VI

There are rumours of an offensive. We go up the line two days earlier than usual. On the way we pass a school that has been shelled to bits. Stacked up two deep all along its front is a wall of brand-new, untreated, whitewood coffins. They still smell of resin, pine, the forest. There are at least a hundred of them.

‘That’s a fine preparation for an offensive,’ says Muller in surprise.

‘Those are for us,’ growls Detering.

‘Don’t talk rubbish,’ Kat snaps back at him.

‘You’ll be lucky to get a coffin at all,’ grins Tjaden, ‘they’ll just use a tarpaulin to wrap up that target-practice dummy you call a body, you wait and see.’

Other men make jokes as well, uncomfortable jokes, but what else can we do? Obviously the coffins really are for us, of course. Arrangements are always efficient where that sort of thing is concerned.

Up ahead of us there is a rumbling noise all around. On the first night we try and get our bearings. Because it is still relatively quiet we can hear the transports on the move behind the enemy lines, rolling forwards, without a break, well beyond dawn. Kat says that they are not going back, just bringing in troops. Troops, munitions and guns.

The British artillery has been strengthened – that much we can hear immediately. Over to the right of the farm, there are at least four extra batteries of eight-inch guns, and they’ve put in trench mortars behind the poplar stump. As well as all that they’ve got a lot of those little French bastards with instantaneous fuses.

Morale is low. Two hours after we reach our dugouts, our own artillery drops some shells on to our trenches. That’s the third time this month. If they were just making mistakes with the gun-laying, nobody would say anything; but it’s because the gun barrels are worn out; sometimes the shots are so unpredictable that they scatter shrapnel right into our sector. Tonight two of our men are wounded that way.

The front is a cage, and you have to wait nervously in it for whatever happens to you. Here we are under a criss-cross of shell trajectories, and we live in the tension of uncertainty. Chance is hovering over us. If there is a shot, all I can do is duck; I don’t know for sure and I can’t influence where it is going to come down.

It’s this awareness of chance that makes us so indifferent. A few months ago I was playing cards in a dugout; after a bit I got up and went out to go and talk to some men I knew in another dugout. When I got back, there was nothing left of the first one, a direct hit from a heavy shell had flattened it. I went back to the other dugout and got there just in time to help dig the men out. While I was away it had been buried.

It is simply a matter of chance whether I am hit or whether I go on living. I can be squashed flat in a bomb-proof dugout, and I can survive ten hours in the open under heavy barrage without a scratch. Every soldier owes the fact that he is still alive to a thousand lucky chances and nothing else. And every soldier believes in and trusts to chance.

We have to watch out for our bread. There are many more rats lately, ever since the trenches stopped being properly maintained.

Detering reckons that this is the clearest sign that we are in for it.

The rats here are especially repulsive, because they are so huge. They are the sort they call corpse-rats. They have horrible, evillooking, naked faces and the sight of their long, bare tails can make you feel sick.

They seem to be really hungry. They have had a go at practically everybody’s bread. Kropp has wrapped his in tarpaulin and put it under his head, but he can’t sleep because they run across his face to try and get at it. Detering tried to outwit them; he fixed a thin wire to the ceding and hooked the bundle with his bread on to it. During the night he puts on his flashlight and sees the wire swinging backwards and forwards. Riding on his bread there is a great fat rat.

In the end we decide that something has to be done. Carefully we cut off the pieces of bread that have been gnawed by the rats; we can’t throw the bread away, of course, or we would have nothing to eat tomorrow.

We put the bits we have cut off all together in the middle of the floor. Everyone grabs a spade and gets ready to hit out. Detering, Kropp and Kat have their flashlights ready.

After a few minutes we hear the first scuffles and scurrying. It gets louder, now it is the sound of lots of little feet. Then the lamps come on and we all lay into the dark mass, which breaks up. The results are good. We shovel what is left of the rats over the edge of the trench and lie in wait again.

It works a few more times. By then the beasts have realized, or they have smelt the blood. No more come. All the same, they have taken what is left of the scraps of bread by the morning.

In one of the adjacent sectors the rats attacked two big cats and a dog, bit them to death and ate them.

