All quiet on the Western Front
dark. We climb in. It is a warm evening and the twilight seems like
a canopy under whose shelter we feel drawn together. Even the stingy
Tjaden gives me a cigarette and then a light.
We stand jammed in together, shoulder to shoulder, there is no room
to sit. But we do not expect that. Müller is in a good mood for
once; he is wearing his new boots.
The engines drone, the lorries bump and rattle. The roads are worn
and full of holes. We dare not show a light so we lurch along and
are often almost pitched out. That does not worry us, however. It
can happen if it likes; a broken arm is better than a hole in the
guts, and many a man would be thankful enough for such a chance of
finding his way home again.
Beside us stream the munition-columns in long files. They are making
the pace, they overtake us going forward. We joke with them and they
answer back.
A wall becomes visible, it belongs to a house which lies on the side
of the road. I suddenly prick up my ears. Am I deceived? Again I
hear distinctly the cackle of geese. A glance at Katczinsky--a
glance from him to me; we understand one another.
"Kat, I hear some aspirants for the frying-pan over there."
He nods. "It will be attended to when we come back. I have their
number."
Of course Kat has their number. He knows all about every leg of
goose within a radius of fifteen miles.
The lorries arrive at the artillery lines. The gun-emplacements are
camouflaged with bushes against aerial observation, and look like a
kind of military Feast of the Tabernacles. These branches might seem
gay and cheerful were not cannon embowered there.
The air becomes acrid with the smoke of the guns and the fog. The
fumes of powder taste bitter on the tongue. The roar of the guns
makes our lorry stagger, the reverberation rolls raging away to the
rear, everything quakes. Our faces change imperceptibly. We are
not, indeed, in the front-line, but only in the reserves, yet in
every face can be read: This is the Front, now we are within its
embrace.
It is not fear. Men who have been up as often as we have become
thick skinned. Only the young recruits are agitated. Kat explains
to them: "That was a twelve-inch. You hear the explosion first and
afterwards comes the sound of the gun."
But the hollow sound of the firing does not reach us. It is
swallowed up in the general murmur of the front. Kat listens:
"There'll be a bombardment to-night."
We all listen. The front is restless. "The Tommies are firing
already," says Kropp.
The shelling can be heard distinctly. It is the English batteries to
the right of our section. They are beginning an hour too soon.
According to us they start punctually at ten o'clock.
"What's got them?" says Müller, "their clocks must be fast."
"There'll be a bombardment, I tell you, I can feel it in my bones."
Kat shrugs his shoulders.
Three shells land beside us. The burst of flame shoots across the
fog, the fragments howl and drone. We shiver and are glad to think
that we shall be back in the huts early in the morning.
Our faces are neither paler nor more flushed than usual; they are not
more tense nor more flabby--and yet they are changed. We feel that
in our blood a contact has shot home. That is no figure of speech;
it is fact. It is the front, the consciousness of the front, that
makes this contact. The moment that the first shells whistle over
and the air is rent with the explosions there is suddenly in our
veins, in our hands, in our eyes a tense waiting, a watching, a
heightened alertness, a strange sharpening of the senses. The body
with one bound is in full readiness.
It often seems to me as though it were the vibrating, shuddering air
that with a noiseless leap springs upon us; or as though the front
itself emitted an electric current which awakened unknown
nerve-centres.
Every time it is the same. We start out for the front plain
soldiers, either cheerful or gloomy: then come the first
gun-emplacements and every word of our speech has a new ring.
When Kat stands in front of the hut and says: "There'll be a
bombardment," that is merely his own opinion; but if he says it here,
then the sentence has the sharpness of a bayonet in the moonlight, it
cuts clean through the thought, it thrusts nearer and speaks to this
unknown thing that is awakened in us, a dark meaning--"There'll be a
bombardment." Perhaps it is our inner and most secret life that
shivers and falls on guard.
* *
To me the front is a mysterious whirlpool. Though I am in still
water far away from its centre, I feel the whirl of the vortex
sucking me slowly, irresistibly, inescapably into itself.
From the earth, from the air, sustaining forces pour into us--mostly
from the earth. To no man does the earth mean so much as to the
soldier. When he presses himself down upon her long and powerfully,
when he buries his face and his limbs deep in her from the fear of
death by shell-fire, then she is his only friend, his brother, his
mother; he stifles his terror and his cries in her silence and her
security; she shelters him and gives him a new lease of ten seconds
of life, receives him again and often for ever.
Earth!--Earth!--Earth!
Earth with thy folds, and hollows and holes, into which a man may
fling himself and crouch down! In the spasm of terror, under the
hailing of annihilation, in the bellowing death of the explosions, O
Earth, thou grantest us the great resisting surge of new-won life.
Our being, almost utterly carried away by the fury of the storm,
streams back through our hands from thee, and we, thy redeemed ones,
bury ourselves in thee, and through the long minutes in a mute agony
of hope bite into thee with our lips!
