Half an hour later, Private Bertin, now warmed up, reported back to him. The hand grenade was gone, but Knappe handed him the fuse by the tips of his fingers. ‘There,’ he said simply. ‘Drop it in the water from the bridge. But watch out it doesn’t turn round, lad, or you’ll have drunk your last cup of coffee on this earth.’
Somewhat sobered by the little bearded man’s stern tone and serious eyes, Bertin trotted off. On the bridge, he did as he’d been told, but as the water closed over the accursed thing, his thoughts darted off in a completely different direction. The gunners, who knew the area well, had given him a piece of news whose importance none of them could have understood. There was a relatively unscathed village on the hills above Vilosnes-East – what was it called again? It was called Dannevoux. And the barracks on the perimeter above the railway tracks, where the Barkopp working party loaded and unloaded its wagons and which you could just see from the Meuse, formed the large Dannevoux field hospital. There in the immediate vicinity lived Eberhard Kroysing. Bertin would have to go and see him, shake him by the hand and find out how much of him had emerged healthy and unbroken from the darkness of the December battle. His comrade Pahl had been sent there three days ago with blood poisoning in the foot, and that would provide a good excuse for his superiors. Visiting Pahl could easily be passed off as his soldierly duty – a duty to which Eberhard Kroysing had always attached such importance. A good day, a good walk, a welcome hand grenade, a nice chat over a cup of coffee.
BOOK EIGHT
The eleventh hour
CHAPTER ONE
The blessed island
THE BATTLE FOR Verdun had been fought and lost, but nobody said that. The German communiqués had revised the aims of the operation, invented the ‘battle of attrition’ and recast the truth, and there were a lot of big kids who believed this fairytale. Raw materials and supplies essential for life were stretched to the utmost, diluted and mixed with substitutes. But what had just about sufficed in the second winter of the war failed in the third. Not enough butter, not enough meat, not nearly enough bread, although it had been ‘extended’ with bran and potatoes; hardly any pulses or fresh vegetables, no ham, almost no eggs, and no noodles, millet, oatmeal or semolina delivered from abroad. Leather was running out, as were linen and woollen cloth; you only got clothes if you had a ration coupon, and they were often made with unsatisfactory new materials. When fruit and sugar disappeared into the jam factories, notices were put up encouraging children to collect fruit kernels for their oil. For the same reason, sunflowers were planted, and linseed and beechnuts crushed. Wool to darn stockings and thread to mend shirts were precious goods hunted down by anxious housewives. And just as plant compounds and chemical mixtures appeared in tins and tubes as sham food, so paper masqueraded as clothes, twine, bags and shoelaces. Newspapers and cookery books were full of recipes for conjuring up tasty dishes out of insipid mixtures of potatoes, turnips and brine. No vitamins, no carbohydrates, no protein and still fully fit for work – that’s what the physiologists and doctors preached in order to secure final victory in a war that had long since been lost. Germany was trying to triumph over the whole world, all reason and the course of history and development in the last century. That diabolical instrument of war, the British blockade, was at last being countered – so said the powers that be – with something equally effective: the torpedoing of all cargo ships on the seas. In half a year, Britain would sue for peace. And the nation believed this. Unaccustomed to measuring their rulers’ speeches against reality or demanding accountability for spilt blood and the wasted years of their lives, the people worked in the factories, fields and cities, sent their children to be soldiers, washed themselves with clay soap and paper towels, travelled in unheated railway carriages, froze in lukewarm flats, sunned themselves in the glow of future glories and unverified reports of victories, mourned their dead, spied on the healthy and patiently allowed themselves to be ridden into destruction.
