I was back on trench duty again at five. In No. 1 Platoon’s part of the line, I ran into Sergeant Hock standing outside his dugout. When I expressed surprise at seeing him out so early, he informed me that he was lying in wait for a large rat whose gnawing and rustling had kept him up all night. And from time to time he would look ruefully at his absurdly small dugout, which he had christened ‘Villa Fat-of-the-Land Chicken’.
While we were standing together, we heard a distant sound of firing, which boded nothing in particular to us. But Hock, who the day before had almost been brained by a large mortar-bomb, and was therefore very apprehensive, dived into the nearest shelter, sliding down the first fifteen steps in his haste, and finding space in the next fifteen for three virtuoso somersaults. I stood up by the entrance, laughing so hard I forgot all about mortars and shelters, when I heard the poor chap bewailing this painfully curtailed rat-hunt, all the while rubbing various sore joints and attempting to put back a dislocated thumb. The unhappy man went on to tell me he’d just been sitting down to eat the night before when the mortar-bomb had come along. As a result he’d got grit all over his dinner, and had made a first painful acquaintance with the flight of steps. He had just arrived here from home, and wasn’t yet used to our roughneck ways.
After this incident, I betook myself to my dugout, but today too there was no chance of any restorative kip. From early morning on, our trench was subjected to mortar attack, at shorter and shorter intervals. By noon, I’d had enough. With a few other fellows, I got our Lanz mortar set up, and aimed at our opponent’s trenches – a pretty feeble reply, admittedly, to the heavy bombs we’d been ploughed with. Sweating, we squatted on a little dip in the trench – the clay baked hard by the June sun – and sent bomb after bomb towards their lines.
Since the British seemed quite unperturbed, I went with Wetje to the telephone, where, after some thought, we agreed on the following form of words: ‘Helen’s spitting in our trenches. We need potatoes, big ones and little ones!’ We used this type of language when there was a chance that the enemy might be listening in; and before long we were pleased to hear back from Lieutenant Deichmann that the fat policeman with the stiff moustaches and a couple of his little friends would be brought up, and before long the first of our two-hundredweight bombs flew into the enemy trench, followed by a few units of field artillery, with the result that we were left in peace for the rest of the day.
Midday the following day the dance began again, but significantly intensified. At the first shot, I took my subterranean passage to the second line, and from there to the communications trench where we had set up our own mortar emplacement. We opened fire in such a way that every time we received a ‘toffee-apple’ we replied with a Lanz. After exchanging about forty mortars, the enemy gunner seemed to be finding his range. His missiles were coming down to the right and left of us, without being able to interrupt our activity until one was seen heading straight for us. At the very last moment we pulled our trigger one last time, and then ran as fast as we could. I had just made it to a mucky, wired stretch of trench when the monster blew up just behind me. The enormous air pressure threw me over a bundle of barbed wire into a shell-hole full of greenish water, and sent a sprinkling of hard clay shards on top of me. I picked myself up, feeling very groggy and dishevelled. My boots and trousers were ripped by the barbed wire, my hands and my uniform were stuck with thick clay, and my knee was bleeding from a long wound. Rather the worse for wear, I slunk back through the trench to my dugout to get over the experience.
Other than that, the mortars hadn’t done much in the way of damage. The trench had taken a battering in a few places, a Priester mortar was smashed, and the ‘Villa Fat-of- the-Land Chicken’ was no more. It had received a direct hit, while its unlucky owner was down in the deep dugout, otherwise in all probability he would have practised his third freestyle descent of the steps.
The firing went on all afternoon without a break, and by evening it had been increased to drumfire by numbers of cylindrical bombs. We referred to these missiles as ‘wash- basket mortars’ because it sometimes looked as though they had been shaken down from the sky by the basketload. The best way of picturing their design is imagining a rolling-pin with two short handles on it. Apparently they were fired from special revolver-like drums and were sent spinning end over end through the air, making a somewhat laboured wheezing sound. From a distance they resembled flying sausages. These came down so thick and fast that their landing was like the torching of a batch of rockets. The ‘toffee-apples’ had something crushing or stamping about them, these had more of a rending effect on the nerves.
We sat tensed and ready in the shelter entrances, prepared at any moment to repel invaders with rifles and hand-grenades, but the bombardment died back after half an hour. In the night we had two more bouts of firing to withstand, during which our sentries stood at their posts and indomitably kept watch. As soon as the gunning relented, numerous flares lit up the defenders charging out from their shelters, and a brisk fire persuaded the enemy that there was still life in our lines.
In spite of the heavy bombardment, we lost only one man, Fusilier Diersmann, whose skull was smashed by a mortar-bomb landing on the parapet in front of him. Another man was wounded in the back.
On the day after this unquiet night, numerous bursts of firing prepared us for an imminent attack. In that time, our trenches really were shot to pieces, and the smashed timber from their revetment made them almost impassable; a number of dugouts were also flattened.
Brigade headquarters sent an intelligence report to the front: ‘Intercepted British telephone message: the British have precise descriptions of the gaps in our lines, and have requested “Steel Helmets”. It is not known whether “Steel Helmet” is code for heavy mortars. Be prepared!’
We resolved to be on the alert for anything the coming night, and agreed that anyone who didn’t give his name in response to a ‘Hallo!’ would be immediately fired at. Every officer had his pistol loaded with a red flare, to alert the artillery.
The night was still wilder than the last. In particular, one concentration of fire at quarter past two outdid anything there had been up to that point. A hail of heavy shells struck all round my dugout. We stood fully armed on the shelter steps, while the light of our little candle stumps reflected glitteringly off the wet, mildewed walls. Blue smoke streamed in through the entrances, and earth crumbled off the ceiling. ‘Boom!’