My Last Storm

On the 30th July 1918 we went into rest at Sauchy Lestrée, a delightful spot in Artois surrounded by water. A few days later we marched still further back to Escaudœuvres, a small, smug workingmen’s suburb of Cambrai.

I occupied the typical best bedroom of an artisan’s house in northern France. The huge double bed as its ominous pièce de résistance; a fireplace with hideous red and blue glass vases on the mantelpiece; a round table, chairs; on the walls some of those frightful colour-prints of the Familistère, Vive la classe, souvenir de première communion, postcards, and other rubbish. I did what I could to give the right note to my arrival by throwing a pack of cards on the table and my riding-boots on the double bed.

The clear moonlight nights favoured the visits of enemy bombers, who gave us a notion of the overwhelming superiority of matériel possessed by the other side. Night after night several formations came over and dropped their bombs of alarmingly high explosives over Cambrai and its suburbs. I was not agitated so much by the fine mosquito-like hum of the engines and the series of reverberating detonations as I was by the dash of my host for the cellar. It is true that, one day before my arrival, a bomb had landed in front of the windows and flung the gentleman of the house half-stunned out of the bed in which I slept, broken a bedpost, and bored the walls of the house with splinters. It was precisely this accident that lulled me into the belief that a repetition of it would be unlikely.

After one day’s rest the detested but indispensable round of training set in once more. Drill, instruction, roll-calls, lectures, and inspections filled a great part of the day. One entire morning was spent in pronouncing a verdict in a court of honour.

Here, too, we were miserably fed. For a long while there was nothing for supper but gherkins, which the men very drily and aptly named “gardener’s sausage.”

It was by no means easy to weld my decimated company into a unit again. It often went against the grain to be always insisting on the details of drill in my relations with the men, convinced though I was of the necessity. Drill as the means to an end is indispensable to every army. It cannot be replaced entirely by individual training nor by sporting instinct. A man, unless his inherent worth is beyond all doubt, must have obedience drilled into him, so that his natural instincts can be curbed by the spiritual compulsion of his commander even in the most awful moments.

Above all, I 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. 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. So it would appear we possessed no longer the wholly pure understanding of poetry.

One afternoon I got a bicycle and rode into Cambrai. The dear old town was a desert. Shops and cafés were shut; the streets seemed dead in spite of the field-grey uniforms that thronged them. M. and Mme. Plancot, who had given me such a fine billet a year before, were delighted by my visit. They told me that conditions of life at Cambrai had got worse in every way. They complained particularly of the frequent visits the night bombers paid them. They often had to run downstairs and up again several times a night, disputing the point as they went whether it was better to die in the first cellar by the bomb itself or in the one lower by being buried alive. The old people’s careworn looks made me heartily sorry. A few weeks later, when the town was shelled, they had to leave the house, where they had spent their lives, at a moment’s notice.

On the 23rd of August, I was alarmed by a violent knocking at my door at eleven, when I had sunk into a happy sleep. It was an orderly with marching orders. Already the day before the monotonous roll and stamp of unusually heavy artillery-fire had surged over and warned us on duty, at meals, at cards, to have no illusions about being on rest much longer. We had coined an expressive front-line expression for this distant thunder of guns: “es wummert.”

We packed up in haste and were soon marching on the road to Cambrai in a storm like a cloudburst. Our destination was Marquion, and we reached it at five in the morning. The quarters allotted to the company were a farmyard, surrounded by demolished farm-buildings, in which each man found shelter as well as he could. I, with my one company officer, Lieutenant Schrader, crept into a little dungeon of brick that had apparently, in more peaceful times, been a goat-shed, but was now occupied only by several large rats.

At midday there was an officers’ powwow, at which we heard that we were that night to take up a position in readiness on the right of the great Cambrai-Bapaume road, not far from Beugny. We were warned that an attack by the new swift and more easily manoeuvred tanks was probable.

I paraded my company in battle order in a small orchard; and then, standing under an apple-tree, I said a few words to them as they stood round me in a horseshoe. The expression on their faces was serious and manly. There was little to say. By this time there was not a man who did not know that we were on a precipitous descent, and the fact was accepted with an equanimity that only the moral force which in every army accompanies its armed force can explain. Every man knew that victory could no longer be ours. But the enemy should know that he fought against men of honour.

On such occasions I took care not to be carried away by a spirit of daredevilry. It would hardly have been appropriate to show that one looked forward to the battle with a certain joy in the face of men whose dread of death was in many cases increased by anxiety for wife and child. 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.

