Storm of Steel Read online

  Towards noon, the artillery fire had increased to a kind of savage pounding dance. The flames lit around us incessantly. Black, white and yellow clouds mingled. The shells with black smoke, which the old-timers called ‘Americans’ or ‘coal boxes’, ripped with incredible violence. And all the time the curious, canary-like twittering of dozens of fuses. With their cut-out shapes, in which the trapped air produced a flute-like trill, they drifted over the long surf of explosions like ticking copper toy clocks or mechanical insects. The odd thing was that the little birds in the forest seemed quite untroubled by the myriad noise; they sat peaceably over the smoke in their battered boughs. In the short intervals of firing, we could hear them singing happily or ardently to one another, if anything even inspired or encouraged by the dreadful noise on all sides.

  In the moments when the shelling was particularly heavy, the men called to each other to remain vigilant. In the stretch of trench that I could see, and out of whose walls great clumps of mud had already been knocked here and there, we were in complete readiness. Our rifles were unlocked in the shooting-slits, and the riflemen were alertly eyeing the foreground. From time to time they checked to left and right to see whether we were still in contact, and they smiled when their eyes encountered those of comrades.

  I sat with a comrade on a bench cut into the clay wall of the trench. Once, the board of the shooting-slit through which we were looking splintered, and a rifle bullet flew between our heads and buried itself in the clay.

  By and by, there were casualties. I had no way of knowing how things stood in other sectors of the labyrinthine trench, but the increasing frequency of the calls for ‘Ambulancemen!’ showed that the shelling was starting to take effect. From time to time, a figure hurried by with its head or neck or hand wrapped in fresh, clean and very visible bandages, on its way to the rear. It was a matter of urgency to get the victim out of the way, because of the military superstition by which a trifling wound or hit, if not immediately dealt with, is certain to be followed by something rather worse.

  My comrade, volunteer Kohl, kept up that North German sang-froid that might have been made for such a situation. He was chewing and squeezing on a cigar that refused to draw, and apart from that looked rather sleepy. Nor did he allow himself to be upset when, suddenly, to the rear of us, there was a clattering as of a thousand rifles. It turned out that the intensity of the shelling had caused the wood to catch fire. Great tongues of flame climbed noisily up the tree trunks.

  While all this was going on, I suffered from a rather curious anxiety. I was envious of the old ‘Lions of Perthes’ for their experience in the ‘witches’ cauldron’, which I had missed out on through being away in Recouvrence. Therefore, each time the coal-boxes came down especially thick and fast in our neck of things, I would turn to Kohl, who had been there, and ask:

  ‘Hey, would you say this was like Perthes now?’

  To my chagrin, he would reply each time with a casually dismissive gesture:

  ‘Not by a long chalk!’

  When the shelling had intensified to the extent that now our clay bench had started to sway with the impact of the black monsters, I yelled into his ear:

  ‘Hey, is it like Perthes now?’

  Kohl was a conscientious soldier. He began by standing up, looked about himself carefully, and then roared back, to my satisfaction:

  ‘I think it’s getting there!’

  The reply filled me with foolish delight, as it confirmed to me that this was my first proper battle.

  At that instant, a man popped up in the corner of our sector: ‘Follow me left!’ We passed on the command, and started along the smoke-filled position. The ration party had just arrived with the chow, and hundreds of unwanted mess-tins sat and steamed on the breastwork. Who could think to eat now? A crowd of wounded men pushed past us with blood-soaked bandages, the excitement of the battle still etched on their pale faces. Up on the edge of the trench, stretcher after stretcher was swiftly lugged to the rear. The sense of being up against it began to take hold of us. ‘Careful of my arm, mate!’ ‘Come along, man, keep up!’

  I spotted Lieutenant Sandvoss, rushing past the trench with distracted staring eyes. A long white bandage trailing round his neck gave him a strangely ungainly appearance, which probably explains why just at that moment he reminded me of a duck. There was something dreamlike about the vision – terror in the guise of the absurd. Straight afterwards, we hurried past Colonel von Oppen, who had his hand in his tunic pocket and was issuing orders to his adjutant. ‘Aha, so there is some organization and purpose behind all this,’ it flashed through my brain.

  The trench debouched into a stretch of wood. We stood irresolutely under huge beech trees. A lieutenant emerged from dense undergrowth and called to our longest-serving NCO: ‘Have them fall out towards the sunset, and then take up position. Report to me in the dugout by the clearing.’ Swearing, the NCO took over.

  We fell out in extended order, and lay down expectantly in a series of flattish depressions that some predecessors of ours had scooped out of the ground. Our ribald conversations were suddenly cut off by a marrow-freezing cry. Twenty yards behind us, clumps of earth whirled up out of a white cloud and smacked into the boughs. The crash echoed through the woods. Stricken eyes looked at each other, bodies pressed themselves into the ground with a humbling sensation of powerlessness to do anything else. Explosion followed explosion. Choking gases drifted through the undergrowth, smoke obscured the treetops, trees and branches came crashing to the ground, screams. We leaped up and ran blindly, chased by lightnings and crushing air pressure, from tree to tree, looking for cover, skirting around giant tree trunks like frightened game. A dugout where many men had taken shelter, and which I too was running towards, took a direct hit that ripped up the planking and sent heavy timbers spinning through the air.

