Outside Verdun

^{CHAPTER ONE} Profound effects

DURING THE NIGHT and towards morning, when the captive balloons’ eyes were shut, the field kitchen staff tried to creep up on the infantry positions. They’d find some cover and distribute from there the warm food the men had long done without: thick bean soup with scraps of meat, bluish barley stew, yellow peas and ham – all packed in heat-retaining tin containers, which the food carriers lugged down the final stretches to the trenches. The operation had its dangers. A soldier with warm soup in his belly fights better, and causing privations that might break the men’s morale was part of the civilised nations’ machinery of war. Advance batteries lay in wait for the field kitchen staff. Sometimes they miscalculated but usually they didn’t, and their actions were always disastrous.

In the early morning around 6.30am, when the ground mist, which had long since turned into autumnal morning fog, parted for a moment, the French at Belleville caught sight of Captain Niggl’s ASC men at work. They had known for a long time that the Germans were expanding their positions behind the lines and had marked the presumed locations of these bases on their maps. For weeks, the Germans had been planning the push that would reclaim Douaumont village and Fort Vaux. They’d been saving up ammunition, improving their approach roads and preparing their field batteries for the advance. The construction of the German front had many advantages, but flexibility wasn’t one of them. Communication between the artillery and the observers in the infantry, especially those in the forts, was handled much better, more quickly and more intelligently by the French. A couple of minutes after the suspected field kitchen was discovered, shrapnel burst over the area in the gathering fog, whipping down on the ASC men, who scattered in panic. Only eight men were injured in all because the French made the mistake of rapidly moving their fire further forward on to the huge depression that opened out to the south from Douaumont, and through which the food carriers should indeed have run. Nonetheless, the company returned at 9.30am instead of 8am, and that hour and a half was nerve-racking for Niggl.

He’d been so happy, so pleased with Feicht, who really had turned things round in a most satisfactory manner with his idea about the army postal depot, the accompanying letter and all the rest of it. He could now calmly wait for the lieutenant to make his next move. He’d even metabolised the increase in work, worry and to and fro caused by the arrival of his first two companies. Douaumont was now rammed with men, and so his Bavarians could no longer complain, since more and more ASC battalions shared their fate. The Somme battle hadn’t just ripped half the batteries out of the Meuse east bank sector like eye teeth from a jaw (whether one believed this or not); it had also stolen away entire infantry squads – how many, no one knew – which were to be replaced with ASC men and Landwehr. It all sounded preposterous, for what were the ASC men to do there? Niggl knew full well what: they were to relieve the infantry regiments of the heavy lifting and reinforcing of the supply lines in the rear positions. It was a fine mess that meant his men were chased across the field like hares and his casualty list had trebled. They’d got off lightly this time. Sergeant Pangerl had taken a bullet in the backside, five men had been more or less badly injured and were looking forward to being sent home, and two others looked as if they might be finished with their grey uniforms for good – joy unconfined. This all ran through the captain’s mind, as he tossed and turned in his bed trying to catch up on his morning’s sleep. He had lice and missed the warm bath he’d always been used to as an officer in a foreign country. At home in Weilheim he seldom bathed. Now the dreadful suckers were tormenting him as if he were a common soldier. It was already 10.30am when he eventually fell asleep. His cell, as he called it, was pretty dark even during the day. He had a host of unclear, largely unpleasant dreams, and any refreshment his slumbers might have brought vanished thanks to the way he was woken up.

If a shell hits the roof you’re sleeping under, the noise of the impact wakes you – or you never wake again. If it falls near you, however, 50m to your right or left, the dreadful howl of its approach bores into your soul first. You spend five faltering heartbeats still dazed but wide awake waiting for the blast, and that fraction of a minute saps your vitality. At exactly the same time as the recent attack, a second 40cm mortar battery fired at Douaumont, but this time on to the opposite corner of the pentagon. The first shot landed some 30m to the right of the fort on the disintegrating slope. Herr Niggl slept through its approach, though his subconscious was on high alert. This was the first sign of attrition and exactly what the attacker wanted. He was awoken by the burst and thunder of the explosion, which shook the fort’s foundations from the side. Train crash, he thought still half asleep. I’m on the Augsburg to Berlin sleeper on my way to an official meeting about awarding Hindenburg the freedom of Weilheim. Then he woke up. He wasn’t on the sleeper train; he was in the most accursed place in Europe. That had been a heavy-calibre weapon, a repeat of recent events. The French really were gunning for them. There wouldn’t be a minute’s peace from now on. It was all kicking off now. This was the final hour.

‘Oh, most holy Saint Aloysius, pray for me now and in the hour of my death,’ he cried. ‘I shall go to Hell impenitent. My soul will burn forever. Bring a priest. I must confess!’

And then, oh yes, oh Jesus, down it howled, dragging a trail of hellish screaming in its wake. It was the devil, whinnying and hissing. Where, oh where would it strike? He dove under the bedclothes. A blaring and crashing, an echo rolling through the fort’s corridors and tunnels, signalled relief. It had landed further off this time, in the northeast wing by the sound of it, the sapper depot where his enemy lived. Limbs aquiver and sweating from every pore, Niggl huddled in his bed, listening to the men’s shouts and the clatter of their boots running past his door.

‘Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Alois Niggl,’ he told himself. ‘It’s too much to hope that the French will have carried off the second brother too. No one gets that lucky.’

His hair fell in his eyes. An irksome fly drank his sweat. At last, the clerk Dillinger rushed in to report a direct hit on the sapper depot: nuffink damaged. Smoothing his hair over his forehead, the captain calmly asked if Lieutenant Kroysing had been informed of the company’s recent losses – if he was in fact in the fort.

Dillinger answered both questions in the affirmative. The lieutenant had just been called into a meeting with the airfield commander when the first one struck. Although everyone knew there must be a second, the lieutenant nonetheless set off and what was more took a short cut across the inner courtyard, which was littered with great fat shell splinters. There could so easily have been an accident.

‘We’d never have got over that,’ said the captain, adding that the orderly room should try to find a Catholic chaplain to bestow spiritual consolation on the men in their time of need. Dillinger’s face lit up; the orderly room would get on it straight away. The division currently holding the sector was admittedly from Saxony and Protestant, but such difficulties could be overcome with a bit of ingenuity.

‘Very good, Dillinger,’ said the captain. ‘Let me know when you’ve sorted it out.’

When Private Bertin heard about the Bavarian dead and wounded, he went slowly pale under his tan both from the shock and on Lieutenant Kroysing’s account.

It was now September, and this part of the front had never been so quiet. There were good reasons for the Germans not to attack, but the French weren’t budging either, and that gave pause. It was a magical September. In the unspoilt ancient woodland, some 60m wide, small yellow leaves flickered in the burnished light. The longer nights were perfect for a game of skat. The two genial Badeners and Bertin took turns on the switchboard. Friedrich Strumpf, park keeper at Schwetzingen, was convinced he’d seen grey feral cats, and so he often took his infantry rifle out at noon, hoping to get a catskin for his rheumatism. He always came back grumbling, down two cartridges and with no catskin. The little minxes just wouldn’t stand still, he said. Meanwhile, the rear part of the valley was being filled with wood stacks of various sizes. The rainy season was approaching, and the construction troops and sappers were getting ready to raise the narrow-gauge railway platforms.

Almost every morning or afternoon, Bertin wandered over to the field howitzer emplacement to get the post, choosing a time when the light was bad. ‘You have the youngest legs, lad,’ the Badeners said. ‘You still enjoy running about.’

Bertin did enjoy it, for as well as sating his thirst for adventure, he had found a genuine countryman and passing acquaintance in the lieutenant and battery commander there. Lieutenant Paul Schanz had taken his school leaving examination as an outside student with Bertin’s class at school some years previously. He was from Russian Poland, where his father worked as head foreman in a coal mine. The lieutenant had initially taken a bored tone with Bertin but had softened when he recognised him. By the end of Bertin’s second visit this tall, blonde man with blue eyes was inviting him to linger for a game of chess. The lieutenant was delightful company when he opened up. He and Bertin sat in the entrance to the dugout with a box between them shuffling the black and white pieces around. They talked to each other about the past and the present. They spoke about peace, which must surely come at the beginning of 1917. Bertin got the inside track on the light field howitzer – its mechanism and range, and how best to use it. Lieutenant Schanz, smart and clean-shaven, with smooth skin and a boyish laugh, told him how his men were getting into all kinds of careless ways, partly because they were so used to what they did and partly because they were sick of it. They were fed up with the whole bloody business. They no longer used a charge of salt to dampen the gleam from their shots because they didn’t want to have to clean the dirty barrels. They’d left their carabines at the rest camp so the locks wouldn’t get rusty – there were a lot of water trickles among the rocks – and anyway he didn’t even have the prescribed number of canister shells for close combat.

‘Who needs canister shells here?’ he said. ‘We’ll see to it that the Frogs don’t break through, and we’ll never have enough shrapnel.’ Thus, at the back, under a green tarpaulin, was a store of what were called canister shells, but in fact it was a dump of another 300 shrapnel.

The battery hardly fired now. Strict orders to save ammunition and keep it hidden from the French observers. On all the hills, sound-ranging troops lay in wait in the trenches on both sides, intelligent men with good eyes able to calculate a gun position’s distance from the interval between firing and impact. Using this information and with the help of the captive balloons, both sides were able to mark the enemy’s gun positions on their maps. The day would come when this information would be needed. Bertin also got the chance to look through the periscopic binoculars in Lieutenant Schanz’s observation post. They had been cleverly installed under a jutting rock behind the guns with a decoy barrel in a treetop 80m to the side to deceive the French aeroplanes. Through that curious apparatus, he saw inclines, scarred hillsides, tiny beings moving about, sharply alive, walls of earth and small hollows. Sometimes clouds appeared and drifted away. Those were the Belleville ridges, Schanz explained. Behind the horizon was a French battery, probably 400m to the rear, 5,500m from barrel to barrel.

‘I’d like to know if there’s another Schanz lying in wait in a dugout over there with his eye on our battery,’ he said.

Bertin didn’t want to let the amazing instrument go. ‘All in aid of destruction,’ he said, shaking his head and looking again into the grey-rimmed lenses. ‘When will we use this magic for something constructive?’

‘When indeed? After the peace, of course. When those chaps over there have realised they don’t have us by the throat.’

They were united in their desire for peace and they strolled back through the light, sunny air to have a smoke and think about how their lives might turn out. Paul Schanz hoped for a career in the administration of the Upper Silesian coal mines, where his father now worked. There was a lot of work to be done there. His father had written that the mines were being ruined. Nothing could be replaced properly, and the workings were threatened by gas and water. German coal was one of the most important tools of war: neutral and allied countries couldn’t get enough of it. Transport trains left Upper Silesian railway stations bound for Constantinople, Aleppo, Haifa.

Bertin’s visits often lasted only half an hour. He needed to be on the move again. One time, he didn’t meet his friends. They were further forwards installing new mine throwers. There was to be a local operation in mid-October to improve the infantry positions. But the next time, he’d arranged to meet Süßmann and as they walked along, chatting amiably, Süßmann told him about the casualties that had so put the wind up Captain Niggl.

