He swung his steel helmet on to the coat stand, carefully hung his cape and gas mask under it, threw his belt with his dirk and heavy pistol and his torch on to the bed and sat down beside them to take off his puttees and mud-caked shoes. In other circumstances, he’d have rung and woken his batman, sleepy Sapper Dickmann, who only had one virtue: he could fry schnitzel and make coffee like no one else. But he wanted to be alone with this package. While he was bent over undoing his laces and putting on his house shoes, he didn’t let it out his sight for a second, as if it might disappear just as suddenly and magically as it had wafted in. Yes, he thought, this was a victory. Victory number two, won by fearlessly advancing, constantly upping the ante and exploiting the enemy’s weakness – precise knowledge of the terrain. The tactical instructions applied to Lieutenant Kroysing’s private war with Captain Niggl were bearing fruit. Funny, he pondered, I never for one moment thought that this could be one of the welcome packages from home that sporadically reach us. I’ve got my teeth some way into Captain Niggl.
He read the accompanying bumph signed ‘Feicht, Sergeant Major’ and written in Feicht’s best handwriting, examined the wrapping paper suspiciously and nodded knowingly. There was nothing to prove that the package had really been sent back by the army postal service. Asterisks and curved lines might convince a schoolboy. However, nothing proved the contrary either. The conspiracy against the young lad had been carried out by shrewd and experienced soldiers. They weren’t so easily unsettled. They’d parried his strike splendidly and hung the clerk Dillinger out to dry in the customary manner. If he fell for it and demanded that Dillinger be punished, the clerk would definitely be sent to prison, but as recompense for his silence he’d be off on leave in the next round. A wolf like Kroysing wasn’t about to be seduced by such tricks. His steady grey eyes looked through the wall at his target, the captain. He wasn’t finished with him. He pulled out his knife, slit the string with an audible rip and opened the package. Enclosed in the soft brown leather waistcoat he knew so well lay all that remained of Christoph on earth. It had without a doubt been shared among his enemies as booty: watch, fountain pen, purse, the little snake ring, a wallet, a notebook, his smoking things.
Breathing heavily with his balled fists pressed into the table, Eberhard Kroysing looked at his younger brother’s effects. He hadn’t been a good brother to him – definitely not easy to put up with. We don’t love our younger siblings. We want our parents’ love all to ourselves. We don’t want to share our domain. We want to be the sole object of their affection. As we can’t push aside siblings that are born later, we subjugate them. Hell mend them if they don’t obey. The nursery can be a mini hell. It can. Boys are very inventive and instinctively know how to wage war inconspicuously. That’s how it is – and not just in the Kroysing household. If the parents intervene, it just makes it worse for the weaker ones. In his case, it carried on until the bonds of home loosened and the brothers began to move in different circles. A cool indifference had then crept into the older brother’s attitude towards the younger. Only much later in the university holidays did he suddenly realise that his little brother was growing into a man with a good heart – a potential friend. Then the war started and he’d been turned into a savage again, and just when he was hoping that they’d both get leave by Christmas at the latest and be able to enjoy the festivities with their parents, it was too late. A couple of scoundrels had let the French finish the young lad off to spare themselves a bit of unpleasantness. He’d get his own back on the Frogs, but here and now written on the walls of this monk’s cell were the words: ‘too late’. ‘Too late’ on the ceiling and the window, ‘too late’ on the floor. ‘Too late’ hung in the air. Nothing was more natural for men at war than to believe in kingdom come, life after death, a reunion on the other side. The fighting man’s simple, forward-driven mind couldn’t grasp that those who were carried off had disappeared forever; his imagination couldn’t deal with it. The enemy had to live on, so that victory was eternal. And a brother had to live on so you could make up for all the bad and evil things you’d done in your youth.
