That hit the mark. Still riding on the chair, his mouth fell open. ‘What’s the lieutenant’s name?’ he asked.
‘Kroysing,’ Bertin repeated readily. ‘Eberhard Kroysing. He’s the brother of a young NCO who met his maker in mid-July.’
‘And he’s in command at Douaumont?’ Glinsky asked, still stunned.
‘Certainly not, Sergeant Major,’ Bertin answered. ‘Only of the sapper unit attached to it.’
He didn’t need to say more. Glinsky was quick on the uptake. There had been something funny about the transfer of the Bavarian ASC men to Douaumont (which, naturally enough, had got about), and this explained it, albeit in the most unsettling and unclear way. His expression darkened. ‘Forward march!’ he snarled suddenly. ‘Dismissed! You’ll have to work out how to get there yourself.’
Bertin about-turned and left the orderly room feeling very satisfied. He’d long since worked out how to get where he was going: with the drivers who brought the short, fat 21cm shells to the howitzer guns in the Ornes valley.
(Naturally, no one knew why the 1/X/20’s rations improved so much after Bertin left: butter and Dutch cheese, big chunks of meat at lunch – magic! And this wonderful state of affairs lasted fully five days. On the sixth and seventh, it tailed off, and on the eighth the old menu took hold again as if nothing had happened: gristle in ‘barbed wire’, dried vegetables and the turnip jam known as Fat for Heroes.)
At 2.10pm, Bertin laid his rucksack down on the wooden floor of the telephone room at the artillery depot, so that his new duties could be explained to him. The telephonists from the Steinbergquell ammunitions depot were all very pleasant. They’d been worried for days that one of them would have to provide leave cover for the operator at Wild Boar gorge; they knew the score. That someone else now had to go out to that dreadful place where shells were always falling filled them with gratitude.
‘Oh, it’s child’s play, comrade’ they explained. ‘You’ve got your eight switches for the stations in front and behind of you – for the sapper depot, the next exchange and the artillery group – and your new comrades will show you how to use the plugs in two minutes. And it’s not dangerous at all because if the cable gets shot up, other men have to go out to mend it.’ They kindly didn’t tell him that as the newcomer he might have to run to the sapper depot and tell them that the cable had been shot up.
‘And there are men from your part of the world nearby – Upper Silesians,’ said the telephonist Otto Schneider.
Bertin wasn’t particularly attached to men from his part of the world. He had more in common with Bavarians and men from Berlin and Hamburg. He only took an interest in one Silesian regiment: the 57th, which was on active service and where his little brother served. The day before yesterday, he’d received another letter from his mother. The fear that Fritz Bertin might be no more pulsated behind her faint handwriting. The lad had already been wounded once the previous autumn.
About 3pm, a message was sent up that the short 21cm shells had been loaded up. Bertin swung his rucksack on to one shoulder, took his knotty stick in his hand and ran downstairs, cheerfully parrying the curious, mocking shouts from his closer friends in the Third Company. Oddly enough, everyone was in clover that day; those who were staying behind were glad to be staying behind, and Bertin was glad he was going.
The Silesian gunners, bony men with strained faces, didn’t stand on ceremony. ‘Chuck your pack on top of the pots and let’s get going, lad,’ they said with their hard r’s and high-pitched vowels. Bertin hid his disappointment. He hadn’t bargained with having to help push the loaded trucks. But as he looked in some annoyance at the stubby, pointed shells lying there like chubby babies, he realised something: Glinsky had made no impression on him – he was neither confused nor worried. Something quite new and brilliant!
