At the Cojeul River

After a few days on rest we relieved the 10th Company in the front line on the 9th December. Our part of the line was in front of Vis-en-Artois, as I mentioned above. My company front was bounded on the right flank by the Arras-Cambrai road, on the left by the marshy bed of the Cojeul river, across which we kept touch with the neighbouring company by nightly patrols. The enemy’s lines were hidden from sight by a hill lying between the front lines. Apart from an occasional patrol messing about with our wire at night, and the hum of an electric-light engine set up in Hubert’s Farm not far off, we had no knowledge of the enemy. On the other hand, the frequent gas attacks were unpleasant and claimed many victims. They were carried out by means of hundreds of iron cylinders buried in the earth and discharged by electricity in a salvo of flame. As soon as the light showed, gas-alarm was given, and anyone who had not his mask on and the flap well tucked in found himself in a bad way. In many spots, too, the gas reached an almost absolute density, so that even the mask was useless, since there was literally no oxygen there to breathe. Consequently there were many casualties.

My dugout was in the steep wall of a gravel-pit behind the line, and was shelled nearly every day. Behind, the iron girders of a destroyed sugar-factory showed up in grotesque desolation.

The gravel-pit was an unholy spot. Among the shell-holes, filled with the refuse of war, the crosses of fallen trench-dwellers stuck up awry. At night I could not see my hand in front of my face, and had to stand still between Verey lights in case I fell off the duckboards into the marsh at the edge of the Cojeul.

I spent the days, when I was not busied over works of construction going on in the trench, in the ice-cold dugout, reading a book or drumming my feet against the dugout framework to get some warmth into them. A bottle concealed in a niche of the chalk served the same purpose, and the remedy was sedulously applied by my orderlies and me.

If the smoke of a fire, however small, had wound up into the still December sky, the place would have become utterly uninhabitable. So far the enemy took the sugar-factory to be headquarters and behaved accordingly. Thus it was not till evening that we came alive. The little stove was then lighted and spread genial warmth as well as thick smoke. Soon the pots and pans of the ration-party, just returned from Vis, clattered down the dugout stairs. They had been long and eagerly awaited. And then when the eternal rotation of swedes, barley, and dried vegetables was interrupted by beans or dumplings, our joy knew no bounds.

As I sat at my little table I used to listen with delight to the racy talk of the men crouching in a cloud of tobacco smoke over the stove, on which stood a pan full of grog diffusing a powerful odour. War and peace, battle and home, rest-place and leave, were discussed in the dry Lower Saxon way. Love, too, played a leading part.

On the 17th of December I went on leave, and came back on the 2nd of January.

On the 19th of January we were relieved at four in the morning and marched through snow to Gouy. Here we were to stay some while, training for the great offensive. Ludendorff’s marvellously clear scheme of training, which was distributed even to company commands, foreshadowed the scope of the coming attack.

We practised skirmishing in line and open warfare and did a lot of shooting with the rifle and machine-gun. As all the villages behind the line were crammed to the attics, every little slope was in use as a range, so that the bullets whistled about the country very much as in a battle. A machine-gunner of my company shot the C.O. of another unit off his horse while he was reviewing some troops. Fortunately the wound was not mortal, and equally fortunately the deed was not clearly brought home to us.

Sometimes I made practice attacks with the company on complicated trench-systems, with live bombs, in order to turn to account the lessons of the Cambrai battle. Here, too, we had casualties.

On the 24th of January, Colonel von Oppen, who was esteemed by all, left us to take over a brigade in the far southeast. The whole regiment keenly felt the loss. During the long years of the war he had become part of the life of the troops he commanded. Besides the warm sympathy he took in the destiny of those under his command, he had a quality not very common among officers who have grown old in the monotony of peacetime soldiering, the power to adapt himself to the immense innovations brought about by the war. Such a man can effect marvels in wartime. Unfortunately his last words, “Auf wiedersehen in Hannover!” did not come true. Our beloved colonel saw neither his country nor his proud regiment again. He fell a victim to plague, and lies in foreign soil, far from his own country.

On the 6th February we were moved back to Lécluse again, and on the 22nd we spent four days in the shelled area left of the Dury-Hendecourt road, and went on working-parties into the front line at night.

As soon as I saw this part of the line, opposite the slagheaps that used to be Bullecourt, I was certain that a part of the great offensive, of which the western front was talking with bated breath, would be launched at this point.

Everywhere construction was going forward with feverish haste: dugouts sunk, roads laid down. The shell-hole area was beset with little placards standing in the open and displaying incomprehensible figures that denoted presumably the positions of the batteries and headquarters. Our aeroplanes flew to and fro in a phalanx to prevent observation by the enemy. A novelty that interested us on this front was that every day precisely at twelve a black ball was let down from the observation balloons and disappeared precisely at 12:10. This was done to let the troops know the exact time.

Towards the end of the month we marched to our old quarters in Gouy. After further battalion and brigade rehearsals we twice practised a breakthrough of the whole division over prepared ground with a whole trench-system marked out. Finally, the general commanding the division addressed the officers in a way that left no doubt that the offensive was to be launched in a few days. The brazen spirit of the attack, the spirit of the Prussian infantry, swept through the massed troops assembled here in the opening spring on the soil of France to go through the ordeal of battle.

If the aim the higher command had in view was not attained, it was certainly not the fault of the officers and the men. After forty-four months of hard fighting they threw themselves upon the enemy with all the enthusiasm of August 1914. No wonder it needed a world in arms to bring such a storm-flood to a standstill. In the course of time, when the waves of hatred have subsided, history will recognize that we fought as no people ever fought before.

It is a pleasure, too, to recall those evenings when we sat together round the table and talked, hotheaded, of the fresh frolic in front of us⁠—the war of movement. Though our last coins went in wine, what need had we of money beyond the enemy’s lines, or, indeed, in a better beyond?

Who knows but that the world
To ruin may be hurled?
But if it last today,
Today’s enough!

On the last evening it needed Captain von Brixen’s representation that the staff also had the right to exist, or we should have smashed glasses, bottles, and crockery against the walls. The men, too, were in good form. It was enough to hear them talk of the coming event as the “Hindenburg flat-race” in their dry Lower Saxon way, to know that they would take hold as they always did, with an absolute reliability and without a word too much. How could one be behindhand when these sons of the old oak-encircled homesteads went into battle? The gleam of many an ideal that shimmered for me over our war aims has been dashed to earth by war. One remains forever: this fidelity that cannot be shaken.

On the 17th March, towards dusk, we left the quarters we had now become very much attached to, and marched to Brunemont. All the roads were crowded with columns on the march, eagerly pressing forward, with countless guns and endless transport. Nevertheless, everything went precisely according to plans worked out by the general staff. Woe to any unit whose movements were not up to scheduled time! They were ruthlessly relegated to the ditch and had to wait hours before they found a gap into which they could squeeze. Once we were caught in the scrum and Captain von Brixen’s charger was pierced by an iron-tipped wagon-pole and killed.