Langemarck

Cambrai is a quiet, sleepy little town whose name calls up many historical associations. The narrow, old-world streets twist about round the mighty town-hall, the weathered gates, and the many churches. Ponderous towers rear themselves from a maze of gables. Broad avenues lead to the park, which is adorned by a monument to the aviator Blériot.

The inhabitants are peaceful, friendly folk who lead a comfortable bourgeois life in the large houses which are simple to look at but richly furnished. Many retired people settle here. The town is rightly called “la ville des millionaires,” for there were over forty millionaires there just before the war.

The war broke its enchanted sleep with brutal suddenness and turned it into a focus of mighty battles. A new life hurried and rattled over its unevenly paved streets and clattered against the little windows where anxious faces were on the watch. Foreigners drank the treasured cellars dry, flung themselves on the great mahogany beds, and upset the contemplative civilians with something fresh every day. Now in their changed surroundings they could do no more than collect at corners or in doorways and hold whispered consultations over the latest fairytales of an eyewitness and the most certain news of the final and speedy victory of their fellow-countrymen.

The men lived in barracks and the officers in the Rue des Liniers. While we were there this street had the appearance of a students’ quarter. Conversation carried on from one window to another, nightly singsongs, and little romantic adventures were the order of the day.

We went every morning for training to the great square near the village of Fontaine, which was later to become famous. My job was a very interesting one, for Colonel von Oppen had entrusted me with the training of the storm troop.

My billet was extremely comfortable. It was in the house of a jeweller named Plancot-Bourlon, and he and his wife were both very friendly. They seldom allowed my midday meal to pass without sending me up something good from their own table. At night we drank tea together, played cards, and talked. One of the questions we most often discussed, naturally enough, was the very difficult one, why there had to be wars.

On these occasions M. Plancot used to tell stories of the citizens of Cambrai, who are never too busy for a joke. In peace time these stories had sent streets, wineshops, and market into roars of laughter, and they reminded me very forcibly of Tillier’s wonderful uncle Benjamin.

A wicked fellow once sent to all the hunchbacks of the district requesting them to call on a certain solicitor with reference to an important inheritance. At the appointed hour he and some of his friends watched from the window of the opposite house and enjoyed the delightful comedy⁠—seventeen outraged and weeping hobgoblins storming the office of the unfortunate lawyer.

There was the story, too, of an old spinster who lived opposite, and who was distinguished by a long and slender neck strangely bent to one side. Twenty years before she had been notoriously eager to marry. Six young fellows presented themselves, and to each she gladly gave the permission to speak to her parents. The next Sunday a capacious coach drove up in which sat the six young men, each with a bouquet in his hand. In terror she locked the door and hid herself, and the suitors delighted the neighbourhood by playing the fool in the street.

Again: A notorious young Cambresian went to the market and asked a peasant’s wife, pointing to a soft, round, and appetizing cheese covered with green mould:

“What is the price of this cheese?”

“Twenty sous, sir.”

He paid her the twenty sous.

“So the cheese is now mine?”

“To be sure, sir.”

“And can I do what I like with it?”

“Well, of course!”

Smack! he threw the cheese in her face and fled.

On the 25th of July we left the dear little town and entrained for Flanders. We had read in the papers that an artillery duel was raging there such as the world had never seen.

We detrained in Staden to the distant thunder of guns and marched through the unfamiliar landscape to our camp. On either side of the dead-straight road were green and fruitful fields, raised up in plots like flowerbeds, and luscious, well-watered meadows surrounded by hedges. There were clean farmhouses scattered here and there, with low thatched or tiled roofs, and on the walls bundles of tobacco-plants hung out to dry. The countryfolk on the roads were of German type, and their rough speech had a pleasant, homely sound. We spent the afternoon in the farm gardens to avoid being seen from the air. Now and then the shells of heavy naval guns could be heard rushing hoarsely overhead from far back and then exploding not far from us. A number of men of the 91st Regiment who were bathing in one of the numerous little streams were killed.

Towards evening I had to go with an advance detachment to the front line to prepare for the relief, and we went through Houthulst Forest and the village of Koekuit to the reserve battalion. On the way we had to “break step” once or twice on account of some heavy shells. In the darkness I heard the voice of a recruit: “The officer never lies down!”

“He knows what he is about,” an older soldier informed him. “Wait till a proper one comes, and he’ll be the first to lie down!”

The man had noticed the principle I always followed: “Only take cover when it is necessary, and then do it quickly.”

