Storm of Steel

Les Eparges

The tender green of young leaves shimmered in the flat light. We followed hidden, twisting paths towards a narrow gorge behind the front line. We had been told that the 76th was to attack after a bombardment of only twenty minutes, and that we were to be held in reserve. On the dot of noon, our artillery launched into a furious bombardment that echoed and re-echoed through the wooded hollows. For the first time, we heard what was meant by the expression ‘drumfire’. We sat perched on our haversacks, idle and excited. A runner plunged through to the company commander. Brisk exchange. The three nearest trenches have fallen to us, and six field guns have been captured!’ Loud cheers rang out. A feeling of up-and-at-’em.

At last, the longed-for order. In a long line, we moved forward, towards the pattering of heavy rifle fire. It was getting serious. To the side of the forest path, dull thumps came down in a clump of firs, bringing down a rain of branches and soil. One nervous soldier threw himself to the ground, while his comrades laughed uneasily. Then Death’s call slipped through the ranks: ‘Ambulancemen to the Front!’

A little later, we passed the spot that had been hit. The casualties had already been removed. Bloody scraps of cloth and flesh had been left on bushes around the crater – a strange and dreadful sight that put me in mind of the butcher-bird that spikes its prey on thorn bushes.

Troops were advancing at the double along the Grande Tranchee. Casualties huddled by the roadside, whimpering for water, prisoners carrying stretchers came panting back, limbers clattered through fire at a gallop. On either side, shells spattered the soft ground, heavy boughs came crashing down. A dead horse lay across the middle of the path, with giant wounds, its steaming entrails beside it. In among the great, bloody scenes there was a wild, unsuspected hilarity. A bearded reservist leaned against a tree:

‘On you go now, boys, Frenchie’s on the run!’

We entered the battle-tramped realm of the infantryman. The area round the jumping-off position had been deforested by shells. In the ripped-up no man’s land lay the victims of the attack, still facing the enemy; their grey tunics barely stood out from the ground. A giant form with red, blood-spattered beard stared fixedly at the sky, his fingers clutching the spongy ground. A young man tossed in a shell-crater, his features already yellow with his impending death. He seemed not to want to be looked at; he gave us a cross shrug and pulled his coat over his head, and lay still.

Our marching column broke up. Shells came continually hissing towards us in long, flat arcs, lightnings whirled up the forest floor. The shrill toot of field artillery shells I had heard quite often even before Orainville; it didn’t strike me as being particularly dangerous. The loose order in which our company now advanced over the broken field had something oddly calming about it; I thought privately that this baptism of fire business was actually far less dangerous than I’d expected. In a curious failure of comprehension, I looked alertly about me for possible targets for all this artillery fire, not, apparently, realizing that it was actually ourselves that the enemy gunners were trying for all they were worth to hit.

‘Ambulancemen!’ We had our first fatality. A shrapnel ball had ripped through rifleman Stoker’s carotid artery. Three packets of lint were sodden with blood in no time. In a matter of seconds he had bled to death. Next to us, a couple of ordnance pieces loosed off shells, drawing more fire down on us from the enemy. An artillery lieutenant, who was in the vanguard, looking for wounded, was thrown to the ground by a column of steam that spurted in front of him. He got to his feet and made his way back with notable calm. We took him in with gleaming eyes.

It was getting dark when we received orders to advance further. The way now led through dense undergrowth shot through by shells, into an endless communication trench along which the French had dropped their packs as they ran. Approaching the village of Les Eparges, without having any troops in front of us, we were forced to hew defensive positions in solid rock. Finally, I slumped into a bush and fell asleep. At moments, half asleep, I was aware of artillery shells, ours or theirs, describing their ellipses in a trail of sparks.

‘Come on, man, get up! We’re moving out!’ I woke up in dew-sodden grass. Through a stuttering swathe of machine-gun fire, we plunged back into our communication trench, and moved to a position on the edge of the wood previously held by the French. A sweetish smell and a bundle hanging in the wire caught my attention. In the rising mist,

I leaped out of the trench and found a shrunken French corpse. Flesh like mouldering fish gleamed greenishly through splits in the shredded uniform. Turning round, I took a step back in horror: next to me a figure was crouched against a tree. It still had gleaming French leather harness, and on its back was a fully packed haversack, topped by a round mess-tin. Empty eye-sockets and a few strands of hair on the bluish-black skull indicated that the man was not among the living. There was another sitting down, slumped forward towards his feet, as though he had just collapsed. All around were dozens more, rotted, dried and stiffened to mummies, frozen in an eerie dance of death. The French must have spent months in the proximity of their fallen comrades, without burying them.

