Chapter 21 – Blood and Mud (1915)
The new year dawned without celebration. There were no fireworks, no toasts, no clinking glasses. Only the thunder of distant artillery rolling over Flanders fields announced that 1915 had begun. For the men of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment, hope of a swift victory had already collapsed. The war had sunk into the ground, into endless lines of trenches cut through the sodden fields of Belgium and France.
At first, the trenches had been shallow things, scraped out in haste after the failed rush to Paris. But by 1915 they were an entire world, frontline and reserve, dugouts and communication tunnels, duckboards laid over sucking mud, barbed wire snarling before parapets. They stank of rot and excrement, of men unwashed for weeks, of rats bold enough to feast on corpses in plain sight.
Into this world stepped Adolf Hitler, dispatch runner, Iron Cross pinned to his breast, a quiet figure in a regiment worn thin.
The Misery of Existence
Lice tormented the men, breeding in seams of uniforms. Boots, once polished in Munich, never dried, and feet rotted with trench foot. Shells burst with such regularity that silence itself became a stranger. When bombardments fell, men pressed themselves into mud, cursing, praying, or weeping; when the barrage lifted, survivors clawed out their dead comrades and tossed them onto stretchers already soaked through.
Food came irregularly, stale bread, watery soup, the occasional wedge of sausage. Sometimes meals never reached the front at all, destroyed by shellfire or swallowed in the mud. Water reeked of rust or corpses lying upstream.
Yet Hitler endured. He seemed immune to fatigue, driven by something deeper than the body. While others complained or slumped, he remained upright, waiting for orders, ready for the next dash across fire-swept ground.
The Comradeship He Never Shared
For many soldiers, survival was found in comradeship. A joke passed between dugouts, a cigarette shared in the darkness, a song hummed quietly before dawn, all this gave men reason to keep breathing. But Hitler remained apart.
He ate alone, cleaned his gear alone, and when he spoke, it was often curt and tinged with disapproval. His comrades respected him for his courage, none could deny his nerve as a runner but affection rarely followed respect. They found him too stern, too humorless, too intense.
They laughed with Karl, the Bavarian farm boy who could mimic officers; they wept when Franz, who sang in the dugouts, was killed. But no one wept for Hitler. He was the odd figure always present, always reliable, but never one of them.
The Jewish Comrades
Among the regiment were Jewish soldiers, men from Munich, Nuremberg, even Vienna. They fought, bled, and endured like everyone else. Some joked, some prayed quietly in Hebrew, some cursed the Kaiser under their breath. For most soldiers, such differences meant little. A man was judged by how he held his rifle, how he endured under fire.
But not for Hitler.
Every mistake by a Jewish comrade, no matter how small, became evidence of weakness. If a Jewish soldier misread an order, Hitler muttered, "Useless, untrustworthy." If a man groaned under the weight of supplies, Hitler scowled, "They cannot carry Germany's burden."
When some went missing, captured, killed, or simply vanished into the chaos of war; Hitler muttered about "pretenders" and "cowards." He never spoke such words to their faces; he reserved them for under his breath, in the shadows, a private disdain that fermented in silence.
Where others saw comrades, Hitler saw confirmation of prejudice. He convinced himself that Jews fought without the same devotion, without the same love for the Fatherland.
And yet ironically, it was a Jewish officer, Lieutenant Hugo Gutmann, who had recommended him for his Iron Cross. This contradiction Hitler never acknowledged.
The Obsession with Germany
If Hitler scorned Jews, he idolized Germany.
He saw in his Aryan comrades the virtues he worshipped; discipline, courage, endurance. When they held the line under impossible odds, he believed it was proof of racial superiority. When they charged into fire with bayonets fixed, he muttered about the iron will of the German spirit.
Even in mud and misery, he believed Germany stood above all nations. He studied every order, every movement, as if the war itself were a great test of blood and destiny.
To him, this was more than a war for territory. It was a struggle for survival, a contest between superior and inferior races.
The Long Winter of 1915
The battles of that year were not grand offensives but attrition; Ypres, Artois, Champagne. Men fought over yards of ground, only to surrender them weeks later. Shells pulverized trenches until they collapsed in on themselves. Poison gas, first unleashed at Ypres, drifted across lines, turning lungs into liquid and eyes into blindness.
The regiment lost men daily, not in glorious charges, but in fragments: a headless body after a shellburst, a man buried alive when dugout beams collapsed, another drowned in a shell crater too deep to climb out of.
Hitler carried his messages through it all, his figure darting through smoke, his tunic plastered with mud. He seemed untouched by fear, as if danger was fuel for his resolve.
The Hardening of the Heart
The misery that broke other men only hardened Hitler further. Where comrades longed for home, he thought of destiny. Where others clung to friendship, he clung to discipline.
When Jewish soldiers tried to lighten the mood, he turned away. When they failed in minor duties, he cursed under his breath. Each error, in his mind, was not individual but racial, a reflection of something deeper.
And when Germany faltered, when supplies thinned, when soldiers complained, when strikes erupted back home, Hitler blamed not the war, not the generals, but the "enemies within."
The idea that would later become the Dolchstoßlegende; the "stab in the back", was already coiling in his thoughts.
Blood and Mud
By the end of 1915, the regiment had been reduced to a skeleton of its former self. New recruits filled the gaps, wide-eyed boys replacing veterans buried in nameless graves.
The war had consumed everything, youth, laughter, innocence. It replaced them with mud, blood, and the stench of decay.
Hitler endured it all. He bore no scars, though he had faced death countless times. But the true scars were invisible, etched not on his skin but in his mind.
In the years to come, Hitler would remember 1915 not as a year of despair but as a year of confirmation. The mud had not swallowed him; the rats had not broken him; the endless shelling had not unmade him.
Where others faltered, he endured. And in enduring, he believed he had glimpsed the secret of existence: struggle as law, endurance as destiny, Germany as chosen.
But entwined with that belief was poison. Every Jewish comrade who failed, every whisper of discontent from home, every rumor of weakness, he gathered them into a creed of contempt.
1915 had baptized Germany in blood and mud. For Hitler, it had baptized him in hatred.