Faced with numbers of that order, I felt pretty insignificant with my silly leg wound. From Fins, I was taken along with four other officers to a hospital that had been set up in an affluent house in St-Quentin. When we were unloaded, all the window-panes were jangling; it was exactly the moment when the British, with maximal help from their artillery, were taking Guillemont.
When the stretcher next to mine was lifted out of the car, I heard one of those toneless voices that have remained with me:
‘Take me to the doctor right away, if you will – I’m very poorly – I have a gas phlegmon.’ That was the term for a horrible form of blood poisoning that often sets in after a man has been wounded, and kills him.
I was carried into a room, where twelve beds stood so close together that one had the impression of a room entirely filled with snow-white pillows. Most of the wounds were grave, and there was a commotion in which, in my feverish state, I dreamily participated. Soon after my arrival, for instance, a young man with a bandage wrapped round his head like a turban, leaped up from his bed and addressed us all. I thought it was some rather extravagant sort of joke, only to see him collapse as suddenly as he’d leaped up. His bed was rolled out through a dark little door, amid a rather grim silence.
Next to me lay a pioneer officer. He had trodden on an explosive in the trench, and the contact had caused a long tongue of flame to leap up. His mutilated foot had been placed under a translucent gauze wrapper. He seemed to be in a good humour, and was happy to have found a listener in me. On my left, a very young ensign was on a diet of claret and egg yolks; he was in the very last stages of emaciation. When the sister wanted to make his bed, she picked him up like a feather; through his skin, you could see all the bones in his body. When the sister asked him at night whether he wouldn’t like to write his parents a nice letter,
I guessed it was all up with him, and, indeed, later that night, his bed too was rolled through the dark door to the dying ward.
By noon the next day I was lying in a hospital train that was taking me to Gera, where I was extremely well looked after in the garrison hospital there. A week later, and I was already skipping out in the evenings, though I had to be careful not to run into the head doctor.
It was here that I signed away the three thousand marks that were my entire fortune at the time as a war loan. I never saw them again. As I held the form in my hand, I thought of the beautiful fireworks that the wrong-coloured flare had sparked off – a spectacle that surely couldn’t have cost less than a million.
I return now to the dreadful defile, to view the final act of the drama. My sources are the reports of the few men who were wounded and survived, in particular my orderly, Otto Schmidt.
Following my wounding, my subordinate, Sergeant Heistermann, took over the command of the platoon, and it was he who a few minutes later led the men to the cratered field at Guillemont. With barely a handful of exceptions – those men who were hit during the march, and were fit enough to get back to Combles – the outfit disappeared without trace in the fiery labyrinths of the battle.
The platoon relieved their predecessors, and settled into the now familiar foxholes. The gap on the right flank had now widened, thanks to the incessant withering fire, so that there was no longer any visual communication. On the left side as well, there were now spaces, so that the position resembled a little island adrift in titanic streams of fire. The whole sector was made up of nothing more than similar islands, greater and lesser, but all of them dwindling. The attacker found himself confronting a net whose meshes had grown too wide to catch anything.
And so the night passed, with increasing disquiet. Towards morning, a two-man patrol from the 76th showed up, having groped their way through with incredible difficulty. They went away again into the sea of fire, and that was the last the platoon saw of the outside world. The fire concentrated with ever-growing force on the right flank, and slowly worked to widen the gap, knocking out one pocket of resistance after another.
Towards six in the morning, Schmidt reached for the cooking tin that he kept outside our old foxhole, to get some breakfast, but all he found was a piece of flattened and riddled aluminium. Soon the shelling started up again, and slowly raised itself to a crescendo that was inevitably interpreted as the sign of an imminent attack. Aeroplanes appeared, and, like jabbing vultures, began circling low over the ground.
Heistermann and Schmidt, the only occupants of the tiny hole in the ground that had miraculously survived so long, knew that the moment had come for their stand. As they stepped out into the smoke- and dust-filled defile, they saw they were utterly alone. In the course of the night, the bombardment had smashed the last sparse bits of cover between themselves and the right flank, and buried their occupants under quantities of earth. But to the left of them as well, the rim of the defile turned out to be devoid of defenders. The last remnants of the platoon, among them a machine-gun unit, had withdrawn to a narrow shelter, covered over with planks and a thin layer of soil, half-way along the defile, and in its rear slope, with an entrance at either end of it.
Heistermann and Schmidt now made for this refuge. On the way there, however, the sergeant, whose birthday it happened to be that day, disappeared. He was following Schmidt, coming up to a bend, and was never seen again.
The only man who made it to the little group in the shelter from the right flank was a lance-corporal, with a bandaged face, who suddenly stripped off his bandage, spewed a torrent of blood over the men and their weapons, and lay down to die. All this time, the power and intensity of the bombardment was still waxing; at any moment, the overcrowded shelter, in which no one now could speak, could reckon on being hit.
Further left, a few soldiers from No. 3 Platoon were still tenaciously defending their crater, and it seems that the position was crushed from the right, where the breach had been forced, which was by now a huge cavity. These soldiers must have been the first to have become aware of an incursion of British storm troops following one final inferno of bombing. At any rate, it seems the occupants of the shelter were alerted to the presence of the enemy by a shouted warning from the left.
Schmidt, the last man to have reached the shelter, and therefore sitting nearest the entrance, was the first man to emerge into the defile. He leaped into the spurting cone of a shell. As the smoke cleared, he saw to his right, just by the site of the foxhole that had so stoutly sheltered us, some lurking khaki figures. Simultaneously, the enemy broke through in numbers on the left of the position. What was happening beyond the projecting rim of the defile could not be seen, because of its depth.
In this desperate situation, the next occupants of the shelter, in particular Sergeant Sievers, plunged out with the intact machine-gun and its operator. To set it up on the floor of the defile and aim it at the enemy on the right was the work of seconds. But even as the gunner had his fist on the belt and his finger on the trigger, British hand-grenades were hobbling down the front slope. The two men fell beside their weapon, without managing to get off a shot. Anyone else leaping out of the shelter was received with rifle bullets, so that in the space of a few moments there was a cluster of dead round both entrances.
Schmidt was laid out by the first volley of hand-grenades. One splinter hit him in the head, others tore off three of his fingers. With his face down, he remained close to the shelter, where an exchange of rifle fire and hand-grenades continued for some time.
At last there was silence, and the British took over the last part of the position. Schmidt, perhaps the last living soul in the defile, heard footfalls announcing the approach of the attacker. Shortly after, rifle shots rang out, and explosions and gas bombs, as the shelter was pumped clear. Even then, towards evening, a last few survivors came crawling out of the shelter, from some nook at the back. They probably made up the little group of prisoners that fell into the hands of the enemy storm troops. British stretcher-bearers picked them up and took them away.