Outside Verdun

^{CHAPTER ONE} A helping hand

FATHER LOCHNER TRIPPED into Sister Kläre’s nun’s cell with excited little baby steps. She’d invited him for a coffee before the end of the lunch break. ‘What’s this I hear, Sister Kläre – and not from you, but from the wild hunter himself!’

The little room smelt pleasantly of real coffee, the one luxury Sister Kläre did not deny herself and her friends. She sat calmly on the bed looking at the agitated priest with a direct, almost stern expression. ‘It doesn’t matter who you heard it from, and if our tall friend exaggerated, then I’m here to set things straight. So, will you condone it or not?’

The chaplain had lowered himself on to the stool and was stirring his sugar with a small spoon, his pinkie delicately raised. ‘That’s what I call taking the bull by the horns. That’s vintage Sister Kläre. Do you know, you could have been abbess of a great convent. A thousand years ago, you might have shed light and consolation upon a whole area or province.’

‘Now you’re just talking rubbish, Father Lochner, complete and utter rubbish, and you’re doing it to avoid answering. But you must answer.’

‘Do you like him?’ asked the priest carefully.

‘Yes,’ replied Sister Kläre. ‘I like him. I like that tall young man a lot. But I also like my husband and children. I’m not some daft wee girl. My liking for him is not so ingrained that I couldn’t cauterise it like a granulated wound if need be. If you think that the practical difficulties are too great and that it would be too painful for my husband and children, I’ll tell Kroysing we can’t have what we want and that we’ll have to form a different kind of friendship if we survive the war or go our separate ways.’

Father Lochner raised his eyebrows, secretly shocked at the down-to-earth way this lady from the highest echelons of society, in nurse’s uniform with the face of a lovely nun called Klara, expressed herself. ‘Do you think then,’ he fumbled, ‘that Colonel Schwersenz will ever get better? Do you think you’ll ever be able to live with him properly again and mean something to him?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ said Sister Kläre. ‘My mother writes from the house in Hinterstein that he sits there surrounded by maps and papers, more shut away than ever. He’s completely obsessed by his role in the Battle of the Marne and is dead to everything else. He only takes the vaguest and most distracted interest in what’s going on around him and hardly ever asks about the children, whom he calls his grandchildren. But he’s strong physically and has a healthy appetite. He goes for long walks – route marches – and sees nothing but sectors and strategic, tactical problems. The old lady, who’s the wisest person I know, says she’s become quite a military expert. Her main concern is that Schwersenz will try to leave so he can explain his role in the Battle of the Marne to the Kaiser and the Reichstag, or even try to address the nation from a public square, in which case he’d be transferred to a closed institution.’

‘Dreadful,’ said Father Lochner. ‘O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!’

‘That’s Hamlet, isn’t it? It’s only too true. What if I can never really connect with him again?’

‘Then a Christian marriage with him is no longer possible,’ said the priest, draining his cup. They were both silent.

Sister Kläre wondered whether she should say any more. Then she did: ‘It’s not that I’m complaining. But neither do I particularly care what people think. What I would like to say is that the current state of affairs is just the last stage in a process that began years ago and always looked like it might end this way. My husband lived for his work like a scholar or a monk. He was a soldier body and soul. Otherwise a man of his class would never have embarked on such a career. No living creature was ever good enough for him, me included. Before the war I thought that was just how it was, particularly as my father and brothers were no different. Now I don’t think that any more.’

‘I understand,’ said the priest, as he watched the steaming coffee fall on to another cube of sugar and began to look forward to a second cup. ‘The war has shown you humanity in all its myriad forms. It has revealed the kingdom of the world to you in all its abundance and misery, as well as the relief work you perform. You no longer want to lie fallow. But, Sister Kläre, how do you think a new marriage would affect your children?’

Sister Kläre took off her head covering and smoothed her hair into shape with her strong hands. ‘I’m convinced,’ she said, ‘that a younger, more active stepfather such as Kroysing would be good for them – as far as one can humanly tell. But children are passionate, impulsive and unpredictable, and so you never know how they will react. I know only too well that growing children are people in their own right, inscrutable to a certain extent and not easily swayed. That needs to be taken into account.’

‘People are not insurance companies,’ said Father Lochner, dabbing his bald head with a handkerchief. ‘If they have good intentions and are convinced their actions are right, that’s enough.’

‘God knows I have those,’ said Sister Kläre.

‘Then in my opinion your marriage to Colonel Schwersenz may be declared invalid, and if that’s what you want I’ll do everything I can to support you.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what I want.’ And she replaced her head covering.

‘My God.’ He looked at the clock. ‘You must get back to work. And I had better say goodbye to all those poor lads who want to ease their souls, whether they’re Catholics or not. I’ll start in ward 1 and try to finish in ward 3. I must find time for that Pahl. And the boss man has invited me to share a bottle of wine after dinner as a reward for my abstemiousness during my treatment. That’s my little timetable for today.’

Sister Kläre buttoned on her apron. ‘Then we’ll be bumping into each other.’ She did up the buttons at the back, and almost as an after-thought added: ‘You know Kroysing’s a Protestant, don’t you?’

‘Oh,’ said Father Lochner, raising his hands to table height as if to fend off this objection, ‘it’s best if we stick to the matter in hand. If your marriage is dissolved or declared invalid, a new page will be turned and this is not the time to decide what will be written on it. But I must confess,’ and he smiled a little guiltily, ‘that I shall not perform this service without misgivings. As he will tell you himself, Kroysing has promised me he will behave like a Christian rather than a heathen and pardon an enemy, or at least to let him go, avoid a dreadful court case that would have caused uproar in Bavaria and embarrassed our Church, and for that reason, Sister Kläre, I thank the Holy Virgin that things come together for the best and no one will suffer for your happiness.’

‘Here on earth we can expect no more.’

^{CHAPTER TWO} The man

BERTIN APPEARED LATE in the afternoon, accompanied by Karl Lebehde. They found a strange gathering at Pahl’s bedside. A lot of patients were standing around, sitting on beds or leaning on the wall, listening. Kroysing, looking like a referee, sat on a stool with his bandaged leg stretched out on Pahl’s mattress. He had in mind the unnecessarily strident arguments from his student days, which ended in mutual insults. But Father Lochner, who’d worked in the Ruhr mining district, the Cologne docks and the button-making factories of Elberfeld, had no intention of playing that game. As a Rhinelander he was used to dealing with city folk, and in a few minutes he had started a conversation, which he expected to control, watched expectantly by Pahl with his magnetic gaze. However, it proved not to be so easy. When Kroysing arrived, accompanied by the medical officer in his white coat, they were arguing about the origins and meaning of the Easter festival. Pahl saw reflected in it the general joy that people and animals felt at the return of spring, and for him the symbolic egg represented fertility rites and resurgent life. Father Lochner, by contrast, took an historical, materialist view of the festival’s meaning, taking it back to the struggle for freedom – for example, that of the Jewish proletarian nation from Egyptian exploitation – under a civil servant or member of the ruling class, such as Mirabeau or, at that moment, the lawyer Kerenski in Russia. So they’ve swapped sides, thought Kroysing in amusement. The priest had been too clever, and Pahl was as ever Pahl, bright-eyed and calm. But when Bertin and Lebehde joined the friends, the conversation took an even more general turn. They discussed redemption, martyrdom on Calvary, ‘evil’ and human nature, and the divine. There was a fervour in the air, said Lochner. With each passing month, all of humanity was yearning ever more deeply for peace, since the Kaiser had, so to speak, stamped the imperial eagle on the word. The Pope, the Kaiser, Professor Wilson and international labour leaders were united in their efforts to restore peace to the world, but it didn’t happen. What was going on? What was barring the road to salvation? Definitely not the soldiers. They’d all had enough, and if the bugles sounded the ceasefire at 12 noon that afternoon, it would be pretty to difficult to drum up a German, French or British soldier for a game of skat by 12.30.

General laughter. General agreement. Only Pahl didn’t laugh. He’d sat on his pillow, his back against the bedstead, and in his slow but direct manner advanced the counter argument: ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘the ruling masters’ peace overtures all have conditions attached that the other side must meet, just as a dog catcher will keep a dog that he’s just caught on the lead. He doesn’t know the dog, and guess what, it turns out to be wild and won’t do what he tells it, and so the conditions are not met and peace must unfortunately stay in the box.’

‘No politics, please,’ said the medical officer. The wide space between his eyes, his square forehead and bouffant hair gave him a decisive air, which was softened by his husky voice.

‘Nonsense, doctor,’ said Kroysing. ‘Let the tormented flesh talk politics if it wants. We won’t lock horns.’

‘I should hope not,’ said Father Lochner. ‘Please note that I’m the only man in this group wearing anything approaching a military tunic…’

‘The militant Church—’ interjected Kroysing.

‘…I’d find it difficult to raise an army among all these white coats. And yet I’m in favour of war – and a militant Church. Not war with guns and infantry, but war against the indefatigable adversary – the only one who can chase peace from the world and impede redemption.’

‘Yes, when I look around me the world looks pretty darned redeemed,’ said the medical officer without bitterness.

‘And yet me must believe that Christ died on the cross to save us from the worst of our bestiality,’ said Father Lochner almost passionately, ‘or we might as well pack up and suck gas.’

‘Do you mean that if that hadn’t taken place things would be even worse,’ said Kroysing. ‘Assuming it really did take place?’

‘No religion, please,’ said the chief physician, not without a little self-irony.

It was relatively immaterial whether something had happened or not, compared with the faith it inspired, said Pahl. There was therefore no need for a theological dispute, since faith was a generally recognised fact and could not be denied by Christians, Jews or atheists. So the priest could happily carry on. But, he said with a joking twinkle, they should really hear what their comrade Bertin had to say about it. Because the Exodus from Egypt and the trial of Jesus of Nazareth before the Roman military governor of Judea had all taken place among Jews.

Bertin gave an embarrassed laugh. He was the only Jew in the room. He was proud of the urge for redemption and the messianic impulse towards a better organised world that had dominated the spiritual history of his race since the days of Nebuchadnezzar. Before he’d been able to talk at length about the prophet’s tirades against the potentates and the multitudes, which were intended to instil morality in organised society. But now my mind is so dulled, he thought, as he prepared to answer Pahl’s question. Yes, he said, the struggle with fate, expressed by the Greeks in their tragedies, had been played out in real life for the Jews in the prophets’ struggle against the reluctant flesh of their own nation. They had not spared that nation and had even made a bad name for themselves on account of their obstinacy. But in truth all nations were just as obstinate; they just didn’t talk about it, or so it seemed. There was something there, he said, staring glumly into the middle distance, that impeded redemption. That was why the devil played such an important role in all cults and in every age, even if Christian teaching said that the worst of his teeth had been knocked out. You had to concur with the poets, Goethe for example, who said that his remaining powers were enough to be going on with.

Pahl and Kroysing protested, and Father Lochner wasn’t happy either. The first two didn’t want to hear such superstitious nonsense, while Father Lochner wanted more recognition to be given to the reality of the devil.

‘Oh dear,’ said Bertin, ‘I’m in hot water now. They don’t want to acknowledge the devil’s existence, and for you, Father, he’s not real enough. What am I to do?’

‘I’ll tell you what you can do,’ muttered Kroysing. ‘Let’s forget the bogeymen, eh? And we don’t need any riddles either.’

Pahl said nothing more, but made a mental note to box Comrade Bertin’s ears for coming out with such embarrassing antiquities, which would’ve made any young worker roar with laughter.

Karl Lebehde opened his mouth, which he’d thus far not done in that company. If the gas man came demanding payment for January in March and there was no money left to pay the bill, he explained, his wife would say the gas man was the devil incarnate. For there was only one gas cooker in their flat, provided by the state, and if the supply were to be cut off she wouldn’t be able to cook or eat. For his wife that would be the devil incarnate appearing. ‘If my wife were stupid,’ he said, ‘she’d have a go at the gas man, as if he could do something about it. If she weren’t so stupid, and I don’t think she is, then she’d work out where the real devil lies. For there must be one. She’d just have to ferret him out. Is he at the gasworks? No. In the city of Berlin? Again, no. At the provincial administration? Who knows. In the State of Prussia? That’s what the British think, as if their gas men were angels. Among the whites? That’s what the Indians and blacks are saying now. And so we come back to the Father’s view that he’s got the whole world firmly in his claws.’

‘Slow down,’ said Pahl. ‘I think you skipped a few stations there.’

‘No,’ broke in Father Lochner. ‘Our Landstürmer hasn’t skipped any stations at all. The harshness of life, the lack of brotherly love, our un-Christian society: the spirit of the nation expresses all that in horns, hooves and the hairy tail of a cold, jeering monster, and there’s no point getting angry about it. The wise old Egyptians wrote in pictures, and nations are like children and Egyptians and poets: they think in pictures. The only fools are those who take the pictures literally and act as if the others were stupid. And yet no one thinks that lightning is really a jagged, shining wire thrown down from on high, even if that’s what it looks like.’

‘That’s one way to redemption,’ observed Kroysing drily.

