For the whole morning two butterflies have been playing around our trench. They are brimstones, and their yellow wings have orange spots on them. I wonder what could have brought them here? There are no plants or flowers for miles. They settle on the teeth of a skull. The birds are just as carefree as the butterflies, because they have long since got used to the war. Every morning larks rise between the two front-line trenches. A year ago we watched them nesting, and they even brought up a brood of young ones.
For the time being our trenches are free of rats. They have moved up ahead, and we know why. They are getting fat; whenever we see one, we shoot it. At night we hear once again the rolling noises from over there. During the day we just get ordinary shellfire, so we have a chance to sort out our trenches. There is also a certain amount of entertainment the airmen see to that. Every day the audience can watch any number of dogfights.
We dont mind the fighter planes, but we hate the reconnaissance aircraft like the plague; they are the ones that direct the artillery fire towards us. A few moments after they appear there is a hail of shrapnel and shells. Because of that we lose eleven men in a single day, five stretcher-bearers amongst them. Two are so smashed up that Tjaden reckons you could scrape them off the trench wall with a spoon and bury them in a mess-tin. Another one has his legs and the lower part of his body torn off. Hes dead, leaning with his chest against the trench wall, his face is bright yellow and there is a cigarette glowing between his bearded bps. It carries on glowing until it bums down to his lips, then goes out with a hiss.
For the moment we place the dead into a huge shell hole. They are three deep so far.
Suddenly the shelling starts to thunder again. Soon we are sitting there, tense and rigid once more in that helpless waiting.
Attack, counter-attack, charge, counter-strike they are all just words, but what is contained in them. We lose a lot of men, mainly recruits. Fresh troops are being sent into our sector again. They are from one of the newly raised regiments, almost exclusively young men from the latest age group to be drafted. Theyve had hardly any training, nothing more than a bit of theory, before they were sent up the line. For example, they know what a hand-grenade is, but they have no idea about taking cover, and above all else they cant spot things. A ridge has to be two feet high before they can make it out.
Even though we desperately need reinforcements, the new recruits almost make more trouble for us than they are worth. In this sector, where we are under heavy attack, they are helpless and go down like flies. Modem trench warfare demands knowledge and experience, you have to have a good grasp of the he of the land, have the sounds and effects of the different shells in your ear, you have to be able to work out in advance where they are going to land, what the scatter will be like, how to take cover.
These young recruits, of course, know as good as nothing about all that. They are decimated because they cant tell shrapnel from high explosive[166], and they are mown down because they are listening in terror to the howl of the great coal-box shells[167], which arent dangerous because they are coming down way behind us, but dont hear the whistling noise, the quiet whirring of the little bastards with the low lateral spread. They huddle together like sheep instead of fanning out, and even the wounded are picked off like rabbits by the fighter planes.
The pale, turnip faces, the pitifully clenched hands, the wretched bravery of these poor devils, who advance and attack regardless, these poor plucky devils, who have been so browbeaten that they dont even dare to scream out, and just whimper softly for their mothers as they lie there with their chests and guts and arms and legs torn to pieces, and shut up when someone comes along.
Their dead, downy, thin-featured faces have that awful absence of any expression that you see in dead children.
You get a lump in your throat when you see them, the way they go over, and run, and drop. You want to thrash them for being so stupid, and pick them up and take them away from here, away from this place where they dont belong. They are wearing battledress, trousers and army boots, but for most of them the uniform is too big and flaps about, their shoulders are too narrow, their bodies too slight; there werent any uniforms available in these childrens sizes.
To every one old soldier, between five and ten of the recruits are killed.
A surprise gas attack carries off a lot of them. They didnt even begin to expect what was waiting for them. We find a whole dugout full of them, their faces blue and their lips black. In one of the shell holes some of them have taken their gas-masks off too soon; they didnt realize that the gas lies longest down at the bottom, and when they saw others without their masks they tore theirs off, and swallowed enough to burn their lungs to pieces. There is no hope for them; they are choking to death, coughing up blood and suffocating.
In one section of the trench I suddenly find myself face to face with Himmelstoss. We have taken cover in the same dugout. Everyone is lying down out of breath, waiting for the advance.
