Since we went about our work with some diligence, we often got to see places that until very recently had been strictly no go. It gave us an insight into all the other things that went on in out-of-the-way places. Everywhere we saw traces of death; it was almost as though there wasn’t a living soul anywhere in this wasteland. Here, behind a dishevelled hedge, lay a group of men, their bodies covered with the fresh soil that the explosion had dropped on them after killing them; there were two runners lying by a crater, from which the acrid fumes of explosive were still bubbling up. In another place, we found many bodies in a small area: either a group of stretcher-bearers or an errant platoon of reservists that had been found by the centre of a ball of fire, and met their end. We would surface in these deadly places, take in their secrets at a glance, and disappear again into the smoke.
After hurrying unscathed across the heavily bombarded stretch the other side of the Passchendaele–Westroosebeke road, I was able to report to Colonel von Oppen.
The next morning, I was sent to the front at six o’clock with instructions to establish whether, and if so where, the regiment was in touch with the units on its flanks. On my way, I ran into Sergeant-Major Ferchland, who was taking the 8th Company orders to advance to Goudberg, and, in the event of there being a gap between us and the regiment on the left, to close it. In the speedy performance of my duty, I could do nothing better than fall in with him. After searching for some time, we finally found the commander of the 8th, my friend Tebbe, in a rather inhospitable part of the crater landscape close to the clearing-station. He was not pleased with the order to perform such a visible movement in broad daylight. During our laconic conversation, further oppressed by the indescribable dreariness of the craters in the early light, we lit cigars, and waited for the company to collect itself.
After no more than a few paces, we came under carefully aimed infantry fire from the opposing heights, and had to go on alone, each man dodging from crater to crater. Crossing the next ridge, the fire became so intense that Tebbe gave orders to occupy a crater position until nightfall. Puffing on his cigar, he reviewed his line.
I made up my mind to go forward and check on the size of the gap myself, and rested awhile in Tebbe’s crater. The enemy’s artillery was soon finding its range, to punish the company for its bold advance. A projectile smashing down on the rim of our little refuge and leaving both my face and my map spattered with mud, told me it was time to go. I bade goodbye to Tebbe, and wished him all the best for the hours ahead. He called after me: ‘God, just let it be night, the morning will come by itself!’
We picked our way across the Paddelbach basin, where we were within view of the enemy, ducking behind the foliage of shot-over poplars, and using their trunks to balance along. From time to time one of us would disappear up to the hips in mire, and would certainly have drowned but for the presence of his comrades and their helpfully extended rifle butts. I aimed for a blockhouse that had a group of soldiers standing around it. In front of us, a stretcher carried by four bearers was heading in the same direction as we were. Puzzled to see a wounded man being carried towards the front, I took a look through my binoculars, and saw a line of khaki-clad figures with flat steel helmets. At the same instant, the first shots rang out. As there was nowhere to take cover, we had no option but to run back, with the bullets plugging into the mud all round us. The chase through the morass was very fatiguing; but the minute we stopped, completely out of breath, and offered the British a still target, a clutch of high-explosive shells gave us our second wind. The shells had the virtue, moreover, of obscuring us from view with their smoke. The least pleasant aspect of this chase was the prospect that almost any sort of wound was enough to see you to a watery grave. We hurried along the crater rims, as along the narrow walls of a honeycomb. Trickles of blood here and there indicated that some unlucky men must have gone there before us.
Dog tired, we reached the regimental headquarters, where I handed in my sketches, and gave a report on the situation. We had investigated the gap. Tebbe would advance under cover of night to fill it.
On 28 October, we were relieved in turn by the 10th Bavarian reserves, and, prepared to step in if needed, were put up in villages in the back area. The general staff withdrew as far as Most.
At night we sat in the bar of an abandoned public house, and celebrated the promotion and engagement of Lieutenant Zürn, who had just got back from leave. For such behaviour we were duly punished the following morning by being woken at six by a gigantic drumfire, which, though far away, still shattered my windows. The alarm went off immediately. Obviously, the closing of the gap had not gone completely according to plan. The rumour was going around that the British had broken through. I spent the day waiting for orders at the observation point, in an area lying under sparse fire. A light shell drove through the window of one building, sending three wounded artillerymen staggering out, covered in brick dust. Three more lay dead under the rubble.