The track that formed the gunners’ route forked off to the east in the middle of a desolate valley floor. Wild Boar gorge opened off the the right, they said. It was the third one along and quite narrow, easily recognisable by all its greenery. He’d find it. Despite his rucksack and tunic, Bertin walked very quickly. For the first time, he found himself alone under the open sky in the flashing sunlight. Death might crash down upon him at any moment from the summer air. He had to summon all his courage. He cursed his stupidity for following this order simply because he wanted Eberhard Kroysing to have a good opinion of him. Footprints everywhere between the shell holes. Who wouldn’t get lost here? Sweat stuck to the lenses of his glasses, and his hands shook as he cleaned them. The deathly silence frightened him; every sound that wafted over the ridge frightened him; when a plane appeared up above, he felt like throwing himself to the ground – he was too short-sighted to make out if it was German or French. He scurried on, teeth clenched on his pipe, pursued by his humpbacked shadow, just as one of his forebears might have dragged his wares from farm to farm in the mountains of Austrian Silesia in the time of the empress Maria Theresa. He counted the openings in the land ahead: one was already behind him, there was one opposite and two shimmered in the sunlight ahead. He looked at his watch as if that might help him. His heart thumped wildly on account of his load and from loneliness. If he hadn’t been thoroughly used to crushing his internal demons, he would’ve turned round and not carried out his orders. He rested briefly at the edge of the next shell hole, drank a couple of slugs of lukewarm coffee from his canteen, relit his pipe and forced himself to breathe calmly. At last he was steeped in solitude – as he’d longed to be. He cursed himself and called himself an ass. He was like a peasant from the countryside blundering about in the bustle of city traffic for the first time. The peasant is frightened of the cars, trams and hurrying people and doesn’t dare to ask his way. He feels like he’s fallen to earth from the moon and when he finally does open his mouth, he finds he’s already at his destination. Bertin narrowed his eyes and shaded them with his hands. That there, diagonally to the right, could be the opening of Wild Boar gorge. He set off at a trot, bounding up the hillside then slowing down on the valley floor. A tangle of green beckoned to him. The chopped and scattered remains of felled trees with terrible butchered trunks covered the slope to his right. Pale, yellowed leaves covered the branches and bisected crowns. A profusion of young shoots, dried rose hips and beech saplings that soared like flag poles pushed through them above shell holes as white as bones. A German bombardment must have caused this. The slope was open to the north. The southern side had been similarly ravaged by the French. There the mown down trees had larger, greener leaves and were piled up horizontally.
Suddenly a sign with an arrow rose up in front of him: ‘Wild Boar gorge! Lower reaches may be subject to enemy observation’. Bloody hell, he thought and feeling relieved and worried at the same time, he set off at a trot through the fallen trees and found a footpath. A few minutes later, something screamed past. He was down before he knew it, pressed against a beech tree with his rucksack thumping into the nape of his neck. A dull thud on the hillside behind him, then a second. He waited. No explosion. Duds, he thought with relief. The French were using new American ammunition, and it was useless. The howling of the shells alone, that desolate, ripping sound, had got to him this time, and he hurried on, his hands filthy from the swampy ground. The dead trees struck him as unearthly. How would this destruction of nature ever be made good? A minute later, the valley took a turn: pristine wood, primaeval.
He was surrounded by green and shadows. Birds called in the beech tops. Bundles of young shoots as thin as fingers or children’s arms rose up beside the sun-dappled tree trunks high enough to open their leaves to the light. Bramble bushes spread out their tendrils, heaving with late flowers and pink and reddish black fruits. The steep slope shone green with the sword-shaped leaves of the lily of the valley. Hawthorn and barberry bushes intertwined, and the feathery bracken fluttered above the moss and stones. It was amazing— like a mountain wood on a holiday walk at home. It was wonderful to sit there with his rucksack propped against a stone
and his stick between his knees, free from thought, relaxed. The air among the tree trunks was cool and refreshing.
Five minutes later, Bertin again came across the light railway track, a branch line, and a blockhouse with a corrugated iron roof. At last! He reported military style to a corporal, a bearded man, who was sitting by the door cutting a stick.
‘Ah, here you are,’ the corporal said equably.
He had a Baden accent, as did his colleague, who came over, barefoot and in shirt-sleeves, pleased that the new third man had actually arrived. Bertin was asked if he could play skat – he could – and if he’d brought a lot of lice with him. They said he’d be able to keep clean there. Thank God, said Bertin.
At a push, the two reservists from the Landsturm could’ve managed alone. They only had one fear: being recalled. The telephone box, which was looked after by the railway service, did indeed only have eight switches, but someone had to stay awake day and night in case one of the switches dropped. Bertin checked over his new bed, hung his rucksack on the post, unrolled his blankets and unpacked his smaller items: washing things, writing things, smoking things and a picture of his wife in a small, round frame. This would be his home for the next fortnight.
