It wasn’t until I was back in Hanover that I heard that, along with many other friends and acquaintances, little Schultz had fallen in the fighting. Kius had got away with a harmless abdominal wound. At the same time, his camera had been broken, and a number of photographs of our attack on the railway embankment were lost.
Anyone who witnessed the celebration of our reunion in a little bar in Hanover, at which my brother with his stiff arm and Bachmann with a stiff knee also attended, would hardly have thought that barely a fortnight previously we had all been listening to other music than the merry popping of champagne corks.
Even so, there was a shadow over those days, because before long we understood from the news reports that the offensive had bogged down, and that, in strategic terms, it had failed. This was confirmed for me by the French and British newspapers I read in cafes in Berlin. The Great Battle was a turning-point for me, and not merely because from then on I thought it possible that we might actually lose the war.
The incredible massing of forces in the hour of destiny, to fight for a distant future, and the violence it so surprisingly, stunningly unleashed, had taken me for the first time into the depths of something that was more than mere personal experience. That out the white ribbon of road from the surrounding darkness. The various whinings of the heavy bombs were engulfed by the rolling blasts of their detonation. Then searchlights probed the skies for the treacherous night birds, shrapnels exploded like toys, and tracer shells loped after one another in long chains like fiery wolves.
A persistent smell of carrion hung over the conquered territory, sometimes unbearable, sometimes not so bad, but always nettling the senses like an embassy from another country.
‘Eau d’offensive,’ I heard the voice of an old veteran next to me, as we seemed to have been going down an avenue lined with mass graves for the past several minutes.
From Achiet-le-Grand, we marched along the railway line leading to Bapaume, and then went cross-country to our position. The shelling was pretty lively. When we paused to rest once, a couple of medium shells landed very close. The memory of that unforgettable night of terror on 19 March assailed us. We were approaching the front line when we marched past a rowdy company that had obviously just been relieved, and was standing by; a few dozen shrapnels soon shut them up. With a hail of obscenities, my men dived into the nearest trench. A couple weren’t so lucky, and needed to go back to the field dressing-station to get themselves patched up.
At three o’clock, completely exhausted, I pitched up at my dugout, whose cramped dimensions promised a rather uncomfortable stay.
The reddish light of a candle was burning in a thick fog. I tripped over a tangled mass of legs, and the magic word ‘Relief!’ brought some animation to the place. From an oven-shaped hole came a series of oaths, and then by and by there appeared an unshaven face, a pair of tarnished shoulder-pieces, an ancient uniform, and two clumps of clay, which presumably contained boots. We sat down at the rickety table and sorted out the hand-over, each trying to do the other out of a dozen iron rations and a couple of flare pistols. Then my predecessor was disgorged through the narrow entryway, predicting that the rotten hole wouldn’t last another three days. I remained behind, the newly promoted captain of A Sector.
The position, when I came to inspect it the following morning, was not a gladsome sight. No sooner had I left the dugout than I saw two bloodied coffee-carriers coming towards me, who had been hit by shrapnel in the communication trench. A few steps along, and Fusilier Ahrens reported himself hit by a ricochet and unfit to continue.
We had the village of Bucquoy ahead of us and Puisieux-au-Mont at our backs. The company was without support in a shallow position, separated from our neighbours on the right, the 76th infantry, by a wide untenanted gap. The left edge of our sector was formed by a piece of splintered woodland, known as Copse 125. In compliance with orders, no deep dugouts had been excavated. We were not to dig in, but remain on the offensive. We didn’t even have any wire entanglements in front of the line. The men sheltered by twos in little holes in the ground with so-called tin Siegfrieds in front of them – curved ovals of corrugated metal about three feet high, which we put in front of the tight oven-shaped hide-outs.
Since my own dugout was behind another sector, I started by looking for new accommodation. A hut-like construction in a collapsed bit of trench looked like just the thing to me, once I had made it into a defensible proposition by hauling together various murderous weapons. There, with my orderlies, I led a hermit’s life in the open, only occasionally bothered by runners or messengers who brought their pieces of bumf even into this secluded spot. I would shake my head as I read, between the explosions of shells, of how, among other less-than-earth-shattering items, the local commandant of X had lost his black-and-brown terrier who answered to the name of Zippi; that is, if I didn’t happen to be reading about a suit for maintenance brought by a serving girl, Makeben, against one Corporal Meyer. Sketches and frequent announcements kept us continually on the hop.
But to get back to my refuge, which I named ‘Casa Wahnfried’. My only worry was its relative porosity; though it was secure enough, so long as nothing landed on top of it. At any rate, I was comforted by the thought that I was no better off than my men. At lunchtime, Haller would lay a blanket in a huge crater, which we had made a path to, for me to use as a suntrap. There, I would work on my tan, disturbed, on occasion, by shells or whizzing fragments of metal coming too near.
The nights brought heavy bombardments like swift, devastating summer thunderstorms. I would lie on my bunk on a mattress of fresh grass, and listen, with a strange and quite unjustified feeling of security, to the explosions all around that sent the sand trickling out of the walls. Or I would walk out to the fire-step to take in the mournful nocturnal scene, and the strange contrast between its heaviness and the fiery spectacle whose dance-floor it was.
At such moments, there crept over me a mood I hadn’t known before. A profound reorientation, a reaction to so much time spent so intensely, on the edge. The seasons followed one another, it was winter and then it was summer again, but it was still war. I felt I had got tired, and used to the aspect of war, but it was from this familiarity that I observed what was in front of me in a new and subdued light. Things were less dazzlingly distinct. And I felt that the purpose with which I had gone out to fight had been used up, and no longer held. The war posed new, deeper puzzles. It was a strange time altogether.
The front line had relatively little to suffer from the enemy bombardment, which was just as well, because it could not have held if it had. It was principally Puisieux and the hollows around that were targets for the bombardments that in the evenings worked themselves up into extraordinary ferocity. Bringing food and relieving other units were both greatly complicated. Now here, now there, a chance hit would knock out a link of our chain.
On 14 June, I was relieved at two in the morning by Kius, who like me had come back and was now commanding the 2nd Company. We spent our rest period at the railway embankment at Achiet-le-Grand, in barracks and shelters in the lee of its protective bulk. The British often sent heavy low-trajectory shells our way. Rackebrand, a sergeant with the 3rd Company, fell victim to one such. He was killed by a shard that drilled through the wall of the flimsy hut that he had set up as a company office on top of the embankment. A few days before that, there had been a real catastrophe. A bomber pilot had dropped a bomb right on top of the 76th regimental band as it was playing, surrounded by listeners. Among its victims were many men from our regiment.