Everything would have been fine and dandy, but as I stepped out to leave, I found a torch shining in my eyes, and a military policeman asking me for my documentation. My talking to the civilians, the attentiveness with which I’d observed the gas cylinders, my unexplained appearance in this sparsely garrisoned district, all had aroused the suspicion of espionage. Of course I hadn’t brought my service-book with me, and so had to be led before the King of Queant, who was, as usual at this time of night, presiding over his round table.
Luckily, I found a sympathetic ear there. I was identified and made welcome. On this occasion, I came away with a rather different impression of the king; the hour was late, and he was talking about tropical jungles where he had spent a lot of time in charge of the building of a railway line.
On 16 June, the general sent us back to our units with a little speech, from which we were given to understand that our opponents were preparing a large-scale offensive on the Western Front, with its left flank facing our own position. This was our first inkling of what was to be the Battle of the Somme. It marked the end of the first and mildest part of the war; thereafter, it was like embarking on a different one altogether. What we had, admittedly almost unbeknown to ourselves, been through had been the attempt to win a war by old-fashioned pitched battles, and the stalemating of the attempt in static warfare. What confronted us now was a war of materiel of the most gigantic proportions. This war in turn was replaced towards the end of 1917 by mechanized warfare, though that was not given time fully to develop.
The sense that something was imminent hardened once we returned to our regiments, because our comrades told us of the increasing activity of the enemy. The British had twice, albeit unsuccessfully, essayed a raid in force against C Sector. We had retaliated with a well-prepared assault by three officers’ patrols against the so-called trench triangle, in the course of which we had taken several prisoners. While I’d been away, Wetje had been wounded by a shrapnel ball on the arm, but resumed command of the company shortly after my return. My dugout was somewhat changed as well, a direct hit had just about halved its dimensions. During the aforementioned raid, the British had fumigated it with a few hand-grenades. My replacement had managed to squeeze his way out through the skylight, while his batman had perished. His blood was still visible in great brown stains across the lining boards.
On 20 June I was ordered to eavesdrop on the enemy trenches, to find out whether they were trying to undermine us, and with Ensign Wohlgemut, Lance-Corporal Schmidt and Fusilier Par-thenfelder, I set out a little before midnight across our own, pretty high wire entanglements. The first stretch we did hunched forward, and then we crept side by side over the densely grown field. Fourth-form memories of Karl May [German author and polygrapher (1842-1912), whose tendentious, patriotic, neo-colonialist tales were routinely read by generations of young Germans.] came to me as I slithered along on my front through dewy grass and thistles, anxious to avoid the slightest rustle, with the British lines visible barely fifty yards in front of us as a black stroke against the grey. From a great distance, a spray of machine-gun bullets came down almost perpendicularly on top of us; an occasional flare went up and threw its chill light on our already rather inhospitable patch of land.
Then there was a loud rustling behind us. Two shadows were dashing between the trenches. Even as we made ready to throw ourselves upon them, they had disappeared. Moments later, the thunder of two hand-grenades in the British trenches indicated that we had brushed past some of our own. We continued to creep forward.
Suddenly the ensign gripped my arm: ‘Watch out, right, very close, ssh, ssh!’ And then, no more than ten paces away, I heard sundry rustlings in the grass. We had lost our orientation, and had been creeping along parallel to the English lines; presumably the enemy had heard us, and had now emerged from his trenches to see what was going on.
These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass is an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsman, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.
A line of dim forms surfaced, their whispers carried across to us. We turned to look at them; I heard the Bavarian Parthenfelder biting the blade of his knife.
They took a few more steps towards us, and then started working on their wires, seemingly not having noticed us. We crept very slowly backwards, keeping our eyes fixed on them. Death, which had already loomed up expectantly between us, slunk away dejectedly. After a little, we stood up and went on, till we reached our sector safely.
Our expedition’s fortunate conclusion gave us the idea of taking a prisoner, and we decided to go again the next night. I had just lain down, therefore, for an afternoon nap when I was startled up by a thunderous din outside my dugout. The British were lobbing ‘toffee-apples’ across, which, even though they made very little noise as they were fired, were so heavy that their splinters ripped away the massive posts of the revetment. Swearing, I clambered up from my bed and went into the trench, only, the next time I saw one of the black weights arcing towards us, to shout: ‘Mortar coming left!’ and nip into the nearest shelter.
In the course of the next few weeks, we were so abundantly graced with trench mortars of all shapes and sizes that we got in the habit, each time we found ourselves walking along the trench, of keeping one eye aloft, and the other on the entrance to the nearest deep dugout.
That night, my three companions and I once more crept out between the trenches. We crawled along on our toes and elbows till right up to the British entanglements, where we hid behind clumps of grass. After a while, some British came out, dragging a roll of wire after them. They stopped close in front of us, put the roll down, snipped at it with wire-cutters, and talked in whispers. We sidled together, and had a hasty discussion: Toss a hand-grenade in there, and pick up the pieces!’
‘Come on, there’s four of them!’
‘Don’t talk rubbish!’
‘Quiet! Quiet down!’ My warning came too late; as I looked up, the
British were darting lizard-like under their wires, and disappeared into their trench. The feeling now got a little clammy. The thought: ‘Now they’re going to bring up a machine-gun’ gave me a bad taste in my mouth. The others entertained similar fears. We slid back as quickly as we could, with quite a jangle. The British lines woke up. Drumming of feet, whispers, running hither and thither. Pssht… a flare. All around it was as bright as day, while we tried to press our heads into the grass. Another flare. Tricky moments. You wish the earth would swallow you up, you’d rather be anywhere than where you are, ten yards in front of enemy lines. Another one. Paow! Paow! The unmistakably crisp and deafening report of rifle shots fired at almost point-blank range.
‘Christ! They’ve seen us!’
No longer worried about making a noise, we called to each other to run for our lives, and leapt up and raced towards our lines through the now pattering gunfire. After a few bounds, I stumbled and landed in a small and very shallow crater, while the other three raced past me, thinking I was done for. I pressed myself to the ground, pulled in my head and my legs, and allowed the bullets to brush over me. Every bit as menacing were the burning lumps of magnesium from the flares, which burned down very close to me in some cases, and which I tried to pat away with my cap. Eventually the shooting relented, and, after a further quarter of an hour, I left my hiding-hole, slowly and cautiously to begin with, and then as fast as my hands and feet could carry me. Since the moon had set by now, I soon became utterly disorientated and had no idea where the British or the German lines were. Not even the distinctive shape of the ruined mill at Monchy was visible against the horizon. The odd bullet from one side or the other streaked over the ground. In the end I lay down in the grass and determined to wait for morning. Suddenly I heard some whispers very close by. I prepared to do battle, and then cautiously made a series of indeterminate natural sounds that I thought might pass equally well for English as German. I resolved to reply to the first English call I received with a hand-grenade. Then, to my delight, it turned out that the whispering was that of my little troop, who were just in the process of taking off their belts, to carry my body back. We sat a while longer in a bomb-crater, and were overjoyed at seeing each other again. Then we made our way back to our trenches. All told, our adventure had taken three hours.