The Last Full Measure
Page 25
Robert Graves encountered a corpse “lying on the fire-step waiting to be taken down to the grave-yard tonight: a sanitary-man, killed in the open while burying lavatory stuff between our support lines. His arm was stretched out stiff when they carried him in and laid him on the fire-step; it stretched right across the trench. His comrades joke as they push it out of the way to get by. ‘Out of the light, you old bastard! Do you own this bloody trench?’ Or else they shake hands with him familiarly. ‘Put it there, Billy Boy.’ ”136
The dead had a useful afterlife in all sorts of ways. Captain Dunn recalls that on October 23, 1914, “the front was under fire, more or less all night … we had, I think, 19 men to bury. A large grave had been dug, and the first few poor chaps put into it when the usual nightly attacks started. There was no cover where we were except the grave, so in we went—the quick and the dead together.”137
During the battle of Passchendaele in 1917 gunner Aubrey Wade crossed a stream, the Steenbeek, by “a bridge composed of a compact mass of human bodies over which I stepped gingerly. I was not at all squeamish, the sight of dead men having long lost its terror for me, but making use of corpses, even enemy corpses, for bridge-building purposes seemed about the limit of callousness. The major said nothing, but stopped to light his pipe on the farther bank.”138
The dead could also be quite profitable. Gunner Leonard Ounsworth explains how the killed provided increased rations for the survivors: “When you lost men, it was a day or two before you could stop their rations coming up. The Army Service Corps would still be sending up the rations of so many men while you might have lost half of them. And what happened to all that grub? You’d live like fighting cocks on what was left for a day or two.”139 “The bread ration varied,” explains Corporal Frederic Hodges, “four or five men to a loaf when we had recently received a new draft to replace casualties, or three to a loaf when we had recently suffered casualties but still received their rations. As the ration party came in sight, the first question we asked was ‘How many to a bun?’ ”140
Even after the war ex-soldiers employed to exhume bodies could hit the jackpot. One such at Ypres in 1920 reported: “It’s jolly hard work. But it ‘as its better side. Some fellers the other day came on a dug-out with three officers in it, and they picked up five thousand francs between ’em.”141
In a convoluted bit of irony, propaganda points could be scored from the (completely fictitious) profit squeezed from British bodies by the fiendish Hun. George Coppard remembers:
[There was] a piece of psychological propaganda, put about by some War Office person, which brought poor comfort to Tommies. The story swept the world and, being gullible, we in the trenches were taken in by it for a while. With slight variations it indicated that the German war industry was in a bad way, and it was short of fats for making glycerine. To overcome the shortage a vast secret factory had been erected in the Black Forest, to which the bodies of dead British soldiers were dispatched. The bodies, wired together in bundles, were pitchforked on to conveyor belts and moved into the factory for conversion into fats.… If the object of the story was to work the British troops into a state of fighting frenzy, then it was a complete and utter wash-out.142
If the long-dead proclaimed their own putrid narrative of past battles, the bodies of the freshly slain created a heartbreaking topography—if one had the eye to read it as the poet John Masefield did:
The field of Gommecourt [the Somme, 1916] is heaped with the bodies of Londoners: the London Scottish lie at the Sixteen Poplars; the Yorkshire are outside Serre; the Warwickshires lie in Serre itself; all the great hill of the Hawthorn Ridge is littered with Middlesex; the Irish are at Hamel, the Kents on the Schwaben, and the Wilts and Dorset on the Leipzig. Men of all the towns and counties of England, Wales, and Scotland lie scattered among the slopes from Ovillers to Maricourt. English dead pave the road to La Boisselle, the Welsh and Scotch are in Mametz. In gullies and sheltered places, where wounded could be brought during the fighting, there are little towns of dead in all these places.143
Another poet, Siegfried Sassoon, viewed the same battlefield and also saw a kind of confraternity: “After going a very short distance we made the first of many halts, and I saw, arranged by the roadside, about fifty of the British dead. Many of them were Gordon Highlanders. There were Devons and South Staffordshires among them, but they were beyond regimental rivalry now—their fingers mingled in blood-stained bunches as though acknowledging the companionship of death.”144
The forced intimacy of “the quick and the dead” could be profound. Ernst Jünger saw it as a kind of resurrection: “The day’s sentries were already in position while the trenches had yet to be cleared. Here and there, the sentry posts were covered with dead, and, in among them, as it were, arisen from their bodies, stood the new relief with his rifle. There was an odd rigidity about these composites—it was as though the distinction between alive and dead had momentarily been taken away.”145
And for the Italian poet-soldier Giuseppe Ungaretti the proximity was transfiguring:
WATCH
CIMA QUATTRO, 23 DECEMBER 1915
A whole night through
thrown down beside
a butchered comrade
with his clenched teeth
turned to the full moon
and the clutching
of his hands
thrust
into my silence
I have written
letters full of love
Never have I
clung
so fast to life146
The dead spoke, but the problem was to understand what they said. For Sassoon there was a ferocious repudiation of any uplifting message:
Wherever we looked the mangled effigies of the dead were our memento mori. Shell-twisted and dismembered, the Germans maintained the violent attitudes in which they had died. The British had mostly been killed by bullets and bombs, or they looked more resigned. But I can remember a pair of hands (nationality unknown) which protruded from the soaked ashen soil like the roots of a tree turned upside down; one hand seemed to be pointing at the sky with an accusing gesture. Each time I passed the place the protest of those fingers became more expressive of an appeal to God in defiance of those who made the War. Who made the War? I laughed hysterically as the thought passed through my mud-stained mind. But I only laughed mentally, for my box of Stokes gun ammunition left me no breath to spare for an angry guffaw. And the dead were the dead; this was no time to be pitying them or asking silly questions about their outraged lives.147
To Henri Barbusse, however, they spoke a quite different language: “No, you can’t imagine. All these deaths at once crush the soul. There are not enough of us left. But we have a vague idea of the grandeur of these dead. They have given everything; they gave it little by little, with all their strength, then finally they gave themselves, altogether, all at once. They outdistanced life, and there is something superhuman and perfect in what they did.”148
MEN USED A spectrum of techniques to deal with their fear. One was to simply laugh in the ogre’s face. A German soldier, the twenty-five-year-old Alfred Lichtenstein, wrote his jocular “death poem” in 1914 as he left for war:
Before dying I must write my poem.
