English Gains

On the 4th of June 1918 I joined the regiment again. It was out on rest at Vraucourt, now far behind the line. The new commanding officer, Major von Lüttichau, gave me the command of my old 7th company.

As I drew near my quarters the men ran to meet me and, taking my things from me, led me in in triumph. It was like coming back to a family circle.

We occupied a number of corrugated-iron huts in the middle of neglected grass fields whose green was lit up with sheets of yellow flowers. This waste ground, that we had christened “Die Wallachei,” was grazed by herds of horses. If you went out of the hut you experienced the disquieting sense of empty spaces that sometimes grips the cowboy, the Bedouin, and every other dweller of the waste. We went long walks in the evenings in the country round, and looked out for partridges, or for war material hidden in the grass. One afternoon I rode to the sunken road near Vraucourt where there had been such hard fighting two months before. It was thickly edged with crosses, among which I found many a well-known name.

Soon the regiment was put into the line in front of Puisieux-au-Mont. We were conveyed by night on lorries, when the cone of light from the parachute lights of night bombers showed up the road as a strip of white in the darkness. Near or far the rushing swirl of the descending bomb was swallowed in reverberations as it burst. Then the searchlight’s quivering arm probed the dark sky for the treacherous nighthawk, shrapnel burst in a scintillating spray, and tracer-shells chased each other in a long chain like fiery wolves.

A repulsive scent of corpses hung about this conquered ground. Whether strong or almost imperceptible, it acted on the nerves as an irritant and wrapped one in a mood of overstrung and eerie foreboding.

“Offensive incense,” I heard a cynic and an old soldier say at my elbow, as we were passing for some minutes between rows of dimly-seen graves.

From Achiet-le-Grand we marched along the embankment of the Bapaume railway line and cut across country into the line. The shelling was lively. Two shells of medium calibre fell close while we were making a brief halt. The memory of the unforgettable night of horror, March 19th, drove us onwards. Close behind the front line we came on a noisy company that had been relieved, and chance took us past them just as their mouths were stopped by a dozen or two of shrapnel. Heaping them with abuse, my men jumped head over heels into the next communication trench. Three were hit and had to go back to the field dressing-station.

I was utterly exhausted when at three in the morning I reached my dugout. It was miserably small, and promised little for my comfort during the days ahead.

A candle glowed red in the indescribable atmosphere. I stumbled over a tangle of legs and brought the hovel to life by the magic word “Relief.” A string of curses proceeded from a hole like a baker’s oven, and then one by one emerged an unshaven face, a pair of battered shoulder-straps, a weather-beaten uniform, and two clods of earth in which presumably boots were concealed. We sat down at a so-called table and went through the business of handing over, in which each tried to do the other in to the tune of a dozen iron rations and a few Verey-light pistols. My predecessor was then disgorged into the open through the narrow entry, prophesying as he went that the rotten hole would not last out another three days. I remained inside⁠—the new captain of Sector A.

I surveyed our trench next morning and found little to cheer me. I had scarcely left the dugout when I met two coffee-carriers bleeding from wounds inflicted by shrapnel bullets in the communication trench. A few steps further Fusilier Ahrens reported to me with a hit from a ricochet.

We had the village of Bucquoy in front of us and Puisieux-au-Mont behind. The company was without support in a front line that was both shallow and narrow, and we were separated from the 76th Infantry Regiment on our right by a large unoccupied gap. The left flank of the regimental front comprised a piece of splintered woodland, known as Wood 125. By orders, no deep dugouts were excavated. The men were accommodated two at a time in little dugouts held up by so-called tin Siegfrieds.

As my dugout was situated behind quite another part of our front, the next thing I did was to seek new quarters. A hut-like affair in a length of trench that had fallen in seemed to me to meet the case when I had put it into a defensible state by collecting a few lethal instruments there. Once installed, I lived a hermit’s life among fields of green, disturbed only by an occasional runner or orderly, who carried the paper war even into this retired spot.

One was able then to shake one’s head between two shell-bursts over many matters of grave importance, such as that the town-major of X had lost a terrier with black spots, answering to the name of Zippi, if one had not lost oneself with savage humour in the suit for maintenance of the servant-girl Makeben against Corporal Meger. The pro formas and returns, too, provided us with needful distraction. One was kept so fully occupied with the inner organization that time was scarcely left over for the little affair of holding the line. And indeed one was asked little about it. It often appeared that collecting empty cartridge-cases was of far greater importance. Whenever the visit of a superior officer was announced I hurried along the trench collecting paper and cartridge-cases and instructing the men on guard how they were to report themselves and click their heels together. Also that they were not to commit the crime of averting their eyes from the enemy in the course of the operation (though not even the tip of the enemy’s nose had been seen for three months past), nor even to let their rifles out of their hands. The sure reward was three days’ solitary confinement.

