Storm of Steel

by Ernst Jünger

  The captured defile was lined with weapons, uniforms and supplies. Dotted all about were dead men in grey and brown uniforms, and groaning wounded. Soldiers from all different regiments were standing together in a thick knot, all shouting and chattering at once. Officers pointed out to them the continuation of the dip, and the heap of fighters, gradually, with surprising indifference, started moving forward again.

  The dip ran up into higher ground, where enemy columns appeared. Occasionally stopping to shoot, we advanced until we were stopped by fierce fire. It was a sobering feeling, having the bullets smash into the ground round our heads. Kius, who had turned up again, picked up a flattened bullet that had stopped inches from his nose. At that instant, a man far to the left of us was hit on the helmet, and the ringing echoed throughout the dip. We took advantage of a momentary lull in the firing to scoot into one of the not very many shell-holes there were hereabouts. There I met up with the other surviving officers of our battalion again, which was now being commanded by Lieutenant Lindenberg, since Lieutenant von Solemacher had been fatally shot in the stomach during the storming of the embankment. On the right edge of the little valley, to the general amusement, Lieutenant Breyer – who had been seconded to us from the 10th Jagers – was strolling about seemingly oblivious of the flying bullets, walking-stick in hand, and long huntsman’s pipe in mouth, rifle slung over his shoulder, every bit as though out shooting rabbits.

  We told each other quickly what we’d been through, and handed round canteens and bars of chocolate, then, ‘by popular demand’, we resumed our advance. The machine-guns, apparently under threat from the flank, had been withdrawn. We had probably taken two or three miles back already. The dip was now swarming with attackers. As far back as the eye could see, they were advancing in open order, ranks and columns. It was unfortunate that we were so densely packed; how many we left behind on the attack we luckily had no way of knowing.

  Without meeting any resistance, we climbed to the top. To our right, khaki-clad figures were spilling out of a trench. We followed the example given us by Breyer, who, without taking the pipe out of his mouth, briefly stood still to loose off a round or two, and then marched on.

  The heights were fortified by an unevenly distributed series of dugouts. They were not defended; probably our approach had gone unnoticed by the men in them. In some cases, clouds of smoke showed that they had already been flushed out, elsewhere it was the men themselves that emerged, pale and with their hands in the air. They were made to hand over canteens and cigarettes, then they were pointed to our rear, in which direction they vanished with some alacrity. One young British soldier had already surrendered to me when he suddenly turned round and disappeared back in his dugout. Then, as he stayed there, apparently ignoring my call to come out, we put an end to his dithering with a few hand-grenades, and went on. A narrow footpath disappeared over the crest of the hill. A signpost said it led to Vraucourt. While the others were still busy looking over the dugouts, I passed the crest of the hill, with Heins.

  Down below lay the ruins of Vraucourt. In front of it we could see the flashing muzzles of an artillery battery whose men took flight as our first wave approached and they came under fire. The occupants of a row of dugouts along the side of the path also ran away. I encountered one such as he was just about to leave the last one.1

  Along with a couple of men from my company who had hooked up with me, I proceeded down the path. To the right of it was a fortified line, from where we came under heavy fire. We retreated to the first of the dugouts, over which the bullets of both sides were soon flying back and forth. It looked as though it had been a base for messengers and bicyclists attached to the artillery. Outside it lay my British soldier, little more than a boy, who had been hit in the temple. He lay there, looking quite relaxed. I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn’t a case of ‘you or me’ any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams.

  Ignoring the crescendo of firing, we settled into the dugout, and helped ourselves to the supplies left behind, since our stomachs reminded us that we hadn’t eaten anything since the beginning of the attack. We found ham, white bread, jam and a stone jar of ginger beer. After I had fortified myself, I sat down on an empty biscuit case, and browsed in some English newspapers, all of them full of invective against ‘the Huns’. After a while, we got bored, and scampered back to the beginning of the path, where a large number of men had by now assembled. From up there, we could see a battalion of the 164th already up alongside Vraucourt to the left. We decided to storm the village, and hurried back down the path. Just outside the village, we were stopped by our own artillery, which was pounding the same spot over and over again. A heavy shell landed plumb on the path, and killed four of our men. The others ran back.

