← The Martyr Made Podcast
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- [00:06]
A
Hey there everybody. This is Darrell Cooper, back at long last with a new episode of the Martyr Maid podcast. And I know, I know it's been a long time. And all I can say for now is that it's just been a tough year. I'll tell my subscribers more about it another time. But it's just been a long year on top of some personal trials. One of the things I've realized over this last year is that I've just really, truly had enough of politics. I mean, I'm still gonna vote and I'm sure people will ask me my opinion on something and I'll bloviate about it. But I just spent way too much time this year accepting interview requests to talk about the day's news in Gaza or you Ukraine or Washington D.C. and all it's done is exhaust me and distract me from the only thing that I'm actually good at and from the only people I actually work for, which is you. Well, that is over. That is over. I am not going to let anything distract me anymore from this history podcast and from the substack content I create for subscribers. I want to make this series the best series that I can. And so I feel bad panhandling given the way that I've already abused my subscribers patience this year. But I love my cat more than I love my honor. And my cat needs to eat. I don't accept advertisers for this show. I never have. If I did, they would have cancelled me a long time ago. Several times. This is a one man operation and I am 100% supported by the generosity of my listeners, by you. So please consider, if you're not already becoming a subscriber either to the Martyrmaid substack, which can be found@subscribe.martyrmaid.com I'll put a link in the show notes or you can subscribe on X if you prefer that platform. I'm going to make the content on substack, including the podcast available there as well. So for just five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year, you can help keep my cat's belly full and help keep this show going. As always, if $5 is a lot of money at this particular time in your life and don't worry, I know what that's like. Please just email me and I'll comp you a subscription. I want everybody to listen to this show who wants to listen to it, but if you can manage it, do please consider supporting the show because it is the only way I'm able to do this and to those of you who have stuck with me through this difficult year, all I can say is thank you. Thank you, thank you.
- [03:07]
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So.
- [03:07]
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Alright, let's do this. I'd wanted to cover more ground in this episode, but trying to make that work is part of why it's taken so long. But I'm happy with how it's turned out overall, and I hope you are too. You're about to hear the Germans. War, part one. We are the war. Years ago, in my former life with the US Department of Defense, I was at a bar somewhere in East Africa, Tanzania, I think. I'd been stuck on a US Navy ship for over a month and I was blowing off some steam with a few of the ship's junior officers. Down the bar a bit was this older guy, white guy, maybe a buck 60, balding, bit of a pot belly. The guy didn't look like much, but he had this attitude. Now, I've been deployed on different ships with nothing to do but lift weights for five or six months at this point, and I'm about 30 years old at the time and I'm pretty jacked, feeling pretty good about myself. I'm half this guy's age, twice his size, at least it seemed like it. Well, maybe we were being kind of loud and obnoxious. Like I said, we've been out to sea for a long time, but this guy keeps scoffing, you know, just shaking his head and making little comments about our conversation and not even under his breath, really. It was like this guy was looking for a fight, but that could not be because there were four of us and we were all bigger and younger than he was. And so I supposed he was just an ornery old bastard with a big mouth and we just tried to ignore him. Well, it probably should have occurred to me at the time to wonder about some white guy in his late 50s, early 60s, drinking alone at a nondescript bar in East Africa and seemingly not the least bit intimidated by a group of younger, bigger military guys. But it didn't. So then some other guys from our ship showed up and sat at the bar with us, and there were actually a few women from the ship as well. So, you know, the atmosphere changed a little bit. Now this guy is making his comments and we're getting a little more defensive and our larger group is crowded a little closer to this guy's personal space. And we're louder because there's more of us and we're a little drunker than we were before. And so this old guy says something I remember what it was, because all I remember is what happened afterward. I finally turn on this guy with the intention, I'm sure, to say something awesome and badass, no doubt. But before I even get started, this old guy springs out of his seat like a cat and cracks me in the jaw. It was all over me before I could even get my bearings. It surprised me like a sucker punch, but I can't lay that on the old man because he came straight at me from the front. It didn't go any further than that, thankfully, because there were six or seven of us at this point and my buddies snatched him up and the old guy was out the door. While I'm still trying to figure out what the hell just happened. And we're all saying the usual nonsense things. What the hell was that? What was that guy's problem? And I'm trying to process the fact that I just lost a fight, sort of, yeah, I just lost a fight to a pot bellied 60 year old half my size.
- [06:35]
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And.
- [06:35]
A
And meanwhile the bartender is behind the bar wiping up the beer I'd spilled, just giggling to himself like it was the funniest thing he had ever seen. So anyway, the night drags on. We're talking to the bartender, and at a certain point he informs us that that guy, the old man, had spent years with a famous South African special forces unit. And when he told us the name of the unit, I'd read enough about the various Bush wars to know that I had gotten off very easy with just a sore jaw. But a lot of those thoughts came later. At this point, it's still a few minutes or so after it happened, I'm still kind of half in shock. And so I say, oh, okay, well, whatever, what the hell was his problem? The bartender sort of shrugs and says, you wouldn't understand. You Americans don't know what it's like to lose a war. And so of course, one of the guys with me pipes in. We've lost wars. And the bartender looks over at him, perks up one eyebrow like the Rock, he says, no, you haven't. Not really, Bob. I think that's what he said the guy's name was. I can't really remember. Bob's mates died for a country that don't even exist no more. I guess I can see how that might give a guy an attitude. I'm content to die for my beliefs. So cut off my head and make me a martyr. The people will always remember it. No, they will forget.
- [08:27]
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Hell does exist.
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God is a thought. God is an idea. It is a place. It is somewhere.
- [08:38]
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Hell does exist, but its reference is.
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To something that transcends all things. We must tear ourselves apart for this.
- [08:54]
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Small question of religion.
- [08:59]
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In his 1948 novel, Intruder in the Dust, William Faulkner wrote about the ancestral memory American Southerners have of the moment on July 3, 1863, just before the fateful charge led by General George Pickett commenced. When the Battle of Gettysburg, the American Civil War and Southern Independence still hung in the balance. That last moment when there was still hope for every Southern boy 14 years old, not once, but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it's still not yet two o' clock on that July afternoon in 1863. The Brigades are in position behind the rail fence. The guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out. And Pickett himself, with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably, and his sword in the other, looking up the hill, waiting for Longstreet to give the word. And it's all in the balance. It hasn't happened yet. It hasn't even begun yet. It not only hasn't begun yet, but there's still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances. And yet it's going to begin. We all know that we've come too far with too much at stake. And that moment doesn't need even a 14 year old boy to think this time, maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain. Desperate and unbelievable victory. The desperate gamble the cast made two years ago. This is it. The absolute edge of no return. To turn back now and make for home, or go irrevocably on and either win or plunge over the world's roaring rim. End quote. Some of us have a moment like that in our own lives. A moment when it seemed like the only sensible option we had was to bet everything on what we hoped was a coin flip. If we win, we say, of course we won. We tell stories about how our victory is. Sure, it took courage and determination in brains. But as long as we showed up and provided those things, our victory was inevitable. Because we were smarter or stronger or braver or all of those things. And if we were luckier, it was only because fate favored the righteousness of our purpose. If we lose everything, we spend the rest of our lives wondering what we could have done differently and whether that gamble really was the only option we had and what things might have been like if the bet had paid off. Instead of ruining us, every country that's lost a war, I mean really lost one the way Bob's country lost one. Well, they have moments like that. I imagine when the Russia Ukraine war is over, a lot of Ukrainians are going to look back at that moment in the spring of 2022 when the first phase of the Russian invasion was in total disarray and the Russians were wanting to negotiate, clearly looking for a face saving way to back out of a mess that they were not prepared for. I imagine a lot of Ukrainians are going to look back at that time and wonder how much different their futures and the future of their country would have been if they'd just taken what they could get when they had the early initiative, instead of listening to people who told them they didn't have to settle for that, that they could win at all, have this epic victory that Ukrainian fathers would still be telling their sons about centuries from now. I think of the Gauls making their stand against Caesar, or Jerusalem when she rebelled against Rome, with glorious visions of the successful Maccabean revolt against the Greeks dancing before their eyes. This time, maybe this time they gambled everything and they lost. In the case of Ukraine, they're in the process of losing, but none of them lost for lack of effort or courage or because they weren't willing to suffer or to make the necessary sacrifices. They gave it everything they had, but they were crushed under the weight of a larger opponent. Defeated by mathematics as much as anything by gravity, by things that have always been undefeated and always will be. Germany had one of those moments in 1918. It was the fourth year of the Great War. To settle the question of who was going to hold sway on the European continent. And to many observers, not only in Berlin, but in Paris, London, Rome, Moscow, New York, it looked like the Germans were about to win. The previous year had brought one disaster after another to Germany's enemies. After a failed and very costly offensive in the spring, the French army had experienced mutinies up and down the line, troops refusing to go over the top and attack, and only with great effort and by executing hundreds, if not thousands. Nobody's quite sure, but at least hundreds of their own soldiers was that mutiny put down, The French managed to avoid a general collapse of their lines. But it was clear to their leaders and to the leaders of both her allies and her enemies, that France would not be going on the offensive for the foreseeable future. The tsarist regime that had ruled Russia for 300 years had collapsed in March 1917. And that summer the new revolutionary government in Russia launched what was supposed to be a pretty easy campaign just to quiet down domestic critics of the war and to show Russia's war allies, chiefly Britain, on whom she was totally dependent for financial and diplomatic support, that she was still committed to the fight, that the new Russia was going to keep the old Russia's promises. 900,000 Russian soldiers were thrown against a section of the Central Powers line that was defended by only 260,000. But within just a few weeks, the Russians were in complete chaos, beating a disorderly retreat as the soldiers threw off their uniforms and deserted by the tens of thousands. Before the year was up, that government would fall to Lenin's Bolsheviks and by early 1918, the Russians would be out of the war altogether. On the heels of Russia's defeat in the summer, the British army attacked the Germans in Flanders. And while they managed to inflict a lot of casualties on the Germans, they took a lot themselves and they failed to achieve any significant strategic objectives. The Battle of Passchendaele, that's what this battle was called, was one of the most brutal and psychologically difficult of the entire war and it took its toll on the British army. He maintained discipline as he always did, but the British soldier was reminded after a second failed all out effort in two years, of the futility of going on the attack in World War I. That battle ended in the fall when the British were forced to transfer on short notice several divisions to help save her ally Italy, who had been holding down the southern front against the Central Powers. The Italian military often gets a bad rap because of later high profile misadventures in places like Ethiopia and Greece. But they battled hard. In the First World War they fought a high elevation, intense mountain war against Austria, Hungary, in arguably the most difficult environmental conditions of the war. And as on every other front, the fighting had been extremely costly but completely indecisive, with immense suffering on both sides and nothing to show for it. But then, in October 1917, just as Lenin's Bolsheviks were seizing control in Russia, the Austro Hungarian Imperial army attacked the Italians and claimed its most significant victory of the war. The fact that this was called the twelfth Battle of the Isonzo river should tell you how much the previous 11 engagements had achieved. But this time was different. After an initial barrage of heavy artillery, Austro Hungarian forces, supported by six German divisions, among whom was a crack young infantry officer named Erwin Rommel, about whom much more later in the series, they broke through the lines of the Italian second Army, which was sent retreating in near chaos until the officers finally managed to stem the panic and reconstitute a defensive line just north of Venice. Nearly 300,000 Italians were killed, wounded or captured in a matter of weeks. 300,000. As historian Robert Gairworth writes, even if the rout of Caporetto. This was also called the Battle of Caporetto, after a nearby town. Even if the rout of Caporetto, which led to the dismissal of the Italian Chief of Staff, Marshal Luigi Cadorna, and the fall of Prime Minister Paolo Boselli, did not bring about a complete collapse of the Italian army in November 1917, it seemed as if the best that Rome could now hope for was the conclusion of an honorable peace treaty without territorial losses. Italy's French and British allies were not encouraged by the new prime minister's promise to carry on the fight from Sicily if necessary. If the whole Italian peninsula was lost. And so the Russians are finished in the east, the Italians look finished in the south. In the west, the French are nearly finished. And the British were undermanned and licking their wounds from Passchendaele. True, the Americans had declared war in April, but the US was not prepared for a major war. And by early 1918, there was still time for the Germans to land a crushing blow on the Western front and force an end to the war before the Americans showed up with enough forces to decide things. The man in charge of the German war effort, First Quartermaster General Erich Ludendorff, summed up the the situation in Russia and Italy will likely make it possible to strike a blow in the Western theater of war. In the new year, the balance of forces will be Approximately equal. Around 35 divisions and 1,000 heavy artillery pieces can be made available for an offensive. Our overall situation demands that we strike as early as possible, ideally in late February or early March, before the Americans throw powerful forces into the balance. One of Ludendorff's staff officers was even more optimistic. Our position was really never so good. The military giant Russia is completely finished and pleads for peace. The same with Romania. Serbia and Montenegro have simply gone. Italy is supported only with difficulty by England and France. And we stand in its best province. England and France are still ready for battle, but are much exhausted. Above all, the French and the English are very much under pressure from the U boats. That optimism was felt by many soldiers on the front line, and it was felt by many of their families back home. The German soldier had no doubt that he fought for the best army in the world. Who else could have stood up to four powerful empires on three fronts for this long and now still find themselves in a position to potentially win. After three years of the most intense fighting against the combined forces of Great Britain, France, Russia, Italy, Serbia and Romania, along with all the men and resources the four great empires could bring to bear, Germany and her allies had held the line and her armies remained entrenched deep in enemy territory, while the only enemy soldiers standing on German soil were prisoners of war. Now, with the Russians out of the fight and Italy seemingly out of it, the Kaiser's forces wheeled around to face Great Britain and a hobbled France on a single front. But the clock was ticking. Central Europe was under siege, with millions of soldiers manning the battlements of a fortress that spanned half a continent. In 1916, men were killed, wounded or went missing at a rate of about 23 every minute, more than 1,400 every hour. Over 30,000 every day for 365 days of the year. It was the bloodiest year in the history of warfare, with roughly 12.2 million casualties taken by all sides. The next year, 1917, brought no relief, just more death on an enormous scale. As the Entente nations and the Central Powers geared up for the fighting season. In 1918, some 26 to 28 million men had been killed, captured or wounded badly enough to be taken out of the war. Two thirds of those casualties had been taken by Germany's enemies. But the Entente powers had vast colonial empires to draw on for manpower and resources, while Germany and her allies had to fight with the men and material available from their own territories. The Entente governed half the Globe's landmass, some 700 million people around the world, about 40% of the global population, while the Central Powers governed only about 140 million people, the overwhelming majority of whom were their own people. After three years of fighting, more than three years, Germany and her allies were still at a disadvantage in almost every area. Every area except one. Germany still fielded the most efficient and well led army on the planet. An army that would go down as one of the great military forces in world history. But it wasn't the same German army that had invaded France and Belgium in 1914. None of the armies were the same, not after what they'd been through. What these men had been through is indescribable in terms that could give us the faintest idea of it. We can hear about it in bloody detail, but we were not there. My friend Jocko Willink is one of the hardest men you're going to find in our modern world. A Navy SEAL commander who led men in the most intense combat of the Iraq War. And who dreams at night of being behind enemy lines in Vietnam, coming up out of the water like Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now. And when he's asked if there's a war in history that he would never want to be involved in, he gives the same answer without hesitation every time he says he wants no part of the trenches in World War I. Like anybody else, a soldier needs at least an illusion of agency on the battlefield. Some feeling that the decisions he makes play some part in his fate and the fate of the mission. Even if it is an illusion, or even if the fog of war clouds any insight into the outcome of your decisions at the time you make them, or if it's really all just up to chance. Whether you catch a stray round or your buddy does, or nobody does, the illusion of agency is enough to carry you through. It makes it so that every day there are things to do, things that might help keep you alive or your friends alive or contribute to the success of the mission. It orients you in the world, gives you direction and purpose. When you get out of bed every morning, it carves out a space for order amidst the chaos of war. But it was impossible for a soldier in the trenches of the Great War to pretend that his fate was anything but arbitrary, that even the grand strategic decisions that made his fate arbitrary were themselves anything but arbitrary. Whether you lived or died, were crippled, maimed, blinded, whether you survived and were returned alive to your mother or wife with part of your lower jaw ripped off or an eye and a part of your orbital bone missing, or if you made it home in one piece but thanks to a cruel dose of mustard gas, or unable for the rest of your life to take a flight of stairs without pausing twice to catch your breath, nothing you did or could have done had anything to do with the outcome. Your fate was in the hands of God. And it can be very hard to believe in God when you are eye deep in hell. As the Canadian poet and soldier John McCrae famously described life in a trench. The great World War I soldier and writer Ernst Younger, reflecting back on his time in the trenches. The trench soldier was stamped with the mark of the animal, the mark of the uncertain, the fateful and the elemental. In an environment as charged with menace as in primeval times, the eyeless face of death often stared at other men as well, but only for a few hours or a few days. If the aviator rose in a decisive flight above the armies. It was still a brief game, with death complete with white collar and the relaxed Smile typical of the courageous man. For him, battle was an intoxicating drink from the glass of the moment, as in the old days when one galloped across dewy fields while the morning sun danced on colored rocks and bare blades. Once upon a time, war was celebrated in days when dying was a joy. Days that rose above the ages like gleaming monuments of human courage. The trench, on the other hand, has turned war into a profession and warriors into day laborers of death rooted in a bloody everyday life. It is now a mere romantic legend. That sense of anguish, foreboding that seizes the soldiers on the eve of war, around the campfire or writing at dawn, that feeling that can transform the world into a dark and solemn cathedral and can weigh down the breath at dinner time the day before the battle. The trench gives no room for lyrical feelings, for the veneration of one's own greatness. Every sophistication is trampled and shredded, every delicacy incinerated by the brutality of events. For many soldiers, the challenge of facing the acute danger of enemy fire was less difficult than simply keeping their sanity amidst the drudgery, boredom, filth and casual horror of daily life. In a trench, you had to survive the environment before you even concerned yourself with the enemy. Just take the rain. There's a light rain in the forecast for my area this evening. If it's still warm enough outside and the lightning isn't too close, I might put on my raincoat and my galoshes and go for a nice walk. Who doesn't love the scent given off by the world following an early autumn downpour? Okay, fine. Now go out into your yard and dig a big hole. Big enough for you to stand up in, but without seeing over the top. Now go get everything you own or everything you can carry, at least your clothes, your food, your cooking utensils, your blanket and pillow, your pictures of your family. Everything you need to live and can fit in a large backpack and throw it in that hole and then put yourself down there and then just forget your house exists because you live here now. And now it starts to rain. Now it's a little different. Now the rain is no longer an opportunity for a leisurely stroll. It is a cold hearted enemy that wants to kill you and to make you suffer before it does. To make matters worse, in Belgium and northern France, where the strongest forces on both sides of the Western Front were concentrated, much of the landscape sits at or below sea level. And so the water table lay just beneath the soldiers feet. And when they dug down to cut a trench it wasn't long at all before they hit water. The trench soldier was invariably ankle deep in mud, and that's if he was lucky. Often the trench went deep below the water table, and so water seeped endlessly from the muddy walls. And bailing water was a full time job. For nine or ten months a year, they used buckets to bail water, if they had buckets, and then dug a few spadefuls of mud and threw it over the top before the water rose and they had to bail it out again. And during the wet season, which was half the year, the trenches would sometimes have men on rotation bailing water 24, 7, just to keep the level of the water below their knees. Any interruption in the process, like if everyone had to take cover from artillery fire or man the battlements to face a potential attack, the water quickly rose to their thighs, to their