The Case of Sergeant Grischa by Arnold Zweig (1927)

I wonder if this was an angrier book in the original German. In this translation by Eric Sutton, only published a year after the original, it comes across as a sardonic satire of German military bureaucracy. Its moments of height, the points of humanity to which it stretches, are tragic; possibly informed by anger, but not showing it. Showing heartbreak, but undercutting that in some senses with wryness, rather than vituperation proper. It is a story of the Eastern Front of the First World War, in the area around the borderlands of Lithuania and Belarus (as they are now), and involves a Russian POW in an isolated timber camp, who decides to escape back to his little family in a trainload of cut wood. Having got so far, he skips off into the snowy forest and finds a group of similar escapees and minor outlaws, one of whom after some examination turns out to be a woman, Babka. Grischa, our escapee, and Babka fall for each other. She determines to help him get further on by lending him some parts of the uniform and identity tags of a dead deserter, Bjuscheff, thinking that if the German army pick him up, he'll get good treatment on the whole as a deserter and won't be sent back to the POW camp. But things have changed as the German army has advanced. Notices are up to the effect that deserters are to give themselves up to the conquerors immediately or be regarded as spies. But Grischa is illiterate - he carries on his merry way, and when eventually captured, his declaration of himself as Bjuscheff is the last thing that will help him. He is condemned to be shot. Here follows the major part of the book and its significant point. When he realises what he has let himself in for, he reveals his true identity. Most of the soldiers and officers around in his prison camp get to know and like him - they believe him. But getting confirmation of his identity from his old POW camp takes a long time. By the time it occurs a lot of water has run under the bridge, and the more dead-headed parts of the establishment want to see him shot anyway. A few more traditionally upstanding men feel that shooting him would be, in effect, a dishonour to the German army and a symptom of a creeping moral vacuum in army affairs. This push and pull between rival groups over Grischa takes on epic proportions in terms of its extent, however unepic it may be in its essential nitpicking, orders-versus-protocols-versus-ethics way. The satire of paperwork and vying allegiances appears at least gloriously realistic, but it sits a little uncomfortably next to Grischa's impending death, notwithstanding the fact that that oncoming doom must lend it contrarily frightening impact. The wrangling goes on and on; we feel for Grischa, lost in this maze of nonsense, his hope inflating and deflating as tiny battles are won or lost, but, a few chapters from the end of the book, comes the last journey out to a small quarry near the camp, a few shots, and this fallible, lost creature we have known through thick and thin falls down in a crumpled heap. The effect is to reveal the essential contrast here - humanity versus bureaucracy, literally the alive and the dead. An intriguing and challenging book, with a strange streak of humour through it, leaving one in a state of confirmed uncomfortability.