Western Front

EDUCATION BEFORE VERDUN -- Arnold Zweig--Viking ($2.50).

Eight years ago U. S. readers were mostly unaware that the late great German Army had been made up of human beings. To the few that read it, a little book called Way of Sacrifice, by a Prussian officer who had fought before Verdun, came with the shock of revelation. Few months later a much wider U. S. audience was discovering The Case of Sergeant Grischa. Though it never became such an enormous seller as All Quiet on the Western Front, it soon ranked as a modern classic, has sold nearly 250,000 copies in English translation alone. Those two novels (both German) were generally admitted to be the best produced by the war. Last week appeared Sergeant Grischa's companion-piece, Education Before Verdun. Like its predecessor, it was chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club.

Even without that endorsement, there was no danger that Education Before Verdun would lack readers, but whether it. too, would take its place among modern classics was more dubious. The third of Author Zweig's tetralogy-in-progress (Young Woman of 1914, Education Before Verdun, The Case of Sergeant Grischa, The Crowning of a King--the last yet to appear), but the second in his time scheme, Education Before Verdun seeks to repeat Sergeant Grischa's case in terms of the Western Front. Perhaps because its inhumanly terrible story is not so concentrated, the sympathy it arouses is more diffused, less trenchant. Perhaps any plot based on human relationships loses much of its poignancy when staged before the plotless chaos of Verdun; the scenes readers will find most memorable are the ones in which that impersonally erupting background is most to the fore.

Theme of Education Before Verdun is stated on p. 323: "In the middle of a war, when civilization had long since collapsed . . , mankind, tenacious and defiant in the face of gross injustice, fought desperately against outrages that would indeed have cried aloud to heaven in peace, but might now rank as trifling irregularities." As in so many contemporary German novels, Injustice is the theme. The story opens with a minor but significant example. Bertin, who in peacetime had been a well-known German novelist, is now simply a near-sighted private in the Army Service Corps, gets into serious hot water for giving some thirsty French prisoners a drink. Thenceforward he is a marked man, is relentlessly persecuted by his superiors, given dirty and dangerous jobs, punished for no reason, refused leave.

When he meets young Christoph Kroysing, Berlin's self-pity vanishes. Kroysing had discovered some fellow-non-coms were selling army rations instead of distributing them to their hungry men; he had been so foolish as to write an influential uncle about it. Of course his letter was stopped by the censor, and he was threatened with court martial. Kroysing would have welcomed the chance to testify, but the court martial was indefinitely postponed, and he was transferred to a dangerous advanced post, kept there on the supposition that sooner or later he would be killed. Day after he tells Berlin his story a shell gets him. At his funeral Berlin meets Kroysing's brother, a hard-bitten sapper lieutenant, tells him the story. Lieutenant Kroysing swears vengeance. He manages lo gel his brother's company transferred to the dreaded Fort of Douaumont, intends to keep them there until he gets a signed confession from the captain that he knowingly sent young Kroysing to his death.

Cowardly Captain Niggl, ripped from his comfortable post behind the lines and plumped down in the most awful spot on the Verdun front, soon understands the reason behind the company's transfer; when he realizes how ruthless Lieutenant Kroysing is, he is terrified. Just as he is about ready to sign the damning confession, the French attack. After a terrific bombardment the order is given to evacuate Douaumont, and in the chaos of the battle Captain Niggl gets back to safety. Lieutenant Kroysing is reported missing. Meantime Berlin, whose company is in charge of an ammunition dump, is the only one to keep his head and stick to his post during a bombardment. A well-meaning artillery officer recommends him for The Iron Cross. Only result is that Berlin is given a more dangerous job: scavenging for dud shells.

One of his pals goes lo a nearby field hospital with a cunningly self-inflicted wound. When Berlin pays him a visit he finds Lieutenant Kroysing a patient there too. Kroysing is furious that Niggl has given him the slip but swears he will corner him again somehow when he has recovered from his wound. Berlin's man-made misfortunes seem momentarily on the mend. The pretty head nurse knows his books and admires them. Thanks to her personal influence with the Crown Prince, he is transferred to a better job, with an army corps that is leaving for the comparative comfort and quiet of the Russian front. The nurse and Lieutenant Kroysing fall in love, and when she promises to marry him he forswears his vengeance on his brother's murderers. They have one night together before a French airman's bomb blots out Kroysing. Bertin, nearly all his friends dead, sets out for the Eastern Front. An epilog shows Bertin in 1919 going to call on the Kroysing parents, to tell them "how their sons had died, and in how pitiful and futile a fashion; they must be made to understand that it was no deed of heroism or sacrifice, that had robbed them of two young men who would have comforted them in their old age; it was an act of villainy, and a stroke of chance." But when he sees the old couple in their garden he understands that illusion is all that is left them. His heart fails him, he goes away.

Background rather than theme, incidents rather than story, are the memorable notes in Education Before Verdun. As in Sergeant Grischa, the War is not the subject but the setting--with the difference that here the setting overlooms the human figures struggling in brief silhouet before its curtain. Fortress-girt Verdun, innermost circle of the Western Front's hell; where in 1916 the French and Germans each lost 350,000 men; where, between February and July, 23 million shells punctuated the deadlocked argument; Douaumont, captured and recaptured but each time by an accident, the death trap where an explosion wiped out a whole battalion and the corpses were bricked in where they lay. The Crown Prince, dressed in tennis flannels, a racket under his arm, cheering on the troops marching up to the front line; his aide tossing packets of cigarets from a speeding car, and the soldiers stamping them into the mud after he has passed. The German veterans' version of I Want to Go Home: "For this campaign isn't an express train, So wipe your tears away, With sandpaper." The mistier background of the "home front," where "unaccustomed to apply the standards of reality to the speeches of their masters, and demand a reckoning for squandered blood and wasted years, [people] toiled in the factories, fields, and cities, sent their children to be soldiers, washed with lye-soap and paper towels, travelled in unheated railway carriages, froze in chilly houses, sunned themselves in future glories and reports of victories they never presumed to question, mourned their dead, and were patiently ridden to destruction."

The Author, like his patient protagonist Bertin, is a near-sighted Jewish writer,* served on three fronts (southeastern Europe, before Verdun, in Russia) in the German Army. A pre-War writer of national reputation, with many a story and play to his credit, the War that changed him from an intelligent, independent man to a numbered pawn was a crippling straitjacket. Like Bertin, he decided: "More lies will be told about this war than any other international shooting-match. The survivors must tell the truth, and some of those who have a story to tell will survive." In 1933 he left Germany, is now, in company with every first-rate German writer, in exile. With his wife and two sons Arnold Zweig lives at Haifa, in Palestine, works as laboriously as his one remaining good eye will permit, to tell the truth about the education he has survived.

*Not to be confused with Austrian Author Stefan Zweig, no kin (Conflicts, Amok, Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles).

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