Some of the men laughed. They always enjoyed listening to the tall lieutenant. He didn’t let these boring speechifiers pull the wool over his eyes.

‘So the devil is the capitalist system.’

Father Lochner frowned. That was trivial, he said sharply. Any economic system that knew no charity could degenerate in exactly the same infernal way. They’d been discussing fundamental forces, which were the message of Easter and the objective of religion when it tried to look after people’s souls.

Suddenly Sister Kläre pushed through the circle of seated and standing men, radiantly white in her apron and starched head covering. She whispered a couple of figures to the medical officer, which she read from her chart, a long slip of paper that trembled in her hands. The doctor nodded at most of them, frowned at a couple and shook his head angrily at a few: ‘The devil is our stubborn flesh,’ he said. ‘Our accursed organic state that we’ll never fully understand. And redemption, if I may speak bluntly, is and remains death. As long as flesh lives it suffers, and our tricks for deadening pain turn out to be a swindle when the chips are down.’

And, guess what? At that, the adversaries of a moment ago suddenly united in protest. ‘Impossible!’ they almost shouted.

Death, wheezed Father Lochner fiercely, was a gigantic folly that had first been brought into the world by sin. It crushed everything under its clumsy feet. It had trampled Novalis into his grave and destroyed thousands of fresh talents and new beginnings.

Yes, agreed Kroysing, it was a point of honour with soldiers never to have a good word to say about death. In the trenches, death was the ultimate treachery and desertion. A man who died left the Fatherland and the cause in the lurch, so to speak. He couldn’t help it if war was eternal and men were imbued with an inextinguishable desire for conflict, and all warrior religions had to take that into account. Given the choice, he at any rate would prefer to roam the earth as the Wandering German, like the Wandering Jew, plunging into every conflict and joining in every victory.

Pahl’s pale eyes lit up. That was fine so long as there were an idea behind it, if it were about liberating a vast, productive section of humanity from oppression, exploitation and injustice. It was for those kinds of ideas that the fighting spirit should travel the earth, building a new platform so that future generations would have a better starting point and every Pahl, Bertin and Kroysing would be able to fulfil their talents to the benefit and redemption of humanity.’

‘There it is again,’ said Kroysing. ‘Redemption.’

But Bertin, pale and trembling, said that if anything were the devil it was the use of violence, trampling people underfoot in a murderous, silencing frenzy. Death wasn’t evil. Death had wonderful, alluring depths – to lie down as your ancestors had lain down, to understand nothing, answer nothing, ask nothing. It was the business of murder that was infernal, the thousands of ways of achieving extinction, the executioner’s axe crashing down. If everyone’s life ran out as a candle burns down, then there would be nothing to say against death. But if an individual – or a whole generation – had his life and rights ripped out from under him like a chair wrenched from him by a stronger person, then we should combat that with all available means, join the fight and ally ourselves with those who, like ourselves, were under threat.’

The man’s gone mad, thought Sister Kläre. He’s talking himself into trouble. ‘Bed rest!’ she cried. ‘Time for quiet!’

The men muttered. They wanted to hear more. The man was right. Everyone had the right to live.

‘You’ll make yourself very popular with the Prussians with those opinions,’ said Father Lochner sharply but with respect.

‘If you’re against violence, then you must be against life, young man,’ added the medical officer. ‘I’m afraid your indignation is blinding you to the facts of life. People create suffering; it’s the first thing they do. Before birth, during birth, after birth – it’s all the same. A baby makes its way into the world by force, or more correctly, is thrust into it when its time comes. There’s force, pressure, blood, screaming. That’s how a young hero appears – you, me, all of us. And if these basic facts mean anything to you, how does he reply? What does he do to greet existence?’

‘We scream?’ asked Bertin. ‘We scream furiously, rebelling against our delivery?’

No one listening knew why he was so eager to hear the answer.

The doctor had an inscrutable smile on his face. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, speaking slowly in the silence, ‘if you’ll be satisfied with my answer. You want me to verify the revolutionary principle, and I will in a certain way. But it’s not very appetising and it’s bound be too much for you. In order to make a newborn baby cry, we slap it. Blows are the first thing it experiences. That’s the only way to get it to take its first breath.’

A couple of soldiers laughed appreciatively. Blows created a bit of atmosphere.

‘And yet,’ continued the doctor, ‘even that isn’t the beginning, the first utterance. For as the baby passes through the gateway into the world, it suffers fear; how much remains to be established. And in order to express that fear, it shits. That’s how it greets life. The name for this calling card is “meconium”, young man. I knew you wouldn’t like it. It’s not very heroic, is it, this revolutionary act? But our nation retains the memory of it one of our vulgar expressions for mishap.’

Four men opened their mouths to speak then shut them again. Objections flared within Bertin: hadn’t reason and intellect been applied to alleviate the natural pains of childbirth through obstetrics? But he didn’t feel he could say that. The doctor had struck a commanding tone that must be allowed to fade away. And so the group fell back respectfully to let the doctor through. As he left, he turned round one last time: ‘I hope that what we’ve been discussing won’t go beyond the four walls of this room,’ he said.

‘It’s not a room,’ laughed Sister Kläre. ‘It’s a miserable barracks. Throw a trouser button on to the roof and watch it collapse.’ And with that she followed him out.

The others followed her example and began to leave. Pahl shook Bertin’s hand as they said goodbye. Bertin, looking pale, said he was on guard duty that night, as was Lebehde, and so they’d better get back pronto. ‘Get your guard duty over with, my friend, and come and see me again soon,’ said Pahl almost tenderly. ‘You really stuck it to them, my friend. You and me together: we’ll shake that baby up.’

Lebehde made a mental note to advise Bertin on the way home to be more careful, although he was less surprised than the rest by his outburst. It was an accident waiting to happen after everything he had been through and seen.

‘Wait for me outside, Lebehde,’ said Bertin. ‘I’d better go and calm my lieutenant down or he’ll bite my head off the next time I visit him.’

As Bertin made his way slowly out of the room with Kroysing on his arm, he apologised, saying he didn’t understand why he’d flared up like that. Priests had always infuriated him before, but it was the first it had happened for a while.

‘You’re a right one,’ snarled Kroysing. ‘It seems you’re not as daft as you look.’

They had reached the corridor. The door to the broom cupboard opened and Sister Kläre came towards them. ‘You’re quite a ball of fire,’ she said, looking at Bertin. ‘You’d better tone it down and sharpish. I’m going to be making a telephone call on your behalf this evening.’ And she nodded and went off down the corridor.

Kroysing stopped and pressed his fist into Bertin’s shoulder painfully hard. ‘There is going to be a redemption, then,’ he said, breathing heavily. ‘Yours, I mean.’

^{CHAPTER THREE} Bread for the hungry

LEBEHDE THE INN-KEEPER, disguised as a Landstürmer, his grey oilcloth cap with its brass cross tipped over his forehead, a leather belt round his hips, handed Private Bertin a long rifle, infantry issue 91 with an improved lock, at one minute to 10. ‘Right, my friend,’ he said a little shiftily, ‘take this shooter and have a ball.’

Both men were wearing their overcoats. Lebehde’s stuck out oddly at the hips. As they walked a little way together towards the barracks where the Barkopp working party was billeted, Lebehde explained in passing why: he’d taken the liberty of feeling the gigantic paper bags in the French freight cars and had been very pleasantly surprised. ‘Have a taste,’ he said holding something hard and sharp-edged in front of Bertin’s mouth.

Bertin bit in to it cautiously. It was white bread, a hard old roll. He looked at Lebehde in astonishment. He nodded solemnly. ‘White bread, my lad. For the French prisoners in Germany, so they don’t starve. The Red Cross provides it. But it doesn’t provide for our wives. We have to sort that out ourselves.’ Lebehde tapped his pocket. ‘I’ve got a whole load of it.’

‘This rock hard stuff?’ asked Bertin.

‘Listen, lad,’ said Lebehde kindly, ‘dunked in coffee and fried up with a wee bit of butter and artificial honey it’ll make great French toast. And if your wife can get hold of some of raisins and whisk those in and bake it in a mould, it’ll make a better pudding than the Easter bunny himself could wish for. It’s great quality wheat. Ask the Kaiser’s wife and if she’s in a truthful mood, she’ll tell you she hasn’t had wheat that good for ages.

And chatting away in this vein, Karl Lebehde grabbed the door handle. But then he swung round and whispered: ‘If you hadn’t sorted out that lot up there, I wouldn’t have let on about this, because there have been too many times recently when you didn’t share your tin of fat with us.’

Stunned, Bertin made his way back in his jackboots, shouldering his gun, to his beat between the two sidings at the tiny station of Vilosnes-East.

The mild glow of the spring night spread along the valley to the river. On top of the steep slope to the right, out of sight, sat Dannevoux field hospital. The earth stuck to his boots, but the damp air was pleasantly soothing compared to the smoke and stink of the barracks. Vilosnes-East station! It was there that Acting Lieutenant Graßnick’s labour company from Serbia had alighted and marched behind him in a kind of dream, past the muzzles of the Bavarian field guns almost stumbling into range of the French guns. A year had passed since then, slightly longer even – and what a year! He looked back on it the way he must have looked back on himself as first-year schoolboy when he left school: a moustached teenager in slacks, schooled in dancing, looking down on a trusting little squirt in short trousers. And he wasn’t even sure if the year was over. But Sister Kläre had promised to telephone someone for him tonight. He was no longer as naïve as he had been when he first met her, when she was ironing in Kroysing’s room, for example. From snippets he’d heard, it seemed there had been something going on between that lovely woman and the crown prince, which of course put a different light on things. Well, why not? Adults’ private lives were their own business. The crown prince was not well liked in the army. He refused to endure the hardships that hundreds of thousands of men were commanded to endure in his name. He paid the price for that. Packets of cigarettes were left lying in the mud on the Moirey-Azannes road. But he was also meant to be gallant and incapable of being unkind to a woman with whom he’d been on intimate terms. If Sister Kläre took up his cause, things looked promising – thank God. Even if that poisonous little toad Major Jansch stood on tiptoe and spat as far as he could, he wouldn’t reach this particular bowl of soup.

Bertin felt hopeful as he climbed over switches and sleepers on his beat between the two trains: on his right were the five closed rectangular freight cars full of damp powder, damaged shells and collected duds, on his left the open wagons of the bread train covered with large tarpaulins. He shoved his hands in his pockets and strolled on. He was glad of the chance to think for a couple of hours. He was damned if he understood what had happened up there. Like any soldier, he often grumbled. Grumbling went together with discipline. But never before had he lost his temper like that in front of strangers and superior officers to the point where Pahl had congratulated him and the medical officer had asked everyone not to repeat what he’d said outside ward 3. What was happening to him? He was 28 years old but he felt about 100. He’d gone to war full of enthusiasm for Germany’s cause, thrilled that he’d experience the Glory Years, worried only that he might miss it because of his physical infirmities. And now, barely two years later, all his hopes had turned to ash. The world around him was bleak and leering, and violence ruled – the plain and simple violence of the fist. It wasn’t the justice of the cause that held sway but the size of the boot. This war was a stamping of boots: German boots kicked French boots, Russian boots German boots, Austrian boots Russian boots, Italian boots Austrian boots, and the British, with their lace-up shoes that were sturdier than them all but more elegantly cut, helped out where they could, sticking in a few kicks of their own – and he understood that. Now American shoes had appeared, and the world had become a madhouse. Everything from peacetime had been swept aside. The world was now run by sergeant majors and you were a lucky man if you survived in it.

Sunk in such thoughts, Werner Bertin reached the bread cars, which were sealed with grey and brown tarpaulins. He pulled up the open flap on the middle car and felt inside. Fantastic! The papers bags had been slit on one side and some of the contents were already gone. Bertin, the sentry, hurriedly stuck his hand in and began to fill his coat pockets, hunching his shoulders guiltily and glancing round. But there was only the moon to see him, small and faraway, shining down through a hole in the mist high up in the sky on to the wisps of fog in the valley.

Bertin was wearing gloves so he didn’t need to put his hands in his pockets, the deep sack-like bags of thick lining material inside his coat. The next day he’d send the rolls to Lenore with that recipe Karl Lebehde had magicked up. Things weren’t good at home. How could they be? And it seemed they weren’t any better elsewhere in Germany – or so he’d heard. His last few weeks’ post had given him a great deal of food for thought, only he didn’t have the time to think. But today he did, and his thoughts turned to his brother-in-law, David, a future musician, who had sent his sister bitter letters of complaint about their parents from the training camp, because they’d knowingly let him participate in the whole swindle. ‘We’re forced to do things that can only be done voluntarily, and to round the whole dirty trick off we’re called volunteers though we’re slaves.’ David was sharp young man, thought Bertin, and not just when it came to musical notation and the five-line staff, which he’d once called Beethoven’s telegraph wires. The news from his brother, Fritz, wasn’t very joyful either: the regiment had left Romania again and was now inexplicably stationed in the Adige valley in the South Tyrol, which was bad news for all concerned, including the Italians. The old Kaiser Franz Josef had died, and his successor, Karl, had, as they said, betaken himself to the front, but the bulk of the task still fell to the Prussians (who might be from Bavaria, Württemberg or Hessen). In short, there was little to gladden Frau Lina Bertin’s heart – to the contrary. At least soon she wouldn’t need to worry about her eldest son, even if little Fritzel was undeniably her favourite. Sister Kläre, a grateful reader, was going to make an important call that night. She might already have done it, in which case Frau Bertin could soon put her mind at rest.

