by Ludwig Renn
In a hospital we received a little soup and were sent on. The man with the calf wound complained about hunger. I ate little and was only thirsty.
We wandered on to a wide, paved street. The stones were very hard and somewhat rough.
We came to a small city. Every now and then a shell came roaring and landed somewhere. We asked for a field hospital. As we arrived there, a medical attendant told us, “We can’t admit anyone. An order has arrived to evacuate the hospital because shells are continually falling here.”
“Where do we have to go then?”
“That I don’t know. I only know that this street leads to the rear.”
We wandered on. Lamm became dizzy, and the pain in the tip of my foot became more and more of a strain on me. I could feel the blood pounding on the sole of my foot.
Toward evening we reached a village. Lamm and I were so weak willed that we allowed the young man to set us on stones on both sides of a gate. I noticed that it must appear funny, but I couldn’t laugh.
I can no longer remember any particulars of this night.
Anyway, I fantasized through the night.
As the light of morning came, I felt better. I drank some coffee and moved on with the others. I had no more delirium, but instead saw the wasted landscape with terrible alertness and felt almost too weak to go.
Some trucks overtook us. Lamm called to one of them. The drivers only cursed and continued on.
Lamm called to another one. They didn’t even answer. I noticed how Lamm’s lips twitched. He was close to tears from exhaustion and was terribly pale. The man with the calf wound was cheerful and almost didn’t hobble anymore. I spoke quietly with him and suggested he should try once more.
“I’ll get it done,” he whispered. “Set yourselves down on the side of the road.”
As another vehicle came along he placed himself in the road and held his arms out wide. The drivers halted.
“What’s wrong?”
“Take the two there with you!”
“You can’t just wave us to a halt!” they complained.
“There is no other way to communicate with you people!” he laughed.
They complained, but helped us into the cargo space. Then the vehicle, rattling and whining, started off. My foot lay on the trembling boards. I pulled it up and lay it across my left knee. However, that place was too uncertain. I took the foot in my hands. That was a whole lot worse.
“Hold on,” said the young guy, who then sat on the sideboard and took the foot in both hands on his lap. That was really charitable of him, maybe because of his good heartedness rather than the situation.
In this way we arrived in St. Quentin and traveled on with a procession of lightly wounded. I was in a number of different field hospitals. Everywhere they x-rayed my foot.
“It is a difficult operation! Be sure that you are brought to a specialist!”
In this fashion I came, in a few days, to the station hospital. I was again x-rayed.
“Take him into the operating room!”
The orderly took me there. I was washed and received a local anesthetic in my foot. It was very painful. The next one was already less painful.
A nurse held a cloth in front of me so I couldn’t see anything.
I noticed that the doctor was cutting.
“Keep it open, nurse! You have all sorts of stuff in there, a nice grenade splinter, a bone splinter, a piece of leather, and wool or something from your sock.”
VI
The healing was protracted. One bone splinter after the other festered out. Every day the doctor fished a number of splinters out of the wound with a pair of tweezers. Then he would stuff wadding inside so that it wouldn’t heal before it should. I received a splint and with that could walk just a little and with difficulty.
“Over in the officers station there is, since yesterday, a lieutenant Lamm,” said the orderly. “He is asking for you.”
I hobbled across.
Lamm lay pale in bed. It had been discovered that a nerve in his arm had been severed and it was necessary to sew the ends together. He was operated on. Afterward he was in awful pain.
I developed a fever. In the following days I lay continuously in bed. One day while bandaging, the doctor said suddenly, “Now we have the troublemaker! A splinter has been wandering and wants to come out here.”
He pressed on one area with tweezers. It was painful.
“Orderly, take him into the operating room!” We will make a small incision in the skin. Then you are free of the splinter and the fever.”
VII
The procedure on the wound was painful. I often had a fever and for the most part lay in bed. A bone fistula had developed, which festered continually, and in addition bone splinters kept coming out.
Then one day Haensel came visiting. He sat on my bed.
“I thought you were in the field.” I said.
“I am on leave.” He looked at me with a startling stare and his gaze went right through me.
“Do you see the signs?”
“What signs?”
“The old order is breaking down.”—
The nurse brought me a package. What was it? It was from my regiment!—I wanted to lay it aside but Haensel said: “Go ahead and open it!”
It was a flat box with a silver cross on the top. I opened it up. There, with shining silver border, lay the Iron Cross First Class. A sheet of paper was enclosed with a short word of congratulation from the Colonel.
“That makes me happy!” Haensel said and, childlike, suddenly looked inside.
Two days later Haensel came again. I had gotten up because it wasn’t good to lie in bed in the sweltering heat. We went into the garden. I laid my leg along a bench. He sat down on a chair across from me. He appeared to have gotten stronger.
