In Europe

always placed on the suffering and the dying, but one reads little about the actual experience of killing.
    What was the motive? After a year of war, Barthas said he never wanted to hear the word ‘patriotic’ again: ‘It was very simple: we were forced to do it as victims of an unrelenting fate … We had lost our sense of values and our humanity. We were degraded to the status of pack animals: indifferent, unfeeling and deadened.’ Barthas was a committed socialist and humanist, and found his own solution to the problem: he fired only in self-defence, never for any other reason.
    The attitude adopted by the poet Robert Graves was the polar opposite of this, perhaps in part because Graves was an officer and wished to do all he could to renounce his German origins. He had no qualms about treating an unsuspecting German, whom he had heard humming a tune from
Die lustige Witwe
during a reconnaissance mission, to a mortar attack fifteen minutes later. He killed with calm pragmatism. He had come up with a sort of formula for taking risks: ‘We would all take any risk, even the certainty of death, to save life or to maintain an important position. To take life we would run, say, a one-in-five risk.’
    This same pragmatism also extended to the killing of prisoners. Although it was in violation of every military convention and code of honour, Barthas, Graves and other diarists mention it frequently. Prisoners on theway to the rear lines would have a live grenade stuffed into their pockets, or were simply shot down. When a German patrol found a wounded man in no-man's-land, there was every chance they would slit his throat. Graves: ‘We ourselves preferred the mace.’
    The most important thing in actual combat was the group, the soldiers with whom one interacted on a daily basis. ‘Regimental pride’, Graves called it. ‘No one wanted to be a bigger coward than his neighbour,’ Barthas observed. ‘Besides that, the men, stubborn as they were, believed in their own good luck.’ This same sense of solidarity was sometimes a powerful motive for killing: protecting the group, avenging a fallen comrade. Ernst Jünger describes how one of his men, the father of four children, was killed by a British sniper: ‘His comrades hung around the foxholes for a long time, hoping to avenge him. They wept with rage. They seemed to consider the Englishman who had fired the deadly shot to be their personal enemy.’ After the death of one of his best friends, the English poet Siegfried Sassoon volunteered for patrol duty every night ‘looking for Germans to kill’.
    ‘I think a curse should rest on me – because I love this war,’ wrote Winston Churchill to Violet Asquith, the prime minister's daughter, in early 1915. ‘I know it's smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment – & yet – I can't help it – I enjoy every second of it.’
    Still, in most of the accounts of the Great War, one finds little or nothing of the individual passion for killing. On the contrary. Barthas relates how his men, while pursuing the enemy, were suddenly handed butchers’ knives. Clearly, these were to be used to kill the German wounded or prisoners. Most of the soldiers threw them aside: ‘These are weapons for murderers, not for soldiers.’ During the Battle of the Somme, German machine-gunners – shocked by the slaughter – regularly stopped firing long enough to allow British soldiers to crawl back to their trenches. Some British officers even felt that the soldiers’ greatest reservations about going over the top had to do not with their fear of dying, but their fear of killing.
    The British machine-gunner Albert Depew was one of the few who wrote openly about how, in 1918, he had jumped a German in a trench and run his bayonet right through the man. ‘He was as delicate as apencil. When I returned to our trenches after my first charge, I could not sleep for a long time afterwards for remembering what that fellow looked like and how my bayonet slipped into him and how he screamed when he fell. He had his leg and his neck twisted under him after he got it. I thought about it a lot, and it grew to be almost a habit that whenever I was going to sleep I would think about him, and then all hope of sleeping was gone.’

Chapter NINE
Verdun
    YPRES LIVES OFF THE PAST, OFF ITS STEP GABLES, ITS NEWLY constructed Middle Ages, off the graves and the dead. Ever since 1927, two buglers from the local volunteer fire