Copse 125: A Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of 1918 by Ernst Jünger

Author:Ernst Jünger [Jünger, Ernst]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Rogue Scholar Press
Published: 2020-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

F. L. 18.7.

The weather has cleared and the rain has driven the sultry air out of the trenches. We have had another proof today how careful and attentive to every detail one has to be. A runner was shot through the back of the head as he was coming along the trench that connects the dugout with the front line. Up to now there has never been a casualty in this bit of trench; and the only explanation is that the rain has washed away the banked-up earth on the sides and in this way exposed the trench to the enemy’s view at a place where it runs slightly downhill. It is always the same: one gets used to danger, as the hands do in a powder factory, and at last careless of it. Now we have laid a row of poles across the trench with wire-netting and grass on top and so masked the place from view.

A horse was hit last night pear Puisieux Alley. It was harnessed to a wagon loaded with trench-mortar ammunition, destined for the hedge-trench where there is a heavy trench-mortar emplacement for firing to the front of Copse 125. In earlier days when a horse was shot it lay where it fell, rotted, and poisoned the whole neighbourhood till somebody threw a sack of quicklime on it. Today it is as though we were in the tropics where vultures are at home. At first great pieces disappear from the hams and shoulders, and within the day nearly all the flesh is removed from the bones. It finds its way into the dixies and makes a powerful brew. So it was today. H., like a regular freebooter, was one of the first to hear of this windfall and brought the tongue along. We found it excellent.

We live just as though in a beleaguered fortress. The English have even asserted in their newspapers that we submit human bodies to a chemical process in order to turn them to account. We have rebutted the charge with great earnestness. Perhaps it would have been more impressive if we had said: ‘Certainly, we barbarians are glad even after our deaths to be hurled at your heads in the form of nitro-glycerine.’

‘Mark this,’ said General Rapp, when he answered the summons to surrender Strasburg, ‘I will not surrender the place till my soldiers have to eat human flesh, as those in my command in Dantzig did with the hindquarters of the Russians.’

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