In normal circumstances, for example at work, punishment wipes the slate clean. In the abnormal circumstances that pertain in the army of the class state, however, punishment marks the start of a man’s suffering. From now on, Bertin would always be in the wrong, slipping from one awkward situation to the next. It would be a gradual process, possibly with the odd break along the way, but however uneven the delivery of the knocks, as surely as copulation leads to reproduction they would teach Private Bertin that life is harsh. Until now, he hadn’t fared badly in the company, as he himself admitted. It was part of his idealism to want to be like any other ASC private, and idealism, as Wilhelm Pahl knew, was one of the subtlest lures used by society to prevent gifted men furthering their own interests and to seduce them into serving the interests of the ruling classes for no wages other than glory. If the men in the company and the officers in charge of the depot assumed a Jewish writer and future lawyer must be a socialist, then they were smarter than Private Bertin himself and understood his true nature and the meaning of his feelings and impulse towards solidarity better than he did. Deep down, Bertin obviously knew the score. But not consciously. Consciously – and he’d often made this point – he believed that wars were necessary and Germany’s cause was justified. As the majority of the Party thought the same way, he could hardly be criticised for this. Nonetheless, the default approach with all such lads was to adopt a certain entirely understandable mistrust until they’d shown by their actions which side they were on. In this particular case, however, it was highly desirable to bring the man into the fold.
There Bertin stood in the bright sunshine, in the pillory, a servant of the ruling class, still thinking the stupid things he’d been told to think. It just showed what an important and powerful force education was. But now Bertin really was going to get an education. Glinsky, Graßnick, Colonel Stein and the entire machinery of the army would see to that. He, Pahl the typesetter, would make sure this education had the right spin; he was the man for the job. A man such as Bertin could be invaluable to the working class. He was a writer who was having a book published right in the middle of the war. Wilhelm Pahl had never read anything by him, but he’d heard him talking. It was obvious the man could put anything he wanted across in words, even in front of an audience. Pahl recalled speeches Bertin had given to 40 or 50 highly sceptical ASC men when they were working in Serbia. By contrast, he, Wilhelm Pahl, preferred not to express his views in front of more than one or two trusted friends. He was aware of his ugliness, his hunchback, his short neck, his squashed nose and piggy eyes, and this held him back from appearing in public. And yet nothing was more important to further the cause of the working class. If the gifts of Bertin the lawyer and the thoughts of Pahl the typesetter could be combined that would be no mean weapon. If the hatred in Pahl and his indignation at class injustice could be made to burn in Comrade Bertin’s breast, if Bertin’s natural courage and disregard for personal danger were turned in the right direction, then they really could start something. It was something to work on. Maybe even during the war. Definitely afterwards. At the moment, all the power was in the hands of the ruling class. The owning classes, from which the officers came, had 70 million Germans at their disposal. They controlled their thoughts, deeds and desires. Only idealistic sheep such as Bertin believed they would ever willingly give this power up. But there was no need to decide how to wrest it from them just yet. No, Wilhelm Pahl would have time enough to work it out clearly in his own slow way. He certainly didn’t want to go to the Party majority with questions of how, what and when. The company hadn’t honoured him with the nickname ‘Liebknecht’ for nothing. His opinion of those who had passed the war credit bills was exactly the same as that lonely man’s. Liebknecht had paid for his courageous protests in the Reichstag and on Potsdamer Platz on 1 May with a prison sentence. In some places, comrades had risked a strike because of it. Not a bad sign. But at the moment the battle for Verdun and the costly campaign to control Europe – the world even – had eclipsed all else.