There was still a last streak of smoky red in the evening sky, as Bertin climbed up to Dannevoux field hospital, with Sergeant Barkopp’s permission, to find out how Pahl was getting on (but above all to see Eberhard Kroysing again). From the rear, a minor road wound up the hill to the plateau, then past some barbed wire and wooden fencing to the hospital offices. Several wings enclosed a large open square, and the barracks loomed like a headland above a plain. It was outside visiting hours, and Bertin was greeted curtly and told he should kindly keep to the prescribed times displayed on the gate. After much explaining and a bit of toing and froing he was finally admitted through a back door at the top of a small wooden staircase. It led into a white corridor that clearly went through the section for seriously ill patients. Bertin’s heart contorted with anxiety, and the groaning he heard pierced his thin layer of self-protection. The smell of iodoform and lysol wafted towards him. When a nurse squeezed past him with a covered bucket, the sudden proximity of pus and rancid bodily fluids nearly made him sick. Through an open door, he glimpsed thick, white bandages, a row of beds, a leg suspended in a pulley, the backs of two nurses. He might have grasped then the full terrible significance of it all, but instead he closed up like a mussel caught in an unwelcome current of water and carried on looking for men’s ward 3, which he found at the end of the second long corridor on the left, and on the right room 19.
Eberhard Kroysing greeted Bertin, who looked shy and unkempt, with undisguised joy. Kroysing sat up in his bed beaming and stretched out his powerful arm to Bertin, letting the ASC man’s hand disappear in his. Kroysing’s deep voice filled the room. ‘Wow!’ he exclaimed. ‘Bertin! This is definitely your best deed of this fine New Year, and you’ll be richly rewarded for it in heaven, which, like the rest of us, you seem to have to dodged so far. Now get some of those layers off, you old grey onion. Hang that lice-infested gear in the corridor. There’s a coat stand on the right outside the door.’ When Bertin asked suspiciously if things didn’t get stolen even here, there was a roar of laughter from all three beds; he could still hear it through the closed door. Obediently, he took off his head protector, coat and canvas jacket, returning in his tunic.
The room smelt of bandages and wounds, cigarettes and soap. But it was warm, light and clean – to Bertin it seemed like an enviable, heavenly existence. He might easily have thought that the times must be pretty crazy if pain, blood and wounds were the price to be paid for such modest comforts. But he had no such thoughts; he was much too steeped in the world of war with its twisted values. Besides, Kroysing immediately commanded his attention. He told him to sit on the bed, introduced him to the two lieutenants, Mettner and Flachsbauer, as a friend he’d inherited from his late brother, failing to notice that Bertin was starving, freezing and miserable. Bertin asked Kroysing how he was – ‘Great, of course,’ he replied – and to tell his story, but he was reluctant. Storytelling wasn’t his game. It was Bertin’s game, and everyone should stick to what they knew. The last time they’d met had been on the other side of Wild Boar gorge. Since then, he’d been in the thick of it. They hadn’t got Douaumont back, but they had dug themselves in quite nicely up on Pepper ridge and laid a load of mines, but just as they were about to let the Frogs have it, that 15 December business started, putting a stop to their fun. He, Kroysing, must have spent too much time sitting in the fort and the trenches because he’d lost the knack of doing a break in a field battle or he wouldn’t have had the misfortune to throw himself into a hole that was much too shallow when the advancing battery’s damned shells reached him. The shell hole had been deep and steep enough in itself but it was frozen and full of ice, and so Kroysing ended up with his great knuckle of a right leg sticking up in the air and it was caught by a shell splinter that sliced right through his puttee and shin bone, though it didn’t bisect his calf bone. He’d hobbled over to the dressing station on his stick like some demented grasshopper and had passed out there. Well, now he’d paid his debts to the French in full and could relax. He had an excellent doctor here in the hospital, and the care was first-class. For now, he wanted for nothing. The bone was healing nicely, and a piece of ivory had been inserted to replace some damaged fragments – as he’d said, the head physician was a hot shot and had worked miracles. He’d not yet decided what to do when he was better – there was still plenty of time to think about it. And now it was time to hear Bertin’s news. He must have a lot to tell too. Above all, how was Kroysing’s old friend, Captain Niggl? Here they were under the Western Group Command – west of the Meuse – and heard about as much about the eastern sector than they did about Honolulu, although they hadn’t crossed the river, geographically speaking.