Douchy and Monchy

My wound was healed in fourteen days. I was sent to the reserve battalion at Hanover, and reported there as a cadet. After going through a course at Doberitz and getting further promotion, I went back to the regiment in September 1915.

I left the train at St. Leger, the headquarters of the division, and marched with a detachment of recruits to Douchy, the headquarters of the regiment. On our front the autumn offensive was in full swing. Over a wide stretch of country the front line was marked by a swaying cloud of smoke. Over our heads were aeroplanes and the tac-tac-tac of their Lewis guns. Apparently we were spotted from a captive balloon, for at the entrance of the village the smoke of a bomb rose in a black cone in front of us. I turned aside and led the column into the village by another route.

Douchy, the headquarters of the 73rd, was a village of moderate size, and had not so far suffered a great deal from the war. It lies in the undulating country of Astois, and during our year and a half’s fighting in this part of the front it served us as a second depot and as a rest-place where we could recuperate after hard times in the front line. How often we heaved a sigh of relief at the sight of a lonely light gleaming on a wet night at the entrance of the village! There one had at any rate a roof over one’s head and an undisturbed nook of one’s own. One could sleep without having to turn out every four hours and without being pursued even in one’s dreams by the constant expectation of a raid. The first day of rest was like being born anew, when after a bath one puts on clean clothes and well-brushed uniform. There were drill and games on the fields about, to loosen the joints and awaken a sense of comradeship among men who had spent the long and lonely nights on guard. From this we got fresh zest for new and arduous days. At first the companies used to march up in turn to the front every night. This exhausting double shift was later given up by order of Colonel von Oppen, who showed in this his habitual commonsense. The security of a position depends on the freshness of its defenders and their fighting spirit, not on the length of the communication trenches and the depth of the firing line.

Douchy had many innocent recreations to offer us. There were numerous canteens well provided with eatables and drinks. There was a reading-room, a café, and later even a cinema in a large barn most skilfully converted. The officers had a splendidly-equipped casino and a skittle-alley in the vicarage garden. Often companies held festive evenings at which officers and men vied with each other in drinking in the good old German style.

As the civil population still lived in the village, all the space available had to be made full use of. The gardens were partly occupied with huts and temporary dwellings of one sort and another; a large orchard in the centre of the village was used for church parade; another was made into a pleasure-garden and called the Emmich Platz. Here in huts covered with branches were the barber and the dentist. A large meadow near the church served as a burial-ground. Nearly every day one company or another marched there to bury one or more of their number.

Thus in the course of a year the buildings appropriate to a garrison town overgrew the dilapidated village like a mighty parasite. The peaceful picture was scarcely recognizable. Dragoons watered their horses in the village pond, infantry training went on in the gardens, and all over the meadows soldiers lay and sunned themselves. Nothing was kept up that did not serve a military purpose, and all that did was in perfect order. Hedges and fences were broken down or removed altogether to give better communications, while, on the other hand, at every corner there were huge signposts, shining and resplendent. While roofs fell in and all that was burnable went by degrees for fuel, the telephone and electric light were installed. The cellars were used as the starting-points for deep dugouts so that the occupants of the houses could have shelter during bombardments, and the spoil was heaped callously in the gardens. A political economist could have studied here a small working model of the Communist state, for in the whole village there were no boundaries and no personal possessions.

The French inhabitants were in huts on the outskirts of the village towards Monchy. They were mostly timid, pitiful figures who had suffered bitterly from the war. Children played without a thought on the threshold of the ruinous houses, and old men went with bent heads through the busy scenes that with brutal ruthlessness made the place where they had lived their lives no longer recognizable. The young people had to present themselves every morning before Lieutenant Oberländer, the town-major, whose rule was a strict one, in order to have their tasks allotted them in the cultivation of the land within the village boundaries. We only came in contact with the natives when we took our clothes to be washed or bought eggs and butter. Intimate relations were very rare. Love had no place in this stark and devastating machinery.

