On 11 December, I went over the top to the front line, to report to Lieutenant Wetje, the commander of my new company, which occupied C Sector in turn about with my former company, the 6th. As I was about to leap into the trench, I was shocked at the change to the position in just a fortnight. It had collapsed into a huge, mud-filled pit in which the occupants sloshed around miserably. Already up to my hip in it, I thought ruefully back to the round table of the King of Queant. We poor grunts! Almost all the dugouts had collapsed, and the shelters were inundated. We had to spend the next weeks working incessantly, merely to get something resembling terra firma underfoot. For the time being, I stayed with Lieutenants Wetje and Boje in a shelter, whose ceiling – in spite of tarpaulins suspended beneath it – leaked like a sieve, so that the servants had to carry the water out in buckets every half-hour.
When I left the shelter completely sodden the following morning, I couldn’t believe the sight that met my eyes. The battlefield that previously had borne the stamp of deathly emptiness upon it was now as animated as a fairground. The occupants of both trenches had emerged from the morass of their trenches on to the top, and already a lively exchange of schnapps, cigarettes, uniform buttons and other items had commenced between the two barbed-wire lines. The throng of khaki-clad figure emerging from the hitherto so apparently deserted English lines seemed as eerie as the appearance of a ghost in daylight.
Suddenly a shot rang out that laid one of our men dead in the mire, whereupon both sides quickly scuttled back into their trenches. I went to that part of our line which fronted on to the British sap, and called out that I wanted to speak to an officer. And lo, I saw several British soldiers going back, and returning with a young man from their firing trench who had on, as I was able to see through my field glasses, a somewhat more ornate cap than they did. We negotiated first in English, and then a little more fluently in French, with all the men listening. I reproached him for the fact that one of our men had been killed by a treacherous shot, to which he replied that that hadn’t been his company, but the one adjacent. ‘Il y a des cochons aussi chez vous!’ he remarked when a few shots from the sector next to ours plugged into the ground not far from his head, causing me to get ready to take cover. [‘There are some unscrupulous bastards on your side too!’]
We did, though, say much to one another that betokened an almost sportsmanlike admiration for the other, and I’m sure we should have liked to exchange mementoes.
For clarity’s sake, we gave a solemn mutual declaration of war, to commence three minutes after the end of our talks, and following a ‘Good-night!’ on his part, and an ‘Au revoir!’ on mine, to the regret of my men I fired off a shot that pinged against his steel loophole, and got one myself that almost knocked the rifle out of my hands.
It was the first time I had been given an opportunity of surveying the battlefield in front of the sap, seeing as otherwise one couldn’t even show the peak of one’s cap in such a perilous place. I saw that immediately in front of our entanglements there was a skeleton whose bleached bones glimmered out of scraps of blue uniform. From the British cap-badges seen that day, we were able to tell that the regiment facing ours were the ‘Hindustani’ Leicestershires.
Shortly after our negotiations were concluded, our artillery fired off a few rounds at the enemy positions, whereupon, before our eyes, four stretchers were carried across the open field without a single shot being loosed off at them from our side. I must say I felt proud.
Throughout the war, it was always my endeavour to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try and seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him. When prisoners fell into my hands, later on, I felt responsible for their safety, and would always do everything in my power for them.
As Christmas approached, the weather seemed to worsen; we had recourse to pumps in our efforts to do something about the water. During this muddy phase, our losses also worsened. So, for instance, I find in my diary for 12 December: ‘Today we buried seven men in Douchy, and two more were shot.’ And for 23 December: ‘Mud and filth are getting the better of us. This morning at three o’clock an enormous deposit came down at the entrance to my dugout. I had to employ three men, who were barely able to bale the water that poured like a freshet into my dugout. Our trench is drowning, the morass is now up to our navels, it’s desperate. On the right edge of our frontage, another corpse has begun to appear, so far just the legs.’
We spent Christmas Eve in the line, and, standing in the mud, sang hymns, to which the British responded with machine-gun fire. On Christmas Day, we lost one man to a ricochet in the head. Immediately afterwards, the British attempted a friendly gesture by hauling a Christmas tree up on their traverse, but our angry troops quickly shot it down again, to which Tommy replied with rifle-grenades. It was all in all a less than merry Christmas.
On 28 December, I was back in command of the Altenburg Redoubt. On that day, rifleman Hohn, one of my best men, lost his arm to a shell fragment. Heidotting received a bad thigh wound from one of the many bullets that were whizzing round our earthworks in the hollow. And my faithful August Kettler, the first of many servants to die in my service, fell victim to a shrapnel that passed through his windpipe as he was on his way to Monchy to get my lunch. As he was setting off with the mess-tins, I had called out to him: ‘August, mind how you go, won’t you.’
‘I’ll be fine, Lieutenant!’ And then I was summoned and found him lying on the ground close to the dugout, gurgling, as the air passed through the wound into his chest with every breath he took. I had him carried back; he died a few days later in hospital. It was a feature of his case, as it was of quite a few others, that his inability to speak made him even more pathetic, as he stared at the nurses in bewilderment like a tormented animal.
The road from Monchy to Altenburg Redoubt cost us a lot of blood. It led along the rear slope of a modest elevation, perhaps five hundred paces behind our front line. Our opponents, perhaps alerted by aerial photographs to the fact that this road was indeed much frequented, set themselves to rake it at intervals with machine-gun fire, or to unload shrapnels over the area. Even though there was a ditch running along beside the road, and there were strict orders to walk in the ditch, sure enough everyone tended to stroll along this dangerous road, without any cover, with the habitual insouciance of old soldiers. Generally, we got away with it, but on many days fate snatched a victim or two, and over time they added up. Here, too, stray bullets from all directions seemed to have arranged a rendezvous for themselves at the latrine, so that we were often compelled to flee, holding a newspaper and trousers at half-mast. And for all that, it seemed not to have occurred to anyone to move this indispensable facility to a place of greater safety. January also was a month of back-breaking work. Each platoon began by removing the mud from the immediate vicinity of its dugout, by means of shovels, buckets and pumps, and then, having firm ground underfoot once more, set about establishing communications with its neighbours. In the Adinfer forest, where our artillery was positioned, teams of woodcutters were set to strip the branches off young trees and split them into long struts. The trench walls were sloped off and entirely reverted with this material. Also, numerous culverts, drainage ditches and sumps were dug, so that things were once more made bearable. What really made a difference were those deep sumps that were dug through the surface clay and enabled water to drain into the absorptive chalk beneath.