It is true that only the experienced can judge of the necessity, and feel the end of the shell’s trajectory before the recruit has even recognized the light warning whisper in the air.

Our guides, who did not seem to be quite sure of themselves, took us along an endless box-trench. Such is the name for trenches that are not dug in the ground, because the water would stand in them at once, but built up above its level with sandbags and fascines. Then we went along the side of a terribly dishevelled wood, from which a few days before, according to our guides, a regimental staff had been driven by the small matter of one thousand 24-centimetre shells. “Things seem to be done on a large scale here,” I thought to myself.

After we had wandered backwards and forwards through thick undergrowth, we came to a halt in a piece of ground overgrown with weeds and fringed by a marshy swamp in whose black pools the moonlight was reflected. Our guide had abandoned us, and all the while shells were falling somewhere and slinging up the mud that splashed back again into the water. At last the miserable guide returned to receive the full volley of our wrath and to announce that he had found the way. Nevertheless, he again led us astray till we came at last to a dressing-station over which shrapnel shells were bursting in couples at short and regular intervals. The bullets and empty cases rattled through the branches. The M.O. on duty gave us a sensible fellow, who took us on to the Mäuseburg, the headquarters of the reserve line.

From there I went straight on to the company of the 225th Regiment that our 2nd Company was to relieve. It took me a long search in the shell-pitted country before I found a few ruinous houses that were fortified inside by reinforced concrete. One had been smashed in the day before by a shell and the occupants squashed like mice beneath the falling roof-plate.

I spent the rest of the night in the company commander’s overcrowded concrete blockhouse. He was an honest front-line swine who, with his orderlies, was passing the time over a bottle of schnapps and a good chunk of pork, with frequent intervals during which he listened to the steadily increasing shellfire and shook his head. Then he would fall to bemoaning the good old days on the Russian front, and cursing the way his regiment had been pumped out. At last I fell asleep.

My sleep was heavy and oppressed. The H.E. shells falling all round the house in the pitchy darkness evoked a sense of indescribable loneliness and forlornness from the murdered landscape. Involuntarily I nestled up to a man who shared the same bunk. Once I was scared by a heavy thump. My men made a light and looked to see if the wall had been penetrated. It was found that a light shell had exploded against the outer wall.

I spent the next afternoon with the commanding officer of the battalion at the Mäuseburg, as there were still some important points on which I had to be informed. All the time 15-centimetre shells were falling round headquarters, while the captain, with his adjutant and the orderly officer, played an endless game of Skat over a soda water bottle full of raw spirits. Sometimes he put his cards down to send off a report, or to discuss very seriously whether our concrete shelter was bombproof. We convinced him, in spite of the warmth with which he argued the contrary (the wish being clearly the father to the thought), that we were not fitted to sustain a direct hit from the air.

In the evening the customary artillery fire rose to frantic intensity, and in the front line there was an unceasing display of coloured lights. Dust-covered despatch-carriers brought in reports that the enemy was attacking. After weeks of drumfire the infantry battle had begun.

I went back to company headquarters, and waited there for the arrival of the 2nd Company. It appeared at four in the morning during a very lively burst of shellfire. I took command of my platoon at once and led it to a position covered with the fragments of a shell-destroyed house, a spot most unspeakably forlorn in the midst of an immense and dreary waste of shell-holes.

At six in the morning the Flanders mist lifted and gave us a glimpse of our ghastly surroundings. At once a swarm of low-flying enemy machines appeared, scrutinizing the battered ground and sounding sirens. Any scattered detachments of infantry that were above ground instantly endeavoured to hide themselves in shell-holes.

Half an hour later a terrific artillery fire set in. It raged round our refuge like a typhoon-scourged sea round an island. The hail of shells thickened to a throbbing wall of fire. We crouched together, expecting each second the crashing hit that would sweep us up with our concrete blocks and make our position indistinguishable from the desert of craters all round.

The whole day passed in bursts of heavy shellfire like this, with pauses during which we prepared ourselves for the next bout.

In the evening an exhausted orderly turned up and handed me an order. From this I learned that the 1st, 3rd, and 4th Companies were to counterattack at 10:30, and that the 2nd Company after being relieved was to swarm into the front line. In order to get a little strength to face the hours ahead, I lay down, never dreaming that my brother Fritz, whom I supposed to be still in Hanover, was in a section of the 3rd Company, and passing close to my hut in a hurricane of fire on his way to the attack.

