Shortly afterwards, Combles too fell, once the noose had been drawn tight around Fregicourt-Ferme. Its last defenders, who had taken refuge in the catacombs during the bombardment, were mown down fighting round the ruins of the church.
Then things went quiet in the area, until we retook it in spring 1918.
The Woods of St-Pierre-Vaast
After a fortnight in hospital and another fortnight recuperating, I returned to the regiment, which was positioned at Deuxnouds, hard by the familiar Grande Tranchee. For the first two days after my arrival, it remained there, and then two more days in the old-world hill village of Hattonchatel. Then we steamed out of Mars-la-Tour station back to the Somme.
We were taken off the train at Bohain, and put up in Brancourt. This area, which we often brushed by later, is arable farmland, but almost every house boasts a loom as well.
I was quartered with a couple and their very beautiful daughter. We shared the two rooms of their little cottage, and at night I had to go through the family’s bedroom. On the very first day, the father asked me to compose a letter of complaint to the local commandant, against a neighbour who had grabbed him by the throat, beaten him and, crying ‘Demande pardon!’, threatened to kill him.
As I was on my way out of my room to go on duty, the daughter pushed the door shut against me. I took this to be one of her little jokes, pushed back, and our combined efforts were enough to lift the door off its hinges, and we waltzed round the room holding it between us for a few moments. Suddenly it came down, and to our mutual embarrassment, and her mother’s great hilarity, I saw she was standing there completely naked.
Never in all my life, incidentally, have I heard anyone swear and scold as volubly as that rose of Brancourt did, when a neighbour accused her of having once worked in a certain street in St-Quentin. ‘Ah, cette plure, cette pomme de terre pourrie, jetee sur un fumier, c’est la creme de la creme pourrie,’ she bubbled, as she criss-crossed the room with her hands out in front of her like claws, lacking only a victim for her pent-up rage. [This affair of honour is conducted in almost literally ‘earthy’ language, in which the essential item is a ‘mouldy potato’.]
Things in this village had quite a baronial flavour to them altogether. One evening I was on my way to call on a comrade, who was quartered with the aforementioned neighbour, a rather coarse Flemish beauty, who went by the name of Madame Louise. I went the back way through the gardens of the two houses, and saw Madame Louise through the kitchen window, sitting at the table helping herself from a large pot of coffee. Suddenly, the door opened and in strode the man who had been given such a cosy billet, with the full self-confidence of a sleepwalker and about as fully dressed as one too. Without saying a word, he picked up the coffee pot, and poured a goodly jet of it through the spout straight into his mouth. Then, every bit as laconically, he walked out again. Feeling I would only get in the way of such an idyllic set-up, I quietly went back the way I had come.
There was a relaxed tone in this area, which was in odd contrast to its agricultural character. I think it must have been something to do with the weaving, because in towns and regions where the spindle rules, there seems to be a different spirit to those where, say, there are a lot of blacksmiths.
As we had been settled in various villages and hamlets by the company, there was only a small group of us in the evenings. Our clique normally consisted of Lieutenant Boje, who commanded the 2nd Company, Lieutenant Heilmann, a dogged warrior who had lost an eye, Ensign Gornick, later to join the Paris airmen, and me. Every night we dined on boiled potatoes with tinned goulash, and afterwards the playing cards came out and the odd bottle of ‘Polish Rider’ or Benedictine. The dominant personality was Heilmann, who was one of those people who are resolutely unimpressed by anything.
He was staying in quite a nice billet, had had quite a bad wound, had witnessed quite a sizeable funeral. The only exception was anything relating to his native Upper Silesia, where you could find the biggest village, the biggest goods station and the deepest mineshaft anywhere in the world.
I was now to be used as a scouting officer, and had been assigned to the division with a scout troop and two NCOs. Special assignments like that were really not my line, because to me the company was like a family, and I was loath to leave it before a battle.
On 8 November, the battalion travelled through streaming rain to the now entirely depopulated village of Gonnelieu. From there, the scout troop was detailed to Lieramont and put under the command of the divisional intelligence officer, Captain Bockelmann. Along with four of us troop leaders, a couple of observation officers, and his personal adjutant, the captain occupied a priest’s spacious house, whose rooms we divided among ourselves. On one of our first evenings there, there was a long conversation in the library about the German peace proposals, which had just been made known. Bockelmann put an end to it by remarking that during a war no soldier should be permitted to say the word ‘peace’.
Our predecessors familiarized us with the position of the division. Every night, we had to go to the front. Our task was to reconnoitre the situation, test the communications between the units, and make a picture of everything, so as to put in reinforcements if need be and perform special duties. My own allotted area was just left of the woods of St-Pierre-Vaast, and against another ‘nameless’ wood.
The scene at night was muddy and wild, often with heavy exchanges of artillery. Frequently, yellow rockets were shot off that blew up in the air, and sent a rain of fire cascading down, of a colour that somehow reminded me of the tone of a viola.
That very first night, I lost my way in the pitch black and almost drowned in the swamps of the Tortille stream. It was a place of unfathomable mystery; only the night before, a munitions cart had disappeared without trace in a vast shell-crater hidden under a crust of mud.
Having made good my escape from this wilderness, I tried to make my way to the ‘nameless woods’, where there was a low-level, but unremitting shelling going on. I headed for it pretty insouciantly, because the dull sound of the detonations suggested that the British were shooting off some rather veteran ammunitions. Suddenly, a little puff of wind brought up a sweetish, oniony smell, and at the same time I heard the shout go up in the wood: ‘Gas, gas, gas!’ From a distance, the cry sounded oddly small and plaintive, not unlike a chorus of crickets.
As I heard the next morning, in that hour in the woods a lot of our men died of poisoning from the clouds of heavy phosgene nestling in the undergrowth.
With weeping eyes, I stumbled back to the Vaux woods, plunging from one crater into the next, as I was unable to see anything through the misted visor of my gas mask.
With the extent and inhospitableness of its spaces, it was a night of eerie solitude. Each time I blundered into sentries or troops who had lost their way, I had the icy sensation of conversing not with people, but with demons. We were all roving around in an enormous dump somewhere off the edge of the charted world.
On 12 November, hoping for better luck, I undertook my second mission, which was to test the communications between units in our crater positions. A chain of relays concealed in foxholes led me to my destination.