The Storm of Steel quotes

With unbelievable awe we listened to the slow pulsation of the machinery of the front, a tune to which long years were to accustom us. Far away the white ball of a shrapnel shell melted into the grey December sky.

The breath of the war passed by us with its peculiar horror.

Did we imagine that nearly every one of us would be swallowed up in the days when that dull muttering over there broke out into unceasing thunder … one earlier, another later?

We had grown up in a material age, and in each one of us there was the yearning for great experience, such as we had never known.

The war had entered into us like wine.

We had set out in a rain of flowers to seek the death of heroes. The war was our dream of greatness, power, and glory. It was a man’s work, a duel on fields whose flowers would be stained with blood.

We had grown up in a material age, and in each one of us there was the yearning for great experience, such as we had never known. The war had entered into us like wine.

We had set out in a rain of flowers to seek the death of heroes.

The war was our dream of greatness, power, and glory. It was a man’s work, a duel on fields whose flowers would be stained with blood.

He was carried into a cottage with the Red Cross flag over the door. What was all this, then?

The war had shown its claws and torn off its pleasant mask.

It was so mysterious, so impersonal. One had scarcely given a thought to the enemy carrying on his secret and malignant existence somewhere behind.

It was a sensation over which habit could not prevail, since the instinct of self-preservation remains always the same.

The notion that a soldier becomes hardier and bolder as war proceeds is mistaken. What he gains in the science and art of attacking his enemy he loses in strength of nerve.

The only dam against this loss is a sense of honour so resolute that few attain to it. For this reason I consider that troops composed of boys of twenty, under experienced leadership, are the most formidable.

The beck flowed over the weir of a destroyed mill, surrounded by gloomy trees.

It was an eerie spot to be in when the moon threw shifting shadows between rifts of cloud and when strange sounds seemed to be mingled with the murmur of the water and the whisper of the reeds.

Trench life here was as exhausting as it well could be. The day began before dawn, when every man had to be standing-to. From ten p.m. to six a.m.

but in a war that drags on, this leads to physical collapse. The immense number of posts and the continual digging were for the most part unnecessary and even harmful.

Trenches are not the first thing, but the courage and freshness of the men behind them.

“Battles are won by iron hearts in wooden ships.”

It is a moment so important in the experience of war. The horrible was undoubtedly a part of that irresistible attraction that drew us into the war.

A long period of law and order, such as our generation had behind it, produces a real craving for the abnormal, a craving that literature stimulates.

Among other questions that occupied us was this: what does it look like when there are dead lying about?

And now at our first glance of horror we had a feeling that is difficult to describe.

Seeing and recognizing are matters, really, of habit.

In the case of something quite unknown the eye alone can make nothing of it. So it was that we had to stare again and again at these things that we had never seen before, without being able to give them any meaning.

I could see no occasion for all this activity, and it disturbed and puzzled me. I was still without experience of the fighting, and saw it as a recruit.

The battle seemed to me to proceed as strangely and disconnectedly as though it went on upon another planet.

At the same time I had no fear. For I felt that I was not seen, and I could not believe that anyone aimed at me or that I should be hit. Indeed, when I rejoined my section I surveyed our front with complete calm.

We only came in contact with the natives when we took our clothes to be washed or bought eggs and butter. Intimate relations were very rare.

Love had no place in this stark and devastating machinery.

There were two French boys, orphans, one eight, the other twelve years old, who became attached to the troops in the most extraordinary way. They wore nothing but field grey, spoke fluent German, and saluted all officers in the prescribed manner.

Only here and there the smoke of a shell wavered up, as though propelled by a ghostly hand, and fluttered loose in the air; or the ball of a shrapnel hovered over the desert land like a great flock of wool, and slowly dissolved away.

The face of the earth was dark and fabulous, for the war had expunged the pleasant features of the countryside and engraved there its own iron lines that in a lonely hour made the spectator shudder.