The next morning, I received the following orders from the Bavarian commander: ‘By repeated enemy pressure, the position of the regiment to the left of us has been further pushed back, and the gap between the two regiments greatly widened. In view of the danger that the regiment might be outflanked on the left, yesterday evening the 1st Battalion of the 73rd Fusiliers moved forward to counter-attack, but was apparently dispersed by the barrage, and never reached the enemy. This morning, the 2nd Battalion was sent forward into the gap. We have at present no news of either. Information is required on the position of the 1st and 2nd Battalions.’
I set off on my way, and had only got as far as Nordhof when I met Captain von Brixen, the commanding officer of the 2nd Battalion, who had the position sketched in his pocket. I copied it, and had thereby effectively carried out my task, but I went on anyway to the headquarters of the troops in the line, to effect a personal reconnaissance. The way was littered with dead, their pale faces staring up out of water-filled craters, or already so covered with mud that their human identity was almost completely masked. Many of the sleeves had the blue Gibraltar brassard.
The commanding officer was a Bavarian, Captain Radlmaier. This extremely diligent officer told me in some detail what Captain von Brixen had already told me in hasty outline. Our 2nd Battalion had suffered heavy casualties; among many others, the adjutant and the commander of the brave 7th. The adjutant, Lemière, was the brother of the Lemière who had commanded the 8th Company, and had fallen at Fresnoy. Both were from Liechtenstein, and both had volunteered to fight on the German side. Both died, shot in the mouth.
The captain pointed to a blockhouse a couple of hundred yards away, that had been particularly doggedly defended yesterday. Shortly after the attack had begun, the man in command of it, a sergeant-major, saw a British soldier leading back three German prisoners. He picked him off, and acquired three more men for the defence. When they had used up all their ammunition, they tied a British captive to the door, in order to put a temporary stop to the firing, and were able to retire unobserved after nightfall.
Another blockhouse, this one under a lieutenant, was called upon to surrender; by way of reply, the German leaped out, grabbed the Englishman, and pulled him inside, to the astonishment of his watching troops.
That day, I saw little troops of stretcher-bearers going around the battlefield with raised flags, and not coming under fire. The only time the warrior got to see such scenes in this often subterranean war, was when the need for them had become too dire.
My return was impeded by a nasty irritant gas that smelled of rotten apples from the British shells that had saturated the ground. It made breathing difficult, and caused the eyes to tear up. After I’d made my report to headquarters, I met two officer friends of mine on stretchers outside the dressing-station, both gravely wounded. One was Lieutenant Zürn, in whose honour we had celebrated only two nights before. Now he was lying on a door, half stripped, with the waxy colour that is a sure sign of imminent death, staring up at me with sightless eyes as I
stepped out to squeeze his hand. The other, Lieutenant Haverkamp, had had an arm and a leg so badly smashed by shell splinters that a double amputation seemed probable. He lay, deathly pale, on his stretcher, smoking cigarettes which his bearers lit for him and put in his mouth.
Once again, our losses were appalling, especially of young officers. This second Battle of Flanders was a monotonous affair; it was fought on sticky, muddy ground, and it caused immense casualties.
On 3 November, we were put on trains at the station in Gits, still fresh in our memory from the first Flanders Campaign. We saw our two Flemish waitresses again, but they weren’t what they had been either. They too seemed to have been through some heavy action.
We were taken to Tourcoing, a pleasant sister town of Lille, for a few days. For the first and last time in the entire war, every man of the 7th Company slept on a feather bed. I was put up in a magnificent room in the house of a rich manufacturer on the Rue de Lille. I greatly enjoyed my first evening on a leather armchair in front of an open fire in a marble fireplace.
