In the Village of Fresnoy

My leave, on which I went a few days later, was this time not curtailed. I find in my diary this brief but eloquent record: “Leave spent very happily. Need have no reproaches on that score after my death.” On the 9th April 1917 I returned to the 2nd Company, then quartered in the village of Merignies, not far from Douai. The pleasure of my return was dashed by an unexpected alarm which had for me the peculiarly unpleasant consequence that I had to ride the company charger to Beaumont. Through rain and sleet I rode at the head of the transport, that slipped all over the paved road, till we reached our destination at one in the morning.

When I had seen to my horse and the men as well as I could, I went in search of quarters for myself; but there was not an unoccupied corner to be found. At last a commissariat orderly had the excellent idea of offering me his bed, as he had to sit up for the telephone calls. While I was pulling off my boots and spurs he told me that the English had captured Vimy Ridge and a lot of ground from the Bavarians.

I could not help observing, in spite of his hospitality, that he was not at all pleased to find his quiet village headquarters turned into an assembly-point for the fighting troops.

The next morning the battalion marched in the direction of heavy firing to the village of Fresnoy. There I received orders to set up an observation post. I took a few men and explored the western outskirts of the village and found a cottage, in whose roof I had a lookout post made that commanded the front. We took the cellar as our dwelling-place, and in the course of making room there we came upon a sack of potatoes, a very welcome addition to our scanty provisions. My batman now roasted me potatoes every evening, with salt. Lieutenant Gornick also, like a true friend, sent me a large parcel of Leberwurst and some red wine. He had found them among the stores left behind in haste in Villerval, which had already been evacuated, but which Gornick was holding as an outpost with one platoon. I at once equipped an expedition furnished with perambulators and similar means of transport to secure this treasure. Unfortunately it returned empty-handed, as the English were already in full strength on the edge of the village. Gornick told me later that after the discovery of a large cellar of red wine a drinking bout had started, which, in spite of the attack then being made on the village, it had been extremely difficult to bring to a close.

On the 14th of April I was given the task of organizing an intelligence clearing-station in the village. For this purpose I had despatch-riders, bicyclists, telephone and light-signal stations, underground telegraph wires, carrier pigeons, and a chain of Verey-light posts placed at my disposal. I looked out a suitable cellar, with a deep dugout, and returned for the last time to my dwelling-place on the western edge of the village.

During the night I fancied I heard a crash now and then and shouts from my batman, but I was so dazed with sleep that I only murmured, “Oh, let them shoot!” and turned over, though the whole place was thick with dust. Next morning I was awakened by little Schultz, Colonel von Oppen’s nephew, who was shouting, “I say⁠—don’t you know yet that your whole house has been blown to blazes?”

When I got up and surveyed the damage, I observed that a shell of the heaviest calibre had been planted on the roof, and that the observation post, indeed the whole house, was no more. If the velocity had only been a trifle slower the hit would have got us in the cellar and plastered the walls with us, so that in the nice saying of the trenches we might have been “scraped off with a spoon and buried in the pot.” Schultz told me that his orderly said to him when he saw the ruins of the house: “There was a lieutenant in there yesterday. Better have a look and see whether he is there still.” My batman was beside himself at the way I had slept through it.

During the morning we shifted our quarters into the new cellar. On the way we were nearly hit by the church tower, which the engineers were unobtrusively blowing up in order to deprive the enemy of an easy mark. In a neighbouring village they had forgotten to warn a post of two men who were keeping a lookout from the top of the tower there. By a miracle they were retrieved uninjured from the debris.

We furnished our roomy cellar very passably, for we collected what we required from mansion or cottage, and what we had no use for we burned in the stove.

During the first day there was a succession of duels to the death in the air. They ended nearly every time in the defeat of the English, as Richthofen’s battle formation was circling over the neighbourhood. Often five or six machines were driven down or shot down in flames. Once we saw the pilot thrown from his machine and fall to the earth as a separate black speck. There were dangers, too, in staring up into the sky. A man of the 4th Company was killed by a falling splinter that hit him in the neck.

On the 18th April I paid a visit to the 2nd Company in the line. It held a salient in front of the village of Arleux. Lieutenant Boje told me that he had only had a single casualty for a long while, as the English shelling was so methodical that it allowed them to sidestep and avoid it every time.

After I had wished him all the best, I had to leave the village at the gallop, on account of the continuous shooting by the enemy’s heavy guns. I stopped 300 metres behind Arleux to watch the clouds that rose from each hit. They were red or black according to whether brick walls had been pounded or garden soil flung up; and among them was the delicate white of exploding shrapnel. When a few “whizzbangs” began falling on the footpaths that connected Arleux with Fresnoy, I abandoned the pursuit of further impressions and decamped at full speed, in case I might be “slain,” as the stock phrase then was in the 2nd Company.

I was often making expeditions of this kind, sometimes as far as the little town of Hénin-Liétard, for during the first fourteen days, in spite of my large staff, there was not a single report to communicate.

