KRIEG (War)

by Ludwig Renn

  “Here is the tunnel,” said the man. “The rest of the company is quartered here with a platoon leader.”

  “And I?” asked Fabian.

  “At the lower end of the forest where the dead horses are lying.”

  “You could have said that at the beginning!” He must not have heard it earlier.

  We stood in the narrow trench with half the company behind us. The firing increased in violence.

  We crawled out of the trench toward the front. The forest was thick and full of broken limbs. After only a few steps we got hung up in barbed wire that could not be seen among the tangle of limbs. It clanged and clapped in the trees. Limbs fell down.

  Outside, before the edge of the forest, here and there in the meadow, there were light flashes and small smoke clouds on the ground in the gray twilight. The crashing and cracking rang and echoed in one’s steel helmet so that one couldn’t identify any particular sound. I only saw that it was shells and shrapnel. Again we came into the wire. On the ground I saw the form of a machine gun and a dirty, pale face with a steel helmet. The guard stood in a hole in the ground protected by logs. We curved out of the forest into the clear in order to move ahead more quickly. But suddenly there was a tangle of knee-high barbed wire. As we climbed through the wire, one of the strings on my ground sheet got hung and in freeing it I tore a three-cornered hole in my sleeve. We walked along the edge of the forest. I looked continually to all sides to see where the shells were landing. Now the trench, which we had been in, led close to the edge of the forest. We jumped in and continued on. Soon it opened onto the road. We walked around the dead horses as well as the muddy street would allow and went pretty breathless into our building. That was, however, only a stair without a dugout at the bottom. On the left side, pretty far up, a couple of mine timbers had been stood straight up as a resting place. Next to that remained only a narrow entrance to the lower living area.

  Eilitz threw down a large sack, which he had been carrying extra from the rest of his baggage, and began unpacking. He lit a candle and stuck it on the lieutenant’s lower bunk.

  “Renn, you have to go out again and take this report to battalion headquarters! It must lie somewhere here in the forest.”

  I was about to walk out, but Ziesche said: “I’m coming with you. Then I’ll also know where battalion is located.”

  He hung his gas mask over his shoulder and we walked outside. It was already pretty light. The dead horses in front of the ambulance wagon had bloated bodies so that their legs stood in the air and they stank.

  We walked into the trench.

  Wham! A shell detonated close behind us. I got a mud ball down my neck.

  To the left a guard stood in a narrow side ditch.

  “Do you know where the battalion headquarters is located?”

  “In here.”

  We came to a door with an armored glass pane and knocked.

  “Come in!” Inside sat a captain with his adjutant at a large table. They were eating bread. I handed over the report.

  As we arrived back at our burrow Eilitz had already warmed up coffee and was cheerfully slicing bread.

  “How they are shooting!” He laughed and pointed outside with his thumb.

  “They probably think,” Fabian laughed, “that it’s a slaughter potpourri in the green firs with rockets and frogs!”

  I sat down with Ziesche on the steps and had breakfast. Then we lay down to sleep, Eilitz and Ziesche above and down below, Fabian against the wall and I next to him. Outside, shells were crashing against the trees.

  We woke up around noon. We ate bread with canned sausage. Then Fabian went out to take a look at the area and took me with him.

  There was a light fog. No shells were falling near or far. We went into the trench. At one place a tree had fallen across it and sharp points stuck out with broken limbs mixed in so that we had to crawl under it. The trench became shallower and went along close to the edge of the woods. To the left at some distance a second section of woods could be seen.

  “Listen!” said Fabian. “When you are needed as runners, for the most part, you have no idea where anything is. I am going to tell you everything I know and you instruct Ziesche.—That piece of woods ahead is the Turkish Woods. The remaining companies of our battalion are located there. About eight hundred meters ahead of that, the second battalion is located in the most forward positions. Now stamp that into your memory. The regimental front is not even a kilometer wide and therein is laying, with eight hundred meters distance, the first battalion in the forward position. In the Turkish woods the second battalion is spread out until it connects with us, the third company here in the Bourraine Woods and behind us the third battalion. You can probably figure out for yourself why we are here: as counterattack company in the event that the French break through up ahead.”

  We came to the tunnel. The roof of the steps was carried by two train rails that lay across fairly weak timbers.

  Down below hung a damp, cool vapor of wet articles, tobacco smoke, and soot. Candles stuck at medium height onto anything handy burned brownish red.

  Away in the distance was a gray gleam of daylight. That was the exit to the tunnel.

  We had to bend over in order not to come in contact with the ceiling. On the right side of the tunnel there were beds made out of wire mesh, one above the other. Next to that the way was so narrow that someone standing there eating had to climb onto his bed in order to let us pass through. Now he sat there with a large, blond beard and harmless, blue eyes among wet socks, bread, boots, cigars, and letter writing paper and smiled at his lack of order.

  A narrow, gloomy passage led off to the left.

  “Where does that lead to?”

  “To the latrine, Herr Leutnant.”

