At last we reached the front line, which was occupied by men huddled together in little holes. Their dull voices trembled with joy when they learned that we were come to relieve them. A Bavarian sergeant handed over the sector and his flare pistol to me with a few words.
My platoon’s sector was on the right flank of the regiment’s position, and consisted of a defile hammered by constant shelling into little more than a dip, running through open country from a couple of hundred paces to the left of Guillemont, to a little less than that to the right of the Bois de Trônes. Some five hundred paces separated us from the troops to our right, the 76th Infantry. The shelling here was so heavy that nothing could survive.
Suddenly the Bavarian sergeant had disappeared, and I stood all alone, with my flare pistol in my hand, in the midst of that eerie cratered landscape, masked now by patches of creeping fog. Behind me I heard a stifled, unpleasant sound; with a degree of calm that astonished me, I registered that it came from a bloated disintegrating corpse.
Since I had no idea as to the enemy’s possible whereabouts, I went back to my men and told them to be ready for the worst. All of us stayed awake; I spent the night with Paulicke and my two orderlies in a foxhole no bigger than a cubic yard.
When morning paled, the strange surroundings gradually revealed themselves to our disbelieving eyes.
The defile proved to be little more than a series of enormous craters full of pieces of uniform, weapons and dead bodies; the country around, so far as the eye could see, had been completely ploughed by heavy shells. Not a single blade of grass showed itself. The churned-up field was gruesome. In among the living defenders lay the dead. When we dug foxholes, we realized that they were stacked in layers. One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors’ place. And now it was our turn.
The defile and the land behind was strewn with German dead, the field ahead with British. Arms and legs and heads stuck out of the slopes; in front of our holes were severed limbs and bodies, some of which had had coats or tarpaulins thrown over them, to save us the sight of the disfigured faces. In spite of the heat, no one thought of covering the bodies with earth.
The village of Guillemont seemed to have disappeared without trace; just a whitish stain on the cratered field indicated where one of the limestone houses had been pulverized. In front of us lay the station, crumpled like a child’s toy; further to the rear the woods of Delville, ripped to splinters.
No sooner had day broken than a low-flying RAF plane whirled towards us, and, vulture-like, began drawing its circles overhead, while we fled into our holes and huddled together. The sharp eye of the observer must have noticed something anyway, because before long the plane began to emit a series of low, long-drawn-out siren tones, coming at short intervals. They put one in mind of the cries of a fabulous creature, hanging pitilessly over the desert.
A little later, and the battery seemed to have taken the signals. One heavy, low-arcing shell after the other came barging along with incredible force. We sat helplessly in our refuges, lighting a cigar and then throwing it away again, prepared at any moment to find ourselves buried. Schmidt’s sleeve was sliced open by a large shard.
With only the third shell the fellow in the hole next to ours was buried by an enormous explosion. We dug him up again right away; even so, the weight of the masses of earth had left him deathly tired, his face sunken, like a skull. It was Private Simon. His experience had made him wise, because each time anyone moved around in the open while there were aeroplanes about, I could hear his furious voice and a fist waving from the opening of his tarpaulin-covered foxhole.
At three in the afternoon my sentries came to me from the left and stated that they were unable to hold out where they were any longer, as their holes had been shot away. I had to display my full authority to get them back to their stations. What helped me make my case was the fact that I myself was in the place of greatest danger.
A little before ten o’clock at night, a fire-storm was directed at the left flank of the regiment, which, twenty minutes later, had moved over to us. Soon we were completely wrapped in smoke and dust, but most of the shells came down just behind or just in front of our trench, if one can use that word for our smashed hollow. As the storm raged around us, I walked up and down my sector. The men had fixed bayonets. They stood stony and motionless, rifle in hand, on the front edge of the dip, gazing into the field. Now and then, by the light of a flare, I saw steel helmet by steel helmet, blade by glinting blade, and I was overcome by a feeling of invulnerability. We might be crushed, but surely we could not be conquered.
