‘You’ve got everything here,’ marvelled Bertin.
‘Resurrection stores,’ replied Süßmann. ‘We take up a fair bit of room in this old colliery, don’t we?’ Right at the back in the uncertain light from the lamps the Bavarian ASC men were handing in their tools. ‘They’ll get 12 hours’ rest now,’ said Süßmann. ‘The lieutenant takes damn good care no work gets sent their way in their free time. Captain Niggl finds it all rather surprising.’
‘And how deep into the earth does the place go?’
‘Deep enough for Sunday and Monday,’ answered Süßmann. ‘There’s 3m of concrete above our heads and an entire barracks, armoured towers, machine gun emplacements – in short, every possible comfort. Our lieutenant lives here.’
Bertin entered a vault and stood to attention. Lieutenant Kroysing was sitting by a window, an embrasure facing a wall split by two direct hits. ‘Nice open view,’ he laughed, welcoming Bertin. ‘I can even see a bit of sky from here.’
Bertin thanked him for getting him a nice job. The lieutenant nodded; he hadn’t acted out of kindness but so that there would be at least one person left who could explain the whole business to Judge Advocate Mertens in Montmédy. For it was down to him to clear Sergeant Kroysing’s name. ‘My father will get over Christoph’s death and mine if I kick the bucket. The rank and file march with death now. No exceptions, you understand, no special fuss. But if it gets around in Bavaria – and it will get around – that a Kroysing only escaped sanction from a court martial because he died, he’ll feel like a discredited outcast, and I’d like to spare him that.’
Bertin looked into his sallow face with compassion. It seemed even more gaunt than last time. It was terrible, he said in an undertone, to have to deal with such nastiness in a private capacity as well. Kroysing dismissed this. It wasn’t terrible at all. It was a game and it was revenge, and in that moment his face looked as pitiless to Bertin as the cratered earth outside.
The room was lit by pale daylight. Sergeant Süßmann brought in a dish of warm water. Lieutenant Kroysing took a couple of sheets of blotting paper from a drawer; it had taken more than a fortnight to get hold of them. Then with his long, slender fingers he unwrapped his brother’s letter, now gone stiff, from a white handkerchief and immersed it in the water. Three heads, two brown-haired and one blonde, pressed close together and watched as a pink then dark red colouring pervaded the water and settled on the bottom of the dish.
‘Careful now,’ said Süßmann. ‘Leave the preparation to me.’
‘Preparation. That’s a good one,’ muttered Kroysing.
It was a delicate businesss to make it possible to unfold the letter without destroying the paper or washing the ink away. The timing had to be exact. The dead man had used an army postal service letter card. You could write on both sides and on the inside of the envelope, and it was all held together with glue. Warily, Süßmann swayed the paper back and forwards. Soon the water was entirely brown.
‘May I pour it away?’ he asked.
‘Shame,’ answered Kroysing. ‘Now I won’t be able to make anyone drink it.’
Süßmann silently emptied the dish into a bucket and poured new water on the letter, whose gummed sides were already starting to loosen. The letter softened, and a third lot of water remained clear. The pages were laid between blotting paper. The writing was only slightly blurred.
‘Good ink,’ said Kroysing flatly. ‘The lad loved clear, black writing on the page. Do you want to hear what it says?’
This is it, thought Bertin, his breath catching. Who would have thought it possible?
‘Dearest Mother,’ Eberhard Kroysing read, ‘forgive me for writing to bother you with my troubles this time. Up until now, I’ve made my situation sound rosier than it is. We were brought up to tell the truth and never to shrink from pursuing what is right; fear God more than people, you used to say. And although I no longer believe in God, as you well know, that doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten everything that was ingrained in us as children. In April, I wrote a letter to Uncle Franz describing to him how our NCOs misuse the men’s rations and live it up at their expense. Uncle Franz knows how important an unblemished sense of justice is to the men’s morale. Things are what he would call a bloody scandal. My letter was opened by our censor. Papa will explain to you why a court martial investigation was then started, and not of the NCOs but of me, and why our battalion doesn’t want this investigation to go ahead. As a result, I’ve been shifted on a permanent basis to the most dangerous place there is. If you only knew, dear mother, how much it pains me to write this. Now you’ll be sick with worry and sleep badly, imagining me already in the ground. Don’t believe it is so, dear mother. I appeal to your clever heart. I’ve been living here for two months in the cellar of a big farmhouse, and nothing has happened to me yet. You can tell from that how little chance there is that something will happen. But it can’t last forever or I might come a cropper after all. Please therefore wire Uncle Franz immediately. He must get me brought before the court martial in Montmédy as a matter of urgency. He must give the court martial my exact address, because I suspect Captain Niggl has had me declared “whereabouts unknown” or some funny business like that.’ (‘Well spotted, lad,’ muttered the older brother as he turned the page.) ‘He mustn’t allow himself to be fobbed off. He must phone the court martial immediately and support me to the hilt. He doesn’t have to worry. I’m exactly the same as I was two years ago when I volunteered. My sense of responsibility simply wouldn’t allow me to look on in silence. I’ve tried to rope Eberhard in, but he’s extremely busy – you know where he is and what he’s doing – and as an officer he shouldn’t be getting involved in my business. I haven’t heard from him for a couple of weeks. And I’m not sending this letter to you directly but through the good offices of an ASC private and scholar whom I got to know today. Act quickly and prudently, dear Mama, guiding light of our family, as you always do. You’ve had a hard time with us. But when we’re back and there’s peace, we’ll understand what life is worth, how good it is to be home, and what we have in each other. Because a great deal has turned out to be lies, much more than you realise, much more than ought to be. We’ll all have to start again to spare the world a repeat of what we’ve seen here with our own eyes, done with our own hands and suffered with our own bodies. But the mutual love between parents and children – that has proved durable and dependable, and that’s where I’ll finish. Always your loving son, Christoph. PS: Give Papa a big kiss and tell him he can write to me himself.’
The audience of two was silent. The faint rumble from the daily artillery fire rattled the closed windows. ‘If you think about it,’ said Eberhard Kroysing, ‘if you really think about it, we are no closer to the earth’s surface than the author of this letter – with one small difference that Captain Niggl is soon going to know all about.’
Suddenly, Bertin ducked. A brief, wild howl. Then a shattering crash nearby that echoed dully against the walls. Then a second. ‘This all helps,’ smiled Kroysing.
CHAPTER THREE
Captain Niggl
CAPTAIN NIGGL— AFTER the march-in he’d lain down to sleep with a mixture of elation and disgust on an iron bed, which, to his eternal relief was tucked under a white-washed vaulting of reassuring thickness. ‘Safe wee billet, Douaumont, isn’t it?’ he kept saying to the garrison commander’s adjutant in his outmoded Bavarian accent. At least there was a good cart load of cement above his head. If he managed to sleep here for two weeks he’d definitely get the Iron Cross, first class and become a great man in Weilheim for the rest of time – and not just in Weilheim. Such were his thoughts. He’d convinced himself that the men of the Third Company, who were billeted in an enormous vaulted casemate in the same wing and had received hot coffee, bread and tinned dripping after their night march, would sleep reasonably well on their three-high wire bunks and sacks of wood shavings and that their first duty the following morning would be to scour out their new quarters.