Rites IV of War
0 Weissdorn mit den roten Beern, was wird der Fruhling uns beschern? (o hawthorn with your berry red, What will spring bring instead?)
RICHARD DEHMEL
"Der Frontsoldat," Christmas 1914 . . . But many there stood still To face the stark, blank sky beyond the ridge, Knowing their feet had come to the end of the world.
WILFRED OWEN
"Spring Offensive" Often during the scientific, chemical "cubist" warfare, on nights made terrible by air raids, I have thought of the Sacre . . .
JACQUES-EMILE BLANCHE
BATTLE BALLET
The artillery barrage is deafening. When the air is still, the din can be heard faintly in London and Paris. Sometimes the pounding lasts for days. In June 1916 at the Somme it continues for seven days and nights. Field artillery, medium artillery, and heavy howitzers. The fifteen-inch-caliber gun of the British can fire a shell of fourteen hundred pounds. "Big Bertha" of the Germans, with a caliber of seventeen inches, can project a missile weighing over a ton. At Verdun in 1916 the Germans bring in thirteen of these twenty-ton monsters. Each is moved into position by nine tractors; a crane is required to insert the shell. The impact of this shell annihilates buildings; it shatters windows in a two-mile radius. In August 1914 these huge machines of war had demolished the purportedly impregnable forts of Liege. As the Krupp guns "walked" their shells toward the final target, Belgian defenders inside the forts went mad. For concentrated attack there is usually one field gun for every ten yards under fire, and one heavy--six-inch caliber and up--for every twenty yards. When the huge shells burst, they ravage the earth with their violence, hurling trees, rock, mud, torsos, and other debris hundreds of feet into the air. Craters the size of swimming pools remain. When a lull comes and the rains return, men bathe in these cavernous holes. The small and medium shells, which make up most of the barrage, are less sensational in their effect. But to the soldier they too can mean annihilation without trace. "A signaller had just stepped out," wrote a medical officer of the 2nd Royal Welch Fusiliers, "when a shell burst on him, leaving not a vestige that could be seen anywhere near." The same officer
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described another image of shellfire: Two men suddenly rose into the air vertically, fifteen feet perhaps, amid a spout of soil 150 yards ahead. They rose and fell with the easy, graceful poise of acrobats. A rifle, revolving slowly, rose high above them before, still revolving, it fell. Defenders huddle either in "funk holes" burrowed out of the forward side of the trench, or in dugouts, often fifteen to twenty feet underground, perhaps five paces square and about six feet high. The heavier shells not only demolish trenches; they can bring the wooden support beams, corrugated iron, and wire netting of the dugouts tumbling down and at the very least rearrange the earth above so as to obstruct exits. Acetylene lights and candles flicker. Larger concussions extinguish them altogether. A respite, will it come? Yes. Finally. But then the muted voice of a sentry, who has survived in a forward sap, is heard to shout "Gas!" There is a wild scramble to find masks, to tug and pull to get them on; and the ordeal mounts as gas fumes begin slowly to mix with darkness and smoke. At last there is stillness, apart from muffled breathing, some rasping, coughing, and traces of weeping. Will the cycle begin again? Is the attack on its way? Have the sentries survived? Are the periscopes manned? For when the attack comes, there will be a "race for the parapet," up the dugout steps, should that still be possible, into the trenches, if they are still there, to fix bayonets, to assemble machine guns, to locate grenades, and if time permits, to man mortars, flame throwers, and other sundry weapons of this war of "troglodytes." One must reach the parapet before the enemy arrives! On the other side of no man's land men wait. Faces assembled at scaling ladders are drawn and ashen. The tot of navy rum or Schnaps or pinard, which has been distributed a few minutes earlier, can dull the senses but not reverse the flow of blood. Equipment has been checked. Picks