In the platoon to the left of us, Sergeant Hock, the unfortunate rat-catcher of Monchy, aimed to discharge a white flare, picked up the wrong flare, and instead sent up a red barrage light, which was taken up in all quarters. Straight away our own artillery opened up, and it was a joy to behold. One shell after another came yowling down out of the sky and showered the field ahead of us in a fountain of shards and sparks on impact. A mixture of dust, stale gases and the reek of flung carcasses brewed up from the craters.
After this orgy of destruction, the shelling quickly flooded back to its previous levels. One man’s slip of the hand had got the whole titanic machinery of war rolling.
Hock was and remained an unlucky fellow; that same night, as he was loading his pistol, he shot a flare into his bootleg, and had to be carried back with grave burns.
The following day, it rained hard, which was no bad thing so far as we were concerned, as once the dust turned to mud the feeling of dryness in our mouths wasn’t so tormenting, and the great clumps of monstrous blue-black flies basking in the sun – they were like velvet cushions to look at – were finally dispersed. I spent almost the whole day sitting on the ground in front of my foxhole, smoking and eating, in spite of the surroundings, with a healthy appetite.
The following morning, Fusilier Knicke in my platoon got a rifle shot from somewhere through the chest and against his spine, so that he lost the use of his legs. When I went to see how he was, he was lying soberly in a hole in the ground, looking like a man who had come to terms with his own death. That evening he was carried back through the bombardment, in the course of which, when the stretcher-bearers suddenly had to dive for cover, he suffered an additional broken leg. He died at the dressing-station.
That afternoon one of my men had me come over and look in the direction of Guillemont station, from behind a torn-off British leg. Hundreds of British soldiers were running forward through a flat communication trench, little troubled by the weak gunfire we were able to direct at them. The scene was indicative of the inequality of the resources with which we had to fight. Had we essayed the same thing, our units would have been shot to pieces in a matter of minutes. While on our side there wasn’t a single captive balloon to be seen anywhere, the British had about thirty clustered into one vast luminous-yellow bunch, watching with Argus eyes for the least movement to show itself anywhere in the crumpled landscape, to have a hail of steel directed against it.
In the evening, as I gave out the password, a large shell fragment came buzzing into my stomach. Fortunately, it was almost spent, and so merely struck my belt buckle hard and fell to the ground. I was so astonished that it took the concerned cries of my men, and their offers of water from their canteens, to show me that I’d had a near thing.
At dusk, two members of a British ration party lost their way, and blundered up to the sector of the line that was held by the first platoon. They approached perfectly serenely; one of them was carrying a large round container of food, the other a longish tea kettle. They were shot down at point-blank range; one of them landing with his upper body in the defile, while his legs remained on the slope. It was hardly possible to take prisoners in this inferno, and how could we have brought them back through the barrage in any case?
It was
almost one o’clock in the morning when I was roused by Schmidt from my half-sleep. Instantly I leaped up, and reached for my rifle. Our relief had come. We handed over what there was to be handed over, and as quickly as possible made our way out of this fiendish place.
But no sooner had we reached the shallow communication trench than a first clutch of shrapnels blew up in our midst. One ball smashed the wrist of the man in front of me, sending the arterial blood spurting everywhere. He reeled, and made to lie down on his side. I took him by the arm, pulled him to his feet in spite of his complaints, and only let go of him when we’d reached the dressing-station next to battle headquarters.
Things were pretty ‘hot’ along both the defiles, and we were panting for breath. The worst place was a valley we ended up in, where shrapnels and light shells seemed to go up uninterruptedly. Prruch! Prruch! went the spinning iron, sending a rain of sparks into the night. Whee! Another volley! I gasped because, seconds in advance, I knew from the increasing noise that the arc of the next projectile was heading almost exactly for me. An instant later, there was a heavy crash at my feet, and soft scraps of clay flipped into the air. It was a dud!
