The following day, our lunch was rudely interrupted by some shells landing hard by our wooden walls, sending up spurts of dirt that slowly spiralled down on to our tar-paper roof. Everyone streamed out of the hut; I fled to a nearby farmhouse, and, because it was raining, went inside. That evening, precisely the same chain of events, only this time I stayed in the open, as the rain had stopped. The next shell flew into the middle of the collapsing farmhouse. That’s the role of chance in war. More than elsewhere, small causes can have a vast effect.
On 25 October, we had already been driven out of our shacks by eight o’clock, one of them being nailed by only the second shell to be fired. Further shells flew into the damp pastures. They gave the impression of just expiring there, but they tore up considerable craters. Alerted by my experience of the day before, I sought out an isolated and confidence-inspiring crater in the large cabbage field behind headquarters, and didn’t leave it for quite some time afterwards. It was on that day that I got to hear the bad news of the death of Lieutenant Brecht, who had fallen in battle as a divisional observation officer in the crater field just right of the Nordhof farm. He was one of those few who, even in this war of materiel, always had a particular aura of calm about him, and whom we supposed to be invulnerable. It’s always easy to spot people like that in a crowd of others – they were the ones who laughed when there were orders to attack. Hearing of such a man’s death inexorably led to thoughts of my own mortality.
The morning hours of 26 October were filled by drumfire of unusual severity. Our artillery too redoubled its fury on seeing the signals for a barrage that were sent up from the front. Every little piece of wood and every hedge was home to a gun, whose half-deaf gunners did their business.
As wounded men going back were making exaggerated and unclear statements about a British advance, I was sent off to the front at eleven o’clock with four men, for more accurate information. Our way led through heated fire. We passed numerous wounded, among them Lieutenant Spitz, the commander of the 12th, with a shot in the chin. Even before we got to the command dugout we came under aimed machine-gun fire, a sure sign that the enemy must have forced our line back. My suspicion was confirmed by Major Dietlein, the commander of the 3rd Battalion. I found the old gentleman engaged in crawling out of the doorway of his three-parts inundated blockhouse, and fishing in the mud for his meerschaum cigar-holder.
The British had forced a way through our front line, and had occupied a ridge from where they commanded the Paddelbach basin and our battalion headquarters. I entered the change in the position with a couple of red strokes on my map, and then geed the men up for their next sapping run through the mud. We bounded across the terrain overlooked by the British, got behind the crest of the next elevation, and from there, more slowly, advanced to the Nordhof. To the right and left of us shells splashed down in the swamp and sent up vast mud mushrooms ringed with innumerable lesser splatters. The Nordhof also needed to be got through in a hurry, as it was under fire from high-explosive shells. Those things went off with a peculiarly nasty and stunning bang. They were fired over, a few at a time, with only short intervals between them. Each time, we had to make some rapid ground and then wait for the next round in a shell-hole. In the time between the first distant whine and the very close explosion, one’s will to live was painfully challenged, with the body helpless and motionless left to its fate.
Shrapnels were also present in the compound, and one threw its freight of balls in our midst, with a multiple clatter. One of my companions was struck on the back of the helmet, and thrown to the ground. After lying there stunned for some time, he struggled to his feet and ran on. The terrain around the Nordhof was covered with a lot of bodies in frightful condition.
Since we went about our work with some diligence, we often got to see places that until very recently had been strictly no go. It gave us an insight into all the other things that went on in out-of-the-way places. Everywhere we saw traces of death; it was almost as though there wasn’t a living soul anywhere in this wasteland. Here, behind a dishevelled hedge, lay a group of men, their bodies covered with the fresh soil that the explosion had dropped on them after killing them; there were two runners lying by a crater, from which the acrid fumes of explosive were still bubbling up. In another place, we found many bodies in a small area: either a group of stretcher-bearers or an errant platoon of reservists that had been found by the centre of a ball of fire, and met their end. We would surface in these deadly places, take in their secrets at a glance, and disappear again into the smoke.
After hurrying unscathed across the heavily bombarded stretch the other side of the Passchendaele-Westroosebeke road, I was able to report to Colonel von Oppen.
The next morning, I was sent to the front at six o’clock with instructions to establish whether, and if so where, the regiment was in touch with the units on its flanks. On my way, I ran into Sergeant-Major Ferchland, who was taking the 8th Company orders to advance to Goudberg, and, in the event of there being a gap between us and the regiment on the left, to close it. In the speedy performance of my duty, I could do nothing better than fall in with him. After searching for some time, we finally found the commander of the 8th, my friend Tebbe, in a rather inhospitable part of the crater landscape close to the clearing-station. He was not pleased with the order to perform such a visible movement in broad daylight. During our laconic conversation, further oppressed by the indescribable dreariness of the craters in the early light, we lit cigars, and waited for the company to collect itself.
After no more than a few paces, we came under carefully aimed infantry fire from the opposing heights, and had to go on alone, each man dodging from crater to crater. Crossing the next ridge, the fire became so intense that Tebbe gave orders to occupy a crater position until nightfall. Puffing on his cigar, he reviewed his line.
I made up my mind to go forward and check on the size of the gap myself, and rested awhile in Tebbe’s crater. The enemy’s artillery was soon finding its range, to punish the company for its bold advance. A projectile smashing down on the rim of our little refuge and leaving both my face and my map spattered with mud, told me it was time to go. I bade goodbye to Tebbe, and wished him all the best for the hours ahead. He called after me: God, just let it be night, the morning will come by itself!’
We picked our way across the Paddelbach basin, where we were within view of the enemy, ducking behind the foliage of shot-over poplars, and using their trunks to balance along. From time to time one of us would disappear up to the hips in mire, and would certainly have drowned but for the presence of his comrades and their helpfully extended rifle butts. I aimed for a blockhouse that had a group of soldiers standing around it. In front of us, a stretcher carried by four bearers was heading in the same direction as we were. Puzzled to see a wounded man being carried towards the front, I took a look through my binoculars, and saw a line of khaki-clad figures with flat steel helmets. At the same instant, the first shots rang out. As there was nowhere to take cover, we had no option but to run back, with the bullets plugging into the mud all round us. The chase through the morass was very fatiguing; but the minute we stopped, completely out of breath, and offered the British a still target, a clutch of high-explosive shells gave us our second wind. The shells had the virtue, moreover, of obscuring us from view with their smoke. The least pleasant aspect of this chase was the prospect that almost any sort of wound was enough to see you to a watery grave. We hurried along the crater rims, as along the narrow walls of a honeycomb. Trickles of blood here and there indicated that some unlucky men must have gone there before us.