Elements of the 1st Battalion moved into the castle grounds. Of the 2nd, only my company and the 5th had got through the flaming curtain unscathed, or nearly so. We made our way forward through craters and debris to a sunken road on the western edge of the village. On the way I picked up a steel helmet off the floor and put it on – something I only ever did in very dicey situations. To my amazement, Favreuil seemed to be completely dead. It appeared as though the defensive line had been abandoned, because the ruins had the oddly tense feeling of a place that is unoccupied, and that spurs the eye to utmost vigilance.
Captain von Weyhe – who, though we didn’t know this at the time, was lying all alone and badly hurt in a shell-hole in the village – had ordered the 5th and 8th Companies to form the first attacking line, the 6th the second, and the 7th the third. As there was no sign of the 6th or 8th anywhere yet, I decided to go on the attack without worrying too much about the plan of battle.
By now it was seven o’clock. I saw, against a backdrop of ruined houses and tree stumps, a line of men advancing across the field under moderate rifle fire. It must be the 5th.
I drew up my men in the sunken road, and gave orders to advance in two waves. ‘Hundred yards apart. I myself shall be between the first wave and the second.’
It was our last storm. How many times over the last few years we had advanced into the setting sun in a similar frame of mind! Les Eparges, Guillemont, St-Pierre-Vaast, Langemarck, Passchendaele, Mœuvres, Vraucourt, Mory! Another gory carnival beckoned.
We left the sunken road as if it had been the exercise ground, except for the fact that ‘I myself’, as I had expressed it just now, suddenly found myself walking alongside Lieutenant Schrader on open ground way ahead.
I felt a little better, but there were still butterflies. Haller told me later, as he said goodbye to me before leaving for South America, that the man next to him had said: ‘You know something, I don’t think our lieutenant is going to come out of this show alive!’ That strange man, whose wild and destructive spirit I so loved, told me things on that occasion which made me realize that the simple soldier weighs the heart of his commanding officer as in a goldsmith’s scales. I felt pretty weary, and I had thought all along that this attack was a mistake. Even so, this is the one I most often recall. It didn’t have the mighty impetus of the Great Battle, its bubbling exuberance; on the other hand, I had a very impartial feeling, as if I were able to view myself through binoculars. For the first time in the entire war, I heard the hissing of individual bullets, as if they were whistling past some target. The landscape was utterly pellucid.
Isolated rifle shots rang out in front of us; perhaps the village walls in the background kept us from being too clearly seen. With my cane in my left hand, and my pistol in my right, I tramped on ahead, not quite realizing I was leaving the line of the 5th Company behind me and to my right. As I marched, I noticed that my Iron Cross had become detached and fallen on the ground somewhere. Schrader, my servant and I started looking for it, even though concealed snipers were shooting at us. At last, Schrader picked it up out of a tuft of grass, and I pinned it back on.
We were coming downhill. Indistinct figures moved against a background of red-brown clay. A machine-gun spat out its gouts of bullets. The feeling of hopelessness increased. Even so, we broke into a run, while the gunners were finding their range.
We jumped over several snipers’ nests and hurriedly excavated trenches. In mid-jump over a slightly better-made trench, I felt a piercing jolt in the chest – as though I had been hit like a game-bird. With a sharp cry that seemed to cost me all the air I had, I spun on my axis and crashed to the ground.
It had got me at last. At the same time as feeling I had been hit, I felt the bullet taking away my life. I had felt Death’s hand once before, on the road at Mory – but this time his grip was firmer and more determined. As I came down heavily on the bottom of the trench, I was convinced it was all over. Strangely, that moment is one of very few in my life of which I am able to say they were utterly happy. I understood, as in a flash of lightning, the true inner purpose and form of my life. I felt surprise and disbelief that it was to end there and then, but this surprise had something untroubled and almost merry about it. Then I heard the firing grow less, as if I were a stone sinking under the surface of some turbulent water. Where I was going, there was neither war nor enmity.
