The tall men in the guard squad, the first squad of the first platoon, were sitting at breakfast. They invited Bertin to help himself. They looked worried. Bertin listened. The guns had not roared like this since the heavy fighting in May and June. The wild barking of enemy fire could be picked out clearly in the frantic bombardment. But fat Sergeant Büttner exuded unshakeable calm. ‘Your squad has delivered various things for you about which I know nothing,’ he said.
Under a bench stood the lid of Bertin’s canteen neatly packed with his evening rations from the day before, some butter and cheese, his writing case and black oilcloth notebook, and five cigars in a screw of paper. Ah, thought Bertin with a surge of warmth, they’re looking out for me, they’re backing me up. Sergeant Büttner said that if Bertin wanted something to read or his pipe he would turn a blind eye. Hot coffee did a person good when he’d been freezing all the night. But what did a bit of freezing matter? Thousands of men would have given years of their lives to have frozen as tranquilly as he had done in the last 12 hours. Now the heating was on, and a pleasant warmth circulated through the whole ramshackle structure of planks and pasteboard. No one made any distinction between the prisoner eating his breakfast and his jailers.
Back in his cell, he decided to smoke a cigar, and the blue smoke wafted out of the window – it was rotten weed, company weed, but still it was a cigar. There was uproar outside – people running back and forth – no one would pay any attention to the cell window. He stretched out on the plank bed, closed his eyes and took the time to breathe again as if he were alone in the world. The cause of his incarceration slipped into the shadows. Perhaps a man had to be put in solitary confinement and robbed of his freedom in this fairly mild way to find himself.
As he blinked idly into the space in front of him, a figure appeared behind his eyelids: tanned face under a peaked cap, imperious look in his dark brown eyes, shoulders bent. The figure hid his left arm; the ribbon of the Iron Cross glowed in his buttonhole as if caught in a sunbeam. The figure’s dark grey outline remained in place although the gaps in the boarding showed through it as Bertin blinked. Kroysing, Bertin said in an undertone to the spectre, which was looking at him, I did everything I could for you. I’m just a louse, as you know, a humble ASC private, and I’ve been under close observation since the incident with the water tap. I found your brother and gave him your legacy. We read your letter, and Eberhard set off at full tilt in pursuit of justice but he hasn’t got anywhere yet. You’ve got to leave me in peace now. I’m a helpless soldier if ever there was one. I can’t write to your mother, can I? That’s up to your brother, and I can’t write to your uncle either. ‘Write!’ echoed the figure silently. Tanned face, thought Bertin, somewhat drawn, narrow cheeks, a rounded forehead, straight eyebrows, long eyelashes, kind brown eyes. They’d gone after him and brought him down, and he’d been rotting in that sodden grave in the swampy wood at Billy for quite some time now – hardly a peaceful resting place. It was understandable that he should reappear. Write? Why not? He had the time. Before he’d always fashioned his torments into shapes, sculptures made with the ivory of words; there were 12 of them out there now for people to read. This ghost within him couldn’t be laid to rest until he’d captured it in words. He had a pad of writing paper with a heavy cardboard cover and a fountain pen – of thought-provoking origins – which one of his comrades, probably Strauß the shopkeeper, had wrapped in with the cigars. So that’s what I’m supposed to do with it, he thought in shock.
Bertin the writer pulled on his coat, wrapped one blanket round his body and legs and another round his shoulders, leant his back on the barracks wall, rested his feet on the plank bed and made his thighs into a desk. The cold daylight fell over his cap on to the square of his writing paper. His left hand, which was holding the paper, reached for a glove, which he put on. He began to write the story of the Kroysings. He wrote from morning until midday. His squad sent him lunch, and he hid his work. He ate his soup, washed out his canteen, was locked up again, climbed on to his bed, wrapped himself up and wrote. The glorious mercy of inspiration was upon him. Sentence after sentence slipped from his unconscious into his pen. He was warmed by that wonderful creative fever that allows individuals to expand, to leave themselves behind and become a tool of the urgent forces the spirit has laid within them. He cursed the gathering dusk; he had to write! He put his work away, his Kroysing story, which didn’t yet have a title, and knocked to be let out.