The forlornness and the profound silence, broken now and then by the deep tones of the guns, were emphasized by the sad marks of devastation. Torn packs, broken rifles, pieces of equipment, and among them, in grim contrast, a child’s plaything;

Around us in heaped-up mounds of earth lay the bodies of fallen comrades. On every foot’s-breadth a drama had been enacted.

Behind every traverse fate lay in ambush, day and night, to snatch a victim.

And yet all of us felt a strong attachment to our sector and had almost grown to be a part of it.

We said a good deal to each other in the course of the interview in a fashion that can only be described as sportsmanlike, and would gladly at the end have made some exchange of presents in memory of the occasion.

It has always been my ideal in war to eliminate all feelings of hatred and to treat my enemy as an enemy only in battle and to honour him as a man according to his courage.

It is exactly in this that I have found many kindred souls among British officers. It depends, of course, on not letting oneself be blinded by an excessive national feeling, as the case generally is between the French and the Germans.

It was only now when there was time for it that I was able to experience this feeling to the full. In the winter months we had not a thought in the trenches but of digging and “Will this damned business never end?”

It is not danger, however extreme it may be, that depresses the spirit of the men so much as over-fatigue and wretched conditions.

People who have leisure can afford themselves every luxury, even that of heroic feelings. This is true for the people as a whole. Its moral worth can only reach its full height when the pressure of work is not crushing upon any section of it.

In the winter months we had not a thought in the trenches but of digging and “Will this damned business never end?” It is not danger, however extreme it may be, that depresses the spirit of the men so much as over-fatigue and wretched conditions.

People who have leisure can afford themselves every luxury, even that of heroic feelings.

This is true for the people as a whole. Its moral worth can only reach its full height when the pressure of work is not crushing upon any section of it.

One evening, at Croisilles, I suddenly had the impulse to ride over there. I had a horse saddled, and the town was soon behind me. It was an evening of May, as though designed for a romantic excursion.

The clover lay in dark red billows over the meadows, whose hedges were white with may and the chestnuts were like giant candelabra standing lit up in the dusk before the villages.

I rode through Bullecourt and Ecoust without ever dreaming that two years later I should be going over the top in an attack on the ruins of these very villages that now lay so peacefully with their ponds and the hills behind.

Hence too came the charm of my little adventure, to which there were other chapters to be added. Its charm lay in the contrast between its tender rural colours and the brazen background.

The little pleasures that life offered borrowed an unimagined enhancement from the unceasing thunder of the guns and from the destiny whose oppression never left one’s mind.

The colours were more affecting. The wish to knit oneself with life in enjoyment was more urgent. For the thought crept into everybody’s mind: “Perhaps this is the last spring you will see.”

The safety-catch of your revolver goes back with a little metallic click—a sound that goes through the nerves like a knife. The teeth grate on the fuse-pin of the bomb. The fray will have to be short and murderous.

You are aquiver with two violent sensations⁠—the tense excitement of the hunter and the terror of the hunted.

You are a world in yourself, and the dark and horrible atmosphere that broods over the waste land has sucked you in utterly to itself.

… the security of the deep dugout and face the storm of fire during those days in the trenches when the trench-mortar bombs were exploding by the hundred and when the flanking battery swept us with shrapnel and when bits and splinters were hurtling all ways.

In the open field there may be some pleasure in showing your courage, but it is another thing to clench your teeth and to go to your post alone in the night and under fire.

It is just this quality of courage that I have always marvelled at in those quiet, fair-haired Saxons.

Artillery fire of a hitherto unimagined intensity rolled and thundered on our front.

Thousands of twitching flashes turned the western horizon into a sea of flowers.

All the while the wounded came trailing back with white dejected faces, huddled into the ditches by the gun and ammunition columns that rattled past.

“

Where you fall, there you lie. No one can help you.

No one knows whether he will come back alive. They attack every day, but they can’t get through. Everybody knows it is life and death.”

From nine to ten the shelling was frantic.

The earth rocked and the sky boiled like a gigantic cauldron.

Hundreds of heavy batteries were concentrated on and round Combles. Innumerable shells came howling and hurtling over us. Thick smoke, ominously lit up by Verey lights, veiled everything.