Those few days were used by all of us to enjoy the life that we’d had to fight so hard to cling on to. We still couldn’t quite grasp that for the time being we’d given death the slip, and we wanted to feel the possession of this new lease of life, by enjoying it in every way possible.
The Double Battle of Cambrai
The delightful days at Tourcoing were soon over. For a short while we were at Villers-au-Tertre, where we were brought up to strength by new drafts, and on 15 November we were put on trains for Lécluse, the resting-place of the battalion in reserve on the new front now assigned to us. Lécluse was a fairly large village in the lake country of the Artois. Extensive reed beds were home to ducks and water-fowl, and the waters were full of fish. Fishing was strictly forbidden, yet even so there were mysterious noises coming from the water at night. One day I was sent the pay-books of men in my company who had been caught by the town commandant fishing with bombs. I refused to make an issue of it, because the good spirits of the men mattered far more to me than the protection of French fishing-rights or the dinner-tables of the military bigwigs. From then on, I found, almost every night, a giant pike anonymously left outside my door. The day after I treated my two company officers to lunch with ‘Pike à la Lohen-grin’ as the pièce de résistance.
On 19 November, I took my platoon commanders to see the part of the line where we would be going in a day or two. It was in front of the village of Vis-en-Artois. But then we didn’t enter the line as soon as we’d thought, because there was an alarm nearly every night and we were variously sent off to the Wotan Line, the reserve gun positions, or the village of Dury to be in readiness for an expected British attack. Experienced warriors knew that nothing good could come of this.
And indeed we heard on 29 November from Captain von Brixen that we were to take part in a sweeping counter-offensive against the bulge that the tank battle at Cambrai had made in our front. Even though we were pleased to play the part of the hammer, having so long been the anvil, we wondered whether the troops, still exhausted from Flanders, would be up to the job. That said, I had every confidence in my company; they had never let anyone down yet.
On the night of 30 November to 1 December, we were put on lorries. In the process, we took our first losses, as a soldier dropped a hand-grenade which for some reason exploded, gravely injuring him and another man. Someone else feigned insanity in an attempt to get out of the battle. After a lot of toing and froing, a buffet in the ribs from an NCO seemed to sort him out, and we were able to go. It showed me that that sort of play-acting is difficult to keep up.
We drove, squashed together, almost as far as Baralle, where we were made to stand for hours in a ditch and wait for orders. In spite of the cold, I lay down in a meadow and slept till dawn. Since we had been prepared for the attack, it came as something of a disappointment to learn that the 225th, whom we were to support, had decided to go it alone. We were to stay in readiness in the castle grounds of Baralle.
At nine o’clock in the morning our artillery began a powerful pounding, which from quarter to twelve to ten to twelve achieved the intensity of drumfire. The woods of Bourlon, which were not even under direct attack as they were too heavily defended, simply vanished in a chartreuse fog of gas. At ten to twelve we observed through our binoculars lines of riflemen emerging on to the empty crater landscape, while in the rear the batteries were harnessed up and rushed forward to new positions. A German aeroplane brought down a British barrage balloon in flames; we saw the occupants parachute clear. The fact that he circled round them as they drifted through the air, and fired tracer rounds at them, was further evidence of the growing bitterness of the conflict.
After following the progress of the attack avidly from the elevation of the castle grounds, we emptied a dixie of noodles and lay down for a nap on the frozen ground. At three o’clock we received orders to advance as far as the regimental HQ, which was situated in the lock-chamber of a drained canal bed. We went there by platoons, through a feeble scattered fire. From there the 7th and 8th were sent forward to the officer commanding the troops in reserve, to relieve two companies of the 225th. The five hundred yards of canal that were to be got through lay under a dense barrage. We got there by running in a tight mass, without sustaining any losses. Numerous corpses showed that other companies had been made to suffer heavily. Reserves were squeezed up against the banks, busily trying to dig foxholes in the canal walls. As all the places were taken, and the canal, as a landmark, was a magnet for artillery fire, I led my company to a crater field to the right of it, and left it up to each individual to settle down as they liked. A splinter jangled against my bayonet. Together with Tebbe, who had followed our example with his 8th Company, I looked out a suitable crater, which we covered with a tarpaulin. We lit a candle, ate supper, smoked our pipes, and had a shivering conversation. Tebbe, who even in these insalubrious surroundings always remained something of a dandy, was telling me some long and involved story about a girl who had sat for him once in Rome.
