A German Soldier (by Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R05148 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de) |
During the Great War, however, dawn
was often “zero hour” – the time scheduled for an “over the top” attack on the
enemy’s trenches, moments tense with the possibility of death. Armies at
the front had developed the ritual of “stand-to” (in English, a shortening of
the command “Stand to Arms”) or in German, “In Bereitschaft” (the term
translated as “in readiness” or “on stand-by”).
At the order, every man in the trenches stood at attention and stared in
the half-light toward the enemy’s lines.
When it became clear that an attack was not imminent, the troops were
allowed to “stand down” and prepare their breakfasts. Stand-to has been described as “a daily routine of quiet terror.”*
German soldier Anton Schnack wrote of the experience in the
poem “In Bereitschaft" (the original poem in German can be found on page 59 at this link).
Standing To (“In Bereitschaft”)
I shall go into
death as into a doorway filled with summer coolness, the scent of hay, and
cobwebs:
I shall never return
To colourful
butterflies, flowers and girls, to dancing and violin music.
Somewhere or
other I shall fall on stones, shot in the heart, to join someone else who fell
wearily earlier;
I shall have to
wander through much smoke and fire and have beautiful eyes like the godly,
inward-looking,
Dark as velvet,
incredibly ardent …What is death? A long sleep. Sleeping eternally deep down
beneath grass and plants,
Among old
gravel? Trumpery. Maybe I shall go to Heaven and enter the snow-white night of
God’s stars,
His silken
gardens,
His golden
evenings, His lakes … I shall lie beneath the open sky, looking strange,
ancient, portentous,
My mind once
again filled with days out in the Tyrol, fishing in the Isar, snowfields, the
noise and excitement of the annual fair
In prosperous
villages in Franconia, prayers, songs, cuckoos calling, woods, and a train
journey along the Rhine by night.
Then I shall
become like evening, secret, dark, puzzling, mysterious, benighted;
Then I shall be
like earth, lifeless and void,
And totally
removed from the things around me: days, animals, tears, deep blue dreams, hunting,
merrymaking.
I shall go into
death as into the doorway of my house, with a shot in the heart, painless,
strangely small.
--Anton
Schnack, translated Patrick Bridgwater
What is death? In Schnack’s vision, death begins as a
doorway that opens into the cool of a
summer barn filled with the comforting scent of hay. Yet once a man has stepped across that threshold,
he cannot return to the world of sunlight, music, flowers, and butterflies, but must push past cobwebs to “fall on stones.” Shot in the heart, the dead soldier collapses into weariness, joining the multitude of others who have
wearily gone before.
And then the vision alters: perhaps death will offer no
opportunity to collapse, but only a long wandering “through much smoke and fire.” Or perhaps death is a “long sleep…deep down
beneath grass and plants.” This last consideration is dismissed as tand or worthless – the memorials of a graveyard are
nothing but trifling vanities to comfort the living.
Flanders, by Otto Dix |
Seeing himself as one of the corpses lying in the open, the
man’s mind strays to happy scenes of home: attending the annual fair, fishing in rivers,
hiking in the mountains, singing, dancing. As his mind returns to the commonplace
joys of the past, his body becomes one with the earth, “lifeless and void.” The
dead remain “secret, dark, puzzling, mysterious, benighted”; they are full of
memory, yet emptied of life.
The close of the poem returns to the doorway of death, where the only certainty is that the dead are released from pain and become “strangely
small.” The poem “Standing To” celebrates the small beauties and
wonders of everyday life while also recognizing that all life is fleeting and insignificant
when set beside the incomprehensible worlds of death and war.
German War Bond poster 1917 |
Schnack's poetry is virtually unknown, even in Germany, despite the claim that “he is one of the two unambiguously great poets of the war on the German side and is also the only German-language poet whose work can be compared with that of Wilfred Owen” (Bridgwater, 1985, p. 96). Describing his poetry, Schnack called his work "elegiac" - mournful and nostalgic sonnets that lament all that is lost in war.
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*Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (2000), p. 60.
*Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (2000), p. 60.
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