By noon the next day I was lying in a hospital train that was taking me to Gera, where I was extremely well looked after in the garrison hospital there. A week later, and I was already skipping out in the evenings, though I had to be careful not to run into the head doctor.
It was here that I signed away the three thousand marks that were my entire fortune at the time as a war loan. I never saw them again. As I held the form in my hand, I thought of the beautiful fireworks that the wrong-coloured flare had sparked off – a spectacle that surely couldn’t have cost less than a million.
I return now to the dreadful defile, to view the final act of the drama. My sources are the reports of the few men who were wounded and survived, in particular my orderly, Otto Schmidt.
Following my wounding, my subordinate, Sergeant Heistermann, took over the command of the platoon, and it was he who a few minutes later led the men to the cratered field at Guillemont. With barely a handful of exceptions – those men who were hit during the march, and were fit enough to get back to Combles – the outfit disappeared without trace in the fiery labyrinths of the battle.
The platoon relieved their predecessors, and settled into the now familiar foxholes. The gap on the right flank had now widened, thanks to the incessant withering fire, so that there was no longer any visual communication. On the left side as well, there were now spaces, so that the position resembled a little island adrift in titanic streams of fire. The whole sector was made up of nothing more than similar islands, greater and lesser, but all of them dwindling. The attacker found himself confronting a net whose meshes had grown too wide to catch anything.
And so the night passed, with increasing disquiet. Towards morning, a two-man patrol from the 76th showed up, having groped their way through with incredible difficulty. They went away again into the sea of fire, and that was the last the platoon saw of the outside world. The fire concentrated with ever-growing force on the right flank, and slowly worked to widen the gap, knocking out one pocket of resistance after another.
Towards six in the morning, Schmidt reached for the cooking tin that he kept outside our old foxhole, to get some breakfast, but all he found was a piece of flattened and riddled aluminium. Soon the shelling started up again, and slowly raised itself to a crescendo that was inevitably interpreted as the sign of an imminent attack. Aeroplanes appeared, and, like jabbing vultures, began circling low over the ground.
Heistermann and Schmidt, the only occupants of the tiny hole in the ground that had miraculously survived so long, knew that the moment had come for their stand. As they stepped out into the smoke- and dust-filled defile, they saw they were utterly alone. In the course of the night, the bombardment had smashed the last sparse bits of cover between themselves and the right flank, and buried their occupants under quantities of earth. But to the left of them as well, the rim of the defile turned out to be devoid of defenders. The last remnants of the platoon, among them a machine-gun unit, had withdrawn to a narrow shelter, covered over with planks and a thin layer of soil, half-way along the defile, and in its rear slope, with an entrance at either end of it. Heistermann and Schmidt now made for this refuge. On the way there, however, the sergeant, whose birthday it happened to be that day, disappeared. He was following Schmidt, coming up to a bend, and was never seen again.
The only man who made it to the little group in the shelter from the right flank was a lance-corporal, with a bandaged face, who suddenly stripped off his bandage, spewed a torrent of blood over the men and their weapons, and lay down to die. All this time, the power and intensity of the bombardment was still waxing; at any moment, the overcrowded shelter, in which no one now could speak, could reckon on being hit.
Further left, a few soldiers from No. 3 Platoon were still tenaciously defending their crater, and it seems that the position was crushed from the right, where the breach had been forced, which was by now a huge cavity. These soldiers must have been the first to have become aware of an incursion of British storm troops following one final inferno of bombing. At any rate, it seems the occupants of the shelter were alerted to the presence of the enemy by a shouted warning from the left.
Schmidt, the last man to have reached the shelter, and therefore sitting nearest the entrance, was the first man to emerge into the defile. He leaped into the spurting cone of a shell. As the smoke cleared, he saw to his right, just by the site of the foxhole that had so stoutly sheltered us, some lurking khaki figures. Simultaneously, the enemy broke through in numbers on the left of the position. What was happening beyond the projecting rim of the defile could not be seen, because of its depth.
