‘I buttoned up my tunic, even turning the collar up, and staggered to my feet. I felt dizzy, it hurt when I coughed and I had a dreadful headache, but that was all. The medical NCO who saw me first was amazed. “Well, you’re a lucky devil,” were his first words to me. I was already a sergeant by then but I’d forgotten that. I was still a bit dazed and so I saluted and said, ‘Private Süßmann, sir,’ and I’m told I grinned stupidly, though I consider that slanderous. I was given something to drink, Aspirin for my headache, a couple of whiffs of oxygen, and then I told them what had happened. I didn’t know much at that point, but it was enough to make them decide not to clear out the extinguished crater. Our captain had the dead all carried back in again, but I was already asleep in the new hospital section on a nice, comfy bed by then – still wood wool, of course – and when I woke up the second time I was really fine. I wasn’t coughing any more. My head was throbbing and there was a ring of raw flesh on the inside of my throat, but that was about it. Later on, I saw our construction squad walling up the passages. They’re still there now, the dead residents of Douaumont, a whole battalion of them, can’t be much fewer than 1,000 men, all the occupants of the far end of that wing: Bavarians, sappers, ASC men, the entire dressing station.
‘That was the explosion in Douaumont. It wasn’t reported, and if you like I’ll take you to the spot later and you can pray for the souls of the fallen. Since then, I’ve thought about things more carefully and I no longer find them all that agreeable. And now you should be heading back.’
Bertin said he should and thanked Süßmann for telling him his story. But something still troubled him. ‘Did you go straight back on duty after that as if nothing had happened?’ he asked, stretching himself.
‘What do you think? Sergeant Süßmann retorted. ‘I got some sick leave, naturally. Fourteen glorious days in May at home, where I didn’t breathe a word about any of it. Civilians don’t like their picture of the war to be spoiled by the real war. And, anyway, we’d been told to keep our traps shut.’
‘It’s always like that,’ said Lieutenant Kroysing. ‘He who knows too much dies young. And how did Captain Niggl respond to my kind enquiry after his health? Will he be able to turn out tonight?’
Sergeant Süßmann pulled a grave face and said the captain still felt ill. The doctor had prescribed – or at least authorised – bed rest, particularly as there were now three acting lieutenants present who could take his place.
Kroysing’s tone was also grave: ‘Shame. I do regret causing an old officer nothing but trouble. And I’m not very congenial company. When you come back, my friend,’ he said, standing up and offering Bertin his hand, ‘Niggl’s health will have got a lot worse.’
Sergeant Süßmann arranged his cap in such a way that both cockades hung over the bridge of his nose. He planned to accompany Bertin some of the way. Then he asked whether the lieutenant wasn’t perhaps being too optimistic about the captain’s health. The telephone exchange had received instructions from the captain’s orderly room to find a Catholic field chaplain. He’d be arriving in the next few days if the Frogs continued to behave themselves.
A thin smile played on Kroysing’s lips. ‘He wants to confess,’ he said. ‘Does no harm if a man’s going soft on the inside. Mulch is the name given to that condition in apples and pears. Thanks, Süßmann. After that news, I think I may turn out tonight myself.’
CHAPTER THREE
Father Lochner
‘IT’S GOING TO be a hard winter,’ observed Strumpf the park-keeper a morning or two later as he stepped out of his hut, which had once been a French blockhouse.
Blue sky and sunlight flashed through the clouds of mist. Beechnuts hung heavily from gilded beech branches, and red berries shone among the rowan leaves, barberry sprigs and bramble bushes. Unperturbed by the approaching thunder, a pair of squirrels worked in the treetops, driving out a squawking magpie.
‘A hard winter’s all we need,’ countered his comrade Kilian in Baden dialect.
Bertin was at the switchboard communicating with the Cape camp. Through the open window, he heard Friedrich Strumpf expanding on how nature alleviated bad cold snaps for birds and wild animals by providing a surfeit of fruit, almost as if someone were looking out for the innocent creatures. Kilian the tobacco worker laughed at that: he was a free thinker, a Darwinist, as he proudly explained, saw the struggle for existence everywhere confirmed and would have preferred harsh winters to be alleviated for the women and children at home first of all. As he spoke, he sat happily in the early autumn sunshine darning a grey woollen sock. He had time for that kind of thing now, while his wife, who had taken his place in the factory and was bringing up two children, couldn’t possibly be expected to mend his winter things as well. Bertin, earphones on his head, nodded. Every individual man in the army, himself included, was attached to threads that travelled far back behind the lines. Then the switchboard buzzed again, and he received instructions from the sapper depot in Fosses wood about changing the points, with enquiries about construction troops and the number of wagons on the siding. He liked the little railway operation. This tiny cog in a giant wheel helped him to grasp the human ingenuity required to power the front line, how everything had to be done exactly right, so that when the crucial moment came a smooth and decisive blow could be struck. The two Badeners were happy with him. They just shook their heads at his enterprising spirit when he headed off past the field howitzers to Douaumont. Karl Kilian understood him better than his older colleague; it was right and proper for a newspaper reporter to do that, he said, so that he could relate the truth later.
Bertin knew full well that the good times were coming to an end. In a couple of days the man on leave would return. Bertin would then have to pack his things and go back to the stuffy, noisy barracks, his company and the poisonous fug around Graßnick and Glinsky, where all finer feelings were steamrollered like grass beneath a rolling donkey. Group living seemed to drain people of energy. He’d recovered here in the sunshine. He slept better in the clear air, he had time off and he enjoyed his food more because Friedrich Strumpf knew how to liven up the rations with all kinds of flavourings. Night hours spent awake at the silent switchboard reading under the electric light gave him the peace and solitude to be himself. He often saw beyond the printed pages to young Kroysing, who’d already been swept so far along by the river of life, and his wild brother who was wading through its centre, knee-deep today, waist-high tomorrow… If ever a man had needed this war it was Eberhard Kroysing – to find himself, express his nature, test his range, as he put it. It was the urge for such experience that had made an entire generation of German youth flee the strictures of the pre-war period for unbridled war – Kroysing, Süßmann, Bertin, all of them. In 1914, they’d all felt that real life – a life of danger and hardship – was just about to begin. Now here they sat sunk in the disgusting realities of it and expected to come to terms with them. If anyone could have predicted to the schoolboy Süßmann how he would feel two years after the start of the war or what he would have gone through… boy, oh boy!