‘Our author is horrified by the burden on your conscience, Lieutenant,’ joked Süßmann shortly after they arrived at Kroysing’s billet, taking a deep drag of his cigarette.

Bertin, who was enjoying the first puffs of a freshly filled pipe, met Kroysing’s astonished grey eyes calmly. He knew he’d have to choose his words carefully in order not to cause offence. ‘Four dead,’ he said, ‘and so much suffering. I’m sure you’re not indifferent to that either.’

‘Why not?’ asked Kroysing.

‘Does that require an answer?’ countered Bertin, whereupon the lieutenant told him not to sit there feeling pleased with himself but to think logically.

‘Is the war my responsibility? Obviously not. I’m not even liable for the transfer of Niggl’s battalion; that was some area commander or other. And in the final analysis it was a signature from the crown prince that put his men under my command. So, what do you want from me?’

Bertin asked him to leave this nice big picture aside and concentrate on one, perhaps incidental detail: who had had the men flung into Douaumont and why?

‘Because duty required it!’ Kroysing roared.

Bertin stepped back, blushed and was silent. He didn’t tell Kroysing that people roar when they are in the wrong. Instead, he resolved to leave again as soon as possible.

Kroysing frowned darkly, annoyed by his outburst. He bit his lip, glowered straight ahead, and then at his shocked visitors. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said at last. ‘But you’re so naïve it can really get on people’s nerves.’

‘That’s a shame,’ Bertin answered. ‘I was really enjoying your tobacco, and now my naïvety has spoilt my enjoyment.’

Kroysing considered. The man was sensitive. That was the good side of the self-pity that had provoked his own outburst, and it made up for it. ‘Sir,’ he said jokingly, ‘you’re a sensitive soul. I obviously need to bone up on the correct treatment of ASC men. How about a conciliatory drink?’ He opened the cabinet behind him – he was so tall he only needed to stretch out his arm – pulled out a familiar bottle and filled some glasses. ‘Well, Prost,’ he said. ‘Here’s to getting along.’ Bertin took small sips, Süßmann knocked back half his glass and Kroysing downed his in one with a satisfied look in his eyes. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘That’s the stuff. You can wage war without women, ammunition or even trenches, but not without tobacco and definitely not without alcohol.

In an effort to beat down his hurt feelings, Bertin expounded on Serbian plum brandy, which was nearly as good as this cognac. Kroysing pretended to be very interested and said that if he ever got tired of the western front, he might be tempted to go to Macedonia on account of the slivovitz – in other words, there was an uncomfortable atmosphere.

Little Süßmann looked wisely from one man to the other. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you gentlemen aren’t going to sort things out like this. You need to take your dispute seriously. It was really me who caused this problem so I need to resolve it. Our author thinks that you brought the ASC men to Douaumont and are responsible for what befell them, because you have a private matter to settle with their captain. Isn’t that right, my dear author?’ Bertin nodded. ‘To you, the Bavarian ASC men were just an appendage of the captain, unimportant statistics,’ continued Süßmann, ‘but our author’s moral searchlight is now trained on them. Look, he says: dead and wounded. Mortal beings. Your move, Lieutenant,’ he finished, stubbing out his cigarette. The ashtray on the table was made from a flattened brass cartridge case from a large howitzer shell. They were often used in this way in sapper depots.

Kroysing thought for a moment. ‘Sergeant Süßmann gets an honourable mention for setting out the characters before us correctly. Let’s consider these men. Did any of them lift a finger to stand by my brother? Not at all. And on whose account had my brother incurred Niggl & Co’s disfavour? For those men. In a certain general sense, they therefore share responsibility for his death. In the same general sense, I tossed them into a slightly more dangerous frying pan than the one they were in before. I’ll take responsibility for that. Duty demanded that some labour company or other did it. I chose that one.’

Deep in thought, Bertin took another sip of cognac. ‘I’m afraid there’s something not quite right there. The dead and wounded far outweigh the degree of guilt that can be attributed to an individual ASC man, because the company’s guilt is collective, and you must take account of the fact that the common soldier has few rights.’

‘Those affected will have to settle up with those who have so far been spared,’ said Kroysing shortly. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I’m not playing God. And how do you explain your part in it?’ Bertin looked amazed. ‘Look at that innocent angel,’ laughed Kroysing. ‘Yes, someone always has to hit us over the head with our own part in things. Who set the whole thing in motion, eh? Shook me out of my lamentable indifference? From whom did I first learn that my brother had been set up? It’s enough to astonish a layman and surprise an expert,’ he finished triumphantly, using an expression current at the time.

Bertin looked at Süßmann in shock, then at Kroysing’s triumphant face, then pensively up at the vaulted ceiling, which formed an impenetrable barrier between him and the sky. ‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ he conceded honestly. ‘There’s certainly something in what you say. It’s hard to unravel the tangle of cause and effect. But I didn’t want that.’

‘Exactly. Neither did I. But answer me this, dear sir: would you have kept quiet if someone had told you about my dangerous character? Weren’t you rather keen for me to right the wrong, as I was the victim’s brother and the best man for the job?’

‘Yes,’ said Bertin, sunk in thought, analysing his own motives, ‘that was more or less what I wanted. In a vague way, you know. Something terrible had happened. The world had gone awry, but things have come to a pretty pass when it’s sent further awry by our attempts to put it right.’

‘Yes,’ laughed Krosying amiably, ‘the world’s construction is a bit faulty, at least from the point of view of us humans. It short circuits and backfires all the time. If we built an engine along those lines we’d probably be in heaven quicker than it takes to get from here to our new mine throwers.’

‘But where’s the fault?’ asked Bertin passionately. ‘It must be mended if our world view isn’t to collapse.’

‘Why shouldn’t our precious world view collapse?’ asked Sergeant Süßmann in astonishment. ‘Hasn’t yours collapsed?’ he asked pointing a crooked index finger at Kroysing. ‘Hasn’t mine collapsed,’ and he turned the finger on himself. ‘It’s just too bad about yours, isn’t that right, my writerly and prophetic friend? Four dead and about 40 wounded,’ he continued, ‘and here in Douaumont. If it weren’t so boring for the lieutenant, I’d tell the gentleman here the story of this hollow mountain as I experienced it. I promised him I would, in any case.’

‘Oh yes, that’s not to be missed,’ said Kroysing. ‘He ought to hear it, and I’ll be fascinated to watch our author’s face. On you go, Süßmann.’

‘A couple of thousand years after the Deluge had dried up, when God had turned his countenance away from the world and people had multiplied like ants, on the 21st of February of the year 1916, men rose up out of their trenches, sappers to the front.’ Süßmann blinked and continued in the same tone: ‘In those four days as the attack advanced, legion upon legion of grey and grey-blue martyrs died as they’d been ordered. Their bodies were strewn between Caures wood and the hills, and their souls multiplied the heavenly host by an army corps.’

^{CHAPTER TWO} Little Süßmann

‘WE LAY FLAT on the ground at the edge of the glacis and looked over at Douaumont, which was covered in snow and giving nothing away – a detachment of sappers attached to men from a platoon of the 24th. The ground was frozen, but we were hot. We’d all been drinking and besides we were scared. Not a shot came from over there, do you follow? It was so threatening. Who would have thought that Douaumont, the cornerstone of Verdun, would be undefended with no garrison? French shells were dropping on the wood behind us but they came from somewhere else. Our own artillery was bombarding the village of Douaumont and the barbed wire outside it, and there was a French machine gun rattling over there. But the block of rock itself was silent. We had our coats on but we were soaked through underneath. Crawling through frozen mud is no fun. We wanted to feel something dry under our feet, to undress, light a stove and sleep. Our artillery kept battering the bare escarpment of the casemate, but there wasn’t a whisper of a reply. Eventually, we threw ourselves forwards, the first lieutenant at the front, headed downhill to the barbed wire – which thankfully wasn’t electrified – clambered on to the monster’s roof and to hell with it. Then we were on top and wanted to get down because our goal was inside. And as we were talking and staring apprehensively into the depths below us, we suddenly saw a detachment of men nosing their way very carefully out of a tunnel, and before we could shoot them or they us, we realised they were our neighbouring platoon. The two officers glared at each other, and if I’m not mistaken they still argue today about who the genuine conqueror of Douaumont was. Inside, we took the garrison prisoners: about 20 gunners in an armoured turret. They’d been firing for four days and four nights and now they were asleep – bit rude, no? Just when we arrived. But we kindly excused them. That’s how Douaumont was captured by the heroic first battalion of the 29th regiment, and anyone who doesn’t believe it can pay me one thaler.’

Kroysing watched Private Bertin’s baffled face with amusement. Bertin sat there in his uniform, hair shorn like a real soldier, but seemed to have believed all the Supreme Army Command’s pompous self-congratulation and to want to live in a world of heroic deeds like a child in a book of fairytales. ‘So that was the famous storming of Douaumont? Before his Majesty’s eyes…’

Raucous laughter. ‘Oh boy,’ cried Kroysing, ‘spare us!’ And Süßmann, giggling like a little imp, gasped: ‘Where was Douaumont, and where was the Kaiser?’

‘Gentlemen,’ said Bertin, not at all offended, ‘that’s what it said in the report. We read it out to each other from the bulletin board at brigade headquarters in Vranje, a small mountain town north of Kumanovo in Macedonia – a crowd of field greys in the spring sunshine – and I can still hear a young hussar lieutenant next to me shouting: “Brilliant, now there’ll be an end to this shit.” How am I supposed to know what really happened?’

‘Oh boy,’ cried Kroysing again and his eyes shone in the light from his third glass of cognac, ‘haven’t you worked out yet that it’s all a lie? Lies to the rear and at the front, lies on our side and over there. We’re bluffing, and they’re bluffing. The only ones who aren’t bluffing are the dead – the only decent ones in the whole show…’

‘Nothing is true,’ said Sergeant Süßmann, ‘and everything’s permitted. Are you familiar with that expression? The Assassins’ motto.’ Bertin confirmed that he was indeed educated and knew about the Assassins – an oriental murder sect from the Middle Ages, whose sheikh was called ‘The Old Man of the Mountain’.

‘You’re educated,’ said Kroysing, calming down. ‘Thank God. Now we just need to understand how a world works where young men such as yourself are knocking about like Parsifal in squaddy’s boots. That motto rules here, my dear boy. Nothing that’s printed is true, including the Bible. Everything men want to do is permitted, and that includes you and me if we have the guts. I don’t want to hold up the youngster here, because he’ll paint you a picture of how things really are here, but if you believe what the reports say, that we captured Fort Vaux in May and then magnanimously left “the ruins of the armoured fortress” to the French the next day, you deserve the Iron Cross. We laughed ourselves silly, my boy. But the infantry were furious because they were still under fire from that concrete monstrosity, which the French were defending like mad, but now they were also being pelted with questions and threats, and being dressed down by telephone, just because some idiot from headquarters had probably looked through his periscopic binoculars, from God knows how many kilometres to the rear, and had mistaken the backs of German prisoners being led into the fort by the French for those of our heroic conquerors taking their prize. Fort Vaux fell in June, and that’s all there is to it, and the way it held out amazed the world. War only runs smoothly on paper. A plague on all writing jackals.’ And he tipped out his fourth cognac, smaller this time, and drank. ‘And now it’s your turn, young Süßmann, and I’ll become a Trappist monk.’