Innumerable shells came howling and hurtling over us. Thick smoke, ominously lit up by Verey lights, veiled everything. Head and ears ached violently, and we could only make ourselves understood by shouting a word at a time.

The power of logical thought and the force of gravity seemed alike to be suspended.

One had the sense of something as unescapable and as unconditionally fated as a catastrophe of nature. A N.C.O. of No. 3 platoon went mad.

… and then by the light of a rocket I saw the gleam of helmet after helmet, bayonet after bayonet, and I was filled with pride at commanding this handful of men that might very likely be pounded into the earth but could not be conquered.

It is in such moments that the human spirit triumphs over the mightiest demonstrations of material force. The fragile body, steeled by the will, stands up to the most terrific punishment.

Sergeant-major H., the unfortunate rat-catcher of Monchy, who was with the platoon on our left, intended to fire a white Verey light. By mistake he fired a red one, and this signal was taken up on all sides.

After this orgy of destruction, the fire returned to its customary level and stayed there all the night and the next day.

One man in a moment of agitation had released the whole mighty machinery of war.

H. remained what he was, an unlucky fellow. That same night he shot a Verey light into the leg of his boot while loading the pistol, and had to be carried back severely burnt. Next day it rained hard, and we were not sorry.

A shell-hole strewn with bully-tins, broken weapons, fragments of uniform, and dud shells, with one or two dead bodies on its edge … this was the never-changing scene that surrounded each one of all these hundreds of thousands of men.

And it seemed that man, on this landscape he had himself created, became different, more mysterious and hardy and callous than in any previous battle.

The spirit and the tempo of the fighting altered, and after the battle of the Somme the war had its own peculiar impress that distinguished it from all other wars.

What was a man’s life in this wilderness whose vapour was laden with the stench of thousands upon thousands of decaying bodies? Death lay in ambush for each one in every shell-hole, merciless, and making one merciless in turn.

Chivalry here took a final farewell. It had to yield to the heightened intensity of war, just as all fine and personal feeling has to yield when machinery gets the upper hand.

The Europe of today appeared here for the first time on the field of battle. …

All the devastation of every kind that surrounded one was seen in the light of humour and in a state of bliss, however fleeting it might be, and was finally lost altogether in that lighthearted independence of time that attends upon every toper.

One broke through time, menacing and oppressive as it was, and rejoiced for an hour or two in a boundless world.

The war left one with two memories, as I am sure every outspoken soldier of it will agree, that were always recurring: one, when one was faced with the worst moments it had to offer;

When I left the edge of the wood it was daylight. Before me lay an expanse of shell-holes without a sign of life.

I stopped short, for, in modern battle, stretches of ground where not a man is to be seen are always suspicious.

Suddenly a shot from an unseen sniper got me in both legs. I flung myself into the nearest shell-hole and bound the wounds with my handkerchief, for, needless to say, I had forgotten my field-dressing.

If the wire had been broken I had to have it mended by my breakdown squad. Apart from this I had nothing to do but wait for the moment of an attack.

The modern battlefield is like a huge, sleeping machine with innumerable eyes and ears and arms, lying hidden and inactive, ambushed for the one moment on which all depends.

Then from some hole in the ground a single red light ascends in fiery prelude. A thousand guns roar out on the instant, and at a touch, driven by innumerable levers, the work of annihilation goes pounding on its way.

Orders fly like sparks and flashes over a close network, spurring on to heightened destruction in front and bringing up from behind a steady stream of fresh men and fresh materials to fling into the flames.

Everyone feels that he is caught in a vortex which draws him on and on and thrusts him with unrelenting precision over the brink of death.

Every twenty-four hours I was relieved by another officer and betook myself to Nurlu, where fairly comfortable quarters had been rigged up in a large wine-cellar.

The moral justification of this has been much discussed. However, it seems to me that the gratified approval of armchair warriors and journalists is incomprehensible.

When thousands of peaceful persons are robbed of their homes, the self-satisfaction of power may at least keep silence.