Small was the room, and narrow was the bed. And yet two people successfully squeezed into them with surprising regularity. Even Lieutenant Kroysing’s long legs somehow slipped under the covers quite easily, although one of them was swathed in stiff bandages. Lieutenant Flachsbauer slept across the way blissfully alone.

‘Should I go and phone now?’

‘Why would you do that?’

The tinkle of a woman’s laugh: ‘Because I promised you that I’d phone tonight.’

‘The night is still long. It’s only just begun.’

The woman laughed again, a light, charming laugh, such as may never before have been heard under that flat roof. The glow from a wick floating in an ugly glass tumbler of oil played on the ceiling. It shone on Sister Kläre’s quiet eyes and across Kroysing’s forehead and the bridge of his nose. ‘We have to be sensible. Don’t forget your sweetheart is a maidservant, Lieutenant. She has to get a good night’s sleep and be up early. I need seven hours.’

‘Sweet maidservant. Couldn’t you make the call after 11?’

‘How about between 10 and 11? Okay, just before 11. And then you really have to hit the sack, all right?’ She sat up and looked at him sternly, her plaits hanging down, a laugh on her lips. The exquisite line of her shoulders seemed to start beneath her ear lobes and flow down her arm, inviting caresses.

Kroysing let his long hand slide down her skin. ‘Kläre,’ he said. ‘Kläre.’

‘What is it, sweetheart?’

‘I’m so stupidly happy. Bertin in his entirety does not merit you taking your beloved leg out from under the covers and putting your foot on the cold floorboards.’

She stretched her leg out and wiggled her toes, and their shadows flickered on the wall.

How quickly does time pass on guard duty? As quickly as the guard wants. He can think about his own life, the movements of the stars or whatever he chooses as he paces back and forth. The one strange thing is how a veiled thought will sometimes know how to keep battering away inside his head until it finds a weak spot and breaks through. Bertin looked around happily, drinking in the moonlit night, the vast stillness and indistinct sounds wafting over. Somewhere very far away a lorry with iron tyres was driving past. If there was anything happening at the front, it was out of earshot, for the guns barely fired now and the rifle fire was swallowed by the steep ridge. It was so very light. He could make out every sleeper, the points over the way, baskets of broken shells and the gravel between the rails. Should he have filled his pockets with that stale, unsalted bread? Hadn’t Lebehde committed a serious crime by stealing goods he was commanded to guard? And had not Bertin now committed the same crime? A military offence of the first order – if it were discovered. At the same time, most officers would just laugh if someone accused him or someone else of such a crime. For what was the harm in stealing a little food in the middle of a war? War was one long, uninterrupted looting spree. They’d been thieving from the homeland and neighbouring nations for three years now, day and night, every second of every day. Stealing a little food did no harm. A soldier’s needs had to be met. An army needs a lot over the duration and as it doesn’t produce anything it has to steal. If it’s judicious in its stealing, it can last for a long time, but if it isn’t, if it’s too greedy, it won’t last. Just as Sergeant Major Pfund, who had suddenly disappeared a couple of days previously, had been sent back to Metz with a fat black mark against his name. For the winter of starvation had reached its peak. Major Jansch had been forced to cough up his hoarded supplies. He had sought and found a victim. Herr Pfund and his cunning Christmas purchases became: embezzlement. The result was the company had no money and couldn’t offer its men the same supplementary food as other canteens – cheese, pickled herrings and chocolate. The doctor had complained and the depot had complained, but these complaints were viewed very unsympathetically by Army Group East, and according to the postal orderly Behrend, a pair of dilapidated shoes had arrived with a snide letter enclosed – all most helpful for sending a sergeant major into the wilderness. A new man had been put in charge of the company about three days previously. Who was he? Sergeant Duhn, a quiet man with steady grey eyes, who didn’t draw attention to himself but had achieved the dagger and badges of the regular army that had been denied to pushy Glinsky. Lost in his own thoughts, Bertin hooked his thumb under his rifle sling and wandered the long stretch back to the bread wagons.

There they stood, the covering loosened in one place, laying them open to the guard who was supposed to protect them. Excellent, thought Bertin, and how typical of human society. The state, which is supposed to protect the weak against the strong, comes down firmly on the side of the strong and steals from those it’s supposed to protect, but in a limited way, so that the starving don’t go too hungry, throw down their tools and band together against the thieves. Organised protest is forbidden. The weak have to present their complaints individually. I believe in organised protest and want to join cause with the weak but here I am with my pockets full of white bread for my wife, which I’ve stolen from the very weakest. Deal thy bread to the hungry, it says in the Bible. Steal thy bread from the hungry more like in wartime, and I’m cheerfully joining in. For what had actually happened? Private Werner Bertin from the ASC had just stolen eagerly awaited food from French prisoners, which had been collected for them by their wives. Despite this realisation, he made absolutely no move to put the stolen goods back. For his wife was starving too back home. Back in late summer and even at the beginning of October, he had disobeyed officers’ orders and given some of his ration bread to the Russian prisoners who at that time were doing menial jobs in the depot. He clearly remembered a gaunt soldier in an earth brown coat with earth brown skin who was scraping around on the platform outside the third platoon barracks. When he saw Bertin stop, he whispered: ‘Bread, Kamerad!’ What a look of joy had crossed that starved man’s face as he whisked the hard black bread into his coat pocket. Bertin slung his rifle back over his shoulder but put his hands behind his back and continued on his beat bent over, eyes to the ground, astonished and disgusted. Bloody hell, he thought. Bloody hell.

Far beyond the burnt, half-destroyed city of Verdun, an aeroplane was at that very moment being readied for take off. Pale in the moonlight and feeling tight round the chest, the painter Jean-François Rouard, together with the mechanics, was checking the wing struts, altitude and directional controls and bomb fixings. The bombs hung head downwards under the belly of the aeroplane like giant bats: two on the right, two on the left. These old crates always look pretty rickety, he thought. No wonder. It was not yet quite eight years since Blériot had flown across the channel. And how long was it since Pégoud had horrified the world with his loops, dives and upside down flight? With his hands in his pockets, Rouard shook his head and marvelled at people, for what had once been considered disgusting was now a wartime pilot’s bread and butter. Down with war, he thought. It’s a filthy mess, but as long as the Boche wants to trample over France, we’ll have to drop the necessary on his thick, wooden skull. And then he asked about the petrol. All being well, he hoped to be back in half an hour and he knocked three times on the leafless apple tree next to the hangar, whose branches were silhouetted like veins against the sky. From the half shadow of the nearby barn Philippe appeared, his friend and pilot. He’d been answering the call of nature before being strapped in. He was the son of a Breton fisherman and approached with a rolling stride. From his hand swung a rosary of ivory beads that he always hung on a little hook to the right of his seat at the front of the plane as a talisman. Rouard nodded to him and he nodded back. There was a calm affinity between the two friends, who had already faced death together under an aeroplane’s blazing wreckage, and no more was required.

Lieutenant Kroysing stretched his long legs over the edge of his hard-won woman’s bed, got dressed, kissed both her hands, wished her good night and hobbled the couple of steps to the room across the corridor as quietly as he could. It was completely dark, Lieutenant Flachsbauer was snoring and a similar sawing could be heard from many of the men in the ward across the corridor. Kroysing felt his way along the wall to his bed, stowed his crutch and hopped into the sack with practised ease. His heart was full of joy and a contentment as deep as the voice in his chest. He had bent fate to his will. By taking possession of that woman, he felt quite sure he had given himself a head start on all other men. Now he could become whatever he wanted: air force captain, chief engineer, the driving force at the head of a global company. That woman was now rummaging about in her tiny room, getting washed, and in a moment she would open her door warily and hurry down the corridor by the light of her pocket torch to put in a word for a friend at his request with a man of whom he was not the slightest bit jealous. Because henceforth he would just be a memory to her. That woman who had hesitated so long and laughed at him, even when he took her in his arms, would propel him on and be the wind in his wings. He couldn’t imagine a higher state of bliss. He hadn’t been able to hold Douaumont because imbeciles had intervened, but he would hold on to that woman and with her the path into the future. He closed his eyes, completely at peace, and let himself sink back with a smile. He actually wanted to stay awake so he’d hear her come back. He still felt very awake; he’d just doze for a moment. The following day she’d have to clear up the squaddies’ festering bandages again. No matter, that was part of life too. He hummed a tune in his head, a song from his student days by the poet Friedrich Schiller. It began with the words: ‘Joy, beautiful sparkle of the gods…’

As Sister Kläre walked down the long corridor in barracks 3, turned the corner and made her way down the much longer ones in barracks 2 and 1, she wondered if it had been silly of her to leave the electric light on in her room. She’d opened the window. She didn’t want to sleep in the fumes from the oil lamp and had left the room to air until she came back. She wished she could find a new way of breathing that would let her to suck the happiness she felt right down into the tips of her toes along with the God-given breath of life. She hadn’t felt as alive as this for a decade. If only she were sure she’d closed the shutter. There was enough of a draught between its wooden edge and the barracks wall. And there was no point in being too careful. Sister Kläre was an old soldier and knew you sometimes had to be careless. Nonetheless, it would be cleverer and better, more sensible and more careful to go back and turn the light out. But – and she laughed internally – we don’t always do what’s careful and sensible; we usually do what’s sensible and sometimes what’s easiest. And she was very tired and she’d need be on the ball for the conversation to come and it would probably take a while to get put through, and so she’d best save those precious minutes. And what if the shutter were gaping open? And someone went past precisely in the quarter of an hour when she was away and noticed that Sister Kläre had disobeyed the regulations and left her light on and not sealed the window? Was it that nice lad Bertin who’d told a story about seeing a general when he was on guard duty driving through an ammunitions dump with his headlights on full beam? Come on, thought Sister Kläre as she went into the telephone room, leave it. I’m so happy. I’ve got such a fine specimen for a husband. Nothing can go wrong for me now.

For obvious reasons, the Dannevoux field hospital telephone exchange was located in that part of the large barracks complex closest to the approach from the village. It was operated by severely disabled soldiers with eye injuries; before this war they would have been called blind men. One of them could made out a certain amount of light and shade, the second only had the use of part of his left eye and the third could only see things on the edges of his field of vision – everything in front of him dissolved into darkness. The medical officer had selected these three almost blind men from among his patients and made them telephonists. They were happy with their work and accommodation. All three had been cavalrymen: an Uhlan from Magdeburg, a cuirassier from Schwedt and a dragoon from Allenstein. None of them wanted to go back to Germany and tap around as blind men, and they had all easily mastered the tasks associated with their new work. Their hearing had sharpened and their memories had improved. The telephone service in Dannevoux field hospital functioned smoothly. When Sister Kläre opened the door, the room reeked of smoke from the men’s tobacco. By the faint light of the lamp she saw Keller the cuirassier sitting knitting – a sense of touch was more important for that than sight. He recognised her by her voice and was surprised and pleased to have her visit at this late hour. As he’d been working at this job for while, he often made the connection Sister Kläre requested and as usual he said: ‘Sit yourself down, sister. It might take a while.’ Then he began to negotiate with people far away. He’d never seen them but was on highly confidential terms with them. Discretion is part of a telephonist’s job.

In the circle of light from the small lamp, Sister Kläre waited to hear the results of his efforts. With her arms propped on the table and her slim wrists either side of her chin, she watched him. She felt for her cigarette case, pulled out a cigarette and began to smoke. She smiled as her eye lit upon a small monogram on the hammered metal with a tiny coronet under it. That golden thing was quite appropriate here; the man who gave it to her would soon be on the other end of the line.

The crown prince of the German Reich was a particularly genial host and that evening he was in radiant mood. He’d had a Swiss military author to dinner, and they’d enjoyed a long, technical chat about the movements of the 5th Army during the last days of the Battle of the Marne – a discussion that would one day bear fruit. Also at the small, round table were a war correspondent and an artist, both from German newspapers. The crown prince’s personal adjutant completed the company. There were no women. When an orderly entered and whispered something to the adjutant, and he turned to his host and said, with a particular emphasis that remained opaque to the guests, that there was an official telephone call for him, the slim gentleman leapt up, excused himself with a few polite words and hurried into the room next door. He didn’t know exactly who might be calling him, but it couldn’t be anything unpleasant. Perhaps it was the crown princess, perhaps one of his boys, but before he’d sat down at the writing table with the telephone on it, his adjutant caught up with him, said two words to him and disappeared again. ‘But how delightful,’ were therefore the first words he spoke into the telephone.

No woman is immune to such graciousness, especially not a German woman, since German women are not very spoiled in that department. Therefore, Sister Kläre immediately made a joke and said he should find out who was on the line before squandering his charm like that.

