Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

Private Bertin really was in a bad way and every day it got worse. The back-breaking work in icy conditions had used up his last reserves of strength, and the occasional pleasant interlude, of which there were some, didn’t seem to help.

One evening, when he was already dozing on his bed and the rest of Schwertlein’s squad were doing their mending and playing cards, a stout man with glasses, a flat nose and bulging eyes marched into the barracks, bringing a gust of cold air behind him. He looked around in the bright carbide light, taking in the iron stove, the long pipe with drying laundry and the bare windows, which the men had labouriously covered with newspaper to keep out the wind and cold, and wheezed out that he was looking for a certain private named Bertin who was a trainee lawyer and had obviously come to the wrong place. Nearly all of the men had stood up when he came in, as in his fur coat he looked like an officer come to carry out an inspection. But Sergeant Porisch waved this aside and said there was no need for any fuss. He saluted Sergeant Schwerdtlein, put a packet of cigarettes on the table and had everyone won over.

In the meantime, Bertin pulled himself up, looked at the stranger with sleepy eyes and said he was the man he was looking for. At that, Sergeant Porisch explained that although he was from the court martial in Montmédy, he wasn’t there to cause Bertin any trouble, but simply wanted some information for a current case. And as the main purpose of his journey was connected with a secondary purpose, he asked Bertin if he would kindly put his boots back on and accompany him to the station, where a friend of his, also a Berliner, was on duty. At the words ‘Montmédy court martial’ Bertin had brought his feet to the floor and said: ‘Aha.’ Suddenly, he was moving more confidently and within a minute he was standing at the door ready to go.

‘Let’s get one down us,’ wheezed Sergeant Porisch, making a drinking motion with his fist.

‘Just don’t send him back plastered,’ said Sergeant Schwerdtlein. ‘Work starts again tomorrow morning at 6am sharp,’ and the other men sniggered maliciously.

They walked carefully down the slippery, dimly lit staircase. The icy streets lay deserted in a vicious easterly wind. ‘Let’s get into the warm,’ groaned Porisch. ‘These thin shoes of mine are not suitable for polar expeditions.’

Bertin, who had completely revived in the biting night wind, laughed a little: the man was wearing nicely cut civilian shoes of fine leather. ‘Where are you actually taking me off to?’ he asked as they walked.

‘To Fürth, an old friend of mine from university,’ panted Porisch, breathing heavily through his flat nose. ‘But we’d better keep our gobs shut or we’ll freeze our throats off.’

Bertin knew Sergeant Fürth slightly, and had always taken him for a dislikeable big mouth. There were plenty of wisecracking know-alls from the city in the army, but in his own billet Sergeant Fürth made a much less offensive impression than he did outside.

He used the informal du with Sergeant Porisch and shook Bertin’s hand as warmly as if they were old drinking buddies. Two fine scars ran across his right cheek, one straight and one jagged – tiercé and quarté , thought Bertin, surprised that he hadn’t forgotten these student fencing terms from his school days. In any case, they fitted with the way Fürth had done out his billet. A huge sofa of yellowish wood upholstered in tobacco brown wool occupied the back wall. Above it Fürth had hung a sort of coat of arms painted in red, white and black diagonal stripes with ornate writing in the centre that conveyed the mysterious message: ‘To A.J.B. the banner!’ Beneath it an embroidered student cap hung from a nail, and beneath that were two crossed sabres of French origin with coloured ribbons from various academic associations woven through their hilts. To the right and left of it pictures of bearded men in drinking garb, cut from magazines, were fixed to the wall with drawing pins. Bertin realised with amazement that this had all been swept here from the forgotten world of German universities, where young men joined associations seemingly in order to drink, fence and enjoy their youth, but in fact to smooth their future career path with the connections and patronage provided by the ‘old boy network’. As the various layers of the German bourgeoisie excluded young Jewish men of similar social standing, on transparent pretexts of race or faith, they had formed their own associations, with or without Christians, unless, like Bertin, they preferred to join the army of free, self-reliant academics, where what mattered was not a man’s origins or how wealthy his father was but his abilities, commitment and personal dedication. So Bertin now stood in the billet of an A.J.B.-er, who wore colours and fought with sabres like a member of a corps or fraternity, but who, as a member of the University Jurists’ Club, had known many club mates and protégés of weighty professors from the time of that great old man, Gotthold Mertens, who for his part had first seen the light of day in a modest parsonage in Güstrow in Mecklenburg.