As for the necessity, I have of course, as a Prussian officer, no doubt whatever. War means the destruction of the enemy without scruple and by any means.

As for the necessity, I have of course, as a Prussian officer, no doubt whatever. War means the destruction of the enemy without scruple and by any means.

War is the harshest of all trades, and the masters of it can only entertain humane feelings so long as they do no harm.

It makes no difference that these operations which the situation demanded were not very pretty.

In Fresnoy the shells were sending up the earth in fountains as high as church towers. Each seemed bent on outdoing its predecessor.

As though by magic, one house after another was sucked into the earth.

Walls collapsed, gables fell, and bare rafters were flung through the air to mow the roofs of neighbouring houses. Clouds of splinters danced above whitish swathes of vapour. Eye and ear hung as though entranced upon this dance of destruction.

As though by magic, one house after another was sucked into the earth. Walls collapsed, gables fell, and bare rafters were flung through the air to mow the roofs of neighbouring houses. Clouds of splinters danced above whitish swathes of vapour.

Eye and ear hung as though entranced upon this dance of destruction.

We spent two days in a painfully confined space in the dressing-station dugout, for besides my men there were the staffs of two battalions, two relief detachments, and the indispensable corps troops.

… though ten out of twelve had fallen, still the last two, as sure as death, were to be found on the first evening of rest over the bottle, drinking a silent health to their dead companions, talking and laughing over all they had been through.

For dangers past⁠—an old soldier’s laugh.

For those to come—a full glass, though death and the devil grin there, as long as the wine was good. Such has ever been the custom of war.

Soon, however, a succession of bright, warm days reconciled us to our new station. I enjoyed the wonderful country undisturbed by the white puffs of shrapnel and the leaping cones of the shell-bursts; indeed, I scarcely noticed them.

In those years of increased activity the signs of an offensive were as much a part of the spring as primroses and opening buds.

Our lines formed a crescent in front of the St. Quentin Canal. Behind us was the famous Siegfried line. I never could tell why we had to occupy the narrow, unfinished trenches in the chalk, when behind us lay this magnificent line.

Here and there single trees stood by the wayside. In peace time the labourers must often have rested beneath them. They had an air of enchantment, standing alone in the solitude, covered with blossom white or pink or red.

It seemed that the war had thrown a heroic and melancholy light over the landscape, and without disturbing its loveliness added a ray to its brightness and a strength to its spell.

It is easier to go into the battle in the midst of such beauties of nature than when surrounded by a dead and cold winter landscape.

In the midst of the most beautiful castle in the air, I was suddenly alarmed by a peculiar rustling in the wood and the meadow.

In the face of the enemy the senses are always on the lookout; and it is remarkable that, at such moments, quite ordinary sounds can give one the instant conviction, “Something is up!”

At the same instant the nearest post came up to me: “Sir, there are seventy Englishmen advancing to the edge of the wood.”

I gave up all hope of a safe return when I heard this unholy clatter. Unconsciously, I was in constant expectation of being hit.

Death was out hunting.

Somewhere near us a detachment advanced to the attack with a shrill hurrah. Little Schultz confessed to me afterwards that he imagined a lean Indian behind him wielding a knife and already clutching him tight by the neck.

On such occasions I was always surprised and touched by the trusting reliance of the men on the ability of the officer to cope with the situation. “Where shall we go, sir?” “Help, sir, I’m wounded!” “Where’s the officer?”

To be in command at such moments and to have a clear head is its own supreme reward, just as cowardice is its own punishment.

I have always pitied the coward, in whom battle arouses a series of hellish tortures, while the spirit of the brave man merely rises the higher to meet a chain of exciting experiences.

“He knows what he is about,” an older soldier informed him. “Wait till a proper one comes, and he’ll be the first to lie down!”

The man had noticed the principle I always followed: “Only take cover when it is necessary, and then do it quickly.”

It is true that only the experienced can judge of the necessity, and feel the end of the shell’s trajectory before the recruit has even recognized the light warning whisper in the air.