and shovels, bags for sand, Verey lights, wire. A load of over sixty pounds rests on each man's back. Along with personal kit there is a water bottle, rations, a gas mask, field dressings, mess tins, ammunition. Some men carry hand grenades and trench mortar bombs. "Carrying your house on your back is no joke," wrote Peter McGregor, a choirmaster from Edinburgh. Officers travel more lightly, the British with swagger sticks to indicate commands, for a voice is unlikely to be heard above the tumult, with a pistol in lieu of a rifle, and without most of the other more cumbersome gear. Conversation at this point is almost insignificant. A few men chatter nervously. Some exchange final wishes. Some whisper prayers. Watches of platoon leaders are now synchronized. Zero. A shrill whistle. The wave of a cap. Men clamber up ladders. Many are clumsy-- because of the load, from fear, or by nature. Over the top! Physical nakedness is the first sensation. The body is now exposed, tense, expectant, awaiting direct violence upon it. Even if one is to follow the "creeping barrage"--the practice by 1917--of one's own artillery toward the enemy trenches, that first moment of exposure reduces him to innocence. "A man who stepped out of the trenches at that moment and lived through has never in all the ensuing years faced such a climax," wrote a survivor. Then the advance. Slow and faltering, because of the load, because of the terrain, and because of the tactics of the attack. The Germans and French are more innovative, often
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rushing forward in groups. The British are more systematic. A man every two or three yards, platoons abreast, a second wave twenty yards back. Heads are bowed, by the weight of the pack and by the instinctual effort to shrink the target presented to the enemy. The cratered honeycomb of no man's land quickly breaks down any planned order. Men slip and fall. The line becomes straggly. Some get up and continue. Others cannot. In the mud of Passchendaele in 1917 some men drown in the huge, sewerlike craters filled with slime that comes of rain, earth, and decomposition. Some now begin to hear the bullets. Some note the stench, an overpowering odor, emanating from corpses the barrage has churned up. Some are hit. The race for the parapet has been lost. The field is now being swept by machine guns, pocketed by mortar fire, and scoured by rifle bullets. More men fall. Some cry out. Most are silent. The wounded rarely feel pain initially. Officers try to keep the line together. But these men in the limbo of no man's land, these "wanderers between two worlds," need little encouragement, for isolation in this situation means fear. Only in the group is there any emotional safety, any comfort. Indeed, the attackers are inclined to bunch, to herd together for mutual protection. Has the artillery managed to cut the wire, as promised? Rarely, with any kind of consistency. Breathless, on the brink of exhaustion, men look for gaps in the wire. The disappointment is overwhelming. The gaps are few, if any. The enemy fire has become withering. Only a handful of men reach the wire. They pitch their grenades. They fire their rifles. A few get through to the enemy trench, but bayonet combat is uncommon. Most of the officers leading the attack have been hit. Communication has ceased. The second wave experiences the same fate as the first. The third wave then decides that the attack has failed. Another whistle, this time a faltering one, signals retreat. Survivors stumble back. Some are disoriented and head in a lateral direction. Wounded men crawl. Some huddle in shell holes. The enemy artillery opens up, wreaking havoc on the retreat, but at least this time there is no counterattack. A remnant of the attacking unit returns. The wounded in no man's land are left to their fate until nightfall. Then an attempt will be made to bring them in. They try to stifle their rising agony. Moans bring down a torrent of bullets. And at last a tortured stillness falls on the battlefield. THEMES The illusion of the knockout blow continued to dominate strategic thinking throughout 1915, particularly in Britain and France, despite shortages of munitions and of adequately