Trench Warfare Day by Day

Thus it was that our days passed in a fatiguing monotony, broken only by the short spells of rest at Douchy. Yet there were many pleasant hours even in the line. I often sat at the table of my little dugout, whose roughly planked walls, hung with weapons, had a look of the Wild West, and enjoyed a pleasant feeling of being comfortably tucked away, as I drank a cup of tea, read and smoked while my batman was busy at the tiny stove and a smell of toast rose in the air. No one who has fought in the trenches has missed this mood. Outside, along the fire-bays went the stamp of heavy, regular steps; a challenge rang out in monotone when someone passed along the trench. The dulled ear scarcely detects the never-ceasing rifle-fire, or the short whack of a bullet striking, or the Verey lights that sizzle near the opening of the air-shaft. It was then I took out my notebook from my map-case and wrote down in brief the events of the day. So, as time went on, a conscientious chronicle of C sector took shape as a part of my diary, a chronicle of one tiny snippet of the long front where we were at home and where at last we knew every overgrown bit of trench, every shelter whose roof had fallen in. Around us in heaped-up mounds of earth lay the bodies of fallen comrades. On every foot’s-breadth a drama had been enacted. Behind every traverse fate lay in ambush, day and night, to snatch a victim. And yet all of us felt a strong attachment to our sector and had almost grown to be a part of it. We knew it when it ran as a black band across a landscape covered with snow, when at midday the flowery wilderness around pervaded it with drowsy scent, or when the eerie paleness of the full ghostly moon caught in its web those dark corners where the squeaking companies of rats carried on their secret existence. On the long summer evenings we sat on its fire-steps while the balmy air carried the busy hammerings or the songs of home across to the enemy; we fell over timber and broken wire when Death drummed with his steel club on the trenches and a heavy vapour crept out from their shattered walls. Often the general wanted to give us a quieter part of the regimental front. Each time the company begged as one man to stay in sector C. I am setting down here a short selection from the notes that I wrote down on these nights at Monchy.

October 7, 1915.⁠—Standing at dawn near my section’s post on the fire-step opposite our dugout when a rifle bullet tore one of the men’s caps from front to back without hurting him. Just at this time two pioneers were wounded on our wire. One shot through both legs. The other shot through the ear.

During the morning the left-flank post was shot through both cheekbones. The blood spurted in thick streams from the wound. To finish the bad luck, Lieutenant Ewald came to our sector today to photograph sap N, which is only 50 metres from the trench. As he turned to get down off the fire-step a shot shattered the back of his head. He died instantly. Besides this, one of the men had a slight shoulder wound.

October 19.⁠—The sector of the middle platoon was shelled with 15-centimetre shells. One of the men was blown against the boarding of the trench. He suffered severe internal injury, and a splinter cut the artery of his arm. In the early morning mist, while repairing our wire in front of our right flank, we found a French corpse that must have been months old. In the night we had two casualties wire-carrying. Gutschmidt was shot through both hands and one thigh, Schäfer through the knee.

October 30.⁠—Owing to heavy rain in the night the trench fell in in many places, and the soil mixing with the rain to a sticky soup turned the trench into an almost impassable swamp. The only comfort was that the English were no better off, for they could be seen busily scooping the water out of their trench. As we were on higher ground, they had the benefit of the superfluous water we pumped out as well. The collapse of the trench walls brought to light a number of those who fell in the last autumn’s fighting.

November.⁠—I was standing next Landsturmsman Wiegman in front of the Altenburg Redoubt when a long shot pierced his bayonet, which was hanging from his shoulders, and wounded him severely in the pelvis. The English bullets with their aluminium tips are pure dumdums.

November 21.⁠—I took an entrenching party from the Altenburg Redoubt to C sector. One of them, Landsturmsman Diener, climbed on to a ledge in the side of the trench to shovel earth over the top. He was scarce up when a shot fired from the sap got him in the skull and laid him dead on the floor of the trench. He was married and had four children. His comrades lay in wait a long while behind the parapet to take vengeance. They sobbed with rage. It is remarkable how little they grasp the war as an objective thing. They seem to regard the Englishman who fired the fatal shot as a personal enemy. I can understand it.

