Morning was clear on the Western Front. It was a fresh spring day under bright blue sky, a freshness that made Bernhard queasy with fear. No fog and no rain meant the French artillery and spotters would have a clear field of operation. Even worse, the scent of French meadowlands wafting eastward on the dawn air might inspire his own Prussian commanders to order new assaults—more lives squandered, for what? To enlarge Germany by at best a few hundred paces of blasted, treeless hell?
Before him stretched Niemands Land, the place for no man, a pitted chaos of mud and barbed wire sown with mines and unexploded shells, and well-fertilized with the blood and bodies of men. The stench of death in the moldering, flooded shell-holes was carried to him intermittently on the cool morning breeze. The other men in the trench, strangers all, were equally afraid, even as breakfast bread and kaffee and salt pork were handed out down the line. They ate in silence, oppressed by the clear blue sky. No one sat near him, since their line had been thinned by casualties and transfers out. He was alone in this bend of the great trench, but did not dare desert his post to be with others.
It hadn’t been like this in those first exuberant days of the war, or so Bernhard remembered it. He thought of the cheering townsfolk at the rail depot back home, the oompah-ing brass bands and the flowers stuck by flaxen-haired maidens into the young men’s gun barrels. Like a dream to him now was the long overnight train ride, and then the brisk march into Belgium, along straight roads with seldom even the sound of a gunshot. A triumphant beginning, but it all stopped suddenly when they reached the fortresses around Liège and Namur.
That brought weeks of anxious waiting, listening to the rolling thunder of the three-hundred millimeter siege cannons and the howl of the really huge Big Bertha gun as the forts were reduced. Then at last came the forced marches down country lanes, following the thump of smaller howitzers, which finally led him here to this long, open grave called a trench line.
How strange it all seemed, thinking back. His first certainty of war had come when they drafted his beloved Putzi from the farm. Returning from the fields, he saw her trooping away down the road at the head of a line of livestock. She was a fine horse, a dappled bay, his favorite to ride. But like every mule and ox in Germany, she had a registry number in the event of wartime mobilization. Early the next morning the telegram arrived–after all his reserve training, Bernhard too had been called up and was to report in town that same afternoon.
He was willing, and his parents and sisters helped him pack. Everyone had said the war was coming. The foreign encirclement, depriving Germany of warm-water ports, had to be broken. A strong young nation like the newly formed Germany, if they were to have any standing in the modern age, needed trade and colonies. To be continually met by foreign obstacles and insults, and held down by legions of inferiors, was insufferable. Every German knew that, given the chance, they could regain all the stolen territories and more than equal France and Britain’s global empires. And they had set out to do so. But who would have thought such a noble crusade would stumble to a halt here, in a muddy field in Flanders?
Well, Bernhard was ready to fight. But he prayed that, if he was to be wounded in an assault, it would come late in the day, with some hope of rescue by night. Those who fell and lay in no-man’s-land in the early hours–whether just hurt and playing dead, crying out for help or moaning in delirium–faced a daylong ordeal in the sun without treatment for their wounds. With no relief possible, they lay at risk of being pierced again by random shellfire, or shot by tortured listeners merely to silence their cries.
Worst of all was the jagged wire, where men, even if unwounded, were caught without food or water in steel barbs for days. Though exposed to enemy fire, sometimes they were left alive as bait to lure out would-be rescuers to their deaths.
In the assaults, leading men were detailed to throw themselves onto the concertina wire, to flatten the coils for their comrades to advance over. Bernhard had never yet been one of those. When trapped, if the attack was successful and gained ground, they could be cut loose and saved. If not, they might be trampled by the retreating troops or pulverized by shellfire.
This morning, as it happened, it was the French who decided to attack. With weather reports from the British Isles far to westward, they may have known this clear spell was coming and made secret preparations. At breakfast, while crouching in the muddy trench and trying to keep his feet dry on the slimy boards, Bernhard heard the thunder of the enemy cannon as the first shells came whistling in. He felt the mud quiver as the explosive rounds struck, and he dove into a revetment to cower from the flying dirt and whining shrapnel.
