At St. Pierre Vaast

After fourteen days in hospital and as long on leave I went back to the regiment, which was now in the line near Deux Nœuds, quite close to the well-known Grande Tranchée. After my arrival it remained two days there, and the same time in the old mountain town of Hattonchâtel. Then we entrained at Mars-la-Tour for the Somme region once more.

We detrained at Bohain again and went into quarters in the village of Brancourt, near by. This was a neighbourhood we often touched upon in later days. It was agricultural, and yet there was a loom in nearly every house. The inhabitants did not appeal to me. They were dirty and of a very low moral development. I was billeted on a cottage where lived a man and his wife and their daughter. I must own that in return for my money they made me most excellent dishes of eggs. The daughter told me over the first cup of coffee that she was going “to drink a good coffee with Poincaré after his return,” by which she meant, give him a piece of her mind. I have never heard anyone so fluent in abuse as this filia hospitalis, particularly on the topic of a neighbour whom she accused of having lived in a certain street of St. Quentin. “Ah cette p’lure, cette pomme de terre pourrie, jetée sur un fumier. C’est la crème de la crème,” she spluttered while she raged round the room stretching out her hands like claws in the vain search for an object on which to vent her wrath.

In the morning, when this rose of Brancourt was busied making butter or some other domestic matter, she looked unbelievably uninviting. Yet in the afternoon, when it came to parading the village street with pride or visiting her friends, the ugly grub had turned into the splendid butterfly. I always observed with some mistrust a large box of rice-powder that never left the table, for it seemed to me to be a complete substitute for soap and water.

One day the father begged me to forward an indictment to the town-major complaining of a neighbour who, not content with taking him by the throat and giving him a good beating, had shouted “Demande pardon!” while threatening him with death.

Little observations of this kind gave me the comforting assurance that national pride, even in France, is not a quality of the masses. Two years later, when we returned to our native land after honourable and exacting warfare, the knowledge of this helped me to get over the remarkable reception that some of our own people gave us. “Il y a des cochons partout!” as the English officer very justly remarked to me in front of the trenches at Monchy.

The 2nd Company was now under command of Lieutenant Boje. We spent our days here in the happy atmosphere of good fellowship. I must own that we often drank heavily until, indeed, we treated the whole world as no more than a laughable phantom that circled round our table. There were usually also uproarious sounds from the room occupied by our batmen. Those who have never known the brief spells that separate one murderous battle from another may hold up their hands at us if they please. In any case we were glad to indulge ourselves and our men with every hour of debauch that life would yield while we were still within its circle.

I shall not be taken for a dipsomaniac, though I mention drink so often. I have never flouted the time-honoured and social rites of the bottle. At the same time, both before the war and since I have often gone for months without drinking at all. But at the front one came out of the line covered with mud and in a bad temper, to have the few days on rest taken up in training⁠ ⁠… and then the night came in the mess, and the present was blotted out and only memory and hope were lit up. All the devastation of every kind that surrounded one was seen in the light of humour and in a state of bliss, however fleeting it might be, and was finally lost altogether in that lighthearted independence of time that attends upon every toper. One broke through time, menacing and oppressive as it was, and rejoiced for an hour or two in a boundless world. The war left one with two memories, as I am sure every outspoken soldier of it will agree, that were always recurring: one, when one was faced with the worst moments it had to offer; the other, when the bottle went round as madly and merrily as ever it did in times of peace. It was only because these black and red threads were interlaced in fairly equal proportions that the experiences of the war were not intolerable.

For the coming spell in the line I was appointed as scouting officer, and with a scout troop and two N.C.O.s was under the orders of the division.

On the 8th November the battalion moved in pouring rain to Gonnelieu. There the scout troop was detached to Lièremont and put under the command of the divisional intelligence officer, Captain Böckelmann. The captain, with us four scout officers, two observation officers, and his adjutant, was quartered in the priest’s house. There we lived very happily together in comfortably furnished rooms.

