No Man's Land (80 page)

Today 1/96 artillery regiment has fired for four hours without itself being hit once.

*

…but to break through without rest day and night, across the second and third lines into the open ground… These conditions ensure success…

The posthumous literary reputation of
Edlef Köppen
(1893–1939) depends essentially on one book,
Heeresbericht
, published in 1930. There was an English translation as early as 1931 under the title ‘Higher Command' – though an accurate rendering of the German title would be ‘Military Communiqué'. In the novel Köppen describes the experience of Adolf Reisiger, a volunteer and junior officer in an artillery unit who serves, largely on the Western Front, from October 1914 to the end of the war. Köppen's own wartime career was broadly similar to that, except that in September 1918 he was confined in a mental asylum for disobeying orders.
Heeresbericht
is, on the one hand, a description of human survival amidst the immense technological expenditure of modern warfare and, on the other, an account of increasing disillusion in the face of the slaughter on the Western Front and elsewhere. The chapters which describe the combat situations, the competing artillery barrages and the hospital stays are interrupted by documentary quotations, montages of extracts from newspaper reports, army dispatches, government declarations, wartime advertising and theatre programmes. After the war Köppen suffered ill health, having been several times wounded in action. He found a professional home, however, in the new medium of radio and helped develop the radio play as a form. His pacifist views and his novel cost him his job when the Nazis came to power in 1933. He got by writing reviews and scripts under a pseudonym, but died in 1939 due to the long-term effect of a war wound.

JOSEPH ROTH

MY SON IS DEAD!

from
The Radetzky March

translated by Michael Hofmann

T
HAT VERY NIGHT
, the Jäger battalion marched to the north-eastern frontier at Woloczyska. It began raining, gently at first, then harder and harder, until the white dusty roads were turned to silvery grey mud. The mud smacked together over the boots of the soldiers, and spattered the spotless uniforms of the officers marching to their regulation deaths. Their long sabres got in their way, the magnificent, long-haired pompoms dangling from their black and yellow sashes were now tangled, wet and mired by thousands of little spots of mud. At daybreak, the battalion reached its destination, joined up with a couple of other infantry regiments, and fell into extended order. They waited like that for two days, and there was nothing to be seen of the war. Sometimes they heard isolated, distant shots from somewhere to the right of them. There were little frontier skirmishes between cavalry units. From time to time they caught glimpses of wounded revenue officers, and occasionally a dead border guard. Medical orderlies removed the casualties, dead or wounded, under the eyes of the waiting troops. The war refused to start. It hung fire, as occasionally thunderstorms will hang fire for days before breaking out.

On the third day came the command to withdraw, and the battalion got into marching order. Officers and men alike were disappointed. A rumour spread that two miles east of them, an entire regiment of dragoons had been pulverized, and that enemy Cossacks had already broken through into the interior. The troops marched westward in grim silence. They soon realized that this was an unplanned retreat, because at the crossroads and in the villages and small towns on their route, they encountered a confused mixture of all sorts of forces. The high command issued contradictory orders. Most of these were to do with the evacuation of towns and villages, and the treatment of pro-Russian Ukrainians, Orthodox priests and spies. Hastily formed courts martial handed down hasty judgments. Secret informants supplied unverifiable reports on peasants, priests, teachers, photographers, civil servants. There was no time. They were in a hurry to retreat, but also in a hurry to punish the traitors. And while ambulances, baggage columns, field guns, dragoons, uhlans and infantrymen met up in various configurations under the incessant rain on the softened roads, while couriers galloped this way and that, while the inhabitants of the little towns fled west in endless hordes, surrounded by the white terror, laden with chequered white and red feather beds, grey sacks, brown chairs and tables, and blue oil lamps – while all this went on, in the little church squares of the villages and hamlets, the shots of hastily assembled firing squads executed the hasty death sentences, and ominous drum rolls accompanied the monotonous judgments of the courts martial, and the wives of the slain lay screaming for mercy in front of the muddied boots of the officers, and flickering red and silver flames shot out of huts and barns, sheds and outbuildings. The Austrian army's war began with punishments, with courts martial. For many days the real or supposed traitors were left dangling on trees in the church squares, as an example to the living. But far and wide, the living had fled. Fires burned round the hanging corpses, and the leaves caught, and the fire was stronger than the continuous, drizzling rain that ushered in a bloody autumn. The old bark of the ancient trees slowly turned to charcoal, and tiny, silver, smouldering sparks darted out between the little ridges of it, like fiery worms, and licked at the leaves; the green foliage shrivelled up and turned red, then black, then grey; the ropes loosened, and the corpses fell to the ground, with blackened faces and bodies untouched.

