Or this one: one day at the market, a notorious young man of Cambrai goes up to a farmer’s wife and, pointing to a soft white cheese prettily sprinkled with herbs, asks her:
‘How much do you want for that cheese?’
‘Twenty sous, monsieur!’
He gives her the twenty sous.
‘So the cheese belongs to me now, is that right?’
‘Of course, monsieur!’
‘So I can do whatever I want with it?’
‘But of course!’
Splat! he throws the cheese in her face, and leaves her standing there.
On 25 July, we left our pleasant temporary home, and travelled north to Flanders. We had read in the newspapers that an artillery battle had been raging there for weeks already, outdoing the Battle of the Somme, if not in intensity then in range.
In Staden, we detrained to the distant roar of cannon, and marched through the unfamiliar landscape towards the camp at Ohndank. Either side of the dead-straight military road were green, fertile, elevated beet fields and juicy pastures surrounded by hedges. Tidy farmhouses lay scattered about, with low overhanging thatched or tiled roofs, and bunches of tobacco hung on the walls to dry in the sun. The country people we passed were Flemish, and spoke in that rough tongue that we almost thought we understood. We spent the afternoon in farm gardens, where the enemy aviators could not see us. Occasional ships’ ordnance would fly over our heads, with a gurgling sound we could hear from far off, and hit near by. One dived into one of the many little streams in the area, and killed several men of the 91st, who happened to be bathing in it.
As evening approached, I went up to the front line with an advance detachment, to prepare the relief. We passed through the forest of Houthulst and the village of Koekuit to the reserve battalion, and on the way were forced to break stride by a few heavy shells. In the dark I could hear the voice of one recruit who was still unversed in our ways: ‘That lieutenant never seems to take cover.’
‘He knows what’s what,’ he was told by a member of the storm troop. ‘If there’s one on its way, then he’s the first to lie down.’
We only took cover now when it was necessary, but then we didn’t hang around. The degree of necessity is something that only an experienced man can determine, who can sense the course of the shell before the new soldier can hear the light fluttering of its approach. To hear better when things got hot, I would even exchange my steel helmet for a forage cap.
Our guides, who didn’t inspire complete confidence, advanced along endless box trenches. That’s the term for passages that are not dug into the ground, because they would instantly fill with water, but are built up between lines of sandbags and fascines. After that we brushed an amazingly dishevelled-looking wood, out of which, our guides told us, a regimental staff had been pushed back a few days ago by the small matter of a thousand ten-inch shells. ‘Such prodigality,’ I thought to myself.
After traipsing this way and that through the thick brush, we were finally left standing completely lost, and abandoned by our guides, on a rush-covered spot, surrounded by marshy pools of black water that gave back the moonlight. Shells plunged into the soft soil, sending up great sprays of mud that splattered down. At last our unhappy guide, with whom we were now pretty incensed, came back, claiming to have remembered the way. Then he proceeded to lead us astray again, as far as a dressing-station, over which, in short, regular intervals, shrapnels broke up, sending their balls and empty casings clattering through the boughs. The doctor on duty provided us with a better guide, who escorted us to the Mauseburg, the headquarters of the reserve line.
I straight away went on to the company of the 225th Regiment, which was to be relieved by our 2nd, and after a long search found a few houses in the cratered landscape that had been discreetly toughened on the inside with reinforced concrete. One of these had been smashed in the day before by a direct hit, and its inhabitants crushed as in a mousetrap by the collapsing roof plate.
For the rest of the night, I squeezed into the overcrowded concrete box of the company commander, a decent grunt, who whiled away the time with his servant over a bottle of schnapps and a large tin of salt pork, stopping often to shake his head and listen to the steadily increasing roar of the artillery. Then he would sigh for the good old days on the Russian front, and curse the way his regiment had been pumped out. In the end, my eyes simply fell shut.
My sleep was heavy and troubled; the high explosive shells falling all around the house in the impenetrable dark evoked extraordinary feelings of solitude and abandon in me. I pressed myself unconsciously against a man lying beside me on the pallet. Once, I was startled awake by a powerful impact. We lit the walls to check if the house had been breached. It turned out to have been a small shell that had exploded against the outer wall.
The following afternoon I spent with the battalion commander in the Mauseburg. In rapid sequence, the six-inch shells came down close to the command centre, while the captain, his adjutant and the orderly played unending rounds of skat, and handed round a soda bottle full of rotgut. Sometimes he would put down his cards to attend to a messenger, or, with concerned expression, wonder about the safety of our concrete blockhouse against the bombardment. In spite of his loyal conviction to the contrary, we finally convinced him that it wouldn’t stand up to a direct hit from above.
In the evening, the shelling waxed to a demented fury. Ahead of us, coloured flares went up in a continual stream. Dust-covered runners reported that the enemy was attacking. After weeks of drumming, the infantry battle was about to begin; we had come at the right time.
I returned to company headquarters, and waited for the company to arrive. They finally got in at four in the morning, during a vehement shelling session. I took charge of my platoon, and led it to its place, a concrete construction disguised by the ruins of a demolished house, in the middle of a huge cratered field of desperate horror.
At six in the morning, the dense Flanders fog lifted, and permitted us to view our situation in its full hideousness. Straight away, a swarm of enemy aeroplanes flew in low over our heads, surveying the battered terrain, and giving siren signals, while isolated infantrymen jumped for cover in shell-holes.
Half an hour later, the shelling commenced, washing over our little refuge like a typhoon. The forest of explosions gradually thickened into a solid whirling wall. We squatted together, every second expecting the annihilating hit that would blow us and our concrete blocks away, and leave our strongpoint level with the pitted desert all around.
And so the day passed, with mighty outbursts of shelling, and momentary quieter phases during which we sat and gritted our teeth.
In the evening, an exhausted runner turned up, and gave me an order from which I understood that the 1st, 3rd and 4th Companies would commence a counter-attack at ten to eleven in the morning, and the 2nd should wait to be relieved and then swarm into the front line. To gain strength for the hours ahead, I lay down, never guessing that my brother Fritz, whom I had supposed to be still in Hanover, was even now hurrying forward with a platoon from the 3rd Company, through the fire-storm close by our hut.
I was long kept from sleep by the cries of a wounded man whom a couple of Saxons had brought in. They had lost their way and had fallen asleep, completely exhausted. When they woke up the following morning, their comrade was dead. They carted him to the nearest shell-hole, scooped a couple of shovelfuls of earth over him, and mooched off, leaving behind them another of the countless unknown and unmarked graves of this war.