My sleep was disturbed for a long while by the pitiful cries of a wounded man whom two Saxons had brought in. They had lost their way, and were utterly done up and had fallen asleep. When they woke in the morning, their comrade was dead. They carried him to the nearest shell-hole, and after covering him with a few shovelfuls of earth they went on their way, leaving one more to be added to the countless lonely and unknown graves of the war.

I woke at eleven out of a heavy sleep. I washed in my helmet, and sent for orders to the company commander. To my astonishment, he had already gone, without letting me or Kius or our platoons know anything of it.

This showed the consequence of putting officers of another arm of the service in command of front-line troops, only because of seniority, and though they did not know even how to handle a rifle. Let such fetishes be followed when human lives are not at stake.

While I still sat cursing on my bunk and considered what to do, an orderly appeared from battalion headquarters with the order to take immediate command of the 8th Company.

I learnt that the counterattack of the 1st Battalion on the previous night had been repulsed with heavy loss, and that what was left had taken up a defensive position in a small wood called Dobschütz wood, and to right and left of it. The 8th Company had been given the task of swarming into the wood in support. It had, however, run into a barrage in the intervening ground and suffered heavy losses. As the company commander, Lieutenant Büdingen, was among the fallen, I was to lead the company on in a fresh advance.

After I had taken leave of my orphaned platoon, I made my way with the orderly across country. The desolation lay under a rain of shrapnel, and as we went along half-bent we were checked by a despairing voice. In the distance we could see a figure with bleeding arm-stumps raising itself from a shell-hole. We pointed to the hut we had just left, and hastened on.

I found the 8th Company crouching behind a row of concrete positions: an utterly dispirited little mob.

“Platoon commanders!”

Three N.C.O.s came forward and declared that a further advance towards Dobschütz wood was out of the question. It was indeed the fact that the shells were bursting on our front like a wall of fire. Next I had the platoons assembled behind three concrete positions. Each was about fifteen to twenty men strong. At this moment the fire lifted and came on to us. The scene was indescribable. At the concrete position on the left a whole section was blown into the air; the right got a direct hit and buried Lieutenant Büdingen, who was still lying there wounded, beneath its tons of masonry. We were in a mortar and beaten down by incessant concussions. Faces as white as death stared at one another, and the cries of those who were hit never ceased.

It was all the same now whether we stayed where we were, or went on or back. So I gave the command to follow me, and sprang out into the fire. After a few steps I was covered with earth and flung into a shell-hole by a shell which fortunately exploded straight upwards. I observed soon after, however, that the fire was not so heavy further on. When I had worked my way forward another two hundred metres, I looked about me. There was not a soul in sight.

Finally, two men emerged from the clouds of dust and smoke. Then one more. Then another two. With these five men I safely arrived at my goal.

I found Lieutenant Sandvoss, commander of the 3rd Company, and little Schultz seated in a half-smashed-up concrete pillbox with three heavy machine-guns. I was greeted with a loud “Hullo!” and a sip of cognac; and then the situation, by no means a pleasant one, was explained to me. The English were close in front of us, and both our flanks were in the air. We cordially agreed that this was a corner too tight for any but old veterans who had grown grey in the smoke of battle.

Without a word of warning Sandvoss asked me if I had heard anything of my brother. My feelings can be imagined when I heard that he had been in yesterday’s attack and was missing. A moment later a man came and told me that my brother was lying wounded in a shelter close by, and pointed out to me a desolate blockhouse covered with uprooted trees. I hurried across a clearing which was covered by rifle-fire, and went in. What a meeting! My brother lay among a crowd of groaning stretcher-cases in a place that stank of death. He was in a sad plight. He had been hit by two shrapnel bullets in the attack, one of which had pierced the lung and the other his right shoulder. Fever shone in his eyes; it was only with difficulty that he could move or speak or breathe. He returned the pressure of my hand, and we began to talk.

It was clear to me that I could not leave him there, for at any moment the English might attack, or a shell put an end to the already damaged concrete shelter. It was a brother’s duty to get him sent back at once. In spite of Sandvoss, who would not hear of any weakening of our strength, I ordered the five men who had come with me to get my brother back to the Kolumbusei dressing-station, and from there to bring back with them men to rescue the other wounded also. We tied him in a groundsheet, and stuck a long pole through it, which rested on two of the men’s shoulders. I squeezed his hand again, and the sad procession started on its way.

From the edge of the wood I watched the swaying load on its way through another wood, among towering shell-bursts. As each one struck, I caught myself together, though the place where I was was no safer. It is odd that another’s danger makes a stronger impression than one’s own. This may be explained partly by the confidence in his own luck that everyone has. The belief that nothing can happen to himself makes each man underestimate the danger. It is only in another’s case that one sees how overwhelming it is and how defenceless its victim.