‘We’ll believe it when we see it,’ joked Sergeant Süßmann. ‘At least we had Douaumont and we stayed there, but the French advance positions weren’t far below. Now the show really began: counter attack! At the end of April, the French were actually tramping about above our heads. They’d retaken the upper works as far as the northwest corner, but the machine guns in the embrasures and the flanking positions stopped them coming down. Then our reinforcements arrived, and they had to leave with their tails between their legs. That’s when we learnt from the French prisoners that our success in February had been due to a bit of standard military confusion. Two fresh divisions had taken over the sector, one to the left and and one to the right of Douaumont. Each one was convinced that the other had occupied the fort, and the relieved division had withdrawn so bloody quickly to Belleville ridge that no one knew how things stood. If we’d had fresh reserves back then, our victor’s luck might have taken us forward to Fleury and Souville, and who knows if Verdun would still be in French hands today. It would still have been tough, but it would have bucked us up and the reports would have been glorious. But the miserable French weren’t giving us anything for free. We had to attack Thiaumont and Fleury, and that’s what we were doing when the great explosion happened that gave me a glimpse of the Hereafter. Prost to that!’

He drained his glass and Kroysing refilled it. Staring intently into a corner of the small room, Süßmann continued with his story in his even, boyish voice. At that time, the beginning of May, Douaumont had been the strongest support point on the front. It was packed with soldiers, supplies, ammunition and sapper equipment, and it had a large dressing station. It was like a huge communications tunnel leading to the front and back. The Bavarians storming Fleury slept there before attacking or collapsed exhausted on the paving stones afterwards. The great attack of 5 May failed after a massive bombardment, but down below the fort still teemed with life.

‘Back then, our depot was over where the ASC men sleep now underneath the armoured turret, which the French had used as an ammunition store. A few dozen shells were still left over. Our mines and flamethrower oil reserve tanks were stored there. More harmless stuff, such as flares, was lined up against the corridor wall, with crates of hand grenades on the other side. On the right of the corridor were steps leading down to the hospital rooms, where the doctors were busy day and night. Orderlies dashed back and forth, hauling in the serious cases, while those with minor injuries or who were just shell-shocked or had been buried crouched by the walls, sleeping or dozing, until they got soup, which they spooned down as if it were heaven-sent. But as we know, heaven is right beside hell, and there must have been a couple of nut cases among them, because, using the boxes of flares as cover, two or three of those Bavarian morons went over to heat up their chow with a hand grenade – it was too cold for them, do you see? In order to make it taste better, they invited the devil in.

‘Now, anyone can unscrew an infantry hand grenade and use the head, which contains the charge of powder, to warm up his food if he has a couple of stones to stand a pot on and everything nearby is harmless. But as bad luck would have it, my Bavarians picked up a hand grenade that had already been filed off or was defective, and it blew up in their faces. That might have just been their private misfortune. Screams. Three or four more dead. A few wounded. That didn’t count for much in the battle for Fleury. But Satan decreed that the splinters should fly through the open door into the ammunition dump and stick into one of our harmless flame throwers, which are filled with a blend of heavy and light oils. The stuff flowed out, evaporated, and contact with air turned it into an explosive. I saw it with my own eyes; naturally, I don’t know where the bit of burning wood came from that set it alight – a smouldering cigarette would’ve done it. “Fire!” screamed those around the hand grenade cooks. At the same time, heavy fragments were hurled against the roof and the burning oil tipped on to the rocket crates made of nice, dry pinewood.

‘In that moment, we were already running. We ran forwards, the clever ones in silence, some screaming with terror. You know the long tunnel where I met the captain just now? It’s 80m long, I believe. Men ran into it from all the side passages. We were fighting for our lives with our friends and comrades. Woe betide anyone who stumbled or turned round. We men from the depot were pretty much the furthest back. In front of us were the minor casualties and the Bavarians who’d just been relieved. The ASC men were in the side passages and the infantrymen were up front – a seething knot of anxious grey backs, necks, heads and fists. Then a crash came from behind. There was thick smoke and heat, a dreadful stench as the signal rockets exploded like some colossal fireworks. The flames were bound to reach the shells and they did, but first they reached our hand grenades. There was a rumble from behind, and a jolt with the force of an earthquake flung us all against the walls, me included. I was 40m into the tunnel when I fell over. Actually, I didn’t fall over; I passed out. I lost consciousness propped against the curved wall and hung for I don’t know how long wedged in the throng. I assume I gradually sank to the floor with them. That must have been when the explosion came that wiped out all life in the tunnel, the side corridors, the casemates, the hospital – everywhere. I choked on the poisonous gases. I was actually dead, subjectively speaking. If you can feel fear, it’s terrible, because your lungs struggle for fresh air and inhale ever more poison and muck, your throat burns, your ears roar – but for me expiry was a relief. Let’s drink to that.’

He took a small mouthful, and Bertin, who was listening intently, finally drained his glass. For a moment, Süßmann seemed sunk in the distant past. Then he resurfaced, lit a cigarette and continued: ‘I came to in the rain. I was lying under the open sky on the rubble-strew paving stones of the inner courtyard. I gazed up at the grey clouds, at first uncomprehendingly. Everything inside me felt raw and burning, but I was alive. It was probably a while before I gave any sign of life. I watched men in smoke masks dragging soldiers’ bodies out of the opening to the blackened tunnel, where a plume of black smoke curled. I wanted to check the time, but my watch was gone. I always used to wear a small ring I inherited from my grandmother on my left hand – a lucky turquoise. It was gone too. I searched for my cigarette case. Also gone for good. My tunic had been unbuttoned and my shirt ripped open. My chest was bare, which was probably what woke me up and rescued me. But there had been quite a bit of wages in my neck pouch, and it had also vanished. I sat up then – the damp paving stones felt good on my hands – and saw that all around me were stone-dead men: blue, suffocated, blackened faces. A column of 400 men takes up a fair bit of room, but there were many more than that lying in the courtyard and the orderlies kept bringing out more. They’d cleaned me out, but I didn’t begrudge them it because I was breathing air again. I don’t ever want to be hanged or choked. I never turn on the gas tap and when I hear about our gas attacks I feel sick. I’d prefer a shell splinter in the head or a bullet in the heart.

‘I buttoned up my tunic, even turning the collar up, and staggered to my feet. I felt dizzy, it hurt when I coughed and I had a dreadful headache, but that was all. The medical NCO who saw me first was amazed. “Well, you’re a lucky devil,” were his first words to me. I was already a sergeant by then but I’d forgotten that. I was still a bit dazed and so I saluted and said, ‘Private Süßmann, sir,’ and I’m told I grinned stupidly, though I consider that slanderous. I was given something to drink, Aspirin for my headache, a couple of whiffs of oxygen, and then I told them what had happened. I didn’t know much at that point, but it was enough to make them decide not to clear out the extinguished crater. Our captain had the dead all carried back in again, but I was already asleep in the new hospital section on a nice, comfy bed by then – still wood wool, of course – and when I woke up the second time I was really fine. I wasn’t coughing any more. My head was throbbing and there was a ring of raw flesh on the inside of my throat, but that was about it. Later on, I saw our construction squad walling up the passages. They’re still there now, the dead residents of Douaumont, a whole battalion of them, can’t be much fewer than 1,000 men, all the occupants of the far end of that wing: Bavarians, sappers, ASC men, the entire dressing station.

‘That was the explosion in Douaumont. It wasn’t reported, and if you like I’ll take you to the spot later and you can pray for the souls of the fallen. Since then, I’ve thought about things more carefully and I no longer find them all that agreeable. And now you should be heading back.’

Bertin said he should and thanked Süßmann for telling him his story. But something still troubled him. ‘Did you go straight back on duty after that as if nothing had happened?’ he asked, stretching himself.

‘What do you think? Sergeant Süßmann retorted. ‘I got some sick leave, naturally. Fourteen glorious days in May at home, where I didn’t breathe a word about any of it. Civilians don’t like their picture of the war to be spoiled by the real war. And, anyway, we’d been told to keep our traps shut.’

‘It’s always like that,’ said Lieutenant Kroysing. ‘He who knows too much dies young. And how did Captain Niggl respond to my kind enquiry after his health? Will he be able to turn out tonight?’

Sergeant Süßmann pulled a grave face and said the captain still felt ill. The doctor had prescribed – or at least authorised – bed rest, particularly as there were now three acting lieutenants present who could take his place.

Kroysing’s tone was also grave: ‘Shame. I do regret causing an old officer nothing but trouble. And I’m not very congenial company. When you come back, my friend,’ he said, standing up and offering Bertin his hand, ‘Niggl’s health will have got a lot worse.’

Sergeant Süßmann arranged his cap in such a way that both cockades hung over the bridge of his nose. He planned to accompany Bertin some of the way. Then he asked whether the lieutenant wasn’t perhaps being too optimistic about the captain’s health. The telephone exchange had received instructions from the captain’s orderly room to find a Catholic field chaplain. He’d be arriving in the next few days if the Frogs continued to behave themselves.

A thin smile played on Kroysing’s lips. ‘He wants to confess,’ he said. ‘Does no harm if a man’s going soft on the inside. Mulch is the name given to that condition in apples and pears. Thanks, Süßmann. After that news, I think I may turn out tonight myself.’

^{CHAPTER THREE} Father Lochner

‘IT’S GOING TO be a hard winter,’ observed Strumpf the park-keeper a morning or two later as he stepped out of his hut, which had once been a French blockhouse.

Blue sky and sunlight flashed through the clouds of mist. Beechnuts hung heavily from gilded beech branches, and red berries shone among the rowan leaves, barberry sprigs and bramble bushes. Unperturbed by the approaching thunder, a pair of squirrels worked in the treetops, driving out a squawking magpie.

‘A hard winter’s all we need,’ countered his comrade Kilian in Baden dialect.

Bertin was at the switchboard communicating with the Cape camp. Through the open window, he heard Friedrich Strumpf expanding on how nature alleviated bad cold snaps for birds and wild animals by providing a surfeit of fruit, almost as if someone were looking out for the innocent creatures. Kilian the tobacco worker laughed at that: he was a free thinker, a Darwinist, as he proudly explained, saw the struggle for existence everywhere confirmed and would have preferred harsh winters to be alleviated for the women and children at home first of all. As he spoke, he sat happily in the early autumn sunshine darning a grey woollen sock. He had time for that kind of thing now, while his wife, who had taken his place in the factory and was bringing up two children, couldn’t possibly be expected to mend his winter things as well. Bertin, earphones on his head, nodded. Every individual man in the army, himself included, was attached to threads that travelled far back behind the lines. Then the switchboard buzzed again, and he received instructions from the sapper depot in Fosses wood about changing the points, with enquiries about construction troops and the number of wagons on the siding. He liked the little railway operation. This tiny cog in a giant wheel helped him to grasp the human ingenuity required to power the front line, how everything had to be done exactly right, so that when the crucial moment came a smooth and decisive blow could be struck. The two Badeners were happy with him. They just shook their heads at his enterprising spirit when he headed off past the field howitzers to Douaumont. Karl Kilian understood him better than his older colleague; it was right and proper for a newspaper reporter to do that, he said, so that he could relate the truth later.