Schrader and I had our meal at night on a door laid on a wheelbarrow in the farmyard, and drank a bottle of wine. We then rolled ourselves up in our goat-shed, till the guard woke us at two a.m. with the announcement that the motor lorries were in the marketplace ready to load up.

In the ghostly light we rattled over the war-torn country of last year’s Cambrai battle, through villages in grotesque states of destruction, with their streets bordered by billows of wreckage. Just before Beugny we were unloaded and led to our position. The battalion was occupying a hollow on the road Beugny-Vaux. During the morning an orderly brought orders for the company to push on to the road Frémicourt-Vaux. This typical forward movement made me sure that we were in for it till nightfall.

I led my three platoons strung out in file, through a country over which aeroplanes circled, dropping bombs and scattering bullets. When we reached our objective we dispersed in shell-holes, as an occasional shell came over the road.

I felt so bad that day that I lay down at once in a small length of trench and fell asleep. When I awoke I read Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and thus the afternoon went by, while I lay in the sun with the apathy of an invalid.

At 6:15 a despatch-rider summoned the company commanders to Captain von Weyhe.

“I have to make the serious announcement that we are to attack. After half an hour’s artillery preparation the battalion will advance at seven (!) from the western edge of Favreuil and storm the enemy lines. You are to march on the church tower of Sapignies.”

After brief coming and going and a hearty handshake we rushed back to our companies, as the artillery fire began in ten minutes and we had still a good way to march.

“By sections in single file at twenty metres interval. Direction, half left, treetops at Favreuil.”

A good sign of the spirit that was in the men now as ever was that I had to detail one man to stay behind to tell the cookers where to go. No one would volunteer.

I walked far ahead of the company with my company staff and Sergeant-major Reinecke. The shots of our guns were bursting out from behind hedges and ruins. Their fire sounded more like a furious yapping than a wave of destruction. Behind me I saw my sections advancing in perfect order. Close to them like dust flew the clouds of shots from aeroplanes; the shrapnel, bullets, empty shells, and driving bands drove with a hellish whirr between the files of the thin human line. On the right Beuquâtre lay under heavy shellfire, and jagged fragments of iron hurtled heavily overhead and drove with a sudden jab into the clayey ground.

Our advance was still more unpleasant behind the Beuquâtre-Bapaume road. A salvo of H.E. went up madly behind and before and among us. We scattered and threw ourselves into shell-holes. The smoke of shell after shell hung in clouds over the edge of Favreuil, and through it rose and fell again brown fountains of earth, one rapidly succeeding another. I went forward alone, as far as the first ruined houses, to find the way, and then gave the signal with my cane to follow.

The village was fringed with badly-shelled huts, and there detachments of the 1st and 2nd Companies assembled by degrees. A machine-gun had claimed several victims during the last part of the way. Among others, Vice-sergeant-major Balg of my company was hit in the leg. A figure in a brown waterproof came quietly across this fire-swept piece of ground and shook hands with me. Kius and Boje, Captain Junker and Schaper, Schrader, Schläger, Heins, Findeisen, Höhlemann, and Hoppenrath stood behind a hedge that was being raked with lead and iron, and held a great council of war. On many a day of wrath we had fought on one battlefield together, and this time, too, the sun, already low in the west, was to gild the blood of all, or nearly all.

Part of the 1st Battalion moved into the park of the château. Of the 2nd Battalion only my company and the 5th had come through the curtain of fire practically without casualties. We worked our way forward under cover of shell-holes and ruins to a sunken road on the western edge of the village. On the way I clapped on to my head a helmet I picked up, a precaution I never took except in critical moments. I was astonished to find Favreuil utterly deserted. Apparently the line of defence had been abandoned by the troops occupying it.

Captain von Weyhe, now lying alone and severely wounded in a shell-hole in the village, had given orders that the 5th and 8th Companies were to form the first attacking line, the 6th the second, and the 7th the third. As there was nothing to be seen so far of the 6th and the 8th, I decided to go ahead without bothering too long over the distribution of the attack in depth.

It was already seven. Looking from between fragments of houses and stumps of trees, I saw an attacking party advance across the open in two waves under moderate rifle-fire. It must be the 5th.

I drew up my men in the sunken road and gave the order to advance in two waves. “At a hundred metres interval. I myself will be between the first and second waves.”

It was our last storm. How often in years gone by we had stepped out into the western sun in a mood the same as now! Les Eparges, Guillemont, St. Pierre Vaast, Langemarck, Passchendaele, Mœuvres, Vraucourt, Mory! Again the carnival of carnage beckoned.

