A cool breeze gave promise of a bitter night. Wrapped in my warm English coat, I leaned against the trench wall, chatting with little Schultz, who had accompanied me on the patrol against the Indians, and had turned up, in the timeless way of comrades, just where things were looking tough, toting four heavy machine-guns. Men of all companies sat on the fire-steps, the young, keen faces under the steel helmets, eyeing the enemy lines. I saw them looming stock-still out of the dim of the trench, as though on turrets. Their officers had fallen; it was by their own instincts that they were standing in exactly the right place now.
We were already settling in for a night of what we have we hold. I laid my pistol and a dozen British duck’s egg grenades next to me, and felt myself a match for all comers, even the most obdurate Scotsman.
Then there came the sound of more hand-grenades from the right, while on the left German flares went up. Out of the gloaming rose a faint distant cheer. It caught on. ‘We’ve got round the back of them! We’ve got round the back of them!’ In one of those moments of enthusiasm that precede great actions, all reached for their rifles, and stormed forward along the trench. A brief exchange of hand-grenades, and a bunch of Highlanders were seen running for the road. Now there was no stopping us. In spite of warning cries: ‘Watch out, the machine-gun on the left is still shooting!’ we leaped out of the trench, and in no time had reached the road, which was swarming with disorientated Highlanders. They were fleeing, but their own entanglement was in the way. Briefly they paused, then they started running parallel to it. To our tumultuous shouts, they had to run the gauntlet. And that was the moment little Schultz turned up with his machine-guns.
The road presented an apocalyptic scene. Death was reaping great swathes. The echoing cry of war, the intense fire of handguns, the dull force of bombs, all exhilarated the attackers and lamed the defenders. All that long day the battle had been smouldering away; now it caught and burned. Our superiority grew with every second, because the narrow wedge of shock troops, now fanning out, was followed by broad sections of reinforcements.
When I reached the road, I looked down on to it from a steep embankment. The Scottish position was in a deepened ditch on the other side, it was some way below where we were. In those first few seconds, though, we were distracted from it; the vision of the Highlanders charging along the wire entanglement was all we had eyes for. We threw ourselves down along the top of the embankment, and fired. It was one of those very rare moments when the opposition have been driven into an impasse, and you feel the burning desire to be everywhere at once.
Swearing and trying desperately to fix my jammed pistol, I felt someone striking me hard on the shoulder. I spun round and looked into the contorted face of little Schultz. ‘The bloody bastards are still firing!’ I followed the direction he was pointing in, and finally spotted a line of figures in the little warren of trenches barely the other side of the road from us, some loading, some with their rifles to their cheeks, feverishly busy. From the right came the first hand-grenades, one tossing the body of a Scotsman high up into the air.
Common sense advised staying where we were and disabling the enemy from there. He was an easy target. Instead, I threw away my rifle and plunged between the lines with my bare fists. Unluckily, I was still in my English coat, and my red-trimmed forage cap. There I was already, on the other side, and in enemy clothes! In the midst of the rush of victory, I felt a sharp jolt on the left side of my breast. Night descended on me! I was finished.
I supposed I’d been hit in the heart, but the prospect of death neither hurt nor frightened me. As I fell, I saw the smooth, white pebbles in the muddy road; their arrangement made sense, it was as necessary as that of the stars, and certainly great wisdom was hidden in it. That concerned me, and mattered more than the slaughter that was going on all round me. I fell to the ground, but, to my astonishment, I got to my feet again straight away. As I could see no hole in my tunic, I turned to the enemy once more. A soldier from my company ran up to me: ‘Lieutenant, sir, take your coat off!’ and he ripped the dangerous garment from my shoulders.
A new cheer rent the air. From the right, where all afternoon they had been working with hand-grenades, a number of Germans now ran across the road in support, headed by a young officer in brown corduroy. It was Kius. He was lucky enough to have been sent flying by a trip-wire in the very instant that an English machine-gun was about to fire its last rounds. The spray of bullets flew past him – so close, admittedly, that a bullet ripped open a wallet he carried in his trouser pocket. The Scots were now dealt with in moments. The area around the road was covered with the dead, while the few survivors were pursued by bullets.
