But to get back to my refuge, which I named ‘Casa Wahnfried’. My only worry was its relative porosity; though it was secure enough, so long as nothing landed on top of it. At any rate, I was comforted by the thought that I was no better off than my men. At lunchtime, Haller would lay a blanket in a huge crater, which we had made a path to, for me to use as a suntrap. There, I would work on my tan, disturbed, on occasion, by shells or whizzing fragments of metal coming too near.
The nights brought heavy bombardments like swift, devastating summer thunderstorms. I would lie on my bunk on a mattress of fresh grass, and listen, with a strange and quite unjustified feeling of security, to the explosions all around that sent the sand trickling out of the walls. Or I would walk out to the fire-step to take in the mournful nocturnal scene, and the strange contrast between its heaviness and the fiery spectacle whose dance-floor it was.
At such moments, there crept over me a mood I hadn’t known before. A profound reorientation, a reaction to so much time spent so intensely, on the edge. The seasons followed one another, it was winter and then it was summer again, but it was still war. I felt I had got tired, and used to the aspect of war, but it was from this familiarity that I observed what was in front of me in a new and subdued light. Things were less dazzlingly distinct. And I felt that the purpose with which I had gone out to fight had been used up, and no longer held. The war posed new, deeper puzzles. It was a strange time altogether.
The front line had relatively little to suffer from the enemy bombardment, which was just as well, because it could not have held if it had. It was principally Puisieux and the hollows around that were targets for the bombardments that in the evenings worked themselves up into extraordinary ferocity. Bringing food and relieving other units were both greatly complicated. Now here, now there, a chance hit would knock out a link of our chain.
On 14 June, I was relieved at two in the morning by Kius, who like me had come back and was now commanding the 2nd Company. We spent our rest period at the railway embankment at Achiet-le-Grand, in barracks and shelters in the lee of its protective bulk. The British often sent heavy low-trajectory shells our way. Rackebrand, a sergeant with the 3rd Company, fell victim to one such. He was killed by a shard that drilled through the wall of the flimsy hut that he had set up as a company office on top of the embankment. A few days before that, there had been a real catastrophe. A bomber pilot had dropped a bomb right on top of the 76th regimental band as it was playing, surrounded by listeners. Among its victims were many men from our regiment.
In the vicinity of the embankment, looking like stranded hulls, were many shot-up tanks, which I would inspect closely in the course of my peregrinations. Also, I would have my company cluster round them to study methods of combating them, their tactics and their weak points – these ever-more commonly seen elephants of the technical war. They carried names and emblems and designs that were variously ironic, menacing or lucky; there was the clover leaf and the pig (for luck), and the white death’s head. One was distinguished by a gallows with a noose dangling from it; that one was called ‘Judge Jeffries’. All of them were in a bad way. To be in the narrow turret of such a tank, going forward, with its tangle of rods and wires and poles, must have been extremely unpleasant as these colossuses, in efforts to out-manœuvre the artillery, were forced to zigzag over the country like huge helpless beetles. I felt keen sympathy for the men in those fiery furnaces. Also, the countryside was dotted about with the skeletal wreckage of downed aeroplanes, an indication that machines were playing an ever greater part on the battlefield. One afternoon, not far from us, the huge white bell of a parachute came down, as a pilot leaped from his burning aeroplane.
On the morning of 18 June, on account of the volatile situation, the 7th was obliged to go back to Puisieux ahead of time, to be at the disposal of the commanding officer of the line troops for carrying parties and other purposes. We moved into shelters and basements facing out towards Bucquoy. Just as we arrived there, a group of heavy shells came down in the surrounding gardens. Even so, I wasn’t deterred from taking my breakfast in a little gazebo in front of my shelter. After a while there was another one came whistling across. I dropped flat on the ground. Flames spurted beside me. An ambulanceman in my company by the name of Kenziora, who was just bringing several cooking pans full of water, fell, hit in the stomach. I ran over to him, and with the help of a signalman, dragged him into the dressing-station, whose entrance, as luck would have it, was just opposite the place where the shell burst.
