Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

It was very quiet in the house. Somewhere a mouse rustled behind the ancient wallpaper. Posnanski drank a mouthful of wine – he was using a porcelain beaker on three lion’s feet that made the wine look a darker red – and rose to move about as he thought.

That was all true for industrial areas, cities. But what form would the case take if it happened among farm workers out in the sticks on the big estates of West Prussia, Posen, East Prussia, Pomerania and Mecklenburg? He brooded over this, his hooded eyes half closed, stopping on a woven shepherd’s scene from the 18th century in which he could make out nothing but a narrow mesh of different coloured stitches, until gradually it revealed itself to be a representation of a human foot above a leafy plant. In a country setting, clarification would be more difficult and there would be more of a threat to the lawyer and witnesses. Some of them would be discredited as Jews, but the conclusion would be the same. The conservative Protestant landlords of the region east of the Elbe, the feudal Catholic landowners of Bavaria: they wouldn’t aid and abet such rash employees either and in the end would sacrifice their incompetent peers. But in wartime injustice piled up, committed by one nation on another – violence unleashed by one group on another – and became such a mountain that a bucketful of filth simply disappeared. The naked interests of life were so fully at play, the question of the existence and survival of the ruling classes, and therefore, admittedly, the ruled as well, that an individual’s right to life and honour was postponed until further notice – shifted on to a siding until civilisation was reinstated. Of course that signified a relapse into the times of the migrations, a decisive defeat for the Mosaic Convenant. Captain Niggl’s reckless dirty tricks, his trading in human life, was currently being carried out (if the mutual recriminations in the war bulletins were to be believed) with little better justification on the largest possible scale and on all fronts by many of the great nations – don’t bother asking after individuals, dear lawyer. And as all the groups concerned daily affirmed that they were fighting only to save their existence and human culture, a civilian such as Dr Posnanski had no influence at the moment. All he could do was advise Lieutenant Kroysing to wait until peace was re-established, get the names and addresses of as many of his brother’s comrades as possible now and bring his case as soon as the German nation, its lust for victory notwithstanding, was ready to rekindle the memory of Christoph Kroysing.

Dr Posnanski was now haunted by his figure. He’d read his letter and taken it on board. Then in deepening silence he’d studied his black notebook, which contained drawings, scraps of verse, thoughts, opinions, impressions, questions. To begin with Posnanski had been interested in the notebook because of a particular hobby of his: he loved shorthand, which he considered to be a valuable and sensible invention; he knew all the systems and ways of abbreviating and even at school had excelled at deciphering unknown handwriting. Even the style of Kroysing’s pencil strokes appealed to his inner being. An honest, clear-minded man had made those marks, and his good opinion was confirmed on every page by the content of the notebook. Young Kroysing had been someone. He had campaigned against injustice not with a particular end in mind, but simply because it was injustice – an ugly blemish on the body of the community he loved. A pure and wonderful love of Germany spoke from that young man. He didn’t have an heroically distorted vision of his nation. He saw its weaknesses. ‘I don’t understand,’ he once complained, ‘why our men let themselves be manipulated. They’re not dim-witted or without a sense of justice, but they’re almost more sensitive than women. Are we a feminine nation? Is it our fate simply to know what ails us and express it? If so, I don’t want to join in.’ He clearly realised that the high moral development of German writers and thinkers had its roots in the nation. ‘…but it seems to me that root is long and fibrous and takes a convoluted route and only sends up a beautiful plant to the light much later and somewhere far away. I wish we had a short, strong tap root that sent up healthy growth full of spikes and stings against violence.’ Another time he complained ‘that the beauty of life as expressed in a sunset, a starry night or even just ordinary daylight doesn’t seem to have any influence on the ways of the Germans. They enjoy nature for a couple of minutes and then fall back into old habits that might just as well have been developed in underground caves. But Goethe and Hölderlin, Mörike and Gottfried Keller, seem constantly aware of plants, wind, clouds, streams. The air of the countryside goes with them into their studies and offices, and to the lectern. That’s why they’re free. That’s why they’re great.’ Yes, my young friend , thought Posnanski, what you say there is very true and important. Such things cannot be learnt from working life. It’s a shame that we can’t talk about them any more. Men like you will be missed. Your verses are lovely and sensitive, though still very juvenile. But let us imagine that Hölderlin, who was a volunteer for a year, Sergeant Heinrich Heine, Lieutenant von Liliencron or Sergeant Major C.F. Meyer had been killed at your age – with assistance or otherwise, it doesn’t matter – or that the little cadet von Hardenberg had died at 14 of a cold caught on a training march – to say nothing of officer trainee Schiller drowned at 18 while swimming in a mountain stream in Swabia: would those young men’s legacy have looked much different from yours? Not at all. But how much poorer and more miserable the world would have been! We wouldn’t have known what we’d lost . ‘Yes,’ he sighed to himself, ‘it’s not an easy problem, and whoever can solve it for me gets a thaler and five Pfennigs: whether the people live for the gifted, or the gifted live for the people, so that any old Niggl has the right to abuse them. That’s why I’m going to have a look and see what Herr Bertin made of his meeting with you.’

AT THAT HE opened the manuscript that Bertin had sent him. He poured another glass of wine, lit another slim Dutch cigar, looked disapprovingly at Bertin’s rather cramped handwriting, began to read the story, holding each sheet up to the light, and was quickly absorbed and captivated. The light cast a soft glow, the mouse rustled behind the wallpaper, people passed the window, talking, but Posnanski was now in Fosses wood in a hollow full of shot-up trees where two abandoned guns raised their long, mournful necks to the sky and amongst a group of workers in field grey he saw the tanned, friendly face of young Kroysing, his curved forehead and calm eyes. The work could hardly pass as a novella, since it contained no artful characterisation or surprising plot twists. Sometimes the language wasn’t very polished, which could be excused by the speed of writing, or was too bold where a more restrained expression would’ve been more powerful. But it did invoke the figure of the man as perceived by the author and it showed what had happened clearly and pitilessly, shaking the world from its sleep so that it could not just snore on as a French shell dispatched the writer’s recently won friend. And it made it quite clear that the burden of this death did not lie with the French. No, behind the miserable ASC chiefs lay the gigantic outline of the owners and unleashers of violence – all those who were planning and carrying out the suicide of Europe, those backward types who saw their neighbours only as something to attack and whose last trump card in international competition was: the gun.