We Fight Our Way Through
Often enough I have seen wounded men dreaming in a world of their own, taking no further part in the noise of battle, the summit of human passions all around them; and I may say I know something of how they must have felt.
The time I lay completely unconscious can’t have been that long in terms of chronometry – it probably corresponded to the time it took our first wave to reach the line where I fell. I awoke with a feeling of distress, jammed in between narrow clay walls, while the call: ‘Stretcher-bearers! The company commander’s been hurt!’ slipped along a cowering line of men.
An older man from another company bent over me with a kindly expression, undid my belt and opened my tunic. He saw two round bloody stains – one in the right of my chest, the other in my back. I felt as though I were nailed to the earth, and the burning air of the narrow trench bathed me in tormenting sweat. My kindly helper gave me air by fanning me with my map case. I struggled to breathe, and hoped for darkness to fall soon.
Suddenly a fire-storm broke loose from the direction of Sapignies. No question, this smooth rumbling, this incessant roaring and stamping signified more than merely the turning back of our ill-conceived little attack. Over me I saw the granite face of Lieutenant Schrader under his steel helmet, loading and firing like a machine. There was a conversation between us that was a little like the tower scene in St Joan. Albeit, I didn’t feel amused, because I had the clear sense I was done for.
Schrader rarely had time to toss me a few words, because I didn’t really figure any more. Feeling my own feebleness, I tried to glean from his expression how things stood for us up there. It appeared that the attackers were gaining ground, because I heard him call out more frequently and with greater alarm to his neighbours, pointing out targets that must be very close at hand.
Suddenly, as when a dam breaks under the pressure of flood water, the cry went up: ‘They’ve broken through on the left! They’re round the back of us!’ going from mouth to mouth. At that terrible instant, I felt my life force beginning to glimmer again like a spark. I was able to push two fingers into a mouse-or mole-hole level with my arm. Slowly I pulled myself up, while the blood that was bogging my lungs trickled out of my wounds. As it drained away, I felt relief. With bare head and open tunic, I stared out at the battle.
A line of men with packs plunged straight ahead through whitish swathes of smoke. A few stopped and lay where they fell, others performed somersets like rabbits do. A hundred yards in front of us, the last of them were drawn into the cratered landscape. They must have belonged to a very new outfit that hadn’t been tested under fire, because they showed the courage of inexperience.
Four tanks crawled over a ridge, as though pulled along on a string. In a matter of minutes, the artillery had smashed them to the ground. One broke in half, like a child’s toy car. On the right, the valiant cadet Mohrmann collapsed with a death shout. He was as brave as a young lion; I had seen that at Cambrai already. He was felled by a bullet square in the middle of his forehead, better aimed than the one that he had once bandaged up for me.
The affair didn’t seem to be irrevocably lost. I whispered to Corporal Wilsky to creep a little left, and enfilade the gap in the line with his machine-gun. He came back straight away and reported that twenty yards beyond everyone had surrendered. That was part of another regiment. So far I had been clutching a tuft of grass with my left hand like a steering column. Now I succeeded in turning round, and a strange sight met my eyes. The British had begun to penetrate sectors of the line to the left of us, and were sweeping them with fixed bayonets. Before I cou
ld grasp the proximity of the danger, I was distracted by another, more startling development: at our backs were other attackers, coming towards us, escorting prisoners with their hands raised! It seemed that the enemy must have broken into the abandoned village only moments after we had left it to make our attack. At that instant, they tightened the noose round our necks; we had completely lost contact.
The scene was getting more and more animated. A ring of British and Germans surrounded us and called on us to drop our weapons. It was pandemonium, as on a sinking ship. In my feeble voice, I called upon the men near me to fight on. They shot at friend and foe. A ring of silent or yelling bodies circled our little band. To the left of me, two colossal British soldiers plunged their bayonets into a piece of trench, from where I could see beseeching hands thrust out.
Among us, too, there were now loud yells: ‘It’s no use! Put your guns down! Don’t shoot, comrades!’
