No Man's Land: Writings From a World at War

by Pete Ayrton

  My losses were two wounded and one missing, but I’m certain at least 30 men were knocked out.

  14. VI.17

  Our action naturally caused a sensation at all the more senior levels. From the regiment I received the order to occupy the position again at night, and if the enemy were still in it to throw him out. I put together 2 patrols, one under my command, the other under Kius. We went round the wood from both sides with 45 men and met up at the slope. There was no enemy to be seen, only from the route I had taken with Hackmann’s patrol did a sentry call out to us and fire a couple of shots. So I took up occupation of the place again and searched the ground, since I was naturally interested in yesterday’s outcome. In the area where the section had come from the left, there were still 3 corpses in the grass, 2 Indians and a White officer with two golden stars on his epaulettes. The officer had got a bullet in the eye that had come out at the other temple. He had a massive six-barrel revolver in his left hand, while his right gripped a long wooden club that was spattered with his own blood. His helmet had been shot through. I had his epaulettes taken off, I kept one as a souvenir, likewise his cigarette case, which was not very valuable, and the shot-through helmet and the club. In his breast pocket he had a metal flask with cognac. He was lying approximately 20 yards in front of where we were standing yesterday, I had really not thought that they had come so close, at any rate these people had made a dashing attack. That he had seen us is proven by the fact that he had fired four bullets from his revolver.

  My men took the things off the dead. I have always found the undressing and robbing of corpses an unpleasant business, I didn’t forbid it, since it was better the men had the things than that they rot, and in war moral considerations should not be allowed to determine any action. Apart from which this feeling was not a moral but an aesthetic one. Even when one fellow wanted to pull the rings from the officer’s fingers, I didn’t say anything, although the repulsive laughter of this man goaded me to do so. Besides his comrades had the tact to stop him doing it. In a very small shell hole lay three helmets, a sign that our opponents would have preferred to withdraw into holes in the ground under our fire.

  Also lying at the edge of the wood were gas masks, hand grenades, helmets, digging tools, ammunition pouches and other pieces of equipment that betrayed there must be corpses lying there, too. But because of the jungle-like undergrowth we were unable to search. Towards morning I withdrew to the trench and slept in my wooden shack, twice there was shellfire close by without me being able to rouse myself to get up.

  18. VI.17

  Yesterday evening the outpost was attacked again, this time the business didn’t take such a glorious course. The commander, a Sergeant Blüm, arrived at the trench alone with a group, having left the two other groups in the lurch, but these defended themselves anyway, one man being wounded. NCO Erdelt fell down the steep slope right into a bunch of lurking Indians. He threw some hand grenades around, but was quickly held down and first of all an Indian officer struck him in the face with a wire whip. Then the Indian took his watch from him. Shoved and poked he had to march off with them and escaped again when the Indians scattered under our machine gun fire. After wandering about behind the English lines for some time he got back to our area. This time, too, the Indians must again have suffered losses, because he saw some being carried back. There were English cars waiting at the road, apparently to drive the wounded away.

  There has been a truly tropical heat for the last 12 days. The overgrown fields shimmer in the brightest colours. I have been struck by one colour effect in particular, which seems as if made for the war. A green field, thick with red poppy, when darkness falls the red appears almost black and almost runs together with the darkest shades of the green.

  19. VI.17

  Last night I went out on patrol. I wanted to have a go at the English double outpost at the slope, if it wasn’t there, push further forward and take prisoners. Without a request on my part Lieutenant Schulz and a light machine gun were assigned to me. I split up the patrol so that Schulz with the machine gun and six men went down the sunken track, I with Sergeant Teilengertes and Knigge about 40 yards to the left of it and Corporal Braun in the middle as liaison man. If a part of the patrol came under fire, the others should wheel round to attack. We went forward, bent double, expectant.