There were two French boys, orphans, one eight, the other twelve years old, who became attached to the troops in the most extraordinary way. They wore nothing but field grey, spoke fluent German, and saluted all officers in the prescribed manner. They spoke of their fellow-countrymen contemptuously and called them “Schangels” as they heard the soldiers doing. Their great desire was to go into the line with their company. They were proficient in drill and fell in on the left of the company at roll-call, and when they wished to accompany the canteen orderlies on an expedition to buy provisions at Cambrai they duly asked for leave. When the 2nd Battalion went to Quéant for a few weeks’ training, one of the two, called Louis, was, by order of Colonel von Oppen, to remain behind in Douchy, so that no occasion for false reports should be given to the civil population. During the march he was nowhere to be seen, but when the battalion arrived he jumped out of one of the transport wagons, where he had hidden himself. Unfortunately some of the more thoughtless of the men used to take them with them into the canteen for the amusement of teaching them to drink. Later, I believe, the elder was sent to a N.C.O. course in Germany.

Scarcely an hour by road from Douchy lay Monchy-au-Bois, the village where the two companies in reserve were quartered. This place was the occasion of bitter fighting in the autumn of 1914. At length it remained in German hands, and the fighting came to a standstill in a shallow ellipse round the ruins of the once prosperous place. The houses were now burnt and shot to bits. The waste gardens were churned up by shells and the fruit trees split and riven. The wilderness of stone had been adapted for defence by trenches, barbed wire, barricades, and concrete emplacements. The streets could all be swept with machine-gun fire from a central concrete emplacement, the Torgau Redoubt. There was another, the Altenburg Redoubt, an entrenched post on the right of the village, which concealed one platoon of the reserve company. There was a quarry out of which in times of peace limestone had been got for building, and this was an important part of the defences. It had been discovered only by chance. A company cook, whose bucket had fallen into a well of spring water, went down after it and discovered a hole that seemed to connect with a large cave. The matter was looked into, and a second entrance was broken through into a bombproof refuge that held a considerable body of men.

On the lonely hill on the road to Ransart there was a ruin that once had been an estaminet. It was called Bellevue because of the extensive view from there over the front. In spite of its danger it had great attractions for me. The eye could travel for miles over the ruined landscape, whose dead villages were connected by roads where no vehicle moved and no living being was to be seen. Further back were the faint outlines of Arras, the forsaken city, and further to the right gleamed the chalk-mine craters of St. Eloi. The waste and overgrown fields, with great cloud shadows flitting over them, checkered and crossed the network of trenches with yellow lines. Only here and there the smoke of a shell wavered up, as though propelled by a ghostly hand, and fluttered loose in the air; or the ball of a shrapnel hovered over the desert land like a great flock of wool, and slowly dissolved away. The face of the earth was dark and fabulous, for the war had expunged the pleasant features of the countryside and engraved there its own iron lines that in a lonely hour made the spectator shudder.

The forlornness and the profound silence, broken now and then by the deep tones of the guns, were emphasized by the sad marks of devastation. Torn packs, broken rifles, pieces of equipment, and among them, in grim contrast, a child’s plaything; shell fuses, deep shell-holes, water-bottles, torn books, broken utensils, holes whose mysterious darkness suggests a cellar in which, perhaps, the bones of the unfortunate tenant have been gnawed clean by the never idle swarms of rats; a peach-tree, whose supporting wall has gone, stretching out its branches for help, the skeletons of the domestic animals still tied by their heads in their stalls, trenches cut through the deserted gardens where, smothered among weeds, are seen onions, wormwood, rhubarb, and daffodils; in the neighbouring fields stacks through whose thatch the corn is shooting; and all this traversed by a half-obliterated communication trench and scented by the odour of burning and decay. The soldier who walks among the ruins of a place like this and thinks of those who lately lived their peaceful lives there, may well be overtaken by sad reflections.