In the brief seconds of my unconsciousness, little Schultz had also met his fate. As I was to hear later on, in that raving of his with which he had infected me, he had leaped into the trench to carry on rampaging there. When a Scot, who had already taken off his belt to surrender, saw him charging towards him in that condition, he picked up a rifle off the ground, and brought him down with a mortal bullet.
I stood, talking to Kius, in the conquered stretch of trench, heavy with the fog of hand-grenades. We were talking about how we should take the field guns that must be very near by. Suddenly he interrupted me: ‘Are you wounded? There’s blood coming out under your tunic!’ Indeed, I could feel a curious lightness and a sensation of damp on my chest. We tore open my shirt, and saw that a bullet had passed through my chest directly under my Iron Cross, and diagonally over my heart. There was a little round entry wound on the right, and a slightly larger exit wound on the left. Since I had been leaping from left to right across the road, at a sharp angle, there was no doubt but that one of our troops had taken me for a Britisher, and shot at me from very close range. I strongly suspected it might be the man who had torn off my coat, and yet he had meant well by me, so to speak, and I had myself to blame.
Kius wrapped a bandage round me and with some difficulty prevailed upon me to leave the battlefield. We parted with a: ‘See you in Hanover!’
I chose a fellow to accompany me, and returned to the fire-swept road, to pick up my map case, which my unknown helper had pulled off me along with the English coat. It contained my diary. Then we walked back, through the trench we had fought so hard to take.
Our battle cries had been so loud that the enemy artillery had woken up. The area beyond the road and the trench itself was under an extraordinarily thick barrage. Since the wound I had was quite sufficient for me, I made my way back cautiously, dodging from traverse to traverse.
Suddenly there was a deafening crash on the edge of the trench. I got a blow on the skull, and fell forward unconscious. When I came round, I was dangling head down over the breech of a heavy machine-gun, staring down at a pool of blood that was growing alarmingly fast on the floor of the trench. The blood was running down so unstoppably that I lost all hope. As my escort assured me he could see no brains, I took courage, picked myself up, and trotted on. That was what I got for being so foolish as to go into battle without a steel helmet.
In spite of my twofold haemorrhage, I was terribly excited, and told everyone I passed in the trench that they should hurry to the line, and join the battle. Before long, we were out of range of the light artillery, and could slow down, as the isolated heavy shells would only strike you if your number was up.
In the sunken road leading from Noreuil, I passed the brigade headquarters, had myself announced to Major-General Höbel, reported to him on our triumph, and asked him to send reinforcements to help the storm troops. The general told me I’d been reported dead the day before. It wasn’t the first time that had happened in this war. Perhaps someone had seen me collapse in the assault on the first trench where the shrapnel wounded Haake.
I learned further that our progress had been slower than had been hoped. Evidently, we had been up against some elite troops of the British; our advance had gone through a series of strong-points. The railway embankment had barely been grazed by our heavy artil
lery; we had simply charged it, in defiance of all the rules of warfare. We had not managed to reach Mory. Perhaps we could have done, had our artillery not got in our way. The opposition had been reinforced overnight. Everything that could be achieved by will-power had been, and perhaps more; the general conceded that.
In Noreuil, we passed a great stack of grenade boxes well ablaze. We hurried past with very mixed feelings. Just after the village, a driver gave me a ride on his empty munitions lorry. I had a sharp difference of opinion with the officer in charge of the munitions column, who wanted to have two wounded Britishers who had supported me for the latter part of the journey thrown off the lorry.
The traffic on the Noreuil–Quéant road was quite indescribable. No one who has not seen such a thing for himself can have any idea of the endless columns of vehicles and men that go towards making an offensive. Beyond Quéant, the crush became mythical. I felt a momentary pang when passing little Jeanne’s house, which was reduced to its foundations.
