The following afternoon we finally moved back for a few days to our beloved Douchy. That same evening, we celebrated the success of the engagement with several well-earned bottles.
On 1 July, it was our sorry task to bury a proportion of our dead in our churchyard. Thirty-nine wooden coffins, with the names written in pencil on the unplaned planks, were laid side by side in the pit. The minister spoke on the text: ‘They have fought a good fight,’ beginning with the words, ‘Gibraltar, that is your motto, and why not, for have you not stood firm like the rock in the sea surge!’
It was in the course of these days that I learned to appreciate these men, with whom I was to be together for two more years of the war. What was at stake here was a British initiative on such a small scale as barely to find mention in the histories of both armies, intended to commit us to a sector where the main attack was not to be. Nor did the men have very much to do, only cover the very small amount of ground, from the entrance of the shelter to the sentry posts. But these few steps needed to be taken in the instant of a great crescendo of fire before an attack, the precise timing of which is a matter of gut instinct and feeling. The dark wave that so many times in those nights welled up to the traverses through raging fire, and without even an order being possible, remained with me in my heart as a personal yardstick for human trustworthiness.
Especially strongly marked is the memory of the position, broken and still steaming, as I walked through it shortly after the attack. The day’s sentries were already in position while the trenches had yet to be cleared. Here and there, the sentry posts were covered with dead, and, in among them, as it were, arisen from their bodies, stood the new relief with his rifle. There was an odd rigidity about these composites – it was as though the distinction between alive and dead had momentarily been taken away.
On the evening of 3 July, we moved back up to the front. It was relatively quiet, but there were little indications that there was something afoot. There was soft and insistent hammering from the mill at all times, as though metal were being fashioned. We intercepted numerous telephone calls to an English pioneer officer at the very front, concerning gas cylinders and explosions. From dawn to the last gleam of light at the end of the day, English aeroplanes kept up a dense pattern of overflying, to keep us and the hinterland apart. The trench bombardments were substantially harder than usual; also, there was a suspicious change of target, as though new batteries were set to finding their range. In spite of it all, we were relieved on 12 July, without too much disagreeableness, and went into the reserve in Monchy.
On the evening of the 13th, our dugouts in the garden came under fire from a ten-inch naval gun, whose massive shells rumbled at us in a low arc. They burst with a terrific bang. At night, we were woken up by intense fire and a gas attack. We sat round the stove in the dugout in our gas masks, all except Vogel, who had lost his, and was running around like a madman, looking in all the corners, while a few sadistic fellows whom he’d given a hard time reported that the smell of gas was getting stronger and stronger. In the end, I gave him my refill, and he sat for an hour behind the smoking stove, holding his nose, and sucking on the mouthpiece.
On that same day I lost two men from my platoon, wounded as they went around the village: Hasselmann had a bullet through the arm, while Maschmeier caught a shrapnel ball through the throat.
There was no attack that night; even so, the regiment lost another twenty-five dead and a great many wounded. On the 15 th and 17th, we had further gas attacks to endure.
On the 17th, we were relieved and twice suffered heavy bombardment in Douchy. One of them came just as we were having an officers’ meeting with Major von Jarotzky in an orchard. It was dangerous, but it was still ridiculous to watch the company suddenly burst apart, fall on their faces, force their way through hedges in an absolute trice, and disappear under various cover before you could count to ten. A shell falling in the garden of my lodgings killed a little girl who had been digging around for rubbish in a pit.
On 20 July we moved back up. On the 28th, I arranged with Ensign Wohlgemut and Privates Bartels and Birkner to go on another one of our patrols. We had nothing more in mind than to wander around between the lines and see what was new in no man’s land, because we were beginning to get a bit bored with the trench. In the afternoon, Lieutenant Brauns, the officer in the 6th Company who was relieving me, paid me a call in my dugout, bringing a fine Burgundy with him. Towards midnight we broke up; I went out into the trench, where my three companions were already assembled in the lee of a traverse. After I’d picked out a few bombs that looked dry and in working order, I climbed over the wire in a high good humour, and Brauns called out a joviaclass="underline"
‘Break a leg!’ after me.
In quick time, we had crept up to the enemy barrier. Just before it, we came across a pretty stout and well-insulated wire in some long grass. I was of the opinion that information was important here, and instructed Wohlgemut to cut off a piece and take it with him. While he was sawing away at it with – for want of more appropriate tools – a cigar clipper, we heard something jingling the wire; a few British soldiers appeared and started working without noticing us, pressed as we were in the long grass.
Mindful of our hard time on the previous expedition, I breathed: ‘Wohlgemut, toss a hand-grenade in that lot!’
‘Lieutenant, shouldn’t we let them work a bit more first?’
‘Ensign that was an order!’
Even here, in this wasteland, the magic words took effect. With the sinking feeling of a man embarking on an uncertain adventure, I listened to the dry crackle of the pulled fuse, and watched Wohlgemut, to offer less of a target, trundle and almost roll the grenade at the British group. It stopped in a thicket, almost in the middle of them; they seemed not to have seen anything. A few moments of great tension ticked by. ‘C-crashh!’ A flash of lightning lit up their sprawling figures. With a shout of ‘You are prisoners!’ we launched ourselves like tigers into the dense white smoke. A desperate scene developed in fractions of seconds. I held my pistol in the middle of a face that seemed to loom out of the dark at me like a pale mask. A shadow slammed back against the barbed wire with a grunt. There was a ghastly cry, a sort of ‘Wah!’ – of the kind that people only produce when they’ve seen a ghost. On my left, Wohlgemut was banging away with his pistol, while Bartels in his excitement was throwing a hand-grenade in our midst.
After one shot, the magazine had clicked out of my pistol grip. I stood yelling in front of a Briton who in his horror was pressing his back into the barbed wire, and kept pulling the trigger. Nothing happened – it was like a dream of impotence. Sounds came from the trench in front of us. Shouts rang out, a machine-gun clattered into life. We jumped away. Once more I stopped in a crater and aimed my pistol at a shadowy form that was pursuing me. This time, it was just as well it didn’t fire, because it was Birkner, whom I had supposed to be safely back long ago.
Then we raced towards our lines. Just before our wire, the bullets were coming so thick and fast that I had to leap into a water-filled, wire-laced mine-crater. Dangling over the water on the swaying wire, I heard the bullets rushing past me like a huge swarm of bees, while scraps of wire and metal shards sliced into the rim of the crater. After half an hour or so, once the firing had abated, I made my way over our entanglements and leaped into our trench, to an enthusiastic reception. Wohlgemut and Bartels were already back; and another half an hour later, so was Birkner. We were all pleased at the happy outcome, and only regretted that once again our intended captive had managed to get away. It was only afterwards that I noticed that the experience had taken its toll on my nerves, when I was lying on my pallet in my dugout with teeth chattering, and quite unable to sleep. Rather, I had the sensation of a sort of supreme awakeness – as if I had a little electric bell going off somewhere in my body. The following morning, I could hardly walk, because over one knee (over other, historic injuries) I had a long scrape from the barbed wire, while the other had caught some shards from Bartels’s hand-grenade.