These things were typical of us and did much harm. The letter stifled the spirit. The war was bureaucratized. At the same time, the front-line officer had far too much discipline in his bones to raise these matters, though they were the object of curses in every platoon commander’s dugout. Yet it was for him to fuse the old Prussian spirit with the methods of modern warfare.

To return to my dugout, to which I gave the fine name “Wahnfried House.” Its roof was my only worry; for it could only be described as relatively shellproof⁠—that is, only so long as it was not hit. However, I comforted myself with the thought that I was no worse off than the men. Every afternoon my batman put a blanket down in an immense shell-hole approached by a sap we had excavated, and there I had a sunbath. My siesta was, I confess, frequently interrupted by the bursts of shells nearby or the whizz of bomb-splinters when we were bombed from the air.

We were often heavily shelled at night. I lay on my bunk on a mattress of fresh grass and listened with a quite peculiar and a quite ungrounded sense of security to the shells falling around, while the soil descended in showers at each shock. Or else I went outside and looked from the fire-step across the sad night landscape, that was in such strange and indescribable contrast to the fiery spectacle whose dance-floor it was.

At such moments there crept over me a mood I had never known before: a certain falling-off of the fighting spirit, a war-weariness occasioned by the length of time I had been exposed to the war’s excitements. Nothing but war and danger; not a night that was not convulsed with shells. The seasons succeeded each other. Winter came and then summer, and one was always in the war. Tired of it and used to it, one was all the more dispirited and fed up with it just because one was used to it. One was blinded no longer by appearances. The war had raised deeper problems of its own. It was a singular time.

The front line had comparatively little to suffer from the enemy fire. Otherwise it would have been untenable. It was Puisieux and the hollows near it that were chiefly and almost continuously shelled; and in the evenings the bombardment rose to quite extraordinary intensity. Ration-parties and reliefs were consequently very risky matters.

On the 14th of June I was relieved at two in the morning by Kius, who also had returned and was in command of the 2nd Company. We spent our time on rest behind the railway embankment at Achiet-le-Grand, which gave shelter to our huts and dugouts. The English shelled time after time with heavy low-trajectory shells. The quartermaster-sergeant of the 3rd Company, Rackebrand, fell a victim. A few days before this there had been an appalling disaster. A bomb had been dropped in the midst of the band of the 76th while a crowd stood round listening. There were many of the 73rd too among the casualties.

There was a cluster of shell-shot tanks quite close to the embankment, and I often went to look at them. They bore names that were sometimes humorous, sometimes defiant, and sometimes affectionate, and they were camouflaged with paint; but they were all in a pitiable plight. The little cabin of armoured plate, now shot to pieces, with its maze of pipes, rods, and wires, must have been an extremely uncomfortable crib during an attack, when the monsters, hoping to baffle the aim of our guns, took a tortuous course over the battlefield like gigantic helpless cockchafers. I thought more than once of the men in these fiery furnaces.

On the morning of the 18th the 7th Company had to return to Puisieux on account of the uncertain state of affairs there, to be at the disposal of the C.O. of the troops in the line for carrying-parties or any other purpose. We occupied cellars and dugouts on the edge of the village nearest Bucquoy. Just as we arrived, a salvo of heavy shells went up in the surrounding gardens. In spite of this I did not refrain from breakfasting in a little arbour at the entrance of my dugout. After a while there was another of them; so I made a dash for it. It went up quite close. A stretcher-bearer of my company named Kenziora, who was passing by with some dixies of water, was hit in the lower part of the body. As we bound him up, great drops of sweat stood on his forehead; and when I tried to comfort him, he groaned out: “It is a mortal wound. I can tell that well enough.” In spite of this prophecy I shook him by the hand half a year later on our entry into Hanover.

In the afternoon I took a solitary walk through Puisieux. The village had already been pounded to a heap of ruins by the Somme battle, and now shell-holes and wreckage of walls wore a mantle of green from which the white disks of the ruin-loving elder shone out on every side. Numerous more recent bursts had made rents in this mantle and once more laid bare the soil of the gardens, so often churned up already.