The next day we are issued with Edam cheese. Every man gets almost a quarter of a cheese. This is fine in one way, because Edam tastes good – but bad in another, because for us these thick red balls of cheese have always been a sure sign that we are in for a hell of a battering. Our suspicions grow when we are given an issue of liquor. We drink it, but it doesn’t make us feel any better.

During the day we have competitions about who can shoot the most rats, and we lounge around. Supplies of cartridges and of hand-grenades are increased. We check the bayonets ourselves. The reason for this is that you sometimes find bayonets that are saw-toothed along the blunt edge. Anybody caught by the enemy with one of those out there has had it. In the sector next to ours some men from our side were found afterwards with their noses sawn off by these bayonets, and their eyes poked out. Then their mouths had been stuffed with sawdust so that they suffocated.

A few recruits have weapons like that; we get rid of them and get them different ones.

In any case, the bayonet isn’t as important as it used to be. It’s more usual now to go into the attack with hand-grenades and your entrenching tool. The sharpened spade is a lighter and more versatile weapon – not only can you get a man under the chin, but more to the point you can strike a blow with a lot more force behind it; that’s especially true if you can bring it down diagonally between the neck and the shoulder, because then you can split down as far as the chest. When you put a bayonet in, it can stick, and you have to give the other man a hefty kick in the guts to get it out, and in the meantime you might easily have copped it yourself. Besides, quite often it snaps off.

At night gas gets blown across at us. We are expecting the attack and lie with our gas-masks handy, ready to tear them out as soon as we see the first shadow of a cloud.

The grey light of morning comes, but nothing happens. There is just that continuous and nerve-wracking rolling on the other side, trains, more trains, trucks and more trucks – what is all the concentration for? Our own artillery keeps on sending shells across, but it doesn’t stop, it doesn’t stop…

Our faces are tired and we stare past one another. ‘It’ll be just like it was on the Somme, it finished up with seven days and nights unbroken shelling,’ says Kat gloomily. He isn’t making jokes any more, and that’s bad. Kat is an old sweat and he can sense these things. Only Tjaden is happy about the extra rations and the rum; he even reckons that we might make it back without being fired on, that maybe nothing will happen.

It almost looks as if it could be like that. One day goes past after another. At night I sit in a forward sap on sentry duty, listening. Rockets and Verey lights go up and come down over my head. I am watchful and tense, my heart is pounding. Time and again I look at the luminous dial of my watch; the hands don’t seem to want to move. Sleep is heavy on my eyelids, I wriggle my toes in my boots to stay awake. Nothing happens, and then my relief comes up – there was nothing but that constant rolling over there. Gradually we calm down, and play cards all the time. Maybe we’ll be lucky, after all.

During the day the sky is full of observation balloons. Word gets around that they are going to bring in tanks over on the other side when they attack, and fighter aircraft. We are less interested in that news, though, than what we hear about the new flame-throwers.

In the middle of the night we wake up. The ground is rumbling, there is a heavy bombardment going on above us. We huddle into the corners. We can pick out shells of pretty well every calibre.

We all grab hold of our kit, and keep on checking that it is there. The dugout shakes, and the night is all roars and flashes. We look at each other in the moments of light, and shake our heads, our faces pale and our lips pressed tight.

We can all feel it when the heavy shelling rips away the parapet and churns into the bulkheads, shattering the topmost blocks of concrete. We hear the duller, angrier impact when a shell hits our trench, like the blow from the claws of some snarling beast of prey. By morning a few of the recruits are already green and throwing up. They haven’t had enough experience of it all yet.

Slowly an unpleasant grey light trickles into our posts and makes the flashes of the impacts look paler. It is morning. Now we can hear trench mortars exploding, in amongst the shellfire. They cause the worst devastation possible. Wherever one of those lands, all you get is a mass grave.

The reliefs go out and the observers stumble in, trembling and covered with dirt. One lies down in a corner without saying anything and starts to eat, the other, one of the older reservists, just sobs; he has been thrown over the parapet twice by the blast without suffering anything more than shell shock.

The recruits are looking at him. That sort of thing is contagious, and we have to keep an eye on it; already a few lips are starting to quiver. It’s a good thing that it is daylight; perhaps the attack will come this morning.

The shelling doesn’t die down. It is behind us as well. All around, as far as you can see, fountains of mud and iron are shooting up. They are raking a very broad belt indeed.