From the 20th April Fresnoy was shelled by a 30.5 centimetre gun. The shells came over with a perfectly infernal hiss. After each hit the village was veiled in a huge reddish-brown cloud of picric-acid gas. Even the duds caused a small earthquake. A man of the 9th Company, who was surprised by one of them in the courtyard of the château, was flung over the trees in the park and broke most of his bones in the fall.

In the afternoon the village was shelled with all calibres. In spite of the danger I could not tear myself from the attic windows of my house. It was a breathless sight to see how small parties and despatch-carriers chased over the shelled area, often throwing themselves flat, while the ground was flung up on every side of them.

When I went into the village after this, one more cellar had been hit and set on fire. The salvage operations recovered only three bodies. Near the cellar lay one on its face, with the uniform in shreds. The head was torn off and the blood flowed into a puddle of water. When the stretcher-bearer turned the body over to remove any valuables I could not help seeing that on the stump of the arm there was only a thumb.

The enemy artillery became more active every day and left no doubt of an early attack. On the 27th April at midnight I had the following telephone message: “67 from five a.m.,” which meant in our code, “Utmost readiness for an alarm from five a.m.”

So I lay down again, hoping to be all the better prepared for the expected exertions. However, as I was just falling asleep a shell hit the house and blew in the wall of the cellar stairs and threw the masonry into the cellar. We jumped up and hurried into the dugout.

As we crouched on the steps in the light of a candle, disconcerted and weary, the sergeant of my light-signalling section, whose post, together with two valuable signalling lamps, had been smashed up in the afternoon, came rushing in. “Sir, the cellar of No. 11 has had a direct hit and some of the men are still buried in the ruins.” As I had two cyclists and three telephonists in No. 11, I took some men and hurried to their help.

I found a lance-corporal and a wounded man in the dugout, and was given the following account. When the shells began to fall suspiciously near, four of the five occupants of the cellar decided to go down into the dugout shaft. One of them went straight away, one stayed where he was in bed, while the remaining three delayed to pull on their boots. The most prudent and the least, as so often in war, came off the best: the first had not a scratch, and the second had a splinter in the thigh. The three others were caught by the shell, which came through the cellar wall and exploded in the opposite corner.

After this narration I lit a cigar and went into the smoke-filled cellar. In the middle of it there was a heap of wreckage⁠—bedsteads, straw mattresses, and various pieces of furniture, all in fragments and piled nearly up to the roof. After we had put a few candles on ledges of the walls, we set to work. Catching hold of the limbs that stuck out from the wreckage, we pulled out the dead bodies. One had the head struck off, and the neck on the trunk was like a great sponge of blood. From the arm stumps of another the broken bones projected, and the uniform was saturated by a large wound in the chest. The entrails of the third poured out from a wound in the belly. As we pulled out the last a splintered board caught in the ghastly wound with a hideous noise. The orderly made a comment on this, and was reproved by my batman with these words: “Best hold your tongue. In such matters talking nonsense serves no purpose.”

I took an inventory of the valuables found on them. It was a horrible job. The candles flickered red in the vaporous air, and as the two men handed me pocketbooks and silver objects it seemed as though we were engaged in some dark and secret work. The fine yellow plaster-dust fell on the faces of the dead and gave them the fixed look of wax figures. We threw coverings over them and hurried out of the cellar, after taking up the wounded man in a groundsheet. With the stoical advice to set his teeth, we carried him through a whirl of shrapnel fire to the dressing-station dugout.

When I got back to my dwelling-place the first thing I did was to have a few cherry-brandies. The experience I had been through had touched my nerve. Soon we were being violently shelled once more, and with the example before our eyes of what artillery fire can do in cellars we made all speed into the dugout shaft.

At 5:15 a.m. the fire increased to an incredible violence. Our dugout rocked and trembled like a ship on a stormy sea. All round resounded the rending of masonry and the crash of collapsing houses.

At seven a.m. I received a message by light-signal addressed to the 2nd Battalion: “Brigade requires immediate report on the situation.” After an hour a despatch-carrier brought back the news: “Enemy taken Arleux and Arleux park. Ordered 8th Company to counterattack. No news so far. Rocholl, Captain.”

This was the only message that my tremendous apparatus of transmission had to deal with during all three weeks of my time in Fresnoy⁠—though certainly it was a very important one. And now that my activity was of the utmost value, the artillery fire had put nearly the whole organization out of action. Such were the results of over-centralization.

This surprising information explained why we had heard rifle-bullets, fired at no very great range, clattering against the walls of the houses.

We had scarcely realized the great losses suffered by the regiment, when the shelling was renewed with increasing fury. My batman was standing, the last of all, on the top step of the dugout stairs, when a crash like thunder announced that the English had at last succeeded in knocking in our cellar. The trusty Knigge got a good squared building-stone on the back, but was not hurt. Above, everything was shot to blazes. Daylight came to us past two bicycles squeezed into the dugout entrance. We made ourselves as small as we could on the lowest step, while heavy explosions and the din of falling masonry convinced us of the insecurity of our refuge.

