Арнольд Цвейг - Outside Verdun

She nodded and was about to repeat his final word, but Kroysing made two sudden hops across the room on his good leg, wrapped her in his long arms and pressed his mouth to her parted lips, felt her go soft against his chest then stiffen, let her go and said: ‘To have is to hold,’ and hopped back to the bed like a long-legged grasshopper. She took her bucket and scrubbing brush and left the room without a word, like a pretty housemaid who’s just been kissed. Kroysing felt his heart hammering against his ribs. She’ll telephone , he thought triumphantly. She’ll telephone tonight and her name will be Frau Kroysing as surely as mine is Herr Kroysing . Immediately afterwards it occurred to him that she’d definitely ask Father Lochner’s advice. He’d have to get the priest on his side. He could not deny that Niggl had become completely irrelevant to him in that moment. He laughed inwardly. It would pain him, but if Sister Kläre married him and Father Lochner helped her to get her present marriage dissolved he’d abandon his vendetta against Niggl.

In a fairly large field hospital, the staff working to relieve human suffering and return wounded men to full strength are kept fully occupied in the morning. That underlying reality doesn’t change whether you view the process as a way of rehabilitating slaves to work and fight for the ruling class, as Pahl did, or a way of summoning all Germany’s strength in the battle for her very existence, as Kroysing did. The sometimes terrible ceremony of changing bandages, with its groans, clenched teeth and curses, its snarling and coaxing, passed on, which is to say it moved from room to room. Nurses carried buckets of festering wood pulp out to be burnt. Sometimes, if the healing process had gone wrong and there was excessive granulation in the wound rather than firm, new flesh, cauterisation was required. Then the silver nitrate probe or small, sharp scrapers were brought out, and great suffering ensued. Other, more fortunate men toiled in the gym where their injured limbs were gradually restored to the purposes for which nature intended them through exercise. Once it has realised its potential, human material, that baffling, growing, animate cell tissue, is doomed to rejoin the Earth’s surface – that underlying impulse is inherent in its target form, just as butterflies, flies and bees are driven to fertilise flowers. Sometimes it seemed as though the planet itself wanted to be stimulated to preordained levels of performance – a frenzy of raw materials and forces – so it might offer ever-improving living conditions to rational beings. Perhaps that was why it incited the nearly two billion cells called humanity to excessive activity and conflict. It wanted to spur the higher, more rational, more forward-looking ones on, while provoking resistance from the lower, wilder, more instinctive ones, so as to squeeze as much as possible in the way of inventions, discoveries and harvests from both. Aviation, chemistry, medical science, warfare – all had advanced in leaps and bounds. New means of communication had brought communities together that previously had hardly known of each other’s existence. Biased social systems had come crashing down, and those who did not understand how to deploy all available forces within their borders in the struggle for existence were doomed to defeat, whatever the existing privileged classes might say. Services rendered could always be repaid with ingratitude, promises could be turned around and chartered rights rescinded. Why not? People did not have a very well developed sense of civilised behaviour. They barely understood what it was for. It was easier to appreciate technology. It helped with killing.

On this basis, the engineer and the priest understood each other very well. Each considered the other to be the champion of a weaker cause. Happily, their meeting took place in an atmosphere of vague agreement that members of the global household had an important duty to respect the individual. For they knew that nature only works in species, kinds, races and large groups; the requirement placed on men by nature to respect the individual was thus all the greater. For as it battled to enrich its homeland, humanity had need of individuals as if they were the purpose of earthly fertility and the battle for existence. And while the engineer and the priest conducted their cheerful argument, the medical officer sat with some wounded man who had been put in special rooms to test whether water promoted natural healing. The water did help. Man’s fluid composition seemed to respond gratefully to it. Out in the courtyard, flocks of white and tan chickens cackled, pecked and fluttered, commanded by a couple of cocks, pigs grunted by a row of sties, and enormous long-haired Belgian rabbits with soft eyes and fur hopped about. March light sparkled down on them, and their animal hearts thrilled with joy. They did not divine their purpose, which would bring their joyful existence to an end, or that it was only because of that purpose that they existed in the first place. In certain rooms, wet laundry was being rubbed down on corrugated iron; in others, food was being cooked for several hundred people. A ruddy-faced matron bent over a ledger and noted down figures. A horse-drawn wagon panted up the hill, bringing tinned food, ration bread and the post in a large sack. That created a lot work; it had to be sorted, distributed and read – but it also radiated healing. Pahl the typesetter received a letter, which he read with a strange smile. His application was already in progress and would doubtless be successful. His unit, the replacement ASC battalion in Küstrin, had emerged from obscurity. Once it had established what pension the grateful Fatherland owed him, it was going to order that he be sent home, formally and solemnly discharged, transferred back to civilian life and his profession. As a typesetter doesn’t exactly need his toe, the compensation for his wound wouldn’t be very high; nonetheless, Pahl was now a pensioner, and so there was a limit to how bad things could get. The soldiers sang that this campaign was no express train, but for him it had come to a halt. For the others it would rattle cheerfully on. It had been as little detained by the Kaiser’s peace initiative as by President Wilson’s messages or Pope Benedict XV’s prayers – this capitalist war about the redistribution of world markets. You couldn’t say that the capitalists had started it, but they had made the aristocratic land-owning class in the three empires into masters of a military machine so strong that once it had been set in motion it could only come to a standstill when it had extinguished them and itself. Capitalists couldn’t make peace. Neither could feudal states. They paid for it with their own collapse. Only nations could make peace, when the blessings of a lost war had made enough of an impression on them. The Russians would prove that.

Lieutenant Flachsbauer also received a letter, read it, sighed and placed it under his pillow. So did Lieutenant Kroysing. His letter was from his mother, as his father had delegated letter writing to her some time ago. She was looking forward to him being transferred to a Nuremberg hospital and asked him to hurry the process along. She was having nightmares and clung to every bit of news from him. She felt that he would only be safe from the murderous claws of war when he was in her arms. Kroysing frowned: people at home really knew how to lay it on thick. Claws of war! That kind of talk should be left to washerwomen. He wondered what exactly she thought was going to happen to him here. The Verdun front had lost its importance, and there had been no more talk of long-range guns from the Frogs. And the Red Cross flew its flag and had painted a cross on the roof to prevent air attacks. He decided he’d better wait to tell his parents about his transfer to the air force in person when he had some proper leave.