After I had skirmished a little from the shell-holes on the forward edge of the wood with the English, who were coming on very slowly, I spent the night with my men and a machine-gun section among the ruins of the concrete pillbox. H.E. shells of quite extraordinary ferocity were going up all the time close by us. In the evening I was within an ace of being killed by one of them. The machine-gun began rattling off towards morning, when some figures approached in the darkness. It was a patrol of the 76th Regiment, come to get into touch with us. One of them was killed. There were many such mistakes during these days, but it was of no use to dwell on them.

At six in the morning we were relieved by a detachment from the 9th Company. They brought me orders to occupy the Rattenburg with my men. I had a casualty on the way, a Fahnenjunker wounded by a shrapnel bullet.

We found the Rattenburg to be a shell-shot house walled up with concrete slabs. It stood close by the marshy bed of the Steenbeek, which no doubt well deserved its name.

Somewhat done up, we entered into possession and flung ourselves down on the straw-covered bed boards. After a good feed and a pipe of tobacco we felt more ourselves again.

In the early hours of the afternoon we were heavily shelled with shells up to the heaviest calibres. Between six and eight one explosion overlapped another, and the building often trembled at the sickening thump of a dud and threatened to collapse. When the fire ebbed later on, I went cautiously over a hill that was covered in a close and whirring mesh of shrapnel to the Kolumbusei dressing-station, and asked for news of my brother. The doctor, who was examining the terribly mangled legs of a dying man, told me to my joy that he had been sent back in a fairly promising state.

Later in the night my ration-party turned up and brought the company, now reduced to twenty men, warm food, bully-beef, coffee, and bread, tobacco and schnapps. We ate heartily, circulating the bottle of “ninety-eight percent” without any irksome distinctions of rank. Then we turned in; but our rest, owing to the swarms of gnats that rose from the marshy banks of the stream, the shells, and the gas that was shot over occasionally, was not exactly undisturbed.

The result was that I was so fast asleep the next morning that after a heavy bombardment had gone on for hours my men had to rouse me. They told me that men were coming back all the time, saying that the front line had been evacuated and that the enemy were coming on.

I first followed the old soldier’s maxim, “A good breakfast holds body and soul together,” and then, after lighting a pipe, went outside to see what was happening.

I could not see a great deal, as the surroundings were veiled in a thick haze. The artillery fire was increasing from moment to moment, and soon reached that pitch of intensity which the nerves, incapable of further shock, accept with an almost happy indifference. Showers of earth clattered incessantly on the roof, and the house itself was hit twice. Incendiary shells threw up heavy milk-white clouds, out of which fiery drops rained on the ground. A piece of this burning stuff came smack on a stone at my feet, and went on burning for a good minute. We were told later that men hit with it had rolled on the ground without being able to put it out. Shells with delay-action fuses burrowed into the ground, rumbling and pushing out flat disks of soil. Swathes of gas and mist crept over the battlefield, hugging the ground. Immediately in front we heard rifle and machine-gun fire, a sign that the enemy must have advanced already.

Below, beside the stream, I saw some men walking through a constantly changing scenery of mud fountains shooting high into the air. I recognized the commanding officer, Captain von Brixen, supported by two stretcher-bearers, and with an arm bound up. I hastened towards him; he called out that the enemy was advancing, and warned me not to delay in getting under cover.

Soon the first bullets smacked in the shell-holes near by or were shivered against the broken masonry. More and more fleeing figures disappeared to our rear, while in front a storm of rifle-fire testified to the embittered defence put up by those who were holding on.

It was time to act. I decided to defend the Rattenburg, and made it plain to the men, among whom at this there were some rueful faces, that I had not the remotest thought of retiring. I posted the men at loopholes, and our one machine-gun was mounted on a windowsill. A shell-hole was chosen and a stretcher-bearer, who soon had plenty to do, was installed there. I, too, took a rifle I found lying about, and hung a belt of cartridges round my neck.

As my crowd was very small I tried to get reinforcements from the numbers of men who were passing by in disorder. Most of them obeyed my call willingly, glad to join up, while others whose nerve had gone hurried past after a hasty pause to see that there was nothing to be got by staying with us. In such cases a tender consideration has no place.