Our predecessors took us over the divisional front. We had to go up the line every second night. Our task was to ascertain exactly where the front line ran and to see that communications were maintained, so that if the need arose we should be able to take the troops into the line and carry out orders in an emergency. My sphere of action was a sector left of St. Pierre Vaast wood and immediately in front of the so-called “Nameless” wood. The first night, after nearly drowning myself in crossing a marsh flooded by the Tortille, I got into a thick cloud of phosgene shell-gas, and scurried back with weeping eyes to Vaux wood. On the way I fell into one shell-hole after another, as I could see nothing through the misted eyepieces of the mask.

On the 13th November, hoping for better luck, I set out again on my second tour of the line. My orders were to ascertain that touch was maintained between the shell-holes that constituted the front line. I struggled to my goal along a chain of posts concealed in holes in the ground.

The shell-hole line deserved its name. A plateau in front of the village of Rancourt was pockmarked with innumerable miniature craters which here and there were occupied by two or three men. The monotony of the scene, where nothing was heard but the whistle and crash of shells, filled the mind with the dread of its utter desolation. After some time I lost touch with the line of shell-holes and went back in case I walked into the French. Soon after I came upon an officer I knew in the 164th Regiment, who warned me not to stay any longer now that dawn was breaking. So I hurried on through “Nameless” wood, stumbling into deep shell-holes and over uprooted trees and through the almost impassable tangle of branches that covered the ground.

When I left the edge of the wood it was daylight. Before me lay an expanse of shell-holes without a sign of life. I stopped short, for, in modern battle, stretches of ground where not a man is to be seen are always suspicious.

Suddenly a shot from an unseen sniper got me in both legs. I flung myself into the nearest shell-hole and bound the wounds with my handkerchief, for, needless to say, I had forgotten my field-dressing. A bullet had passed through my right calf and grazed my left.

I crept back into the wood with the utmost caution, and from there limped over the shell-shot ground to the dressing-station. Shortly before this I had an example of the little incidents on which the chances of war turn. I was making for the crossroads about a hundred metres ahead of me, when an officer in command of a working party whom I had known in the 9th Company called out to me. We had scarcely been talking for a minute when a shell struck the crossroads where but for this chance encounter I should probably have been at that moment.

After dark I was carried on a stretcher to Nurlu. Captain Böckelmann was most kindly waiting for me with a car. We were proceeding along the chaussée in the light of the enemy searchlights when the driver suddenly applied the brakes. A dark obstruction barred the way. It was an infantry section with its N.C.O., which had just fallen a victim to a direct hit. It seemed as though death had united them in a peaceful sleep.

I had to be taken into the cellar of the priest’s house, as Lièremont was just receiving its evening benediction. The same evening I was moved to the Villeret field hospital, and thence to the war hospital at Valenciennes.

The hospital was installed in the gymnasium near the station, and accommodated four hundred severe cases. A funeral procession with muffled drums left the main entrance day after day. The whole misery of the war was concentrated in the spacious operating-theatre. The surgeons carried on their sanguinary trade at a row of operating-tables. Here a limb was amputated, there a skull chiselled away, or a grown-in bandage cut out. Moans and cries of pain sounded through the room in the flood of remorseless light, while nurses in white hastened busily from one table to another with instruments and dressings.

The soldier who after such a sight goes back under fire with ardour unquenched has indeed withstood a test of nerve; for every fresh and terrible impression claws itself into the brain, and is added to the prostrating complex of imaginings that make the moment between the rush and the burst of a shell ever more frightful.

Next to my bed a sergeant-major who had lost a leg lay dying. In his last moments he woke from delirium and got the nurse to read him his favourite chapter of the Bible. Then in a voice scarcely audible he asked all his ward companions to forgive him for having so often awaked them from sleep by his delirious ravings, and then just before he died a few minutes later he tried to cheer us all up with an imitation of our orderly’s comic dialect.

I was glad when after fourteen days I was able to leave this abode of piled-up agonies, with my wound half-healed. I had read with pride, meanwhile, of the magnificent and successful attack of the Fusiliers on St. Pierre Vaast wood.

The 111th Division were still holding the same front. There were several explosions as my train trundled into Epéhy. The ruins of goods trucks lumped up together showed that it was no joking matter.