  In the sunken track we suddenly heard the sound of a rifle being cocked. We lay as if rooted to the spot. Then a shot was fired. I lay behind a gorse bush and waited. Hand grenades exploded to the right. Then a general furious firing in front of us, the horrible, familiar sharp report showed that the shots were passing very close to us. I gave the order to withdraw. In mad haste we ran back. To our right infantry fire and a machine gun opened up. The bullets swarmed around us in the most unpleasant manner, that is, we heard only the sharp, brief shots, one doesn’t hear a bullet fired at such close range. I didn’t think I would get back in one piece. Death had come hunting. My subconscious was all the time expecting me to be hit.

  To the right somewhere on the terrain a section of Indians charged with a shrill Hooray!

  Once I fell and Teilengertes fell over me. In the collision I lost helmet, pistol, hand grenades. Just keep going! At last we came to the steep slope and dashed down. I came upon Schulz who told me that the impudent marksman had been chastised with hand grenades. Immediately after that two men appeared dragging along Infantryman Feldmann who had been shot twice through the legs. The others were all there. The biggest misfortune was that the fellow who was carrying the machine gun had fallen over the wounded man and left the thing lying. Notwithstanding that Schulz had ordered him to open fire, he had taken to his heels without carrying out the order.

  While we were still engaged in lively debate we came under very unpleasant fire, which damned well reminded me of the night of the 12th/13th. Again there was utter confusion. I found myself quite alone on the slope with one man. Pulling himself forward with his hands the wounded man crawled up to me and moaned: ‘Lieutenant, lieutenant, sir, don’t leave me alone.’ It was a pitiful sight, but I couldn’t have the man brought back without weakening my fighting strength. So I laid the wounded man in a sentry hole, placed Infantryman Sasse beside him and made Sasse responsible. I myself gathered together the outpost squad by the wood, since the duty sergeant, being in a spot, turned to me. I positioned the men in the gun pits and wanted to run over to the wounded man again. Against my order he had been carried back by Sergeant Schnelle and his half squad. Immediately on my return I had a report handed in against the man.

  I was heartily relieved when the Indians didn’t come. In the wood that was behind us, we could hear shouting, it was sappers coming from the rear area who were supposed to clear a break through the wood. They abandoned their equipment and weapons and then strayed around in the forefield all night.

  Only the veterans were sitting at the edge of the wood again, rifle in hand, and waiting. A tremendous stench tempted me to go into the wood. Some Indians we had killed on the first night were still lying there. I ordered the men to keep on searching and they found quite a few more. We had really messed the fellows up. The sounds of decomposition, familiar to me from Guillemont, were coming from the bodies, a wan head, resting on its hands looked ghost-like at me in the darkness. I took the gas mask from one, it was still quite warm from the warmth of the decomposition, but it didn’t matter, since it was one of the older carbolic-soaked English masks.

  After the shooting had completely died down, I went back with Sergeant Teilengertes.

  Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) remains one of the most controversial writers of modern literature. Although he was admired on the left as well as the right, the stigma of appearing to prepare the way for Nazism still, for many, makes him unacceptable as an author of significance. If he is difficult to categorise as a conventional nationalist, he was certainly not only anti-bourgeois, in a particular dandified way, but also anti-democratic and hierarchical in his thinking. He first made his name as a w
riter at the age of 25 with his memoir of the Western Front, Storm of Steel. War Diary 1914–1918 from which the extracts in the present volume are taken formed the basis of that memoir, but were not published in German until 2010. In them we find Jünger both discovering his voice as a writer and doing so by taking an attitude of dispassion and indifference. Yet there’s also a touch of youthful immaturity to the elevation of battle as supreme human test. This nihilism, in which hatred or contempt for the enemy is absent, would not remain Jünger’s attitude: it gave way in his diaries of the Second World War to something like cynical melancholy. Nevertheless the combination of boyishness and a reaching for precision and clarity of description make the Diary at once unique and representative of how a generation coped with the horrors of trench warfare. The extract, an encounter with Indian troops, is dated 13th and 14th June 1917 and 18th and 19th June of the same year.

