Sagts du mir wo die soldaten sind?

I will always remember the rats.1

At night they’d keep you awake as they tried to find someplace dry and warm in our dugout. The water was ankle deep on a good day. On a bad day we would vacate the lower bunks and double up on the uppers. The rats did the same. Willy liked to joke that we built the dugout for the benefit of the rats. And the lice.2

After an attack the rats would swarm over our sector frontage, feasting on corpses and severed body parts. They made a ghastly sound, scurrying, chomping, chewing tearing, fighting among themselves for the best morsels. Willy joked that only the rats and the armaments makers profited by the war.3

I will always remember the mud.4

I remember the mud oozing up between the duckboard at the bottom of the trenches. The mud, stinking of excrement, cordite and human decay. In winter the mud never really froze. Just stayed a frosty slime, but didn’t smell so badly. After a rain it was a rotting porridge. In the heat of summer, the mud dried; but the stench increased. Willy joked that after the war France should become one giant pig farm because the mud was already here, and the pigs would be happy.5

I will always remember my nineteenth birthday.6

It was early September 1918. The Americans were now in our sector, and our generals had ordered an assault for the next day. But at four forty-five a.m. the Americans’ artillery opened up on us. 7

On my left Willy was pressed against the forward wall of the trench. A shell burst a little ways down the trench. I heard Willy moan, and saw him sink to his knees. A piece of shrapnel had eviscerated him. He looked up at me in surprise. The grimace on his face froze. He would tell no more jokes.8

The next shell hit the parapet, and I remember nothing else that day, and into the night.9

Voices. Vague, muffled, distant, confused. It was, what – twilight? I couldn’t see clearly. I tried to move, and terrible pain exploded in my left arm. That, and there was a great weight pressing me down. I was pinned. I think I cried out.10

Sometime later hands scrapped away the dirt, removed the sandbags and posts and dragged me into the sunshine. I passed out from the pain of the rough handling. When I came to I was on a stretcher on the floor of a bombed-out barn behind the front. A German orderly and a doctor stood over me. The doctor spoke. I did not understand him. The orderly translated. 11

The Americans had taken our trench. I was a prisoner. My arm was irreparably crushed, and would have to be amputated.12

I wondered deliriously if Willy could have made a joke of this. It made me laugh.13

I had been an apprentice toolmaker before the war. 14

Years later I read "All Quiet on the Western Front". I don’t remember seeing any butterflies in my war.15