Bertin knew full well that the good times were coming to an end. In a couple of days the man on leave would return. Bertin would then have to pack his things and go back to the stuffy, noisy barracks, his company and the poisonous fug around Graßnick and Glinsky, where all finer feelings were steamrollered like grass beneath a rolling donkey. Group living seemed to drain people of energy. He’d recovered here in the sunshine. He slept better in the clear air, he had time off and he enjoyed his food more because Friedrich Strumpf knew how to liven up the rations with all kinds of flavourings. Night hours spent awake at the silent switchboard reading under the electric light gave him the peace and solitude to be himself. He often saw beyond the printed pages to young Kroysing, who’d already been swept so far along by the river of life, and his wild brother who was wading through its centre, knee-deep today, waist-high tomorrow… If ever a man had needed this war it was Eberhard Kroysing – to find himself, express his nature, test his range, as he put it. It was the urge for such experience that had made an entire generation of German youth flee the strictures of the pre-war period for unbridled war – Kroysing, Süßmann, Bertin, all of them. In 1914, they’d all felt that real life – a life of danger and hardship – was just about to begin. Now here they sat sunk in the disgusting realities of it and expected to come to terms with them. If anyone could have predicted to the schoolboy Süßmann how he would feel two years after the start of the war or what he would have gone through… boy, oh boy!

Then Süßmann’s cheerful voice crackled in Bertin’s ear. He said he was to say hello to Bertin from his company, or at least from the Fosses wood unit. He’d worked long and hard with them the day before. In particular, two Berliners had been asking for him: a funny chap with fat cheeks, freckles and very clever eyes (Bertin nodded to himself: Lebehde) and a bad-tempered hunchback (aha, Pahl). They’d said to tell him there was plenty of company news and that he should come back soon if only to see the arrival of a new sergeant major – something he would no doubt welcome.

What rubbish, thought Bertin listlessly. And from next week that will be my world again, day in, day out. Yes, he quoted the poet Schiller, the great days of Aranjuez would soon be over.

‘You’re leaving us,’ said the lad. ‘Kroysing still has a lot to discuss with you. He said to ask you to stay the night with us tomorrow.’

‘That’s easily arranged,’ said Bertin, somewhat taken aback. He’d make sure to arrive before the evening bombardment so the gunfire didn’t spoil his journey.

In the entrance tunnel to the fort, Bertin got caught up in an eddy of departing infantry – a battalion waiting for nightfall to move up to the front and send the current trench crew for a so-called rest. A great deal of food had been handed out, and the men’s cooking pots were steaming, possibly for the last time in weeks. In one corner of the yard, sergeants were bent over postal bags calling out the names of their squads: ‘Wädchen!’ – ‘Here.’ ‘Sauerbier! – ‘Here.’ ‘Klotsche!’ – ‘Here.’ ‘Frauenfeind!’ – ‘Here.’ As Bertin pushed through them, he got a whiff of them and saw their thin faces, skin stretched over bones, and exhausted expressions. Few of them were more than medium height; none of them was fresh. He almost felt guilty in their presence, because he looked upright, reasonably well fed and refreshed. Their sing-song Saxon speech helped to neutralise the bitterness that saturated their exchanges. In their caps (they wouldn’t change into steel helmets until they were at the front) and shabby uniforms they looked half-grown, more like 17-year-old schoolboys on a class outing than the living wall, which, according to the cant in the newspapers, was protecting the homeland on French soil.

It was nearly 4.30pm. The September sun bathed the pentagon’s massive inner chamber and the deep cut leading to the casemate in rich, golden light. Bertin wove his way patiently through the throngs of men, who had laid down their bundles of hand grenades, assault equipment and gas masks. Muzzle covers gleamed on their rifles, and the locks were wrapped in rags to protect them from the dust in the narrow approach trenches and shelled zones. A group who’d already eaten stopped him and asked him for a light for their cigarettes and pipes. Bertin spent a few minutes with them. They were curious because of his grey oil-cloth cap and yellow brass cross, and his glasses gave them the idea he might know when peace would come. Weariness was etched on their brows, and they made no secret of it, but Bertin knew that wouldn’t stop them giving their last. As usual, their rest days had not been restorative. They’d improved rear positions, brought up materials and been subjected to all kinds of roll calls designed to maintain discipline. The only difference compared with the front line was hot food, undisturbed sleep and plenty of water to wash in. It was something but it wasn’t much. As they swarmed around in the fort, they seemed to Bertin to be like animated fragments of the wrecked upper works, which looked as though they had long ago lost all powers of resistance. Shell holes bordered shell holes. Scraps of yellowed turf still clung on in the shadow of the ramparts, but the brickwork had collapsed, falling into the trenches outside and blocking tunnel entrances inside. The ramparts were like mounds of earth dotted with steel splinters, which was particularly astonishing when you considered the unshakable fastness of the underground fortress. The infantrymen were like that too. They looked like drifting herds of death, workers in the factory of destruction, and displayed all the indifference that industry and machines force on men. But inside they were unbroken. They went to the front without enthusiasm or illusions, buoyed only by the hope of returning in one piece in 10 days. Forward again and back again until released by a wound that hospitalised them – or death. But they didn’t like to think about that. They wanted to live. They hoped to go home. And now they wanted to sleep a couple of hours longer.

Still brooding on their fate, Bertin climbed down over some sandbags and disappeared into the bowels of the fort. With no guide, he initially got completely lost in the passages. Eventually, he ended up in the telephone exchange where a man who like himself wore glasses told him the way. With the Saxons’ lilt still in his ear, he found the telephonist’s clean Hanoverian tones almost disconcerting. He himself was a Silesian. He was visiting a Franconian and a Berliner by birth. The Germans had become thoroughly integrated and had learnt to respect one another.

‘Come in!’ Kroysing called out curtly. A visitor sat in his room, a gentleman. On the bed lay a kind of riding hat with one upturned brim. The visitor had violet lapels, a plump, brown, clean-shaven oval of a face with an exceptionally small mouth and very clear, bright eyes: a priest! A field chaplain in Douaumont with a silver cross round his neck! Bertin knew you were supposed to salute these men like officers and that they set a lot of store by that. He’d have preferred to make an immediate getaway, but Lieutenant Kroysing, behind his desk as usual, was emphatically warm: ‘At last, my friend. May I introduce you gentlemen? My friend Bertin, a trainee lawyer currently in the garb of an ASC private. Father Benedikt Lochner, currently in cavalry trooper’s garb.’

The priest laughed heartily. His hand in Bertin’s felt fat but strong. ‘You shouldn’t speak about cavalry troopers, Lieutenant. I came here riding pillion on a motorbike – what Berliners call the bridemobile and Viennese the dolly stool. So take your pick: I’m either a bride or a dolly bird.’ He ran a smoothing hand through his thin blonde hair, dabbed his head with a handkerchief, said he found it rather hot down below and took a sip of cognac. His jovial, urban Rhineland dialect sounded odd on his delicate lips.

‘It’s absolutely fine for my friend Bertin to hear what we have to discuss,’ said Kroysing, resuming their conversation. ‘In fact, no one is more qualified to listen in and comment than him. He spoke to my poor brother the day before he died, heard about his troubles and offered him help – the only man to do so in a desert, or should I say a vale of tears – and I’ll remember that until the day I die. You won’t mind that he’s a Jew. Compared to Protestant heretics, they’re chips off the old block.’

Bertin sat glumly on Kroysing’s bed. He’d have preferred to be alone with him. The priest assessed Bertin, the shape of his skull, the beginnings of a bald patch on his crown. True enough, he thought. This young man looks like a monk in some famous painting. I can’t remember which one, but it’s bound to be Italian. He may make my job easier or harder. In any case, he clearly labours and is heavy laden. Aloud, he said that he didn’t know how Captain Niggl would feel about this three-way discussion.

Bertin made to stand up, but Kroysing stretched out a hand to stop him. ‘Nothing doing,’ he said. ‘You’re staying. Shall we postpone our discussion, Father Lochner? That would be fine by me. Bertin’s here today for the last time. He has to go back to his lousy company, and I’m planning to give him a goodbye present, a special memento. I’m going to the front tonight. Our mine throwers are in position, and the section officers want to talk to me. I assume you’re prepared to risk it, Bertin? Everyone ought to see the show.’

Bertin blushed and confirmed that he would of course come. ‘I was expecting a booze-up from what Süßmann said but I prefer it this way.’

‘Huh,’ said the priest, adding that such chances didn’t come along very often and that he’d like to join them if they didn’t mind.

Kroysing raised his eyebrows and contemplated the priest’s long, fine tunic, wide-cut riding trousers and almost elegant lace-up shoes: ‘Won’t it damage your robes?’ The priest emphatically denied that it would, and Kroysing said: ‘You’ll meet a lot of Christian men, Lutherans in fact, but such distinctions evaporate out there. Machine guns welcome Jews and atheists just as warmly as Catholics and Protestants. The position we’ll be visiting was relieved yesterday. The lads here in the fort are being sent somewhere worse, I believe, further to the west. Do you want to postpone our business, Father? I don’t mind, though I’d prefer it if you said your piece now.’

Glad of an excuse, Bertin got up. ‘If we won’t be getting any sleep tonight, I think it’s best if I ask Süßmann for a bed now and lie down for an hour. A man needs his rest.’

‘Not an easy life for an educated man,’ the priest mused, when the door had closed behind Bertin. ‘I’m constantly surprised by how well our Jews adapt to military life.’

‘Why wouldn’t they?’ asked Kroysing. ‘They do what everyone else does and often a lot better. They want to prove themselves to us. And, anyway, I know of no more war-like book than the Old Testament with all its fire and brimstone.’

The priest skilfully parried the mildly antagonistic subtext he discerned in this remark with a general observation: trench warfare had dispelled many prejudices, not just those against Jews. Had there not at one time been doubts about the value of soldiers from industrial areas? And now? And now, agreed Kroysing, townsmen, especially from the cities, were the backbone of the defence. They were less afraid of machines than country lads. The latter had perhaps provided the best human material in the first year of the war, but the trench war required more adaptable men of nimbler intelligence.

‘And on the topic of country areas, Lieutenant,’ interjected Father Lochner abruptly, ‘what’s gone wrong between you and Captain Niggl?’

Kroysing leant back. ‘Surely he must have told you, when he asked you to mediate,’ he growled.

