The snoring in the barracks was louder than the guns outside. Or had they gone quiet? Had society muzzled their iron jaws? Had the typesetting machines at the front stopped clattering? Were the printing presses no longer rolling that had flattened thousands of men into the letters of a new alphabet describing the future? No more trams on Schöneberg high street. Time for Sunday rest.
CHAPTER FOUR
Christoph Kroysing
‘SUPERB!’ SAID PRIVATE Bertin the next morning. The dew sparkled in the sunshine, and the cross-country march took the Böhne commando away from the company commanders, and the men hated being near them. Yes, Bertin was responding rather differently to his despatch to the front than Herr Glinsky and his like had anticipated. For Bertin, this march provided an excursion into life proper. He positively quivered with joy at the thought that he was at last about to experience something. His whole being was as receptive as a dry sponge and pushed impatiently forwards, as if he were on an invisible lead. He was all eyes and ears that morning, totally alert.
There were several routes to the front from the Steinbergquell ammunition depot, which was tucked away at the junction of the Flabas to Moirey station road and the Damvillers to Azannes road. The shortest route was in Fosses wood and passed through a village called Ville, which had been shot to pieces and had gaping holes in its roofs and walls. It was still nice and early, and the sun slanted down behind the marching men. Pear tree leaves and laundry hung out to dry by signals men and flak gunners in their billet yard flashed in the morning light. The billets were all in the cellars. Ville was now a town of cellars, full of technical troops and infantry.
In the green valley, which they turned into as the road changed direction in the hills, they came upon the first dead. They lay under rust red tarpaulins, watched over by a sapper in a steel helmet. For a few minutes afterwards, the ASC men stopped talking. Then they found themselves in a green beech wood. Light shone through the young leaves on the treetops against the bright sky; a clear stream gurgled towards the men; drivers brought bareback horses to drink and carried full buckets of water up the hill on broad wooden shoulder yokes, disappearing behind black barracks where smoke billowed from narrow kitchen chimneys. The wood was practically untouched by shells, but the trees had been thinned and it was crossed by paths heading in different directions uphill. The further forwards the Böhne commando pushed, the more ripped and truncated trees they found lying on both sides of the valley. The red wood of the beeches stood out in the wild green tangle of creepers, foliage and brambles. Hazel bushes and wild cherry trees formed a thick undergrowth. Smooth, silvery grey beech trunks thrust upwards, hemmed in by dozens of younger saplings, pushing up branches as wide as a finger or arm to get as much light as possible and avoid being choked by the predatory tops of the older trees. Slanting light glimmered through the wild tangle, and birds called. As the valley turned southwards, all the trees were suddenly truncated, their bark hanging in loops. There were exposed white rocks everywhere, split open by shells, and a mass of creepers and shrubs sprawled round the edges of the huge blast holes, half submerged in the loam. Later – it must’ve been about eight o’clock – they crossed a plateau riddled like a sieve with shell holes, many of them as big as craters. The abused land stretched southwards: a desolate, brownish wasteland. Without warning, columns of smoke suddenly rose up, and a loud blast threw the ASC men into the nearest shell hole. Nobody knew which direction was which or if they were taking cover on the wrong side. The young man in Bertin felt great joy at that moment. This was how things should be. He was 27, but his heart beat like a boy’s, perhaps that was his good fortune. He pushed on and before the next blast came he was lying beside the detachment leaders, Sergeant Böhne and Sergeant Schulz, the ammunitions expert. For the first time, splinters and clumps of earth hurtled over the shocked ASC men. They regrouped at the edge of the field and advanced in the pauses between explosions. No one was hurt. Still, they looked pale by the time they arrived at the light railway tracks in the next valley, screened by wire netting interlaced with foliage. At that very moment, the whirr and clatter of the German counter bombardment howled past above their heads. Further down, they met a couple of gunners from the heavy batteries, who grinned at them unperturbed and asked how they liked the pyrotechnics. Bertin felt almost ashamed of his comrades’ blotchy faces and deathly pale noses.
‘Get a move on!’ said Sergeant Böhne, hustling his detachment down the pathless valley slope, pitted with shell holes and covered in footprints. Down below, a gunner was riding around. He inspected the edge of the wood and disappeared into a Beech copse. He clearly belonged to the battery that was to be installed there. In the valley, the barrels of two long-range guns stretched skywards like telescopes. Around them swarmed groups of small men. The light railway lines ended halfway up the shielding ridge. A new railway track needed to be laid between them and the guns so that the small locomotive could haul the barrel and mount of the first gun to the rear that night. Herr Böhne explained this to the young Bavarian NCO who was waiting for them. Bertin liked the look of the young man’s agreeable brown face and his warm eyes under his visor. He was obviously a 1914 volunteer who had acquired an Iron Cross, Second Class, a wound and his stripes in the space of a year, and was now in charge of a detachment. Bertin had gone to university in the south of Germany, and he loved the man’s dialect, which made him feel more homesick than his native Silesian. The work plan was simple. There were some piles of rails. The Prussians were to lay a new line to the guns, while the Bavarian’s men dismantled the two monsters, removing their mounts from their bedding. They’d have to be gone by midday or the Frogs would rain on their parade. He knew the score, because he and his men were dug in as a standby detachment in the ruin up the hill known as Chambrettes-Ferme. Every morning, the Frogs, who knew the area like the backs of their hands, battered the line to pieces. The Bavarian’s men then crawled out of their holes and laid new rails – and so forth. He had 30 men and two medical orderlies, because every now and then one of the men didn’t duck quickly enough and got hurt.
As he spoke, he shaded his eyes, squinting at the captive balloon. He said he could tell from its pale colour that the other side was out of action for the time being because of the ground mist and the morning sun in their eyes. And so the work began. Some of the men levelled the ground with picks and shovels, while the main group brought over the rails and stuck them together like a child’s model railway, fixing the sleepers into the ground with small clips. The hill ridge towered above them, a bleak yellowy brown dotted with grassy clumps between the shell holes, occasional thistles, camomile and dandelion leaves. At every step, they had to watch out for steel splinters, which came in all different sizes. The ground was covered with them, and they could damage the leather uppers of their boots. Perhaps there’s been shooting here, Bertin thought, as he chipped away with his pick at the front of the group. The sun felt strong on their backs. They’d ditched their tunics long ago. Sergeant Böhne watched them out of the corner of his pale eyes, which were sunk in wrinkles. Swinging his walking stick, he paraded up and down, rather pleased with the excursion, which might get him an Iron Cross, and with the work of his men, who, to the Bavarian’s astonishment, were making good progress. Yes, thought Bertin, who heard them discussing the topic, workers from Hamburg and Berlin get through it quicker than others. And was he mistaken or was the young Bavarian with the blue and white cockade deliberately hanging about in his vicinity? The Bavarian had given him a searching look earlier. Or did people tend to imagine such things when they liked someone?