I sent one runner after another to headquarters, demanding that the shelling either stop forthwith, or else that artillery officers present themselves in the line. Instead of any form of reply, we had a still-heavier mortar, which turned the line into a complete shambles.
At seven-fifteen, I received very belated orders, from which I understood that at seven-thirty a strong bombardment would commence, and that at eight o’clock two sections of the storm company under Lieutenant Voigt were to break out across the barricade in the Hedge Trench. They were to roll up the trench as far as point A, and meet up with a shock troop that would proceed along a parallel line to the right of them. Two sections of my company were to follow on behind and occupy the trench.
I quickly issued the necessary commands – the artillery barrage was already beginning – picked out the two sections, and had a brief discussion with Voigt, who set out a few minutes afterwards, as per the instructions I’d received. As I thought of the whole business as a kind of glorified evening constitutional, with no further consequences, I strolled behind my two sections, in a cap, and with a stick-bomb under my arm. At the moment of the attack, announced by clouds of explosions, every rifle anywhere near was directed at the Hedge Trench. We darted forward from traverse to traverse, and made good headway. The British retreated to a line behind, leaving one casualty.
To explain what happened next, I must remind the reader that we were not following the line of a trench, but one of many communication lines, where the British, or rather the New Zealanders, had established a foothold. (We were fighting, as I learned after the war, from letters addressed to me from the Antipodes, against a contingent from New Zealand.) This communications line, the so-called Hedge Trench, led along a ridge; on the left and below was the Valley Trench. The Valley Trench, which I had rolled up with Voigt on 22 July, had been abandoned, as described, by the section we had left there; it was now once more occupied, or at least controlled, by the New Zealanders. The two lines were connected by various cross trenches; from the lower parts of the Hedge Trench, we were not able to see down into the Valley Trench.
I was following the section as it worked its way forward, feeling quite chipper, for as yet all I had seen of the enemy had been several figures fleeing over the top. Ahead of me, NCO Meier was bringing up the rear of the section, and, ahead of him, I could sometimes see, depending on the twists and turns of the trench, little Wilzek from my own company. And so we passed a narrow sap, which, climbing up out of the valley, connected with the Hedge Trench, like a kind of tributary. In between its two separate entrances, there was a sort of delta, a mound of earth perhaps five paces long, which had been left to stand. I had just passed the first juncture, Meier was approaching the second.
In trench-fighting, with forks of this kind, one usually posts two men as a sentry to guard the rear. This Voigt had either forgotten to do, or in his haste he had overlooked the sap altogether. In any case, I now heard the NCO ahead of me shout out in alarm, and saw him raise his rifle and fire just past my head into the second fork of the sap.
Since the block of earth meant I couldn’t see into it, I was mystified by this, but all it took was a step back for me to be able to look down the first fork. What I saw was enough to freeze my blood, for there was a strongly built New Zealander practically near enough to touch. At the same time I heard the shouts of still-unseen attackers running up from the valley to cut us off. The New Zealander who had, as if by magic, appeared at our rear, and whom I stood gawping at helplessly, was unhappily for him unaware of my being there. All his attention was on the NCO, to whose shot he replied with a hand-grenade. I watched him detach one of his lemon-shaped bombs to throw at Meier, who tried to escape his death by charging forward. At the same time, I took out the stick-bomb, which was the only weapon I had on me, and didn’t so much throw it as lob it at the feet of the New Zealander in a short arc. I wasn’t there to see him go up, because it was the last possible moment in which I had any chance of being able to make it back. So I dashed back, and just caught a glimpse of little Wilzek, who had been sharp and calm enough to duck under the New Zealander’s grenade, dash past Meier and follow me. One steel egg that was hurled in his direction ripped his belt and the seat of his trousers, but did no further damage. That was how tight the noose was that had been drawn around us, leaving Voigt and the other forty attackers surrounded and doomed. Without guessing anything of the strange event I had witnessed, they felt pressure behind them pushing them to their deaths. Shouts and numerous explosions suggested that they were selling their lives dearly.