‘We had a chat,’ the priest replied, kneading one of his hands with the other. ‘He gave the impression of being a man deep in struggle. He said you two disagreed about your poor brother, that you thought the captain had maltreated or abused him.’

‘Is that all he told you?’ Kroysing asked, his expression unchanging.

‘Yes. Or at least, I took no more from what he said. Those Bavarians are all from farming stock. They speak in such a way that you can read a great deal or very little into what they say, depending on how familiar you are with their customs.’

Kroysing lit a cigarette and threw the match into the squashed shell case: ‘Let’s suppose he was fibbing. How does that square with the respect he has for you as a clergyman and the eternal punishment he may be lining up for himself?’

Father Lochner gave a frank laugh. ‘I was a curate for two years at Kochl at the foot of the mountains. I didn’t get to know the people there very well. That would’ve taken a lifetime. But I did learn a few things. No one lied to me in holy confession, especially as they only had to speak in generalities, but they thought it was extremely clever to lie to me day-to-day whilst still availing themselves of my spiritual office.’

‘Excellent,’ said Kroysing. ‘So, you’re not biased, as I feared.’

‘Oh no,’ said Father Lochner expansively, lapsing into Rhenish. ‘That’d be nuts – mad, I mean. Man is a frail creature. Catholics simply have the advantage over you of knowing about original sin and being able to compensate for their fragility through our sacraments and the Church.’

Kroysing listened to the gentleman’s clever chatter with a grim delight that he concealed. Had Niggl really represented their dispute to the priest in such a harmless way? It was possible. Field chaplains got bored, and the cleverer they were, the more bored they got surrounded by the ossified commanders and clowns at headquarters behind the lines. Father Lochner might very well have ventured over to Douaumont on a motorbike for a bit of a change, without asking for a compelling reason. Perhaps sorting out a quarrel between two officers was an interesting opportunity for a former theology student. Well, he might find things surprisingly intense at Douaumont.

‘What do you think about the story of King David and his field captain Uriah, Father Lochner? Excuse me asking so directly.’

The priest started. ‘It was murder,’ he said. ‘Shameless, premeditated murder over a woman. A mortal sin, and the House of David had to atone for it. Even the grandson from that union lost the majority of his realm, despite David’s remorse and the deeds of Solomon.’

‘I see,’ said Kroysing casually. ‘So what temporal and eternal punishments will be visited upon the Niggl dynasty? For I’m pursuing the captain for that same sin. The only difference is that the woman is not called Bathsheba but “The Third Company’s Reputation”.’

Father Lochner sat stiffly on his chair. ‘You must make yourself very clear, Lieutenant, if you want to make accusations of that kind.’

Kroysing was glad to have sickened the other man’s happiness. ‘Wanna do and can do,’ he said in Berlin dialect, opening a drawer and taking out two pieces of paper. He gave the larger piece of paper to the field chaplain and asked him to read it.

Father Lochner slowly pulled on his horn-rimmed spectacles. Then he read Christoph Kroysing’s last letter. His lips moved as he read, and his eyes scanned each word conscientiously, which Kroysing noted appreciatively.

‘You don’t seem troubled by the state of the paper and the writing, Chaplain. The letter was a little stuck together when we received it. You can see the traces in the corner.’

‘Blood?’ asked Father Lochner with a shudder. ‘Terrible,’ he said. ‘But Lieutenant, not wishing to upset you, have you any proof? Captain Niggl – does seem very pleasant. Although one is used to things not being as they seem…’ He let his voice float off.

‘My dear man,’ laughed his companion, ‘surely you don’t still attach any importance to appearances? Haven’t you noticed that power doesn’t agree with a lot of men in the two years you’ve been at this? That your average man needs an average amount of pressure to function normally? Being a member of the officer class places such average men in too rarefied an atmosphere, and the likes of Niggl and his cronies get carried away. Then a travelling wine salesman – or, let’s say, a retired civil servant with a bit of wit – starts to act like King David, except that he cowers behind a stranger’s back when he feels the avenger’s fist on the scruff of his neck.’ And he raised his right hand, curling his fingers into a claw.

‘Tell me what happened,’ said Father Lochner in a haunted voice.

^{CHAPTER FOUR} Two subordinates

MEANWHILE, TWO TIRED soldiers, Süßmann and Bertin, were lying on iron bunks, one on top of the other, in a former guardroom that accommodated 15 men – Kroysing’s sappers in charge of routine work in and around the depot. They were smoking a cigar and talking. Bertin, on the lower bunk, felt quite excited about the forthcoming excursion.

‘Do clergymen give you the willies like they do me?’ he asked. ‘All of them, I mean – even ours.’

‘Seldom clap eyes on them,’ muttered Süßmann.

‘We sometimes do,’ said Bertin. ‘Our company held a Whitsun service about half a year ago before Verdun, and we were all ordered to attend. There was the priest preaching about the Outpouring of the Holy Spirit in our cartridge tent and all around were baskets with yellow and green crosses on the labels.’

‘Brilliant,’ said Süßmann. Bertin didn’t need to tell him that yellow and green crosses denoted two of the three poisonous gases used in shells.

‘In his defence, I believe he was short-sighted,’ said Bertin, not joking.

‘Why?’ retorted Süßmann. ‘Surely the Prussians believe anything that serves the Fatherland pleases God. And we Jews should keep quiet,’ he added in a more serious tone. ‘Our Old God fits right in with this war.’

‘Yes,’ quipped Bertin. ‘I depart in my wrath, and my shadow falleth towards midnight upon Assur, so that the people crawl into caves and Rezin, King of Syria, laments in his palace of Damascus, and I strike the first born of Mizraim in the south, and shake my spear and lance, and like the hooves of the wild ass I trample down the seed of Ammon and the walls of Moab, saith the Lord.’

‘Nice sort of God,’ said Süßmann. ‘Where’s that from?’

‘From my heart,’ answered Bertin. ‘But I could just as easily have made it up.’

‘This is what happens when you hang about with poets,’ said Süßmann absently. He was watching a spider, a large, black female, who’d spun her web across a ventilator in the corner and was now dashing back and forth, irritated by the cigar smoke.

‘Poets…’ Bertin continued, thinking aloud. ‘No, not poets. Witnesses, writers. The hallmark of a poet is that he uses the full palette of his imagination – inventiveness and artistry. No scrimping on gods and goddesses, and a plausible fiction is better than the truth. But what is needed today in our situation is truth, not plausibility. Think about it, Süßmann. Our company toiled away at Steinbergquell depot for four months and nothing really happened. Then I was sent up to the front, I met young Kroysing on my first day there and he asked for my help. Is that plausible? Could I put that in a fictional story? No. But it’s true. And the truth goes on in that vein. The very next day, no sooner, no later, the lad is killed. The day after that, I go to look for him again so I can take his letter and help him out of the mess he’s in. He’s already dead, and his battalion has got what it wanted. But my eyes have been ripped open, and I’ve been galvanised into action. No, it’s not about poets – for now. As long as the effects of this war continue to shake the world, the survivors will need true accounts. Those who don’t survive will already have given everything humanly possible.’

‘What about me?’ a voice boomed from above, echoing off the ceiling. ‘I’ve already given everything humanly possible. I was actually dead. Shell splinters from our own hand grenades were whistling past my ears. It’s a miracle I survived. Shouldn’t I be able to call it a day?’

‘My dear Süßmann,’ said Bertin soothingly, ‘no-one expects any more of you.’

‘Thanks for the get-out,’ the thin, boyish voice snapped in the gloom. ‘That’s not what I was asking. I was asking if the whole business makes any sense. Is it worth it? That’s what I want to know. Will we at least get a decent new society out of all this appalling fumbling and fidgeting – a cosier home than the old Prussian one? A boy starts to think a bit when he reaches 16. By 17 he begins to imagine he knows how his future might turn out. I keep asking myself what the point of it is. How did it start, where will it lead and who’s benefiting from it?’

Bertin lay there, shocked. Shouldn’t he be the one asking these questions? But he’d given himself over entirely to the present now. He took what came, lived with it, abandoned himself to it. The devil only knows why I was naïve enough to confuse what is with what should be, he thought. I never used to do that; now I do. Perhaps I’ll understand later.

‘If my thoughts were all as harmless as that, things would be fine,’ Süßmann continued. ‘But there are a couple of things I haven’t been able to get out of my mind since I told you my story about the explosion. I picked your Sergeant Schulz’s brains about it yesterday. He maintains that secured shells, even French ones, only explode in certain special circumstances. But that explosion was a really big deal. Floors split down to the drains. Windows ripped out. That impact that threw us all against the walls. If it wasn’t the shells in the empty gun position, what was it?’ He became introspective for a moment, like someone who is turning a debatable point over and over in his head and therefore can’t converse. ‘Don’t think I’m just wallowing in my exciting past. Perhaps the vigilant French concealed a stack of mines so they could blow their own fort to bits if need be? And then our doughty Bavarians touched one off with flame thrower oil, flares and hand grenades. Brr,’ he shuddered and got down suddenly from his bed, appearing pale-faced at Bertin’s side. ‘I wouldn’t want to go through that again. What if we’re walking on a loaded mine and any idiot could accidentally make the contact and blow us to bits?’

Bertin sat up and looked into the desperate eyes of this 19-year-old with a man’s strength of judgement and suddenly shivered. ‘Sit down, Süßmann,’ he said soothingly. ‘Assuming that’s true, then you’re just as much at risk when you’re asleep as when you’re awake. You and your comrades at the front whom we’ll be crawling over to later. Does it really change your situation? I don’t see that it does. It makes it a shade worse, but what does that matter to a man like you?’

‘Hmm,’ said Süßmann, eyes to the ground, searching for caches of explosives under the layers of concrete. ‘Nicely put, but you’re just a visitor here.’

‘That’s not the point,’ countered Bertin, ‘I get the feeling I’m meant to record something of your sufferings and great deeds for the coming generation. It’s not just by chance that we met, you with your story to tell and the Kroysings with theirs. There’ll be more lies told about this war than about any other international conflict. It’ll be up to the survivors to tell the truth, and some of those who’ve something to say will survive. Why not you? Why not me? Why not Kroysing? Whether there’s a stack of explosives or not, Süßmann, you’ve already been through enough. Death never calls twice.’

Süßmann stuck his lip out defiantly. Then he laughed and clapped Bertin on the shoulder. ‘And I thought we didn’t have any decent field rabbis. You’re wearing the wrong gear, Bertin.’

Bertin laughed too. ‘My parents would gladly have made a rabbi out of me, but I read too much and had too many doubts. A clergyman must believe the way that priest in there with the lieutenant believes in his cross. And I don’t believe.’

Süßmann breathed more easily. ‘And yet you talk about destiny and being in good hands. You’re not much of a sceptic, Reverend Bertin,’ he said almost tenderly. ‘It’s amazing what words can do. Now I almost believe too, by which I mean believe it’s worth battling on here and that the men we’re going to visit at the front aren’t completely mad.’

^{CHAPTER FIVE} ‘…will sign.’