We left the sunken road quite according to programme, only “I myself,” as the formula of command finely puts it, suddenly found myself near Lieutenant Schrader far in front of the first wave.

Isolated rifle-shots rang out in front of us. My cane in my right hand and revolver in the left, I stumped ahead and, without observing it, left the advancing lines of the 5th Company partly behind us and partly on our right. Meanwhile I found that my Iron Cross had dropped to the ground from my breast. Schrader, my batman, and I began a zealous search for it, in spite of snipers, who seemed to be drawing ahead of us. At last Schrader extracted it from a tuft of grass and I fastened it securely on again.

The ground began to fall. Indistinct figures were seen in motion against a background of brown earth. A machine-gun spat out its bullets at us. A sense of aimlessness took hold of me. Nevertheless, we began to charge at the double. In mid-jump over a piece of trench a piercing shock through the chest took away my breath. I spun head over heels with a loud cry and fell stunned to the ground.

I woke with a sense of great misfortune. I was pinned between narrow walls of earth, and along a row of crouching figures the cry was taken up: “Stretcher-bearers! The company commander is wounded.”

An elderly man of another company was leaning over me with a kindly expression, loosening my belt and opening my tunic. Two bloodred circular marks shone out on the middle of my right breast and on my back. I was crippled and chained to earth, and the close air of the narrow trench bathed me in sweat. My good Samaritan revived me by fanning me with my map-case. My hope as I struggled for breath was for darkness to come soon, so that I could be carried back.

Of a sudden a hurricane of fire broke on us from Sapignies. It was clear that this unbroken roll, this even and regular roaring and stamping, betokened more than a defensive measure against so poorly staged an attack as ours. Above me I could see beneath his helmet Schrader’s strong face, as like a machine he loaded and fired, loaded and fired. A conversation arose between us that recalled the tower scene of the Maid of Orleans. Humorous as it was, it was all the same hardly in my mood, for I had the clear consciousness that I was done.

Above rose a cry of horror and ran from mouth to mouth: “They’re through on the left! We’re surrounded!”

This gave me back my old strength again. I fastened upon a hole that a mole had bored in the trench wall and pulled myself to my feet, while the blood poured from my mouth. With bare head and open coat I stared, revolver in hand, into the fight.

Through whitish swathes of smoke a row of men with packs came on in a straight line. Some fell and lay there, others turned head over heels like shot hares. A hundred metres in front of us the last were sucked down into the shell-pocked earth. They must have been young troops, still unacquainted with the effects of the modern rifle, for they came on with all the hardihood of ignorance.

As though drawn by strings, four tanks crept over the crest of a rise. In a few minutes our artillery had trodden them into the ground. One broke across like a tin engine. On my right the brave Mohrmann collapsed with a cry of death.

It did not seem that all was lost. I whispered to Fähnrich Wilsky to creep to the left and enfilade the gap in our line. He came back almost at once and announced that twenty metres from us the show was up and all were surrendering. It was part of the 99th Regiment there (Zabern). I turned round and saw a strange sight. From the rear there were men coming forward with their hands up. The enemy must already have taken the village from which we went to the attack.

The scene became more and more lively. We were surrounded by a circle of Germans and English and called upon to throw down our weapons. I urged those nearest me in a weak voice to fight it out to the death. Friend and foe were fired on alike. Some who surrounded our little band were shouting, some were dumb. On the left two gigantic Englishmen were using their bayonets in a length of trench from which hands were held up imploring mercy.

Among us, too, there was heard a tumult of voices. “It’s all up! Throw away your rifle! Don’t shoot, Kameraden!”

I looked at the two officers who were with me in the trench. They smiled back and with a shrug let their belts fall to the ground.

There was left only the choice of being taken or being shot. And now the moment had come to show whether all that I had often said to the men when on rest about the fighting spirit was more than empty phrases. I crawled out of the trench and staggered off in the direction of Favreuil. Two Englishmen who were taking a haul of prisoners of the 99th Regiment to their own lines barred my way. I shot the nearest one in the middle of the body with my revolver. He collapsed like a dummy figure. The other blazed his rifle at me and missed. These quick movements caused the blood to be driven clear of the lung in deep pulsations. I could breathe more freely, and set off at a run over the open beside the trench. Lieutenant Schläger was crouching behind a traverse with a section who were still firing. They joined forces with me. Some English who were going over the open stopped to get a Lewis gun in position and began shooting at us. Except for me, Schläger, and two others, not one escaped. Schläger, who had lost his pince-nez, told me afterwards that he saw nothing but my map-case flying up and down. The continuous loss of blood gave me the lightness and airiness of intoxication. One thing only bothered me⁠—that I might collapse too soon.⁠ ⁠…