From the edge of the wood I watched the swaying load on its way through another wood, among towering shell-bursts. As each one struck, I caught myself together, though the place where I was was no safer.

It is odd that another’s danger makes a stronger impression than one’s own.

This may be explained partly by the confidence in his own luck that everyone has. The belief that nothing can happen to himself makes each man underestimate the danger.

With horror you feel that all your intelligence, your capacities, your bodily and spiritual characteristics, have become utterly meaningless and absurd. While you think it, the lump of metal that will crush you to a shapeless nothing may have started on its course.

Your discomfort is concentrated in your ear, that tries to distinguish amid the uproar the swirl of your own death rushing near.

It is dark, too; and you must find in yourself alone all the strength for holding out. You can’t get up and with a blasé laugh light a cigarette in the wondering sight of your companions.

Nor can you be encouraged by the sight of your friend clipping a monocle into his eye to observe a hit on the traverse close beside you.

You know that not even a cock will crow when you are hit.

Well, why don’t you jump up and rush into the night till you collapse in safety behind a bush like an exhausted animal? Why do you hang on there all the time, you and your braves? There are no superior officers to see you.

We stood shivering with cold and without a dry stitch on our bodies, knowing that when next we were shelled we had no protection whatever. It was a cheerful situation.

And here I permit myself the observation that even artillery fire does not break the resistance of troops so surely as wet and cold.

The steady downpour was nevertheless a true blessing in its effects upon the further course of the battle; for the English offensive was just in its first and most critical days.

The men often suffered literally from hunger, and this led to pilfering of rations. It surprised me to find that I, though used to good and plentiful food, seemed to bear the privation much better than the men. Cabbage soup was their only thought.

When it comes to food, the good manners that in Europe are mostly whitewash are soon scratched off.

A man shows his real superiority when hunger is part of the meal, not at festive tables. Privation and danger tear away all that has been acquired, and then good form survives only in those in whom it is born.

Cabbage soup was their only thought. When it comes to food, the good manners that in Europe are mostly whitewash are soon scratched off.

A man shows his real superiority when hunger is part of the meal, not at festive tables.

Privation and danger tear away all that has been acquired, and then good form survives only in those in whom it is born.

In the evening von Kienitz and I made our way through the dark forest to regimental headquarters. We had been invited to a farewell dinner by the commanding officer of the battalion, Captain Schumacher. After that we lay down to sleep in our deep dugout.

It is a peculiar feeling when, knowing that next morning you have a fight to the death to go through, you give yourself a last audience before you fall asleep.

We were awakened at three, and we got up and washed and had breakfast made for us.

After we had gone to and fro and up and down trenches running parallel and across, no one had any longer the least idea where we were, nor in what direction the German lines lay. By degrees we all got the wind up.

The needles of our compasses danced in our hands, and when we looked for the Polestar all we had learned at school evaporated and left us in the lurch.

The sound of voices in the next trenches warned us that the enemy had recovered from the shock of surprise. He would be bound soon to realize our position.

only this time, as it was fine, I stood outside the farmhouse. The next shell fell right in the middle of it. Such are the chances of war. Here more than anywhere it is a case of little causes and great effects.

Seconds and millimetres make the difference.

On the 28th we were driven from the huts by eight o’clock, and one of those opposite us got a direct hit at the second shot. Others fell in the waterlogged meadows. They made less noise, but they scooped out some fine holes.

As we carried out our job in a sporting spirit, we were often in places that had just ceased to be possible. In this way the unseen events of the battlefield came to our eyes.

We were everywhere pressing on the heels of death.

It was almost as though not one living soul was to be found in this desolation. Here lay a group behind a tattered hedge, their bodies covered by the still fresh earth that showered on them after the shell had burst;

At other spots there were many corpses scattered over a small surface—a carrying-party caught in a vortex of shell-bursts, or a strayed platoon coming up in support, had found an end here.

We appeared, took in the drama at one glance, and disappeared into the smoke again.

