by Ernst Jünger
After that titanic final drumroll, things got quieter. The shelling now passed over our heads, on to the Langemarck–Bixschoote road. We weren’t even that happy to see it. So far we hadn’t seen the wood for the trees; danger had come down at us on such a massive scale and in so many guises that we couldn’t really begin to cope with it. After the storm had passed over our heads, everyone had time to prepare themselves for what inevitably must come.
And come it did. The guns ahead of us fell silent. The defenders had been finished off. Out of the haze, a dense line of men began to approach. My men shot, concealed behind the ruins, the machine-gun was clicking away. As though smeared away, the attackers disappeared into the craters, and tied us down by their return of fire. On either flank, strong detachments began to march forward. Before long, we were surrounded by rifles.
The situation was hopeless; there was no point in merely sacrificing the soldiers. I gave the order for withdrawal. Now it was difficult to get the committed and tenacious soldiers to stop.
Taking advantage of a long cloud of smoke that hung down near the water, we made good our escape, partly wading through streams whose water went up to our hips. Although the noose around us was all but drawn tight, we still squirmed our way out. I was the last man out of our little strongpoint, supporting Lieutenant Hohlemann, who was bleeding badly from a wound to the head, but was still making jokes at his own expense.
As we crossed the road, we ran into the 2nd Company. Kius had heard of our situation, from wounded men going back, and had come, not at his own prompting, but in response to the urging of his men, to get us out.
It was a spontaneous initiative. We were moved, and it created in us a kind of happy euphoria, the sort of mood in which you want to pull up trees by the roots.
After a short discussion, we decided to stop and allow the enemy to catch us up. Here, too, there were artillerymen present, signallers, telephonists, and various stray bits and bobs, who could only be persuaded by force that, given the particular circumstances, they too were required to lie down with a rifle in the front line. By means of cajoling, ordering and rifle butts, we established a new defensive line.
Then we sat down in a trench that was more imagination than reality, and breakfasted. Kius pulled out his inevitable camera and took pictures. On our left there was a sudden commotion, coming from the outskirts of Langemarck. Our men fired at various figures who were running around, until I called a halt. Unhappily, an NCO came up and reported that a company of Fusilier Guards had dug in by the road, and had suffered casualties from our fire.
Thereupon I ordered us to advance, through dense rifle fire, to join them. We lost a few men, and Lieutenant Bartmer of the 2nd Company was gravely wounded. Kius stayed at my side, munching what was left of his bread and butter as he advanced. When we had occupied the road from where the terrain fell away down into the Steenbach, we saw that the British had purposed exactly the same thing. The nearest khaki-clad figures were only twenty yards away. The field was full of lines of men and marching columns, as far as the eye could see. Even the Rattenburg was already being swarmed all over.
They were completely unconcerned, so engrossed were they in what they were doing. One man had a roll of wire on his back, which he was slowly unspooling. Obviously they had seen hardly any fire, and were just cheerfully advancing. Even though they were in vastly superior numbers, we thought we would put a spoke in their wheel. There was a good deal of shooting, but aimed shooting. I saw a stout corporal from the 8th Company calmly rest his rifle on a splintered tree trunk; with every shot an attacker fell. The enemy were bewildered, and started hopping about this way and that, like rabbits, while clouds of dust were whirled up between them. Some were hit, the rest crept into shell-craters, to lie low until it got dark. The wheels had come off their advance; they had paid for it dearly.
At around eleven o’clock, rosette-decorated aircraft circled down towards us, and were driven away by fierce fire. In the middle of that crazy banging away, I had to laugh at one soldier who came up to me and wanted me to confirm that it was he with his rifle who had brought down one plane in flames.
Right after I’d occupied the roadway, I’d reported to regimental headquarters and called in support. In the afternoon, infantry columns, engineers and machine-gunners came to reinforce us. Taking a leaf from Old Fritz’s [Frederick the Great] tactical handbook, they were all stuffed into our already over-full front line. From time to time, the British snipers managed to kill one or two men who crossed the road without looking.
