Storm of Steel

  ‘But of course!’

  Splat! he throws the cheese in her face, and leaves her standing there.

  On 25 July, we left our pleasant temporary home, and travelled north to Flanders. We had read in the newspapers that an artillery battle had been raging there for weeks already, outdoing the Battle of the Somme, if not in intensity then in range.

  In Staden, we detrained to the distant roar of cannon, and marched through the unfamiliar landscape towards the camp at Ohndank. Either side of the dead-straight military road were green, fertile, elevated beet fields and juicy pastures surrounded by hedges. Tidy farmhouses lay scattered about, with low overhanging thatched or tiled roofs, and bunches of tobacco hung on the walls to dry in the sun. The country people we passed were Flemish, and spoke in that rough tongue that we almost thought we understood. We spent the afternoon in farm gardens, where the enemy aviators could not see us. Occasional ships’ ordnance would fly over our heads, with a gurgling sound we could hear from far off, and hit near by. One dived into one of the many little streams in the area, and killed several men of the 91st, who happened to be bathing in it.

  As evening approached, I went up to the front line with an advance detachment, to prepare the relief. We passed through the forest of Houthulst and the village of Koekuit to the reserve battalion, and on the way were forced to break stride by a few heavy shells. In the dark I could hear the voice of one recruit who was still unversed in our ways: ‘That lieutenant never seems to take cover.’

  ‘He knows what’s what,’ he was told by a member of the storm troop. ‘If there’s one on its way, then he’s the first to lie down.’

  We only took cover now when it was necessary, but then we didn’t hang around. The degree of necessity is something that only an experienced man can determine, who can sense the course of the shell before the new soldier can hear the light fluttering of its approach. To hear better when things got hot, I would even exchange my steel helmet for a forage cap.

  Our guides, who didn’t inspire complete confidence, advanced along endless box trenches. That’s the term for passages that are not dug into the ground, because they would instantly fill with water, but are built up between lines of sandbags and fascines. After that we brushed an amazingly dishevelled-looking wood, out of which, our guides told us, a regimental staff had been pushed back a few days ago by the small matter of a thousand ten-inch shells. ‘Such prodigality,’ I thought to myself.

  After traipsing this way and that through the thick brush, we were finally left standing completely lost, and abandoned by our guides, on a rush-covered spot, surrounded by marshy pools of black water that gave back the moonlight. Shells plunged into the soft soil, sending up great sprays of mud that splattered down. At last our unhappy guide, with whom we were now pretty incensed, came back, claiming to have remembered the way. Then he proceeded to lead us astray again, as far as a dressing-station, over which, in short, regular intervals, shrapnels broke up, sending their balls and empty casings clattering through the boughs. The doctor on duty provided us with a better guide, who escorted us to the Mauseburg, the headquarters of the reserve line.

  I straight away went on to the company of the 225th Regiment, which was to be relieved by our 2nd, and after a long search found a few houses in the cratered landscape that had been discreetly toughened on the inside with reinforced concrete. One of these had been smashed in the day before by a direct hit, and its inhabitants crushed as in a mousetrap by the collapsing roof plate.

  For the rest of the night, I squeezed into the overcrowded concrete box of the company commander, a decent grunt, who whiled away the time with his servant over a bottle of schnapps and a large tin of salt pork, stopping often to shake his head and listen to the steadily increasing roar of the artillery. Then he would sigh for the good old days on the Russian front, and curse the way his regiment had been pumped out. In the end, my eyes simply fell shut.

  My sleep was heavy and troubled; the high explosive shells falling all round the house in the impenetrable dark evoked extraordinary feelings of solitude and abandon in me. I pressed myself unconsciously against a man lying beside me on the pallet. Once, I was startled awake by a powerful impact. We lit the walls to check if the house had been breached. It turned out to have been a small shell that had exploded against the outer wall.