trained troops. British and French attacks in Artois, Picardy, and Champagne, German attacks in Flanders, and even the British vision of a breakthrough against the Turks in the Dardanelles, were all based on the dream of the "gap," the sudden parting of the enemy front, as if it were the Red Sea confronted by the faith of Moses, and the subsequent charge to victory. Only the abysmal Allied failures of Second Ypres, Gallipoli, Neuve Chapelle, Festubert, Arras, and Loos forced a reconsideration of the approach, but even then it was not so much active as reactive thinking that gradually changed the view of the military planners. It was the German attack on Verdun, in February 1916, with an intensity and firepower
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unprecedented in warfare that definitively changed attitudes. The year 1916 saw the advent and acceptance by both sides of a new war, the intentional war of attrition, which would swallow up millions of men, not under the pretext that quick victory was in the offing provided one could clear a major hurdle but because the decision had been made that only by wearing down the enemy could one win this war. Everywhere industry was mobilized, the work force reorganized, food rationing applied or planned, taxation readjusted. The war, in short, became an all-consuming enterprise. It became "total." Charles Sorley termed attrition "that last resort of paralyzed strategy." Behind Falkenhayn's decision to concentrate German offensive power on Verdun lay a number of motives and considerations. He was always a "westerner" in that he believed that the decisive battle in the war would take place in the west. While he agreed to place more effort on the Eastern Front in 1915 in the attempt to defeat Russia, by December of that year he had concluded that, contrary to expectations, Russia would not be broken quickly. By contrast, France was on the edge of collapse, and she might use the salient around Verdun, which constituted an advanced French position in relation to the rest of the Western Front, as a point from which to launch a last desperate offensive. That danger had to be forestalled. Moreover, a strong German attack would wear down the French completely and would also force the British to counterattack to the north. This would cause Britain to sustain enormous casualties and push her, too, toward exhaustion. At Verdun General Falkenhayn assembled, along with his troops, 1220 pieces of artillery for an assault on a front of roughly eight miles. He estimated that for every two lives his armies lost, the French would lose five. That was the essence of attrition. Somehow, however, the French managed to survive the opening barrage and the initial attacks, and the battle then settled down to an atrocious mutual punishment. By November the French were to lose half a million men in this salient. Under such pressure they had to ask the British to take up the slack. The British response was to mount the great offensive on the Somme in July 1916, in which 60,000 men were lost on the very first day and another half million by November. Despite these Allied losses, Falkenhayn's mathematics had failed him. In the two battles of Verdun and the Somme the Germans lost about 800,000 men, slightly less than the French and the British. Ypres and the surrounding salient in Flanders continued to be pounded during 1916 and then fought over tenaciously again in 1917, at Passchendaele or Third Ypres, and so one can add Ypres to Verdun and the Somme to produce a trinity of horror. General Falkenhayn called this Stellungskrieg, position warfare. "The first principle of position warfare," he wrote, "must be to yield not one foot of ground; and if it be lost to retake it immediately by counterattack, even to the use of the last man." Both sides adopted the same rules. "Whole regiments gambled away eternity for ten yards of wasteland"--that was the judgment of Ivan Goll. For Ernst Junger, after the Somme the war and life in general had changed complexion:
Here chivalry disappeared for always. Like all noble and personal feelings it had to give way to the new tempo of battle and to the rule of the machine. Here the new Europe revealed itself for the first time in combat.