Quiet, comrades, don’t disturb me.
We are off to war—death is our bond.
Oh, if only my girlfriend would stop howling!
What do I care? I am happy to go.
My mother’s crying; one needs to be made of iron.
The sun falls to the horizon;
Soon they’ll be throwing me into a nice mass-grave.
In the sky the good old sun is glowing red;
In thirteen days I shall probably be dead.149
He was killed that year.
Black humor was a protective shield:
But when we were confronted by death, with what light hands we touched the common friend. To a man off his feed Price had offered the mocking counsel:
“You had better eat it up, it’s as likely as not your last.” And to another, down over the death of a pal, “Cheer up, Cockie, it’s your turn next.” I remember, when bringing in the wounded at Hooge, I heard a man say “Down you go there, you won’t trouble any more to-night,” and with that the fellow heaved a dead man into a big crater.… We simply could not afford to allow death to hover in the offing as the final mystery; it must be brought to earth and robbed of its disturbing influence, by rough gibes and the touch of ridicule. If it was firmly grasped like a nettle soon there was no sting left in it.150
Grasping the nettle of the fear of one’s own death was one thing, but the sickening foreboding at the possible loss of a friend was an agony that humor of whatever color could not relieve. Lord Moran confides in his wartime diary:
I have ceased to bother much about the odds, the chance of stopping something, but I have another infirmity now. I am for ever worrying about the people I really like. The Boche gunners have certain spots taped, but it is after dark that I begin to get uneasy. Every evening Barty Price starts off for the trenches walking up the Menin Road with an orderly and I cannot settle until I hear him return. I feel certain he will pick up a spare [hit by a random shell] and come back on a stretcher done, and I often try to get him to go by day when it is—in spite of the attention of their gunners—much safer.
But he only laughs. I lie reading by candle light and every time I hear a machine gun in the distance he comes into my head and I expect at any moment to see him carried in. The noise of the footsteps in the street above brings my heart into my mouth and I say irritably “Why the devil does he play the fool like this?”151
With comradeship came risk: “When you learn or see the death of one of those who had been fighting alongside you and living the very same life it gives you a direct shock which hits you before you understand. It really is almost like suddenly learning of one’s annihilation.”152
Homicidal fury was one way of dealing with grief. In Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We, Martlow, the young friend of his older mentor, Bourne, is killed:
Martlow was perhaps a couple of yards in front of Bourne, when he swayed a little, his knees collapsed under him, and he pitched forward on to his face, his feet kicking and his whole body convulsive for a moment. Bourne flung himself down beside him, and, putting his arms around his body, lifted him, calling him.
“Kid! You’re all right, Kid? He cried eagerly.… As Bourne lifted the limp body, the boy’s hat came off, showing half the back of his skull shattered where the bullet had come through it; and a little blood welled out on to Bourne’s sleeve and the knee of his trousers.… Bourne let him settle to earth again … the ache in him became a consuming hate that filled him with exultant cruelty.…” Kill the buggers! Kill the bloody fucking swine! Kill them!”
All the filth and ordure he had ever heard came from between his clenched teeth … a Hun went for Minton, and Bourne got him with the bayonet, under the ribs near the liver, and then, unable to wrench the bayonet out again, pulled the trigger, and it came away easily enough.