The attack doesn’t come, but the bombardment goes on. Gradually we become deaf. Hardly anyone speaks any more. It’s impossible to understand one another anyway.

Our trench has been shelled nearly to pieces. In several places there is less than a couple of feet of wall left standing, and it is full of holes, craters and piles of earth. A shell bursts just in front of our post. Immediately everything goes dark. We have been buried and have to dig ourselves out. After an hour the entrance is clear again, and we are a bit calmer because we have had something to occupy us.

Our company commander climbs in and reports that two of the dugouts are gone. The recruits calm down when they see him. He tells us that they are going to try to get food up to us tonight.

That sounds comforting. No one had given it any thought except Tjaden. Food is something else that might bring the outside world a bit closer – if food is going to be brought in, then it can’t be as bad as all that, reckon the recruits. We don’t contradict them, although we know that food is just as important as ammunition, and it is only for that reason that it has to be brought in.

But the attempt to fetch it fails. A second party sets out, but turns back as well. The last group contains Kat, but even he has to return empty-handed. No one can get through, a dog’s tail wouldn’t be thin enough to slip through that kind of fire.

We tighten our belts and chew each mouthful three times as long as usual. But it still isn’t enough; we are bloody hungry. I save myself a crust of bread; I eat the soft part and leave the crust in my pack; every so often I nibble at it.

The night is unbearable. We can’t sleep, we just stare in front of us and doze. Tjaden is sorry that we wasted the scraps of bread that had been gnawed on by the rats. He says we should have gone ahead and kept it, and that we would all eat it now. Water is short as well, but we are not quite so badly off on that score.

Towards morning, while it is still dark, there is a sudden commotion. A mob of fleeing rats storms into the dugout and they run up the walls. Our flashlights show up the chaos. Everyone screams and curses and starts hitting out. It is the working off of all the anger and frustration of all those long hours. Faces are distorted, arms flail, the rats squeak and it is hard for us to stop – we were almost on the point of setting about each other.

The sudden exertion has exhausted us. We lie down and wait again. It is a miracle that our dugout hasn’t had any casualties. It is one of the few deep dugouts still intact.

An NCO climbs down to us; he has some bread with him. Three men did manage to get through last night and fetch some provisions. They reported that the shellfire was constant and just as heavy all the way back to our gun emplacements. They say it is a mystery where the other side is getting so much artillery.

We have to wait, wait. Around midday something happens that I have been expecting to happen. One of the recruits cracks. I have been watching him for a long time, seeing the way he has been constantly grinding his teeth and clenching and unclenching his fists. We are all too familiar with those hunted, wild eyes. In the last few hours he seems to have quietened down, but it isn’t real. He has collapsed in on himself like a tree that is rotten inside.

Now he gets up and creeps quietly through the dugout, then rushes for the door. I turn over on to my side and ask, ‘Where are you off to?’

‘I won’t be a minute,’ he says, and tries to get past me.

‘Hang on for a while, the shelling is already dying down a bit.’

He listens and his eyes clear for a moment. Then they take on that dull shine again, just like a rabid dog, and he pushes me aside without saying anything.

‘Just a minute, chum!’ I shout. Kat sees what is going on. As the recruit pushes me, Kat grabs him and we hold on to him tightly.

Straight away he begins to rave. ‘Let go of me, let me out, I have to get out of here!’

He won’t listen, and flails out, spitting out words that are gurgling nonsense. It’s claustrophobia from being in the dugout, he feels that he is suffocating and has one basic urge: to get outside. If we let him go he’d run off somewhere and not take cover. He isn’t the first.

Because he is raging and his eyes are rolling, there is nothing for it but to hit him, so that he comes to himself. We do so quickly and without mercy and manage to get him sitting quietly again for the time being. The others turn pale when they see all this; let’s hope it scares them off doing the same. This concentrated artillery fire is too much for the poor lads; they’ve come straight from the recruiting depot into a bombardment that would give grey hairs even to one of the old hands.

The stifling air in the dugout gets on our nerves even more after this incident. It’s as if we were sitting in our own grave, just waiting for someone to bury us.