Pahl’s cigar was burning down. He was pleasantly tired now. Sleep would come quickly and do him good. Those, then, were his ‘War Thoughts’ – quite different, admittedly, from those that appeared in the newspapers, penned by venerable, patriotic professors. Wilhelm Pahl had earlier consigned one such column to the underworld, tossing it down to the rustling maggots in the latrine. The big 42cm gun 2km away in Thonne-le-Thil, which had roared so loudly it made the barracks shudder, was also quiet now and had been since the day before yesterday. The story was that a squib round had wiped it out – it and its entire crew. No doubt they were surprised when the shell, which was as big as an eight-year-old boy, burst in the gun’s barrel and ripped it open, spewing out a craterful of fire and steel – but not on to the French. What was this war for? A gigantic undertaking organised by the industries of destruction, involving extreme mortal danger for all concerned. You didn’t even need the French pilots, who were getting cockier by the day, to finish a gun off… There: Bertin had put his light out. Pahl’s cigar stub fell sizzling into a tin. A little water stopped it stinking the place out. Pahl snuggled down in his wood-fibre bag, pulled his blanket up and rested his head on his folded-up tunic. Bertin, he happened to know, used a fine latex air cushion as a pillow. May sleep bring balm for your nerves, my boy, he thought. You’re going to need it. For the first time, Pahl felt a kind of grim sympathy for his comrade.
The snoring in the barracks was louder than the guns outside. Or had they gone quiet? Had society muzzled their iron jaws? Had the typesetting machines at the front stopped clattering? Were the printing presses no longer rolling that had flattened thousands of men into the letters of a new alphabet describing the future? No more trams on Schöneberg high street. Time for Sunday rest.
CHAPTER FOUR
Christoph Kroysing
‘SUPERB!’ SAID PRIVATE Bertin the next morning. The dew sparkled in the sunshine, and the cross-country march took the Böhne commando away from the company commanders, and the men hated being near them. Yes, Bertin was responding rather differently to his despatch to the front than Herr Glinsky and his like had anticipated. For Bertin, this march provided an excursion into life proper. He positively quivered with joy at the thought that he was at last about to experience something. His whole being was as receptive as a dry sponge and pushed impatiently forwards, as if he were on an invisible lead. He was all eyes and ears that morning, totally alert.
There were several routes to the front from the Steinbergquell ammunition depot, which was tucked away at the junction of the Flabas to Moirey station road and the Damvillers to Azannes road. The shortest route was in Fosses wood and passed through a village called Ville, which had been shot to pieces and had gaping holes in its roofs and walls. It was still nice and early, and the sun slanted down behind the marching men. Pear tree leaves and laundry hung out to dry by signals men and flak gunners in their billet yard flashed in the morning light. The billets were all in the cellars. Ville was now a town of cellars, full of technical troops and infantry.
In the green valley, which they turned into as the road changed direction in the hills, they came upon the first dead. They lay under rust red tarpaulins, watched over by a sapper in a steel helmet. For a few minutes afterwards, the ASC men stopped talking. Then they found themselves in a green beech wood. Light shone through the young leaves on the treetops against the bright sky; a clear stream gurgled towards the men; drivers brought bareback horses to drink and carried full buckets of water up the hill on broad wooden shoulder yokes, disappearing behind black barracks where smoke billowed from narrow kitchen chimneys. The wood was practically untouched by shells, but the trees had been thinned and it was crossed by paths heading in different directions uphill. The further forwards the Böhne commando pushed, the more ripped and truncated trees they found lying on both sides of the valley. The red wood of the beeches stood out in the wild green tangle of creepers, foliage and brambles. Hazel bushes and wild cherry tr
ees formed a thick undergrowth. Smooth, silvery grey beech trunks thrust upwards, hemmed in by dozens of younger saplings, pushing up branches as wide as a finger or arm to get as much light as possible and avoid being choked by the predatory tops of the older trees. Slanting light glimmered through the wild tangle, and birds called. As the valley turned southwards, all the trees were suddenly truncated, their bark hanging in loops. There were exposed white rocks everywhere, split open by shells, and a mass of creepers and shrubs sprawled round the edges of the huge blast holes, half submerged in the loam. Later – it must’ve been about eight o’clock – they crossed a plateau riddled like a sieve with shell holes, many of them as big as craters. The abused land stretched southwards: a desolate, brownish wasteland. Without warning, columns of smoke suddenly rose up, and a loud blast threw the ASC men into the nearest shell hole. Nobody knew which direction was which or if they were taking cover on the wrong side. The young man in Bertin felt great joy at that moment. This was how things should be. He was 27, but his heart beat like a boy’s, perhaps that was his good fortune. He pushed on and before the next blast came he was lying beside the detachment leaders, Sergeant Böhne and Sergeant Schulz, the ammunitions expert. For the first time, splinters and clumps of earth hurtled over the shocked ASC men. They regrouped at the edge of the field and advanced in the pauses between explosions. No one was hurt. Still, they looked pale by the time they arrived at the light railway tracks in the next valley, screened by wire netting interlaced with foliage. At that very moment, the whirr and clatter of the German counter bombardment howled past above their heads. Further down, they met a couple of gunners from the heavy batteries, who grinned at them unperturbed and asked how they liked the pyrotechnics. Bertin felt almost ashamed of his comrades’ blotchy faces and deathly pale noses.
