Even so, brave puny men are always to be preferred to strong cowards, as was shown over and over in the course of the few weeks we spent in this position.
If our sector of the front could be described as quiet, mighty poundings of artillery that sometimes came hammering down on our lines proved there was no shortage of fire-power in the area. Also, the British were full of curiosity and enterprise here, and not a week passed without some attempt by little exploratory groups to gain information about us, either by cunning or by main force. There were already rumours of some vast impending ‘materiel battle’ in the spring, which would make last year’s Battle of the Somme appear like a picnic. To dampen the impetus of the assault, we were engaged in an extensive tactical withdrawal. There follow a few incidents taken from this phase:
1 March 1917. Hefty exchanges of fire, to take advantage of the good visibility. One heavy battery in particular – with the help of an observation balloon – practically levelled the No. 3 Platoon’s section. In an effort to fill in my map of the position, I spent the afternoon splashing about in the completely inundated ‘Trench with no name’.
On my way, I saw a huge yellow sun slowly sinking, leaving a black plume of smoke after it. A German aeroplane had approached the pesky balloon and shot it in flames. Followed by furious fire from the ground, it made off happily in steeply banking curves. In the evening, Lance-Corporal Schnau came to me and reported that for four days now there had been chipping sounds heard below his unit’s shelter. I passed on the observation, and was sent a pioneer commando with listening apparatus, which registered no suspicious activity. It later transpired that the whole position was undermined.
In the early hours of 5 March, a patrol approached our position and began to cut at our barbed wire. Alerted by the sentry, Eisen hurried over with a few men and threw bombs, whereupon the attackers turned to flee, leaving two casualties behind. One, a young lieutenant, died shortly after; the other, a sergeant, was badly wounded in the arm and leg. From the officer’s papers, it appears his name was Stokes, and that he was with the Royal Munster Fusiliers. He was extremely well dressed, and his features, though a little twisted in death, were intelligent and energetic. In his notebook, I came upon a lot of addresses of girls in London, and was rather moved. We buried him behind our lines, putting up a simple cross, in which I had his name set in hobnails. This experience taught me that not every sally ends as harmlessly as mine have to date.
The next morning, after brief preliminary bombardment, the British with fifty men attacked the adjacent section, under the command of Lieutenant Reinhardt. The attackers had crept up to our wires, and after one of them had given a light signal to their own machine-gunners, by means of a striking surface attached to his sleeve, they had charged our lines as the last of the shells were falling. All had blackened faces, so as not to show against the dark.
Our men had arranged such a consummate reception for them, that only one made it into our trenches, running straight through to the second line, where, ignoring calls to surrender, he was shot down. The only ones to get across the wires were a lieutenant and a sergeant. The lieutenant fell, in spite of the fact that he was wearing body armour, because a pistol bullet, fired into him by Reinhardt point-blank, drove one of its plates into his body. The sergeant practically had both legs sheared off by hand-grenade splinters; even so, with stoical calm, he kept his pipe clenched between his teeth to the end. This incident, like all our other encounters with the Britishers, left us pleasantly impressed with their bravery and manliness. Later that morning, I was strolling along my line when I saw
Lieutenant Pfaffendorf at a sentry post, directing the fire of a trench mortar by means of a periscope. Stepping up beside him, I spotted a British soldier breaking cover behind the third enemy line, the khaki uniform clearly visible against the sky. I grabbed the nearest sentry’s rifle, set the sights to six hundred, aimed quickly, just in front of the man’s head, and fired. He took another three steps, then collapsed on to his back, as though his legs had been taken away from him, flapped his arms once or twice, and rolled into a shell-crater, where through the binoculars we could see his brown sleeves shining for a long time yet.
On 9 March, the British once again slathered our sector with everything they had. Early in the morning I was awakened by a noisy barrage, reached for my pistol and staggered outside, still half asleep. Pulling aside the tarpaulin in front of my shelter entrance, I saw it was still pitch black. The lurid flaming of the shells and the whooshing dirt woke me in no time. I ran along the trench without encountering anyone at all, until I came to a deep dugout, where a leaderless bunch of men were cowering together on the step like chickens in the rain. I took them with me, and soon livened up the trench. To my satisfaction, I could hear Hambrock’s squeaky voice in another sector, also galvanizing.
After the shelling abated somewhat, I went irritably back to my shelter, only for my temper to be further exacerbated by a call from the command:
‘What in God’s name is going on here? Why does it take you so long to answer the bloody telephone?’
After breakfast, the bombardment resumed. This time, the British were nailing our position slowly but systematically with heavy bombs. Finally, it got a bit boring; I went down an underground passage to pay a call on little Hambrock, see what he had to drink, and play a few rounds of cards. Then we were disturbed by a gigantic noise; clumps of earth clattered through the door and down the stove-pipe. The entrance had collapsed, the wooden revetment was crushed like a matchbox. Sometimes an oily bitter-almond smell seemed to waft through the passage -were they hitting us with Prussic acid now? Well, cheers anyway! Once, I needed to answer the call; because of the continual interruptions from heavy shells, I did it in four separate instalments. Then the batman rushed in with the news that the latrine had been blown to smithereens, prompting Hambrock to comment approvingly on my dilatoriness. I replied: ‘If I’d stayed out there, I’d probably have as many freckles as you do.’
Towards evening, the shelling stopped. In the mood that always befell me after heavy bombardments, and which I can only compare to the feeling of relief after a storm, I inspected the line. The trench looked awful; whole stretches had caved in, five dugout shafts had been crushed. Several men had been wounded; I visited them, and found them relatively cheerful. A body lay in the trench, covered by a tarpaulin. His left hip had been ripped away by a shell fragment as he stood right at the bottom of the dugout steps.
In the evening, we were relieved.
On 13 March, I was assigned by Colonel von Oppen to hold the company front with a patrol of two platoons until the regiment had withdrawn across the Somme. Each one of the four sectors was to be held by one such patrol, under the command of its own officer. From right to left, the sectors were to be under the command of Lieutenants Reinhardt, Fischer, Lorek and myself.
The villages we passed through on our way had the look of vast lunatic asylums. Whole companies were set to knocking or pulling down walls, or sitting on rooftops, uprooting the tiles. Trees were cut down, windows smashed; wherever you looked, clouds of smoke and dust rose from vast piles of debris. We saw men dashing about wearing suits and dresses left behind by the inhabitants, with top hats on their heads. With destructive cunning, they found the roof-trees of the houses, fixed ropes to them, and, with concerted shouts, pulled till they all came tumbling down. Others were swinging pile-driving hammers, and went around smashing everything that got in their way, from the flowerpots on the window-sills to whole ornate conservatories.