Told by Walther Harich, Wilhelm Spengler and Willie Treller
What the educated German soldier thinks about the war, how he is affected by the strain and the brutalities and the heroisms of life consequent of it, is described with a fresh, powerful vividness in a book of war letters from German students issued under the editorship of Professor Philipp Witkop, of Freiburg ("Kriegsbriefe Deutscher Studenten"). Translations of some of the impressions on the German youth are here presented.
I—"DRIVEN TO DEATH BY ME"
Of the worst of all I have not written.... It is not the slaying, not the mounds of dead, which we are always passing, and not the wounded (they have the morphine needle and they lie quiet and peaceful in the straw of the requisitioned peasant carts). To me the worst is the distress and suffering to which man and beast are constantly subjected by the terrible strain. We have just buried my first mount, a glorious animal, virtually driven to his death. Driven to death by me! Can you imagine that a person as peaceable as I could find it possible to drive a horse to death with whip and spurs?
There is no help for it. The word is forward—always forward!
Oh, this everlasting driving on!
One stands beside a team that can go no further and compels the drivers, with kindness or threats, to force the impossible out of the horses. The poor animals are all in, but one grabs the whip himself and mercilessly beats away at the miserable beasts till they move again. That is the shocking thing—that one is constantly compelled to make demands upon the poor animals to which they are not equal. Everything here is beyond one's strength. The impossible is made possible. It must go—till something or other breaks.
Or picture this to yourself: Shaken with fever and with burning eyes, a boy comes to me, whimpering—he can endure no more—and I ride into him and drive him back to the front. Can you picture that? But it must be!
Everything here is beyond one's strength. My God! We ourselves must do impossible things. But can one demand that of the others? We know that the struggle is for the German idea in the world—that it is to defend German understanding, German perception against the onslaught of Asiatic barbarism and Romanic indifference. We know what is on the cards if we do not do our utmost.
But the men? How often since we came to this God-forsaken region did we tell ourselves that it was impossible to go forward at night. It is really impossible. And then came an order—an order which could not be carried out during the day, so it went at night. It went because it must. Because "the order" is the great unavoidable—something that must be carried out—Fate, the all-determining. We know what "the order" means now! It is that which gives our people the ascendancy over the whole world.