Everywhere groups of men, either relieving or being relieved, were hurrying through the night and the bombardment, some of them utterly lost, and groaning with tension and exhaustion; shouts fell, and orders, and in monotonous repetition the long-drawn-out cries for help from the abandoned and the wounded. As we raced on, I gave directions to the lost, pulled some men out of shell-holes, threatened others who wanted to lie down, kept shouting my name, and so brought my platoon, as if by a miracle, back to Combles.
Then we needed to march via Sailly and Gouvernements-Ferme to Hennois woods, where we would bivouac. It was only now that the degree of our exhaustion became fully clear. Heads brutishly down, we slunk along the road, often forced off it by cars or munitions columns. In my unhealthy irritation, I couldn’t help but think that these vehicles followed no other purpose than to annoy us as they sliced past us, and more than once I caught myself reaching for my pistol.
After our march we had to put up tents, and only then could we throw ourselves on the hard ground. During our stay in the forest camp, we endured great storms of rain. The straw in the tents started to moulder, and many men got sick. We five company officers were not much put out by this external wetness, spending our evenings sitting on our cases in our tent, with a few goodly bottles that had been magicked up from somewhere. In such situations, red wine is the best medicine.
On one of these evenings, our Guards counter-attacked and captured the village of Maurepas. While the two sets of artillery were raging against each other over a wide area, a violent storm broke loose overhead, so that, as in the Homeric battle of gods and men, the disturbance below seemed to be vying with that on high.
Three days later, we moved back to Combles, where my platoon this time occupied four smallish basements. These basements were hewn from blocks of chalk, long and narrow and with arched ceilings; they promised security. They seemed to have belonged to a vintner – or that, at any rate, was my explanation for the fact that they afforded small fireplaces broken into the walls. After I’d posted sentries, we stretched out on the many mattresses that our predecessors had lugged into place here.
The first morning, things were relatively calm; I took a walk through the ravaged gardens, and looted delicious peaches from their espaliered boughs. On my wanderings I happened into a house surrounded by tall hedges, which must have belonged to a lover of antiques. On the walls of the rooms hung a collection of painted plates, holy water basins, etchings and wooden carvings of saints. Old china sat in piles in large cupboards, ornate leather-bound volumes were scattered about the floor, among them an exquisite old edition of Don Quixote. I would have loved to pick up a memento, but I felt like Robinson Crusoe and the lump of gold; none of these things were of any value here. So great bales of beautiful silks rotted away in a workshop, without anyone paying them any attention. You had only to think of the glowing barrage at Frémicourt-Ferme, which cut off this landscape, and you soon thought better of picking up any extra baggage.
When I reached my lodgings, the men were back from foraging trips of their own through the gardens, and had boiled up a soup in which you could stand your spoon out of bully beef, potatoes, peas, carrots, artichokes and various other vegetables. While we were eating, a shell landed on the house, and three others came down near by, without us lifting our heads. We had seen and been through too much already to care. The house must have seen some bloody happenings already, because on a pile of rubble in the middle room there was a rough cross with a list of names scratched into it. The next day at lunchtime I went back to the china collector’s house and picked up a volume of the illustrated supplements to Le Petit Journal; then I sat myself down in a reasonably well-preserved room, made a little fire in the hearth with some sticks of furniture, and settled down to read. I had frequent occasion to shake my head, because I had picked up those issues that had appeared at the time of the Fashoda1 affair. The time I spent reading was punctuated by four bombs hitting the house. At just about seven o’clock I turned the last page, and went down to the passage outside the basement, where the men were preparing supper at a small stove.
No sooner was I standing with them than there was a sharp report outside the front door, and, in the same moment, I felt a piercing blow low down on my left calf. With the immemorial warrior’s refrain ‘I’ve been hit!’ I took off, pipe of shag tobacco in my mouth, down the stairs.
