‘Left section! Left front!’
The men spun round, and welcomed the new arrivals in a standing posture. A few of the enemy, among them their leader, collapsed under the hurriedly fired-off shots, the others vanished as quickly as they had appeared.
Now was our moment to charge. With fixed bayonets and loud hurrahs, we surged into the little wood. Hand-grenades flew into the tangled undergrowth, and in no time at all we were back in control of our outpost, although admittedly without having come to grips with our elusive foe.
We assembled in an adjacent cornfield and gazed at each other’s pale and exhausted faces. The sun had risen radiantly. A lark was ascending, getting on our wicks with its trilling. It was all unreal after that feverishly intent night. While we handed round our canteens and lit cigarettes, we heard the enemy leaving along the path, with a few loudly lamenting wounded in tow. We even caught a glimpse of them, but not long enough to chase after and finish them off.
I went off to survey the battlefield. From the meadow arose exotic calls and cries for help. The voices were like the noise that frogs make in the grass after a rainstorm. In the tall grass we discovered a line of dead and three wounded who threw themselves at our feet and begged us for mercy. They seemed to be convinced that we would massacre them.
In answer to my question ‘Quelle nation?’ one replied: ‘Pauvre Rajput!’
So these were Indians we had confronted, who had travelled thousands of miles across the sea, only to give themselves a bloody nose on this god-forsaken piece of earth against the Hanoverian Rifles.
They were delicate, and in a bad way. At such short range, an infantry bullet has an explosive effect. Some of them had been hit a second time as they lay there, and in such a way that the bullets had passed longitudinally, down the length of their bodies. All of them had been hit twice, and a few more than that. We picked them up, and dragged them towards our lines. Since they were screaming like banshees, my men tried to hold their mouths shut and brandished their fists at them, which terrified them still more. One died on the way, but he was still taken along, because there was a reward for every prisoner taken, whether alive or dead. The other two tried to ingratiate themselves with us by calling out repeatedly: ‘Anglais pas bon!’ Why these people spoke French I couldn’t quite understand. The whole scene – the mixture of the prisoners’ laments and our jubilation – had something primordial about it. This wasn’t war; it was ancient history.
Returned to the line, we were received in triumph by the company, who had heard the sounds of fighting, and had been pegged back by a heavy artillery barrage, and our captives were much gawped at. Here I was able to set the minds of our captives at rest – they seemed to have been told the direst things about us. They thawed a little, and told me their names; one of them was Amar Singh. Their outfit was the First Hariana Lancers, a good regiment, I’m told. Then I retired with Kius, who took half a dozen photographs, to our hut, and had him treat me to celebratory fried eggs.
Our little skirmish was mentioned in the divisional orders for the day. With only twenty men we had seen off a detachment several times larger, and attacking us from more than one side, and in spite of the fact that we had orders to withdraw if we were outnumbered. It was precisely an engagement like this that I’d been dreaming of during the longueurs of positional warfare.
It turned out, by the way, that we lost a man in addition to the one who was wounded and that in mysterious circumstances. The fellow in question was barely fit for active service any longer, because an earlier wound had left him morbidly fearful. We only noticed he was missing the next day; I assumed that in a fit of panic he ran off into one of the cornfields, and there met his end.
The following evening, I received orders to occupy the outpost again. As the enemy might have dug himself in there by now, I took the wood in a pincer movement; I led one detachment, Kius the other. Here, for the first time, I adopted a particular mode of approaching a dangerous site, which consisted of having one man after another going around it. If the place was in fact occupied, a simple left- or rightward movement created a possibility for flanking fire. After the war, I included this manoeuvre in the Infantry Engagement Manual, under the name of ‘flanking file’.
The two detachments met up without incident at the slope -aside from the fact that Kius barely missed shooting me as he cocked his pistol.
There was no sign of the enemy, it was only on the path between the two hills that I had reconnoitred with Sergeant-Major Hackmann that a sentry challenged us, fired a flare and some live rounds. We made a note of the noisy young man for another time.
In the place where the night before we had beaten back the flank attack we found three bodies. They were two Indians and a white officer with two gold stars on his shoulder- straps – a first lieutenant. He had been shot in the eye. The bullet had exited through his temple and shattered the rim of his steel helmet, which I kept as a souvenir. In his right hand he still held the club – reddened with his own blood – and in his left a heavy Colt revolver, whose magazine had only two bullets left in it. He had evidently had serious intentions towards us.
In the course of the following days, more bodies were discovered in the undergrowth – evidence of the attackers’ heavy losses, which added to the gloomy atmosphere that prevailed there. As I was making my way through a thicket once, on my own, I was dismayed by a quiet hissing and burbling sound. I stepped closer and encountered two bodies, which the heat had awakened to a ghostly type of life. The night was silent and humid; I stopped a long time before the eerie scene.
On 18 June, the outpost was again attacked; on this occasion, things didn’t go so well for us. Panic developed; the men fled in all directions, and couldn’t be brought together again. In the confusion, one of them, Corporal Erdelt, ran straight towards the slope, tumbled down it, and found himself in the midst of a group of lurking Indians. He flung hand-grenades around, but was seized by the collar by an Indian officer, and hit in the face with a wire whip. Then his watch was taken off him. He was kicked and punched to make him march; but he successfully escaped when the Indians once lay down to avoid some machine-gun fire. After wandering around for a long time behind the enemy lines, he came back with nothing worse than a few bloody welts across his face.
On the evening of 19 June, I set off with little Schultz, ten men and a light machine-gun on a patrol from the now distinctly morbid-feeling place, to pay a call on the sentry on the path who had reacted so noisily to our presence there a few days ago. Schultz and his men went right, and I went left, to meet at the path, promising to come to one another’s aid if there was any trouble. We worked our way forward on our bellies through the grass and furze, stopping to listen every so often.
Suddenly, we heard the sharp rattle of a rifle bolt. We lay completely riveted to the ground. Anyone who’s been on a patrol will be familiar with the rapid succession of disagreeable feelings that flooded us in the next few seconds. You’ve at least temporarily lost the freedom of action, and you have to wait and see what the enemy will do.
A shot rang out through the oppressive silence. I was lying behind a clump of furze; the man on my right was dropping hand-grenades down on to the path. Then a line of bullets spurted in front of our faces. The sharp sound of the reports told us the marksmen were only a few feet away. I saw that we had fallen into a trap, and ordered retreat. We leaped up and ran back like crazy, while I saw that rifle fire had engaged my left-hand troop as well. In the middle of all this clatter, I gave up all hope of a safe return. Every moment I was expecting to be hit. Death was at our heels.