The tall blacksmith Hildebrandt came to let him out. Bertin had had some good chats in the past with the Swabian from Stuttgart, who’d been a comrade since Küstrin days. ‘Boy,’ he said, ‘there’s something going on out there and no mistake.’
Bertin didn’t say that he hadn’t heard anything until just then. Until a few minutes before he’d been sunk in months gone past, beneath Chambrettes-Ferme, on the valley floor with the gun emplacement. There was much agitated talk in the guard room. It was a lucky thing that Sergeant Büttner’s large frame filled the doorway, radiating calm. The battery fire had not let up, and neither had the seething, rattling shellfire. The French were definitely going to attack, perhaps that night, perhaps not until the morning. Rumours were rife; batteries rang constantly to check the lines were still intact; some of them that had still had a connection that morning hadn’t rung since midday. Two field artillery limbers had made their way over earlier through Ville with heavy losses – two horses and three drivers – and were now loading up in the field gun depot, the deepest and most sheltered position in the whole area. Hildebrandt the Swabian had spoken to them; they were dreading the thought of taking the carts back through but they had to get through or their batteries would crumble. It was effectively a death sentence for some of them. No matter: the limbers were being loaded and were going back. The loading parties were moving out of the park in grey and reddish brown columns; it was drizzling, and they had their tarpaulins round them. Bertin was lucky to be under arrest. Escorted by Hildebrandt, he visited the latrines; you always met people there. Wild rumours about French attacks from Douaumont, the whole area under heavy fire. They were going to get a nice strip of land for themselves that day – how much, no one knew. (A lot. The whole right bank of the Meuse captured between March and September at the price of mountains of corpses, all the trashed woods and gullies: Chauffour wood, Hassoule wood, Vauche wood, the Hermitage, Caurrière wood, Hardoumont wood – everything, absolutely everything.)
Little Vehse came in as Bertin was about to leave. ‘There’s your answer to the peace initiative,’ he said dejectedly in his Hamburg accent, and his eyes revealed how strong his hope had been. He had married young and was due to go on leave in February, or perhaps the beginning of March, when he intended to wallpaper his bedroom. A few days previously he’d been asking Bertin’s advice on colours. He preferred green, but green wallpaper was often poisonous and his wife was sensitive, so it might affect her lungs.
Bertin had negotiated with Hildebrandt for a candle. He was locked up again and again he listened to the surging ocean of fire behind Caures wood, not blocking out the seething misery of the world that came from there. Then he pushed the window frame over the ventilation flap and set to work. The candle gave enough light. It would make his eyes worse, but that didn’t matter. This war was an unhealthy enterprise, and being a fraction more short-sighted could come in handy for future medical examinations. At first he faltered but then things loosened up and he found his thread. Bertin brought Kroysing, his friend of one day, back to life at least to himself in that moment. It would be painful to relive his destruction, but he wanted to get to that point that day. The next day he’d describe how delighted the sergeant, the company commander and the battalion leader had been at Kroysing’s accident. One man’s owl is another man’s nightingale, as they said in Hamburg. He’d have to invent other names for Feicht, Simmerding and Niggl, not forgetting the wonderful Glinsky. That was enough for one day. His eyes hurt, and he was starting to freeze sitting there in the
damp night air. He had his dinner, smoked a cigar and lay in the dark, limbs trembling. His excitement receded, and he tried to warm himself up by taking deep breaths; and so Bertin fell asleep without noticing that the crash of the explosions was moving ever closer.
‘They’re shooting in Thil wood! ‘They’re shooting at Flabas!’ ‘They’re bombarbing Chaumont!’ ‘Soon it will be our turn!’
