‘To the left – in extended order – quick march!’
The column spilled out over the fields at the double; we formed up again to the left, and entered the village by a large detour.
Douchy, where the 73rd Rifles were billeted, was a middle-sized village that had not, as yet, suffered much from the war. This place, nestled on the wavy ground of Artois, became, over the year and a half of stationary warfare in that region, a kind of second garrison to the regiment, a place of rest and recreation after gruelling days of fighting and working on the front line. How many a time we drew a deep breath to see the
lonely light at the entrance to the village winking towards us through the black and rainy night! It meant having a roof over our heads again, and a bed in the dry. We could sleep without having to go out into the night four hours later, and without being pursued even into our dreams by the fear of a surprise attack. It made us feel reborn, on the first day of a rest spell, when we’d had a bath, and cleaned our uniforms of the grime of the trenches. We exercised and drilled out on the meadows, to return suppleness to our rusty bones, and to reawaken the esprit de corps of individuals isolated over the long watches of the night. That gave us the ability to resist during the long and taxing days ahead. At first, the companies took it in turn to march to the front for work on the fortifications. The strenuous double roster was dropped later on, on the orders of our understanding Colonel von Oppen. The security of a position depends less on the elaborate construction of its approach routes and the depths of the firing trench than on the freshness and undiminished courage of the men defending it.
For off hours, Douchy had much to commend it to its grey inhabitants. Numerous bars were still plentifully provided with eatables and drinkables; there was a reading room, a coffee bar and, later on, a cinema was improvised from a large barn. The officers enjoyed an excellently equipped mess-room and a bowling alley in the rectory garden. There were regular company parties, in which officers and men, in the timeless German fashion, vied with one another in drinking. Not to forget the killing days, for which the company pigs, kept fat on the refuse from the field kitchens, gave their lives.
Since the civilian population was still living in the village, it was important to exploit all available space. Gardens were partly taken up with huts and various temporary dwellings; a large orchard in the middle of the village was turned into a public square, another became a park, the so-called Emmichplatz. A barber and dentist were installed in a couple of dugouts covered with branches. A large meadow next to the church became a burial ground, to which the company marched almost daily, to take their leave of one or more comrades to the strains of mass singing.
In the space of a single year, a crumbling rural village had sprouted an army town, like a great parasitical growth. The former peacetime aspect of the place was barely discernible. The village pond was where dragoons watered their horses, infantry exercised in the orchards, soldiers lay in the meadows sunning themselves. All the peacetime institutions collapsed, only what was needed for war was maintained. Hedges and fences were broken through or simply torn down for easier access, and everywhere there were large signs giving directions to military traffic. While roofs caved in, and furniture was gradually used up as firewood, telephone lines and electricity cables were installed. Cellars were extended outwards and downwards to make bomb shelters for the residents; the removed earth was dumped in the gardens. The village no longer knew any demarcations or distinctions between thine and mine.
The French population was quartered at the edge of the village, towards Monchy. Children played on the steps of dilapidated houses, and old people made hunched figures, slinking timidly through the new bustle that had remorselessly evicted them from the places where they had spent entire lifetimes. The young people had to stand-to every morning, and were detailed to work the land by the village commandant, First Lieutenant Oberlander. The only time we came into contact with the locals was when we brought them our clothes to be washed, or went to buy butter and eggs.
One of the more remarkable features of this army town was the way a couple of young orphaned French boys followed the troops around. The two boys, of whom one was eight or so, the other twelve, went around clad entirely in field grey, and both spoke fluent German. They referred to their compatriots as the soldiers did, as ‘Schangels’.
[I would hazard, derived from the German pronunciation of the French ‘Jean’.] Their keenest desire was to go with ‘their’ company up the line. They drilled faultlessly, saluted their superior officers, formed up on the left flank for roll-call, and put in for leave when it was time to accompany the kitchen-helpers on shopping expeditions to Cambrai. When the 2nd Battalion went to Queant for a couple of weeks of instruction, one of the two, Louis, was ordered by Colonel von Oppen to remain behind in Douchy; no one spotted him anywhere on the way, but when the battalion arrived, there he was leaping happily out of the baggage cart where he had been hiding. The elder of the two, I was told, was later sent to petty-officer school in Germany.
Barely an hour’s march from Douchy lay Monchy-au-Bois, where the regiment’s two reserve companies were billeted. In the autumn of 1914, it had been bitterly fought over, and had ended up in German possession, as the battle slowly fought to a standstill in a half-circle round the ruins of this once-affluent town.
Now the houses were burned down and shot up, the neglected gardens raked by shells, and the fruit trees snapped. The rubble of stones had been heaped into a defensive installation with the aid of trenches, barbed wire, barricades and concrete strong- points. All the approach roads could be covered by machine-gun fire from a pillbox called ‘Torgau Redoubt’. Another strongpoint went by the name of ‘Altenburg Redoubt’, an entrenched post to the right of the village that was home to a detachment of company reserves. Also pivotal to the defence was a quarry that in peacetime had provided the limestone for the village houses, and which we had stumbled upon rather by chance. A company cook who had lost his water-pail in a well had had himself lowered after it, and had noticed a spreading cavern-like hole. The place was investigated and, after a second entrance had been knocked through, it offered bomb-proof accommodation for a large number of fighters.
On the isolated heights on the way to Ransart was the ruin of a one-time estaminet – dubbed ‘Bellevue’ on account of the wide view of the front that was afforded from it – and this was a place I came to love, in spite of its exposed situation. From there, the view stretched over the dead land, whose defunct villages were linked by roads that had no traffic on them, and on which no living creature was to be seen. In the distance glimmered the outline of the abandoned city of Arras, and round to the right the shining chalk mine-craters of St Eloi. The weedy fields lay barren under the passing clouds and the shadows of clouds, and the tightly woven web of trenches spread its little white and yellow links, secured by lengthy communication trenches. From time to time, there was a puff of smoke from a shell, lobbed into the air as if by a ghostly hand; or the ball of a shrapnel hung over the wasteland like a great white flake slowly melting. The aspect of the landscape was dark and fantastic, the war had erased anything attractive or appealing from the scene, and etched its own brazen features, to appall the lonely onlooker.
The desolation and the profound silence, sporadically broken by the crump of shells, were heightened by the sorry impression of devastation. Ripped haversacks, broken rifles, scraps of cloth, counterpointed grotesquely with children’s toys, shell fuses, deep craters from explosions, bottles, harvest implements, shredded books, battered household gear, holes whose gaping darkness betrayed the presence of basements, where the bodies of the unlucky inhabitants of the houses were gnawed by the particularly assiduous swarms of rats; a little espaliered peach tree despoiled of its sustaining wall, and spreading its arms pitifully; in the cattle byres and stables and barns the bones of livestock still dangling from their chains; trenches dug through the ravaged gardens, in among sprouting bulbs of onions, wormwood, rhubarb, narcissus, buried under weeds; on the neighbouring fields grain barns, through whose roofs the grain was already sprouting; all that, with a half-buried communication trench running through it, and all suffused with the smell of burning and decay. Sad thoughts are apt to sneak up on the warrior in such a locale, when he thinks of those who only recently led their lives in tranquillity.