The Last Full Measure (34 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
Even with a relatively clean kill there was an appalling intimacy to deal with. Sergeant Stefan Westmann describes bayoneting a Frenchman:
I was confronted by a French corporal with his bayonet to the ready, just as I had mine. I felt the fear of death in that fraction of a second when I realised that he was after my life, exactly as I was after his. But I was quicker than he was, I pushed his rifle away and ran my bayonet through his chest. He fell, putting his hand on the place where I had hit him, and then I thrust again. Blood came out of his mouth and he died.
I nearly vomited.…
I had the dead French soldier in front of me, and how I would have liked him to have raised his hand! I would have shaken it and we would have been the best of friends because he was nothing but a poor boy—like me.
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More often than not, however, bayonet confrontations followed the pattern described by Lance Corporal F. Heardman of the Manchester Pals: “I came face to face with a great big German who had come up unexpectedly out of a shell hole. He had his rifle and bayonet ‘at the ready.’ So had I, but mine suddenly felt only the size of a small boy’s play gun and my steel helmet shrank to the size of a small tin lid. Then, almost before I had time to realize what was happening, the German threw down his rifle, put up his arms and shouted ‘Kamerad.’ I could hardly believe my eyes.”
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JUST AS, IN
combat, killing and dying are two sides of the same coin, so are celebration and grief in the act of killing. Sergeant Westmann may have been devastated by bayoneting to death his French counterpart, but his comrades seemed to have been utterly unperturbed by their death dealing:
My knees were shaking and they asked me, “What’s the matter with you?” I remembered then that we had been told that a good soldier kills without thinking of his adversary as a human being—the very moment he sees him as a fellow man, he’s no longer a good soldier. My comrades were absolutely undisturbed by what had happened. One of them boasted that he had killed a
poilu
with the butt of his rifle. Another one had strangled a French captain. A third had hit somebody over the head with his spade. They were ordinary men like me. One was a tram conductor, another a commercial traveller, two were students, the rest farm workers—ordinary people who never would have thought to harm anybody.
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Killing could be a joy unclouded by guilt—a simple relishing of one’s skill; as artillery forward observer H. M. Stanford wrote to a pal: “Next day I had the time of my life. I got on to Bosche bombing parties at short range and fairly blew hell out of them with shrapnel whenever they showed.… I believe I made a bag of about 20 Huns with one round.… One time I saw a Bosche bombing-party appear over the parapet and I hit one man plumb with a percussion [high-explosive shell], disintegrating him and his pal alongside. Another time I got into the middle of six or seven firing over the parapet and the whole lot dropped.… Anyhow I had a real hectic day.”
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Stanford’s hunting reference (“I made a bag of about 20 Huns”) is both a celebratory flourish and a way to neutralize the guilt of killing by turning it into sport. Artillery observer Julian Tyndale-Biscoe described how German infantry “zig-zagged like rabbits.… [I] picked up a rifle and had some pot-shots … I saw several bowled over.”
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As in all wars, killing prisoners was sometimes done with an almost larky flippancy. A British officer who had just witnessed what was tantamount to the murder of a surrendering German officer tries to explain his uneasiness to a colleague: “We took a lot of prisoners in those trenches yesterday morning. Just as we got into their line, an officer came out of a dug-out. He’d got one hand over his head, and a pair of field-glasses in the other. He held out the glasses to S—, and said, ‘Here you are sergeant, I surrender.’ S— said, ‘Thank you, Sir,’ and took the glasses in his left hand. At the same moment, he tucked the butt of his rifle under his arm and shot the officer straight through the head. What the hell ought I to do?”
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Captain J. C. Dunn records the casual murder of four prisoners: “The next dug-out also contained four men. They came out with their hands up—‘Kamerad.’ … Soon after, a man of
ours came along with a wound of the left arm. He was given a revolver, and told to take the four prisoners back to the Company’s trench and hand them over to the C.Q.M.S. [company quartermaster sergeant], who was waiting in a deep dug-out to receive prisoners.… Those four never got to him. The escort wrote from hospital to a pal in the Company that he thought they were going to slip him, so he shot them, but he was ‘sorry at losing the Sergeant-Major’s revolver.’ ”
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Jauntiness is possible if the killing is sanitized by distance. It is much more difficult when the results are too close for comfort. Ernst Jünger shot a British soldier as he was emerging from a dugout and after a while went back to the dugout to examine the body: “Outside it lay my British soldier, little more than a boy, who had been hit in the temple. He lay there, looking quite relaxed. I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn’t a case of ‘you or me’ any more. I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams.”
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IN ALL HIS
considerable time in combat zones as a medical officer, Lord Moran saw only one man die in terror:
The men of his company would do anything for him, which is another way of saying that he was no coward. Hit early one morning he was taken to a broken-down farm not far distant, and I was with him until he died many hours later. Though gravely hurt and in great pain he kept cheerful and patient without complaint. He was so certain he was going to get well—he said as much—but a few hours later, when he was worse … he took my hand in terror and whispered,
“Am I going to die?” I got up and put a heavy box of dressings against the door.