Kroysing grabbed the little watch, wound it and set it. It was half eleven. From the distance came rumbling and crashing. It must be from the Fort Vaux area, where fighting was constantly flaring up and the French were improving their positions. Nonetheless, the tick of the watch was audible in the quiet room. The young lad’s heart couldn’t be made to tick again. But at least he had already made an offering to the dead boy. And he would pursue Niggl until he confessed. Then Judge Advocate Mertens would take up the case and deal with Niggl, and his machinations would all have been in vain. He’d thought about it and made up his mind. He could cheerfully have spat on the retired civil servant before witnesses, slapped his face or wrung his neck. But duelling was forbidden in wartime, and however satisfying it might have been to haul that fat, trembling lump in front of his gun, the legal route was the only possible one and actually the more effective. He would totally and utterly destroy Herr Niggl. Even if Niggl survived, he’d take no pleasure in his life. He’d be a social outcast, dishonoured by his years in jail. He’d be dismissed from his post and, as the bureaucrat’s life was all he knew, he and his family would starve. Perhaps he’d open a little stationery business in Buenos Aires or Constantinople. But wherever the German officer corps had connections he’d be a dead man, despised by his wife and hated by his children.
Will that satisfy you, Christoph? he wondered. You’re soft. Your enemy’s scalp means nothing to you, but it means something to me. It won’t be tonight or the day after tomorrow, but we’ll get it. And then we’ll make Bertin a lieutenant in your place. He resisted the temptation to look through his brother’s notebook, wrapped his effects up in the leather waistcoat, undressed, got into bed and turned out the light.
BOOK FOUR
On the fringes of humanity
CHAPTER ONE
Profound effects
DURING THE NIGHT and towards morning, when the captive balloons’ eyes were shut, the field kitchen staff tried to creep up on the infantry positions. They’d find some cover and distribute from there the warm food the men had long done without: thick bean soup with scraps of meat, bluish barley stew, yellow peas and ham – all packed in heat-retaining tin containers, which the food carriers lugged down the final stretches to the trenches. The operation had its dangers. A soldier with warm soup in his belly fights better, and causing privations that might break the men’s morale was part of the civilised nations’ machinery of war. Advance batteries lay in wait for the field kitchen staff. Sometimes they miscalculated but usually they didn’t, and their actions were always disastrous.
In the early morning around 6.30am, when the ground mist, which had long since turned into autumnal morning fog, parted for a moment, the French at Belleville caught sight of Captain Niggl’s ASC men at work. They had known for a long time that the Germans were expanding their positions behind the lines and had marked the presumed locations of these bases on their maps. For weeks, the Germans had been planning the push that would reclaim Douaumont village and Fort Vaux. They’d been saving up ammunition, improving their approach roads and preparing their field batteries for the advance. The construction of the German front had many advantages, but flexibility wasn’t one of them. Communication between the artillery and the observers in the infantry, especially those in the forts, was handled much better, more quickly and more intelligently by the French. A couple of minutes after the suspected field kitchen was discovered, shrapnel burst over the area in the gathering fog, whipping down on the ASC men, who scattered in panic. Only eight men were injured in all because the French made the mistake of rapidly moving their fire further forward on to the huge depression that opened out to the south from Douaumont, and through which the food carriers should indeed have run. Nonetheless, the company returned at 9.30am instead of 8am, and that hour and a half was nerve-racking for Niggl.
He’d been so happy, so pleased with Feich
t, who really had turned things round in a most satisfactory manner with his idea about the army postal depot, the accompanying letter and all the rest of it. He could now calmly wait for the lieutenant to make his next move. He’d even metabolised the increase in work, worry and to and fro caused by the arrival of his first two companies. Douaumont was now rammed with men, and so his Bavarians could no longer complain, since more and more ASC battalions shared their fate. The Somme battle hadn’t just ripped half the batteries out of the Meuse east bank sector like eye teeth from a jaw (whether one believed this or not); it had also stolen away entire infantry squads – how many, no one knew – which were to be replaced with ASC men and Landwehr. It all sounded preposterous, for what were the ASC men to do there? Niggl knew full well what: they were to relieve the infantry regiments of the heavy lifting and reinforcing of the supply lines in the rear positions. It was a fine mess that meant his men were chased across the field like hares and his casualty list had trebled. They’d got off lightly this time. Sergeant Pangerl had taken a bullet in the backside, five men had been more or less badly injured and were looking forward to being sent home, and two others looked as if they might be finished with their grey uniforms for good – joy unconfined. This all ran through the captain’s mind, as he tossed and turned in his bed trying to catch up on his morning’s sleep. He had lice and missed the warm bath he’d always been used to as an officer in a foreign country. At home in Weilheim he seldom bathed. Now the dreadful suckers were tormenting him as if he were a common soldier. It was already 10.30am when he eventually fell asleep. His cell, as he called it, was pretty dark even during the day. He had a host of unclear, largely unpleasant dreams, and any refreshment his slumbers might have brought vanished thanks to the way he was woken up.
