Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

The fact that Bertin had not invented names in this draft created an unusual and convincing effect. The hero was simply called Christoph, and other names were indicated by initial capital letters. At the end of the fourth page he found a note from the author to himself: ‘Improve names.’ But however essential it might be for artistic effect to invent credible characters and refine real events to bring out their essence, the relaxed handling of names and events meant this first draft spoke all the more directly to the lonely reader. Posnanski groaned in agony and also in satisfaction; under no circumstances should he let the unprepossessing Bertin get away. He belonged to the same group of men as young Kroysing and Posnanski himself: those who tried to sort the world out and using the right tools for the job – justice, reason and informed debate. It might seem laughable but it was true: whoever used those tools inevitably excited the anger of the evil principle and its minions, the men of violence with their feverish thirst for action and desire to oppress. And as Posnanksi buttoned his housecoat over his rotund body, because it was a cold March night and he was tired, to his amazement he found himself marching over to the fireplace at the far end of the room where embers still glowed. Marching because the glow embodied the enemy, the eternal foe of all creativity, the opponent and the opposition in one, the blocker, Satan himself. He literally saw him squatting there with claws, a beak, bat-like wings and a dragon’s tail, casting around with his ambiguous basilisk’s eyes, always on the brink of shrill laughter. It was this rash, devouring element, allied with ubiquitous steel, that had given birth to every technology and forged every gun, and whose omnipotent laughter lay behind every explosion. It had killed young Kroysing and wounded his older brother. It threatened Bertin in the form of duds, it had killed Judge Advocate Mertens in the form of an aerial bomb, it lurked over him, Posnanski, over Winfried, over that old Junker Lychow – over every man and every woman. Man had made a bad job of taming the fire that had fallen from Heaven; reason too, the light of Heaven, and morality, born on Mount Sinai, he had handled like a schoolboy. In that dark hour before bedtime, Posnanski was inclined to give the human race as a whole a mark of three minus. That made Pupil Bertin all the more indispensable. Fire had consumed Pupil Kroysing, and the same thing happened to countless others every day. It was sheeplike logic to plunge into the fire in ever greater numbers because of that and not bother about individuals because that had no purpose in such times. But Pupil Posnanski knew that there was a purpose and that it was the only purpose because it was always at hand; it didn’t wait for the fire to go out but quietly smuggled the creative principle away from the destroyers. At present there was nothing to be done about the Kroysing case, and Posnanski carefully laid the various sheets of paper in the orange folder with a Montmédy file reference. He put the Kroysing novel in there too.

But the Bertin case was one to fight. He’d used the first half of the night well and he’d use the second half even better, because people were always much cleverer and more whole when asleep than when awake. And as Posnanski opened the window to spare Madame Jovin the worst of the bother, he said to himself: there are serious ways to rescue a man and funny ways, direct and indirect, honest and dishonest. They’re all allowed. The only way that is proscribed is the one that doesn’t work and puts him in more danger. Common sense and what he remembered from his last conversation with Lieutenant Winfried told Posnanski that he wouldn’t be able to count on Lychow in this instance but should turn to his ADC (which he was wrong about). The only one he could rope in fully was Eberhard Kroysing, because it would be easy to make him see that the future shape of his campaign against Niggl stood or fell on Bertin’s testimony. Sitting on the edge of his bed in his underpants, groaning, flushed and tight-lipped from the effort of reaching his sock suspenders over the bulk of his stomach, Posnanski came to a final decision: the main thing was to sort out the Bertin affair.

Then, when he was already in his pyjamas under his soft clean coverlet and had turned off the lamp, he noticed to his annoyance that he’d left the light on in the living room. Fire always resisted him, he thought, mocking himself grumpily, as get got up, fussed about with his slippers, went out and turned the light off. He noticed with amazement how bright the moon, now sinking in the west, shone through the window.

Once he was asleep and dreaming, he was transported to a fabulous landscape and there came to him the face of Christoph Kroysing, whom he’d never seen. It appeared surrounded by luxuriant southern foliage like the face of a man pushing through a jungle, and in the middle of the jungle resided the sleeping man – Posnanski, in rejuvenated form, fervently engaged in regulating the traffic on an anthill and in reaching, with the help of white termites, the ideal offered by the round public square and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial church outside his window. As if seen from the perspective of ants, the young sergeant’s countenance hung like a large orb in the midst of bayonet-like agave leaves, which ended in a spike and were ridged with narrow little points, and palm fronds seemed to grab at his visored cap. Beneath the red ribbon and visor of his cap, Kroysing’s steady, dark brown eyes were trained on Posnanski, who was busily working away, and there was a smile on his lips beneath his broad forehead and arching brows. ‘As you can see, I was unfortunately detained, my dear colleague,’ his voice said from far above the earth, and Posnanski, a chubby schoolboy crouched in the sand, replied: ‘I hope you’ve got a note from your parents. You brown-eyed types are always playing truant and leaving us to do all the work. It’s a typical sixth former’s trick.’

‘Oh, you poor thing. You’ve really changed,’ said the young sergeant. ‘Can’t you see that there’ll be no leave for me?’

And then Posnanski recognised the fire burning among the plants: iron and oxygen had combined to set their green cells ablaze. ‘A hundred years of purgatory will pass in no time,’ he said reassuringly. And the man held prisoner by the plants agreed: ‘War years count double.’

‘I’ll be your representative in the meantime, my dear colleague,’ said Posnanski into a telephone attached to a green silk cord that he was now holding in his hand, and from far above, now transformed into a sort of moon but still connected to Posnanski’s desk lamp by a long, twisted root, the prisoner spoke into the receiver: ‘Affirmative.’

IT WAS A lucky thing for Private Bertin that the First Company’s postal orderly never arrived from Etraye-East until the early hours of the afternoon. Otherwise he would have come to grief that day. There wasn’t much left to crush in his soul, but such miserable little scraps of optimism and presence of mind as remained were obliterated by Diehl’s carbon copy. He understood immediately what had happened and saw what it meant. This was the end. He’d had a bit of wild good luck and been applied for by a court martial – but because it was him, things didn’t follow their natural course, and an ASC major was able to turn the request down and suggest a replacement who was no replacement at all. It was disgusting, it was enough to make you puke, to make you mutiny, to make you want to die. Would anyone keep trying after such a rebuff? Surely not. There was only one way out. He’d better go at once to Kroysing, to Sister Kläre, to people who knew him and wished him well, and who thought that he wasn’t meant to hump crates of wet explosives around and break his back under a load that made the blood rush to his head and weighed 89 pounds even when dry. He gave himself a cursory wash, told Sergeant Barkopp he was going out and ran rather than walked up the familiar hill path, which was getting muddier each day but luckily froze over at night. Blind to the misty beauty of the early spring evening under a jade sky, he trudged on, getting worked up over a long letter and cry for help he was composing in his head to his wife Lenore – as if she were in a position to help. To the rhythm of his footsteps, his troubled heart let rip, spilling forth a confused, accusing mixture of self-pity and entreaties, based upon a pathetic overestimate of the influence his father-in-law could wield on his daughter’s behalf.