‘What’s going on here?’ asked a captain who appeared to be fresh out of Germany. Without stopping to give him an answer, I tore open the door of the compartment and took cover behind the railway embankment, while the train rolled on a little. None of the passengers had been hurt; but a few bleeding horses were led out of the cattle car.
Since I wasn’t able to march properly yet, I was given the job of observation officer. The observation post was on a downhill slope between Nurlu and Moislains. It was nothing more than a periscope through which I could view the familiar front line. If the bombing was stepped up, or there were coloured flares or anything else out of the ordinary, I was to inform the divisional command by telephone. For days I perched shivering on a little stool behind the two layers of glass, and the only variety on offer was if the line broke down. If the wire had been shot through, I had to get it repaired by my breakdown squad. In these men, of whose activity I had been all but unaware hitherto, I now found a special type of unappreciated worker in the most perilous conditions. While most others strained to leave a shelled zone, the breakdown squad had to enter it calmly and professionally. Day and night, they went into still-warm shell-holes to tie together the ends of two severed wires; their job was as dangerous as it was unglamorous.
The observation post was well camouflaged in the landscape. All that could be seen from outside was a narrow slit half hidden behind a grassy knoll. Only chance shells ended up there, and, from my safe hiding-place, I was able to follow the activities of individuals and units that I hadn’t paid that much attention to when I myself had also been under fire. At times, and most of all at dawn and dusk, the landscape was not unlike a wide steppe inhabited by animals. Especially when floods of new arrivals were making for certain points that were regularly shelled, only suddenly to hurl themselves to the ground, or run away as fast as they could, I was put in mind of a natural scene. Such an impression was so strong because my function was a little like that of an antenna, I was a sort of advance sensory organ, detailed to observe calmly all that was happening before me, and inform the leadership. I really had little more to do than wait for the hour of the attack.
Every twenty-four hours, I was relieved by another officer, and I recovered in Nurlu, where there were relatively comfortable quarters set up in a large wine cellar. I still remember long, pensive November evenings, smoking my pipe by the stove in the little vaulted space, while outside in the ravaged park, the fog dripped from the bare chestnut trees and the occasional echoing blast of a shell broke the stillness.
On 18 December, the division was relieved, and I rejoined my regiment, now on rest in the village of Fresnoy-le-Grand. There, I took over the command of the 2nd Company from Lieutenant Boje, who had a spell of leave. In Fresnoy, the regiment had four weeks of uninterrupted rest, and everyone tried to make the most of it. Christmas and New Year were marked by company parties, at which the beer and grog flowed. Only five men were left of the 2nd Company with whom I had celebrated Christmas in the trenches at Monchy, a year ago.
With Ensign Gornick and my brother Fritz, who had joined the regiment for six weeks as cadets, I occupied the living room and two bedrooms of a French rentier. There I started to relax again a little, and frequently only got home when it was light.
One morning, as I lay half asleep in bed, a comrade came in to escort me to duty. We were chatting, and he was toying with my pistol, which as usual was on my bedside table, when he fired a shot that narrowly missed my skull. I have witnessed several fatal accidents in war that were caused by careless handling of weapons; cases like that are always especially irritating.
In the first week, there was an inspection by General Sontag, at which the regiment was praised for its deeds in the assault on the woods of St-Pierre-Vaast, and numerous medals were given out. As I led the 2nd Company forward on parade, I caught a glimpse of Colonel von Oppen leaning across and talking to the general about me. A few hours later, I was ordered to divisional HQ, where the general awarded me the Iron Cross First Class. I was all the more delighted, as I had followed the order half thinking I was going to be carpeted for something. ‘It seems you have a habit of getting yourself wounded,’ the General said, ‘well, I’ve got a little plaster for you.’
On 17 January 1917, I was ordered to leave Fresnoy for four weeks, to take a company-command course at the French manœuvring ground of Sissonne near Laon. The work was rendered very agreeable by the head of our section, Captain Funk, who had the gift of distilling the great plethora of regulations into a small number of basic principles; it is a method that always works, no matter where it is applied.