ENTHRONED ON HIS hard, low-backed wooden stool, Father Lochner no longer looked as happy and confident as he had. ‘Tell me what you want, Lieutenant,’ he said quietly, ‘and I’ll do my best to get Captain Niggl to agree to it.’

Lieutenant Kroysing took a second piece of paper from the table, a small square sheet, and read: ‘The undersigned confesses that, in order to protect the reputation of the Third Company of his battalion and avoid court martial proceedings, he did, in conjunction with the heads of the company, intentionally and systematically precipitate the death of Sergeant Christoph Kroysing. Douaumont, 1916— the date, month and signature to be added.’

Father Lochner stretched his folded hands out in front of him. ‘Merciful Jesus, no man can sign that. It’s suicide.’

Kroysing shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s recompense,’ he blinked. ‘When this paper, duly signed, has been passed to Judge Advocate Mertens in Montmédy, who is working on the files against my brother, then certain wheels will be set in motion, as God sees fit, and Herr Niggl and his men may look for quieter quarters, if service interests permit. But if he does not sign he’ll be staying here in my harmless little molehill, even if his soul turns to buttermilk.’

‘Blackmail,’ cried the priest. ‘Coercion, duress!’

Kroysing smiled genially, a wolfish glint in his eyes. ‘Do as you’re done by, Father,’ he said in a deeply satisfied voice.

Father Lochner thought for a moment, almost as if he were alone. ‘I accept everything,’ he sighed at last. ‘It wasn’t you, Lieutenant, who involved me in this matter. Neither is it your fault that I came here as a harmless field chaplain and now find myself gazing into the most ghastly depths of the human soul. And I cannot just stand there and gaze. I must intervene, take sides, concede that a son of my Church behaved like a common murderer towards your brother, which would have been bad enough if your brother had been your average, common man. However, his letter demonstrates that the Creator had housed within his body a most noble and loveable soul. There can be no recompense for such a loss either for the parents or the brother or the nation. Measured against it, earthly vengeance seems grotesque. I imagine that’s clear to you, though it doesn’t of course diminish your loss. What then do you hope to achieve?’

Eberhard Kroysing wrinkled his tan-lined brow. ‘If we take the impotence of punishment as our starting point, the fact that we cannot recreate that which has been destroyed, we’ll get nowhere. Let’s make things easy for ourselves. I want to cleanse the Kroysings’ reputation, which Captain Niggl besmirched. Why don’t we leave everything else out of the equation.’

Father Lochner exhaled. He didn’t understand himself why he’d sided so firmly with a miserable type like Niggl. I didn’t side with him although he is miserable, he thought quickly, remembering his training, but because his lowly soul needs so much compassion, warped as it clearly is. ‘I knew it,’ he said in relief. ‘It’s always words that stop two reasonable men reaching agreement. Allow me to draft a text that will give your family full satisfaction without destroying Captain Niggl.’ He made to grab a piece of paper and began unscrewing his fountain pen.

But a look from Lieutenant Kroysing stilled his hand. ‘Excuse me, Reverend,’ he growled amiably enough, ‘but I’m with Pontius Pilate on this one when he said, “What I have written I have written”.’ And as the priest pulled his hand back, he continued: ‘I’m a physicist and an engineer. Captain Niggl unleashed a rotary movement against my brother that ended up hurling him tangentially into the void. But that didn’t stop the movement. Now it will seize Niggl himself and hurl him tangentially into the void. Or if you prefer, the balance of things has been disturbed. My brother tipped the scales a little in the direction of good. To compensate for his loss, I’m going to stamp out an adverse element, maybe even three. I hope it may earn me a civic crown,’ he finished, and Father Lochner shuddered at the young man’s savage mastery and sparkling intelligence.

The priest sat up straight and his eyes, small in his plump face, took on the implacable expression of the confessor. He thrust his lower jaw out, and under the electric light his mouth became a moving line. ‘Lieutenant,’ he said, ‘we are both quite alone here. Our conversation crossed the normal boundaries of a negotiation between two uniformed officers long ago. What I’m about to say puts me in your hands. None of my Church superiors would defend me if you wrote a letter to HQ saying that Field Chaplain Lochner from the Order of St Francis told you what I’m about to tell you. But whit mus be, mus be,’ he added in plattdeutsch.

‘The sickness of our people, the moral sickness, can no longer be affected by the existence or otherwise of Captain Niggl. I was in Belgium with our Rhinelanders when force was used against neutrality and justice. What I saw, what our men proudly carried out in the name of service and duty, was murder, robbery, rape, arson, desecration of churches, every vice of the human soul. They did it because they were ordered to and they were delighted to obey, because their souls – even German souls – were in the possession of the devil’s joy of destruction. I saw the corpses of old men, women and children. I was there when small towns were burnt to the ground in order to terrify a people weaker than us so that they wouldn’t impede us as we marched through. As a German, I was shaken with horror; as a Christian, I wept bitter tears.’

‘The franctireurs resistance fighters shouldn’t have kicked off then,’ said Kroysing darkly.

‘Who can prove that they did?’ Father Lochner stood up and paced from one corner of the room to other. ‘We maintained that they did, and the Belgians denied it. We are accuser, accused and judge in one person. We didn’t allow a neutral investigation – so much the worse for us. But there is a man in Belgium with an indomitable conscience, and as a Catholic and a member of a religious order I’m proud to call him a prince of our Most Holy Church. His name is Cardinal Mercier, and he repudiated the franctireurs story in the strongest terms. And the soldier in you must agree with me when I say that even if Belgian civilians did join the fight, which no one has admitted, our actions in Belgium were the vilest heathenism. That was no war between Christian nations, but a barbaric assault on a Catholic country. My esteemed friend, do you really believe that this can end without permanent damage being done to our German soul? The murder of thousands of innocent people. Thousands of houses burnt down. Residents driven into the flames with kicks and rifle butts. Priests hung in bell towers. Villagers herded together and massacred with machine guns and bayonets. And the stream of lies we unleash to cover it up. The iron face we show to the better informed world so that our own poor people may cling to the delusion that the Belgian atrocities are a fairytale. My dear mannie,’ he said in Rhenish, ‘we have besmirched our souls like nae ither civilised folk. How do you propose to rebalance that with your Niggl? We shall be very sick men when this war ends. We shall need a cure such as cannot yet be foreseen. Of course, the other nations can’t talk. The Americans with their Negroes. The British with their Boer War. The Belgians in the Congo, and the French in Tongking and Morocco. Even the honest Russians. But that doesn’t give us carte blanche, and so I say to you: assign this matter to the Lord, safe in the assurance that Herr Niggl…’

‘…will sign,’ the Lieutenant broke in, unmoved. ‘You see,’ he began, filling the deep brown bowl of his full-bent pipe for a long smoke, ‘you see, Father Lochner, you’ve risked saying what you have because you understand me. Your courage is to your credit, I like your openness and I’m impressed by your knowledge. But overall I feel sorry for you. Why? Because you are trying to maintain a fiction – an important fiction, I concede. But here’s a nasty truth about the Christian nations and Christian codes of behaviour for you. I don’t know if we had any reason to call our Reich Christian in peacetime. As a future engineer, I serve commercial enterprise and am entirely dependent on people who have money to build machines and pay workers’ wages, and it’s not up to me to decide whether capitalism and Christianity can march side by side. But what is clear is that they do march side by side all over the world and no priest has yet taken his own life over it. Your expedients of poverty, chastity and obedience change nothing. That’s just shirking – or worse. Let’s leave peace to one side, then. But I find it disturbing that you maintain that this war here, this little project that we unleashed two years ago, has anything to do with Christianity. I know what you’re going to say’ – and he waved the priest’s objection aside – ‘you keep alive such remnants of Christianity as our people are able to digest in your soul so you can give them comfort in their despair, which is more than anyone else can give them – the same comfort in the same despair that poor Private Bertin gave to my brother when no Christian soul was moved by his fate, to get back to the topic in hand. We live in nice, clean heathen times. We kill with every means at our disposal. We don’t scrimp, sir. We use the elements. We exploit the laws of physics and chemistry. We calculate elaborate parabolas for shell-fire. We conduct scientific investigations of wind direction the better to discharge our poisonous gases. We’ve subjugated the air so that we can rain down bombs, and as surely as my soul lives, I would hate to die such a dirty, cowardly death. In half an hour when we go to eat, each of us will put a steel pot on his baldy skull’ – and he leant his long head forward with a smile and pointed to his thinning hair – ‘and then we’ll proceed into the joyful world of unvarnished reality and European civilisation. What was that quote we heard the other day from our educated schoolboy Süßmann who’s already been dead once? “Nothing is true, and everything is permitted.” Where we’re going that phrase applies, and there’s no quarter for the phrase: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you!” That tells you all you need to know. For just as water always seeks the lowest point, the human soul will sink as far as it can go as a group with impunity. That’s heathenism, sir. And I’m an honest adherent. And if I survive, which isn’t in the stars, I’ll make sure that my entire family are equally honest heathens. In the conflict between truthfulness and Christianity, in 1916, I choose truthfulness.’

Father Lochner regarded him fearfully. He said nothing, lifted the piece of paper from the desk, folded it and went to the door, where he turned. ‘I wish, Lieutenant, that I might one day be allowed to relieve your soul of its bitterness.’

‘See you in half an hour,’ said the heathen Kroysing.

^{CHAPTER SIX} The slip of paper is returned

AS THE EVENING’S last red flashes paled to smoky brown in the west, three men and a boy in steel helmets stood by Douaumont’s southern exit, called the “throat”, and eyed the pitted landscape bending away from them in troughs and mounds. They looked bold in their metal headgear, like mediaeval warriors, which was exactly how young Bertin felt. He held his head high and was filled with mettle; the coming hours would transcend all others in his life. To their left below Hardaumont, some sort of pond gleamed like a glowing log. Otherwise, the landscape was a world of churned earth floating in the violet evening haze. The three men and the boy inspected the sky. To the east, rose a large, wide crescent moon the colour of brass, enveloped in a halo. It was waxing. The boy – Sergeant Süßmann, the most experienced of them all – pointed to it with his thumb. ‘There’ll be a new moon in three days, and that’ll be the end of the good weather.’

Father Lochner, the heftiest of them in his cloak, asked if the dark nights presaged attacks.

‘Something much worse, Reverend,’ answered Süßmann. ‘Rain.’

‘It could cheerfully hold off for another month,’ muttered Kroysing behind them. ‘We’re nowhere near ready.’

‘It could but it won’t,’ said the youngster. ‘The land is very unobliging towards its conqueror,’ and he laughed at his own joke.

The four men, so unalike in rank and experience, made their way slowly down the slope. Their eyes had adjusted to the gloaming, and they easily picked out the well-trodden paths. Each had a stick. The two officers were wrapped in their cloaks, and the two men had hooked their coat tails back. A damp chill hung over the field, and it would get colder as the night wore on. Süßmann knew the area like his way to school in Berlin and led the party. An excited Bertin followed him, and Lieutenant Kroysing took up the rear behind the priest.

