by Ernst Jünger
I had already given up hope of getting out of this hornets’ nest in one piece, when I suddenly gave a shout for joy. My eye had lit on the mess-tin with the spoon standing in it; now I got the picture. As it was already quite light, there wasn’t a second to lose. We raced across the open field, the first rifle bullets whistling past us, towards our own lines. In the furthest French trench, we ran into Lieutenant von Kienitz’s patrol. As the cry of ‘Lüttje Lage!’ came back, we knew we were over the worst. Unfortunately, I dropped on to a badly wounded man. Kienitz hurriedly told me he’d driven off French sappers in the first trench with hand-grenades, and, going on, had taken some losses, dead and wounded, from our own artillery fire.
After a longish wait, two more of my men appeared, NCO Dujesiefken and Fusilier Haller, who at least had some comforting news for me. As he’d wandered around, he had ended up in a remote sap, and had found three machine-guns, one of which he had taken off its mount and picked up with him. As it was getting lighter all the time, we raced over no man’s land back to our own front line.
Of the fourteen who had set out, only four returned, and Kienitz’s patrol had suffered heavy losses as well. My dejection was a little helped by the words of the stout Oldenburger Dujesiefken, who, while I was getting my hand bandaged up in the dugout, was outside telling his comrades what had befallen, finishing with the sentence: ‘I must say, though, that Lieutenant Jünger is really something else: my word, the sight of him vaulting over those barricades!’
Then, almost all of us with bandaged heads or hands, we marched through the woods to the regimental headquarters. Colonel von Oppen welcomed us, and sat us down to coffee. He was disappointed at our lack of success, but still told us we’d done our best. We felt comforted. Then I was put in a car, and taken to divisional command, who wanted a full report. A few hours before, I had had enemy hand-grenades exploding in my ears; now I was enjoying sitting back in a powerful car, being whisked along the highway, eating up the miles.
The general staff officer received me in his office. He was pretty cut up, and I saw to my irritation that he was trying to leave the blame for the failure of our mission at my door. When he jabbed his finger at the map and asked questions like: ‘Don’t you think you should have turned right into this communication trench instead?’ I realized that the kind of confusion where notions like right and left just go out the window was quite outside his experience. For him the whole thing had been a plan; for us an intensely experienced reality.
The divisional commander greeted me kindly, and soon improved my mood. I sat next to him at lunch with my ragged tunic and bandaged hand, and tried, without false modesty, to make him see this morning’s action in the best way, in which I think I succeeded.
The next day, Colonel von Oppen summoned the members of the patrol once more, and gave out Iron Crosses and two weeks’ furlough apiece. In the afternoon, those of the fallen who were brought in were buried in the military cemetery at Thiaucourt. In among the fallen of this war, there were also fighters from 1870. One of those old graves was marked by a mossy stone with the inscription: ‘Distant to the eye, but to the heart forever nigh!’ A large stone slab was etched with the lines:
Heroes’ deeds and heroes’ graves,
Old and new you here may see.
How the Empire was created,
How the Empire was preserved.
That evening I read in a French communiqué: ‘A German attack at Regniéville was foiled; prisoners were taken.’ Wolves had broken into the sheep-pen, but lost their bearings – nothing more. At any rate, the short item told me that among our lost comrades there were some who had survived.
Some months later, I got a letter from one of the missing men, Fusilier Meyer, who had lost a leg in the hand-grenade battle; after wandering around a long time he, with three companions, had been engaged in a fight, and, heavily wounded, had been taken prisoner, after the others, NCO Kloppmann among them, had died. Kloppmann was one of those men you couldn’t imagine being taken alive.
I experienced quite a few adventures in the course of the war, but none was quite as eerie as this. It still makes me feel a cold sweat when I think of us wandering around among those unfamiliar trenches by the cold early light. It was like the dream of a labyrinth.
A few days later, after some preliminary shrapnel fire, Lieutenants Domeyer and Zürn with several companions leaped into the enemy firing trench. Domeyer ran into a heavily bearded French reservist who, when called upon to ‘Rendez-vous!’ replied with an irascible ‘Ah non!’ and threw himself at him. In the course of a bitter tussle, Domeyer shot him through the throat with his pistol, and was forced to return, as I had done, sans captives. In our mission alone we had used enough munitions to have furnished forth a whole battle in 1870.
Flanders Again
The day I returned from my furlough, we were relieved by Bavarian troops, and billeted at first in the nearby village of Labry.
On 17 October we were entrained, and after travelling for a day and a half found ourselves back on Flemish soil, having last left it barely two months previously. We spent the night in the small town of Izegem, and the following morning marched to Roulers, or, to give it its Flemish name, Roeselare. The town was in the early stages of destruction. There were still shops with goods in them, but the inhabitants were already living in their cellars, and the ties of bourgeois existence were being loosened by frequent bombardment. With the war raging on all sides, a shop window opposite my quarters containing, of all things, ladies’ hats, seemed the height of absurd irrelevance. At night, looters broke into the abandoned houses.