  We walked uncertainly into the passage. The walls were without wooden supports, just loam. Fabian snapped on his electric flashlight. A number of people were sitting across a long pole like owls in the dark with their heads turned toward us. In the narrow passage ahead of them rose a wall of hand-grenade boxes.

  “Good morning, Herr Oberleutnant!” said someone suddenly. It was the reserve lieutenant, Eisoldt, leader of our first platoon.

  “Do you always receive guests in this place?”

  “No, Herr Leutnant, I—” He pulled paper from his pocket and, embarrassed, wiped himself.

  “Have you already ascertained,” Fabian said, annoyed, “how many hand grenades are lying here and if they are armed?’

  “No, Herr Leutnant.”

  “I want a report on it! Good day!”

  I was surprised that Eisoldt had such an obvious fear of Fabian. Admittedly, however, he appeared to be right dumb and Fabian seemed to have little use for him. The company also had little love for Eisoldt.

  We went back toward the main passage from which a number of intersecting passages led to other positions, in which engineers and artillery observers lived. Some passages also led to now abandoned, concrete-protected positions. The whole tunnel was some seventy meters long.

  We followed the trench some distance toward Bourraine and came back out of the trench through the forest.

  “Look: there are entrances to bunkers! An underground munitions depot must have exploded here. The crater is over ten meters across and this depth!—if people were down there—?”

  In the forest lay a large bundle in a ground sheet. A limb was sticking through the upper part of the bundle. Inside was a body.

  “We’ll carry it up to the meadow. There appears to be a cemetery there.”

  We dragged the bundle up the rise and set it between a couple of wooden crosses. There were unburied bodies lying there, everything gray and still.

  From somewhere it began to rumble. Ahead of us, clouds from shells began to rise from the Turkish woods.

  The next morning after breakfast Fabian sent us out to scout the trenches that led toward the front. It was a cold morning. The usually silent Ziesche chattered about all sorts of things.


  As we came into the Turkish woods I was surprised that it was so much less disheveled than our woods. There were even green bushes still. Next to them there even stood earthen huts with limbs for roofs. And around these huts people from the second company sunned themselves. One man was shaving. A couple of men were playing Skat. Liebert, from our neighboring village, was busy cleaning his rifle.

  “You all really have it nice!” I said.

  “But last night it wasn’t at all nice! Over there a barracks was knocked down. They got out of there fast!”

  We went laterally through the woods. On the far side edge ran a ruined trench. We followed this one to the left and curved into another one that led toward the front. The condition of the trench became worse and worse so that from time to time half our bodies towered out of it.

  “Hey!” said Ziesche suddenly from behind me.

  “What’s up?”

  He pointed down. I saw a sleeve with a hand. Other than that the body had been completely trampled into the mud. I hesitated to cross over it and looked around. All around was a flat, muddy, waste on which the sun shone. Slowly, across the sky, came a large, French airplane, surrounded by three small ones moving around him in gentle circles.

  “Hey, that is an artillery spotter. There is going to be a barrage. We had best go back.”

  The first shell already came in and burst some fifty meters ahead of us in the woods.

  We climbed out of the trench and walked cross country.

  At our woods I turned around. The entire Turkish wood was full of smoke and dust. Suddenly a whole tree went flying into the air.

  Sch-wham! One went by us.

  We sprang into the trench. Now it cracked so close behind me that I looked around for Ziesche. He looked at me and laughed.

  We ran around the horses and piled into the dugout.

  “It drove you guys back too?” laughed Fabian. “I caught one in the face! It’s only mud though.”

  Eilitz brought water and held a small mirror in front of him. He had a few bloody scrapes. He looked at them and then, satisfied, nodded.

  The barrage soon let up. Fabian took me with him.

  We saw three men coming from the Turkish woods. One of them had his steel helmet in his hand. Another—now I recognized Liebert—had his coat and shirt opened wide.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Oh, Herr Leutnant, we have been buried up there in the woods! Our entire platoon is buried! We are the only ones to get out because we were lying at the entrance! Up ahead they are still shooting!”

  Liebert gasped. He didn’t recognize me.

  Fabian sent them into the tunnel. We turned around and went to the battalion bunker. I sat down with the orderlies and watched as the officers spoke.

  “Good!” said the captain. “Take everybody who comes back from the second company into the tunnel! And put a platoon leader with a guard behind at the fork in the trench to gather up the people! Otherwise, they will go who knows where in their fear.”

  The door was opened and someone shoved inside. He was completely naked. Around his neck he had a cord with the oval identification tag.

  The captain looked at him: “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Captain, sir,” said the orderly, who had brought him in, “I can’t get a thing out of him. He is from the second company.”

  “Give him a coat!” Someone put a coat on him and he stood there. “Were you buried alive?”

  “The roof came down.”

  “And then?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean—you apparently crawled out of the bunker?” He hesitated.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why weren’t you able to?”

  “My foot was held fast.”

  “And you took off the wedged boot?”

  He hesitated again. “Everything was so confined.”

  “Orderly! Take him to a doctor! And also give him some hot coffee—or don’t we have any more?”

