Even the laws of nature appeared to have been suspended. The air swam as on hot summer days, and its variable density caused fixed objects to appear to dance to and fro. Shadows streaked through the clouds. The noise now was a sort of absolute noise – you heard nothing at all. Only dimly were you aware that thousands of machine-guns behind you were slinging their leaden swarms into the blue air.
The last hour of the preparation was more dangerous than all four of its predecessors, during which we had moved around insolently on the parapets. The enemy brought in a heavy battery that hurled shell after shell into our overcrowded lines. To move out of the way, I turned left and met Lieutenant Heins, who asked me if I’d seen Lieutenant Solemacher: ‘He’s wanted to take over command, Captain von Brixen’s fallen.’ Shaken by this news, I went back, and sat myself in a deep foxhole. By the time I got there, I had forgotten what I’d been told. I was as in a dream, sleepwalking through this storm.
NCO Dujesiefken, my comrade at Regniéville, was standing in front of my foxhole, begging me to get into the trench as even a light shell bursting anywhere near would cause masses of earth to come down on top of me. An explosion cut him off: he sprawled to the ground, missing a leg. He was past help. I jumped over him, and darted into a foxhole on the right, where a couple of pioneers had already sought shelter. Heavy shells continued to rain down all round us. You suddenly saw black clumps of earth spinning out of a white cloud; the sound of the explosion was engulfed by the noise level. In the sector to our left, three men from my company were torn to pieces. One of the last hits, a dud, killed poor Schmidtchen as he sat on the dugout steps.
I was standing with Sprenger, watch in hand, in front of my foxhole, waiting for the great moment to come. The rest of the company had clustered round. We managed to cheer and distract them with a few crude jokes. Lieutenant Meyer, who briefly stuck his head round the traverse, told me later he thought we were out of our minds.
At ten past nine, the officer patrols who were to cover our advance left the trench. Since the two positions were perhaps half a mile apart, we had to move forward during the artillery preparation, and lie ready in no man’s land, to be able to leap into the first enemy line as soon as nine-forty came. A few minutes later, then, Sprenger and I climbed up on to the top, followed by the rest of the company.
‘Now let’s show them what the 7th are made of!’ ‘I’m past caring what happens to me!’ ‘Revenge for the 7th Company!’ ‘Revenge for Captain von Brixen!’ We drew our pistols and climbed over the wires, through which the first of the wounded were already dragging themselves back.
I looked left and right. The moment before the engagement was an unforgettable picture. In shell craters against the enemy line, which was still being forked over and over by the fire-storm, lay the battalions of attackers, clumped together by company. At the sight of the dammed-up masses of men, the breakthrough appeared certain to me. But did we have the strength and the stamina to splinter also the enemy reserves and rend them apart? I was confident. The decisive battle, the last charge, was here. Here the fates of nations would be decided, what was at stake was the future of the world. I sensed the weight of the hour, and I think everyone felt the individual in them dissolve, and fear depart.
The mood was curious, brimming with tension and a kind of exaltation. Officers stood up and exchanged banter. I saw Solemacher standing there in a long coat in the midst of his little staff, a short pipe with a green bowl in his hand, like a huntsman on a cold day, waiting for the gillies to do their work. We exchanged a fraternal wave. Often a mortar would fall short, and a shower of earth as high as a steeple would cover the waiting men, and no one would even flinch. The noise of battle had become so terrific, that no one was at all clear-headed.
Three minutes before the attack, Vinke beckoned to me with a full water-bottle. I took a long pull, as though it were indeed only water I was drinking. Now just the cigar was missing. Three times the air pressure snuffed out my match.
The great moment was at hand. The wave of fire had trundled up to the first lines. We attacked.
Our rage broke like a storm. Thousands must have fallen already. That was clear; and even though the shelling continued, it felt quiet, as though it had lost its imperative thrust.
No man’s land was packed tight with attackers, advancing singly, in little groups or great masses towards the curtain of fire. They didn’t run or even take cover if the vast plume of an explosion rose between them. Ponderous, but unstoppable, they advanced on the enemy lines. It was as though nothing could hurt them any more.