The line, as I said above, ran in a narrow half-circle round the village, with which it was connected by a number of communication trenches. Our front was divided into two segments, Monchy South and Monchy West. These were again subdivided into the six company sectors A to F. The circular form of the position offered the English an excellent opportunity of flanking fire, and they made good use of it, inflicting heavy losses.

I was sent to the 6th Company, and went into the line a few days after my arrival, as a section leader. An unpleasant welcome awaited me, owing to English “toffee-apples.” C sector, held by the 6th Company, was the most exposed of the whole of our front. Our company commander at that time was Lieutenant R. Brecht, who had hurried across from America at the outbreak of the war, and a better man for the defence of such a position could not be found. His fighting spirit was never behindhand, and it brought him at last a glorious death.

Our life in the trenches passed very methodically. The following is the description of a normal day.

A day in the front line begins at dusk. At seven a member of my section wakes me from the afternoon sleep in which I have indulged in view of trench duty at night. I buckle on my belt, stick a Verey-light pistol in it and some bombs, and leave my more or less comfortable shelter. A first patrol of the familiar section of the trench assures me that all posts are properly manned. The password is exchanged in a low voice. Meanwhile night has fallen, and the first Verey lights have taken their silver course up the sky. Eyes stare intently along our front. A rat rustles among the jam tins thrown over the top. A second joins it with a squeak, and soon the scene is alive with flitting shadows that stream from the ruined cellars or disused dugouts of the village. Rat-hunts are a favourite diversion in the dreary round of trench duty. A piece of bread is laid as a bait and a rifle carefully sighted on it, or the explosive is taken from the duds, strewn in their holes, and ignited, till, with shrill squeaks, their singed bodies are shot forth. Repulsive, nauseous creatures! Their rustling multitudes carry with them a penetrating effluvium, and I can never help thinking of their secret doings among the dead in the cellars of the village.

A few cats, too, have been drawn to the trenches from the destroyed villages in search of human company. A large white tomcat, with one forepaw shot off, was a frequent ghostly visitant of No-man’s-land, and seemed to be on terms with both sides.

But I was speaking of trench duty. Such distractions are welcome; and it is easy to be talkative, if only to fill in the endless hours of darkness. That is why I, too, have stopped beside one of the men, a veteran of many scraps, or another N.C.O., and drink in with rapt interest all the little nothings he can tell me. As N.C.O. it is often my fortune in turn to be led into amiable talk with the officer on duty, who feels a bit lonely himself. He will even talk to me like a brother, and in a low and earnest voice pour out all his hopes and secrets. Nor am I behindhand, for the pressure of the hard black walls of the trench weighs on me too, and I have a longing for a little warmth and something human in all this unnatural loneliness.

The talk flags. We are tired out. Phlegmatically we stand in a fire-bay, leaning against the trench and staring at the glow of each other’s cigarettes.⁠ ⁠…

In frost, one tramps freezing to and fro, and the hard ground rings with all the foot-beats. Very often it is raining. Then with upturned collar one stands under the penthouse entrance of a deep dugout and watches the monotonous descent of the drops. Suppose the step of a superior officer is heard approaching along the sopping trench. One leaps out, of course, and going a little further on whips suddenly round, and saluting with a crack of the heels, reports “Sergeant on duty. All in order in the trench.” For standing in the dugout entrances is forbidden.

The thoughts go woolgathering. One looks at the moon and thinks of snug and happy days at home, or of the great town far away behind where at this moment people are streaming from the cafés, and where the chief streets, with their busy night life, are brightly lit with arc lamps. It seems as though one must have dreamed all that ages ago.

Then something rustles in front of the trench. There is a sound of wire clinking. In a second every dream is shattered and the senses are sharpened till they hurt. You clamber on to the fire-step and let off a Verey light. Not a sound nor a sign. It must have been a partridge, or a hare.

