The faces of the sappers, gunners and Saxon riflemen made him feel almost sick. Until now he had garlanded them with splendid delusions, draped them in noble titles. But no illusion could hold out here. The men in this boarded clay grave were just lost battalions, the sacrificed herds of world markets, which were currently experiencing a glut in human material. Crouched on a plank under the earth 200m from the enemy and yawning suddenly from exhaustion, he saw that even here the men were just doing their duty – nothing more than that.
The earth rumbled above him, chunks fell from the walls, dust rained down from the timbers and as the infantrymen calmly carried on smoking their cigarettes, he wondered hesitantly how he had come to see this truth. It hurt! It robbed you of the strength to endure life. Surely it couldn’t be the same everywhere else as in his own company.
The rest is attrition. The Douaumont is vacated under French pressure, Kroysing vanishes temporarily in the fog of war while vainly attempting to rally troops for a counteroffensive, and in the aftermath of that episode Bertin is confronted with a series of unnerving horrors: a blinded man mechanically addressing an imaginary doctor, a devastated field battery, and the corpse of a schoolfriend. In the course of his duties he is at the mercy of the institutionalised malice of his superiors and is assigned to the dangerous and fatiguing task of searching for unexploded shells. Progressively the novel registers the arbitrary destruction of the people Bertin has come to know. Both Pahl, the character most closely associated with the possibility of resistance against the war, and Kroysing, a defiant warrior and a fervent nationalist to the last, are killed in an air raid on the hospital where they are recovering from wounds. Süßmann, meanwhile, has died a particularly pointless death as a result of an accident during weapons training, and his last message makes clear the dichotomy between fond illusion and disillusionment that remains difficult for Bertin to resolve to the very end of the novel. Tell my parents it was worth it, Süßmann says, and tell Kroysing it wasn’t.
There are other novels in which Zweig explores the social and political dimensions of the First World War. He shows us the life of the home front in the early months in Young Woman of 1914 (1932), focusing on the situation of the fiancée that Bertin left behind with an unwanted pregnancy, and the political machinations in occupied Eastern Europe in The Crowning of a King (1937). Indeed, he continued to add volumes to the cycle he called ‘The Great War of the White Men’ after the Second World War in East Berlin, where he settled in 1948 and where he died in 1968. But it is in Outside Verdun above all that he brings his reader face to face with experiences that challenge and undermine any attempt to glorify the war. It contains his most penetrating depictions of the effects of protracted warfare on the personalities and the outlook of the people directly involved, and it allows the reader to accompany the naïve young protagonist Bertin on his journey to deeper self-knowledge as well as to an awareness of the conflicting aspects of human nature that the war has brought into the open.
Not that Outside Verdun brings the reader to anything as neat as a firm conclusion. On the closing pages, Bertin is shown to be still wrestling with the conflicts he has witnessed and with the question of how he should position himself in relation to them. The date of the final scene, in which he and his wife have come to visit Kroysing’s grieving parents, is June 29th, 1919, the day after the Versailles Treaty had been signed – with all the associations of subjugation that that event carried in the eyes of the German population, and thus also the associations of betrayal on the part of the politicians who accepted its terms. For his readers in 1935, Zweig did not need to spell out the poignancy of that moment. But here, too, his novel distinguishes itself from the common expectations we might have of a war novel. By contrast with Remarque, who tells us how the life of his protagonist was snuffed out on a day when it was reported that ‘all was quiet’ on the western front, Zweig takes leave of Bertin in a post-war world in which he, and all of German society with him, will be facing difficult choices.
Professor David Midgley, University of Cambridge
1
David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: the Great War and the twentieth century, London 2013.
2
See David Midgley, Writing Weimar. Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918-1933, Oxford 2000, chapter 6: ‘Remembering the War’.
BOOK ONE
In the woods
CHAPTER ONE
Turning off a tap
THE EARTH WAS a disc flecked yellow-green and drenched in blood. Above it, like a mousetrap, hung the unrelentingly blue sky, imprisoning humanity within the misery its animal nature prescribes.
