The track that formed the gunners’ route forked off to the east in the middle of a desolate valley floor. Wild Boar gorge opened off the the right, they said. It was the third one along and quite narrow, easily recognisable by all its greenery. He’d find it. Despite his rucksack and tunic, Bertin walked very quickly. For the first time, he found himself alone under the open sky in the flashing sunlight. Death might crash down upon him at any moment from the summer air. He had to summon all his courage. He cursed his stupidity for following this order simply because he wanted Eberhard Kroysing to have a good opinion of him. Footprints everywhere between the shell holes. Who wouldn’t get lost here? Sweat stuck to the lenses of his glasses, and his hands shook as he cleaned them. The deathly silence frightened him; every sound that wafted over the ridge frightened him; when a plane appeared up above, he felt like throwing himself to the ground – he was too short-sighted to make out if it was German or French. He scurried on, teeth clenched on his pipe, pursued by his humpbacked shadow, just as one of his forebears might have dragged his wares from farm to farm in the mountains of Austrian Silesia in the time of the empress Maria Theresa. He counted the openings in the land ahead: one was already behind him, there was one opposite and two shimmered in the sunlight ahead. He looked at his watch as if that might help him. His heart thumped wildly on account of his load and from loneliness. If he hadn’t been thoroughly used to crushing his internal demons, he would’ve turned round and not carried out his orders. He rested briefly at the edge of the next shell hole, drank a couple of slugs of lukewarm coffee from his canteen, relit his pipe and forced himself to breathe calmly. At last he was steeped in solitude – as he’d longed to be. He cursed himself and called himself an ass. He was like a peasant from the countryside blundering about in the bustle of city traffic for the first time. The peasant is frightened of the cars, trams and hurrying people and doesn’t dare to ask his way. He feels like he’s fallen to earth from the moon and when he finally does open his mouth, he finds he’s already at his destination. Bertin narrowed his eyes and shaded them with his hands. That there, diagonally to the right, could be the opening of Wild Boar gorge. He set off at a trot, bounding up the hillside then slowing down on the valley floor. A tangle of green beckoned to him. The chopped and scattered remains of felled trees with terrible butchered trunks covered the slope to his right. Pale, yellowed leaves covered the branches and bisected crowns. A profusion of young shoots, dried rose hips and beech saplings that soared like flag poles pushed through them above shell holes as white as bones. A German bombardment must have caused this. The slope was open to the north. The southern side had been similarly ravaged by the French. There the mown down trees had larger, greener leaves and were piled up horizontally.
Suddenly a sign with an arrow rose up in front of him: ‘Wild Boar gorge! Lower reaches may be subject to enemy observation’. Bloody hell, he thought and feeling relieved and worried at the same time, he set off at a trot through the fallen trees and found a footpath. A few minutes later, something screamed past. He was down before he knew it, pressed against a beech tree with his rucksack thumping into the nape of his neck. A dull thud on the hillside behind him, then a second. He waited. No explosion. Duds, he thought with relief. The French were using new American ammunition, and it was useless. The howling of the shells alone, that desolate, ripping sound, had got to him this time, and he hurried on, his hands filthy from the swampy ground. The dead trees struck him as unearthly. How would this destruction of nature ever be made good? A minute later, the valley took a turn: pristine wood, primaeval.
He was surrounded by green and shadows. Birds called in the beech tops. Bundles of young shoots as thin as fingers or children’s arms rose up beside the sun-dappled tree trunks high enough to open their leaves to the light. Bramble bushes spread out their tendrils, heaving with late flowers and pink and reddish black fruits. The steep slope shone green with the sword-shaped leaves of the lily of the valley. Hawthorn and barberry bushes intertwined, and the feathery bracken fluttered above the moss and stones. It was amazing— like a mountain wood on a holiday walk at home. It was wonderful to sit there with his rucksack propped against a stone and his stick between his knees, free from thought, relaxed. The air among the tree trunks was cool and refreshing.
Five minutes later, Bertin again came across the light railway track, a branch line, and a blockhouse with a corrugated iron roof. At last! He reported military style to a corporal, a bearded man, who was sitting by the door cutting a stick.
‘Ah, here you are,’ the corporal said equably.
He had a Baden accent, as did his colleague, who came over, barefoot and in shirt-sleeves, pleased that the new third man had actually arrived. Bertin was asked if he could play skat – he could – and if he’d brought a lot of lice with him. They said he’d be able to keep clean there. Thank God, said Bertin.
At a push, the two reservists from the Landsturm could’ve managed alone. They only had one fear: being recalled. The telephone box, which was looked after by the railway service, did indeed only have eight switches, but someone had to stay awake day and night in case one of the switches dropped. Bertin checked over his new bed, hung his rucksack on the post, unrolled his blankets and unpacked his smaller items: washing things, writing things, smoking things and a picture of his wife in a small, round frame. This would be his home for the next fortnight.
Just before 6pm, he put a call through to the sapper depot at Douaumont at the suggestion of the corporal. He was called Friedrich Strumpf and he was a park-keeper in Schwetzingen, not far from Heidelberg. When Bertin spoke into the black mouthpiece and asked to report to Lieutenant Kroysing, the man from Baden looked at him suspiciously. The new boy seemed to have fancy friends. After a while, Sergeant Süßmann answered: the lieutenant sent his best wishes and he, Süßmann, would pick Bertin up at a convenient time the following afternoon. Happy working until then. ‘Fine,’ said Bertin. He then set about reassuring his new colleagues that he was an all right sort.
He offered the men from Baden a cigar, chatting away about how he’d swum in the river Neckar in 1914, and describing the castle grounds at Schwetzingen. They contained a mosque, didn’t they, built by the prince-elector Karl Theodor? And beautiful birds kept in an aviary. There was also a Chinese pavilion and a little marble bath. After five minutes of this, he had won Strumpf the park-keeper’s heart. Strumpf beamed. Soon he was showing Bertin a picture of his two children – a boy with a satchel and a 10-year-old girl holding a cat in her arms – and enlightening him about to the character of the third man, a freckled, sandy-haired tobacco worker from Heidelberg called Kilian. Kilian was quick-tempered and argumentative and didn’t like to be contradicted but he was a good comrade when you knew how to take him.
That afternoon, Bertin learnt what his duties would be, which batteries were firing nearby, when the French shot and what their targets were, how the land lay. Douaumont was to the south-west, and to the north-east, behind them beyond the great depression, was the Ornes valley, and Bezonvaux, or what was called Bezonvaux, was practically due east. To their left, the French were attacking an artillery position, and three-quarters of an hour to the front were the field howitzers. They sometimes got post from them; they brought it past with their ammunition. If they didn’t show up for a couple of days, you had to remind them. They were a dour lot, Poles from the Russian border, and when they spoke, the words clattered from their mouths like bricks, but their lieutenant was nice and bored to death over there. Schanz was his name.