No sooner had we got back from this interruption to our lunch than there was more pandemonium. It was one of those curious incidents that can suddenly and unpredictably transform an entire situation. The noise was coming from a subaltern in the regiment on our left who wanted to line up with us, and seemed inflamed by a berserk fury. Drink seemed to have tipped his innate bravery into a towering rage.
‘Where are the Tommies? Lemme at ‘em! Come on boys, who’s coming with me?’ In his insensate fury, he knocked over our fine barricade, and plunged forward, clearing a path for himself with hand-grenades. His orderly slipped ahead of him along the trench, shooting down anyone who survived the explosions.
Bravery, fearless risking of one’s own life, is always inspiring. We too found ourselves picked up by his wild fury, and scrabbling around to grab a few hand-grenades, rushed to form part of this berserker’s progress. Soon I was up alongside him, tearing along the line, and the other officers too, followed by riflemen from my company, weren’t slow in coming. Even Captain von Brixen, the battalion commander, was up there in the van, rifle in hand, bringing down enemy grenade-throwers over our heads.
The British resisted manfully. Every traverse had to be fought for. The black balls of Mills bombs crossed in the air with our own long-handled grenades. Behind every traverse we captured, we found corpses or bodies still twitching. We killed each other, sight unseen. We too suffered losses. A piece of iron crashed to the ground next to the orderly, which the fellow was unable to avoid; and he collapsed to the ground, while his blood issued on to the clay from many wounds.
We hurdled over his body, and charged forward. Thunderous crashes pointed us the way. Hundreds of pairs of eyes were lying in wait behind rifles and machine-guns in the dead land. We were already a long way in front of our own lines. From all sides, bullets whistled round our steel helmets or struck the trench parapet with a hard crack. Each time a black iron oval broke the horizon, one’s eye sized it up with that instantaneous clarity of which a man is only capable in moments of life and death. During those instants of waiting, you had to try to get to a place where you could see as much of the sky as possible, because it was only against its pale backdrop that it was possible to see the black jagged iron of those deadly balls with sufficient clarity. Then you hurled your own bomb, and leaped forward. One barely glanced at the crumpled body of one’s opponent; he was finished, and a new duel was commencing. The exchange of hand-grenades reminded me of fencing with foils; you needed to jump and stretch, almost as in a ballet. It’s the deadliest of duels, as it invariably ends with one or other of the participants being blown to smithereens. Or both.
In those moments, I was capable of seeing the dead -I jumped over them with every stride – without horror. They lay there in the relaxed and softly spilled attitude that characterizes those moments in which life takes its leave. During my leaping progress, I had a difference of opinion with the subaltern, who was really quite a card. He wanted to be first, and insisted that I supply him with bombs, rather than throw them myself. In amongst the short terrible shouts that accompany the work, and by which you alert the other to the presence of the enemy, I would sometimes hear him:
‘One man to throw! And after all I was the instructor at the storm troop training!’
A trench that led off to the right was cleaned up by soldiers of the 225th, who were trailing in our wake. British soldiers caught in a cleft stick tried to flee across the open fields, but were mown down in the fire that straight away was directed at them from all sides.
And those soldiers we were pursuing gradually felt the Siegfried Line becoming too hot for them. They tried to disappear down a communications trench that led off to the right. We jumped up on to the sentry steps, and saw something that made us shout with wild glee: the trench they were trying to escape down doubled back on itself towards ours, like the curved frame of a lyre, and, at the narrowest point, they were only ten paces apart! So they had to pass us again. From our elevated position, we were able to look down on the British helmets as they stumbled in their haste and excitement. I tossed a hand-grenade in front of the first lot, bringing them up short, and after them all the others. Then they were stuck in a frightful jam; hand-grenades flew through the air like snowballs, covering everything in milk-white smoke. Fresh bombs were handed up to us from below. Lightnings flashed between the huddled British, hurling up rags of flesh and uniforms and helmets. There were mingled cries of rage and fear. With fire in our eyes, we jumped on to the very lip of the trench. The rifles of the whole area were pointed at us.
Suddenly, in my delirium, I was knocked to the ground as by a hammer blow. Sober, I pulled off my helmet and saw to my terror that there were two large holes in it. Cadet Mohrmann, leaping up to assist me, assured me that I had a bleeding scratch at the back of my head, nothing more. A bullet shot from some distance had punched through my helmet and only brushed my skull. Half unconscious, I reeled back with a hurriedly applied bandage, to remove myself from the eye of the storm. No sooner had I passed the nearest traverse than a man ran up behind me and told me that Tebbe had just been killed in the same place, by a shot in the head.
That news floored me. A friend of mine with noble qualities, with whom I had shared joy, sorrow and danger for years now, who only a few moments ago had called out some pleasantry to me, taken from life by a tiny piece of lead! I could not grasp the fact; unfortunately, it was all too true.
In this murderous sector of trench, all my NCOs and a third of my company were bleeding to death. Shots in the head rained down. Lieutenant Hopf was another one of the fallen, an older man, a teacher by profession, a German schoolmaster in the best sense of the word. My two ensigns and many others besides were wounded. And yet, the 7th Company held on to the conquered line, under the command of Lieutenant Hoppenrath, the only able-bodied officer remaining, until we were relieved.
Of all the stimulating moments in a war, there is none to compare with the encounter of two storm troop commanders in the narrow clay walls of a line. There is no going back, and no pity. And so everyone knows who has seen one or other of them in their kingdom, the aristocrat of the trench, with hard, determined visage, brave to the point of folly, leaping agilely forward and back, with keen, bloodthirsty eyes, men who answered the demands of the hour, and whose names go down in no chronicle.
On the way back, I stopped with Captain von Brixen for a moment, who with a few troops was shooting at a row of heads over a nearby parallel trench. I stood between him and the other marksmen, and watched the bullets striking home. In the dreamlike mood that followed the shock of my wounding, it never occurred to me that my white turban-like bandage must be visible miles away.
Suddenly a blow to the forehead knocked me to the floor, while my eyes were drenched with blood. The man next to me fell at the same time, and started to moan. Shot in the head through steel helmet and temple. The captain feared he had lost two company commanders on one day, but on inspection could make out only two surface wounds near the hairline. They must have been caused by the bursting bullet, or perhaps splinters from the helmet of the wounded man. This same man, with whom I shared pieces of metal from the same bullet, came to visit me after the war; he worked in a cigarette factory, and, ever since his wound, had been sickly and a little eccentric.