When the imposing folio sheet with the teal and violet seals of the two quarrelling army groups was placed in front of Major Jansch, he first removed a yellow sweet from his mouth and stuck it to the edge of a saucer on his right. When he realised that behind the polite, typewritten text lay an attempt to wrest one of his men from him, and furthermore this particular man, he gave a hiss of fury that made his clerk Diehl’s blood run cold. However, the blue-pencilled query, whose meaning Jansch immediately divined, calmed him down. ‘Take this down,’ he said to Diehl, standing up and striding round the room with his hands behind his back as Bonaparte was said to have done. Eventually, after many improvements and deletions, he dictated the following text: ‘Returned to sender with the following remarks: the battalion’s First Company occupies the area between Mureaux-Ferme and Vilsones-East, and its working parties large and small are scattered across it. The company is so weakened by casualties and illness that it cannot countenance the departure of a single healthy man fit for work if there is no replacement. The battalion proposes that Private Pahl, currently in Dannevoux field hospital, should, when recovered, be detailed for the required duty at the court martial. P., a typesetter by trade and exceptionally able, knows how to use a typewriter and is unfit for anything but office work due to the loss of a toe.’ He felt the distinguished gentlemen had miscalculated.
The clerk Diehl left the major’s room and descended the stone steps to the orderly room. As far as he was concerned, his most important duty was to get through his servile existence under that sweet-guzzling old whinger until peace came and return to his wife and child in Hamburg come what may. He felt a lot of comradely sympathy for Private Bertin and wished him well. Anything would have suited Bertin better than collecting duds with Sergeant Barkopp, and now he was going to be done out of a good opportunity in that smooth, hypocritical way that powerful men’s protégés could be pushed aside by those who were protected by equally powerful men. Diehl stopped at the landing window halfway down the stairs, looked at the court martial’s application, which he’d been the first to read that morning, and carried on out into the pale spring light gilding the streets and roofs of Damvillers. He knew nothing of the war between the two army groups, and the Eastern Group’s request seemed reasonable to him, though he spotted the guile in Jansch’s reply. It couldn’t be helped, he decided, walking on: once jinxed, always jinxed, poor lad. Even a blind man could see that he’d pulled some strings to get this transfer. It he found out quickly enough that it had been refused, then he could perhaps – perhaps – think of a way round it, though Diehl couldn’t think what that way might be. He was a primary school teacher, a man with a great deal of respect for books and writers of books, and he felt he should try to help. As he rang the doorbell and stepped into the overheated orderly room, which smelt of men and tobacco, he decided what to do. He opened the typewriter. But before slipping the folio page of the Western Group’s court martial through the roller, he laid a sheet of blue copy paper and a thin sheet of carbon paper beneath it, as was normal practice. If someone sent the carbon to Bertin at lunchtime, he would know what to expect. The typewriter tapped, tinkled and tapped again. The folio sheet was taken out and slipped into the file for signature and the thin carbon copy was placed in a drawer. Everything was going like clockwork. Diehl didn’t even notice that he was breathing more heavily than normal.
In the meantime, Major Jansch telephoned his friend Niggl. Yes, they had become friends. They had eradicated the Main frontier, and Prussia and Bavaria had risen as one empire, dedicated to the overthrow of its malign adversaries. Every morning, they congratulated each other on the recently sunk merchant tonnage and thought they heard the edifice of the British Empire cracking within its boundaries. Every morning, they agreed that French discipline was weakening, the Italian attacks were making them a laughing stock and one could only shrug at the Americans’ big talk. The Russians were on their knees and would soon vanish from the map of Europe: the revolution had finished them off. No danger of bumping into them again in the Balkans or the Near East. Victory was finally within Germany’s grasp. When the concentrated might of the German army was unleashed on the Western front and that of the Austro-Hungarians on the southern front, that would be it – and then it would be the turn of those who pulled the strings behind the scenes: Free Masons and speculators, Jesuits, socialists and Jews.
Niggl listened to his clever friend with profound admiration. He was quite right, said Niggl. You couldn’t argue with a word of what he said. And there would be a remedy that got rid of the Free Masons and Jews just as there was for everything else.
Yes, replied Herr Jansch, sounding both triumphant and concerned, but it would require quite a bit of work, because they were as thick as thieves and if you wanted to see what they could do you need look no further than the fiery warning of the Russian revolution. Jewish bankers had vowed to bring down Tsarism at the behest of the Alliance Israélite and had armed the Japanese against the mighty Russian empire 10 years previously. That time they’d failed, but they didn’t mean to fail this time.
