At the front, the men were all busy greasing their rifles in accordance with the nostrums of ‘What To Do in a Gas Attack’, because their barrels had been completely blackened by chlorine. An ensign dolefully showed me his new sword-knot, which had quite lost its silver sheen, and had turned a greenish black.
Since our opponents seemed not to be making a move, I took my troops back to the rear. Outside the company office in Monchy, we saw a lot of men affected by gas, pressing their hands against their sides and groaning and retching while their eyes watered. It was a bad business, because a few of them went on to die over the next several days, in terrible agony. We had had to withstand an attack with chlorine, which has a burning, corrosive effect on the lungs. Henceforth, I resolved never to go anywhere without my gas mask, having previously, incredibly foolishly, often left it behind in my dugout, and used its case – like a botanist – as a container for sandwiches. Seeing this taught me a lesson.
On the way back, meaning to buy something, I had gone into the 2nd Battalion canteen, where I found a dejected canteen boy standing surrounded by broken crockery. A shell had come through the ceiling and gone off in the store, converting its treasures into a mélange of jam, liquid soap and punctured containers of this and that. He had just, with Prussian pernicketiness, done his accounts, showing a loss of 82 marks and 58 pfennigs.
In the evening, because of the uncertain position, my platoon, which had so far been withdrawn to the second line, was moved forward to the village, and was housed in the quarry. We settled ourselves into its numerous nooks and crannies, and lit an enormous fire, whose smoke went up through the well-shaft, greatly to the annoyance of some of the company cooks, who were almost asphyxiated as they pulled up their buckets of water. Since we had been issued with strong grog, we sat on limestone blocks round the fire, and sang and talked and smoked.
Round about midnight, all hell was let loose in the curved front enclosing Monchy. Dozens of alarm clocks rang, hundreds of rifles went off, and white and green flares went up unceasingly. Next, a barrage of fire went off, heavy trench mortars crashed, drawing plumes of fiery sparks after them. Wherever in the maze of ruins there was a human soul, the long-drawn-out cry went up: ‘Gas attack! Gas attack! Gas! Gas! Gaaas!’
By the light of the flares, a dazzling flow of gas billowed over the black jags of masonry. Since there was a heavy smell of chlorine in the quarry as well, we lit large straw fires at the entrances, whose acrid smoke almost drove us out of our refuge, and forced us to try and cleanse the air by waving coats and tarpaulins.
The next day, we were able to marvel at the traces the gas had left. A large proportion of the plants had withered, snails and moles lay dead, and the horses that were stabled in Monchy for use by the messengers, had watering eyes and muzzles. The shells and ammunition splinters that lay all over the place had a fetching green patina. The cloud had been noticed as far away as Douchy, where rattled civilians had assembled outside Colonel von Oppen’s quarters and demanded gas masks. Instead, they were loaded on to Lorries, and driven to towns and villages set back from the front.
The following night we were in the quarry again; in the evening, I was given news that coffee would be provided at quarter past four in the morning, as an English deserter had said an attack was planned for five. And, indeed, no sooner had the coffee-bringers roused us the next morning than the almost familiar shout of ‘Gas attack!’ rang out. There was a sweetish smell in the air; and, as we were later to find out, this was phosgene to which we were being treated. In the ring around Monchy, powerful drumfire was raging, but that ebbed away before long.
This anxious hour turned into a bracing morning. From communication trench 6, Lieutenant Brecht emerged on to the village street, with a bloody bandage wrapped round his hand, accompanied by a soldier with fixed bayonet and an English captive. Brecht was given a triumphant reception in Headquarters West, and told us the following:
The British had let off clouds of gas and smoke at five in the morning, and had gone on to rattle our trench with mortar fire. Our soldiers, as was their custom, had leapt out of their shelters while the bombing was still in progress, and we had taken more than thirty casualties. Then, still hidden in the smoke, two large British raiding parties had appeared, one of which had got into the trench, and taken a wounded NCO of ours. The other never made it past the wire entanglement. The single exception Brecht – who, before the war, had been a plantation owner in America – now seized by the throat, and greeted with the words, ‘Come here, you son of a bitch!’ The captive was presently being treated to a glass of wine, and looking with half-frightened, half-puzzled eyes at the previously deserted village street, now filling with ration parties, ambulancemen, dispatch-carriers and various nondescript onlookers. He was a tall fellow, very young, fresh-faced, and with fair hair. ‘What a shame to have to shoot at such people!’ went through my head as I saw him.
Soon a long line of stretchers arrived at the dressing-station. A lot of wounded men came from Monchy South as well, because the enemy had also succeeded in breaking into the line – briefly – in E Sector. One of the assailants must have been an amazing character. He had leaped into the trench, apparently unremarked, and run along it, past the backs of the sentries, who all had their eyes on the field in front of them. One after the other, he leaped on them from behind – the gas masks restricted further their field of vision – and, having felled a number of them with blows of a club or rifle butt, returned, equally unremarked, to the British lines. When the trench was tidied up later, eight sentries were found with broken skulls.
Around fifty stretchers, with men lying groaning on them in blood-soaked bandages, were laid out in front of some sheets of corrugated metal, under which the doctor did his business, with sleeves rolled up.
One young fellow, whose blue lips shone rather ominously from his ghostly white face, was mumbling to himself: ‘I’m too badly… they won’t be able… I’m sure – I’ll die.’ A fat NCO from the medical corps looked at him pityingly, and several times breathed a comforting: ‘Come on, mate, come on!’
Even though the British had thoroughly prepared this little attack – designed to tie up our forces here, to favour their offensive on the Somme – with plenty of trench-mortar attacks and clouds of poison gas, they only managed to take alive a single, wounded, prisoner, whereas they left plenty of dead on our wires. Of course our losses were also substantial; the regiment later that morning mourned over forty dead, among them three officers, and a good number of wounded as well.