He laughed softly calling her by a pet name he had for her, seemingly unaware that they hadn’t seen each other for nine months. He asked if she couldn’t come over for a little while. He had some good friends round, unfortunately there were as usual no ladies present and a car could be on its way to Dannevoux in two minutes.

Sister Kläre laughed. The blind telephonist was beside her, but he got up and went out to look at the stars. She could then speak more freely and assure the crown prince that while he might be a great general he clearly had no idea what it was like to work with her boss. She’d be delighted if one of his cars came by one day, but she’d expect his Imperial Highness to be inside it on a benevolent visit to the field hospital. Then she’d be able to introduce him to an officer, a sapper lieutenant, who could tell him the most amazing things about the last days at Douaumont.

The crown prince asked teasingly if Sister Kläre had a personal attachment to this gentleman and received a scornful rebuff. He couldn’t see her blush. Then he asked after Colonel Schwersenz – was there anything he could do for him? – and heard with regret that there was nothing new to report or to be expected as long as the war continued. Sister Kläre then said that she had rung up to ask a favour – not for one her intimates but for a man of intrinsic worth. And in her charming Rhenish accent she described the whole situation with Bertin the author and lawyer, his major and the court martial at Lychow, which needed a replacement for a man who’d been transferred to active service.

The crown prince was overcome with liking for the woman on the other end of the line, whom he could visualise very clearly. With his mouth very close to the receiver he said he wished she would think of him again with such warmth and eloquence. Anyone who didn’t know Sister Kläre very well might imagine all kinds of silly things about her.

Oh, Sister Kläre replied innocently, in a field hospital where there were so many ‘departures’ at certain times you learnt to have more regard for the individual than did the authors of war reports. (In the heartless language of the doctors, departures always meant deaths.)

The crown prince pretended to be shocked by Sister Kläre’s vehemence but said that doing something for an author fitted in very well with his plans that evening as he happened to have three newspaper men to dinner, and he noted Private Bertin’s name and unit on his writing pad.

Pleased to have got to that point, Sister Kläre now metamorphosed into a charming but bossy governess. He mustn’t dawdle over it as was unfortunately his wont. He must get on to it straight away, brook no refusal and remind the major who was actually in charge of the 5th Army.

The crown prince was tickled; she really was a clever woman. He’d arrange to see her again in the next couple of days, visit Dannevoux field hospital and look up the sapper lieutenant. And he’d put the telegram through to the labour company that night. As he told her this, speaking in a warm, endearing way, he remembered his guests. He stood up and leaning over the telephone began to bring the conversation to a close, saying he would visit the following Sunday, and then he heard Sister Kläre’s calm voice thanking him repeatedly and asking to be excused: she’d have to hang up as the line was urgently required on account of an air raid warning.

Somewhat startled, the crown prince said he hoped the anti-aircraft batteries and M.G.’s would give the blasted Frogs hell and hung up. He lit a cigarette and, deep in thought, wandered back to the small, atmospherically lit dining table where the Sekt glasses were being filled. These air attacks were making the war ever more unfair.

For the last few seconds, Keller the almost blind cuirassier had been standing beside Sister Kläre pointing to the light for the second line, which had suddenly lit up. Discretion aside, it had been the whinny of a horse that had drawn him outside earlier. Horses were his passion, and it was a source of great regret to him that there were no riding horses in the hospital stables. He’d recognised the whinny. It was a chestnut called Egon, an average gelding, well kept though undernourished, upon whose back the field chaplain with the lanced boil came and went. Keller wondered if he might perhaps get a chance to hold the chestnut by its curb strap for a minute, stroke its soft fur and breathe in the warm odour that every rider knows and loves. And sure enough, there was Pechler the bath orderly leading the horse, which was looking forward to getting back to its own stable, through the pale moonlight. Father Lochner, meanwhile, was warmly shaking the medical officer by both hands, saying how much those hands had helped him, and heaping blessings and prosperity upon the doctor and his admirable institution. Then, despite his bulk, he swung himself nimbly from the stirrup into the saddle. He looked like a cowboy now protected against the night air by a riding coat, his wide-brimmed hat cocked at a jaunty angle. And off he rode towards Dannevoux where he was to spend the night. The Sauterne wine had been splendid, and they’d had a stimulating discussion about the deeply sceptical views on the value of life the doctor had expressed at the bedside of that ugly but rather bright typesetter – what was he called again? Pahl, that was it. Yes, when you had to abstain for a couple of weeks even the smallest amount of wine went straight to your head. But it gladdened the heart, as the Holy Scriptures said, comforted those who mourned, gave hope to the lame and helped the righteous to a gentle sleep. And furthermore 20 minutes’ slow riding – it was nearly 11pm – should be enough to ensure a good night’s sleep. The moon shone so beautifully. Up ahead the road forked into two shining bands that stretched into the distance: one towards Dannevoux and the other downhill to Vilosnes-East on the right. Dr Münnich, now in a Litevka and looking more like a major than a surgeon, watched the peaceable rider’s bold silhouette for a moment; then he sent his men back inside and went in after them. And still smiling to himself at the contrast between the dashing figure the good father cut on his horse and the silver cross around his neck, he didn’t notice how hastily Keller opened his office door and pulled it shut behind him.

Keller really was in a hurry. He’d already heard the phone’s urgent ring from outside. He pushed the plug in impatiently and received a report from further up the line via the switchboard at Esnes that an aeroplane was approaching and to pass the news on. When telephonists and sentries received air-raid reports, they passed them on to the nearest exchange.

Meanwhile, the telephone was also buzzing in the shed that served as a station building at nearby Vilosnes-East. It was definitely buzzing, but no one heard it. After an exhausting day’s work, the railwaymen who ran it by, older men from the Landwehr, were sleeping the sleep of the righteous. They had a sort of arrangement with the ASC men that their sentries would wake them if anything happened. But did the ASC sentries hear the desperate clamouring of the old telephone? No one was sleeping nearby. The railwaymen liked to be comfortable. Both they and the ASC men preferred the roomy barracks on the other side of the station. There were dugouts in the hillside to be used in case of air raids, but the men had to be woken in plenty of time to reach them. The telephone buzzed and squawked. Where the hell was the sentry from Barkopp’s working party? Did he want to consign his sleeping comrades to eternity if that bloody aeroplane did fly over?

Bertin, with his rifle, was still between the tracks deep in thought – not so far away that he couldn’t hear, but too distracted to be alarmed. He was full of self-pity in that moment. If he’d had any sense, he have been like the other grown-ups in the company and wouldn’t have trusted the sergeant major back in the barracks yard in Küstrin. He’d have let himself be transferred to the east rather than insisting on making a voluntary pilgrimage west. That way he’d have remained the decent lad he used to be and he’d have been able to do his duty just as well in the east. But he’d been afraid of the east, hadn’t he? In the east there was the threat of lice, snow and cold, uncivilised towns, horribly degraded roads, and in the towns lots of Jews – Eastern European Jews with nasty habits, steeped in an embarrassing, over-the-top kind of Judaism designed to make him, Bertin, feel as uncomfortable as possible. He’d been honest enough to admit that to himself and he admitted it now too. He just felt the punishment was a bit harsh for such a small misdemeanour. Why should a Jew not be able to admit that he didn’t like certain other Jews, but did very much like the Prussian military: its discipline and order, its spruceness and drills, its warrior dress and spirit, the military might of its proud traditions and its invincible strike power? Hadn’t he been brought up to feel like that?

And now, after two years of service, here he stood a miserable thief of bread for the hungry. In such circumstances a Berliner would joke that something was a bit fishy. A lot of things had been revealed as a hoax in the last two years, for example the idea that it was sweet and honourable to die for the Fatherland. Well no, actually, it was always nasty and awful to sacrifice a young life before it had come to anything. But sometimes, by God, it was necessary. You couldn’t just leave women, children and old men to be overrun by brown barbarian hordes, such as the Mongols and Tartars who had repeatedly attacked the his Silesian homeland. Well, Mr Bertin, he told himself, you’ve been a sheep with your Prussian patriotism, you’ve behaved like a wee laddie going off on an adventure and failed to noticed that you were in fact in the service – and in the noose – of the enemy of all people: naked force, the adversary incarnate. It was a bit late to be discovering this. In the meantime, he’d sunk to the level of the plundering Bashkir nomads held up in horror in the history books of his childhood. For they had only plundered food from the Silesian peasants and townspeople because they were hungry and needed to put food on their own tables. Bertin Bashkir – what a slap in the face!

And then he heard the ringing. He jolted awake and was back in the present. Pushed the shed door open, flashed his torch around: no one there. Grabbed the receiver from its cradle and listened: air raid alarm, pass it on! A sudden, glaring memory of the five wagons of explosives. Fifty living men dependent on his watchfulness. Get a move on!

Bertin bounded like a hare over the rails and sleepers. Shoving his gun aside, he stormed into the railwaymen’s barracks. ‘Get out! Air raid alarm!’ He left the door open so the air would help to rouse the sleeping men and rushed out again to wake his comrades. He had no fear for himself. He was alive with sensations, engulfed in the excitement of this extraordinary night. He stood in the doorway, heard Sergeant Barkopp curse the draught and banged on the floorboards with the butt of his musket, cruelly driving out the last vestiges of sleep: there was a reason why a certain private had once blissfully slept through an air raid alarm. Back then, there had been 150m between the men and the ammunition; now there were just 30m.

He looked to the sky and listened. A very faint singing could be heard, unmistakable and evil. A searchlight had already swung upwards from the Sivry area, its chameleon tongue, broader at the top, licking for insects. A second joined it, apparently from behind the main railway station at Vilosnes, then a third from Dannevoux. And then the anti-aircraft guns started yelping. They boomed out from behind the hill on the other side of the railway, and heavy machine gun fire clattered from the side of the hill. Shafts of light swung across the sky. Dark puffs of red shrapnel burst around the plane and bullets ripped towards it. Watch out, Froggie! We’ll punch holes in your wings or arms, engine or heart, petrol tank or lungs – it’s all one to us. You must be brought down before those terrible Easter eggs of yours can be sent crashing to earth. A flock of inadequately clothed ASC men trotted past in the moonlight towards the dark hollows of the dugouts. Most of them tried to push through to the back where it was safest, but the railwaymen were already there, smoking cigarettes. The ASC men had to take cover further forwards.

One man stayed outside: Bertin. He had to stay and see what happened. Sergeant Barkopp barked at him good-naturedly to come inside as it was about to rain. Bertin, shading the visor of his cap with hand, stayed where he was, saying there was time yet. Where was the Frenchman? Had he cleared off to Stenay, where the crown prince was supposed to have his headquarters? Woe betide you, Frenchie, if you take out a certain someone before he has arranged my transfer to the Lychow divison court martial.

One thousand two hundred metres up in the air, Jean-François Rouard leant out of the cockpit and peered down with his night binoculars. The landscape beneath him was completely different from in daytime. The silvery light of the moon is a poetic lie. Beneath him lay a shrouded, grey expanse, and he could barely make out the course of the Meuse. He shouldn’t have let himself in for a bombing raid so soon. On the other hand, orders were orders and he had to stop taking childish photographs sometime and get down to the real business. There were four pointed bombs hanging from the belly of his plane. They looked like sleeping bats hanging head downwards from the eaves of a barn. He couldn’t wait to get rid of them. God in heaven, where was that bend in the Meuse and the target valley with the railway tracks? He flashed his torch over his time sheet, map and watch: still straight on. He didn’t hear the shrapnel bursting in the noise of the engine, but he saw it when he leant out of the cockpit again searching for some sign that would bring this paralysing uncertainty to an end – the hot, wild confusion of his first night-time bombing raid. If the time sheet was right, they should fly on for two seconds and then downwards to get a better aim, and then a jerk of the lever, and to hell with the mess he’d be creating. Life was one big mess, you just had to accept that and make sure you hit the target. Perhaps he’d get hit himself. There, a light ahead on the left, a bright speck on the ground. Probably someone stumbling along between the tracks. He tapped the pilot’s left upper arm, and he changed course almost imperceptibly.

Below a witches’ Sabbath had reached its peak. Guns crashed. Shells howled up and burst. Machine guns rattled out their violent worst. Searchlights groped around. The hum of the plane’s engine and propeller grew more distinct. Bertin was trembling with excitement. He was pressed into the entrance of the dugout, all his senses alert. The mad frenzy of battle tearing the night to shreds engulfed his soul. Madness gripped him. A few hours earlier he’d been attacking violence up at the hospital and now he was in raptures over it. How is that possible? he wondered. Could the two go together? Didn’t you need to be a sergeant major to tremble with bliss, as he was now doing, at the volley of explosions and the air man up there, chasing his target undeterred, which included Bertin? Have I become a savage as well as a thief? he wondered. Did I even need to become one? Haven’t I always been one? Didn’t I bully my little brother, just as Glinsky bullied me. Didn’t I throw a weaker and worthier person than myself to the ground and rape them, just as Jansch did with me? I mean my wife. I mean Lenore.