The village street was fringed with the refuse of the advance now come to a standstill. Shell-shot wagons, abandoned ammunition, the weapons of hand-to-hand fighting, skeletons of half-decayed horses, surrounded by the hum of myriads of flies, all told of the vanity of all things in the fight for life. The church that occupied the highest point in the village consisted of nothing now but a dreary heap of stones. While I picked a bunch of wonderful roses in a waste garden a few shells came to remind me of prudence in this dancing-place of death.

After a few days we relieved the 9th Company in the line of resistance, about 500 metres behind the front line. Three of my men were wounded in the course of the relief. Captain von Ledebur was wounded in the foot next morning by a shrapnel bullet close to my dugout. Though far gone in consumption, he felt that fighting was his vocation. It was his fate to succumb to this slight wound. He died soon after in hospital. On the 28th, Sergeant Gruner, who was in charge of my ration-party, was hit by a shell-splinter. This was the ninth casualty in the company within a few days.

After we had been a week in the front line we had again to occupy the line of resistance, since our relief battalion was pretty well disbanded owing to Spanish influenza. With us, too, several men reported sick daily. Influenza was so severe in the neighbouring division, that an enemy flier dropped a pamphlet to say that the English would undertake the relief if the troops were not taken out soon. We heard, all the same, that the malady was spreading more and more on the other side too. With us the effects were worse owing to undernourishment, and in addition we were kept in constant readiness for an attack, as Wood 125 was being shelled incessantly with an intensity that boded no good. The 6th Company, who were in the line there, were many of them down with carbonic-oxide poisoning. Some were only saved by an oxygen apparatus.

One afternoon while walking along the trench I found several buried cases of English ammunition, and blew off the tip of my right forefinger through foolishly taking a rifle-grenade to pieces. The same evening, while I stood talking to Lieutenant Sprenger on the top of my dugout, a heavy shell went up close to us. We argued over the distance it was from us, and Sprenger estimated it at ten metres, I at thirty. In order to see how far I could rely on myself in such matters, I measured it and found the shell-hole twenty-two metres away from where we were standing. People are very apt to underestimate distances.

On the 20th of July I was again with my company at Puisieux. I spent the whole afternoon standing on the ruins of a wall and watching the front line, where, it seemed to me, something very suspicious was going on.

Wood 125 was often veiled in the smoke of violent shelling, while green and red lights were rising and falling. Often the artillery fire was silent, and then the tac-tac-tac of a machine-gun could be heard and the faint reports of distant bombing.

From where I stood the whole thing was like a pretty game. It had not the majesty of the first-class battle, and yet the relentless strife between two brazen forces was there to see.

All over the empty expanse there were hidden eyes fixed on the little wood, round whose shuddering oak tops fountains of brown earth danced in ever-changing figures. All round, distributed in trenches, shell-holes, caverns, and ruins, were men and guns, awaiting their turn in the battle for a piece of ground covered with splintered trunks.

Far behind, at opposite poles, two generals are seated at tables spread with maps. There is a report, a brief exposition, a few words to a staff officer, a conversation on the telephone. An hour later a fresh bombardment tears up the old shell-holes and a fresh hecatomb of men bleeds in the suffocating fumes.⁠ ⁠…

Towards evening I was summoned to the headquarters of the troops in reserve, and there learned that the enemy had got a footing on the left flank of our trench system. In order to make a little room in front of us again, the order was that Lieutenant Petersen with the storm company was to clear the hedge trench that ran along the side of the wood, and I with my fellows the communication trench running parallel to it in a hollow of the ground. We moved off at dawn, but before we left our jumping-off place the rifle-fire became so violent that we abandoned the enterprise for the time. I gave orders to occupy the Elbinger Alley, and made up for my broken night’s sleep in an immense cavern of a dugout. At eleven in the morning I was awakened by the noise of bombs from the left flank, where we held a block. I hurried to the spot and found the usual scene in this description of fighting. White clouds of bomb-smoke hanging over the trench and a few traverses back, a machine-gun rattling from either side, while in between there were men bending forward and jumping now forward, now back. The little coup de main was already beaten off, but it had cost one man, who lay behind the block, torn by bomb-splinters.

Towards evening I had orders to lead the company back to Puisieux, and then, on arrival, I was ordered to take two sections and join in rolling up the trench in the hollow. At 3:40 we⁠—that is to say, Lieutenant Voigt of the storm company with a storm troop, and I with my two sections⁠—set off for the starting-point. Our instructions were to roll up the trench from the red point K to red point Z after a five minutes’ artillery and trench-mortar preparation.