The battle had been at an impasse since mid-May. Now, in mid-July, guns were still pounding the valley between the village of Fleury and Fort Souville. Volleys of explosions rolled back and forth; billows of poisonous smoke, dust clouds, pulverised earth and flying chunks of stone and masonry darkened the air, which was riddled with steel splinters and whistling bullets. At night, the area behind the front blazed and roared with gunfire; by day, the blue skies throbbed to the rattle of machine guns, bursting hand grenades, and the howls and whimpers of lost men. Time and again, the summer wind blew off the dust from the assaults, dried the storm troopers’ sweat as they climbed from their dugouts, eyes and jaws fixed, and carried away the moans of the wounded and the last gasps of the dying. The Germans had been on the attack here since the end of February. This war between Europeans, which had been raging for two years, might have originated in the south east of the continent, but it was nonetheless France – her people, her land, her army – that bore the brunt of the devastation. There might be bitter fighting at this very moment in Bukovina, on the rivers Adige and Isonzo, but the combat was at its wildest on the banks of the two French rivers, the Somme and the Meuse. And the battle that raged by the Meuse was about possession of the fortress at Verdun.
Escorted by Bavarian infantrymen, a troop of French prisoners marched along the main road leading from the former village of Azannes to a surviving train station at Moirey. It was hard to march between fixed bayonets as prisoners of an opponent who had shown just how cheap life was to him – his own as much as the enemy’s – during the invasion of Belgium and France. In Germany, people were starving. Everyone knew that. In Germany, prisoners were maltreated. It said so in the all the newspapers. For the French it was terrible to think that they should have fallen into the hands of the Germans precisely now, at the eleventh hour. Soon the Germans would have to call the whole thing off, because the force of the Franco-British attack on the Somme would knock the stuffing out of them. Still, these prisoners had escaped from hell fire with limbs intact. If they behaved themselves, they’d get through a few months in prison too, even if it did make them want to puke to be led away like a herd of cattle. The ravines and what had once been woods, now a mass of shell craters, were behind them, as were the Meuse hills and the descent to Azannes. The landscape here was still in one piece, so to speak. Beneath them to the right flowed a stream. Around them rose the rounded, green hilltops of the Lorraine countryside. If only they could have a drink. Heat, dust and sweat tormented the 40 or 50 marching men from the Fourth Infantry in their blue-grey tunics and steel helmets or twin-peaked caps.
As they turned a corner on the left side of the road, they spotted two big troughs, each with a jet of clear water gushing into it. Men from the German Army Service Corps (ASC) were washing pots and pans there. The Frenchmen raised their heads, straightened up and quickened their pace. The Bavarian guards knew about thirst too. They’d give them time to drink or fill their canteens. Both armies were really only bitter enemies in battle. In any case, word had long been out among the French that the ASC men were unarmed non-combatants, reservists from the Landsturm too young or too old for battle, harmless folk.
On the slope above the road, black against the blue sky, was an extensive hutted encampment with steps leading down. Waves of ASC men ran over. They wanted to see the spectacle, and it was lun
chtime. Well, the more hands, the quicker everyone would get a drink. A blue-grey clump of thirsty men surrounded the troughs. Brown faces, all bearded, reached up; dozens of arms stretched out; there were mugs, pots, pans. Men dunked their faces in the translucent water, which shimmered and rippled at the bottom of the troughs. This French water, the last they’d swallow for a long time, tasted so good in their parched throats. It restored them. The ASC men understood immediately. They filled their pots and pans and helpfully took them down the line. German and French aluminium and tin clinked amicably together; white and pale grey fatigues framed the Frenchmen’s dark tunics.
