Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

But when Sister Kläre went into Pechler the bath orderly’s room, the bird had, as he put it, flown. Bertin had hurried off to see Pahl, reproaching himself for neglecting him and saying that he really should put his own worries aside for once and think about him. He was concerned, however, about how he would justify his desire to be transferred to the court martial to Pahl.

Thus two ASC men met by Pahl’s bed: Lebehde and Bertin, both currently troubled in mind but physically comforted; for one of them had emerged newborn from the bath and the other had been in the kitchen, which also had its merits. They were unanimous in their view that Wilhelm was changed beyond recognition. He was sitting up for half an hour at a time, putting on weight and felt himself to be on the mend. ‘I bet you’re surprised, aren’t you?’ he grinned. ‘Yes, I’m feeling better. It’s not getting me down so much any more. The worst is when they change the bandages in the morning.’ He frowned. ‘Just lying there knowing you’re going to be put through the mill and there’s no help for it – that’s what knocks the heart out of you.’

Karl Lebehde caught himself wanting to stroke Pahl’s hands. Bertin wondered anxiously what he’d say to this martyr if he started to talk hopefully about their future work together in Berlin. Diehl’s carbon copy rustled in his pocket. Perhaps there would be a way to give a funny twist to the whole application story, which thanks to Major Jansch’s kindness now affected Pahl too.

‘Now I’m going to talk as much as I want,’ joked Pahl. ‘My bed is my castle, and we can spin a few yarns.’ He said that since his bandage had been changed he knew how prisoners must have felt in the Middle Ages when they were waiting to be tortured – tomorrow at 9am I’ll be interrogated again – or executed. It was horrible to have to hold still and let people do as they wanted with you like some kind of overgrown baby. The terrible pain, the intrusion – it was all awful. You didn’t need to experience an actual execution, be hanged or have you head chopped off or be shot, to realise that the death penalty was the lowest of all human ideas; it was enough to have your own body reduced to a passive object. Abolishing the death penalty was a natural step for people who had electricity and could spread the truth through print. Then he asked if there was any news from Russia. What he missed most here in hospital was the chance to discuss that earth-shattering event.

No, said Bertin and Lebehde. They only knew what everyone else knew. The three of them marvelled at the speed and consistency with which things were moving in Russia. They all admitted that they hadn’t thought the Russians had it in them. Bertin in particular, who had twice crossed the Russian border with his school class and had taken an optional Russian class at school, repeated several times that no one had expected it because the people were so passive and had such meek faith in the Tsar. It had seemed as though the sun rose and set at the behest of the ‘Little Father’, and now, look, it had carried on doing its duty and was still shining down on Little Mother Russia although the double-headed imperial eagle was gone.

‘One day every beer glass will be full.’

‘Ours too,’ said Pahl firmly, looking at Bertin.

But Bertin didn’t want to follow him down that path. Fortunately, he remembered something he’d witnessed when he was working with the Russian prisoners during the weeks at Romagne. One of them, a lad with teeth like a fish and a full blonde beard, was sitting at the fire in the lunch break distributing pieces of bread amongst his comrades, not out of kind-heartedness but for money: 10 Pfennigs a slice, quite costly. A young Russki with his cap pushed back and a blonde fringe, handed him a coin, received his slice, held it in front of him for a moment, opened his mouth as if to take a bite but then calmly said: ‘When we get you home, you miserable Kulak, we’ll batter you to death and that’s a promise.’ Then he took a bite. You could see the bread seller turning a lighter shade of grey beneath his dirty, tanned skin, and his small, light-coloured eyes were fixed on the other man’s as he replied: ‘If such is God’s will, Grigori, I’ll have you shot first.’ But the younger man, chewing away with his mouth full, just laughed and shook his head. ‘Did you hear that, my friends? We’d better watch out for those Kulaks.’ Muttered laughter ran through the group, but many of them clearly didn’t want to queer their pitch with the profiteer, who calmly went on selling his wares, checking coins and shoving them in his pockets. However, he did throw a quick glance at the guard’s bayonet, which didn’t escape Grigori’s notice. ‘No,’ he laughed, cleaning his hands on his coat, ‘there won’t be any Cossack there to protect you from us then.’

‘If God so wills it, then no one will protect me,’ the bearded man replied patiently. He was a gaunt, middle-aged man, who obviously had to exercise great self-control to hold on to the bread in order to sell it. This scene, which Bertin had observed during a cold snap worthy of Russia in the middle of France, had stayed with him because it was so savagely strange. Since the outbreak of the Revolution, it had taken on a deeper meaning. ‘If it has gripped the peasants, then it’ll succeed and it’ll last,’ he said pensively. ‘It started with the peasants in France too in 1789. They were crawling across the fields like animals, looking for something to eat – ragged beings reminiscent of people, as a writer called Taine wrote. The lord of the manor had sold the crops in order to live bon in Paris. It might succeed in Russia too, but what about at home,’ said Bertin doubtfully, ‘where everything’s so well organised?’

‘We’ve invented organised famine,’ said Pahl.

And Karl Lebehde, his fat fingers folded across his stomach, said in a measured voice: ‘My dear man, has the phrase “grubbing trip” never come before your esteemed eyes? According to my old lady, whose letters are quite uplifting, Berliners go swarming across the Mark with rucksacks on Saturday evenings, sort of like older versions of the youngsters from the Wandervogel rambling club, and curse like blazes if a gendarme asks to look inside their packs. And I’ll tell you something for nothing, there aren’t many gendarmes that take the stuff off them, and it’s easy to see why. If this goes on for another year…’

‘Another year!’ cried Bertin and Pahl as one. ‘Listen,’ said Bertin, overcome by the dreadful prospect of an endless war and and full of good will towards the comrades who shared his fate. ‘For a couple of days, I’ve been mulling something over, and sometimes it makes me hopeful and sometimes it fills me with dread. I want you to tell me what you’d do in my place. It actually affects you quite deeply too, Wilhelm,’ and he described what had happened, or what he could guess had happened, between his first conversation with Posnanski and the present moment. Pahl’s hands trembled slightly as he held the carbon copy in silence. Lebehde bent his copper head over the pillow and read it too. Bertin waited to hear what they would say as if it were a court judgement. Then Pahl tore the thin paper into long strips. ‘What they want won’t happen,’ he said, ‘and what they don’t want will. You’ve no idea how well this suits us, my friend. I had a long chat with Karl about it the day before yesterday. I was still woozy when we had our first talk. I had completely forgotten something that my agent only wrote to me about in detail in January. And now you appear like an angel from Heaven and put everything straight again.’

Bertin looked uncomprehendingly from one of the two hardened agitators to the other and listened while Lebehde explained all the preliminaries that had to be gone through before a man could be transferred from the front back to Germany. A detour via the court martial would reinvigorate the plan and make it realistic.