In Europe

shape as well. For centuries, the British had been concentrating on the maintenance of their empire. They were equipped for wars in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, but not in Europe. In the years preceding the war their army had served largely as a colonial police force, attuned more to brief skirmishes. In 1914 theBritish Army had neither the experience nor the troops to fight a modern, large-scale war in Europe. All that still had to be mustered.
    The French had suffered grave losses back in August and, to make things worse, the lion's share of their heavy industry had fallen into German hands. But they were fighting on their own soil, amid their own people, and that quickly proved to be a major advantage. On 23 August, 1914 there were twenty-four German divisions opposing seventeen Allied divisions. By 6 September that had changed to twenty-four against forty-one. The French brought everything they had into action, including the entire fleet of Parisian taxis, to get their troops to the Marne on time. The Germans were beaten back, lost a quarter of a million troops, and dug in.
    After that the war froze. The soldiers began connecting their foxholes, and both sides of the front were soon marked by enormous networks of muddy hideaways and trenches. No one, no soldier, no strategist, was prepared for such a war. Except for a few minor oscillations, the war would barely move from these positions; it was not until 1918 that a German offensive once again turned things upside down.
    For months in 1915, Lieutenant Ernst Jünger kept a diary of the events in the ‘windy little segment of the long front that we have come to regard as home, where we have gradually come to know every overgrown hollow, every dilapidated earthen bunker.’
    30 October
    Last night, after a cloudburst, the breastworks collapsed and mixed with rainwater into a tough mush that turned the trenches into a quagmire. The only comfort was that the English were no better off, for we could see them energetically bailing water out of their trenches as well. Because we were on somewhat higher ground, we pumped our bilge water in their direction. We watched through our telescopic sights as well. When the walls of the trenches collapsed, it uncovered a row of corpses from last autumn's fighting.
    9 November
    Among the diversions offered by this post is the hunting of various animals, most particularly the partridges that live in huge numbersin these abandoned fields. Because we have no cartridges with shot, we have no choice but to creep up quietly on the relatively fearless ‘dinner party candidates’ and shoot their heads off, otherwise little of the meat would remain. While doing this, we must take care not to leave our trenches in the heat of the pursuit, for otherwise we would turn from hunters into prey.
    28 December
    My faithful man August Kettler was killed on the road to Monchy, where he was going to fetch my dinner. He was the first of my many stewards to be struck down by a mortar attack, which threw him to the ground with a piece of shrapnel through his windpipe. When he left with the pans, I said to him:‘August, don't let anything happen to you along the way.’ ‘Oh, Lieutenant, why should anything happen?!’ Now I was summoned and found him gasping on the ground close to our shelter, every breath he took sucked air into his lungs through the wound in his throat. I had him carried back, he died a few days later in the field hospital. For him, as for many others, I found it particularly sad that the victim couldn't talk, only stare desperately at his helpers, like an animal in torment.’
    The letter sent by the British government to the family of those who died in battle contained the following standard phrase: ‘He was killed by a bullet, straight to the heart.’ In reality, however, only very few were fortunate enough for that. Countless soldiers bled to death between the front lines, where no one could help them, amid the dying donkeys and whinnying horses. After the first day of the Battle of the Somme, as the British Lieutenant Hornshaw reported, an unearthly wailing and groaning rose up from no-man's-land, ‘a sound like moist fingers being dragged down an enormous windowpane’.
    After the first year of the war, Corporal Louis Barthas noted that only three of his 13th Group's old guard were left. The others had all been wounded or killed. In Berlin, Käthe Kollwitz saw a uniformed boy, no older than fifteen, wearing the Iron