by Ernst Jünger
On the dot of seven, we drew up in the determined order in a long, snaking line. We found Dragon Alley untenanted; a row of empty ammunitions drums behind a barricade attested to the fact that the notorious machine-gun had been withdrawn. That cheered us up no end. After I’d blocked off a well-constructed trench that led off to the right, we entered a defile. It slowly climbed, and before long we found ourselves on the open field just as day was breaking. We turned about and tried the trench off to the right, where we found plenty of signs of yesterday’s failed attack. The ground was littered with British corpses and hardware. This was the Siegfried Line. Suddenly, the leader of the shock troops, Lieutenant Hoppenrath, seized the rifle from one of his soldiers, and fired. He had encountered a British sentry, who threw a few hand-grenades and then took to his heels. We went on, and soon encountered further resistance. Hand-grenades were thrown by both sides, and exploded with loud bangs. The shock troops attacked. Bombs were passed from hand to hand; snipers took up position behind traverses to deal with the enemy throwers; the platoon commanders peered over the edge of the trench to see if a counter-attack might be coming; and the light machine-gun units set up their weapons in suitable places. We attacked the trench from the front with grenades, and covered its length with our rifles. Things now started to perk up all around, and swarms of bullets crossed over our heads.
After a short fight, excited voices called out from the other side, and before we understood what was happening, the first British soldiers came out towards us with their hands above their heads. One after another, they rounded the traverse and unbuckled, while our guns and pistols remained levelled at them. They were young, good-looking fellows in new uniforms. I let them go by me, and said ‘Hands down!’ and summoned a platoon to lead them away. Most of them showed us by their confident smiles that they didn’t expect us to do anything too terrible to them. Others tried to propitiate us by holding out cigarette packets and bars of chocolate. With the waxing joy of the huntsman, I saw we had made a huge catch; the line seemed unending. We had counted past a hundred and fifty, and more were still coming out. I stopped an officer and asked him about the rest of the position, and its defence. He replied very politely; he really didn’t need to stand to attention. He took me to the company commander, a wounded captain, who was in a nearby foxhole. I saw myself face to face with a young man of about twenty-six, with fine features, leaning against the shelter door with a bullet through his calf. When I introduced myself to him, he lifted his hand to his cap, I caught a flash of gold at the wrist, he said his name, and handed over his pistol. His opening words showed me he was a real man. ‘We were surrounded.’ He felt obliged to explain to his opponent why his company had surrendered so quickly. We talked about various matters in French. He told me there were quite a few German wounded, whom his men had bandaged and fed, in a nearby shelter. When I asked him how strong the rearward defences of the line were, he would give me no information. After I had promised to have him and the other wounded men sent back, we parted with a shake of the hand.
Outside the dugout, I ran into Hoppenrath, who told me we’d taken about two hundred prisoners. For a company that was eighty strong, that wasn’t bad going. After I’d posted sentries, we took a look around at the captured trench, which was bristling with weapons and all manner of equipment. In the fire-bays lay machine-guns, mortars, hand- and rifle-grenades, water-bottles, sheepskin jerkins, waterproofs, tarpaulins, tins of meat, jam, tea, coffee, cocoa and tobacco, bottles of cognac, tools, pistols, flare pistols, undergarments, gloves; in short, pretty much anything you could think of. Like an old feudal commander, I allowed a few minutes for taking plunder, to give the men a chance to draw breath, and to take a look at some of the items. I, for my part, was unable to resist ordering up a little breakfast for myself in a dugout entrance and filling my pipe with some fine Navy Cut tobacco while I scribbled out my report to the commanding officer of the troops in the line. Painstaking man that I am, I also sent a copy to our battalion commander.
Half an hour later, we set off again in euphoric mood – perhaps the British cognac might have contributed a little – and made our way forward along the Siegfried Line, dodging from traverse to traverse.
