Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

‘So far as that’s in our power,’ agreed Bertin cautiously.

‘It’s in our power alone. Only the victims of injustice can stop injustice. Only the oppressed can put an end to oppression. Only men who’ve been shelled can bring the shell factories to a standstill. Why would those who profit from the torment want to abolish it? No reason.’

Bertin was glad to be able to distract Pahl from his sorrows by contradicting him. A sensible man would willingly give up one-third of his power in order to be able to enjoy the remaining two-thirds in peace, he said. But Pahl said no. That had never happened. Everyone preferred to grasp hold of three thirds and be killed for it. And so the proletariat would be forced into a reckoning with the capitalist class.

Pain hardens you , Bertin thought. Aloud, he said there were some very decent capitalists.

And in a whisper Pahl rejected this objection. First the world had to be rid of collective injustice. ‘If you had a finger hacked off, you’d spend your whole life wanting to abolish finger hacking. It’s good to get this all off my chest. This place is full of butchers and pious old women, and the patients only think about next lunchtime’s soup and whether the nurses are sleeping with the doctors or officers. Sometimes it drives me nuts. The ruling class certainly has finished us off.’

Bertin stole a glance at his watch. Pahl noticed and said he should go: duty required sleep. ‘That game old bird will be back in a minute, so we’d better decide quickly what we’re going to do.’ Would Bertin allow himself to be requested if Pahl could get him a job somewhere when he’d recovered and was back at work? He’d be able to work his way up from typesetter to copy editor, and it was a secure job as no administration could afford to ignore newspapers, whose job it was to titivate the national mood morning, noon and night.

Bertin looked away. This tormented man was so sure of his cause and so convinced he’d be able to spirit Bertin away. Bertin asked if he hadn’t perhaps underestimated the difficulties.

‘No,’ said Pahl impatiently. ‘And once you’re in Berlin, perhaps you’ll come and talk to a works gathering or a members’ meeting. And then maybe you’ll write me up a few leaflets that’ll get the ammunitions factory workers thinking. Agreed?’

Bertin looked into the drawn, waxen face of Pahl the typesetter, now more than ever a cripple and resolved to resist evil. For a moment he bridled inside and wondered why they were all drawn to him: Kroysing from the right, Pahl from the left. Why did no one leave him in peace to listen to his own inner voice? He suddenly clenched his fist and thought, Let me come to myself!

But Pahl misunderstood the gesture. ‘Good,’ he whispered. ‘Bravo!’

Sister Mariechen came up behind them, and Bertin stood up. ‘See if you can fix it, Wilhelm,’ he said with a smile.

‘Come again soon,’ said Pahl with a similar sort of smile.

And Bertin thought how much better he looked when he was smiling. The nurse waved a little package at him: a ham sandwich as a thank you, she explained.

‘No one could resist that,’ said Bertin. ‘I’ll eat it on my way down.’

‘Reward for your good deed,’ said Pahl.

THE STAFF OF the ‘West of the Meuse’ Army Group were each week reduced to despair by the breadth of Judge Advocate Dr Posnanski’s knowledge and his propensity to share it. How were they to know that their billet of Montfaucon had provided the poet Heinrich Heine with an opportunity to lampoon his colleagues Fouqué, Uhland and Tieck in ‘Mistress Joanna of Montfaucon’? Posnanski, in his graciousness, didn’t expect that others might be educated in these matters too, but no one likes to be made to look like an ignorant boor, and less tolerant men than Lieutenant Winfried, the general’s ADC, found the judge advocate’s blethering rather offensive. ‘I’ve got nothing against Jews,’ Brigadier-General von Hesta (whose family had migrated from the Hungarian to the Prussian service in 1835) growled on one occasion. ‘Nothing at all, so long as they knuckle down and keep their gobs shut. But when they worry away at this book stuff like a dog in a sandpit – out with them.’ Should Dr Posnanski learn of such remarks, the corners of his mouth, much wider apart than those of most men, would twitch, he’d close one of his eyes, look heavenwards with the other and drily note: ‘That’s what comes of letting newcomers into the ways of the Mark. Let them play the Prussian as long as the likes of us have. They weren’t there at Fehrbellin, they fought on the other side from Mollwitz to Torgau, and I didn’t see them at Waterloo either – and that little chicklet wants to say his piece.’ Indeed, his friends admired in him a certain philosophical calm, which came from an understanding of how slowly civilisation progresses and that people absorb that progress at a snail’s pace. ‘If I thought life under our changing moon would always remain as it is now, I’d breakfast on rat poison tomorrow and greet you in the evening from the fourth dimension.’

He said this one morning to Lieutenant Winfried. They were sitting in the cellar dugout of the Mairie in the village of Esnes, both on urgent business. It was to do with the relief of the division – a weighty matter. As Hill 304 and Mort Homme could testify, the Lychow Army Group had done its duty, and when it returned to the Russian front that had been its home since the start of the war, as it was about to do, it would be able to inscribe certain names from the Battle of the Somme in its group register. While in France, it had bored a couple of tunnels in the rock – the Raven, Gallwitz, Bismarck and Lychow tunnels – and it would be leaving the ‘West of the Meuse’ sector in excellent condition. For as everyone knew, from the infantry to the general staff, who were inclined to make up their own minds about army commanders, General von Lychow asked a lot of his men but nothing unnecessary. Yes, Old Lychow still enjoyed the confidence of the men. And when the French took the left bank of the Meuse in August 1917, and those tunnels were full of dead Germans, a number of the officers around the crown prince expressed the view that it wouldn’t have happened under Lychow…

The two men were occupied with completely different matters. While Lieutenant Winfried was to inform His Excellency of conditions in the sector that was to be evacuated next, Posnanski was to investigate a break-in at the provision stores in Esnes; responsibility for it was being passed back and forth among units, and no one wanted to admit it was them. ‘From the point of view of who’s hungry, it was all of them,’ said Posnanski earnestly, ‘but the main culprit was probably the name of the place. Because although that’s not how the French say it, our men pronounce it “Essen”. And having said the German word for food, they want to have some.’

‘Posnanski,’ groaned Winfried, ‘have you no sympathy?’

‘I do indeed. For example with my clerk Adler who’s quaking with fear in case he is sent to be medically re-evaluated for active service.’

‘Is he going to be re-evaluated? God help him.’

Posnanski’s bald, knobbly head bobbed in concern: ‘It’s a shame because he was a good lawyer and it’s a double shame because he had training. I suppose I’ll have to find another one.’

‘There’s plenty of choice,’ said Lieutenant Winfried. He was studying the battle history of a particular battalion whose commander was to be put in charge of the rear guard.

‘Less than people think. I require certain moral aptitudes, and they don’t grow on trees.’

‘Seek and ye shall find,’ murmured the ADC, trying to decipher some reports written in half rubbed-out pencil: 12-18.XII.16, extremely critical days…