These short expeditions, where a man takes his life in his hands, were a good means of testing our mettle and interrupting the monotony of trench life. There’s nothing worse for a soldier than boredom.
On 11 August there was a black riding stallion loose outside Berles-au-bois, which a territorial was finally able to kill with three bullets. The British officer it had escaped from wouldn’t have been too pleased to see it in that condition. In the night, Fusilier Schulz caught a spent part of an English bullet in his eye. In Monchy, too, there were more casualties, as the walls brought down by shelling now afforded less and less protection from random sprays of machine-gun bullets. We started to dig trenches right across the village, and erected new walls near the most dangerous places. In the neglected gardens, the berries were ripe, and tasted all the sweeter because of the bullets flying around us as we ate them.
The 12th of August was the long-awaited day when, for the second time in the war, I had a home furlough. No sooner had I got home and settled in, though, than a telegram came winging after me: ‘Return immediately, further details from local command Cambrai.’ And three hours later, I was on the train. On the way to the station, three girls in light dresses swayed past me, clutching tennis racquets – a shining last image of that sort of life, which was to stay with me for a long time.
On the 21 st I was back in familiar country, the roads swarming with soldiers on account of the departure of the IIIth and the arrival of a new division. The 1st Battalion was based in the village of Ecoust-St-Mein, whose wreckage we were to reoccupy on our advance two years from now.
I was welcomed by Paulicke, whose days were also numbered. He told me that the young fellows from my platoon must have inquired about a dozen times whether I wasn’t back yet. It stirred and revived me to hear that; I realized that in the hot days that were ahead of us, I had a following based not only on rank, but also on character.
That night I was put up with eight other officers in the loft of an empty house. We stayed up a long time, and, for want of anything stronger, sat drinking coffee that a couple of Frenchwomen made for us in the house next door. We knew there was a battle impending, the like of which the world had not seen. We felt no less aggressive than the troops who had marched over the border two years before, but we were more experienced and therefore more dangerous. We were up for it, in the best and most cheerful condition, and expressions like ‘avoid contact with the enemy’ were not in our vocabulary. Anyone seeing the men round this jolly table would have to tell themselves that positions entrusted to them would only be lost when the last defender had fallen. And that indeed proved to be the case.
Guillemont
On 23 August 1916, we were put on lorries and driven as far as Le Mesnil. Even though we had already heard we were to be posted to the legendary heart of the Battle of the Somme, namely the village of Guillemont, the mood was extraordinarily high. Jokes and witticisms flew from one vehicle to another, to the general merriment of all.
During one stop on the way, a driver split his thumb in the course of crank-starting his lorry. The sight of the wound almost made me ill, I have always been sensitive to such things. I mention this because it seems virtually unaccountable as I witnessed such terrible mutilation in the course of the following days. It’s an example of the way in which one’s response to an experience is actually largely determined by its context.
From Le Mesnil we marched, after dark, to Sailly-Saillisel, where the battalion took off their knapsacks in a large meadow and prepared a storm pack.
Ahead of us rumbled and thundered artillery fire of a volume we had never dreamed of; a thousand quivering lightnings bathed the western horizon in a sea of flame. A continual stream of wounded, with pale, sunken faces, made their way back, often barged aside by clattering guns or munitions columns heading the other way.
A runner from a Wurttemberg regiment reported to me to guide my platoon to the famous town of Combles, where we were to be held in reserve for the time being. He was the first German soldier I saw in a steel helmet, and he straightaway struck me as the denizen of a new and far harsher world. Sitting next to him in the roadside ditch, I questioned him avidly about the state of the position, and got from him a grey tale of days hunkered in craters, with no outside contact or communications lines, of incessant attacks, fields of corpses and crazy thirst, of the wounded left to die, and more of the same. The impassive features under the rim of the steel helmet and the monotonous voice accompanied by the noise of the battle made a ghostly impression on us. A few days had put their stamp on the runner, who was to escort us into the realm of flame, setting him inexpressibly apart from us.
‘If a man falls, he’s left to lie. No one can help. No one knows if he’ll return alive. Every day we’re attacked, but they won’t get through. Everyone knows this is about life and death.’
Nothing was left in this voice but equanimity, apathy; fire had burned everything else out of it. It’s men like that that you need for fighting.
We were marching along a wide road, which ran in the moonlight like a white ribbon across the dark countryside, towards the thunder of guns, whose voracious roar grew ever more immeasurable. Abandon all hope! What gave the scene a particularly sinister aspect was the way all the roads were clearly visible, like a network of white veins in the moonlight, and there was no living being on them. We marched as on the gleaming paths of a midnight cemetery.
Before long the first shells landed left and right of us. Conversations grew quieter and stopped altogether. We listened to the whining approach of each shell with the strange tenseness that seems somehow to sharpen one’s hearing. The first real challenge that confronted us was crossing Fregicourt-Ferme, a small cluster of houses just past the graveyard at Combles. That was where the noose that had been drawn around Combles was tightest.
Everyone wanting to enter or leave the town had to pass through here, and so incessant very heavy fire, like the focused beams of a magnifying glass, was concentrated on this one little lifeline. Our guide had warned us about this notorious bottleneck; we passed through it at the double, while the ruins clattered around us.
Over the ruins, as over all the most dangerous parts of the terrain, lay a heavy smell of death, because the fire was so intense that no one could bother with the corpses. You really did have to run for your life in these places, and when I caught the smell of it as I ran, I was hardly surprised – it belonged to there. Moreover, this heavy sweetish atmosphere was not merely disgusting; it also, in association with the piercing fogs of gunpowder, brought about an almost visionary excitement, that otherwise only the extreme nearness of death is able to produce.
Here, and really only here, I was to observe that there is a quality of dread that feels as unfamiliar as a foreign country. In moments when I felt it, I experienced no fear as such but a kind of exalted, almost demoniacal lightness; often attended by fits of laughter I was unable to repress.
So far as we were able to see in the dark, Combles was a mere skeleton of its former self. Great amounts of wood and jettisoned household objects told us that its destruction was very recent. After crossing numerous piles of junk, sped on our way by a stream of shrapnels, we reached our quarters, a large house riddled with holes, which I chose for my base with three of my sections, while the other two settled into the basement of a ruin across the way.