The Somme Retreat

On my return to the regiment, which had for some days been in the line near the ruins of Villers-Carbonnel, I was given temporary command of the 8th Company. Our rest-place was Devise.

On the march from there to the line one had to cross the plain of the Somme near the villages of Brie and St. Christ. The dreary devastation of these places in the midst of the melancholy marsh country used to put me in a peculiarly sorrowful mood as dark fragments of cloud chased across a moonlit sky, and the eerie interplay of light and shadow heightened the impression of chaos.

During the latter part of the time our front was exposed to numerous English attacks, connected with the great evacuation of the Somme area, for which we had made the most careful preparations. The enemy raided nearly every morning to ascertain whether we were still there. The following are a few of the experiences of those days.

1st March 1917. During the morning there was great artillery activity owing to the clear weather. In particular a heavy battery, with the help of balloon observation, pretty well flattened the section of trench occupied by No. 3 platoon of my company. In the afternoon, in order to mark up any alteration of the line on my map, I splashed along to No. 3 platoon through the utterly waterlogged “unnamed trench.” On the way I saw a giant yellow sun rush down to the ground trailing a black streamer behind it. An airman had attacked the unpleasant balloon and shot it down in flames. He got back in spite of a storm of fire.

In the evening Lance-corporal Schnau came to report that he had detected a sound of pickaxes, for four days past, underneath his section’s dugout. I forwarded the report, and was sent a pioneer detachment with a listening apparatus, but our suspicions were not confirmed. Later we heard that our whole position had been undermined.

On the 5th March a patrol approached our trench in the early morning and began to cut our wire. Lieutenant Eisen with a few men hurried off to warn the nearest post, and threw bombs. The enemy patrol then took to flight, leaving two men behind them. One, a young lieutenant, died immediately; the other, a sergeant, was severely wounded in the arm and leg. It appeared from papers found on the officer that he belonged to the Royal Munster Fusiliers. He was very well clothed, and his features, though distorted in death, were intelligent and energetic. It affected me to find the addresses of several London girls in his pocketbook. We buried him behind our trench, and put a simple cross at his head. I saw from this that all patrols need not end so fortunately as mine had done in days past.

Next morning the English, after a short artillery preparation, attacked the front of the next company, commanded by Lieutenant Reinhardt, with fifty men. The enemy crept up to the wire. Then one of them, who had a striker attached to his cuff, made a light-signal in order to silence the English machine-guns, and the whole party threw their last bombs and advanced on the trench. The men received them in such a masterly fashion that only one of them got into the trench. He ran straight through to the second line, and there, when he made no reply to the summons to give himself up, he was shot. Only a lieutenant and a sergeant got through the wire. The officer, though he wore a steel shirt under his uniform, was accounted for by a bullet point-blank from Reinhardt’s revolver that drove a whole steel plate into his body. The sergeant had both legs nearly torn off by a bomb; nevertheless, he clenched his short pipe between his teeth with stoical calm until he died. Here, as always, whenever we encountered the English we encountered brave men.

During the morning of this success I was strolling through the trench and saw Lieutenant Pfaffendorf, who was controlling the fire of his trench-mortar with a periscopic telescope from a fire-step. I had scarcely joined him when I saw an Englishman walking along over the top behind the third line of the enemy trenches. His khaki uniform showed up distinctly on the horizon. I seized the nearest rifle, sighted it at 600, got the man in the tip of the foresight, and then, aiming a bit in front of his head, I pulled the trigger. He went three steps, and then fell on his back as though his legs had been knocked from under him. After a few movements of his arms he rolled into a shell-hole, where, with the glass, we could see his brown sleeves showing up for a long while after.

On the 9th of March our front was properly plastered with shells. I was awakened in the early morning by the heavy firing, and, seizing my revolver, went, dazed with sleep, into the trench. When I pulled aside the groundsheet at the top of the dugout steps, it was still as black as pitch. The bright flashes of the guns and the showers of earth woke me up in no time. I ran through the trench, but not a soul did I see till I came to a deep dugout, where a group of men crowded on the steps like hens crowding together in the rain, with no one in command. On such occasions the Prussian way is the best. Pitch into the men, and so get yourself going too. I took them with me, and soon made the trench look lively. I was delighted to hear little Hambrock’s piping voice somewhere along the trench, occupied in the same way as I was.

When the firing died down, I went back to my dugout in a bad temper, and there I was further ruffled by a telephone call from headquarters:

“What the hell is up? Why have you been all this time coming to the phone?”

Keeping in touch is no doubt most important, but fighting, after all, is action first and last.

After breakfast there was more of it. This time H.E.s were slowly but incessantly being “plonked down” in front of our noses. At last it became boring, so I paid little Hambrock a visit by an underground galley, and, after seeing what he had to drink, sat down with him to a game of “seven and four.” We were a little upset once by a giant crash. It sounded as though a drunken gang came tumbling over each other down the steps. Lumps of earth clattered through the door and down the stovepipe. The dugout shaft had got hit, and the timber revetment was shivered to matchwood. Sometimes a suffocating smell of bitter almonds blew down the shaft. Were they shooting prussic acid at us? Well, good luck to them. I had to leave the dugout once⁠—indeed, I made four attempts in all, owing to constant interruption by the shells. Immediately after, the batman bounced in with the announcement that the latrine had disappeared beneath a direct hit. “Well,” said Hambrock, “you do have the devil’s own luck!”