Almost four, and a very nasty bout of shrapnel ensued. The loads were flung right at the road. There was no doubt about it, the flyers had identified our new position, and it looked as if we were going to be in for some rough times.
And soon a violent bombardment followed, with light and heavy shells. We lay pressed together in the overcrowded, dead-straight roadside ditch. The fire danced before our eyes, twigs and clumps of clay whistled down upon us. To the left of me, a bolt of lightning flared up, leaving white, acrid steam. I crept over to my neighbour on all fours. He was motionless. Blood trickled from little jagged splinter wounds too numerous to count. Further right there were more heavy losses.
After a half-hour of this, there was quiet. Quickly we dug deep holes in the flat sides of the ditch, so as to have at least some protection against splinters in the event of a second attack. As we dug, our shovels encountered guns, ammunition belts and cartridges from 1914 – proof that this wasn’t the first time this ground had drunk blood. Our predecessors here had been the volunteers of Langemarck.
As dusk was falling, we were treated to a second helping. I squatted next to Kius in a little sitz-shelter, that had cost us a fair few digging blisters. The ground was being tossed around like a ship’s plank under the close and very close explosions. We thought this might well be it.
My steel helmet pulled down over my brow, staring at the road, whose stones shot sparks when iron fragments flew off them, I chewed my pipe and tried to talk myself into feeling brave. Curious thoughts flashed through my brain. For instance, I thought hard about a French popular novel called Le vautour de la Sierra that had fallen into my hands in Cambrai. Several times I murmured a phrase of Ariosto’s: ‘A great heart feels no dread of approaching death, whenever it may come, so long as it be honourable.’ That produced a pleasant kind of intoxication, of the sort that one experiences, maybe, on a rollercoaster. When the shells briefly abated, I heard fragments of the lovely song of ‘The Black Whale at Askalon’ coming from the man next to me, and I thought my friend Kius must have gone mad. But everyone has his own particular idiosyncratic method.
At the end of the shelling, a large splinter hit me in the hand. Kius flashed his torch at it, and saw it was only a flesh wound.
After midnight, it started to rain gently; patrols from a supporting regiment that had advanced as far as the Steenbach found only craters full of mud. The British had retreated behind the stream.
Exhausted by the strains of this momentous day, we settled down in our holes, except for the sentries. I pulled the ragged coat of my dead neighbour up over my head, and fell into an unquiet slumber. Towards dawn, I woke up shivering, and discovered my situation was sorry indeed. It was bucketing down, and the little rivulets on the road were all emptying themselves into my foxhole. I rigged up a dam, and baled out my resting-place with the lid of my mess-tin. As the rivulets deepened, I put up successive parapets on my earthworks, until in the end the weak construction gave way to the growing pressure, and, with a grateful gurgle, a dirty rush of water filled my foxhole up to the top. While I was busy fishing my pistol and helmet out of the mire, I watched my bread and tobacco go bobbing along the ditch, whose other denizens had suffered similar misfortunes to mine. Shivering and trembling, without a dry stitch on our bodies, we stood there knowing the next bombardment would find us utterly helpless, on the muddy road. It was a wretched morning. Once again, I learned that no artillery bombardment is as capable of break
ing resistance in the same measure as the elemental forces of wet and cold.
In the wider scheme of the battle, however, that downpour was a real godsend for us, because it doomed the English push to bog down in its first, crucial days. The enemy had to get his artillery through the swampy cratered landscape, while we could trundle our ammunition along intact roads.
At eleven in the morning, as we were in the pit of despair, a saving angel appeared to us in the guise of a dispatch-rider who brought the order for the regiment to assemble in Koekuit.
On our march back, we saw just how difficult forward communications and supply must have been on the day of the attack. The roads were thick with soldiers and horses. Alongside a few limbers sieved with holes, twelve gruesomely shot-up horses blocked the road.
