‘Revenge for Captain von Brixen!’ We drew our pistols and climbed over the wires, through which the first of the wounded were already dragging themselves back.
I looked left and right. The moment before the engagement was an unforgettable picture. In shell craters against the enemy line, which was still being forked over and over by the fire-storm, lay the battalions of attackers, clumped together by company. At the sight of the dammed-up masses of men, the breakthrough appeared certain to me. But did we have the strength and the stamina to splinter also the enemy reserves and rend them apart? I was confident. The decisive battle, the last charge, was here. Here the fates of nations would be decided, what was at stake was the future of the world. I sensed the weight of the hour, and I think everyone felt the individual in them dissolve, and fear depart.
The mood was curious, brimming with tension and a kind of exaltation. Officers stood up and exchanged banter. I saw Solemacher standing there in a long coat in the midst of his little staff, a short pipe with a green bowl in his hand, like a huntsman on a cold day, waiting for the gillies to do their work. We exchanged a fraternal wave. Often a mortar would fall short, and a shower of earth as high as a steeple would cover the waiting men, and no one would even flinch. The noise of battle had become so terrific, that no one was at all clear-headed.
Three minutes before the attack, Vinke beckoned to me with a full water-bottle. I took a long pull, as though it were indeed only water I was drinking. Now just the cigar was missing. Three times the air pressure snuffed out my match.
The great moment was at hand. The wave of fire had trundled up to the first lines. We attacked.
Our rage broke like a storm. Thousands must have fallen already. That was clear; and even though the shelling continued it felt quiet, as though it had lost its imperative thrust.
No man’s land was packed tight with attackers, advancing singly, in little groups or great masses towards the curtain of fire. They didn’t run or even take cover if the vast plume of an explosion rose between them. Ponderous, but unstoppable, they advanced on the enemy lines. It was as though nothing could hurt them anymore.
In the midst of these masses that had risen up, one was still alone; the units were all mixed up. I had lost my men from sight; they had disappeared like a wave in the crashing surf. All I had with me were my Vinke and a one-year volunteer by the name of Haake. In my right hand, I gripped my pistol, in my left, a bamboo riding-crop. Even though I was feeling hot, I was still wearing my long coat, and, as per regulations, gloves. As we advanced, we were in the grip of a berserk rage. The overwhelming desire to kill lent wings to my stride. Rage squeezed bitter tears from my eyes.
The immense desire to destroy that overhung the battlefield precipitated a red mist in our brains. We called out sobbing and stammering fragments of sentences to one another, and an impartial observer might have concluded that we were all ecstatically happy.
The shredded wire entanglements provided no obstacle at all, and we cleared the first trench, barely recognizable as such, in a single bound. The wave of attackers danced like a row of ghosts through the white seething mists of the flattened dip. There was no one here to oppose us.
Quite unexpectedly, the clatter of machine-gun fire rattled at us from the second line. I and my companions jumped into a crater. Another second, and there was a fearsome crash, and I sprawled on my face. Vinke grabbed me by the collar, and twisted me round on to my back: ‘Lieutenant, are you hurt?’ There was no sign of anything. The one-year volunteer had a hole in his upper arm, and assured us in groans that the bullet had lodged in his back. We tore the tunic off him and bandaged him up. A smooth furrow showed that a shrapnel shell had struck the lip of the crater on a level with our faces. It was a miracle we were still alive. It seemed the enemy were more obdurate than we’d given them credit for.
Others by now had overtaken us. We plunged after them, leaving our wounded man to his fate, having put up a piece of wood with a white strip of gauze hanging from it as a sign for the wave of stretcher-bearers that would follow. Half left of us the great railway embankment of the Ecoust-Croisilles line loomed up out of the haze; we had to get across that. From built-in loopholes and dugout windows, the rifle and machine-gun fire was pattering at us so thickly it was like having a sack of dried peas emptied over you. They could see what they were doing too.
Vinke had disappeared somewhere. I followed a defile, from whose sides flattened dugouts gaped. I strode along furiously, across the black opened ground that the acrid fumes of our shells seemed to cling to. I was quite alone.
Then I saw my first enemy. A figure in brown uniform, wounded apparently, crouched twenty paces away in the middle of the battered path, with his hands propped on the ground. I turned a corner, and we caught sight of each other. I saw him jump as I approached, and stare at me with gaping eyes, while I, with my face behind my pistol, stalked up to him slowly and coldly. A bloody scene with no witnesses was about to happen. It was a relief to me, finally, to have the foe in front of me and within reach. I set the mouth of the pistol at the man’s temple – he was too frightened to move – while my other fist grabbed hold of his tunic, feeling medals and badges of rank. An officer; he must have held some command post in these trenches. With a plaintive sound, he reached into his pocket, not to pull out a weapon, but a photograph which he held up to me. I saw him on it, surrounded by numerous family, all standing on a terrace.
It was a plea from another world. Later, I thought it was blind chance that I let him go and plunged onward. That one man of all often appeared in my dreams. I hope that meant he got to see his homeland again.
Men from my company were jumping down into the defile from above. I was boiling hot. I tore off my coat, and threw it away. I remember shouting: ‘Now Lieutenant Junger’s throwing off his coat!’ several times, and the fusiliers laughing, as if it had been the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Everyone was pouring across the open terrain, careless of the machine guns that can have been no more than four hundred yards away. I too ran blindly towards the fire-spitting embankment. In some crater, I landed on top of a pistol-potting figure in brown corduroy. It was Kius, who was in a similar mood to me, and who passed me a fistful of cartridges by way of greeting.
I concluded from that that our penetration into the cratered area in front of the railway embankment must have hit upon some resistance, because I had taken a good supply of pistol bullets with me before we set out. Probably it was the rest of the troops who had been dislodged from the trenches and had settled here, popping up in various places in among the attackers. But as far as this part of the story goes, I have no recollection. All I know is I must have got through it, and unhurt, even though there was firing from craters on all sides, not to mention the bullets fizzing down from the embankment on friend and foe alike. They must have had an inexhaustible supply of ammunition in there.
Our attention now shifted to that obstacle, which loomed up in front of us like a menacing wall. The scarred field that separated us from it was still held by hundreds of scattered British. Some were trying to scramble back, others were already engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with our forward troops.
Kius later told me things that I took in with the same sort of feeling as when some eyewitness tells you of amazing japes or stunts that you performed while drunk. For instance, he had been chasing a British soldier through a section of trench with hand-grenades. When he ran out of missiles, to keep his opponent on the run, he continued the chase with lumps of earth, while I stood up above, splitting my sides with laughter.