Where was he now? Low pine trees, greyish green under the dull blue Brandenburg sky. The clearing between Wilkersdorf and Tamsel. Yellow sand and fields waist-high in rye. He was in the uniform of a warrior, which he’d been wearing for three months by then, and he had to prove his manhood because she’d refused him under that clear sky. He’d gone for her and pressed her down into the moss by the shoulders. She struggled furiously. He’d forced himself on her and frightened her as he’d earlier frightened a boy who’d tried to follow them. Had that rape, and all the misery, pain and unpleasantness that followed, been a manly act? No, it had been the act of a sergeant major. Crushing someone instead of winning them over, throwing them down instead of seducing them, ordering them about rather than persuading them – that was how a sergeant major behaved. Tons of steel, volleys of explosions, desolate swathes of poisonous smoke, careening mounds of earth, cracking joists, howling and whistling bursts of splinters and shells: they were all the result of a kind of exasperated weakness. Anyone could press a button. On 14 July, he, Bertin, had not pressed the button. But on 15 July, do truth the honour…

Bertin clung to the dugout post. Suddenly he felt sick and dizzy. The outlines of the wagons standing calmly on the tracks not 40m away, treacherously quiet in the treacherous moonlight, swam in circles before him. But before the sergeant could ask him what was wrong, a dull thud shook the hill above their heads, then a second. Splinters of stone fell from roof. The anti-aircraft fire doubled in intensity. The machine guns grew frantic. But the roar of the propeller was still there, though more distant. The railwaymen sat against the wall, and the ASC men further forward in the darkness. Bertin the sentry, suddenly completely exhausted, crouched beside them on the wooden edge of the wire bed. Excited chattering until the conclusion was finally drawn that it had been a lot of noise about nothing. He’d missed the ammunitions wagons and been disorientated by the counter fire. He must’ve dropped his bombs somewhere on the ridge behind or in front of Dannevoux. From the sound of it, the second bomb had probably ripped a hole in the hill path.

Bertin stretched his aching knees slowly. Only half an hour more of sentry duty and he could go to bed and spend four hours wrapped up in his blankets like a chrysalis undergoing metamorphosis. His second round from 4am to 6am might be restorative, with bird song, sunrise and a chance to pull himself together. But this last half hour would be hard. His limbs were trembling. He hurriedly lit his pipe and felt better, letting the men’s talk wash over him. Sergeant Barkopp pushed off to bed: tomorrow was another day – and an off-duty one at that. Bertin carried on smoking, in contravention of the rules, as he made his way out of the shelter with Karl Lebehde and Hildebrandt, who was on sentry duty after him, and stumbled across the rails past the ammunitions wagons towards the middle of the valley. Karl Lebehde stopped, turned and peered up at the hillside. A flickering red glow. An old barn or pile of wood was burning up there, said the tall Swabian. A bomb must have hit it. Karl Lebehde said nothing, wagged his head on his short neck, looked round again and finally went to bed. Bertin shivered. His musket suddenly felt like it weighed nine pounds. It had been a long, exciting day, and around midnight nature said: enough! But he was still on duty. That couldn’t be helped. His bulging pockets dragged at this shoulders.

^{CHAPTER FOUR} A tile falls from the roof

LIEUTENANT KROYSING, IN bed by the outer wall of his room, was already fast asleep. Only a tiny spark of consciousness connected him to the earth’s surface; his reality in that moment was that of a dream. He was flying, he, Flight Lieutenant Kroysing, was flying over the Channel. He was surrounded by roaring: from the sea, the wind and the thrum of his engine. The North Sea heaved beneath him. But its waves couldn’t hurt him and neither could the long-range guns on the ships below: their shells fell back down, yelping and powerless. In his dream, the missiles climbed towards him, pointed end first, hovered for a moment, bowed before him and hurtled back down. The cheeky little machine gun bullets were another matter. They flew up at him like bees and settled on his wings, making curves and star shapes, and transforming his plane into a butterfly. But it wasn’t like other butterflies. It was a huge death’s head moth, a bomber that threatened cities. Beneath him lay an English city full of English people, with a layout similar to Nuremberg. There was the castle where Alfred the Great had lived with Christopher Columbus – they were going to drop a bomb on its chimney. His hand was already reaching for the bomb release handle. Then a shell burst beside that hand and with a start Eberhard Kroysing woke up.

Noise filled the lieutenants’ ward. It seemed that an aircraft was actually paying a visit to the station down below. For all the batteries and M.G.’s in the area were letting rip at it. At first he wanted to jump out of bed and alert the barracks. But then he felt ashamed of that impulse, for this was a hospital not a… He couldn’t follow this thought to its conclusion. Sitting bolt upright, all ears, he tried to imagine the enemy – the enemy, who was really a comrade. Just you wait, old chap, he thought. In three months, I’ll knock you out of the sky and pay you back for this night-time visit with pleasure.

Through all the noise he heard the engine approaching in the darkness, despite Lieutenant Flachsbauer’s snoring. (The poor man wrapped himself up in sleep as though it were a thick quilt. His bride was seriously ill with septic appendicitis. It was an almost hopeless case, and he’d become suspicious, as soldiers do in hospital, and thought it wasn’t her appendix but septicaemia in another organ.) What a healthy racket the anti-aircraft guns were making! Out of bed. Yank the window open; white ribbons streaking across the night sky. Flashes as the anti-aircraft guns opened fire. A black-red puff of bursting shrapnel, then a second. He heard the aircraft engine very clearly through the frantic rattle of the machine guns. Kroysing peered up, half leaning out of the window; nothing but sky, ribbons of light and a couple of stars. A figure almost as tall as himself ran past underneath and returned a couple of seconds later. A muffled voice almost as deep as his own cried out to him: ‘Kamerad, take cover!’ And the man disappeared. Kroysing paid him no mind. This visit would be on little Bertin’s watch. Wasn’t he on guard duty? Of course he was. It was nearly 11pm, and he had number two. Well, that boy had a cool head. Kroysing had seen how he handled different kinds of situations. He would wake the barracks up.

But hadn’t the sound above him changed? It certainly had. It was fractionally louder and getting closer. He couldn’t see much out of this bloody window, which faced Dannevoux. And was it appropriate for an old soldier with an injured leg to go running out into the night against doctor’s orders? A little sobered, Kroysing straightened his pyjamas and was about to go back into the room. But what was that? That guy up there just kept heading downwards. Was he still dreaming or what? Had his dream spooled on and flipped over, as sometimes happens? This is a field hospital, a voice screamed inside him. You can’t drop your bomb on our beds.

He listened intently and suddenly the realisation struck him like a bullet to the heart that the guy must have made a mistake. He was going to blow the field hospital to pieces by accident and it would happen any second now if the anti-aircraft guns didn’t take him out.

Bring the devil down, you morons! Shoot, you lazy bastards, shoot!

Suddenly, the engine cut. Had they got him? They’d got him! Kroysing dropped his arms in relief. No more comradeship with the airman. Hostility ruled the world.

And then, as he stood in the darkness clutching the window in his pale pyjamas, the experienced soldier in him who’d seen it all before heard a faint whistling – the wilful whistling and shrill shriek of a falling bomb. The inescapable drone of fate lay within that sound: I’m coming to snuff out life and ignite fire… The plane had glided down with its engine cut, now it thundered back up. Fire from Heaven was a good thing, in the hands of Prometheus, benefactor of mankind. Watch how I crash as ordered, I, the hammering thunderbolt, obedient destroyer. A bomb takes nearly six seconds to fall the 180m this one had to travel. But it wasn’t falling on a leaderless sheep pen. A man, who suddenly had two healthy legs, tore open the door of men’s ward 3 and yelled: ‘Air raid! Get out!’ After the men, the woman. He grabbed the door handle. Empty – the room glaringly bright, the window half open. And as ward 3 erupted in screams and the electric light blazed on, a figure appeared at the end of the corridor, and just before the crash Kroysing heard death’s messenger clamouring above the roof. In a furious frenzy, he grabbed the water jug by Kläre’s bed, totally beside himself, and hurled it up at the ceiling, into death’s ugly mug: ‘You cowardly bastard!’ Then the explosion above his head ripped him to bloody shreds.

Flames, flames. The bomb had landed in the corridor right between room 19 and ward 3. Seven or eight of those who’d fled had simply collapsed in a heap. Flying all around were corrugated iron, splintered beams, burning wood and flaming tar paper, and almost in a single moment the entire outermost wing of the barracks flared up like a bonfire. With fists and kicks and their whole bodies the wounded fought their way out through the furthest of the three doors despite their bandages. From beneath the poisonous, choking fumes of the billowing black and white smoke came the shrill screams and primaeval whining of men who’d collapsed and been crushed, and the ghastly howls of those licked by flames. Those who’d been killed outright by splinters from the bomb were lucky.

In bed, surrounded by burning floorboards, lay the body of Pahl the typesetter. Only his body: his clever head, of which the workers had such desperate need, had been crushed by the explosion like a hen’s egg under a horse’s hoof. It had got him in his sleep this time, just as it could so nearly have got Bertin nine months previously but hadn’t, to his and Karl Lebehde’s astonishment. This time he’d slept through the noise. By the time the noise started to wake him, he was already gone. There would be nothing left of him. For his brain and crushed skull had been spurted somewhere, and his disfigured body would be reduced to ashes by the slow, tenacious blaze, as would his bed and that entire section of the barracks. In the meantime, the medical officer, Pechler the bath attendant, the night watchmen and orderlies had rushed over. A bit of luck, thought the medical officer, as he pulled the fire extinguisher from its bracket and let the hose unfurl – a bit of luck that it had hit ward 3 with all the minor cases. In ward 1, no one would have been able to escape. Wrapped in blankets, the occupants of the burning wing crowded into the safe side of the courtyard and the southern terrace with its deckchairs.

The chief nurse did a roll call to get an idea of how many were missing and who they were. Streams of carbon dioxide from the red canisters were already hissing on to the blaze, and men with minor injuries helped the telephonists to pull the hose out further. The bath orderly, in his capacity as a water supply expert, soon had a sharp jet raining down on the burning timberwork, dashing the debris aside and sending the ruins flying into the air. ‘Watch out, roofing!’ cried one of the rescued men for whom the disaster had quickly become exciting entertainment.

Sister Kläre lay on the matron’s bed, passed out. It was a mystery why this woman who normally had such presence of mind had been shocked to the core like that. No doubt she’d been overcome by belated horror at her miraculous escape from death. That corner had suffered the worst. No one had been rescued from there. No, not true: Lieutenant Flachsbauer had survived. The explosion from the bomb that had crashed through the roof into the corridor and set the floorboards on fire had spared him. It had only shaken him wide awake, warning him that something was happening. He’d climbed out of the window as the hut went up in flames above him. He’d lowered himself down the outer wall. He’d been very calm and phlegmatic and hadn’t got as much as a splinter in his skin. That was what happened, he thought, when you didn’t give a monkey’s about life, when it made you sick, because a wee lassie at home had got some old quack of a woman to abort a baby that wasn’t yours. As if any of it mattered: pregnant or not, a baby by Mr X or Mr Y, trouble from the parents or people talking. All that mattered was to be alive, to continue to breathe, to have eyes to see, ears to hear, a head to think, a nose to smell, even if all you smelt were tar fumes and burning flesh. A miracle that he’d been saved, really and truly. He must write to that silly little goose immediately the following afternoon and make it clear to her that she should get well, for God’s sake, and not give a toss about anything else.

Twenty minutes after the bomb had fallen, drivers arrived at the scene of the blaze from the Headquarters at Dannevoux with men from the large billets there, sappers with picks and axes and infantrymen with spades. The front part of the men’s ward and the nurses’ rooms across the corridor could still be saved, though they’d be too water-logged and full of debris to be used.

The second bomb… A solitary rider on the way to Dannevoux had stopped, rigid with shock, and turned in his saddle as white arcs cut across the dome of the sky and the deafening play of the guns and rifles began. Father Lochner, under his wide-brimmed hat, was admittedly quite convinced he was in no danger up there. His fear was for the others, the ASC men down below, who didn’t belong to his division but whom he’d intended to visit before Easter. Apparently there were a couple of Polish Catholics among them.

Suddenly, a shrapnel case hurtled to the ground beside him. ‘Watch out!’ it said. This nice little show, which mere mortals had cribbed from the magnificence of God’s thunderstorms, was not without its dangers. For a precious second, Father Lochner remained undecided as to whether he should spur his gelding on and gallop over to Dannevoux or turn back and take refuge in the hospital for a few minutes until the attack was over.

Unfortunately for him, he did neither. He stopped where the road forked, sorely tempted to take the one that led downhill and shelter against the hillside in the round black shadows cast by the summit. The gelding Egon, much wiser than his master, pulled impatiently at the reins; he wanted to go. This dark field surrounded by banging frightened him. A horse has a long back to protect if things fall from the air, and the rider had no sooner given him the direction than he flew down the muddy path at a canter. Father Lochner had a job bringing him to a standstill when they reached a point that deceptively seemed to offer cover. For the horse, ears laid back, wanted to bound off as behind him the hill began to roar and flash. Across the road, down the slope – he just wanted away. (It was because of his nervous disposition that the heavy machine gun company had exchanged this otherwise lovely animal for a more placid one.) Lochner, a fearless man with a heart both kind and wise, held the trembling horse by its bridle and spoke to him soothingly, looking to the sky when he jerked his neck up. And there he saw the body of the aeroplane in the glare of the searchlights, barely 100m above him, roaring over the hill large and white, the curve of its belly, the pale cross of its wings, the circle of its insignia, its struts: it all appeared before the eyes of the solitary priest with ghostly clarity, as the Frenchman prepared to complete his attack, ascend and veer away.