In this desperate situation, the next occupants of the shelter, in particular Sergeant Sievers, plunged out with the intact machine-gun and its operator. To set it up on the floor of the defile and aim it at the enemy on the right was the work of seconds. But even as the gunner had his fist on the belt and his finger on the trigger, British hand-grenades were bobbling down the front slope. The two men fell beside their weapon, without managing to get off a shot. Anyone else leaping out of the shelter was received with rifle bullets, so that in the space of a few moments there was a cluster of dead round both entrances.
Schmidt was laid out by the first volley of hand-grenades. One splinter hit him in the head, others tore off three of his fingers. With his face down, he remained close to the shelter, where an exchange of rifle fire and hand-grenades continued for some time.
At last there was silence, and the British took over the last part of the position. Schmidt, perhaps the last living soul in the defile, heard footfalls announcing the approach of the attacker. Shortly after, rifle shots rang out, and explosions and gas bombs, as the shelter was pumped clear. Even then, towards evening, a last few survivors came crawling out of the shelter, from some nook at the back. They probably made up the little group of prisoners that fell into the hands of the enemy storm troops. British stretcher-bearers picked them up and took them away.
Shortly afterwards, Combles too fell, once the noose had been drawn tight around Frégicourt-Ferme. Its last defenders, who had taken refuge in the catacombs during the bombardment, were mown down fighting round the ruins of the church.
Then things went quiet in the area, until we retook it in spring 1918.
The Woods of St-Pierre-Vaast
After a fortnight in hospital and another fortnight recuperating, I returned to the regiment, which was positioned at Deuxnouds, hard by the familiar Grande Tranchée. For the first two days after my arrival, it remained there, and then two more days in the old-world hill village of Hattonchâtel. Then we steamed out of Mars-la-Tour station back to the Somme.
We were taken off the train at Bohain, and put up in Brancourt. This area, which we often brushed by later, is arable farmland, but almost every house boasts a loom as well.
I was quartered with a couple and their very beautiful daughter. We shared the two rooms of their little cottage, and at night I had to go through the family’s bedroom.
On the very first day, the father asked me to compose a letter of complaint to the local commandant, against a neighbour who had grabbed him by the throat, beaten him and, crying ‘Demande pardon!’, threatened to kill him.
As I was on my way out of my room to go on duty, the daughter pushed the door shut against me. I took this to be one of her little jokes, pushed back, and our combined efforts were enough to lift the door off its hinges, and we waltzed round the room holding it between us for a few moments. Suddenly it came down, and to our mutual embarrassment, and her mother’s great hilarity, I saw she was standing there completely naked.
Never in all my life, incidentally, have I heard anyone swear and scold as volubly as that rose of Brancourt did, when a neighbour accused her of having once worked in a certain street in St-Quentin. ‘Ah, cette plure, cette pomme de terre pourrie, jetée sur un fumier, c’est la crème de la crème pourrie,’1 she bubbled, as she criss-crossed the room with her hands out in front of her like claws, lacking only a victi
m for her pent-up rage.
Things in this village had quite a baronial flavour to them altogether. One evening I was on my way to call on a comrade, who was quartered with the aforementioned neighbour, a rather coarse Flemish beauty, who went by the name of Madame Louise. I went the back way through the gardens of the two houses, and saw Madame Louise through the kitchen window, sitting at the table helping herself from a large pot of coffee. Suddenly, the door opened and in strode the man who had been given such a cosy billet, with the full self-confidence of a sleepwalker and about as fully dressed as one too. Without saying a word, he picked up the coffee pot, and poured a goodly jet of it through the spout straight into his mouth. Then, every bit as laconically, he walked out again. Feeling I would only get in the way of such an idyllic set-up, I quietly went back the way I had come.
There was a relaxed tone in this area, which was in odd contrast to its agricultural character. I think it must have been something to do with the weaving, because in towns and regions where the spindle rules, there seems to be a different spirit to those where, say, there are a lot of blacksmiths.