Just before 6pm, he put a call through to the sapper depot at Douaumont at the suggestion of the corporal. He was called Friedrich Strumpf and he was a park-keeper in Schwetzingen, not far from Heidelberg. When Bertin spoke into the black mouthpiece and asked to report to Lieutenant Kroysing, the man from Baden looked at him suspiciously. The new boy seemed to have fancy friends. After a while, Sergeant Süßmann answered: the lieutenant sent his best wishes and he, Süßmann, would pick Bertin up at a convenient time the following afternoon. Happy working until then. ‘Fine,’ said Bertin. He then set about reassuring his new colleagues that he was an all right sort.
He offered the men from Baden a cigar, chatting away about how he’d swum in the river Neckar in 1914, and describing the castle grounds at Schwetzingen. They contained a mosque, didn’t they, built by the prince-elector Karl Theodor? And beautiful birds kept in an aviary. There was also a Chinese pavilion and a little marble bath. After five minutes of this, he had won Strumpf the park-keeper’s heart. Strumpf beamed. Soon he was showing Bertin a picture of his two children – a boy with a satchel and a 10-year-old girl holding a cat in her arms – and enlightening him about to the character of the third man, a freckled, sandy-haired tobacco worker from Heidelberg called Kilian. Kilian was quick-tempered and argumentative and didn’t like to be contradicted but he was a good comrade when you knew how to take him.
That afternoon, Bertin learnt what his duties would be, which batteries were firing nearby, when the French shot and what their targets were, how the land lay. Douaumont was to the south-west, and to the north-east, behind them beyond the great depression, was the Ornes valley, and Bezonvaux, or what was called Bezonvaux, was practically due east. To their left, the French were attacking an artillery position, and three-quarters of an hour to the front were the field howitzers. They sometimes got post from them; they brought it past with their ammunition. If they didn’t show up for a couple of days, you had to remind them. They were a dour lot, Poles from the Russian border, and when they spoke, the words clattered from their mouths like bricks, but their lieutenant was nice and bored to death over there. Schanz was his name.
Later when they were at their evening meal – tea with rum and toast with rashers of bacon – and Bertin was holding his sandwich skewered on a twig over the fire, a clamour sounded above the roof. Outside it began to boom, sing, roar, gurgle and rattle, fading away then returning again and again. The two men from Baden didn’t even look up. It was just the 15cm guns’ evening blessing on its way to Thiaumont and beyond. It was a repulsive, unnatural sound, whose deeply evil nature was instantly apparent. Private Bertin sat there deeply affected by it. What he heard wasn’t the drone of a man-made implement whose purpose and use were determined by men. To him, it was as if an ancient force, a bit like an avalanche, roared out there, for which the laws of nature, not man, were responsible. The war, an operation instituted by men, still felt to him like a storm decreed by fate, an unleashing of powerful elements, unaccountable and beyond criticism.
CHAPTER TWO
A voice from the grave
SUDDENLY, THE FOLLOWING day at noon, Erich Süßmann was there, looking around with his piercing eyes and promising the men from Baden to send the newcomer back in time. Their route took them past the field howitzers. Great. They strode off like a couple of ramblers, crossed the light railway tracks and the stream on some planks, climbed up the slope through branches and bushes dappled with light and shade, turned into a gorge on the right, which was currently a mass of pulverised woodland, and followed a sort of cattle path halfway down the slope that led to the railway tracks in the valley. Sergeant Süßmann knew all these woods by name: they were in Moyemont, Vauche wood was further back, Hassoule with its ravines further on. Each one had literally cost streams of blood, German and French. They turned on to a narrow path, and Bertin grabbed Süßmann’s shoulder. ‘Look! A Frenchman!’ A few feet from them was a blue-grey figure with his back to them. His steel helmet hung round the nape of his neck and he was pressed against a bush as though about to walk on.
Süßmann gave a short laugh. ‘God, yes, the Frog. He signposts the way to the field howitzers. No need to be scared of him. He’s deader than dead.’
‘And no one has buried him?’ asked Bertin in disgust.
