We were madmen, gesturing and moving without thought or hope. Our legs and arms were numbed by hours of crowding and shoving against neighbors, living or dead, who were taking up too much room. The stabsfeldwebel repeated mechanically that we must maintain our position, but each new series of explosions sent us plunging to the bottom of our hole.
Night fell before we realized day had ended, and with darkness our terror returned. Lindberg, whose nervous condition was alarming, had collapsed into a kind of stupor which, for the moment, made him oblivious of hell. The Sudeten was almost as badly affected. He had begun to tremble, like someone in a fit, and to vomit uncontrollably.
Madness had invaded our group, and was gaining ground rapidly.
In a state of semi delirium, I saw a giant, whom I had known in another time as Hals, leap to his machine gun and fire at the sky, which continued to pour down its rain of flame and metal. I also saw the stabs, seized by a kind of dementia, beat the ground with his clenched fist, and then deliberately turn on the surviving grenadier, and pound him. The grenadier, who had seemed to be functioning normally until that moment, simply stared at the stabs, like someone in a trance, and then burst into tears. I could hear the millions of echoes ringing through the ground with an almost infernal precision, and I felt that I was going to faint. I stood up, totally unaware of what I was doing, shouting curses and obscenities at the sky. I had reached the edge of the abyss, like all my companions, and like them I was nearly finished. My rage burned like a straw fire, consuming my last reserves of strength, my head began to swim, and I fell forward against the edge of the trench. My mouth, which was wide open, filled with dirt. I began to vomit, and knew I wouldn’t be able to stop until I had emptied myself completely. I waded through my vomit with my trembling hands stretched out in front of me, reaching for the support of the crumbling parapet. A white flash, like an element of a nightmare, lit the darkness which had enveloped us, and kept me from losing consciousness. I slowly raised my eyes above the level of the trench wall, to follow the Russian flare as it fell to the ground. During those moments I felt strangely certain that I was at home, that none of my surroundings existed, and that the descending flare was really a falling star.
I remained in my stupor for a long time, while the explosions continued to compress my lungs. Some men stood in one position for hours, asleep on their feet with their eyes wide open. Finally, toward midnight, everything fell silent. However, no one moved. We all felt so weakened that movement was beyond the limit of possibility. Finally the veteran was able to make us pay attention:
“Don’t go to sleep, boys — this is when Ivan will attack.”
The stabs stared at him with troubled eyes. He stood up and leaned against the trench wall. A few minutes later, his head fell forward, and he was lost in paralytic sleep.
The veteran continued to exhort us, but the six of us who were left received his pleas with a silence as absolute as the silence of our eight corpses. Sleep was crushing us, as the guns had not quite managed to do. If the Russians had chosen that moment to attack, they would undoubtedly have saved a great many lives on their side. Our advance interception positions were manned only by sleepers and dead men. Although there must have been more noise from the big guns, and more flares, our ears picked up nothing for the next four hours.
The stabsfeldwebel was the first to wake. When we opened our eyes, we found him leaning over the Sudeten, who was sleeping beside him. The Sudeten had just cried out, which must have waked the stabs. We felt so ground down by exhaustion that every gesture made us grimace with pain. The sky once again was turning pink, and we could already see the chaos scattered across the plain. Everything was calm, and we couldn’t hear a sound. We stared out at the enormous space surrounding us. The horizon was almost a perfect circle, losing its line only in the hedge of woods to the north and to the south. We got out some tins of food, and tried to eat and talk a little.
“That’s right — you should build up your strength,” joked the stabs, who was living through his last moments. “I’d be surprised if this quiet lasted.”
“Maybe it will, though,” someone else said. “That show yesterday must have done in quite a few fellows. We might even get two or three days like this.”
“I doubt it,” said the stabs. “The Fuhrer has given the order to march east, and nothing can stop our troops now. The offensive will begin as soon as the sun is up.”
“Do you really think so?” asked Lindberg, excited as usual when something seemed to be going our way.
“Will our troops be able to knock out those damned Russian guns?”
“If it starts up again,” Hals muttered to me, “I’ll go right off my rocker.”
“Or be killed,” I answered. “We can’t expect the same luck we had yesterday.”
Hals stared at me as he chewed. The stabs, Lindberg, and the surviving grenadier were still talking, while Hals and I traded pessimistic predictions. Only the veteran went on eating in silence, his eyes, red from sleeplessness, fixed on the morning star.
“You two,” said the stabs pointing to Hals and me, “you keep your eyes open for another couple of hours, while the rest of us try to get some sleep. But first we have to get rid of these stiffs.” He waved at the eight mutilated corpses which were already beginning to swarm with big blue flies.
We watched the dead being stripped of their tags: for once we were not playing undertaker’s assistant, and guard duty seemed like a stroke of luck. The same curses and exclamations seemed to occur to survivors every time they had to deal with the remains of their slaughtered comrades.
“Fuck it… this fellow weighs a ton.”
“My God… he would have been better off if they’d finished him right away. Look at that!”
And then the metallic click as the identity tags slid off.
“Pach… he’s swimming in shit!”
We looked away with indifference; death had lost any dramatic importance for us; we were used to it. While the others were shifting the carrion, Hals and I continued to discuss our chances of survival.
“Hands and feet hurt more than other places, but aren’t really serious.”
“I wonder what happened to Olensheim.”
“Broken arm, I heard.”
“How’s your arm?”
“My shoulder hurts like hell.”
Behind our backs the others were hard at their filthy work.
“Heinz Veller, 1925, unmarried… poor fellow.”
“Let’s see your shoulder,” Hals said. “Maybe you’re badly hurt.”
“I don’t think so… just a bruise,” I said, unfastening my harness.
I was about to pull the cloth away from my shoulder when a roll of thunder shook the pure morning air. A second later, a hail of Russian shells fell all around us, and once again we collapsed in terror at the bottom of our hole.
“My God,” someone shouted. “It’s starting again.”
Hals was moving closer to me, through a shower of flying clods. He had just opened his mouth to say something when a violent explosion very near us drowned the sound of his voice.
“We’ll never be able to hold on,” he said. “We’d better get out.”
A shell fell so close to us that the gray earth wall of the trench glowed red in the light of its flames. A thick cloud of smoke enveloped us, and cubic yards of earth fell into our holes. We could hear cries of fright, and then the voice of the stabs: “Anyone hit?”