The guard room was full of excited voices. Bertin walked in from his cell, refreshed but freezing. He’d slept exceptionally well, dreaming of the sandpits of his youth. It was 15 December, and the rain had stopped. The sky was cloudy, presaging harder frosts in the coming days. Bertin felt the frost that day had been hard enough.
The company felt under threat, that much was clear. Because of where it lay it would make sense for the company commander to postpone his leave for a few days. He was responsible for the lives of 400 men, living without dugouts among mountains of shells and house-high piles of explosives. Unfortunately, there hadn’t yet been time to build them. For how would the carpenters and bricklayers have found time to prepare elegant billets for the orderly room gods if they’d had to install underground shelters at the depot for the men? Querfurth the bearded clerk ran past, terror in his eyes: Sergeant Büttner and his squad would have to go on guard duty again that day. They make a show of grumbling about it but were of course delighted not to have to haul shells around for another 24 hours.
‘I suggest you clear off to your cell,’ said Sergeant Büttner casually to Bertin in his boyish voice. Bertin was curious about the ordeal his company was about to face and even a little amused by it. ‘But we won’t lock you in. Who knows what’s going to happen?’
Bertin gave him a grateful, trusting glance and obeyed. As he was nodding off to sleep the night before, he’d began to wonder if the work suddenly taking shape in his head was really any good. He now flicked through the manuscript, shaking his head uneasily. He couldn’t judge something he’d created so recently, but his increasingly cramped handwriting at least showed that it had flowed. It had certainly surged up fully formed, and as he read it over he again felt the excitement of the previous day’s writing. A writer is lucky, he thought. He can set up shop anywhere in the world, put his feet under the table and write. His raw material is his own life: everything that hurts and makes him happy, his dissatisfaction with the world and himself, the restless feeling that there is a better, more meaningful way of life. Admittedly, he had to learn his trade and art.
Bertin stuck the work in progress in his coat pocket. He was powerfully attracted to the world outside that day. He climbed on to his plank bed and looked out of the small window, enjoying the spectacle outside as if he were watching from a theatre box with a restricted view. Fresh ammunition trucks seemed to have arrived, and the whole company was clattering up the wooden stairs to the depot, which extended as far as the road to Flabas. The orderly room was to his right; a little later some men came out of the open door engaged in debate, but unfortunately he couldn’t hear them. However, he understood what was happening. The company commander appeared first in his coat and cap, booted and spurred, followed by his batman, Herr Mikoleit, who was wearing a peaked cap as if he were an NCO and hauling a two-handled crate. Bertin banged his head against the window surround in astonishment: Graßnick was going on leave after all! The company commander was pursued by Staff Sergeant Susemihl, agitated and sweating. So, Susemihl asked, was he supposed to take over the company then? He was just an honest policeman from Thorn. He’d stuck it out there for 12 years to provide for his wife and child. And what was this? Was dapper Staff Sergeant Pohl also planning a trip? Wasn’t it Pohl, a teacher in civilian life, who had given them lectures in Serbia about a soldier’s responsibilities and pursuing duty to the utmost? And now he was doing a bunk? Bertin smelt a rat. Panje of Vranje, his monocle screwed firmly into his face, was waving his arms in the direction of Chaumont and Flabas, no doubt presenting Herr Susemihl and his few sergeants with a reassuring picture of the situation and telling them how safe the depot was. It was a clear case of rats fleeing a sinking ship.
Then Sergeant Major Pfund came out – an old regular. He’d buckled on his sabre and waxed his moustache, but in his hand he held an iron box: the cash tin containing the company’s canteen money. For nine months, the men had all been forced to contribute a couple of pennies every pay day towards supplies for the company canteen; excess profits were supposed to be paid back to the men after a certain amount of time. Sergeant Major Pfund set about distributing this money. His ruse was to go to Metz, where he was well know, buy cheap trinkets (duff knives, red-patterned hankies and ordinary lighters, as it later transpired) and pocket the rest. ‘What a fiddle,’ said Bertin to himself. ‘He’ll have got a fair bit, and no one will dare say anything, me included, although we could all do with a couple of extra Marks.’ Bertin resolved to work out later how much the orderly must’ve had in that iron box; for now he wanted to watch what was going on. (If all the men paid in just 10 Pfennigs every 10 days it came to 1,269 Marks.)