I looked at the two officers who were standing in the trench with me. They smiled back, shrugged, and dropped their belts on the ground.
There was only the choice between captivity and a bullet. I crept out of the trench, and reeled towards Favreuil. It was as in a bad dream, where you can’t pick your feet off the floor. The only thing in my favour was perhaps the utter confusion, in which some were already exchanging cigarettes, while others were still butchering each other. Two Englishmen, who were leading back a troop of prisoners from the 99th, confronted me. I aimed my pistol at the nearer of the two, and pulled the trigger. The other blazed his rifle at me and missed. My hurried movements pushed the blood from my lungs in bright spurts. I could breathe more easily, and started running along the trench. Behind a traverse crouched Lieutenant Schläger in the middle of a group of blazing rifles. They fell in with me. A few British, who were making their way over the field, stopped, set down a Lewis gun on the ground, and fired at us. Except for Schläger and me and a couple of others, everyone went down. Schläger, who was extremely shortsighted, told me later that all he had been able to see was my map case flying up and down. That was his signal. The loss of blood gave me the lightness and airiness of intoxication, the only thing that worried me was that I might break down too soon.
Finally, we reached a semi-circular earthworks to the right of Favreuil, from where half a dozen heavy machine-guns were spitting lead at friend and foe alike. Either the noose hadn’t been completely drawn tight, or else this was one last pocket of resistance; we had been lucky to find it. Enemy bullets shattered on sandbags, officers yelled, excited men leaped here and there. A medical officer from the 6th Company ripped my tunic off, and told me to lie down immediately, otherwise I might bleed to death in a matter of minutes.
I was rolled in a tarpaulin and dragged to the entrance of Favreuil, accompanied by some of my soldiers, and some from the 6th. The village was already heaving with British, so it was inevitable that we soon came under fire from very short range. The medical officer of the 6th, who was holding the back end of my tarpaulin, went down, shot in the head; I fell with him.
The little group had thrown themselves flat on the ground, and, lashed by bullets, were trying to creep to the nearest dip in the ground.
I stayed behind on the field, bundled up in my tarpaulin, almost apathetically waiting for the shot that would put an end to this Odyssey.
But even in my hopeless plight I was not forsaken; my companions were keeping an eye on me, and soon fresh efforts were made to rescue me. At my ear I heard the voice of Corporal Hengstmann, a tall blond Lower Saxon: ‘I’ll take you on my back, sir, either we’ll get through or we won’t!’
Unfortunately, we didn’t get through; there were too many rifles waiting at the edge of the village. Hengstmann started running, while I wrapped my arms around his neck. Straight away they started banging away, as if it were a prize-shoot at a funfair. After a few bounds, a soft metallic buzz indicated that Hengstmann had stopped one. He collapsed gently under me, making no sound, but I could feel that Death had claimed him even before we touched the ground. I freed myself from his arms, which were still securing me, and saw that a bullet had drilled through his steel helmet and his temple. The brave fellow was the son of a teacher in Letter near Hanover. As soon as I was able to walk, I called on his parents, and gave them my report on their son.
This discouraging example didn’t deter the next volunteer from making a bid to rescue me. This was Sergeant Strichalsky of the Medical Corps. He put me on his shoulders, and, while a second shower of bullets whistled around us, he carried me safely to the shelter of a little hump of ground.
It was getting dark. My comrades took the tarpaulin off a body and carried me across a deserted stretch of ground, under the jagged flash of ordnance, near or far. I got to know what a terrible thing it is to have to struggle for breath. Smoke from a cigarette that someone ten steps ahead of me was smoking almost choked me.
At last we got to a dressing-station, where my friend Dr Key was in charge. He mixed me some delicious lemonade, and gave me a morphine injection that put me to revivifying sleep.
The wild drive to the hospital the next day was the last difficult challenge to my powers of survival. Then I was in the hands of the sisters, and was able to carry on reading Tristram Shandy from where I had had to put it down for the order to attack.
