Father Lochner stretched his folded hands out in front of him. ‘Merciful Jesus, no man can sign that. It’s suicide.’
Kroysing shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s recompense,’ he blinked. ‘When this paper, duly signed, has been passed to Judge Advocate Mertens in Montmédy, who is working on the files against my brother, then certain wheels will be set in motion, as God sees fit, and Herr Niggl and his men may look for quieter quarters, if service interests permit. But if he does not sign he’ll be staying here in my harmless little molehill, even if his soul turns to buttermilk.’
‘Blackmail,’ cried the priest. ‘Coercion, duress!’
Kroysing smiled genially, a wolfish glint in his eyes. ‘Do as you’re done by, Father,’ he said in a deeply satisfied voice.
Father Lochner thought for a moment, almost as if he were alone. ‘I accept everything,’ he sighed at last. ‘It wasn’t you, Lieutenant, who involved me in this matter. Neither is it your fault that I came here as a harmless field chaplain and now find myself gazing into the most ghastly depths of the human soul. And I cannot just stand there and gaze. I must intervene, take sides, concede that a son of my Church behaved like a common murderer towards your brother, which would have been bad enough if your brother had been your average, common man. However, his letter demonstrates that the Creator had housed within his body a most noble and loveable soul. There can be no recompense for such a loss either for the parents or the brother or the nation. Measured against it, earthly vengeance seems grotesque. I imagine that’s clear to you, though it doesn’t of course diminish your loss. What then do you hope to achieve?’
Eberhard Kroysing wrinkled his tan-lined brow. ‘If we take the impotence of punishment as our starting point, the fact that we cannot recreate that which has been destroyed, we’ll get nowhere. Let’s make things easy for ourselves. I want to cleanse the Kroysings’ reputation, which Captain Niggl besmirched. Why don’t we leave everything else out of the equation.’
Father Lochner exhaled. He didn’t understand himself why he’d sided so firmly with a miserable type like Niggl. I didn’t side with him although he is miserable, he thought quickly, remembering his training, but because his lowly soul needs so much compassion, warped as it clearly is. ‘I knew it,’ he said in relief. ‘It’s always words that stop two reasonable men reaching agreement. Allow me to draft a text that will give your family full satisfaction without destroying Captain Niggl.’ He made to grab a piece of paper and began unscrewing his fountain pen.
But a look from Lieutenant Kroysing stilled his hand. ‘Excuse me, Reverend,’ he growled amiably enough, ‘but I’m with Pontius Pilate on this one when he said, “What I have written I have written”.’ And as the priest pulled his hand back, he continued: ‘I’m a physicist and an engineer. Captain Niggl unleashed a rotary movement against my brother that ended up hurling him tangentially into the void. But that didn’t stop the movement. Now it will seize Niggl himself and hurl him tangentially into the void. Or if you prefer, the balance of things has been disturbed. My brother tipped the scales a little in the direction of good. To compensate for his loss, I’m going to stamp out an adverse element, maybe even three. I hope it may earn me a civic crown,’ he finished, and Father Lochner shuddered at the young man’s savage mastery and sparkling intelligence.
The priest sat up straight and his eyes, small in his plump face, took on the implacable expression of the confessor. He thrust his lower jaw out, and under the electric light his mouth became a moving line. ‘Lieutenant,’ he said, ‘we are both quite alone here. Our conversation crossed the normal boundaries of a negotiation between two uniformed officers long ago. What I’m about to say puts me in your hands. None of my Church superiors would defend me if you wrote a letter to HQ saying that Field Chaplain Lochner from the Order of St Francis told you what I’m about to tell you. But whit mus be, mus be,’ he added in plattdeutsch.
‘The sickness of our people, the moral sickness, can no longer be affected by the existence or otherwise of Captain Niggl. I was in Belgium with our Rhinelanders when force was used against neutrality and justice. What I saw, what our men proudly carried out in the name of service and duty, was murder, robbery, rape, arson, desecration of churches, every vice of the human soul. They did it because they were ordered to and they were delighted to obey, because their souls – even German souls – were in the possession of the devil’s joy of destruction. I saw the corpses of old men, women and children. I was there when small towns were burnt to the ground in order to terrify a people weaker than us so that they wouldn’t impede us as we marched through. As a German, I was shaken with horror; as a Christian, I wept bitter tears.’