At the same time, the victualling left something to be desired. Potatoes seemed to have become a thing of the past; day after day, when we lifted the lids of our dishes in the vast mess hall, we found nothing but watery swedes. Before long, we couldn’t stand the sight of them. Even though they’re better than they’re cracked up to be – so long as they’re roasted with a nice piece of pork, and plenty of black pepper. Which these weren’t.
Retreat from the Somme
At the end of February 1917, I returned to the regiment, which had now for some days been in position near the ruins of Villers-Carbonnel, and there I took over command of the 8th Company.
The approach route to the front line snaked through the eerie and devastated area of the Somme Valley; an old and already badly damaged bridge led across the river. Other approach paths were on log-roads laid over the swampy flats; here we had to walk in Indian file, crashing through the wide, rustling reed beds, and striding over the silent oil-black expanses of water. When shells came down on these stretches, and sent up great liquescent columns of mud and water, or when sprays of machine-gun bullets erred over the swampy surface, all you could do was grit your teeth, because it was like walking on a tightrope, there was nowhere for you to go on either side. Hence, the sight of several fantastically shot-up locomotives that had been stopped in their tracks on the high bank on the other side, roughly level with our destination, was each time greeted with relief that otherwise might have been hard to account for.
In the flats lay the villages of Brie and St-Christ. Towers, of which only one slender wall remained, and in whose window openings the moonlight flittered, dark piles of rubble, topped off by smashed beamwork, and isolated trees despoiled of their twigs on the wide snowy plain scarred by black shell-holes accompanied the path like a mechanical scenery, behind which the ghostly quality of the landscape still seemed to lurk.
The firing trenches had been tidied up slightly following a bad, muddy stretch. The platoon commanders told me that, for a while, relief had only been possible with the use of flares; otherwise there would have been every chance of men drowning. A flare shot diagonally over the trench signified: ‘I’m going off watch,’ and another, coming the other way, confirmed: ‘I’ve taken over.’
My dugout was in a cross trench about fifty yards behind the front line. It housed my small staff and myself, and also a platoon that was under my personal command. It was dry and quite extensive. At each of its entrances, which were draped with tarpaulins, were little iron stoves with long pipes; during heavy bombardments, clumps of earth often came down them with an awful rumble. At right angles to the principal shelter were a number of little blind passages that were used as dormitories. I had one of these to myself. Apart from a narrow cot, a table and a few hand-grenade chests, the only amenities were a few trusty items, such as a spirit stove, a candle-holder, cooking equipment and my personal effects.
This was also the place where we sat together cosily of an evening, each of us perched on twenty-five live hand-grenades. My companions were the two company officers, Hambrock and Eisen, and it seemed to me that these subterranean sessions of ours, three hundred yards from the enemy lines, were pretty curious affairs.
Hambrock, astronomer by vocation, and a great devotee of E. T. A. Hoffmann, liked to hold forth about Venus, contending that it was impossible to do justice to the pure light of th
is astral body from anywhere on earth. He was a tiny chap, thin and spidery and red-haired, and he had a face dotted with yellow and green freckles that had got him the nickname ‘The Marquess of Gorgonzola’. Over the course of the war, he had fallen into some eccentric habits; thus, he tended to sleep in the daytime and only came to life as it got dark, occasionally wandering around all alone in front of our trenches, or the British ones, it seemed to make little difference to him. Also, he had the worrying habit of creeping up to a sentry and firing off a flare right by his ear, ‘to test the man’s courage’. Unfortunately, his constitution was really far too weak for a war, and so it happened that he died of a relatively trivial wound he suffered shortly afterwards at Fresnoy.