Tea stood steaming on the table beside a bottle of rum for grog and a box of cigars. Sergeant Fürth himself was smoking a short pipe. ‘I feel,’ he beamed, ‘as if I had a drinking jacket on and this were a house party in Munich or Freiburg. You get these kinds of Arctic nights with no snow there too. It’s very decent of you, Pogge, to come to say goodbye like this.’ Bertin guessed that Pogge was the sergeant’s drinking name – a Low German word meaning frog, which given Herr Porisch’s appearance, wasn’t at all inappropriate.

‘Hardly,’ said Porisch. ‘I came to see you and I came to see him’ – he pointed to Bertin – ‘but above all it suited me to come. Because I need to talk. Because I can’t keep the thing to myself and I know that I won’t find a single soul in Berlin who’ll believe me or understand: people don’t dare use their heads in our circles because they’re so intimidated and so patriotic. And in the War Materials Department, where I’m being shifted, I’ll obviously have to act much more stupid than elsewhere – do your walls have ears, Pelican?’

Pelican – Bertin had to laugh. Again, the name wasn’t a bad fit with Sergeant Fürth’s big nose, small, round, bird-like eyes and receding chin.

‘Pull your chairs in closer…’

‘But first let’s fortify ourselves with a slug of something to help against this polar chill,’ said Pelican.’

‘Slug is the right word,’ said Porisch, noisily blowing his nose. Was Bertin mistaken or were the fat man’s eyes a little moist?

So, Carl Georg Mertens, the erstwhile judge advocate in Montmédy, had poisoned himself. He had not, as had been reported in the papers, died in an accident, neither a car crash nor an aerial bomb. ‘It was too much for him, you see,’ snivelled Herr Porisch. ‘He wasn’t used to the brutality of this world, and so he threw in the towel so that men with thicker skins and coarser hands could pick it up – men who had a better idea how to shovel muck than him. He was a gentleman. No one apart from me realises quite what a gentleman he was. And to boot his father had equipped him rather poorly for this life – had crushed him, in fact. Being old Mertens’ son was a job in itself.’ And then Porisch unburdened himself of the pressure that had weighed on him for weeks, and the words tumbled haphazardly from his mouth, mixed with cigar smoke and interspersed with unclear insinuations and terrible jokes. He talked most about the Belgian deportations, because he had helped to collect information about them. Fürth showed himself to be much better informed about this than Private Bertin, who seldom saw a newspaper, and it was years since he had felt so keenly that he was still training to be a lawyer. He’d removed his tunic and sat in his blue sweater with his elbows on the table. Agreeable sips of grog warmed him inside. Now he understood what he’d seen around Romagne: civilians in thin, black Sunday clothes standing motionless on the road with their shovels stuck in the icy ground, not working to warm themselves up. He had been told they were Belgian civilians by the Landsturm guards, who had long since give up trying to make the Belgians work. They starved, they froze and they didn’t move a finger. It had left a deep impression on Private Bertin. It was called forcible recruitment, but that expression hid the reality. However, he had also disapproved of the fierce contempt in which the Belgians held those of their countrymen who crawled to the guards in Flemish, made fires and heated coffee for them in return for some bread. This is war, he’d thought; people shouldn’t be so sensitive and proud. The conquered had to come to terms with the conqueror and not increase their own suffering unnecessarily. Now, coloured by the outrage of the dead Mertens, these things appeared differently to Bertin.