‘That was once a trench,’ said Süßmann, as they changed direction and headed for the patch of ground where the village of Douaumont had once stood with its imposing houses and a church. Now it was indistinguishable from the jagged earth all around. And that earth was beginning to smell; it breathed a sweetish, putrid odour on the four men that became scorched, sulphurous and sick. In his even, boyish voice, Süßmann warned that they’d have to duck under the barbed wire that covered the hillside all the way to the fort. He also read the smells. They came from shallow graves, stale faeces not properly dug in, the poisoned gas shells that had soaked the soil here, incendiary shells and piles of rotting tins in which leftovers had been lazily dumped. He explained to Bertin that the smell was much worse when it was sunny and windy. Then it got mixed up with the dust and the stench of this whole pulverised, putrefying area that stretched 2.5km to the French lines and the same distance again to the girdle of forts at Verdun. Their route, he continued, cut diagonally across the switch position known as the Adalbert line, where things became more dangerous. The former road between the villages of Douaumont and Fleury ran dead straight to the front and was a huge temptation both to the French field artillery and their targets – relief troops, stretcher bearers, orderlies, anyone on two legs.

The eerie quiet was broken only by the sound of rats scattering. On the barbed wire that they now walked alongside fluttered scraps of material and paper blown over by the wind. At one point shortly before they left the trenches behind and turned in a different direction, a formless black mass hung from the barbed wire. Shortly thereafter, the four men met a couple of panting soldiers and exchanged a few words with them. They were guides running at a trot up to Douaumont to bring down the relief battalion. The regiment had thought the deathly quiet so suspicious it had brought the normal departure time forward by one and a half hours. The trenches, Bertin suddenly realised, were occupied. Those little things sticking up must be steel helmets. After 30 paces, they jumped behind a steep wall, a switch position. To their right stood a figure peering to the south. He radiated tension, and the new arrivals felt the pressure. They breathed more heavily and were tempted to stay put with their backs leaning against the cool earth instead of descending into the flat, mist-wreathed field. Süßmann and Bertin were half a minute ahead of the other two. Mists came in from the Meuse, Süßmann explained, and sometimes caused gas alarms. Better one too many than one too few. Over to the left was Thiaumont farm and further forward lay the Thiaumont line, a dark ridge etched on the night sky. This trench was thinly populated. Bertin suddenly realised how nerve-racking it must be to be responsible for what could happen and how that responsibility must weigh on the couple of officers and staff sergeants in the battalion command. They obviously wouldn’t have that sense of security that still coated daily business at Douaumont. His cheerful mood evaporated; for the first time since he was a boy he felt hostility in the air.

He’d seen all kinds of things. He’d got used to handling military equipment on a daily basis. Dead men were no longer a novelty, neither were exploding shells or aerial bombs. Furthermore, he’d been listening to the war reports for two years. The idea that war exists was as familiar to him as his uniform. But as he himself had no enemies, felt no desire to destroy and was not filled with racial hatred when he thought of the French, the struggle and intensity of war was missing from his world view. Only now did he feel it physically, and it constricted his chest. Hordes of men were lying in wait, peering at one another through the night in order to kill one another. Way over there, a French soldier with a flat steel helmet on his head was pressed against a trench wall looking northwards with a view to shooting at and perhaps killing him, Bertin, as he advanced. Over there in the dark, just the same as here, the issue of an order could turn a knot of men into assault troops, throwing themselves against the lines, always ready to strike the first blow. They weren’t glad to go or keen to die, but when ordered to do so they mounted an attack upon the bodies of their enemies. We’ve come far, he thought bitterly, we Europeans of the year nineteen hundred and sixteen. In the spring of 1914, we met these same French, Belgian and British people at peaceful sporting gatherings and academic symposia. We were delighted when German fire engines rushed to France to help with a mining disaster or French rescue parties appeared in Germany. And now we’re organising murder parties. Why aren’t we ashamed of this trick?

Eberhard Kroysing and the priest, now rather pale, came round the corner. ‘Move on,’ said Kroysing nervously. ‘I’m think there’s going to be a bit of a to-do tonight.’

Young Süßmann sniffed the air like a hunting dog. ‘Not here,’ he said confidently. He scaled the trench parapet, walked upright alongside the barbed wire entanglement and led Bertin through the narrow alleyways that zigzagged across the steel network. The barbed wire entanglement was very wide and very new. ‘ASC job,’ Süßmann said, as a kind of compliment to Bertin. To their left was a ridge of high ground. They kept to the valley and hurried across the shelled areas, avoiding the broad road, which shimmered palely in the dark despite its parlous state. Their path then turned once again. In front of them, white in the distance, flares rose in the haze, shooting straight up or hovering in milky cascades. Telephone lines sometimes ran near them, but their well-trodden path constantly changed direction, though always heading downhill and to the south. They kept alongside earthen walls, trench walls, sometimes waist-high, sometimes neck-high. Then with the suddenness of an electric discharge, shots cracked at the front, wild as whiplash, and machine gun fire rattled. For a moment, Bertin stood watching the chains of red flashes as they traversed the valley, then a fist pressed his helmet against a mound of earth. Something whistled over their heads like scuttling rats and clattered down out of sight spraying them with loose earth.

‘A dud,’ said Süßmann beside him.

‘A dud can still take you out,’ a voice grumbled in a neighbouring shell-hole. Then the two men heard excited whispering nearby, but couldn’t follow it, for the gruesome churning of the machine guns had started up again, German guns this time.

‘Lieutenant, I’ll stay here,’ Father Lochner groaned in Kroysing’s ear.

‘Bad idea,’ was Kroysing’s emphatic reply. ‘You’re right in the middle of the shrapnel zone.’

‘But I can’t manage it,’ moaned the priest. ‘My legs won’t go any further.’

‘Nonsense, Reverend,’ said Kroysing. ‘Just a little attack of nerves. A wee nip will cure that,’ and he offered him his canteen. The aroma of cognac wafted out as he uncorked it. ‘Have a drink,’ he added in a calm, maternal voice tinged with mockery. ‘Only healthy men have nipped from that bottle.’ With shaking hands, the chaplain grasped the canteen by its felt cover, put it to his lips and took two sips, then a third. The liquor felt hot in his stomach. ‘Watch out. It works,’ said Kroysing, hooking the canteen back on to his belt. ‘You should’ve taken your quota before.’ Then he noticed that under his wrap the chaplain was worrying a silver cross with one hand and handing him something white and folded with the other.

‘You’d better take this slip of paper,’ he said. ‘It could be dangerous for you if your enemy got hold of it.’

Kroysing jerked round to face him, wild-eyed under his steel helmet. ‘Good Lord,’ he said, taking the paper and stuffing it inside his leather puttee. ‘Thank you. That could easily have looked like blackmail. But you’ll pass my message on verbally, won’t you, Reverend?’

‘If we get back in one piece,’ answered Lochner, already more composed. ‘Schnapps is one of God’s gifts.’

Three things were required to wage war, Kroysing muttered in reply, still disconcerted by his own carelessness: schnapps, tobacco and men. And then he leant his long frame over the earthen slope; it really had been a dud. Gratitude is a great virtue, he thought. That was a colossal act of stupidity. With that scrap of paper in his hand, Niggl could easily have proven that I had him moved to Douaumont purely out of private revenge and that I put him under pressure to sign a declaration that was a pack of lies. I was skating on thin ice there – and he wiped the sweat away from under his helmet. ‘Are you okay now?’ he asked the priest.

‘I’m okay.’

‘Let’s go then.’

They crawled down the last 1,000m, stooping for cover the whole way. When white flares shot up over the way, they halted unless they were in a particularly deep section of trench. Their narrow path, pitted with holes and buried in places from the gunfire, wound forwards through traverse trenches, giant mole heaps and smashed tunnels where black holes marked the entrances to the dugouts. Eventually, drenched in sweat, they caught sight of the backs of soldiers, boys really, and the curve of German steel helmets among the ridges of upturned earth. Suddenly, machine gun fire rattled near them. In a corner, smoking a pipe, sat a bearded sapper NCO, who’d been waiting for them.

‘Bang on time, Lieutenant,’ he grinned. ‘Everything’s fine here. The battalion is virtually set up. The officers are waiting for you in the big dugout.’ He spoke in an undertone and with a certain familiarity that didn’t seem to faze Kroysing. Then he frowned anxiously. ‘There seems to be a lot going on across the way. The Frogs are so bloody quiet. I think they’re listening to the racket of the relief troops arriving, and the new lot aren’t even in yet.’

‘Then we’ll have to blow some smoke in their eyes,’ answered Kroysing. ‘Father, why don’t you have a lie down? There’ll be a space in the next medical dugout. I’ll pick you up from the medical men later.’ He disappeared with the guide, and Lochner left with another man.

Bertin followed Süßmann through the deep, narrow cutting, above which the Milky Way hung like two balls of white smoke. Infantry men pushed past them, crawling out of dugouts and disappearing into others. In one place, some of them were using spades to widen a passage that incorporated a large shell hole further on. Everything was done wordlessly and as far as possible without a sound. In the former shell hole, a short, thick pipe such as Bertin had never seen before sat on a mount, and right beside it a newly dug tunnel slanted downwards. They sat down on two-handled wicker baskets filled with large shells: the lightweight mines.

‘If those are lightweight, I wouldn’t like to see the heavy ones,’ said Bertin.

A screen of wire and branches covered in earth protected the mine throwers from aerial view. Hot coffee was brought to them from the dugout. Süßmann suggested going down. Bertin asked to stay up. The cold, damp earth and the smell that escaped from it disgusted him. He watched the small, thin Saxon men at their posts in horror. There were so few of them, and their faces were wretched. This was the front – the grey Wall of Heroes that protected Germany’s conquests. They were already worn down and overextended. Gingerly sipping his hot coffee, Bertin asked Süßmann if the surrounding dugouts would withstand a bombardment.

Süßmann just laughed and said they were safe against shrapnel, nothing more. In an emergency, they might withstand one 7.5cm shell, but not 10. If the rain came, it would get inside. He pointed to the pale, hazy ball of the moon, which cast a faint glow, and said that rain was on its way as surely as their wages. The newly replenished battalion of over 700 men had 12 light and six heavy machine guns at its disposal, and with that it was expected to hold an area twice as wide as the previous month. And the French were always putting fresh divisions in the front line, and they withdrew their men after a short stint for a proper rest and a good feed. They didn’t undermine their nerves with inadequate rations of fat, poor quality jam and stale bread made with leftovers. The four mine throwers were to replace two batteries taken out of the line. Everyone was ready for peace, that much was clear, but it didn’t much look like peace. Men in helmets and caps kept rushing past them, stumbling and swearing under their breath. Like a dark cloud, danger, palpable to all, seemed to roll in across the upturned earth from the other side of the trenches. Two hundred metres of land is a broad stretch but for a bullet it’s nothing. Advancing infantrymen cover it in five minutes, a shell in a second. So this is the war at last, thought Bertin. Now you have it. You’re stuck on its outermost edge like a fly in glue. Your heart and lungs are pounding, and the enemy isn’t even doing anything. Pale light poured down from above, casting black shadows in the trench. Had they missed the sound of the rockets going up? There’d definitely be more action tonight. Bertin noticed that his knees and hands were trembling with suppressed tension. He made to leave his cover and climb up the recess cut into the trench wall.