waist, sometimes their armpits. Soldiers on watch couldn't call a timeout for a bathroom break, so the trench often doubled as a latrine. Sometimes men had to stand in near freezing water mixed with urine, blood, feces and who knows what, up to their waist, sometimes their armpits, for days at a time. They could get out of it if they wanted to. They could get out of the water by getting out of the trench. But along large parts of the front, that was tantamount to suicide. A French soldier wrote, the trench is nothing more than a strip of water. The sides cave in behind you as you pass with a soft slither. We ourselves are transformed into statues of clay, with mud even in one's very mouth. Well, as if it wasn't difficult enough to slog through knee deep water and ankle deep mud carrying a rifle and a pack full of gear. The greatcoat worn by the men in the trenches was not waterproof. And in addition to the seven pound weight of the coat itself, water and mud often added another 25 to 35 pounds to it. Men from one British platoon that emerged from the trenches during the Battle of the Somme were reported to have an average of 58 pounds of water and mud soaked into their gear, in addition to the 60 pounds of gear itself. And so you're talking 90, 100, 110 pounds of extra weight to carry for men who were much smaller than we are, the average weight of a British soldier in the Great War was £112. German soldiers describe their first encounters with corn fed Americans in 1918 as if they'd come under attack by a race of giants. But even the Americans were only 141 pounds on average. So you're 110, 120, maybe 130 pounds, carrying 90 to 100 pounds of waterlogged mud cake gear through mud up to your calves and water up to your thighs. And if you were a German soldier, you enjoyed the added bonus of doing it all on an empty stomach. Another curse feared by every soldier was trench foot, which was caused by having to stand in water for long periods without being able to remove wet socks or boots. The combination of wet and cold led to reduced blood flow in the foot, and soon the wrinkly skin starts turning blotchy and red, then begins to die and fall off if left untreated, as soldiers in the trench often had no choice but to do. The flesh would start to turn black and come off in chunks. Toes and whole feet would sometimes have to be amputated to ward off trench foot. Men had to change their socks two or three times a day, making sure to dry their feet thoroughly and then coating their feet with grease made from whale oil before putting on a fresh pair with. But obviously that was just not always possible. It gets cold in France and Belgium too, a lieutenant of the 2nd Scottish Rifle said. No one who was not there can fully appreciate the excruciating agonies and misery through which the men had to go in those days. Paddling about by day, sometimes with water above the knees, standing at night, hour after hour on sentry duty, while the drenched boots, putties and breeches became stiff like cardboard with ice from the freezing cold air. The winter of 1916, 17 was the worst in decades, lasting from October to April. An Australian sergeant remembered how one time he had filled his bottle with boiling hot tea around midday, only to find when he reached his trench assignment just a few hours later, that the whole thing was frozen solid as a brick. Sometimes the temperature fluctuated so that the weather would alternate between rain, sleet and snow from day to day. A landscape covered with ice and snow would suddenly melt during one warm afternoon with water running into the trenches, only to have it all freeze again later that night. No matter how much rain fell on the Western Front, though, it was never enough to wash away the filth. The muddy, pockmarked, lifeless landscape, suffused with smoke and acrid fumes, smelled of sweaty, unwashed men, of their piss and shit, their garbage, and of rotting flesh, of corpses that lay at every hand. No man's land between the two sides, trenches was littered with dead bodies, some of them blown to bits, others intact and propped up by the endless mass of barbed wire. Like some Kind of macabre scarecrow. Dead bodies couldn't always be evac'd for processing. Sometimes they sat in the trenches for days. You can't take your friend's body topside to bury him because then they'll be burying you with him, and. And so you bury him beneath the floor of the trench. But by the middle of the war, in many places, there was no more room to bury more bodies underfoot. And when the ground was churned up into mud, the rotting bodies would rise to the surface. One soldier told a story about trudging through the muck in the dark when his foot got caught on something. He had to reach down with his hands into the dirty water, into the mud, to work his foot out. And when he did, he realized that his boot had pushed through the soft chest of a rotting corpse and he'd gotten tangled up in the dead man's rib cage. A German soldier, whose face had been blown off by a French sniper was sat down in a corner of his trench until something could be done with him. He stayed there for days. His friends covered his face with a cloth out of respect and so that they didn't have to be reminded of what would happen if the sniper got them. The smell, the smell of rotting flesh wasn't something one encountered. It was in every breath the men took for as long as they remained at the front. At great battle sites like Verdun or the Somme, men coming to relieve the frontline soldiers said they could smell the scene long before they saw it. When they were still miles away from the fighting, a private remembered that his overriding memory of all this time on the Western Front was the smell. You ever seen a dead body? I don't mean in a funeral home, although even that can be jarring and uncanny and is not something to be dwelt on for too long. But in the wild, you know, in a house or on the street, dead bodies were such a common sight to the trench soldier that they hardly noticed them. After a while, some German soldiers who'd taken a British trench came across the arm of a British soldier jutting out from the side of a wall caved in by German artillery. They stared at it dumbly for a moment and then shrugged and hung their rifles from it and sat down to rest. We can read about bodies being stacked on top one another to give the living soldiers something to sit on above the water. In one particularly horrifying story, men who had recently retaken a trench from the Germans used a pile of corpses as a table to play Cards on. Sorry to put these images in your mind, but what I want you to understand is that this is not a bunch of criminal psychotics in the trenches. This is factory workers, farmers, school teachers, clerks. It was kids barely out of school, guys who had not yet been with a woman or ever left their hometown except to go to this war. Well, then there were the lice and the fleas. And of course, the rats. Hordes of them everywhere, all the time. The German whose body was propped up in a corner after being killed by the French sniper. His friend stood watch to keep the rats from chewing his flesh. But not everyone had friends like that, or conditions made it impossible to be vigilant all the time. And even that German whose friends watched over him, even he couldn't be watched all the time. The man who told the story remembered waking up from a nap one day and being startled when the shroud hanging over his dead friend's head began twitching. He knew from experience what it was, but even still, his nerve almost failed him, he says, and he almost just walked away rather than face what was under that cloth. But this was his friend, and he worked up the courage to pull away the clothes and found two rats picking through the exit wound behind the dead man's ear, digging in to get at what brains hadn't been blown onto the trench wall by the bullet. There were hundreds of millions of them, and the rats weren't just numerous, they were huge and had been feasting on the flesh of human beings for so long that they had no fear of the soldiers. A British soldier told of a man from his unit who'd ventured out into no man's land and was blown up by a landmine. It didn't kill him, but the explosion had drawn the attention of every German gun within range, so his unit couldn't send men out to retrieve him. And so he screamed and screamed into the night, begging for someone to save him, crying that he'd been crushed and couldn't move. Sometime after midnight, the rats found him, and what had been the screams of a man in pain became the horrified screams of a little boy confronted with the worst imaginable nightmare. His friends ran up and down the trench looking for a clear shot so they could put him out of his misery rather than having him watch the rats eat his paralyzed body alive. But they could not see him, and so they listened to him screaming until he passed out from shock or loss of blood. There was so much to eat that the rats could afford to be picky, often eating just the eyes and Burrowing in to get at the liver, leaving the rest of the meat to rot. Even the living would wake up to find rats nibbling at their earlobes or any other exposed flesh they could get at. Historian John Ellis describes an encounter of a French soldier in what he says was a typical story. One evening whilst on patrol, Jacques saw some rats running from under the dead men's greatcoats. Enormous rats, fat with human flesh. His heart pounding, he edged toward one of the bodies. Its helmet had rolled off. The man displayed a grimacing face stripped of flesh, the skull bare, the eyes devoured. A set of false teeth had slid down onto his rotting jacket. And from the yawning mouth leapt an unspeakably foul beast. End quote. Well fed black rats multiply at an astronomical rate. A single couple, under ideal circumstances, can give birth to 8 or 900 young per year. But even in those numbers, even in those numbers, the rats were still something that you could occasionally get away from. You could get away from, you could swat away the lice. And the fleas were ever present. Every man in the trench was swarming with them at all times. Your clothes and blankets were covered with them. The vermin never produced anything like the plagues of the past, but they did carry lesser diseases that every soldier contracted. Eventually, black clouds of huge flies gorged on corpse flesh took over the battlefield in trenches, so that every piece of exposed food was covered with them in seconds. And so you're cold, you're wet, you're filthy, sleep deprived and sick. You're covered in lice and rashes, maybe with chunks of rotting skin falling off your body, eating food covered in flies, swatting rats off the corpse of your friend, whose stink is so pervasive that it soaks into your clothes, your hair, your bread. And this was not something you experienced occasionally. It wasn't the worst vacation you'd ever been on. This was the world in which tens of millions of men spent their young adulthood. And we haven't even talked about the guns and the gas. We haven't talked about battle. The scale of combat on the Western Front was titanic, never before witnessed in the history of the world. Unimaginable artillery barrages, including shells filled with poison gas, followed by millions of men being thrown at entrenched lines of machine gunners, riflemen and defensive artillery fire. The British army suffered 60,000 casualties on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The first day. And then that battle went on for another four and a half months. When it was over, the British, French and Germans had taken Over a million casualties in one offensive. Just think about that. The Battle of Verdun, another 800,000 casualties. The Battle of the Frontiers, another 700,000. First Battle of the Marne, 600,000. Passchendaele, 800,000. Any one of these battles would have been the biggest and deadliest war Europe had ever seen. And there were several of them. Every fighting season, the best writers of the early 20th century tried and mostly failed to describe what battle on the Western Front was like, even when they hit the mark. It's almost impossible for most of us to imagine the emotional impact of these experiences. During the Battle of Passchendaele, that 1917 British assault in Flanders, a British soldier described coming across an artillery shell crater that had turned into a death trap for wounded soldiers. Stumbling back to the rear. A khaki clad leg, three heads in a row, the rest of the body submerged, giving one the idea that they had used their last ounce of strength to keep their heads above the rising water. In another miniature pond, a hand still gripping a rifle is all that is visible, while its next door neighbor is occupied by a steel helmet and half a head. The staring eyes staring icily at the green slime which floats on the surface almost at their level. End quote. Passchendaele became a byword for the brutality and futility of combat in the First World War. The Canadian historian and military officer D.J. goodspeed described the scene encountered by a batch of British troops just outside Ypres. The troops who marched up through the broken arch of the Menin Gate, across the footbridge over the Yser Canal and made their way to the line came on a dreary plain that stretched as far as the eye could see. It was a nightmare landscape, featureless, evil smelling, a gray waste of scum, coated water and mud. It was all too easy to sink down and suffocate in the stinking mud. Horses, mules and men were often lost this way, and many of the walking wounded never reached the regimental aid post. The thousands of shell holes were filled with water, and in some the water was reddened with blood, and in some there floated horribly bloated corpses. End quote. The mud at Passchendaele was like something from an alien planet. It swallowed whole vehicles and artillery pieces just as it swallowed men. Private David Jones of the Royal Welch Fusiliers participated in the Passchendaele offensive, and he remembered. In this desolation, the mud is unfathomable, and men and horses sink without trace. Guns stick fast, mules flounder, wagons overturn and men reel and stumble like drunkards Jones, Captain Robert Graves said that the mud did not seem like an inert environmental threat, but a living, evil thing that existed to kill men and make them suffer. Soldiers sometimes had to cross kilometers of deep mud while being raked by enemy machine guns and pounded by artillery. Often artillery shells would be smothered by the deep mud before they exploded, which provided some protection from shrapnel. But the explosion would create a large empty space under the mud that would then collapse and swallow alive all the men in their vicinity. The sky was darkened by rain clouds and smoke, and light was provided by flares fired high over a battlefield on which there was nothing alive except human beings and the bacteria and vermin that feasted on their corpses. Shell craters full of fetid, stinking water, the surface sprayed with noxious chemicals. Men fallen into flooded shell holes, weighed down by too much gear to swim, drowning in a soup of mud and poison gas and waste, given off by the torn and rotting corpses of their comrades. To even make their way from one place to another, wide wooden planks were laid down to distribute their weight. And you better stay on those planks. Artillery shells and machine gun bullets be damned, you better stay on those planks. But that was harder than it sounds, given that the men were often stumbling around from lack of sleep, overburdened by gear, with bullets and explosions all around. Not to mention that the planks quickly accumulated a layer of grease from the smoke that covered the battlefield. A British private who was there said, if you fell off the duck boards, you never got out. Men and horses sank and they just disappeared. The official British account of the battle, based on interviews and written accounts from the men who fought at Passchendaele, recalled a party of men passing up to the front line, found a man bogged down to above the knees. The united efforts of four of them with rifles under his armpits made not the slightest impression. And to dig, even if shovels had been available, was impossible, for there was no foothold. Duty compelled them to move on up the line. And when, two days later, they passed down that way, the wretched man was still there, but only his head was visible, and he was raving mad. End quote. There are stories of men trapped like this and begging their friends for the mercy of a bullet, and their friends often gave it to him and carried that memory with them. On top of everything else, the lines were pounded by artillery in the lead up to a great battle, but even in relative downtime, shells fell all the time. Even if you were in a reserve unit, not in A front line trench. Very often they were hit harder than the front line trenches because advancing troops were going to be close to the front line trenches. And so they would fire behind the lines. There was nowhere safe. There were anti personnel shrapnel shells that sprayed small metal balls out in a cone that covered an area more than a football field. The purpose of these was to tear flesh. Then there were shells packed with high explosives and fitted with a fuse so that they exploded on impact. And the purpose of these was to destroy earthworks and enemy defensive infrastructure. And some were filled with poison gas. As the war dragged on, artillery tactics became more and more sophisticated. An attack meant to soften up the enemy for an assault might see shrapnel shells fired to drive men deep down into their bunkers, which would be followed up by high explosive rounds to bury them alive if possible, and then followed up by shells carrying chlorine or mustard gas to seep into the hiding places of any survivors. The standard howitzer round was about 6 inches in diameter at the base and weighed about 100 pounds. Even deep in their dugouts, front line and reserve soldiers were experiencing traumatic brain injuries on a daily basis during heavy bombardments. I was at the range the other day, sighting in my rifle for this year's elk hunt. The guy next to me was shooting this awesome, really expensive. 338 Lapua, that big rifle. And every time he fired, I could feel this little shockwave from the muzzle blast as the round left the barrel. A.338 Lapua Magnum is a large round, but it's still just a rifle that a guy is holding. And the bullet itself only weighs just over half an ounce. And so imagine the shockwave from a 100 pound projectile packed with high explosives. And those aren't even the big ones. Those are just your standard field howitzers. As both sides constructed fortifications that could stand up to those larger guns became more common. We're talking nine 10 inch rounds that weighed 200 or more pounds each. There were even siege guns that fired 17 inch rounds, which are bigger than the shells fired from the big guns. On a World War II battleship. Sometimes it might be half a dozen shells every hour, just to keep you on your toes. But during scaled operations, artillery would open up until it sounded like a drum roll with no break between one shot and the next. And it would go on for hours. In very intense operations, like when one side was softening up the other before a major battle, even the drum roll would increase in intensity until the reports merged all together and it Just sounded like one endless roar for hours. And the shells themselves were not silent. They would come in like screaming locomotives. A lot of you veterans know from experience, but the rest of us have probably seen it in movies. You know that sound when a bullet whizzes past that? Well, larger rounds do that too, only they don't. They roar. They explode on impact and send geysers of Earth 50 to 100ft up into the air as they blast craters that could be anywhere from 10 to 50ft in diameter, up to 15ft deep, and send thousands of pieces of deadly shrapnel in every direction. It would be crazy to have one of these land in your vicinity. Just the sensory overload and just the trauma, the experience. Just imagine they're coming down like rain, and not for one day, but all the time. It was an overwhelming sensory experience. Hundreds of thousands of men had to be hospitalized for what came to be known as shell shock. In one of many searing passages from Ernst Younger's war memoir, Storm of Steel, he recalled witnessing a barrage. Quote, the earth trembled, the air boiled with the crash of shells, and the drumming on the eardrum was such that one felt as though one's skull would burst. Fragments whistled past, whined, hummed, clanged, and whirled up the soil into black geysers. The whole surface of the earth was one great wound, gaping, smoking, bleeding. A British officer, Guy Chapman, in his memoir, wrote, the great shells came rushing in, each with the sound of an express train and burst with a crash that shook the world. You had the impression of being the object of a relentless mechanical extermination against which nothing could avail. The shells came with a sinister precision, whining, shrieking, rushing down as though each one had been aimed at me alone. There was no protection, no escape. Each one came with the shriek of something malevolent, seeking me out. I felt hunted like an animal in a cage. There was no defense, no shelter, no prayer that could save me. I was naked beneath that sky of iron, a sky filled with hatred. The feeling was of being hunted by some monstrous mechanical beast. End quote. Younger described the feeling of being under bombardment in similar terms as feeling like a cowering prey animal. We crouched low, clutching the earth, while the storm swept over us. One could feel the air torn asunder by the iron rain. Each crash was followed by the whir of fragments. You felt you were the object of a gigantic chase, like game pursued by invisible hunters who missed you only by chance. Almost every account you find describes this feeling of being personally hunted. Amidst the chaos, an unknown British soldier wrote in a letter home. It is as if the guns can see you. You lie in the mud, face down, while the whole world above you bursts and you wait like a condemned man for the stroke. Each shell seems meant for your body. Each explosion says, this one is yours. When the whistle blew and you were ordered over the top to attack, you mounted the parapet and emerged into a hellscape with a raging hurricane of metal and fire tearing across it in your direction. The ground is churned up and muddy. You're £120 carrying £80 of gear, and the mud is sucking your boots down to the ankle with every step. And the ground isn't even it's pockmarked with moguls and blast craters, some of which are completely full of mud or water. And sometimes the mud is 10, 20ft deep. And in your panicked sprint across no man's land, it sometimes looks solid enough to run on until you splash down into it and no one can pull you out without getting shot up by the enemy or pulled in after you. Guys are dropping like flies all around you as you look for a spot to take cover and catch your breath before breaking for the next one. Anti personnel artillery shells and landmines are exploding all around you. Your head is pounding, your mind is confused and unfocused from the concussive blasts, and it's so loud that you could not hear someone even if they were screaming directly into your ear. If you make it far enough across the battlefield, you'll encounter row after row after row of tangled razor wire. So you pull out your bolt cutters, which you've also been carrying, and start trying to cut your way through. But the wire has been placed in that specific spot to give the defenders a clear line of fire at anyone trying to cut it. So the enemy machine guns fix on your position and open up. Henri Barbuss, a French soldier who wrote a novel based on his experiences while the war was still on, describes what it was like to go on the attack. Halt. A fire of intense and incredible fury was threshing the parapets of the trench where we were halted. At the moment I looked through a loophole and saw a swift and strange vision in front of us, a dozen yards away at most. There were motionless forms outstretched side by side. A row of mown down soldiers and the countless projectiles that hurtled from all sides were riddling into this rank of the dead. The bullets that flayed the soil in straight streaks amid raised slender stems of cloud were perforating, ripping the bodies so rigidly close to the ground, breaking the stiffened limbs plunging into the wan and vacant faces, bursting and bespattering the liquefied eyes. And even did that file of corpses stir and budge out of line under the avalanche. We could hear the blunt sound of the dizzy copper points as they pierced cloth and flesh, the sound of a furious stroke with a knife, the harsh blow of a stick upon clothing. Above us rushed jets of shrill whistling and the declining and far more serious hum of ricochets. And we bent our heads under the enormous flight of noises and voices. Trench must be cleared. Get up. We leave this most infamous corner of the battlefield, where even the dead are torn, wounded and slain anew. We turn towards the right and towards the rear. The communication trench rises, and at the top of the gully we pass in front of a telephone station and a group of artillery officers and gunners. Here there's a further halt. Some of us have risked our heads over the edge of the bank and have glimpsed, for the space of the lightning's flash, all the field of battle round which our company has uncertainly wandered since morning and saw a limitless gray plain. Afar, on the evil, endless and half ruined fields, caverned like cemeteries, we see the slender skeleton of a church, like a bit of torn paper, and from one margin of the picture to the other, dim rows of vertical marks, close together and underlined like the straight strokes of a written page. And these are roads and they're trees. Delicate meandering lines streak the plane backward and forward and rule it in squares. And these windings are stippled with men. We can make out some fragments of lines made up of these human points who have emerged from the hollowed streaks and are moving on the plain. In the horrible face of flying firmament, it is difficult to believe that each one of those tiny spots is a