Gray clouds stretched across the sky, so low that it almost seemed you could reach up and touch them from within the depths of the trenches. Even now, it looked as if it would start to drizzle at any moment. He felt horribly small beneath that endless sky. Like a mouse hiding low in a gutter.
Jörg rubbed his hands together and blew on them, his rifle slung across his shoulder. The early-morning air had chilled his fingers, but they were finally beginning to warm up again. The stench of stale water and putrid soil rose incessantly from underneath the duckboards laid out over the ground. Although the smell was better today than when the weather was hot, it was still awful. Yet Jörg had lost any capacity to despise it a long time ago.
As soon as a person joined the army, training camp immediately destroyed their idea of a normal life. The reality of war had exacerbated that effect, shattering the spirit of every soldier. Whether they overcorrected or failed to adapt, in the end, no one could remain sane. A person might one day cry themselves to sleep, praying to return home as soon as possible—only to wake up the next morning thinking it was only natural that the war would go on forever. Huddled for weeks on end at the bottom of a trench, surrounded by wretched odors as they indifferently consumed food and water, snatching moments of peace by showering affection on the cats that caught the ration-thieving trench rats. No one could tell the soldiers on the front line when the war would end. Even Wilhelm II, the emperor of Jörg’s homeland—Germany—couldn’t say what might happen in the future. The Western Front, the Eastern Front, the Balkan Peninsula—Jörg had no answer for how to douse the flames of war that had spread across the continent.
June 28, 1914. A Bosnian Serb had assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his wife during their inspection of Sarajevo, causing Austria-Hungary to declare war against Serbia on July 28. Thus began Europe’s Great War—what would eventually become known as World War I.
Each nation in Europe had been faced with the choice of aligning themselves with one of the great powers or defending their own land as a neutral country.
Jörg was a soldier with the German Army. The German Empire had decided to support Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria followed suit, forming the alliance of the Central powers.
France and Great Britain had elected to oppose Germany. Russia, who supported Serbia, had joined them, forming a coalition referred to as the Allied powers. Every nation of the Allies had become an enemy to Jörg.
At first, both the Central powers and the Allies believed that the soldiers fighting in this war that had consumed the whole of Europe would “be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” They confidently declared that it would be decided within four months.
Yet the war raged on.
The middle of December arrived, and still there was no sign of an end to the conflict.
Although the war continued, on Christmas Eve of that year, soldiers from both sides left the trenches to celebrate the birth of Christ, share wine, and even play a friendly game of soccer. Neither side fired a bullet that day. The times allowed for such a moment of peace.
Christmas the following year afforded no such frivolity. Commanding officers on both sides ordered their soldiers to shoot anyone who attempted to repeat the event.
Before arriving at the Western Front, Jörg had lived in a small town in southern Hesse, where he helped out at his father’s barbershop. However, his hometown had changed completely with the outbreak of the war. A belief settled over the villagers that a man’s honor demands he do everything possible for his country, so he should voluntarily join the war effort—a stance Jörg also adopted. And so he, too, soon went off to war.
His barber shears were replaced by a rifle in his new life. Jörg’s days consisted of felling the enemies that ran through the sights of his M 98 or mowing down Allied soldiers with an MG 08 machine gun. A shiver had gone through his body the first time he killed someone—a French infantryman—but he hadn’t felt as guilty as he thought he would. As the fusillade continued, he became absorbed in the world around him and soon began to feel nothing at all.
Exposed to the cacophony of the battlefield, the first thing soldiers lose is their hearing. The bang of rifles firing, the rumble of artillery fire striking the ground, the endless roar of machine guns spitting out rounds—every noise does horrific damage to their ears. Eventually, the only sound they can hear is that of their own breathing, and they become unable to distinguish whether even that is real or a delusion. Meanwhile, they’re running into no-man’s-land under orders to charge and fighting off enemy soldiers rushing into their trenches. Jörg could remember furiously beating a man with his club, then thrusting his knife into the man’s stomach and chest before tearing his throat out with his trench shovel. It was the first time he’d felt as if he was truly broken.
Jörg felt nothing, no matter how terrible the act. After a battle, he returned to being just a normal person. It terrified even himself. He realized that the moment a person killed someone on the battlefield, they also killed themselves. Not only did their soul become numb, but a part of it died, meaning they could never return to the person they had been before taking a life.
And so, soldiers spilled oceans of blood across barren land and heaped up piles of corpses, hoping to push the front line even the slightest bit forward. Yet that way of fighting hardly ever showed results. The vast majority of battles ended in stalemates, with each army returning back to their trenches battered and bruised.
Every aspect of this war differed from those Jörg had heard about from his parents’ generation. The amount of gunpowder used, the variety of weaponry, the scale. On top of that, enemy bullets weren’t the only things that flew into the trenches. Overused cannons would sometimes misfire, raining fodder on friendly troops, and some days, warplanes even dropped bombs on them. Had he known all of this before enlisting, Jörg wasn’t sure he would have joined. It would have been better for him to flee to the US, which hadn’t joined the war at that point.