During the morning, the sun gradually pierced the fog, and spread a pleasant warmth. After I’d slept on the bottom of the trench for a while, curiosity impelled me to inspect the unoccupied trench we’d captured the day before. It was littered with great piles of provisions, ammunition, equipment, weapons, letters and newspapers. The dugouts were like looted junk-shops. In amongst it all were the bodies of the brave defenders, their guns still poking out through the shooting-slits. A headless torso was jammed in some shot-up beams. Head and neck were gone, white cartilage gleamed out of reddish-black flesh. I found it difficult to fathom. Next to it a very young man lay on his back with glassy eyes and fists still aiming. A peculiar feeling, looking into dead, questioning eyes – a shudder that I never quite lost in the course of the war. His pockets had been turned inside out, and his emptied wallet lay beside him.

Unmolested by any fire, I strolled along the ravaged trench. It was the short mid-morning lull that was often to be my only moment of respite on the battlefield. I used it to take a good look at everything. The unfamiliar weapons, the darkness of the dugouts, the colourful contents of the haversacks, it was all new and strange to me. I pocketed some French ammunition, undid a silky-soft tarpaulin and picked up a canteen wrapped in blue cloth, only to chuck it all away again a few steps further along. The sight of a beautiful striped shirt, lying next to a ripped-open officer’s valise, seduced me to strip off my uniform and get into some fresh linen. I relished the pleasant tickle of clean cloth against my skin. Thus kitted out, I looked for a sunny spot in the trench, sat down on a beam-end, and with my bayonet opened a round can of meat for my breakfast. Then I lit my pipe, and browsed through some of the many French magazines that lay scattered about, some of them, as I saw from the dates, only sent to the trenches on the eve of Verdun.

Not without a certain shudder, I remember that during my breakfast I tried to unscrew a curious little contraption that I found lying at my feet in the trench, which for some reason I took to be a ‘storm lantern’. It wasn’t until a lot later that it dawned on me that the thing I’d been fiddling around with was a live hand-grenade.

As conditions grew brighter, a German battery opened up from a stretch of woods just behind the trench. It didn’t take long for the enemy to reply. Suddenly I was struck by a mighty crash behind me, and saw a steep pillar of smoke rising. Still unfamiliar with the sounds of war, I was not able to distinguish the hisses and whistles and bangs of our own gunnery from the ripping crash of enemy shells, and hence, to get a sense of the lines of engagement. Above all, I could not account for the way I seemed to be under fire from all sides, so that the trajectories of the various shells were criss-crossing apparently aimlessly over the little warren of trenches where a few of us were holed up. This effect, for which I could see no cause, disquieted me and made me think. I still viewed the machinery of conflict with the eyes of an inexperienced recruit – the expressions of bellicosity seemed as distant and peculiar to me as events on another planet. This meant I was unafraid; feeling myself to be invisible, I couldn’t believe I was a target to anyone, much less that I might be hit. So, returned to my unit, I surveyed the terrain in front of me with great indifference. In my pocket-diary I wrote down – a habit of mine later on as well – the times and the intensity of the bombardment.

Towards noon, the artillery fire had increased to a kind of savage pounding dance. The flames lit around us incessantly. Black, white and yellow clouds mingled. The shells with black smoke, which the old-timers called ‘Americans’ or ‘coal boxes’, ripped with incredible violence. And all the time the curious, canary-like twittering of dozens of fuses. With their cut-out shapes, in which the trapped air produced a flute-like trill, they drifted over the long surf of explosions like ticking copper toy clocks or mechanical insects. The odd thing was that the little birds in the forest seemed quite untroubled by the myriad noise; they sat peaceably over the smoke in their battered boughs. In the short intervals of firing, we could hear them singing happily or ardently to one another, if anything even inspired or encouraged by the dreadful noise on all sides.

In the moments when the shelling was particularly heavy, the men called to each other to remain vigilant. In the stretch of trench that I could see, and out of whose walls great clumps of mud had already been knocked here and there, we were in complete readiness. Our rifles were unlocked in the shooting-slits, and the riflemen were alertly eyeing the foreground. From time to time they checked to left and right to see whether we were still in contact, and they smiled when their eyes encountered those of comrades. I sat with a comrade on a bench cut into the clay wall of the trench. Once, the board of the shooting-slit through which we were looking splintered, and a rifle bullet flew between our heads and buried itself in the clay.