When we had safely crossed the much-shelled bit of ground behind the Passchendaele-Westroosebeke road, I was able to give intelligence to the commander of the regiment.

A bit of shell that struck our refuge, throwing the soil over my map and into my eyes, gave me the tip to go. I bade farewell to Tebbe, and wished him good luck for the hours ahead. He called after me: “

God send the night; the morning will come of itself.

”

A feeling of indescribable discomfort steals upon the nerves, even though the shellfire is not particularly heavy, when one is traversing an unfamiliar part of the line by night.

The strangest illusions play upon the eye and ear, and the menacing walls of the trench inspire a sense of loneliness, like that of a child that has lost its way on a dark heath.

At last we found the narrow mouth of the first line in the wall of the canal, and went on through overcrowded trenches to battalion headquarters.

Trench warfare is the bloodiest, wildest, and most brutal of all warfare, yet it too has had its men, men whom the call of the hour has raised up, unknown foolhardy fighters.

Of all the nerve-racking moments of war none is so formidable as the meeting of two storm-troop leaders between the narrow walls of the trench. There is no retreat and no mercy then.

Blood sounds in the shrill cry that is wrung like a nightmare from the breast.

And yet the other voice was heard: “You are the company commander, man!” Exactly so. I do not say it in self-praise. I might as well say: “When God gives an office, He gives the understanding for it.”

I have often observed in myself and others that an officer’s sense of responsibility drowns his personal fears.

There is a sticking-place, something to occupy the thoughts. So I forced myself back to the ghastly spot. On the way I ran into Fusilier Haller, he who had bagged the machine-gun on my November patrol, and took him along with me.

There I found little Schmidt, who knew nothing of our disaster. The guides, also, were there. After that day, whenever we moved into a new position I always chose the guides myself and with the greatest care.

The lessons of the war are thorough but costly.

After settling-in the men who had come with me, I went back to the horrible scene of the night before. It was a ghastly sight. In a ring round the burst were lying over twenty charred corpses, nearly all of them unrecognizably mutilated.

Apart from this I lay on a bunk talking to my two officers about trifling matters, in order to escape the torture of our thoughts. The constant refrain was: “

Thank God, we can only die once.

” I said a few words to the men, who crouched together in silence on the steps, with a view to cheering them up; but it seemed to have little effect. Nor was I myself in an encouraging mood.

The very laws of nature seemed to have lost their validity. The air shimmered as though on a day of summer heat. The changing index of refraction made fixed objects dance to and fro. Black streaks of shadow fitted across the mass of smoke.

The roar had become a norm and one heard no longer.

One could scarcely hear the thousands of machine-guns in our rear that swept the blue sky with swarm upon swarm of lead.

Often a heavy trench-mortar fired short and scattered us with its fountains of earth; and no one even bent his head. The roar of the battle had become so terrific that we were scarcely in our right senses. The nerves could register fear no longer.

Everyone was mad and beyond reckoning; we had gone over the edge of the world into superhuman perspectives.

Death had lost its meaning and the will to live was made over to our country; and hence everyone was blind and regardless of his personal fate.

In my right hand I gripped my revolver, in my left a bamboo riding-cane. I was boiling with a fury now utterly inconceivable to me. The overpowering desire to kill winged my feet.

Rage squeezed bitter tears from my eyes.

The tremendous force of destruction that bent over the field of battle was concentrated in our brains.

I saw him start at the sight of me and stare at me with wide-open eyes as I walked slowly up to him holding out my revolver in front of me.

A drama without an audience was ready.

To me the mere sight of an enemy in tangible form was a release. Grinding my teeth, I pressed the muzzle to the temple of this wretch, whom terror now crippled, and with my other hand gripped hold of his tunic.

I found a young officer of another regiment close to me who, quite alone like myself, was rejoicing over the success of our first assault.

The common enthusiasm brought us as close in those few moments as if we had known each other for years.

The next spring forward parted us, never to meet again.

A man near me whipped his rifle to his shoulder as though he were out shooting, to shoot at a hare that suddenly jumped up and ran through our lines. The episode was so bewildering that I had to laugh.

