The Storm of Steel

Introduction

This book does not pretend to be fiction, and if it provides entertainment it is on account of its sterling honesty. This same quality gives it an even higher value as a document, and it is as such that those will read it who desire to arrive at any conclusion at once profound and useful about the War.

Its honesty, however, lends this book a further attraction. The young student of nineteen, who entered the German Army of his own free will, before the War was a year old, and “stuck it” in spite of twenty wounds and the usual disillusionment that we all experienced, displays the truly adventurous spirit. He is a real schoolboy, childishly delighted with life, forgivably boasting of his drinking capacity. He is no more brutal or insensitive than any other explorer, Arctic or Equatorial. He snipes at English Tommies or French poilus, and naively claims to have hit them, in a spirit of sportsmanship which contains no sting for us because we know the inevitable end. The remarkable thing is that, perhaps on account of his youth, perhaps because of German over-training, possibly because of some personal quality, he never seems to see that the end was inevitable. He had no conception of himself as the man of violence, so familiar in Holy Writ or classic story. He must have been astonished to find himself described as a “Hun.” There was nothing petty or mean about his deliberate destruction of property in the German retreat of 1917. It was part of the game, and there is no word against the similar treatment of East Prussia by the Russians. That was war as he saw it. He had his regrets for friends and comrades slain all round him, aesthetic appreciation of the landscape of the Western Front, on which alone he served, bursts of philosophy which are no worse than most, and very considerable narrative power. Yet none of these qualities helped him to any understanding of what war is, and must be. Right to the end, when, helmetless, his lungs full of blood, he saw the German troops coming up from the support line, holding up their hands and throwing away their arms and equipment, he clings to his ideal of military Germany expressed in the last three pages. Even after that, when writing this book, he seems to imagine that a sort of Nietzschean-Wagnerian atmosphere of heroics translated into terms of gas and tanks can be recreated out of the wreckage of empire. One cannot but respect the sincere, courageous fighter.

What, then, does this book prove? There are in it mistakes of fact due, I think, to the physical effects on his memory of repeated blows from great pieces of metal. There is the necessary limitation of one who was never other than a company officer, and who apparently did not know the very names of the battles into the forefront of which he was thrust. There are statements of things seen or done on battlefields, at moments when neither he nor anyone else could be sure of accuracy; they may be put down as images evoked by the delirium of battle fever. Yet the whole is stamped with truth, and has remained untranslated since its first publication in Germany in 1921. It comes most opportunely now, when there are signs of an attempt to resurrect the God of War, to re-gild his gas-bleached armour, and to clothe in some sort of martial panoply the machinery on which he depends. To discredit such an attempt, nothing could be better than the diary of this high-minded devotee of personal combat. He was no middle-aged civilian, unwillingly taking up arms and finding all his worst preconceptions abundantly fulfilled. He was nearly as good a specimen as ever worshipped Mars, and to what did he come?—to that unescapable doom that brings to meet violence precisely such resistance as shall cancel and annul it. On this point the strength and finality of the testimony cannot be missed. It is to be hoped that the book will be widely read.

The Author’s Preface to the English Edition

It is not impossible that among the English readers of this book there may be one who in 1915 and 1916 was in one of those trenches that were woven like a web, among the ruins of Monchy-au-Bois. In that case he had opposite him at that time the 73rd Hanoverian Fusiliers, who wear as their distinctive badge a brassard with “Gibraltar” inscribed on it in gold, in memory of the defence of that fortress under General Elliot; for this, besides Waterloo, has its place in the regiment’s history.

At the time I refer to I was a nineteen-year-old lieutenant in command of a platoon, and my part of the line was easily recognizable from the English side by a row of tall shell-stripped trees that rose from the ruins of Monchy. My left flank was bounded by the sunken road leading to Berles-au-Bois, which was in the hands of the English; my right was marked by a sap running out from our lines, one that helped us many a time to make our presence felt by means of bombs and rifle-grenades.

I daresay this reader remembers, too, the white tomcat, lamed in one foot by a stray bullet, who had his headquarters in No-man’s-land. He used often to pay me a visit at night in my dugout. This creature, the sole living being that was on visiting terms with both sides, always made on me an impression of extreme mystery. This charm of mystery which lay over all that belonged to the other side, to that danger zone full of unseen figures, is one of the strongest impressions that the war has left with me. At that time, before the battle of the Somme, which opened a new chapter in the history of the war, the struggle had not taken on that grim and mathematical aspect which cast over its landscapes a deeper and deeper gloom. There was more rest for the soldier than in the later years when he was thrown into one murderous battle after another; and so it is that many of those days come back to my memory now with a light on them that is almost peaceful.

