Father Lochner regarded him fearfully. He said nothing, lifted the piece of paper from the desk, folded it and went to the door, where he turned. ‘I wish, Lieutenant, that I might one day be allowed to relieve your soul of its bitterness.’
‘See you in half an hour,’ said the heathen Kroysing.
CHAPTER SIX
The slip of paper is returned
AS THE EVENING’S last red flashes paled to smoky brown in the west, three men and a boy in steel helmets stood by Douaumont’s southern exit, called the “throat”, and eyed the pitted landscape bending away from them in troughs and mounds. They looked bold in their metal headgear, like mediaeval warriors, which was exactly how young Bertin felt. He held his head high and was filled with mettle; the coming hours would transcend all others in his life. To their left below Hardaumont, some sort of pond gleamed like a glowing log. Otherwise, the landscape was a world of churned earth floating in the violet evening haze. The three men and the boy inspected the sky. To the east, rose a large, wide crescent moon the colour of brass, enveloped in a halo. It was waxing. The boy – Sergeant Süßmann, the most experienced of them all – pointed to it with his thumb. ‘There’ll be a new moon in three days, and that’ll be the end of the good weather.’
Father Lochner, the heftiest of them in his cloak, asked if the dark nights presaged attacks.
‘Something much worse, Reverend,’ answered Süßmann. ‘Rain.’
‘It could cheerfully hold off for another month,’ muttered Kroysing behind them. ‘We’re nowhere near ready.’
‘It could but it won’t,’ said the youngster. ‘The land is very unobliging towards its conqueror,’ and he laughed at his own joke.
The four men, so unalike in rank and experience, made their way slowly down the slope. Their eyes had adjusted to the gloaming, and they easily picked out the well-trodden paths. Each had a stick. The two officers were wrapped in their cloaks, and the two men had hooked their coat tails back. A damp chill hung over the field, and it would get colder as the night wore on. Süßmann knew the area like his way to school in Berlin and led the party. An excited Bertin followed him, and Lieutenant Kroysing took up the rear behind the priest.
‘That was once a trench,’ said Süßmann, as they changed direction and headed for the patch of ground where the village of Douaumont had once stood with its imposing houses and a church. Now it was indistinguishable from the jagged earth all around. And that earth was beginning to smell; it breathed a sweetish, putrid odour on the four men that became scorched, sulphurous and sick. In his even, boyish voice, Süßmann warned that they’d have to duck under the barbed wire that covered the hillside all the way to the fort. He also read the smells. They came from shallow graves, stale faeces not properly dug in, the poisoned gas shells that had soaked the soil here, incendiary shells and piles of rotting tins in which leftovers had been lazily dumped. He explained to Bertin that the smell was much worse when it was sunny and windy. Then it got mixed up with the dust and the stench of this whole pulverised, putrefying area that stretched 2.5km to the French lines and the same distance again to the girdle of forts at Verdun. Their route, he continued, cut diagonally across the switch position known as the Adalbert line, where things became more dangerous. The former road between the villages of Douaumont and Fleury ran dead straight to the front and was a huge temptation both to the French field artillery and their targets – relief troops, stretcher bearers, orderlies, anyone on two legs.
The eerie quiet was broken only by the sound of rats scattering. On the barbed wire that they now walked alongside fluttered scraps of material and paper blown over by the wind. At one point shortly before they left the trenches behind and turned in a different direction, a formless black mass hung from the barbed wire. Shortly thereafter, the four men met a couple of panting soldiers and exchanged a few words with them. They were guides running at a trot up to Douaumont to bring down the relief battalion. The regiment had thought the deathly quiet so suspicious it had brought the normal departure time forward by one and a half hours. The trenches, Bertin suddenly realised, were occupied. Those little things sticking up must be steel helmets. After 30 paces, they jumped behind a steep wall, a switch position. To their right stood a figure peering to the south. He radiated tension, and the new arrivals felt the pressure. They breathed more heavily and were tempted to stay put with their backs leaning against the cool earth instead of descending into the flat, mist-wreathed field. Süßmann and Bertin were half a minute ahead of the other two. Mists came in from the Meuse, Süßmann explained, and sometimes caused gas alarms. Better one too many than one too few. Over to the left was Thiaumont farm and further forward lay the Thiaumont line, a dark ridge etched on the night sky. This trench was thinly populated. Bertin suddenly realised how nerve-racking it must be to be responsible for what could happen and how that responsibility must weigh on the couple of officers and staff sergeants in the battalion command. They obviously wouldn’t have that sense of security that still coated daily business at Douaumont. His cheerful mood evaporated; for the first time since he was a boy he felt hostility in the air.
He’d seen all kinds of things. He’d got used to handling military equipment on a daily basis. Dead men were no longer a novelty, neither were exploding shells or aerial bombs. Furthermore, he’d been listening to the war reports for two years. The idea that war exists was as familiar to him as his uniform. But as he himself had no enemies, felt no desire to destroy and was not filled with racial hatred when he thought of the French, the struggle and intensity of war was missing from his world view. Only now did he feel it physically, and it constricted his chest. Hordes of men were lying in wait, peering at one another through the night in order to kill one another. Way over there, a French soldier with a flat steel helmet on his head was pressed against a trench wall looking northwards with a view to shooting at and perhaps killing him, Bertin, as he advanced. Over there in the dark, just the same as here, the issue of an order could turn a knot of men into assault troops, throwing themselves against the lines, always ready to strike the first blow. They weren’t glad to go or keen to die, but when ordered to do so they mounted an attack upon the bodies of their enemies. We’ve come far, he thought bitterly, we Europeans of the year nineteen hundred and sixteen. In the spring of 1914, we met these same French, Belgian and British people at peaceful sporting gatherings and academic symposia. We were delighted when German fire engines rushed to France to help with a mining disaster or French rescue parties appeared in Germany. And now we’re organising murder parties. Why aren’t we ashamed of this trick?