living thing, with fragile and quivering flesh, infinitely unarmed in space, full of deep thoughts, full of far memories and crowded pictures. Poor unknowns, poor fellow men. It is your turn to give battle. We descend over the rough and slippery ground with involuntary gestures, helping ourselves sometimes with the rifle. Mechanically, the eye fastens on some detail of the declivity of the ruined ground, of the sparse and shattered stakes pricking up of the wreckage in the holes on all sides. The slope is covered by men who, like us, are bent on the descent. Several bullets arrive at last among us. Bertrand shouts to us to reserve our grenades and wait to the last moment. But the sound of his voice is carried away abruptly, all the width of the opposite slope, lurid flames burst forth and strike the air with terrible detonations in line from left to right. Fires emerge from the sky and explosions from the ground. It is a frightful curtain which divides us from the world, which divides us from the past and from the future. We stop, fixed to the ground, stupefied by the sudden host that thunders from every side. Then a simultaneous effort uplifts our mass again and throws it swiftly forward. We stumble and impede each other in the great waves of smoke, with harsh crashes and whirlwinds of pulverized earth toward the profundity into which we hurl ourselves. Pell mell. We see craters opened here and there, side by side and merging with each other. Then one knows no longer where the discharges fall. Volleys are let loose, so monstrously resounding that one feels himself annihilated by the mere sound of the downpoured thunder of these great constellations of destruction that form in the sky. One sees and one feels the fragments passing close to one's head with their hiss of red hot iron plunged in water. The blasts of one explosion so burns my hands that I let my rifle fall. I pick it up again, reeling and set off in the tawny gleaming tempest with lowered head lashed by spirits of dust and soot in a crushing downpour like volcanic lava. The strider of the bursting shells hurts your ears, beats you on the neck, goes through your temples, and you cannot endure it without a cry. The gusts of death drive us on, lift us up, rock us to and fro. We leap and we do not know whither we go. Our eyes are blinking and weeping and obscured. The view before us is blocked by a flashing avalanche that fills space. It is the barrage fire we have to go through that whirlwind of fire and those fearful showers that vertically fall. We are passing through. We are through it by chance. Here and there I have seen forms that spun around and were lifted up and laid down, illumined by a brief reflection from over yonder. I have glimpsed strange faces that uttered some sort of cry. You could see them without hearing them in the roar of annihilation. A brazier full of red and black masses, huge and furious, fell about me, excavating the ground, tearing it from under my feet, throwing me aside like a bouncing toy. I remember that I strode over a smoldering corpse, quite black, with a tissue of rosy blood shriveling on him. And I remember too, that the skirts of my greatcoat had caught fire and left a trail of smoke behind. On our right all along Trench 97, our glances were drawn and dazzled by a rank of frightful flames, closely crowded against each other like men. Forward now. We were nearly running. I see some who fall solidly flat, face forward, and others who founder meekly, as though they would sit down on the ground. We step aside abruptly to avoid the prostrate, dead, quiet and rigid, or else offensive and also more perilous. Snares the wounded that hook onto you, struggling. The international trench. We are there. End quote. He continues, Quote A shower of bullets spurts around me, increasing the number of those who suddenly halt, who collapse slowly, defiant and gesticulating, of those who dive forward solidly with all the body's burden. Of the shouts deep, furious and desperate, and even of that hollow and terrible gasp when a man's life goes bodily forth in a breath. And we who are not yet stricken, we look ahead, we walk and we run among the frolics of the death that strikes at random into our flesh. The wire entanglements. And there is one stretch of them intact. We go along to where it has been gutted into a wide and deep opening. This is a colossal funnel hole, formed of smaller funnels placed together. A fantastic volcanic crater scooped there by the guns. The sight of this convulsion is stupefying. Truly, it seems that it must have come from the center of the earth. Such a rending of virgin strata puts new edge on our attacking fury. Driven as if by the wind, we mount or descend at the will of the hollows and the earthly mounds and the gigantic fissure, dug and blackened and burned by furious flames. The soil clings to the feet and we tear them out angrily. The accoutrements, stuff that cover the soft soil, the. The linen that is scattered about from sundered knapsacks prevents us from sticking fast in it, and we're careful to plant our feet in this debris. When we jump into the holes or climb the hillocks behind us, voices urge us Forward, boys, forward. Nom de Dieu. All the regiment is behind us. They cry. We do not turn round to see, but the assurance electrifies our rush. Once more. No more caps are visible behind the embankment of the trench we are nearing. Some German dead are crumbling in front of it in pinnacled heaps or extended lines. We are there. The parapet takes definite and sinister shape and detail. The loopholes. We are prodigiously, incredibly close. Something falls in front of us. It is a grenade with a kick. Corporal Bertrand returns it so well that it rises and bursts just over the trench with that fortunate deed the squad reaches the trench. Pepin has hurled himself flat on the ground and has found himself involved with a corpse. He reaches the edge and plunges into it. The first to enter fore lab, with great gestures and shouts, jumps into the pit almost at the same time that Pepin rolls down into it indistinctly. I see in the time of a lightning's flash a whole row of black demons stooping and squatting for the descent on the ridge of the embankment. On the edge of the dark ambush. A terrible volley burst point blank in our faces, flinging in front of us a sudden row of flames the whole length of the earthen verge. After the stunning shock we shake ourselves and burst into devilish laughter. The discharge is passed too high and at once, with shouts and roars of salvation, we slide and roll and fall alive into the belly of the trench. I hope you'll forgive my resorting to these extended quotations. These are experiences that are best related in narrative form by men who were there, or at least one who has studied and spoken to men who were there and written their stories down. I could tell you of gas attacks, of the choking panic, the blistering skin, the bloody vomit and yellow film that covered every inch of a victimized soldier. But I could never explain to you the terror of what it was like here. Novelist Sebastian Barry, in his book A Long, Long Way, about a young Irish soldier named Willie Dunn, does his best to put into words Willie's first encounter with poison gas. The yellow cloud was noticed first by Christy Moran because he was standing on the firestep with his less than handy mirror arrangement, looking out across the quiet battlefield. That little breeze had freshened and it blew now against the ratty hair that dropped out of Christy Moran's hat here and there. So the breeze was more of a wind and was blowing full on against Christy's hat and mirror. But it was nothing remarkable. What was remarkable was the strange yellow tinged cloud that had just appeared from nowhere. Like a sea fog, but not like a fog, really. He knew what a flaming fog looked like, for God's sake, being born and bred near the sea in fucking Kingstown. He watched for a few seconds in his mirror, straining to see and straining to understand. It was about 4 o' clock and all as peaceful as anything. Not even the guns were firing now. The caterpillars foamed on the yellow flowers and the grass died in the path of the cloud. That was only Christy Moran's impression. Maybe he hoicked down the mirror a moment, wiped it clean with his cleanest sleeve. Back up it went. The cloud didn't look too deep, but it was as wide as the eye could see. Christy Moran was absolutely certain now. He could see figures moving in the yellow smoke. It must be some sort of way of hiding the advancing men, he was thinking, some new fashioned piece of warfare. Would you fetch out the captain? He said to o'. Hara. All right, boys, stand now in readiness. Get those rifles up here. Machine gunners, start firing there into that bloody cloud. So the gun detail leaped to their machine gun. Joe McNulty and Joe Kielty, the loaders as ever, Mayo men and cousins too, that joined up somewhere against the wishes of their fathers, they had confessed, and the bullets started clattering away from them, the water man keeping the gun well cooled, the shooter firm on his knees and expecting all the while to have the top of his noggin shot off. But this was a very curious advance. Captain Pasley came out and stood contemplatively by Christy Moran, who had abandoned his mirror and was now standing up on the fire step. Such was his puzzlement. What's going on, Sergeant Major? Said Captain Pasley. I couldn't tell you for the life of me, said Christy Moran. There's just this big fucking cloud about 50 yards off, drifting along in the wind. It doesn't look like fog. It might be smoke from the fires they're burning. Might be. Can you see them coming on? I thought I could, sir, but there doesn't seem to be anyone. No shouts, no cries. It's as quiet as a nursery, sir. And the baby's all asleep. Very good, Sergeant Major. Cease firing, men. The Algerians to the right were a little ahead of them as the trench twisted away there in a slight salient. All the Irish were on the firestep now. All along the length of the trench, some 1500 men showing their faces to this unknown freak of weather or whatever it might be. The commanding officer was rung up and told what was afoot, but there wasn't any coherent order he could think to give except to be cautious and to shoot anything that came creeping. There had been no warning barrage and the dense smoke didn't look too threatening. It was beautiful in a way. The yellow seemed to boil about and sink into whatever craters it was offered and then rise again with the march of the main body of smoke. There were still birds singing behind them, but whatever birds had been in front of them were silent now. Captain Pasley removed his hat and scratched his balding pate and put the hat back on Again, I don't know, he said. Like a London fog, only worse. The big snake of turning yellow reached the parapet of the Algerian trench far over to the right. And now strange noises were heard. The soldiers seemed to be milling about haphazardly, as if invisible soldiers had fallen in on them and were bayonetting them without restraint. That wasn't a good sound. The colonial men were roaring now. And there were other frightening cries, as if the unseen horde were throttling them. Of course, the Irishman could not see into the trenches as such, but in their mind's eye a ferocious slaughter must have been afoot. Horrible laments rose from the affronted Algerians. Now they were climbing up the parados and seemed to be fleeing back toward the rear. The smoke came steadily on. It's the smoke, said Captain Pasley. There's something wrong with the smoke, gents. Now, in his old house at home in Wicklow, there were seven fireplaces, and two or three of them were as leaky as old buckets. And when they were lit, smoke poured forth into the bedrooms above them. And that was an evil smoke, but it would not drive you back as if you were cattle, as was happening to those poor men of Algiers now, for some reason tearing off their uniforms and writhing on the ground and howling. Howling was the word for it. The Dublin Fusiliers took the smoke at the furthest right tip beside the Algerians, exactly the same thing happened. Now the men were possessed of an utter fear of this dark and seemingly infernal thing creeping along, seeming to make the grass fizz and silencing birds and turning men into howling demons. On instinct, the men pushed down along the trench as anyone would do in the same circumstance, crowding into the next stretch suddenly, so that the. The men there for a moment thought they were being attacked. From the turn of the trench. These men in turn were panicked and poured out onto the next section. And because the line of the trench was only at the slightest of angles to the line of the smoke, they had to move proportionately faster to keep ahead of it. Soon the third and fourth stretches were in a hopeless tangle and the smoke poured in upon them. In the sudden yellowy darkness, awful sounds sprang up like a harvest of hopeless cries. O' Hara started to scramble up the parados behind, and it was only Christy Moran's bark that made him stop. The sergeant major looked to the captain. Captain Pasley's face had turned the color of a sliced potato. There was the same bloom on it, also of damp. I need to ring headquarters and ask them what to do. What is this hellish thing? No time for that, sir, said the sergeant major. Can I let the men fall back, sir? Said I have no earthly orders for such a thing, said Captain Pasley. We are to hold this position. That's all there is to it. You won't hold nothing against that smoke, sir. Best to fall back to the reserve trenches anyhow. There's something deathly and wrong. But before such a sensible conversation could continue, the smoke was slipping down the parapet about a dozen yards ahead itself like dozens and dozens of slithering fingers, and there was a stench so foul that Willie Dunn gripped his stomach. Joe McNulty came tumbling down from his emplacement, gripping his mayo throat like a dog done in by poison meant for rats. Get the fuck out, said Christy Moran. All right, said the captain. I'll hold the fort here, Sergeant Major. You will on your fuck, sir. Begging your flaming pardon. Come on. Willie Dunn and his comrades scaled the parados, and everyone started to stumble back across the broken ground. It was astonishing to be up out of the trench and going along at the level of normal things. Ghosts of soldiers plummeted up out of the smoke to the right and tottered screaming along, falling to their knees, their hands around their throats, like those funny men in the music halls that would pretend to be strangled, and it was their own hands at their necks doing the throttling. Now there was no question of order or retreat. The soldiers that had not had a dance with the smoke just went tearing away towards what they hoped was safety. After some hundreds of yards they reached one of the advance batteries, who, without a word caught the horror in their faces and began to shout and pull and jostle, tried to get up the horses quickly to bring their guns, for it would be a fearsome disaster to let the guns be captured. But it was all aspiration when the scores and scores of suffering men were beheld staggering towards them like an insane enemy. The artillerymen scarpered, too. There was nothing else to be done. Anyone that lingered tasted the smoke, felt the sharp tines in his throat raking and gashing, and he was undone. Now and then, miraculously, a man seemed to run unscathed from the gloom, running all the faster for his escape. Rifles were scattered now across the pounded fields, as if some proper battle were being fought after all. Willie Dunn ran with the rest. There was a bottleneck ahead where the ground had been fought over a few weeks back, and the men had to get up on a rough road to make any progress at all. This of course engendered the wild fear of being prevented from escaping at all. And still the vile smoke came on behind. Men were slushing into craters to try to swim across and could not get to the other blessed side. No act of virtue or rescue was possible. Every man had to do for himself. Now three or four battalions seemed to be mixing themselves together. There were the remnants of the Algerians and some regular French soldiers and the fusiliers themselves. And there were lads from some Lincolnshire regiments that must have been driven from across the field. Everyone was gripped by the same remorseless impulse to flee the site of this nameless death. If it were a battle proper, these men would never have turned tail. They would have fought to the last man in the trenches and put up with that and cursed their fate. But it was the force of something they did not know that drove them, shoving and gasping, away from that long, long monster with yellow skin. There were officers now along the road trying in a bewildered and puzzled fashion to get the men to turn around. They did not know what was happening, and all they saw was that the men seemed to be deserting wholesale. A rout like this was unheard of, unless a man was a veteran of the terrible pushback from Mons to the Marne in the first months of the war. Battalions in reserve had to conclude that there had been some mighty breakthrough by the Hun. But this seemed entirely mysterious, as no one had received the least message in this direction and. And no mass bombardment had been heard and endured. Furthermore, no bullets even followed the retreating and desperate men. Now a weakened version of the stench seemed to be everywhere. It was getting into every niche and nook in creation, into ears and eyes, into mouse holes and rat holes. But the danger then was at last passing men dropped where they found themselves soaked in sweat, Already exhausted men further exhausted by such a hard gallop across ruined ground. Willie Dunn was visited by a tiredness so deep that he lay where he had fallen and plummeted further into a dreamless sleep. He awoke to a yellow world. His first thought was that he was dead. It was the small hours of the morning and there were still torches and lights being used. Long lines of men were going back along the road with weird faces, their right hand on the right shoulder of the man in front, about 40 men in a chain. Sometimes he thought horribly of the Revelation of St. John and wondered if by chance and lack he had reached the unknown date of the end of the living world. Smeared across the faces was a yellowish grease. The men's uniforms had turned a peculiar and undesirable yellow and all the acres of the world had been seared and ruined afresh. Even the leaves of the trees, so fresh the day before, seemed to have gone limp on their natural hinges and twisted about sadly, not making the usual reassuring music of the poplars along the roadside, but a dank, dead metallic rustling as if every drop of SAP had been replaced with a dreadful poison. End quote. You were a goner if you took the full brunt of a gas attack. But of course, not everyone died. Some were just late getting their masks on or else put them on in a way that they didn't seal properly. These men were merely blinded, not always for good, but sometimes. Or they had their lungs wrecked, and that was usually a life sentence. After the war, there were thousands of young men on both sides who had to live the rest of their lives as if they'd been smoking two packs a day for 60 years, unable to get up a flight of steps without pausing a few times for breath. Your reward for coming through unscathed was that you got to go back to living in the wet, muddy, rat infested, lice, bitten corpse, stuffed hole until it was your turn again. This was your life. And by 1917, most frontline troops had been living this life for almost three years. A young American preacher wrote a short book published by the YMCA that year. In it, he war is now dropping bombs from aeroplanes and killing women and children in their beds. It is shooting by telephone orders at an unseen place miles away and slaughtering invisible men. War, he said, is men with jaws gone, eyes gone, limbs gone, minds gone. And yet this young American clergyman ended his book with a call for American men to enlist and go fight in Europe. Everything I've described so far was a common experience of every front soldier on all sides. If anything, the French had it the worst because their military culture was so focused on always being on the attack that they could never bring themselves to think of their trenches as anything more than a temporary stop before they move forward. And so they were always in disrepair. But now take everything I just described, from the acute expenditures of total effort in battle to the daily grind, to digging out and bailing water from the collapsed trenches and carrying gear equal to 60 to 70% of your body weight through ankle deep mud and knee deep water. And now imagine doing it all on an empty stomach. That was an element of suffering that was felt only by Germany and the other Central powers. When the war began, all sides envisioned a short, sharp conflict to settle which powers were going to hold sway in Europe. All sides envisioned that, but the Germans needed it to happen that way. Of course, it didn't go that way. A war that everyone hoped and believed would be short and decisive had devolved into an apparently purposeless and maybe endless killing machine that chewed up human bodies with mathematical regularity and which seemed to operate without regard for the plans or desires of the people involved. The main military lesson taken from the first few months of the war was that technology, like machine guns, accurate long range rifles, barbed wire, precision artillery, had given the defender a huge advantage over the attacker. And so the Germans, after their initial push into France and Belgium, was brought to a halt, hunkered down and dug their trenches and built a powerful defensive line that stretched all the way from the English Channel to the border of neutral Switzerland. That was in the West. The Eastern Front never settled into the kind of stasis for which the Western Front became famous. But military frontiers were established there as well. It's oversimplifying things a bit, but the basic situation was that the Germans simply didn't have the manpower to attempt a decisive blow on one front without making themselves fatally vulnerable on another front. In any case, they were the ones who were now occupying their enemy's land, not the other way around. So the impetus to attack was on their enemies, not on Germany. All Germany had to do was hold its ground until the other side got tired of smashing headfirst into their defensive line and opted for a negotiated conclusion that hopefully favored Germany. That was the plan in 1915 and 16. All sides had played their part. The Entente threw bodies at the Central Powers lines and the Central Powers threw them back. But still the cold, hard math continued to favor the Entente. The soldiers they lost could be replaced by men drawn from their globe spanning empires, While German reinforcements could only be drawn from each year's graduating class. The Entente had access to financing from the Americans into the resources of six continents. While Germany and her allies, already by 1916, were beginning to starve, Germany had no substantive plan for a long war. The country is relatively resource poor and even before the 20th century often had difficulty providing for all of its people. That's a big reason there are large German populations in the Americas. And there used to be large German populations in the countries of Germany's near abroad in Eastern Europe, these were outlets for excess population. In 1914, Germany depended on imports for at least a third of her food staples, her fertilizers and her animal feed. With the outbreak of war, those imports disappeared as Germany's enemies locked down her Borders, and the British Navy locked down her coast with Central Powers, made do by using up stores and rationing in 1915. But poor crop yields and more efficient blockade tactics by the Royal Navy made hunger and deprivation a major problem by 1916. As early as October 1914, a few months into the war, to save grain, bakers in Germany were using potato flour to make bread. But soon potatoes were in short supply and flour was made from corn and lentils. And by late 1916, when even those were hard to come by, they made up the difference with sawdust and straw. Food scarcity naturally affected the poor first and most severely, but everyone was feeling it. Princess Blucher, an English woman who'd married a German aristocrat, kept a diary of her life in Germany during the war. In it, she wrote, quote, we are all growing thinner every day, and the rounded contours of the German nation have become a legend of the past. We are all gaunt and bony now and have dark shadows round our eyes, and our thoughts are chiefly taken up with wondering when our next meal will be. End quote. Like all countries in the war, Germany censored the mail. But bad news still made it through. Soldiers who went home on leave found their families starving, and they brought those stories back to the front. Women whose husbands had been killed in the war watched their children waste away from hunger. There were food protests and even riots, mostly involving women, since most of the men were in the army. In the autumn of 1915 and even more widespread and intense waves of riots in the summer of 1916, when things were getting really bad, the government did what it could. Extra rations were allocated for workers in heavy industry, people who burned most calories. Women in the last three months of pregnancy were given extra rations and some other groups. But this was complicated to enforce, and at the end of the day, there was no getting around the fact that there was simply not enough food available. Available. C. Paul Vincent, in his book the Politics of Hunger, quotes an Once I set out for the purpose of finding in these food lines a face that did not show the ravages of hunger. But among the 300 applicants for food, there was not one who had had enough to eat for weeks. In the case of the youngest women and children, the skin was drawn hard to the bones and bloodless eyes had fallen deeper into the sockets. From the lips, all color was gone, and the tufts of hair which fell over the parchmented faces seemed dull and famished, a sign that the nervous vigor of the body was departing with the physical strength. End quote. A Swiss diplomat reported Seeing similar things, the faces of Berlin are gray with hunger. One sees children with legs like sticks, women fainting in queues, men too weak to work. It is as though the city is under a slow siege. Death advances invisibly, not with shells, but with empty stomachs. Products like sugar, milk and butter became luxuries early on and before long were hardly ever seen at all. Meat consumption dropped to 12% of pre war levels. People with hookups in the countryside, where people grew more of their own food than in the cities, often had more than others. But in large areas of the country, like the industrial heartland of the Ruhr in the west, much of the food had always come from far afield. And these areas were hit very hard. Middle class housewives were searching dumpsters and trash heaps for scraps of used food, discarded food that they could bring back to their children. Old people, women and children staggered around in fields outside of town, looking for gleanings and edible roots, even bugs, anything that would quiet the demon of hunger for just an hour. Looting and stealing became more common, and magistrates were often faced with the difficult choice of whether to make an example of a poor mother stealing a loaf of bread for her hungry children. By the long winter of 1916, 1917, the so called turnip winter, even potatoes had become a rare sight. And many people lived almost exclusively throughout that winter on turnips and cabbage. Winston Churchill, the architect of the blockade in its first year, would later write, quote, the British blockade treated the whole of Germany as if it were a beleaguered fortress and avowedly sought to starve the whole population, men, women, children, old and young, wounded and sound, into submission. And Churchill is kind of doing himself a favor here, because it wasn't only Germany that was under this blockade. The German army stood in large parts of France and Belgium and in Slavic territories in the east. And those people starved, too. Starvation, starvation tears society up by their roots. People start to behave in ways that they would never have even considered, because your mind goes when you're starving, you know, you become like a crack fiend who needs his drug. He'll do anything to get it, because the need, the impulse, just swallows up every other human impulse until it's satisfied. Flavius Josephus, in his history of Jerusalem's rebellion against Rome in the first century, tells a story of a woman who was caught roasting her baby for dinner. Things didn't get that bad in Germany, but about 1% of the pre war population, up to about 800,000 people, died of starvation or causes directly linked to malnutrition that were brought on by the blockade. 