“Fire!” I called to the men who stood in front of me in the cover of the house, and a few shots rang out. Overcome by the eloquence of the rifle-muzzle, the shirkers, of whom in every battle there must always be some, came slowly nearer, though it was plain from their faces how little eager they were to give us their company. A canteen orderly whom I knew well made all kinds of excuses to get away. But I would not let go of him.

“But I have no rifle!”

“Then wait till there’s a man shot.”

During a final crisis of artillery fire, in the course of which the ruins of the house were hit several times and the fragments of bricks pattered down on our helmets from high in the air, I was thrown down to the ground in the flash of a terrific burst. To the astonishment of the men, I got up again unhurt.

After this wild whirligig of shells it became calmer. The fire lifted over us and rested on the Langemarck-Bixschoote road. But we were none the better off in mind, for so far we had not seen the wood for trees; the danger had been so overwhelming that we had had no time or power to think of it. Now that the storm had swept on past us, everyone had time to get ready for what was inevitably coming nearer. And it came.

The rifles in front were silent. The opposition had been overcome. Out of the haze emerged a thick advancing line. My men fired crouching behind the wreckage. The machine-gun tacked out. As though they had been wiped away, the attacking line vanished into shell-holes and opened fire on us. Strong detachments went on to the left and right. We were soon surrounded by a ring of fire.

The position was pointless, and there was no object in sacrificing the men. I gave the order to retire. Now that they had started, it was difficult to make the men give up the fight.

Making use of a low-lying cloud of smoke, we got away unobserved, partly by wading above the hips along the stream. I was the last to leave the little fort. Lieutenant Höhlemann, whom I helped along, was bleeding from a severe head-wound, though he joked and made light of it as we went.

As we crossed the road we ran into the 2nd Company, who had been sent up in support. After a brief consultation we decided to stay where we were and await the enemy. Here, too, we had to compel troops of other units, who wished to carry out retirements on their own, to remain. Stern measures were necessary to persuade artillerymen, and signallers, and so on, that even they in circumstances like these had to take hold of a rifle and get into the firing-line. With the help of Kius and a few quiet folk I soon got matters into order by means of entreaties, commands, and blows with the butt-end.

Then we sat ourselves in a half-dug trench and had breakfast. Kius pulled out his inevitable camera and took photographs. On our left there was some movement on the outskirts of Langemarck. The men began shooting at some figures that were running here and there, until I told them to stop. Immediately after a N.C.O. came up and reported that a company of the Fusilier Guards were taking up a position on the road, and that our fire had inflicted losses.

I gave the order thereupon to advance and occupy the highest part of the road. There was lively rifle-fire, some of the men fell, and Lieutenant Bartmer of the 2nd Company was severely wounded. Kius remained at my side and finished his piece of bread-and-butter as we went. When we occupied the line of the road, whence the ground fell away to the Steenbeek, we saw that the English had been on the point of doing the same. The first khaki uniforms were already within twenty metres of it. As far as the eye could see, the ground to our front was full of troops in line and column. They were swarming round the Rattenburg too.

We made full use of the surprise of our sudden appearance and at once opened a steady fire on them. Along the Steenbeek a whole column broke up. One man had a coil of wire on his back of which he was unrolling one end. Others jumped like hares this way and that while our bullets raised clouds of dust among them. A sturdy corporal of the 8th Company rested his rifle with the greatest calm on a shattered tree-stump and shot four of the enemy one after the other. The remainder crept into shell-holes and lay concealed there till nightfall. We had made a good clearance.

At about eleven o’clock aeroplanes tied with streamers came diving down on us and were driven off by a lively fire, which they replied to from above. In the midst of the wild clatter I could not help smiling when a man reported to me and desired to have it placed on record that he had shot down a machine in flames with his rifle.

Immediately after occupying the road I had made a report to regimental headquarters and asked for reinforcements. At midday detachments of infantry, engineers, and machine-guns came up in support. According to the time-honoured tactics of Old Fritz all of them were crammed into the already crowded front-line. Here and there the English laid out a few of the men who incautiously crossed the road.

About four o’clock a very unpleasant bombardment with shrapnel started. The volleys got the road to a T. It was clear to me that the aeroplanes had ascertained the line on which we were making a stand, and that there were worse times ahead.

And, in fact, we were soon being heavily shelled with shells of all sizes. We lay close to one another in the narrow and crowded ditch of the road. Fire danced before our eyes; twigs and clods whistled about our ears. Close to me on my left a flash flared out, leaving a white suffocating vapour behind it. I crept on all-fours to the man next me. He moved no more. The blood trickled from many wounds caused by small jagged splinters. On my right, too, there were many hit.

