The Last Full Measure (36 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
The dead spoke, but the problem was to understand what they said. For Sassoon there was a ferocious repudiation of any uplifting message:
Wherever we looked the mangled effigies of the dead were our
memento mori
. Shell-twisted and dismembered, the Germans maintained the violent attitudes in which they had died. The British had mostly been killed by bullets and bombs, or they looked more resigned. But I can remember a pair of hands (nationality unknown) which protruded from
the soaked ashen soil like the roots of a tree turned upside down; one hand seemed to be pointing at the sky with an accusing gesture. Each time I passed the place the protest of those fingers became more expressive of an appeal to God in defiance of those who made the War. Who made the War? I laughed hysterically as the thought passed through my mud-stained mind. But I only laughed mentally, for my box of Stokes gun ammunition left me no breath to spare for an angry guffaw. And the dead were the dead; this was no time to be pitying them or asking silly questions about their outraged lives.
147
To Henri Barbusse, however, they spoke a quite different language: “No, you can’t imagine. All these deaths at once crush the soul. There are not enough of us left. But we have a vague idea of the grandeur of these dead. They have given everything; they gave it little by little, with all their strength, then finally they gave themselves, altogether, all at once. They outdistanced life, and there is something superhuman and perfect in what they did.”
148
MEN USED A
spectrum of techniques to deal with their fear. One was to simply laugh in the ogre’s face. A German soldier, the twenty-five-year-old Alfred Lichtenstein, wrote his jocular “death poem” in 1914 as he left for war:
Before dying I must write my poem
.
Quiet, comrades, don’t disturb me
.
We are off to war—death is our bond
.
Oh, if only my girlfriend would stop howling!
What do I care? I am happy to go
.
My mother’s crying; one needs to be made of iron
.
The sun falls to the horizon;
Soon they’ll be throwing me into a nice mass-grave
.
In the sky the good old sun is glowing red;
In thirteen days I shall probably be dead
.
149
He was killed that year.
Black humor was a protective shield:
But when we were confronted by death, with what light hands we touched the common friend. To a man off his feed Price had offered the mocking counsel: “You had better eat it up, it’s as likely as not your last.” And to another, down over the death of a pal, “Cheer up, Cockie, it’s your turn next.” I remember, when bringing in the wounded at Hooge, I heard a man say “Down you go there, you won’t trouble any more to-night,” and with that the fellow heaved a dead man into a big crater.… We simply could not afford to allow death to hover in the offing as the final mystery; it must be brought to earth and robbed of its disturbing influence, by rough gibes and the touch of ridicule. If it was firmly grasped like a nettle soon there was no sting left in it.
150
Grasping the nettle of the fear of one’s own death was one thing, but the sickening foreboding at the possible loss of a friend was an agony that humor of whatever color could not relieve. Lord Moran confides in his wartime diary:
I have ceased to bother much about the odds, the chance of stopping something, but I have another infirmity now. I am for ever worrying about the people I really like. The Boche gunners have certain spots taped, but it is after dark that I begin to get uneasy. Every evening Barty Price starts off for the trenches walking up the Menin Road with an orderly
and I cannot settle until I hear him return. I feel certain he will pick up a spare [
hit by a random shell
] and come back on a stretcher done, and I often try to get him to go by day when it is—in spite of the attention of their gunners—much safer.
But he only laughs. I lie reading by candle light and every time I hear a machine gun in the distance he comes into my head and I expect at any moment to see him carried in. The noise of the footsteps in the street above brings my heart into my mouth and I say irritably “Why the devil does he play the fool like this?”
151
With comradeship came risk: “When you learn or see the death of one of those who had been fighting alongside you and living the very same life it gives you a direct shock which hits you before you understand. It really is almost like suddenly learning of one’s annihilation.”
152
Homicidal fury was one way of dealing with grief. In Frederic Manning’s
Her Privates We
, Martlow, the young friend of his older mentor, Bourne, is killed:
Martlow was perhaps a couple of yards in front of Bourne, when he swayed a little, his knees collapsed under him, and he pitched forward on to his face, his feet kicking and his whole body convulsive for a moment. Bourne flung himself down beside him, and, putting his arms around his body, lifted him, calling him.
“Kid! You’re all right, Kid? He cried eagerly.… As Bourne lifted the limp body, the boy’s hat came off, showing half the back of his skull shattered where the bullet had come through it; and a little blood welled out on to Bourne’s sleeve and the knee of his trousers.… Bourne let him settle to earth again … the ache in him became a consuming hate
that filled him with exultant cruelty.…” Kill the buggers! Kill the bloody fucking swine! Kill them!”
All the filth and ordure he had ever heard came from between his clenched teeth … a Hun went for Minton, and Bourne got him with the bayonet, under the ribs near the liver, and then, unable to wrench the bayonet out again, pulled the trigger, and it came away easily enough.
