‘Good God!’
‘A light! A light!’
‘Get everything ready!’ Everyone’s hearts were in their mouths. Hands darted to release the pins on bombs. ‘That was the last of them!’
‘Let’s go!’ As we charged out of the entrance, a mine with a delay fuse went off, and hurled us back inside. All the same, as the last of the iron birds came whooshing down, all the sentry positions were manned by us. Bright as day, a firework display of flares lit the cloud-swathed field. These instants, in which the entire complement of men stood behind the traverses, tensed and ready, had something magical about them; they were like the last breathless second before a hugely important performance, as the music is turned off and the big lights go up.
For several hours that night, I stood leaning against the entrance to my dugout, which, irregularly, faced the enemy, from time to time looking at my watch, to take down notes about the levels of fire. I eyed the sentry, an older man with children, standing completely impassive with his rifle, lit from time to time by the flash of an explosion.
Oddly, it was after the shooting had subsided that we took another casualty. Fusilier Nienhauser suddenly fell from his sentry post, and came crashing down the shelter steps to join his comrades who were all assembled at the bottom. When they inspected the eerie arrival, all they could find on him was a small wound on the forehead, and a puncture over the right nipple from which blood was flowing. It remained unclear whether the wound or the sudden fall had killed him.
At the end of this night of terror, we were relieved by the 6th. In the grumpy mood produced by the appearance of the sun following a sleepless night, we marched down the communications trench to Monchy, and from there to the reserve line set back at the edge of the Adinfer forest that afforded us box seats for the overture to the Somme battles. The sectors to our left were still swathed in black and white smoke, one massive explosion after another sent the dirt spewing up past rooftop height; and over them, hundreds of speedy lightnings produced by bursting shrapnels. Only the coloured signals, the mute appeals to the artillery for help, indicated that there was still life in the trenches. This was the first time I had seen artillery fire to match a natural spectacle.
In the evening, just as we hoped for a good night’s sleep at last, we were given orders to load trench-mortar ammunition at Monchy, and had to spend all night waiting up in vain for a lorry that had got stuck, while the British made various, fortunately unsuccessful, attempts on our lives, either by means of high-angled machine-gun fire or sweeping the road with shrapnels. We were especially irritated by one machine-gunner who sprayed his bullets at such an angle that they came down vertically, with acceleration produced by sheer gravity. There was absolutely no point in trying to duck behind walls.
That night, the enemy gave us an example of his painstaking observation skills. In the second line, perhaps a mile and a quarter from the enemy, we had left a heap of chalk in front of what was to be a subterranean munitions dump. The British drew the unfortunately correct conclusion that this dump was to be masked over in the course of the night, and fired a group of shrapnels at it, succeeding in gravely wounding three of our men.
In the morning, I was shaken out of my sleep yet again by the order to lead my platoon on a digging detail to C Sector. My sections were broken up and divided among the 6th Company. I accompanied some of them back to the Adinfer woods, to get them chopping timber. On the way back to the trench, I stopped in my dugout for a quick catnap. But it was no good, I was unable to get any rest in those days. No sooner had I pulled off my boots, than I heard our artillery firing with unwonted animation from their position on the edge of the woods. At the same time my batman Paulicke materialized in the entrance to the shelter, and shouted down: ‘Gas attack!’
I broke out the gas mask, got into my boots, buckled up, ran out and saw a huge cloud of gas hanging over Monchy in thick white swathes, and drifting under a slight breeze in the direction of Point 124 on the low ground.
Since my platoon was for the most part in the front line, and an attack was probable, there wasn’t much time to stop and think. I leaped over the ramparts of the reserve line, raced forward, and soon found myself enveloped in the gas cloud. A penetrating smell of chlorine confirmed for me that this was indeed fighting gas, and not, as I had briefly thought, artificial fog. I therefore donned my mask, only to tear it off again right away because I’d been running so fast that the mask didn’t give me enough air to breathe; also the goggles misted over in no time, and completely whited out. All this of course was hardly the stuff of ‘What To Do in a Gas Attack’, which I’d taught so often myself. Since I felt pain in my chest, I tried at least to put the cloud behind me as fast as I could. At the entrance to the village, I needed to get through a barrage of gunfire, whose impacts, topped by numerous clouds of shrapnel, drew a long and even chain across the barren and otherwise unfrequented fields.
Artillery fire in open country never has the same effect, either physically or on one’s morale, as it does among dwellings or fortifications. I had therefore broken through the line of fire, and found myself in Monchy, which lay under an extraordinary hail of shrapnel. A shower of balls, splinters and fuses came hissing and whizzing through the branches of the fruit trees in the neglected gardens, or smacked against the masonry.
In a dugout in the garden, I saw my company comrades Sievers and Vogel sitting; they had lit a merry wood fire, and were leaning over the cleansing flame to escape the effects of the chlorine. I joined them there, until the fire had slackened off a little, and then went forward down communication trench 6.
As I went on, I looked at all the little animals lying in the pit of the trench, killed by the chlorine, and thought: ‘The barrage is bound to start up again any moment, and if you continue taking your time, you’ll be caught in the open, like a mouse in a trap.’ And yet, I continued phlegmatically at my own pace.
Exactly what I had anticipated happened: not more than fifty yards away from the company shelter, I found myself in a whole new and much worse bombardment, in which it seemed completely impossible to get through even this short stretch of trench without being hit. Luckily for me, I saw right by me one of the occasional niches that were carved into the trench walls for dispatch runners. Three dugout frames, not a whole lot, but better than none at all. So I pressed myself in there and allowed the storm to pass.
Unwittingly, I seemed to have chosen the liveliest corner going. Light and heavy ‘toffee-apples’, Stokes bombs, shrapnels, rattles, shells of all kinds – I could no longer identify everything that was buzzing and whizzing and crashing around me. I was reminded of my corporal at Les Eparges, and his exclamation: ‘What in God’s name are those things?’
Occasionally my ears were utterly deafened by a single fiendish crashing burst of flame. Then incessant hissing gave me the sense of hundreds of pound weights rushing down at incredible speed, one after the other. Or a dud shell landed with a short, heavy ground-shaking thump. Shrapnels burst by the dozen, like dainty crackers, shook loose their little balls in a dense cloud, and the empty casings rasped after they were gone. Each time a shell landed anywhere close, the earth flew up and down, and metal shards drove themselves into it.
It’s an easier matter to describe these sounds than to endure them, because one cannot but associate every single sound of flying steel with the idea of death, and so I huddled in my hole in the ground with my hand in front of my face, imagining all the possible variants of being hit. I think I have found a comparison that captures the situation in which I and all the other soldiers who took part in this war so often found ourselves: you must imagine you are securely tied to a post, being menaced by a man swinging a heavy hammer. Now the hammer has been taken back over his head, ready to be swung, now it’s cleaving the air towards you, on the point of touching your skull, then it’s struck the post, and the splinters are flying – that’s what it’s like to experience heavy shelling in an exposed position. Luckily, I still had a bit of that subliminal feeling of optimism, ‘it’ll be all right’, that you feel during a game, say, and which, while it may be quite unfounded, still has a soothing effect on you. And indeed even this shelling came to an end, and I could go on my way once more, and, this time, with some urgency.