At last we reached a half-moon-shaped earthwork to the right of Favreuil whence half a dozen heavy machine-guns were pumping lead on friend and foe without distinction. Enemy shots were spluttering against the parapet; men danced to and fro in the greatest excitement. A N.C.O. of the Medical Corps attached to the 6th Company tore off my tunic and advised me to lie down at once, as otherwise I might bleed to death in a very few minutes.

I was rolled in a groundsheet and carried past the outskirts of Favreuil. Some men of my own and the 6th Company went with me.

After a few hundred paces we were fired on from the village at close range. The shots went with a smack into the human bodies. The stretcher-bearer of the 6th Company who carried the rear end of my groundsheet was laid out with a bullet through the head; I was dropped as he fell.

The small detachment had thrown themselves flat on the ground and now crept to the nearest hollow, with bullets dropping into the ground all round them.

I lay by myself, firmly secured in my groundsheet, awaiting the coup de grâce.

And yet, so long as a man of my company lived, I was not quite forsaken. Near by I heard Lance-corporal Hengstmann’s voice: “I’ll take you on my back, sir. Either we’ll get through or, at worst, we’ll lie where we fall.”

Unfortunately, we did not get through. Too many rifles were aimed at us at almost point-blank range. He took me on his back with my arms round his neck, but before we had gone very far there was a metallic report and Hengstmann sank softly beneath me to the ground. I released myself from his arms that were still clasped under my knees, and found that a bullet had passed through helmet and temples. This brave man was a schoolmaster’s son from Letter near Hanover.

This evil precedent did not deter another from coming to my aid and venturing on a fresh attempt to rescue me. It was Sergeant Strichalsky of the Medical Corps. He took me on his shoulders and carried me safely to the blind side of the rise of ground.

It was getting dark. The men found the groundsheet of a dead man and carried me over a deserted stretch of ground over which, far and near, jagged flashes were flaming up. I had to struggle for breath, one of the most painful sensations there are. The smoke of the cigarette that a man was smoking ten paces in front threatened to suffocate me.

At length we reached a dressing-station in charge of a friend of mine, Dr. Key. He made me a divine lemon-squash, and then put me into a refreshing sleep with an injection of morphine.

Next day began the usual journey by stages to the rear. The terrible journey by car to the war hospital brought me to the edge of the grave. Then I was in nurses’ hands. Though I am no misogynist, I was always irritated by the presence of women every time that the fate of battle threw me into the bed of a hospital ward. One sank, after the manly and purposeful activities of the war, into a vague atmosphere of warmth. The clear objectivity of the Catholic nursing sisterhoods afforded a welcome exception. I found with them an atmosphere very congenial to soldiering.

My wound was made lighter by many expressions of sympathy; and indeed bodily suffering always increases the sensibility of the inner being. From the Plancots I had a delightful letter, written when the enemy, who were gaining ground very slowly, first began shelling Cambrai. They sent me also a tin of milk they could ill spare, and the only melon their garden had produced. I must not let slip this opportunity of saying that I found many an example among the French civilian population of that internationality of the heart that every decent man and educated soldier ought to uphold. The last of my long series of batmen, too, was no exception to the rest. He stuck by me, though the hospital allowed no provisions to be made for him and he had to beg what he could in the kitchen.

I amused myself once during the monotonous hours on my back by counting the number of times I had been hit. I found that I had been hit in all fourteen times: six times by rifle-bullets, once by a shrapnel bullet, once by a shell splinter, three times by bomb splinters, and twice by splinters of rifle-bullets. Counting the ins and outs, this made precisely twenty punctures, so that I might confidently, with that Roman centurion, Holkschen Reiter, take my place in every warlike circle. Certainly I could at any time assert my claim to belong to one order at least, namely, that of the gold wound-stripes. This honour did in fact come to me at this very time, though the gold, certainly, was only yellow-lacquered metal. Yet I must confess I had it sewn on my coat with a certain pleasure, for if doctors and professors, for all their correctness, do not look askance upon the stamp of an official title, why should the soldier refuse a visible sign of his gallantry? The worth of an order, as of everything else, lies not on but beneath the surface; and who would grudge a heart that has so often beaten fast in the excitement of battle for country’s sake the adornment of a bit of enamel as the outward sign? In huckstering times, indeed, when everything turns on money, these things lose their value, for it rests solely within the ideal with which they are bound up.