For over two years the belligerents on the Western Front hammered at each other in battles, if that old word is appropriate for this new warfare, that cost millions of men their lives but moved the front line at most a mile or so in either direction. If the war in the
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west can be divided into four periods--the opening battles of movement, the consolidation of 1915, the war of attrition of 1916-1917, and the denouement of 1918 with its renewed movement--then the situation of 1916-1917 constitutes the longest and most consistent period. The battles of Verdun, the Somme, and Ypres embody the logic, the meaning, the essence of the Great War. Two of every three French poilus were funneled through Verdun in 1916; most British soldiers saw action at the Somme or Ypres or both; and most German units were in Flanders or at Verdun at some point. These also constituted the crucial battle areas of the war. And the standard imagery that we have of the Great War--the deafening, enervating artillery barrages, the attacks in which long lines of men moved forward as if in slow motion over a moonscape of craters and mud, only to confront machine guns, uncut barbed wire, and grenade comes from these battles rather than those of the first or last year of the war. This middle part of the war reversed all traditional notions of warfare. Defense was turned into offense, a process that Joffre, unaware of the implications of his own idea, had earlier called a "victorious resistance."' The gulf between technology and strategy meant that the attacker, regardless of numbers, was far more vulnerable than the defender, notwithstanding the effect on nerves of preparatory barrages. Despite the dramatic effects of heavy artillery at Liege, Verdun, the Somme, and Passchendaele, rarely was there sufficient firepower to destroy the enemy lines. As a result, defenders almost invariably won the "race for the parapet." This meant that the attacker faced a far greater risk of defeat than the defender. The attacks of 1914 and 1915 decimated all the armies, and at the end of 1915 the stalemate was complete. In 1916 while the Germans and French were battering each other at Verdun, the attacking British lost at the Somme. In 1917 the French lost on the Chemin des Dames, to the point where their armies mutinied. The British lost at Passchendaele. In 1918 the Germans defeated themselves in their final desperate attempt to break through. Exhaustion, in the wake of that attack, led to their final retreat. The victimized crowd of attackers in no man's land--a scene dramatically opposed to the hearty revelries between the lines at Christmas 1914--has become one of the supreme images of the war. Attackers moved forward usually without seeking cover and were mowed down in rows, with the mechanical efficiency of a scythe, like so many blades of grass. "We were very surprised to see them walking," wrote a German machine gunner of his experience of a British attack at the Somme.
The officers went in front. I noticed one of them walking calmly, carrying a walking stick. When we started firing we just had to load and reload. They went down in their hundreds. You didn't have to aim, we just fired into them.
A Frenchman described the effects of his machine gunners more laconically: "The Germans fell like cardboard soldiers." Herbert Read recalled seeing German soldiers falling like shooting-gallery targets. Here the hero became the victim and the victim the hero. The attacker became the representative of a world, the nineteenth-century world, which was demolished by this war. If the attacker was the representative of a world in its death throes, the defender, either the dogged, frightened defender or the resilient, cocky repeller, became the symbol of a
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new world dawning. Since full-scale attacks were the exception rather than the rule, most of trench life consisted of a form of defense, of a constant and wearisome struggle to defend "existence," to survive the conditions that were primordial at best. Words like poilu or Frontschwein, the hairy one and the front pig, referring to the dirty, mud-caked, bearded French soldier and his German counterpart, became terms of affection in their respective countries by 1916, not the terms of abuse they might have been in an earlier age of colorful and heroic military engagements. In this existence the assault on the senses was total. "Our master is our daily misery," wrote a Frenchman.. The whole landscape of the Western Front became surrealistic before the term surrealism was invented by the soldier-poet Guillaume Apollinaire, in his program notes for the Diaghilev production of Parade in 1917, on which Stravinsky, Satie, Picasso, and Cocteau collaborated. A panorama of devastation confronted the soldiers in the major battle zones. Trees had been reduced to charred stumps; charred stumps were in turn erected--as observation posts--to look like despoiled trees. Mud was ubiquitous. "Sunset and sunrise are blasphemous," wrote Paul Nash, who served in the Ypres salient, was invalided home, and then returned to Flanders as a war artist:
. . . only the black rain out of the bruised and swollen clouds . . . is fit atmosphere in such a land. The rain drives on, the stinking mud becomes more evilly yellow, the shell-holes fill up with green-white water, the roads and tracks are covered in inches of slime, the black dying trees ooze and sweat and the shells never cease . . . they plunge into the grave which is this land . . . It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless.