If a shell hits the roof you’re sleeping under, the noise of the impact wakes you – or you never wake again. If it falls near you, however, 50m to your right or left, the dreadful howl of its approach bores into your soul first. You spend five faltering heartbeats still dazed but wide awake waiting for the blast, and that fraction of a minute saps your vitality. At exactly the same time as the recent attack, a second 40cm mortar battery fired at Douaumont, but this time on to the opposite corner of the pentagon. The first shot landed some 30m to the right of the fort on the disintegrating slope. Herr Niggl slept through its approach, though his subconscious was on high alert. This was the first sign of attrition and exactly what the attacker wanted. He was awoken by the burst and thunder of the explosion, which shook the fort’s foundations from the side. Train crash, he thought still half asleep. I’m on the Augsburg to Berlin sleeper on my way to an official meeting about awarding Hindenburg the freedom of Weilheim. Then he woke up. He wasn’t on the sleeper train; he was in the most accursed place in Europe. That had been a heavy-calibre weapon, a repeat of recent events. The French really were gunning for them. There wouldn’t be a minute’s peace from now on. It was all kicking off now. This was the final hour.
‘Oh, most holy Saint Aloysius, pray for me now and in the hour of my death,’ he cried. ‘I shall go to Hell impenitent. My soul will burn forever. Bring a priest. I must confess!’
And then, oh yes, oh Jesus, down it howled, dragging a trail of hellish screaming in its wake. It was the devil, whinnying and hissing. Where, oh where would it strike? He dove under the bedclothes. A blaring and crashing, an echo rolling through the fort’s corridors and tunnels, signalled relief. It had landed further off this time, in the northeast wing by the sound of it, the sapper depot where his enemy lived. Limbs aquiver and sweating from every pore, Niggl huddled in his bed, listening to the men’s shouts and the clatter of their boots running past his door.
‘Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Alois Niggl,’ he told himself. ‘It’s too much to hope that the French will have carried off the second brother too. No one gets that lucky.’
His hair fell in his eyes. An irksome fly drank his sweat. At last, the clerk Dillinger rushed in to report a direct hit on the sapper depot: nuffink damaged. Smoothing his hair over his forehead, the captain calmly asked if Lieutenant Kroysing had been informed of the company’s recent losses – if he was in fact in the fort.
Dillinger answered both questions in the affirmative. The lieutenant had just been called into a meeting with the airfield commander when the first one struck. Although everyone knew there must be a second, the lieutenant nonetheless set off and what was more took a short cut across the inner courtyard, which was littered with great fat shell splinters. There could so easily have been an accident.
‘We’d never have got over that,’ said the captain, adding that the orderly room should try to find a Catholic chaplain to bestow spiritual consolation on the men in their time of need. Dillinger’s face lit up; the orderly room would get on it straight away. The division currently holding the sector was admittedly from Saxony and Protestant, but such difficulties could be overcome with a bit of ingenuity.
‘Very good, Dillinger,’ said the captain. ‘Let me know when you’ve sorted it out.’
When Private Bertin heard about the Bavarian dead and wounded, he went slowly pale under his tan both from the shock and on Lieutenant Kroysing’s account.
