Why?

Der Sturm
Hans Baluschek (PD)

"Why aren't the machine guns firing?" Louis yelled at the Baron as he scrambled to get the mud out of his rifle's firing mechanism. He heard the Baron shout back ...

"Beats me! Maybe they're not set up yet!"

As Louis was finally able to work his bolt, he peered out over the trench lip. There were a lot of Boche out there. As he watched, he heard the machine guns start up, finally.

Wolfgang watched in horror as his best mate, Friedrich, pitched forward and fell into the mud. He knelt beside him and started to roll his friend over when a passing sergeant bellowed at him, "Leave him, he's dead!"

Looking down at his friend, Wolfgang could now see where two or three rounds had penetrated his friend's body, ripping the back of his greatcoat open. Reluctantly he stumbled to his feet and forced himself to advance into the maelstrom, the air was alive with enemy bullets.

Just ahead he saw that some of his comrades had reached the old front line trench they had unceremoniously been thrown out of earlier. One man was wielding his rifle like a club, which made no sense to Wolfgang. Was the man out of bullets?

Wolfgang was ready to use his bayonet, or so he thought. When he got up to the trench, a Frenchman stabbed upwards at him. Just like in training, he parried the man's thrust, then stabbed down with his own bayonet, driving it into the Frenchman's chest, where it stuck.

He was frantically trying to yank the blade out when he saw another Frenchman lower his rifle and aim it. At him!

"Armand! Look out!" Louis yelled as he saw Armand aiming at a German standing on the lip of the trench, trying to free his bayonet. Armand never saw the man who jumped into the trench and hacked at him with an entrenching tool.

Armand fell to the muddy floor of the trench, his left arm nearly severed at the elbow. The German turned with a wild look as Louis started to panic. The Baron shoved him aside and Louis saw the Baron's bayonet jab into the German's belly, be pulled out, then jabbed in again. The German folded over the muzzle of the Baron's rifle then slid to the floor of the trench, his blood staining the mud.

Louis looked up, the man with the stuck bayonet was gone, his rifle still there, the bayonet lodged in the dead Frenchman.

"Louis, use your damned rifle or we're both going to die!" the Baron screamed at him.

Wolfgang stumbled back from the trench, leaving his weapon, he was looking for another one when he saw his lieutenant stop to aim his pistol, then be hit by French machine gun fire, dropping the man like a discarded doll.

There, a rifle! Picking it up, he checked that it worked, it was still loaded but the safety was on. Flicking the safety off he turned towards the French, there! A man was climbing out of the trench, his back to Wolfgang, so Wolfgang aimed and fired.

The Frenchman dropped his rifle then reached behind him, as if to pluck Wolfgang's bullet from his lower back. He dropped to one knee then turned to face his attacker. The look on his face was one of shock and surprise. Then he fell forward into the muck.

Louis worked his bolt and fired another round, when he went to reload, he realized that the magazine was empty. Scrabbling for his ammunition pouches, he extracted a handful of bullets and laboriously began loading them into his rifle. With a tubular magazine, his Lebel held more rounds than the German K98, but it was slow to load them in.

Once loaded with eight rounds, he'd had to grab another as he'd dropped one round into the mud at his feet, he looked for a target. Then he heard the whistles start blowing, what now?

The Baron ran down the trench, gathering what was left of the platoon. "Come on, lads, there's too many of them and our supports are nowhere to be seen."

"So we're just abandoning what we captured?" one of the men argued.

"Well, Jean, you're welcome to stay and defend your piece, but you'll be dead in minutes. Fall back or die, your choice."

Grabbing Louis by the collar, the Baron forced him up and out of the trench. "Run like your life depended on it, boy!"

Regaining the relative safety of their old line, Louis turned to his sergeant, "Why? Just what was the point of all that?"

The Baron took his time answering, "Well, I'm no strategist, but if we don't try and do something, the war will go on forever. We'll be here teaching the next generation how to dig trenches and mount patrols. But yes, today was a colossal screw up. The unit that was supposed to follow us in then continue attacking apparently never got the word. Or they were sent to the wrong place or ... I just don't know, Louis. Someone messed up and we were left in the lurch. But we did hurt the Boche pretty bad. We left a lot of dead Boche in that trench."

Louis shook his head, "Seems we left a lot of dead comrades there as well. Did the Lieutenant make it back?"

The Baron shook his head, "He's missing, probably still in that shell hole he went down in."

"Are we going to go out and bring him back?" Louis thought it made sense.

The Baron stared at Louis for a moment, then answered, "No. Certainly not. If he's alive, which I doubt, he'll be dead before midnight. That's if he was hit. If not, Lord knows what will be his fate. They'll probably never find his body. My wager is that he's already dead. God rest his soul." The Baron crossed himself as he said that.

That shocked Louis, he hadn't seen the Baron as a particularly religious man. So he asked him, "Do you believe?"

"Sometimes. Mostly I try not to think of how God could let us do this to each other. Doesn't seem right, does it?"

Louis wondered what his old village priest might say to that. If he made it home, he'd ask the man.

Then he felt a chill, he'd just thought "if" he made it home, not "when."

After today, Louis didn't know what to think, but he wasn't sure just how much more of this he could take.

He'd been on the line for ten days.