November 24.⁠—A man of the machine-gun company got a bad head wound while in our sector. Half an hour later one of our company was hit in the cheek.

November 29.⁠—Our battalion went back for fourteen days to the little town of Q⁠⸺ that lay in the divisional area, and was destined later to get such a sanguinary name. We went for training and to enjoy the blessings of life behind the line. While there I got my commission as lieutenant and was posted to the 2nd Company, where I was to see many cheery times, and stiff ones too.

We were invited to many a heavy drink by the town-majors of Q⁠⸺ and neighbouring places, and had a little glimpse into the almost boundless sway that these village potentates exercised over their subjects and the inhabitants. The King of Q⁠⸺, as he called himself, a captain, was greeted on his appearance at table every evening with uplifted right hands and a thundering shout, “Long live the King!” He played the capricious monarch till dawn, and punished every breach of his etiquette and its very intricate formulations with drinks all round. We front-line fellows, in our innocence, came out of it very badly.

Next day he was to be seen after lunch, in thin disguise, proceeding through his domains in a dogcart to pay his visits on neighbouring Kings and do copious honour to Bacchus. Thus he made worthy preparations for the evening bout. He called it “making a raid.” Once he got into a dispute with the King of J⁠⸺, and sent a mounted military policeman to declare war. After several engagements, in the course of which two detachments of officers’ grooms pelted each other with lumps of earth from small trenches furnished with wire entanglements, the King of J⁠⸺ unwisely regaled himself with Bavarian beer in the Q⁠⸺ canteen and was surprised and taken prisoner while visiting a secluded spot. He had to ransom himself with a large barrel of beer. Thus ended the battle of these mighty ones.

The inhabitants were under strict discipline. Trespasses and transgressions were speedily visited by the town-majors with fines or imprisonment. Much as I am the disciple of the logical gospel of force, I was disgusted by the painful exaggerations of it I witnessed in those days, such as the compulsion upon all inhabitants, women included, to salute officers. Such regulations are pointless, degrading, and injurious. Such was our method, however, all through the war. Punctilious over trifles, undecided in the face of the severest injuries from within.

On the 11th of December I went over the top to the front line to report to Lieutenant R. Wetje, commanding the 2nd Company, which was in C sector. It gave me a shock, as I jumped down into the trench, to see how it had altered during our fortnight’s absence. It had fallen in until it was nothing but a large trough filled with mud a yard deep, in which its occupants splashed sadly about in an amphibious existence. As I sank in to my hips my thoughts recurred with sorrow to the King of Q⁠⸺ and his round table. We poor front-line swine! nearly all the dugouts had fallen in and the deep dugouts were flooded. For the next weeks we had to work without respite merely to get firm ground beneath our feet. For the time being I lived with Lieutenants Wetje and Boje in a dugout whose roof, in spite of a groundsheet suspended beneath it, dripped like a watering-can. Every half-hour the batmen had to bail out the water with buckets.

One morning, when, thoroughly wet through, I went up out of the dugout into the trench, I could scarcely believe my eyes. The field of battle that hitherto had been marked by the desolation of death itself had taken on the appearance of a fair. The occupants of the trenches on both sides had been driven to take to the top, and now there was a lively traffic and exchange going on in schnapps, cigarettes, uniform buttons, etc., in front of the wire. The crowds of khaki-coloured figures that streamed from the hitherto so deserted English trenches had a most bewildering effect.

