wrote to his wife from Galicia that everything was so dreadful, so unspeakably dreadful. Thus while he was always absolutely sure where his duty lay, he did not write a single chauvinistic war poem even at the time when nearly everybody else in Germany - or so it seemed - was doing so. Nor did he write overtly anti-war poems, which his conscience would not have allowed him to do. In retrospect it seems extraordinary that the poem Feuertaufe ("Baptism by Fire") should have caused a scandal in the German press in 1915, for its only conceivable fault is its utter honesty, its attempt to convey the feeling of coming under enemy fire for the first time and its implicit refusal to pretend that the feeling in question was one of heroic excitement." According to Jeremy Adler, "Although the letters testify to profound inner turmoil, Stramm was a popular officer and a brave soldier." Serving as a company commander on both the Eastern and Western Fronts, Stramm repeatedly distinguished himself by acts of courage under enemy fire. Stramm's performance was particularly praised while he was serving under the command of General August von Mackensen during the Gorlice–Tarnów Offensive, which successfully drove the Imperial Russian Army out of Austrian Galicia and Congress Poland and into the Great Retreat of 1915. For his actions during the Offensive, Captain Stramm was highly decorated by both the Imperial German and Austro-Hungarian Armies. At the beginning of August 1915, Stramm was sent home to Berlin on what would be his final furlough. His daughter Inge, who adored her father, later recalled how Stramm made her ten-year-old brother Helmuth promise, "never to let himself down," by being, "a Schweinhund before himself." His family would later learn that throughout his furlough, Stramm had carried a letter in his pocket which he needed only to countersign to be released from all future military service at his publisher's request. By this time, Captain Stramm believed that his combat death was imminent. His mind was also filled with projects that he longed to write down. In the end, however, Stramm was, according to Patrick Bridgwater, "unable to accept the alibi of a higher duty to literature," and left the letter unsigned. On 1 September 1915, mere weeks after returning to his unit, Captain August Stramm was shot in the head during brutal hand-to-hand combat against soldiers of the Imperial Russian