By a miracle the telephone was still working, so I explained the plight we were in to my chief at the Division, and received orders to withdraw with my men into the dressing-station dugout close by.

After packing up what it was most essential to take with us, we set about leaving the dugout by the second and only remaining exit. In spite of my peremptory orders, backed up by unequivocal threats, the telephone staff, which was not much used to war, hesitated so long to venture out of the protection of the dugout into the shellfire that this exit, too, was smashed in with a crash by a heavy shell. Luckily, no one was hit; only our little dog howled miserably, and from that moment was never seen again.

We now pushed aside the bicycles that barred the way out through the cellar, and, creeping on all-fours over the heaps of debris, got into the open through a narrow crack in the wall. We did not pause to observe the incredible change that these few hours had produced in the village, but ran out of it as fast as we could. The last of us had scarcely left the yard gates when the house got another tremendous hit.

A compact belt of fire covered the area between the edge of the village and the dressing-station dugout. Light and heavy shells with direct and delay action fuses, duds, empty cases, and shrapnel combined to produce a nightmare of acoustic and optical effects. Through it, passing to right and left of the witch’s cauldron seething in the village, the reserves were marching up.

In Fresnoy the shells were sending up the earth in fountains as high as church towers. Each seemed bent on outdoing its predecessor. As though by magic, one house after another was sucked into the earth. Walls collapsed, gables fell, and bare rafters were flung through the air to mow the roofs of neighbouring houses. Clouds of splinters danced above whitish swathes of vapour. Eye and ear hung as though entranced upon this dance of destruction.

We spent two days in a painfully confined space in the dressing-station dugout, for besides my men there were the staffs of two battalions, two relief detachments, and the indispensable corps troops. Naturally, the constant coming and going in front of the entrances was observed by the enemy. Soon the range was got to a yard, and at intervals of a minute shells fell on the track outside, and there were casualties all the time. Indeed, the shouts for stretcher-bearers never ceased. I lost four bicycles which we had left outside, owing to this disagreeable bombardment. They were scattered to the four winds, in various states of contortion.

Stark and still, and wrapped in a groundsheet, Lieutenant Lemière, the commander of the 8th Company, lay at the entrance, his large horn spectacles still on his nose. His men had brought him there. He was shot in the mouth. His younger brother was killed a few months later in exactly the same way.

On the 30th April I handed over to my successor of the 25th Regiment, by whom we were relieved. We made our way to Flers, the rendezvous of the 1st Battalion. Leaving the much-shelled limekilns, “Chez bon temps,” on our left, we went quickly on through the afternoon sunshine along the path to Beaumont. Our eyes rejoiced again in the beauty of the earth. We drew in the intoxicating breath of spring, thankful to have escaped the intolerably crowded confinement of the dugout. With the thunder of the guns in our rear, my sympathies were with the poet:

“Surely the day that God has given
Has better uses than to kill.”

In Flers I found the quarters allotted me in the possession of some staff sergeant-majors, who, under the pretext that they had to keep the room for a certain Baron von X, refused to give it up to me. They failed, however, to reckon with the overstrained nerves of a worn-out front-line soldier. I told my men to smash in the door, and after a brief hand-to-hand engagement, under the eyes of the owner of the house, who, much alarmed, hastened on to the scene in his dressing-gown, we sent the gentlemen flying down the stairs. My batman carried politeness to such lengths that he threw their trench boots after them. After this assault I took possession of the warm bed, surrendering half of it to my friend Kius, who was wandering round without a billet. Sleeping in a bed after so long a time did us so much good that we woke next morning in all our “pristine vigour.”

As the 1st Battalion had come off the lightest in the casualties of the recent days of fighting, we were in excellent trim as we marched to Douai station. From there we went by train to the junction of Busigny. We were to have some days’ rest in Serain, a village in the neighbourhood. The population was friendly, and we had good quarters. On the very first evening the sounds of happy forgathering were to be heard from many of the houses.

These drink-offerings on the morrow of well-fought fights count among an old soldier’s happiest memories. And though ten out of twelve had fallen, still the last two, as sure as death, were to be found on the first evening of rest over the bottle, drinking a silent health to their dead companions, talking and laughing over all they had been through. For dangers past⁠—an old soldier’s laugh. For those to come⁠—a full glass, though death and the devil grin there, as long as the wine was good. Such has ever been the custom of war.

It was the officers’ mess more than all that made me appreciate this. It was here, among the spirits of the undaunted dead, that the will to conquer was concentrated and made visible in the features of each weather-beaten face. There was an element at work here that the very horror of the war underlined and even spiritualized, an element one seldom found among the men with whom one lay in the shell-holes⁠—sporting joy in danger, and a chivalrous impulse to see things out. And to say the least of it, I have never in this much-reviled circle heard one fainthearted word.

My batman came next morning and read me the orders. From these it appeared that I was to take command of the 4th Company. It was in this company, in the autumn of 1914, that Hermann Löns, the Lower Saxon poet, fell.