It was hard to understand. Near by a young fellow lay on his back, his glazed eyes and his fingers fixed in their last aim. It was a weird sensation to look into those dead and questioning eyes. It gave me a shudder that all through the war I never quite lost. His pockets were turned inside out, and beside him lay his pitiful plundered purse. …
Although I made up my mind to omit all comments from this book,1 I should like all the same to say a word or two about this first glimpse of horrors. It is a moment so important in the experience of war. The horrible was undoubtedly a part of that irresistible attraction that drew us into the war. A long period of law and order, such as our generation had behind it, produces a real craving for the abnormal, a craving that literature stimulates. Among other questions that occupied us was this: what does it look like when there are dead lying about? And we never for a moment dreamt that in this war the dead would be left month after month to the mercy of wind and weather, as once the bodies on the gallows were.
And now at our first glance of horror we had a feeling that is difficult to describe. Seeing and recognizing are matters, really, of habit. In the case of something quite unknown the eye alone can make nothing of it. So it was that we had to stare again and again at these things that we had never seen before, without being able to give them any meaning. It was too entirely unfamiliar. We looked at all these dead with dislocated limbs, distorted faces, and the hideous colours of decay, as though we walked in a dream through a garden full of strange plants, and we could not realize at first what we had all round us. But finally we were so accustomed to the horrible that if we came on a dead body anywhere on a fire-step or in a ditch we gave it no more than a passing thought and recognized it as we would a stone or a tree. …
I strolled along the devastated trench without being troubled by enemy fire. It was the brief respite before midday that often on many a battlefield I learned to welcome as a breathing-space. I used this time now to have a look at everything quietly and comfortably. The enemy accoutrements, the darkness of the dugouts, the miscellaneous contents of the haversacks, everything was new and puzzling. I put French cartridges in my pockets, unbuckled a silk-soft groundsheet, and carried off a water-bottle covered with blue cloth, and after three steps threw all away again. I was induced by a fine striped shirt, lying near an officer’s ransacked valise, to pull off my uniform and change my linen, and I was delighted by the fresh, clean feel on my skin. In those days no one imagined going on leave during a war or being able to have a change of clothes. We fought till we were wounded, and wore the old shirt till the acquisition of a new one allowed us to throw it away. It was the length of the war that drove us back at last to humdrum ways. Even Colonel von Oppen, who had sworn a mighty oath that there were three things he would never do during the campaign—have his beard trimmed, change his patched cloak for a new one, or take a pen in his hand—had at last to forswear himself.
Now that I was rigged out afresh, I looked for a sunny nook in the trench and, sitting on a piece of timber, I opened a round tin of beef and had lunch. Then I lit a pipe and read the numerous French newspapers lying all round. Most of them, as I saw from the date, had been sent into the trenches the day before from Verdun.
Visibility was now good, and a German battery in a small wood just behind the trench began firing. It was not long before the enemy made the appropriate answer. Suddenly I was frightened out of my wits by a mighty crash bebind me, and a cone of smoke rose high up in the air. Unused as I still was to the multiple din of the war, I was not able to disentangle the whistle and hum of our own guns from the rending crash of the enemy shells that fell with ever briefer pauses. And what puzzled me most of all was why it went on from all sides, as though the whizzing shells crossed each others’ paths in a senseless maze above the maze of little trenches in which we were dispersed. I could see no occasion for all this activity, and it disturbed and puzzled me. I was still without experience of the fighting, and saw it as a recruit. The battle seemed to me to proceed as strangely and disconnectedly as though it went on upon another planet. At the same time I had no fear. For I felt that I was not seen, and I could not believe that anyone aimed at me or that I should be hit. Indeed, when I rejoined my section I surveyed our front with complete calm. It was the courage of ignorance.
Towards midday the artillery fire rose to a wild dance. It broke round us without a pause. White, black, and yellow smoke mingled their clouds. The shells with black smoke, called “Americans” or “coal-boxes” by the old soldiers, exploded with a fearful detonation. In