Often one hears the enemy at work on his wire. At once shot after shot is fired in the direction of the sounds, and not only because such are the orders, but because there’s a certain satisfaction in it. We, too, take out wire nearly every night, and have many casualties doing it. Then we curse the beastly swine the English.

Then, perhaps, there’s a whistling, whispering noise following upon a dull report. “Trench mortar over!”

You rush for the nearest dugout steps and hold your breath. Trench-mortar bombs explode with a very different and far worse noise than shells. There’s something rending about them and treacherous, and something personally malignant. They’re insidious beasts, and rifle-grenades are not much better. As soon as there are flashes from a particular spot behind the enemy front, all the posts leave the fire-steps and vanish. They know exactly from long experience where the guns are that are directed upon Section C.

At last the phosphorescent figures of your watch show that two hours have gone by. So you wake your relief without delay and get back to the dugout. Perhaps the ration party has brought letters or a parcel or a newspaper. It is a quite remarkable feeling to read the news from home and all its peaceful concerns while the shadow of the flickering candle flits to and fro across the low, rough timbering overhead. After I have scraped the worst of the mud from my boots with a bit of wood and given them a finishing touch on one of the legs of the primitive table, I lie down on the plank bed and pull my blanket over my head to enjoy four hours of sleep. Outside, the shots strike the parapet in wearisome iteration. A mouse flits over my face and hands without disturbing my sleep. I am left in peace even by smaller beasts, for the dugout was thoroughly disinfected only a few days ago.

I am torn from sleep twice more to take my turn of duty. During the last spell a light streak behind us in the eastern sky heralds the new day. The contours of the trench show up more sharply, and the impression made by the dawning light is one of unspeakable desolation.

A lark soars up. I feel that its trills underline the situation too obtrusively, and I am annoyed. Leaning on the parapet, I stare at the strip of ground in front bounded by our wire in a mood of utter disenchantment. Surely these last twenty minutes might come to an end! At last there is a rattle of the dixies as the party sent for the coffee comes back along the communication trench. It is seven o’clock and the round of night guards is ended.

I go into the dugout and drink some coffee and have a wash in a Bismarck herring-tin. I am so cheered up that the wish to lie down again has deserted me. And at nine I have to allot my section its tasks and set it to work. We are regular Jacks-of-all-trades, and every day the care of the trench makes its thousand claims on us. We sink deep shafts, construct dugouts and concreted posts, get wire entanglements ready, lay out drainage schemes, revet, prop, level, heighten, chamfer, and fill in latrines. In short, out of our resources we apply ourselves to every trade. And why not? What one can’t do, another can. Not long since a miner took the pick from my hand as I was at work on our platoon dugout and said: “Keep getting it out below, sir. It’ll fall down of itself from on top!”

Fancy not having known such a simple thing as that all this while! But here, planted down in the middle of the empty waste where there’s the sudden and unanswerable compulsion of seeking shelter from shot and shell and wind and weather, of carpentering beds and tables, of building hearths and stairs, a man soon learns to use his hands. He sees the value of the handicrafts.

At one o’clock dinner is brought up the line in large vessels that once were milk-cans and jam-drums, from the kitchen in a cellar at Monchy. After dinner⁠ ⁠… a little sleep or reading while gradually the two hours’ daily trench duty draws nearer. They pass a great deal more quickly than those of the night. One observes the well-known enemy position through field-glasses or periscope, and often gets a shot at a head target with the help of the latter. But caution is necessary, for the English too have sharp eyes and good glasses.

One of a post suddenly collapses in a stream of blood, shot in the head. His fellows tear the field-dressing from his tunic and bind him up.

“There’s no use in doing that now, Wilhelm.”

“He’s still breathing, man.”

