During one stop on the way, a driver split his thumb in the course of crank-starting his lorry. The sight of the wound almost made me ill, I have always been sensitive to such things. I mention this because it seems virtually unaccountable as I witnessed such terrible mutilation in the course of the following days. It's an example of the way in which one's response to an experience is actually largely determined by its context.
From Le Mesnil we marched, after dark, to Sailly-Saillisel, where the battalion took off their knapsacks in a large meadow and prepared a storm pack.
Ahead of us rumbled and thundered artillery fire of a volume we had never dreamed of; a thousand quivering lightnings bathed the western horizon in a sea of flame. A continual stream of wounded, with pale, sunken faces, made their way back, often barged aside by clattering guns or munitions columns heading the other way.
A runner from a Wurttemberg regiment reported to me to guide my platoon to the famous town of Combles, where we were to be held in reserve for the time being. He was the first German soldier I saw in a steel helmet, and he straightaway struck me as the denizen of a new and far harsher world. Sitting next to him in the roadside ditch, I questioned him avidly about the state of the position, and got from him a grey tale of days hunkered in craters, with no outside contact or communications lines, of incessant attacks, fields of corpses and crazy thirst, of the wounded left to die, and more of the same. The impassive features under the rim of the steel helmet and the monotonous voice accompanied by the noise of the battle made a ghostly impression on us. A few days had put their stamp on the runner, who was to escort us into the realm of flame, setting him inexpressibly apart from us.
'If a man falls, he's left to lie. No one can help. No one knows if he'll return alive. Every day we're attacked, but they won't get through. Everyone knows this is about life and death.'
Nothing was left in this voice but equanimity, apathy; fire had burned everything else out of it. It's men like that that you need for fighting.
We were marching along a wide road, which ran in the moonlight like a white ribbon across the dark countryside, towards the thunder of guns, whose voracious roar grew ever more immeasurable. Abandon all hope! What gave the scene a particularly sinister aspect was the way all the roads were clearly visible, like a network of white veins in the moonlight, and there was no living being on them. We marched as on the gleaming paths of a midnight cemetery.
Before long the first shells landed left and right of us. Conversations grew quieter and stopped altogether. We listened to the whining approach of each shell with the strange tenseness that seems somehow to sharpen one's hearing. The first real challenge that confronted us was crossing Fregicourt-Ferme, a small cluster of houses just past the graveyard at Combles. That was where the noose that had been drawn around Combles was tightest. Everyone wanting to enter or leave the town had to pass through here, and so incessant very heavy fire, like the focused beams of a magnifying glass, was concentrated on this one little lifeline. Our guide had warned us about this notorious bottleneck; we passed through it at the double, while the ruins clattered around us.
Over the ruins, as over all the most dangerous parts of the terrain, lay a heavy smell of death, because the fire was so intense that no one could bother with the corpses. You really did have to run for your life in these places, and when I caught the smell of it as I ran, I was hardly surprised - it belonged to there. Moreover, this heavy sweetish atmosphere was not merely disgusting; it also, in association with the piercing fogs of gunpowder, brought about an almost visionary excitement, that otherwise only the extreme nearness of death is able to produce.
Here, and really only here, I was to observe that there is a quality of dread that feels as unfamiliar as a foreign country. In moments when I felt it, I experienced no fear as such but a kind of exalted, almost demoniacal lightness; often attended by fits of laughter I was unable to repress.
~ From Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, p. 91