A French aviator, looking down on the Verdun landscape after a rainfall, was reminded of "the humid skin of a monstrous toad." The most inarticulate diaries of common front soldiers who experienced Verdun or the Somme or Ypres manage to transmit at least a sense of the physical misery of this warfare. A tour of trench duty consisted normally of three or four days and nights in the front line, followed by the same length of time in support trenches, followed in turn by a similar period in reserve. Only in reserve was it possible, as Herbert Read put it, "to be civilized -- to wash and change and write letters." Otherwise each man was a savage. Before the mutinies of 1917, the French command was frequently lax about the proper organization of leaves and rest periods. A tour could last for over a month, and sometimes even for more than two months. Dirt and filth were, of course, constant companions in the trenches. The enveloping dirt was so depressing that men in midwinter sometimes the braved cold and took baths in shell holes. These were often full because of the persistent rain. "A life so frightfully bestial ... Even pigs are better off!" Such was the comment of Louis Mairet. Soldiers debated about whether the mud of Ypres or the Somme was worse. Of Ypres in 1917 one Englishman wrote:
It was not war. It was more like a mud lark if it had not been for the machine guns and shelling. One dragged about everywhere. The tenacious mud pulled one's puttees down and would have pulled boots and socks and legs off if they had not been properly fixed.
On taking over a flooded trench a Frenchman quipped, "It'll be all right so long as the U-
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boats don't torpedo us." "Never was there a climate as this of Flanders," wrote J. W. Harvey in a letter,
and I hope my objurgation against this rain, rain, rain, will not be deleted as censorable matter! I suppose the continual firing may be in part to blame; yet I feel I shall look with far greater clemency in future upon our own proverbial English weather in comparing it with this.
Such comparisons were inevitable. "I always thought France was the land of sunshine," remarked Peter McGregor with genuine innocence in June 1916, "but it has been very cold and showery." Four days later the news to his wife, Jen, was "It rains here like a blooming tap." Edward Thomas even wrote a poem on the subject, "Rain": "Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain." The rain had dissolved all love, all meaning
. . . except the love of death, If love it be for what is perfect and Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
Soaked through and freezing, Ernst Junger decided that "no artillery fire could break man's resistance so thoroughly as wet and cold." No amount of clothing--wool socks, vests, jerkins--or even added newspapers, wrapped around various parts of the body, helped. Winter nights seemed impossibly long, and dawn was the coldest moment of the day. "We don't think of death," wrote a Frenchman in the winter of early 1915. "But it's the cold, the terrible cold! It seems to me at the moment that my blood is full of blocks of ice. Oh, I wish they'd attack, because that would warm us up a little." In the next winter, in Artois, coffee and even wine froze in November. "Weather for polar bears," Marc Boasson commented in a letter. "Before you can have a drink, you have to chip away the ice. The meat is frozen solid, the potatoes are bonded by ice, and even the hand grenades are welded together in their cases." In the severe winter of 19161917 hot tea froze within minutes, and bread, bully beef, and sausage turned to chunks of ice. In a poem titled "Exposure," Wilfred Owen evoked shriveled hands, puckered foreheads, and eyes of ice. In such conditions food could not be enjoyed, and the strain of battle reduced appetites further. The irregular hours for meals, the unreliability of supply lines, the lack of vegetables, the sameness of the meat diet--all this destroyed any possibility of pleasure. When Siegfried Sassoon returned to the Somme from home leave in the spring of 1916, he brought with him a smoked salmon to share with his men, but as he stumbled and splashed up a communication trench known as Canterbury Avenue he reflected that "smoked salmon wasn't much of an antidote for people who had been putting up with all that shell-fire." The weather, then, had a great deal to do with a soldier's spirits. A sudden lifting of cloud and the appearance of sun could raise morale. "Splendid weather," exulted Charles Delvert in the midst of the Verdun battle in March 1916. "This life has its charm. It's like camping out. You wander through the trenches; the air is fresh, the sun brilliant. Gay little clouds flit across the blue sky." But such weather was very much the exception in the war, and such a lyrical outburst was also very much the exception in Charles Delvert's diary. The trenches were infested with vermin. Flies, mites, nits, fleas, mosquitoes, and beetles
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were bothersome, but lice and rats were the major irritants. Lice laid their eggs in the seams of garments and multiplied at a terrifying rate. The louse was so fertile, said the poilu, that one born in the morning was a grandmother by evening. The battle against them was unwinnable. Soldiers tried to crush them with their thumb nails, burn them with candle flames, drive them out with powders and pomades sent from home, but to little avail. "The only way is to heave a few Rum Jars at them," quipped one Tommy. The biggest of them were given names: Kaiser, Kronpinz, Hindenburg. Only field laundry service and hot baths had any effect, and then just briefly. Roger Campana found these pests more ferocious than the "vampires of the Congo or Polynesia . . . If Mr. Magpie had had a chance to get to know them, he would have cited them as an example for all Frenchmen." Campana's only consolation was the rumor that the lice in German trenches were bigger! Rats the size of cats were reported in the trenches, although they existed in even larger numbers around rest quarters. They were attracted by food left lying about and by decomposing corpses. They chewed up haversacks and gnawed through ration bags. In his section of the line, Roland Mountfort wrote to his mother, the rats'
greatest feat was to kill and devour five kittens nearly three weeks old that the trench cat was rearing in one of the dugouts. I don't know why they haven't done it before unless they were waiting in order to get a better meal.