So, asked Niggl naïvely, had Germany been doing the Jews’ work against Russia?
Major Jansch, for a moment nonplussed, said you couldn’t exactly say that. The situation did indeed shed a bright light on just how devilishly clever the Jews were, but also on their basic stupidity, because in the Germans they had finally found a superior adversary, who saw through them and would make sure they were cheated of their profits this time. That very day, he, Jansch, had, not without difficulty, repelled a Jewish attack. Some Jew, a scandal in itself, was judge advocate for Group West. No sooner had he found a little Jewish writer within the ASC than he had wanted to pick him out, probably at the expense of a decent German, and the unsuspecting army commander had given his blessing to this scheme. Jansch was vigilant, however, and Bertin, the author in question, would be blue in the face before he’d be allowed to skive off useful work and loaf about. It was the same man who’d already put on a little show for them, as his friend Niggl might remember. That time he’d wanted to go on leave; now he was trying another ruse.
At the other end of the line, Captain Niggl, soon to be Major Niggl, cleared his throat, stuttered something in reply, and asked to be excused for a moment as someone had just come in with a question. The combination of ‘Bertin’ and ‘court martial’ had momentarily taken his breath away. All too clearly did he see again the dreadful vaults of Douaumont, the gaunt figure of the dastardly Kroysing, who unfortunately hadn’t been killed but was lying in a field hospital with a harmless leg wound. Damn him, damn him, he thought. By the Holy Crucifix, may he never rise again, the miserable dog. He would donate a candle as big as his arm to the Ettal monastery or the Pilgrimage Church in Alt-Ötting if Kroysing and all his cronies came to horrible end. Then he picked up the receiver again and said he couldn’t wait to hear how his comrade had sorted the Jew out.
Moving his yellow sweet over to his left cheek, Herr Jansch described with a giggle the replacement he had generously offered – a decent man who’d been wounded, a Christian typesetter. In any case, it was well known that His Excellency Lychow was moving back to the east again. In a fortnight, or even 10 days, it would all be over.
CHAPTER SIX
Night-time reading
JUDGE ADVOCATE POSNANSKI received the Kroysing files from the Montmédy court martial and ASC battalion X/20’s negative decision on the same morning via the staff records office. Every man in Montfaucon who came into contact with that piece of paper had a laugh at it. Sergeant Major Pont laughed at it as he put it in the judge advocate’s in-tray, and the judge advocate himself laughed, as did his clerk Sergeant Adler, despite the pressure he was under. Even the orderly, Gieseken from the Landsturm, burst out laughing when he saw the document, observing: ‘Whoever wrote this is some man. We’ve got a hard neck here in the Prussian army – and that’s for sure.’
The only man who didn’t laugh but was furious was Colonel Winfried
, Excellency Lychow’s ADC and nephew. He was angry at the lack of respect for his uncle, at the sheer insolence of the ASC major on the other bank and above all that the refusal would have to stand. ‘If Dr Posnanski thinks we’re going to let this matter detain us he’s got another think coming. Another time, we might have taken it up, but we don’t have the time right now to start doing callisthenics and going on the warpath against Group East. He’ll have to magic up a replacement as his clerk.’
Sergeant Major Pont, a thickset master builder from Kalkar on the lower Rhine, smiled a knowing smile and said: ‘I’m of the view that we will not be spared this Herr Bertin. That’s what my nose tells me.’ And he pressed his thumb to his squat nose. ‘Lawyers can work magic.’ And as proof he told the story of an advocate in Cleves who had fought a firm of brick makers for a year and a half over two lorryloads of bricks and had nearly ruined it.
Lieutenant Winfried carried on going through some documents on the of the division’s step-by-step transfer. ‘Posnanski will have to handle it himself. I’m not going to bother His Excellency. He’s already back in his beloved east, sniffing lakes and pine woods from his window. If the French don’t put a spoke in our wheels, we’ll be gone in a fortnight and Group East can… shed a tear for us.’
Sergeant Major Pont stuck out his lower lip and murmured something about how far away they’d soon be from the lower Rhine, then veered into saying he’d like to go on a three-day official trip so he might visit his mother. Lieutenant Winfried replied crisply that the sergeant major’s desire was God’s desire, adding only that he would like him back five days before the staff departed.
Pont thanked him profusely and immediately consulted the railway map to work out the best place for him and his wife Luise to meet. He loved her, and she was the centre of his life.