  The following afternoon I spent with the battalion commander in the Mauseburg. In rapid sequence, the six-inch shells came down close to the command centre, while the captain, his adjutant and the orderly played unending rounds of skat, and handed round a soda bottle full of rotgut. Sometimes he would put down his cards to attend to a messenger, or, with concerned expression, wonder about the safety of our concrete blockhouse against the bombardment. In spite of his loyal conviction to the contrary, we finally convinced him that it wouldn’t stand up to a direct hit from above.

  In the evening, the shelling waxed to a demented fury. Ahead of us, coloured flares went up in a continual stream. Dust-covered runners reported that the enemy was attacking. After weeks of drumming, the infantry battle was about to begin; we had come at the right time.

  I returned to company headquarters, and waited for the company to arrive. They finally got in at four in the morning, during a vehement shelling session. I took charge of my platoon, and led it to its place, a concrete construction disguised by the ruins of a demolished house, in the middle of a huge cratered field of desperate horror.

  At six in the morning, the dense Flanders fog lifted, and permitted us to view our situation in its full hideousness. Straight away, a swarm of enemy aeroplanes flew in low over our heads, surveying the battered terrain, and giving siren signals, while isolated infantrymen jumped for cover in shell-holes.

  Half an hour later, the shelling commenced, washing over our little refuge like a typhoon. The forest of explosions gradually thickened into a solid whirling wall. We squatted together, every second expecting the annihilating hit that would blow us and our concrete blocks away, and leave our strongpoint level with the pitted desert all around.

  And so the day passed, with mighty outbursts of shelling, and momentary quieter phases during which we sat and gritted our teeth.

  In the evening, an exhausted runner turned up, and gave me an order from which I understood that the 1st, 3rd and 4th Companies would commence a counter-attack at ten to eleven in the morning, and the 2nd should wait to be relieved and then swarm into the front line. To gain strength for the hours ahead, I lay down, never guessing that my brother Fritz, whom I had supposed to be still in Hanover, was even now hurrying forward with a platoon from the 3rd Company, through the fire-storm close by our hut.

  I was long kept from sleep by the cries of a wounded man whom a couple of Saxons had brought in. They had lost their way and had fallen asleep, completely exhausted. When they woke up the following morning, their comrade was dead. They carted him to the nearest shell-hole, scooped a couple of shovelfuls of earth over him, and mooched off, leaving behind them another of the countless unknown and unmarked graves of this war.

  I didn’t wake from my deep sleep until eleven o’clock, washed myself in my steel helmet, and sent for further instructions to the company commander, who, to my consternation, had moved off without leaving word where. That’s war for you; things happen in a way you wouldn’t have thought possible on the exercise ground.

  While I was still sitting on my pallet, cursing and wondering what to do, a runner arrived from Battalion HQ and told me to take over the 8th Company.

  I learned that the 1st Battalion’s counter-attack last night had collapsed with heavy casualties, and that the survivors were defending themselves in a small wood ahead of us, the Dobschutz woods, and either side of it. The 8th Company had been given the task of swarming forward to the wood to give support, but had been roughed up on open ground before even getting there by a heavy barrage, taking bad losses. Since their commander, First Lieutenant Budingen, was among those wounded, I should take them along myself.

>   After taking leave of my orphaned platoon, I set off with the orderly across the shrapnel-strewn wastes. A despairing voice stopped us on our stooping, scurrying progress. In the distance, a figure half out of his shell-hole was waving a bloodied stump at us. We pointed to the blockhouse we’d just left, and hastened on.

  The 8th, when I found them, were a despondent little bunch, clustered behind a row of blockhouses.

  ‘Platoon commanders!’

  Three NCOs came forward and declared that a second advance in the direction of the Dobschutz woods could not be undertaken. True, heavy explosions reared up in front of us like a wall of fire. First, then, I had the platoons assemble behind three huts; each one numbered fifteen or twenty men. Just then, the shelling turned to us. The confusion was indescribable. By the left blockhouse, a whole section went up in the air, then the right took a direct hit and buried Lieutenant Budingen, still lying there wounded, under several tonnes of rubble. It was like being pounded in a mortar and pestle. Deathly pale faces stared at each other, as the wounded wailed all round.