The battle against the rats was as serious at times as that against the human enemy. To Percy Jones the rats became an obsession. "I am . . . addicted to rat-hunting," he admitted in his diary. He went after them every night with pickhandles and spades.
We sometimes go a bit too far. For instance the night before last four of us were in full cry after a rat between our front line trenches and chased him right up to the second line where a sentry nearly shot us, imagining us to be Germans!
Jones's obsession followed him to rest billets a fortnight later. Near the canal in Ypres he participated in a veritable massacre:
We had a great battle last night and killed nearly a hundred, excluding many that must have been stoned while swimming. The raft party ran out of ammunition and had to come ashore for more bricks.
The only effective instrument against rats and other pests was gas. A gas attack would clear the trenches of vermin for a time. It was at night that much of the work in the trenches was done. The normal bourgeois approach to time and to the clock was reversed. As darkness fell, armies of troglodytes emerged from their holes, like the very vermin they despised, and scurried about their tasks: wiring parties went out into no man's land; trench fortifications were repaired and extended as the Western Front became a vast, intricate anthill; vicious little raids, comparable to mosquito bites on the body of the collective enemy, were carried out. And even if one had no specific task to fulfill, sleep was impossible. Delvert described a night in the trenches in January 1916:
Lights out. Now the rats and the lice are the masters of the house. You can hear the rats nibbling, running, jumping, rushing from plank to plank, emitting their little squeals behind the dugout's corrugated metal. It's a noisy swarming activity that just won't stop. At any moment I expect one to land on my nose. And then
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it's the lice and fleas that begin to devour me. Absolutely impossible to get any shuteye. Toward midnight I begin to doze off. A terrible racket makes me jump. Artillery fire, the crackling of rifle and machine-gun fire. The Boches must be attacking Mont Tau again. The charivari seems to quiet down about 1:30. At 2:15 it starts up again, this time with a frightful violence. Everything shakes. Our artillery thunders away without pause. At 3:00 the cannon shots become more spread out and slowly things quiet down. I doze off so as to get up at six. The rats and the lice get up too: waking to life is also waking to misery.
After a couple of days and nights of this relentless bombardment of the senses, men easily became disoriented, sluggish, even apathetic. "I felt I would barter my soul for a few hours of uninterrupted slumber," noted one. "What kills is the absence of sleep," wrote Delvert. When relief finally came, the battalion moved off to rest quarters. Wilfred Owen:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep . . .
The odor of decomposition--masked only by the almost equally intolerable reek of chloride of lime--and clouds of flies attracted by the carrion were other inescapable curses. Limbs and torsos were churned up again and again by the shelling. Working parties digging or repairing trenches repeatedly uncovered corpses in all stages of decay and mutilation. Most of the time they simply shoveled them out of the way. Fragments of bodies did find their way, however, into sandbags. If those burst, they could divulge their contents in a manner so horrific that black humor became the only defense against hysteria. In the Ypres salient at one point men being relieved all filed past an arm protruding from the side of the trench and shook hands with it--"Tata, Jack." Those effecting the relief did the same on arrival--" 'ello, Jack." An artillery gunner captain, F. H. T. Tatham, described to his mother another situation so grotesque that it was almost humorous:
There has always been a horrid smell at our 0.P.* in the trenches, which creosote has failed to remove. I found today that it is decomposed remains in a sandbag against which we leaned to use the periscope. I believe the unfortunate corpse may have been there six months--the rats don't usually leave them alone, so it was probably a dirty German. Having disturbed it, it stinks more than ever--full of maggots. The offending sandbag has been drowned in creosote and thrown far away--but they evidently couldn't get what was left of Fritz into one sandbag, and I fear to eradicate the evil would mean a fall in the parapet, so am in rather a dilemma. * Observation post.
The Australian J. A. Raws sent home an equally "rum" tale. At work with a digging party at Pozires at the end of July 1916, he was subjected to, as he put it, "a tornado of bursting shells." He was buried twice. The second time, after struggling free, he saw a body, half buried, nearby. Thinking it a comrade who had just suffered the same fate as himself, he stumbled over to help the man out. He tugged and lifted. Suddenly, blood spouted all over Raws, and the head came off in his hands. "The horror was
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indescribable," he wrote. His brother had been killed three days earlier, and Raws himself would be killed on his next tour. A Frenchman at Verdun noted: "We all had on us the stench of dead bodies. The bread we ate, the stagnant water we drank, everything we touched had a rotten smell." Mutilation was a daily spectacle in some sectors. At Fresnoy on the Somme a house with German soldiers quartered in it received a direct hit. Ernst Junger ran to help.
We grabbed the limbs sticking out of the rubble and pulled the corpses out. One was missing its head, and the neck sat on the torso like a large bloody fungus. On another shattered bones protruded from the stump on an arm, and the uniform was sodden with blood from a huge chest wound. On a third the innards flowed forth from a body that had been slit open. As we were pulling this one out, a splintered board that had stuck in the terrible wound gave resistance, making gruesome sounds.
On another occasion Junger was witness to a machine gun duel.
Suddenly our master marksman collapsed, shot through the head. Although his brains were running down his face to his chin, he was still fully conscious as we carried him to an adjoining tunnel.
After his dugout had been hit by a shell, Roger Campana took a photograph of a comrade's body in order to prove to a friend what a near miss he had lived through. The body was "laid open from the shoulders to the haunches like a quartered carcass in a butcher's window." Delvert recorded with greater precision the death of a colleague:
The death of Jegoud was atrocious. He was on the first steps of the dugout when a shell (probably an Austrian 130) burst. His face was burned; one splinter entered his skull behind the ear; another slit open his stomach, broke his spine, and in the bloody mess one saw his spinal cord gliding about. His right leg was completely crushed above the knee. The most hideous part of it all was that he continued to live for four or five minutes.
The Verdun of Cesar Mlra included this scene and observation:
Horses and mules buried. A fetid mud sometimes reaches your ankle, disgorging an awful smell and a heavy opaque air. He who has not seen the wounded emitting their death rattle on the field of battle, without cares, drinking their urine to appease their thirst . . . has seen nothing of war.
Men were threatened not solely by enemy fire but by their own artillery, too, when it fired short. General Percin estimated that seventy-five thousand French troops were killed or wounded by their own artillery. Jean Giraudoux noted ironically to Paul Morand, "I belong to the French regiment that has killed the most English." Short shelling was caused by poor communication, human error, damp ammunition, or wind conditions, and invariably created bad blood between troops in the front lines and staff officers and the artillery regiments. Its incidence appears to have increased in general proportion to the increase in shelling as the war progressed. The front, in short, was, in Siegfried Sassoon's words, "rotten with dead." A month before his own death Louis Mairet reflected on the subject:
Death! that word which booms like the echo of sea caverns, striking and restriking in dark and unseen depths. Between this war and the last, we did not
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die: we ended. Neatly, in the shelter of a room, in the warmth of a bed. Now we die. It is the wet death, the muddy death, death dripping with blood, death by drowning, death by sucking under, death in the slaughterhouse. The bodies lie frozen in the earth which gradually sucks them in. The luckiest depart, wrapped in canvas from a tent, to sleep in the nearest cemetery.
