Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

JUDGE ADVOCATE POSNANSKI received the Kroysing files from the Montmédy court martial and ASC battalion X/20’s negative decision on the same morning via the staff records office. Every man in Montfaucon who came into contact with that piece of paper had a laugh at it. Sergeant Major Pont laughed at it as he put it in the judge advocate’s in-tray, and the judge advocate himself laughed, as did his clerk Sergeant Adler, despite the pressure he was under. Even the orderly, Gieseken from the Landsturm, burst out laughing when he saw the document, observing: ‘Whoever wrote this is some man. We’ve got a hard neck here in the Prussian army – and that’s for sure.’

The only man who didn’t laugh but was furious was Colonel Winfried, Excellency Lychow’s ADC and nephew. He was angry at the lack of respect for his uncle, at the sheer insolence of the ASC major on the other bank and above all that the refusal would have to stand. ‘If Dr Posnanski thinks we’re going to let this matter detain us he’s got another think coming. Another time, we might have taken it up, but we don’t have the time right now to start doing callisthenics and going on the warpath against Group East. He’ll have to magic up a replacement as his clerk.’

Sergeant Major Pont, a thickset master builder from Kalkar on the lower Rhine, smiled a knowing smile and said: ‘I’m of the view that we will not be spared this Herr Bertin. That’s what my nose tells me.’ And he pressed his thumb to his squat nose. ‘Lawyers can work magic.’ And as proof he told the story of an advocate in Cleves who had fought a firm of brick makers for a year and a half over two lorryloads of bricks and had nearly ruined it.

Lieutenant Winfried carried on going through some documents on the of the division’s step-by-step transfer. ‘Posnanski will have to handle it himself. I’m not going to bother His Excellency. He’s already back in his beloved east, sniffing lakes and pine woods from his window. If the French don’t put a spoke in our wheels, we’ll be gone in a fortnight and Group East can… shed a tear for us.’

Sergeant Major Pont stuck out his lower lip and murmured something about how far away they’d soon be from the lower Rhine, then veered into saying he’d like to go on a three-day official trip so he might visit his mother. Lieutenant Winfried replied crisply that the sergeant major’s desire was God’s desire, adding only that he would like him back five days before the staff departed.

Pont thanked him profusely and immediately consulted the railway map to work out the best place for him and his wife Luise to meet. He loved her, and she was the centre of his life.

In the early evening, Judge Advocate Dr Posnanksi sat at the round table in his chilly living room, which actually belonged to the pharmacist Jovin and his wife but had been removed from them by the town headquarters at Montfaucon and given to the judge advocate as his billet. The room was full of solid, old-fashioned furniture and artefacts. The lamp stood on a high alabaster pedestal and shed a mellow light through a pleated silk shade. The paintings on the wall were rustic renderings of members of Madame Jovin’s family, peasants, who had not been slow to seize their chance when the aristocracy’s estates were partitioned immediately after the revolution. The Jovins had a son in the field and a married daughter in Paris and under constant threat from enemy Zeppelins. Their interaction with their compulsory lodger was limited to a dozen words daily. But compared to some of his predecessors, they found this German officer tactful and not unlikeable. Madame Jovin occasionally remarked to her husband that the way he lived was almost French, praise which Monsieur Jovin felt he must circumscribe with an ‘Oh là là’. But Dr Posnanski was at home a lot, he drank black coffee and red wine in the evening, and he loved books and took his work back to his quarters, which he had left unchanged. He was domesticated, frugal, moderate and industrious, and he didn’t have the dreadful habit of smoking cigars, which left the curtains, tapestries and carpets hopelessly saturated with tobacco. Madame Jovin could not have wished for a more agreeable intruder for the duration of this dreadful war.

Posnanski, in an old brown tweed house jacket, laid his cigar in its white holder on the pewter ashtray from time to time and stretched his slippered feet under the table. The only military item in his clothing were his long, grey trousers with red piping. His thick neck bulged from an open shirt with no buttons or collar, and the Kroysing files lays scattered on Madame Jovin’s elegant walnut table. The Bertin affair glimmered on the edge of his awareness; it would be sorted out later – or not. As intellect was not held in respect and there was no demand for men of good will, it would probably fall through. A lawyer had to be well-versed in injustice and not let it disconcert him. But this case was about the fundamentals of coexistence. He had already established the legal facts in conversation with the brother and accuser. There was no conclusive proof in these papers that the younger Kroysing had been deliberately got rid of because of misappropriated foodstuffs – because meat, butter, ham, sugar and beer had not ended up in the right stomachs but the wrong ones. If there were no other cases and he’d had all the time in the world to become obsessed with this one, he would have questioned the men individually, forced the NCOs to confess, artfully pumped the orderly room and the company and battalion commanders for information about the normal duration of outpost duty and how often men were relieved, and then examined the question of why young Kroysing had not been given leave to appear before the court martial and why the files had been sent to Ingolstadt. All that having been established, the witness Bertin could have marched in and read out young Kroysing’s letter and testament. With his advocate’s oratory, bolstered by genuine conviction, he could then have forced the judges to see that such activities could not go unpunished as that would only encourage them. Advocate Posnanski was confident he could have brought such a case to a happy conclusion with the public behind him and the nation avidly following the matter for weeks, passionately debating whether there had been a cover-up or the officers were just carrying out their duties – in other words in peacetime.

Peacetime! Posnanski leant back in his chair and snorted derisively. In peacetime, this Kroysing case would have been a sure-fire route to victory and fame. Could something like that happen in peacetime? Of course it could. If you replaced the ASC battalion with a large industrial concern that clothed and fed its workers through its own canteens and shops, housed them and provided medical care, then the opportunities for corruption and profiteering at the expense of the mass of the workers would be just as great as in the Prussian army. If you put Kroysing in the overalls of an apprentice and future engineer, assigned him to dangerous work until his knowledge of a crime was extinguished by an industrial accident – an industrial accident helped along ever so slightly by cunning people in the know – then you pretty much had the exact sequence of events as Posnanski was convinced they had occurred. But woe betide the employers if such a thing happened in their company. In a well-governed nation they’d go to jail; in a nation where the exploited were on the march there would be a mass uprising whose effects would be felt deep into the middle classes; in Britain or France new parliamentary elections and a change of government would be required. Even in the German Fatherland, such a case would have far-reaching political consequences; none of the ruling groups would dare to back the guilty parties. An experienced reader of Berlin newspapers could easily imagine the tone that the conservative, liberal and even social democratic press would take. In peacetime.