On 17 October we were entrained, and after travelling for a day and a half found ourselves back on Flemish soil, having last left it barely two months previously. We spent the night in the small town of Izegem, and the following morning marched to Roulers, or, to give it its Flemish name, Roeselare. The town was in the early stages of destruction. There were still shops with goods in them, but the inhabitants were already living in their cellars, and the ties of bourgeois existence were being loosened by frequent bombardment. With the war raging on all sides, a shop window opposite my quarters containing, of all things, ladies’ hats, seemed the height of absurd irrelevance. At night, looters broke into the abandoned houses.
I was the only person in my billet on the Ooststraat to be living above ground. The building belonged to a draper, who had fled at the beginning of the war, leaving an old housekeeper and her daughter to look after it. The two of them were also minding a little orphan girl whom they had found wandering the streets as we were marching in, and of whom they knew nothing, not even her name or her age. They all were terrified of bombs, and begged me, practically on their knees, not to leave light on upstairs for the wicked aeroplanes. I have to say, I laughed on the other side of my face when I was standing in the window with my friend Reinhardt, watching an English plane flitting over the rooftops in the beam of a searchlight, a huge bomb came down nearby, and the air pressure wrapped the window-panes about our ears.
For the next round of fighting, I had been designated as an intelligence officer, and sent to regimental staff. To learn a little more, I looked up the 10th Bavarian Regiment, whom we were to relieve, ahead of time. I found their commander to be friendly enough, even though he chided me over the non-regulation ‘red ribbon’ on my cap, which ought really to have been covered over with grey, so as not to draw any gunfire to the spot.
Two orderlies took me to the clearing-station, which was said to have a very good view of the front. No sooner had we left headquarters than a shell stirred up the meadow.
My guides were quite adept at avoiding the shelling – which towards noon turned into an uninterrupted rumble – by taking byways through the poplar woods that were dotted about. They worked through the gold-gleaming autumnal landscape with the instinct of the experienced modern warrior, who, even in the densest bombardment, can hit on a path that offers at least reasonable odds of getting through.
On the doorstep of an isolated farmyard that appeared to have been freshly bombed, we saw a man lying face down on the ground. ‘He’s stopped one!’ said the stolid Bavarian. ‘Air’s got a high iron content,’ said his companion, looking around appraisingly, and strode quickly on. The clearing-station lay the other side of the heavily shelled Passchendaele-Westroosebeke road. It was rather like the one I had commanded in Fresnoy, having been installed next to a building that had been reduced to a pile of rubble, and having so little cover that the first half-accurate shell would knock it for six. I was briefed by three officers, who seemed to be leading a very companionable cave-life in the place and were pleased that they were to be relieved, about the enemy, the position and how to approach, and then went by way of Roodkruis-Oostnieuwkerke, back to Roulers, where I reported to the colonel.
As I passed through the streets of the little town, I kept an eye out for the cosy names of the numerous little pubs that are such an apt expression of whatever the Flemish equivalent for dolce vita is. Who wouldn’t feel tempted by a pub-sign called ‘De Zalm’ [Salmon], ‘De Reeper’ [Heron], ‘De Nieuwe Trompette’, ‘De drie Koningen’ or ‘Den Oliphant’? Even to be welcomed in the intimate ‘Du’ form in that pithy and guttural language puts one right at ease. May God permit this splendid country, which has so often in its history been the battlefield for warring armies, to rise again from this war with its old quality intact.
In the evening, the town was once again bombed. I went down into the cellar, where the women were huddled trembling in a corner, and switched on my torch to settle the nerves of the little girl, who had been screaming ever since an explosion had knocked out the light. Here was proof again of man’s need for home. In spite of the huge fear these women had in the face of such danger, yet they clung fast to the ground which at any moment might bury them.
On the morning of 22 October, with my reconnaissance group of four men, I started off for Kalve, where the regimental staff were to be relieved this morning. At the front, there was very heavy fire, whose lightnings tinged the mist blood red. At the entrance to Oostnieuwkerke a building was hit by a heavy shell and collapsed just as we were about to pass it. Lumps of debris trundled across the street. We tried to go around the place, but ended up having to go through it after all, as we weren’t sure of the direction to Kalve. As we hurried on, I called out for directions to an NCO who was standing in a doorway. Instead of giving me an answer, he thrust his hands deeper into his pockets, and shrugged his shoulders. As I couldn’t stand on ceremony in the midst of this bombardment, I sprang over to him, held my pistol under his nose, and got my information out of him that way.
It was the first time in the war that I’d come across an example of a man acting up, not out of cowardice, but obviously out of complete indifference. Although such indifference was more commonly seen in the last years of the war, its display in action remained very unusual, as battle brings men together, whereas inactivity separates them. In a battle, you stand under external pressures. It was on the march, surrounded by columns of men moving out of the battle, that the erosion of the war ethos showed itself most nakedly.
In Roodkruis, a little farmstead at a fork in the road, things got really worrying. Limbers chased across the shelled road, troops of infantry wended along through the brush either side of the road, and innumerable wounded men dragged themselves back. We encountered one young artilleryman who had a long, jagged splinter sticking out of his shoulder, like a spear. He passed us, wandering like a somnambulist, never once looking up.
We turned right off the road, to the regimental headquarters, which stood in a ring of fire. Nearby, a couple of telephonists were laying their wires across a cabbage field. A shell landed right next to one of them; we saw him crumple, and thought he was done for. But then he picked himself up, and calmly continued laying his wire. As the headquarters consisted of a tiny concrete blockhouse that barely had room for the commander, an adjutant and an orderly, I looked for a place nearby. I moved in, with intelligence, gas-protection and trench-mortar officers, to a wooden shack that didn’t exactly strike me as the embodiment of a bomb-proof abode.
In the afternoon, I went up the line, seeing as news had come in that the enemy had that morning attacked our 5th Company. My route went via the clearing-station to the Nordhof, essentially a former farmhouse, in whose ruins the commander of the battalion in reserve was staying. From there, a path, not always recognizable as such, led to the commander of the fighting troops.
The heavy rains of the past few days had turned the crater field into a morass, deep enough, especially around the Paddelbach, to endanger life. On my wanderings, I would regularly pass solitary and abandoned corpses; often it was just a head or a hand that was left protruding from the dirty level of the crater. Thousands have come to rest in such a way, without a sign put up by a friendly hand to mark the grave.
After the extremely sapping crossing of the Paddelbach, which was only possible after improvising a bridge from fallen poplars, I came across Lieutenant Heins, the commander of the 5th Company, along with a handful of loyal men, in an enormous shell-crater. The crater position was on a hill, and as it wasn’t completely inundated, undemanding grunts might find it habitable. Heins told me that that morning a British line had appeared and then disappeared again, when it had come under fire. They in turn had shot a few men from the 164th, who had run off at their approach. Other than that, everything was tiptop; I returned to headquarters, and reported to the colonel.