Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

‘Better not,’ said Bertin, then seeing Sister Kläre’s wide eyes: ‘Forget, I mean. People forget much too quickly.’ He stopped talking, realising he wouldn’t find the right words.

‘No, no,’ joked Posnanski, ‘we won’t forget this one. We’ll dress it up in patriotic colours and nice little rosy cheeks for future generations.’

‘I’ll be interested to see how you’re going to manage that,’ blinked Kroysing. ‘But beforehand, let me share my humble experiences with you. In the spring of 1915, on the Flanders front, we were facing the British and were pretty close to them when we installed our gas canisters – we had the honour of being the first gas company. From February to April we slept cosied up to those large iron canisters. One time one of them leaked, and I saw the damage in the morning in the shape of 45 sappers, dead and blue. And when we did a test explosion with the bloody things on the drill ground and carried the pieces home, every man who’d touched them entered the hereafter too. They died slowly. When I was in the hospital at Jülich with my first wound I met some of them. They died off, and no one really knew why. The doctors were very upset about it, but, hey ho, they still died. End of the line, alight here. Anyway, there we were waiting in our waterlogged trenches for a favourable wind. We kept having to relocate the canisters because they kept getting stuck in the clay. There were no gas masks back then. We were supposed to protect ourselves from the bloody stuff by shoving cotton wool in our noses. The Tommies kept throwing over cheery little notes, asking if the big stink was ever going to start. They were bursting with curiosity, they wrote. And then finally an east wind came, and we blew our gas over and the Tommies were curious no more. Their trenches were full of blue-black corpses when we walked through them. Blue and black, Tommies and Frenchmen, lying peacefully side by side. There were at least 5,000 dead on the Poelkapelle cycle track, and the lucky ones, who’d only got a bit of the stuff and were still choking and spitting, they expired in Jülich, without ceremony, slowly, one by one. Well, it was an unpleasant episode, best buried as quickly as possible. We’ll revisit it next time, when the only ammunition will be gas.’

‘You’re horrible, Kroysing,’ said Sister Kläre. ‘You always have to spoil everything. Haven’t I got enough on my plate looking after your filthy wounds? Can’t I spend five minutes soothing my soul with God’s creation without one of you butting in? The next war! There won’t be another war! If anyone threatens to go to war again after this massacre, our womenfolk will beat them to death with their brooms.’

‘Let’s hope so, sister,’ said Posnanski with conviction.

‘There won’t be another war,’ said Bertin, nodding. ‘This is the last one. Our rulers can fight the next one on their own. We men won’t be there.’

‘Quite right!’ cried Sister Kläre, wiping away a tear with the back of her index finger. She had been thinking of her husband, Colonel Schwersenz, a once proficient staff officer who had been sinking ever deeper into depression since the winter of 1914 and was now being cared for by her mother, the elderly Frau Pidderit, in a small hunting lodge in Hinterstein valley in the Bavarian Allgäu. Only the medical officer knew Sister Kläre’s story and real name. She was generally thought to be the plucky wife of a captain somewhere on the Eastern front, and there were whispered rumours about a flirtation with a very high-ranking personage.

Kroysing, towering above them all, his mouth set in a sarcastic line, shrugged his shoulders: ‘Then we have the honour of living through the funeral of the last war. It didn’t really have a very long career, war – a mere 5,000 years. It was born in the time of the Assyrians and ancient Egyptians, and we’re putting it in its coffin. The world has been waiting for us. The people who ran the Thirty Years’ War, the Seven Years’ War and the Napoleonic Wars didn’t know what they were doing. We folks from the 1914 war are the ones to sort it out – we of all people.’

‘That’s right,’ said Sister Kläre and Bertin in defiant unison. However, Bertin couldn’t help but see a grave and them all as grave diggers standing round it, spades in hand: Kroysing, the nurse, the fat judge advocate, and he himself, outlined against the cloudy sky, hacking at clods of earth. Below them bulged a bloated belly and a plump, hairless face with a grin across its chubby cheeks beneath its closed eyes – perhaps portentous, perhaps a sign of contentment at its own demise.

Meanwhile, Sister Kläre closed first the shutters then the window. ‘Now put the light on and then you can go,’ she said.

They all blinked as the light bounced off the walls. ‘We’d all like to thank you for your kind hospitality,’ said Judge Advocate Posnanski, bowing over Sister Kläre’s long, strong hand, calloused by work. A strand of ash blonde hair escaped from her nun-like head covering. Beneath it shone her beautifully set eyes. Her alluring, tender lips were obdurately closed. Hell of a lovely little thing with her Madonna face and pert lips , thought Kroysing. V ery likely she did have a thing with the crown prince . He felt the need to improve his standing with her. ‘What would I get, sister—’

‘You’d get nothing,’ she interrupted, eyes flashing. ‘You’d get a punch on the nose.’

‘—if I dished up something extra nice for you? Allow me to introduce you to my friend Werner Bertin…’ – Sister Kläre stopped in the middle of the room, her lips slightly parted and her hands outstretched as if to push him away – ‘… author of the much-read novel Love at Last Sight .’

Sister Kläre’s trained eyes took in Bertin’s grey-brown face, drawn cheeks, bristly chin, the rim of slack, dirty skin above his worn and muddy lice-infested collar. When he laughed in embarrassment, she saw he had a gap in his teeth and a broken front tooth and that he was going bald on top. And yet there was something about his eyebrows, his forehead, his hands, which suggested that Kroysing wasn’t joking. This man had written that tender love story! ‘It’s you,’ she said quietly, offering him her hand. ‘I can’t believe it. And my friend Annemarie in Krefeld wrote to me three months ago to say that she had met the author and he was a Hussar lieutenant and a charming man.’

Bertin laughed in disgust at this, and Posnanski and Kroysing laughed at his disgust, and they all left Sister Kläre’s nun’s cell like a cheerful party breaking up. Now she could sleep in the room again, she said, adding that Bertin should visit her the next day when she would be off duty.

‘Well be in touch,’ said Posnanski, bringing the memorable meeting to a close.

THE BLACKBIRDS WERE singing as Judge Advocate Posnanski got out of his car at Montfaucon castle. After some thought, he had decided to let the package with Private Pahl’s shoes in it disappear without trace so as not to complicate his request for Private Bertin to be transferred to the Lychow division court martial of the Eastern Group. But he could have spared himself these reflections. Sometimes documents such as his request took weeks to arrive, other times only days. This one was passed very quickly from the Western to the Eastern Group, where it was eyed suspiciously in the ADC’s office and a query scrawled across it in blue pencil: was ASC battalion X/20 in a position to give up any of its men? That meant: kindly say that you are not in a position to do so. As well as the usual hostilities, the transfer of the Lychow division to the Russian front played a decisive role in this. The rivalry between the fronts was gathering momentum. The new Supreme Command had not been able to change this, and the two staffs rejoiced – General Schieffenzahn’s word – only in each other’s setbacks.