I was the only person in my billet on the Ooststraat to be living above ground. The building belonged to a draper, who had fled at the beginning of the war, leaving an old housekeeper and her daughter to look after it. The two of them were also minding a little orphan girl whom they had found wandering the streets as we were marching in, and of whom they knew nothing, not even her name or her age. They all were terrified of bombs, and begged me, practically on their knees, not to leave light on upstairs for the wicked aeroplanes. I have to say, I laughed on the other side of my face when I was standing in the window with my friend Reinhardt, watching an English plane flitting over the rooftops in the beam of a searchlight, a huge bomb came down near by, and the air pressure wrapped the window-panes about our ears.
For the next round of fighting, I had been designated as an intelligence officer, and sent to regimental staff. To learn a little more, I looked up the 10th Bavarian Regiment, whom we were to relieve, ahead of time. I found their commander to be friendly enough, even though he chided me over the non-regulation ‘red ribbon’ on my cap, which ought really to have been covered over with grey, so as not to draw any gunfire to the spot.
Two orderlies took me to the clearing-station, which was said to have a very good view of the front. No sooner had we left headquarters than a shell stirred up the meadow. My guides were quite adept at avoiding the shelling – which towards noon turned into an uninterrupted rumble – by taking byways through the poplar woods that were dotted about. They worked through the gold-gleaming autumnal landscape with the instincts of the experienced modern warrior, who, even in the densest bombardment, can hit on a path that offers at least reasonable odds of getting through.
On the doorstep of an isolated farmyard that appeared to have been freshly bombed, we saw a man lying face down on the ground. ‘He’s stopped one!’ said the stolid Bavarian. ‘Air’s got a high iron content,’ said his companion, looking around appraisingly, and strode quickly on. The clearing-station lay the other side of the heavily shelled Passchendaele–Westroosebeke road. It was rather like the one I had commanded in Fresnoy, having been installed next to a building that had been reduced to a pile of rubble, and having so little cover that the first half-accurate shell would knock it for six. I was briefed by three officers, who seemed to be leading a very companionable cave-life in the place and were pleased that they were to be relieved, about the
enemy, the position and how to approach, and then went by way of Roodkruis-Oostnieuwkerke, back to Roulers, where I reported to the colonel.
As I passed through the streets of the little town, I kept an eye out for the cosy names of the numerous little pubs that are such an apt expression of whatever the Flemish equivalent for dolce vita is. Who wouldn’t feel tempted by a pub-sign called ‘De Zalm’ [Salmon], ‘De Reeper’ [Heron], ‘De Nieuwe Trompette’, ‘De drie Koningen’ or ‘Den Oliphant’? Even to be welcomed in the intimate ‘Du’ form in that pithy and guttural language puts one right at ease. May God permit this splendid country, which has so often in its history been the battlefield for warring armies, to rise again from this war with its old quality intact.
In the evening, the town was once again bombed. I went down into the cellar, where the women were huddled trembling in a corner, and switched on my torch to settle the nerves of the little girl, who had been screaming ever since an explosion had knocked out the light. Here was proof again of man’s need for home. In spite of the huge fear these women had in the face of such danger, yet they clung fast to the ground which at any moment might bury them.
On the morning of 22 October, with my reconnaissance group of four men, I started off for Kalve, where the regimental staff were to be relieved this morning. At the front, there was very heavy fire, whose lightnings tinged the mist blood red. At the entrance to Oostnieuwkerke a building was hit by a heavy shell and collapsed just as we were about to pass it. Lumps of debris trundled across the street. We tried to go around the place, but ended up having to go through it after all, as we weren’t sure of the direction to Kalve. As we hurried on, I called out for directions to an NCO who was standing in a doorway. Instead of giving me an answer, he thrust his hands deeper into his pockets, and shrugged his shoulders. As I couldn’t stand on ceremony in the midst of this bombardment, I sprang over to him, held my pistol under his nose, and got my information out of him that way.
It was the first time in the war that I’d come across an example of a man acting up, not out of cowardice, but obviously out of complete indifference. Although such indifference was more commonly seen in the last years of the war, its display in action remained very unusual, as battle brings men together, whereas inactivity separates them. In a battle, you stand under external pressures. It was on the march, surrounded by columns of men moving out of the battle, that the erosion of the war ethos showed itself most nakedly.
In Roodkruis, a little farmstead at a fork in the road, things got really worrying. Limbers chased across the shelled road, troops of infantry wended along through the brush either side of the road, and innumerable wounded men dragged themselves back. We encountered one young artilleryman who had a long, jagged splinter sticking out of his shoulder, like a spear. He passed us, wandering like a somnambulist, never once looking up.