I cannot deny that both of us considered the artillery preparation, and in fact the taking and occupying of the trench, as unnecessary and ill-judged. The trench lay in the bottom of the hollow and was overlooked from all sides. The decisive point was the hedge trench: if an attack was to be made, it was essential to take it, and it automatically gave possession of the hollow. I cherished the firm suspicion that this operation had been ordered from the rear and by the map, for it could not have occurred to anyone who had seen the lie of the land to give such orders as these.

After the artillery preparation⁠—which cost us one man wounded⁠—we advanced and rolled up the trench. Shortly before two we encountered opposition and bombed our way through it. As we had gained our objective and were not disposed for further fighting, we made a block and posted a section with a machine-gun behind it.

The only pleasure I had in the affair was the behaviour of the men of the storm troop, who reminded me forcibly of Grimmelhausen’s Simplicissimus. These young warriors with great shocks of hair and puttees fell into a hot dispute twenty metres from the enemy because one of them had called the other a rabbit. They cursed like troopers and vaunted themselves with mighty boasts. “Look here, we are not all such funks as you!” one of them shouted at last, and rolled up fifty metres of trench by himself.

By midday the section holding the block came back. They had had casualties and could hold out no longer. I had already given them up for lost, and was surprised that anyone at all had been able to pass along this trench and still be alive. That is what comes of war on paper.

In spite of our counterattacks, the enemy still had a firm footing on the left flank of our front line and in the strongly barricaded communication trenches, and so threatened our support line.

On the 24th of July I went to the new C sector of the support line to find my way about, as I was to take it over on the next day. I got Lieutenant Gipkens, commanding the company, to show me the block at the hedge trench, and sat down beside him on a fire-step. Suddenly Gipkens seized hold of me and pulled me to one side. Next moment a shot flew into splinters on the very place where I had been sitting. By a lucky chance he had seen a rifle barrel slowly pushed forward out of a loophole in the block only forty metres from us. The keen eye of an artist had saved my life, for any fool could have hit me at that range. I was told later that three men of the 9th Company had already been shot through the head at this apparently harmless spot. In the afternoon I was tempted from my coal-hole by some not particularly violent artillery fire, though I was at the moment comfortably reading, over a cup of coffee. On the front there were signals for the barrage going up incessantly. Wounded men, limping back, told that the English had penetrated sectors B and C in the support line and occupied the ground in front of sector A. Immediately after came the bad news that Lieutenants Vorbeck and Grieshaber had fallen while defending their sectors, and that Lieutenant Kastner was badly wounded. At eight, too, Sprenger, till now in temporary command of the 5th Company, came to my dugout with a splinter in his back. After fortifying himself with a pull at the bottle, he went on to the dressing-station, quoting, “Back now! Back now, Don Rodrigo!” His friend Lieutenant Domeyer followed him, bleeding from the hand.

Next morning we relieved C sector, which had meanwhile been cleared of the enemy. There I found pioneers Boje and Kius with a detachment of the 2nd Company, Gipkens with what remained of the 9th. Eight dead Germans lay in the trench, and two English (cap badge: South Africa, Otago Rifles). All had been roughly handled by bombs. Their fearful injuries were written on their faces, distorted by anguish. Both eyes of two of them were shot away.

While I was greeting Boje and Kius in our usual tone of ironical pessimism, I felt the look of horror in the eyes of a new recruit, a seminarist, who was gazing at me. Looking along the channel of his thoughts I had a shock when I realized for the first time how callous the war had made me. One got to regarding men as mere matter.

I had men posted at the block and the trench cleared of the dead. At 11:45, without any warning having been given us, our artillery opened out on the position in front of us with the utmost fury. The result was more casualties for us than for the English, and it was not long before the tale of woe opened. The cry for stretchers came along the trench from the left. Hurrying along, I found what was left of my best platoon commander, a shapeless mass, in front of the block in the hedge trench. He had had a direct hit in the loins from one of our shells. The fragments of his uniform and clothing, torn from his body by the force of the explosion, were hanging above him on the splintered remnant of a thorn hedge. I had a groundsheet thrown over him to spare the men the sight. Immediately after three more men were wounded at the same spot. One of them had both hands severed at the wrist. He staggered to the rear, covered with blood, both arms resting on the shoulders of a stretcher-bearer. Lance-corporal Ehlers writhed on the ground, stupefied by the explosion.