Suddenly there is a terrible noise and flash of light, and every joint in the dugout creaks under the impact of a direct hit – luckily not a heavy one, and one that the concrete blocks could withstand. There is a fearsome metallic rattling, the walls shake, rifles, steel helmets, earth, mud and dust fly around. Sulphurous fumes penetrate the walls. If we had been in one of the light shelters that they are building these days, instead of our solid dugout, we’d all be dead by now.

But even so the effect it has is bad enough. The recruit who had the fit earlier is raving again, and two more have joined in. One breaks away and runs for it. We have trouble holding the other two. I rush out after the one who ran away and I wonder if I should shoot him in the leg; then there is a whistling noise, I throw myself flat, and when I get up there are fragments of hot shrapnel, scraps of flesh and torn pieces of uniform spattered on the walls of the trench. I scramble back inside.

The first recruit seems to have gone completely crazy. If we let go of him he butts his head against the wall like a goat. Tonight we shall have to try to get him back into the rear zone. For the moment we tie him up securely, but in such a way that we can release him if there is an attack.

Kat suggests a game of cards; what else can we do, perhaps it will make things easier? But it is no good, we are listening to every impact that sounds close, we lose count and we lead the wrong suits. We have to give up. It’s as if we were sitting inside a massive echoing metal boiler that is being pounded on every side.

Another night. The tension has worn us out. It is a deadly tension that feels as if a jagged knife blade is being scraped along the spine. Our legs won’t function, our hands are trembling and our bodies are like thin membranes stretched over barely repressed madness, holding in what would otherwise be an unrestrained outburst of endless screams. We have no flesh, no muscles now, we cannot even look at one another for fear of seeing the unimaginable. And so we press our lips together tightly – it has to stop, it has to stop – perhaps we’ll get through it all.

Suddenly there are no more close explosions. The shelling goes on, but it has drawn back a little, our trench is clear. We grab hold of our hand-grenades, heave them out in front of the dugout and then leap out. The constant artillery fire has stopped, but in its place there is heavy defensive fire from behind us. It is the attack.

Nobody would believe that there could still be human beings in this churned-up wilderness; but everywhere steel helmets are appearing from the trenches, and fifty yards from us a machine-gun has already been set up and starts to bark away.

The wire entanglements have been torn to bits. Even so, the wire is still holding up in places. We can see the attackers coming. Our big guns fire, machine-guns rattle, rifles crack. They are working their way across and on to us. Haie and Kropp start on the grenades. They throw them as fast as they can, and the grenades are handed to them ready primed. Haie throws them sixty yards, Kropp fifty – this has been tested and it is important. The men from the other side can’t do much until they are within thirty yards of us.

We recognize the distorted faces and the flattened helmets – it’s the French. They reach what is left of our wire and already they’ve clearly had losses. A whole line of them is wiped out by the machine-gun near us; but then it starts to jam, and they move in closer.

I see one of them run into a knife-rest, his face lifted upwards. His body slumps, and his hands stay caught, raised up as if he is praying. Then the body falls away completely and only the shot-off hands and the stumps of the arms are left hanging in the wire.

In the seconds when we turn to go back, three faces come up from the ground in front of us. Beneath one of the helmets there is a dark moustache and two eyes which are fixed on me. I raise my arm, but I can’t throw a grenade towards those strange eyes, and for one crazy moment the whole battle rages round me and round those two eyes like a circus, then the head looks up, there is a hand, a movement, and my grenade flies across and into them.

We run back, pull the wooden wire-cradles into the trench and toss primed grenades behind us, to ensure fire cover to the rear. The machine-guns are firing from the next post.

We have turned into dangerous animals. We are not fighting, we are defending ourselves from annihilation. We are not hurling our grenades against human beings – what do we know about all that in the heat of the moment? – the hands and the helmets that are after us belong to Death himself, and for the first time in three days we are able to look Death in the eyes, for the first time in three days we can defend ourselves against it, we are maddened with fury, not lying there waiting impotently for the executioner any more, we can destroy and we can kill to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to take revenge.

We squat down behind every corner, behind every wire-cradle, and throw exploding bundles at the feet of those coming at us before we get away. The blast of our hand-grenades strikes hard against our legs and arms as we run, stooping like cats, swept by the wave that carries us onwards, the wave that makes us cruel, makes us into highwaymen, into murderers, I suppose into devils, this wave which multiplies our strength in fear and fury and the urge to live, which seeks and fights for a way out for us. If your own father came across with those from the other side you wouldn’t hesitate to hurl a hand-grenade straight at him!