We were fired on from a pillbox built into the trench, and we therefore climbed out on to the nearest fire-step to have a look around. Whilst we were trading bullets with the occupants, one man was knocked flat as if by an invisible fist. A bullet had drilled through the top of his helmet, and ploughed a furrow along the top of his skull. I could see the brain rise and fall in the wound with every heartbeat, and yet he was capable of going back on his own. I had to remind him to leave his knapsack behind, he had been going to take it, and I implored him to take his time and be careful.
I asked for some volunteers to break the resistance by an attack across the open field. The men eyed each other doubtfully; only an awkward Pole, whom I had always taken for a cretin, climbed out of the trench, and trudged off towards the pillbox. Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten the name of this simple man, who taught me that you can’t say you really know a man if you haven’t seen him under conditions of danger. Then Ensign Neupert and his section leaped out of the line, while we continued along the trench at the same time. The British fired off a few shots and fled, leaving the pillbox for us. One of our attackers had collapsed in mid-charge, and was lying on the ground a few steps away from it. He had received one of those shots to the heart that lay a man out as if he were asleep.
As we proceeded, we encountered some stiff resistance from some hand-grenade throwers we couldn’t see, and gradually found ourselves pushed back to the pillbox. There we locked ourselves up. In the contested line of trench, both sides sustained losses. Unfortunately, one of ours happened to be NCO Mevius, whom I had discovered to be a bold fighter on the night of Regniéville. He was lying face down in a puddle of blood. When I turned him over, I saw by a large hole in his forehead that it was too late for any help. I had just exchanged a few words with him; suddenly a question I’d asked went unanswered. A few seconds later, when I looked round the traverse to see what was keeping him, he was already dead. It was an eerie feeling.
After our opponents had also pulled back a little, a protracted exchange of fire ensued, with a Lewis gun barely fifty yards away from us forcing us to keep our heads down. We responded with one of our own light machine-guns. For maybe half a minute, the two guns fought it out, with the bullets spraying and bouncing everywhere. Then our gunner, Lance-Corporal Motullo, collapsed with a shot in the head. Even though his brains were dribbling down past his chin, he was still lucid as we carried him into the nearest shelter. Motullo was an older man, one of those who would never have volunteered; but once he was standing behind his machine-gun, I had occasion to observe that, even though he was standing in a hail of bullets, he didn’t duck his head by so much as an inch. When I asked him how he was feeling, he was capable of replying in complete sentences. I had the sense that his mortal wound didn’t hurt him at all, maybe that he wasn’t even aware of it.
Gradually, things calmed down a little, as the British for their part were also busy digging themselves in. At twelve o’clock, Captain von Brixen, Lieutenant Tebbe and Lieutenant Voigt came by; they offered their congratulations on the company’s successes. We sat down in the pillbox, lunched off British provisions, and discussed the position. In between times, I was having to negotiate with about two dozen Britishers, whose heads appeared out of the trench a hundred yards away, and who seemed to want to surrender. But as soon as I put my own head over the parapet, I found myself under fire from somewhere further back.
Suddenly, there was some commotion at the British barricade. Hand-grenades flew, rifles banged, machine-guns clattered. ‘They’re coming! They’re coming!’ We leaped behind sandbags and started shooting. In the heat of battle, one of my men, Corporal Kimpenhaus, jumped up on to the parapet, and fired down into the trench until he was brought down by two bad wounds in his arms. I took a note of this hero o
f the hour, and was proud to be able to congratulate him two weeks later, on the award of the Iron Cross, First Class.
No sooner had we got back from this interruption to our lunch than there was more pandemonium. It was one of those curious incidents that can suddenly and unpredictably transform an entire situation. The noise was coming from a subaltern in the regiment on our left who wanted to line up with us, and seemed inflamed by a berserk fury. Drink seemed to have tipped his innate bravery into a towering rage. ‘Where are the Tommies? Lemme at ’em! Come on boys, who’s coming with me?’ In his insensate fury, he knocked over our fine barricade, and plunged forward, clearing a path for himself with hand-grenades. His orderly slipped ahead of him along the trench, shooting down anyone who survived the explosions.