I sent protest after protest to headquarters, vigorously demanding either the cessation of the firing or the presence of artillery officers in the trench. Instead of any reply, a heavy trench-mortar joined in with the rest and made the trench an utter shambles. Blood and brains and pieces of flesh were everywhere, and at once collected swarms of flies. At 7:15 (!) I had orders, from which I learned that at 7:30 the fire would be increased; that at eight two sections of the storm company were to rush the block in the hedge trench, to roll it up as far as red point A and then to get into touch on the right with a shock troop that was to make an attack parallel with theirs. Two sections of my company were to follow on and occupy the trench.

I made the necessary arrangements with all speed while the artillery fire set in; detailed the two sections, and had a word with Lieutenant Voigt, who a few minutes later advanced as ordered. I took the matter more as an evening walk than anything else, and strolled along behind my two sections, wearing a cap, a stick-bomb under my arm. At the moment of the attack every rifle anywhere near was directed upon the hedge trench. With heads bent we made jumps from one traverse to the next. In front of us all went splendidly. The English fled to a line behind, leaving one dead. I was bringing up the rear and had just passed the mouth of a trench branching off to the left, when the man ahead of me, a N.C.O., gave an excited shout and fired past my head to the left. As I could not at all explain his conduct to myself, I went a few steps back and found myself faced of a sudden by a powerfully-built Englishman, just at the moment when he was lobbing a bomb after the flying N.C.O. At the same time shouts rose on all sides. They were coming on over the top to cut us off. I drew forth the bomb, my only weapon, and dropped it at the feet of the Tommy. Then I took to my heels in the direction of our lines. One man only, little Wilzek of my company, had the presence of mind to run after me. An egg-bomb was thrown after us, and tore his belt and the seat of his trousers without doing him any further injury.

Voigt and the rest of the men who had gone the other way were apparently surrounded and done for. Continued shouts and explosions of bombs showed that they were selling their lives dearly.

In the hope of coming to their help I led Fahnenjunker Mohrmann’s section forward along the hedge trench. However, we were brought to a stop by a hail of bursting Stokes bombs. A splinter flew against my chest and was caught on the clasp of my braces. Besides this, there was a sudden onset of artillery-fire.

Fountains of earth were sprayed up out of coloured smoke; the blare of flying metal screamed athwart the blunt roar of heavy shell-bursts; the hum of approaching shells came to an end with alarming suddenness; a cloud of splinters sang and whizzed about us. As an attack might be expected, I picked up a helmet and put it on and hurried back with a few men to the trench.

Above we saw figures appearing, so we lay down on the edge of the trench and opened fire. Near me a new recruit was feverishly fingering the trigger of his machine-gun, without succeeding in getting a shot out of the barrel, till I snatched the thing out of his hands. A few English dropped. The rest disappeared in their trenches again, while the artillery fire grew ever more furious. As for our own⁠—it took sides no longer.

When I was walking to my crib, followed by an orderly, something struck the trench wall between us and, whipping my helmet off my head with enormous force, threw it far away. I thought I had got the whole charge of a shrapnel shell, and lay half-stunned in my foxhole. A moment later a shell struck the verge of it and filled the small space with thick smoke. A long splinter smashed a box of gherkins at my feet. To prevent myself being buried I crept out into the trench again, and was able at least to rouse the two orderlies and my batman and put them on the lookout.

It was a really unpleasant half-hour, and the company had many losses. When the worst of it was over I went through the trench to take stock of the damage and ascertain what men I had left. As the count of fifteen men was not enough for holding the trench, I left the defence of the block to Mohrmann and three men, and withdrew the remainder to a giant shell-hole behind our line and had all the available bombs collected there. My plan was to let the enemy, if they attacked, enter our trench unopposed and then at a signal blow them to bits from above. However, the battle confined itself to an incessant uproar of light trench-mortars, rifle-grenades, and bombs.

On the 27th of July we were relieved by a company of the 164th Infantry Regiment. We were indeed utterly exhausted. The officer commanding the company was seriously wounded while marching into the line; and a few days later my crib got a hit and buried his successor. We all breathed more freely when we had left Puisieux behind us and the rising storm of the final offensive that growled around it.

111 Inf. Div.

Divisional Headquarters,
12/8/18.

Divisional Orders of the Day

The 73rd Fusilier Regiment has added in the most brilliant fashion to its high reputation as a brave and war-tried unit in the severe fighting which was renewed against an enemy much superior in numbers. I am all the more glad to recognize this as I well know what high demands in endurance and loyalty to duty in our country’s cause must have been made on the troops of the division during this long spell in the line on a difficult front.

In particular, Lieutenant Jünger earned fresh recognition. Already six times wounded, he was on this occasion, as always, a shining example to both officers and men.