“In two days I have to go back out,” he said gloomily. “You know, it isn’t about my life—although I naturally love it—but that one even has to go into war.”
He bent over close to me: “At the first opportunity I am going over to the other side!”
——————————
It wasn’t going particularly well for me. I was almost continually in pain and the wound festered.
If the wound would just close up! I thought. I will first have to learn how to go again. My toes have become completely stiff.
Some bone splinters were still taken out of the wound. Then the wound healed quickly.
At the beginning of October I was again ready for field duty and was given a short leave to my home.
I had had no news of Haensel since his visit to me. Had he gone over? He never wrote letters anyway. However, I was unsettled. When one doesn’t want to participate in the war, then maybe going over has a purpose. But to go into captivity! To allow oneself to be under guard behind wire fences!
Collapse
I
“We have to see how we can get the replacements out of here,” the lieutenant of the replacement battalion said to me in the orderly room.
I wondered at the tone. He is probably one of those really fearful types, I thought.
We went out onto the parade ground. The company sergeants arranged their people and reported. Some fifty men were not present. Those who were there carried large packages in their hands, stood disorderly in formation, and gossiped throughout the ranks.
We waited. Of those missing, only three still showed up. Conditions are bad here in the replacement battalion, I thought.
“Those missing will be reported to the Herr Major!” said the lieutenant. “We have to move out now.”
As we climbed into the rail cars the people complained that there was too little space.
The lieutenant took me into his compartment. The train moved off.
“Unpleasant!” he said after a while. “The situation at the front also appears to be dangerous.”
“I haven’t been following the movement at the front, Herr Leutnant.”
“Don’t you read any new
spapers?”
“Only seldom, and then one doesn’t understand anything.”
He looked at me searchingly. “Then you haven’t heard anything of the German peace offer?”
“I’ve heard that everyone is getting upset about it. But I don’t understand why.”
“Well, it is an admission of our weakness!” flared the lieutenant.
I didn’t want to argue with him. Also, it didn’t matter to me what anyone said about it if only the war would end! I had also never given any thought to politics. I had a loathing for it as for something dirty.
II
After a number of days of riding on the train we climbed out at a small city in Flanders. We marched in sunshine on a flat street. To the right and left were vegetable fields with blue heads of cabbage and peat-black earth.
I marched forward, the lieutenant behind. The men gossiped and complained so loudly that we could hear it.
“Now the crap is in the open! We won’t let ourselves be shot dead because of a couple more days of war!”
“If I am supposed to go forward I will simply say: I refuse!”
We came to a couple of low, brick houses beside which four trees appeared curiously tall.
We came to a larger place. On the four-cornered marketplace the regimental clerks divided the replacements between the battalions. I was sent to the second battalion.
III
I waited from day to day to see what should be done with me. The regiment had become very small. At one place forward a whole battalion had been encircled and taken prisoner, and at another place the first and third companies with the battalion staff. Officers from unknown regiments had been transferred in, who no one knew. Two of the battalion commanders were actually cavalrymen. Now a reserve regiment was to be disbanded and our regiment to be filled by them.
The orderly rooms, where I was, lay some fifty kilometers behind the front and communicated with the front and the field kitchens through messengers on bicycles. Most of which only returned the following day.
The replacements I had brought with me strolled around in the streets and went to the movies.
Finally one morning, the regimental adjutant came and ordered that the replacements were to move with an arriving battalion to the front at ten o’clock and join the regiment.
We assembled on the market square. The replacements were very quiet. Maybe they were afraid of the battalion we were assigned to and wanted to just wait and see what would happen next.
We waited. After an hour and a half, an officer rode up and said the battalion didn’t want to make the detour to the place here. He would lead the replacements forward.
We marched off. I went in the rear. It was sultry. The sun shone, but at the same time there was a gray, stormy light.
It had become very dark. In the distance there were lightning flashes. Large raindrops fell, and became heavier.
At the next place we went into a large, empty barn, which appeared peculiarly black, and waited for the storm to pass.
Toward evening we came to a small city with narrow streets. We moved over narrow bridges across canals with slow-moving water, where freight barges rested.
We halted at one place. A number of officers came out of a house. I didn’t know any of them.
“Vizefeldwebel Renn is assigned to the sixth company!”
I moved out with the twenty men for my company. A battalion runner guided us.
“This is where Herr Leutnant Schubring is quartered,” said the runner.
I ordered a halt and got the men ready. Their sloppy posture bothered me.
“You must now stand at attention,” I said, “and do it right! Or do you belong to those who want to denigrate everything as much as possible?”
The tenor of my voice appeared to astound them. I left them standing and went into the house. On the second floor I met a corporal.
“I want to see the Herr Leutnant.”
Someone looked out from a door: “Who’s there?” He had a sparse, very straight part in the middle with a clip below it.