  By now it probably didn’t matter whether we stayed put, took to our heels, or advanced. So I gave the order to follow me, and leaped into the midst of the shelling. After no more than a couple of bounds, a shell covered me with earth, and hurled me back into the last crater. I couldn’t think why I hadn’t been hit, because the shells were coming so thick and fast they practically brushed my head and shoulders, and they scoured open the ground under my feet like huge beasts. The fact that I ran through them without being touched could only be due to the way the ploughed earth gulped the shells down, before its resistance caused them to detonate. The plumes of the explosions didn’t travel laterally like bushes, but steeply up in a spear shape, like poplars. Others only brought up a little bell. Also, I began to notice that further forward the force of the shelling was lesser. After I had worked my way through the worst of it, I looked about me. The terrain was empty.

  At last, two men emerged from clouds of dust and smoke, then another, then two more. With these five, I succeeded in reaching my objective.

  In a half-exploded blockhouse sat the commander of the 3rd Company, Lieutenant Sandvoss, and little Schultz, with three heavy machine-guns. I was welcomed with loud hellos and a gulp of cognac, then they explained the situation to me, and a very disagreeable one it was too. The British were right up against us, and we had no contact with troops to the left or right. We could see that this corner was one fit only for warriors grizzled in powder fumes.

  Out of the blue, Sandvoss asked me if I’d heard about my brother. The reader may imagine my consternation when I learned that he’d taken part in the night attack, and had been reported missing. He was the dearest to my heart; a feeling of appalling, irreplaceable loss opened up in front of me.

  Then in walked a soldier, who told me that my brother was lying wounded in a nearby shelter. He pointed at a desolate-looking blockhouse, covered over by uprooted trees, that had already been vacated by its defenders. I dashed through sniper fire, across a clearing, and walked in. What a reunion! My brother lay in a room full of the stink of death, surrounded by the groans of gravely wounded men. I found him in poor shape. As he’d advanced, he’d been hit by a couple of shrapnel balls, one of them had penetrated his lung, the other shattered his right shoulder. There was a gleam of fever in his eyes; an opened-out gas mask was perched on his chest. It was only with great difficulty that he could move, speak, breathe. We squeezed each other’s hands, and said what had to be said.

  It was clear to me that he couldn’t remain where he was, because at any moment the British might attack, or a shell might crush the already badly damaged hut. The best thing I could do for my brother was get him taken back right away. Even though Sandvoss was opposed to any further weakening of our numbers, I told the five men who had come with me to take Fritz to the medical shelter, ‘Columbus’s Egg’, and there pick up some men to collect the other casualties. We tied him up in a tarpaulin, slid a long pole through it, and two of the men shouldered it. One more handshake, and the sorry procession set off.

  I watched the swaying burden being taken off through a forest of towering shell bursts. With each explosion I winced, till the little group had vanished into the haze of battle. I felt both that I was representing my mother, and that I would have to account to her for whatever happened to my brother.

  After bandying a little with the slowly advancing British from the shell-holes at the front edge of the wood, I spent the night with my men, who had grown a little more numerous by now, and a machine-gun crew among the wreckage of the blockhouse. High-explosive shells of quite exceptional ferocity were coming down all the time, one of which just missed killing me that evening.

  Towards morning, the machine-gun suddenly started rattling away, as some dark figures were approaching. It was a patrol from the 76th Regiment come to get in touch with us, and one of them was left dead. Mistakes like that happened quite frequently at that time, and one didn’t spend too much time anguishing over them.

  At six in the morning, we were relieved by a detachment of the 9th, who gave me orders to occupy the Rattenburg with my men. On the way there, I had a cadet disabled by shrapnel.

  The Rattenburg [Rats’ castle or fortress] turned out to be a shot-up shell of a building reinforced with concrete slabs, close to the swampy course of the Steenbach. The name fitted. We made our way in, feeling pretty shattered, and threw ourselves down on straw-covered pallets till a plentiful lunch and a revivifying pipe afterwards more or less restored us.