  D. H. LAWRENCE

  THE NIGHTMARE

  from Kangaroo

  IN SEPTEMBER, ON HIS BIRTHDAY, came the third summons: On His Majesty’s Service. – His Majesty’s Service, God help us! Somers was bidden present himself at Derby on a certain date, to join the colours.

  He replied: ‘If I am turned out of my home, and forbidden to enter the area of Cornwall: if I am forced to report myself to the police wherever I go, and am treated like a criminal, you surely cannot wish me to present myself to join the colours.’

  There was an interval: much correspondence with Bodmin, where they seemed to have forgotten him again. Then he received a notice that he was to present himself as ordered.

  What else was there to do? – But he was growing devilish inside himself. However, he went: and Harriett accompanied him to the town. The recruiting-place was a big Sunday School – you went down a little flight of steps from the road. In a smallish ante-room like a basement he sat on a form and waited while all his papers were filed. Beside him sat a big collier, about as old as himself. And the man’s face was a study of anger and devilishness growing under humiliation. After an hour’s waiting, Somers was called. He stripped as usual – but this time was told to put on his jacket over his complete nakedness.

  And so – he was shown into a high, long schoolroom, with various sections down one side – bits of screens where various doctor-fellows were performing – and opposite, a long writing table where clerks and old military buffers in uniform sat in power: the clerks dutifully scribbling, glad to be in a safe job, no doubt, the old military buffers staring about. Near this Judgment-Day table a fire was burning, and there was a bench where two naked men sat ignominiously waiting, trying to cover their nakedness a little with their jackets, but too much upset to care really.

  ‘Good God!’ thought Somers. ‘Naked men in civilised jackets and nothing else make the most heaven-forsaken sight I have ever seen.’The big stark-naked collier was being measured: a big, gaunt, naked figure, with a gruesome sort of nudity. ‘Oh God, oh God,’ thought Somers, ‘why do the animals none of them look like this. It doesn’t look like life, like a living creature’s figure. It is gruesome, with no life-meaning.’

  In another section a youth of about twenty-five, stark naked too, was throwing out his chest while a chit of a doctor-fellow felt him between the legs. This naked young fellow evidently thought himself an athlete, and that he must make a good impression, so he threw his head up in a would-be noble attitude, and coughed bravely when the doctor- buffoon said cough! Like a piece of furniture waiting to be sat on, the athletic young man looked.

  Across the room the military buffers looked on at the operette; – occasionally a joke, incomprehensible, at the expense of the naked, was called across from the military papas to the fellows who may have been doctors. The place was full of an indescribable tone of jeering, gibing shamelessness. Somers stood in his street jacket and thin legs and beard – a sight enough for any gods – and waited his turn. Then he took off the jacket and was cleanly naked, and stood to be measured and weighed – being moved about like a block of meat, in the atmosphere of corrosive derision.

  Then he was sent to the next section for eye-tests, and jokes were called across the room. Then after a time to the next section, where he was made to hop on one foot – then on the other foot – bend over – and so on: apparently to see if he had any physical deformity. In due course to the next section where a fool of a little fellow, surely no doctor, eyed him up and down and said:

  ‘Anything to complain of?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Somers. ‘I’ve had pneumonia three times and been threatened with consumption.’

  ‘Oh. Go over there then.’

  So in his stalky, ignominious nakedness he was sent over to another section, where an elderly fool turned his back on him for ten minutes, before looking round and saying:

  ‘Yes. What have you to say.’

  Somers repeated.

  ‘When did you have pneumonia –?’

  Somers answered – he could hardly speak, he was in such a fury of rage and humiliation.

  ‘What doctor said you were threatened with consumption? Give his name.’ – This in a tone of sneering scepticism.

  The whole room was watching and listening. Somers knew his appearance had been anticipated, and they wanted to count him out.

