Right after I’d occupied the roadway, I’d reported to regimental headquarters and called in support. In the afternoon, infantry columns, engineers and machine-gunners came to reinforce us. Taking a leaf from Old Fritz’s [Frederick the Great] tactical handbook, they were all stuffed into our already over-full front line. From time to time, the British snipers managed to kill one or two men who crossed the road without looking.
Almost four, and a very nasty bout of shrapnel ensued. The loads were flung right at the road. There was no doubt about it, the flyers had identified our new position, and it looked as if we were going to be in for some rough times.
And soon a violent bombardment followed, with light and heavy shells. We lay pressed together in the overcrowded, dead-straight roadside ditch. The fire danced before our eyes, twigs and clumps of clay whistled down upon us. To the left of me, a bolt of lightning flared up, leaving white, acrid steam. I crept over to my neighbour on all fours. He was motionless. Blood trickled from little jagged splinter wounds too numerous to count. Further right there were more heavy losses.
After a half-hour of this, there was quiet. Quickly we dug deep holes in the flat sides of the ditch, so as to have at least some protection against splinters in the event of a second attack. As we dug, our shovels encountered guns, ammunition belts and cartridges from 1914 – proof that this wasn’t the first time this ground had drunk blood. Our predecessors here had been the volunteers of Langemarck.
As dusk was falling, we were treated to a second helping. I squatted next to Kius in a little sitz-shelter that had cost us a fair few digging blisters. The ground was being tossed around like a ship’s plank under the close and very close explosions. We thought this might well be it.
My steel helmet pulled down over my brow, staring at the road, whose stones shot sparks when iron fragments flew off them, I chewed my pipe and tried to talk myself into feeling brave. Curious thoughts flashed through my brain. For instance, I thought hard about a French popular novel called he vautour de la Sierra that had fallen into my hands in Cambrai. Several times I murmured a phrase of Ariosto’s: ‘A great heart feels no dread of approaching death, whenever it may come, so long as it be honourable.’ That produced a pleasant kind of intoxication, of the sort that one experiences, maybe, on a rollercoaster. When the shells briefly abated, I heard fragments of the lovely song of ‘The Black Whale at Askalon’ coming from the man next to me, and I thought my friend Kius must have gone mad. But everyone has his own particular idiosyncratic method.
At the end of the shelling, a large splinter hit me in the hand. Kius flashed his torch at it, and saw it was only a flesh wound.
After midnight, it started to rain gently; patrols from a supporting regiment that had advanced as far as the Steenbach found only craters full of mud. The British had retreated behind the stream.
Exhausted by the strains of this momentous day, we settled down in our holes, except for the sentries. I pulled the ragged coat of my dead neighbour up over my head, and fell into an unquiet slumber. Towards dawn, I woke up shivering, and discovered my situation was sorry indeed. It was bucketing down, and the little rivulets on the road were all emptying themselves into my foxhole. I rigged up a dam, and baled out my resting-place with the lid of my mess-tin. As the rivulets deepened, I put up successive parapets on my earthworks, until in the end the weak construction gave way to the growing pressure, and, with a grateful gurgle, a dirty rush of water filled my foxhole up to the top. While I was busy fishing my pistol and helmet out of the mire, I watched my bread and tobacco go bobbing along the ditch, whose other denizens had suffered similar misfortunes to mine. Shivering and trembling, without a dry stitch on our bodies, we stood there knowing the next bombardment would find us utterly helpless, on the muddy road. It was a wretched morning. Once again, I learned that no artillery bombardment is as capable of breaking resistance in the same measure as the elemental forces of wet and cold.
In the wider scheme of the battle, however, that downpour was a real godsend for us, because it doomed the English push to bog down in its first, crucial days. The enemy had to get his artillery through the swampy cratered landscape, while we could trundle our ammunition along intact roads.
At eleven in the morning, as we were in the pit of despair, a saving angel appeared to us in the guise of a dispatch-rider who brought the order for the regiment to assemble in Koekuit.
On our march back, we saw just how difficult forward communications and supply must have been on the day of the attack. The roads were thick with soldiers and horses. Alongside a few limbers sieved with holes, twelve gruesomely shot-up horses blocked the road.
On a rain-slicked pasture, over which the milk-white balls of a few shrapnels hung like clouds, the rest of the regiment came together. It was a little band of men, of about company strength, and a couple of officers in the middle. The losses! Almost the entire complement of two battalions in officers and men. Grimly the survivors stood in the teeming rain, and waited to be assigned quarters. Then we got dried in a wooden hut, huddled round a burning stove, and, over a hearty breakfast, we once more felt courage flow back into our limbs.
In the early evening, the first shells hit the village. One of the huts was hit, and several men from the 3rd Company killed. In spite of the bombardment, we lay down betimes with the desperate hope that we wouldn’t be called upon to counter-attack or reinforce or otherwise be thrown out into the rain.
At three in the morning, the order came to move out. We marched down the corpse- and wreckage-strewn road to Staden. The shelling had come this far; we came upon an isolated crater ringed by twelve bodies. Staden, which at our arrival had seemed such a lively place, already had quite a few bombed houses to show. The bleak market-place was littered with domestic rubble. A family left the little town at the same time as us, driving ahead of them their only possession: a cow. They were simple people; the man had a wooden leg, the woman was leading the crying children by the hand. The wild sounds behind us cast a further pall over the sad scene.
The remnants of the 2nd Battalion were housed in an isolated farmyard, in the midst of juicy high pastures, behind tall hedges. There I was put in command of the 7th Company, with whom I was to share sorrow and joy until the end of the war.
In the evening, we sat in front of the old tiled stove, sipping a stiff grog, and listening to the renewed thunder of the battle.
A sentence caught my eye from a military communique in a newspaper: ‘The enemy was held along the line of the Steenbach.’
It was an odd thing that our apparently confused actions in the depths of the night had had such pronounced and public consequences. We had done our part towards bringing the attack, which had begun with such mighty force, to a halt. However colossal the quantities of men and materiel, the work at decisive points had been done by no more than a few handfuls of men.
Before long, we went up to the hayloft to lie down. In spite of our nightcaps, most of the sleepers still had vivid dreams, and tossed and rolled, as though the Battle of Flanders had to be fought all over again.
On 3 August, weighed down with the meat and fruits of this deserted province, we marched off to the station of the nearby town of Gits. In the station canteen, the reduced battalion, once more in fine fettle, drank coffee together, spiced by the earthy language of a couple of heavy Flemish beauties as waitresses. What especially tickled the men was the way that, following the regional custom, they addressed everyone, officers included, as ‘Du’.
After a few days, I got a letter from my brother Fritz, by now in hospital in Gelsenkirchen. He wrote that he would probably have a stiff arm and a rattling lung till the day he died.