“Vizefeldwebel Renn with twenty men as replacements for the sixth company!”
“Come in!” He was some forty years of age and appeared nervous. “What kind of replacements? More of that wasted baggage?”
“They’re very sloppy, Herr Leutnant.”
“What?—Good, I’ll take a look at them.”
He divided the people.
“You are getting the second platoon,” he said to me. “Until now it has been led by Unteroffizier Mehling, a clever person, but too young. He is here next door.”
I went in the house next door.
Mehling looked at me with clear, brown eyes and explained everything with few words. He was the first lucid person since I had returned to the field.
The leader of the first platoon was Unteroffizier Hoehle, the leader of the third, lieutenant Hanfstengel.
We remained a number of days in the city. In the distance we sometimes heard the rumble of cannons. Another division lay ahead of us. We placed sentries only on the right because we didn’t trust our neighboring division there. Ostensibly they were fraternizing with the local population.
All the shops in the city were open. Thread was available and also white breakfast rolls. I immediately bought some and in a bakery shop ate a piece of real pastry. All of that had been unobtainable in Germany for years now.
IV
In the first days of November the order came to move to the front.
Around midday we came to a small place with trees and low houses. Every couple of minutes a round fell on the intersection. We moved one group after the other across the intersection to a barn, where we remained for a number of hours.
Toward five o’clock in the evening two heavy machine guns arrived. We took our light machine guns from the wagon and moved forward along a railway embankment.
It began to grow dark.
Dark houses with tall trees appeared. Maybe two hundred meters ahead of us shells were crashing. There was the rattling of wagons. Two cannons raced by us toward the rear.
“What then does that mean, Herr Leutnant?” I asked.
“During the night the position here is being evacuated. Probably, the batteries are already going to the rear.”
We moved into a pretty dilapidated stall, in which some cows were standing.
Two or three hours later the retreat was ordered. It was pitch dark.
After midnight we arrived, very tired, in a village and spent the night in a church on straw.
The next morning Schubring called the platoon leaders to him.
“The accompanying supply column has been taken over by mutineers. We will have to requisition cattle. Who among you understands something about that?”
“I am a butcher,” said Unteroffizier Hoehle. “I have already noticed a pair of good oxen here.”
About ten men had positioned themselves in front of the altar to play “Slap the Ham.” One of them would have to lay his hands on the palms of another. He would receive a smack on the back of one so that there was a loud noise and a voice: “You, Albin!” He pointed to someone.
“False! Again!”
They played that for several hours with a lot of yelling. Most of the people in the company were very young guys. Lieutenant Hanfstengel stood watching and laughed. He probably would have liked to participate.
V
Two days later we again moved a distance to the front. We were the reserve. Ahead of us the first battalion had occupied a position along a canal.
After daybreak we moved over a rise. The German batteries barked piercingly in our ears. Now and then French shells burst.
In one place we were supposed to remain. There we were directed to a small, abandoned house in which there was nothing more than walls and a few windowpanes. The officers lived in the next house.
The youngsters immediately began “Slap the Ham” again in the sunshine before the house. Unteroffizier Hoehle slaughtered a pig behind
the house so that the company commander wouldn’t notice. Lieutenant Hanfstengel’s people wanted to entice him away from the company commander so they could give him boiled meat, too. His people, I believe, liked him as much because he kept his head under fire as they did because he was so young and refined.
At noon the field kitchen came with beef. An hour later, behind the house there was Hoehle’s pig. We were so short of breath from eating so much that we just lay down on the straw.
Toward evening Lieutenant Schubring called us.
“Gentlemen, I miss the necessary discipline in the company. We must exercise. During the day too many fliers come over. Therefore we will have to do it in the morning twilight. You have to take vigorous action and drive this lack of discipline out of the people. First and foremost they salute badly. Direct your platoons to assemble early in the morning at seven o’clock. Thank you!”
He saluted and we fell out.
The next morning I woke my people. “Fall out for exercise! Coffee will be given out afterward.”
“In what uniform, Herr Feldwebel?” asked Mehling.
“Ammunition pouches, rifles, caps.”
Ka-whump! A shell landed in front of the house.
“Suspicious dogs!” complained someone.
I went in front of the house.
Ka-bam! It landed in the next yard.
Hanfstengel came: “Are you going to exercise anyway?”
“Is the company commander not coming?”
“Yes, he’s coming. However, we can’t have them fall in. I think we had best remain where we are.”
Boom! Fifty meters further along the street.
We left the platoons in the house and we ourselves waited in front of the door.
In about ten minutes Schubring arrived.
Hanfstengel reported, “We did not assemble the company because of the barrage.”
“Because of three shells?—You can’t just call off the exercises I ordered!—Have them fall in!”