Bertin looked into the drawn, waxen face of Pahl the typesetter, now more than ever a cripple and resolved to resist evil. For a moment he bridled inside and wondered why they were all drawn to him: Kroysing from the right, Pahl from the left. Why did no one leave him in peace to listen to his own inner voice? He suddenly clenched his fist and thought, Let me come to myself!
But Pahl misunderstood the gesture. ‘Good,’ he whispered. ‘Bravo!’
Sister Mariechen came up behind them, and Bertin stood up. ‘See if you can fix it, Wilhelm,’ he said with a smile.
‘Come again soon,’ said Pahl with a similar sort of smile.
And Bertin thought how much better he looked when he was smiling. The nurse waved a little package at him: a ham sandwich as a thank you, she explained.
‘No one could resist that,’ said Bertin. ‘I’ll eat it on my way down.’
‘Reward for your good deed,’ said Pahl.
CHAPTER THREE
Man and justice
THE STAFF OF the ‘West of the Meuse’ Army Group were each week reduced to despair by the breadth of Judge Advocate Dr Posnanski’s knowledge and his propensity to share it. How were they to know that their billet of Montfaucon had provided the poet Heinrich Heine with an opportunity to lampoon his colleagues Fouqué, Uhland and Tieck in ‘Mistress Joanna of Montfaucon’? Posnanski, in his graciousness, didn’t expect that others might be educated in these matters too, but no one likes to be made to look like an ignorant boor, and less tolerant men than Lieutenant Winfried, the general’s ADC, found the judge advocate’s blethering rather offensive. ‘I’ve got nothing against Jews,’ Brigadier-General von Hesta (whose family had migrated from the Hungarian to the Prussian service in 1835) growled on one occasion. ‘Nothing at all, so long as they knuckle down and keep their gobs shut. But when they worry away at this book stuff like a dog in a sandpit – out with them.’ Should Dr Posnanski learn of such remarks, the corners of his mouth, much wider apart than those of most men, would twitch, he’d close one of his eyes, look heavenwards with the other and drily note: ‘That’s what comes of letting newcomers into the ways of the Mark. Let them play the Prussian as long as the likes of us have. They weren’t there at Fehrbellin, they fought on the other side from Mollwitz to Torgau, and I didn’t see them at Waterloo either – and that little chicklet wants to say his piece.’ Indeed, his friends admired in him a certain philosophical calm, which came from an understanding of how slowly civilisation progresses and that people absorb that progress at a snail’s pace. ‘If I thought life under our changing moon would always remain as it is now, I’d breakfast on rat poison tomorrow and greet you in the evening from the fourth dimension.’
He said this one morning to Lieutenant Winfried. They were sitting in the cellar dugout of the Mairie in the village of Esnes, both on urgent business. It was to do with the relief of the division – a weighty matter. As Hill 304 and Mort Homme could testify, the Lychow Army Group had done its duty, and when it returned to the Russian front that had been its home since the start of the war, as it was about to do, it would be able to inscribe certain names from the Battle of the Somme in its group register. While in France, it had bored a couple of tunnels in the rock – the Raven, Gallwitz, Bismarck and Lychow tunnels – and it would be leaving the ‘West of the Meuse’ sector in excellent condition. For as everyone knew, from the infantry to the general staff, who were inclined to make up their own minds about army commanders, General von Lychow asked a lot of his men but nothing unnecessary. Yes, Old Lychow still enjoyed the confidence of the men. And when the French took the left bank of the Meuse in August 1917, and those tunnels were full of dead Germans, a number of the officers around the crown prince expressed the view that it wouldn’t have happened under Lychow…
The two men were occupied with completely different matters. While Lieutenant Winfried was to inform His Excellency of conditions in the sector that was to be evacuated next, Posnanski was to investigate a break-in at the provision stores in Esnes; responsibility for it was being passed back and forth among units, and no one wanted to admit it was them. ‘From the point of view of who’s hungry, it was all of them,’ said Posnanski earnestly, ‘but the main culprit was probably the name of the place. Because although that’s not how the French say it, our men pronounce it “Essen”. And having said the German word for food, they want to have some.’
‘Posnanski,’ groaned Winfried, ‘have you no sympathy?’
‘I do indeed. For example with my clerk Adler who’s quaking with fear in case he is sent to be medically re-evaluated for active service.’
‘Is he going to be re-evaluated? God help him.’
Posnanski’s bald, knobbly head bobbed in concern: ‘It’s a shame because he was a good lawyer and it’s a double shame because he had training. I suppose I’ll have to find another one.’
‘There’s plenty of choice,’ said Lieutenant Winfried. He was studying the battle history of a particular battalion whose commander was to be put in charge of the rear guard.
‘Less than people think. I require certain moral aptitudes, and they don’t grow on trees.’
‘Seek and ye shall find,’ murmured the ADC, trying to decipher some reports written in half rubbed-out penciclass="underline" 12-18.XII.16, extremely critical days…
‘I hope you know how the quotation continues,’ said Posnanski, getting ready to go.
‘How?’ said Winfried, his pale eyes meeting the dark grey ones of his stout friend.
‘Knock and it shall be opened unto you.’
Winfried laughed. ‘Right. Have a private word with Sergeant-Major Pont. I’ll be in reserve.’
‘Thanks,’ said Posnanski cheerfully. ‘And as you’re in such a giving mood, when can I have the car for a little official trip? I’m hearing strange noises from the Dannevoux field hospital.’
‘Laurenz Pont is the man for that.’
‘Good afternoon, then,’ said Posnanski expansively.
As he climbed the narrow staircase, moving slowly in the gloom because of his extreme myopia and astigmatism, he steeled himself for the distressing interview to come. Waiting upstairs was his clerk Adler, once a barrister at the High Court in Berlin… he quickly pushed the thought aside. Odd how things happened in pairs. He’d had two enquiries from the same field hospital on two successive days. First, the medical officer wanted to complain about the shoes issued to a particular ASC private and asked how best he might do this; secondly, a wounded lieutenant asked for a interview regarding a serious miscarriage of justice committed against his younger brother, killed in action. As he grasped the handrail then make his way across the rubble-strewn courtyard, Posnanski marvelled at people’s inextinguishable need for justice. In the middle of a war, when civilisation had long since broken down and was about as dilapidated as that Mairie over there, people still railed, in defiance of the gross injustice all around, against incidents that might have screamed unfairness to the heavens in peacetime but now counted as little more than minor irregularities. And it was good that they did so. For that unswerving compulsion provided the only means of bridging the abyss of the war years and creating a world worth living in.
‘Good afternoon, Herr Adler,’ said Posnanski.
Judge Advocate Posnanski’s uniform had a high collar, purple tabs, officer’s epaulettes and a dagger. His tunic strained almost as tightly round his stomach as did Colonel Stein’s, and he wore the same leather puttees round his calves. For these reasons, Bertin stood to attention in his presence, which rather turned Dr Posnanski against him.