Bertin thought for a moment then said no, his experience was no different. He usually only had news of his brother Fritz from his parents. The boy had been serving the whole time with the 57s, first in Flanders then in Lens, in the Carpathians and on the Hartmannsweilerkopf, and now, more was the pity, in the worst part of the Somme battle. Who knew if he was still alive? Brotherly love was just an ingrained figure of speech. Brothers had always fought for favour and position in the family, from Cain and Abel to Romulus and Remus, to say nothing of German royalty, who enjoyed blinding, murdering and exiling each other to monasteries.
‘Let’s go,’ said Kroysing. ‘The drivers here have organised a car for me, so I’ll be back in my hellish cellar by tonight. We’ll go via your park. And if I get the proof I need, then I’ll put it before the court martial. And then we’ll see. I’m not vengeful. But if those gentleman really did spirit little Christel away from my mother in order that he should end up awaiting resurrection on the third shelf of that grave, then it’s time they made my acquaintance.’
They waited for the car in front of the mess. Above the hills towards Romagne, known as the Morimont, the sky was a diaphanous green. Bertin was hungry. He was counting on someone from his platoon having kept some dinner for him. If not, a ration of dry bread was enough for a man who had furthered a dead friend’s cause. No one was better placed than Eberhard Kroysing to bring those responsible for his brother’s murder to account.
The army driver in his leather jacket drove the open car over the white roads like a man possessed because he wanted to reach the firing zone, where he had to drive without lights, before dark. Less than half an hour later they pulled up by the water troughs at the Steinbergquell barracks. Bertin ran over and came back a short time later. He handed the lieutenant what looked to be a piece of stiff cardboard, wrapped in white paper. Eberhard Kroysing clasped it carefully in his hand.
A few nights later, Private Bertin had a remarkable experience, which he only believed the following noon when he saw the evidence with his own eyes.
Like many short-sighted people, Bertin relied on his hearing to interpret the blurry, threatening world around him. As people also hear when they are asleep because from the time of the glaciers and forest swamps danger has approached by night, he’d had some difficulty adjusting to communal sleeping. It was a sweltering July night in the valley, which cut between Moirey and Chaumont like a butcher’s trough and was permanently filled with swamp fog from the Theinte. The moon was nearly full, and in its pale, milky glow the night seem deceptively clear. Nice weather for flying. The wakeful would do well to keep watch.
Shortly after one, the machine guns at the Cape camp began to rattle furiously a few kilometres beyond Thil wood; anti-aircraft guns croaked red sparking shrapnel up into the air. They were coming! It wasn’t unexpected. Men of a very cautious disposition – a couple of gunners and a few ASC men, including Pahl the typesetter – had been sleeping in the old dugouts by the roadside for a week. The phone at Moirey shrilled with calls from the Cape camp. The Frogs wouldn’t be flying over at one in the morning to distribute biscuits. One of the telephonists at Steinbergquell sped over to see the on-duty sergeant. A bomb attack on a depot currently holding 30,000 shells of which 5,000 were gas shells – and the company was asleep in its barracks! The sentries rushed around, while from the south (the ammunitions depot was at the north end of the encampment) the gentle mosquito drone of the French engines began to build in the dormitories: ‘Air attack! Everyone outside with gas masks! Lights out! Assemble behind the kitchen hut!’ Behind the kitchen hut, the ground fell gradually away so that a flat mound of earth curved up between it and the dangerous ammunition.
A lot of ASC men slept in their lace-ups; no one needed more than a couple of seconds to wake up, slip into their boots, coat or tunic, and underpants or trousers, and leap on to the wooden floor with a crash. The barracks stood open and empty in the pale grey of the night. The clatter of hobnailed boots was drowned out by defensive fire from the MGs and the artillery. The white antennae of searchlights slunk across the sky to help drag down the mosquito swarm: three planes, or maybe five. They were flying so high! Spread out along the damp grass and hard, clayey soil of the southern slope, the defenceless ASC men listened breathlessly and looked up to the sky where the storm would soon start. Yes, they were for it. A fine whistle was unleashed up above, two-voiced, many-voiced, getting stronger, and then the valley filled with flashing and roaring, and a dull thunder crashed. For a second, the Earth’s fiery interior seemed to gape open were the bombs had hit; then the valley was engulfed in black. The valley roared under fire nine times; then the French had flown the loop that allowed them to escape the anti-aircraft fire; the planes flew off to the west, perhaps to launch a further attack on the other side of the Meuse.
‘Well,’ said Private Halezinsky in a quavering voice to his nearby friend, Karl Lebehde, ‘another successful strike.’
‘Think so? asked Lebehde, lighting a night-time cigarette with remarkable sangfroid. ‘I’d venture to suggest they were after the railway station, August, which did take one hit. They’ll sort us out next time.’
It was tempting to wander over there now. There would be hot shell splinters and fuses in the fresh bomb holes, and they could be sold for a good price. By early the next morning, the railwaymen would have nabbed them all. But the sergeants were ushering their men back to bed.
The barracks had been aired in the meantime and had cooled down. It was half past one, so they could still easily grab four hours’ sleep. Halezinsky went to his bed and shone a light to check for rats. The electric light fell on the bed to the left of his. Someone was actually lying there sleeping. ‘Karl,’ he called quietly in utter astonishment, ‘look at this. He must be a sound sleeper.’
The two men looked at Bertin’s sleeping form almost reverently. He’d slept through the alarm, the attack and the bomb explosions that had destroyed a railway track and the fields 70 or 80 metres across the road. The next morning, he would be the only one who didn’t believe the reports of the night before, who thought he was being taken for a ride. He would sacrifice some of his lunch break to go and see the bomb holes that had appeared overnight in the green fields and were big enough to accommodate a telephone box. He would bend over to touch the rails that had been blasted apart and check for freshly filled shell holes between the two rods. That was how completely his sleeping self had pushed aside the world of war, where a demise such as that of Kroysing was possible. A couple of kilometres ahead, machine guns were sweeping the ripped up ground under the limelight of flares; several thousand men, covered in earth, riddled with shell splinters, mangled by direct hits and poisoned by gas, huddled in bomb holes or behind ramparts to escape the fire bursts as the guns picked off flying shells. But only a mile and half away, a man of around 30 with good hearing had been able to sleep through a bomb attack, plunged into the deepest sanctuary and safety known to man, akin to the oblivion of the grave.
BOOK TWO
Resistance
CHAPTER ONE
A turning point
THE GERMANS WERE using all the smaller and larger settlements in the Meuse area as bases and had made themselves at home there. Of course, they admired the men at the front and the way they endured privations under fire in the mud, but they didn’t let that dent their self-esteem. The further behind the lines you went, the more obviously the war metamorphosed into a system of administration and supply. A bunch of bureaucrats in uniform held absolute sway here. They didn’t like to hear talk of later restitution. They requisitioned what they needed and paid with stamped paper, which France was supposed to redeem later. To them cleanliness, staunch service and the military for its own sake were the highest virtues. That they lived in primitive rustic stone cottages, without comforts such as warm water, tiled baths and leather armchairs, was to them a sacrifice for which the people and the Fatherland would one day have to compensate them; such was their war.