  Like a couple of squirrels having stones thrown at them, the NCO and I dodged panting round a huge beech. Quite mechanically, and spurred on by further explosions, I ran after my superior, who sometimes turned round and stared at me, wild-eyed, yelling: ‘What in God’s name are those things? What are they?’ Suddenly there was a flash among the rootwork, and a blow on the left thigh flung me to the ground. I thought I had been struck by a clump of earth, but the warm trickle of blood indicated that I’d been wounded. Later, I saw that a needle-sharp piece of shrapnel had given me a flesh wound, though my wallet had taken the brunt of it. The fine cut, which before slicing into the muscle had split no fewer than nine thicknesses of stout leather, looked as though it might have been administered by a scalpel.

  I threw down my haversack and ran towards the trench we had come from. From all sides, wounded men were making tracks towards it from the shelled woods. The trench was appalling, choked with seriously wounded and dying men. A figure stripped to the waist, with ripped-open back, leaned against the parapet. Another, with a triangular flap hanging off the back of his skull, emitted short, high-pitched screams. This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm. And fresh shells came down all the time.

  I lost my head completely. Ruthlessly, I barged past everyone on my path, before finally, having fallen back a few times in my haste, climbing out of the hellish crush of the trench, to move more freely above. Like a bolting horse, I rushed through dense undergrowth, across paths and clearings, till I collapsed in a copse by the Grande Tranchée.

  It was already growing dark by the time a couple of stretcher-bearers who were looking for casualties came upon me. They picked me up on their stretcher and carried me back to their dressing-station in a dugout covered over with tree branches, where I spent the night, pressed together with many other wounded men. An exhausted medic stood in the throng of groaning men, bandaging, injecting and giving calm instructions. I pulled a dead man’s coat over me, and fell into a sleep that incipient fever lit with lurid dreams. Once, in the middle of the night, I awoke, and saw the doctor still work
ing by the light of a lamp. A Frenchman was screaming incessantly, and next to me a man growled: ‘Bloody Frenchies, never happy if they’ve not got something to moan about!’ And then I was asleep again.

  As I was being carried away the following morning, a splinter bored a hole through the stretcher canvas between my knees.

  Along with other wounded men, I was loaded on to one of the ambulance wagons that shuttled between the battlefield and the main dressing-station. We galloped across the Grande Tranchée, which was still under heavy fire. Behind the grey canvas walls we careered through the danger that accompanied us with giant stamping strides.

  On one of the stretchers on which – like loaves of bread into an oven – we had been pushed into the back of the cart lay a comrade with a shot in the belly that occasioned him intense pain. He appealed to every one of us to finish him off with the ambulanceman’s pistol that hung in the wagon. No one answered. I was yet to experience the feeling where every jolt seems like a hammer blow on a bad injury.

  The chief dressing-station was in a forest clearing. Long rows of straw had been laid out and covered with foliage. The stream of wounded was proof, if proof were needed, that a significant engagement was in progress. At the sight of the surgeon, who stood checking the roster in the bloody chaos, I once again had the impression, hard to describe, of seeing a man surrounded by elemental terror and anguish, studying the functioning of his organization with ant-like cold-bloodedness.

  Supplied with food and drink, and smoking a cigarette, I lay in the middle of a long line of wounded men on my spill of straw, in that mood which sets in when a test has been got through, if not exactly with flying colours, then still one way or another. A short snatch of conversation next to me gave me pause.

  ‘What happened to you, comrade?’

  ‘I’ve been shot in the bladder.’

  ‘Is it very bad?’

  ‘Oh, that’s not the problem. I can’t stand it that I can’t fight …’

  Later that same morning, we were taken to the main collection point in the village church at St Maurice. A hospital train was there, already getting up steam. We would be back in Germany in two days. From my bed on the train, I could see the fields just coming into spring. We were well looked after by a quiet fellow, a philosophy scholar in private life. The first thing he did for me was to take out his penknife and cut the boot off my foot. There are people who have a gift for tending others, and so it was with this man; even seeing him reading a book by a night-light made me feel better.

  The train took us to Heidelberg.

  At the sight of the Neckar slopes wreathed with flowering cherry trees, I had a strong sense of having come home. What a beautiful country it was, and eminently worth our blood and our lives. Never before had I felt its charm so clearly. I had good and serious thoughts, and for the first time I sensed that this war was more than just a great adventure.

  The battle at Les Eparges was my first. It was quite unlike what I had expected. I had taken part in a major engagement, without having clapped eyes on a single live opponent. It wasn’t until much later that I experienced the direct coming together, the climax of battle in the form of waves of attackers on an open field, which, for decisive, murderous moments, would break into the chaos and vacuity of the battlefield.

