads to reproduction they would teach Private Bertin that life is harsh. Until now, he hadn’t fared badly in the company, as he himself admitted. It was part of his idealism to want to be like any other ASC private, and idealism, as Wilhelm Pahl knew, was one of the subtlest lures used by society to prevent gifted men furthering their own interests and to seduce them into serving the interests of the ruling classes for no wages other than glory. If the men in the company and the officers in charge of the depot assumed a Jewish writer and future lawyer must be a socialist, then they were smarter than Private Bertin himself and understood his true nature and the meaning of his feelings and impulse towards solidarity better than he did. Deep down, Bertin obviously knew the score. But not consciously. Consciously – and he’d often made this point – he believed that wars were necessary and Germany’s cause was justified. As the majority of the Party thought the same way, he could hardly be criticised for this. Nonetheless, the default approach with all such lads was to adopt a certain entirely understandable mistrust until they’d shown by their actions which side they were on. In this particular case, however, it was highly desirable to bring the man into the fold.

There Bertin stood in the bright sunshine, in the pillory, a servant of the ruling class, still thinking the stupid things he’d been told to think. It just showed what an important and powerful force education was. But now Bertin really was going to get an education. Glinsky, Graßnick, Colonel Stein and the entire machinery of the army would see to that. He, Pahl the typesetter, would make sure this education had the right spin; he was the man for the job. A man such as Bertin could be invaluable to the working class. He was a writer who was having a book published right in the middle of the war. Wilhelm Pahl had never read anything by him, but he’d heard him talking. It was obvious the man could put anything he wanted across in words, even in front of an audience. Pahl recalled speeches Bertin had given to 40 or 50 highly sceptical ASC men when they were working in Serbia. By contrast, he, Wilhelm Pahl, preferred not to express his views in front of more than one or two trusted friends. He was aware of his ugliness, his hunchback, his short neck, his squashed nose and piggy eyes, and this held him back from appearing in public. And yet nothing was more important to further the cause of the working class. If the gifts of Bertin the lawyer and the thoughts of Pahl the typesetter could be combined that would be no mean weapon. If the hatred in Pahl and his indignation at class injustice could be made to burn in Comrade Bertin’s breast, if Bertin’s natural courage and disregard for personal danger were turned in the right direction, then they really could start something. It was something to work on. Maybe even during the war. Definitely afterwards. At the moment, all the power was in the hands of the ruling class. The owning classes, from which the officers came, had 70 million Germans at their disposal. They controlled their thoughts, deeds and desires. Only idealistic sheep such as Bertin believed they would ever willingly give this power up. But there was no need to decide how to wrest it from them just yet. No, Wilhelm Pahl would have time enough to work it out clearly in his own slow way. He certainly didn’t want to go to the Party majority with questions of how, what and when. The company hadn’t honoured him with the nickname ‘Liebknecht’ for nothing. His opinion of those who had passed the war credit bills was exactly the same as that lonely man’s. Liebknecht had paid for his courageous protests in the Reichstag and on Potsdamer Platz on 1 May with a prison sentence. In some places, comrades had risked a strike because of it. Not a bad sign. But at the moment the battle for Verdun and the costly campaign to control Europe – the world even – had eclipsed all else.

Pahl’s cigar was burning down. He was pleasantly tired now. Sleep would come quickly and do him good. Those, then, were his ‘War Thoughts’ – quite different, admittedly, from those that appeared in the newspapers, penned by venerable, patriotic professors. Wilhelm Pahl had earlier consigned one such column to the underworld, tossing it down to the rustling maggots in the latrine. The big 42cm gun 2km away in Thonne-le-Thil, which had roared so loudly it made the barracks shudder, was also quiet now and had been since the day before yesterday. The story was that a squib round had wiped it out – it and its entire crew. No doubt they were surprised when the shell, which was as big as an eight-year-old boy, burst in the gun’s barrel and ripped it open, spewing out a craterful of fire and steel – but not on to the French. What was this war for? A gigantic undertaking organised by the industries of destruction, involving extreme mortal danger for all concerned. You didn’t even need the French pilots, who were getting cockier by the day, to finish a gun off… There: Bertin had put his light out. Pahl’s cigar stub fell sizzling into a tin. A little water stopped it stinking the place out. Pahl snuggled down in his wood-fibre bag, pulled his blanket up and rested his head on his folded-up tunic. Bertin, he happened to know, used a fine latex air cushion as a pillow. May sleep bring balm for your nerves, my boy , he thought. You’re going to need it . For the first time, Pahl felt a kind of grim sympathy for his comrade.