The fire ceased towards evening. I went along the trench in the mood I always experienced after being heavily shelled, a mood like the relief one feels after a violent storm. The trench looked pretty bad; stretches of it were entirely filled in. Five dugout shafts were smashed up. Several men were wounded. I went to see them and found them all fairly comfortable. There was one man killed. His body lay in the trench covered with a groundsheet. A long splinter had torn his left hip away, though he was standing right at the bottom of the dugout steps.

In the morning we were relieved. On the 13th I was entrusted by Colonel von Oppen with the honourable task of holding the company front with a patrol of two sections until the whole regiment had crossed the Somme. Each of the four sectors of our front was to be held by a similar patrol under the command of an officer. The officers, starting from the right flank, were Reinhardt, Fischa, Lorek, and myself.

The villages we passed through as we marched to the front line had the appearance of lunatic asylums let loose. Whole companies were pushing walls down or sitting on the roofs of the houses throwing down the slates. Trees were felled, window-frames broken, and smoke and clouds of dust rose from heap after heap of rubbish. In short, an orgy of destruction was going on. The men were chasing round with incredible zeal, arrayed in the abandoned wardrobes of the population, in women’s dresses and with top hats on their heads. With positive genius they singled out the main beams of the houses and, tying ropes round them, tugged with all their might, shouting out in time with their pulls, till the whole house collapsed. Others swung hammers and smashed whatever came in their way, from flowerpots on the window ledges to the glasswork of conservatories.

Every village up to the Siegfried line was a rubbish-heap. Every tree felled, every road mined, every well fouled, every watercourse dammed, every cellar blown up or made into a deathtrap with concealed bombs, all supplies or metal sent back, all rails ripped up, all telephone wire rolled up, everything burnable burned. In short, the country over which the enemy were to advance had been turned into an utter desolation.

The moral justification of this has been much discussed. However, it seems to me that the gratified approval of armchair warriors and journalists is incomprehensible. When thousands of peaceful persons are robbed of their homes, the self-satisfaction of power may at least keep silence.

As for the necessity, I have of course, as a Prussian officer, no doubt whatever. War means the destruction of the enemy without scruple and by any means. War is the harshest of all trades, and the masters of it can only entertain humane feelings so long as they do no harm. It makes no difference that these operations which the situation demanded were not very pretty.

On the 13th I took over with my two sections the front that the 2nd Company now left to me. During the night a man with the ominous name of Kirchhof was killed by a shot through the head. This unlucky shot happened to be the only one fired by the enemy during several hours.

I did all I could to deceive the enemy as to our strength. A few shovelfuls of earth were thrown over the top, now at one point, now at another, and our machine-gun had to fire a few shots first from the left, then from the right. Nevertheless, our fire sounded extremely thin when a low-flying scout crossed the line or a working party traversed our front behind the enemy’s trenches. Consequently, patrols appeared every night at one point or another and set to work tampering with our wire.

On the last day but one I nearly met a sorrowful end. A dud shell from an antiaircraft gun came hurtling down and exploded on the traverse against which I was innocently leaning. The rush of air sent me flying into the entrance of a deep dugout exactly opposite, where I came to in a state of utter stupefaction.

On the 17th, in the early morning, we could tell that an attack was imminent. In the English front line, usually unoccupied owing to the mud, was to be heard the clatter of many feet. The laughter and shouting showed that they were a strong party and well fortified from within. Presently dark figures approached our wire. They dispersed under our fire, and one collapsed with a cry and was left behind. I withdrew my men to the entrance of a communication trench, and was kept busy in illuminating our front, now suddenly under artillery and trench-mortar fire, with Verey lights. As the white soon gave out, we made a fireworks display with coloured ones. When five o’clock came, the hour at which, according to orders, we were to evacuate the trench, we quickly blew up the dugouts with bombs, in so far as they were not already provided with infernal machines, some of which we had ingeniously constructed. During the last hours I had not dared to touch any box or door or bucket in case I might go up in the air.

At the appointed time all the patrols, some of them already involved in bombing engagements, retreated towards the Somme. We were the last to cross the river, and then the bridges were blown up by an engineer detachment. The drumfire still raged away on our front, and it was some hours later when the first enemy patrols appeared on the Somme. We retired behind the Siegfried position, then still being constructed. The battalion was quartered in the village of Lehaucourt on the St. Quentin Canal. I occupied, with my batman, a comfortable little cottage where the household goods were still stored away in chests and cupboards. I should like to put on record, to show what sort of fellows ours were, that nothing I could say would induce my batman, the trusty Knigge, to make his bed in the warm sitting-room. He insisted all the time on sleeping in the cold kitchen. This attitude of reserve which is typical of the Lower Saxon made the relations between officer and men work very smoothly.

The first evening out on rest I invited a party of my fellow-officers to drink mulled wine spiced with all the spices left behind by the owner of the house; for our rearguard had earned the praise of all our superior officers, and fourteen days’ leave as well.