After fourteen days I was lying on the feather mattress of a hospital train. Once again a German landscape flitted by me, tinged this time with the first dyes of autumn, and once again, as on that time at Heidelberg, I was gripped by the sad and proud feeling of being more closely bound to my country because of the blood shed for her greatness. Why should I conceal that tears smarted in my eyes when I thought of the end of the enterprise in which I had borne my share? I had set out to the war gaily enough, thinking we were to hold a festival on which all the pride of youth was lavished, and I had thought little, once I was in the thick of it, about the ideal that I had to stand for. Now I looked back: four years of development in the midst of a generation predestined to death, spent in caves, smoke-filled trenches, and shell-illumined wastes; years enlivened only by the pleasures of a mercenary, and nights of guard after guard in an endless perspective; in short, a monotonous calendar full of hardships and privation, divided by the red-letter days of battles. And almost without any thought of mine, the idea of the Fatherland had been distilled from all these afflictions in a clearer and brighter essence. That was the final winnings in a game on which so often all had been staked: the nation was no longer for me an empty thought veiled in symbols; and how could it have been otherwise when I had seen so many die for its sake, and been schooled myself to stake my life for its credit every minute, day and night, without a thought? And so, strange as it may sound, I learned from this very four years’ schooling in force and in all the fantastic extravagance of material warfare that life has no depth of meaning except when it is pledged for an ideal, and that there are ideals in comparison with which the life of an individual and even of a people has no weight. And though the aim for which I fought as an individual, as an atom in the whole body of the army, was not to be achieved, though material force cast us, apparently, to the earth, yet we learned once and for all to stand for a cause and if necessary to fall as befitted men.

Hardened as scarcely another generation ever was in fire and flame, we could go into life as though from the anvil; into friendship, love, politics, professions, into all that destiny had in store. It is not every generation that is so favoured.

And if it be objected that we belong to a time of crude force our answer is: We stood with our feet in mud and blood, yet our faces were turned to things of exalted worth. And not one of that countless number who fell in our attacks fell for nothing. Each one fulfilled his own resolve. For to everyone may be applied the saying from St. John that Dostoevsky put in front of his greatest novel:

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.”

Today we cannot understand the martyrs who threw themselves into the arena in a transport that lifted them even before their deaths beyond humanity, beyond every phase of pain and fear. Their faith no longer exercises a compelling force. When once it is no longer possible to understand how a man gives his life for his country⁠—and the time will come⁠—then all is over with that faith also, and the idea of the Fatherland is dead; and then, perhaps, we shall be envied, as we envy the saints their inward and irresistible strength. For all these great and solemn ideas bloom from a feeling that dwells in the blood and that cannot be forced. In the cold light of reason everything alike is a matter of expedience and sinks to the paltry and mean. It was our luck to live in the invisible rays of a feeling that filled the heart, and of this inestimable treasure we can never be deprived.

I had the good fortune to be taken out at Hanover and sent to the Clementine infirmary. One of my companions there was a young flying-man of Richthofen’s squadron, named Wenzel, who had shot down twelve of the enemy. The last of them had first shot him through the shoulder.

On the 22nd of September 1918 I had the following telegram:

His Majesty the Kaiser has bestowed on you the order Pour le Mérite. I congratulate you in the name of the whole Division.

As soon as I was fit enough I celebrated this event with Wenzel, my brother, and a few friends. As a doubt had been expressed whether we should soon be passed out fit for active service, Wenzel and I felt ourselves compelled to jump again and again over a large armchair. We came out of it, however, very badly. Wenzel broke his arm again, and I was kept in bed next morning with a temperature of 104.

In spite of this it was not long before we were in excellent form for another winter campaign. This was deferred for a while; and we soon had to take part in other battles than we ever dreamed.

Now these too are over, and already we see once more in the dim light of the future the tumult of fresh ones. We⁠—by this I mean those of the youth of this land who are capable of enthusiasm for an ideal⁠—will not shrink from them. We stand in the memory of the dead who are holy to us, and we believe ourselves entrusted with the true and spiritual welfare of our people. We stand for what will be and for what has been. Though force without and barbarity within conglomerate in sombre clouds, yet so long as the blade of a sword will strike a spark in the night may it be said: Germany lives and Germany shall never go under!