We’ve given up the front-line trenches. Are they still trenches at all? They have been shot to pieces, destroyed – there are just odd sections of trench, craters linked to one another by shallow communication alleys, groups of shell holes, nothing else. But the numbers of losses from the other side are increasing. They didn’t reckon on so much resistance.

It is getting on for midday. The sun bums down and sweat stings our eyes, and when we wipe it away on our sleeves there is often blood there, too. We make it back to the first of our better maintained trenches. It is manned and ready to withstand the counter-attack, and the men take us in. Our artillery gets going at full blast and makes an attack impossible.

The lines of men following us have to stop. They can’t move forwards. Their attack is cut to pieces by our artillery. We lie in wait. The shellfire lifts a hundred yards and we go over the top again. Right next to me a lance-corporal gets his head blown off. He runs on for a few paces more with blood shooting up out of his neck like a fountain.

It doesn’t come to hand-to-hand fighting. The others are forced back. We get back to our original bits of trench and then go on beyond them.

God, this turning! You get to the protection of the reserve trenches and you just want to crawl into them and disappear; but you have to turn around and go back into the terror. If we hadn’t turned into automata at this moment we would have just lain down, exhausted, stripped of any will to go on. But we are dragged along forwards again with everyone else, unwilling but crazed, wild and raging, we want to kill, because now the others are our deadly enemies, their grenades and rifles are aimed at us, and if we don’t destroy them they will destroy us.

The brown earth, the torn and mangled brown earth, shimmering greasily under the sun’s rays, becomes a backdrop for our dulled and ever-moving automatic actions, our harsh breathing is the rasping of the clockwork, our lips are dry and our heads feel worse than after a night’s hard drinking – and so we stumble onwards, while into our bullet-ridden, shot-through souls the image of the brown earth insinuates itself painfully, the brown earth with the greasy sun and the dead or twitching soldiers, who he there as if that were perfectly normal, and who grab at our legs and scream as we try to jump over them.

We have lost all feelings for others, we barely recognize each other when somebody else comes into our line of vision, agitated as we are. We are dead men with no feelings, who are able by some trick, some dangerous magic, to keep on running and keep on killing.

A young Frenchman falls behind, we catch up with him, he raises his hands and he still has a revolver in one of them – we don’t know if he wants to shoot or to surrender. A blow with an entrenching tool splits his face in two. A second Frenchman sees this and tries to get away, and a bayonet hisses into his back. He leaps in the air and then stumbles away, his arms outstretched and his mouth wide open in a scream, the bayonet swaying in his back. A third throws down his rifle and cowers with his hands over his eyes. He stays behind with a few other prisoners-of-war, to help carry off the wounded.

Suddenly in our pursuit we reach the enemy lines. We are so close behind our fleeing opponents that we get there at almost the same time as they do. Because of that, we don’t have too many casualties. A machine-gun barks out, but is silenced with a hand-grenade. All the same, those few seconds were enough for five of our men to get stomach wounds. With the butt of his rifle, Kat smashes to pulp the face of one of the machine-gunners, who hasn’t been wounded. We bayonet the others before they can get their grenades out. Then we gulp down thirstily the water they have been using to cool their gun.

All around there is the clicking of wire-cutters, planks are manhandled across the entanglements and we jump through the narrow gaps into the trenches. Haie hits a massive Frenchman in the throat with his spade and throws the first hand-grenade; for a second or so we duck down behind a parapet, and then the straight section of trench in front of us is empty. The next throw whistles over the corner of the trench and gives us clear passage, and as we go past we toss explosives into the dugouts; the earth shakes, creaking, smoking and groaning, we stumble on over slippery fragments of flesh, over soft bodies; I fall into a belly that has been ripped open, and on the body is a new, clean, French officer’s cap.

The fighting stops. We lose our contact with the enemy. Since we can’t hold out here for a long time, we are brought back to our original position under covering fire from our artillery. We hardly know what we are doing as we dive into the nearest dugout to grab what we can of any provisions that we happen to see before we get away, especially tins of corned beef.