“Kill the buggers!” he muttered thickly.
153
A British soldier was escorting six German prisoners to the rear:
“Look here, Dick, about an hour ago I lost the best pal I ever had, and he was worth all these six Jerries put together. I’m not going to take them far.” …
Some little time later I saw him coming back.… As he passed me again he said, “I done them in as I said, about two hundred yards back. Two bombs did the trick.”
154
At the other end of the emotional gauge the loss of a friend could be met with a stoicism of unnerving rigor: “We took over trenches from Delville Wood to Waterlot Farm … we had scarcely moved in when we lost a Company Commander. I went to tell Toby: Pat and he were inseparable. I found him making out a return [of casualties] for the brigade. When I had done he did not look up but sat without a word making holes in a piece of blotting paper with his pen. Then he said, ‘Thanks, old thing,’ and went on writing.”
155
Booze was the great and universal anesthetic. But perhaps the commonest psychological defense against being killed was resignation—“a universal torpor,” Moran calls it, “a wall … set up by nature to meet the violence of the hour.” A padre, Oswin Creighton, writes of his fears before his division was to make an
assault at Gallipoli, where “slaughter seems to be inevitable,” but adds that the men “are quite prepared for it.”
156
This is how Lance Corporal Marshall of the Accrington Pals experienced it during the carnage of the first day of the Somme: “I saw many men fall back into the trench as they attempted to climb out. Those of us who managed had to walk two yards apart, very slowly, then stop, then walk again.… We all had to keep in a line. Machine-gun bullets were sweeping backwards and forwards … shells were bursting everywhere. I had no special feeling of fear and I knew that we must all go forward until wounded or killed.”
157
But in this stoicism there was the possibility of something that transcended the “torpor” of animals being led to slaughter—the almost unimaginable victory of glorious defiance: “And I saw it then, as I see it now—a dreadful place, a place of horror and desolation which no imagination could have invented. Also it was a place where a man of strong spirit might know himself utterly powerless against death and destruction, and yet stand up and defy gross darkness and stupefying shell-fire, discovering in himself the invincible resistance of an animal or an insect, and an endurance which he might, in after days, forget or disbelieve.”
158
*
The first use was by Germany against the Russians at Bolimov, west of Warsaw, in January 1915. See Philip Haythornthwaite,
The World War One Source Book
(London: Arms and Armour Press, 1992), 90.
†
French poet-adventurer-soldier Blaise Cendrars was in a stretch of the line riddled with German mines. He found that his pet hedgehog, who, despite lapping up the soldiers’ wine, had such acute hearing that he could unerringly locate German miners, “showed every sign of terror and ran off in the opposite direction if he thought there was still time, or rolled himself into a ball at the foot of the trench wall if the enemy was very close. And we instantly took precautions, counter-mines or rapid flight, knowing there was no possibility of error.” (Blaise Cendrars,
Lice
(London: Peter Owen, 1973), 145. First published as
La main coupée
, 1946.)
‡
Although there is much evidence to support the idea that bayonet combat was rare, it is interesting to read a contrary opinion, by someone who was at the sharp end. John Laffin was an Australian infantryman in World War II, and in his history of battlefield medicine,
Combat Surgeons
(London: J. M. Dent, 1970), 152, observes: “I think surgeons may be mistaken in their assumption that few wounds are made with the bayonet. Such an assumption ignores the frequent and early fatality of bayonet wounds: a man with a bayonet wound in the throat, stomach or chest does not live long enough to reach the surgeon. Again, a bayonet wound is often a secondary one. That is, soldiers attacking forward after firing at an enemy often kill with the bayonet disabled troops who are nevertheless still firing their rifles or machine guns. I can only say from experience … that bayonet fighting occurs more frequently than surgeons believe, although few soldiers would engage in it if they still had a bullet in their firearms.”
EVEN
A C
ONFRATERNITY OF
G
HOSTS
How Soldiers Were Killed in World War II
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die
.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his
.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar hears
And look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do
.
—From “How to Kill” by Keith Douglas (killed by mortar fire in Normandy, June 9, 1944)
A
S KEITH DOUGLAS
squeezed the trigger he experienced the emotional violence of two images, two ideas of humanity, as they elided in the crosshairs: the particular, the
individual, and the precious versus the anonymous, generalized, and expendable. He knows the Man but does not know the man.
In a century dedicated to computation, to measurement, to exactitude, there are multitudes who remain uncounted and unaccounted for. In the ocean of the slain so many souls were easily lost in the great rise and fall of the swell. They simply drifted away into the deep blue of history. We have no accurate reckoning. About 16 million (give or take a million) fighting men and women died—roughly double the number of the First World War.
1
“It is testimony to the scale of wartime carnage that the estimates of military losses should vary by margins of millions.”
2