Suddenly there was a shot that dropped one of our fellows dead in the mud.⁠ ⁠… Whereupon both sides disappeared like moles into their trenches. I went to the part of the trench opposite the English sap and shouted across that I wished to speak to an officer. Some of the English did in fact go back, and presently returned from their main trench with a young man who was distinguished from them, as I could see through my glasses, by a smarter cap. At first we conversed in English and then rather more fluently in French, while the men stood round listening. I put it to him that one of our men had been killed by a treacherous shot. He replied that this was the doing of the company on his flank and not of his men. “Il y a des cochons aussi chez vous,” he remarked when some shots from the sector next to ours passed close to his head; and thereupon I made ready to take cover forthwith. We said a good deal to each other in the course of the interview in a fashion that can only be described as sportsmanlike, and would gladly at the end have made some exchange of presents in memory of the occasion.

It has always been my ideal in war to eliminate all feelings of hatred and to treat my enemy as an enemy only in battle and to honour him as a man according to his courage. It is exactly in this that I have found many kindred souls among British officers. It depends, of course, on not letting oneself be blinded by an excessive national feeling, as the case generally is between the French and the Germans. The consciousness of the importance of one’s own nation ought to reside as a matter of course and unobtrusively in everybody, just as an unconditional sense of honour does in the gentleman. Without this it is impossible to give others their due.

In order to be on a clear footing again we made a solemn declaration of war within three minutes of breaking off our parley; and after “Good evening” on his side and “Au revoir” on mine, I had a shot, in spite of the regrets of my men, at his loophole. It was retured at once with one that nearly knocked the rifle from my hands.

This was the first opportunity I had of surveying the ground before the sap, for it was madness to show the peak of a cap at this dangerous spot. One thing I noticed was that there was the skeleton of a Frenchman just in front of our wire, whose white bones shone out from the rags of his blue uniform.

Shortly after this conference our artillery fired a few shells on the enemy trenches, whereupon, before our eyes, four stretchers were carried across the open without, to my delight, a single shot being fired from our side. From the English cap-badges we were left in no doubt after that day that we had the “Hindustani” Leicestershires opposite us.

The weather towards Christmas became more and more dreary. We had to set up pumps in the trenches in order to make a show of keeping even with the water.

During this time of mud, too, our casualty rate rose considerably above the average. For example, I find in my diary under December 12: “Today seven of our men were buried at Douchy and two more since have been shot dead”; and under December 23: “Mud and dirt get the upper hand. This morning at three o’clock a regular landslide came thundering down the entrance of my dugout. I had to set three men to work, and it took them all their time to bail out the water that poured like a mountain torrent into the dugout. The trench is waterlogged beyond hope. We are up to our waists in ooze. It is enough to make one despair. On the right flank a dead body is coming to light, the legs only so far.”

We spent Christmas Eve in the line. The men stood in the mud and sang Christmas carols that were drowned by the enemy machine-guns. On Christmas Day we lost a man in No. 3 platoon by a flanking shot through the head. Immediately after, the English attempted a friendly overture and put up a Christmas tree on their parapet. But our fellows were so embittered that they fired and knocked it over. And this in turn was answered with rifle grenades. In this miserable fashion we celebrated Christmas Day.

On the 28th of December I was commandant of the Altenburg Redoubt. It was on this day that one of my best men, Fusilier Hohn, had an arm torn off by a shell splinter. Another, Heidotting, was badly wounded in the thigh by one of the many stray bullets that buzzed round this low-lying strong post. My trusty August Kettler, too, was hit by a shrapnel bullet on the road to Monchy, where he was going to fetch my rations⁠—the first of my many batmen. It got him in the windpipe and stretched him out. When he had started off with the dishes I called after him, “August, don’t you stop one on the way!” “No fear, sir.” And now I was summoned and found him lying on the ground quite close to my dugout drawing every breath with a raucous noise through the wound at the base of his neck. I had him taken back, and he died in hospital some months later. On this occasion, as on many others, what I found particularly painful was that the wounded man could not say a word and only stared with helpless eyes like a tortured beast at those who tried to help him. It always made one feel more than usually powerless in face of another’s troubles.