It was now September, and this part of the front had never been so quiet. There were good reasons for the Germans not to attack, but the French weren’t budging either, and that gave pause. It was a magical September. In the unspoilt ancient woodland, some 60m wide, small yellow leaves flickered in the burnished light. The longer nights were perfect for a game of skat. The two genial Badeners and Bertin took turns on the switchboard. Friedrich Strumpf, park keeper at Schwetzingen, was convinced he’d seen grey feral cats, and so he often took his infantry rifle out at noon, hoping to get a catskin for his rheumatism. He always came back grumbling, down two cartridges and with no catskin. The little minxes just wouldn’t stand still, he said. Meanwhile, the rear part of the valley was being filled with wood stacks of various sizes. The rainy season was approaching, and the construction troops and sappers were getting ready to raise the narrow-gauge railway platforms.
Almost every morning or afternoon, Bertin wandered over to the field howitzer emplacement to get the post, choosing a time when the light was bad. ‘You have the youngest legs, lad,’ the Badeners said. ‘You still enjoy running about.’
Bertin did enjoy it, for as well as sating his thirst for adventure, he had found a genuine countryman and passing acquaintance in the lieutenant and battery commander there. Lieutenant Paul Schanz had taken his school leaving examination as an outside student with Bertin’s class at school some years previously. He was from Russian Poland, where his father worked as head foreman in a coal mine. The lieutenant had initially taken a bored tone with Bertin but had softened when he recognised him. By the end of Bertin’s second visit this tall, blonde man with blue eyes was inviting him to linger for a game of chess. The lieutenant was delightful company when he opened up. He and Bertin sat in the entrance to the dugout with a box between them shuffling the black and white pieces around. They talked to each other about the past and the present. They spoke about peace, which must surely come at the beginning of 1917. Bertin got the inside track on the light field howitzer – its mechanism and range, and how best to use it. Lieutenant Schanz, smart and clean-shaven, with smooth skin and a boyish laugh, told him how his men were getting into all kinds of careless ways, partly because they were so used to what they did and partly because they were sick of it. They were fed up with the whole bloody business. They no longer used a charge of salt to dampen the gleam from their shots because they didn’t want to have to clean the dirty barrels. They’d left their carabines at the rest camp so the locks wouldn’t get rusty – there were a lot of water trickles among the rocks – and anyway he didn’t even have the prescribed number of canister shells for close combat.
‘Who needs canister shells here?’ he said. ‘We’ll see to it that the Frogs don’t break through, and we’ll never have enough shrap
nel.’ Thus, at the back, under a green tarpaulin, was a store of what were called canister shells, but in fact it was a dump of another 300 shrapnel.
The battery hardly fired now. Strict orders to save ammunition and keep it hidden from the French observers. On all the hills, sound-ranging troops lay in wait in the trenches on both sides, intelligent men with good eyes able to calculate a gun position’s distance from the interval between firing and impact. Using this information and with the help of the captive balloons, both sides were able to mark the enemy’s gun positions on their maps. The day would come when this information would be needed. Bertin also got the chance to look through the periscopic binoculars in Lieutenant Schanz’s observation post. They had been cleverly installed under a jutting rock behind the guns with a decoy barrel in a treetop 80m to the side to deceive the French aeroplanes. Through that curious apparatus, he saw inclines, scarred hillsides, tiny beings moving about, sharply alive, walls of earth and small hollows. Sometimes clouds appeared and drifted away. Those were the Belleville ridges, Schanz explained. Behind the horizon was a French battery, probably 400m to the rear, 5,500m from barrel to barrel.
‘I’d like to know if there’s another Schanz lying in wait in a dugout over there with his eye on our battery,’ he said.
Bertin didn’t want to let the amazing instrument go. ‘All in aid of destruction,’ he said, shaking his head and looking again into the grey-rimmed lenses. ‘When will we use this magic for something constructive?’
‘When indeed? After the peace, of course. When those chaps over there have realised they don’t have us by the throat.’
They were united in their desire for peace and they strolled back through the light, sunny air to have a smoke and think about how their lives might turn out. Paul Schanz hoped for a career in the administration of the Upper Silesian coal mines, where his father now worked. There was a lot of work to be done there. His father had written that the mines were being ruined. Nothing could be replaced properly, and the workings were threatened by gas and water. German coal was one of the most important tools of war: neutral and allied countries couldn’t get enough of it. Transport trains left Upper Silesian railway stations bound for Constantinople, Aleppo, Haifa.
Outside Verdun Page 16