As we had been settled in various villages and hamlets by the company, there was only a small group of us in the evenings. Our clique normally consisted of Lieutenant Boje, who commanded the 2nd Company, Lieutenant Heilmann, a dogged warrior who had lost an eye, Ensign Gornick, later to join the Paris airmen, and me. Every night we dined on boiled potatoes with tinned goulash, and afterwards the playing cards came out and the odd bottle of ‘Polish Rider’ or Bénédictine. The dominant personality was Heilmann, who was one of those people who are resolutely unimpressed by anything. He was staying in quite a nice billet, had had quite a bad wound, had witnessed quite a sizeable funeral. The only exception was anything relating to his native Upper Silesia, where you could find the biggest village, the biggest goods station and the deepest mineshaft anywhere in the world.
I was now to be used as a scouting officer, and had been assigned to the division with a scout troop and two NCOs. Special assignments like that were really not my line, because to me the company was like a family, and I was loath to leave it before a battle.
On 8 November, the battalion travelled through streaming rain to the now entirely depopulated village of Gonnelieu. From there, the scout troop was detailed to Liéramont and put under the command of the divisional intelligence officer, Captain Böckelmann. Along with four of us troop leaders, a couple of observation officers, and his personal adjutant, the captain occupied a priest’s spacious house, whose rooms we divided among ourselves. On one of our first evenings there, there was a long conversation in the library about the German peace proposals, which had just been made known. Böckelmann put an end to it by remarking that during a war no soldier should be permitted to say the word ‘peace’.
Our predecessors familiarized us with the position of the division. Every night, we had to go to the front. Our task was to reconnoitre the situation, test the communications between the units, and make a picture of everything, so as to put in reinforcements if need be and perform special duties. My own allotted area was just left of the woods of St-Pierre-Vaast, and against another ‘nameless’ wood.
The scene at night was muddy and wild, often with heavy exchanges of artillery. Frequently, yellow rockets were shot off that blew up in the air, and sent a rain of fire cascading down, of a colour that somehow reminded me of the tone of a viola.
That very first night, I lost my way in the pitch black and almost drowned in the swamps of the Tortille stream. It was a place of unfathomable mystery; only the night before, a munitions cart had disappeared without trace in a vast shell-crater hidden under a crust of mud.
Having made good my escape from this wilderness, I tried to make my way to the ‘nameless woods’, where there was a low-level, but unremitting shelling going on. I headed for it pretty insouciantly, because the dull sound of the detonations suggested that the British were shooting off some rather veteran ammunitions. Suddenly, a little puff of wind brought up a sweetish, oniony smell, and at the same time I heard the shout go up in the wood: ‘Gas, gas, gas!’ From a distance, the cry sounded oddly small and plaintive, not unlike a chorus of crickets.
As I heard the next morning, in that hour in the woods a lot of our men died of poisoning from the clouds of heavy phosgene nestling in the undergrowth.
With weeping eyes, I stumbled back to the Vaux woods, plunging from one crater into the next, as I was unable to see anything through the misted visor of my gas mask. With the extent and inhospitableness of its spaces, it was a night of eerie solitude. Each time I blundered into sentries or troops who had lost their way, I had the icy sensation of conversing not with people, but with demons. We were all roving around in an enormous dump somewhere off the edge of the charted world.
On 12 November, hoping for better luck, I undertook my second mission, which was to test the communications between units in our crater positions. A chain of relays concealed in foxholes led me to my destination.
The term ‘crater positions’ was accurate. On a ridge outside the village of Rancourt, there were numerous craters scattered, some occupied by a few soldiers here and there. The dark plain, criss-crossed by shells, was barren and intimidating.
It wasn’t long before I had lost communication with the chain of craters, and so I headed back, in case I fell into the hands of the French. I encountered an officer I knew from the 164th, who warned me not to hang around as it got lighter. Therefore, I strode rapidly through the nameless woods, staggering through deep pits, over felled trees and an almost impenetrable tangle of branches.