We who practise physic are compelled to witness things which no man should be asked to face. The wounds we dress are nothing, it is when something has gone in the make-up of a man that this bloody business comes home.
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Moran felt that very often “dying men rarely experience pain or apprehension, or terror or remorse; their lives peter to an end, ‘like their birth, their death is a sleep and forgetting.’ When death is not far off, when a wounded soldier lies very still on his stretcher … nature with a kindly gesture dulls the senses, and death like a narcotic comes to steal men almost in their sleep.”
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Ernst Jünger experienced a similar benignity: “The man with the wound in the belly, a very young lad, lay in amongst us, stretched out like a cat in the warm rays of the setting sun. He slipped into death with an almost childlike smile on his face. It was a sight that didn’t oppress me, but left me with a fraternal feeling for the dying man.”
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Violent death may, occasionally, have had its reassuring smile and the gentle shading off into oblivion, but it also had the rictus of terror; the scream of outrage as well as the sigh of acceptance. On the battlefield mortally wounded men called out for their mothers, as though impending death and pain had made children of them again. Robert Graves records how an officer of the Middlesex caught in no-man’s-land during a failed attack “had his platoon sergeant beside, screaming with a stomach wound, begging for morphia; he was done for, so Hill gave him five pellets [enough to euthanize the wounded man].”
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Lieutenant Edwin Campion Vaughan and his colleague Corporal Breeze were hit by a shell: “As I was blown backwards I saw him thrown into the air to land at my feet, a crumpled heap of torn flesh.… I saw the stump of his arm move an inch or two.… He
was terribly mutilated, both his feet had gone and one arm, his legs and trunk were torn to ribbons and his face was dreadful. But he was conscious and as I bent over him I saw in his remaining eye a gleam of mixed recognition and terror. His feeble hand clutched my equipment, and then the light faded from his eyes.”
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In contrast, Ernst Jünger was hit seriously twice and on each occasion experienced something death-transcending. The first time: “I felt a sharp jolt on the left side of my breast. Night descended on me! I was finished … I supposed I’d been hit in the heart, but the prospect of death neither hurt nor frightened me. As I fell, I saw the smooth, white pebbles in the muddy road; their arrangement made sense, it was as necessary as that of the stars, and certainly great wisdom was hidden in it.” The second hit was as revelatory:
In mid-jump … I felt a piercing jolt in the chest—as though I had been hit like a game bird. With a sharp cry that cost me all the air I had, I spun on my axis and crashed to the ground.
It had got me at last. At the same time as feeling I had been hit, I felt the bullet taking away my life. I had felt Death’s hand once before … but this time his grip was firmer and more determined. As I came down heavily on the bottom of the trench, I was convinced it was all over. Strangely, that moment is one of the very few in my life of which I am able to say they were utterly happy. I understood, as in a flash of lightning, the true inner purpose and form of my life. I felt surprise and disbelief that it was to end there and then, but this surprise had something untroubled and almost merry about it. Then I heard the firing grow less, as if I were a stone sinking under the surface of some turbulent water. Where I was going, there was neither war nor enmity.
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Escaping the fear of death meant, as Lord Moran said, grasping the nettle. Sergeant Major Richard Tobin describes how this transmutation took place as he was waiting to go into action:
We stood there in dead silence, you couldn’t make noise, and the fellow next to you felt like your best friend, you loved him, although you probably didn’t know him a day before. They were both the longest and the shortest hours of my life. An infantryman in the front line feels the coldest, deepest fear.
Then, it was just five minutes to go—then zero—and all hell let loose. There was our barrage, then the German barrage, and over the top we went. As soon as we got over the top the fear and the terror left us. You don’t look, you see; you don’t listen, you hear; your nose is filled with fumes and death and you taste the top of your mouth. You are one with your weapon, the veneer of civilisation has dropped away.
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For some, the possibility of being killed acted as a life-enhancing stimulant. For Siegfried Sassoon, “the idea of death made everything seem vivid and valuable.” And for him this was no idle notion hatched in relative security. The day before a major attack he was involved in the highly hazardous job of cutting enemy wire in daylight, but instead of being petrified he found that “it seemed like an escapade, and the excitement was by no means disagreeable. It was rather like going out to weed a neglected garden after being warned that there might be a tiger among the gooseberry bushes.… I was cutting the wire by daylight because commonsense warned me that the lives of several hundred soldiers might depend on doing it properly. I was excited and pleased with myself while I was doing it.” Trench bombing raids made him feel “intensely alive.”
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Captain Charles Carrington of the Warwickshire Regiment went into action on that fateful July 1, 1916, and one might have presumed that he would be filled with apprehension. The opposite was the case: “I got up at dawn. I was acting-adjutant of my battalion.… I went up to take my command post in the trenches, from where we could see over the country between Gommecourt and Serre.… I can only say that I have never been so excited in my life. This was like a boy going to play for the first time in his life. That’s how I felt. The noise rose to a crescendo such as I’d never heard before. A noise which made all bombardments that we’d heard in the previous day seem like nothing at all. And the effect of the bombardment created a sort of hysterical feeling.”
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