The term ‘crater positions’ was accurate. On a ridge outside the village of Rancourt, there were numerous craters scattered, some occupied by a few soldiers here and there. The dark plain, criss-crossed by shells, was barren and intimidating.
It wasn’t long before I had lost communication with the chain of craters, and so I headed back, in case I fell into the hands of the French. I encountered an officer I knew from the 164th, who warned me not to hang around as it got lighter. Therefore, I strode rapidly through the nameless woods, staggering through deep pits, over felled trees and an almost impenetrable tangle of branches.
By the time I emerged from the woods, it was day. The cratered field stretched out ahead of me, apparently endlessly, with no sign of life. I paused, because unoccupied terrain is always a sinister thing in a war.
Suddenly a shot rang out, and I was hit in both legs by a sniper’s bullet. I threw myself into the nearest crater, and tied up the wounds with my handkerchief, having of course forgotten my field dressing. A bullet had drilled through my right calf and brushed the left.
Extremely carefully, I crawled back into the woods, and hobbled from there through the heavily shelled terrain towards the dressing-station.
Just before I reached it, there was an instance of the way tiny imponderables can determine one’s fate in a war. I was roughly a hundred yards from a crossroads when the commander of a digging detail I’d been with in the 9th Company called out to me. We had been speaking for barely a minute when a shell landed on the crossroads, which, but for this chance meeting, would probably have cost me my life. It is hard to see these things as completely random.
After dark, I was carried on a stretcher as far as Nurlu, from where the captain picked me up in a car. On the road lit up by enemy searchlights, the driver suddenly braked. There was a dark obstacle in the way. ‘Don’t look!’ said Bockelmann, who had his arm around me. It was a group of infantry with their leader, who had just been killed by a direct hit. The comrades looked like peaceful sleepers as they lay together in death.
In the priest’s house I was given some supper, at least inasmuch as I lay on the sofa in the common room, enjoying a glass of wine. But this cosiness was quickly interrupted by Lieramont’s evening blessing. Bombardments of towns and buildings are especially disagreeable, and so we hurriedly moved down to the cellar, having heard a few times the hissing song with which the iron messengers announced themselves, before they finished in the gardens or among the roofbeams of neighbouring houses.
I was rolled up in a blanket and carried downstairs first. That same night, I was brought to the field hospital at Villeret, and then on to the military hospital in Valenciennes.
The military hospital had been set up in a school building close to the station, and it was presently housing four hundred severe cases. Day after day, a procession of corpses left its portals to a leaden thump of drums. Doctors did their bloody best at a row of operating tables. Here, a limb was amputated, there a skull chipped open, or a bandage that the flesh had grown over was peeled away. Whimpers and cries echoed through the harshly lit room, while white-clad sisters bustled efficiently from one table to the next with instruments or bandages.
In the bed next to mine lay a sergeant who had lost a leg, and was fighting a bad case of blood poisoning. Mad periods of fever alternated with cold shivering. His temperature chart performed leaps like a wild mustang. The doctors tried to keep him alive on champagne and camphor, but the needle seemed to be pointing unmistakably to death. What was strange, though, was that, having been delirious for the past few days, at the hour of his death he was once more completely lucid, and made some arrangements for what was to be done afterwards. For instance, he had the sister read him his favourite chapter from the Bible, then he took his leave of us all, by asking our forgiveness for having kept us up at night so often with his fever attacks. At the end, he whispered in a voice to which he tried to give a humorous inflection: ‘Ey, Fritz, have yer got a bit of bread for me?’ and, a few minutes later, he was dead. That last sentence was a reference to our male nurse, Fritz, an elderly man, whose accent we sometimes imitated, and we were profoundly moved by it because it showed the dying man’s wish to cheer us up.
It was during this stay in hospital that I suffered an attack of the glooms, a contributing factor in which was surely the memory of the cold, slimy landscape where I had been wounded. Every afternoon, I would hobble along the banks of a bleak-looking canal under bare poplars. I was especially upset not to have been able to participate in the regiment’s attack on the woods of St-Pierre-Vaast – a shining effort that won us several hundred prisoners.
After two weeks, when my wounds had pretty much closed, I returned to my troop. The division was still based where I had left it. As my train rolled into Epehy, there was a series of explosions outside. The twisted wreckage of freight wagons lying by the rails showed that the attack was in earnest.
‘What’s going on here?’ asked a captain who appeared to be fresh out of Germany. Without stopping to give him an answer, I tore open the door of the compartment and took cover behind the railway embankment, while the train rolled on a little. None of the passengers had been hurt; but a few bleeding horses were led out of the cattle car.
Since I wasn’t able to march properly yet, I was given the job of observation officer. The observation post was on a downhill slope between Nurlu and Moislains. It was nothing more than a periscope through which I could view the familiar front line. If the bombing was stepped up, or there were coloured flares or anything else out of the ordinary, I was to inform the divisional command by telephone. For days I perched shivering on a little stool behind the two layers of glass, and the only variety on offer was if the line broke down. If the wire had been shot through, I had to get it repaired by my breakdown squad. In these men, of whose activity I had been all but unaware hitherto, I now found a special type of unappreciated worker in the most perilous conditions. While most others strained to leave a shelled zone, the breakdown squad had to enter it calmly and professionally. Day and night, they went into still-warm shell-holes to tie together the ends of two severed wires; their job was as dangerous as it was unglamorous.
The observation post was well camouflaged in the landscape. All that could be seen from outside was a narrow slit half hidden behind a grassy knoll. Only chance shells ended up there, and, from my safe hiding-place, I was able to follow the activities of individuals and units that I hadn’t paid that much attention to when I myself had also been under fire. At times, and most of all at dawn and dusk, the landscape was not unlike a wide steppe inhabited by animals. Especially when floods of new arrivals were making for certain points that were regularly shelled, only suddenly to hurl themselves to the ground, or run away as fast as they could, I was put in mind of a natural scene. Such an impression was so strong because my function was a little like that of an antenna, I was a sort of advance sensory organ, detailed to observe calmly all that was happening before me, and inform the leadership. I really had little more to do than wait for the hour of the attack.
Every twenty-four hours, I was relieved by another officer, and I recovered in Nurlu, where there were relatively comfortable quarters set up in a large wine cellar. I still remember long, pensive November evenings, smoking my pipe by the stove in the little vaulted space, while outside in the ravaged park, the fog dripped from the bare chestnut trees and the occasional echoing blast of a shell broke the stillness.
On 18 December, the division was relieved, and I rejoined my regiment, now on rest in the village of Fresnoy-le-Grand. There, I took over the command of the 2nd Company from Lieutenant Boje, who had a spell of leave. In Fresnoy, the regiment had four weeks of uninterrupted rest, and everyone tried to make the most of it. Christmas and New Year were marked by company parties, at which the beer and grog flowed. Only five men were left of the 2nd Company with whom I had celebrated Christmas in the trenches at Monchy, a year ago.