An ASC private named Bertin, recognisable from a mile off by his full, shiny, black beard, watched with satisfaction as one of his NCOs, a book seller from Leipzig called Karte, offered one of the Bavarians a cigar, holding out his trench lighter and pumping the Bavarian for information in his Saxon dialect. Hauling a container of water, Bertin pushed through the swarm of men, shouting a word or two to his comrades Pahl and Lebehde, and trotted to the end of the line, where people were vainly trying to elbow past those in front. Like drifting brown animals, a herd of strange yet familiar creatures, the men swore and pleaded in guttural tones, their necks straining from their open coats. They greeted the three men who’d come to take care of them with grateful eyes.
‘Come on, make room,’ Bertin shouted, coming away from the trough with a field kettle balanced in one hand and a full pan lid in the other. Suddenly, there was danger: officers had appeared up by the barracks and were watching what was happening. Fat Colonel Stein, his huge belly protruding over his bandy legs, hastily stuck his monocle in his eye and took it all in. On his right, he was flanked by his adjutant, First Lieutenant Benndorf, on his left by the company commander, Acting Lieutenant Graßnick, while Acting Sergeant Major Glinsky wryly watched the goings-on down below from a respectful distance. The colonel waved his riding crop indignantly at the dripping faces of those who’d cooled off in the trough. How long had this been going on? Three minutes or four? The four men absorbed all the details.
‘Bloody shambles,’ snarled the colonel. ‘Who told them they could drink here? They can stick their bloody snouts in water somewhere else.’ And, with one hand on his moustache, he shouted down the command: ‘Sergeant, move on!’
Colonel Stein was commander of the ammunitions depot at Steinbergquell, which stretched up across the hill. First Lieutenant Benndorf was his adjutant. Graßnick was only a second lieutenant in the labour company attached to the ammunitions depot. All three men had seen action in 1914 and been wounded (Benndorf still walked with a stick and limped) and were now in charge here. Colonel Stein could therefore expect obedience.
But without a favourable wind, the human voice obviously doesn’t carry very far out in the open. There was at first no response to Colonel Stein’s order, though this was against the natural order. Sergeant Major Glinsky rushed over to the balustrade, his backside wagging up and down, and, leaning half over, roared: ‘Stop that, fall in, move on!’
Glinsky knew the right tone. The Bavarian sergeant’s hand moved up involuntarily to the hilt of the bayonet hanging from his belt. Unfortunately, there were epaulettes glittering up there on the hill – otherwise that dirty Prussian pig would have got a few choice greetings in Bavarian. As it was, the sergeant turned sharply to his troops: ‘Fall in, form up.’
It’s as well if prisoners understand even what they don’t understand, and some of the guards spoke a smattering of French. Slowly, the first infantrymen pushed forwards. The ASC men pushed between them with greater determination to make sure they all got a drink. The column reformed peacefully.
The colour rose in Colonel Stein’s face. People down there were going against the spirit of his order. Down at Moirey train station, looking like tiny toys, the wagons were already rolling up that would take the prisoners away and then return as quickly as possible with gas ammunition. Time enough for the men to drink at the station. ‘Stop this nonsense!’ he ordered. ‘Sergeant Major, turn the water off!’ Everyone there knew the two brass taps near the feed trough that cut the flow of water to the lead spouts. Glinsky jumped to it.
Those ASC men who happened to be nearby heard this order with a grumble, a grin or a shrug, but it pierced one man to the heart. Bertin blanched under his black beard. He didn’t think about the tap at Moirey train station. He felt the agony of having to carry on past the trough without drinking almost as if it were his own. He had just filled his canteen. He should now empty it into the dust, as some of his comrades were doing: that docile little chap Otto Reinhold for example, or Pahl the typesetter. But Bertin knew there was still a number of thirsty men waiting at the rear. They were shuffling past the troughs, barely moving, with three Bavarians behind them. No one would now dare to fill their cupped hands or mugs.
‘Nowt we can do. They’re turned off.’ Private Lebehde, an innkeeper, pointed to the two taps, which were running dry.
‘Now I’ve seen it all,’ grunted Halezinsky, a gas worker, ‘and they call themselves human.’ And shrugging his shoulders he showed the last Frenchmen his empty field kettle.
Bertin’s canteen was made of aluminium. It was battered and black with soot on the outside but snow-white on the inside and full of delicious water. As he moved along the edge of the column – conspicuous because of his shiny, black beard – he calmly distributed the water. To a gunner who, with anguished eyes, had only reached out cupped hands he handed the full lid. To another man he gave the water from his canteen, holding it to his lips himself.
‘Prends, camarade,’ he said, and the gunner grabbed hold and drank his fill as he walked. Then he gave the canteen back.
All going well, Bertin, who was training to be a lawyer, had every prospect of living to be an old or at least an elderly man. But he would never forget the look that came into those brown eyes, which were shadowed black with exhaustion and set in yellowy skin grimy with artillery smoke.
‘Es-tu Alsacien?’ the Frenchman asked the German.
Bertin smiled. So, if you behaved decently towards a French prisoner, you had to be from Alsace. ‘Certainly not,’ he answered in French. ‘I’m a Prussian.’ And then by way of goodbye: ‘For you, the war is over.’
‘Merci, bonne chance,’ replied the Frenchman, turning to march on.
Bertin, however, stayed put while the ASC men slowly slipped off up the steps. Satisfied, he watched the blue-grey backs with a warm glow in his heart. If those people were now sent to Pomerania or Westphalia as farm labourers, they’d know they weren’t going to be eaten alive. He could and would defend his actions. What could they really do to him? All he need do was lie low in the barracks for the next quarter of an hour or until he was next on duty. Wrapped in a pleasant afterglow, Bertin climbed up the wooden steps with his canteen, from which Frenchmen had drunk, dangling all nice and clean from a crooked finger. Deep in thought, he strolled past Pahl the typesetter and didn’t even notice the long look of amazement Pahl gave him.
Pahl let him pass because he wouldn’t like to be seen with this particular comrade that day. He’d often taken him for a spy who stuck close to the workers in the company to get information and pass it on. But this man wasn’t a spy. No. He was the opposite: rashness personified. If Wilhelm Pahl knew Prussians, this man was for it – but he didn’t seem to care. Pahl the typesetter, by contrast, cared a great deal. He stood in the sun, a kind of big gnome with thick shoulders, overly long arms, a short neck and small, pale grey eyes, and gazed after the man who had followed his heart – in the Kaiser’s army.
CHAPTER TWO
Inspection
DURING THE AFTERNOON’S work on that memorable day, an order swept through the sprawling park with its turfed ramparts, huts, tents and stacks of grenades: inspection at six o’clock! Inspection? How come? Hadn’t there been four inspections in the past fortnight – with boots, underclothes, fatigues, tunics and neck bands? Hadn’t the nearby gunners, sappers, radio operators and railwaymen been poking fun at this enormous labour company of 500 men for ages because they liked to play soldiers? Everyone knew they were the army’s forgotten children: old people doing sterling work, being treated like new recruits in the middle of France. Quite a circus. Admission free. Annoyance and cursing, then, by the field railway wagons and tracks, ammunition tent and grenade stacks. But nobody connected the order with the events at lunchtime.