In the early evening, Judge Advocate Dr Posnanksi sat at the round table in his chilly living room, which actually belonged to the pharmacist Jovin and his wife but had been removed from them by the town headquarters at Montfaucon and given to the judge advocate as his billet. The room was full of solid, old-fashioned furniture and artefacts. The lamp stood on a high alabaster pedestal and shed a mellow light through a pleated silk shade. The paintings on the wall were rustic renderings of members of Madame Jovin’s family, peasants, who had not been slow to seize their chance when the aristocracy’s estates were partitioned immediately after the revolution. The Jovins had a son in the field and a married daughter in Paris and under constant threat from enemy Zeppelins. Their interaction with their compulsory lodger was limited to a dozen words daily. But compared to some of his predecessors, they found this German officer tactful and not unlikeable. Madame Jovin occasionally remarked to her husband that the way he lived was almost French, praise which Monsieur Jovin felt he must circumscribe with an ‘Oh là là’. But Dr Posnanski was at home a lot, he drank black coffee and red wine in the evening, and he loved books and took his work back to his quarters, which he had left unchanged. He was domesticated, frugal, moderate and industrious, and he didn’t have the dreadful habit of smoking cigars, which left the curtains, tapestries and carpets hopelessly saturated with tobacco. Madame Jovin could not have wished for a more agreeable intruder for the duration of this dreadful war.
Posnanski, in an old brown tweed house jacket, laid his cigar in its white holder on the pewter ashtray from time to time and stretched his slippered feet under the table. The only military item in his clothing were his long, grey trousers with red piping. His thick neck bulged from an open shirt with no buttons or collar, and the Kroysing files lays scattered on Madame Jovin’s elegant walnut table. The Bertin affair glimmered on the edge of his awareness; it would be sorted out later – or not. As intellect was not held in respect and there was no demand for men of good will, it would probably fall through. A lawyer had to be well-versed in injustice and not let it disconcert him. But this case was about the fundamentals of coexistence. He had already established the legal facts in conversation with the brother and accuser. There was no conclusive proof in these papers that the younger Kroysing had been deliberately got rid of because of misappropriated foodstuffs – because meat, butter, ham, sugar and beer had not ended up in the right stomachs but the wrong ones. If there were no other cases and he’d had all the time in the world to become obsessed with this one, he would have questioned the men individually, forced the NCOs to confess, artfully pumped the orderly room and the company and battalion commanders for information about the normal duration of outpost duty and how often men were relieved, and then examined the question of why young Kroysing had not been given leave to appear before the court martial and why the files had been sent to Ingolstadt. All that having been established, the witness Bertin could have marched in and read out young Kroysing’s letter and testament. With his advocate’s oratory, bolstered by genuine conviction, he could then have forced the judges to see that such activities could not go unpunished as that would only encourage them. Advocate Posnanski was confident he could have brought such a case to a happy conclusion with the public behind him and the nation avidly following the matter for weeks, passionately debating whether there had been a cover-up or the officers were just carrying out their duties – in other words in peacetime.
Peacetime! Posnanski leant back in his chair and snorted derisively. In peacetime, this Kroysing case would have been a sure-fire route to victory and fame. Could something like that happen in peacetime? Of course it could. If you replaced the ASC battalion with a large industrial concern that clothed and fed its workers through its own canteens and shops, housed them and provided medical care, then the opportunities for corruption and profiteering at the expense of the mass of the workers would be just as great as in the Prussian army. If you put Kroysing in the overalls of an apprentice and future engineer, assigned him to dangerous work until his knowledge of a crime was extinguished by an industrial accident – an industrial accident helped along ever so slightly by cunning people in the know – then you pretty much had the exact sequence of events as Posnanski was convinced they had occurred. But woe betide the employers if such a thing happened in their company. In a well-governed nation they’d go to jail; in a nation where the exploited were on the march there would be a mass uprising whose effects would be felt deep into the middle classes; in Britain or France new parliamentary elections and a change of government would be required. Even in the German Fatherland, such a case would have far-reaching political consequences; none of the ruling groups would dare to back the guilty parties. An experienced reader of Berlin newspapers could easily imagine the tone that the conservative, liberal and even social democratic press would take. In peacetime.
It was very quiet in the house. Somewhere a mouse rustled behind the ancient wallpaper. Posnanski drank a mouthful of wine – he was using a porcelain beaker on three lion’s feet that made the wine look a darker red – and rose to move about as he thought.