After half an hour it was quiet and we set to digging out the shallow trough of the ditch so as to have at least protection from splinters in case of a second bombardment. Our entrenching tools came against rifles, equipment, and cartridge-cases of 1914, showing that this soil was not drinking blood for the first time.

As dark came on we were given another thorough good do. I crouched beside Kius in a little hole that had cost us some blisters. The ground rocked like a ship’s deck under hit after hit at the least possible distances. We were ready for the end.

I chewed my pipe, my helmet pressed on to my forehead, and stared at the pavé whose stones showered sparks under the bursting lumps of metal; and I succeeded in philosophizing myself into courage. The most remarkable thoughts shot through my head. I took a trashy French novel, Le Vautour de la Sierra, that I had picked up at Cambrai, into lively consideration. I repeated several times to myself a saying of Ariosto, “A great heart cares nothing for death when it comes, so long as it be glorious.” It may seem extraordinary, but it helped me to keep control over myself. When the shells gave our ears a little peace, I heard fragments of the beautiful song from “The Black Whale of Askelon” close beside me, and I thought that my friend Kius must have had a drop too much. Everyone has his own manner of calming his nerves.

At the end of it a large splinter struck my hand. Kius took out a torch. We found only a scratch.

Hours such as these were without doubt the most awful of the whole war.

You cower in a heap alone in a hole and feel yourself the victim of a pitiless thirst for destruction. With horror you feel that all your intelligence, your capacities, your bodily and spiritual characteristics, have become utterly meaningless and absurd. While you think it, the lump of metal that will crush you to a shapeless nothing may have started on its course. Your discomfort is concentrated in your ear, that tries to distinguish amid the uproar the swirl of your own death rushing near. It is dark, too; and you must find in yourself alone all the strength for holding out. You can’t get up and with a blasé laugh light a cigarette in the wondering sight of your companions. Nor can you be encouraged by the sight of your friend clipping a monocle into his eye to observe a hit on the traverse close beside you. You know that not even a cock will crow when you are hit.

Well, why don’t you jump up and rush into the night till you collapse in safety behind a bush like an exhausted animal? Why do you hang on there all the time, you and your braves? There are no superior officers to see you.

Yet someone watches you. Unknown perhaps to yourself, there is someone within you who keeps you to your post by the power of two mighty spells: Duty and Honour. You know that this is your place in the battle, and that a whole people relies on you to do your job. You feel, “If I leave my post, I am a coward in my own eyes, a wretch who will ever after blush at every word of praise.” You clench your teeth and stay.

All of us held on that evening, all who lay along that dark Flanders road. Officers and men alike showed what they were made of. Duty and Honour must be the cornerstones of every army. And a heightened sense of duty and honour must be inculcated in the officer who fights in the forefront of the battle. For that, suitable material and a fixed mould are required. The truth of this is fully known only in war.⁠ ⁠…

It began to drizzle after midnight; patrols of a regiment which had come up meanwhile in support went forward as far as the Steenbeek and found nothing but mud-filled shell-holes. The enemy had withdrawn beyond the stream.

Worn out by the fatigues of this tremendous day, we got down into our holes, with the exception of the men on guard. I pulled the cloak of my dead neighbour over my head and fell into a restless sleep. As it grew light I was awakened by a curiously cold feeling and discovered that I was in a sad way. It was raining in torrents and the drainage of the road was pouring into the hole where I was sitting. I built a small dam and bailed out my resting-place with a saucepan-lid. In consequence of the ever-increasing volume of water I had to add one course after another to my earthwork, till at last faulty construction yielded to growing weight and a muddy stream gurgled in and filled my refuge to the brim. While I was busy fishing out my revolver and helmet, tobacco and rations were borne away along the ditch, whose other occupants were faring just as I was. We stood shivering with cold and without a dry stitch on our bodies, knowing that when next we were shelled we had no protection whatever. It was a cheerful situation. And here I permit myself the observation that even artillery fire does not break the resistance of troops so surely as wet and cold.

The steady downpour was nevertheless a true blessing in its effects upon the further course of the battle; for the English offensive was just in its first and most critical days. The enemy had to bring up his artillery over a morass of waterlogged shell-holes, while we had undamaged roads for the transport of all we needed.

At eleven in the morning, when we were already desperate, an angel appeared in the person of a despatch-rider who brought the order for the regiment to assemble in Koekuit.