Few people see the bomb that kills them before if falls, but Benedikt Lochner from the Order of St Francis, Catholic chaplain on the western front, was one of those few. A road was nearly as good a target as a railway line, and that was why the little painter Rouard yanked the lever when he got a clearer view of the area the plane was crossing. And Lochner saw it. In the beam of the searchlight he saw a bright drop detach itself from the dreadful monster, as if it were sweat or dirt, and fall. And he fell to his knees. He knelt at his horse’s feet with his hand clasped round his small silver cross. The aeroplane had long since vanished into the night. With his eyes firmly closed, while his horse Egon chewed and stretched his neck out above him, he filled the space inside his chest with prayer: that the Father in Heaven preserve him, that the Virgin take him into her gracious protection, that the Son of God, who had suffered so much, shelter and receive his soul. ‘Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit,’ cried his inaudible voice and then it spooled frantically into that great old prayer made up of snatches from the Holy Scriptures that is called ‘Our Father’. He didn’t pray in Latin, as was his habit. German words welled up inside him and drowned out the shrill approach of the falling bomb. And as he prayed, he saw pictures from his childhood of the majesty of the Trinity enthroned on painted clouds, the Father, bearded and in flowing robes, his hands spread in a blessing, to his right the Son, and above their heads doves with halos. And when he got to the line, ‘And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors’, a red blaze crashed down in front of him. A good 12m from him, Rouard’s hanging bat had burst a hole in the road surface, sending mounds of earth rolling downhill and scattering cascades of splinters all around. They hit the dead wall of the hillside with as much force as the trembling flesh of the man and the horse. Lochner was struck in the chest, the horse in the neck and leg. A scream was the last thing Lochner heard – it wasn’t clear if it came from him or the animal, which now collapsed on top of him. Their gasps and groans and blood intermingled.

The next morning infantrymen would arrive from their position nearby shaking their heads at the size of the holes an aerial bomb could make and saying, good heavens, it’s taken out a field chaplain this time. And then they would calmly get out their canteens and knifes and cut off the tenderest parts of Egon the gelding’s flesh to make a delicious roast for their evening meal.

^{CHAPTER FIVE} The survivors

MAJOR JANSCH PACED round his office, very pale, with slippers on his feet – thick felt slippers as there was a draught through the floor. He’d blanched in fury and hissed at his batman Kuhlmann that he was going to transfer him back to his unit because his cocoa was too hot. He’d blanched in fury and trampled on a spider because it had the temerity to cross his path. He’d blanched in fury… The orderly room beneath him was in no doubt as to his state of mind; if his friend Niggl didn’t come and mollify him no one would dare to go near him that day. No one perhaps except Corporal Diehl, the primary school teacher from Hamburg. He was in restrained high spirits for the same reason that Herr Jansch was beside himself. For Diehl had learnt that the world was not always as evil and nasty and it sometimes seemed. Even in the Kaiser’s army, the weak sometimes found succour. Such a miracle encouraged backbone. If necessary, Diehl would venture into the lion’s den.

But it wasn’t necessary. Outside the spring weather looked moody and changeable. But Herr Jansch didn’t notice. His indignation prevented him from noticing. First, there had been a dreadful air attack the night before. Damvillers station had suffered a service breakdown, and you could see why. Even in his cellar, Major Jansch had heard the two bombs crashing down. And furthermore, it had been proved that the Jews were omnipotent. Even in the Kaiser’s army. Even if they knew how to act powerless for a year or two. When it suited them, off they floated. And just when an honest German thought he’d backed them into a corner, they pressed a button and a Hohenzollern appeared through a secret door to play the rescuing angel of Judas, disappearing with his charge as the orchestra struck up the march from Handel’s Messiah: ‘Daughter of Zion, rejoice’.

Jansch pressed his chin into the collar of his Litevka, tugged at his long moustache with both hands, bit into a raspberry flavoured sweet and cut a deep shaft in his world view. He’d always known the Hohenzollerns weren’t up to much. They were erratic people, those descendants of the Burgraves of Nuremberg, and their blood was far too mixed for them to produce men of steady character, true sovereigns and rulers. Again and again, this inborn mushiness broke through the little bit of toughness and character they had painstakingly cultivated in Berlin and Brandenburg. All of them had signed despicable peace treaties, all of them had made bad bargains, and all of them had had dealings with Jews. After Frederick the Great it had got worse, not better. The Guelphic and French blood that had produced him had only really been properly felt in his descendants. Wilhelm II and especially his son, grandson of the English woman, they had been the business. When Frederick III succumbed to cancer of the throat after 99 days – his father had told him this – the citizenry mourned in its entirety, but Old Prussia secretly breathed a sigh of relief: that bearded liberal would only have let the country down. And then, barely two years later, that which ought never to have happened happened: Bismarck’s dismissal. A logical chain ran from that act of betrayal to the overthrow of the Old Prussian constitution, which, as the Pan-German Union admitted through clenched teeth, seemed inevitable now, and right in the middle of a war. A man who could chase out the Iron Chancellor as though he were a disloyal lackey deserved that Bethmann-Hollweg, that chancellor made out of philosophy papers, and the rubbish that came out of his mouth every time he opened it. So much for the father, but the son wouldn’t improve things, wouldn’t rescue the situation, however much he seemed to applaud the Old Germans. That frivolous man always did the opposite of what might have been expected, as the present example showed. Such things came back to roost. Any reasonable man could see that, even in sunglasses at midnight. Those people were played out.

Major Jansch paced round the stone walls of his room, which was hung with maps and lay in a house wrested from the conquered French. Solemn music resonated within him, based on the funeral march that tended to be played at burials, which, regrettably, had been written by a Pole, a certain Chopin. He filled up inside with sorrow at Germany’s destiny, at the decline that always threatened that which was most noble. Some lines of verse sounded within him, heroic lines from his favourite poet Dahn:

So ended the conflict between the noble Gothic nation and those sly, shifty sons of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantines. Innocence, nobility of mind and trusting heroism had no place in that world, which belonged to the descendants of dwarves. The riff-raff always triumphed because internal German discord smoothed their path.

There it lay, the document that represented the end of all hope; printed in blue on German Army notepaper, the telegram from the Commander-in-Chief of the crown prince’s Army Group, sent via his Quartermaster General, said that Private Bertin of the ASC was to be transferred forthwith from the First Company to the Lychow Army Group. Confirmation was to be telegraphed when the order had been carried out. All over, Jansch. No Iron Cross, first class will ever adorn your breast. If that Jew ever learnt of your intentions and were asked questions, he’d only have to laugh and tell stories and the game would be up… The First Company orderly room was on the line, literally a-quiver with awe and excitement. A telegram from the crown prince! The order would be carried out that day. Private Bertin would be summoned to Etraye-East that very morning. His papers had already been drawn up, and his travel documents were being prepared. He could leave that evening and then the battalion could report up that the order had been carried out.

Life had taught Major Jansch self-control. ‘Whoa, whoa, hold your horses,’ he said, acting casual. Was it not the case that the First Company, like so many others, was considerably below strength? And would not the staff first have to find out the current position of the Lychow Army Group? The battalion could pass on the whereabouts of the court martial during the course of the day. The man would manage fine if he left the following morning, or afternoon, or sometime during the day. In the meantime, he could do his duty, night duty for example. He could relieve one of his comrades of that arduous task. Perhaps rations were due to be transported to the front that night. Did Sergeant Major Duhn understand his meaning? He did. The major hung up. Sometimes miracles happened. He was entitled to clutch at any straw. The French were still shelling both the standard-gauge and light railways. Maybe Herr Bertin would take a hit.

His other source of disgruntlement, admittedly, continued unabated. Easter was drawing inexorably closer. In a fortnight – at the behest of the Frau Major – Herr Jansch would have to go on leave. What for the overwhelming majority of soldiers in Europe was the greatest pleasure imaginable he viewed with dislike. What was missing from his life here in the field? Nothing, or as good as nothing. He was a master. He had lackeys and servants who trembled before him. A whole outfit was geared towards him. The population of a subject land had to speak respectfully to him and his like or there’d be hell to pay. Here he need fear no dissent. Even if people didn’t like him personally, a whole caste closed ranks behind him. But at home… He sighed.

There was no peace. He was constantly disturbed by trivial bills. He had to fight each day to preserve his inner composure in the face of the silliest disruptions. He didn’t like women. They were in every sense inadequate. And their nagging voices got on his nerves. A three-room apartment on Windhorststraße in the suburb of Steglitz – a street name that infuriated him every time he thought of it – brought no happiness when it was run by Frau Major Jansch and the maidservant Agnes Durst from Lübchen in Saxony, and a man had to constantly rescue his papers from their concepts of order. For they didn’t understand his work at Windhorststraße. They treated it with contempt. Within the family, his work was judged according to money and monetary value, and they were unable to hide their mild disdain. They – the girl, his wife and even his son. His son Otto would also be home on leave and that increased his discomfort… Lieutenant Otto Jansch was from one of those nameless infantry regiments that fight and die in enormous numbers without distinction. However, during the fighting at the end of 1915 on one of the rivers in southern Poland his son had distinguished himself, perhaps more by accident than through exceptional merit. Since then, he’d possessed an Iron Cross, first class, and his father did not possess one – and therefore had hardly any authority over his son any more. Even though his friend, Major Niggl, had done everything he could to bring the officers at the depot round to his side, he still didn’t possess one and he never would, although news had been received from the hallowed domain of the Artillery High Command that a certain Lieutenant von Roggstroh had fallen, killed in a small but successful action against Bezonvaux that had unfortunately led to considerable losses. He was supposed to have been a nice, blonde chap, little Roggstroh. Now he wouldn’t bother anyone any more. The day before yesterday, actually even yesterday, it had seemed that the longed-for decoration was about to appear on the horizon like the morning or evening star. But now it was all over.

Major Jansch grabbed the telephone, then let his hand drop. There was no point. He needed to get out, shake off his agitation, go and see his friend Niggl, get some fresh air about him. He rang for his batman and told him he wanted to get dressed and ride out.

The streets of Damvillers bustled with spring. Sparrows chirruped in the bright sunshine. Swallows shot across the light sky, and men hurried past without coats. From his high steed, Major Jansch checked whether they were saluting properly. Drills were taking place on the meadow on the other side of the village, and from the machine gun practice range came the rhythmic tap of blank cartridges. Major Niggl was not at home. In fact, he had ridden over to see Captain Lauber, the sapper commandant. Major Jansch hesitated for a moment and then, under pressure from his news, decided to fetch him from there. He didn’t particularly like Captain Lauber. Swabians were all democrats – adversaries in other words. But in his present mood he overcame his aversion, turned his chestnut horse, and rode back at a walk and over to the sapper headquarters.

Captain Lauber sat crestfallen at one end of his sofa and at the other sat Major Niggl, full of concern. An armchair was pulled up for Major Jansch, a rare visitor, and he was given a glass of cherry brandy and offered a cigar. Indeed no, Captain Lauber wasn’t smoking that day either. He didn’t feel like it. He’d received dreadful news from the Dannevoux field hospital via the brigade headquarters: the plane that wreaked havoc on Damvillers station had smashed up Dannevoux field hospital beforehand. Definitely a breach of international law. Of course the French would maintain it had been an accident if representatives of the Red Cross raised a complaint. They’d punish the airman or replace him, and they might not even do that. But that wouldn’t bring back Lieutenant Kroysing, who had been killed with a number of other wounded. Major Niggl nodded his head sympathetically. His little pale eyes were full of deepest condolences as they sought the captain’s dark eyes. Surely not the Lieutenant Kroysing he’d fought beside at Douaumont, he asked. And Captain Lauber nodded. Of course it was him; there was only one lieutenant of that name in the army. And there weren’t many officers of his calibre. He’d had high hopes for him and expected him to go far. It was from such tempered steel that the bonds had been forged that held the front together. Such men guaranteed the nation’s future: affable, always ready to listen to the men’s concerns, relentless in the pursuit of duty, completely and utterly committed. And to think how happy they’d been that the lad had escaped unharmed from that lice-infested pile of rubble that was Douaumont and had come through that mess on 14 December without serious injury, and now a stupid aerial bomb had landed on his head and killed him off. Well, today was a black day. Today the world felt like a speck in his eye. This war in the air reduced war to a kind of trade for mechanics, photographers and hurlers of bombers – it was time to abolish it and replace it with something more sensible, something that didn’t mean it was always the best men who got destroyed. It was a great and wonderful thing to defend the Fatherland, to use intelligent means and brave men to prevail against an intelligent and brave opponent. He used to have joking quarrels with his friend Reinhart about whether the heavy artillery had spelt the end of that. But when it came to this flying business, there no was point in wasting breath. It wasn’t proper; it was bloody idiotic – be done with it. So, Lieutenant Kroysing was gone too; maybe it would be his turn next. That would be fine by him. Let the next airman crack his skull the way his little boy cracked walnuts at Christmas. But until then one had carry on working, do one’s duty, look neither right nor left. His two visitors got up. Major Niggl shook the Swabian’s hand, all innocence. He and Lieutenant Kroysing had not always seen eye to eye, he said. That could happen among comrades. But that he’d now been taken from them was enough to make a man spew, and he hoped that his friend Lauber would soon recover from the knock and take a more cheerful view of the world.