‘Where have you been living, dear chap? In the Bible probably and with Antigone. They needed a signpost here and took what came their way.’ Bertin looked away as they walked past the murdered man, who was nailed to the truncated tree with a shell splinter like a sword. ‘Heavy mortar,’ said Süßmann.
Bertin felt ashamed in the presence of the dead man. He had an irrepressible urge to scatter earth on his helmet and shoulders, to atone for his death, to give him back to Mother Earth. His gaze sought out the ravaged face and desiccated hands. Good God, he thought, he might have been a young father. He might have carried his little son on those shoulders the last time he was home on leave. He trotted along silently beside Süßmann. Unexpectedly, they came upon piles of ammunition covered by greenish tarpaulins. To the left, the railway reappeared beneath their path. Shortly thereafter, the heavy barrel of a gun, whose mounting was wedged into the earth, reared up among the ruined trees. Only then did Bertin notice the overturned tree trunks bound together with wire cables, sandbagged and covered with canvas camouflage. A heap of useless iron in the form of spent cartridges rusted nearby. Someone called to them. Süßmann spoke to the guard, who was strolling around without a rifle, and learnt there was no post that day. Next day perhaps. The hard Upper Silesian dialect was unrecognisable on the lean soldier’s stubbly lips.
At last the hillside to the fort towered above them like a mountain that had had part of it blown off. The earth: it was beyond Bertin’s worst dreams. It bared its scabs and pus like a piece of leprous skin under the microscope. It was scorched and crumbling, and the remains of roots wormed through it like veins. A bundle of spoiled hand grenades lay in a shell hole. Of course, thought Bertin, the place had once been full of water. Scraps of cloth fluttered on a jumble of barbed wire – a sleeve with buttons, cartridge cases, the remains of a machine gun belt – and there were human excrement and tin boxes everywhere. But no bodies. In his relief he mentioned this to Süßmann, who waved a dismissive hand.
‘There were plenty of dead bodies here at the beginning of April. Naturally, we couldn’t let them stink away to their heart’s content. We buried them in the big shell holes back there.’
‘How long have you been here?’ asked Bertin in astonishment.
‘Forever,’ laughed Süßmann. ‘First we captured it, then came the rumpus inside the bowels of the place, then I was away for a few weeks and then I came back.’
‘What do you mean by the “rumpus”?’
‘The explosion,
’ answered Süßmann. ‘I tell you, it’s a strange world. I was practically dead, and that wasn’t half as bad as being tormented by the question: why? Who are we doing all this for?’ Bertin stopped to catch his breath. All the answers that drifted into his head seemed impossible. In this place, every word smacked of rank pathos. ‘Yes, my young friend,’ joked his little guide, ‘even you don’t know what to say to that. It always feels to me as if people like you have fallen out of a balloon by chance and need some information about the planet they find themselves stumbling across.’
‘Gratefully received,’ said Bertin, not offended in the least. ‘If the Frogs give us time—’
‘Why wouldn’t they?’ Süßmann sniffed. ‘They’re as deep in hot water as we are. They won’t lift a finger.’
The approach turned into a mountain climb, and Bertin’s stick came in handy. Süßmann laughed as they stepped over the drawbridge and passed the barbed wire defences – the spikes of iron gratings bent by direct hits stared up from the moat – and Bertin sniffed the musty smell of rubble and other strange substances. ‘That’s the Douaumont smell. So we don’t forget the place.’
The sentry hadn’t challenged them. ‘Salute when you see an officer here, oh stranger,’ Süßmann instructed him. ‘You’re never off duty.’
‘I actually can’t see a thing,’ Bertin answered, his voice echoing in the dark tunnel. Vaults opened off to the right and left, and there were small electric lamps in the ceiling.
‘We’re in the north-west wing,’ said Süßmann. ‘At the end of March, the Frogs were practically dancing on our heads, but they didn’t pull it off.’ ASC men ran past them with bundles of tools on their shoulders. A couple of sappers covered in dirt nodded to Süßmann. ‘They’ll be able to sleep today,’ he said, ‘but otherwise we’re trained to be night owls. Funny how you get used to things. It seems there are no limits to what human nature can take.’
Outside Verdun Page 12