‘Get a move on!’ said Sergeant Böhne, hustling his detachment down the pathless valley slope, pitted with shell holes and covered in footprints. Down below, a gunner was riding around. He inspected the edge of the wood and disappeared into a Beech copse. He clearly belonged to the battery that was to be installed there. In the valley, the barrels of two long-range guns stretched skywards like telescopes. Around them swarmed groups of small men. The light railway lines ended halfway up the shielding ridge. A new railway track needed to be laid between them and the guns so that the small locomotive could haul the barrel and mount of the first gun to the rear that night. Herr Böhne explained this to the young Bavarian NCO who was waiting for them. Bertin liked the look of the young man’s agreeable brown face and his warm eyes under his visor. He was obviously a 1914 volunteer who had acquired an Iron Cross, Second Class, a wound and his stripes in the space of a year, and was now in charge of a detachment. Bertin had gone to university in the south of Germany, and he loved the man’s dialect, which made him feel more homesick than his native Silesian. The work plan was simple. There were some piles of rails. The Prussians were to lay a new line to the guns, while the Bavarian’s men dismantled the two monsters, removing their mounts from their bedding. They’d have to be gone by midday or the Frogs would rain on their parade. He knew the score, because he and his men were dug in as a standby detachment in the ruin up the hill known as Chambrettes-Ferme. Every morning, the Frogs, who knew the area like the backs of their hands, battered the line to pieces. The Bavarian’s men then crawled out of their holes and laid new rails – and so forth. He had 30 men and two medical orderlies, because every now and then one of the men didn’t duck quickly enough and got hurt.
As he spoke, he shaded his eyes, squinting at the captive balloon. He said he could tell from its pale colour that the other side was out of action for the time being because of the ground mist and the morning sun in their eyes. And so the work began. Some of the men levelled the ground with picks and shovels, while the main group brought over the rails and stuck them together like a child’s model railway, fixing the sleepers into the ground with small clips. The hill ridge towered above them, a bleak yellowy brown dotted with grassy clumps between the shell holes, occasional thistles, camomile and dandelion leaves. At every step, they had to watch out for steel splinters, which came in all different sizes. The ground was covered with them, and they could damage the leather uppers of their boots. Perhaps there’s been shooting here, Bertin thought, as he chipped away with his pick at the front of the group. The sun felt strong on their backs. They’d ditched their tunics long ago. Sergeant Böhne watched them out of the corner of his pale eyes, which were sunk in wrinkles. Swinging his walking stick, he paraded up and down, rather pleased with the excursion, which might get him an Iron Cross, and with the work of his men, who, to the Bavarian’s astonishment, were making good progress. Yes, thought Bertin, who heard them discussing the topic, workers from Hamburg and Berlin get through it quicker than others. And was he mistaken or was the young Bavarian with the blue and white cockade deliberately hanging about in his vicinity? The Bavarian had given him a searching look earlier. Or did people tend to imagine such things when they liked someone?