By and by, there were casualties. I had no way of knowing how things stood in other sectors of the labyrinthine trench, but the increasing frequency of the calls for

‘Ambulancemen!’ showed that the shelling was starting to take effect. From time to time, a figure hurried by with its head or neck or hand wrapped in fresh, clean and very visible bandages, on its way to the rear. It was a matter of urgency to get the victim out of the way, because of the military superstition by which a trifling wound or hit, if not immediately dealt with, is certain to be followed by something rather worse.

My comrade, volunteer Kohl, kept up that North German sang-froid that might have been made for such a situation. He was chewing and squeezing on a cigar that refused to draw, and apart from that looked rather sleepy. Nor did he allow himself to be upset when, suddenly, to the rear of us, there was a clattering as of a thousand rifles. It turned out that the intensity of the shelling had caused the wood to catch fire. Great tongues of flame climbed noisily up the tree trunks.

While all this was going on, I suffered from a rather curious anxiety. I was envious of the old ‘Lions of Perthes’ for their experience in the ‘witches’ cauldron’, which I had missed out on through being away in Recouvrence. Therefore, each time the coal-boxes came down especially thick and fast in our neck of things, I would turn to

Kohl, who had been there, and ask:

‘Hey, would you say this was like Perthes now?’

To my chagrin, he would reply each time with a casually dismissive gesture:

‘Not by a long chalk!’

When the shelling had intensified to the extent that now our clay bench had started to sway with the impact of the black monsters, I yelled into his ear:

‘Hey, is it like Perthes now?’

Kohl was a conscientious soldier. He began by standing up, looked about himself carefully, and then roared back, to my satisfaction:

‘I think it’s getting there!’

The reply filled me with foolish delight, as it confirmed to me that this was my first proper battle.

At that instant, a man popped up in the corner of our sector: ‘Follow me left!’ We passed on the command, and started along the smoke-filled position. The ration party had just arrived with the chow, and hundreds of unwanted mess-tins sat and steamed on the breastwork. Who could think to eat now? A crowd of wounded men pushed past us with blood-soaked bandages, the excitement of the battle still etched on their pale faces. Up on the edge of the trench, stretcher after stretcher was swiftly lugged to the rear. The sense of being up against it began to take hold of us. ‘Careful of my arm, mate!’

‘Come along, man, keep up!’

I spotted Lieutenant Sandvoss, rushing past the trench with distracted staring eyes. A long white bandage trailing round his neck gave him a strangely ungainly appearance, which probably explains why just at that moment he reminded me of a duck. There was something dreamlike about the vision – terror in the guise of the absurd. Straight afterwards, we hurried past Colonel von Oppen, who had his hand in his tunic pocket and was issuing orders to his adjutant. ‘Aha, so there is some organization and purpose behind all this,’ it flashed through my brain.

The trench debouched into a stretch of wood. We stood irresolutely under huge beech trees. A lieutenant emerged from dense undergrowth and called to our longest-serving NCO: ‘Have them fall out towards the sunset, and then take up position. Report to me in the dugout by the clearing.’ Swearing, the NCO took over.

We fell out in extended order, and lay down expectantly in a series of flattish depressions that some predecessors of ours had scooped out of the ground. Our ribald conversations were suddenly cut off by a marrow-freezing cry. Twenty yards behind us, clumps of earth whirled up out of a white cloud and smacked into the boughs. The crash echoed through the woods. Stricken eyes looked at each other, bodies pressed themselves into the ground with a humbling sensation of powerlessness to do anything else. Explosion followed explosion. Choking gases drifted through the undergrowth, smoke obscured the treetops, trees and branches came crashing to the ground, screams.

We leaped up and ran blindly, chased by lightnings and crushing air pressure, from tree to tree, looking for cover, skirting around giant tree trunks like frightened game. A dugout where many men had taken shelter, and which I too was running towards, took a direct hit that ripped up the planking and sent heavy timbers spinning through the air.

Like a couple of squirrels having stones thrown at them, the NCO and I dodged panting round a huge beech. Quite mechanically, and spurred on by further explosions, I ran after my superior, who sometimes turned round and stared at me, wild-eyed, yelling:

‘What in God’s name are those things? What are they?’