We get back in one piece. For the moment there are no more attacks from over there. We he on the ground for more than an hour, getting our breath and resting, before anyone says anything. We are so completely done in that we don’t even think of the tinned beef, even though we are ravenously hungry. Only gradually do we turn into something like human beings again.

The corned beef that they get on the other side is famous all along the front. Occasionally it serves as the main reason for a surprise raid from our side, because our provisions are generally bad; we are always hungry.

We’ve got hold of five tins altogether. Those people over there get looked after well, it’s the lap of luxury compared to us lot here in hungry corner, with our turnip jam – on the other side the beef is just sitting around, all you need to do is take it. Haie has also snaffled a thin loaf of French white bread and tucked it in his belt like a spade. There’s a bit of blood on one end of it, but that can be cut off.

It’s lucky that we’ve got some decent food to eat now; we’ll still need all our strength. Having a full belly is just as important as a good dugout; that’s why we are so keen to get hold of food, because it can save our lives.

Tjaden has even managed to get hold of a couple of water bottles full of cognac. We pass them round.

The evening benediction starts. Night falls, and mist rises out of the shell holes. It looks as if the craters are full of ghostly secrets. The white vapour creeps around fearfully before it dares to float up over the edge and away. Then long streaks drift from one shell hole to the next.

It’s cold. I’m on look-out, staring into the darkness. I feel limp and drained, just like I always do after an attack, and so I find it hard to be alone with my own thoughts. They are not really thoughts; they are memories that come to torment me in my weakness and put me into a strange mood.

Up go the Verey lights – and I see a picture of a summer evening, and I’m in the cloistered courtyard of the cathedral looking at the tall rose trees that grow in the middle of the little garden there, where the deans of the chapter are buried. All around are stone carvings for the different stations of the cross. There is nobody there; this flower-filled square is caught up in a profound silence, the sun shines warm on the thick grey stones, I place my hand on one and feel the warmth. Above the right-hand end of the cloister’s slate roof the green spire of the cathedral rises up into the pale blue wash of the evening sky. Between the slender sunlit columns of the cloisters themselves is that cool darkness that only churches have, and I am standing there and thinking that by the time I am twenty I shall have learnt the secret of the confusion that women cause in men’s minds.

The picture is astonishingly close, it touches me before it dissolves under the flash of the next Verey light.

I grip my rifle and hold it properly upright. The barrel is wet, and I put my hand round it and wipe off the dampness with my fingers.

Between the meadows behind our home town there was a row of old poplar trees that rose up by the side of a stream. You could see them from a long way off, and although they were actually only along one side, the place was still known as the poplar avenue. Even when we were children it was a favourite place and those poplars had an inexplicable attraction for us, so that we used to spend whole days there listening to their gentle rustling. We used to sit beneath them on the banks of the stream and dangle our feet in the bright, fast-moving eddies. The clean scent of the water and the song of the wind in the poplars captured our imagination. We really loved them, and picturing those days still makes my heart race, before the image vanishes again.

It is a strange thing that all the memories have these two qualities. They are always full of quietness, that is the most striking thing about them; and even when things weren’t like that in reality, they still seem to have that quality. They are soundless apparitions, which speak to me by looks and gestures, wordless and silent – and their silence is precisely what disturbs me, forces me to hold on to my sleeve or my rifle so that I don’t abandon myself to this seductive dissolution, in which my body would like to disperse itself and flow away towards the silent powers that he behind all things.

The pictures are so silent because that is something which is quite incomprehensible to us. There is no silence at the front and the spell of the front is so strong that we are never away from it. Even in the depots way behind the lines, or in the rest areas, the buzz and the muted thundering of the shellfire is always in our ears. We are never so far away that we can’t hear it any more. But in the last few days it has been unbearable.

The quietness is the reason why all these images awaken in us not so much desire as sadness – a vast and inexplicable melancholy. The scenes existed once – but they will never return. They are gone, they are another world, a world that is in the past for us. When we were doing our basic training, those scenes called up in us a wild and rebellious longing, they were still a part of us then, we belonged to them and they to us, even if we had been taken away from them. They rose up out of the soldiers’ songs that we sang, when we marched off to the heath for exercises on the long, long trail а-winding between the red rays of dawn and the black silhouettes of the forest, they were still a strong memory then, a memory that was inside us and came from within us.