We saw on the way how difficult communications must have been on the day of the attack. The roads were packed with men and horses. Twelve horribly mutilated horses lay in one heap near some limbers whose wreckage was scarcely recognizable.

What was left of the regiment assembled in a rain-soaked meadow over which single bursts of shrapnel opened their white balls. It was a shock to see what was left⁠—a body of about the strength of a company with a small group of officers in the midst. What losses! Of two battalions, nearly all the officers and men! The survivors stood in pouring rain with gloomy faces till quarters were assigned. Then we dried ourselves in a wooden hut, crowding round a glowing stove, and got fresh courage from a hearty meal. Human nature is indeed indestructible.

Towards evening shells fell in the village. One of the huts was hit and several men of the 3rd Company killed. In spite of the shelling we soon lay down to sleep, only hoping that we should not have to counterattack in the rain or be flung without warning into some gap in the line.

At three in the morning orders came that we were definitely to be taken out of the line. We marched along the pavé to Staden. It was strewn all the way with dead bodies and smashed-up transport. Twelve dead lay round the crater of one gigantic burst alone. Staden, that had been so full of life on our arrival, now had many houses shelled; the deserted marketplace heaped up with household goods hurriedly taken out of the houses. One family was leaving the town at the same time as we were. It led a cow as its only possession. The man had a wooden leg, and the woman led the crying children by the hand. The confused din behind added to the sadness of the picture.

The remains of the 2nd Battalion were quartered in a lonely farm, concealed behind tall hedges in the midst of luxuriant fields. There I was given command of the 7th Company. Till the end of the war its fortune and mine were one.

In the evening we sat before an old tiled hearth and refreshed ourselves with a stiff grog while we listened to the thunder of battle breaking out afresh. A sentence from the army communiqué suddenly met my eyes in a recent newspaper: “We succeeded in holding up the attack on the Steenbeek.”

It was odd to feel that our apparently confused doings in the depth of night had won a place in history. The enemy offensive, launched with such tremendous force, had been brought to a standstill, and we had had a large share in that result.

Soon we tured in in the hayloft. In spite of the profound sleep in which they were sunk, most of the sleepers tossed to and fro in their dreams, as though they had to fight their Flanders battle over again.

On the 3rd of August we set off on the march to the station of the neighbouring town of Gits. We took much of the cattle and produce of the now deserted neighbourhood with us. The whole battalion, in fine spirits again, shrunken though it was, had coffee in the station restaurant. Two buxom Flemish waitresses added to its flavour and to the general contentment by their bold speeches. The men were particularly delighted when they addressed everyone, officers included, as “thou,” as it is the local custom to do.

A few days later I had a letter from my brother in hospital in Gelsenkirchen. He wrote that he was booked for a stiff arm and a shaky lung.

I take the following pages from his diary. They fill in my own account and give a vivid picture of the impressions made on a young boy who was thrown into the hurricane of modern battle:⁠—

“ ‘… Fall in for the attack!’ The face of my platoon commander, Sergeant-major Schnell, looked in over the entrance of the little hole covered with branches and boards where we had lain for hours smoking and eating. The three men near me stopped their talk and jumped up cursing. I got up and put on my equipment, set my helmet tight on my head, and went out into the dusk. It was misty and chilly. The scene had altered meanwhile. The shellfire had moved off and now thundered on other parts of the immense battlefield. Aeroplanes roared through the air and calmed one’s anxiously peering eyes with their large iron crosses.

“I went once more to a spring which was still wonderfully clear in spite of the wreckage and rubbish, and drawing up the bucket I drank, and filled my water-bottle.

“The company fell in by platoons. I quickly stuck four bombs in my belt and went to my section, from which two men were missing. I had scarcely time to write down their names before we moved off. The platoons proceeded in single file over the shell-holes, skirting bits of timber, squeezing against hedges, sinking into holes, and making their way with much clatter and rattle to attack the enemy.

“I knew what my task was. The 2nd Battalion of our regiment and a battalion of another on our flank had orders to drive some English detachments, which had pushed on over the canal, back to the other side again. My orders were to take up a position in advance with my section and to lie down in readiness to open the counterattack. While I was going over this again, I happened to see the pale, set face of a young N.C.O. ‘Bachmann,’ I thought, although I did not know him. It was my comrade, a Fahnenjunker likewise in Sandvoss’s company. I lost sight of him, and looked with astonishment at the scene that had suddenly unfolded.

