Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

Bertin stared down at him, arms hanging. No one was safe, and it was always the wrong ones who got it. Every minute a man was taken, and no one cared. Yes, Pelican and Sergeant Fürth had been right. There’d be nothing but rubbish left in Germany if things went on like this. And eyes full of dread, he looked round the comfortable room where the smell of ironed sheets now mingled with that of cigarettes. They all had plans for the future. He was trying to be transferred to the Lychow Division court martial, Kroysing wanted to join the air force, Lieutenant Mettner wanted to return to his study of mathematics and Lieutenant Flachsbauer wanted if possible to join the world of commerce where his father’s company was eagerly awaiting him. Sister Kläre and the priest no doubt had clear plans too, just like Pahl down the corridor, who wanted to organise strikes in Germany. So many decisions and ideas! ‘Nothing is final as long as we live,’ was how his novel ended. Existence was always uncertain. A tile could fall on your head at any moment; an electric cable might snap and kill you. In Upper Silesia a parson had been killed when the fly wheel broke loose at a pumping station, flew through the air and crashed into the roof of the parsonage, crushing the parson at his dinner. But in war such accidents became part of a malicious system that multiplied them tenfold – a hundredfold at the front. Death wasn’t unusual; survival was unusual.

Just then someone knocked at the door. ‘Are you coming?’ asked Karl Lebehde.

A FEW MORNINGS later, full of longing, Sister Kläre opened the tar paper-covered shutters of her little cell; the next day was 21 March, the first day of spring. In her cosy, candy-striped flannel pyjamas, she stretched out her arms, folded her hands behind her thick ash blonde plaits and leant out to look at the great silvery star set in the green dawn to the east: Venus. She could see right across the countryside to the golden streaks above the horizon and the misty river valley, and on the left to the woods of Consenvoye. She noticed that the beech trees were already covered in green shoots and didn’t hear a couple of metallic strikes that drifted across from behind the hills. If only this year would fulfil its promise. It’s Tuesday today, she thought. Father Lochner will be coming about his carbuncle for the last time. If I want to speak to him it’ll have to be today . The week before he’d said that Kroysing was an extraordinary man, and that he had presented him with the news of his friend Süßmann’s sudden death in that unvarnished way in order to give him a shock, make him understand humanity’s limits and force him to reflect. But unfortunately it hadn’t done much good, and that steely soul would have to experience much worse before it learnt humility in the face of the unfathomable and opened up to the sorrows and splendour of natural life. Yes, Kroysing was quite someone, but so was Father Lochner. He was well schooled in the contemplative as well as the active life, and it was a pleasure to listen to his feisty debates with those atheist savages, Kroysing and Pahl. Father Lochner found Pahl almost more compelling than Kroysing, but Sister Kläre wasn’t with him on that one; she found Kroysing much more compelling than Pahl, than Mettner, than the medical officer – although he did put forward spectacularly gloomy views about life on earth – than Bertin, dear God, whom circumstances had reduced to a sheep, than Father Lochner himself. So far there had been no declaration or even a hint of one between herself and Kroysing, the enemy of God; the odd embarrassed glance had done the talking. Was it possible to marry a man like that? She was reserving judgement on that point until she’d heard the priest’s view. But how to get out of her current marriage, that cross she had to bear, or at least have it annulled on account of her husband’s condition? Conscientious Peter Schwersenz was in the grip of a disastrous depression, unable to cope with experiences he bore and answered for in silence. He sat there in Hinterstein valley, like a hermit in his cell, poring over maps, files and cuttings from French, British and Swiss newspapers, like a man eternally damned to fight the Battle of the Marne over and over again, to replay what ought to have happened and what, through his actions though not his fault, had in fact happened.

Well, she understood nothing of that, or very little. She had always been glad of her husband’s intellectual superiority. But she, Kläre Schwersenz, had given birth to two children, had aborted another one and prevented the conception of countless others, but she had never felt as fulfilled as a woman as she did now. The last decade of her womanhood had begun. She didn’t want an intellectual man, a kind, pleasant man who was unsure of himself; she wanted a real man, a man who bristled with energy and crackled with fire – who was dangerous, facetious and opinionated and who if necessary was prepared to spit in the face of death. She knew too much of life to claim that she couldn’t live without Kroysing, but she knew that with him she would be twice the woman she was now. And for him, as an engineer, an alliance with a daughter of the Pidderit family would open doors he didn’t even know where there. The workers at the Pidderit plant would naturally respond quite differently to the man who wouldn’t surrender at Douaumont than they did to her brothers and the directors, and they would be ready to obey him. After the enormous sacrifices of this war, the workers would quite justifiably make demands on the state that would be hard to resist. Only those who understood them and appealed to them as soldiers would be able to deal with them. Her father, Blasius Pidderit, a great old man who loved her as much as he was capable of loving another human being, after visiting the Great Headquarters of the crown prince (with whom she was still on close terms at that time), had spoken contemptuously of the idiots who were mad enough to try to curry favour with the Junkers by blocking the workers’ most basic demand: equal, secret and direct suffrage in Prussia. The old man and Eberhard Kroysing – they would get on. She could see Kroysing in the bosom of her family, a tall man with a deep, resonant voice that captured people’s attention. Then shaking her head at herself, half laughing, half disapproving, she pulled her small window shut and went over to the washstand, wishing for the first time that her mirror weren’t so tiny, and got ready to face her day’s work.

For Eberhard Kroysing having his bandages changed was no longer horrific. He began each day with breakfast, which he enjoyed less each morning, but that couldn’t be helped. In his mind, he replaced the weak coffee, meanly spread slices of bread, and porridge or rye flour soup with the dishes he would have when the the war was won and he had an adequate wage that allowed him to breakfast properly. It remained to be seen if Sister Kläre, were she to become his wife, would know how to reconcile the modest income of an engineer with his lavish requirements. Either way, breakfast at the Kroysings must and would comprise an apple, a Calville apple, crisp, yellow and fragrant; it would also comprise two eggs in a glass, fresh butter, toasted bread or white rolls, and coffee – coffee such as the Austrians were supposed to make, although compared with the breakfast coffee of Eberhard Kroysing’s dreams they didn’t even know what coffee was: small beans, round and silken as pearls, freshly roasted, which, after they’d been ground, would have no contact with metal; hot water would slowly be poured over them and they’d percolate for three minutes, after which a drink would be poured into the master of the house’s cup whose aroma would pervade the entire apartment and the master would enjoy it with a spoonful of thick cream and some good-quality sugar. Resplendent upon the fluffy white rolls would lie either properly salted steak tartare mixed with chopped onion and goose fat and very lightly peppered, or that ivory coloured cheese you got in Switzerland and the Allgäu, that dark yellow cheese from Holland, that reddish cheese from England, a flat Brie or a runny Camembert.