At eleven o’clock, I received orders to advance into the erstwhile front line, and report to the commander of the fighting troops. I gathered up my men and moved forward. Mighty shells were falling only singly now, but then one promptly smashed down at our feet like a greeting from hell, and filled the canal bed with dark smoke. The men fell silent, as if an icy fist had them by the neck, and stumbled along over barbed wire and debris in my wake. It is an eerie feeling to be striding through an unknown position by night, even when the shelling isn’t particularly strong; your eyes and ears are subject to all sorts of deceptions. Everything feels cold and alien as in some cursed other world.
At last, we found the spot where the front line met the canal, and wended our way through the crowded trenches to the battalion headquarters. I stepped in, and found a bunch of officers and orderlies standing around in an atmosphere one could have cut with a knife. Then I learned that the attack had not prospered so far, and was to be taken up again in the morning. The feeling in the room was rather doomy. A couple of battalion commanders started on lengthy negotiations with their adjutants. From time to time special weapons’ officers tossed an item into the conversation from the height of their bunks, which were swarming like hen-roosts. The cigar smoke was dense. Servants tried to cut bread for their officers in the middle of the bustle; a wounded man charged in, and caused pandemonium by announcing an enemy hand-grenade attack.
Finally, I was able to take down my orders for the attack. At six o’clock in the morning we were to roll up Dragon Alley and as much as possible of the Siegfried Line. The two battalions of the regiment in the line were to commence attacking on our right at seven o’clock. The discrepancy in times made me suspect that our high-ups didn’t quite trust this attack, and were giving us the role of guinea-pigs. I objected to the two-phase attack, and our time was duly commuted to seven o’clock. The next morning was to show what a difference that made.
Since I had
absolutely no idea where Dragon Alley was, I asked for a map as I was leaving, but was told they had none to spare. I drew my own conclusions, and went out into the fresh air. Other commanders don’t often give strange units a cushy time.
After I’d spent a long time wandering around the position with my heavily laden soldiers, one man spotted a sign with the half-effaced writing ‘Dragon Alley’ on a small sap going forward, which was blocked off by knife-rests. When I went down there, after a few steps, I heard the sound of foreign voices. Silently I crept back. It was evident that I had encountered the spearhead of the British attack, either through over-confidence or, in ignorance of where they were, behaving incautiously. I had the sap blocked off right away by a platoon.
Right next to Dragon Alley was an enormous hole in the ground that I took to be a tank-trap, and there I had the whole company assemble, to explain our orders, and to give the different platoons their places. While speaking, I was several times interrupted by small shells. Once, a dud even plummeted into the back wall of the hole. I was standing up on the rim, and, with every explosion, I could see the steel helmets assembled below me perform a deep and synchronous bow in the moonlight.
In case of the possibility of us all being wiped out by a chance hit, I sent the first and second platoons back into the trench, and settled myself into the pit with the third. Men from another unit, which had been roughed up on Dragon Alley that morning, had a worrying impact on my men, telling them that an English machine-gun fifty yards away was an insurmountable obstacle across the trench. We decided therefore, at the first sign of resistance, to fan out left and right and make a concerted bombing attack.
The endless night hours I spent huddled up against Lieutenant Hopf in a hole in the ground. At six o’clock I got up and, with the curious feeling that precedes any attack, settled a last few details. You have butterflies in the stomach as you talk to the platoon commanders, try to make jokes, run around as if you were facing a parade in front of the commander-in-chief; in a word, you try and make yourself as busy as possible, to avoid any troubling thoughts. A soldier offered me a mug of coffee that he’d warmed up on a paraffin stove, and that had a magical effect on me, spreading warmth and confidence throughout my body.