Suddenly there was a flash among the rootwork, and a blow on the left thigh flung me to the ground. I thought I had been struck by a clump of earth, but the warm trickle of blood indicated that I’d been wounded. Later, I saw that a needle-sharp piece of shrapnel had given me a flesh wound, though my wallet had taken the brunt of it. The fine cut, which before slicing into the muscle had split no fewer than nine thicknesses of stout leather, looked as though it might have been administered by a scalpel.

I threw down my haversack and ran towards the trench we had come from. From all sides, wounded men were making tracks towards it from the shelled woods. The trench was appalling, choked with seriously wounded and dying men. A figure stripped to the waist, with ripped-open back, leaned against the parapet. Another, with a triangular flap hanging off the back of his skull, emitted short, high-pitched screams. This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm. And fresh shells came down all the time.

I lost my head completely. Ruthlessly, I barged past everyone on my path, before finally, having fallen back a few times in my haste, climbing out of the hellish crush of the trench, to move more freely above. Like a bolting horse, I rushed through dense undergrowth, across paths and clearings, till I collapsed in a copse by the Grande Tranchee.

It was already growing dark by the time a couple of stretcher-bearers who were looking for casualties came upon me. They picked me up on their stretcher and carried me back to their dressing-station in a dugout covered over with tree branches, where I spent the night, pressed together with many other wounded men. An exhausted medic stood in the throng of groaning men, bandaging, injecting and giving calm instructions. I pulled a dead man’s coat over me, and fell into a sleep that incipient fever lit with lurid dreams. Once, in the middle of the night, I awoke, and saw the doctor still working by the light of a lamp. A Frenchman was screaming incessantly, and next to me a man growled:

‘Bloody Frenchies, never happy if they’ve not got something to moan about!’ And then I was asleep again.

As I was being carried away the following morning, a splinter bored a hole through the stretcher canvas between my knees.

Along with other wounded men, I was loaded on to one of the ambulance wagons that shuttled between the battlefield and the main dressing-station. We galloped across the Grande Tranchee, which was still under heavy fire. Behind the grey canvas walls we careered through the danger that accompanied us with giant stamping strides.

On one of the stretchers on which – like loaves of bread into an oven – we had been pushed into the back of the cart lay a comrade with a shot in the belly that occasioned him intense pain. He appealed to every one of us to finish him off with the ambulanceman’s pistol that hung in the wagon. No one answered. I was yet to experience the feeling where every jolt seems like a hammer blow on a bad injury.

The chief dressing-station was in a forest clearing. Long rows of straw had been laid out and covered with foliage. The stream of wounded was proof, if proof were needed, that a significant engagement was in progress. At the sight of the surgeon, who stood checking the roster in the bloody chaos, I once again had the impression, hard to describe, of seeing a man surrounded by elemental terror and anguish, studying the functioning of his organization with ant-like cold-bloodedness.

Supplied with food and drink, and smoking a cigarette, I lay in the middle of a long line of wounded men on my spill of straw, in that mood which sets in when a test has been got through, if not exactly with flying colours, then still one way or another. A short snatch of conversation next to me gave me pause. ‘What happened to you, comrade?’

‘I’ve been shot in the bladder.’

‘Is it very bad?’

‘Oh, that’s not the problem. I can’t stand it that I can’t fight

Later that same morning, we were taken to the main collection point in the village church at St Maurice. A hospital train was there, already getting up steam. We would be back in Germany in two days. From my bed on the train, I could see the fields just coming into spring. We were well looked after by a quiet fellow, a philosophy scholar in private life. The first thing he did for me was to take out his penknife and cut the boot off my foot. There are people who have a gift for tending others, and so it was with this man; even seeing him reading a book by a night-light made me feel better.

The train took us to Heidelberg.

At the sight of the Neckar slopes wreathed with flowering cherry trees, I had a strong sense of having come home. What a beautiful country it was, and eminently worth our blood and our lives. Never before had I felt its charm so clearly. I had good and serious thoughts, and for the first time I sensed that this war was more than just a great adventure.

The battle at Les Eparges was my first. It was quite unlike what I had expected. I had taken part in a major engagement, without having clapped eyes on a single live opponent. It wasn’t until much later that I experienced the direct coming together, the climax of battle in the form of waves of attackers on an open field, which, for decisive, murderous moments, would break into the chaos and vacuity of the battlefield.