Bravery, fearless risking of one’s own life, is always inspiring. We too found ourselves picked up by his wild fury, and scrabbling around to grab a few hand-grenades, rushed to form part of this berserker’s progress. Soon I was up alongside him, tearing along the line, and the other officers too, followed by riflemen from my company, weren’t slow in coming. Even Captain von Brixen, the battalion commander, was up there in the van, rifle in hand, bringing down enemy grenade-throwers over our heads.
The British resisted manfully. Every traverse had to be fought for. The black balls of Mills bombs crossed in the air with our own long-handled grenades. Behind every traverse we captured, we found corpses or bodies still twitching. We killed each other, sight unseen. We too suffered losses. A piece of iron crashed to the ground next to the orderly, which the fellow was unable to avoid; and he collapsed to the ground, while his blood issued on to the clay from many wounds.
We hurdled over his body, and charged forward. Thunderous crashes pointed us the way. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were lying in wait behind rifles and machine-guns in the dead land. We were already a long way in front of our own lines. From all sides, bullets whistled round our steel helmets or struck the trench parapet with a hard crack. Each time a black iron oval broke the horizon, one’s eye sized it up with that instantaneous clarity of which a man is only capable in moments of life and death. During those instants of waiting, you had to try to get to a place where you could see as much of the sky as possible, because it was only against its pale backdrop that it was possible to see the black jagged iron of those deadly balls with sufficient clarity. Then you hurled your own bomb, and leaped forward. One barely glanced at the crumpled body of one’s opponent; he was finished, and a new duel was commencing. The exchange of hand-grenades reminded me of fencing with foils; you needed to jump and stretch, almost as in a ballet. It’s the deadliest of duels, as it invariably ends with one or other of the participants being blown to smithereens. Or both.
In those moments, I was capable of seeing the dead – I jumped over them with every stride – without horror. They lay there in the relaxed and softly spilled attitude that characterizes those moments in which life takes its leave. During my leaping progress, I had a difference of opinion with the subaltern, who was really quite a card. He wanted to be first, and insisted that I supply him with bombs, rather than throw them myself. In amongst the short terrible shouts that accompany the work, and by which you alert the other to the presence of the enemy, I would sometimes hear him: ‘One man to throw! And after all I was the instructor at the storm troop training!’
A trench that led off to the right was cleaned up by soldiers of the 225th, who were trailing in our wake. British soldiers caught in a cleft stick tried to flee across the open fields, but were mown down in the fire that straight away was directed at them from all sides.
And those soldiers we were pursuing gradually felt the Siegfried Line becoming too hot for them. They tried to disappear down a communications trench that led off to the right. We jumped up on to the sentry steps, and saw something that made us shout with wild glee: the trench they were trying to escape down doubled back on itself towards ours, like the curved frame of a lyre, and, at the narrowest point, they were only ten paces apart! So they had to pass us again. From our elevated position, we were able to look down on the British helmets as they stumbled in their haste and excitement. I tossed a hand-grenade in front of the first lot, bringing them up short, and after them all the others. Then they were stuck in a frightful jam; hand-grenades flew through the air like snowballs, covering everything in milk-white smoke. Fresh bombs were handed up to us from below. Lightnings flashed between the huddled British, hurling up rags of flesh and uniforms and helmets. There were mingled cries of rage and fear. With fire in our eyes, we jumped on to the very lip of the trench. The rifles of the whole area were pointed at us.
Suddenly, in my delirium, I was knocked to the ground as by a hammer blow. Sober, I pulled off my helmet and saw to my terror that there were two large holes in it. Cadet Mohrmann, leaping up to assist me, assured me that I had a bleeding scratch at the back of my head, nothing more. A bullet shot from some distance had punched through my helmet and only brushed my skull. Half unconscious, I reeled back with a hurriedly applied bandage, to remove myself from the eye of the storm. No sooner had I passed the nearest traverse than a man ran up behind me and told me that Tebbe had just been killed in the same place, by a shot in the head.