The way to Monchy from the Altenburg Redoubt cost, all told, a profusion of blood. It followed the further slope of a slight depression that lay 500 metres perhaps behind our front line. The enemy, who no doubt was aware from aeroplane photographs that the track was much used, made it his business to comb it out with machine-gun fire at short intervals or to sling plenty of shrapnel at it. Although there was a trench running beside it, and though there were strict orders to use this trench, everybody made a practice of going along in the open with the usual indifference of the old soldier to the risk of a bullet. As a rule it was all right, but one of two victims were claimed daily, and this with time mounted up to a good number. Besides this, the builders of the Altenburg Redoubt had placed the latrine in the very lowest spot of the valley, where the stray bullets from every quarter of the compass appeared to forgather, so that one was often compelled to fly for the open clasping a newspaper in one hand and one’s clothing in the other. Nevertheless, this indispensable institution was left undisturbed in its perilous position, a speaking example of the general indifference to danger.

January, too, was a month of unremitting labour. Each platoon, with shovels, buckets, and pumps, first removed the mud from the immediate neighbourhood of their dugout, and then, when they had solid ground under their feet, proceeded to establish communications with the sections on either side. In Adinfer wood, where our artillery was situated, forestry detachments were employed in stripping young trees of their branches and splitting them in long sections. The walls of the trench were sloped off and entirely revetted with this material. Numerous culverts and sump pits and gullies were constructed, till by degrees the conditions of life were bearable again.

On the 28th January 1916 a man in my platoon got a body wound from a splinter of a bullet that was shattered to bits against his loophole plate. On the 30th another got a bullet in the thigh. On the 1st February, the day of our relief, the communication trenches were being heavily shelled. A shrapnel shell fell just at the feet of Fusilier Junge, my onetime cleaner of the 6th Company. It did not explode, but flared up and he had to be carried away with severe burns.

About the same time a N.C.O. of the 6th Company, whom I knew well and whose brother had been killed a few days before, was fatally injured by a toffee-apple which he had picked up. He had unscrewed the fuse, and observing that the powder was smouldering he put the end of his cigarette into the opening. Of course, the toffee-apple exploded and wounded him in over fifty places. In ways like this we were continually suffering losses through the carelessness that comes from constantly having to do with explosives. Lieutenant Pook was an uncomfortable neighbour for this reason. He inhabited a lonely dugout in a tangle of trenches behind the left flank, and there he had shepherded together a number of enormous duds. He occupied himself unscrewing their fuses and then examining them. I always gave this uncomfortable dwelling a wide berth whenever I had to pass by it.

On the night of the 3rd February we had arrived in Douchy once more after a fatiguing spell in the line. Next morning I was sitting in my billet on the Emmichs Platz in the mood appropriate to the first day of rest, comfortably drinking coffee, when suddenly a monster of a shell, the herald of a heavy bombardment, exploded at my very door and blew the window into the room. With three bounds I was in the cellar, whither the other occupants of the house had also betaken themselves with astonishing speed, and there we presented a lamentable picture. As the cellar was half above ground and separated from the garden only by a thin wall, we all crowded into the short, cramped neck of a shaft. My sheepdog crept whimpering between our tightly-packed bodies with an animal’s instinctive desire for the darkest corner. Far away in the distance one heard the heavy reports at regular intervals, followed within a few seconds by the whistling howl of the heavy lumps of metal hurtling through the air and ending in crash after crash as they exploded all round our little house. Each time an unpleasant rush of air came through the cellar window, clods of earth and splinters rattled on the tiled roof, and in the stalls the terrified horses snorted and reared up. The dog whimpered, and a fat bandsman, as each shell came whistling over, cried aloud as though he was going to have a tooth pulled out.