800,000 people starving to death. What did those 800,000 do before they gave in to the hunger? What did the survivors do to keep alive? Profound instincts scream in the brains of people watching their children starve. Obligations that are taken for granted by people living together in good times wither away in a famine. The law abiding start to break the law. People who would never hurt a fly, let alone a child, steal food from out of the mouths of their neighbors children to quiet the rumbling in the bellies of their own kids. These people have to go back to living next door to each other when the famine passes. No society goes through a period of extreme deprivation like Germany faced during this period and is the same when it's over. Imagine trying to fight a war in conditions that are hardly endurable under the best circumstances. And not only doing it on an empty stomach, but doing it while knowing that your family back home is slowly starving to death. Knowing that your wife, your sister, your mother is forced to steal and fight for food to feed her children or your children. Soldiers home on leave saw rail thin women with drawn faces standing in queues for hours waiting for a scrap of food. They saw children with bloated, distended bellies and bulging eyes begging on the streets. Respectable middle class women with husbands and sons at the front fought with each other in the streets for scraps. Sometimes after hours of waiting for a meager ration that would get their kids through the next few days. The window would slam shut and a sign would be put up announcing that supplies had run out. But not before policemen got into position to deal with the potential riot that was sure to follow. As malnutrition set in, the overall health of the population rapidly declined. The number of stillbirths and deaths in early infancy skyrocketed. The death rate of tuberculosis for people in towns and cities nearly doubled over the course of the war. As did the number of those dying from typhoid. Half of school children in the big Cities were anemic. 40% suffered from rickets. A physician in Hamburg. Every day I see the swollen bodies of children suffering from hunger. Edema mothers bring them in with faces thin as skulls. The children are so weak they cannot walk. The old die quietly. The young protest with cries that cannot be stilled. 800,000 people. Germany's pre war population was about 67 million in 1914, so that would be the equivalent of about 4 million Americans starving to death. Old people and kids died first. Starving new mothers couldn't make milk and watched their babies starve to death. Like workers in heavy industry, men at the front received a larger food ration to account for the heavy labor that was often required of them. You know, digging and bathing water, moving things around, just simply getting from one place to another with £70 of gear on their backs. But even they rarely had enough that food was not a predominant topic of every conversation. This would only continue to get worse and worse right up until the end of the war and even far beyond the end of the war. You know, I mentioned Jocko earlier and how he says that of all the wars in world history, World War I is the conflict he would least like to be involved with. I believe him because if you rank the wars from ones you'd most to least want to be involved in, you can't say all or none. Then one of them has to be at the bottom. But I still think that if you threw Jocko in a time machine and plopped him down in Flanders in the mud in 1917, he'd figure out how to have the time of his life. Because that's just how some people are. There's a certain kind of man, and I think probably this idea sleeps in every man, but in a certain kind of man, it doesn't sleep. It's wide awake, whispering in your ear from boyhood, a certain type who, while he respects and understands the need for every kind of labor, he believes on some bone deep level that there is really only one vocation, one, one calling that is truly worthy of a man, that of a soldier, a warrior. Such a man can rest at home. He can enjoy its comforts for a while, but he knows that comfort is poison. He can feel it rotting his insides, dulling his senses, weakening him for the fight. And he only truly feels at home standing with his friends across a battlefield from men with the capability and intent to take everything from him. Jocko is just one of those people. And he would have been one of those people, whether he was in Ramadi, Khe Sanh, Stalingrad, or Thermopylae. And I know it because there were men like that in every one of those battles. There were men like that in the trenches of the Great War. Ernst Younger was a man like that. Younger was a young infantry officer and stormtrooper in the German army. Reflecting back on the war a decade later, he wrote, we cannot deny, as some would have it, that war, father of all things, is also in us. He has forged, chiseled, and hardened us. And always, as long as the Spinning wheel of life continues to whirl within us. This war will be its axis. He has educated us to fight and we will remain fighters as long as we live. We lived in the womb of a culture gone insane, more confined than our ancestors, disintegrating between cravings, in business and at breakneck speed, between glittering plazas and subway tunnels, lured into cafes by the glow of mirrors, boulevards, beams of colored light, bars full of glittering liquor, conference tables, everything up to date, a novelty. Every hour, every day a problem solved, a new sensation. Every week, in great rattling, underlying discontent. Children of an age intoxicated with the material progress appeared to us as the ultimate crowning achievement. The machine was the key to approaching God. The telescope and mirror were our organs of perception. But underneath that polished and shiny shell, underneath the robes with which we were adorned, like magicians, we remained naked and raw, like the men of the forest. In step, in divine sparks, the blood spurts through the veins. When one marches on the fields headed for battle with a clear consciousness of one's daring. Under the warlike step, all the values of the world wither like leaves in autumn. Having reached such heights of charisma, one can only feel reverence for oneself. What is more sacred than a fighting human being? End quote. There were other men like Younger. One of them was the most famous soldier to emerge from the Great War. The most consequential man of our age, Adolf Hitler. Hitler had found his home in the army. It was the first place he had ever really, truly felt at home. He was a 24 year old artist renting a single room in Munich, living hand to mouth, working the streets, selling painted postcards and portraits of passersby. Before that, he had shuffled through men's homes and soup kitchens and spent many nights with hunger gnawing at his insides. When the news came down in June 1914 that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Habsburg throne of Germany's ally, the Austro Hungarian Empire, by a Bosnian Serb terrorist, Hitler was incensed. Like most of his countrymen, the Austrians demanded satisfaction for the murder. And when Serbia wouldn't give it to them, a military operation was inevitable. When the Russian Empire, in all likelihood with her ally France, made clear that she would intervene in defense of Serbia, and Germany announced that she would honor her commitment to fight alongside Austria before anyone really knew what was happening, a continent that had known mostly peace for a hundred years suddenly found itself in the deadliest and most destructive war in human history. Despite governments on all sides predicting a great victory by the end of the year, the most perceptive observers and participants had a deep foreboding, as when one of English Prime Minister Asquith's sons remarked that sinister influences, hostile and imponderable, seemed to be moving behind the veils. And there was a sense also of the tramp, of some malign destiny marching toward disaster. But most did not pay attention to or even consider what might be lurking behind the veil, and instead rushed into the fire with wild abandon. The dislocations generated by Germany's very rapid industrial revolution had broken up ancient communities and called into question old customs and beliefs and created strife between newly conscious social classes. Millions of people, mostly men, whose ancestors had lived in the countryside and worked on farms for countless generations, milled around the teeming cities looking for something that would restore a lost sense of belonging, purpose, a lost sense of order to their lives. Some dissipated themselves in alcohol or the passing pleasures on offer in the cities, but many latched on with great enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of a drowning man clutching at a floating life ring to social movements that promised to fill the void left by the abdication of family, church and community. All the things that had given structure and direction to the men's lives right up until the most recently passed generation. But the ideological replacements, whether nationalism, socialism, anarchism, what have you, just produced more conflict and antipathy within society. And everyone had the sense, and not only in Germany actually, but in all the belligerent countries, they had the sense that they were in some kind of a holding pattern. Things could not simply continue as they were, they couldn't. The building pressures were becoming too great, and no one could imagine a world where the laws of physics were defied and the pressure just kept building indefinitely without an explosion of some kind. And so history, in other words, that sense of continuity between past, present and the immediate future, at least the feeling of moving together toward a hoped for future. It was as if the pause button had been pressed. People were confused and overwhelmed and disoriented by the rapidity of change. The English writer and historian Caroline Plain, reflecting on the summer of 1914 years later, wrote, the exceeding complexity of life had produced an overstrained generation. Men's patience failed them in facing the great tasks of organization necessitated by new conditions. The war was a welcome relief from facing the difficulties inherent in the situation. It was felt to be a war to save civilization, to clear a certain blocking of progress. Let us fight, they said, peradventure. Amidst the excitement of battling, we shall stumble onto a life fit for heroes. There was a feeling abroad that life without Great excitement was no longer tenable, that explosive forces had become too threatening, too dangerous to tolerate, too intractable to coordinate, impossible to subdue. Nations of men, fearing one another, glided into a suicidal attitude. Then they departed from the course of life and plunged into the adventure of death. They dethroned reason and espoused force till large tracts of habitable earth became fatal playgrounds for madden millions, whilst the masses of the home population watched and upheld and encouraged and loudly applauded the murderous game. End quote. Another English novelist, Agnes Hamilton, had one of her characters put it more succinctly. After all these years of unreality and sham, a big thing like this gives one the sense of having escaped out of the tunnel into the air. It's the same impulse that causes people to pine for the apocalypse, for the EMP or the solar flare that hits the reset button and drags us out of the illusory world generated by our technological civilization and back into the real world. People were waiting for something. No one knew what. Something that would bring about the moment of decision that would be followed. They were sure of it by a renewed sense of unity. It was not hard to believe that the moment had come. In the summer of 1914, Americans who remember the days immediately following 911 will tell you how strangers passing on the street would exchange looks with each other. Looks of acknowledgment. We don't know each other, but we're Americans. People were actually nicer to each other. That's not my imagination. Anyone who was around will tell you that you saw American flags everywhere. Less than a year after a contested election that came down to a few hanging chads on Florida voting sheets, George W. Bush had a 90% approval rating, something that is absolutely impossible to imagine in the decades before or since 9 11. This is how it was in Germany and the other belligerent countries when the Great War broke out. Only it was even more intense. Because back then, in the age of mass conscription, instead of boutique professional militaries like we have now, the outbreak of war meant that a whole generation of young men would be on the battlefield. Like in a month or two, crowds of strangers in the streets would spontaneously break out into national anthems. Political opponents reached across the aisle. Socialist parties that had espoused international working class solidarity all of a sudden became nationalists and announced their fealty to king and country and encouraged the working men of their own nations to take up arms against workers in neighboring countries. Hitler later recalled that when the German declaration of war was announced. I am not ashamed to say that, overcome with rapturous enthusiasm, I fell to my knees and thanked heaven from an overflowing heart for granting me the good fortune of being allowed to live. At this time, Hitler was no conscript. He was a volunteer, having previously been found physically unfit for service in peacetime. He wrote a letter to the King of Bavaria begging for the privilege of serving in his army. And later that day, after he sent the letter, as he stood in a crowd cheering the monarch, all he could think of was whether the King had received and read his letter. Yet the next day, a letter in reply, and Hitler says he opened it with trembling hands. He was overjoyed that his request had been approved. He would be a soldier. After a short period of training, he, along with millions of other young men, went to war. Historian John Tolan describes the atmosphere as this hopeful, naive generation waded into the bloodbath. A brigade lieutenant, a professional soldier named Fritz Wiedemann, watched with mixed feelings as Hitler and his comrades loaded into the cars. The regimental commander had not been on active service for years. Most of the companies were led by reserve officers and the men had only perfunctory training. There were few machine guns. The telephone equipment had been originally manufactured by a Nuremberg firm for the British army, and the men didn't even have iron helmets. Instead, they were going off to war in oil cloth caps, as did the volunteers of the 1812-13 wars of Liberation. What the brigade lacked in equipment and training, it made up for in enthusiasm. As each train pulled out, the occupants laughed and sang. It was as if they were bound for a glorious party. There would be a few weeks of gallant and exciting fighting and then victory. By the new year. At dawn, Hitler's train was running along the Rhine, a sight most of the Bavarians had never seen. The sun drawing up the mist from the river, suddenly revealed the gargantuan statue of Germania looking down from the Niederwald. All along the train, the men spontaneously burst into Tivakt am Rhein. I felt as though my heart would burst, recalled Hitler. Eight days later, Hitler's company was thrown into battle near Ypres. Hitler's unit was at the tip of the spear of Germany's early push into Belgium and France. They posted up overnight at a rear position, and the next morning, under cover of fog, they pushed toward a forest that was already being bombarded with English and Belgian artillery shells. In a letter to a friend in Munich, Hitler wrote, quote, now the first shrapnel hisses over us and explodes. At the edge of the forest Splintering trees as if they were straws. We watch with curiosity. We have no idea as yet of the danger. None of us is afraid. Everyone is waiting impatiently for the command forward. We crawl on our stomachs to the forest. Above us are howls and hisses. Splintered branches and trees surround us. Then again, shells explode at the edge of the forest and hurl clouds of stone, earth and sand into the air, tear the heaviest trees out by their roots and choke everything in a yellow green, terribly stinking steam. We cannot lie here forever, and if we fall in battle, it's better to be killed outside. So when all the units that are needed for an assault got in position, Hitler and his comrades rose and advanced in the direction of the enemy. Four times they pushed forward, four times they were driven back. This was in the earliest part of the war, before everyone realized that it was really, really hard to go on the offensive. People hadn't realized the unassailable advantage new Tech had given to the defending force. So the Germans were just getting their first faces ripped off on this initial thrust. A bullet tore through Hitler's right sleeve on his first day in battle, and of the batch of men with whom he started out, every single one of them except him went down dead or wounded. The Germans had amassed enough forces to eventually push through, but it was incredibly difficult, not least because many units full of recent recruits and led by reserve officers found themselves up against hard ass professional British regular soldiers. These were guys who did not hesitate, who knew where to be and what to do, whose discipline did not break and who hit what they were shooting at. On the fifth try, Hitler's unit finally occupied a series of farms and a bit of forest from which the enemy had been forced to retreat. And they went right back at it. The fighting continued for another three days. Hitler's regimental commander was killed and his XO went down seriously wounded. It was Hitler himself who actually ran to find a medic and then together they dragged their XO back to the rear. Within about three weeks, Hitler's regiment, which had started with roughly 3,600 men, had been reduced to less than 700. That's a 70% attrition rate. They were not a combat ready regiment at that point. But everything about the German's plan in this initial phase was based on speed and timing. And so the regiment was thrown back into battle and told to press the attack. Hitler and another soldier were tasked with accompanying their new commander to reconnoiter way out front to the rest of the German line. On their way, they were spotted and enemy machine guns opened up on them, and without hesitation, Hitler and the other enlisted men jumped and put themselves between the bullets and their commander and pushed the commander down into a ditch. When they were back to safety, the commander just shook their hands without comment. But the next day he called Hitler and the other man into his tent at regimental headquarters. Two other enlisted men were already there, and the commander informed the four of them that he intended to recommend them for the Iron Cross for gallantry in battle. A group of company commanders arrived for a meeting, so Hitler and the other men were shooed out to make room, and they had hardly left the tent when a British shell crashed down onto it, killing three officers and badly wounding the regimental commander. Hitler wrote to his friend in Munich that it was the most terrible moment of my life. We all worshiped Lieutenant Colonel Engelhard. The great push of which Hitler's regiment had been a part was brought to a halt east of a small town called Ypres. And here I have to issue my first of many apologies. I am just warning you now, I am doing everything I can to practice, to try to get them right, but my tongue and throat just tie themselves in knots when I try to pronounce anything in French. I will do my best, but I hope you won't hold it against me when I inevitably take a hatchet to a very beautiful language. German pronunciations are a little easier for an English speaker, but I'm sure I'll butcher plenty of those, too. I will do my best. And those of you who are familiar enough with European languages to know when I'm embarrassing myself, I hope you will stifle your laughter and finish the episode anyway. But anyway, as I said, the great push of which Hitler's regiment was a small part was brought to a halt when the Germans failed to overcome the resistance around the town of Ypres. Hitler was reassigned as a message runner for regimental headquarters. His biographers almost invariably used the fact that he was assigned to headquarters as an opportunity to denigrate his service, as if he was working a desk in the military bureaucracy back in Berlin or something. Nothing could be further from the truth. Dispatch runners were extremely important and reliable ones, ones who a commander could count on to deliver his message or die trying, no matter what. They were invaluable, and they were often in more danger than even the frontline troops. If you've seen that recent movie, 1917, the main character in that film was assigned to be a dispatch runner, and his mission in the film was to deliver a message from headquarters to A frontline unit that had lost telephone communication. Runners were often tasked with moving out ahead of the front line, out into no man's land, where small units had outposts and ditches and shell craters. These guys were often alone, which was pretty unique in the First World War. They'd often be out alone in in contested territory or territory of uncertain ownership, where they might find themselves in close contact with enemy forces. Very often they were sent out in blinding fog or torrential weather when most other soldiers were hunkering down. There were communication trenches that were theoretically in place so that a dispatch runner could move between the front and the rear. But since no one actually lived in those trenches on a daily basis, they were usually neglected to the point of being unusable. This was especially true during periods of heavy combat, when the men who might have maintained them were otherwise occupied, and the comms trenches frequently got completely filled in with earth or flooded with water. For whatever reason, Hitler was very good at this job, something his peers and his superiors picked up on very early. The historian R.H.S. stolfi writes, Hitler evinced a genius for finding his way to forward command posts across an intricate system of routes in a lunar like landscape of shell craters and other obstacles. Hitler appeared in situations of varying time, of day or night, in rain, mud and fog, and infrequently intense artillery concentrations. The duty was dangerous because the most important messages were those carried during the heaviest combat under the massive British and French artillery bombardments. And in Flanders and Artois and on the Somme, during the heavier Allied bombardments, German troops in the line. In the line companies entirely evacuated the deep fighting trenches, seeking relative safety in deeper dugouts off and around the trenches during those critical and almost insanely dangerous periods. Hitler and other dispatch runners would commonly be moving through and around these empty fighting and communication trenches, delivering orders from regiment. Tellingly, the German fighting trenches contained niches cut at various intervals into their deep, steep sides for the specific use of runners. Forced to deliver the epistles under such dangerous circumstances, while the line combat troops sheltered in the dugouts, Hitler's new regimental commander finally got around to pushing his citation recommendation up the chain of