Although I am pretty agitated, when I rush out one thought still comes into my head: I cant see Himmelstoss. I dive back quickly into the dugout and find him in the corner, pretending to be wounded, even though he only has a slight scratch. His face looks as if he has been beaten up. Its shell shock after all, he is new here. But it makes me mad that the young recruits are outside and he is down here.
Out! I shout.
He doesnt move. His lips quiver, his moustache twitches.
Out! I shout again.
He pulls his legs in, presses himself against the wall and bares his teeth like a mad dog.
I grab him by the arm and try to pull him up. He makes a strangled noise. Then something in me snaps. I grab him by the shoulders and shake him like a sack, so that his head swings backwards and forwards, and scream into his face, You shit, get out of here you little shit, you bastard, trying to hide, are you? His eyes glaze over, and I bang his head against the wall You sod I hit him in the ribs You swine I shove him forwards, headfirst out of the dugout.
Just at that moment a new wave of troops comes over. They have a lieutenant with them. He sees us and shouts, Move on, move on, close up, close up and his command does what my blows couldnt manage. Himmelstoss hears the superior officer, looks around as if he has just woken up, and runs to catch up.
I follow on, and see him bounding along, the old, smart, parade-ground Himmelstoss again, who has even overtaken the lieutenant and is away out in front
Continuous fire, defensive fire, curtain fire, trench mortars, gas, tanks, machine-guns, hand-grenades[168] words, words, but they embrace all the horrors of the world.
Our faces are crusted with dirt, our thoughts are a shambles, we are dead tired; when the attack comes, a lot of our men have to be punched hard so that they wake up and go along; our eyes are red and swollen, our hands are ripped, our knees are bleeding and our elbows raw.
Is it weeks that pass or months or years? It is only days. We watch how time disappears before our eyes in the ashen faces of the dying, we shovel food into ourselves, we run, we throw, we shoot, we kill, we hurl ourselves down, we are weak and dulled, and the only thing that keeps us going is that there are even weaker, even more dulled, even more helpless men than us who look at us wide-eyed, and take us for gods who can sometimes outrun death himself.
In the few rest periods we try to teach them. Look, see that one like a toffee-apple[169]? Thats a mortar coming across. Keep down, itll go over us. But if it comes your way, get the hell out! You can run away from those.
We make sure that they can hear the malicious buzz of the little ones that you barely notice they have to learn to recognize a sound like the buzzing of flies amongst all the noise. We teach them that these are much more dangerous than the big ones that you can hear long before. We show them how to hide from airmen, how to play dead when they are overtaken by an attack, how to prime a hand-grenade so that it explodes half a second before impact. We teach them to dive for cover as fast as they can into a shell hole when they see a shell with an instantaneous fuse, and we demonstrate for them how to clean out a whole trench with a handful of grenades. We teach them the difference in the detonation time between enemy hand-grenades and ours, make sure they know what a gas shell sounds like, and show them all the tricks that might just save them from being killed.
They listen obediently but when it all starts they are usually so worked up that they get it wrong again after all.
Haie Westhus is carried off with his back torn open; you can see the lung throbbing through the wound with every breath he takes. I manage to take his hand Thats me done for, Paul, he groans, and bites his arm because of the pain.
We see men go on living with the top of their skulls missing; we see soldiers go on running when both their feet have been shot away they stumble on their splintering stumps to the next shell hole. One lance-corporal crawls for a full half-mile on his hands, dragging his legs behind him, with both knees shattered. Another man makes it to a dressing station with his guts spilling out over his hands as he holds them in. We see soldiers with their mouths missing, with their lower jaws missing, with their faces missing; we find someone who has gripped the main artery in his arm between his teeth for two hours so that he doesnt bleed to death. The sun goes down, night falls, the shells whistle, life comes to an end.
The scrap of churned-up earth where we are has been held against superior forces, and we have only had to give up a few hundred yards. But for every one of those yards there is a dead man.
Relief troops take over from us. The truck wheels roll along beneath us, we stand numbed, and when they shout, Mind the wire! we bob down. It was summer when we came past here, the trees were still green, but now they have begun to look autumnal, and the night is grey and damp. The trucks stop. We climb down, a ragged bunch, all that there is left of a whole list of names. In the dark to either side of us there are people calling out the numbers of regiments and companies. And with every shout a little handful moves away from the rest, a sparse, tiny handful of dirty, pallid soldiers, a terribly small handful, a terribly small remainder.