‘Have you gone mad?’ Süßmann hissed in his hear. ‘They’ll be able to pick out your pale face against the black earth quite easily from over there with their night glasses.’

Nothing would happen in their sector, but if the French were paying attention the battalion that was being relieved might get some grief as the troops were being exchanged. Suddenly – and Bertin’s heart seemed to stop – the machine gun they had passed earlier spat out a furious volley. It thrust maliciously up into the night, though he didn’t see its fire. Three or four of the same weapons continued the noise. Nearby, rockets whistled up and released their signal lights, bathing the huddled soldiers’ faces in a strange red glow. Soon, a wild gurgling roared over their heads and there was a crash far in front of them.

‘Barrage fire,’ said Süßmann in Bertin’s ear. ‘It’s just for show to fool the Frogs.’

From the way the two Saxons had pressed themselves into the ground, Bertin could tell that they were frightened too – the guns often shot too short. What if the diversion worked and the French replied? It did work. Flashing and roaring ahead, with blinding light from the sides. Men in artillery caps appeared from the dugout with an aiming circle. Under the protection of the mine throwers’ screen, they sighted the flashes from the French guns and shouted figures to one another. Bertin wondered how long this terrible din would last, the explosions, flames, flickers, howling and droning in the starlit night. He couldn’t stand it. There was a thunderous ringing his ears, and the once repellent dugout now seemed like a refuge. He stumbled down the stairs, pushed aside a tarpaulin and saw brightness and men sitting and lying on wire grating, their weapons to hand beside them. A stearin cartridge on a box cast a thin glow, and the air underground was thick and smoky. The faces of the sappers, gunners and Saxon riflemen made him feel almost sick. Until now he had garlanded them with splendid delusions, draped them in noble titles. But no illusion could hold out here. The men in this boarded clay grave were just lost battalions, the sacrificed herds of world markets, which were currently experiencing a glut in human material. Crouched on a plank under the earth 200m from the enemy and yawning suddenly from exhaustion, he saw that even here the men were just doing their duty – nothing more than that.

The earth rumbled above him, chunks fell from the walls, dust rained down from the timbers and as the infantrymen calmly carried on smoking their cigarettes, he wondered hesitantly how he had come to see this truth. It hurt! It robbed you of the strength to endure life. Surely it couldn’t be the same everywhere else as in his own company. He must tell Kroysing about it. Was that Kroysing coming through the door? Yes, there was young Kroysing in his sergeant’s cap, smiling engagingly. Things were pretty jolly in the cellars at Chambrettes-Ferme. The sausage machines were rattling away and guts were being stretched for sausage skins, and on the door hung the new regulation about using human flesh, grey human flesh…

Sergeant Süßmann looked at Private Bertin’s face both in amusement and complete sympathy. He’d fallen abruptly asleep and his steel helmet had fallen from his head. Süßmann took Bertin’s hand and moved it to and fro, establishing that the boy had come through it all fine.

‘The relief of the battalion took place one and a half hours ahead of schedule. Nothing to report.’

^{CHAPTER SEVEN} The gift

AROUND 11PM, SÜSSMANN woke Bertin in darkness; the candle had burnt down and gone out. He’d been dreaming about an incredibly violent storm on Lake Ammer. Lightning seemed to whip up the expanse of water, and thunder echoed off the mountain walls against underwater banks.

‘Up you get,’ said Süßmann. ‘Big fireworks display. It’s worth a look.’

Bertin knew immediately where he was. His head hurt, but it would clear in the open air. Outside, the trench was full of men, all looking behind them. A roar like an organ playing filled the night with thunderous tones. Flames sprang up over the neighbouring sector. Fiery discharges rained down, methodically spread out across the approach routes and familiar hills and valleys. As the shells hit, they hurled up fiery gasses and earth in cloud-like columns. The howl as they approached, the pounding tide of vicious hissing, the ringing, rattling and manic cracking, made Bertin’s heart tremble, but he also pressed Süßmann’s arm in fascination as the full force of the human drive to destroy was unleashed – rejoicing in evil’s omnipotence.

A thin, bespectacled Saxon sergeant standing next to Bertin surprised him by calmly observing: ‘That’s what we can do, bastards that we may be.’

As Bertin looked at the man’s stubbly face under his helmet, his narrow cheekbones and shrewd eyes, and the two ribbons, black and white and green and white, in his top buttonhole, he felt a surge of pride and admiration for his comrades, these German soldiers with their sense of duty, their hopelessness, their grim courage. They’d seen it all.

Luckily, the first battalion was to get off lightly this time. It would all be over in 10 minutes, Süßmann shouted in his ear. Then, Bertin knew, the German artillery would take its turn, and this squaring of accounts would create more destruction – a new day of anti-creation.

In the meantime, the young Saxon calmly lit his pipe, and a couple of others shared his lighter. The wild noise gradually petered out. They could hear one another again. It was only above the Adalbert line that shrapnel was still exploding. That’s where the long 10cm guns were, said the Saxon. They’d obviously received a big batch of ammunition and were now getting rid of it. Of course, his neighbour confirmed. Otherwise, they’d have to take it back home if peace broke out that day. The young sergeant pooh-poohed this. Peace wouldn’t break out that quickly. Plenty of time to pour a few more pots of coffee before that happened. There were many more medals to be pocketed and bestowed before peace could be allowed to break out.

‘Of course, it’s not just medals,’ said the neighbour. Bertin listened up. These men were talking like Pahl, like the inn-keeper Lebehde, Halezinsky the gas worker and little Vehse from Hamburg. In the pallid darkness that had once more descended, their faces shimmered like masks under the sharp edges of their helmets.

The men who were still on duty looked ahead again, while the others began to vanish into the dugouts. The bespectacled Saxon had just expressed his amazement at Bertin’s cap and was asking what kinds of folks Süßmann and his lieutenant had brought to the front, when Father Lochner’s substantial shoulders came into view, topped by Kroysing’s tall form. Süßmann quickly kicked the Saxon in the shin, and he got the message equally quickly. ‘I’m a theology student too and I’ve never been out of Halle in my life,’ he said.

‘A colleague?’ asked the chaplain innocently.

‘Yes, Pastor, sir!’ replied the sergeant, standing to attention. Bertin bit back a grin. ‘Sir’ and ‘pastor’ didn’t go together.

Father Lochner didn’t notice. He wanted to be kind to the young man. ‘The hand of our Lord God will continue to protect you,’ he said and made to move on.

But in his polite voice and as if agreeing with the priest, the young theologian replied, ‘I almost believe that myself. Nothing will happen to us for the time being. The likes of us get killed on the morning of the armistice.’

Lochner twitched, said nothing and tried to move on. The Saxons nudged one another. As they moved on, Kroysing spoke into his companion’s ear, asking him if this sample of sentiment at the front was enough for him and if he’d like to head for home.

‘Ten minutes and a schnapps,’ the priest requested.

Kroysing was happy to oblige. ‘When will you speak to Herr Niggl?’ he asked casually as he unhooked his canteen.

Lochner’s face took on an imploring look. ‘Tomorrow afternoon,’ he promised. ‘As soon as I get back.’

Kroysing’s head revolved on his long neck like a lighthouse. He was looking for Bertin. ‘I want to gather in my chicks,’ he explained.

Sergeant Süßmann cocked his thumb Bertin’s direction. ‘He’s studying no man’s land.’

Bertin had forced his head into a gap in the screen above the mine throwers. Hands cupping his eyes, he peered into the night at the glinting barbed wire entanglements. The reflection from the explosions no longer blinded him. Far back to the right, German shells were now bursting. Something formless menaced in the distance, something dark, strange and fascinating. And he remembered a school excursion he’d gone on one morning as a 13-year-old to Three Emperors’ Corner, where the German Kaiser’s Reich met those of the Austrians and the Tsars behind the town of Myslowitz. The greenish waters of a stream called the Przemsa snaked between them. Nothing distinguished one bank of the stream from the other: flat green land, a railway bridge, a sandy path, and in the distance a wood. Only the uniform of the border Cossack was different from that of the German customs guard. But the young schoolboy had nonetheless sensed the foreign on the other side of the stream, another country both threatening and fascinating, where the language was unintelligible, the customs different and the people uneducated, perhaps even dangerous. Borders, thought Bertin. Borders! What tales we’ve been told! What had that clever Saxon said when the French were shooting? ‘Bastards that we may be.’ We: that’s what it was all about. Who had held his canteen to a Frenchman’s thirsty lips? And now this…? There was no hope of getting to the truth.

Kroysing watched his charge approvingly. He’d brought him here partly to study his behaviour at the edge of the abyss. No doubt about it: he’d done well. Let him go back to his stuffy old company, he thought, and then my suggestion will seem to him like a message from heaven.

‘Why are you shaking your head, Bertin?’ he asked behind his back.

‘I can’t see anything,’ Bertin answered, climbing down carefully.

‘Reason should have told you that would be the case.’

‘Sometimes we believe appearances more than reason.’

‘All right,’ said Kroysing. ‘Now we can get some sleep.’

On the way back, the moon and stars lit the pitted area. Refreshed from his sleep, Bertin gladly breathed in the air, which cooled as they pushed on. The burnt smoke from the explosives hadn’t blown this way; the night wind had driven it to the river. After half an hour of walking in silence, Kroysing tapped Bertin on the shoulder and pulled him back a little.

‘I don’t know if we’ll get a chance to speak tomorrow, as you’re sleeping in Süßmann’s billet and clearing off early,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen what kinds of nice surprises the Frogs have in store for us. We got off lightly today; tomorrow could be a different story. For that reason, I’d like to prevail on you again in relation to our small family matter. There are a couple of objects in my desk drawer that belonged to my brother and a couple of papers that Judge Advocate Mertens must receive as soon as someone has signed a certain harmless slip of paper. If I’m not able to do it, I’ll rely on you. Will that be okay?’ he asked urgently.

And after a moment’s thought Bertin said, ‘That’ll be okay.’

‘Excellent,’ said Kroysing. ‘Then all that remains is for me to carry out a commission on behalf of my brother, who sends you his fountain pen through me.’ Kroysing’s big hand held out a black rod.

Bertin was taken aback. His eyes under the rim of his helmet timidly sought those of Kroysing, whose war-like face was dusky in the gloaming. ‘Please, don’t,’ he said quietly. ‘This belongs to your parents.’

‘It belongs to you,’ retorted Kroysing. ‘I’m executing his will.’ Bertin hesitantly took the gift from Kroysing’s fingers and looked at it, concealing his superstitious feelings. ‘I hope it will serve you longer than it did the youngster and remind you of the Kroysings’ gratitude every time you put it to paper. A writer and a pen like that go together.’

Bertin thanked him uncertainly. The pressure of the long, hard object in the breast pocket of his tunic felt new and strange: the Kroysings held him fast.