  In the early afternoon, shelling with large and very large calibres began. Between six o’clock and eight, it was simply one explosion after the next; often the building was shaking and threatening to collapse from the horrible jolts of duds impacting near by. There were the usual conversations about the safety or otherwise of the structure. We thought the concrete ceiling was fairly trustworthy; but as the ‘castle’ was close to the steep bank of the stream, we thought there was a chance that a shell with a low trajectory might undermine us, and send us, concrete and all, skittering down into the stream bed.

  When the firing died down in the evening, I clambered over a slope, which was being buzzed around by a hornets’ nest of shrapnel, to the hospital shelter, ‘Columbus’s Egg’, to ask the doctor, who was just then examining the horribly mutilated leg of a man who was about to die, about my brother. I was overjoyed to learn that he had been shipped back in reasonably good shape.

  Later on, the ration party appeared, bringing the company, now reduced to just twenty men, hot soup, canned beef, coffee, bread, tobacco and schnapps. We ate heartily, and handed the bottle of ‘98 proof’ round. Then we settled off to sleep, disturbed only by the swarming mosquitoes that bred along the stream, shelling, and occasional bombardments with gas.

  At the end of that restless night, I was so fast asleep that my men had to wake me when the fire intensified to – in their eyes – an alarming degree. They reported that men were drifting back from the front line all the time, saying the line had been given up and the enemy was advancing.

  Following the old soldier’s watchword that a good breakfast will hold body and soul together, I took some nourishment, lit a pipe, and then took a look around outside.

  My view was somewhat restricted because we were swathed in thick smoke. The shelling grew more imposing by the minute, and soon reached that climactic stage that was so thrilling as to produce an almost amused indifference. The earth showered on to our roof incessantly; twice the building itself was hit. Incendiaries threw up heavy milk-white clouds, out of which fiery streaks dribbled to the ground. A piece of that phosphoric mass smacked down on to a stone at my feet, and I was able to watch it burn for minutes. Later on, we were told that men it had landed on had rolled around on the ground, without being able to quench the flames. Delay shells drilled themselves into the ground with a roar, throwing up flat casts of earth. Swathes of gas and fog crept slowly across the terrain. Rifle and machine-gu
n fire rang out from just ahead of us, a sign that the enemy must already be very near.

  Down on the bed of the Steenbach, a group of men were wading through the constantly changing scenery of leaping geysers of mud. I saw among them the battalion commander, Captain von Brixen, with a bandaged arm, being supported by two ambulancemen, and I hurried down to him. He called to warn me that the enemy were pressing forward, and I should see that I found cover quickly.

  Before long the first infantry bullets were smacking into the surrounding craters or bursting against masonry debris. More and more fleeing figures were disappearing into the haze behind us, while furious rifle fire spoke for the implacable defence of those holding on further forward.

  The hour was at hand. We had to defend the Rattenburg, and I told the men, some of whom looked troubled, that we were not about to run away. They were allotted various loopholes, and our one and only machine-gun was set up in a window-opening. A crater was designated as a dressing-station, and a stretcher-bearer, who before long found himself with plenty of work on his hands, sat in it. I picked up a rifle off the floor, and hung a belt of cartridges round my neck.

  As our band was very small, I tried to bolster it from the numbers of those who were drifting around leaderless. Most of them heard our appeal willingly enough, glad of the chance to join in somewhere, while others hurried on their way, having stopped in disbelief and seen what poor prospects we offered. It was no time for niceties. I ordered my men to aim at them.

  Magnetically drawn by the barrels of the rifles, they slowly came nearer, even though one could see from their expressions that they were really most reluctant to keep us company. There were various excuses, prevarications, more or less compelling arguments.

  ‘But I don’t even have a gun!’

  ‘Then wait till someone gets shot, and use his!’

  In the course of one last, massive intensification of the shelling, during which the ruins of the house were struck several times, and the pieces of brick came hurtling down on to our helmets, I was thrown to the ground by a fearful blow. To the amazement of the men, I picked myself up, unhurt.