To come to their aid, I led cadet Mohrmann’s section forward along Hedge Trench. We were forced to pause by a rain of Stokes bombs. One splinter struck me in the chest, but was stopped by the clasp of my braces.
A vehement artillery bombardment now began. All around geysers of earth spouted up out of various-coloured steam, and the dull thump of shells bursting deep in the earth mingled with a high-pitched metallic yowl that sounded like a circular saw. Blocks of iron burst with incredible vehemence, interspersed with the singing and flickering of clouds of splinters. As there was every prospect of facing an attack, I put on one of the steel helmets I saw lying around, and hurried back to the firing trench with a few companions.
Figures surfaced in front of us. We laid ourselves on the mangled trench walls and fired away. Next to me, a very young soldier was fumbling with the trigger of his machine-gun, and not getting off a single shot, so I tore the thing from him. I fired some shots, but then as in a nightmare the thing failed again; luckily, though, the attackers vanished into trenches and craters as the artillery heated up. As for our own – it seemed to be directed equally against both sides.
As I went into my bunker, followed by an orderly, something struck the trench wall between us, ripping the helmet from my head and hurling it away into the distance. I thought I had caught a whole load of shrapnel, and lay half numbed in my foxhole, whose rim a moment later was struck by a shell. The little space was filled with thick smoke and a long splinter shattered a jar of gherkins at my feet. So as not to be crushed to death, I crawled back out into the trench, and from below urged the two orderlies and my batman to be alert.
It was a grim half-hour; the already reduced company was further mangled. After the artillery fire had abated, I walked the line, inspected the damage, and established that we were down to fifteen men. The long sector could not be held by so few. Therefore I assigned Mohrmann and three men to defend the barricade, and with the rest formed a hedgehog in a deep crater behind the back wall. From there, we could take a hand in the fight for the barricade, or, if the enemy succeeded in breaking into our line, attack him with hand-grenades from above. In the event, further action was limited to a few light mortars and rifle-grenades.
On 27 July, we were relieved by a company of the 164th. We were utterly exhausted. The commander of the relieving company was badly wounded on the way out; a few days later, my bunker was hit, and his successor buried. We all sighed with relief when we finally turned our backs on Puisieux and the storm of steel of the finale.
Their advances showed how much the enemy’s strength was increasing, supplemented by drafts from every corner of the earth. We had fewer men to set against them, many were little more than boys, and we were short of equipment and training. It was all we could do to plug gaps with our bodies as the tide flooded in. There wasn’t the wherewithal for great counter-attacks like Cambrai any more.
Later on, when I thought of the way the New Zealanders triumphantly ran up and forced our sections into that deadly bottleneck, it struck me that that was exactly what had happened on 2 December 1917 at Cambrai, but with roles reversed. We had looked into a mirror.
My Last Assault
On 30 July 1918, we moved into rest quarters in Sauchy-Léstrée, a delightful spot in the Artois, surrounded by water. A few days later, we marched further back to Escaudœuvres, a quiet working-class suburb, cast out, as it were, by the rather fancier Cambrai.
I occupied the best bedroom of a Northern French working-class family, on the Rue-des-Bouchers. The usual massive bed was the principal item of furniture, a hearth with red and blue glass vases on the mantelpiece, a round table, chairs, and a few colour prints on the walls: such things as ‘vive la classe’ and ‘souvenir de première communion’. A few postcards completed the décor. The view out of the window was of a graveyard.
The bright full-moon nights favoured the visitations of enemy aircraft, which gave us an appreciation of the growing superiority they enjoyed in terms of weaponry. Every night, several squadrons of bombers floated up and dropped bombs of extraordinary destructiveness on Cambrai and its suburbs. What bothered me throughout was less the mosquito-like drone of the engines and the clumps of echoing explosions than the timorous scuttling downstairs of my hosts. The day before my arrival, admittedly, a bomb had gone off just outside the window, which had hurled the master of the house, who had been sleeping in my bed, clear across the room, broken off one bedpost, and riddled the walls. It was, perversely, this circumstance that gave me a feeling of security, because I did at least partly subscribe to the old warrior’s superstition that the safest place to be is in a new crater.