That news floored me. A friend of mine with noble qualities, with whom I had shared joy, sorrow and danger for years now, who only a few moments ago had called out some pleasantry to me, taken from life by a tiny piece of lead! I could not grasp the fact; unfortunately, it was all too true.
In this murderous sector of trench, all my NCOs and a third of my company were bleeding to death. Shots in the head rained down. Lieutenant Hopf was another one of the fallen, an older man, a teacher by profession, a German schoolmaster in the best sense of the word. My two ensigns and many others besides were wounded. And yet, the 7th Company held on to the conquered line, under the command of Lieutenant Hoppenrath, the only able-bodied officer remaining, until we were relieved.
Of all the stimulating moments in a war, there is none to compare with the encounter of two storm troop commanders in the narrow clay walls of a line. There is no going back, and no pity. And so everyone knows who has seen one or other of them in their kingdom, the aristocrat of the trench, with hard, determined visage, brave to the point of folly, leaping agilely forward and back, with keen, bloodthirsty eyes, men who answered the demands of the hour, and whose names go down in no chronicle.
On the way back, I stopped with Captain von Brixen for a moment, who with a few troops was shooting at a row of heads over a nearby parallel trench. I stood between him and the other marksmen, and watched the bullets striking home. In the dreamlike mood that followed the shock of my wounding, it never occurred to me that my white turban-like bandage must be visible miles away.
Suddenly a blow to the forehead knocked me to the floor, while my eyes were drenched with blood. The man next to me fell at the same time, and started to moan. Shot in the head through steel helmet and temple. The captain feared he had lost two company commanders on one day, but on inspection could make out only two surface wounds near the hairline. They must have been caused by the bursting bullet, or perhaps splinters from the helmet of the wounded man. This same man, with whom I shared pieces of metal from the same bullet, came to visit me after the war; he worked in a cigarette factory, and, ever since his wound, had been sickly and a little eccentric.
Weakened by further loss of blood, I accompanied the captain, who was returning to his command post. Skirting the heavily shelled village of Mœuvres at a jogtrot, we got back to the dugout in the canal bed, where I was bandaged up and given a tetanus injection.
In the afternoon, I got on a lorry, and had myself driven to Lécluse, where I gave my report to Colonel von Oppen over supper. After sharing a bottle of wine with him, feeling half asleep but in a wonderful mood, I said good-night, and, following this immense day, hurled myself with a meritorious feeling on to the bed that my trusty Vinke had made up for me.
A couple of days afte
r that, the battalion moved into Lécluse. On 4 December, the divisional commander, General von Busse, addressed the battalions involved, singling out the 7th Company. I marched them past, bandaged head held high.
I had every right to be proud of my men. Some eighty men had taken a long stretch of line, capturing a quantity of machine-guns, mortars and other matériel, and taken some two hundred prisoners. I had the pleasure of being able to announce a number of promotions and distinctions. Thus, Lieutenant Hoppenrath, the leader of the shock troops, Ensign Neupert, the stormer of the pillbox, and the brave barricade defender, Kimpenhaus, all got to wear the well-earned Iron Cross, First Class, on their breasts.
I didn’t bother the hospitals with my fifth double-wounding, but allowed them to heal over the course of my Christmas leave. The scrape to the back of my head got better quickly, the shards in my forehead grew in, to provide company for two others that I’d got at Regniéville, one in my left hand, the other in my earlobe. At this time, I was surprised by the Knight’s Cross of the House of Hohenzollern, which was sent to me at home.
That gold-edged cross and a silver cup bearing the legend ‘For the Victor of Mœuvres’, which the other three company commanders in the battalion presented to me, are my souvenirs of the double battle of Cambrai, which will enter the history books as the first attempt to break out of the deadly stasis of trench-fighting by new methods.
I also brought back my holed helmet, and keep it as a pendant to the other one that the lieutenant-colonel of the Indian Lancers had worn when leading his men against us.