Eisen was no taller, but plump, and, having grown up in the warmer climes of Portugal as the son of an emigrant, he was perpetually shivering. That was why he swore by a large red-chequered handkerchief that he tied round his helmet, knotted under his chin, claiming it kept his head warm. Also, he liked going around festooned with weapons – apart from his rifle, from which he was inseparable, he wore numerous daggers, pistols, hand-grenades and a torch tucked into his belt. Encountering him in the trench was like suddenly coming upon an Armenian or somesuch. For a while he used to carry hand-grenades loose in his pockets as well, till that habit gave him a very nasty turn, which he related to us one evening. He had been digging around in his pocket, trying to pull out his pipe, when it got caught in the loop of a hand-grenade and accidentally pulled it off. He was startled by the sudden unmistakable little click, which usually serves as the introduction to a soft hiss, lasting for three seconds, while the priming explosive burns. In his appalled efforts to pull the thing out and hurl it away from him, he had got so tangled up in his trouser pocket that it would have long since blown him to smithereens, had it not been that, by a fairy-tale stroke of luck, this particular hand-grenade had been a dud. Half paralysed and sweating with fear, he saw himself, after all, restored to life.
It was only temporary, though, because a few months later he too died in the battle at Langemarck. In his case, too, will-power had to come to the aid of his body; he was both shortsighted and hard of hearing, so that, as we were to see on the occasion of a little skirmish, he had to be pointed in the right direction by his men if he was to participate in the action in a meaningful way.
Even so, brave puny men are always to be preferred to strong cowards, as was shown over and over in the course of the few weeks we spent in this position.
If our sector of the front could be described as quiet, mighty poundings of artillery that sometimes came hammering down on our lines proved there was no shortage of fire-power in the area. Also, the British were full of curiosity and enterprise here, and not a week passed without some attempt by little exploratory groups to gain information about us, either by cunning or by main force. There were already rumours of some vast impending ‘matériel battle’ in the spring, which would make last year’s Battle of the Somme appear like a picnic. To dampen the impetus of the assault, we were engaged in an extensive tactical withdrawal. There follow a few incidents taken from this phase:
1 March 1917. Hefty exchanges of fire, to take advantage of the good visibility. One heavy battery in particular – with the help of an observation balloon – practically levelled the No. 3 Platoon’s section. In an effort to fill in my map of the position, I spent the afternoon splashing about in the completely inundated ‘Trench with no name’. On my way, I saw a huge yellow sun slowly sinking, leaving a black plume of smoke after it. A German aeroplane had approached the pesky balloon and shot it in flames. Followed by furious fire from the ground, it made off happily in steeply banking curves.
In the evening, Lance-Corporal Schnau came to me and reported that for four days now there had been chipping sounds heard below his unit’s shelter. I passed on the observation, and was sent a pioneer commando with listening apparatus, which registered no suspicious activity. It later transpired that the whole position was undermined.
In the early hours of 5 March, a patrol approached our position and began to cut at our barbed wire. Alerted by the sentry, Eisen hurried over with a few men and threw bombs, whereupon the attackers turned to flee, leaving two casualties behind. One, a young lieutenant, died shortly after; the other, a sergeant, was badly wounded in the arm and leg. From the officer’s papers, it appears his name was Stokes, and that he was with the Royal Munster Fusiliers. He was extremely well dressed, and his features, though a little twisted in death, were intelligent and energetic. In his notebook, I came upon a lot of addresses of girls in London, and was rather moved. We buried him behind our lines, putting up a simple cross, in which I had his name set in hobnails. This experience taught me that not every sally ends as harmlessly as mine have to date.
The next morning, after brief preliminary bombardment, the British with fifty men attacked the adjacent section, under the command of Lieutenant Reinhardt. The attackers had crept up to our wires, and after one of them had given a light signal to their own machine-gunners, by means of a striking surface attached to his sleeve, they had charged our lines as the last of the shells were falling. All had blackened faces, so as not to show against the dark.