There can indeed be nothing so horrible that some crazy fellow cannot cap it.

Near the ruins of the house lay a small length of trench which was being raked by machine-gun fire from the far side. I jumped in at one bound and found it unoccupied. Immediately after Kius and Wedelstädt appeared.

And yet, where would be the success of war if it were not for individuals whom the thrill of action intoxicates and hurls forward with an impetus not to be resisted?

It seemed often as though death itself feared to cross our path.

From the left, where the resistance was weaker, there appeared a few men who were almost in a position to bomb the post. I set out on my last spring forward and stumbled over a barbed-wire entanglement into the trench.

I cannot blame our men for their bloodthirsty conduct.

To kill a defenceless man is a baseness.

Nothing in the war was more repulsive to me than those heroes of the mess tables who used to repeat with a fat laugh the familiar tale of the prisoners marched in: “Did you hear that about the massacre? Priceless!”

So we withdrew into the first dugout, over which very soon the shots of both sides were crossing. My Englishman lay in front of it, a mere lad. I had shot him right through the head.

It is a strange feeling to look into the eyes of a man whom you have killed with your own hands.

We did not worry over the increasing fire, but established ourselves in the dugout and looked through the provisions left behind, as our stomachs reminded us that we had eaten nothing during the attack.

The bravest push to the front shooting and bomb-throwing. The rest follow on their heels automatically, in a herd. In the hand-to-hand battle the fighters jump back and forward, and in avoiding the murderous bombs of the enemy they run back on those behind them.

Only those in the forefront know what the situation is, while further back a wild panic breaks out in the crowded trench.

Perhaps a few even jump over the top and get shot, whereat the enemy of course are much encouraged. Indeed, if they seize their opportunity all is lost;

Near or far the rushing swirl of the descending bomb was swallowed in reverberations as it burst.

Then the searchlight’s quivering arm probed the dark sky for the treacherous nighthawk, shrapnel burst in a scintillating spray, and tracer-shells chased each other in a long chain like fiery wolves.

A repulsive scent of corpses hung about this conquered ground. Whether strong or almost imperceptible, it acted on the nerves as an irritant and wrapped one in a mood of overstrung and eerie foreboding.

A candle glowed red in the indescribable atmosphere.

I stumbled over a tangle of legs and brought the hovel to life by the magic word “Relief.”

A string of curses proceeded from a hole like a baker’s oven, and then one by one emerged an unshaven face, a pair of battered shoulder-straps, a weather-beaten uniform, and two clods of earth in which presumably boots were concealed.

The pro formas and returns, too, provided us with needful distraction.

One was kept so fully occupied with the inner organization that time was scarcely left over for the little affair of holding the line.

And indeed one was asked little about it. It often appeared that collecting empty cartridge-cases was of far greater importance.

These things were typical of us and did much harm.

The letter stifled the spirit. The war was bureaucratized.

At the same time, the front-line officer had far too much discipline in his bones to raise these matters, though they were the object of curses in every platoon commander’s dugout.

We were often heavily shelled at night.

I lay on my bunk on a mattress of fresh grass and listened with a quite peculiar and a quite ungrounded sense of security to the shells falling around, while the soil descended in showers at each shock.

Or else I went outside and looked from the fire-step across the sad night landscape, that was in such strange and indescribable contrast to the fiery spectacle whose dance-floor it was.

At such moments there crept over me a mood I had never known before: a certain falling-off of the fighting spirit, a war-weariness occasioned by the length of time I had been exposed to the war’s excitements.

Nothing but war and danger; not a night that was not convulsed with shells.

The seasons succeeded each other. Winter came and then summer, and one was always in the war. Tired of it and used to it, one was all the more dispirited and fed up with it just because one was used to it.

a certain falling-off of the fighting spirit, a war-weariness occasioned by the length of time I had been exposed to the war’s excitements. Nothing but war and danger; not a night that was not convulsed with shells.

The seasons succeeded each other. Winter came and then summer, and one was always in the war.