On a rain-slicked pasture, over which the milk-white balls of a few shrapnels hung like clouds, the rest of the regiment came together. It was a little band of men, of about company strength, and a couple of officers in the middle. The losses! Almost the entire complement of two battalions in officers and men. Grimly the survivors stood in the teeming rain, and waited to be assigned quarters. Then we got dried in a wooden hut, huddled round a burning stove, and, over a hearty breakfast, we once more felt courage flow back into our limbs.
In the early evening, the first shells hit the village. One of the huts was hit, and several men from the 3rd Company killed. In spite of the bombardment, we lay down betimes with the desperate hope that we wouldn’t be called upon to counter-attack or reinforce or otherwise be thrown out into the rain.
At three in the morning, the order came to move out. We marched down the corpse- and wreckage-strewn road to Staden. The shelling had come this far; we came upon an isolated crater ringed by twelve bodies. Staden, which at our arrival had seemed such a lively place, already had quite a few bombed houses to show. The bleak market-place was littered with domestic rubble. A family left the little town at the same time as us, driving ahead of them their only possession: a cow. They were simple people; the man had a wooden leg, the woman was leading the crying children by the hand. The wild sounds behind us cast a further pall over the sad scene.
The remnants of the 2nd Battalion were housed in an isolated farmyard, in the midst of juicy high pastures, behind tall hedges. There I was put in command of the 7th Company, with whom I was to share sorrow and joy until the end of the war.
In the evening, we sat in front of the old tiled stove, sipping a stiff grog, and listening to the renewed thunder of the battle. A sentence caught my eye from a military communiqué in a newspaper: ‘The enemy was held along the line of the Steenbach.’
It was an odd thing that our apparently confused actions in the depths of the night had had such pronounced and public consequences. We had done our part towards bringing the attack, which had begun with such mighty force, to a halt. However colossal the quantities of men and matériel, the work at decisive points had been done by no more than a few handfuls of men.
Before long, we went up to the hayloft to lie down. In spite of our nightcaps, most of the sleepers still had vivid dreams, and tossed and rolled, as though the Battle of Flanders had to be fought all over again.
On 3 August, weighed down with the meat and fruits of this deserted province, we marched off to the station of the nearby town of Gits. In the station canteen, the reduced battalion, once more in fine fettle, drank coffee together, spiced by the earthy language of a couple of heavy Flemish beauties as waitresses. What especially tickled the men was the way that, following the regional custom, they addressed everyone, officers included, as ‘Du’.
After a few days, I got a letter from my brother Fritz, by now in hospital in Gelsenkirchen. He wrote that he would probably have a stiff arm and a rattling lung till the day he died.
From his account I excerpted the following passage, to complement my own narrative. It gives a vivid sense of how it felt to be an inexperienced soldier, dropped into the hurricane of the matériel battle.
‘“Fall in for the attack!” My platoon commander’s face peered down into our little foxhole. The three men with me ended their conversation and, cursing, got to their feet. I stood up, tightened my steel helmet, and stepped out into the gloaming.
‘The scene had changed; it had grown foggy now, and cool. The bombardment had moved off and its dull thunder was now assailing other parts of the vast battlefield. Planes were droning through the air, calming the anxiously raised eye by displaying large Maltese crosses painted on the undersides of their wings.
‘I went one more time to the spring, which still looked remarkably clean and pure amidst all the rubble and debris, and filled my water-bottle.
‘The company formed up by platoons. Quickly I clipped four hand-grenades on to my belt, and went to my section, from which two men were missing. There was barely time to take down their names before the whole thing was set in motion. The platoons proceeded in single file through the cratered landscape, skirted around bits of timber, pressed against hedges, and jangling and thumping made their way towards the enemy.
‘The attack was to be carried out by two battalions; ours and one battalion from the regiment next to ours. Our orders were short and sharp. British units who had got across the canal were to be repulsed. My role in this undertaking was to remain with my section far forward, to be in position for a British counter-attack.