  But he kept his head. – The elderly fellow then proceeded to listen to his heart and lungs with a stethoscope, jabbing the end of the instrument against the flesh as if he wished to make a pattern on it. Somers kept a set face. He knew what he was out against, and he just hated and despised them all.

  The fellow at length threw the stethoscope aside as if he were throwing Somers aside, and went to write. Somers stood still, with a set face, and waited.

  Then he was sent to the next section, and this stethoscoping doctor strolled over to the great judgment table. In the final section was a young puppy like a chemist’s assistant, who made most of the jokes. Jokes were all the time passing across the room – but Somers had the faculty of becoming quite deaf to anything that might disturb his equanimity.

  The chemist-assistant puppy looked him up and down with a small grin as if to say ‘Law-lummy, what a sight of a human scarecrow!’ Somers looked him back again, under lowered lids, and the puppy left off joking for the moment. He told Somers to take up other attitudes. Then he came forward close to him, right till their bodies almost touched, the one in a navy blue serge, holding back a little as if from the contagion of the naked one. He put his hand between Somers’ legs, and pressed it upwards, under the genitals. Somers felt his eyes going black.

  ‘Cough,’ said the puppy. He coughed.

  ‘Again,’ said the puppy. He made a noise in his throat, then turned aside in disgust.

  ‘Turn round,’ said the puppy. ‘Face the other way.’

  Somers turned and faced the shameful monkey-faces at the long table. So, he had his back to the tall window: and the puppy stood plumb behind him.

  ‘Put your feet apart.’

  He put his feet apart.

  ‘Bend forward – further – further –’

  Somers bent forward, lower, and realised that the puppy was standing aloof behind him to look into his anus. And that this was the source of the wonderful jesting that went on all the time.

  ‘That will do. – Get your jacket and go over there.’

  Somers put on his jacket and went and sat on the form that was placed endwise at the side of the fire, facing the side of the judgment table. The big, gaunt collier was still being fooled. He apparently was not very intelligent, and didn’t know what they meant when they told him to bend forward. Instead of bending with stiff knees – not knowing at all what they wanted – he crouched down, squatting on his heels as colliers do. And the doctor puppy, amid the hugest amusement, had to start him over again. So the game went on, and Somers watched them all.

  The collier was terrible to him. He had a sort of Irish face with a short nose and a thin black head. This snub-nosed face had gone quite blank with a ghastly voidness, void of intelli
gence, bewildered and blind. It was as if the big, ugly, powerful body could not obey words any more. Oh God, such an ugly body – not as if it belonged to a living creature.

  Somers kept himself hard and in command, face set, eyes watchful.

  He felt his cup had been filled now. He watched these buffoons in this great room, as he sat there naked save for his jacket, and he felt that from his heart, from his spine went out vibrations that should annihilate them – blot them out, the canaille, stamp them into the mud they belonged to.

  He was called at length to the table.

  ‘What is your name?’ asked one of the old parties. Somers looked at him.

  ‘Somers,’ he said, in a very low tone.

  ‘Somers – Richard Lovatt?’ – with an indescribable sneer.

  Richard Lovatt realised that they had got their knife into him. So!

  He had his knife in them, and it would strike deeper at last.

  ‘You describe yourself as a writer.’

  He did not answer.

  ‘A writer of what?’ – with a perfect sneer.

  ‘Books – essays –’

  The old buffer went on writing. Oh yes, they intended to make him feel they had got their knife into him. They would have his beard off, too! – But would they? He stood there with his ridiculous thin legs, in his ridiculous jacket, but he did not feel a fool. Oh God no. The white composure of his face, the slight lifting of his nose, like a dog’s disgust, the heavy, unshakeable watchfulness of his eyes brought even the judgment table to silence: even the puppy-doctors. It was not till he was walking out of the room, with his jacket above his thin legs, and his beard in front of him, that they lifted their heads for a final jeer.