To my delight, Sprenger emerged from a nearby dugout with a whole lot of men who had spent the night there. I had the section leaders report to me, and found out that we had sixty-three men. And the previous night, I’d set out in high spirits with a hundred and fifty! I was able to identify over twenty dead and sixty wounded, many of whom later died of their injuries. My inquiries involved a lot of looking around in trenches and craters, but it had the effect of distracting me from the horror.
My one, feeble consolation was that it might have been even worse. Fusilier Rust, for instance, was standing so close to the bomb blast that the straps on his munitions box caught fire. NCO Pregau, who, admittedly, went on to lose his life the next day, was not even scratched as he stood between two comrades who were torn to ribbons.
We spent the rest of the day in pretty low humour, much of it sleeping. I was frequently called away to see the battalion commander, as there were many details of the attack to be settled. Otherwise, lying on a bunk, I conversed with my two officers on all kinds of trivial subjects, all to escape our tormenting thoughts. The refrain was: ‘Well, thanks be to God, all that can happen is we get shot.’ A few remarks that I addressed to the men gathered on the dugout steps, to try to cheer them up, seemed to have little effect. I was hardly in a cheer-bringing mood.
At ten, a messenger arrived with instructions to go to the front line. A wild animal dragged from its lair, or a sailor feeling the deck sinking under his feet, must have felt like us as we took our leave of the warm, secure dugout and headed out into the inhospitable darkness.
There was already some activity. We dashed down Felix Lane under sharp shrapnel fire, and reached the front line without casualties. While we were wending our way along the trenches, over our heads the artillery was being trundled across bridges into forward positions. The regiment, whose most-advanced battalion we were to be, had been given a very narrow sector of the front. Every dugout was immediately jammed. Those left in the cold dug themselves holes in the trench walls, so as to have at least minimal protection against the artillery barrage that was to be expected before the attack. After a lot of toing and froing, it seemed everyone had some kind of foxhole. Once more Captain von Brixen assembled the company commanders to talk through the plan. For the last time, watches were synchronized, and then we all shook hands and went our separate ways.
I sat down with my two officers on the dugout steps, to wait for five past five, when the preliminary shelling was due to start. The mood had lifted somewhat, as the rain had stopped, and the starry night gave promise of a dry morning. We chatted and smoked. At three o’clock there was breakfast, and a flask went the rounds. During the early morning hours, the enemy artillery was so lively we feared the British might have caught a whiff of something. A few of the numerous munitions dumps dotted around blew up.
Shortly before the show, the following flash signal was circulated: ‘His Majesty the Kaiser and Hindenburg are on the scene of operations.’ It was greeted with applause.
The watch-hands moved round; we counted off the last few minutes. At last, it was five past five. The tempest was unleashed.
A flaming curtain went up, followed by unprecedentedly brutal roaring. A wild thunder, capable of submerging even the loudest detonations in its rolling, made the earth shake. The gigantic roaring of the innumerable guns behind us was so atrocious that even the greatest of the battles we had experienced seemed like a tea party by comparison. What we hadn’t dared hope for happened: the enemy artillery was silenced; a prodigious blow had laid it out. We felt too restless to stay in the dugout. Standing out on top, we gasped at the colossal wall of flame over the English lines, gradually obscuring itself behind crimson, surging clouds.
The only thing that took the edge off our enjoyment of this spectacle were our watering eyes and inflamed mucous membranes. The clouds of our gas shells, beaten back by a headwind, wrapped us in a powerful aroma of bitter almonds. I looked on in concern as some of the men started coughing and choking, and finally tore the masks off their faces. I was therefore at pains myself to suppress any cough, and breathe slowly and carefully. Finally, the cloud dispersed, and after an hour it was safe to take off our gas masks.
It had become light. At our rear, the massive roaring and surging was still waxing, even though any intensification of the noise had seemed impossible. In front of us an impenetrable wall of smoke, dust and gas had formed. Men ran past, shouting cheerily in our ears. Infantrymen and artillerymen, pioneers and telephonists, Prussians and Bavarians, officers and men, all were overwhelmed by the elemental force of the fire-storm, and all were impatient to go over the top at nine-forty. At twenty-five past eight our heavy mortars, which were standing massed behind our front lines, entered the fray. We watched the daunting two-hundredweight bombs loop high up into the air, and come crashing down with the force of volcanic eruptions on the enemy lines. Their impacts were like a row of spurting craters.
Even the laws of nature appeared to have been suspended. The air swam as on hot summer days, and its variable density caused fixed objects to appear to dance to and fro. Shadows streaked through the clouds. The noise now was a sort of absolute noise – you heard nothing at all. Only dimly were you aware that thousands of machine-guns behind you were slinging their leaden swarms into the blue air.
The last hour of the preparation was more dangerous than all four of its predecessors, during which we had moved around insolently on the parapets. The enemy brought in a heavy battery that hurled shell after shell into our overcrowded lines. To move out of the way, I turned left and met Lieutenant Heins, who asked me if I’d seen Lieutenant Solemacher: ‘He’s wanted to take over command, Captain von Brixen’s fallen.’ Shaken by this news, I went back, and sat myself in a deep foxhole. By the time I got there, I had forgotten what I’d been told. I was as in a dream, sleepwalking through this storm.
NCO Dujesiefken, my comrade at Regnieville, was standing in front of my foxhole, begging me to get into the trench as even a light shell bursting anywhere near would cause masses of earth to come down on top of me. An explosion cut him off: he sprawled to the ground, missing a leg. He was past help. I jumped over him, and darted into a foxhole on the right, where a couple of pioneers had already sought shelter. Heavy shells continued to rain down all round us. You suddenly saw black clumps of earth spinning out of a white cloud; the sound of the explosion was engulfed by the noise level. In the sector to our left, three men from my company were torn to pieces. One of the last hits, a dud, killed poor Schmidtchen as he sat on the dugout steps.
I was standing with Sprenger, watch in hand, in front of my foxhole, waiting for the great moment to come. The rest of the company had clustered round. We managed to cheer and distract them with a few crude jokes. Lieutenant Meyer, who briefly stuck his head round the traverse, told me later he thought we were out of our minds.
At ten past nine, the officer patrols who were to cover our advance left the trench. Since the two positions were perhaps half a mile apart, we had to move forward during the artillery preparation, and lie ready in no man’s land, to be able to leap into the first enemy line as soon as nine-forty came. A few minutes later, then, Sprenger and I climbed up on to the top, followed by the rest of the company.
‘Now let’s show them what the 7th are made of!’
‘I’m past caring what happens to me!’
‘Revenge for the 7th Company!’