“Kill the buggers!” he muttered thickly.153
A British soldier was escorting six German prisoners to the rear:
“Look here, Dick, about an hour ago I lost the best pal I ever had, and he was worth all these six Jerries put together. I’m not going to take them far.” …
Some little time later I saw him coming back.… As he passed me again he said, “I done them in as I said, about two hundred yards back. Two bombs did the trick.”154
At the other end of the emotional gauge the loss of a friend could be met with a stoicism of unnerving rigor: “We took over trenches from Delville Wood to Waterlot Farm … we had scarcely moved in when we lost a Company Commander. I went to tell Toby: Pat and he were inseparable. I found him making out a return [of casualties] for the brigade. When I had done he did not look up but sat without a word making holes in a piece of blotting paper with his pen. Then he said, ‘Thanks, old thing,’ and went on writing.”155
Booze was the great and universal anesthetic. But perhaps the commonest psychological defense against being killed was resignation—“a universal torpor,” Moran calls it, “a wall … set up by nature to meet the violence of the hour.” A padre, Oswin Creighton, writes of his fears before his division was to make an assault at Gallipoli, where “slaughter seems to be inevitable,” but adds that the men “are quite prepared for it.”156 This is how Lance Corporal Marshall of the Accrington Pals experienced it during the carnage of the first day of the Somme: “I saw many men fall back into the trench as they attempted to climb out. Those of us who managed had to walk two yards apart, very slowly, then stop, then walk again.… We all had to keep in a line. Machine-gun bullets were sweeping backwards and forwards … shells were bursting everywhere. I had no special feeling of fear and I knew that we must all go forward until wounded or killed.”157
But in this stoicism there was the possibility of something that transcended the “torpor” of animals being led to slaughter—the almost unimaginable victory of glorious defiance: “And I saw it then, as I see it now—a dreadful place, a place of horror and desolation which no imagination could have invented. Also it was a place where a man of strong spirit might know himself utterly powerless against death and destruction, and yet stand up and defy gross darkness and stupefying shell-fire, discovering in himself the invincible resistance of an animal or an insect, and an endurance which he might, in after days, forget or disbelieve.”158
* The first use was by Germany against the Russians at Bolimov, west of Warsaw, in January 1915. See Philip Haythornthwaite, The World War One Source Book (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1992), 90.
† French poet-adventurer-soldier Blaise Cendrars was in a stretch of the line riddled with German mines. He found that his pet hedgehog, who, despite lapping up the soldiers’ wine, had such acute hearing that he could unerringly locate German miners, “showed every sign of terror and ran off in the opposite direction if he thought there was still time, or rolled himself into a ball at the foot of the trench wall if the enemy was very close. And we instantly took precautions, counter-mines or rapid flight, knowing there was no possibility of error.” (Blaise Cendrars, Lice (London: Peter Owen, 1973), 145. First published as La main coupée, 1946.)
‡ Although there is much evidence to support the idea that bayonet combat was rare, it is interesting to read a contrary opinion, by someone who was at the sharp end. John Laffin was an Australian infantryman in World War II, and in his history of battlefield medicine, Combat Surgeons (London: J. M. Dent, 1970), 152, observes: “I think surgeons may be mistaken in their assumption that few wounds are made with the bayonet. Such an assumption ignores the frequent and early fatality of bayonet wounds: a man with a bayonet wound in the throat, stomach or chest does not live long enough to reach the surgeon. Again, a bayonet wound is often a secondary one. That is, soldiers attacking forward after firing at an enemy often kill with the bayonet disabled troops who are nevertheless still firing their rifles or machine guns. I can only say from experience … that bayonet fighting occurs more frequently than surgeons believe, although few soldiers would engage in it if they still had a bullet in their firearms.”
SEVEN
A CONFRATERNITY OF GHOSTS
How Soldiers Were Killed in World War II
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar hears
And look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do.
—From “How to Kill” by Keith Douglas (killed by mortar fire in Normandy, June 9, 1944)
AS KEITH DOUGLAS squeezed the trigger he experienced the emotional violence of two images, two ideas of humanity, as they elided in the crosshairs: the parti
cular, the individual, and the precious versus the anonymous, generalized, and expendable. He knows the Man but does not know the man.
In a century dedicated to computation, to measurement, to exactitude, there are multitudes who remain uncounted and unaccounted for. In the ocean of the slain so many souls were easily lost in the great rise and fall of the swell. They simply drifted away into the deep blue of history. We have no accurate reckoning. About 16 million (give or take a million) fighting men and women died—roughly double the number of the First World War.1 “It is testimony to the scale of wartime carnage that the estimates of military losses should vary by margins of millions.”2
The great killing ground was Russia. It was here that Germany was bled to death. And in the bleeding, the Soviet Union sacrificed fighting men and women on a scale that would have been completely insupportable for their Western Allies. Although the numbers of Soviets and Germans killed on the eastern front are approximate, they are, even in a rough comparison with Western Allied deaths, astonishing. In combat deaths alone the Soviets lost about 6.5 million.3 In addition, more than 5.7 million Red Army soldiers were captured, of whom probably more than half were killed, primarily by being starved, worked to death, or, in the case of perhaps 600,000 of them, peremptorily shot either on capture or in captivity.4 During the first six months of the war alone, the Red Army lost two-thirds of its starting strength of just over 3 million men.5