We turned right off the road, to the regimental headquarters, which stood in a ring of fire. Near by, a couple of telephonists were laying their wires across a cabbage field. A shell landed right next to one of them; we saw him crumple, and thought he was done for. But then he picked himself up, and calmly continued laying his wire. As the headquarters consisted of a tiny concrete blockhouse that barely had room for the commander, an adjutant and an orderly, I looked for a place near by. I moved in, with intelligence, gas-protection and trench-mortar officers, to a wooden shack that didn’t exactly strike me as the embodiment of a bomb-proof abode.
In the afternoon, I went up the line, seeing as news had come in that the enemy had that morning attacked our 5th Company. My route went via the clearing-station to the Nordhof, essentially a former farmhouse, in whose ruins the commander of the battalion in reserve was staying. From there, a path, not always recognizable as such, led to the commander of the fighting troops. The heavy rains of the past few days had turned the crater field into a morass, deep enough, especially around the Paddelbach, to endanger life. On my wanderings, I would regularly pass solitary and abandoned corpses; often it was just a head or a hand that was left protruding from the dirty level of the crater. Thousands have come to rest in such a way, without a sign put up by a friendly hand to mark the grave.
After the extremely sapping crossing of the Paddelbach, which was only possible after improvising a bridge from fallen poplars, I came across Lieutenant Heins, the commander of the 5th Company, along with a handful of loyal men, in an enormous shell-crater. The crater position was on a hill, and as it wasn’t completely inundated, undemanding grunts might find it habitable. Heins told me that that morning a British line had appeared and then disappeared again, when it had come under fire. They in turn had shot a few men from the 164th, who had run off at their approach. Other than that, everything was tiptop; I returned to headquarters, and reported to the colonel.
The following day, our lunch was rudely interrupted by some shells landing hard by our wooden walls, sending up spurts of dirt that slowly spiralled down on to our tar-paper roof. Everyone streamed out of the hut; I fled to a nearby farmhouse, and, because it was raining, went inside. That evening, precisely the same chain of events, only this time I stayed in the open, as the rain had stopped. The next shell flew into the middle of the collapsing farmhouse. That’s the role of chance in war. More than elsewhere, small causes can have a vast effect.
On 25 October, we had already been driven out of our shacks by eight o’clock, one of them being nailed by only the second shell to be fired. Further shells flew into the damp pastures. They gave the impression of just expiring there, but they tore up considerable craters. Alerted by my experience of the day before, I sought out an isolated and confidence-inspiring crater in the large cabbage field behind headquarters, and didn’t leave it for quite some time afterwards. It was on that day that I got to hear the bad news of the death of Lieutenant Brecht, who had fallen in battle as a divisional observation officer in the crater field just right of the Nordhof farm. He was one of those few who, even in this war of matériel, always had a particular aura of calm about him, and whom we supposed to be invulnerable. It’s always easy to spot people like that in a crowd of others – they were the ones who laughed when there were orders to attack. Hearing of such a man’s death inexorably led to thoughts of my own mortality.
The morning hours of 26 October were filled by drumfire of unusual severity. Our artillery too redoubled its fury on seeing the signals for a barrage that were sent up from the front. Every little piece of wood and every hedge was home to a gun, whose half-deaf gunners did their business.
As wounded men going back were making exaggerated and unclear statements about a British advance, I was sent off to the front at eleven o’clock with four men, for more accurate information. Our way led through heated fire. We passed numerous wounded, among them Lieutenant Spitz, the commander of the 12th, with a shot in the chin. Even before we got to the command dugout we came under aimed machine-gun fire, a sure sign that the enemy must have forced our line back. My suspicion was confirmed by Major Dietlein, the commander of the 3rd Battalion. I found the old gentleman engaged in crawling out of the doorway of his three-parts inundated blockhouse, and fishing in the mud for his meerschaum cigar-holder.
The British had forced a way through our front line, and had occupied a ridge from where they commanded the Paddelbach basin and our battalion headquarters. I entered the change in the position with a couple of red strokes on my map, and then geed the men up for their next sapping run through the mud. We bounded across the terrain overlooked by the British, got behind the crest of the next elevation, and from there, more slowly, advanced to the Nordhof. To the right and left of us shells splashed down in the swamp and sent up vast mud mushrooms ringed with innumerable lesser splatters. The Nordhof also needed to be got through in a hurry, as it was under fire from high-explosive shells. Those things went off with a peculiarly nasty and stunning bang. They were fired over, a few at a time, with only short intervals between them. Each time, we had to make some rapid ground and then wait for the next rou
nd in a shell-hole. In the time between the first distant whine and the very close explosion, one’s will to live was painfully challenged, with the body helpless and motionless left to its fate.
Shrapnels were also present in the compound, and one threw its freight of balls in our midst, with a multiple clatter. One of my companions was struck on the back of the helmet, and thrown to the ground. After lying there stunned for some time, he struggled to his feet and ran on. The terrain around the Nordhof was covered with a lot of bodies in frightful condition.