He read the accompanying bumph signed ‘Feicht, Sergeant Major’ and written in Feicht’s best handwriting, examined the wrapping paper suspiciously and nodded knowingly. There was nothing to prove that the package had really been sent back by the army postal service. Asterisks and curved lines might convince a schoolboy. However, nothing proved the contrary either. The conspiracy against the young lad had been carried out by shrewd and experienced soldiers. They weren’t so easily unsettled. They’d parried his strike splendidly and hung the clerk Dillinger out to dry in the customary manner. If he fell for it and demanded that Dillinger be punished, the clerk would definitely be sent to prison, but as recompense for his silence he’d be off on leave in the next round. A wolf like Kroysing wasn’t about to be seduced by such tricks. His steady grey eyes looked through the wall at his target, the captain. He wasn’t finished with him. He pulled out his knife, slit the string with an audible rip and opened the package. Enclosed in the soft brown leather waistcoat he knew so well lay all that remained of Christoph on earth. It had without a doubt been shared among his enemies as booty: watch, fountain pen, purse, the little snake ring, a wallet, a notebook, his smoking things.
Breathing heavily with his balled fists pressed into the table, Eberhard Kroysing looked at his younger brother’s effects. He hadn’t been a good brother to him – definitely not easy to put up with. We don’t love our younger siblings. We want our parents’ love all to ourselves. We don’t want to share our domain. We want to be the sole object of their affection. As we can’t push aside siblings that are born later, we subjugate them. Hell mend them if they don’t obey. The nursery can be a mini hell. It can. Boys are very inventive and instinctively know how to wage war inconspicuously. That’s how it is – and not just in the Kroysing household. If the parents intervene, it just makes it worse for the weaker ones. In his case, it carried on until the bonds of home loosened and the brothers began to move in different circles. A cool indifference had then crept into the older brother’s attitude towards the younger. Only much later in the university holidays did he suddenly realise that his little brother was growing into a man with a good heart – a potential friend. Then the war started and he’d been turned into a savage again, and just when he was hoping that they’d both get leave by Christmas at the latest and be able to enjoy the festivities with their parents, it was too late. A couple of scoundrels had let the French finish the young lad off to spare themselves a bit of unpleasantness. He’d get his own back on the Frogs, but here and now written on the walls of this monk’s cell were the words: ‘too late’. ‘Too late’ on the ceiling and the window, ‘too late’ on the floor. ‘Too late’ hung in the air. Nothing was more natural for men at war than to believe in kingdom come, life after death, a reunion on the other side. The fighting man’s simple, forward-driven mind couldn’t grasp that those who were carried off had disappeared forever; his imagination couldn’t deal with it. The enemy had to live on, so that victory was eternal. And a brother had to live on so you could make up for all the bad and evil things you’d done in your youth.
Kroysing grabbed the little watch, wound it and set it. It was half eleven. From the distance came rumbling and crashing. It must be from the Fort Vaux area, where fighting was constantly flaring up and the French were improving their positions. Nonetheless, the tick of the watch was audible in the quiet room. The young lad’s heart couldn’t be made to tick again. But at least he had already made an offering to the dead boy. And he would pursue Niggl until he confessed. Then Judge Advocate Mertens would take up the case and deal with Niggl, and his machinations would all have been in vain. He’d thought about it and made up his mind. He could cheerfully have spat on the retired civil servant before witnesses, slapped his face or wrung his neck. But duelling was forbidden in wartime, and however satisfying it might have been to haul that fat, trembling lump in front of his gun, the legal route was the only possible one and actually the more effective. He would totally and utterly destroy Herr Niggl. Even if Niggl survived, he’d take no pleasure in his life. He’d be a social outcast, dishonoured by his years in jail. He’d be dismissed from his post and, as the bureaucrat’s life was all he knew, he and his family would starve. Perhaps he’d open a little stationery business in Buenos Aires or Constantinople. But wherever the German officer corps had connections he’d be a dead man, despised by his wife and hated by his children.
Will that satisfy you, Christoph? he wondered. You’re soft. Your enemy’s scalp means nothing to you, but it means something to me. It won’t be tonight or the day after tomorrow, but we’ll get it. And then we’ll make Bertin a lieutenant in your place. He resisted the temptation to look through his brother’s notebook, wrapped his effects up in the leather waistcoat, undressed, got into bed and turned out the light.
BOOK FOUR
On the fringes of humanity
CHAPTER ONE
Profound effects
DURING THE NIGHT and towards morning, when the captive balloons’ eyes were shut, the field kitchen staff tried to creep up on the infantry positions. They’d find some cover and distribute from there the warm food the men had long done without: thick bean soup with scraps of meat, bluish barley stew, yellow peas and ham – all packed in heat-retaining tin containers, which the food carriers lugged down the final stretches to the trenches. The operation had its dangers. A soldier with warm soup in his belly fights better, and causing privations that might break the men’s morale was part of the civilised nations’ machinery of war. Advance batteries lay in wait for the field kitchen staff. Sometimes they miscalculated but usually they didn’t, and their actions were always disastrous.
In the early morning around 6.30am, when the ground mist, which had long since turned into autumnal morning fog, parted for a moment, the French at Belleville caught sight of Captain Niggl’s ASC men at work. They had known for a long time that the Germans were expanding their positions behind the lines and had marked the presumed locations of these bases on their maps. For weeks, the Germans had been planning the push that would reclaim Douaumont village and Fort Vaux. They’d been saving up ammunition, improving their approach roads and preparing their field batteries for the advance. The construction of the German front had many advantages, but flexibility wasn’t one of them. Communication between the artillery and the observers in the infantry, especially those in the forts, was handled much better, more quickly and more intelligently by the French. A couple of minutes after the suspected field kitchen was discovered, shrapnel burst over the area in the gathering fog, whipping down on the ASC men, who scattered in panic. Only eight men were injured in all because the French made the mistake of rapidly moving their fire further forward on to the huge depression that opened out to the south from Douaumont, and through which the food carriers should indeed have run. Nonetheless, the company returned at 9.30am instead of 8am, and that hour and a half was nerve-racking for Niggl.