I sought help from one of the traffic officers, distinguished by white armbands, who gave me a place in a private car to the field hospital at Sauchy-Cauchy. We were regularly made to wait for up to half an hour while wagons and lorries got disentangled on the road. Even though the doctors in the field hospital were feverishly busy, the surgeon found time to be surprised at the luck I’d had with my injuries. The wound to my head also had entry and exit wounds, and the skull had not been fractured. Far more painful than the wounds, which to me had felt like dull blows, was the treatment I received from a hospital assistant, once the doctor had stylishly pushed a probe through both wounds. That treatment consisted of scraping the edges of the wound to my head with a blunt blade and no soap.
After an excellent night’s sleep, I was driven the following morning to the casualty clearing-station at Cantin, where I was delighted to see Sprenger, whom I hadn’t seen since the beginning of the offensive. He had a bullet wound to the thigh. I also found my baggage waiting for me – further proof, if proof were needed, of Vinke’s dependability. He had, once we had lost sight of one another, been wounded in the attack on the railway embankment. Before taking himself to the field hospital, and thence back to his farm in Westphalia, he would not rest until he knew that the things of mine that were in his care were safely in my possession. That was him all over; not so much a servant as my older comrade. Often enough, when rations were meagre, I would find a piece of butter waiting at my place at table, ‘from a member of the company who wishes to remain nameless’, though it was never hard to guess who. He was no adventurer, like Haller, but he followed me into battle like the squires of yore, and he thought his responsibility lay in nothing less than the care of my person. Long after the war was over, he wrote to me for a photograph ‘so that I can tell the grandchildren about my lieutenant’. It is to him that I owe an insight into the stolidity and decency of the common people, of the character of the territorial soldier.
After a brief stay in the Bavarian field hospital at Montigny, I was put on a hospital train in Douai and taken to Berlin. There, this sixth double-wound of mine healed in a fortnight, just as well as all its predecessors had. The only unpleasant after-effect was an incessant ringing in my ears. As the weeks passed, it grew fainter and finally went away altogether.
It wasn’t until I was back in Hanover that I heard that, along with many other friends and acquaintances, little Schultz had fallen in the fighting. Kius had got away with a harmless abdominal wound. At the same time, his camera had been broken, and a number of photographs of our attack on the railway embankment were lost.
Anyone who witnessed the celebration of our reunion in a little bar in Hanover, at which my brother with his stiff arm and Bachmann with a stiff knee also attended, would hardly have thought that barely a fortnight previously we had all been listening to other music than the merry popping of champagne corks.
Even so, there was a shadow over those days, because before long we understood from the news reports that the offensive had bogged down, and that, in strategic terms, it had failed. This was confirmed for me by the French and British newspapers I read in cafés in Berlin.
The Great Battle was a turning-point for me, and not merely because from then on I thought it possible that we might actually lose the war.
The incredible massing of forces in the hour of destiny, to fight for a distant future, and the violence it so surprisingly, stunningly unleashed, had taken me for the first time into the depths of something that was more than mere personal experience. That was what distinguished it from what I had been through before; it was an initiation that had not only opened the red-hot chambers of dread but had also led me through them.
British Gains
On 4 June 1918, I rejoined the regiment on rest near Vraucourt, which was now a long way behind the front line. The new commander, Major von Lüttichau, gave me the command of my old 7th Company.
As I drew near my quarters, the men rushed out to meet me, carried my bags for me, and gave me a hero’s welcome. It was like returning to the bosom of a family.
We were staying in a group of corrugated-tin huts in the middle of neglected grass fields, amidst whose green innumerable yellow flowers glowed. The wild terrain, which we dubbed ‘Wallachia’, was grazed by herds of horses. If you stepped outside the door of your hut, you felt the intimidating sense of emptiness that oftentimes comes over the cowboy, the bedouin, and other inhabitants of wild, desert spaces. In the evenings, we would go for long walks around the barracks, looking for partridges, or for weapons half buried in the grass, souvenirs of the Great Battle. One afternoon, I rode up to the defile at Vraucourt that had been so dearly fought over two months before, whose edges were now rimmed with graves, on which I recognized quite a few names.