At last the weather cleared and we could emerge again into the open air. The devastated village street was as lively as a disturbed ant-heap. My quarters had a sorry appearance. Close to the cellar wall the earth was torn up in several places, fruit trees were snapped off, and in the middle of the doorway lay a long and sinister dud. The roof was riddled with holes. A big splinter had carried off the chimney. In the company orderly-room next door a few sizable splinters had pierced the walls and a large wardrobe and torn nearly all the officers’ uniforms that were kept there. Their owners were very much incensed, but I myself was among those who escaped.

On the 8th February, C sector was badly shelled. Already in the early hours our own artillery landed a dud into the dugout of my right-flank section. The inmates had an unpleasant surprise when it pushed in the door and overturned the stove. A witty fellow drew a caricature in which eight men were rushing for the shattered door over the smoking stove while the dud observed them from the corner with an evil wink. Besides this, at midday we had three dugouts smashed in. Fortunately, only one man was wounded slightly in the knee; for everyone, even the posts, had been withdrawn into the deep dugouts. On the next day Fusilier Hartmann of my platoon got a mortal wound in the side. It was from a shell from the flanking battery. On the 25th February we had a very severe loss through the death of a very fine fellow and a great favourite. Just before the relief I got word in my dugout that Karg, a volunteer, had been hit in the deep dugout near by. I went along and found, as so often before, a sad group standing round a motionless figure. The hands on the bloodstained snow were clenched and the glazed eyes stared into the sky. One more victim of the flanking battery. Karg, when the first few came over, was in the trench and at once jumped into the shaft of the deep dugout. A large splinter from a shell that struck the wall of the trench just opposite flew into the dugout entrance and hit him in the back of the head when he thought himself in safety. He died an instant, unlooked-for death.

The flanking battery was, indeed, very active during those days. Almost hourly it fired a single unexpected salvo and the shell splinters fairly swept the trench. In the six days from the 3rd February to the 8th it cost three dead and three severely and three lightly wounded. Though it was at the utmost 1,500 metres from us on a hillside on our left flank, it was beyond the power of our artillery to silence it. The only means we had of diminishing its effectiveness lay in increasing the number of our traverses and heightening them so that the range of a shell-burst was confined to short lengths of trench.

With the beginning of March we had the worst of the mud behind us. The weather was dry and the trench freshly revetted; and now and then we had an hour or two of leisure and comfort. I sat every evening in my dugout at my little writing-table and read, or talked when I had a visitor. We were four officers with the company commander, and we passed our days together on the best of terms.

We met for coffee in the dugout of one or the other of us every day, or sat together in the evening over a bottle or two and smoked, played cards, and comported ourselves like soldiers of fortune. Those pleasant hours in the dugout outweigh the memory of many days of blood and dirt and exhaustion. They were, too, only possible during the long periods of, comparatively speaking, quiet trench warfare, during which we became completely at home with each other and fell into almost peacetime habits. Our chief pride lay in our building activities, to which the gentry further back contributed very little. We sank a shaft of thirty steps near the other deep dugout into the soft chalky ground, and connected the two by a gallery at right angles to the shaft. By this means we could go in comfort six metres underground from the one flank of our platoons to the other. My pet enterprise was a gallery sixty metres long running from my platoon headquarters to the company commander’s dugout, provided on the right hand and on the left with chambers for ammunition and living-rooms. These places were of the utmost value during the subsequent fighting.

When, after morning coffee (one even got the paper pretty regularly), we met each other washed and shaved in the trench footrule in hand, we compared progress in our respective parts of it, while the talk turned on dugout frames, pattern dugouts, hours of work, and such matters. At night when I lay down on my plank bed I always had the pleasant consciousness of having in my sphere fulfilled the expectations those at home had of me. I had given all my energies to the defence of my two hundred metres of the front line, and cared for the well-being of my sixty men.

It was only now when there was time for it that I was able to experience this feeling to the full. In the winter months we had not a thought in the trenches but of digging and “Will this damned business never end?” It is not danger, however extreme it may be, that depresses the spirit of the men so much as over-fatigue and wretched conditions. People who have leisure can afford themselves every luxury, even that of heroic feelings. This is true for the people as a whole. Its moral worth can only reach its full height when the pressure of work is not crushing upon any section of it.