At the sound of the first droning of the shells we rush back, in one
part of our being, a thousand years. By the animal instinct that is
awakened in us we are led and protected. It is not conscious; it is
far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. One
cannot explain it. A man is walking along without thought or
heed;--suddenly he throws himself down on the ground and a storm of
fragments flies harmlessly over him;--yet he cannot remember either
to have heard the shell coming or to have thought of flinging himself
down. But had he not abandoned himself to the impulse he would now
be a heap of mangled flesh. It is this other, this second sight in
us, that has thrown us to the ground and saved us, without our
knowing how. If it were not so, there would not be one man alive
from Flanders to the Vosges.
We march up, moody or good-tempered soldiers--we reach the zone where
the front begins and become on the instant human animals.
* *
An indigent looking wood receives us. We pass by the soup-kitchens.
Under cover of the wood we climb out. The lorries turn back. They
are to collect us again in the morning, before dawn.
Mist and the smoke of guns lie breast-high over the fields. The moon
is shining. Along the road troops file. Their helmets gleam softly
in the moonlight. The heads and the rifles stand out above the white
mist, nodding heads, rocking carriers of guns.
Farther on the mist ends. Here the heads become figures; coats,
trousers, and boots appear out of the mist as from a milky pool.
They become a column. The column marches on, straight ahead, the
figures resolve themselves into a block, individuals are no longer
recognizable, the dark wedge presses onward, fantastically topped by
the heads and weapons floating off on the milky pool. A column--not
men at all.
Guns and munition wagons are moving along a cross-road. The backs of
the horses shine in the moonlight, their movements are beautiful,
they toss their heads, and their eyes gleam. The guns and the wagons
float before the dim background of the moonlit landscape, the riders
in their steel helmets resemble knights of a forgotten time; it is
strangely beautiful and arresting.
We push on to the pioneer dump. Some of us load our shoulders with
pointed and twisted iron stakes; others thrust smooth iron rods
through rolls of wire and go off with them. The burdens are awkward
and heavy.
The ground becomes more broken. From ahead come warnings: "Look out,
deep shell-hole on the left"--"Mind, trenches"----
Our eyes peer out, our feet and our sticks feel in front of us before
they take the weight of the body. Suddenly the line halts; I bump my
face against the roll of wire carried by the man in front and curse.
There are some shell-smashed lorries in the road. Another order:
"Cigarettes and pipes out," We are getting near the line.
In the meantime it has become pitch dark. We skirt a small wood and
then have the front line immediately before us.
An uncertain, red glow spreads along the sky line from one end to the
other. It is in perpetual movement, punctuated with the bursts of
flame from the muzzles of the batteries. Balls of light rise up high
above it, silver and red spheres which explode and rain down in
showers of red, white, and green stars. French rockets go up, which
unfold a silk parachute to the air and drift slowly down. They light
up everything as bright as day, their light shines on us and we see
our shadows sharply outlined on the ground. They hover for the space
of a minute before they burn out. Immediately fresh ones shoot up to
the sky, and again green, red, and blue stars.
"Bombardment," says Kat.
The thunder of the guns swells to a single heavy roar and then breaks
up again into separate explosions. The dry bursts of the
machine-guns rattle. Above us the air teems with invisible swift
movement, with howls, pipings, and hisses. They are the smaller
shells;--and amongst them, booming through the night like an organ,
go the great coal-boxes and the heavies. They have a hoarse, distant
bellow like a rutting stag and make their way high above the howl and
whistle of the smaller shells. It reminds me of flocks of wild geese
when I hear them. Last autumn the wild geese flew day after day
across the path of the shells.
The searchlights begin to sweep the dark sky. They slide along it
like gigantic tapering rulers. One of them pauses, and quivers a
little. Immediately a second is beside him, a black insect is caught
between them and tries to escape--the airman. He hesitates, is
blinded and falls.
* *
At regular intervals we ram in the iron stakes. Two men hold a roll
and the others spool off the barbed wire. It is that awful stuff
with close-set, long spikes. I am not used to unrolling it and tear
my hand.
After a few hours it is done. But there is still some time before
the lorries come. Most of us lie down and sleep. I try also, but it
has turned too chilly. Near to the sea one is constantly waked by
the cold.
Once I fall fast asleep. Then waking suddenly with a start I do not
know where I am. I see the stars, I see the rockets, and for a
moment have the impression that I have fallen asleep at a garden
fête. I don't know whether it is morning or evening, I lie in the
pale cradle of the twilight, and listen for soft words which will
come, soft and near--am I crying? I put my hand to my eyes, it is so
fantastic, am I a child? Smooth skin:--it lasts only a second, then
I recognize the silhouette of Katczinsky. The old veteran, he sits
quietly and smokes his pipe--a covered pipe of course. When he sees
I am awake, he says: "That gave you a fright. It was only a
nose-cap, it landed in the bushes over there."
I sit up, I feel myself strangely alone. It's good Kat is there. He
gazes thoughtfully at the front and says:
"Mighty fine fire-works if they weren't so dangerous."
One lands behind us. Two recruits jump up terrified. A couple of