With Ensign Gornick and my brother Fritz, who had joined the regiment for six weeks as cadets, I occupied the living room and two bedrooms of a French rentier. There I started to relax again a little, and frequently only got home when it was light.
One morning, as I lay half asleep in bed, a comrade came in to escort me to duty. We were chatting, and he was toying with my pistol, which as usual was on my bedside table, when he fired a shot that narrowly missed my skull. I have witnessed several fatal accidents in war that were caused by careless handling of weapons; cases like that are always especially irritating.
In the first week, there was an inspection by General Sontag, at which the regiment was praised for its deeds in the assault on the woods of St-Pierre-Vaast, and numerous medals were given out. As I led the 2nd Company forward on parade, I caught a glimpse of Colonel von Oppen leaning across and talking to the general about me. A few hours later, I was ordered to divisional HQ, where the general awarded me the Iron Cross First Class. I was all the more delighted, as I had followed the order half thinking I was going to be carpeted for something. ‘It seems you have a habit of getting yourself wounded,’ the General said, ‘well, I’ve got a little plaster for you.’
On 17 January 1917, I was ordered to leave Fresnoy for four weeks, to take a company-command course at the French manoeuvring ground of Sissonne near Laon. The work was rendered very agreeable by the head of our section, Captain Funk, who had the gift of distilling the great plethora of regulations into a small number of basic principles; it is a method that always Works, no matter where it is applied.
At the same time, the victualling left something to be desired. Potatoes seemed to have become a thing of the past; day after day, when we lifted the lids of our dishes in the vast mess hall, we found nothing but watery swedes. Before long, we couldn’t stand the sight of them. Even though they’re better than they’re cracked up to be – so long as they’re roasted with a nice piece of pork, and plenty of black pepper. Which these weren’t.
Retreat from the Somme
At the end of February 1917, I returned to the regiment, which had now for some days been in position near the ruins of Villers-Carbonnel, and there I took over command of the 8th Company.
The approach route to the front line snaked through the eerie and devastated area of the Somme Valley; an old and already badly damaged bridge led across the river. Other approach paths were on log-roads laid over the swampy flats; here we had to walk in Indian file, crashing through the wide, rustling reed beds, and striding over the silent oil-black expanses of water. When shells came down on these stretches, and sent up
great liquescent columns of mud and water, or when sprays of machine-gun bullets erred over the swampy surface, all you could do was grit your teeth, because it was like walking on a tightrope, there was nowhere for you to go on either side. Hence, the sight of several fantastically shot-up locomotives that had been stopped in their tracks on the high bank on the other side, roughly level with our destination, was each time greeted with relief that otherwise might have been hard to account for.
In the flats lay the villages of Brie and St-Christ. Towers, of which only one slender wall remained, and in whose window openings the moonlight flittered, dark piles of rubble, topped off by smashed beamwork, and isolated trees despoiled of their twigs on the wide snowy plain scarred by black shell-holes accompanied the path like a mechanical scenery, behind which the ghostly quality of the landscape still seemed to lurk.
The firing trenches had been tidied up slightly following a bad, muddy stretch. The platoon commanders told me that, for a while, relief had only been possible with the use of flares; otherwise there would have been every chance of men drowning. A flare shot diagonally over the trench signified: ‘I’m going off watch,’ and another, coming the other way, confirmed: ‘I’ve taken over.’
My dugout was in a cross trench about fifty yards behind the front line. It housed my small staff and myself, and also a platoon that was under my personal command. It was dry and quite extensive. At each of its entrances, which were draped with tarpaulins, were little iron stoves with long pipes; during heavy bombardments, clumps of earth often came down them with an awful rumble. At right angles to the principal shelter were a number of little blind passages that were used as dormitories. I had one of these to myself. Apart from a narrow cot, a table and a few hand-grenade chests, the only amenities were a few trusty items, such as a spirit stove, a candle-holder, cooking equipment and my personal effects.
This was also the place where we sat together cosily of an evening, each of us perched on twenty-five live hand-grenades. My companions were the two company officers, Hambrock and Eisen, and it seemed to me that these subterranean sessions of ours, three hundred yards from the enemy lines, were pretty curious affairs.
Hambrock, astronomer by vocation, and a great devotee of E. T. A. Hoffmann, liked to hold forth about Venus, contending that it was impossible to do justice to the pure light of this astral body from anywhere on earth. He was a tiny chap, thin and spidery and red-haired, and he had a face dotted with yellow and green freckles that had got him the nickname ‘The Marquess of Gorgonzola’. Over the course of the war, he had fallen into some eccentric habits; thus, he tended to sleep in the daytime and only came to life as it got dark, occasionally wandering around all alone in front of our trenches, or the British ones, it seemed to make little difference to him. Also, he had the worrying habit of creeping up to a sentry and firing off a flare right by his ear, ‘to test the man’s courage’. Unfortunately, his constitution was really far too weak for a war, and so it happened that he died of a relatively trivial wound he suffered shortly afterwards at Fresnoy.
Eisen was no taller, but plump, and, having grown up in the warmer climes of Portugal as the son of an emigrant, he was perpetually shivering. That was why he swore by a large red-chequered handkerchief that he tied round his helmet, knotted under his chin, claiming it kept his head warm. Also, he liked going around festooned with weapons – apart from his rifle, from which he was inseparable, he wore numerous daggers, pistols, hand-grenades and a torch tucked into his belt. Encountering him in the trench was like suddenly coming upon an Armenian or somesuch. For a while he used to carry hand-grenades loose in his pockets as well, till that habit gave him a very nasty turn, which he related to us one evening. He had been digging around in his pocket, trying to pull out his pipe, when it got caught in the loop of a hand-grenade and accidentally pulled it off. He was startled by the sudden unmistakable little click, which usually serves as the introduction to a soft hiss, lasting for three seconds, while the priming explosive burns. In his appalled efforts to pull the thing out and hurl it away from him, he had got so tangled up in his trouser pocket that it would have long since blown him to smithereens, had it not been that, by a fairy-tale stroke of luck, this particular hand-grenade had been a dud. Half paralysed and sweating with fear, he saw himself, after all, restored to life.
It was only temporary, though, because a few months later he too died in the battle at Langemarck. In his case, too, willpower had to come to the aid of his body; he was both shortsighted and hard of hearing, so that, as we were to see on the occasion of a little skirmish, he had to be pointed in the right direction by his men if he was to participate in the action in a meaningful way.