command. He was recommended for the Iron Cross first Class, which were given out only to honor acts of exceptional courage. But since he was assigned to the regimental staff by this point, his name was put at the bottom of the list of recommendees. It was a common practice to avoid looking like HQ was showing favoritism toward its own, and so he was instead awarded the Iron Cross second Class. It made no Difference to Hitler. He wrote back to his friend in Munich that this was the happiest day of his life. Soon after, he would be promoted to corporal. Hitler very quickly earned the universal respect of his leaders and the soldiers with whom he served. It says something that they held him in such high regard, despite virtually all of them considering him to be a pretty weird guy. Several of the men who knew him at the time remarked that his military bearing was lacking. He wore his helmet askew. He slouched rather than keep the erect posture expected of a soldier. His facial hair was frequently out of regs. He almost never shined his boots. He hated that his mates found him socially awkward, but they still liked him. His seriousness was impenetrable. He had no interest at all in typical soldier small talk. You could not engage him in that kind of a conversation. He didn't play dice, he didn't play cards with the other men. When the other soldiers were spending their downtime joking or playing games. Hitler was invariably by himself in some corner painting or drawing or reading a book. He was not a conversationalist because, again, he just couldn't feign interest in small talk. And these all echo impressions of people who knew him before the war. This is just who he was. John Tolan, in what I think is the best biography of Hitler that's been written yet, says, as long as his comrades talked of food or women, Hitler kept to his reading or painting. But once the conversation turned to serious subjects, he would stop and deliver a lecture. His simple comrades were entranced by his fluency and loved to hear him spout on art, architecture and the like. His reputation as an intellectual was enhanced by the fact that he. He always had a book spread out in front of him, recalled one who served with him. He carried several in his pack, including a well worn copy of Schopenhauer's philosophical tome, the World as Will and Representation. Despite his lectures on the evils of smoking and drinking, Adi, as he was known, was generally liked because of his reliability in a crisis. He never abandoned a wounded comrade or pretended to be sick when it came time for a perilous mission. Moreover, he was a good companion during the long, tedious stretches awaiting action. Being an artist actually drew him closer to his barracks mates. He would draw cartoon sketches on postcards illustrating comical moments of their life. Once, for instance, a man shot a rabbit to take home on leave, but left with a parcel containing a brick which someone had exchanged for the animal. Hitler sent the victim of the prank a postcard with two sketches. One of the Soldier unwrapping a brick back home and the other of his friends at the front eating the rabbit. Despite all this, Hitler's personality was just not built to be one of the fellas. The fellas looked up to him, they respected him, but he could never quite be one of them. One of the men said, he lives in his own world, but otherwise he's a nice fellow. The other soldiers received frequent care packages from home, especially early in the war, when their families could afford to send food and candy and other goodies. But Hitler never received anything. Some assumed that he had no family, which was not exactly true. But to Hitler, he did have a family. The army was his family and his purpose in life was to do his part to win the war. He was a fully engaged frontline soldier. He wasn't somewhere else, he was there. His mind wasn't somewhere else. He wasn't thinking about what to do after the war. He wasn't thinking about where he'd rather be. He wanted to be where he was. He wasn't trying to get through the war, he was there to fight it. Tolan says that whenever Hitler was asked where he came from, he answered that his home was the 16th Regiment. Stolfi, the historian I quoted a moment ago, says that the Greek biographer Plutarch, in his brief biography of Alexander the Great, wrote that the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the closest discoveries of virtue or vice in men. Sometimes a matter of less moment, an expression or a jest informs us better of their character and inclinations than the most famous sieges, the greatest armaments or the bloodiest battles. Stolfi says this to preface his telling of a well known story about Hitler right around this period, after he'd been assigned to regimental headquarters, wherein early 1915, right now, while making his rounds delivering messages, Hitler came across a small white terrier, a little dog that had somehow, some way, made its way across no man's land from the British side and jumped into Hitler's trench in pursuit of a rat. None of the other soldiers wanted anything to do with the dog. It was enough to worry about their own survival without making this their responsibility. But Hitler was determined to save it from what was certain to be a death, sooner rather than later. And so he chased after it, and he caught it at first, and for some time the dog squirmed and whined and tried to escape. But eventually, slowly, with patience, Hitler won it over. He named it Fucsel. Having come from the British side, the dog didn't understand commands given in Germany, but very slowly, very patiently, Hitler taught it the basics and then even taught it several tricks, like climbing up and down a ladder. And from that point on, the dog never left his side, accompanied him on his rounds, and he would bring it along partly for companionship, but also because he would use its tricks and its silly antics to lift the spirits of the bored and tired men he encountered. And when you've been sitting in a trench, nothing to do for that long, the sight of a little dog doing tricks is probably the biggest joy you've gotten in a while. Well, they didn't make gas masks for dogs. So when gas warfare started up, he was forced to leave Fuchsil back at HQ when he went out. But his friends were fond of the dog by then, and so they were happy to look after it until he got back. He was awkward with people and had trouble relating to the other soldiers, but he had no problem with the dog. Later, Hitler wrote that it's crazy how fond I was of the little beast. At night, little Fuchsl snuggled up and slept with its new master on his bunk. Then one day in April 1915, Hitler's out making his round of message deliveries as usual, and he encounters a French soldier alone, maybe a dispatch runner like himself. Well, Hitler got the drop on the Frenchman, captured him, and marched him back to the line as a prisoner. This was not a small accomplishment for a junior enlisted soldier. To put this in perspective, Stolfi writes, frontline units made enormous efforts to take prisoners for intelligence, sifted, verified information about the enemy. But commonly, the associated trench raids ended with dead prisoners and friendly casualties. But now here was this dispatch runner who could have avoided the enemy soldier, could have kept his distance and given him a wide berth and still completed his mission, made his deliveries. He could have even justified it to himself by telling himself that his mission was to deliver important messages and forcing a confrontation with the enemy put that mission at risk. But he didn't do that. Here was this dispatch runner by himself, marching a French prisoner, complete with his captured rifle, back to the line for interrogation. It was not a small thing, you know, it's the kind of story your. Your grandkids would ask to hear over and over. Tell us about the time you captured the French soldier. John Tolan says that by the end of the summer of 1915, quote, Hitler had become indispensable to regimental headquarters. The telephone lines to battalion and company command posts were often knocked out by artillery, and only runners could deliver messages. We found out very soon, recalled the lieutenant, which messengers we could rely on most. He was admired by fellow runners as much for his craftiness. He could crawl up front like one of the Indians he had read about in his boyhood as his exceptional courage. Yet there was something in Hitler that disturbed some of the men. He was too different, his sense of duty excessive. He was unnaturally eager to get up front and would often, without being asked, deliver messages for the other runners. End quote. As the Germans dug in, the British increased the intensity of their attacks. That summer, in late September, at a time in the battle when Hitler's entire regiment was in danger of being overrun, all phone communication from headquarters to the front suddenly went dark. Hitler and another man went forward to learn what had happened and came under heavy fire. They managed to escape barely, and they got back and told the regiment that the lines had not been blown up, but cut because a British attack was imminent. And so Hitler was sent out into the storm to spread the warning to the frontline units, and again, barely made it back. He managed to escape so many brushes with death that he started to get a reputation for it. One time, when he was eating his dinner in a trench with a group of soldiers, he suddenly had the urgent impulse. He says it came to him as a clear and insistent voice telling him to get up and move over to another spot further down the trench. The impulse, he says, was so urgent that it brooked no doubt or argument. So he just mechanically got up and started walking, and hardly had he sat back down when a shell came down and burst over the men. He just left and killed every single one of them. Later, Hitler wrote that by now the romance of battle had been replaced by horror. The enthusiasm gradually cooled and the exuberant joy was stifled by mortal fear. The time came when every man had to struggle between the instinct of self preservation and the admonitions of duty. I, too, was not spared by this struggle. Always, when death was on the hunt, a vague something tried to revolt, strove to represent itself to the weak body as reason. Yet it was only cowardice which in such disguises tried to ensnare the individual. A grave tugging and warning set in, and often it was only the last remnant of conscience which decided the issue. Yet the more this voice admonished one to caution, the louder and more insistent its lures, the sharper resistance grew, until at last, after a long inner struggle, consciousness of duty emerged victorious. By the winter of 1915-16, this struggle had for me been decided at last. My will was the undisputed master. If in the first days I went over the top with rejoicing and laughter. I was now calm and determined, and this was enduring. Now fate could bring on the ultimate tests without my nerves shattering or my reason failing. The young volunteer had become an old soldier, and this transformation had occurred in the whole Army. That year, 1916, Hitler's unit was moved south to take part in the gargantuan Battle of the Somme. From it began with an English attack so relentless that almost 20,000 allies were killed or fatally wounded on the first day alone in the Fromelle sector of the enemy barrage on the night of July 14th cut all regimental field telephones. Hitler and another runner were sent out in the face of almost certain death, peppered with shot and shell every meter of the way. They cowered for shelter in watery shell holes and ditches. The other man collapsed from exhaustion, and Hitler had to drag him back to their dugout. End quote. The fighting that summer was extraordinarily intense, and Hitler was always right in the thick of it. For months, the Allies just threw men at the Germans, and when it was all said and done, they would take over 600,000 casualties trying to break the German lines. But the German lines remained intact. And finally, on the night of October 7, 1916, Hitler's luck ran out. He was sleeping with the other messengers in a room when a shell exploded near their position and they were all sent flying and landed in a heap. Hitler took a piece of shrapnel in the thigh, and most of his biographers tend to downplay this as a light wound, but he was evacuated to a field hospital, and there it was determined that he was going to need real treatment and rehab. So he was sent back to an actual military hospital in the vicinity of Berlin. They kept him there to heal for two whole months, and then for three more months after that, he was assigned to a replacement battalion in Munich to recuperate. Even before he was sent away for treatment, and throughout the entire period of recovery, Hitler annoyed his superiors with pleas and demands to rejoin his unit. But it was five months from the time he was wounded before doctors let him go. So it didn't take his leg off. But it doesn't sound like what most people would call a light wound, either. These months at the rear, though, were an important time for him, at least by his own telling, he found morale in the replacement battalion to be in the toilet. Many of the people there, Hitler suspected, didn't really need to be there. They were malingering or exaggerating injuries just to stay out of the fighting. He was disgusted by their attitude Especially their lack of respect, even contempt for the men fighting and dying at the front. At least that's how he perceived it. He wondered what could be causing such a profound collapse of morale among the men who spent time on the home front. Because he didn't hear this kind of talk at the front. Before long, according to Mein Kampf, he discovered the answer. After spending two years without a break in the battle zone, here he was now back in Germany in safety, interacting with these rear echelon personnel who, by luck or choice, had managed to secure jobs that let them ride out the war in safety. He listened, appalled, as they denigrated the Kaiser and denounced the war. In the hearing of recovering frontline soldiers, he says he could not avoid noticing that so many of the administrative and supply personnel, the medical staff, a lot of the jobs back home. Back on the home front, non combat roles seemed to be overwhelmingly manned by Jews, which he said was a surprise to him because he encountered so few Jews in combat roles at the front. Nearly every clerk was a Jew, he wrote in Mein Kampf, and nearly every Jew was a clerk. He believed that the government's reliance on support from Jewish financiers had allowed the bankers to take control of and profit from Germany's war production. The spider, he wrote, was slowly beginning to suck the blood out of the people's pores. Now, you wonder here if he's retconning his own origin story a bit in Mein Kampf, because the people who knew him at the time never heard him talk like this. They said they never had any reason to believe he was any more anti Semitic than anyone else. When he did talk about the Jews, according to an acquaintance, he did so without spitefulness. It's possible that these ideas were kind of percolating in his mind, but weren't developed enough for him to feel comfortable speaking on them out loud. But that does not really fit what we know of Hitler's personality at this time in his life. He'd never been shy about launching into a lecture about whatever he'd been thinking or reading about lately. It's just as likely, I think, that he was relating his time in the hospital in a way that helped shape the narrative he wanted to convey in Mein Kampf. Narrative of his own ideological development. By the time he wrote these words, he may have thought, you know, now that I think back on it, there were a lot of Jews back in Munich avoiding the fighting. And come to think of it, they were mostly the ones spouting defeatist and subversive rhetoric at the wounded men, who knows? But either way, there's no doubt that he would eventually come to believe that and that that belief would profoundly shape the way that he interpreted the events that were still to come. Well, finally he writes to his company commander, says, I'm fit for duty. I want to come back. Help me. They won't let me go. And so the lieutenant made a call and he got Hitler released once again for frontline duty. On March 1, 1917, he was welcomed back to his unit as a returning hero. His little dog, Fuchsle, after five months, was still there and Toland writes, went into paroxysms of ecstasy. Hitler said that the dog hurled himself on me in a frenzy. The company cook prepared a special dinner to mark Hitler's return. He'd been a fish out of water back in civilization, but now he was back home, back where he belonged. He was so excited he couldn't go to bed and he paced around with a flashlight late into the night, gigging rats on his bayonet until someone threw a boot at him for keeping him up. That summer, Hitler and his unit participated in the battle of Passchendaele, the mud drenched British offensive we discussed earlier in the episode. To prepare the ground for that, for that battle, British artillery pounded the German positions unrelentingly for 10 straight days. The threat of gas was constant and so men often had to keep their gas masks on for 24 hours at a time. It was here, on the last day of July, that German defenders faced a new weapon of tanks. These early versions were not battle tanks like we're used to today. They didn't have big turret guns. They were essentially heavily armored monstrosities that were meant to provide cover for infantry as they approached enemy lines and to roll over and flatten berms and ditches and especially patches of barbed wire. Well, Passchendaele was the wrong battle for the tank's grand premiere. The insane mug mud bogged him down and sometimes even swallowed them up. But the British, the British were undeterred, you know, and although they failed to achieve a major breakthrough or really achieve anything at all in the battle of Passchendaele, they did inflict enormous casualties on the Germans. Hitler's regiment comrades had been shattered physically and mentally by the time they were relieved in August. After the men boarded a train that would take them away from the front to rest and reconstitute their ranks, a railroad official who saw little Fuchsl doing his tricks offered Hitler 200 marks for the dog. Hitler snapped, you could give me 200,000 and you wouldn't get him. But when the train arrived and the regiment began to disembark, Hitler couldn't find Fuchsl anywhere. He ran up and down the train in a panic. Desperate, he says. But soon his regiment was already in columns and ready to march out, and he had no choice. He had to leave with words that come off as bitter as any in Mein Kampf. Hitler, talking about this incident, says, the swine who stole my dog doesn't realize what he did to me. The situation on the Western Front settled down that winter, the winter of 1917, 1918. As we talked about earlier, the Russians had been taken out of the war. The Italians were at least temporarily penned up. The French were in a defensive posture, just trying to make it to the next fighting season without another mutiny. And the British. The British were hunkered down, recuperating from the Battle of Passchendaele and waiting patiently for the Americans to arrive. Now that the Germans were finally able to gather enough forces for a showdown on the Western Front, nobody had any doubt about what was coming. In 1918, after four years of enduring wave after wave of Allied assaults from every direction, it was time for the Germans to go on the offensive. Where and when it would happen were the only open questions. There was no question whether it was coming. The Germans would attack because the clock was ticking and they had no choice. By summertime, a quarter million fresh American troops would be landing in France every month to join the fight, which put a hard limit on how long the Germans had to try to win this war. But in January 1918, that seemed like a far off problem because the Germans had more immediate concerns. The starvation blockade had grown tighter over the course of the war, and by the 1917-18 winter, the hunger problem had become a hunger crisis. The health and morale of the home front population was in full collapse. Even the soldiers could not get by on their rations and, like their families back home, had been reduced to hunting dogs and cats for food. To make matters worse, the collapse of morale on the home front had moved past mere complaining into militancy. The French army mutiny in the summer of 1917 had been inspired partly by the success of the first Russian Revolution early that year. But Lenin's Bolshevik coup that autumn that sent out a call to radicals and would be revolutionaries all over Europe, including in Germany. This gang of coffee shop intellectuals, led by a cadre that was overwhelmingly Jewish, not Russian, had just taken control of the Russian Empire. If that was possible, anything might be possible. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Germany's socialist party declared its loyalty to the Kaiser and the trade unions made a commitment not to agitate or strike as long as the war was on. That truce between classes lasted for over three years. But after Lenin's seizure of power in late 1917, the more radical factions within the Socialist Party declared the truce ended and they split off from the spd, the Social Democratic Party of Germany, to form the ispd, the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. The radicals of the ispd, which included many elected politicians and other government officials, had been dismayed at the initial decision by the SPD to support the war at all. But they bit the bullet and accepted it because going against the national mood at that time seemed impossible. But after what had happened in Russia again it seemed like anything might be possible. And so these people were done waiting for the revolution. When Germany's negotiations with the Bolsheviks stalled out in January, a huge wave of strikes, led by radical socialists and concentrated in critical war industries swept through most of the major cities of Germany and Austria. The strikers were not merely demanding an end to the war. They were demanding a total overthrow of the Reichs government. While some war weary conscripts at the front supported the strikers, they had to be careful about saying it out loud. Most front soldiers felt betrayed. The war was a whole of society effort, the fighter and the worker doing their necessary parts. And a worker strike, especially in the critical war industries, were seen as no different from soldiers refusing orders at the front. Adolf Hitler spoke to the fury of many of them when he called the strikes the biggest piece of chicanery in the whole war. What was the army fighting for if the homeland itself no longer wanted victory? For whom the immense sacrifices and privation the soldiers expected to fight for victory and the homeland goes on strike against only lasted about a week before the leaders were rounded up and the strikers went back to work. But something had been awakened and it seemed to everyone like a matter of time before it re erupted with a fury that would not be contained. The Central Powers were at the end of their rope. If they took very harsh measures against strikers and hoarders and looters, if they requisitioned all the available food and the in the foreign territory they occupied and left all the residents to starve. If the German people agreed to waste away indefinitely in order to keep the war going, maybe they could have carried on for another year, maybe two, maybe even three, they could have killed millions more allied soldiers and they would have lost millions of their own. But it would not have changed the ultimate outcome The Allies could feed themselves on American grain alone. The only course of action available to the Germans as they saw it, was to use the last bit of energy her people and her army had for an all out offensive. To finally make a breakthrough on the Western Front. It would be all or nothing. But for men like Ernst Younger and Adolf Hitler, patriotic volunteer front soldiers who'd been champing at the bit to get at the enemy, all they needed was a chance. They'd resisted the enemy for four years, so let the enemy now resist them. It would work because it had to work because the alternative, the alternative that everything the German soldier and his family back home had gone through for four years, all of it had been for nothing. That simply could not be. The victory over Russia had freed up 48 divisions, nearly half a million men for battle on the Western Front. But the German generals weren't all agreed about where to send them. Alexander Watson in his very good book Ring of Steel, writes for the chief of Staff of Crown Prince Wilhelm's army group on the Western Front, Colonel Count von der Schulenburg, an assault on the French offered the best prospect of victory. The Germans were aware of the demoralization and mutinies that had wracked the Republic's army the previous summer. The French home front was also in a parlous state. Inflation was higher than in the Reich and worker militancy was rising. Schulenburg doubted that France could survive another severe military defeat. However, for Ludendorff and other military commanders, the British appeared more vulnerable. Their force was regarded as tactically clumsier than its ally. An intelligence assessment drawn up at the start of 1918 rated British units level of training as inadequate for mobile warfare and observed that after their setbacks in 1917, much of the troops confidence was gone. There's a great deal of war weariness, noted the assessment, end quote. Now that phrase mobile warfare was a term that had not been heard on the Western Front since 1914. In all the great battles of the war after 1914, 15, 16, 17, going on the offensive basically meant sending human waves over the top to overwhelm the enemy's static defensive firepower. Well just imagine what a trained soldier on a belt fed machine gun can do to a crowd of men carrying heavy packs trudging across a muddy field 500 to 1,000 yards long. The only advantage that the attacker had, to the extent that there was any advantage at all, was that he could choose the time