Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

Wilhelm Pahl had been listening carefully, both legs stretched out, thankful for the delay. The tear in his sole under the ball of his left foot gaped, and the right sole was worn through under his big toe. Convinced he’d distracted his friend, Karl Lebehde surveyed the bald patches with his small, glittering eyes. Surreptitiously, he took hold of the rusty nail. Early that morning he’d attached a wooded handle to it made from an elder branch.

‘From nowt comes nowt,’ repeated Pahl meanwhile. ‘That’s why I’ve got to get going and come to the aid of the Party Comrades at home. The signs from Russia says it’s time, which is why I asked you to do this to me. I thought it would be easy. But when I first tried to step on some rusty barbed wire, I noticed immediately that the first step is the hardest. I just didn’t realise how hard. Laugh if you like, Karl, but I’m starting to wonder if it wouldn’t be better if I did it myself after all. It’s like shaving. If someone else cuts you, it hurts more.’

Karl Lebehde smiled. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Do it yourself if you want.’

Wilhelm Pahl sat hanging his head with his back to the wall of the shell crater wearing an agonised expression that made his friend feel very sorry for him. ‘We’re so weakened,’ he said. ‘No fat on our bodies, and the constant cold and stupor, and the lice don’t let you sleep at night, and there’s no hot water to do washing in – it’s a pile of shit, Karl.’ He closed his eyes. ‘If it weren’t for you doing the rounds of the field kitchens I wouldn’t have had the strength to get up in the morning for ages now. Ow!’ he screamed suddenly, ripping his eyes open. ‘What are you doing?’

Karl Lebehde pointed to the spike in Pahl’s shoe. ‘It’s all over,’ he said gently. ‘It’s a good centimetre inside you, my son. Don’t move for the next five minutes. The rest is in the hands of the dear Lord, who created blood circulation.’

Pahl went belatedly pale and shuddered. ‘Good that it’s over,’ he said. ‘You handled that well. I feel a bit funny, but it had to be done. I’d thought it through and… People who find it easy don’t really know what they’re letting themselves in for. At the same time it was really nothing. The cause of the proletariat is worth a bigger sacrifice than that.’

‘The colour’s coming back to your face, Wilhelm. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is not cheap,’ Lebehde joked. ‘And tonight you’ll tell old Barkopp you stepped on some barbed wire…’

‘I asked him for new shoes or boots the other day for the third or fourth time. He just grinned. “New boots.”’

‘And if you can’t walk tomorrow morning, you’ll be put on barracks duty and you’ll have to scour the muck out of that lice-infested hut with Naumann II.’

‘I will be able to walk tomorrow. It doesn’t hurt that much any more. Do you think it’s bad enough?’

‘Don’t worry about that. It’ll start to fester like nobody’s business in two or three days’ time. And if the doctor tells you off for not reporting sick earlier, Barkopp will have to explain that we men in the working parties are such orphans we don’t even have a paramedic to look after us. And that’s nothing but the truth. Besides you don’t feel much pain in your toes if they’re nearly freezing off.’ And he yanked the nail out of the wound, looked at it, threw away the elder wood shaft and hammered the iron spike into the splintering ice sheet with his heel. ‘Don’t you betray us now, little fella,’ he murmured.

Wilhelm Pahl’s normal colour was returning. His face was still grey but not quite as bloodless as before. Cautiously, he tried to get up and walk; he could. He’d hobble a little, partly from the wound and partly for the benefit of the sergeant and later the doctor. The two men climbed out of the shell crater, shivered in the wind and tramped off to look for shells.

‘And you really do want to take Bertin back to Germany with you?’

Pahl nodded. He had to grind his teeth as a twinge of pain ran through him. ‘Haven’t you noticed how he’s slowly going to pieces? He can’t take much more. And I’ll eat the sole of my shoe if he doesn’t make a very useful Comrade when he’s awoken from his stupor.’

