Still in deep shock from this, Professor Mertens then had to deal with the case of Corporal Himmke from the Montmédy field bakery, which seemed to confirm his worst fears. While drunk, the man had boasted about his heroic conduct during the battle of the Marne when the village of Sommeilles was burnt down. He and two comrades had burnt six people alive, a grandmother, mother and four grandchildren, who had taken refuge in the cellar of their house. In his naïvety, this blabbermouth had thought it would help if he could prove that what he’d said was true and call witnesses to show that the men had been ordered to burn the village in terms that put little value on the lives of the peasants and their womenfolk. Judge Advocate Mertens saw it that way too and conducted the investigation with a certain hidden fervour. But the officers from Himmke’s unit who were to attend the court martial saw things quite differently, and the communications inspectorate, as the highest authority, backed them up. The man wasn’t to be punished because he’d committed a crime, though they did condemn his crime, but because he’d boasted about it, with the result that the unsavoury matter became widely known, bringing Germany’s conduct of the war into disrepute.
‘We all know that all kinds of unpleasant things went on,’ said one officer privately, ‘but that that bastard should talk about it – he definitely deserves a good thumping for that.’ And a couple of days later when Himmke was collecting the rest of his things from the bakery at nightfall, he was taken from his Landsturm escort by some unknown cavalrymen, and the following day he appeared in the Montmédy garrison hospital having been beaten to a pulp. What was that? It was war. From the point of view of legal history – and at this Mertens, who was warmer now, smiled to himself – there were two strands to justice: inviolate legal certainty, which came from outside, and the laws of revenge and retribution, based on the best interests of a given fighting unit or group. The two were cunningly interwoven such that to the outside world a façade of European civilisation was formally maintained, while behind it raged the impulses and passions that the process of civilisation was intended to control. The Bible and the human conscience demanded one sort of justice. Several other sorts were permitted by contemporary professors and current conditions. Elements of legal practice that countries had surreptitiously allowed before 1914, but had been ashamed of and disclaimed, now shamelessly reigned, though they were still disclaimed, and there seemed to be no restraining power to punish the abuses and put a stop to them. There was gruesome evidence of this in the story of the Belgian deportations, which had upset the European public in recent months, and Judge Advocate Mertens with them, in the punishment camp in Montmédy citadel, the Kroysing case, the submarine war – everything. Hundreds of thousands of civilians arbitrarily removed to Germany to provide slave labour for the law and peace breaker. Hopeless protests from neutral states against these abductions, conducted in the style of Arab slave traders or African rulers, designed to benefit German industrialists and army units short of men. Dark rumours about hundreds of deaths caused by shell fire, malnutrition and disease in the concentration camps. Was that commendable? How could you square that with German culture, with the polished performances of classical dramas put on in the theatres of Berlin, Dresden and Munich?
Well, you could square anything, it seemed. Fur coats and no knickers, his Auntie Lottchen used to say when she saw her little nephew’s neat desk, then pulled out his messy desk drawer. The punishment camp in the citadel had been set up in retaliation for the abuse of German prisoners of war that certain correspondents were supposed to have observed in France and as a way of applying counter pressure. The French government had denied the reports, and the German military administration had believed the reports blindly and ordered one of the courtyards in Montmédy citadel, which was about three-quarters the height of a man, to be covered over with barbed wire and used for French prisoners. They had to bend over double to move about. It was unwatchable.
Mertens, who as a judge advocate was not without influence, had tried to have the camp closed down, but in vain. First, he was told, the French must learn how to treat Germans properly. The idea that information should be checked had entirely disappeared. When he asked if there was any proof, they just shook their heads. With his Moltke-like face, he was seen as an old traditionalist who was obviously overworked and had better grab some leave. No worries, he was going to grab some— the only question was how. The world exuded horror and could only become more horrific, because it no longer contained any cleansing, atoning force: no church, no prophets, no reflection or repentance – and no notion that such things were needed. The world was inordinately proud of its own existence, and it would remain so in peacetime, if peace ever came. He, Mertens, had to go. He was a stain on this world that was so gloriously in agreement with itself. There was a level of shame that was deadly, because it didn’t come from one event or action, but from the very source of one’s existence: the era, the nation, the race – call it what you will. Plenty of people would pass from life to death in cities large and small this New Year’s Eve in the normal course of things – why not him too? There was no shame in standing and falling for the civilisation you loved, silently and with no fuss. He just wasn’t sure how to do it.
He stood up, feeling better now. He was a man who needed clarity. He lit the shaded lamps, the candles on the piano and the night light. He drank a glass of the French liqueur he kept for visitors, then a second. It tasted good. He collected together the things he’d laid out earlier. He took his matt black service revolver, a modern pistol, from his open desk drawer and placed it on a silver platter beside the poisonous sleeping pills he’d gradually accumulated. In Germany, you could only get them with a doctor’s prescription. Citizens had more freedom in France, even when it came to death. As a Prussian officer, it was his duty to choose the weapon. If he was going to die, he should do it properly. But as an intellectual man, averse to violence and destruction, he preferred poison. As his father’s son, he had paid his father far too much regard while he was alive, silently conforming to his wishes. Should he pay him regard one last time and do as convention demanded? Or should he perform this last of all human actions as he saw fit? To ask the question was to answer it. If he had paid his father less regard, been less the well-behaved son, been less sensitive to the rough and tumble of life, had engaged with the world as vigorously as many of his boyhood friends had done, then who knew what his life might have been like and if he would now be facing the silence of eternal rest. Great was Diana of the Ephesians and Cybele the Great Mother, but great too was the consolation provided by music, the mysterious source of existence that was expressed both in the remarkable ratios of planetary orbits and in the simple metrics and proportions of harmonies, through which the unknown could be measured. Vibration and gradation were all. Physicists said everything could be reduced to movements in the unknown ether, in its force fields, which themselves could transform masses and solids into pulsating, substanceless and therefore spiritual matter. Then why not into something akin to music? Why not into music itself? Wasn’t there something in those remarkable sequences of resonant air, vibrating strings and complex interrelationships that went beyond noise and air? Didn’t we see behind the secrets of advanced mathematics when we lost ourselves in music? Physics had a great future, he sensed, though he understood little of it. The physicist Einstein, raised in Switzerland but whom he’d known in Berlin, had changed our world view, freeing it from the physical and introducing with his spiritual concepts a new way of thinking, akin to that of Husserl in Göttingen. And he loved music. Perhaps music and the solace it provided led us to an existence more real than our earthly existence of flesh and nerves, making us aware, through the physical instrument of the ear, of a wider universe, the other stars and better worlds that Shakespeare, pointing to the night sky, had described as ‘patines of bright gold’ that move ‘like an angel sings’. Be that as it may, he knew how he was going to move: while making music. He would put a sleeping draught on the piano and drink it when he felt like it. It would be a sort of deathly refreshment, and then he would pass into a world of unknown consonances and harmonies, through the portal of those he loved the most, because they were dark and ambivalent, but also modern and glorious: Brahms’ quartet in A minor.