I had the impression, that night, of hearing a few dull crashing sounds and of Knigge calling to me, but I was so fast asleep that I merely mumbled, ‘Oh, let them shoot!’ and turned over on my side, even though the room was as thick with dust as a chalk mill. In the morning I was woken by little Schultz, Colonel von Oppen’s nephew, shouting:
‘Good God, do you mean to tell me you slept through that?’ When I got up and surveyed the debris, I quickly realized that a heavy shell had exploded on the roof, and smashed all the rooms, including our observation post. The fuse would only have had to be a little bigger, and they could have scraped off our remains with a spoon, and buried us in our mess-tins, as the grunts were given to saying. Schultz told me his runner had taken one look at the wreckage and said: ‘There was a lieutenant quartered in there yesterday, better see if he’s still there.’ Knigge was terribly impressed by my deep sleep.
In the morning, we moved to our new basement. As we were about that, we were almost crushed by the debris of the church tower, which was quite unceremoniously – and without any prior notification – blown up by our engineers, to make it harder for the enemy artillery to get their bearings. In one of the neighbouring villages, no one had troubled to warn a couple of lookouts who had been posted up their church. Miraculously, the men were pulled out of the wreckage alive and unhurt. That one morning saw over a dozen church towers in the area bite the dust.
We settled into our spacious cellar, and furnished it pretty much as we pleased, helping ourselves equally to items from the rich man’s castle and the poor man’s hovel. Whatever we ended up not liking, fed the fire.
Also during these days, there was a whole series of dogfights, which almost invariably ended with defeat for the British, since it was Richthofen’s squadron they were up against. Often five or six planes in succession would be chased away or shot down in flames. Once we saw a pilot tumble out in a great arc, and come down separately from his plane, no more than a little black dot. Admittedly, looking up to watch was not without its attendant dangers; one soldier in the 4th Company was fatally wounded in the throat by a falling splinter.
On 18 April I visited the 2nd Company in their position in an oxbow around the village of Arleux. Boje told me that so far he’d only had a single man wounded, since the pedantic preliminary bombardments of the British left ample time to vacate the target area.
After wishing him luck, I left the village at a gallop, as heavy shells had begun to fall. When I was about three hundred yards away, I stopped to watch the clouds thrown up by the spurting explosions, red or black, depending on whether they’d struck brickwork or garden soil, and mingled with the soft white of bursting shrapnels. When a few clusters of small shells began to fall on the narrow footpaths linking Arleux and Fresnoy, I decided I’d seen enough, and cleared the field to avoid being ‘a little bit killed’, as the current expression in the 2nd Company had it.
Such excursions, sometimes as far as the little town of Henin-Lietard, were pretty frequent in the first fortnight because, in spite of my large staff and resources, I was given no intelligence whatsoever to clear.
Beginning on 20 April, Fresnoy came under fire from a ship’s cannon, whose shells came whining up with a hellish hiss. Following every explosion, the village was wrapped in a vast reddish-brown cloud of picric acid gas, which mushroomed out. Even the dud shells were enough to cause a minor earthquake. One soldier in the 9th Company, who was caught by a shell like that while in the castle grounds, was launched high over the trees and broke every bone in his body when he hit the deck.
One evening, I was on my bicycle, heading back down to the village from a local vantage-point, when I saw the familiar reddish-brown cloud go up. I dismounted and stood in a field to wait for the bombardment to finish. About three seconds after each explosion I heard the gigantic crash, followed by a vast twittering and whistling, as if a dense flock of birds were approaching. Then hundreds of splinters would come dusting the dry fields around. This happened several times, and each time I waited feeling half embarrassed, half simply nosy, for the relatively slow arrival of the splinters.
In the afternoons, the village was under bombardment from all sorts of weapons and calibres. In spite of the danger, I was always loath to leave the attic window of the house, because it was an exciting sight, watching units and individual messengers hurrying across the field of fire, often hurling themselves to the ground, while the earth whirled and spat to the left and right of them. Peeping over Destiny’s shoulder like that to see her hand, it’s easy to become negligent and risk one’s own life.
As I entered the village at the end of one of these ordeals by fire – as that’s what they were – I saw a basement flattened. All we could recover from the scorched space were the three bodies. Next to the entrance one man lay on his belly in a shredded uniform; his head was off, and the blood had flowed into a puddle. When an ambulanceman turned him over to check him for valuables, I saw as in a nightmare that his thumb was still hanging from the remains of his arm.
With each day, the bombardment became more intensive, and it soon seemed all but certain that an attack must follow. On the 27th, at midnight, I had the following telegraph message: ‘67 beginning 5 a.m.’, which in our code meant that from five o’clock tomorrow we were to be on a heightened state of alert.
I promptly lay down right away, so as to be up to the anticipated exertions, but as I was on the point of sleep, a shell struck the house, smashed the wall against the basement steps, and filled our room with rubble. We leaped up and hurried into the shelter.
As we sat on the steps, by the light of a candle, tired and sullen, the leader of my light- signalling troop, whose station had been destroyed that afternoon, including two valuable signalling lamps, dashed in to report: ‘Lieutenant, the basement of No. II has taken a direct hit, there are some men buried in the rubble!’ Since I had two bicyclists and three telephonists among them, I hurried over with some of my men.
In the shelter, I found one lance-corporal and one wounded man, and received the following report: As the first shells began to land ominously close, four of the five inhabitants decided to take to the shelter. One of them ran down right away, one of them stayed in his bed imperturbably, and the other three sat down to pull their boots on. The most cautious man and the most carefree, as so often in the war, survived, one of them being quite uninjured, the sleeper receiving a splinter in the thigh, while the other three were torn apart by the shell that flew through the basement wall and blew up in the far corner.
Following this account, I lit a cigar and entered the smoky room, in the middle of which was piled almost to the ceiling a bolus of straw sacks, smashed bedsteads, and other furniture. After we had set down a few candles in niches in the wall, we set about the sorry task. We seized hold of the limbs sticking out from the wreckage, and pulled out the corpses. One man had lost his head, and the end of his torso was like a great sponge of blood. Splintered bones stuck out of the arm stump of the second, and his uniform was drenched with blood from a great wound in his chest. The intestines of the third were spilling out of his opened belly. As we pulled him out, a splintered piece of board caught in the wound with a hideous noise. One orderly passed a remark, and was rebuked by Knigge with the words: ‘Shut up, man, you don’t waste words over something like this!’