If you have any pluck you don't need to run at the front.
The man is Al. Dismiss!"
Kat tells a story that has travelled the whole length of the front from the Vosges to Flanders;— of the staff surgeon who reads the names on the list, and when a man comes before him, without looking up, says:
"Al.
We need soldiers up there."
A fellow with a wooden leg comes up before him, the staff surgeon again says Al–––"And then," Kat raises his voice, "the fellow says to him:
'I already have a wooden leg, but when I go back again and they shoot off my head, then I will get a wooden head made and become a staff surgeon'."
This answer tickles us all immensely.
There may be good doctors, and there are, lots of them; all the same, every soldier some time during his hundreds of inspections falls into the clutches of one of these countless hero-grabbers who pride themselves on changing as many C3's and B3's as possible into Al's.
There are many such stories, they are mostly far more bitter.
All the same, they have nothing to do with mutiny or lead-swinging. They are merely honest and call a thing by its name; for there is a very great deal of fraud, injustice, and baseness in the army.
It is nothing that regiment after regiment returns again and again to the ever more hopeless struggle, that attack follows attack along the weakening, retreating, crumbling line.
From a mockery the tanks have become a terrible weapon.
Armoured they come rolling on in long lines, more than anything else embody for us the horror of war.
We do not see the guns that bombard us; the attacking lines of the enemy infantry are men like ourselves; but these tanks are machines, their caterpillars run on as endless as the war, they are annihilation, they roll without feeling into the craters, and climb up again without stopping, a fleet of roaring, smoke-belching armour-clads, invulnerable steel beasts squashing the dead and the wounded—we shrivel up in our thin skin before them, against their colossal weight our arms are sticks of straw, and our hand-grenades matches.
Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks — shattering, corroding, death.
Dysentery, influenza, typhus — scalding, choking, death.
Trenches, hospitals, the common grave — there are no other possibilities.
In one attack our Company Commander, Bertinck, falls.
He was one of those superb front-line officers who are foremost in every hot place.
He was with us for two years without being wounded, so that something had to happen in the end.
We occupy a crater and get surrounded.
The stink of petroleum or oil blows across with the fumes of powder.
Two fellows with a flamethrower are seen, one carries the tin on his back, the other has the hose in his hands from which the fire spouts.
If they get so near that they can reach us we are done for, we cannot retreat yet.
We open fire on them.
But they work nearer and things begin to look bad.
Bertinck is lying in the hole with us.
When he sees that we cannot hit them because under the sharp fire we have to think too much about keeping under cover, he takes a rifle, crawls out of the hole, and lying down propped on his elbows, he takes aim.
He fires — the same moment a bullet smacks into him, they have got him.
Still he lies and aims again; — once he shifts and again takes aim; at last the rifle cracks.
Bertinck lets the gun drop and says:
"Good," and slips back into the hole.
The hindermost of the two flame-throwers is hit, he falls, the hose slips away from the other fellow, the fire squirts about on all sides and the man burns.
Bertinck has a chest wound.
After a while a fragment smashes away his chin, and the same fragment has sufficient force to tear open Leer's hip.
Leer groans as he supports himself on his arm, he bleeds quickly, no one can help him.
Like an emptying tube, after a couple of minutes he collapses.
What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school.
The months pass by.
The summer of 1918 is the most bloody and the most terrible.
The days stand like angels in blue and gold, incomprehensible, above the ring of annihilation.
Every man here knows that we are losing the war.
Not much is said about it, we are falling back, we will not be able to attack again after this big offensive, we have no more men and no more ammunition.
Still the campaign goes on — the dying goes on ––
Summer of 1918 — Never has life in its niggardliness seemed to us so desirable as now; — the red poppies in the meadows round our billets, the smooth beetles on the blades of grass, the warm evenings in the cool, dim rooms, the black mysterious trees of the twilight, the stars and the flowing waters, dreams and long sleep - O Life, life, life!
Summer of 1918—Never was so much silently suffered as in the moment when we depart once again for the front-line.
Wild, tormenting rumours of an armistice and peace are in the air, they lay hold on our hearts and make the return to the front harder than ever.
Summer of 1918—Never was life in the line more bitter and more full of horror than in the hours of the bombardment, when the blanched faces lie in the dirt and the hands clutch at the one thought: No!
No!