Can one exaggerate the horrors of trench life? Many have supposedly done so and been reprimanded by others for producing in their accounts nothing other than "mud and blood" sensationalism. Some veterans of the Great War never experienced an attack; some never even saw the enemy, despite lengthy front-line duty; a few survived the whole war without more than a few scratches. Some parts of the front were indeed very quiet. Some men never lost their sense of romance and adventure. Some never lost their sense of humor. Thus, to concentrate on the horror of Verdun, the Somme, and Ypres, say the critics, is to distort the reality of the war. Even in these sectors, which were not, they claim, the norm, massive artillery bombardments and attacks were rare. Most of the time men were occupied by the humdrum problems of trench existence and essentially by boredom. Part of the problem in this debate is a matter of definition and semantics. What sort of experience does one classify under "horror" and what constitutes "boredom"? Cannot one man's horror be another man's boredom, and vice versa? If one insists that horror is the sensation aroused solely by the unexpected contradiction of values and conditions that bestow meaning on life, and that in turn boredom is the inevitable upshot of routine, even of routine slaughter, then the question can never be resolved, because no sense of horror, even one caused by this war, can remain constant. After several weeks of frontline experience there was little that could shock. Men became immunized, rather rapidly, to the brutality and obscenity. They had to if they were to survive. As Fritz Kreisler, violinist and Austrian infantryman, put it:
A certain fierceness arises in you, an absolute indifference to anything the world holds except your duty of fighting. You are eating a crust of bread, and a man is shot dead in the trench next to you. You look calmly at him for a moment, and then go on eating your bread. Why not? There is nothing to be done. In the end you talk of your own death with as little excitement as you would of a luncheon engagement..
And John W. Harvey, a Quaker from Leeds who was with the Friends' Ambulance Unit, wrote from Ypres, "I am having a wearing time amid sights that would be too full of horrors and pity to bear but for human nature's capacity to get hardened by familiarity to anything." Hence, even horror can turn to routine and bring on ennui--the sense that one has seen it all before and that existence no longer holds any surprises. "There is nothing left in your mind," continued Kreisler, "but the fact that hordes of men to whom you belong are fighting against other hordes, and your side must win." Even when things seemed quiet, the casualties continued to accumulate--from sniper activity, from random artillery fire designed to keep the enemy on edge, and from accidents. It was this attrition, precisely when nothing of any consequence seemed to be happening, that horrified some soldiers the most. Death seemed totally without purpose. In the war diaries of army units there is often a terrible irony lodged in the terse one-line
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reports for the day's activity: "All quiet. Three casualties." As the anguished American ambassador put it in a letter from London, "When there's 'nothing to report' from France, that means the regular 5,000 casualties that happen every day." The dichotomy set up in the "horror versus boredom" debate is a false one. What is crucial is the broader significance of the 19161917 phase of the war, its relationship to previous forms of warfare, to expectations and values; and here it is hard to deny that the "front" experience of 1916I917 was indeed a "frontier" experience, an experience of something that was, in its implications, completely new. Of course soldiers continued to classify sensations according to previously existing categories--this was an instinctive reaction--but the actual experience as a whole was crucial, and that, in its broader context, was novel. With time the former categories and the accepted relationship of the war to previous history wore thin and collapsed. The rate of this deterioration varied among the belligerents and among people, depending on the resilience and resonance of existing values, but everywhere, even if only in the postwar period, in the cauldron where purpose, memory, and outcome brewed together, the validity of former categories disintegrated.
From: Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age Modris Eksteins Houghton Mifflin, 1989
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