Shaking his head and almost bowing, he walked to the door and went out to where the two horses were tethered, nuzzling one another trustingly, the neck of one laid against the other’s mane. Open-mouthed with admiration for his friend Niggl, Major Jansch followed him out into the open air. For many decades to come, he recalled that feeling whenever he met the Bavarian.

^{CHAPTER SIX} The legacy

IN AN EMPTY barracks, words echo uncomfortably. For that reason, it’s best to speak in a hushed voice. During the morning, Private Bertin was informed by Sergeant Barkopp himself that he was to pack his things and return to the company. Private Lebehde went with him; he wanted to help him. The things that had happened the previous night, whose consequences were visible that morning, made the two men want to stick together. It was a beautiful day outside; the march to Etraye-East would be tiring but enjoyable. Lebehde the inn-keeper and Bertin the lawyer had spread Bertin’s coat out on one of the bunks and folded the arms in accordance with army regulations, and now they were rolling it up into a sausage that was as tight and even as possible: no wrinkles, no knots. Both men had been on sentry duty and looked pale. The news about the havoc the enemy aircraft had wreaked had been brought to them by the railwaymen around 8am. Both of them had scarcely begun to digest the fact that Wilhelm Pahl was no longer in the world. Bertin shook his head inwardly as he performed his tasks and sometimes he actually did shake it to the surprise of uninitiated observers. A banner kept running through his head upon which nothing was written but three words: Pahl and Kroysing… Pahl and Kroysing… had he looked more closely, he’d have observed within himself a child’s amazement at the immense forces of destruction available to life on earth. Kroysing and Pahl… Pahl and Kroysing… A peculiar world, an extremely funny world.

That day Lebehde’s freckles stood out particularly clearly on the pale skin of his round face. His thick fingers rolled the coat up with peerless precision. ‘I imagine they might dig a mass grave in Dannevoux cemetery tonight for the men from last night. They won’t take up much space now.’

‘A load of flaky skin,’ said Bertin senselessly. ‘To the earth it’ll just be flaky skin.’ In his mind he saw a confused mess of white and charred bones, skulls with no jaws and jaws with no skulls, the skeleton of a foot lying in a ribcage. Pahl had exceptionally small hands for an adult, Kroysing exceptionally large ones. ‘Do you think they’ll put the lieutenant with the men?’ he asked.

‘Hmm,’ replied Lebehde. ‘The way I see it, yes, they will. The medical officer is a sensible man, and one grave is less work than two. And at the Resurrection the angel on duty will be able to sort them out. You’re lucky,’ he said, changing the subject. ‘You’re getting out of here, which is the best thing you could do.’

Bertin shrugged his shoulders and hung his gaunt, wasted head. He felt guilty that he was leaving his comrades in the lurch. He couldn’t deny that he had a bad conscience.

Meanwhile, Lebehde contemplated their handiwork: the long tube of coat. Even the Kaiser wouldn’t be ashamed to buckle that to his pack. Then with Bertin’s help he bent it round the rucksack – they had to keep an iron grip on the ends as they did so – and slung the right strap round it, while Bertin slung the left one round. He’d always been surprised that Bertin hadn’t cleared off well before now, he said in the meantime.

‘But you’re my company,’ murmured Bertin, as he secured the upper coat strap round the middle of the sausage.

Lebehde looked at him wide-eyed. What good had his staying there done them or anyone else in the world? And who had asked him to invest so much in their comradeship?

Bertin stepped back, shoved his hands in his pockets and looked at his rucksack, his head to one side. That was how he’d always felt, he said slowly, and after a pause he added that he had no explanation for it. He didn’t say anything about his inability to change things once he’d got himself into them; Lebehde wouldn’t think very highly of that.

Lebehde helped himself to one of Bertin’s cigarettes, which he’d been going to leave him anyway. He said he thought those kinds of feelings were inappropriate. A man encumbered by those kinds of feelings could wind up in Hell’s kitchen. ‘Wilhelm,’ he said suddenly, ‘would have understood that very well. Feelings are for toffs. Sometimes I think they’ve standardised all our feelings for their own ends. Let me tell you something, my friend. What’s important for the likes of us is to think. The more we think, the more clearly we see things, the better it’ll be for us. I take it you’re not offended by me including you with us, Comrade?’

Bertin wasn’t offended. To the contrary, he was deeply moved and greatly satisfied by his inclusion.

‘All afternoon I’ve been asking myself where we went wrong, Wilhelm and I. Where was the mistake in our calculations? And I said to myself: we shouldn’t have jumped so far ahead. You and I, we’re sitting here safe and sound with our heads intact and ready to use. But for Wilhelm all that’s left is a mass grave, and the workers of Berlin will have to get on without him. And it’s a comfort to know that they will get on without him. It would have gone quicker with Wilhlem, no doubt about it. That boy had a good head on his shoulders, and he did what a man could, even if he was a bit careless in his choice of parents, and he knew that the bosses wouldn’t give anything away, and that we would hand them a box of cigars in return for a match. And yet, you see, he miscalculated, as events have shown. Where did he go wrong? Can you answer me that?’

Bertin had started folding his blankets, which had to be strapped under the flap of his rucksack. He was reluctant to answer Lebehde’s question, because his thoughts were of Pahl the living man, his way of smiling, his fondness for a well-turned phrase, for the newspaper quarter in Berlin with its machine rooms and great rolls of white paper held together by wooden battens, for the smell of printer’s ink, the aroma of paraffin from the freshly printed sheets; his fondness for Sunday outings to Treptow, to the Müggelsee, for the high banks of the Havel by the Great Window in Wannsee, the silvery green pine trees of the Mark. How could he possibly identify the mistake in Wilhelm Pahl’s calculations that had cost him his life? Were there actually any calculations?

There certainly were, said Lebehde. Wilhelm hadn’t lost his toe by chance, but thanks to meticulous planning and a sharpened nail that had been carefully made to rust.

Bertin received this news open-mouthed.

They hadn’t told him about it at the time – they could talk about why until the cows came home, but, said Lebehde, there wasn’t much point now and so it would be better to skip it. Wilhelm had wanted it done, and Lebehde had stuck the thing in, and so it was him who’d started it and he shared responsibility for how it had turned out.

Bertin was amazed at himself. Eberhard Kroysing had suffered the same fate as his brother. He would never see him again, and he would never see Pahl again, who had had himself maimed, nor Father Lochner – and what had become of Sister Kläre? It was far too much for one person, who only had two ears and one heart, and whose soul was still preoccupied by all the things that had been going through his mind when he was on sentry duty. He would need time, a lot of time, to make sense of it all. He looked at his dirty fingernails and finally asked whether Lebehdhe required people to factor chance into their calculations, because air men didn’t usually drop bombs on hospitals and so it must have been chance that directed the bomb.

Lebehde immediately said that he did. It wasn’t that he required it. The cause required it, as the facts demonstrated. It required absolute vigilance, for the opponent was ruthless and exploited even the smallest advantage, to say nothing of big advantages. They had underestimated their opponents – the capitalist world order and its wars – and now the goose was cooked.

‘Listen, my friend,’ he whispered confidentially, ‘you made all kinds of pretty speeches against violence up there, but did violence listen? Not a bit of it! It struck and made us into survivors. Perhaps that teaches us a thing or two. And if I hadn’t neglected to pay due attention to my profession, which I should have done, I might have realised it sooner. For what does a good inn-keeper do? You’re thinking he sells beer and cheers people up. If you like. But calling time and throwing out troublemakers – once they’ve settled their bill – is also part of his job, and I’ve always been a stickler for decency and good behaviour. And so I have used force for the collective good. Do you follow?’

And because Bertin thought too long, he shook his broad head. ‘But carry on speaking out against violence by others. The fewer bouncers there are for my competition, the better it is for me, especially as I’ve always got to be my own bouncer. The longer this war lasts, the more stupid the world will become. But an order backed up by a gun – everyone understands that. That’s what a certain Lebehde has learnt, and now he’s going to head back to Germany as quickly as he can. I’ll be out of here before the month is out.’

And that was why he thought it was quite right and the best thing for the cause that Bertin was pushing off to the court martial and to the east where there were no air attacks. Bertin had learnt first hand what the score was. And now he’d have an important position and learn more. The question for the future was whether it was possible to eradicate the great injustice in society. A man who worked in a court sat behind the bar where right and wrong were dished out. He was very happy about this change in Bertin’s career. ‘For what could you have written in the newspapers that would have been of any use? A load of crap. And how long would you have been able to carry on speaking to the workers while the war was going on? Three months at most. Then they would have got you by the collar and thrown you out, and the whole mess would have started again. No, my friend, you scarper off to your quiet little corner right away, keep your eyes peeled, keep your gob shut and try to reduce injustice. Wanna hear how it went when we see one another again after the war. Holzmarkstraße 47, Berlin East. I’ll give you a nice glass of Patzenhofer beer on the house and I imagine you’ll meet some people. And now get going. I’ll represent you at the funeral. And while the priest is babbling on, I’ll have a consultation with myself and try to work out how to create the force that will eventually make all force redundant.’

They shook hands, a thick hand and a thin one. Karl Lebehde had a chin that was twice as strong as his, Bertin noted with surprise, and his narrow mouth sat embedded between it and his nose, giving him the look of a painting or bust of one of the great commanders.

^{CHAPTER SEVEN} Full circle

PRIVATE BERTIN WAS nobody’s chump now. He didn’t even consider walking to Etraye-Ost. Wasn’t that what horse-drawn and engine-powered lorries were for? It was one of the laws of life for the soldier that it was better for someone else to get his boots dirty than to get your own boots dirty because no one would clean them for you. And the drivers were always happy to have a passenger for company. Bertin was a monosyllabic passenger compared with many others, but the carter, a Frisian from Oldenburg who’d grown up with horses and always worked on the land, had a concept of conversation more akin to a city dweller’s idea of silence.

In blank astonishment, Bertin realised that fate – or coincidence, if you preferred – was taking him down the same road that he had travelled when he first arrived in the Verdun area, from Vilosnes-East, where they had been detrained, through Sivry-Consenvoye, then left through the woods where the signpost still stood that read: ‘Not under enemy observation’. And then uphill and back down through the beech trees, which formed muddled green thickets on either side of the road. It was almost exactly a year since a marching solider had opened a letter from his bride-to-be here that said she was pushing through his marriage leave; and at that moment the first heavy gun had sent a shell roaring up into the air like some kind of primaeval forest dragon. Spring had been more advanced that year, and the winter had not been so bitterly cold. But looking at it from the outside that was the only difference.

The feeling that everything was repeating itself reached its zenith in the orderly room when Sergeant Major Duhn informed him rather drily that he was to go to Romagne-West that night with four wagons of explosives, picking up three wagons of flares and light ammunition from Damvillers sapper depot on the way. That meant he had the right to sleep through the afternoon if he wanted, and that’s what he did after he’d had a look round the depot and camp. The Etraye depot, which was built into the valley in tiers, was a lot more difficult to run than old ‘Steinbergquell’ on the road to Moirey, but it was also harder to shoot to pieces. Bertin bumped into a lot of old acquaintances; one minute he was shaking Halezinsky’s hand, the next Sergeant Böhne’s. In the field gun ammunition section, he looked for Strauß, that clever little lad from the Mosel valley, and when he found him, Strauß, who was deeply depressed by the long winter and the seeming impossibility of peace, squealed with delight and congratulations. Bertin had a refreshing three hours’ sleep on Strauß’s bed, ate a dinner of roast horse meat from the private kitchen of the moustachioed ammunitions expert Schulz, borrowed a coat so that he didn’t have to unbuckle his beautifully rolled up coat, and reported to the orderly room and then at the depot.

