Amid such scenes, we had come up to the embankment, barely realizing it. It was still spewing fire like a great machine. Here my recollection begins again, with the registration of an extremely advantageous position. We hadn’t been hit, and now that we were right up against it, the embankment changed from being an obstacle to being cover for us. As though waking from a deep dream, I saw German steel helmets approaching through the craters. They seemed to sprout from the fire-harrowed soil like some iron harvest. At the same time, I noticed that right by my foot there was the barrel of a heavy machine-gun, stuck through a dugout window covered over with sacking. The noise was such that it was only the vibration of the barrel that told us that it was firing. The defender was only an arm’s length away from us then. It was that degree of proximity that kept us safe. And that spelled his doom. Hot haze rose from the weapon. It must have hit a great many men, and it was still mowing. The barrel moved little; its fire was aimed.
I fixed the hot, shaking piece of steel that was sowing death, and that I could almost brush with my foot. Then I shot through the sacking. A man who turned up next to me ripped it clean away, and dropped a hand-grenade in the hole. A shock and the issue of a whitish cloud told the rest of the story. The means were rough, but satisfactory. The muzzle no longer moved, the weapon had stopped firing. We ran along the embankment to treat the next holes in similar fashion, and so we must have broken a few vertebrae out of the spine of the defence. I raised my hand to let my troops, whose shots were ringing round our ears, know who we were and what we were about. They waved happily back. Then we and a hundred others scaled the embankment. For the first time in the war, I saw masses of men collide. The British were defending a couple of terraced trenches the other side of the embankment. Shots were exchanged at point-blank range, hand-grenades looped down.
I leaped into the nearest trench; plunging round the traverse, I ran into an English officer in an open jacket and loose tie; I grabbed him and hurled him against a pile of sandbags. An old white-haired major behind me shouted: ‘Kill the swine!’
There was no point. I turned to the lower trench, which was seething with British soldiers. It was like a shipwreck. A few tossed duck’s eggs, others fired Colt revolvers, most were trying to run. We had the upper hand now. I kept firing off my pistol as in a dream, although I was out of ammunition long ago. A man next to me lobbed hand-grenades at the British as they ran. A steel helmet took off into the air like a spinning plate.
It was all over in a minute. The British leaped out of their trenches, and fled away across the field. From up on the embankment, a wild pursuing fire set in. They were brought down in full flight, and, within seconds, the ground was littered with corpses. That was the disadvantage of the embankment.
German troops were also down among them. An NCO stood next to me watching the fighting open-mouthed. I seized his rifle and shot an Englishman who was tangling with a couple of Germans. They stopped in bafflement at the invisible assistance, and then ran on.
Our success had a magical effect. There was no question of leadership, or even of separate units, but there was only one direction: forwards! Every man ran forward for himself.
For my objective I selected a low rise, on which I could see the ruins of a house, a cross, and the wreckage of an aeroplane. Others were with me; we formed a pack, and in our eagerness ran into the wall of flame laid down by our own artillery. We had to throw ourselves in a crater and wait while the shelling moved forward. Next to me there was a young officer from another regiment, who, like me, was delighted with the success of this first charge. In a few minutes, the intensity of our mutual enthusiasm gave us the feeling we’d known each other for years. Then we leaped up, and never saw each other again.
Even in these frightful moments, something droll could happen. A man next to me pulled his rifle to his cheek and pretended to shoot at a rabbit that suddenly came bounding through our lines. It all happened so abruptly, I had to laugh. Nothing is ever so terrible that some bold and amusing fellow can’t trump it.
Beside the ruined cottage lay a piece of trench that was being swept with machine-gun fire from beyond. I jumped into it, and found it untenanted. Immediately afterwards, I was joined by Oskar Kius and von Wedelstadt. An orderly of Wedelstadt’s, the last man in, collapsed in mid-leap, and was dead, shot through one eye. When Wedelstadt saw this last member of his company fall, he leaned his head against the wall of the trench and cried. He wouldn’t get through the day either.
Below us was a strongly fortified position across a defile, with a couple of machine-gun nests on the slopes in front of it, one either side. Our artillery had already steamrollered past; the enemy seemed to have recovered, and was shooting for all he was worth. We were perhaps five hundred yards away, and the spurts of fire buzzed across it like swarms of bees.
After a short pause for breath, not many of us headed over the top towards the enemy. It was all or nothing. After a few paces, there was just me and one other man facing the left-hand machine-gun. I could clearly see the head under a flat helmet behind the earthworks, next to a fine spout of steam. I approached in very short steps, to leave him no time to aim, and ran in a zigzag, to elude rifle bullets. Each time I hit the deck, my man offered me another clip of ammunition with which to carry the fight.
‘Cartridges! Cartridges!’ I turned round, and saw him lying on his side, twitching.
From the left, where the resistance seemed to be weaker, some men came running up and were almost within hand-grenade range of the defenders. I covered the final yards and tumbled over some wire right into the trench. The British, under fire from all sides, abandoned their position and the machine-gun, and fled across to the other position. The machine-gun was half buried under an enormous pile of brass cartridges. It was steaming and red-hot. Stretched out in front of it lay my adversary, an athletic-looking Englishman with one eye put out by a shot to the head. The colossus with the big white eyeball against his smoke-charred skull looked gruesome. As I was almost fainting with thirst, I didn’t hang around but went looking for water. A dugout entrance looked promising. I put my head round the corner, and saw a man sitting at the bottom, fitting bullets into a belt over his knee. He seemed to have no idea that the situation had been transformed. I calmly levelled my pistol at him, but instead of squeezing the trigger, as common sense dictated, I called out: ‘Come here, hands up!’ He jumped up, looked at me wildly, and scampered into the back of the dugout. I threw a grenade after him. The dugout probably had a further entrance, because a soldier came round a traverse and observed laconically: ‘He won’t be doing no more shooting.’
At last, I managed to find a canister of cooling-water. I gulped down the oily liquid, slushed some more into an English canteen, and handed it to comrades who suddenly filled the trench.
As a curious footnote, I should like to mention that my first thought on forcing my way into this machine-gun nest concerned the cold from which I was suffering. All my life, I’ve had a tendency to throat inflammation; therefore, when I pressed my thumbs under my jaw, I was pleased to note that the vigorous exercise I’d taken had – like a sauna – helped me sweat off this latest bout.
Meanwhile, the right-hand machine-gun nest and the defenders of the defile sixty yards in front of us were still putting up a grim fight. The fellows really were giving it everything. We tried to aim their own machine-gun at them, but didn’t manage that; instead, as I was trying that, a bullet whizzed past my head, brushed the Jager lieutenant who was standing behind me, and finished up giving a private a very nasty-looking wound in the thigh. A light machine-gun crew had better luck setting up their weapon on the edge of our little semi-circle and began raking the British from the flank.