Before long, the regiment received orders to enter the line just ahead of the village of Puisieux-au-Mont. We rode on lorries overnight as far as Achiet-le-Grand, often compelled to pull over when the light from parachute flares dropped by bombers picked out the white ribbon of road from the surrounding darkness. The various whinings of the heavy bombs were engulfed by the rolling blasts of their detonation. Then searchlights probed the skies for the treacherous night birds, shrapnels exploded like toys, and tracer shells loped after one another in long chains like fiery wolves.
A persistent smell of carrion hung over the conquered territory, sometimes unbearable, sometimes not so bad, but always nettling the senses like an embassy from another country.
‘Eau d’offensive,’ I heard the voice of an old veteran next to me, as we seemed to have been going down an avenue lined with mass graves for the past several minutes.
From Achiet-le-Grand, we marched along the railway line leading to Bapaume, and then went cross-country to our position. The shelling was pretty lively. When we paused to rest once, a couple of medium shells landed very close. The memory of that unforgettable night of terror on 19 March assailed us. We were approaching the front line when we marched past a rowdy company that had obviously just been relieved, and was standing by; a few dozen shrapnels soon shut them up. With a hail of obscenities, my men dived into the nearest trench. A couple weren’t so lucky, and needed to go back to the field dressing-station to get themselves patched up.
At three o’clock, completely exhausted, I pitched up at my dugout, whose cramped dimensions promised a rather uncomfortable stay.
The reddish light of a candle was burning in a thick fug. I tripped over a tangled mass of legs, and the magic word ‘Relief!’ brought some animation to the place. From an oven-shaped hole came a series of oaths, and then by and by there appeared an unshaven face, a pair of tarnished shoulder-pieces, an ancient uniform, and two clumps of clay, which presumably contained boots. We sat down at the rickety table and sorted out the hand-over, each trying to do the other out of a dozen iron rations and a couple of flare pistols. Then my predecessor was disgorged through the narrow entryway, predicting that the rotten hole wouldn’t last another three days. I remained behin
d, the newly promoted captain of A Sector.
The position, when I came to inspect it the following morning, was not a gladsome sight. No sooner had I left the dugout than I saw two bloodied coffee-carriers coming towards me, who had been hit by shrapnel in the communication trench. A few steps along, and Fusilier Ahrens reported himself hit by a ricochet and unfit to continue.
We had the village of Bucquoy ahead of us and Puisieux-au-Mont at our backs. The company was without support in a shallow position, separated from our neighbours on the right, the 76th infantry, by a wide untenanted gap. The left edge of our sector was formed by a piece of splintered woodland, known as Copse 125. In compliance with orders, no deep dugouts had been excavated. We were not to dig in, but remain on the offensive. We didn’t even have any wire entanglements in front of the line. The men sheltered by twos in little holes in the ground with so-called tin Siegfrieds in front of them – curved ovals of corrugated metal about three feet high, which we put in front of the tight oven-shaped hide-outs.
Since my own dugout was behind another sector, I started by looking for new accommodation. A hut-like construction in a collapsed bit of trench looked like just the thing to me, once I had made it into a defensible proposition by hauling together various murderous weapons. There, with my orderlies, I led a hermit’s life in the open, only occasionally bothered by runners or messengers who brought their pieces of bumf even into this secluded spot. I would shake my head as I read, between the explosions of shells, of how, among other less-than-earth-shattering items, the local commandant of X had lost his black-and-brown terrier who answered to the name of Zippi; that is, if I didn’t happen to be reading about a suit for maintenance brought by a serving girl, Makeben, against one Corporal Meyer. Sketches and frequent announcements kept us continually on the hop.