But here in the trenches we have lost that memory. It no longer rises up from inside us – we are dead and the memory is far off on some distant horizon, an apparition, a puzzling reflection come to haunt us, something we are afraid of and which we love without hope. It is strong, and our desire is strong; but it is unattainable, and we know it. It is just as impossible as the chance of becoming a general.

And even if someone were to give us it back, that landscape of our youth, we wouldn’t have much idea of how to handle it. The tender, secret forces that bound it to us cannot come back to life. We should be in the landscape, wandering around; we should remember, and love it, and be moved by the sight of it. But it would be just the same as when we see a photograph of one of our friends who has been killed, and we stop to think about it. The features are his, the face is his, and the days we spent with him take on a deceptive life in our memories; but it isn’t really him.

Nowadays we would no longer have any real links with the way we used to be. It wasn’t the awareness of how beautiful it was that meant so much to us, or of how good the atmosphere was, but the feeling of community, the way we all felt a kinship with the objects and events of our existence. That’s what set us apart and made our parents’ world a little difficult for us to understand; because somehow we were always gently bound up with that world, submissive to it all, and the smallest thing led us onwards along the path of eternity. Perhaps it was just the privilege of our youth – we were not yet able to see any restrictions, and we could not admit to ourselves that things would ever come to an end; expectation was in our blood, and this meant that we were at one with our lives as the days went by.

Now we would wander around like strangers in those landscapes of our youth. We have been consumed in the fires of reality, we perceive differences only in the way tradesmen do, and we see necessities like butchers. We are free of care no longer – we are terrifyingly indifferent. We might be present in that world, but would we be alive in it?

We are like children who have been abandoned and we are as experienced as old men, we are coarse, unhappy and superficial – I think that we are lost.

My hands get cold and my flesh shivers; even though it is a warm night. Only the mist is chilly, that ghastly mist that creeps across the dead men in front of us and sucks out their last, concealed scraps of life. By tomorrow they will be green and pallid and their blood will be thickened and black.

The Verey lights are still shooting upwards and throwing their merciless glare over the stony landscape, which is full of craters and a shining coldness, like some dead moon. The blood beneath my skin brings fear and disquiet into my thoughts. They become weak, they tremble, they need warmth and life. They cannot survive without comfort and illusion, they become confused in the face of naked despair.

I hear mess-tins rattling, and at once I have a fierce desire for hot food, which will do me good and calm me down. With some difficulty I force myself to wait until I am relieved.

Then I go into the dugout and get hold of a mug of barley broth. The pearl barley has been cooked in fat and tastes good, and I eat it slowly. But I keep to myself, even though the others are in better spirits now that the shelling has died down.

The days roll by and every hour is incomprehensible and matter of fact at the same time. Attacks alternate with counter-attacks and slowly the dead pile up between the trenches in no man’s land. We can usually get out and fetch back any wounded men that aren’t too far away. Some have to lie there for a long time, though, and we listen to them dying.

We search for one of them for two whole days, in vain. He must be lying face downwards, and can’t turn over. It’s the only explanation for why we can’t find him; because only when someone is screaming with his mouth close to the ground does it make it hard to gauge the direction.

He’ll have one of the worst sort of wounds, one of those that are not so bad as to weaken the body quickly and let you just drift off in a half-numbed state, but not so light that you can bear the pain with any reasonable expectation of getting over it. Kat reckons that either his pelvis has been shattered, or he has been hit in the spine. He says that his chest can’t have been hit, or he wouldn’t have so much strength to scream, but if he had some other kind of wound you would be able to see him moving.

Gradually he gets hoarser. His voice sounds so weird that it could come from anywhere. Three times during the first night groups of our men go out there. But every time they think they have the right direction and are crawling towards him, the next time they hear his voice it is coming from somewhere else. We search in vain until it starts to get light. During the daytime we scan the area with field glasses; not a trace. By the second day the man is quieter, and you can tell that his throat and lips are parched.

Our company commander has promised priority leave and three extra days to anyone who finds him. That is a huge incentive, but even without it we would do all we could anyway; the shouting is so awful. Kat and Kropp even make another sortie during the afternoon. In the process Kropp gets an earlobe shot off. But it is no use, and they come back without him.