  As I found out later, the artillery had been given orders to carry on firing at the furthest extent of their range. This incomprehensible order snatched the fruits of victory from our hands. Grinding our teeth with fury, we had to make a halt before the wall of fire.

  To look for a chink, we moved right, where a company commander of the 76th Hanseatic Regiment was just giving orders for an attack on Vraucourt. We joined in with gusto, but no sooner had we got into the village than we once more found ourselves under fire from our own artillery. Three times we charged in, and three times we were forced back. Cursing, we set up in a few craters, where a grass fire that the shelling had started, and that took off many wounded men, was extraordinarily unpleasant. Also, English rifle bullets accounted for a few men, among them Corporal Grützmacher from my own company.

  Gradually, it got dark. Except for occasional flare-ups, the rifle fire gradually died down. The tired fighters looked for somewhere to lie down. Officers yelled their own names till they were hoarse, in an attempt to reassemble their companies.

  In the course of the last hour, a dozen men of the 7th Company had grouped themselves round me. As it was starting to get cold, I led them back to the little dugout outside which my Englishman lay, and sent them out to find coats and blankets from the fallen. Once I had settled them all, I surrendered to my curiosity, and had a shufti at the artillery in the valley below. It was a bit of free enterprise, so I only took Fusilier Haller with me, who was adventurously inclined. Rifles at the ready, we strode down to the valley, which was still taking a pounding from our artillery, and began by inspecting a dugout that had apparently only recently been abandoned by British officers. On a table sat a huge gramophone, which Haller straight away set going. The cheery melody that purred off the roll had a ghostly effect on both of us. I threw the box on the ground where it scraped on a little longer, and then fell silent. The dugout was the height of luxury, even down to a little open fireplace with a mantelpiece with pipes and tobacco on it, and armchairs pulled round in a circle. Merry old England! Of course we didn’t stint ourselves, but helped ourselves to whatever we fancied. I took a haversack, undergarments, a little flask full of whisky, a map case and some exquisite little items from Roger & Gallet, no doubt keepsakes from some romantic leave in Paris. We could see that the inhabitants had left here in a hurry.

  An adjacent space harboured the kitchen, whose supplies we stared at in wonder. There was a whole crate of eggs, which we sucked on the spot, as eggs were little more than a word to us at this stage. On shelves along the walls were stacks of canned meat, tins of delicious English jam, and bottles of Camp coffee, tomatoes and onions; everything to delight an epicure’s heart.

  It was a scene I often came back to later, when we lay for weeks in trenches, on meagre bread rations, watery soup and thin nondescript jam.

  After that peek into the enviable circumstances of our foes, we left the dugout and investigated the valley, where we found two spanking-new artillery pieces. Great piles of gleaming, freshly fired shell-casings indicated that they had had a t
hing or two to say in the course of our attack. I picked up a piece of chalk, and chalked up the number of my company. I hadn’t yet learned that the victor’s rights were accorded scant respect by the following units; each one wiped away the mark of their predecessor, and wrote up their own, till the last one was that of some digging outfit.

  Then, with our artillery still slinging iron about our ears, we went back to the others. Our front line, formed now from reserve troops, was a couple of hundred yards behind us. I posted two men outside the dugout, and told the others to keep their rifles handy. Then, after arranging the reliefs, having a little more to eat, and jotting down the day’s happenings, I went to sleep.