It was clearing up. Suddenly, a shaft of weak sunlight glinted off the brass sabre scabbard and Herr Graßnick’s eye glass. Herr Graßnick then made a dignified exit, for the train, small but clearly visible in the distance, was being coupled together at Moirey station from empty goods wagons and passenger cars, some with white in their windows. Bertin couldn’t discern any more details with his short-sighted eyes, which was just as well, as the white was bandages; the cars had come from Azannes and were full of wounded men. The company was to be left alone then. A thick brown cloud hung over Chaumont, which was on fire. The officers were tramping down the steps now. In a moment they’d appear on the road and pass in front of him. There they were: Acting Lieutenant Graßnick with his brown dog on a lead, Staff Sergeant Pohl with his blonde beard, Sergeant Major Pfund with his cash-box, his sabre over his coat, and Mikoleit the batman with his crate. They were joined by 20 happy ASC privates going on legitimate leave who seemed to have been waiting for them on the road. Bertin’s cell suddenly felt too small. He needed to get out, breathe the fresh air and stand in the sun for a moment. The men on guard had now calmed down. It wasn’t yet 1pm, but because men were going on leave lunch had already been served to the entire company – a festive meal of beef and haricot beans – proving that the kitchen staff could sometimes get things done on time. After lunch the guards sat in the sun with their prisoners, enjoying the faint warmth on their faces and hands. A captive balloon had gone up to the southwest – the Frogs checking the area out. The wind was blowing in from the east that day, bringing the dull clang of exploding shells and the thunder of defensive fire. Bertin decided to use the daylight to write some more. He’d been thinking and had drafted a couple of short chapters, one of which took place in the home of Kroysing’s parents, possibly in Bamberg. The home of a well-to-do official. The news arrives that the younger son has died a hero’s death. What he had to convey was their genuine pain, clouded by the inflated ideas of the time, so starkly at odds with reality. What name should he give poor Kroysing? Artistic distance and licence required that he transform his subject just as an artist would in a painting.
Back in his cell, he was puffing on a cigar, imagining he felt the warmth of the sun through the black roof, when he heard a familiar howl up above. It hurtled closer, roaring, shrieking, and shattered with a desolate crash. Bertin jumped up; it had landed in the depot. ‘How come?’ he thought. They couldn’t… a second crash, a third, then the dull roar of an explosion. One of the explosives dumps had been hit! Although Bertin could only see the street and the hollow of the valley from his window, he jumped on to the plank bed: crowds of men from the company thundered across the steps and paths. They were off. Quite right, thought Bertin. Their leaders have left, and now they’re leaving too. A fourth and fifth strike hit the depot. Now people were screaming. An unspeakably shrill howl drove him from the bed and out into the guard room. Büttner, an industrialist in civilian life, stood in th
e middle of the room, pale and calm. His men were yanking on their boots and screaming: ‘They’ve got us!’
The next strike crashed even nearer. ‘You’d better take your things,’ said Büttner, opening the locker. Bertin stuffed into his pockets the belongings he’d handed over two day before. While he put on his watch, the depot was emptying. Streams of grey-clad soldiers dashed into the barracks – on a cold night like that you needed a blanket. With a nod towards the open door, Büttner set his prisoner free to join the stream of fleeing men. But Bertin thanked him and declined, saying they would all be safer from shell splinters where they were. Just then Schneevoigt the medical orderly and his men, three pale Berliners and a native of Hamburg, ran out into the strike zone. It was their duty to do that – that was why they wore armbands with a red cross – but amidst the general chaos and flight it was encouraging to see men not copping out.
Outside Verdun Page 28