Like a couple of squirrels having stones thrown at them, the NCO and I dodged panting round a huge beech. Quite mechanically, and spurred on by further explosions, I ran after my superior, who sometimes turned round and stared at me, wild-eyed, yelling:
‘What in God’s name are those things? What are they?’
Suddenly there was a flash among the rootwork, and a blow on the left thigh flung me to the ground. I thought I had been struck by a clump of earth, but the warm trickle of blood indicated that I’d been wounded. Later, I saw that a needle-sharp piece of shrapnel had given me a flesh wound, though my wallet had taken the brunt of it. The fine cut, which before slicing into the muscle had split no fewer than nine thicknesses of stout leather, looked as though it might have been administered by a scalpel.
I threw down my haversack and ran towards the trench we had come from. From all sides, wounded men were making tracks towards it from the shelled woods. The trench was appalling, choked with seriously wounded and dying men. A figure stripped to the waist, with ripped-open back, leaned against the parapet. Another, with a triangular flap hanging off the back of his skull, emitted short, high-pitched screams. This was the home of the great god Pain, and for the first time I looked through a devilish chink into the depths of his realm. And fresh shells came down all the time.
I lost my head completely. Ruthlessly, I barged past everyone on my path, before finally, having fallen back a few times in my haste, climbing out of the hellish crush of the trench, to move more freely above. Like a bolting horse, I rushed through dense undergrowth, across paths and clearings, till I collapsed in a copse by the Grande Tranchee.
It was already growing dark by the time a couple of stretcher-bearers who were looking for casualties came upon me. They picked me up on their stretcher and carried me back to their dressing-station in a dugout covered over with tree branches, where I spent the night, pressed together with many other wounded men. An exhausted medic stood in the throng of groaning men, bandaging, injecting and giving calm instructions. I pulled a dead man’s coat over me, and fell into a sleep that incipient fever lit with lurid dreams. Once, in the middle of the night, I awoke, and saw the doctor still working by the light of a lamp. A Frenchman was screaming incessantly, and next to me a man growled:
‘Bloody Frenchies, never happy if they’ve not got something to moan about!’ And then I was asleep again.
As I was being carried away the following morning, a splinter bored a hole through the stretcher canvas between my knees.
Along with other wounded men, I was loaded on to one of the ambulance wagons that shuttled between the battlefield and the main dressing-station. We galloped across the Grande Tranchee, which was still under heavy fire. Behind the grey canvas walls we careered through the danger that accompanied us with giant stamping strides.
On one of the stretchers on which – like loaves of bread into an oven – we had been pushed into the back of the cart lay a comrade with a shot in the belly that occasioned him intense pain. He appealed to every one of us to finish him off with the ambulanceman’s pistol that hung in the wagon. No one answered. I was yet to experience the feeling where every jolt seems like a hammer blow on a bad injury.
The chief dressing-station was in a forest clearing. Long rows of straw had been laid out and covered with foliage. The stream of wounded was proof, if proof were needed, that a significant engagement was in progress. At the sight of the surgeon, who stood checking the roster in the bloody chaos, I once again had the impression, hard to describe, of seeing a man surrounded by elemental terror and anguish, studying the functioning of his organization with ant-like cold-bloodedness.
Supplied with food and drink, and smoking a cigarette, I lay in the middle of a long line of wounded men on my spill of straw, in that mood which sets in when a test has been got through, if not exactly with flying colours, then still one way or another. A short snatch of conversation next to me gave me pause. ‘What happened to you, comrade?’
‘I’ve been shot in the bladder.’
‘Is it very bad?’
‘Oh, that’s not the problem. I can’t stand it that I can’t fight
Later that same morning, we were taken to the main collection point in the village church at St Maurice. A hospital train was there, already getting up steam. We would be back in Germany in two days. From my bed on the train, I could see the fields just coming into spring. We were well looked after by a quiet fellow, a philosophy scholar in private life. The first thing he did for me was to take out his penknife and cut the boot off my foot. There are people who have a gift for tending others, and so it was with this man; even seeing him reading a book by a night-light made me feel better.
The train took us to Heidelberg.
At the sight of the Neckar slopes wreathed with flowering cherry trees, I had a strong sense of having come home. What a beautiful country it was, and eminently worth our blood and our lives. Never before had I felt its charm so clearly. I had good and serious thoughts, and for the first time I sensed that this war was more than just a great adventure.
The battle at Les Eparges was my first. It was quite unlike what I had expected. I had taken part in a major engagement, without having clapped eyes on a single live opponent. It wasn’t until much later that I experienced the direct coming together, the climax of battle in the form of waves of attackers on an open field, which, for decisive, murderous moments, would break into the chaos and vacuity of the battlefield.
Douchy and Monchy
Two weeks later, my wound was healed. I was released to the reserve battalion in Hanover, and was given a short home leave there to get used to walking again.
‘Why not report as a gentleman-cadet?’ my father suggested to me on one of my first mornings at home, as we were walking round the orchard to see how the trees would bear; and I did as he suggested, even though it had seemed much more attractive to me at the beginning of the war to be a simple rifleman, responsible only for myself.
So the regiment sent me off to Doberitz, on another course, which I left six weeks later with the rank of ensign. From the hundreds of young men who had come from all over Germany, I could tell that the country was not short of good fighting stock. While the training I had received in Recouvrence had been directed at the individual, here we were instructed in various ways of moving across terrain in small groups.
In September 1915, I travelled back to my regiment. I left the train in the village of St Leger, the divisional headquarters, and marched at the head of a small detachment of reservists to Douchy, where the regiment was based. Ahead of us, the French autumn offensive was in full swing. The front manifested itself as a long, billowing cloud over open country. Overhead the machine-guns of the air squadrons pattered away. Sometimes, when one of the French planes came down very low – their colourful rosettes seeming to scan the ground like big butterflies’ eyes – my little troop and I took cover under the poplars that lined the road. The anti-aircraft guns threaded long fleecy lines through the air, and whistling splinters pinged into the tilth.
This little march was to give me an opportunity of putting my newly acquired skills into practice right away. We knew we had been spotted, probably by one of the many captive balloons whose yellow forms glimmered in the Western sky, because, just as we were turning into the village of Douchy, the black cone of a shell exploded in our faces. It struck the entrance to the little village cemetery, just beside the road. For the first time, I found myself in the position of having to react to an unexpected development with an immediate decision.