Tired of it and used to it, one was all the more dispirited and fed up with it just because one was used to it. One was blinded no longer by appearances. The war had raised deeper problems of its own.

Nothing but war and danger; not a night that was not convulsed with shells. The seasons succeeded each other. Winter came and then summer, and one was always in the war.

Tired of it and used to it, one was all the more dispirited and fed up with it just because one was used to it.

One was blinded no longer by appearances. The war had raised deeper problems of its own. It was a singular time.

The church that occupied the highest point in the village consisted of nothing now but a dreary heap of stones.

While I picked a bunch of wonderful roses in a waste garden a few shells came to remind me of prudence in this dancing-place of death.

After a few days we relieved the 9th Company in the line of resistance, about 500 metres behind the front line. Three of my men were wounded in the course of the relief.

From where I stood the whole thing was like a pretty game. It had not the majesty of the first-class battle, and yet the relentless strife between two brazen forces was there to see.

All over the empty expanse there were hidden eyes fixed on the little wood, round whose shuddering oak tops fountains of brown earth danced in ever-changing figures.

All round, distributed in trenches, shell-holes, caverns, and ruins, were men and guns, awaiting their turn in the battle for a piece of ground covered with splintered trunks.

Far behind, at opposite poles, two generals are seated at tables spread with maps. There is a report, a brief exposition, a few words to a staff officer, a conversation on the telephone.

An hour later a fresh bombardment tears up the old shell-holes and a fresh hecatomb of men bleeds in the suffocating fumes.

…

The only pleasure I had in the affair was the behaviour of the men of the storm troop, who reminded me forcibly of Grimmelhausen’s Simplicissimus.

These young warriors with great shocks of hair and puttees fell into a hot dispute twenty metres from the enemy because one of them had called the other a rabbit.

They cursed like troopers and vaunted themselves with mighty boasts. “Look here, we are not all such funks as you!” one of them shouted at last, and rolled up fifty metres of trench by himself.

Looking along the channel of his thoughts I had a shock when I realized for the first time how callous the war had made me.

One got to regarding men as mere matter.

I had men posted at the block and the trench cleared of the dead. At 11:45, without any warning having been given us, our artillery opened out on the position in front of us with the utmost fury.

However, we were brought to a stop by a hail of bursting Stokes bombs. A splinter flew against my chest and was caught on the clasp of my braces. Besides this, there was a sudden onset of artillery-fire.

Fountains of earth were sprayed up out of coloured smoke; the blare of flying metal screamed athwart the blunt roar of heavy shell-bursts; the hum of approaching shells came to an end with alarming suddenness; a cloud of splinters sang and whizzed about us.

As an attack might be expected, I picked up a helmet and put it on and hurried back with a few men to the trench.

… devoted my efforts to the training of a shock troop, as it had become more and more clear to me in the course of the war that all success springs from individual action, while the mass of the troops give impetus and weight of fire.

Better command a resolute section than a wavering company.

I spent my leisure time reading, bathing, shooting, and riding. On my rides I found vast quantities of literature thrown down from aeroplanes. It was designed to hasten the moral deterioration of the army; among it was even Schiller’s poem of Britannia the Free.

I spent my leisure time reading, bathing, shooting, and riding. On my rides I found vast quantities of literature thrown down from aeroplanes. It was designed to hasten the moral deterioration of the army; among it was even Schiller’s poem of Britannia the Free.

It seemed to me very clever of the English to bombard us with poetry, and also very flattering to us. A war in which one fought with verses would indeed be a treat.

The reward of thirty pfennigs set on the head of each copy by the military authorities showed that they did not undervalue the danger of this weapon. The cost of this, it is true, was laid upon the occupied territory.

It was also my principle not to raise their courage by big words nor to threaten the coward. I spoke rather to this effect:—I know well enough that no one will leave me in the lurch.

We are all afraid, but we must fight against it.

To be overcome by one’s weakness is only human. At such a moment look at your leader and your fellows. While I spoke I felt that what I said went home, and the results justified me in this psychological preparation.