In the midst of these masses that had risen up, one was still alone; the units were all mixed up. I had lost my men from sight; they had disappeared like a wave in the crashing surf. All I had with me were my Vinke and a one-year volunteer by the name of Haake. In my right hand, I gripped my pistol, in my left, a bamboo riding-crop. Even though I was feeling hot, I was still wearing my long coat, and, as per regulations, gloves. As we advanced, we were in the grip of a berserk rage. The overwhelming desire to kill lent wings to my stride. Rage squeezed bitter tears from my eyes.
The immense desire to destroy that overhung the battlefield precipitated a red mist in our brains. We called out sobbing and stammering fragments of sentences to one another, and an impartial observer might have concluded that we were all ecstatically happy.
The shredded wire entanglements provided no obstacle at all, and we cleared the first trench, barely recognizable as such, in a single bound. The wave of attackers danced like a row of ghosts through the white seething mists of the flattened dip. There was no one here to oppose us.
Quite unexpectedly, the clatter of machine-gun fire rattled at us from the second line. I and my companions jumped into a crater. Another second, and there was a fearsome crash, and I sprawled on my face. Vinke grabbed me by the collar, and twisted me round on to my back: ‘Lieutenant, are you hurt?’ There was no sign of anything. The one-year volunteer had a hole in his upper arm, and assured us in groans that the bullet had lodged in his back. We tore the tunic off him and bandaged him up. A smooth furrow showed that a shrapnel shell had struck the lip of the crater on a level with our faces. It was a miracle we were still alive. It seemed the enemy were more obdurate than we’d given them credit for.
Others by now had overtaken us. We plunged after them, leaving our wounded man to his fate, having put up a piece of wood with a white strip of gauze hanging from it as a sign for the wave of stretcher-bearers that would follow. Half left of us the great railway embankment of the Ecoust–Croisilles line loomed up out of the haze; we had to get across that. From built-in loopholes and dugout windows, the rifle and machine-gun fire was pattering at us so thickly it was like having a sack of dried peas emptied over you. They could see what they were doing too.
Vinke had disappeared somewhere. I followed a defile, from whose sides flattened dugouts gaped. I strode along furiously, across the black opened ground that the acrid fumes of our shells seemed to cling to. I was quite alone.
Then I saw my first enemy. A figure in brown uniform, wounded apparently, crouched twenty paces away in the middle of the battered path, with his hands propped on the ground. I turned a corner, and we caught sight of each other. I saw him jump as I approached, and stare at me with gaping eyes, while I, with my face behind my pistol, stalked up to him slowly and coldly. A bloody scene with no witnesses was about to happen. It was a relief to me, finally, to have the foe in front of me and within reach. I set the mouth of the pistol at the man’s temple – he was too frightened to move – while my other fist grabbed hold of his tunic, feeling medals and badges of rank. An officer; he must have held some command post in these trenches. With a plaintive sound, he reached into his pocket, not to pull out a weapon, but a photograph which he held up to me. I saw him on it, surrounded by numerous family, all standing on a terrace.
It was a plea from another world. Later, I thought it was blind chance that I let him go and plunged onward. That one man of all o
ften appeared in my dreams. I hope that meant he got to see his homeland again.
Men from my company were jumping down into the defile from above. I was boiling hot. I tore off my coat, and threw it away. I remember shouting: ‘Now Lieutenant Jünger’s throwing off his coat!’ several times, and the fusiliers laughing, as if it had been the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Everyone was pouring across the open terrain, careless of the machine-guns that can have been no more than four hundred yards away. I too ran blindly towards the fire-spitting embankment. In some crater, I landed on top of a pistol-potting figure in brown corduroy. It was Kius, who was in a similar mood to me, and who passed me a fistful of cartridges by way of greeting.
I concluded from that that our penetration into the cratered area in front of the railway embankment must have hit upon some resistance, because I had taken a good supply of pistol bullets with me before we set out. Probably it was the rest of the troops who had been dislodged from the trenches and had settled here, popping up in various places in among the attackers. But as far as this part of the story goes, I have no recollection. All I know is I must have got through it, and unhurt, even though there was firing from craters on all sides, not to mention the bullets fizzing down from the embankment on friend and foe alike. They must have had an inexhaustible supply of ammunition in there.
