I slip warily over the edge, and snake forwards. I creep along on all fours; things are going well, I fix the direction, look about me and take note of the pattern of artillery fire so that I can find my way back. Then I try to make contact with the others.
I am still afraid, but now it is a rational fear, which is just an extraordinarily enhanced cautiousness. It is a windy night, and the shadows move back and forth in the sudden flashes from the gunfire. By this light you can see too much and too little. Often I freeze suddenly, but there is never anything there. In this way I get quite a long distance forward, and then turn back in a curve. I haven't made contact. Every few feet closer to our trench makes me more confident, but I still move as fast as I can. It wouldn't be too good to stop one just at this moment.
And then I get another shock. I'm no longer able to make out the exact direction. Silently I crouch in a shell hole and try to get my bearings. It has happened more than once that a man has jumped cheerfully into a trench, and only then found out that it was the wrong side.
After a while I listen again. I still haven't sorted out where I am. The wilderness of shell holes seems so confusing that in my agitated state I no longer have any idea which way to go. Maybe I am crawling parallel with the trenches, and I could go on for ever doing that. So I make another turn.
These damned Verey lights! It feels as if they last for an hour, and you can't make a move, or things soon start whistling around you.
It's no use, I've got to get out. By fits and starts I work my way along. I crawl crabwise across the ground and tear my hands to pieces on ragged bits of shrapnel as sharp as razor-blades. Often I get the impression that the sky is becoming lighter on the horizon, but that could just be my imagination. Gradually I realise that I am crawling for my life.
A shell hits. Then straight away two more. And then it really starts. A barrage. Machine-guns chatter. Now there is nothing in the world that I can do except lie low. It seems to be an offensive. Light-rockets go up everywhere. Incessantly.
I'm lying bent double in a big shell hole in water up my waist. When the offensive starts I'll drop into the water as far as I can without drowning and put m face in the mud. I'll have to play dead.
Suddenly I hear their shellfire give way. Straight away I slip down into the water at the bottom of the shell hole, my helmet right on the back of my neck and my mouth only sufficiently above water to let me breathe.
Then I remain motionless - because somewhere there is a clinking noise, something is coming closer, moving along and stamping; every nerve in my body tenses up and freezes. The clinking noise moves on over me, the first ware of soldiers is past. All that I had in my head was the one explosive thought: what will you do if someone jumps into your shell hole? Now I quickly pull out my small dagger, grip it tight and hide it by keeping my hand downwards in the mud. The idea keeps pounding in my brain that if anyone jumps in I'll stab him immediately, stick the knife into his throat at once, so that he can't shout out, there's no other way, he'll be as frightened as I am, and we'll attack each other purely out of fear, so I have to get there first.
Now our gun batteries are firing. There is an impact near me. That makes me furiously angry, that's all I need, to be hit by our own gunfire; I curse into the mud and grind my teeth, it's an outburst of rage, and in the end all I can do is groan and plead.
The crash of shells pounds against my ears. If our men launch a counter-offensive, I'm free. I press my head against the earth and I can hear the dull thunder like distant explosions in a mine - then I lift my head to listen to the noises above me.
The machine-guns are rattling away. I know that our barbed-wire entanglements are firm and pretty well undamaged; sections of them are electrified. the gunfire increases. They aren't getting through. They'll have to turn back.
I collapse into the shell hole again, tense almost to breaking point. Clattering, crawling, clinking - it all becomes audible, a single scream ringing out in the midst of it all. They're coming under fire, the attack has been held off.
What you see transcribed above is an excerpt from Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, the book I recommend to everyone fascinated by war, death, and...camaraderie.
Following the journey of Paul and his friends, the reader gets a unique chance to dive into the mind of teenagers -young men deprived of the best years of their life, of an idea of what "normal" is, and in the end, of the life itself.
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