‘Well, did you at least have a proper breakfast inside you?’ asked Doctor Köppen, a real old sawbones, who had had me under him once or twice in his time, as he bandaged up the big wound in his belly.
‘Yes, I did, a big dixie full of noodles!’ whimpered the unhappy fellow, perhaps catching a ray of hope.
‘Well, there you are then,’ Köppen said reassuringly, before turning aside to me and nodding at me with a grave expression on his face.
But gravely wounded men have very acute instincts. Suddenly the man groaned, and large beads of sweat stood out on his forehead: ‘That shell’s done for me, I can feel it.’ But in spite of his prediction, I was able to shake his hand six months later, when the regiment returned to Hanover.
In the afternoon, I took a solitary walk through the devastated village of Puisieux. It had already received a hammering in the course of the battles of the Somme. The craters and ruins had been overgrown with thick grass, dotted about here and there with the gleaming white plates of elderflower, which loves ruins. Numerous fresh explosions had ripped holes in the cover, and exposed the soil all over again.
The main village street was lined with the debris of our recent stalled advance. Shot-up wagons, discarded munitions, rusty pistols and the outlines of half-decomposed horses, seen through fizzing clouds of dazzling flies, commented on the nullity of everything in battle. All that was left of the church standing on the highest spot of the village was a wretched heap of stones. While I picked a bunch of half-wild roses, landing shells reminded me to be careful in this place where Death danced.
A few days later, we relieved the 9th Company in the line of resistance, some five hundred yards behind the front. In the process, we of the 7th suffered three men wounded. The following morning, just by my dugout, Captain von Ledebur was wounded in the foot by a shrapnel ball. Even though he had galloping consumption, he felt the war was his vocation. It was his fate to succumb to that slight wound. He died soon after, in hospital. On the 28th, the commander of my ration party, Sergeant Gruner, was hit by a shell splinter. That was our ninth casualty in a short space of time.
Following a week on the front line, we were again moved back to the resistance line, since the battalion which was to relieve us was almost wiped out by Spanish influenza. Several men a day reported sick in our company as well. In the division next to ours, the epidemic raged to such an extent that an enemy airman dropped leaflets promising that the British would come and relieve them, if the unit weren’t withdrawn. But we learned that the sickness was also spreading among the enemy; even though we, with our poor rations, were more prone to it. Young men in particular sometimes died overnight. And all the time we were to be battle-ready, as there was a continuous cloud of black smoke hanging over Copse 125 at all times, as over a witches’ cauldron. The shelling was so intense there, that on days of no wind the explosive vapours were strong enough to poison part of the 6th Company. We had to go down into the shelters, like divers with oxygen masks, to drag the unconscious men back to the surface. Their faces were cherry-red, and their breath came in nightmarish gasps.
One afternoon, stepping out of my sector, I came upon several half-buried boxes of British munitions. To study the construction of a rifle-grenade, I unscrewed one, and took out the detonator. Something was left behind, which I took to be the percussion cap. However, when I tried to unpick it with my nail, it turned out to be a second detonator, which exploded with a loud bang, took off the tip of my left ind
ex finger, and gave me several bleeding wounds in the face.
That same evening, as I was standing talking to Lieutenant Sprenger on top of my dugout, a heavy shell hit near us. We disagreed about the distance, Sprenger reckoning it was about ten paces off, I nearer thirty. To see how trustworthy my estimates might be in this respect, I stepped it out, and found the crater – of a size to accord with an unpleasant manufacture – to be twenty-five yards away.
The 20th of July found us back in Puisieux. I spent all afternoon standing on a piece of crumbling wall, and watched the condition of the line, which looked rather ominous to me. Occasional details I wrote down in my notebook.