  “We have enough, sir.”

  He turned to Fabian. “How someone can completely undress when only his boot is held fast!—Would we also act so stupidly?”

  “I don’t believe so,” considered Fabian. “There would have to be a necessary lack of self control present!”

  Throughout the whole night it crashed around our bunker. Sometimes the ground shook. Also the stench from the horses grew ever worse.

  In the middle of the night two people came thundering down the steps.

  “What’s the matter, then?”

  “Please excuse us, Herr Oberleutnant! We didn’t know that the company commander was living here! The firing became so heavy that we came in here!”

  Toward morning it suddenly crashed closer than usual and someone crawled around on the steps.

  “Who is it?”

  “Eilitz!—The firing was so heavy that we came deeper.”

  Again, after a while, came a call from outside. “Is this the medical bunker?”

  “It’s the next entrance to the side!” we all called at the same time.

  Then someone came in: “Herr Leutnant, I am reporting my platoon back from digging in the most forward lines. We have three men wounded.”

  It was barely light when we got up and, freezing, drank coffee. Then Fabian left alone and didn’t come back for several hours.

  “They have found the commander of the second company now, dead of course. We now have as our fourth platoon the remains of the second company. Lieutenant Eisoldt is leading them.—And now we are moving, into the tunnel.”

  It was peaceful outside so that we were able to get away from our horses undisturbed. One of them had burst and the guts were hanging blue and red on the street.

  The people of the shot-up second company crouched in the tunnel in tobacco smoke and vapor. “They’re going to shoot us up even down here!—Or the French will get into the forward trenches and then they will also soon be here!”

  “We have to let ourselves be shot into cripples!—They will only pull us out of this position when those capable of garrison duty and the leaders are left!”

  We moved into a bunker where already two officers were with their people. They had to bunch together.

  The evening and the night were unsettled. One of the field-kitchen cooks and the kitchen driver were wounded while serving the meal. Again and again messengers came to the three officers, who were sitting at one table writing. I had to go a number of times to different positions. Finally, towards morning we all lay down to sleep. Bunks were built all around the walls, always one above another. I lay above, Ziesche below me. Above me there was a hole in the roof, probably to stick a stove pipe through. Through it I could hear the crashing in the woods, sometimes closer, sometimes farther away, a clear, wooden sound. The forest was being strewn with shrapnel.

  The next day, I again saw the people crouching in the tunnel and smoking. “It’s no use anymore!—We are never getting back to Germany! In a couple of days you will either be with the French in captivity or you will be lying somewhere in a trench and the others will be walking over your body!”

  I began to get upset because of the second company. Why don’t they pull themselves together? Like this they are going to destroy the last amount of courage of the new recruits just coming to the front.

  In the main entrance to the tunnel, they had built bunks three high close under the roof. It must have been an accomplishment to get oneself into them. A fourth officer had moved in with us along with his orderly so that we had to take turns sleeping, I with Ziesche.

  Outside there was warm sunshine. A lot of French fliers circled over our positions and then flew over us toward the rear. There didn’t appear to be any German fliers. We had no love for these fliers because of their arrogant nature, and now everyone complained more and more about them.

  About midday it clouded up and began to rain heavily. An officer-observer for the artillery came out of the Turkish woods, the last man who had held out there.
He had to move into our dugout, too. Now the lieutenant didn’t have his bed to himself, but now changed off with Eilitz.

  With the coming of darkness the fire began to be quite heavy again in our woods and the surrounding area.

  As Eilitz came back with the steaming field kettles, he said in his high voice, “Gas grenades landed close to the kitchen.”

  “And what made you notice that?”

  “There were small clouds there. At first I didn’t pay any attention to it. But as I was getting the food there was suddenly a sweet smell and for an instant I felt completely dumb!”

  The next day it was clear again. Since morning heavy shells had been landing in our woods. Two dugouts of our second platoon were destroyed and had to be abandoned. The people from there also had to move into the tunnel.

  At about noon there was suddenly a hefty crack very close by. The earth trembled. We walked into the dark passage, which led to the main tunnel. But from there, people came, forcing us back.

  “What’s wrong then?”

  “It just collapsed the tunnel!”

  I could smell the fumes from the shell.

  When the uproar had settled down somewhat we went into the tunnel. The candles still burned dimly. However, only a couple of roof timbers in the middle had been broken. Other than that nothing else was wrong.

  In the afternoon I had to go to battalion with a report. There was blood in front of the dugout from a guard, who had been wounded there. The thick glass pane had been broken and the shards were lying on the ground. But the captain and his adjutant laughed contentedly.

  Again in the night I heard explosions above me crashing in the trees.

  The next morning was clear. The sun shone and a large French airplane circled above us, surrounded by small planes. Again, out of the Turkish woods rose the giant clouds of smoke from shells.

  At noon a battalion orderly arrived—I noticed how pale he was.

  “The Herr Kapitaen reports that the French have occupied the Turkish woods. The third company is to occupy the edge of the woods here.”

  I had the feeling as if suddenly, everything had become white.