  Douchy and Monchy

  Two weeks later, my wound was healed. I was released to the reserve battalion in Hanover, and was given a short home leave there to get used to walking again.

  ‘Why not report as a gentleman-cadet?’ my father suggested to me on one of my first mornings at home, as we were walking round the orchard to see how the trees would bear; and I did as he suggested, even though it had seemed much more attractive to me at the beginning of the war to be a simple rifleman, responsible only for myself.

  So the regiment sent me off to Döberitz, on another course, which I left six weeks later with the rank of ensign. From the hundreds of young men who had come from all over Germany, I could tell that the country was not short of good fighting stock. While the training I had received in Recouvrence had been directed at the individual, here we were instructed in various ways of moving across terrain in small groups.

  In September 1915, I travelled back to my regiment. I left the train in the village of St Léger, the divisional headquarters, and marched at the head of a small detachment of reservists to Douchy, where the regiment was based. Ahead of us, the French autumn offensive was in full swing. The front manifested itself as a long, billowing cloud over open country. Overhead the machine-guns of the air squadrons pattered away. Sometimes, when one of the French planes came down very low – their colourful rosettes seeming to scan the ground like big butterflies’ eyes – my little troop and I took cover under the poplars that lined the road. The anti-aircraft guns threaded long fleecy lines through the air, and whistling splinters pinged into the tilth.

  This little march was to give me an opportunity of putting my newly acquired skills into practice right away. We knew we had been spotted, probably by one of the many captive balloons whose yellow forms glimmered in the Western sky, because, just as we were turning into the village of Douchy, the black cone of a shell exploded in our faces. It struck the entrance to the little village cemetery, just beside the road. For the first time, I found myself in the position of having to react to an unexpected development with an immediate decision.

  ‘To the left – in extended order – quick march!’

  The column spilled out over the fields at the double; we formed up again to the left, and entered the village by a large detour.

  Douchy, where the 73rd Rifles were billeted, was a middle-sized village that had not, as yet, suffered much from the war. This place, nestled on the wavy ground of Artois, became, over the year and a half of stationary warfare in that region, a kind of second garrison to the regiment, a place of rest and recreation after gruelling days of fighting and working on the front line. How many a time we drew a deep breath to see the lonely light at the entrance to the village winking towards us through the black and rainy night! It meant having a roof over our heads again, and a bed in the dry. We could sleep without having to go out into the night four hours later, and without being pursued even into our dreams by the fear of a surprise attack. It made us feel reborn, on the first day of a rest spell, when we’d had a bath, and cleaned our uniforms of the grime of the trenches. We exercised and drilled out on the meadows, to return suppleness to our rusty bones, and to reawaken the esprit de corps of individuals isolated over the long watches of the night. That gave us the ability to resist during the long and taxing days ahead. At first, the companies took it in turn to march to the front for work on the fortifications. The strenuous double roster was dropped later on, on the orders of our understanding Colonel von Oppen. The security of a position depends less on the elaborate construction of its approach routes and the depths of the firing trench than on the freshness and undiminished courage of the men defending it.

  For off hours, Douchy had much to commend it to its grey inhabitants. Numerous bars were still plentifully provided with eatables and drinkables; there was a reading room, a coffee bar and, later on, a cinema was improvised from a large barn. The officers enjoyed an excellently equipped mess-room and a bowling alley in the rectory garden. There were regular company parties, in which officers and men, in the timeless German fashion, vied with one another in drinking. Not to forget the killing days, for which the company pigs, kept fat on the refuse from the field kitchens, gave their lives.

  Since the civilian population was still living in the village, it was important to exploit all available space. Gardens were partly taken up with huts and various temporary dwellings; a large orchard in the middle of the village was turned into a public square, another became a park, the so-called Emmichplatz. A barber and dentist were installed in a couple of dugouts covered with branches. A large meadow next to the church became a burial ground, to which the company marched almost daily, to take their leave of one or
more comrades to the strains of mass singing.

  In the space of a single year, a crumbling rural village had sprouted an army town, like a great parasitical growth. The former peacetime aspect of the place was barely discernible. The village pond was where dragoons watered their horses, infantry exercised in the orchards, soldiers lay in the meadows sunning themselves. All the peacetime institutions collapsed, only what was needed for war was maintained. Hedges and fences were broken through or simply torn down for easier access, and everywhere there were large signs giving directions to military traffic. While roofs caved in, and furniture was gradually used up as firewood, telephone lines and electricity cables were installed. Cellars were extended outwards and downwards to make bomb shelters for the residents; the removed earth was dumped in the gardens. The village no longer knew any demarcations or distinctions between thine and mine.

  The French population was quartered at the edge of the village, towards Monchy. Children played on the steps of dilapidated houses, and old people made hunched figures, slinking timidly through the new bustle that had remorselessly evicted them from the places where they had spent entire lifetimes. The young people had to stand-to every morning, and were detailed to work the land by the village commandant, First Lieutenant Oberländer. The only time we came into contact with the locals was when we brought them our clothes to be washed, or went to buy butter and eggs.