Merry old England! Of course we didn’t stint ourselves, but helped ourselves to whatever we fancied. I took a haversack, undergarments, a little flask full of whisky, a map case and some exquisite little items from Roger & Gallet, no doubt keepsakes from some romantic leave in Paris. We could see that the inhabitants had left here in a hurry.
An adjacent space harboured the kitchen, whose supplies we stared at in wonder.
There was a whole crate of eggs, which we sucked on the spot, as eggs were little more than a word to us at this stage. On shelves along the walls were stacks of canned meat, tins of delicious English jam, and bottles of Camp coffee, tomatoes and onions; everything to delight an epicure’s heart.
It was a scene I often came back to later, when we lay for weeks in trenches, on meagre bread rations, watery soup and thin nondescript jam.
After that peek into the enviable circumstances of our foes, we left the dugout and investigated the valley, where we found two spanking-new artillery pieces. Great piles of gleaming, freshly fired shell-casings indicated that they had had a thing or two to say in the course of our attack. I picked up a piece of chalk, and chalked up the number of my company. I hadn’t yet learned that the victor’s rights were accorded scant respect by the following units; each one wiped away the mark of their predecessor, and wrote up their own, till the last one was that of some digging outfit.
Then, with our artillery still slinging iron about our ears, we went back to the others. Our front line, formed now from reserve troops, was a couple of hundred yards behind us. I posted two men outside the dugout, and told the others to keep their rifles handy. Then, after arranging the reliefs, having a little more to eat, and jotting down the day’s happenings, I went to sleep.
At one o’clock in the morning, we were roused by hurrahs and brisk fire from our right. We grabbed our rifles, plunged out of the dugout, and took up positions in a large shell-hole. From ahead of us came a few scattered German soldiers, who received fire from our ranks. Two of them remained on the path. Alerted by this incident, we waited for the initial excitement behind us to die down, shouted out who we were, and returned to our own line. There we found the commander of the 2nd Company, Lieutenant Kosik, with a wound in the arm and such a heavy cold he couldn’t speak, with roughly sixty men of the 73 rd. Since he had to go back to the dressing-station, I took over the command of his detachment, which included three officers. Apart from them there were also the similarly thrown-together companies under Gipkens and Vorbeck.
The rest of the night I spent with some NCOs of the 2nd, in a little dugout where we all but froze to death. In the morning, I breakfasted off looted supplies, and dispatched runners to Que-ant, to fetch coffee and food from the kitchens. Our own artillery started its bloody cannonade again, its first good-morning to us being a direct hit in a crater that was housing four men from a machine-gun company. At first light, our group was reinforced by Vice-Sergeant-Major Kumpart and some men under him.
No sooner had we managed to stamp the cold out of our chilly bones than I received orders to band together with what was left of the 76th and storm the Vraucourt positions – which we had already begun to take – to the right of where we presently were. In thick morning fog, we moved off to the jumping-off position, a plateau south of Ecoust, where many lay dead from the previous day. There was, as generally happens when orders are unclear, some argy-bargy among the officers, which was only settled when a machine-gun sent a spray of bullets whistling round our legs. Everyone dived into the nearest crater, except for Vice-Sergeant-Major Kumpart, who was left lying on the ground, groaning. I hurried across to him with a medical orderly, to get him bandaged up. He had a bad wound in the knee. With a bent pair of tongs, we pulled out several fragments of bone from the wound. He died a few days later. I was more than usually upset, because Kumpart had been my drill instructor three years previously, in Recouvrence.
In discussion with Captain von Ledebur, who was now in overall command of our assorted units, I spoke of the futility of a frontal attack, arguing that with part of the Vraucourt position already in our hands, we could roll it up from the left with far fewer casualties. We decided to spare our men the ordeal, and the events were to prove us right.
For the time being, we made ourselves comfortable in some craters on the plateau. By and by, the sun broke through, and British aeroplanes appeared, dusting our holes with machine-gun bullets, but they were driven away by our own planes. In the Ecoust Valley, we saw a battery drive up, a rare sight for an old front soldier; it was pretty promptly demolished too. A horse broke loose and galloped over the landscape; a pale roan, looking ghostly as it flew over the wide, lonely plains under the shifting and variable clouds of explosive. The enemy aeroplanes were not long gone before we came under fire. First, there were a few shrapnels, then lots of shells, big and small. They had us on a plate. Timorous natures multiplied the effect of the fire by running mindlessly here and there, instead of getting their heads down in a crater somewhere and taking their punishment. You have to be a fatalist in such situations. I confirmed my adherence to that creed by sampling the delicious contents of a can of gooseberry jam I’d picked up from the British stores. And I pulled on a pair of Scottish woollen socks I’d found in the dugout. Gradually, the sun climbed higher.
For some time, we’d been able to observe activity on the left of the Vraucourt position. Now we could see the arc and the white puffs of German stick-bombs. That was our cue.
I gave the order to advance – or, rather, I raised my right arm, and set off towards the enemy position. We got into their trench without encountering much in the way of fire, and jumped in, getting a joyous welcome from a storm troop of the 76th. We made slow progress, rolling up the line with hand-grenades, as we’d done at Cambrai.
Unfortunately, it soon dawned on the enemy artillery that we were making remorseless progress along their line. A sharp bombardment with shrapnels and light shells just caught the back of those of us who were in the van, and did worse to reserve troops who were just running up towards the trench. We noticed the artillerymen could see what they were firing at. That gave us the gee-up we needed to finish off the job as soon as we could, and slip in under the fire.
It appeared that the Vraucourt position was still being built, because some stretches of trench were merely indicated by the removal of the turf. Each time we came across a piece like that, we drew fire on us from several sides. We repaid the enemy in kind when it was their turn to dash across these death-strips, so that these undug places were before long thickly sown with the injured and dead. There was a wild hunt under clouds of shrapnel.
We raced past stout figures, still warm, with strong knees under their short kilts, or we crawled past them. They were Highlanders, and their way of fighting showed us that we were dealing with real men.
When we had made a few hundred yards in this fashion, the ever-thicker hail of rifle- and hand-grenades forced us to pause. It seemed the tide was about to turn. There was some fear in the air; I heard agitated voices.