Behind the work party, first one then soon a second wagon were lowered in a flurry of screeching and braking. In just an hour, they had reached the guns. With much cursing, the heavy steel equipment and the barrel and mount with their wooden spars, wedges and baulks were heaved on to the groaning wagons. Then 30 straining men pulled the wagons uphill on long cables. Each man had a cable cutting into his left or right shoulder. Like Chaldean or Egyptian slaves, they panted up the hillside, heading for the far-off station, which, amusingly enough, had the same name – Hundekehle – as the tram stop for a well-known Sunday pub in the Grunewald area of Berlin. Suddenly, a lieutenant rode up with a camera. He made the struggling men stop on the hillside and took a snap of them strung out along the cables like a line of smoked fish. Then the typical builder’s call to breakfast rang out: ‘Take fifteen!’ The Nissen huts up above, which had a telephone as well as an unfortunate name, had received news that it wouldn’t be possible to supply a wagon for the second gun that day. Plenty of time, then, for a slug of water from the canteen, a piece of bread and a cigarette.
The wide hollow, yellowy green against the blue sky, was filled with a shimmering heat haze. ‘That’s Fosses wood,’ Bertin heard the young Bavarian say, as he prowled round the gun positions in search of shade, gesturing expansively with his left hand. Bertin looked down on a ragged, grey slope covered in half-uprooted tree stumps. Small green leaves still sprouted from the splintered white and ochre timbers, and some of the trees still resembled chopped-down beeches, but most were tattered stakes, scarred by bullets and shell splinters, that looked more like skeletons. Unexploded cylindrical shells lay among the plants, some with their round ends sticking up towards the light. The grey fingers of ancient root systems thrust into the massive shell holes. Huge trees had been knocked to the ground and lay rotting, their earth-covered roots rising up like umbrellas, their crowns long since trodden into the ground. The destruction was a picture painted in three colours: the white of the chalky cliffs, the dark brown of the scattered soil and the irrepressible green of the foliage. In a few months, man had eradicated what nature had taken generations to produce.
In the odd protected corner of the embankment, one or two remaining whole trees provided shade. Bertin lay under one of them, the back of his head resting on his cap, his legs in a dry, crumbling shell hole. He idly watched the wind playing in the tree’s dark, shining leaves, wondering how much longer the sun and moon would shine on this scrap of nature and creation on this slope in Fosses wood and on the smooth, green-flecked columns of beech. No doubt the new battery would see to it that the surrounding desolation of tree trunks, earth and shrubbery engulfed this last little patch of growth too. What a shame, Bertin thought, oddly not considering the people who would be destroyed along with it.
A light west wind carried on it the whip of individual shells, the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire. But for a young man like Bertin the sun, shade and landscape were more meaningful and exciting than
shrapnel or Tetanus bacteria. His was an essentially musical nature, in thrall to and moved by impressions, sensuous experiences and emotions. Right then, he was playing with a roaming cat that had appeared soundlessly in a bramble bush. Her bottle-green eyes were fixed on the sausage end lying on a piece of greasy paper near Bertin’s left hand. The sausage emitted a wonderful smell of curing and select cuts of meat. Of course, a cat that knows her business needn’t starve in wartime. The place was teeming with rats, and the cat’s fur was thick and glossy across her iron muscles. But this smelt like something tasty: she could jump over and bite the man’s hand, stick a claw in the sausage tip, then bolt up the slanting beech trunk into the high-forked branches… But she was a feral house cat, who understood how the locals operated these days. They no longer threw stones. Instead, they sent something that went pop whipping through the air from sticks with sharp, shiny ends. She crouched uncertainly among the creepers and brambles, tense one minute, relaxed the next. It was a rare treat for a soldier to be alone. Bertin loved it and he loved animals even more. He eyed the cat through the rims of his glasses. How beautiful she was in her wild composure! He remembered all the cats he’d ever had and lost as a boy in Kreuzberg – you never knew how. (Silesian people considered cat skin to be the best remedy for Rheumatism.) Nonetheless, he dithered about whether he should keep the sausage end to eat himself that evening. I’ve already sunk pretty far, he thought, if I’m weighing up whether to eat the scrap of meat in this sausage end or give it to a cat. No, he decided, she’d only get the skin. He flipped the sausage paper round the end of meat. The cat jumped back in alarm and spat.
Outside Verdun Page 4