The bombardment lasted forever, an eternity of cringing, praying, and bracing his whole body against the direct hit that never came. When it ended, there began the terror of the assault. A shrill whistle shrieked in Bernhard’s dulled hearing, and he squirmed up the parapet to defend his post.
Here they came, through smoke and vapor lingering from the shellfire. The French poilus trudged forward in their ridged helmets and long coats. Bayonets gleamed on their rifles as they charged into the morning sun; it was those blades Bernhard dreaded, more than the few bullets that whizzed overhead or spurted mud from the parapet. He had been trained to thrust his own bayonet, twist it and then, if the blade stuck in bone, fire his rifle to dislodge it. But the one time Bernhard used his bayonet, he’d jerked the blade smoothly out of the downed, writhing man and stumbled onward in his attack. He didn’t have the heart to twist the knife. He never knew what became of his French adversary, whether the poilu lived or died. But that victorious charge had won Bernhard this little place in hell.
Before the bayonets came near, the defending machine guns in his line opened up. Chattering, hammering from side to side with industrial efficiency, they swiftly and blessedly mowed down the lines of attackers that materialized out of the smoke. The unevenly spaced figures strode forward through the sunlit haze…then danced, spun, capered and fell to earth as the bullets stitched them. A Spandau Ballet, their death-dance was called, named after the Berlin suburb where the automatic guns were made. By the grace of the Spandaus, the gleaming blade-tips stayed far away; the poilus never got close to the German trenches. Bernhard discharged his own Mauser rifle twice in their direction, with no clear target. Then the morning onslaught was over.
Now would come the worst horror, the counterattack. To follow up on this glorious success, to exploit the enemy’s weakness, to take new land for Germany and finally break through the immobile trench lines…all of these illusions would lure his commanders to waste more lives. It did not matter, could not matter that they had just killed hundreds of French. It would take only a few more behind their machine guns and barbed wire to hold those enemy trenches.
Where was his Putzi right now, he wondered wildly. Was she dead in some field, bloating in the sun like the cavalry horses he had seen? More likely pulling ammunition carts for the endless bombardments. Or maybe between the legs of some lucky courier, carrying orders to and from generals far behind the lines. How he would love to leap on her back right now and gallop her out of here, right back to his farm!
Bernhard huddled head-down, not risking a look over the parapet, still waiting for the attack whistle. Would there be artillery first, to soften up the mud and warn the French? It didn’t matter, since shelling never silenced the machine guns for long. Soon enough would come his turn for a death-dance in the teeth of the French Maxims.
But then a new sound intervened. It was a grating, throbbing noise that came along the trench line, rapidly drawing near. Bernhard rolled aside and saw it approaching, fifty meters above, a biplane with red and yellow Belgian markings on the bottom wing. No machine guns fired, but there was a flurry in the German trenches beneath. A babble of shouts and cries grew louder as the engine pounded overhead. Then he saw it…a fine spray of glinting sparks spilling out of canisters fixed between the landing wheels.
Bernhard writhed for cover, squirming in the mud, but there was no overhang, no protection from this new menace. Filthy water splattered up near him, and a lancing pain pierced the back of his left knee. He heard himself shriek in agony and bent to feel the wound, but the flexing of his body intensified the pain and so he lay, paralyzed and sobbing as the enemy aeroplane droned onward.
He’d heard of this terror, and now it had found him. Flechettes, metal darts dumped from Allied aircraft that could pierce straight through huddled troops on the ground. Here in the bottom of his trench he’d been struck from the skies. He would lose his leg, the racking pain told him. No other way to avoid lethal infection in these filthy mudholes,
Bernhard lay sobbing, involuntarily heaving with waves of agony from his knee. As the medics finally came and dragged him onto a stretcher, he knew that the tears on his face were not from mere pain, but tears of joy and thankfulness as well. He wouldn’t be in any more assaults, or test any Frenchman’s bayonet point. He wouldn’t lie wounded all day, raving in the sun, or be blown apart by artillery. The pain he felt wasn’t fatal, so long as gangrene didn’t set in. What he had now was more precious than any medal or victory. With a clean amputation, it meant a million-reichsmark wound that would take him out of Hell and send him home.