Everywhere groups of men, either relieving or being relieved, were hurrying through the night and the bombardment, some of them utterly lost, and groaning with tension and exhaustion; shouts fell, and orders, and in monotonous repetition the long-drawn-out cries for help from the abandoned and the wounded. As we raced on, I gave directions to the lost, pulled some men out of shell-holes, threatened others who wanted to lie down, kept shouting my name, and so brought my platoon, as if by a miracle, back to Combles.
Then we needed to march via Sailly and Gouvernements-Ferme to Hennois woods, where we would bivouac. It was only now that the degree of our exhaustion became fully clear. Heads brutishly down, we slunk along the road, often forced off it by cars or munitions columns. In my unhealthy irritation, I couldn’t help but think that these vehicles followed no other purpose than to annoy us as they sliced past us, and more than once I caught myself reaching for my pistol.
After our march we had to put up tents, and only then could we throw ourselves on the hard ground. During our stay in the forest camp, we endured great storms of rain. The straw in the tents started to moulder, and many men got sick. We five company officers were not much put out by this external wetness, spending our evenings sitting on our cases in our tent, with a few goodly bottles that had been magicked up from somewhere. In such situations, red wine is the best medicine.
On one of these evenings, our Guards counter-attacked and captured the village of Maurepas. While the two sets of artillery were raging against each other over a wide area, a violent storm broke loose overhead, so that, as in the Homeric battle of gods and men, the disturbance below seemed to be vying with that on high.
Three days later, we moved back to Combles, where my platoon this time occupied four smallish basements. These basements were hewn from blocks of chalk, long and narrow and with arched ceilings; they promised security. They seemed to have belonged to a vintner – or that, at any rate, was my explanation for the fact that they afforded small fireplaces broken into the walls. After I’d posted sentries, we stretched out on the many mattresses that our predecessors had lugged into place here.
The first morning, things were relatively calm; I took a walk through the ravaged gardens, and looted delicious peaches from their espaliered boughs. On my wanderings I happened into a house surrounded by tall hedges, which must have belonged to a lover of antiques. On the walls of the rooms hung a collection of painted plates, holy water basins, etchings and wooden carvings of saints. Old china sat in piles in large cupboards, ornate leather-bound volumes were scattered about the floor, among them an exquisite old edition of Don Quixote.
I would have loved to pick up a memento, but I felt like Robinson Crusoe and the lump of gold; none of these things were of any value here. So great bales of beautiful silks rotted away in a workshop, without anyone paying them any attention. You had only to think of the glowing barrage at Fremicourt-Ferme, which cut off this landscape, and you soon thought better of picking up any extra baggage.
When I reached my lodgings, the men were back from foraging trips of their own through the gardens, and had boiled up a soup in which you could stand your spoon out of bully beef, potatoes, peas, carrots, artichokes and various other vegetables. While we were eating, a shell landed on the house, and three others came down nearby, without us lifting our heads. We had seen and been through too much already to care. The house must have seen some bloody happenings already, because on a pile of rubble in the middle room there was a rough cross with a list of names scratched into it.
The next day at lunchtime I went back to the china collector’s house and picked up a volume of the illustrated supplements to Le Petit Journal, then I sat myself down in a reasonably well-preserved room, made a little fire in the hearth with some sticks of furniture, and settled down to read. I had frequent occasion to shake my head, because I had picked up those issues that had appeared at the time of the Fashoda affair. [Town in the Sudan, and site of an Anglo-French colonial standoff in 1898 involving General Kitchener. The French climb-down paved the way for the Entente Cordiale. Rueful reading matter for a German officer in World War I.]
The time I spent reading was punctuated by four bombs hitting the house. At just about seven o’clock I turned the last page, and went down to the passage outside the basement, where the men were preparing supper at a small stove.
No sooner was I standing with them than there was a sharp report outside the front door, and, in the same moment, I felt a piercing blow low down on my left calf. With the immemorial warrior’s refrain ‘I’ve been hit!’ I took off, pipe of shag tobacco in my mouth, down the stairs.
Quickly someone brought light, and the thing was examined. As ever in these affairs, I had someone tell me about it, while I stared at the ceiling; in case it wasn’t a pretty sight. There was a jagged hole in my putties, out of which a fine spray of blood ran down to the floor. On the opposite side of the leg there was the round bulge of a shrapnel ball under the skin.
The diagnosis was straightforward enough – a typical ticket home: nothing very bad, but nothing too light either. Admittedly, I’d left it to the latest possible moment to get ‘a puncture’ if I wasn’t to miss the bus to Germany. There was something deeply improbable about that hit, because the shrapnel had burst on the ground on the other side of the brick wall that surrounded the courtyard. A shell had previously knocked a little round hole in this wall, and a tub with an oleander plant stood in front of it. The ball must therefore have gone through the shell-hole, then through the oleander’s leaves, crossed the yard and the open door, and, of the many legs in front of it, had picked precisely this one of mine.
After my comrades had bandaged up the wound, they carried me across the street – needless to say, through fire – to the catacombs, and there laid me on the operating table. While a breathless Lieutenant Wetje held my head, our medical major cut out the shrapnel ball with scissors and knife, and told me I was a lucky man, because the ball had passed between shinbone and fibula without harming either. ‘Habent sua fata libelli et balli,’ the old corps student observed, while he left a medical orderly to bandage up the wound. [‘Books and bullets have their own destinies.’]
While I lay on a stretcher in a niche in the catacombs waiting for nightfall, I was pleased that a lot of my men came to say goodbye to me. They had a heavy ordeal ahead of them. My revered Colonel von Oppen managed to pay me a short visit.
In the evening I was carried along with the other casualties to the edge of town, and there loaded on to an ambulance. Paying no attention to the cries and screams of his passengers, the driver raced over the craters and other hindrances along the road, heavily bombarded as ever around Fregicourt-Ferme, and finally passed us on to a car that delivered us to the village church at Fins. The switch of cars took place in the middle of the night outside an isolated group of houses, where a doctor examined the bandages and decided our destiny. Half feverish as I was, I had an impression of a young man whose hair had turned completely white, but who tended our wounds with unimaginable care.
The church at Fins was full of hundreds of wounded men. A nurse told me that in the course of the last few weeks; more than thirty thousand casualties had been tended and bandaged here.