And on top of it all you can hear quite clearly what he is shouting. At first he just screamed for help all the time – then in the second night he must have become feverish, because he is talking to his wife and children, and we can pick out the name Efise. Today he is just crying. Towards evening the voice dies away to just a croak. But he groans softly all through the night. We can hear him so clearly because the wind is blowing towards our trench. In the morning, when we think he must have gone to his rest long since, we hear a gurgling rattle once again.

The days are hot and the dead lie unburied. We can’t fetch them all, and we don’t know where to put them. The shells bury them for us. Quite often their bellies swell up like balloons. They hiss, belch and move because of the gases which are rumbling about inside them.

The sky is blue and cloudless. In the evenings it becomes oppressive, and the heat rises out of the ground. When the wind is in our direction it brings the smell of blood, heavy, and with a repulsive sweetness, a waft of death breathing out of the shell holes, a smell that seems to be composed of a mixture of chloroform and decomposition, and which makes us feel faint, or makes us vomit.

The nights turn quiet, and the hunt for copper driving bands from shells, or for the silk parachutes from French rocket flares starts up. Nobody really knows why the driving bands are so eagerly sought after. The men who collect them simply declare that they are valuable. There are people who hump so many of these away with them that they are bent and staggering under their weight when we withdraw.

Haie at least gives a reason for collecting them: he wants to send them to his girlfriend as a substitute for garters. When they hear this, there is naturally a great outburst of merriment among the other lads from his part of the world; they slap their thighs – ‘That’s a good ’un, bloody hell, old Haie, he’s a sharp one and no mistake!’ Of all of them, Tjaden is the one who just can’t stop laughing; he’s got the biggest of the driving bands and is forever sticking his leg through it to show how much room there is to spare. ‘Christ, Haie, she must have a pair of thighs, thighs!’

And mentally he moves up a bit – ‘and a bum, too, she must have a bum like – like an elephant’s.’

He can’t get over it. ‘I wouldn’t mind a bit of slap and tickle with her, not half I wouldn’t —’

Haie beams to hear his girlfriend getting all this acclaim, and says in a self-satisfied and succinct manner, ‘Oh aye, she’s a big lass.’ The silk parachutes are of greater practical value. Three or four will make up a blouse, depending on bust size. Kropp and I use them for handkerchiefs. The others send them home. If their womenfolk could see the risks that the men sometimes take fetching these flimsy rags it would really give them a shock.

Kat catches Tjaden trying to hammer the driving band off a dud shell, calm as you please. With anyone else, the thing would have exploded, but Tjaden is lucky – he always is.

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 don’t 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. He’s 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. They’ve 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 can’t 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 can’t tell shrapnel from high explosive, and they are mown down because they are listening in terror to the howl of the great coal-box shells, which aren’t dangerous because they are coming down way behind us, but don’t 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 don’t 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 don’t 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 weren’t any uniforms available in these children’s 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 didn’t 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 didn’t 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 can’t 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. It’s 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 doesn’t 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 couldn’t 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 – 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? That’s a mortar coming across. Keep down, it’ll 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 – ‘That’s 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 doesn’t 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.

Then someone shouts out the number of our company – we can hear that it is our company commander, so he must have made it; his arm is in a sling. We move towards him and I pick out Kat and Albert, we join together, prop each other up and look at each other.

And we hear our number called again, and then again. He can go on calling, but they won’t hear him in the clearing stations or out in no man’s land.

Again: ‘B company over here!’

And then more quietly: ‘Nobody else from В Company?’

He is silent, and then his voice sounds hoarse when he asks, ‘Is that all?’ Then he gives the command: ‘Number off!’

It is a grey morning. It was still summer when we went up the line and there were a hundred and fifty of us. Now we are shivering. It is autumn, the leaves rustle, the voices are tired as they call out: ‘One – two – three – four —’ and they are silent after thirty-two. And there is a long silence before the voice asks, ‘Any more?’ – and waits a bit and then says quietly, ‘By squads…’ but then breaks down, and can only finish the command with, ‘B Company painfully, – ‘B Company – march at ease.’

A line, a short line, stumbles off into the morning.

Thirty-two men.