‘Look lively,’ shouted the NCO in charge of the platoon. ‘Get a move on!’ This was an unplanned stop. But he wasn’t really serious. No one was in a hurry to return to their unit at the front if it was dug in at Douaumont. The men who’d quenched their thirst moved slowly away from the trough, dried their dripping beards and reformed in the middle of the road. Their eyes shone more brightly now. After two years of war, a certain mutual respect, liking even, had built up between the Germans and the French at the front. It was only to the rear, beginning with the lines of communication, that considerable numbers of people laboured to whip up hatred and anger lest the human material get infected with war weariness.
An ASC private named Bertin, recognisable from a mile off by his full, shiny, black beard, watched with satisfaction as one of his NCOs, a book seller from Leipzig called Karte, offered one of the Bavarians a cigar, holding out his trench lighter and pumping the Bavarian for information in his Saxon dialect. Hauling a container of water, Bertin pushed through the swarm of men, shouting a word or two to his comrades Pahl and Lebehde, and trotted to the end of the line, where people were vainly trying to elbow past those in front. Like drifting brown animals, a herd of strange yet familiar creatures, the men swore and pleaded in guttural tones, their necks straining from their open coats. They greeted the three men who’d come to take care of them with grateful eyes.
‘Come on, make room,’ Bertin shouted, coming away from the trough with a field kettle balanced in one hand and a full pan lid in the other. Suddenly, there was danger: officers had appeared up by the barracks and were watching what was happening. Fat Colonel Stein, his huge belly protruding over his bandy legs, hastily stuck his monocle in his eye and took it all in. On his right, he was flanked by his adjutant, First Lieutenant Benndorf, on his left by the company commander, Acting Lieutenant Graßnick, while Acting Sergeant Major Glinsky wryly watched the goings-on down below from a respectful distance. The colonel waved his riding crop indignantly at the dripping faces of those who’d cooled off in the trough. How long had this been going on? Three minutes or four? The four men absorbed all the details.
‘Bloody shambles,’ snarled the colonel. ‘Who told them they could drink here? They can stick their bloody snouts in water somewhere else.’ And, with one hand on his moustache, he shouted down the command: ‘Sergeant, move on!’
Colonel Stein was commander of the ammunitions depot at Steinbergquell, which stretched up across the hill. First Lieutenant Benndorf was his adjutant. Graßnick was only a second lieutenant in the labour company attached to the ammunitions depot. All three men had seen action in 1914 and been wounded (Benndorf still walked with a stick and limped) and were now in charge here. Colonel Stein could therefore expect obedience.
But without a favourable wind, the human voice obviously doesn’t carry very far out in the open. There was at first no response to Colonel Stein’s order, though this was against the natural order. Sergeant Major Glinsky rushed over to the balustrade, his backside wagging up and down, and, leaning half over, roared: ‘Stop that, fall in, move on!’
Glinsky knew the right tone. The Bavarian sergeant’s hand moved up involuntarily to the hilt of the bayonet hanging from his belt. Unfortunately, there were epaulettes glittering up there on the hill – otherwise that dirty Prussian pig would have got a few choice greetings in Bavarian. As it was, the sergeant turned sharply to his troops: ‘Fall in, form up.’
It’s as well if prisoners understand even what they don’t understand, and some of the guards spoke a smattering of French. Slowly, the first infantrymen pushed forwards. The ASC men pushed between them with greater determination to make sure they all got a drink. The column reformed peacefully.
The colour rose in Colonel Stein’s face. People down there were going against the spirit of his order. Down at Moirey train station, looking like tiny toys, the wagons were already rolling up that would take the prisoners away and then return as quickly as possible with gas ammunition. Time enough for the men to drink at the station. ‘Stop this nonsense!’ he ordered. ‘Sergeant Major, turn the water off!’ Everyone there knew the two brass taps near the feed trough that cut the flow of water to the lead spouts. Glinsky jumped to it.