After one day of rest, the old training regimen set in again. Drill, lessons, roll-calls, discussions and inspections filled a great part of the day. We took up an entire morning agreeing on a verdict in a court of honour. For a while we were given nothing to eat in the evenings except cucumbers, which the men dubbed ‘vegetarian sausages’.
Most of all, I was busy with the training of a small shock troop, since I had come to understand in the course of the last few engagements that there was an increasing rearrangement of our fighting strength in progress. To make an actual breach or advance, there was now only a very limited number of men on whom one might rely, who had developed into a particularly resilient body of fighters, whereas the bulk of the men were at best fit to lend support. Given these circumstances, it might be better to be at the head of a small and determined group than the commander of an uncertain company.
I spent my free time reading, swimming, shooting and riding. Some afternoons, I would fire over a hundred bullets in target-practice at tin cans and bottles. When I rode out, I would come upon propaganda leaflets which the enemy had taken to dropping in ever greater numbers as morale bombs. They were made up of political and military whisperings, and glowing accounts of the wonderful life to be had in British prisoner-of-war camps. ‘And just remember,’ one of them said, ‘it’s not that hard to lose your way at night, on your way back from getting food, or a digging detail!’ Another reproduced the text of Schiller’s poem, ‘Free Britannia’. These leaflets were sent up on hot-air balloons, and were carried by favourable winds across the lines; they were bundled up with thread, and set adrift by a timed fuse after floating for a certain period of time. A reward of thirty pfennigs apiece showed that the high command did not underestimate the threat they posed. The costs were levied on the population of the occupied territory.
One afternoon, I got on a bicycle and pedalled into Cambrai. The dear old place was in a dire state. The shops and cafés were closed down; the streets seemed dead, in spite of the field-grey waves that kept washing through them. I found M. and Mme Plancot, who had entertained me so kindly a year ago, delighted to see me again. They told me that things in the town had got worse in every respect. Most of all, they complained about the frequent air attacks, which compelled them to rush up and down stairs, often several times a night, arguing whether it was better to be killed outright by a bomb in their first basement, or buried alive in the second. I felt very sorry for these old people with their worried expressions. A few weeks later, when the guns began to speak, they were finally forced to leave the house they had spent their lives in.
At eleven o’clock on 23 August, I had just dropped off to sleep when I was woken by loud knocking on the door. An orderly had come with marching orders. All day, the rolling and stamping of unusually heavy artillery fire had blown across from the front, and had reminded us on the exercise grounds, over our lunch and over games of cards, not to be too hopeful as far as the further duration of this rest period was concerned. We had coined an onomatopoeic front-line expression for this distant sound of cannons: ‘It’s whumping.’
We hurriedly got packed up and were on the road to Cambrai during a cloudburst. We arrived at our destination of Marquion a little before five in the morning. The company was placed in a large yard enclosed by the ruins of farm outbuildings, and told to take shelter wherever we could. With my one company officer, Lieutenant Schrader, I crept into a little brick building, which as its acrid aroma indicated, must have served as a goat-shed in peacetime, though our immediate predecessors were several large rats.
In the afternoon there was an officers’ meeting, at which we were told that the following night we were to take up a position of readiness to the right of the main Cambrai–Bapaume road, not far from Beugny. We were warned of the danger from a new breed of rapid, agile tanks.
I paraded my company in battle order in a small apple orchard. Standing under an apple tree, I addressed a few words to the men, who were drawn up in front of me in a horseshoe arrangement. They looked serious and manly. There wasn’t much to say. In the course of the last few days, and with a kind of sweepingness that is only to be explained by the fact that an army is not only men under arms, but also men fused with a sense of a common purpose, probably every one of them had come to understand that we were on our uppers. With every attack, the enemy came forward with more powerful means; his blows were swifter and more devastating. Everyone knew we could no longer win. But we would stand firm.