One day, they stopped in the village of Krutyny. They had got there in the afternoon and were due to leave the next morning, before daybreak, on their westward route. That day, the rain had let up, and a late September sun spun a kindly, silvery light over the wide, still unharvested fields, the living bread that would never be eaten. An Indian summer drifted slowly through the air. Even the crows and ravens were quiet, deceived by the brief peace of the day, and hence without hope of any carrion. The troops had been in the same clothes for eight days now. Their boots were sodden, their feet swollen, their knees stiff, their calves sore, their backs too locked to bend. They found billets in some huts, tried to pull dry clothes out of their kit-bags and wash in the few wells. It was a clear, calm night, but for the noise of abandoned dogs howling with fear and hunger in the isolated farmyards; the Lieutenant was unable to sleep. He left the hut where he was billeted. He walked down the long village street, towards the church tower which pointed its Orthodox double cross at the stars. The church, with its shingle roof, stood in the middle of a small graveyard, ringed by crooked wooden crosses that seemed to dance in the night. Outside the wide, grey, open gates of the graveyard three bodies were hanging, a bearded priest flanked by two young peasants in sand-coloured jackets with coarsely woven straw shoes on their motionless feet. The priest's black cowl reached down to his shoes. Occasionally, the night wind caused his feet to brush against his priestly robe like the clapper of a bell, but without making any noise.

Lieutenant Trotta went up to the hanged men. He looked at their swollen faces. He thought he could recognize in the three of them various of his men. They were the faces of people with whom he dealt on a daily basis. The broad black beard of the priest reminded him of Onufri's beard. That was what Onufri had looked like, the last time he'd seen him. And who knows, maybe this hanged priest was Onufri's brother. Lieutenant Trotta looked around. He listened. There were no human sounds to be heard. In the bell tower of the church, there was the rustle of bats. The abandoned dogs barked in the abandoned farms. The Lieutenant drew his sabre, and one after the other, cut down the three hanged men. Then he shouldered one body after the other and carried them to the graveyard. With his shining sabre, he began to loosen the soil on the paths between the graves until he thought he'd made enough space for three bodies. He laid them in the hole, all together, scraped the earth over them, with sabre and scabbard, trampled it down with his feet and trod it firm. Then he made the sign of the cross. Not since the final mass in the cadet school of Mahrisch- Weisskirchen had he made the sign of the cross. He wanted to say a Lord's Prayer as well, but he only moved his lips soundlessly. Some unknown night bird screamed. The bats rustled. The dogs howled.

The following morning, they were on the march again before sun-up. The world was swathed in the silvery fogs of an autumn morning. Before long, though, the sun came through, glowing like high summer. They became thirsty. They were marching across a sandy, abandoned plain. From time to time they had the illusion of hearing the sound of running water. A few soldiers ran in the direction of the sound, only to turn back soon enough. No streams, no ponds, no wells. They passed through a couple of villages, but their wells were choked with the corpses of shootings and summary justice. The corpses, some of them bent double, dangled over the wooden rims of the wells. The soldiers didn't bother to look into the depths. They rejoined the company. They marched on.

Their thirst grew. Noon approached. They heard shots, and flung themselves to the ground. The enemy had presumably overtaken them. They crawled forward on their hands and knees. Ahead of them, they could see already, the road widened. There was the gleam of an abandoned railway station. The tracks began there. At a trot, the battalion reached the security of the station; for a few miles from there, they would be covered by the railway embankments. The enemy, perhaps a swift sotnia of Cossacks, might be just alongside them, on the other side of the embankment. Depressed and silent, they marched along between the embankments. Suddenly a man cried: ‘Water!'And a moment later, they had all seen the well on the embankment slope, next to a watchman's hut. ‘Halt!' ordered Major Zoglauer. ‘Halt!' the other officers ordered. But the thirsty men could not be stopped. One by one to begin with, then in groups, the men charged up the slope; shots rang out, and the men fell. The enemy cavalry the other side of the embankment shot at the thirsty men, and more and more thirsty men ran towards the fatal well. By the time the second platoon of the second company approached the well, there were already more than a dozen bodies on the green slope.

