On 28 January 1916, a man in my unit was wounded in the body by a splinter from a bullet that shattered against his plate. On the 30th, another got a bullet in the thigh. When we were relieved on 1 February, the communication trenches were subjected to intense fire. A shrapnel shell landed at the feet of rifleman Junge, my former cleaner in the 6th Company, failed to go off, but flared up instead with a tall flame, so that he had to be carried away with grave burns.
It was round about then too that an NCO with the 6th, whom I knew well, and whose brother had fallen only days before, was fatally injured by a ‘toffee-apple’ that he had found. He had unscrewed the fuse, and, noticing that the greenish powder he tipped out was highly inflammable, he put a lit cigarette in at the opening. The mortar of course blew up, and he received fifty separate wounds. We suffered many casualties from the over-familiarity engendered by daily encounters with gunpowder. A rather alarming neighbour in this respect was Lieutenant Pook, who was housed by himself in a dugout in the maze of trenches behind our left flank. He had collected a number of enormous dud shells, and amused himself by unscrewing their fuses, and tinkering with them as if they were bits of clockwork. Every time I had to go past his lair I made a wide detour. Even when the men were only chipping the copper rings off the shells to work them into paper-knives or bracelets, there were incidents.
On the night of 3 February we were back in Douchy, following a taxing time at the front. The next morning, I was enjoying my first morning of ease, drinking a cup of coffee in my billet on the Emmichplatz, when a monster of a shell, the herald of a heavy bombardment, went off outside my door and sent the window glass jangling into my room. With three bounds I was in the cellar, where the other inhabitants also presented themselves in quick time. Since the cellar was half above ground, and was only separated from the garden by a thin wall, we all pressed together into a short tunnel that had been embarked on only a few days previously. With animal instincts, my sheepdog forced his whimpering way between the tight-pressed bodies into the deepest, furthest corner of the shelter. Far in the distance, we could hear the dull thud of a series of discharges, then, when we’d counted to thirty or so, the whining approach of the heavy iron lumps, ending in crashing explosions all round our little abode. Each time, there was an unpleasant surge of pressure through the cellar window, and clods of Earth and shards came clattering on the tiled roof, while the anxious horses whinnied and stamped in their stables nearby. The dog whined throughout, and a fat bandsman screamed as if he were having a tooth pulled each time a whistling bomb approached.
At last the storm was over, and we could risk going out in the open again. The wrecked village street was swarming like a disturbed anthill. My quarters looked in a bad way. The earth had been blown open in several places against the cellar wall, fruit trees were snapped, and smack in the middle of the path lay a long and malign-looking shell that hadn’t gone off. The roof was riddled with holes. A big fragment of shell had removed half the chimney. In the regimental office next door, a few sizeable splinters had drilled through the walls and the large wardrobe, shredding the uniforms that were kept there for wear on home leave.
On 8 February, the sector received a vigorous pummelling. It began early in the morning when our own artillery dropped a dud on the dugout of my right flank, to the consternation of those within, pushing through the door and toppling the stove. This event, which could have passed off so much worse, was immortalized in a sketch of eight men trying to get out past the smoking stove through the shattered door, while the bomb lay in the corner, rolling its eyes wickedly. In the afternoon, three more dugouts were hit, but luckily only one man was slightly hurt in the knee, because all the others, except for the sentries, had withdrawn into the shelters. The following day, Fusilier Hartmann from my platoon was fatally hit in the side by the flanking battery.
On 25 February, we were particularly affected by a fatality that robbed us of an outstanding comrade. Just before we were to be relieved, I was brought the news in my dugout that volunteer Karg had just fallen in the shelter next door. I went there, to see, as so often before, a serious-looking group of men around a motionless figure, lying with rigid fingers on the bloodied snow, staring at the darkening winter sky with glassy eyes. Another victim for the flanking battery! Karg had been in the trench when it had started up, and had straightaway leaped into the shelter. A shell had struck the opposite wall of the trench high up, and at just such an angle as to cast a large splinter into the entrance to the shelter. Karg, who must have thought he had already reached safety, was struck on the back of the head; his death was instant and unexpected.
That flanking battery was quite a feature of those days. On average once an hour, it would fire a round at us, out of the blue, whose fragments precisely swept out the trench. In the six days from 3 to 8 February, it cost us three dead and seven wounded, three of them seriously. Even though it was located on a hillside no more than a mile away from our left flank, our artillery seemed to be unable to do anything about it. We therefore tried, by adding to the number of traverses and building them higher, to restrict its effectiveness to small parts of the trench at any given time. Those stretches that were visible from it, we masked with screens of hay or material. Also, we beefed up the sentry posts with wooden beams and slabs of reinforced concrete. But even then, because of the way the trench was used as a thoroughfare, the odds favoured the English gunners in their effort to ‘pick us off without excess use of munitions.
By early March, we had seen the worst of the mud. The weather turned dry, and the trench was now securely supported. Every night, I sat in my dugout at a little desk, reading, or chatting if I had company. There were four of us officers, including the company commander, and we lived together very harmoniously, drinking coffee in one or other of our dugouts, or having supper together, often over a bottle or two, smoking, playing cards, and enjoying rather baronial conversations. On some days, there was herring with boiled potatoes and dripping, which was considered quite a feast. In the memory, such congenial hours made up for other days of blood, filth and work. Also, they were only possible in this long stationary phase of the war, where we had all bonded together, and an almost peacetime routine had evolved. Our principal source of pride was our building work, which HQ broadly left us to get on with by ourselves. Through constant work, one thirty-step shelter after another was dug out of the chalk and clay soil, and linked by cross-passages, so that we could go from right to left of our frontage in safety and comfort, entirely underground. My own favourite project was a sixty-yard underground passage linking my dugout with the company commander’s, with other dormitories and munitions depots off to either side, just like a regulation corridor. All this was to come in handy in the fighting to come.
When we met in the trenches after morning coffee – we even had newspapers delivered to the front, at least some of the time – all clean and with our footrules in our hands, we compared progress, and our talk was of shelter-frames, dugout designs, rate of progress, and other such matters. A popular subject was the construction of my ‘boudoir’, a little cubby-hole off the underground passage, dug into dry chalk; a sort of warren where we could have happily dozed through the end of the world. For a mattress I had set aside some fine-meshed wire, and the wallcoverings were of some special sandbag material.