That was all true for industrial areas, cities. But what form would the case take if it happened among farm workers out in the sticks on the big estates of West Prussia, Posen, East Prussia, Pomerania and Mecklenburg? He brooded over this, his hooded eyes half closed, stopping on a woven shepherd’s scene from the 18th century in which he could make out nothing but a narrow mesh of different coloured stitches, until gradually it revealed itself to be a representation of a human foot above a leafy plant. In a country setting, clarification would be more difficult and there would be more of a threat to the lawyer and witnesses. Some of them would be discredited as Jews, but the conclusion would be the same. The conservative Protestant landlords of the region east of the Elbe, the feudal Catholic landowners of Bavaria: they wouldn’t aid and abet such rash employees either and in the end would sacrifice their incompetent peers. But in wartime injustice piled up, committed by one nation on another – violence unleashed by one group on another – and became such a mountain that a bucketful of filth simply disappeared. The naked interests of life were so fully at play, the q
uestion of the existence and survival of the ruling classes, and therefore, admittedly, the ruled as well, that an individual’s right to life and honour was postponed until further notice – shifted on to a siding until civilisation was reinstated. Of course that signified a relapse into the times of the migrations, a decisive defeat for the Mosaic Convenant. Captain Niggl’s reckless dirty tricks, his trading in human life, was currently being carried out (if the mutual recriminations in the war bulletins were to be believed) with little better justification on the largest possible scale and on all fronts by many of the great nations – don’t bother asking after individuals, dear lawyer. And as all the groups concerned daily affirmed that they were fighting only to save their existence and human culture, a civilian such as Dr Posnanski had no influence at the moment. All he could do was advise Lieutenant Kroysing to wait until peace was re-established, get the names and addresses of as many of his brother’s comrades as possible now and bring his case as soon as the German nation, its lust for victory notwithstanding, was ready to rekindle the memory of Christoph Kroysing.
Dr Posnanski was now haunted by his figure. He’d read his letter and taken it on board. Then in deepening silence he’d studied his black notebook, which contained drawings, scraps of verse, thoughts, opinions, impressions, questions. To begin with Posnanski had been interested in the notebook because of a particular hobby of his: he loved shorthand, which he considered to be a valuable and sensible invention; he knew all the systems and ways of abbreviating and even at school had excelled at deciphering unknown handwriting. Even the style of Kroysing’s pencil strokes appealed to his inner being. An honest, clear-minded man had made those marks, and his good opinion was confirmed on every page by the content of the notebook. Young Kroysing had been someone. He had campaigned against injustice not with a particular end in mind, but simply because it was injustice – an ugly blemish on the body of the community he loved. A pure and wonderful love of Germany spoke from that young man. He didn’t have an heroically distorted vision of his nation. He saw its weaknesses. ‘I don’t understand,’ he once complained, ‘why our men let themselves be manipulated. They’re not dim-witted or without a sense of justice, but they’re almost more sensitive than women. Are we a feminine nation? Is it our fate simply to know what ails us and express it? If so, I don’t want to join in.’ He clearly realised that the high moral development of German writers and thinkers had its roots in the nation. ‘…but it seems to me that root is long and fibrous and takes a convoluted route and only sends up a beautiful plant to the light much later and somewhere far away. I wish we had a short, strong tap root that sent up healthy growth full of spikes and stings against violence.’ Another time he complained ‘that the beauty of life as expressed in a sunset, a starry night or even just ordinary daylight doesn’t seem to have any influence on the ways of the Germans. They enjoy nature for a couple of minutes and then fall back into old habits that might just as well have been developed in underground caves. But Goethe and Hölderlin, Mörike and Gottfried Keller, seem constantly aware of plants, wind, clouds, streams. The air of the countryside goes with them into their studies and offices, and to the lectern. That’s why they’re free. That’s why they’re great.’ Yes, my young friend, thought Posnanski, what you say there is very true and important. Such things cannot be learnt from working life. It’s a shame that we can’t talk about them any more. Men like you will be missed. Your verses are lovely and sensitive, though still very juvenile. But let us imagine that Hölderlin, who was a volunteer for a year, Sergeant Heinrich Heine, Lieutenant von Liliencron or Sergeant Major C.F. Meyer had been killed at your age – with assistance or otherwise, it doesn’t matter – or that the little cadet von Hardenberg had died at 14 of a cold caught on a training march – to say nothing of officer trainee Schiller drowned at 18 while swimming in a mountain stream in Swabia: would those young men’s legacy have looked much different from yours? Not at all. But how much poorer and more miserable the world would have been! We wouldn’t have known what we’d lost. ‘Yes,’ he sighed to himself, ‘it’s not an easy problem, and whoever can solve it for me gets a thaler and five Pfennigs: whether the people live for the gifted, or the gifted live for the people, so that any old Niggl has the right to abuse them. That’s why I’m going to have a look and see what Herr Bertin made of his meeting with you.’
Outside Verdun Page 39