Reinhold at the Front

This novella, published in 1931, is a fictional account of the experience of a young German soldier serving in Artois on the Western Front. It was published in English as part of a collection of his war stories with the title Changed Men.

The author, Paul Alverdes (born 6 May 1897), was the son of an army sergeant who himself had written about his experience of war (Hermann Alverdes, Mein Tagebuch aus Südwest: Erinnerungen aus dem Feldzuge gegen die Hottentotten. Oldenburg, 1906). He was educated at a school in Düsseldorf and enlisted, aged 17, at the beginning of the war. He served at the Somme and was severely wounded by a gunshot to the throat. In the short story, The Next Man, he writes about a similar injury for one of his characters:
“a crossing bullet caught the boy in the throat and he fell headlong over the dead man with his face on his. But he sprang up again at once and, pressing the handkerchief to the wound, staggered back and fell at the sergeant-major's feet. By a miracle the arteries of the neck were not severed or at any rate they did not bleed for the moment; and so, scarcely able to breathe and quite unable to speak, he was got back that night to the nearest field hospital on that sector of the front. The surgeon at once performed an operation to help him breathe more easily and it met with some success.”

One of the features of the novella is how the author describes the beauty of nature alongside the horrors of war:
“They were a draft for a Rhineland artillery regiment which had stayed where it was ever since the armies had dug in. It was the end of April 1915 and the chestnuts were just in blossom.”
The colour on the trees and the music of birdsong contrast with the painful sights and sounds of the battlefield:
“The blackbirds were singing already in the chestnut trees and the starlings chattering among the ruins. Now and again, however, a report like the snapping of a tightly-stretched wire broke ominously on the ear, or a sharp whisper passed over, as though for the fraction of a second a jet of steam was forced through a narrow vent. A hollow explosion was heard aloft that turned into a shrill singing sound and the shrapnel bullets pattered among the branches, or whipped through the grass, or went crashing and smacking against the walls. Then everything was still. Cautiously and tentatively the blacbird began to sing again...”

Sometimes the sounds of beauty and horror get muddled in the mind of the soldier. In the story The Next Man a soldier wakes at dawn:
“There'll be another fine day again soon, he thought. Above him too and all around there were numbers of birds singing. But then he became aware that it was the whistling and twittering of rifle bullets.”