The moon was in a completely different position in the sky to the day before when the little narrow-gauge train moved off. Strauß had also pressed a blanket on Bertin. He sat on a sort of recliner made of smoothly planed crates of explosives, with his cold meerschaum pipe between his teeth. Almost in dismay, he felt the helix come full circle: the narrow-gauge railway ran through the sheltered terrain to Damvillers, where the sappers attached their wagons. And then, metre by metre, rail by rail, the train slid back into the past, into what was dead and gone, taking with it a man bundled in blankets, who no longer knew if he was awake or asleep, who kept forcing his eyes open only for them to close again. Bertin had stumbled down this road in October when Major Jansch cancelled his six days’ leave. This was where the crown prince’s car had taken the bend and disappeared from view. Wilhelm Pahl, earmarked to die in a bomb raid, had spent the night in those dugouts when air raids made the camp unsafe in July and August. Wasn’t that him stepping out of the dark and bowing, his hands crossed over his chest, a spectre made of smoke, smiling wryly because he was now under ground? All around ghosts wafted up, whitish trails of smoke, the souls of dead men. Poor little Vehse, good-natured little Otto Reinhold, Wilhelm Schmidt, the illiterate farmhand from the Polish borderlands, and Hein Foth, the ship’s stoker from Hamburg who had such terrible lice. Over there had stood the cartridge tent where they’d worked so hard and argued so vociferously. It wasn’t there any more, but the ghost of it was, built of grey air against the dark grey sky. Above it a pennant made of Sergeant Karde’s blown-off leg fluttered merrily and a couple of dead ASC men formed a grinning guard of honour by the door, because the inspection tent for damaged ammunition had later stood on the same spot awaiting the blast that destroyed it. Up on the right the abandoned camp’s barracks still loomed against the night sky. But where was the field gun depot and the bubbling brook that flowed through it? There was a pond there now, and the new barracks of a delousing station or laundry crouched in the valley.

And then the small railway followed the course of the Theinte, and to its right disappeared the road to Ville and the approach to the ravines of Fosses wood. From the left above Chaumont little Sergeant Süßmann nodded, no longer a sergeant, his clever monkey’s eyes shining in his singed face, and then the puffing locomotive came upon Artillery Lieutenant von Roggstroh wafting past with his boyish face and short, straight nose; and Bertin suddenly understood that he too must have been killed, which was hardly surprising. But rising above the hills like a gigantic pillar of smoke, lit by a reddish glow, was the figure of Sergeant Christoph Kroysing, waving from Chambrettes-Ferme where the French had long since installed themselves. God, God, thought Bertin, snuggling into the crates of explosives and wondering why young Kroysing had that strange form, like a candle flame, sharp and snapped off at the top. Of course – he recalled the balloon observers who’d been shot down and the two columns of smoke that had then unravelled against the sky. Then a ghostly aeroplane crossed the sky, the pilot’s back covered in a handful of dark bullet holes. Poor young lad with his handsome tanned face.

On the right, they’d reached some ruined trees with disintegrating tops – what was called Thil wood. Suddenly, shells were exploding among them. Dark red flames, yellow lighting. Bertin got a real shock. He had slept through the gunfire. But before he could jump down from his crates of explosives, the sapper on the wagon furthest back reassured him that the gunfire was 150m to the right and would stay there. The Frogs couldn’t get any closer however hard they tried – God damn them.

Still feeling somewhat wary, Bertin remained present and alert, but only a couple of rounds of machine gun fire broke the silence and the even chug-chug-chug of the doughty locomotive. He leaned back again and surveyed the black bulk of the land stretching off to his right. Over there was the road to Azannes and Gremilly. There by a fire that didn’t really exist, a red shell flame, crouched the young farmworker Przygulla, blowing on the flames and warming his hands. His mouth hung open as always because of the growths in his nasal cavity, and his fish eyes looked questioningly at clever Herr Bertin, who proved so much more stupid than Przygulla, when his belly was slit open and Private Schamm carried him into the medical dugout dying like a little child. Yes, said, Lieutenant Schanz, we lads from the Prussian school have to go through some pretty stiff tests before we see sense.

Bertin shuddered, buttoned his coat tighter and put his collar up.

The train stopped for a moment. The line branched off here to Romagne in a continuation of the section that the Schwerdtlein party had constructed with the Russian prisoners during the Great Cold. The sapper had to carry on alone with his wagons into unpleasant territory. The front part of the train, with Bertin and his four wagons, went round the corner into the darkness.

Bertin looked back at the three sapper wagons. Stalking over to meet them was a tall, lean figure in breeches and puttees, who revealed his wolf’s teeth as he laughed and waved his long hand in goodbye. In the end, thought Bertin, he really did choose to haunt Douaumont. ‘Not as unpleasant as you might think, my new state,’ he heard Eberhard Kroysing’s deep voice purr from the distance. ‘I decided to skip the whole air force bigwig business and go straight for that pile of rubble. You won’t forget me, will you, my little joker?’ No fear of that, thought Bertin.

Then he jumped up as the train braked with a jolt. From a dugout cut into the hillside a railwayman appeared and took Bertin’s papers. He said the dugout was called Romagne-West and that Bertin could wait in the warm and cruise back to his depot around 5pm with the empty wagons. Below, in the harsh light of an acetylene lamp, a little stove pumped out heat and there was the smell of coffee. Bertin was handed a mugful. He asked how long this new system had been needed. Since the French had gradually shot the old train station at Romagne to pieces, came the reply. During one of their fireworks displays that big-nosed Berliner had been taken out, that capable sergeant from the Railway Transport Office: had Bertin known him? Of course, replied Bertin. Anyone who had anything to do with the railway had known him. He was the soul of the whole operation and the railway transport officer’s right-hand man. So he was gone? Poor Pelican! That night seemed to belong to the dead. It would be better not to ask after anyone else, for example Friedrich Strumpf. It felt bloody spooky to be leaving this place alive.

And so goodnight.

About 8am, freshly shaved and having shared a good breakfast with little Strauß, Private Bertin of the ASC finally received his travel papers in the orderly room: railway warrants, ration card, delousing warrants, identity card. In his identity card it said that he was to report for duty with the court martial of the Lychow division at Mervinsk. He would find out where Mervinsk was – and how to get there – at the Schlesischer train station in Berlin. Because it was a long journey, he was even authorised to take an express train. The arrears of his wages and his ration money, calculated exactly, were handed over to him in brand new five and ten mark notes; he waived his share of the accumulated canteen money and donated it to the gas worker Halezinsky. The clerk Querfurth with his goatee beard made a note of this. Then they shook hands. ‘All the best, Kamerad,’ said Querfurth. ‘Look after yourselves,’ replied Bertin. And he was amazed to find he had a lump in his throat. It had been a lousy company. For nearly two years he’d been drilled and treated in an increasingly unjust and malicious way, but nonetheless it was his company, a surrogate mother and father, wife and work, home and university. It had fed and clothed him, instructed him and brought him up, it had been a second parental home where the state was the father and Germania the mother, and now he had to leave it and go out into an unknown, uncertain world. A man’s eyes might almost fill with tears at the thought. Main thing was nobody saw.

Nobody did see. And when, half an hour later, the shoogly little train on the Meuse line set off taking him to Montmédy, a tanned ASC man stuck his head out of the window and watched the land behind him, which had shaped him in sunshine and rain, summer and winter, day and night, becoming smaller and smaller. What had little Süßmann’s last words been before he died? ‘To my parents: it was worth it. To Lieutenant Kroysing: it wasn’t.’ The truth lay somewhere between those two poles, but as a wise man had once noted, not in the middle.

^{CHAPTER EIGHT} Swansong

IT WAS THE height of June, and the suburb of Ebensee near Nuremberg sparkled in the glow of summer. Here the city touched the old pine and beech woods at the foot of the Franconian part of the Jura hills. Schilfstraße in Ebensee was lined with small villas. From a nearby café came the sound of dance music, modern American tunes called things like the foxtrot or the shimmy.

Two young people strolled along like lovers by the white fence that separated the pavement from the front gardens. The young man was wearing a slightly worn summer suit in a blue-grey material of a cut from before the war. His neck with its prominent Adam’s apple rose up from the open collar of a white shirt. His thin cheekbones, slightly sticky out ears and longish hair looked much less out of place in a conventional suit than in uniform. His small eyes peered searchingly through the thick lenses of his new, stronger spectacles. ‘Number 26,’ he read from the fence opposite. ‘It’s 28 so it must be the next one. Lene, I’m frightened. I’m not sure I can go in.’

Lenore, in a pale yellow summer dress that came just past her knee, laid her hand protectively on his. ‘You don’t have to do it. No one’s forcing you, Werner. You came here of your own accord. Look over there, the flag’s at half mast.’

Werner Bertin looked into the garden of Number 28. A white painted flagpole towered there, and a black, white and red flag hung motionlessly from it. This flag, which for four years he’d seen flying in various countries, from buildings in Skopje and Kaunas, in Lille and Montmédy, in every German street, and which was soon to disappear, had been hoisted in mourning between the cherry tree and the two pine trees on the right and left of the lawn, and scarcely a breeze moved its folds. ‘At last someone who marks this day,’ he said. ‘I’m sure now that it’s that house. Can you read what it says on the sign?’

If she shielded her eyes – her wide-brimmed hat hung from her arm – Lenore could decipher the brass sign from across the road: ‘It says Kroysing.’

A gaunt man, very tall, with his hands behind his back, came down the path that led from the house to the street, looking as though he often trod that route deep in thought. He appeared for a moment at the fence in a black coat, stiff white collar and black tie, turned round and disappeared round the other side of the house.

Werner Bertin pressed Lenore’s hand. ‘That’s him. Eberhard Kroysing was his double. If only that incessant tootling would stop!’

The date was 29 June 1919. As was the case every Sunday afternoon, people were dancing in the garden pubs and cafés. On the calendar, the day was called ‘Peter and Paul’ day after the two apostles. That day Germany was celebrating the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which had taken place the day before. The war was definitively over, and the blockade would soon end too. Soon Bertin and Lenore, and old Herr Kroysing too, would no longer look so pinched. It was a day on which the terrible bloody wounds of the last four years had been declared healed. At the same time, Bertin wished Germany would take it more seriously, be more considered, more collected, more shaken. You felt something of that among the bourgeoisie: there was the flag flying at half mast between black pine trees. But the people danced. They didn’t worry about it. No one noticed that a new page had been turned in the earth’s destiny. Germany danced. Things could only get better. The shotguns had been thrown into the corner. Everyone was piling into work. People just wanted to forget, rejoice and immerse themselves in the hot days of early summer. After all the years of hardship, grief and horror they had the right to go a bit mad.

The young writer and his wife were on their way to southern Germany to recover in the glorious light of the landscape they loved. But before they disappeared into the mountains, Bertin had decided to look up the two Kroysing brothers’ parents. He wanted to tell them how their sons had died, how miserable and pointless their deaths had been, so they might understand it was not some noble lie or bogus heroic sacrifice that had deprived them of the sons who would have supported them in their old age, but brutality and sheer, stupid chance. He’d have to be careful but as a writer he knew how to use words. The poor people shouldn’t be left under any illusions. Instead they should be made to join those who wanted to do away with nationalistic jingoism and only allow war against true predators.

And now the flag was flying at half mast, and the man who looked like Eberhard Kroysing as an old man reappeared, his stony face set in bitter lines, walked up to the garden fence, spotted the young couple across the road, shrugged his shoulders grimly, turned and headed back to the house. From the doorway above the front steps an old woman emerged with a handkerchief in her hand. She dabbed her eyes with it, a habit that had clearly become ingrained. ‘Alfred,’ she cried in a dark voice that held the echo of tears shed long ago, ‘it’s time for tea.’

The old public official nodded to her, climbed the steps and disappeared inside with her. The windows facing the direction of the music were banged shut. The summer’s day sparkled over the red roof of the house, Peter and Paul day, the coming harvest. The corner of the black, white and red flag was almost touching the gravel that surrounded the white mast in a small, yellow circle in the middle of the lawn.

‘I can’t do it,’ said Werner Bertin decisively. ‘Come on, let’s go to the woods. We’re not here to rub salt in old wounds. The government of the republic, once we have a constitution, will expose the truth. Besides, those two won’t forget or let other people forget.’

Deep in her heart, Lenore Bertin didn’t agree with Werner’s decision to shirk this duty. If you decide to do something, you should do it, she thought doubtfully. But he was so irritable at the moment that she didn’t want to disagree with him. He really belonged in a sanatorium, but he wouldn’t hear of it. And so there was nothing left for a wise woman to do but follow the man she loved, who had held out so bravely and still had complete trust in the wisdom of governments, that beloved, foolish boy, that savage heart, into the woods over there, where the magnificent leafy treetops formed a border between the sky and the earth.

‘This meadow,’ said Bertin, putting his arm round her, ‘could be held against two companies from here with one machine gun. They’d never get over that stream down there. And the edge of the woods would make a great emplacement for an anti-aircraft battery.’

The meadow shone blue with lady’s smock and crane’s bill. At the edge of the woods, flashes of sunlight played on the grey tree trunks. ‘That,’ said Werner Bertin dreamily, leaning against his wife’s shoulder, ‘is exactly what the woods at Verdun looked like when we arrived, only much thicker.’

‘If only you could leave those woods behind,’ said Lenore tenderly. She secretly feared it would be a long time before her friend and husband found his way back from those enchanted woods and their undergrowth into the present, into real life. The war worked on within him, burrowed and seethed, clashed and shrieked. But from the outside – she sighed – no one, thank God, could tell.

Like any other pair of lovers, they wandered off into the woods, through the shadows and the bright greenery, and her yellow summer dress shone through longer than his blue-grey suit.