By the time I emerged from the woods, it was day. The cratered field stretched out ahead of me, apparently endlessly, with no sign of life. I paused, because unoccupied terrain is always a sinister thing in a war.
Suddenly a shot rang out, and I was hit in both legs by a sniper’s bullet. I threw myself into the nearest crater, and tied up the wounds with my handkerchief, having of course forgotten my field dressing. A bullet had drilled through my right calf and brushed the left.
Extremely carefully, I crawled back into the woods, and hobbled from there through the heavily shelled terrain towards the dressing-station.
Just before I reached it, there was an instance of the way tiny imponderables can determine one’s fate in a war. I was roughly a hundred yards from a crossroads when the commander of a digging detail I’d been with in the 9th Company called out to me. We had been speaking for barely a minute when a shell landed on the crossroads, which, but for this chance meeting, would probably have cost me my life. It is hard to see these things as completely random.
After dark, I was carried on a stretcher as far as Nurlu, from where the captain picked me up in a car. On the road lit up by enemy searchlights, the driver suddenly braked. There was a dark obstacle in the way. ‘Don’t look!’ said Böckelmann, who had his arm around me. It was a group of infantry with their leader, who had just been killed by a direct hit. The comrades looked like peaceful sleepers as they lay together in death.
In the priest’s house I was given some supper, at least inasmuch as I lay on the sofa in the common room, enjoying a glass of wine. But this cosiness was quickly interrupted by Liéramont’s evening blessing. Bombardments of towns and buildings are especially disagreeable, and so we hurriedly moved down to the cellar, having heard a few times the hissing song with which the iron messengers announced themselves, before they finished in the gardens or among the roofbeams of neighbouring houses.
I was rolled up in a blanket and carried downstairs first. That same night, I was brought to the field hospital at Villeret, and then on to the military hospital in Valenciennes.
The military hospital had been set up in a school building close to the station, and it was presently housing four hundred severe cases. Day after day, a procession of corpses left its portals to a leaden thump of drums. Doctors did their bloody best at a row of operating tables. Here, a limb was amputated, there a skull chipped op
en, or a bandage that the flesh had grown over was peeled away. Whimpers and cries echoed through the harshly lit room, while white-clad sisters bustled efficiently from one table to the next with instruments or bandages.
In the bed next to mine lay a sergeant who had lost a leg, and was fighting a bad case of blood poisoning. Mad periods of fever alternated with cold shivering. His temperature chart performed leaps like a wild mustang. The doctors tried to keep him alive on champagne and camphor, but the needle seemed to be pointing unmistakably to death. What was strange, though, was that, having been delirious for the past few days, at the hour of his death he was once more completely lucid, and made some arrangements for what was to be done afterwards. For instance, he had the sister read him his favourite chapter from the Bible, then he took his leave of us all, by asking our forgiveness for having kept us up at night so often with his fever attacks. At the end, he whispered in a voice to which he tried to give a humorous inflection: ‘Ey, Fritz, have yer got a bit of bread for me?’ and, a few minutes later, he was dead. That last sentence was a reference to our male nurse, Fritz, an elderly man, whose accent we sometimes imitated, and we were profoundly moved by it because it showed the dying man’s wish to cheer us up.
It was during this stay in hospital that I suffered an attack of the glooms, a contributing factor in which was surely the memory of the cold, slimy landscape where I had been wounded. Every afternoon, I would hobble along the banks of a bleak-looking canal under bare poplars. I was especially upset not to have been able to participate in the regiment’s attack on the woods of St-Pierre-Vaast – a shining effort that won us several hundred prisoners.
After two weeks, when my wounds had pretty much closed, I returned to my troop. The division was still based where I had left it. As my train rolled into Epéhy, there was a series of explosions outside. The twisted wreckage of freight wagons lying by the rails showed that the attack was in earnest.