The next morning, Knigge appeared and read out some orders, from which I understood that I was to take over the command of the 4th Company at around noon. This was the company in which the Lower Saxon poet Hermann Lons fell in the autumn of 1914 outside Rheims, a volunteer at the age of almost fifty.
Against Indian Opposition
The 6th of May 1917 already found us back on the march, heading once more for the familiar destination of Brancourt, and on the following day we moved, via Montbrehain, Ramicourt and Jon-court, to the Siegfried Line that we had left only a month before.
The first evening was stormy; heavy rain clattered down on the already flooded terrain. Soon, though, a succession of fine warm days reconciled us to our new place. I enjoyed the splendid landscape, untroubled by the white balls of shrapnel and the jumping cones of shells; in fact, barely noticing them. Each spring marked the beginning of a new year’s fighting; intimations of a big offensive were as much part of the season as primroses and pussy-willows.
Our sector was a semi-circular bulge in front of the St-Quentin Canal, at our rear we had the famous Siegfried Line. I confess I am at a loss to understand why we had to take our place in these tight, undeveloped limestone trenches, when we had that enormously strong bulwark just behind us.
The front line wound its way through meadowland shaded by little clumps of trees, wearing the fresh green of early spring. It was possible to walk safely in front of and behind the trenches, as many advance positions secured the line. These posts were a thorn in the enemy’s side, and some weeks not a night would pass without an attempt to remove the sentries, either by guile or by brute force.
But our first period in position passed pleasantly quietly; the weather was so beautiful that we spent the nights lying on the grass. On 14 May, we were relieved by the 8th Company, and moved, the fires of St-Quentin on our right, to our resting-place, Montbrehain, a large village that had as yet taken little harm from the war and afforded very agreeable accommodation. On the 20th, as the reserve company, we occupied the Siegfried Line. It was summer holidays; we spent the days sitting in little summer huts erected on the slopes, or swimming and rowing on the canal. I spent the time lying stretched out on the grass reading the whole of Ariosto to my great enjoyment.
These idyllic positions have the one drawback that one’s superior officers like to visit them, which is a great dampener to the cosiness of trench life. That said, my left flank, posted against the already ‘nibbled at’ village of Bellenglise, had no shortage of fire to complain of. On the very first day, one man was hit by a shrapnel in the right buttock. On hearing the news, I rushed to the scene of the misfortune, and there he was, happily sitting up on his left, waiting for the ambulancemen to arrive, drinking coffee and munching on a vast slice of bread and jam.
On 25 May, we relieved the 12th Company at Riqueval-Ferme. This farm, formerly a great landed estate, served each of the four companies in the position alternately as base. From there, units went out to man three machine-gun nests positioned in the hinterland. These diagonally positioned support-points, covering each other like chess pieces, represented the first attempts in this war at a more supple, variable form of defence.
The farm was a mile at the most behind the front line; even so, its various buildings, dotted about in a rather overgrown park, were still completely unscathed. It was also densely populated -dugouts had yet to be created. The blooming hawthorn avenues in the park and the attractive surroundings gave our existence here an intimation of the leisurely country idyll that the French are so expert at creating – and that, so close to the front. A pair of swallows had made their nest in my bedroom, and were busy from very early in the morning with the noisy feeding of their insatiable young.
In the evenings, I took a stick out of the corner and strolled along narrow footpaths that went winding through the hilly landscape. The neglected fields were full of flowers, and the smell grew headier and wilder by the day. Occasional trees stood beside the paths, under which a farmworker might have taken his ease in peacetime, bearing white or pink or deep-red blossoms, magical apparitions in the solitude. Nature seemed to be pleasantly intact, and yet the war had given it a suggestion of heroism and melancholy; its almost excessive blooming was even more radiant and narcotic than usual.
It’s easier to go into battle against such a setting than in a cold and wintry scene. The simple soul is convinced here that his life is deeply embedded in nature, and that his death is no end.
On 30 May, this idyll was over for me, because that was the day Lieutenant Vogeley was released from hospital, and resumed command of the 4th Company. I returned to my old 2nd, on the front line.
Two platoons manned our sector from the Roman road to the so-called Artillery Trench; a third was at company headquarters, some two hundred yards back, behind a little slope. There Kius and I shared a tiny plank lean-to together, trusting to the incompetence of the British artillery. One side was built into the downhill slope – the direction the shells would be coming from – while the other three offered their flanks to the enemy. Every day as the morning greetings were wafted up to us, one might have heard a conversation between the occupants of the top and bottom bunks that went roughly like this:
‘I say, Ernst, are you awake?’
‘Hm?’
‘I think they’re shooting!’
‘Oh, I don’t want to get up yet; I’m sure they’ll be finished soon.’ A quarter of an hour later:
‘I say, Oskar!’
‘Hm?’
‘They seem to be going on for ever today; I thought I heard a shrapnel ball come flying through the wall just now. I think we’d better get up after all. The artillery observer next door seems to have scarpered ages ago!’
We were unwise enough always to take our boots off. By the time we were finished, the British usually were too, and we could sit down at the ridiculously small table, drink our sour, stewed coffee, and light a morning cigar. In the afternoons, we mocked the British gunners by lying out on a tarpaulin and doing some sunbathing. In other respects, too, our shack was an entertaining place to be. As we lay idly on our wire-sprung beds, enormous earthworms would come nosing out of the earthen wall; if we interfered with them, they would show a surprising turn of speed, disappearing back into their holes. A gloomy mole occasionally came snuffling out of his warren; his appearances always greatly enlivened our siesta time.
On 12 June, I was told to take a troop of twenty men and invest an outpost on the company front. It was late when we left the trench and headed along a footpath winding through the hilly countryside, into the pleasant evening. Dusk was so far advanced that the poppies in the abandoned fields seemed to merge with the bright-green grass. In the declining light, I saw more and more of my favourite colour, that red which shades into black that is at once sombre and stimulating.
Whatever thoughts we might have had we kept to ourselves as we walked silently over the flowery slopes, with our rifles over our shoulders, and twenty minutes later we had reached our destination. In whispers the post was taken over, a guard was mounted and then the men who had been relieved slipped off into the dark.
The outpost leaned against a steep little slope, with a line of hurriedly dug foxholes. Behind it, a hundred yards or so back, a small tangle of woodland merged with the night. In front and to the right rose two hills across which ran the British lines. One of them was crested by the ruins of the auspiciously named ‘Ascension Farm’. A little path led between the hills, in the general direction of the enemy.