On a table improvised from a wheelbarrow and a door, Schrader and I ate our supper and shared a bottle of wine in the open. Then we bedded down in our goat-shed until two in the morning, when the sentry announced that the trucks were waiting in the market-place.
In spectral light, we clattered through the war-torn country of last year’s Cambrai battles, wending our way through eerily devastated villages, along roads lined with walls of rubble. Just before Beugny, we were unloaded and led to our position. The battalion occupied a hollow on the Beugny–Vaux road. In the morning, an orderly brought instructions for the company to advance to the Frémicourt–Vaux road. This pattern of small advances afforded me the certainty that we were in for some action before nightfall.
I led my three platoons strung out in file across the terrain, with circling aeroplanes bombing and strafing overhead. When we reached our objective, we dispersed into shell-holes and dugouts, as occasional shells came lobbing over the road.
I felt so bad that day that I lay down in a little piece of trench and fell asleep right away. When I woke up, I read a few pages of Tristram Shandy, which I had with me in my map case, and so, apathetically, like an invalid, I spent the sunny afternoon.
At six-fifteen, a dispatch-rider summoned the company commanders to Captain von Weyhe.
‘I have some serious news for you. We are going on the offensive. After half an hour’s artillery preparation, the battalion will advance at seven o’clock tonight from the western edge of Favreuil, and storm the enemy lines. You are to march on the church tower at Sapignies.’
After a little further discussion, and handshakes all round, we raced back to our companies, as the bombardment was to start in barely ten minutes’ time, and we still had quite a stretch ahead of us. I informed my platoon commanders, and had the men fall in.
‘By sections in single file twenty yards apart. Direction half-left, treetops of Favreuil!’
Testimony to the good morale we still enjoyed was that I had to nominate the man to stay behind to inform the cookers where to go. No one volunteered.
I marched along in the van with my company staff and Sergeant-Major Reinicke, who knew the area very well. Our artillery fire was landing behind hedges and ruins. It sounded more like furious yapping than anything seriously destructive. Behind u
s, I saw my sections advancing in perfect order. Alongside them, shots from aeroplanes sent up puffs of dust, bullets, empty shells and driving bands from shrapnels whizzed with fiendish hissing in between the files of the thin human line. Away on the right lay Beugnâtre, heavily attacked, from where jagged lumps of iron buzzed across and stamped themselves on the clayey soil.
The march got a little more uncomfortable still once we were over the Beugnâtre–Bapaume road. All of a sudden, a spate of high-explosive shells landed in front of, behind and in the midst of us. We scattered aside, and hurled ourselves into craters. I landed with my knee on something a frightened predecessor had left behind, and had my batman scrape off the worst of it with a knife.
Around the edge of Favreuil, the clouds from numerous shell-bursts congregated, and up and down in between them in rapid alternation went the geysers of soil. To find a position for the company, I went on ahead to the first ruins, and then with my cane gave a signal to follow.
The village was fringed with badly shelled huts, behind which parts of the 1st and 2nd Battalions gradually came together. During the last part of the march, a machine-gun had taken its toll. I watched from my vantage-point the little string of puffs of dust, in which one or other of the new arrivals would sometimes find himself caught as in a net. Among others, Vice-Sergeant-Major Balg of my company got a bullet through the leg.
A figure in brown corduroy strode with equanimity across this fire-swept piece of terrain, and shook me by the hand. Kius and Boje, Captain Junker and Schaper, Schrader, Schläger, Heins, Findeisen, Höhlemann and Hoppenrath stood behind a hedge raked with lead and iron and talked through the attack. On many a day of wrath we had fought on one and the same battlefield, and today once more the sun, now low in the Western sky, was to gild the blood of all or nearly all.