Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

‘Would you swap places with him?’ asked Bertin, curious.

Grasping the shell from his end and effortlessly lifting it up, Karl Lebehde said: ‘I can’t answer that just like that. Sometimes I might say yes, other times no, depending on my mood. If Barkopp has annoyed me, I might want nothing more to do with that bloody Hamburg bastard and be thinking: “Get a grip, man. Give yourself a hernia and follow Wilhelm.” But if I’ve just had a good bowl of soup, then I might think about how I can get things from the field hospitals cheaper than he could and stay put. Then sometimes I worry about all kinds of things when I think about the poor, old lad. What if there were a fire in those stupid barracks for example – what would happen to that baby then?’ And he shook his coppery head crossly. ‘Right, you take number two then and hoof it back down with me now.’

Guard duty in the Prussian army involved two hours at your post and four hours of sleep. As number one started at 8pm, number two was at the sentry from 10pm until midnight and from 4am until 6am. If French planes flew over, they usually did so around 11pm, sometimes a quarter of an hour earlier, sometimes a quarter of an hour later.

PRIVATE PAHL’S CONFIDENCE and lust for life had increased markedly. Certainly, the hospital, just as expected, had all the characteristics of the class state: doctors, officers and nurses over here, rank and file patients over there, and in the middle the hospital orderlies, who were gradually, albeit much too slowly, realising where they belonged – with those who stand to attention, third-class patients, health insurance cases in uniform. But the things that were good were: they weren’t treated any worse than need be; efforts were made to make the food wholesome; and the general tone of the place was cheerful, though in a hearty way that was a little too Christian for Pahl’s taste. But better Christian than Old Prussian. It was getting easier to face the early mornings when his bandage was removed and the wound that had replaced his big toe was sterilised and dressed again. Only paper bandages had been delivered from the homeland, with wood pulp instead of cotton wool, and so no one needed to feel he was being treated worse than his neighbour in the officer’s room: they were all subject to the same law of the blockade. They were fed five times a day on the kind of food that had long been but a myth for the brave men in field grey: milk, not from a tin but from a live cow, white bread made with real wheat, real sugar and even real ham. The day before yesterday one of the hospital pigs had been killed by its faithful carer, Pechler the bath orderly, with a shot behind the ear. Until its death, it had proudly borne the lovely name of Posemuckel and now it was buried in numerous people’s stomachs. But there would be successors among the pigs – and among the rabbits, which the hospital fattened up on the patients’ leftovers so they didn’t go to waste. Pahl loved pork and he loved rabbit meat, and the nurses and orderlies were delighted to see that Pahl the typesetter had started to make jokes at which his ugly face with its staring eyes lit up in a childish laugh.

Pahl had also come into conversation with officers for the first time since his training, namely the acquaintances of his comrade Bertin. They had visited him. A certain Sister Kläre had warmed to Private Bertin’s friend and had got others interested in him too, and thanks to his unique character Pahl was the last person not to merit such attention. People were captivated by his knack of saying exactly what he thought, without anger, and by his newly discovered smile, the smile of a man reborn. That engineer Kroysing was a strange fish. Pahl knew what had happened to his younger brother: that he’d been a little bit shot to death because he’d stuck his neck out for the men in his company. But his brother, this Kroysing engineer chap, was a clever man and worldly wise. So what conclusions did he draw from the incident? Did he rise above the purely personal element? Was he able to see the structure of the society he served in the case? Not bloody likely! That strong, well brought up man who ought to have known better was heaping his hostility on some miserable retired civil servant from Bavaria and his subordinates. Not even in his wildest dreams did it occur to him to ask if this Captain Niggl had not simply been carrying out society’s instructions when he pinned young Kroysing down in Chambrettes-Ferme – unwritten instructions to get rid of strike breakers in order to put the wind up their successors, to cleanse the ruling class of traitors and elevate the interests of the state above those of so-called humanity.

Although he was mentally focused on his wound, which was healing slowly but healing nonetheless (the skilful surgeon had folded artificially long strips of skin over the site of the operation), Pahl had been curious to meet the tall lieutenant and was delighted when Kroysing came by every day after his first visit to chew the fat with him – i.e. to have a chat. Pahl’s reputation as a thinking man had spread much more quickly in the hospital than in his company. For in hospitals people have a lot of time and few distractions. Authors could easily write novels about the conversations that take place among patients, whereas busy people usually talk to hide their thoughts and advance their aims. Kroysing wasn’t an engineer now but a patient, and he thought carefully, moving his head slowly, as he engaged with the questions that the recumbent typesetter put to him in a polite but facetious tone – very tricky questions. What, for example, did Kroysing, as an engineer, think about the fact that if he invented something while working for some company or other, the patent would not belong to him or the general public but to the company? Did he think that was reasonable? Sitting on Pahl’s bed, Kroysing the engineer did not think that was at all reasonable. He took the view that engineers around the world, though perhaps initially in one country, should band together to make sure they got a share of the profits from their inventions. However, Kroysing was under no illusions as to the viability of such lovely ideas, because it was almost impossible to get engineers to cooperate on anything as they were so competitive. That meant people had to be persuaded that they needed Kroysing the engineer as much as Kroysing the engineer needed them; it would then be possible to rely on the well-developed self-interest of those industrial lords.

It was all very entertaining – the patients in men’s ward 3 listened avidly as the little hunchback presented arguments and counter-arguments, and the tall lieutenant answered him back, glowing with pleasure. Finally, backed into a corner, the lieutenant said that he didn’t give two figs for cooperation and if a man didn’t know how to help himself then he must be left to flounder. He, personally, was not one to be discouraged, and that was the main thing. A real man was a lone wolf, as in the old saying: God helps those who help themselves, and if not there’s always the fire brigade. Whereupon Pahl had pointed out that solidarity and mutual assistance in life and death situations were an essential prerequisite for a fire brigade. Neither of them was prepared to give in, and it became increasingly clear that reason and the facts were on Pahl’s side. He was right and that was all there was to it, whereas Kroysing, snapping around him like a sheepdog, was his own argument and his own person was the best evidence he could offer for this thesis.

In the end, they laughed and agreed to continue their discussion after the war, Pahl at the head of a horde of power-hungry slaves and Kroysing as satrap of the rapacious captains of industry – to use the language of opposing newspapers. Then they’d see who was right – who was stronger and more forward-looking, and could be relied upon to replace all the human lives that had been destroyed. Kroysing wanted to bring in the military; Pahl thought the military would long since have been transformed inwardly into proletarians in uniform. And so they parted on good terms, each with much food for thought, though they didn’t show it.