‘Platoon halt!' ordered Lieutenant Trotta. He stood aside and said: ‘I'll get you water! No one move! Wait here! Get me a bucket!' He was brought a couple of waterproof canvas buckets from the machine gun section. He took one in each hand. And he walked up the slope, towards the well. Bullets whistled around him, clattered at his feet, flew past his ears and his legs and over his head. He leaned over the well. On the other side of the slope he saw two rows of Cossacks firing at him. He wasn't afraid. It never occurred to him that he, like the others, might be shot. He could hear the bullets before they were shot, and, at the same time, the first drumming bars of the Radetzky March. He stood on the balcony of his father's house. The army band was playing below. Now Nechwal raised the black ebony baton with the silver head. Now Trotta dipped the second of his buckets into the well. Now the cymbals clashed. Now he pulled the bucket up. With a brimming bucket in either hand, with bullets fizzing around him, he put out his left foot to begin the descent. He took two steps. Now it was only his head that wasn't covered by the slope.

And now a bullet struck his skull. He took another step and fell. The buckets toppled and swayed and emptied themselves over him. Warm blood poured from his head on to the cool earth of the embankment. From down below the Ukrainian peasants in his platoon chorused: ‘Praise be to Christ Jesus!'

For ever and ever, amen! he wanted to say. They were the only words of Ruthenian that he knew. But his lips could no longer move. His mouth gaped open. His white teeth grimaced against the blue autumn sky. His tongue slowly went blue, he could feel his body cool. And then he died.

That was the end of Lieutenant Carl Joseph, Baron von Trotta.

So simple and so inappropriate for literary treatment in the primers of the K-and-K elementary schools of Austria was the death of the grandson of the hero of Solferino. Lieutenant Trotta died, not with sword in hand, but with a couple of buckets of water. Old Trotta read the letter a couple of times, and let his hands sink. The letter fell from his hands, and fluttered down on to the burgundy carpet. Herr von Trotta did not remove his pince-nez. His head trembled, and the wobbly pince-nez, with its oval glasses, fluttered like a glass butterfly on the old man's nose. Two heavy, crystal tears fell simultaneously from Herr von Trotta's eyes, smeared the glasses of his spectacles, and ran on down into his whiskers. His body remained still, only his head trembled back and forth and from side to side, and all the time the glass wings of his pince-nez were aflutter. The District Commissioner sat at his desk like that for an hour or more. Then he stood up, and walked through into his house, quite normally. He took his black suit out of his wardrobe, his black tie and his black crepe mourning ribbons that he had worn on his hat and sleeve following his father's death. He changed, not looking in the mirror as he did. His head was still trembling. He did his best to tame his unruly head. But, the harder the District Commissioner tried, the more his head trembled. His pince-nez still sat fluttering on his nose. At last, the District Commissioner gave up all his endeavours, and simply allowed his skull to tremble. In his black suit, with his black mourning ribbon on his sleeve, he went into Fraulein Hirschwitz, remained standing in the doorway, and said: ‘My dear, my son is dead!' He quickly shut the door, went into his office, from one room to the next, stuck his trembling head in all the doors and announced everywhere: ‘My son is dead, Herr Suchandsuch! My son is dead, Herr Suchandsuch!'Then he took his hat and cane, and went out on the street. All the passers-by greeted him, and were bemused by his trembling head. The District Commissioner would stop the occasional one of them and say: ‘My son is dead!' And he didn't wait for the other to show consternation and sympathy, but walked straight on, to Dr Skovronnek. Dr Skovronnek, now in the uniform of a colonel in the army Medical Corps, was spending his mornings in the garrison hospital and his afternoons, as before, in the café. He rose when the District Commissioner walked in, saw the old man's trembling, and looked at his unsteady head and fluttering pincenez. ‘My son is dead!' repeated Herr von Trotta. Skovronnek kept his friend's hand for a long time, for minutes. Both remained standing there, hand in hand. The District Commissioner sat down, Skovronnek moved the chess board on to an adjacent table. When the waiter came up, the District Commissioner said: ‘My son is dead!' And the waiter bowed very low, and brought him a cognac.