Our men had arranged such a consummate reception for them, that only one made it into our trenches, running straight through to the second line, where, ignoring calls to surrender, he was shot down. The only ones to get across the wires were a lieutenant and a sergeant. The lieutenant fell, in spite of the fact that he was wearing body armour, because a pistol bullet, fired into him by Reinhardt point-blank, drove one of its plates into his body. The sergeant practically had both legs sheared off by hand-grenade splinters; even so, with stoical calm, he kept his pipe clenched between his teeth to the end. This incident, like all our other encounters with the Britishers, left us pleasantly impressed with their bravery and manliness.
Later that morning, I was strolling along my line when I saw Lieutenant Pfaffendorf at a sentry post, directing the fire of a trench mortar by means of a periscope. Stepping up beside him, I spotted a British soldier breaking cover behind the third enemy line, the khaki uniform clearly visible against the sky. I grabbed the nearest sentry’s rifle, set the sights to six hundred, aimed quickly, just in front of the man’s head, and fired. He took another three steps, then collapsed on to his back, as though his legs had been taken away from him, flapped his arms once or twice, and rolled into a shell-crater, where through the binoculars we could see his brown sleeves shining for a long time yet.
On 9 March, the British once again slathered our sector with everything they had. Early in the morning I was awakened by a noisy barrage, reached for my pistol and staggered outside, still half asleep. Pulling aside the tarpaulin in front of my shelter entrance, I saw it was still pitch black. The lurid flaming of the shells and the whooshing dirt woke me in no time. I ran along the trench without encountering anyone at all, until I came to a deep dugout, where a leaderless bunch of men were cowering together on the step like chickens in the rain. I took them with me, and soon livened up the trench. To my satisfaction, I could hear Hambrock’s squeaky voice in another sector, also galvanizing.
After the shelling abated somewhat, I went irritably back to my shelter, only for my temper to be further exacerbated by a call from the command:
‘What in God’s name is going on here? Why does it take you so long to answer the bloody telephone?’
After breakfast, the bombardment resumed. This time, the British were nailing our position slowly but systematically with heavy bombs. Finally, it got a bit boring; I went down an underground passage to pay a call on little Hambrock, see what he had to drink, and play a few rounds of cards. Then we were disturbed by a gigantic noise; clumps of earth clattered through the door and down the stove-pipe. The entrance had collapsed, the wooden revetment was crushed like a matchbox. Sometimes an oily bitter-almond smell seemed to waft through the passage – were they hitting us with Prussic acid now? Well, cheers anyway! O
nce, I needed to answer the call; because of the continual interruptions from heavy shells, I did it in four separate instalments. Then the batman rushed in with the news that the latrine had been blown to smithereens, prompting Hambrock to comment approvingly on my dilatoriness. I replied: ‘If I’d stayed out there, I’d probably have as many freckles as you do.’
Towards evening, the shelling stopped. In the mood that always befell me after heavy bombardments, and which I can only compare to the feeling of relief after a storm, I inspected the line. The trench looked awful; whole stretches had caved in, five dugout shafts had been crushed. Several men had been wounded; I visited them, and found them relatively cheerful. A body lay in the trench, covered by a tarpaulin. His left hip had been ripped away by a shell fragment as he stood right at the bottom of the dugout steps.
In the evening, we were relieved.
On 13 March, I was assigned by Colonel von Oppen to hold the company front with a patrol of two platoons until the regiment had withdrawn across the Somme. Each one of the four sectors was to be held by one such patrol, under the command of its own officer. From right to left, the sectors were to be under the command of Lieutenants Reinhardt, Fischer, Lorek and myself.
The villages we passed through on our way had the look of vast lunatic asylums. Whole companies were set to knocking or pulling down walls, or sitting on rooftops, uprooting the tiles. Trees were cut down, windows smashed; wherever you looked, clouds of smoke and dust rose from vast piles of debris. We saw men dashing about wearing suits and dresses left behind by the inhabitants, with top hats on their heads. With destructive cunning, they found the roof-trees of the houses, fixed ropes to them, and, with concerted shouts, pulled till they all came tumbling down. Others were swinging pile-driving hammers, and went around smashing everything that got in their way, from the flowerpots on the window-sills to whole ornate conservatories.