Then the stretcher-bearers come and take him to the dressing-station. The stretcher bumps heavily against the comers of the fire-bays. Scarce gone⁠ ⁠… and all is as it was before. Somebody throws a shovelful of soil over the red patch and everyone goes about his business. One has got callous. Only a new recruit leans, whitefaced, against the revetting of the trench. He is trying to see the hang of it all. It had been so sudden, such a terrible surprise, such a brutal and unspeakable assault. It can’t be possible, can’t be real. Poor fellow, there’s something quite different in store for you.⁠ ⁠…

Often, too, it is quite jolly. Many of us take quite a sporting interest in the job. With a malicious satisfaction we observe the hits of our shells on the enemy trenches. “There’s a hit, my boy!” “God! See it go up!” “Poor Tommy!” They delight in shooting off rifle-grenades or sending light mortar bombs over, very much to the disgust of frailer spirits. “Leave off that nonsense, man. We get stink enough without that.” But nevertheless these hotheads are forever puzzling out the best possible ways of slinging over bombs with homemade catapults or of making the ground in front of the trench murderous with explosive machines. Perhaps they cut a narrow passage through the wire in front of their posts in order to entice an enemy patrol, by this bait of an easy way through, straight up to their rifles. Another time they creep out over the top and tie a bell on to the wire and to this a long string which can be pulled in order to excite the English posts. Even the war is a joke to them.

Afternoon coffee time is sometimes positively cheerful. Often the N.C.O. is bidden to give one of the officers his company on these occasions. It is done with great punctiliousness. “May I permit myself?” “Most obedient thanks.” A delightful quality of the Prussian officer is this precision of politeness in all situations. It gives something firm and characteristic even to the youngest of them.

On the tablecloth of hessian there is even the glimmer of two china cups. Afterwards the batman puts a bottle and two glasses on the rickety table. Conversation proceeds more confidentially. Strange to say, here too it is the love of one’s neighbour that affords the welcome topic of conversation. A vigorous gossip of the trenches has been evolved, and this is the mainstay of these afternoon visits. It might almost be a little garrison. Superiors, comrades, and those under one’s command are subjected to a rigorous criticism. A new and engrossing rumour has just run through the platoon commanders’ dugouts of all six companies from the right flank to the left. The observation officers who traverse the regimental front with telescope and sketch-map are not guiltless of it. Indeed, the company sector is by no means a sealed compartment. Rather it is a busy thoroughfare. Staff officers appear in the quiet morning hours and diffuse activity, very much to the annoyance of the front-line swine, who has just got down to it after the last spell of trench duty, and at the horrid cry, “Divisional general in the trench!” hurls himself buttoned and buckled again up the dugout steps. Besides these there are the pioneer officer and the trench-construction officer and the drainage officer, all of whom behave as though the trenches existed only to display their special tasks. The artillery observation officer who wants to put down a trial barrage is greeted with particular coldness, for no sooner has he retreated again with his telescope and periscope than the English artillery is announced and of course the infantry meets the bill as usual. Then the officers in command of entrenching detachments roll up. They plant themselves in the platoon commander’s dugout till nightfall and drink rum and smoke and play Polish lottery, and at last leave as clean a table as the brown rats. It is late when a little fellow flits like a ghost through the trench, creeps up behind the posts and shouts “Gas attack!” in their ears, and then quietly ticks off the seconds it takes them to get their masks on. It is the gas officer. Lastly, at midnight, there’s a knocking on the plank door of the dugout. “Have you dossed down already? Here⁠ ⁠… sign on quick for twenty knife-rests and six dugout frames.” The carrying party has come. So it is that⁠—at least in quiet times⁠—there’s an everlasting coming and going, till at last the dwellers in the dugout are tempted to sigh, “If only they’d shell a bit and then at least there’d be some peace.”

“May I take my leave, sir? Duty in half an hour.”

Outside, the heaped-up earth of parapet and parados gleams in the last rays of the sun and the trench lies already in deep shadow. Soon the first Verey light will go up, the night guards are mounted, and the new day of the front-line soldier has begun.