In our talks in the trenches, in the dugout, or on the fire-step, we often talked of the “Tommy”; and, as any genuine soldier will easily understand, we spoke of him very much more respectfully than was commonly the case with the newspapers of those days. There is no one less likely to disparage the lion than the lion-hunter.

Indeed, the landscape in which we lived at that time had something about it of primeval Africa, with two mighty forces of nature locked in conflict there. It was only now and again that one caught sight of a brownish-yellow fleeting shadow against the desolate countryside that stretched on and on before one’s eyes; or heard, after creeping through the wire at night, a whisper or a cough from a post. The distant sound of transport, a cloud of smoke from a fire hidden from view, fresh chalk spoil thrown out on the tortured ground, the monotonous duel of the guns stretching on from week to month—those were signs that we puzzled over as though they were the runes of a secret book or the spoor of some mighty and unknown beast that came nightly to drink.

As time went on, it grew more and more dangerous to lift a corner of the veil that fell like a magic hood over the spectre that was at once so near and so fatally far off. Raids undertaken to get a glimpse of the enemy’s lines and some information about what was going on there became less frequent and more exacting as the volume and mass of war material increased. A more and more terrific barrage had to be put down before ten or twenty picked men, armed to the teeth, could make their occasional and exceedingly brief appearances in the opposing trenches. What the survivors brought back with them was the memory of a rapid and frantic glance into Vulcan’s white-hot cauldron.

Still, there were moments of another kind when the deep discord and the even deeper unity of this landscape came more clearly to one’s mind. It was strange, for example, to hear at night the cry of the partridges from the waste fields, or at dawn the careless song of the lark as it rose high above the trenches. Did it not seem then that life itself was speaking out of the confidence of its savage and visionary heart, knowing very well that in its more secret and essential depths it had nothing to fear from even the deadliest of wars, and going its way quite unaffected by the superficial interchange of peace and war?

But then, too, did not this life, ruthless towards its creatures, superior to the pain and pleasure of the individual, looking on with indifference while its passive forces were melted down in the crucible of war, enter very clearly even into the soldier’s simple mind? Many a time, in that quiet interlude after sunset before the first Verey light went up, this message was brought very neat to the soul by the song of an outlying post waiting for the night relief. There was a deeper homesickness there than any peace in this world can set at rest.

Then the fire-step was manned once more, the relief moved off along the communication trenches, and the brisker rifle-fire of the nighttime broke out; the ear was again on stretch to catch the pulse-beat of that other life under arms over there in the darkness. And often the Verey lights went up in dozens and the trench got lively when a patrol had crept up to our wire.

Today there is no secret about what those trenches concealed, and a book such as this may, like a trench-map years after the event, be read with sympathy and interest by the other side. But here not only the blue and red lines of the trenches are shown, but the blood that beat and the life that lay hid in them.

Time only strengthens my conviction that it was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart. The front-line soldier whose foot came down on the earth so grimly and harshly may claim this at least, that it came down cleanly. Warlike achievements are enhanced by the inherent worth of the enemy. Of all the troops who were opposed to the Germans on the great battlefields the English were not only the most formidable but the manliest and the most chivalrous. I rejoice, therefore, to have an opportunity of expressing in time of peace the sincere admiration which I never failed to make clear during the war whenever I came across a wounded man or a prisoner belonging to the British forces.

Orainville

The train stopped at Bazancourt, a small town in Champagne, and there we got out. With unbelievable awe we listened to the slow pulsation of the machinery of the front, a tune to which long years were to accustom us. Far away the white ball of a shrapnel shell melted into the grey December sky. The breath of the war passed by us with its peculiar horror. Did we imagine that nearly every one of us would be swallowed up in the days when that dull muttering over there broke out into unceasing thunder … one earlier, another later?

We had left lecture-room, classroom, and bench behind us. We had been welded by a few weeks’ training into the corporate mass inspired by the enthusiasm of one thought … to carry forward the German ideals of ’70. We had grown up in a material age, and in each one of us there was the yearning for great experience, such as we had never known. The war had entered into us like wine. We had set out in a rain of flowers to seek the death of heroes. The war was our dream of greatness, power, and glory. It was a man’s work, a duel on fields whose flowers would be stained with blood. There is no lovelier death in the world … anything rather than stay at home, anything to make one with the rest. …

Our fevered thoughts cooled down as we marched through the heavy chalk loam of Champagne. Pack and ammunition and rifle weighed on us like lead.

At last we reached the village of Orainville, the rest-place of the 73rd Fusiliers, a little spot typical of that neighbourhood, consisting of fifty cottages built of brick or flint round a park-enclosed château.