Our attention now shifted to that obstacle, which loomed up in front of us like a menacing wall. The scarred field that separated us from it was still held by hundreds of scattered British. Some were trying to scramble back, others were already engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with our forward troops.
Kius later told me things that I took in with the same sort of feeling as when some eyewitness tells you of amazing japes or stunts that you performed while drunk. For instance, he had been chasing a British soldier through a section of trench with hand-grenades. When he ran out of missiles, to keep his opponent on the run, he continued the chase with lumps of earth, while I stood up above, splitting my sides with laughter.
Amid such scenes, we had come up to the embankment, barely realizing it. It was still spewing fire like a great machine. Here my recollection begins again, with the registration of an extremely advantageous position. We hadn’t been hit, and now that we were right up against it, the embankment changed from being an obstacle to being cover for us. As though waking from a deep dream, I saw German steel helmets approaching through the craters. They seemed to sprout from the fire-harrowed soil like some iron harvest. At the same time, I noticed that right by my foot there was the barrel of a heavy machine-gun, stuck through a dugout window covered over with sacking. The noise was such that it was only the vibration of the barrel that told us that it was firing. The defender was only an arm’s length away from us then. It was that degree of proximity that kept us safe. And that spelled his doom. Hot haze rose from the weapon. It must have hit a great many men, and it was still mowing. The barrel moved little; its fire was aimed.
I fixed the hot, shaking piece of steel that was sowing death, and that I could almost brush with my foot. Then I shot through the sacking. A man who turned up next to me ripped it clean away, and dropped a hand-grenade in the hole. A shock and the issue of a whitish cloud told the rest of the story. The means were rough, but satisfactory. The muzzle no longer moved, the weapon had stopped firing. We ran along the embankment to treat the next holes in similar fashion, and so we must have broken a few vertebrae out of the spine of the defence. I raised my hand to let my troops, whose shots were ringing round our ears, know who we were and what we were about. They waved happily back. Then we and a hundred others scaled the embankment. For the first time in the war, I saw masses of men collide. The British were defending a couple of terraced trenches the other side of the embankment. Shots were exchanged at point-blank range, hand-grenades looped down.
I leaped into the nearest trench; plunging round the traverse, I ran into an English officer in an open jacket and loose tie; I grabbed him and hurled him against a pile of sandbags. An old white-haired major behind me shouted: ‘Kill the swine!’
There was no point. I turned to the lower trench, which was seething with British soldiers. It was like a shipwreck. A few tossed duck’s eggs, others fired Colt revolvers, most were trying to run. We had the upper hand now. I kept firing off my pistol as in a dream, although I was out of ammunition long ago. A man next to me lobbed hand-grenades at the British as they ran. A steel helmet took off into the air like a spinning plate.
It was all over in a minute. The British leaped out of their trenches, and fled away across the field. From up on the embankment, a wild pursuing fire set in. They were brought down in full flight, and, within seconds, the ground was littered with corpses. That was the disadvantage of the embankment.
German troops were also down among them. An NCO stood next to me watching the fighting open-mouthed. I seized his rifle and shot an Englishman who was tangling with a couple of Germans. They stopped in bafflement at the invisible assistance, and then ran on.
Our success had a magical effect. There was no question of leadership, or even of separate units, but there was only one direction: forwards! Every man ran forward for himself.
For my objective I selected a low rise, on which I could see the ruins of a house, a cross, and the wreckage of an aeroplane. Others were with me; we formed a pack, and in our eagerness ran into the wall of flame laid down by our own artillery. We had to throw ourselves in a crater and wait while the shelling moved forward. Next to me there was a young officer from another regiment, who, like me, was delighted with the success of this first charge. In a few minutes, the intensity of our mutual enthusiasm gave us the feeling we’d known each other for years. Then we leaped up, and never saw each other again.
Even in these frightful moments, something droll could happen. A man next to me pulled his rifle to his cheek and pretended to shoot at a rabbit that suddenly came bounding through our lines. It all happened so abruptly, I had to laugh. Nothing is ever so terrible that some bold and amusing fellow can’t trump it.