Copse 125 was regularly sheeted in thick smoke rising from the massive explosions, under red and green flares that rose and fell. If the artillery was silent for any time, you could hear the tactactac of machine-guns, and the dull crack of hand-grenades going off in the distance. From where I stood, the whole thing looked almost like a game. It lacked the brutish scale of a big battle, but one could feel the tenacious wrestling for all that.
The copse was like a festering wound that both sides nagged and worried at. Both sets of artillery toyed with it, like a couple of beasts of prey, wrangling over a victim; they shredded its trees and flicked them into the air. It never had very large numbers of men in it, but it could be defended, and, as it was so conspicuous in that wasteland all around, it was always available as an instance of the way that even the most gigantic confrontation of forces is nothing but a mechanism by which today, as in every era throughout history, a man’s weight is taken.
Towards evening, I was summoned to the commander of the troops in reserve, where I was told that the enemy had managed to penetrate the trench network on our left flank. In order to clear a little space in front of us again, the instructions were that Lieutenant Petersen with the storm company was to clear the hedge trench, while I with my men cleared the communication trench that ran in a hollow parallel to it.
We set out at daybreak, but immediately came under such strong infantry fire that we postponed our mission. I ordered Elbinger Alley to be occupied, and caught up on some sleep in a huge cavern of a dugout. At eleven in the morning I was woken up by cracks of hand-grenades coming from our left, where we had put up a barricade. I hurried over, and found the usual scene of close-quarters fighting. White hand-grenade clouds whirling over the barricade, machine-guns on either side set back a few traverses clattering away at each other. And in between men, leaping forward and darting back. The minor essay by the British had already been repulsed, but it had cost us a man lying behind the barricade, shredded by hand-grenade splinters.
In the evening I received orders to lead the company back to Puisieux, and when I arrived there I found I had instructions to go on a small-scale initiative with two sections of men the next morning. The purpose was to roll up the so-called Valley Trench from red point K to red point Z, and this was to happen at three-forty in the morning, following a five-minute artillery and mortar barrage. Unfortunately, this enterprise, for which Lieutenant Voigt would lead a storm troop, and I a couple of platoons, had clearly been dreamed up from the map, because the Valley Trench, as its name suggested, followed the lowest line, and could be seen into from many vantage-points from top to bottom. I wasn’t at all happy with the whole thing, or at least I wrote in my diary, after the order: ‘Well, with luck I’ll be able to describe it tomorrow. On account of pressure of time, I must reserve my opinion of the order – I’m sitting in the bunker in F Sector, it’s midnight, and I’m being woken at 3.’
Still, orders are orders, and so three-forty found Voigt and me with our men all ready in the breaking light at the jumping-off point by Elbinger Alley. We were in a knee-deep trench from which we could look down into the valley, which began to fill at the agreed hour with smoke and flames. A large splinter that flew up from this seething mass to our position hurt Fusilier Klaves in the hand. I had the same spectacle before me that I had had so often already before attacks: the image of a group of men waiting in poor light, inclining their heads each time the guns fall short, or else prostrating themselves on the ground, all the while excitement steadily mounts – a scene that grips the spirit like some terrible silent ceremonial that portends human sacrifice.
We jumped off precisely on time, and were favoured by the dense pall of smoke that the bombardment had cast over the Valley Trench. Shortly before Z, we encountered resistance, and forced our way through with hand-grenades. As we had reached our objective, and were not keen to continue fighting, we erected a barricade and left behind a platoon with a machine-gun.
The only satisfaction I took from the whole event was from the way the storm troops comported themselves – they strongly reminded me of old Simplicissimus. They were a new breed of fighter so far as I was concerned, the volunteers of 1918: still raw, but instinctively brave. Those young dashers with long hair and puttees would start quarrelling among themselves twenty yards in front of the enemy because one had called the other a scaredy-cat, and yet they all swore like troopers and threw their weight around no end. ‘Christ, we’re not all such funks as you are!’ yelled one, and rolled up another fifty yards of trench single-handed.