Quickly someone brought light, and the thing was examined. As ever in these affairs, I had someone tell me about it, while I stared at the ceiling; in case it wasn’t a pretty sight. There was a jagged hole in my putties, out of which a fine spray of blood ran down to the floor. On the opposite side of the leg there was the round bulge of a shrapnel ball under the skin.
The diagnosis was straightforward enough – a typical ticket home: nothing very bad, but nothing too light either. Admittedly, I’d left it to the latest possible moment to get ‘a puncture’ if I wasn’t to miss the bus to Germany. There was something deeply improbable about that hit, because the shrapnel had burst on the ground on the other side of the brick wall that surrounded the courtyard. A shell had previously knocked a little round hole in this wall, and a tub with an oleander plant stood in front of it. The ball must therefore have gone through the shell-hole, then through the oleander’s leaves, crossed the yard and the open door, and, of the many legs in front of it, had picked precisely this one of mine.
After my comrades had bandaged up the wound, they carried me across the street – needless to say, through fire – to the catacombs, and there laid me on the operating table. While a breathless Lieutenant Wetje held my head, our medical major cut out the shrapnel ball with scissors and knife, and told me I was a lucky man, because the ball had passed between shinbone and fibula without harming either. ‘Habent sua fata libelli et balli,’2 the old corps student observed, while he left a medical orderly to bandage up the wound.
While I lay on a stretcher in a niche in the catacombs waiting for nightfall, I was pleased that a lot of my men came to say goodbye to me. They had a heavy ordeal ahead of them. My revered Colonel von Oppen managed to pay me a short visit.
In the evening I was carried along with the other casualties to the edge of town, and there loaded on to an ambulance. Paying no attention to the cries and screams of his passengers, the driver raced over the craters and other hindrances along the road, heavily bombarded as ever around Frégicourt-Ferme, and finally passed us on to a car that delivered us to the village church at Fins. The switch of cars took place in the middle of the night outside an isolated group of houses, where a doctor examined the bandages and decided our destiny. Half feverish as I was, I had an impression of a young man whose hair had turned completely white, but who tended our wounds with unimaginable care.
The church at Fins was full of hundreds of wounded men. A nurse told me that in the c
ourse of the last few weeks, more than thirty thousand casualties had been tended and bandaged here. Faced with numbers of that order, I felt pretty insignificant with my silly leg wound.
From Fins, I was taken along with four other officers to a hospital that had been set up in an affluent house in St-Quentin. When we were unloaded, all the window-panes were jangling; it was exactly the moment when the British, with maximal help from their artillery, were taking Guillemont.
When the stretcher next to mine was lifted out of the car, I heard one of those toneless voices that have remained with me:
‘Take me to the doctor right away, if you will – I’m very poorly – I have a gas phlegmon.’
That was the term for a horrible form of blood poisoning that often sets in after a man has been wounded, and kills him.
I was carried into a room, where twelve beds stood so close together that one had the impression of a room entirely filled with snow-white pillows. Most of the wounds were grave, and there was a commotion in which, in my feverish state, I dreamily participated. Soon after my arrival, for instance, a young man with a bandage wrapped round his head like a turban, leaped up from his bed and addressed us all. I thought it was some rather extravagant sort of joke, only to see him collapse as suddenly as he’d leaped up. His bed was rolled out through a dark little door, amid a rather grim silence.
Next to me lay a pioneer officer. He had trodden on an explosive in the trench, and the contact had caused a long tongue of flame to leap up. His mutilated foot had been placed under a translucent gauze wrapper. He seemed to be in a good humour, and was happy to have found a listener in me. On my left, a very young ensign was on a diet of claret and egg yolks; he was in the very last stages of emaciation. When the sister wanted to make his bed, she picked him up like a feather; through his skin, you could see all the bones in his body. When the sister asked him at night whether he wouldn’t like to write his parents a nice letter, I guessed it was all up with him, and, indeed, later that night, his bed too was rolled through the dark door to the dying ward.