Beside the ruined cottage lay a piece of trench that was being swept with machine-gun fire from beyond. I jumped into it, and found it untenanted. Immediately afterwards, I was joined by Oskar Kius and von Wedelstädt. An orderly of Wedelstädt’s, the last man in, collapsed in mid-leap, and was dead, shot through one eye. When Wedelstädt saw this last member of his company fall, he leaned his head against the wall of the trench and cried. He wouldn’t get through the day either.
Below us was a strongly fortified position across a defile, with a couple of machine-gun nests on the slopes in front of it, one either side. Our artillery had already steamrollered past; the enemy seemed to have recovered, and was shooting for all he was worth. We were perhaps five hundred yards away, and the spurts of fire buzzed across it like swarms of bees.
After a short pause for breath, not many of us headed over the top towards the enemy. It was all or nothing. After a few paces, there was just me and one other man facing the left-hand machine-gun. I could clearly see the head under a flat helmet behind the earthworks, next to a fine spout of steam. I approached in very short steps, to leave him no time to aim, and ran in a zigzag, to elude rifle bullets. Each time I hit the deck, my man offered me another clip of ammunition with which to carry the fight. ‘Cartridges! Cartridges!’ I turned round, and saw him lying on his side, twitching.
From the left, where the resistance seemed to be weaker, some men came running up and were almost within hand-grenade range of the defenders. I covered the final yards and tumbled over some wire right into the trench. The British, under fire from all sides, abandoned their position and the machine-gun, and fled across to the other position. The machine-gun was half buried under an enormous pile of brass cartridges. It was steaming and red-hot. Stretched out in front of it lay my adversary, an athletic-looking Englishman with one eye put out by a shot to the head. The colossus with the big white eyeball against his smoke-charred skull looked gruesome. As I was almos
t fainting with thirst, I didn’t hang around but went looking for water. A dugout entrance looked promising. I put my head round the corner, and saw a man sitting at the bottom, fitting bullets into a belt over his knee. He seemed to have no idea that the situation had been transformed. I calmly levelled my pistol at him, but instead of squeezing the trigger, as common sense dictated, I called out: ‘Come here, hands up!’ He jumped up, looked at me wildly, and scampered into the back of the dugout. I threw a grenade after him. The dugout probably had a further entrance, because a soldier came round a traverse and observed laconically: ‘He won’t be doing no more shooting.’
At last, I managed to find a canister of cooling-water. I gulped down the oily liquid, slushed some more into an English canteen, and handed it to comrades who suddenly filled the trench.
As a curious footnote, I should like to mention that my first thought on forcing my way into this machine-gun nest concerned the cold from which I was suffering. All my life, I’ve had a tendency to throat inflammation; therefore, when I pressed my thumbs under my jaw, I was pleased to note that the vigorous exercise I’d taken had – like a sauna – helped me sweat off this latest bout.
Meanwhile, the right-hand machine-gun nest and the defenders of the defile sixty yards in front of us were still putting up a grim fight. The fellows really were giving it everything. We tried to aim their own machine-gun at them, but didn’t manage that; instead, as I was trying that, a bullet whizzed past my head, brushed the Jager lieutenant who was standing behind me, and finished up giving a private a very nasty-looking wound in the thigh. A light machine-gun crew had better luck setting up their weapon on the edge of our little semi-circle and began raking the British from the flank.
The troops attacking on the right took advantage of the distraction we provided and attacked the defile head-on, led by our still-intact 9th Company under the command of Lieutenant Gipkens. And now from every shell-hole figures poured forth, swinging rifles and chasing with a fearsome hurrah towards the enemy position, from where defenders emerged in great numbers. They started running away with their arms aloft, to escape the initial fury of the first wave of shock troops, in particular that of Lieutenant Gipkens’s orderly, who was rampaging like a berserker. I observed the confrontation, which took place just beyond our little earthworks, with rapt attention. Here I saw that any defender who continued to empty his pistol into the bodies of the attackers four or five paces away could not expect any mercy when they were upon him. The fighter, who sees a bloody mist in front of his eyes as he attacks, doesn’t want prisoners; he wants to kill.