The platoon I’d left at the barricade came back in the afternoon. They had taken casualties, and not been able to hang on any longer. I must confess, I’d already given them up for lost, and was amazed that anyone could make it back alive down the long line of the Valley Trench in daylight.
In spite of that, and various other counter-punches, the enemy was well entrenched in the left flank of our front line, and in the barricaded communications trenches, and threatening our line of resistance. This kind of semi-detached arrangement, with no no man’s land dividing us, felt distinctly uncomfortable in the long run; we had a clear sense of not being safe even in our own lines.
On 24 July, I went off to reconnoitre the new C section of the line of resistance, which I was to take over on the following day. I had the company commander, Lieutenant Gipkens, show me the barricade along the Hedge Trench, which was unusual inasmuch as on the British side it comprised a disabled tank, which had been integrated into the fortifications like a strongpoint. To take in the details, we sat down on a little seat cut into the traverse. As we were talking away, I was suddenly grabbed and pulled down. The next second, a bullet struck the sand where I had been sitting. By a lucky chance, Gipkens had noticed a rifle barrel slowly being poked through a loophole in the block only forty paces away. His sharp painter’s eyes had saved my life, because at that range I was a sitting duck. We had happened to sit down in the short stretch between the lines, and were as visible to the British sentry as if we’d been facing him across a table. Gipkens had acted promptly and sensibly. When I came to analyse the scene later, I wondered whether I might not have frozen at the sight of the rifle. I was told that this harmless-looking place had seen three men of the 9th Company shot in the head; it was a bad place.
In the afternoon, a not especially heavy burst of shelling lured me out of my coal-hole, where I had just been sitting and reading comfortably over a cup of coffee. In front of us, the signals for a barrage were going up in monotonous succession. Wounded men hobbling back told us that the British had entered the resistance line in B and C Sectors, and were approaching it in A Sector. Straight afterwards, we had the bad news that Lieutenants Vorbeck and Grieshaber had been killed. They had fallen in defence of their sectors, and Lieutenant Kastner was badly wounded. He had had a near miss only a few days previously, when his right nipple had been sheared off by a bullet. It was as neatly done as if by a scalpel, and he suffered no other injury. At eight o’clock Sprenger, who was in temporary command of the 5th, came into my dugout with a splinter in his back, took a pull at a bottle to ‘steady his nerves’, and exited with the words: ‘Go back, go back, Don Rodrigo.’ His friend Domeyer followed shortly afterwards with a bleeding hand. His parting words were a little less literary.
The following morning, we reoccupied
C Sector, which had once more been cleared of the enemy. We had pioneers there, Boje and Kius with part of the 2nd, and Gipkens with what was left of the 9th. There were eight dead Germans in the trench, and two British, with the badge on their caps reading ‘South Africa – Otago Rifles’. Hand-grenades had made a mess of all of them. Their contorted faces were horribly mutilated.
I gave instructions for the block to be manned and the trench to be tidied up. At a quarter to twelve, our artillery opened fire rather wildly on the positions in front of us, doing more damage to us than they did to the British. Shortly afterwards tragedy struck. The cry ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ was passed along the line from the left. Hurrying to the spot, I found the scattered remnants of my best platoon sergeant at the barricade in the Hedge Trench. He had taken a direct hit from our own shell amidships. Tatters of his uniform and underwear, ripped away by the force of the explosion, were spread out across the ragged branches of the hawthorn hedge that gave the trench its name. I had a tarpaulin draped over him, to spare us the sight. Immediately afterwards, on the same spot, three more men were hurt. Lance-Corporal Ehlers, deafened by the air pressure, writhed on the ground. Another man had both hands severed at the wrist. He tottered back, his arms laid across the shoulders of a stretcher-bearer. The little procession reminded me of a heroic relief, the helper was walking stooped, while the wounded man struggled to remain upright – a young fellow, with black hair and a fine, determined, and now marmoreally pale face.