The atmosphere of intense excitement was amazing. Officers stood upright and shouted chaff nervously to each other. Often a heavy trench-mortar fired short and scattered us with its fountains of earth; and no one even bent his head. The roar of the battle had become so terrific that we were scarcely in our right senses. The nerves could register fear no longer. Everyone was mad and beyond reckoning; we had gone over the edge of the world into superhuman perspectives. Death had lost its meaning and the will to live was made over to our country; and hence everyone was blind and regardless of his personal fate.
Three minutes before the attack my batman, the faithful Vinke, beckoned to me, pointing to a full water-bottle. He recognized, in his own way, the need of the hour. I took a long pull. It was as though I drank water. There was only the cigar wanting, the usual one for such occasions. Three times the match was blown out by the commotion of the air. …
The great moment had come. The fire lifted over the first trenches. We advanced. …
The turmoil of our feelings was called forth by rage, alcohol, and the thirst for blood as we stepped out, heavily and yet irresistibly, for the enemy’s lines. And therewith beat the pulse of heroism—the godlike and the bestial inextricably mingled. I was far in front of the company, followed by my batman and a man of one year’s service called Haake. In my right hand I gripped my revolver, in my left a bamboo riding-cane. I was boiling with a fury now utterly inconceivable to me. The overpowering desire to kill winged my feet. Rage squeezed bitter tears from my eyes.
The tremendous force of destruction that bent over the field of battle was concentrated in our brains. So may men of the Renaissance have been locked in their passions, so may a Cellini have raged or werewolves have howled and hunted through the night on the track of blood. We crossed a battered tangle of wire without difficulty and at a jump were over the front line, scarcely recognizable any longer. The attacking waves of infantry bobbed up and down in ghostly lines in the white rolling smoke.
Against all expectation a machine-gun rattled at us from the second line. I and the men with me jumped for a shell-hole. A second later there was a frightful crack and I sank forward in a heap. Vinke caught me round the neck and turned me on my back: “Are you hit, sir?” There was nothing to be seen. The one-year’s-service fellow had a hole through his arm, and assured us, groaning, that he had a bullet in his back. We pulled off his uniform and bound him up. The churned-up earth showed that a shrapnel shell had burst at the level of our faces on the edge of the shell-hole. It was a wonder we were still alive.
Meanwhile the others were on beyond us. We scrambled after them, leaving the wounded man to his fate, after we had stuck a bit of wood in the ground near him with a strip of white muslin as a mark for the wave of stretcher-bearers that were following the fighting troops. Half-left of us the great railway embankment in the line Ecoust-Croisilles, which we had to cross, rose out of the mist. From loopholes and dugout windows built into the side of it rifles and machine-guns were rattling merrily.
Even Vinke had disappeared. I followed a sunken road, with its smashed-in shelters yawning in its banks. I strode on in a fury over the black and torn-up ground, from which rose the suffocating gas of our shells. I was entirely alone.
Then I caught sight of the first of the enemy. A figure crouched, wounded apparently, three metres in front of me in the middle of the pounded hollow of the road. I saw him start at the sight of me and stare at me with wide-open eyes as I walked slowly up to him holding out my revolver in front of me. A drama without an audience was ready. To me the mere sight of an enemy in tangible form was a release. Grinding my teeth, I pressed the muzzle to the temple of this wretch, whom terror now crippled, and with my other hand gripped hold of his tunic. With a beseeching cry he snatched a photograph from his pocket and held it before my eyes … himself, surrounded by a numerous family. …
I forced down my mad rage and walked past.
Men of my company came jumping down into the sunken road. We were aglow with heat. I pulled off my cloak and threw it away. I still remember that I shouted very emphatically and more than once: “Lieutenant Jünger now casts off his cloak,” and at that the Fusiliers laughed as though I had made the most priceless joke. Above us everyone was going for it over the top without the least regard for the machine-guns, which were at the utmost four hundred metres away from us. The same impulse of annihilation drew me into the sheaves of fire. I ran straight for the embankment, spit bullets as it might. In a shell-hole I came upon a figure in a brown waterproof shooting with a revolver. It was Kius, who was in a like mood and stuffed a handful of cartridges in my pocket by way of greeting.
We must have spent a long while running to and fro among the shell-holes and engaging one target after another. In any case I found myself at last at the foot of the embankment, and I saw a dugout