and the place to focus his assault, whereas the defender had to cover the whole line at all times. Which meant that the front line was often relatively thin. And so theoretically, even if only a portion of the attackers made it far enough to engage the defenders up close, that might be enough to punch a hole in that thin line. The attacker's great hope was that they could fight their way into the enemy trench and then fight their way up the trench, rolling the defender's flank and opening new gaps and widening existing ones for more attackers to rush through. This never really worked, though. Behind the front line, the defensive front line stood reserve units that were ready to reinforce any position that came under pressure. And then there were more reserves ready to counterattack before the attackers could establish their own defensive line. If they managed to occupy the trench, local commanders were given a lot of leeway to respond to emergent circumstances on their own initiative. This meant that decisions could be made very quickly as the situation was developing. And so defensive tactics had become pretty sophisticated over the course of the war. They employed artillery crew served weapons like heavy machine guns and small arms in a complementary layered defense that was backed up by the use of mobile reserves, which maintained a tactical flexibility that the attacker just couldn't match. Well, now it was time for the Germans to go on the attack. In the fall of 1917, Ludendorff had called together a select group of young officers with extensive experience in combat and tasked them with having to devise an entirely new offensive philosophy. These men rewrote the book on offensive tactics in the modern age. I mean, literally, the book was called the Attack in Position Warfare and it was distributed up and down the line to train soldiers accustomed to being on the defensive for three years now, to train them how to understand and execute the coming attack. The fact that the Germans managed to do this on short notice amidst the chaos of war, it really speaks to the military genius of the Germans in this era. A whole new tactical formation, the infantry group, was created, so they were reorganizing their whole force for this assault. This new unit, the infantry group, consisted of just a machine gunner and a few riflemen. And this small unit was encouraged to use their own initiative to find and exploit opportunities as they presented themselves out ahead of the main infantry. Elite assault units, consisting of the best men the German army had left, would hug the edge of the rolling artillery barrage, ready to pounce on the enemy as soon as the barrage passed, before he even had a chance to get his bearings. These assault troops were empowered to adapt on the fly to changes in the situation without waiting for orders from on high. Instead of attacking shoulder to shoulder in a uniform line, these elite Stormtroopers were to probe for weak points in the enemy positions, drive through them and look for other opportunities to exploit rather than pausing to consolidate their new positions if they met stiff resistance. They were not supposed to dig in for a big fight. They were to just find a way to go around it. As the Canadian army Officer and historian D.J. goodspeed wrote, the new German offensive tactics thus abandoned the concept of the battering ram, pounding heavily and head on against a fortified line, and substituted in its place the principle of pervasiveness by which the attackers, like a flood of water, would penetrate the defense, flow around and isolate obstacles and centers of resistance, and move by a thousand different routes into the enemy's territory. The overall plan was to open up and drive a wedge between French and British forces and and then to swing north and push the British toward the port towns on the English Channel, where they would either have to evacuate back to England or be destroyed. Ernst Younger, the German soldier we've heard from a few times now, was a company commander selected to lead a group of the elite stormtroopers on the attack on January 19, 1918. We were relieved at 4am from our position at Vienne Artois and marched to Gue through thick drifts of snow. We were supposed to remain there for a long time and be trained for assignments in the coming great offensive. The wonderfully clear training commands of General Ludendorff were distributed to the company commanders. We learned from these documents that the time of the offensive was not far off. We practiced the almost forgotten combat tactics of infantry skirmishing and war of maneuver. We were also eager to practice firing rifles and machine guns. However, all the villages behind the front were packed with people, literally to the last spare bedroom. As such shooting accidents sometimes happened. Each empty hill slope was used as a target range. Bullets sometimes slipped through over the landscape as if by combat. One time, a gunner in my company tested his light machine gun and accidentally shot the commander of a regiment of foreign allies. This latter was on a saddle horse in the midst of a parade review. Fortunately, the wound was slight and our involvement not clearly proven. A few times I had the company conduct practice attacks with live hand grenades. We assaulted mock ups of complicated trench systems in order to evaluate the experiences of the Battle of Cambrai. Here too, men were wounded accidentally. As the proverb goes, where wood will be carved, eggs will fall and break. On February 6, we moved out again. On February 22, we were brought to the crater field situated to the left of the road linking Duri to Hendecourt. Our new position lay across from a pile of rubble that had formerly been a village. There we worked for four nights digging trenches on the front line. A coming mass of attack by our forces was then whispered in expectant rumors by our troops all along the Western Front. While inspecting our new position, I realized that a part of the great offensive had to take place at this point. We built great defenses all over the area with feverish haste. This included digging bomb shelters and laying out new roads and paths. In the field of craters in front of us, small signs sprouted in the middle of the landscape. Incomprehensible numbers were written on these signs. They were apparently coordinates for use by artillery batteries and command posts. End quote. The great German offensive of 1918 was codenamed Operation Michael, and its focus would be on a 50 mile front on both sides of the Somme river, the site of the gargantuan British offensive the previous year. The preparations for this battle were immense, and they were carried out under as much secrecy as the Germans could manage. When moving 10,000 artillery pieces, 3 million artillery shells and hundreds of thousands of men into position for an attack that the Allies knew was coming, the troops would march only by night to get into their position. Misinformation campaigns tried to get the enemy to think that the Germans would attack at different places or different times. Propaganda leaflets were spread over British lines, trying to convince the ordinary soldiers that their lives were being thrown away for what amounted to French imperial ambitions. Younger writes, quote, our planes flew continuous intercept missions to block enemy aircraft from seeing our activities. Another interesting new feature at the front also appeared. Every midday, at exactly 12 noon, a black ball was lowered from our observant balloons and Then disappeared by 12:10pm this was apparently done to provide the troops with a more exact hourly time. Towards the end of the month, February 1918, we marched back to Gui to our old quarters. We conducted several more practice attacks in battalion and regimental formations. We then drilled two more times as a whole division. At a large mock up of a trench position, we conducted a simulated mass breakthrough of enemy lines. Subsequently, the division commander delivered a speech to all of his officers. He made it clear to each man that the storm or assault was supposed to be unleashed in the next few days. The brazen spirit of the attack, the spirit of Prussian infantry, spread over the masses of men who gathered here. A trial by combat was now to take place in the fields of northern France during the awakening spring of March 1918. The preliminary artillery bombardment for this battle was to begin at 4:20am on March 21, 1918. Sending a storm of shells into defensive lines manned by the British 3rd and 5th Armies. Shells filled with poison gas would be fired far behind the British lines toward their artillery positions in order to suppress any retaliation bombardment. As the moment drew closer, Younger and his men left their trench and began to make their way up to the position from which they would launch their attack. He writes, our advance scouts were waiting for us at a road junction. From here, our companies marched forward separately. We were supposedly positioned in the second line of the trenches, and we seemingly reached and were about to fill them. However, it turned out that it was the wrong place. Our scouts had gotten us lost. This began a collective wandering by my men in the dimly lit, soggy terrain of craters. I worried about my company becoming separated into numerous disoriented groups. I did not want to completely exhaust my people. I called a halt and sent the scouts in different directions to find the right place to go. The squads, they stacked their weapons for the night and all jammed into a huge crater for shelter. I sat with Lt. Sprenger on the rim of one of the smaller craters for some time. Single impacts of flaming shells had burst about a hundred meters ahead of us. A new projectile now struck at a lesser distance. Metal splinters of the shell clapped into the mud walls of the crater. One of my men cried out, claiming to be hit in the foot. I yelled at people spread out into the surrounding shell holes. I then attempted to examine with my hands the muddy boots of the wounded man. I searched for a puncture wound. Another incoming shell was heard. There was again a piercing whistling noise high in the sky. Everyone froze with terrorists. It's coming down here. Then erupted a deafening, tremendous roar. The shell struck in the midst of us. Half unconscious, I sat up in the large crater. Our machine gun ammunition had ignited and radiated an intense pink light. Smoke rose from the impact area and glowed eerily from the flames in the crater. Darkened bodies wallowed there and in the shadows of agitated survivors flew about in every direction. At the same time, there was a frequent dreadful howling and cries for help. I must confess that at first, like everyone else, I jumped up in stark terror. For a moment, I ran away haphazardly into the night. I almost immediately fell headlong into a small shell hole. Only then did I come to my senses and I was able to see clearly what to do next. Two conflicting voices echoed in my head. Juan exclaimed, nothing more to see and hear and get away. Far away. Hide yet immediately. Retorted the other voice. Man, you're the company commander. Exactly so I do not say it to Boast, I would rather say, to whom God gives a position of authority, God also gives the wisdom to do it. I often learned in myself and in others that the sense of responsibility, the sense of being the leader, drowned out personal fear. One had to pause so you could think of what had to be done. So I forced myself back to the terrible place of destruction. As I moved back, I came across Fusilier Haller, who had captured the machine gun during my patrol in November. On this night he was unharmed by the explosion, so I took him with me as an escort. As I inspected the company, the wounded were still screaming terribly. Some came up to me, crawling and crying out. Upon hearing my voice and the gloomy night, they begged me. Lieutenant, sir, Lieutenant, sir. One of my favorite soldiers, a newly arrived recruit, had a leg broken by a large metal splinter from a shell. He desperately clung to my legs. To free myself from this paralysis, I, cursing, punched him on the shoulder. He fell helplessly away. Such moments you never forget. A handful of such faithful soldiers had gathered around me. I had to leave these unfortunate wounded men to the only surviving stretcher bearer by himself. He led them away from the endangered area. Half an hour ago, I still led a mighty and excellent battle ready company. I now wandered with a few completely depressed people through a confusing maze of trenches. One of them was a very young baby faced soldier. A few days ago he was still ridiculed by his comrades. He had cried during training when he lugged heavy ammunition boxes. Now he faithfully dragged this burden along our arduous paths. As we moved away from the terrible scene of destruction. He had carefully recovered and saved our last box of cartridges. I reached the end of my mental rope with this last observation. I threw myself to the ground and burst into convulsive sobs. My people stood around me in a dark mood. End quote. Well, Younger finally got himself together and he ordered his men to spread out the surrounding shell holes for cover as the sun went down, and then they could move around under cover of darkness. At nighttime, they made forays into the surrounding area, looking for men who'd been separated or lost during the day's chaos. Eventually, they settled down into a disused trench, too tired to move, but too amped up to sleep. Younger found himself a little cubbyhole in the wall of the trench and settled in, but stayed up smoking cigars until the sun came up. The battlefield was already buzzing. At first light, countless infantry groups were working toward their assigned positions. Groups of artillery and mortarmen navigated the Pockmark Crater fields with their giant guns and Technicians laid down a web of wires for the advancing troops to remain in contact with their commanders in the rear. The way Younger put it, he said, it was like a carnival at the county fair with all the people moving around. All this just a thousand yards or so from the enemy front line. But the British were either not paying attention or not interested because they didn't open fire. To everyone's surprise, Younger rousted the remnants of his company, and they found their way to the correct trench, the position they were looking for when their advance scouts had misled them. It wasn't far, Younger said. They probably walked past it a dozen times during their night recon patrols. In that trench, he found Lieutenant Schmidt, or Schmidgen, as they called him. Schmidgen had done his job. He found the correct position when Younger sent him out, and he knew nothing about what had befallen the company the previous day. After the mistake made by the first advanced scouts had led to disaster, Younger vowed to himself to always personally select highly competent soldiers for scouting missions. War is a great teacher of fundamental lessons, he writes, but the tuition is expensive. Younger had found a fortified bomb shelter built down into the trench. He settled his men in there before going out himself to survey the site where he and his men had been shelled the previous night. The place was gruesome. Around the burned impact point of the shell were about 20 blackened corpses, almost all shredded beyond recognition. Some of the fallen we later had to report as missing. Their bodies had been vaporized, and nothing could be found of them. From the hideous tangle of charred bodies, some of the soldiers of an unknown detachment were busy pulling out the bloodstained things of the dead. They were searching for booty. Disgusted, I chased away these human hyenas. So Younger made his way back to his men, and there he found a fellow lieutenant who'd been lost the night before. The lieutenant had with him a crowd of Younger's men who'd been given up for missing. He mustered his squad leaders and had them report on their men and found that he still had 63 soldiers fit for combat under his command. It was less than half of what he'd had the previous day, but enough to make some noise. He was able to identify 20 of the dead and about 60 of the wounded. The rest had been taken in by the Earth. At 10pm that night, Younger was ordered to move out toward the front line with his men. Younger admits that he and his men were afraid, and only with effort did they overcome it. If an animal is dragged out from his cave, into the wilderness or a sailor sees the saving plank under his feet fall away into the sea. They might have similar feelings as we did. We had to pry ourselves away from the safe, warm bomb shelter. Younger was an elite storm troop company commander, okay, a soldier who'd been wounded no fewer than six times up to this point, only to recuperate and head back into battle. And one of the the really endearing things about his writing is that he's so self assured and so unselfconscious about his own manhood and his worth as a soldier that he doesn't mind telling you when his nerves fail or his courage is shaken, even to the point of describing himself breaking down in sobs on the battlefield or running away in terror. Once everyone was in place, the battalion commander called Younger and the rest of the company commanders together for one last brief before the big show. They went over the plan to make sure everyone knew their assignments and that everyone had the resources to carry them out. Then they synchronized their watches and shook hands with each other before heading back to to their units to await the call. Shortly before the commencement of battle, a message came over the radio. His Majesty the Kaiser and Hindenburg have gone in person to the operational headquarters of the great attack. Up and down the trenches, the men burst into spontaneous applause. It was all to begin at 5:05am and these are Germans, so when they say 505, they mean 505. Younger and his men counted the last 60 seconds out loud, as if they were waiting for the ball to drop on New Year's Eve. And then a hurricane of massed artillery commenced. Mighty roaring waves of terror drowned out and devoured even the loudest explosions of the heaviest shells. The gigantic destructive howling of countless guns behind us was horrific. Compared to it, surviving even the greatest of battles seemed like child's play. Well, to the amazement of the waiting soldiers, the British artillery did not respond to the German onslaught as they were expected to. It seemed that the massive barrage had devastated the enemy's guns and taken them out of the fight, at least for the moment. So with no return fire incoming, Younger and his men ventured out of their bomb shelters and then even up out of their trenches, standing in the open landscape to view one continuous wall of smoke, flame and poison gas stretching off to the horizon in either direction. As the sun lit up the world, the German barrage only intensified. At each moment, it seemed impossible that the roar could become any more intense than it already was. But then it was raised again to a new level. The men were exuberant from witnessing so much destructive power unleashed right in front of them. They were cheering. Some men were running up and down the trench, half crazy, shouting and rallying the others. And at this point, the heavy mortars hadn't even gotten going. At 8:25am they joined the fight as well. And the noise somehow found more room to climb these gigantic cannons, These mortars threw huge 440 pound shells packed with explosives high up into the air so that they came down vertically on top of heavily reinforced bunkers and other infrastructure in just five hours. In five hours, German artillery and mortar cannons would fire 1,160,000 shells at the enemy. That's more than 60 shells a second for five hours. Finally, the British reconstituted some of their artillery batteries and managed to return fire with a heavy barrage of their own. Younger and his men scurried back into their into their bomb shelters as British shells filled with explosives and ball bearings came down and shredded any unprotected human flesh. Younger ran into another lieutenant and learned that their battalion commander, Captain von Brixon, was down and another officer had taken his place. Younger took that news in, moved back to his assigned position and took cover in another foxhole. And although the news had shaken him because he was close to the commander, he says it was forgotten in seconds, as the only thing he had in mind was 9, 40, 9, 49, 40. That was when they were to go over the top. One of his corporals ran up and tried to coax Younger out of the foxhole, signaling because it was too loud to even be heard, screaming, screaming that a shell might collapse the earth there and bury him alive. Before he could get Younger out, there was an explosion and the corporal fell to the ground with the bloody stump where one of his legs had been down to the left a bit. Three more of Younger's men were torn apart by artillery. Immediately after that, 30 minutes before the big infantry assault groups of officers crept out of the trench and took up positions in no Man's Land. Behind them came the assault units, including Younger's. They were to get as close as possible and take cover, so that when the artillery barrage subsided, they would be prepared to engage the British army before they knew what hit them. Finally, the moment arrived. At 9:40am the hurricane of German artillery subsided into a creeping barrage. Shells fell in an orderly line along the British trenches and then reversed course and fell back in a line the other direction, just a little further out the way you might mow a lawn. As the barrage crept deeper into the British lines, Younger's Company went over the top and made their way forward. I'll let Ernst Younger take it from here. We officers pulled out our pistols and led the men over our own barbed wire. Even so, the first wounded men were already being dragged back through that very wire. I glanced to the left and right. Our troops, the defenders of the nation, were arrayed before me in a distinctive formation. The assault battalions waited along a vast, broad front, clumped together by companies they were temporarily sheltering in shell craters in front of the enemy trench. That trench was being plowed up over and over again by an intense bombardment that was at its peak. At the sight of this pent up, overwhelming mass of military force, breakthrough seemed certain to me. Did we have enough power to split and tear apart reserve troops of the enemy, thereby completing the destruction I expected? It was certainty. The final battle, the last attempt at victory, seemed to have arrived. The emotional atmosphere was unique, filled with the highest tension. Officers stood upright on open ground, exposed to shrapnel and bullets. Often one of our heavy mortar shells fell short near us. It threw up a steeple high fountain of debris and showered us all with earth. Yet not one of us even bowed his head. The thunder of battle had become so terrible that no one had a clear understanding of what was happening. Our nerves could not soak in any more fear. Three minutes before showtime, Younger called over an aide and asked him for a canteen of water. The aide, knowing his commander well, instead handed him a flask of brandy, and Younger took a long drink that made him want a cigar. But each time he tried to light it, the match was blown out by the blast of artillery explosions. Back to the great moment had come. The dance of our artillery fire rolled over the enemy trenches and onward to their secondary trenches in the rear areas. We assembled to commence our assault in a mixture of feelings conjured up by bloodthirstiness, anger and alcohol. We went off to the enemy lines in marching step. I was far ahead of the company, followed by my young aides and by a reserve soldier doing his one year duty. My right hand clutched my pistol, the left hand a riding stick of bamboo reed. I seethed with what now seems to me an incomprehensible fury. The overwhelming desire to kill spurred my steps. The bitter tears of rage shone about my eyes. The immense desire for destruction dominated our thinking and behavior. It weighed heavily upon the battlefield and concentrated itself in the brain. Like werewolves, we rushed forward through the night to drink blood. Without difficulty. We crossed through a ragged tangle of barbed wire and jumped in one leap over the first Trench. Like a series of ghosts, our stormwave of assault troops danced through the white mist. Miraculously enough, British defenders had survived the German artillery barrage to re establish their lines and commence heavy rifle and machine gun fire toward the onrushing Germans. Younger and his men jumped into a crater for cover. But a second later there was a huge explosion. Younger was knocked over by the blast, but one of his men pulled him up and he found that he wasn't wounded and so he got up and chased after the rest of his men who continued on with the attack. He finally catches up to them near the fortified railroad embankment which was on the way to their next objective. The British had planned for this and the embankment was lined with dug in British soldiers, rifles and machine guns ready to fire through small windows and peepholes. Once Younger and his men were close enough, a cloud of British lead filled the air around them and tore into the men for cover. I moved along a narrow depression in the terrain. Depressed dugouts or blockhouses yawned from the raised earthen sides of this small ravine. With great fury I advanced over the black torn soil and through the spreading stifling gases of our own artillery shells. At that moment I saw the first enemy soldier. A figure crouched about 10ft in front of me. Me, apparently wounded. We were in the middle of a small ravine that had been blasted by artillery. The enemy soldier was startled by my appearance and stared at me wide eyed. Very, very slowly I walked toward him with my pistol pointed at him. Gritting my teeth, I put the muzzle of my gun to the temple of this man who was paralyzed by fear. With a wail, he reached into his pocket and held a photo in front of my eyes. It was a picture of him surrounded by numerous family members. After a second's long inner struggle, I got a grip on myself. I lowered my pistol and stepped past him from the open