  At one o’clock in the morning, we were roused by hurrahs and brisk fire from our right. We grabbed our rifles, plunged out of the dugout, and took up positions in a large shell-hole. From ahead of us came a few scattered German soldiers, who received fire from our ranks. Two of them remained on the path. Alerted by this incident, we waited for the initial excitement behind us to die down, shouted out who we were, and returned to our own line. There we found the commander of the 2nd Company, Lieutenant Kosik, with a wound in the arm and such a heavy cold he couldn’t speak, with roughly sixty men of the 73rd. Since he had to go back to the dressing-station, I took over the command of his detachment, which included three officers. Apart from them there were also the similarly thrown-together companies under Gipkens and Vorbeck.

  The rest of the night I spent with some NCOs of the 2nd, in a little dugout where we all but froze to death. In the morning, I breakfasted off looted supplies, and dispatched runners to Quéant, to fetch coffee and food from the kitchens. Our own artillery started its bloody cannonade again, its first good-morning to us being a direct hit in a crater that was housing four men from a machine-gun company. At first light, our group was reinforced by Vice-Sergeant-Major Kumpart and some men under him.

  No sooner had we managed to stamp the cold out of our chilly bones than I received orders to band together with what was left of the 76th and storm the Vraucourt positions – which we had already begun to take – to the right of where we presently were. In thick morning fog, we moved off to the jumping-off position, a plateau south of Ecoust, where many lay dead from the previous day. There was, as generally happens when orders are unclear, some argy-bargy among the officers, which was only settled when a machine-gun sent a spray of bullets whistling round our legs. Everyone dived into the nearest crater, except for Vice-Sergeant-Major Kumpart, who was left lying on the ground, groaning. I hurried across to him with a medical orderly, to get him bandaged up. He had a bad wound in the knee. With a bent pair of tongs, we pulled out several fragments of bone from the wound. He died a few days later. I was more than usually upset, because Kumpart had been my drill instructor three years previously, in Recouvrence.

  In discussion with Captain von Ledebur, who was now in overall command of our assorted units, I spoke of the futility of a frontal attack, arguing that with part of the Vraucourt position already in our hands, we could roll it up from the left with far fewer casualties. We decided to spare our men the ordeal, and the events were to prove us right.

  For the time being, we made ourselves comfortable in some craters on the plateau. By and by, the sun broke through, and British aeroplanes appeared, dusting our holes with machine-gun bullets, but they were driven away by our own planes. In the Ecoust Valley, we saw a battery drive up, a rare sight for an old front soldier; it was pretty promptly demolished too. A horse broke loose and galloped over the landscape; a pale roan, looking ghostly as it flew over the wide, lonely plains under the shifting and variable clouds of explosive. The enemy aeroplanes were not long gone before we came under fire. First, there were a few shrapnels, then lots of shells, big and small. They had us on a plate. Timorous natures multiplied the effect of the fire by running mindlessly here and there, instead of getting their heads down in a crater somewhere and taking their punishment. You have to be a fatalist in such situations. I confirmed my adherence to that creed by sampling the delicious contents of a can of gooseberry jam I’d picked up from the British stores. And I pulled on a pair of Scottish woollen socks I’d found in the dugout. Gradually, the sun climbed higher.

  For some time, we’d been able to observe activity on the left of the Vraucourt position. Now we could see the arc and the white puffs of German stick-bombs. That was our cue.

  I gave the order to advance – or, rather, I raised my right arm, and set off towards the enemy position. We got into their trench without encountering much in the way of fire, and jumped in, getting a joyous welcome from a storm troop of the 76th. We made slow progress, rolling up the line with hand-grenades, as we’d done at Cambrai. Unfortunately, it soon dawned on the enemy artillery that we were making remorseless progress along their line. A sharp bombardment with shrapnels and light shells just caught the back of those of us who were in the van, and did worse to reserve troops who were just running up towards the trench. We noticed the artillerymen could see what they were firing at. That gave us the gee-up we needed to finish off the job as soon as we could, and slip in under the fire.