Friendly solicitude got me safely through a period of setbacks – something that seems to be typical of lung shots. Men and officers from the division came to visit. Those who had taken part in the storm at Sapignies, admittedly, were no more, or else, like Kius, they were in British captivity. With the first shells landing in Cambrai as the enemy slowly gained the upper hand, M. and Mme Plancot sent me a kind letter, a tin of condensed milk they could ill afford to spare, and the only melon their garden had produced. There were bitter times ahead for them. My last batman was in the tradition established by his many predecessors; he stopped with me, even though he wasn’t entitled to hospital rations, and had to go begging down in the kitchen.
During the endless hours flat on your back, you try to distract yourself to pass the time; once, I reckoned up my wounds. Leaving out trifles such as ricochets and grazes, I was hit at least fourteen times, these being five bullets, two shell splinters, one shrapnel ball, four hand-grenade splinters and two bullet splinters, which, with entry and exit wounds, left me an even twenty scars. In the course of this war, where so much of the firing was done blindly into empty space, I still managed to get myself targeted no fewer than eleven times. I felt every justification, therefore, in donning the gold wound-stripes, which arrived for me one day.
A fortnight later, I was lying on the rumbling bed of a hospital train. The German landscape was already bathed in the lustre of early autumn. I was fortunate enough to be taken off the train at Hanover, and was put up in the Clementine infirmary. Among the visitors who soon arrived, I was particularly glad to see my brother; he had continued to grow since his wounding, although his right side, which was where he was hurt, hadn’t.
I shared my room with a young fighter pilot from Richthofen’s squadron, a man named Wenzel, one of the tall and fearless types our nation still produces. He lived up to the motto of his squadron, ‘Hard – and crazy with it!’ and had already brought down a dozen opponents in single combat, although the last had splintered his upper arm with a bullet first.
The first time I went out, I went with him, my brother, and a few comrades who were awaiting their transport, to the rooms of the old Hanoverian Gibraltar Regiment. Since our war-worthiness was being put into question, we felt the urgent need to prove ourselves by vaulting an enormous armchair. We didn’t do too well; Wenzel broke his arm all over again, and the following day I was back in bed with a temperature of forty – yes, my chart even threatened the red line beyond which the doctors are powerless to help. At such high temperatures, you lose your sense of time; while the sisters were fighting for my life, I was in those fever dreams that are often very amusing.
On one of those days, it was 22 Sept
ember 1918, I received the following telegram from General von Busse:
‘His Majesty the Kaiser has bestowed on you the order pour le Mérite. In the name of the whole division, I congratulate you.’
Bibliography
General
Henri Barbusse, Le Feu (Paris, 1917)
Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (London, 1928)
Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme (London, 1994)
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York, 1975)
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London, 1929)
Homer, The Iliad, trans. Robert Fagles (New York, 1990)
Ernst Jünger, Auswahl aus dem Werk in Fünf Bänden, Volume II
(Das erste Pariser Tagebuch; Kaukasische Aufzeichnungen; Das zweite Pariser Tagebuch) (Stuttgart, 1994)
——, Copse 125, trans. Basil Creighton (London, 1930)
——, The Storm of Steel, trans. Basil Creighton (London, 1929)
John Keegan, The Face of Battle (London, 1976)
Gert Ledig, Die Stalinorgel (Hamburg, 1955)
——, Vergeltung (Frankfurt, 1956)
——, Faustrecht (Munich, 1957)
Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (London, 2001)
Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson, The First World War (London, 1999)
Erich Maria Remarque, Im Westen nichts Neues (Berlin, 1929)
Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (London, 1937)
John Silkin (ed.), The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (rev. edn., London, 1996)
Leon Wolff, In Flanders Fields: Passchendaele 1917 (London, 1959)
Particular
Heinz Ludwig Arnold, Krieger, Waldgänger, Anarch (Göttingen, 1990)
—— (ed.), TEXT UND KRITIK # 105/106 (Göttingen, 1990)
Norbert Dietka, Ernst Jünger – vom Weltkrieg zum Weltfrieden (Bad Honnef, 1994)