The traffic in the village street was strange to eyes accustomed to peace conditions. There were only a few uneasy and unkempt civilians to be seen. Everywhere there were soldiers in worn and torn coats, with tanned faces and thick beards, who went to and fro with long swinging strides, or lounging in small groups at the cottage doors assailed us newcomers with chaff. At one place there was a cooker smelling of bean soup and surrounded by a ration-party clattering dixies. The Wallenstein-like romance was heightened by the incipient dilapidation of the village.

After spending our first night in a huge barn, we were paraded before the adjutant, Lieutenant (as he then was) von Brixen, in the courtyard of the château, and told off to our companies; mine being the 9th.

Our first day of the war was destined to make a very distinct impression on us. We were sitting in the schoolhouse, where we were quartered, having breakfast. Suddenly there was a series of heavy explosions close by and soldiers rushed from every house and crowded to the entrance of the village. We followed their example without knowing why. Again there was the peculiar whisper and fluster overhead that we had never before heard, drowned in a terrific crash. I was surprised to see the men round me crouching as if bent under terrific pressure.

Immediately after, black groups appeared in the empty village street, bearing black bundles on stretchers or on joined hands. A feeling of unreality oppressed me as I stared at a figure streaming with blood whose limbs hung loose and who unceasingly gave a hoarse cry for help, as though death had him already by the throat. He was carried into a cottage with the Red Cross flag over the door. What was all this, then? The war had shown its claws and torn off its pleasant mask. It was so mysterious, so impersonal. One had scarcely given a thought to the enemy carrying on his secret and malignant existence somewhere behind. The impression of something arising entirely from beyond the pale of experience was so strange that it was difficult to see the connection of things. It was like a ghost at noon.

A shell had hit the entrance of the château and had struck a mass of stones and masonry into the doorway just as the inmates, terrified by the previous shell-burst, were flocking out. There were thirteen casualties—among them the bandmaster, Gebhard, whom I knew well by sight from the Promenade Concerts at Hanover. A horse standing tied up at the steps realized the danger before the human beings, and breaking loose galloped unhurt into the courtyard.

I could tell from talking to my companions that this episode had somewhat damped their martial ardour. It had affected me too. I seldom heard the rumble of a passing lorry without mistaking it for the sound of that deadly shell.

In any case, however, it was our fate all through the war to start at any sudden and unexpected sound. Whether a train clattered by, or a book fell on the floor, or a cry rang out at night, the heart always stood still for a moment in the belief that some great and unknown danger threatened. It was the sign of living four years under the shadow of death. The effect upon the dark regions that lie beneath the consciousness was so deep that at the least interruption of the usual course Death started up with warning hand, or as he does in those clocks where he appears above the dial at every hour with sandglass and scythe. It was a sensation over which habit could not prevail, since the instinct of self-preservation remains always the same. The notion that a soldier becomes hardier and bolder as war proceeds is mistaken. What he gains in the science and art of attacking his enemy he loses in strength of nerve. The only dam against this loss is a sense of honour so resolute that few attain to it. For this reason I consider that troops composed of boys of twenty, under experienced leadership, are the most formidable.

On the evening of the same day came the moment we had so long desired, when, heavily laden, we set out for the line. Our way led through Betricourt, whose ruins stood up fantastically in the dusk, to a lonely ranger’s lodge concealed in pine woods, known as the Fasanerie. This was battalion reserve, and the 9th Company was in reserve till that night. The officer commanding was Lieutenant R. Brahms.

We reported and were detailed to our platoons, and soon found ourselves surrounded by bearded, mud-caked companions, who greeted us with a certain ironical good-humour. They asked us how things were going in Hanover and whether the war was going to end soon. Then the talk fell to laconic remarks about trenches, cookers, shellfire, and other matters of trench warfare.

After a while there was a shout to “turn out” at the entrance of our hut-like shelter. We fell in with our sections, and at the command “Laden und sichern” we put a clip of live cartridges into the magazine with secret joy.

Then in silence and in single file we went across country through the night, in a landscape studded with clumps of woodland. Now and then a single shot rang out, or a rocket fizzed up and after a brief and ghastly illumination left the darkness blacker than before. The dull clink of rifles and entrenching tools was varied by the warning cry, “Look out: wire!”

Then suddenly a rattle and a crash, and a curse: “Can’t you open your mouth when there’s a shell-hole coming?”

The corporal takes up the tale. “Shut up, blast you! Do you think the French have mud in their ears?” We get on quicker. The dark of night, the glimmer of a Verey light, the slow flicker of rifle-fire, induce a tremulous, alert state of the nerves; occasionally a chance bullet sings by, cool and thin, overhead and is lost in the distance. How often since then have I gone up the line in a mood half of excitement and half of melancholy through scenes of utter desolation!