ground above the trenches. The people of my company jumped into the small ravine. My face was flushed from being overheated. I tore off my coat and threw it away. Then all of us ran out of the ravine onto the open ground. We ignored the opposing machine guns, which at Most were only 400 meters away. The urge for destruction compelled me into the harvest of deadly fire. Running, I made a frontal assault on the fire breathing embankment. In one of the craters leading there, I pounced on a pistol shooting figure in a brown Manchester coat. It was my friend Caius, whom I had found in a similar agitated state. He welcomed me by slipping me a fistful of ammunition. We had now to run through the crater field, zigzagging along the entire time and shooting at various targets. Despite the wayward approach, I suddenly found myself at the foot of the earthen embankment. A burlap covered wooden frame window was next to me. It was part of the fortifications from which gunfire erupted. I fired my pistol through the cloth. The man next to me tore the fabric away and threw a hand grenade into the opening. A blast and a whitish cloud blew out from the window, signaling the grenade's impact. The means were crude but effective. We both ran along the length of the embankment and dealt with the next windows and loopholes in a similar manner. I raised my hand to signal to our people behind us to get up and advance. Their covering fire literally beat about our ears at close range. They waved back happily ceased fire and rushed to join us. Then we climbed over the embankment with hundreds of others. At the same time, for the first time in the war, I saw masses of troops collide with each other on the rear downslope of the embankment. The English occupied two terraced trenches that had been hewn from the raised earth. Our troops engaged them. Bullets were exchanged on both sides, only a few meters apart, and our hand grenades flew in arcs down into the trenches. I jumped into the first trench. Dashing to the next traverse, the walled end of the trench, I bumped into an English officer. He wore an open jacket with a drooping loosened necktie. Foregoing the use of my pistol, I grabbed him by the throat and hurled him against a pile of sandbags. He collapsed into a heap. I turned the lower second trench into the lower second trench that was swarming with English. I shot my pistol with such enthusiasm that after exhausting my last bullet, I probably stood still, pressed the trigger 10 times more. A man next to me threw hand grenades. Among those English hastily fleeing. A plate shaped steel helmet of the English flew up, spinning high into the air. In a minute, the outcome of the battle was decided. The English jumped out of their trenches and fled as battalions across the open field. From the crest of the captured embankment, we unleashed a furious pursuit of rifle fire and machine gun bullets. The fugitives were struck down on the run, and in a few seconds the ground was covered with dead bodies. Only a few of the English had escaped. One of our corporals in front of me gawked at this spectacle. His mouth hung wide open in disbelief and he froze, not firing his weapon. I tore the gun out of his hands and opened fire. My first victim was an Englishman, whom I shot out from between two Germans at a range of 150 meters. He folded up like a pocket knife and remained lying on the ground. After having accomplished so many of our objectives, there were still more to come. Our success in battle fanned to a glowing white heat the aggression and bravado of every individual. This tightly unified band of combat soldiers no longer needed rousing speeches from their leaders. Each man knew only one forward. Next to me I saw a young officer of another regiment like me. He enjoyed entirely by himself the good success of the first onslaught. Our shared enthusiasm brought us as close in a few moments as if we had known each other for years. Our next leap forward separated us. We never saw each other again. End quote. German forces were having similar success all along the line of attack. They were breaking through in a way that had not been seen on the Western Front since the war began. Thick fog had concealed their approach in many parts of the battlefield and they were able to work their way between and around static British positions, encircling them and cutting them off from each other. The British, who were hurting for manpower themselves, had failed to gather enough reserves, and what reserves they had were held too far back to the rear. So before long, masses of British troops were surrendering. On the first day, German forces overran the British front line and occupied 100 square miles new territory. They'd killed or wounded 18,000 British soldiers and captured another 21,000. The next day, the Germans renewed the attack, spreading out into British held territory until lines that the British had been holding for four years began to crack. Ludendorff's tactic of using smaller units empowered to take their own initiative had thrown the British into confusion. Troops seemed to be everywhere. Headquarters lost contact with units under its command and several important railway bridges were seized before the British could blow them up. On the retreat, hundreds of British artillery and mortar cannons were also taken intact by the Germans. Marshal Philippe Petain, the overall commander of the French army, informed General Douglas Haig, who was in charge of British forces, that he believed the main blow of the German attack was still to come and that he would be moving all of his reserves back to defend Paris in the event of a total collapse at the front. Haig was shocked by this and demanded to know if the French general intended to abandon the British right flank and allow the Germans to drive a wedge between their forces. And Marshal Petain nodded his head. His decision to abandon the British and go into a shell around Paris was taken by many, including Haig and many future historians as a tacit admission that Petain believed the battle and the war had been lost for all of Haig's. Many faults and they were very many. Defeatism was not among them. So he called London and told them that his army and the whole war effort was on the brink of catastrophe. He demanded that they finally acquiesce to something that they and he had been refusing, which was to put a determined general. He recommended French General Ferdinand Foch in command of all Allied forces. A joint meeting between French and British military officials was called to consider the question. And it was a somber meeting. Marshal Petain, who was already seated when Haig walked in, turned to the French Prime Minister, George Clemenceau and said, there goes a general who will soon have to surrender in the open field and I after him. Adolf Hitler's regiment took part in every phase of the Germans 1918 offensive. John Toland writes, quote, hitler's fighting spirit was higher than ever. On one of his first trips out front in June, he got a glimpse of something in a trench that looked like a French helmet. He crept forward and saw four French infantrymen. Hitler pulled out his pistol. Messengers had turned in rifles for sidearms by then and began shouting orders in German as though he had a whole company of soldiers. He delivered these four prisoners to the regimental commander personally and was commended. There was no circumstance or situation, recalled the commander, that would have prevented him from volunteering for the most difficult, arduous and dangerous tasks. And he was always ready to sacrifice life and tranquility for his fatherland and for others. Unfortunately, for men like Hitler and Ernst Younger and for Germany and her allies, fighting spirit is not the final measure of victory in war, especially when the enemy has one of his own. No matter how strong the spirit the flesh eventually gives out, there is a hard physical limit to what men can do. And although that limit lies far, far beyond what most people think they're capable of, the German army had pushed itself past that point long ago. Remember, these people are starving at this point. They've been up for days. The battle is still raging. The Germans are still advancing. On the 25th, they captured Albert and the 27th Montdidier. In just two weeks, they had pushed the British back 40 miles across a 40 mile front and had killed, wounded or captured 240,000 Allied soldiers. But they had not been able to capture the strategic strongpoints that might have put the enemy in an untenable position. This was a critical moment of the war. Both sides had fresh reserves waiting to join the battle, and the decision was going to come down to how and where each side employed them. On the offensive, generals faced the question of Whether to send their reserves to reinforce areas where his troops had gotten bogged down or to send them to exploit an opportunity where his troops were having success on the defensive. Generals had to decide whether to send in reserves to help hold the line or or to hold them back until the attacker ran out of steam and then unleashed the reserves in a counter attack. They also had to determine where to deploy their reserves, which was not always an easy thing because many of the attacks that Ludendorff had launched during this period were intended almost entirely just to divert the other side's reserves so that they couldn't be used to defend his real objectives. Up until now the French had been stingy with their reserves, giving up ground in exchange for time and German casualties. And as a result the British were barely holding on. Barely. But they were holding on. Ludendorff just did not have the manpower that would have been necessary to fully route the British army in direct combat. To have any chance at victory, he had to capture strategic points that would divide the French and British armies and break their ability to move troops and resources from one place to another. And so Ludendorff decided to throw a large number of his own reserves into a gap opened by the initial assault in an attempt to capture this vital railroad junction that would have seriously hurt the Allies ability to reinforce and supply their armies. But the war machine he was driving was running on empty again. Most of his soldiers had not slept in days, had only caught maybe a fitful nap here and there in a shell hole or ravine. They were malnourished and had been for a long time, I mean, so try to put yourself in that situation. Have you ever gone three days with no sleep? Have you ever done it on an empty stomach? Have you gone three days without sleep on an empty stomach? On an all out march against furious enemy fire, all while carrying 70 to 100 pounds of gear? The troops at the edge of the attack advanced so quickly they outran their supply lines. They often found themselves in uncertain territory with no reinforcements. They ran out of food and clean water. And so instead of pressing the attack, hungry and thirsty soldiers who overran Allied positions would often stop the attack to raid their storerooms and get something to eat or drink. The German soldier had been underfed for at least two years, but throughout that time he was at least able to take solace in his government's assurances that the enemy was starving too, thanks to the German U Boats blockade. Well, it came as a big shock when they found that their enemies were supplied beyond their wildest dreams. Younger remembers his own discovery of this disheartening. A neighboring room contained a kitchen whose stocks we admired reverently. There was a whole box full of raw eggs. We immediately devoured the innards of a significant number uncooked. After cracking open the shells, we hardly still knew the name egg, so long had it been since we had them. Also piled on shelves were cans full of meat and boxes of delicious, thick jam. Moreover, there were bottles of coffee, liqueur, tomatoes and onions. In short, everything the gourmet could wish for. Later, this image of abundance came back to my mind. Often I thought back to it when we lay in the firing trenches for weeks with skimpy rations of bread, watery soups and thin fruit jelly. We were as badly cared for as a Chinese coolie and wore but a tattered coat. Yet the German soldier of the field hurried from battlefield to battlefield. For four long years. He repeatedly struck his iron fist against opponents many times more numerous, more fully equipped and ever advancing. No other fact can provide greater evidence of the power of the idea that drove us striding towards an encounter with death, dying in an instant of enthusiasm. That means much hungering and starving for the cause much more. The German soldiers were also dismayed to see up close all the nations that were arrayed against them, something they had knew conceptually, but now they saw with their own eyes. The British, the French, the Americans, sure, but they were augmented by the British Commonwealth countries. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. France and Britain also brought in hundreds of thousands of men from their colonies. Germans, overrunning enemy lines in 1918 were capturing Chinese laborers, fighters and laborers from India, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt. They found men from Madagascar, from West Africa, Indochina, the Caribbean. And they had always known they were outnumbered by the French and British even before the Americans had joined the fight. But they had leaned on the hope that the determination of the German soldier and the brilliance of his commanders might overcome the deficit. But many were now realizing for the first time the true scope of what they were facing. The whole world seemed to be against them. And so, for the first time, the morale of the German soldier began to show serious cracks. This was made worse by a very bad idea that in hindsight, probably should have been recognized at the time, back in January, when the socialists on the home front had tried to cripple the German war machine with a series of industrial strikes. The authorities punished many of the organizers and participants by rounding them up and sending them to the front. Take that, you anti war socialists. Well, maybe they figured that the war would be won or lost. In the next few months anyway, before these, thousands of what amounted to enemy propagandists had an effect on frontline morale. But that was a grave miscalculation. Most of Germany's fighting men would have nothing to do with the socialist traitors. But a growing number of Germany's exhausted, starving and increasingly despondent soldiers began to listen to what they were saying. Insubordination was becoming more common and soldiers who could see the end of the war coming started focusing on preserving their lives instead of giving their all for a chance at victory. On April 5, Ludendorff had no choice but to call off Operation Michael. It had achieved more in a few weeks than any operation since the opening days of the war. The Germans had pushed Allied lines back by 50 miles along a broad front. They'd taken 90,000 prisoners of war and captured 1300 artillery pieces. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. The land they'd taken was mostly a bunch of ruins and muddy fields and taking them had not altered the strategic situation in any meaningful way. In exchange for a lot of basically useless and strategically insignificant ground, the Germans had taken almost as many casualties as their enemies, with a huge number of those casualties concentrated among the elite assault troops, the most motivated and capable men the Germans had left. But at this point, from a strategic point of view, their ability to field fresh divisions didn't really matter. It was now or never for the Germans. And so there was no reason for Ludendorff not to throw everything he had left at the enemy before the Americans came in and decided the question for good. Two days after Michael was called off, Ludendorff ordered another large offensive in Flanders. It was originally supposed to be called Operation George and was planned as a potential alternative to Michael. A huge operation. It was not supposed to be a follow up, but Ludendorff was desperate. So George was taken off the shelf and put back on the table. Ludendorff had so few battle ready troops left that the operation had to be scaled back and it was renamed Operation Georgette. Of the troops he did have, a huge number of them were just waking up from their first nap after fighting Operation Michael for several weeks when they got the new order to attack. And so these depleted men did as they were told. And as with Operation Michael, it looked like a smashing success after the first few days, only to peter out as the advancing soldiers outran their supply lines and reinforcements and reached the limit of their physical capabilities within spitting distance of their final objective. But Ludendorff kept pushing because why not? He now ordered another attack. This Time to the south against French lines. It was no use saving resources to meet future needs. So the Germans would either have to win now or there was no future to worry about. They fired two million artillery shells, two million artillery shells into the French lines in four and a half hours to prepare the ground for the infantry. Two million shells in four and a half hours. The French were driven back until the Germans could see the Eiffel Tower in the distance and their long range artillery was harassing Paris itself. But like the others, this Aisne offensive bogged down in the face of hard resistance. The Germans simply had nothing left. The American invasion of France was now in full swing and every enemy soldier the Germans took out of the fight seemed to be replaced by two or three corn fed boys from Nebraska. These Americans were inexperienced, but they also hadn't suffered through four years of war. And they were all full of naive enthusiasm. In their first serious engagement, they drove the Germans back and captured a town near Montdidier on May 28. A few days after that, two more American divisions were thrown into battle at Chateau Thierry in Belleau Wood, where they held like a wall as the Germans tried several times to cross the River Marne. Given their inexperience fighting a modern war, some among the Allies and the Germans had been skeptical that the Americans could learn fast enough to make a difference. But the Americans had shown themselves more than up to the task, a fact which lifted the spirits of the French and British almost as much as it discouraged the Germans. Ludendorff continued to draw down his account and other smaller offensives were ordered in the hope that a broken supply line, a cut off army, something, anything, would lead to a breakthrough. But the hammer blows were getting weaker and weaker as the summer wore on. Ernst Younger had led his company throughout the German offensive of 1918. He had been wounded badly enough to force him off the line no fewer than five times before 1918. And in late May, he received his sixth badge of honor. Well, that's probably a bad metaphor this time. Younger had donned a British soldier's coat after losing his own. As he and his men fought toward their objectives, he felt an impact in his chest and a German soldier suddenly ran up shouting to take off the English coat and then tore it off Younger himself. Younger thought he was done for. But he searched around and couldn't find a wound. And so in the heat of battle, he continued on. He and his men jumped into an enemy trench to get their bearings and assess their casualties. Standing in the conquered piece of trench, I conversed with Caius. Suddenly I had a wet feeling on my chest. Stripping my shirt off, I saw that I had indeed been shot near the heart. The bullet or bullets had flown through just below my Iron Cross metal. Two entry holes were in the front of the shirt and two exit holes behind the body. There was no doubt in my mind that I had been mistaken for an Englishman. I'd been shot by one of our own men at a range of only a few steps. I strongly suspected the man who tore off my coat. Caius wrapped my chest all around in bandages. He expressed his regrets for having to move on, for abandoning me at this interesting moment upon the battlefield, we parted with See you again. In Hanover, I chose an enlisted man to accompany me to the rear. To get my bearings, I identified the intensely bombarded road we were on from a map in my map case. I tucked my diary into the same case. I then walked back through the trench where we had previously fought. Our attack had so greatly shocked our opponent that the enemy's artillery suddenly began shelling us. On the terrain behind the road, and especially in the trench itself, was a curtain fire, a wall of artillery blasts of rare intensity. It seemed unlikely that we could get through it unscathed. We moved through it by sprinting from one traverse to the next, from one walled end of the trench to the next. Suddenly, there was a loud smashing noise next to me on the rim of the trench. Something struck me hard on the back of the skull. Stunned, I fell forward. When I awoke, I was hanging head down on the carriage of a heavy machine gun. I stared at the trench floor. A red puddle below me was enlarging frighteningly fast. The blood gushed forth relentlessly. I thought I was already dead, but had somehow managed to escape to live again. However, my escort claimed that he could not see my brains coming out, so I pulled myself up and ran on with him. Here I had my payback for my carelessness. I went into battle without a steel helmet. End quote. A bloodied Younger finally made his way to the rear and was immediately seen to by a surgeon. There were two holes in the back of his head, but amazingly, they were only through the fleshy parts and the skull was still intact. The chest wound was as minor as a bullet through the chest could be. It went straight through without any serious internal organ or bone damage. While he recuperated, he reunited with more and more of his men, who were being sent back wounded. Each of them had brought fresh bad news of Younger's comrades who would not make it back to the hospital. He demanded to go back to the front, and the hospital staff was only able to restrain him for two weeks With a chest wound that still seeped blood under his bandages. He returned to his company on June 4. They hardly had time to mark his return when the company was ordered to move out. They marched all day and all night with artillery shells exploding all around them, and finally arrived at their destination, a forward trench on the bleeding edge of the German assault, where they were to relieve another unit, or whatever was left of it. By now the English had gathered their wits after the initial rout had thrown them into disarray, and the pace of their counter attacks was increasing. Instead of advancing, the Germans were now fighting to hold on to the ground they had taken. Younger's company fought off British attacks all through June and July, counter attacking when possible. Until near the end of July. He was ordered to take two squads from his unit and accompany an assault unit on a night raid. He was given 15 minutes to to prepare. As they approached the English trench, their artillery fire. The Germans artillery fire opened up with deadly accuracy and the English soldiers were forced to jump out and flee. Younger and his men found the trench mostly usable and did the rounds, checking nooks and crannies for enemy stragglers. Quote I was the last man of our column and had just passed past the entrance to a trench that branched to the left. Suddenly, a man immediately in front of me, a corporal, uttered a cry of extreme excitement. He fired his gun at something to the left, a bullet whizzing past my head. I could not figure out why he had done that. I stepped back a few paces for a better view of the branching trench. At that moment, an athletically built Englishman stood opposite me. Just as he was tossing a hand grenade at the fleeing corporal. At the same time, from all sides rang out the cry attack. From other English troops. To cut us off from retreat, they stormed over the top of the trenches. I pulled out my hand grenade, my only weapon, and flung it in a short arc toward the feet of Tommy, the English troops. Then, surrounded by exploding hand grenades, I turned tail and ran hard back in the direction of our own lines. Only one man of my company, the short Guy Vilzack, had the common sense to run after me. An iron egg, a ball shaped grenade thrown at us tore his belt and pants without wounding him further. Voight and the other people had advanced further ahead by sidestepping English defenders. They appeared surrounded and hopelessly lost. Battle cries and numerous explosions could be heard in the distance. It meant only one thing. Voigt and his men went down fighting hard, inflicting costly losses on their opponents. In an effort to come to their aid, I led the squad of Cadet Sergeant Moorman forward through the bordering trench. However, we had to halt in front of a thick hailstorm of bottle shaped mortar shells. A steel splinter of a shell flew against my chest and was blocked by the metal buckle of my suspenders. In addition, artillery fire of enormous power abruptly broke out. Enormous spheres of exploded dirt sprayed out from large puffs of colored smoke. High pitched metallic screeching cut through the dull roar of heavy impacts. Incoming iron projectiles bellowed in unholy short bursts. And in between all this, clouds of shell splinters howled and whirled past. The artillery battered them, forcing them from the trench into nearby foxholes. As the company took cover, Younger went from dugout to dugout and started to give instructions to his men. After making his rounds, he rose to go back to his own bunker, when, just as he approached it, another explosion threw him into a heap. A projectile had ripped off his helmet and sent it flying to who knows where. Another shell exploded on the rim of the foxhole, wounding several men who were taking cover there with him. Younger knew to expect an enemy ground attack as soon as the bombardment died down. To have any chance of repelling an infantry assault, they had to get back into the trench. So Younger crawled out and toward the parapet. He only had 15 men left under his command, too few for a linear defense because they didn't have enough men