Terrible Effect of a Charge of Senegals Upon German Officer’s
Sensibilities
Perhaps the most vivid and ecstatic description of a fight for trenches
that was written in the course of the war or has been written since was
from the pen of Rheinhold Eichacker, a German officer on the Western
front. It was published in one of the German papers from which it was
translated for the benefit of the New York _Times_. It deserves a
permanent place in the historic record of desperate deeds of courage as
an example of thoroughly adequate treatment, in literary form, of what
may be styled “compound heroism.” The passionate frenzy of a personal
experience could not be made more graphic with mere words as tools.
The occasion was less feelingly covered by the German Army report,
which said:
“After a lengthy artillery preparation, white and colored Frenchmen
attacked our positions in heavy force. They succeeded in getting
a foothold in some of our most advanced trenches. A furious
counter-attack drove them back again in a hand-to-hand encounter.
Nothing else of importance.”
But let us have Rheinhold Eichacker:
“At 7.15 in the morning the French attacked. The black Senegal negroes,
France’s cattle for the shambles. After a seven-hour suffocating
drumfire that, according to all human reckoning, should not have left
a mortal man alive. But we still lived—and waited. Six meters under
the sod lay our ‘waiting rooms.’ Burrowed into the ground on a slant.
‘Courage bracers,’ they call them out there.
“At 7.15 the enemy shifted his fire backward upon our reserves. Our
pickets sounded the alarm. We sprang to arms, with our gas masks in
place. For a few seconds the trenches resembled an antheap. There was
feverish hurrying, running, shouting, and shoving. Just for seconds.
Then everybody was at his post. Everybody who was alive. Every one a
rock in the seething waves. Every one determined to hold his position
against hell itself.”
“LET THEM COME”
“A gas attack! Several hundred pairs of wide-open warriors’ eyes fixed
their glances upon the ugly, smoking cloud that, lazy and impenetrable,
rolled toward us. Hundreds of fighting eyes, fixed, threatening,
deadly. Let them come, the blacks! And they came. First singly, at wide
intervals. Feeling their way, like the arms of a horrible cuttlefish.
Eager, grasping, like the claws of a mighty monster. Thus they rushed
closer, flickering and sometimes disappearing in their cloud. Entire
bodies and single limbs, now showing in the harsh glare, now sinking
in the shadows, came nearer and nearer. Strong, wild fellows, their
log-like, fat, black skulls wrapped in pieces of dirty rags. Showing
their grinning teeth like panthers, with their bellies drawn in and
their necks stretched forward. Some with bayonets on their rifles.
Many only armed with knives. Monsters all, in their confused hatred.
Frightful their distorted, dark grimaces. Horrible their unnaturally
wide-opened, burning, bloodshot eyes. Eyes that seem like terrible
beings themselves. Like unearthly, hell-born beings. Eyes that seemed
to run ahead of their owners, lashed, unchained, no longer to be
restrained. On they came like dogs gone mad and cats spitting and
yowling, with a burning lust for human blood, with a cruel dissemblance
of their beastly malice. Behind them came the first wave of the
attackers, in close order, a solid, rolling black wall, rising and
falling, swaying and heaving, impenetrable, endless.
“‘Close range! Individual firing! Take careful aim!’ My orders rang
out sharp and clear and were correctly understood by all the men.
They stood as if carved out of stone, their lips tightly pressed,
the muscles of their cheeks swollen, and took aim. Just like rifle
range work. The first blacks fell headlong in full course in our wire
entanglements, turning somersaults like the clowns in a circus. Some of
them half rose, remained hanging, jerked themselves further, crawling,
gliding, like snakes—cut wires—sprang over—tumbled—fell.
[Illustration:
© _Underwood and Underwood._