‘The franctireurs resistance fighters shouldn’t have kicked off then,’ said Kroysing darkly.
‘Who can prove that they did?’ Father Lochner stood up and paced from one corner of the room to other. ‘We maintained that they did, and the Belgians denied it. We are accuser, accused and judge in one person. We didn’t allow a neutral investigation – so much the worse for us. But there is a man in Belgium with an indomitable conscience, and as a Catholic and a member of a religious order I’m proud to call him a prince of our Most Holy Church. His name is Cardinal Mercier, and he repudiated the franctireurs story in the strongest terms. And the soldier in you must agree with me when I say that even if Belgian civilians did join the fight, which no one has admitted, our actions in Belgium were the vilest heathenism. That was no war between Christian nations, but a barbaric assault on a Catholic country. My esteemed friend, do you really believe that this can end without permanent damage being done to our German soul? The murder of thousands of innocent people. Thousands of houses burnt down. Residents driven into the flames with kicks and rifle butts. Priests hung in bell towers. Villagers herded together and massacred with machine guns and bayonets. And the stream of lies we unleash to cover it up. The iron face we show to the better informed world so that our own poor people may cling to the delusion that the Belgian atrocities are a fairytale. My dear mannie,’ he said in Rhenish, ‘we have besmirched our souls like nae ither civilised folk. How do you propose to rebalance that with your Niggl? We shall be very sick men when this war ends. We shall need a cure such as cannot yet be foreseen. Of course, the other nations can’t talk. The Americans with their Negroes. The British with their Boer War. The Belgians in the Congo, and the French in Tongking and Morocco. Even the honest Russians. But that doesn’t give us carte blanche, and so I say to you: assign this matter to the Lord, safe in the assurance that Herr Niggl…’
‘…will sign,’ the Lieutenant broke in, unmoved. ‘You see,’ he began, filling the deep brown bowl of his full-bent pipe for a long smoke, ‘you see, Father Lochner, you’ve risked saying what you have because you understand me. Your courage is to your credit, I like your openness and I’m impressed by your knowledge. But overall I feel sorry for you. Why? Because you are trying to maintain a fiction – an important fiction, I concede. But here’s a nasty truth about the Christian nations and Christian codes of behaviour for you. I don’t know if we had any reason to call our Reich Christian in peacetime. As a future engineer, I serve commercial enterprise and am entirely dependent on people who have money to build machines and pay workers’ wages, and it’s not up to me to decide whether capitalism and Christianity can march side by side. But what is clear is that they do march side by side all over the world and no priest has yet taken his own life over it. Your expedients of poverty, chastity and obedience change nothing. That’s just shirking – or worse. Let’s leave peace to one side, then. But I find it disturbing that you maintain that this war here, this little project that we unleashed two years ago, has anything to do with Christianity. I know what you’re going to say’ – and he waved the priest’s objection aside – ‘you keep alive such remnants of Christianity as our people are able to digest in your soul so you can give them comfort in their despair, which is more than anyone else can give them – the same comfort in the same despair that poor Private Bertin gave to my brother when no Christian soul was moved by his fate, to get back to the topic in hand. We live in nice, clean heathen times. We kill with every means at our disposal. We don’t scrimp, sir. We use the elements. We exploit the laws of physics and chemistry. We calculate elaborate parabolas for shell-fire. We conduct scientific investigations of wind direction the better to discharge our poisonous gases. We’ve subjugated the air so that we can rain down bombs, and as surely as my soul lives, I would hate to die such a dirty, cowardly death. In half an hour when we go to eat, each of us will put a steel pot on his baldy skull’ – and he leant his long head forward with a smile and pointed to his thinning hair – ‘and then we’ll proceed into the joyful world of unvarnished reality and European civilisation. What was that quote we heard the other day from our educated schoolboy Süßmann who’s already been dead once? “Nothing is true, and everything is permitted.” Where we’re going that phrase applies, and there’s no quarter for the phrase: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you!” That tells you all you need to know. For just as water always seeks the lowest point, the human soul will sink as far as it can go as a group with impunity. That’s heathenism, sir. And I’m an honest adherent. And if I survive, which isn’t in the stars, I’ll make sure that my entire family are equally honest heathens. In the conflict between truthfulness and Christianity, in 1916, I choose truthfulness.’