Fritz Franke and Siegfried Sassoon, Two Soldiers’ Views (1914–1918)

When war broke out in August 1914, no one foresaw the years of massive destruction and bloodshed that would follow. By late autumn, the two sides were entrenched along a line that extended from France into Belgium, and so the Western Front was born. Here millions of soldiers like Fritz Franke (1892–1915) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) faced unspeakable horrors. In the following letter written in the war’s first months, Franke, a medical student from Berlin, describes trench warfare as a living hell of shells and corpses. His description also reveals what already had become and would remain the war’s defining feature in the West: immobility and stalemate. Franke paid the ultimate price for both—he was killed in May 1915. By contrast, Sassoon, a British officer, survived and became famous for poems like “Counter-Attack,” which describes the war’s misery and futility.

From A. F. Wedd, trans., German Students’ War Letters (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1929), 123–25; and Siegfried Sassoon, Collected Poems (New York: Viking Press, 1949), 68–69.

Fritz Franke

Louve, November 5th, 1914

Yesterday we didn’t feel sure that a single one of us would come through alive. You can’t possibly picture to yourselves what such a battle-field looks like. It is impossible to describe it, and even now, when it is a day behind us, I myself can hardly believe that such bestial barbarity and unspeakable suffering are possible. Every foot of ground contested; every hundred yards another trench; and everywhere bodies—rows of them! All the trees shot to pieces; the whole ground churned up a yard deep by the heaviest shells; dead animals; houses and churches so utterly destroyed by shell-fire that they can never be of the least use again. And every troop that advances in support must pass through a mile of this chaos, through this gigantic burial-ground and the reek of corpses.

In this way we advanced on Tuesday, marching for three hours, a silent column, in the moonlight, towards the Front and into a trench as Reserve, two to three hundred yards from the English, close behind our own infantry.

There we lay the whole day, a yard and a half to two yards below the level of the ground, crouching in the narrow trench on a thin layer of straw, in an overpowering din which never ceased all day or the greater part of the night—the whole ground trembling and shaking! There is every variety of sound—whistling, whining, ringing, crashing, rolling . . . the beastly things pitch right above one and burst and the fragments buzz in all directions, and the only question one asks is: “Why doesn’t one get me?” Often the things land within a hand’s breadth and one just looks on. One gets so hardened to it that at the most one ducks one’s head a little if a great, big naval-gun shell comes a bit too near and its grey-green stink is a bit too thick. Otherwise one soon just lies there and thinks of other things. And then one pulls out the Field Regulations or an old letter from home, and all at once one has fallen asleep in spite of the row.

Then suddenly comes the order: “Back to the horses. You are relieved!” And one runs for a mile or so, mounts, and is a gay trooper once more; hola, away, through night and mist, in gallop and in trot!

One just lives from one hour to the next. For instance, if one starts to prepare some food, one never knows if one mayn’t have to leave it behind within an hour. If you lie down to sleep, you must always be “in Alarm Order.” On the road, you have just to ride behind the man in front of you without knowing where you are going, or at the most only the direction for half a day.

All the same, there is a lot that is pleasant in it all. We often go careering through lovely country in beautiful weather. And above all one acquires a knowledge of human nature! We all live so naturally and unconventionally here, every one according to his own instincts. That brings much that is good and much that is ugly to the surface, but in every one there is a large amount of truth, and above all strength—strength developed almost to a mania!

Siegfried Sassoon

Counter-Attack

We’d gained our first objective hours before

While dawn broke like a face with blinking eyes,

Pallid, unshaved and thirsty, blind with smoke.

Things seemed all right at first. We held their line,

With bombers posted, Lewis guns well placed,

And clink of shovels deepening the shallow trench.

The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs

High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps

And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,

Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;

And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,

Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.

And then the rain began—the jolly old rain!

A yawning soldier knelt against the bank,

Staring across the morning blear with fog;

He wondered when the Allemands would get busy;

And then, of course, they started with five-nines

Traversing, sure as fate, and never a dud.

Mute in the clamor of shells he watched them burst

Spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell,

While posturing giants dissolved in drifts of smoke.

He crouched and flinched, dizzy with galloping fear,

Sick for escape—loathing the strangled horror

And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

An officer came blundering down the trench:

“Stand-to and man the fire-step!” On he went . . .

Gasping and bawling, “Fire-step . . . counter-attack!”

Then the haze lifted. Bombing on the right

Down the old sap: machine-guns on the left;

And stumbling figures looming out in front.

“O Christ, they’re coming at us!” Bullets spat,

And he remembered his rifle . . . rapid fire . . .

And started blazing wildly . . . then a bang

Crumpled and spun him sideways, knocked him out

To grunt and wriggle: none heeded him; he choked

And fought the flapping veils of smothering gloom,

Lost in a blurred confusion of yells and groans . . .

Down, and down, and down, he sank and drowned,

Bleeding to death. The counter-attack had failed.

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