And so goodnight.
About 8am, freshly shaved and having shared a good breakfast with little Strauß, Private Bertin of the ASC finally received his travel papers in the orderly room: railway warrants, ration card, delousing warrants, identity card. In his identity card it said that he was to report for duty with the court martial of the Lychow division at Mervinsk. He would find out where Mervinsk was – and how to get there – at the Schlesischer train station in Berlin. Because it was a long journey, he was even authorised to take an express train. The arrears of his wages and his ration money, calculated exactly, were handed over to him in brand new five and ten mark notes; he waived his share of the accumulated canteen money and donated it to the gas worker Halezinsky. The clerk Querfurth with his goatee beard made a note of this. Then they shook hands. ‘All the best, Kamerad,’ said Querfurth. ‘Look after yourselves,’ replied Bertin. And he was amazed to find he had a lump in his throat. It had been a lousy company. For nearly two years he’d been drilled and treated in an increasingly unjust and malicious way, but nonetheless it was his company, a surrogate mother and father, wife and work, home and university. It had fed and clothed him, instructed him and brought him up, it had been a second parental home where the state was the father and Germania the mother, and now he had to leave it and go out into an unknown, uncertain world. A man’s eyes might almost fill with tears at the thought. Main thing was nobody saw.
Nobody did see. And when, half an hour later, the shoogly little train on the Meuse line set off taking him to Montmédy, a tanned ASC man stuck his head out of the window and watched the land behind him, which had shaped him in sunshine and rain, summer and winter, day and night, becoming smaller and smaller. What had little Süßmann’s last words been before he died? ‘To my parents: it was worth it. To Lieutenant Kroysing: it wasn’t.’ The truth lay somewhere between those two poles, but as a wise man had once noted, not in the middle.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Swansong
IT WAS THE height of June, and the suburb of Ebensee near Nuremberg sparkled in the glow of summer. Here the city touched the old pine and beech woods at the foot of the Franconian part of the Jura hills. Schilfstraße in Ebensee was lined with small villas. From a nearby café came the sound of dance music, modern American tunes called things like the foxtrot or the shimmy.
Two young people strolled along like lovers by the white fence that separated the pavement from the front gardens. The young man was wearing a slightly worn summer suit in a blue-grey material of a cut from before the war. His neck with its prominent Adam’s apple rose up from the open collar of a white shirt. His thin cheekbones, slightly sticky out ears and longish hair looked much less out of place in a conventional suit than in uniform. His small eyes peered searchingly through the thick lenses of his new, stronger spectacles. ‘Number 26,’ he read from the fence opposite. ‘It’s 28 so it must be the next one. Lene, I’m frightened. I’m not sure I can go in.’
Lenore, in a pale yellow summer dress that came just past her knee, laid her hand protectively on his. ‘You don’t have to do it. No one’s forcing you, Werner. You came here of your own accord. Look over there, the flag’s at half mast.’
Werner Bertin looked into the garden of Number 28. A white painted flagpole towered there, and a black, white and red flag hung motionlessly from it. This flag, which for four years he’d seen flying in various countries, from buildings in Skopje and Kaunas, in Lille and Montmédy, in every German street, and which was soon to disappear, had been hoisted in mourning between the cherry tree and the two pine trees on the right and left of the lawn, and scarcely a breeze moved its folds. ‘At last someone who marks this day,’ he said. ‘I’m sure now that it’s that house. Can you read what it says on the sign?’
If she shielded her eyes – her wide-brimmed hat hung from her arm – Lenore could decipher the brass sign from across the road: ‘It says Kroysing.’
A gaunt man, very tall, with his hands behind his back, came down the path that led from the house to the street, looking as though he often trod that route deep in thought. He appeared for a moment at the fence in a black coat, stiff white collar and black tie, turned round and disappeared round the other side of the house.
Werner Bertin pressed Lenore’s hand. ‘That’s him. Eberhard Kroysing was his double. If only that incessant tootling would stop!’
The date was 29 June 1919. As was the case every Sunday afternoon, people were dancing in the garden pubs and cafés. On the calendar, the day was called ‘Peter and Paul’ day after the two apostles. That day Germany was celebrating the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which had taken place the day before. The war was definitively over, and the blockade would soon end too. Soon Bertin and Lenore, and old Herr Kroysing too, would no longer look so pinched. It was a day on which the terrible bloody wounds of the last four years had been declared healed. At the same time, Bertin wished Germany would take it more seriously, be more considered, more collected, more shaken. You felt something of that among the bourgeoisie: there was the flag flying at half mast between black pine trees. But the people danced. They didn’t worry about it. No one noticed that a new page had been turned in the earth’s destiny. Germany danced. Things could only get better. The shotguns had been thrown into the corner. Everyone was piling into work. People just wanted to forget, rejoice and immerse themselves in the hot days of early summer. After all the years of hardship, grief and horror they had the right to go a bit mad.
The young writer and his wife were on their way to southern Germany to recover in the glorious light of the landscape they loved. But before they disappeared into the mountains, Bertin had decided to look up the two Kroysing brothers’ parents. He wanted to tell them how their sons had died, how miserable and pointless their deaths had been, so they might understand it was not some noble lie or bogus heroic sacrifice that had deprived them of the sons who would have supported them in their old age, but brutality and sheer, stupid chance. He’d have to be careful but as a writer he knew how to use words. The poor people shouldn’t be left under any illusions. Instead they should be made to join those who wanted to do away with nationalistic jingoism and only allow war against true predators.
And now the flag was flying at half mast, and the man who looked like Eberhard Kroysing as an old man reappeared, his stony face set in bitter lines, walked up to the garden fence, spotted the young couple across the road, shrugged his shoulders grimly, turned and headed back to the house. From the doorway above the front steps an old woman emerged with a handkerchief in her hand. She dabbed her eyes with it, a habit that had clearly become ingrained. ‘Alfred,’ she cried in a dark voice that held the echo of tears shed long ago, ‘it’s time for tea.’
The old public official nodded to her, climbed the steps and disappeared inside with her. The windows facing the direction of the music were banged shut. The summer’s day sparkled over the red roof of the house, Peter and Paul day, the coming harvest. The corner of the black, white and red flag was almost touching the gravel that surrounded the white mast in a small, yellow circle in the middle of the lawn.
‘I can’t do it,’ said Werner Bertin decisively. ‘Come on, let’s go to the woods. We’re not here to rub salt in old wounds. The government of the republic, once we have a constitution, will expose the truth. Besides, those two won’t forget or let other people forget.’