  It appeared that the Vraucourt position was still being built, because some stretches of trench were merely indicated by the removal of the turf. Each time we came across a piece like that, we drew fire on us from several sides. We repaid the enemy in kind when it was their turn to dash across these death-strips, so that these undug places were before long thickly sown with the injured and dead. There was a wild hunt under clouds of shrapnel. We raced past stout figures, still warm, with strong knees under their short kilts, or we crawled past them. They were Highlanders, and their way of fighting showed us that we were dealing with real men.

  When we had made a few hundred yards in this fashion, the ever-thicker hail of rifle- and hand-grenades forced us to pause. It seemed the tide was about to turn. There was some fear in the air; I heard agitated voices.

  ‘Tommy’s counter-attacking!’

  ‘Hold your ground!’

  ‘I want to check that we’re in touch!’

  ‘More hand-grenades to the front; hand-grenades, for Christ’s sake, hand-grenades!’

  ‘Watch out, Lieutenant!’

  Small reverses can be a serious matter in trench-fighting. A little troop makes its way to the van, shooting and throwing. As the grenade-throwers leap backwards and forwards to get out of the way of the lethal projectiles, they encounter the men coming up behind, who have got too near. The result is confusion. Maybe some men will jump over the top, and get themselves picked off by snipers, which encourages the rest of the enemy like nobody’s business.

  I managed to summon up a handful of men with whom I formed a focus of resistance behind a wide traverse. There was an open stretch of trench between the Highlanders and ourselves. At a distance of only a few yards, we exchanged shots with our invisible opponents. It took pluck to hold your head up when the bullets were pinging around, and the sand was being sprayed out of the traverse. One man beside me from the 76th, a huge Herculean dockworker from Hamburg, fired off one shot after another, with a wild look on his face, not even thinking of cover, until he collapsed in a bloody heap. With the sound of a plank crashing down, a bullet had drilled through his forehead. He crumpled into a corner of the trench, half upright, with his head pressed against the trench wall. His blood poured on to the floor of the trench, as if tipped out of a bucket. His snore-like death-rattle resounded in lengthening intervals, and finally stopped altogether. I seized his rifle, and went on firing. At last there was a pause. Two men who had been just ahead of us tried to make it back over the top. One toppled into the trench with a shot in the head, the other, shot in the belly, could only crawl into it.

  We hunkered down on the floor to wait, and smoked English cigarettes. From time to time, well-aimed rifle-grenades came flying over. We were able to see them, and take evasive action. The man with the wound in the belly, a very young lad, lay in amongst us, stretched out like a cat in th
e warm rays of the setting sun. He slipped into death with an almost childlike smile on his face. It was a sight that didn’t oppress me, but left me with a fraternal feeling for the dying man. Even the groaning of his comrade gradually fell silent. He died in our midst, shuddering.

  We made several attempts to work our way forward at the undug places, by crawling in among the bodies of the Highlanders, but were driven back each time by sniper fire and rifle-grenades. Almost every hit I saw was deadly. And so, the fore part of the trench was gradually filling up with the dead and wounded; but all the time reinforcements were arriving at the back. Before long, every traverse had a light or heavy machine-gun behind it. With the help of these, we held the British end of the trench in check. I took my turn behind one of the lead-spitters, and fired till my index finger was black with smoke. It might have been here that I hit the Scotsman who wrote me a nice letter from Glasgow afterwards, with an exact description of the location where he got his wound. Each time the cooling-water had evaporated, the canisters were passed around and topped up by a natural procedure that occasioned some crude humour. Before long the weapons were red-hot.

  The sun was low over the horizon. It seemed as though the second day of battle was over. For the first time, I took a close look at my whereabouts, and sent back a report and sketch. Five hundred paces from where we were, our trench intersected the Vraucourt–Mory road, which was camouflaged by lengths of cloth. On a slope behind it, enemy troops were hurrying across the field, with shells bursting all around them. The cloudless evening sky was crossed by a squadron of planes marked with our black, red and white. The last rays of the sun, which had already gone down, daubed them a shade of delicate pink, so they looked like flamingoes. We opened out our maps, and turned them face down, indicating to those above how far we had already pushed into the enemy line.