We ducked back into our refuge as the cloud began to thin. Dim figures were rushing past in the tail end of the cloud, and a great deal of shouting and confused firing was taking place further up the hill. We lay down and hoped to be taken for dead if anyone noticed us. Dear God, when would darkness fall? I did not care in the least for this game of soldiers. After about five minutes, just as the last of the gas cloud was passing, there were two explosions away towards our lines, then a further burst of shooting. I decided to chance a peep over the edge of the crater towards our trenches. Perhaps help was coming. I heard shouts—then saw the tops of steel helmets bobbing among the craters. They were the new German coal-scuttle helmets, so that (I knew) meant Austrian assault troops. Despite the enormous number of head-wounds in the Isonzo fighting, the War Ministry was still only thinking about manufacturing an Austro-Hungarian steel helmet—in fact would not get around to it until the war was in its final months. In the mean time a few thousand steel helmets had been purchased from our German allies, but so far they had only been issued to the “Stosstruppen,” the teams of specialist trench-fighters who were now being given the most difficult and dangerous tasks in the front line. Anyway, that meant we would soon be found and escorted back, even if we still had to wait until nightfall. Had they perhaps got water canteens with them, I wondered? I shouted, “We’re over here!” as loudly as I could above the din, then scrambled back down into the hole.
That shout was very nearly my last words. There was a sudden scratter of stones as something landed in the hole with us. I stared at it, paralysed. It was a stick-grenade, lying and hissing faintly as the fuse burnt down. If it had been left to me we would both have been dead men; but with a true pilot’s reflexes Toth leapt across, seized it and flung it over the edge, ducking as he did so. It exploded just as it cleared the lip, sending vicious fragments of hot metal rattling off the rocks. I was still too afraid to move. But that was not the end of the matter. A moment later I was knocked to the ground as someone fell on top of me. The next thing I was lying with a hand grasping my throat, looking into the face of a creature so obscene that the mere sight of it took my remaining strength away: something that combined grasshopper and pig and horse’s skull into the features of a devil from a medieval doom-painting. Its arm was raised above me with a club in its hand, poised to dash my brains out. “Stop!” I yelled, hoarse from thirst and gas. The arm stayed poised—then was lowered slowly as its owner got off my chest. He knelt back, and removed the steel helmet so that he could lower the hideous can-snouted mask with its two huge, flat black eyepieces. It revealed a sweaty, rather florid face of unmistakably Germanic cast, with fair short-cropped hair and glaucous pale-blue eyes. He wiped his face with his tunic sleeve before replacing the helmet. His two companions released Toth and then removed their gas masks as well.
“Good thing that you shouted in German,” he said, “otherwise I’d have smashed your head in for you. Did you chuck that grenade back out again? ”
“No, he did.” I pointed to Toth, crouched near by. The Stosstruppen leader smiled.
“Not bad, not bad at all. Can I interest you in joining my storm- company perhaps? We could use people with reflexes as quick as yours.” He turned back to me. I noticed that although he had the Edelweiss collar badges of the elite Tyrolean Alpine troops, the Landeschutzen, he spoke with a marked Sudetenland accent. “Anyway, let me introduce myself,” he said. “Oskar Friml, Oberleutnant in the 2nd Landeschutzen Regiment; currently leading the 28th Storm-Troop Company attached to infantry regiment No. 4, Hoch-und-Deutschmeister. Pleased to make your acquaintance.”
I thought this display of courtesy rather forced, coming from someone who not a minute before had nearly killed us both. However I said nothing, but merely shook hands and introduced Toth and myself, then thanked him and his men for coming out to rescue us. He smiled: a rather nervous, evasive smile I thought.
“Not a bit of it. We didn’t know you were here. Our look-outs saw your plane come down and we thought you were either dead or taken prisoner by the Wellischers. We came out after that raid to see if we could cut some of them off as they tried to get back. Our people killed quite a lot of them and cleared the rest out of the trenches.”
“Were there many of them? ”
“About a hundred I reckon.”
“Is it usual then for the Stosstruppen to take on the enemy at odds of three against a hundred? ”
“Oh, not unusual at all. Moral force and quickness on your feet is what counts in this sort of warfare. In the trenches a dozen real soldiers can see off a thousand conscripts—or perhaps two thousand if they’re Italians. Cowardly rabble: no stomach for fighting at all—except for a few of their own storm-troops that is, the ‘Arditi.’ Some of them are quite good I understand, but they wear body armour, which isn’t much use and weighs a man down too much. We believe in fighting light, as you see.”
He was quite right about that: he and his men had no rifles or equipment, only a haversack full of stick-grenades slung over one shoulder, a gas-mask canister over the other and a short, vicious-looking spiked cosh. Friml smiled as he showed me his own version of this weapon. It consisted of a wooden handle with a short length of tight-coiled steel spring and, on the end of that, a steel ball studded with hobnails. I noticed that the handle bore rows of filed notches.
“There, how do you like it?” he enquired. “I had it made specially. Much better than the standard issue. Here, look . . .” He bent down and picked up a battered, rusty Italian steel helmet which I supposed had once belonged to the dead soldier: the French “poilu” type, with a raised comb along the crown. He placed it on a stone, then dealt it a sudden blow with his cosh. The helmet-top caved in like an eggshell. “Not bad, eh? And it’s pretty well silent too. Most of them never know what hit them. I’ve killed at least fifty men with it, but I haven’t kept a close account lately. I did for twenty of them at least that afternoon at San Martino. We had about two hundred trapped in a bombshelter. They tried to surrender, but we just squirted flame-throwers in through the air vents. You should have heard them howl in there. I had a wonderful time of it: stood by the entrance knocking them off one by one as they tried to get out with their hair on fire. Half-trained conscript refuse the lot of them: there wasn’t one of them over twenty.” He smiled as if at some idyllic memory.
“How old are you, Herr Leutnant?” I enquired. To me he looked about thirty-five.
“Twenty-three last birthday.”
“And do you expect to see twenty-four at this rate?” To my surprise he seemed not to be at all put out at this question.
“That all depends,” he replied, smiling. “It’s my belief that bullets find out the cowards and weaklings, so I may come through. I’ve been wounded nine times, but nothing serious so far. Anyway, whether I live or not scarcely matters. The thing that the Front has taught me above all else is that in this century the ‘we’ will be everything and the ‘I’ nothing. So what if I do die? The blood and the nation will live on after me as they lived before me. We are the aristocracy of mankind, we trench- fighters: the steel panthers, the very finest specimens that the human race has ever produced, without fear and without pity. The devil take the rest of them, the conscript herd corrupted by town-living and Jew- culture. They’re good for nothing but following up an attack and occupying ground already taken. It’s the front-fighters who bear mankind forward with them in the attack.”
I ventured the view—diffidently, eyeing the spring-loaded cosh as I did so—that at the present rate of losses, if the Stosstruppen were indeed the vanguard of the human species then by about 1924 we would have regressed to the early Stone Age.