CHAPTER FOUR
A winter walk
A MAN’S POWERS of resistance are limited. However, it often takes a while for him to realise that; others usually notice first. Certain types who retain a sort of nostalgia for suffering from their childhood sometimes astonish the world with their martyrdom and heroic endurance. When they break, however, they break completely – it comes as a surprise because their intellectual and spiritual capabilities have been eroding away imperceptibly.
A man was strolling along the road from Vilosnes to Sivry, enjoying the soft of golden light of a late February noontime. He grinned quietly to himself and whistled along with the sparrows, yellowhammers and tits. He had a job to do of course; he wasn’t just walking about enjoying the charms of nature. It was too cold for that, for the frost was relentless. The nature of this happy man’s business was clear from the objects in his right hand: an oval French hand grenade and a long, mushroom-shaped shell fuse of pure brass. ‘Take these to Herr Knappe,’ the bewhiskered Sergeant Barkopp had told Private Bertin. ‘He can have a sniff at them. Mind you hold them up the way I’ve given them to you. You know why.’ Private Bertin did know why. The fuses were awkward customers. They’d explode on you if you changed their position such that the needle inside fell forwards or backwards of the angle at which the damned thing had lain since it was fired or thrown. At first, Private Bertin walked along with the two deadly objects in his right hand. The frost bit into his immobile fingers, and a glove was no help. After a while, Private Bertin started to think this was stupid. Besides, he wanted to be able to swing his arms and jot down any ideas or lines of poetry that might occur to him on such a lovely, clear day. Suddenly, he decided to shove the two explosive machines in his trouser pockets, one in the right and one in the left, making sure that up stayed up and down down. But what if he slipped and fell? The road beside the Meuse was frozen solid and icy, making a slip possible. And he had to cross the river at Sivry on a long wooden bridge, a pontoon bridge to be precise, resting on boats and often pretty slippery. But what the heck? Private Bertin wanted to have warm hands and to feel free and to be as comfortable as possible. Between leaving Sergeant Barkopp and reaching Sergeant Knappe he wanted to open up as a private person. It was a wonderful thing to be alone. All a person needed was to be able to walk and dream.
His thoughts came thick and fast. The street followed the Meuse, an idyllic river, lined with trees and bushes and frozen solid. From the far bank, came the occasional clear, metallic rattle of gunfire or an explosion – both far off. The left bank was known as ‘Hill 304’ and ‘Mort Homme’; on the top the French and Germans faced each other with hand grenades. However, a recent report had said that the Frogs were bombarding Romagne, as the railway station there rankled with them. Whatever, Romagne still glimmered back there somewhere, and the men from Bertin’s working party could still buy fat substitute and chocolate there. Those 30 or so men were starving, like the entire army. When the two-wheeled limbers had been blown to bits somewhere on the way to Etraye and there were dead horses lying about, infantrymen, sappers, gunners and ASC men had rushed towards their still-warm carcases from craters and dugouts all around and used knives to tear the spare flesh from their skeletons, then carried the meat triumphantly back to their small iron stoves in buckets and canteens to roast. But that paled into insignificance compared with one company excursion this side of Etraye when the occupants of the large barracks had feasted on roast meat from a forbidden and much more disgusting source. There was a knacker’s yard down there a few kilometres to the rear, which gave off a dreadful stench all day long. Long dead horses with bloated stomachs were burnt there for manure, glue and grease, and their hides were used for leather. Eating their flesh was forbidden. But, guess what, it was eaten, for the cold kindly kept it fresh and the ASC men preferred a stay in hospital with meat poisoning and attendant torments to their regular lives. Hence the bonds of comradeship had long since frayed away; anyone who got a food package now was best advised to eat it as quickly as possible, because he wouldn’t find it in his rucksack or bed or wherever he’d hidden it when he got back from work. That’s how life was now, and it somehow had to be endured. It wouldn’t last much longer though. A miracle had happened in the meantime. By all accounts, Russia was no longer heading towards a crisis; it had collapsed. The German attacks had taken their toll. The Russians had had enough. They were making democratic demands, and that was the beginning of the end. Of course pessimists such as Halezinsky, know-alls such as Lebehde and scardy cats such as good, old Pahl maintained that the French, British and Japanese military missions would now get the upper hand in Russia and step up hostilities. But the Russians wouldn’t be so stupid. They’d tell their allies to get stuffed and throw down their arms. Yes, they’d all be home by Easter, and if not by Easter then by Whitsun. Private Bertin smiled to himself thinking about it as he stumbled over the deep frozen ruts in the road.
The Meuse now lay before Bertin. He had half a mind to walk across the ice so he didn’t have to go the long way round to the bridge. Surely he’d be able to slide over very easily on his hobnailed boots. ‘Skidding’ they called it at home in Kreuzberg. Ha, ha, ha, he thought, where are Goethe and his friend Klopstock now? He really felt like putting on a pair of skates and sweeping through the meadows and alder trees, rapturously free, composing poems in praise of ice skating. The French would get a bit of a shock if someone came sweeping straight into Verdun in a great arc! Surely they’d be chivalrous enough to let him go on his way unharmed. But he walked obediently along the river’s edge to the wooden bridge and sticking close to the hand rail crossed into another command, a completely different zone. As he crossed, he tossed some twigs on to the ice, and there was a dull echo deep beneath the surface as they bounced. On the other bank, a square of ice had been cut away and you could see the black water moving past, icy and silent.
Since the dismantling of the Steinbergquell depot, Sergeant Knappe had been living in a barracks at the bottom of a gully overgrown with bare bushes and trees, and was in charge of the field gun ammunition. His eyes widened in astonishment when Private Bertin nonchalantly handed him the two explosive devices to examine. Bertin must be off his head, he muttered as he carefully carried them through to the testing tent, which was kept apart from the ammunition, telling Bertin to disappear for half an hour. Bertin longed for a heat and some hot coffee and he soon got them from Knappe’s assistants, a couple of artillerymen. Little Herr Knappe had always been thin, but his cheeks had never been as hollow as they were now, and his goatee beard had grown appreciably. They’re starving here too, thought Bertin, as he said goodbye. You can see it. But Herr Knappe’s emaciation was actually due to quite different reasons than hunger: love of his country and despair. He was an excellent design engineer and using a couple of pictures from newspapers had designed one of those all-terrain combat vehicles with caterpillar tracks instead of wheels that the Entente alliance had been using recently. He had sent the drafts to the Supreme Army Command and had received, through Colonel Stein, a scornful reply: such toys could happily be left to the enemy. Let them crawl into those iron dustbins and bring their coffins with them. German infantrymen had no need of such vehicles and the ammunitions expert should get on with his job and leave the rest to the Supreme Army Command. This grieved Herr Knappe, and ever since then he’d been sleeping badly and had lost his appetite and interest in playing chess; where would it all end?