to man the whole trench. And so they retreated out of it, dragging their gear to a huge shell hole nearby where they could mount a defense in a tight semicircle, and the rim of which was elevated enough to give them a view down into the trench. Younger hoped that the enemy would attack the trench they had just left, and then, before the English realized what was happening, to crush them with hand grenades and hit them with the machine guns as they tried to escape. But there was no attack. Following the bombardment, and after three days of sporadic fighting, he and his men were relieved in a village just behind the front line. The men reunited with the rest of their company and did what they could to rest and refit. They were hungry, but for days all they had to eat were cucumbers, which they called gardener's sausage. Younger continued to drill his men as an officer was required to do, to keep their level of discipline up and to keep their minds from wandering too far from the battlefield. But Younger says he felt awkward barking at these battle hardened men for being out of step or slouching during Drills. After three weeks of training and recuperation, unusually heavy artillery bombardment came from the English side on August 22, and the next day Younger's company was ordered to move out in a torrential storm. They again marched through the day and night, arriving at their post, which was a large farmstead, at 5am the next morning. Most of the farm's buildings were in some stage of demolition, but the men found cover where they could and laid down for a nap to recover from the long hike. The officers of the regiment met that afternoon and were warned to expect a serious attack led by a line of British tanks. After the meeting, Younger called his men to the orchard to speak to them, dispersing them so they wouldn't all be killed together if a stray artillery shell landed among them. Standing under an apple tree, I said a few words to my people. I stood in their midst at the open end of several horseshoe shaped groups. Their faces looked serious and manly. There was little to say. Everyone knew that we could no longer achieve victory, but the enemy should see that he was fighting against men of honor. On such occasions, I avoided letting myself get carried away by bravado. Also, it was my principle not to use big words to inspire courage or to threaten the would be coward. I merely suggested what to do. I knew for certain that no one would let me down. We all have fear, but we must fight against the fear. That night the men enjoyed a good meal of food looted from the surrounding farms. Younger and one of his men even split a bottle of wine. After dinner, they slept together in a large goat pen until at 2am A sentry woke them. The trucks had arrived to take them into battle near Cambrai. Later that morning, a soldier brought Younger his company's orders. They were to push forward to a certain road and hold the intersection at all costs. Younger knew that this maneuver was the prelude to an offensive and that he would see blood by evening. He led his men through a dead landscape, all while being harassed by bombs and bullets from enemy airplanes doing circles above them, far out of reach of any weapon they might have used against it. Younger himself came down sick, but at this point that was nothing. At 6:15 that evening, the company commanders were called to a meeting with the battalion commander, where they were told that they had 45 minutes to move out and go on the attack. The officers shook hands and went back to prepare their respective companies. Younger asked for a volunteer to stay behind because someone had to tell the field kitchen. It's basically a food truck that would be coming up behind them where to find the rest of the company. But none of his men would volunteer, and they fought him when he chose one himself. And then he and his men headed out. This was the last storm, the last assault. In the years since, how often in our minds have we slipped back to a mood like that day. We veterans again feel that we shall face the western sun against our opponents. We left the ravine entirely according to plan. Sporadic gunshots crackled against us. With a walking stick in my right hand, a pistol in my left hand, I trudged forth. During the advance, I discovered that my Iron Cross metal came loose from my chest and fell to the ground. Schrader, my personal aide, and I began intently to search for for it. Even his snipers seem to have set their sights on us. Schrader pulled the metal out of a pile of grass and fastened it firmly back on. And then Younger provides a passage from his diary. A few days later, there was a depression in the terrain. Hazy figures moved against a background of brown clay. A machine gun clattered. Flaming arcs of incendiary bullets sliced against us like a farmer harvesting corn with a scythe. It filled me with a fatal sense of hopelessness. Nevertheless, we began to run. At our objective. In the middle of a jump over a section of trench, a shot penetrated the front of my chest, ripping me out of the air. With a loud cry, I whirled around lengthwise and clattered to the ground. Stunned, I woke up with the feeling of great misfortune being wedged between narrow clay walls. A row of crouching men shouted from down the line. Medic. The company commander has been wounded. Younger lay on the ground, fighting for breath as British artillery fell like rain around his position. Suddenly, from above the trench, men were shouting that the English had broken through on the left flank and were surrounding them. Younger somehow managed to pull himself back to his feet. His blood dripped from his wound into the into the dirt. With no helmet and an open jacket, revealing his bare bandage wrapped torso, Younger took his pistol in hand and prepared to fight. When he looked up, he saw an overwhelming flood of British soldiers rushing straight at them. He and his men opened up, taking down many of the onrushing British. But then the British hunkered down, waiting for something, and four tanks suddenly crawled past them. German artillery managed to take out those tanks, but Younger's men continued to fall. He sent one of his junior officers to take a position 20 meters down on the left and sweep any attackers that jumped into the trench with his machine gun. But a few moments later, the man came back. He told Younger that the whole German line to the left was surrendering. In disbelief, Younger stood up and looked over the rim of the trench. Turning around, I saw something really strange. From behind us, our people were coming forward with their hands up. The enemy had taken the village already, the starting point of our assault. Younger and his men found themselves surrounded, to their great surprise, by a circle of British soldiers and their German POWs, who demanded that they throw down their weapons. Younger, unable to shout, choked out orders to fight to the death, fight with knives if necessary. And so his men did. They shot at the British and the Germans as a circle of men shouted at the suicidal little knot of men they had surrounded. But then voices, friendly, familiar voices from within the trench, were shouting that it was no use. There's no hope and no reason to shoot at fellow Germans. Younger looked at the two officers standing next to him, who gave him a fatalistic smile and then threw their weapons to the ground, but not Younger. The men surrounding them were still recovering, and so he crawled out of the trench to make his way back to the main force. He encountered two English soldiers leading a troop of German prisoners back to their lines. He managed to get close to one without being detected. He put his pistol to the Englishman's body and squeezed off a shot. The Brit folded to the ground and Younger jumped back into a trench as the other Englishman fired at him and missed. Either the effort or the impact of falling into the trench pushed out some of the blood that had been filling his lungs, because, Younger says he suddenly caught his breath and was able to run down the trench. He came upon a squad of men from his regiment. They were crouched down behind a traverse, firing their guns wildly. Together they got up to make their way back to safety, but as soon as they stood up, two nearby British soldiers saw them. Before Younger's group could take cover, the Brits opened up on him with a machine gun. Everyone except Younger and three other men went down, dead or wounded. They managed to get out of the way of the machine gun and made their way back to a fortification to the right of the German position. The battle was a frenzy, with both sides firing wildly, hitting friend and foe alike. Younger and his companions staggered back to the main force, where a medic tore off his coat and told him to lie down or he'd bleed to death. In the next few minutes, he was rolled up in a tent canvas and some men dragged him away from the battle until again they were sprayed with gunfire and his rescuers started going down. The medic who'd saved him took One in the head and went down dead. Shells fell all around and the unwounded men threw themselves to the ground and crawled. Younger was left alone now, lying on the ground, immobilized by the canvas wrapped around him, and he was prepared to die. But he had not been abandoned, not yet. One of his young soldiers, a lance corporal, ran up to him, hoisted him up onto his back and began running back toward their lines. But they didn't get far before this man was shot. The corporal was a dead man, but he used the last of his strength to keep from collapsing so that he could set Younger down gently. Younger had to pry himself from the man's arms, which were clutched around his thighs. A bullet had pierced his steel helmet and struck him in the temple. This brave man sealed his loyalty to his commander with death. He was a teacher's son from letter a town near Hanover. I later visited his family and hold his memory sacred. End quote. Still not abandoned, another medic ran to Younger and lifted him up on his shoulders. They made it to a spot shielded from gunfire and waited there until dark. When the shooting died down, men from Younger's company found him and carried their commander back to the rear to safety. While recovering at the hospital, he received a telegram on September 22nd informing him that the Kaiser had awarded him the Order of Merit, the highest award in the German empire and an award typically only bestowed on senior officers. Ernst Younger had been wounded seven times, 14 depending on if you count wounds for which he refused to take recovery time, and at just 23 years old, was one of the most decorated soldiers on either side of the war. Junger's total effort was exceptional, but the impulse and emotion that drove him existed in men spread throughout the German army. And these men continued to fight and keep their lines intact. There was no panic, no disorderly retreat. But just then, a new enemy appeared on the battlefield. In mid June, the world first became acquainted with the term Spanish Flu. It broke out almost simultaneously all across the world and within a year would kill more people than the entire First World War had done. In terms of raw numbers, it was the deadliest and most widespread pandemic in human history. While the Americans were sacrificing 126,000 young lives in France, 548,000 would die from the disease back in the United States. Unlike most influenza strains, which overwhelmingly hit the very old and the very young hardest, the 1918 Spanish flu was less concentrated and hit younger adults and middle aged people hard as well. D.J. goodspeed writes, quote, in the last two weeks of June, army after army reported to German supreme headquarters that the epidemic had so weakened their divisions that they could not resist an Allied attack, let alone mount one of their own. The British, French and Americans also fell victim to the influenza, and Ludendorff hoped without reason that the Allies would be weakened more than the Germans. Quite predictably, the converse occurred, for the German army, thanks to the British blockade, had long suffered from dietary deficiencies and were already in poor health. The epidemic raged throughout the latter half of June and July died down and then broke out again with increased virulence in October. On August 4, 1918, Adolf Hitler received a telegram informing him that he'd been awarded the Iron Cross, first Class for his exemplary performance on the battlefield. Four days later, an Allied counterattack crashed through the German line at Amiens. Ludendorff rushed reinforcements up to plug the gap, but the fresh soldiers were excoriated by the men they relieved, who accused them of prolonging the war for no reason. Ludendorff, who by this point was starting to show signs of serious strain. Later accounts of him suffering a nervous breakdown are probably exaggerated. He wrote that this was the black day of the German army in the history of this war, and the Kaiser told his staff, we must draw only one we are at the limit of our capabilities. The war must be ended. As the Spanish flu tore through the ranks, another kind of epidemic was spreading throughout the German army and home front. The marks of this new disease were not red spots on the skin, but red flags waved in the air and red armbands worn over shirt sleeves. Bolshevism, the ideological weapon Ludendorff had deployed against Russia, had spread back into Germany. Some German units that had been fighting in the east were considered so infected that they could not be sent to join the battle in the west for fear that they would infect their comrades. Many German prisoners of war freed from Russian captivity by the peace deal, had to be quarantined, but the infection made it through anyway. Discipline began to break down in more and more units. For the first time in the war, significant numbers of German soldiers were refusing to attack, and some took their chance to doff their uniforms altogether and slip across the border into Holland. Trains carrying troops to and from the front often degenerated into a state that approached open rebellion. Gunshots were fired from the windows of the trains, and the number of men on board decreased at each station as they moved toward the battlefield. At each station, more and more men took their chance to escape. Officers who tried to quell the building mutiny were attacked by their own Men sometimes killed by them. Graffiti announcing Bolshevik slogans multiplied on walls and on the sides of trains and cars. This behavior was appalling to a dedicated volunteer soldier like Adolf Hitler. He'd been in a sour mood for months and had no patience for complaining or defeatism. But as the summer wore on, the replacement soldiers were being brought up and many of them were unwilling conscripts infected with the red disease, and they began to shout down Hitler's diatribes. One day he physically attacked a new non commissioned officer who was denouncing the war in front of his men. The two men fought, and Hitler, although he took considerable damage, overcame and beat the man. One of the men who knew him at the time remembered that Hitler's thrashing of one of their champions made the newer troops hate him, but that the old soldiers respected and loved him more than ever. John Toland writes, Four years of dehumanizing trench warfare had engendered in Hitler, as in so many other German patrons patriots, an abiding hatred of the pacifists and slackers back home who were stabbing the fatherland in the back. He and those like him burned with a zeal to avenge such treachery. And out of all this would come the politics of the future. In September, Hitler's unit was returned to the area of Flanders. They marched to the outskirts of Ypres for the third time in the war, dug in to hold their portion of the line. On the morning of October 14th, they were hit with a mustard gas attack by the Allies, and Hitler was temporarily blinded. With others, he was shipped back to a German hospital to await the end of the war in darkness. Hitler and Ernst Younger were not the only men ready to keep the fight going, though. In case the Allies refused to negotiate an honorable peace and instead pressed for total surrender. Some civilian and military planners had begun discussing the possibility of a levey en masse that would force the Allies to fight the German people street by street in the towns and cities of Germany. It would have been a catastrophe for both sides, but especially for Germany, which would have lost and almost certainly would have gone over to Bolshevism if the war continued. On October 24, German Admirals, whose fleet, unable to take on the larger and more experienced British navy, decided to go out in a blaze of glory. They didn't want to watch their ships be taken or scuttled after an ignominious surrender. And so, without seeking permission from the German government, the navy's most senior officers agreed to a plan which would throw the entire high seas surface fleet on an almost certainly suicidal attack against the British later that week. None of them thought they could win, but they were just determined to die on their sinking ships rather than in their beds in a few years wondering what might have happened. To execute the plan, though, the admirals were going to need the support of their rank and file sailors, and it was way too late in the game for that. The sailors in Germany's main navy port in Kiel had been sitting around not doing much of anything for most of the war. And as every officer in non com knows, bad things happen when service members are left with too much free time. Complaints become conventional wisdom, discipline breaks down, bad ideas take hold of idle hands. Defeatism, pacifism, even Bolshevism had taken hold among the sailors more than any other part of the German military. It was impossible to hide the Admiral's suicidal plan from the men, because sailors knew what it looked like when they were preparing to get their ships ready for battle. Right away, it was clear that a few ships would not be joining the attack because their sailors were just refusing to go along with was only a minority, but it was enough to convince the admirals that their plan would would not work well. The rebellion might have ended there, as the Navy joined the rest of Germany in waiting to see how the end would come. But then the officers made a terrible and entirely predictable mistake by arresting and imprisoning the mutineers. Small but growing crowds held protests here and there, and hundreds of men began attending illegal meetings to discuss more concerted action. Red flags and red armbands were on display, and the men wearing them were the loudest and most vociferous agitators. On November 3, 1918, after a mass meeting in the woods outside town, over a thousand sailors marched toward the center of Kiel, toward the prison where their comrades were being held. A military commander got wind of the protest and, fearing that the sailors might try to free the imprisoned men by force, sent a patrol of soldiers to block their way. When the aggressive sailors confronted them, whether due to nerves or contempt for the treacherous sailors, I can't say they opened fire. They killed nine protesters and wounded another 29 with that salvo of gunfire. The German Revolution of 1918 was on. Thousands of people poured into the streets of Kiel. They seized the navy's ships, and within 24 hours, the Red flag flew over the entire town. Over the next five days, anti war and then anti government and then revolutionary protests spread through towns and cities in northern Germany. There were robust plans to deal with an event like that, but by this point, too many of the soldiers and even many of their officers were just unwilling to see spill any more German blood to stop it. On November 9, the officers and men surrounding the Kaiser at the headquarters of the German General Staff were preparing for the worst. News was coming in that the Allies were advancing along a broad front and that the revolutionary uprisings had spread from Germany proper to some of the divisions of the army at the front. Then news came that bloody battles had broken out in Berlin and the blood of countless revolutionaries, loyalists and local civilians was staining the streets. The Kaiser's wife, Empress Augusta Victoria, was still in the capital and her husband feared the worst, remembering how the Russian revolutionaries who had inspired their German counterparts had mercilessly butchered the family of the Tsar just four months earlier. The wives and families of many of the officers guarding the Kaiser were similarly defenseless and far away. The Kaiser and the men spoke of donning their dress uniforms and following the Kaiser on a suicidal cavalry charge against enemy lines. Before any such thing could happen, a call from the Chancellor in Berlin came. Kaiser Wilhelm II was informed that he was no longer the Emperor of the German Reich. The centuries old rule of the Hohenzollern dynasty was at an end. The Kaiser and his men resisted it at first, tried to inform the newspapers that he had not in fact abdicated. But the newspapers wouldn't even print it. So they considered whether it would be possible to gather enough loyal men to march on Berlin and retake the government. And they quickly realized that that was impossible. They were just out of moves. The only thing now was to ensure that the Kaiser didn't meet the same fate as his Russian cousin, Tsar Nicholas ii. When his men approached him with an escape plan, the Kaiser said it would be an act of supreme cowardice and refused to go. But many believed that armed revolutionaries would arrive in force as early as that afternoon to arrest the Kaiser or the former Kaiser now, and to do who knew what else. To him, officers were already taking up arms and establishing a defensive perimeter to hold off a potential assault. The head of the German Navy, whose plan for a last ditch naval attack had sparked the revolution, wrote what he believed would be his last letter to his wife. After a long emotional introduction telling her of his importance to him, he wrote that if this truly was his last letter, he had died at his post as an officer in the German Imperial Navy and that she should not mourn him. Finally, in the early morning hours of October 10th. I'm sorry, November 10th. Wilhelm's men prevailed on him to flee. So they boarded a train to Holland, but soon after it left the station, it stopped, and the former emperor, in a close entourage, got out and made their escape in two unmarked cars. Fearing that revolutionaries had seized control of the stations ahead, they made for the border with Wilhelm's closest aides pointing loaded rifles out the windows of the cars, ready to shoot their way across the border with Holland if necessary. It was not necessary. The Dutch were no friend to the Kaiser in November 1918, but nor were they willing to consign him to the fate of the Russian royal family. And so he was taken in, and he would spend the rest of his days living a quiet life in Holland. In towns and cities across Germany, starving people looted stores. Soldiers sold their weapons and gear to revolutionaries for a bit of bread. And the number of people wearing the red armband multiplied and multiplied again. Officers, many of whom had suffered and bled for Germany for four years, returned to their hometowns only to find themselves surrounded by red mobs who cursed them, spit on them, tore off their medals and epaulettes, and often beat them. The German Empire had fallen. But even now, even at this late date, the army had not been routed. It still held its lines intact, in many cases still in enemy territory. Where they retreated, it was under arms and in good order. And the feeling of many of them was that it was not they who had lost the war. They had been stabbed in the back by traitors at home, vermin who had chewed at the joints and tissues of Germany as her loyal sons tried to hold off a fearsome foreign enemy. Still blind and recovering in the hospital, Adolf Hitler wept for the first time since he'd stood over his mother's grave. How had the revolution spread so quickly? It seemed impossible, unless there'd been a conspiracy at work. And speculation abounded about the plotters identities, whoever they were, wherever they hid, no matter how brazenly and how arrogantly they flaunted their temporary victory, these traitors would pay. And one day, somehow, Germany's enemies would learn that they had not bested her in a fair fight. The war was not over. We who reside in the victorious allied countries read in our history books that hostilities came to an end on November 11, 1918. But every government of every country, from Germany to Siberia, had collapsed in the last 12 months, and they were afire with revolution as people celebrated the end of violence in London, Paris and New York, the streets of Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, Moscow and Istanbul flowed with blood. The Red army was already on the march to put over the revolution. In Ukraine, Poland and Germany, millions were starving and soon millions would be murdered as the revolution consumed Central and Eastern Europe and states newly formed from the carcasses of the dead. Empires fought each other for territory while the question was still open. Now the war was far from over. One German soldier who joined up with one of the independent militias fighting the revolutionaries said that when they got back home, we were told the war was over. That made us laugh. We are the war.
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Sa As a sour breath of and I am my father son and his dreams cannot be un beyond and you training his marauder Writing your history in the sacrifices of the devil where is the fighting man? Am I here? You want to trade every truth for all victory glory follow victory and every empire will fall Every monument rumble Forgotten men who watch who watch the century Poseidon words Rise up Rise up in betrayal and we will rise up Rise up in betrayal where is the fighting hand? Am I here? You will take every truth Follow Victor Victor Sa My heart shall be my tongue It's I leave all the soon to be ruins of my path and when the sky should fall beyond to our discern Then you will know they shall be my tomb. Where is the fighting man? I am here. You will take every truth for hollow Victory follow victory Sa.