‘We reached the ruins of a village. Out of the hideously scarred soil of Flanders rose black, splintered trunks of trees, all that was left of what had once been a large forest. Vast swathes of smoke hung around, and dimmed the evening with their heavy, gloomy clouds. Over the naked earth, which had been so pitilessly and repeatedly ripped open, hovered choking yellow or brown gases that drifted sluggishly about.
‘We were ordered to prepare for a gas attack. At that moment, a huge bombardment set in – the British must have been made aware of our advance. The earth leaped up in hissing fountains, and a hail of splinters swept over the land like a shower of rain. For an instant, each man froze motionless, then they started running in all directions. I heard the voice of our battalion commander, Captain Böckelmann, shouting some command at the top of his voice, but I was unable to understand.
‘My men had vanished. I found myself with some other platoon, and together we pressed towards the ruins of a village that the implacable shells had levelled. We broke out our gas masks.
‘Everyone threw themselves to the ground. Next to me on the left knelt Lieutenant Ehlert, an officer whom I’d come across first at the Somme. Next to him was an NCO, lying down, peering into the distance. The force of the barrage was terrific; I confess it exceeded my wildest notions. It was a wall of yellow flame flickering in front of us; a hail of clods of earth, bricks and iron splinters that battered down on our heads, striking sparks from our steel helmets. I had the sensation that it had become harder to breathe, and that whatever air was left in this iron-charged atmosphere was no longer quite sufficient for my lungs.
‘For a long time I stared into that glowing witches’ cauldron, the furthest point of which was the jabbing fire from the mouth of a British machine-gun. The thousandfold bee-swarm of these shells that flowed over us was past hearing. I realized that our attack, which had been prepared by a mere half-hour’s drumfire, was already smashed before it could properly begin by this immense defensive shelling. Twice in quick succession, an incredible din seemed to swallow up all the other noise. Shells of the very largest calibre exploded. Whole fields of rubble took off, revolved in the air and smashed to the ground with an infernal racket.
‘In response to a yell from Ehlert, I looked right. He raised his left hand, gestured to people behind him, and leaped up. I got to my feet cumbersomely, and took off after him. My feet still felt as if they were burning, but the stabbing pain had relented somewhat.
‘I had covered barely twenty yards before, cresting a shell-crater, I was dazzled by a flaring shrapnel that exploded less than ten paces away from me, and about ten feet o
ff the ground. I felt two blows against my chest and shoulder. I let go of my rifle, and staggered backwards, before rolling back into the crater. I could dimly hear Ehlert calling out as he rushed past: “He’s hit!”
‘He was not to see another day. The attack failed, and on his way back, he and all his surviving comrades were killed. A shot through the back of the head ended the life of this brave officer.
‘When I woke up after being unconscious for I don’t know how long, things had quietened down. I tried to pull myself up, as I was lying head down in the crater, but felt violent pain in my shoulder with every move. My breathing was shallow and sporadic, my lungs couldn’t take in enough air for me. Hit in lung and shoulder, I thought, remembering the two buffets I’d received (they hadn’t hurt at all) earlier. I abandoned my pack and belt and, in an access of utter indifference, even my gas mask. I kept my steel helmet on, and hung my water-bottle off a loop on my tunic.
‘I managed to get out of the crater. After no more than about five steps of a laborious crawl, I broke down in another crater. After another hour, I made another attempt, since the battlefield was once more being shaken by light drumfire. That attempt also got me nowhere. I lost my precious water-bottle, and sank into a state of total exhaustion, from which I was woken, much later, by a burning thirst.
‘It started raining gently. I managed to collect some dirty water in my helmet. I was utterly disorientated, with no notion of where the German lines were running. It was one crater next to another, one wider and deeper than the one before, and from the bottom of these deep pits all you could see were clay walls and a grey sky. A storm drew up, its thunders rather stolen by the onset of a new drumfire. I pressed myself tight against the wall of my crater. A lump of clay struck my shoulder; heavy splinters passed over my head. Gradually, I lost all sense of time as well; I didn’t know if it was morning or evening.
