Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

THE EARTH WAS a stone disc under a sky of ice.

Winter had bitten across the whole continent and now held people and objects in its pitiless grip. In Potsdam, for example, where Frau Bertin’s parents were able to heat two rooms in their villa, the thermometer had registered 34 degrees below zero one night. But that was little help to their son-in-law. In France, particularly in the Meuse hills, the cold was less extreme: 17 degrees below, but it was still plenty. Since the beginning of January, the company’s gods and demigods had all returned from leave and been rather depressed by the reception they’d received from various quarters and by the changes that had taken place. Having already been dismantled and reinstated once, the depot was now dismantled again, this time for good. It was relocated to Mureaux Ferme wood, a dense, undamaged woodland behind a hill, which meant a new railway line was required to connect this sheltered spot to Romagne station. By the time that would have been done, the French airmen would long since have spotted, photographed and reported the clearings in the wood with predictable consequences, so that the whole facility would have to be moved again – chop, chop – this time to the gorges near the village of Etraye, but that was still some way off; work first began on the standard-gauge railway.

Under Sergeant Schwerdtlein’s reliable direction, a construction squad of heavy labourers was transferred from Romagne to work opposite the Mureaux Ferme men. He lived in a stone house and didn’t see the company on weekdays or on Sundays. At daybreak, in a heavy frost, the ASC men loaded one lorry with the heavy 6m full-size rails, another with oak sleepers and a third with loose chippings, before climbing on top of the cargo to travel to their place of work. The lorries were then unloaded – the heavy rails dug into the men’s collarbones – the ground levelled, the sleepers laid and the rails set in place. The screwing in place of the ‘joints’ with fishplates and nuts was the job of the Württemberg sappers, Landsturm men who had come from Damvillers, and they performed this duty with sober exasperation. For the greater part of the day, they all helped the Russians, who were preparing the track. The Russians? Absolutely. Russian prisoners, over 70 men in all, had been attached to the ASC men, and no one knew where they were billeted. Gaunt men in earthen coloured coats, patient and quick on the uptake, they were guarded by men from the Prussian Landsturm, if possible ones with a smattering of a Slavic language. And did we already say that Private Bertin was part of the Schwerdtlein working party too? As it was not a congenial working party, it’s hardly worth mentioning. However, there he was, more patient than ever, apathetic even, no longer hoping for an Iron Cross, but with the demeanour of a man who has escaped death twice in a row. He’d spent five days in the Karde working party, which was in charge of a small testing station in the cartridge tent for shells damaged in the bombardment. On the sixth day, he was sent to Romagne in the morning, and at midday one of the shells burst, killing his bed neighbour, Biedenkapp, a farmhand from Upper Hesse and father of three. And only two days later, an aeroplane had dropped its load on Steinbergquell depot, and although it only destroyed the officers’ latrines, the barrage of shell splinters perforated the outer wall of barracks 2 at the narrow end where only Private Bertin ever slept. Such coincidences made a man think and promoted patience, especially as rumour had it that the same aeroplane had visited Montmédy as well and taken out a high-ranking military official – or possibly several. Happy, then, was the man who could sleep safely in Romagne at night and warm himself up working with a pickaxe during the day. The frozen clay was as hard as marble and could only be broken into small fragments the size of mussel shells. In this terrible cold, the men sometimes warmed themselves by a fire, which the weakest of the Russians were allowed to tend. An undamaged copse of deciduous trees stood outlined against the sky. The new railway line’s course was marked by felled trees, blown-up roots and a levelled ridge. By the time the men had removed 10cm of frozen crust and reached the softer clay underneath, the sun would be setting. In the night, the earth froze again to a depth of 10cm, and the next day the game restarted.

But the worst job of all, feared by everyone, was unloading the loose chippings. The men stood on the trucks, almost unable to feel their feet because of the cold, ramming a broad shovel into the recalcitrant stones and then throwing them with a wide swing into the new stretches of track. Whoever was assigned to beating them flat with a mattock was lucky, because he could move and get his circulation going. No more than three men could fit on to one truck at once without getting in each other’s way.

That day Privates Lebehde, Pahl and Bertin were unloading loose chippings. Lebehde was strong enough to wield the heaving shovel without overstraining himself, but Pahl and Bertin were in agony. They had taken off their coats, canvas jackets, tunics and sweaters, and were sweating and freezing at the same time in their flannel shirts. They shovelled on in grim silence. They were friends, and Karl Lebehde wouldn’t have turned his sharp tongue on the two weaker ones if they had left the bulk of the work to him. But precisely for that reason, decency demanded they not give up. The metallic twang of the shovel and the rattling of the stones was interrupted by shouts of encouragement and cursing. Thus a whole day would pass, from sunrise to sunset, during which the men hardly thought about the task in hand. They thought instead about the unconstrained U-boat war, which was inevitable, and the declaration of war from America that would follow it, which Bertin stupidly misjudged in line with the views imposed on the newspapers by German Army Command. The three men thought about all sorts of special plans, wishes and ideas. Some of their wishes were strange. For example, Private Bertin would have been very shocked if he had realised how seriously his comrade Pahl was considering sacrificing one little bit of his fragile body in order to get the rest home safely. That was why Pahl and Lebehde had not let him in on the secret. Although they thought he was a decent man, they considered him to be a loose canon – and weak, weak. He’d recently bought a tin of fat substitute from some crooked big shot in the kitchen staff and now quietly shovelled it down without offering any to his comrades. He hadn’t been like that before, and they’d have to rub his nose in it at some point. But, as Karl Lebehde pointed out, everyone was in dire straits and men even stole food parcels from each other within the squad, so there was no point in getting too moralistic. Pahl took a dimmer view of Bertin’s conduct, because he had to overcome his disappointment. Fat substitute was a good thing, but solidarity was a better one; Bertin had taken to eating his evening meal on his bunk and no longer showed the same comradely attitude as before. Well, that would change too. As a starter punishment, they told him that he’d been overlooked for the task of caring for a certain letter, which Sergeant Süßmann, now missing, had given to Comrade Lebehde in December. Instead of getting upset or being offended, Bertin had calmly asked if the thing had been duly forwarded. He seemed not to care about things that he would have cared about three months previously. Yes, life was hard. It was no jolly jig with pancakes and New Year’s Eve punch. Pride, sensitivity and honour all got moth-eaten. The fur on the jacket of high ideals and good intentions wore thin, leaving nothing but a scabby rabbit pelt, blue and bald.