‘Hold on for a bit, Wilhelm, and you won’t have to eat any shoe soles, neither roasted nor boiled, because you’ll be living it up. Apparently, there’s a really good leg doctor at the field hospital in Dannevoux. I’m a regular at the kitchen back door there, and if I let the kitchen NCO know that you’re a friend of mine, they’ll feed you up good and proper.’

An aeroplane sped eastwards above them, braving the bitter cold. A young French sergeant, bent over the cockpit with his camera ready, peered through the dry morning light. He didn’t miss the two ants trudging across the abandoned field; he could’ve taken them out with a rifle. But his remit for that day was to photograph Vilosnes-East station, which was being used for ammunitions transport. Of course that was only part of his remit and it would take him further afield. The loops of the Meuse, and the slopes and valleys of the hills also repaid photographing – and later bombing based on the photographs. Jean-François Rouard, a young painter, was in no sense a bloodthirsty person. He would have much preferred to be sitting in a well heated atelier in Montparnasse or Montmartre, helping the further development of French painting, which had gone in new directions since Picasso and Bracque. But as he was now a soldier he had to make the most of these barren war years. Even once pull a bomb release handle and hear and see freight cars blown to bits. Below was his target for that day. He sighted it with his sharp eyes, clicked the shutter and the plates, adequately exposed, fell into the container. The line of Dannevoux roofs up against the tiny wagons on the railway track would look quite odd in the picture. That was because of the perspective in aerial photography, which had its own rules, as yet untested, and offered great possibilities to cartographers. Painting wouldn’t benefit. He knew that. But from a military and aeronautical point of view, the Sivry-Vilosnes-Dannevoux triangle, with the loops of the Meuse and its bridges, was a tough nut to crack. The airman given the job of torpedoing the ammunitions train at night would have to bloody well watch out.

A MAN’S POWERS of resistance are limited. However, it often takes a while for him to realise that; others usually notice first. Certain types who retain a sort of nostalgia for suffering from their childhood sometimes astonish the world with their martyrdom and heroic endurance. When they break, however, they break completely – it comes as a surprise because their intellectual and spiritual capabilities have been eroding away imperceptibly.

A man was strolling along the road from Vilosnes to Sivry, enjoying the soft of golden light of a late February noontime. He grinned quietly to himself and whistled along with the sparrows, yellowhammers and tits. He had a job to do of course; he wasn’t just walking about enjoying the charms of nature. It was too cold for that, for the frost was relentless. The nature of this happy man’s business was clear from the objects in his right hand: an oval French hand grenade and a long, mushroom-shaped shell fuse of pure brass. ‘Take these to Herr Knappe,’ the bewhiskered Sergeant Barkopp had told Private Bertin. ‘He can have a sniff at them. Mind you hold them up the way I’ve given them to you. You know why.’ Private Bertin did know why. The fuses were awkward customers. They’d explode on you if you changed their position such that the needle inside fell forwards or backwards of the angle at which the damned thing had lain since it was fired or thrown. At first, Private Bertin walked along with the two deadly objects in his right hand. The frost bit into his immobile fingers, and a glove was no help. After a while, Private Bertin started to think this was stupid. Besides, he wanted to be able to swing his arms and jot down any ideas or lines of poetry that might occur to him on such a lovely, clear day. Suddenly, he decided to shove the two explosive machines in his trouser pockets, one in the right and one in the left, making sure that up stayed up and down down. But what if he slipped and fell? The road beside the Meuse was frozen solid and icy, making a slip possible. And he had to cross the river at Sivry on a long wooden bridge, a pontoon bridge to be precise, resting on boats and often pretty slippery. But what the heck? Private Bertin wanted to have warm hands and to feel free and to be as comfortable as possible. Between leaving Sergeant Barkopp and reaching Sergeant Knappe he wanted to open up as a private person. It was a wonderful thing to be alone. All a person needed was to be able to walk and dream.