"FORCED TO FIGHT"—THE TALE OF A SCHLESWIG DANE
"What My Eyes Witnessed in East Prussia"
Told by Erich Erichsen, A Soldier in the German Army Translated from the Danish by Ingebord Lund
This is a tragic story of a Dane who was forced to fight in the German Army. He was mobilized at the beginning of the War and forced to serve on the Western and Eastern fronts. He wrote the first revelations of life in the German trenches. This is the first authentic account of how Germany makes war from the lips of a German soldier. After being wounded, disfigured for life, and a cripple, he went home where his own father and mother hardly knew him. Twenty editions of his book have appeared in Danish but for obvious reasons, its sale in Germany has been prohibited. The experiences herein related are by permission of his American publishers, Robert M. McBride and Company.
[6] I—STORY OF SUFFERING ON THE RUSSIAN FRONT
On the East front I took part in the great offensive against the Russians. My old comrade was there also; he was still alive. But there were many new faces in my division. The bloody days before Liège, the horrors of the fight through Belgium, and the long strife in the trenches of Flanders, had cost many men their lives or their reason....
I remember how Belgium was laid waste. But to tell the truth, things were much the same in East Prussia. Before the invasion, it was in many parts a melancholy country. But it looked more pitiable than ever, as we marched through it, with the Russians retreating before us. Trampled fields, ploughed up by shells, burnt farms, property wantonly injured or destroyed, towns in ruins and human beings in despair, robbed of all they had, their happiness, their joy, their future. It was an indescribable scene of misery and woe. But at the same time it was exceedingly touching to see how the greater number of the people clung to the devastated home, whose master was probably in the fighting line, if he were not already killed. The wretched hovels and the ruined farms still sheltered human creatures, who did their work as best they could, and hid themselves from the night and the rain in some cramped space, between half-charred boards and ends of beams, or whatever they could find to hand.
It was misery. It was poverty. It was wretchedness. But it was home—the one fixed point in their existence. If they once forsook that, they were exposed to the merciless uncertainty of life. So they clung to it obstinately and faithfully in spite of all they had to bear and suffer, both when the Russians advanced, and when they retreated. Among their other miseries they had also learnt to know famine. When the Russians advanced, they did not leave much behind. Many a time these people begged our last slice of bread from us, to stay the worst of their hunger.
We gave to them willingly. I felt at times, that their lot was far worse than ours. We indeed might lose our lives in many different ways, and we also knew what it was to be hungry. But we had not to listen to our children crying for food, or see our tiny infants sicken and die because there was no milk to be had and the mother's breasts were empty.
I can well understand why wherever we came, the people greeted us as their deliverers.
I understand their joy and their often boundless gratitude in word and deed. I understand why the old men and the trembling women so often fell upon our necks with tears of joy.
It must be heart-breaking to see the plot of ground you love laid waste and trampled down, without being able to do anything to save it. It must be still more heart-breaking to see the home that you have cherished devoured by flames, and then, on dark and stormy nights, taking your children by the hand or on your back, and followed by terror-stricken women and bewildered old people, to flee from that home and wander along toilsome roads to uncertainty, in company with hundreds of others who know just as little where to go for help or safety.
We met many such crowds of homeless wayfarers on our march, people who could hardly drag themselves along for hunger and cold and terror.
There were miserable carts drawn by miserable, starved horses and wretched bits of furniture, piled up anyhow in haste and fear. There were people huddled together under the lee of a hedge or in a wood, or sheltering in the holes they had dug into banks of earth or dykes, wrapped in rags, starving with cold and still terror-stricken. Men gazing towards the homes from which they had fled, looking in bewilderment and despair at the down-trodden and ruined country; women lying down and trying to warm their little ones at a naked, impoverished breast, or groaning in misery and hopelessness over the dying eyes of a child; old men and old women with only one wish in the world—the sum and substance of their prayers from hour to hour being that God would take them away from all this misery, which they could not in the least comprehend and which they had not strength enough to bear.