Topical Guide 277
Mark Dorset
Places: Real and Fictional
AT THAT MOMENT, Herb was in a field hospital, recovering from a wound that would keep him hors de combat for the rest of the war.
The evening before, as the sun began to set, Herb had been lying in a trench just west of a wood outside the village of Quelquepart-sur-Marne.Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 6
A Google search for “Quelquepart-sur-Marne” returns no results. MD
War: World War I: Trench Warfare
The sun was going down, and its golden light lit a low serpentine ridge between the trench and the wood, about two hundred yards from where Herb and his fellows crouched, waiting. The ridge was strongly fortified, and so was the wood. In a moment, Herb and the others expected the order to charge the ridge, to charge out of the blinding light of the setting sun.
Herb crouched below the lip of the trench, waiting for the call to go up and over, to try to take the ridge and, beyond it, the wood. Before the call came, a shell burst in the trench, to Herb’s right, and the explosion pushed him backward, just as if someone had tackled him around the legs and shoved him, against a timber that supported the muddy walls of the trench, and then spun him around it, as if he were in a revolving door.Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 6
May 28th. In trenches among the Cuinchy brick-stacks. Not my idea of trenches. There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of bricks. It is most confusing. The parapet of a trench which we don’t occupy is built up with ammunition boxes and corpses. Everything here is wet and smelly. The Germans are very close: they have half the brick-stacks, we have the other half. Each side snipes down from the top of its brick-stacks into the other’s trenches. This is also a great place for German rifle-grenades and trench-mortars. We can’t reply properly. We have only a meagre supply of rifle-grenades and nothing to equal the German sausage mortar-bomb. This morning about breakfast time, just as I came out of my dug-out, a rifle-grenade landed within six feet of me. For some reason, instead of falling on its head and exploding, it landed with its stick in the wet clay and stood there looking at me. They are difficult to see coming; they are shot from a rifle, with its butt on the ground, tilted, and go up a long way before turning over and coming down head first. I can’t understand why this particular rifle-grenade fell as it did; the chances were impossibly against it. Sausages are easy to see and dodge, but they make a terrible noise when they drop. We have had about ten casualties in our company today from them. I find that my reactions to danger are extraordinarily quick; but everyone gets like that. We can sort out all the different explosions and disregard whichever don’t concern us — such as the artillery duel, machine-gun fire at the next company to us, desultory rifle-fire. But we pick out at once the faint plop! of the mortar that sends off a sausage, or the muffled rifle noise when a grenade is fired. The men are much afraid, yet always joking. The company sergeant-major stands behind Number Eleven brick-stack and shoots at sausages with a rifle as they come over; trying to explode them in the air. He says that it’s better than pigeon-shooting. He hasn’t hit one yet. … A corpse is lying on the fire-step wailing to be taken down to the grave-yard tonight: a sanitary-man, killed last night in the open while burying lavatory stuff between our front and support lines. His arm was stretched out stiff when they carried him in and laid him on the fire-step; it stretched right across the trench. His comrades joke as they push it out of the way to get by. ‘Out of the light, you old bastard! Do you own this bloody trench?’ Or else they shake hands with him familiarly. ‘Put it there, Billy Boy.’
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
The front is a cage in which we must await fearfully whatever may happen. We lie under the network of arching shells and live in a suspense of uncertainty. Over us Chance hovers. If a shot comes, we can duck, that is all; we neither know nor can determine where it will fall.
It is this Chance that makes us indifferent. A few months ago I was sitting in a dug-out playing skat; after a while I stood up and went to visit some friends in another dug-out. On my return nothing more was to be seen of the first one, it had been blown to pieces by a direct hit. I went back to the second and arrived just in time to lend a hand digging it out. In the interval it had been buried.
It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bombproof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hours’ bombardment unscathed. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.
We must look out for our bread. The rats have become much more numerous lately because the trenches are no longer in good condition. Detering says it is a sure sign of a coming bombardment. The rats here are particularly repulsive, they are so fat—the kind we all call corpse-rats. They have shocking, evil, naked faces, and it is nauseating to see their long, nude tails. They seem to be mighty hungry. …
We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation. It is not against men that we fling our bombs, what do we know of men in this moment when Death is hunting us down—now, for the first time in three days we can see his face, now for the first time in three days we can oppose him; we feel a mad anger. No longer do we lie helpless, waiting on the scaffold, we can destroy and kill, to save ourselves, to save ourselves and to be revenged.
We crouch behind every corner, behind every barrier of barbed wire, and hurl heaps of explosives at the feet of the advancing enemy before we run. The blast of the hand-grenades impinges powerfully on our arms and legs; crouching like cats we run on, overwhelmed by this wave that bears us along, that fills us with ferocity, turns us into thugs, into murderers, into God only knows what devils; this wave that multiplies our strength with fear and madness and greed of life, seeking and fighting for nothing but our deliverance. If your own father came over with them you would not hesitate to fling a bomb at him.
The forward trenches have been abandoned. Are they still trenches? They are blown to pieces, annihilated—there are only broken bits of trenches, holes linked by cracks, nests of craters, that is all. But the enemy’s casualties increase. They did not count on so much resistance.Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (translated from the German by A. W. Wheen)
See also: Places, Real and Fictional TG 64
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