When he looked back on that whole period, he realised that, oddly enough, his art books had helped to sharpen his sense of the authentic. Painters’ creations don’t lie. Their absolute devotion to what is real, their powerful desire to reveal form, in the landscape as much as in figures, had simply made him more sensitive to the embellishments, calculated lies and biased quarter truths that people made do with day after day, month after month, in politics as in the army bulletins. But he could no longer make do with that. Faced with the incredible he had begun to investigate. And once his eyes had been ripped open he couldn’t shut them again. Until he reached a point where it became blindingly clear to him that he couldn’t go on. Until his disgust with the whole business knocked him over – literally. His life did not have many roots. He had no interest in women or the usual male enjoyments and distractions. His father had both replaced such pleasures for him and devalued them. He had loved travelling, but after the destruction of this war there wouldn’t be many places a German could go without feeling ashamed. He had thought himself to be in the service of the intellect and truth but had seen them abused and defiled. Only music remained to him, and that tragic existential force was no longer enough to keep him going. Beyond the soft lit walls of the concert hall, a world of barbarism began; beneath the alluring strains of 50 violins and cellos echoed the groans of the exiled, the slain and the dispossessed, and he would never again be able to look at a conductor’s raised baton without thinking of all the compliant minds that studiously marched in time with the lies fed to the public, all those who heard the beat and followed. Followed, followed, Volk, follow, follow.
When Sergeant Kroysing’s case first came before him, he was initially surprised, then scandalised. He wasn’t deterred by its difficulties. He believed amends could be made; it would be difficult, but not impossible. For about a fortnight now, he’d known it wouldn’t be possible. The letters forwarded by the sapper lieutenant hadn’t given him the necessary leverage, and then he vanished after the fall of Douaumont. His unit provisionally reported him missing, as the fort’s garrison had been blown to bits in October. Subsequent weeks of searching ended hopefully: Lieutenant Kroysing was alive. There had been a confirmed sighting in a dugout in the Pepper ridge lines. The sapper commander had received Kroysing’s report and knew where he was. Until a fortnight previously when those German lines also fell in the fresh French attack. Since then there had been no sign of him. The last news of him had come from one of his NCOs, who had seen him disappearing into an ice-covered shell hole during a French bombardment. Lieutenant Kroysing was again missing, but this time the tone was hopeless. Hard to see how he could have reached safety in an area under continual French machine-gun fire. No, the Kroysing brothers were dead, and justice was unattainable even for an individual within his own nation. What hope was there then among nations? None. ‘None,’ said Judge Advocate Mertens under his breath in the darkening room, and he heard the strings of his piano vibrate slightly with the echo of that terrible word.
Yes, C.G. Mertens had grown ears. He no longer believed people’s claims or their denials. They did not give the complete picture. No one cares to admit that a loved one’s case is hopeless – not metaphorically but literally. And this wasn’t about a beloved person but about the prerequisite for all that one loved: the homeland, the land of one’s birth, the Fatherland, Germany.
This clean-shaven man, with his scholarly head and fine gold-rimmed spectacles, shivered. Headquarters had installed an ugly but efficient little coal stove in the black and white stone fireplace, the same sort as currently heated many a German home. Mertens pulled his armchair nearer to the reddish glow flickering through the vents in the nickel-plated door, sat down and warmed his splayed hands. He relaxed back into the low padded chair. Meaningless scraps of verse ran through his mind from poets who were still alive or whose work has been much discussed when, as a young student, he began to suck up the joys of knowledge and intellectual life: ‘…it will not be long/Till neither moon nor stars/But only black night stands above us in the sky… The crows are cawing/And flapping homewards towards the town/The snow is near at hand / Happy is he that has a home still… We listen gratefully to the rustle of the wind/Gleams of sunlight flicker through the leaves/And we look up and listen as one by one/The ripe fruits patter to the ground…’
He didn’t have a home any more. Why kid himself? He could have chosen another day to resign once and for all. But now was as good a time as any. No one would disturb him until midday tomorrow. And if the officers went on the lash, as they usually did, probably not then either. Koschmieder, the doctor, was fond of saying that a man who really needs a doctor will send for him two or even three times. As there was no need to worry about medical bills behind the lines, officers became ill just to pass the time. He’d have time to consider his options and reach a decision.
The Kroysing case had opened his eyes. Then from somewhere or other he’d heard a report – disputed and denied – that the Germans had also committed arson and murder when they invaded defenceless little Luxembourg, which had almost been an ally. This news had awakened the historian in C.G. Merten, who doesn’t believe any statement until he has checked his sources. Luxembourg was close by and he had the use of an official car. He’d spent many Sundays and weekdays in the areas of Luxembourg where the Germans had broken through, first in uniform and then in civilian clothes. At first he only saw ruins and rubble, which could have been caused by military action. But he began to find the iron silence of the local mayors and residents disturbing. They obviously thought he was a spy. But he found the information he sought among the crude ironwork crosses in the churchyard, adorned with offensively ugly porcelain medallions of the departed created from photographs. A great many of these worthless memorials were from August and September 1914… In Arlon he had finally met a reasonably friendly American professor, who was travelling through the ravaged area, escorted by an officer, as a delegate of the American Red Cross. His job was to collect information to counteract the incredibly skilful horror stories with which Reuters and the British press were bombarding right-thinking American citizens, in particular American Jews who were fond of Germany. It took Professor Mertens four hours, from 9pm until 1am, to convince Professor Mac Corvin that unlike other German scholars he’d remained loyal to the truth. Then Professor Corvin opened his heart. In Luxembourg alone over 1,350 houses had been burnt to the ground and at least 800 people shot. In Belgium and northern France, the same methods had brought much worse results. The newspaper correspondents might have exaggerated certain details, but the reports were basically true.