“What is going on here, I say?” asked a captain sitting opposite me. He had the fresh and rosy air of having been exported straight from home. Without wasting time by a reply I tore open the door and took cover behind the railway embankment. Fortunately they were the last ones, and only a few horses were wounded.

As I could not walk very well, I was given the post of observation officer. My field of observation was over the falling ground between Nurlu and Moislaines. I had a periscopic telescope built into a shelter, and with this I kept a lookout in the front line that I already knew well. My job was to ring up the division in case of heavy fire, coloured lights, or any other unusual events. All day long I crouched freezing on a chair behind the glasses in the November mist, with nothing to vary the monotony except an occasional call to test the wires. If the wire had been broken I had to have it mended by my breakdown squad. Apart from this I had nothing to do but wait for the moment of an attack.

The modern battlefield is like a huge, sleeping machine with innumerable eyes and ears and arms, lying hidden and inactive, ambushed for the one moment on which all depends. Then from some hole in the ground a single red light ascends in fiery prelude. A thousand guns roar out on the instant, and at a touch, driven by innumerable levers, the work of annihilation goes pounding on its way.

Orders fly like sparks and flashes over a close network, spurring on to heightened destruction in front and bringing up from behind a steady stream of fresh men and fresh materials to fling into the flames. Everyone feels that he is caught in a vortex which draws him on and on and thrusts him with unrelenting precision over the brink of death.

Every twenty-four hours I was relieved by another officer and betook myself to Nurlu, where fairly comfortable quarters had been rigged up in a large wine-cellar. I often think of those long, meditative November evenings which I spent smoking my pipe alone at the hearth of this barrel-shaped vault, while outside the mist dripped from the bare trees in the park and at long intervals a reechoing report broke the stillness.

On the 18th November the division was relieved and I went back to the regiment, now on rest in the village of Fresnoy-le-Grand. There I took over the command of the 2nd Company in place of Lieutenant Boje, then on leave. The regiment had four weeks of undisturbed rest in Fresnoy, and everyone did his best to enjoy it to the full. Christmas and New Year were celebrated by the companies with great festivities at which beer and grog flowed in rivers. There were exactly four men left in the 2nd Company who had spent the previous Christmas with me in the line before Monchy. I was billeted on a French rentier, in whose house I shared the so-called “salon” and two bedrooms with Fähnrich Gornick and my brother Fritz, who was spending six weeks with the regiment as cadet. We made ourselves very merry over the worthy married couple, who kept an argus-eyed watch over their plush furniture and alabaster vases and over their stack of wood in the yard, and who lived on terms of ceaseless animosity with the batman.

In this little retreat the bottle went round faster than ever. At night when walking late through the narrow streets one heard the sounds of carnival in every billet. Everything in wartime goes without reckoning, and hence came the preference of the soldier at the front for alcohol in its most concentrated forms. Our relations with the civil population, too, were, to a great extent, of an undesirable familiarity; Venus deprived Mars of many servants.

Needless to say, we were at once put on a footing of old Prussian discipline, and it said a great deal for officers and men that after fourteen days the regiment was once more at its old level.

There was an inspection by the commander of the division, Major-General Sontag. On this occasion the regiment was honoured for its valiant conduct in the attack on St. Pierre Vaast wood, and distinguished by a number of decorations.

As I marched past the general at the head of the 2nd Company I observed that Colonel von Oppen appeared to make some remark about me to the general. A few hours later I received orders to report at divisional headquarters, where the general handed me the Iron Cross of the 1st class.

On the 17th January 1917 I was sent from Fresnoy on a four weeks’ company commanders’ course at Sisonne near Laon, where there was a French manoeuvring ground. Captain Funk, who was in command of our detachment, made the work exceedingly pleasant. He understood to an exceptional degree how to put the spirit above the letter and to interest us in the matters in hand.

The catering was certainly the sorriest I ever experienced in the course of the war. During the whole four weeks there was seldom anything put on the table of our gigantic messroom but watery boiled swedes. At the same time the work was by no means light.