“The remains of a large wood, black, branchless, and splintered stumps, stuck up in isolation here and there from the scarred Flanders plain. Immense swathes of smoke drifted through the air and hung the sky with a gloomy, heavy pall. Stinking gases, yellow and brown, hung and swayed heavily to and fro over the earth that the shells tore up so mercilessly again and again.

“The order was given to be ready for gas. At this moment a terrific fire came on us like a fit. The soil flew up in fountains and a hail of splinters swept the ground like a shower of rain. For a moment everyone stood dazed. Then all broke away like mad. I heard our commanding officer, Captain Böckelmann, bellowing out something, but I could understand nothing.

“My men had vanished and I found myself in another platoon. I pressed on with the rest to the wreckage of a village that the shells had razed relentlessly to the very foundations. We pulled out our masks.

“Without a moment’s warning we were in a terrific machine-gun barrage. Everyone threw himself down. Near me on my left Lieutenant Ehlers was kneeling up, and near him lay a N.C.O. keeping a lookout. In front there was a yellow, flashing wall of fire. Burst followed burst. Fragments of masonry, showers of soil, brickbats, and splinters rained down on us and struck sparks from our helmets. I stared into this glaring witch’s cauldron.

“Compared to this, what was the half-hour’s drumfire that had prepared for this ill-fated attack? For it was as clear to me as a vision that it had failed. Thrice at short intervals a tremendous crash swept through the uproar. Whole rubbish-heaps took the air at once, whirled around and pelted down again with hellish clatter.

“I looked to my right. Ehlers was shouting something. He raised his left hand, beckoned over his shoulder, and with a shout sprang forward. I got up heavily and followed at the double. My feet were burning like fire after the night before, but my socks had soaked up the blood and the pain was not so sharp.

“I had not gone twenty steps when the flash of a shrapnel blinded me as I struggled up out of a shell-hole. It burst not ten paces in front of me at a height of three metres. I felt two dull blows against my chest and shoulder. My rifle flew from my hands of its own accord and fell backwards into the shell-hole. I could still hear remotely Ehlers shouting as he went by, ‘It’s finished him.’ He was not to live out another day. The attack miscarried, and in jumping back he was killed and all who were with him. A shot through the back of the head ended the life of this gallant officer.

“When I woke from a long fainting fit all was still. I tried to stand up, but I felt a sharp pain in my right shoulder that increased with every movement. My breath was short and gasping. The lung could not get enough air. ‘Hit through lung and shoulder,’ I thought, and threw away pack and belt and, in a mood of utter apathy, gas-mask too, and hung my water-bottle on the hooks of my tunic.

“After five steps I sank helplessly into a neighbouring shell-hole. After an hour perhaps, I made a second attempt to crawl on, as a light drumfire had started. This attempt, too, miscarried. I lost my water-bottle and sank into a state of exhaustion, from which after a long time the sensation of burning thirst aroused me.

“It began to rain gently. I succeeded in collecting a few muddy drops in my steel helmet. I had lost all sense of direction. There was a thunderstorm, but its peals were lost in a new onset of drumfire. I clung close to the side of the shell-hole. A clod struck my shoulder. Heavy splinters swept over my head. Gradually I lost all sense of time.

“Once two men appeared, hurrying by with long strides. I called to them, but they disappeared in the mist like shadows without hearing me. At last three men came straight towards me. I recognized the middle one as the N.C.O. of the day before. They took me to a little hut near by. It was crammed with wounded, whom two orderlies were seeing to. I had lain thirteen hours among the shell-holes.

“In a corner I saw Bachmann, who convulsively clasped his shattered knee and swallowed down his agony. We spoke in fragments. Now and then when anyone pushed against him he suppressed a groan.

“All the while the artillery fire kept at the same pitch. Shell after shell burst close to us, often covering the roof with sand and earth. My wounds were dressed, and I was given a new mask and a piece of bread spread with coarse red jam, and a little water. The orderly looked after us like a father.

“The English began to push forward. They came on by springs and then disappeared in shell-holes, as I could make out from the cries of consternation outside.

“Then my company commander, Lieutenant Sandvoss, came in. He asked me if I could walk, and then was called away by an orderly and vanished. Immediately I heard him giving orders. A machine-gun was mounted and began to tack out.

“Suddenly a young officer smeared in mud from his boots to his helmet, with the Iron Cross of the 1st class on his breast, rushed in. It was my brother, who days before, down the line, was said to be dead. We greeted each other, smiling rather awkwardly in the stress of our feelings. After a minute or two he left me and came back with the last five men of his company. I was put in a groundsheet and carried from the battlefield to the thunder of guns.”