Those ASC men who happened to be nearby heard this order with a grumble, a grin or a shrug, but it pierced one man to the heart. Bertin blanched under his black beard. He didn’t think about the tap at Moirey train station. He felt the agony of having to carry on past the trough without drinking almost as if it were his own. He had just filled his canteen. He should now empty it into the dust, as some of his comrades were doing: that docile little chap Otto Reinhold for example, or Pahl the typesetter. But Bertin knew there was still a number of thirsty men waiting at the rear. They were shuffling past the troughs, barely moving, with three Bavarians behind them. No one would now dare to fill their cupped hands or mugs.
‘Nowt we can do. They’re turned off.’ Private Lebehde, an innkeeper, pointed to the two taps, which were running dry.
‘Now I’ve seen it all,’ grunted Halezinsky, a gas worker, ‘and they call themselves human.’ And shrugging his shoulders he showed the last Frenchmen his empty field kettle.
Bertin’s canteen was made of aluminium. It was battered and black with soot on the outside but snow-white on the inside and full of delicious water. As he moved along the edge of the column – conspicuous because of his shiny, black beard – he calmly distributed the water. To a gunner who, with anguished eyes, had only reached out cupped hands he handed the full lid. To another man he gave the water from his canteen, holding it to his lips himself.
‘Prends, camarade,’ he said, and the gunner grabbed hold and drank his fill as he walked. Then he gave the canteen back.
All going well, Bertin, who was training to be a lawyer, had every prospect of living to be an old or at least an elderly man. But he would never forget the look that came into those brown eyes, which were shadowed black with exhaustion and set in yellowy skin grimy with artillery smoke.
‘Es-tu Alsacien?’ the Frenchman asked the German.
Bertin smiled. So, if you behaved decently towards a French prisoner, you had to be from Alsace. ‘Certainly not,’ he answered in French. ‘I’m a Prussian.’ And then by way of goodbye: ‘For you, the war is over.’
‘Merci, bonne chance,’ replied the Frenchman, turning to march on.
Bertin, however, stayed put while the ASC men slowly slipped off up the steps. Satisfied, he watched the blue-grey backs with a warm glow in his heart. If those people were now sent to Pomerania or Westphalia as farm labourers, they’d know they weren’t going to be eaten alive. He could and would defend his actions. What could they really do to him? All he need do was lie low in the barracks for the next quarter of an hour or until he was next on duty. Wrapped in a pleasant afterglow, Bertin climbed up the wooden steps with his canteen, from which Frenchmen had drunk, dangling all nice and clean from a crooked finger. Deep in thought, he strolled past Pahl the typesetter and didn’t even notice the long look of amazement Pahl gave him.
Pahl let him pass because he wouldn’t like to be seen with this particular comrade that day. He’d often taken him for a spy who stuck close to the workers in the company to get information and pass it on. But this man wasn’t a spy. No. He was the opposite: rashness personified. If Wilhelm Pahl knew Prussians, this man was for it – but he did
n’t seem to care. Pahl the typesetter, by contrast, cared a great deal. He stood in the sun, a kind of big gnome with thick shoulders, overly long arms, a short neck and small, pale grey eyes, and gazed after the man who had followed his heart – in the Kaiser’s army.
CHAPTER TWO
Inspection
DURING THE AFTERNOON’S work on that memorable day, an order swept through the sprawling park with its turfed ramparts, huts, tents and stacks of grenades: inspection at six o’clock! Inspection? How come? Hadn’t there been four inspections in the past fortnight – with boots, underclothes, fatigues, tunics and neck bands? Hadn’t the nearby gunners, sappers, radio operators and railwaymen been poking fun at this enormous labour company of 500 men for ages because they liked to play soldiers? Everyone knew they were the army’s forgotten children: old people doing sterling work, being treated like new recruits in the middle of France. Quite a circus. Admission free. Annoyance and cursing, then, by the field railway wagons and tracks, ammunition tent and grenade stacks. But nobody connected the order with the events at lunchtime.
Outside Verdun Page 2