On the 1st of March, as I was standing behind a groundsheet with Landwehrsman Ikman, who was killed not long after, a shell burst straight in front of us. The splinters flew about us without a hit. When we took a closer look we found that numerous fragments of steel of a length and sharpness that turned the stomach had ripped the groundsheet. The men called these things “rattles” or “grapeshot,” because there was nothing to be heard of them but a shower of splinters that suddenly whistled round you.

On the 14th March there was a direct hit from a 15-centimetre shell in the sector on our right. It killed three men and severely wounded three more. One of them disappeared without leaving a trace. Another was burnt black. On the 18th the sentry in front of my dugout was hit by a shell splinter that tore off one cheek and the top of one ear.

On the 19th, Fusilier Schmidt II, on the left flank of my platoon, got a bad head wound. On the 23rd, Fusilier Lohmann was killed near my dugout by a shot in the head. On the same evening one of the posts reported that an enemy patrol was on our wire. I left the trench with a few men, but nothing came of it.

On the 7th of April, on the right flank of the platoon, Fusilier Kramer was wounded in the head by the splinter of a bullet. We had a great many casualties of this kind owing to the ease with which the English bullets flew into fragments at the least impact. At midday the neighbourhood of my dugout was plastered with heavies for hours together. My skylight was smashed for the umpteenth time, and at every detonation there was a hail of hard lumps of soil through the opening. We drank our coffee, however, unmoved.

Later we had a set duel with a harebrained Englishman who showed his head over the parapet of a trench 100 metres away at the utmost, and got a succession of bull’s-eyes on our loophole. I and several others answered his fire, when a perfect shot got the edge of our embrasure and filled our eyes with dust and gave me a very slight skin wound in the neck from a splinter. Nevertheless, we did not give in, but kept bobbing up and taking a short aim and disappearing again. A moment later a bullet struck Fusilier Storch’s rifle and burst, covering his face with blood from at least ten wounds. The next shot tore a piece from the edge of our embrasure. Another smashed the glass we used for observation. We had the satisfaction, however, after several shots had struck the parapet in front of his face, of seeing him disappear for the last time. Just after, I got the plate behind which this mad fellow had kept appearing time after time with three shots of K. ammunition, and sent it flying.

On the 9th of April two English fliers flew up and down just above our position. The entire trench strength rushed into the trench and opened a furious fire. I had just said to Lieutenant Sievers, who was standing beside me, “If only the flanking battery doesn’t look lively!” when the fragments of steel flew about our ears, and we jumped for the nearest dugout stairs. I advised him to come further in, when, smack! a splinter as broad as your hand fell, still smoking, at his feet. Just afterwards we had a few shrapnel shells as well that burst over our heads. A man was hit by a pin’s-head splinter on the shoulder, and small as it was the wound was painful. I replied with a few rifle-grenades, for it was an unwritten law of the infantry to confine themselves to the rifle. When it came to explosives, the retaliation was always at the least in the ratio of two to one. Unfortunately, the enemy was so plentifully supplied with munitions that at first it took our breath away.

After these excitements we drank a few bottles of red wine in Sievers’s dugout, and I became unawares so elated that, in spite of brilliant moonlight, I walked home over the top. Losing my direction, I soon found myself in an enormous mine-crater, and heard the English at work in their trenches close by. After I had made myself a nuisance by throwing them two bombs, I betook myself with all speed back to our trench, and on the way fell foul of one of our foot-angles consisting of four iron spikes. During this time a fairly lively activity prevailed in front of the wire, and sometimes it was not without a certain savage humour. One of our fellows on patrol was shot at because he stammered and could not get out the password quick enough. Another time one of the men, returning at midnight after a festive evening in the kitchen at Monchy, climbed out over the entanglements and opened fire on his own trench. When his ammunition was exhausted he was hauled in and soundly thrashed.