Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

Pale ochre light suffused the high plateau. Private Bertin had strayed too far on his search, and it would soon be nightfall. He trotted on, jumping back and forth, then found a path and continued slowly, catching his breath. But the French batteries in the former German positions knew the path and before it was completely dark they flung a few well-meaning shells in his direction. In the deathly cold air, he heard the discharge at once. By the time the shell had exploded, Private Bertin was pressed to the ground, flat as an insect. But as the splinters from the explosion flew over him with the muffled drone of a giant beetle, a mighty battle was going on within him. Why was he taking cover in this idiotic way? What was the point of extending his life from one incident to the next? Wouldn’t it be as well to help fate remove him from here, never mind to where, by sticking his backside in the air so that one of the splinters might tear into his flesh? He’d often considered letting his foot be crushed under a wagon but hadn’t been able to resolve to do it. But if things continued as they were for another couple of months, there was no telling what he might do. For now, however, he pressed himself into the earth and clung to life. Then the evening blessing was over. He knocked the dirt from his clothes, pulled his cap down over his woollen head protector and trotted off for dinner and some warmth. He hadn’t realised it yet himself, but there was no denying that in his overall demeanour the one he resembled most of all his comrades was that poor idiot Naumann, Ignaz.

An icy wind from the northern glaciers and eastern plains whistled across the churned-up land. Every gust cut across the area, whining and crashing against tree stumps, howling upwards then whooshing on. Between the dun-coloured earth and the ceiling of uniform grey cloud, the wind held sway. Harried and tormented, it lacerated its airy body against the rusty teeth of the barbed wire in a morbid frenzy. There were 10,000 km of barbed between the stormy English Channel and the leaden stone walls of Switzerland, leaving plenty of scope for the wind to whip itself up against the the barbed wire spikes, and this it did. It cut against the knife-sharp edges of old food tins, moaning there. It couldn’t stop – it was in too much of a hurry to reach the warmer climes of the western ocean – but it pulled at every scrap of rotting cloth, chased pieces of paper into the bottoms of shell holes, not caring about the rats that peered restlessly out of their holes and were starving because the whole world had suddenly turned to stone, and rampaged on over the plains, through the narrow gorges, magnificent as an heir squandering the last of his inheritance, knowing it will soon be over.

Two ASC privates had sought refuge from the wind and found it in the bottom of very large and deep shell crater. They thought they were sitting on a thick sheet of ice but they were wrong. They were in fact sitting on the bottom of an ice cone that pointed downwards to the centre of the earth, and frozen within it, like an embryo in the womb, lay a dead German solider, waiting for the midsummer thaw. Then he’d be discovered, earth would be thrown over his fleshless bones and the rags of his uniform, and a wooden cross would be erected over him reading: ‘Here lies a brave German soldier’. That’s if anyone went to so much trouble, for by that time the first tank squadrons would be appearing on the horizon, the first American air squadrons would have relieved the French and things would be looking quite a lot livelier in the western theatre of war. But the two ASC men knew nothing of this as they spread out their legs, trusting their thick layers of clothing to protect them from the ice. To be absolutely sure, one of them, Karl Lebehde, had brought some newspapers with him, which he shared with his friend. As all beggars know, newspaper protects against the sharpest frost and the iciest of seats thanks to the gauze-thin layers of air between the sheets. And the two muddy, unwashed men bundled up in grey clothes looked like beggars, with their frozen faces poking out from their dark grey head protectors, their bluish noses and reddened eyes.

Wilhelm Pahl and Karl Lebehde were speaking to each other in hushed tones – not whispering exactly but speaking in such a way that no one outside could hear their voices. The tension in their faces and their quick, furtive movements suggested they were doing something untoward. Karl Lebehde had a sharp, rusty tool in his hand – a filed nail, which must have lain about in the damp for several days after it was filed, for the point was covered in rust too.

‘Jesus, Karl,’ groaned Pahl. ‘If only I wasn’t so bloody scared. First there’s the pain, and I don’t have a high pain threshold. Then there’s the hospital, and if they have to amputate, they probably won’t have any chloroform to spare. That means more pain. And then who knows if you can walk about or stand at a type case with a missing toe?’

‘Listen, lad,’ replied Karl Lebehde, ‘if you want to buy something, you have to pay the price. There’s no other way. Come on now, son, give me your foot and we’ll give it a wee tickle.’

‘Shout a bit louder, why don’t you?’ said Pahl. ‘Then we’ll have Barkopp or old Knappe over here watching you operate on me.’

Karl Lebehde knew neither Barkopp nor Knappe nor anyone else was nearby. But since mutilations such as the one he was about to carry out at his friend’s request were the only really effective way to escape the vengeance of the class state, the bourgeois Prussian Army pursued those who performed them with blood-thirsty rancour, and so he stood up, clambered up the sloping earthen wall, set his face to the wind and looked around. It was 9.30am, and there was no one around to see his head and freckled hands suddenly appear. Reassured, he slid back down. ‘I don’t know why I always fall for your tricks. You just wanted to put if off, didn’t you, old pal?’

‘Yes, I did. I’m scared stiff. God knows how this’ll all end.’

Karl Lebehde’s voice took on the reassuring tone of a mother persuading her child to go to the dentist with her: ‘Listen, Wilhelm, you’re welcome to forget it as far I’m concerned. I don’t fancy your chances or have any faith in the stuff you talked about during those long winter nights. You think the German workers are too dozy, but it takes someone like me who was brought up behind a bar listening to the rubbish they talk year in, year out to know just how dozy they are.’

‘You can’t say nowt against the Berlin workers, Karl.’

‘Yes, you can, Wilhelm. Yes, indeed. Our Party Comrades are all right, and the Comrades in Hamburg are all right. The core is very capable – nothing against them. And they’re probably in high dudgeon at the moment because their stomachs are empty, and so they’ll listen to you and the couple of men working back at home, and maybe they’ll walk out and jack in work and demand peace. And what will happen then? They won’t be put up against the wall. Thousands will be called up, 80 or 90 will end up in the nick and the rest will get bigger rations with a bit of ham thrown in now and then for heavy labour – and that’ll be the end of it.’

‘So you think the German workers don’t know the score and are going to let themselves be given a showing up by the Russians? If the papers are to be believed, they’ve put a bit of a bomb under their Duma with those massive strikes and hunger riots outside bakeries.’

‘Yes, I do think that.’ (Karl Lebehde tried to be as verbose as possible in order to distract Pahl.) ‘I know as little about the Comrades in Russia as you do. But what I do know, my dear Wilhelm, is that unless the Party newspaper Vorwärts had been making things up, there are a few little differences between us and them. For example, things were always worse in Russia than at home, they faced starvation, Siberia was just around the corner, the bourgeoisie had had enough of Tsarism and world opinion was against it too. Then there were those spectacular defeats by the Japanese in 1905. And clear distinctions between the classes provide an excellent training for class war: we’re here and you’re there with no bridge between us. But everything has always been hunky dory at home. Socialists were only persecuted a little bit under Bismarck and that’s long since been forgotten, and the labour movement was so full of victories and dreams of the future state it didn’t realise that a proletarian on Sunday still stands a bit lower than a bourgeois on a weekday. And when the men in standy-up collars started talking the red, white and black of the flag, the proletariat couldn’t afford to ignore it and no less a man than August Bebel bust a gut to demonstrate his patriotism, shouldered a musket and marched against Russia, and the men in standy-up collars just laughed. But why did they laugh? He was speaking the truth. And that was in peacetime when we had a small, modest army, and the Party’s coffers were full to busting. That’s the difference, do you see? From nowt comes nowt.’