In the vicinity of the embankment, looking like stranded hulls, were many shot-up tanks, which I would inspect closely in the course of my peregrinations. Also, I would have my company cluster round them to study methods of combating them, their tactics and their weak points – these ever-more commonly seen elephants of the technical war. They carried names and emblems and designs that were variously ironic, menacing or lucky; there was the clover leaf and the pig (for luck), and the white death’s head. One was distinguished by a gallows with a noose dangling from it; that one was called ‘Judge Jeffries’. All of them were in a bad way. To be in the narrow turret of such a tank, going forward, with its tangle of rods and wires and poles, must have been extremely unpleasant as these colossuses, in efforts to outmanoeuvre the artillery, were forced to zigzag over the country like huge helpless beetles. I felt keen sympathy for the men in those fiery furnaces. Also, the countryside was dotted about with the skeletal wreckage of downed aeroplanes, an indication that machines were playing an ever greater part on the battlefield.
One afternoon, not far from us, the huge white bell of a parachute came down, as a pilot leaped from his burning aeroplane.
On the morning of 18 June, on account of the volatile situation, the 7th was obliged to go back to Puisieux ahead of time, to be at the disposal of the commanding officer of the line troops for carrying parties and other purposes. We moved into shelters and basements facing out towards Bucquoy. Just as we arrived there, a group of heavy shells came down in the surrounding gardens. Even so, I wasn’t deterred from taking my breakfast in a little gazebo in front of my shelter. After a while there was another one came whistling across. I dropped flat on the ground. Flames spurted beside me. An ambulanceman in my company by the name of Kenziora, who was just bringing several cooking pans full of water, fell, hit in the stomach. I ran over to him, and with the help of a signalman, dragged him into the dressing-station, whose entrance, as luck would have it, was just opposite the place where the shell burst.
‘Well, did you at least have a proper breakfast inside you?’ asked Doctor Koppen, a real old sawbones, who had had me under him once or twice in his time, as he bandaged up the big wound in his belly.
‘Yes, I did, a big dixie full of noodles!’ whimpered the unhappy fellow, perhaps catching a ray of hope.
‘Well, there you are then,’ Koppen said reassuringly, before turning aside to me and nodding at me with a grave expression on his face.
But gravely wounded men have very acute instincts. Suddenly the man groaned, and large beads of sweat stood out on his forehead: ‘That shell’s done for me, I can feel it.’ But in spite of his prediction, I was able to shake his hand six months later, when the regiment returned to Hanover.
In the afternoon, I took a solitary walk through the devastated village of Puisieux. It had already received a hammering in the course of the battles of the Somme. The craters and ruins had been overgrown with thick grass, dotted about here and there with the gleaming white plates of elderflower, which loves ruins. Numerous fresh explosions had ripped holes in the cover, and exposed the soil all over again.
The main village street was lined with the debris of our recent stalled advance. Shot-up wagons, discarded munitions, rusty pistols and the outlines of half-decomposed horses, seen through fizzing clouds of dazzling flies, commented on the nullity of everything in battle. All that was left of the church standing on the highest spot of the village was a wretched heap of stones. While I picked a bunch of half-wild roses, landing shells reminded me to be careful in this place where Death danced.
A few days later, we relieved the 9th Company in the line of resistance, some five hundred yards behind the front. In the process, we of the 7th suffered three men wounded. The following morning, just by my dugout, Captain von Ledebur was wounded in the foot by a shrapnel ball. Even though he had galloping consumption, he felt the war was his vocation. It was his fate to succumb to that slight wound. He died soon after, in hospital. On the 28th, the commander of my ration party, Sergeant Gruner, was hit by a shell splinter. That was our ninth casualty in a short space of time.
Following a week on the front line, we were again moved back to the resistance line, since the battalion which was to relieve us was almost wiped out by Spanish influenza. Several men a day reported sick in our company as well. In the division next to ours, the epidemic raged to such an extent that an enemy airman dropped leaflets promising that the British would come and relieve them, if the unit weren’t withdrawn. But we learned that the sickness was also spreading among the enemy; even though we, with our poor rations, were more prone to it. Young men in particular sometimes died overnight. And all the time we were to be battle-ready, as there was a continuous cloud of black smoke hanging over Copse 125 at all times, as over a witches’ cauldron.
The shelling was so intense there, that on days of no wind the explosive vapours were strong enough to poison part of the 6th Company. We had to go down into the shelters, like divers with oxygen masks, to drag the unconscious men back to the surface. Their faces were cherry-red, and their breath came in nightmarish gasps.
One afternoon, stepping out of my sector, I came upon several half-buried boxes of British munitions. To study the construction of a rifle-grenade, I unscrewed one, and took out the detonator. Something was left behind, which I took to be the percussion cap. However, when I tried to unpick it with my nail, it turned out to be a second detonator, which exploded with a loud bang, took off the tip of my left index finger, and gave me several bleeding wounds in the face.
That same evening, as I was standing talking to Lieutenant Sprenger on top of my dugout, a heavy shell hit near us. We disagreed about the distance, Sprenger reckoning it was about ten paces off, I nearer thirty. To see how trustworthy my estimates might be in this respect, I stepped it out, and found the crater -of a size to accord with an unpleasant manufacture – to be twenty-five yards away.
The 20th of July found us back in Puisieux. I spent all afternoon standing on a piece of crumbling wall, and watched the condition of the line, which looked rather ominous to me. Occasional details I wrote down in my notebook.
Copse 125 was regularly sheeted in thick smoke rising from the massive explosions, under red and green flares that rose and fell. If the artillery was silent for any time, you could hear the tactactac of machine-guns, and the dull crack of hand-grenades going off in the distance. From where I stood, the whole thing looked almost like a game. It lacked the brutish scale of a big battle, but one could feel the tenacious wrestling for all that.
The copse was like a festering wound that both sides nagged and worried at. Both sets of artillery toyed with it, like a couple of beasts of prey, wrangling over a victim; they shredded its trees and flicked them into the air. It never had very large numbers of men in it, but it could be defended, and, as it was so conspicuous in that wasteland all around, it was always available as an instance of the way that even the most gigantic confrontation of forces is nothing but a mechanism by which today, as in every era throughout history, a man’s weight is taken.
Towards evening, I was summoned to the commander of the troops in reserve, where I was told that the enemy had managed to penetrate the trench network on our left flank. In order to clear a little space in front of us again, the instructions were that Lieutenant Petersen with the storm company was to clear the hedge trench, while I with my men cleared the communication trench that ran in a hollow parallel to it.
We set out at daybreak, but immediately came under such strong infantry fire that we postponed our mission. I ordered Elbinger Alley to be occupied, and caught up on some sleep in a huge cavern of a dugout. At eleven in the morning I was woken up by cracks of hand-grenades coming from our left, where we had put up a barricade. I hurried over, and found the usual scene of close-quarters fighting. White hand-grenade clouds whirling over the barricade, machine-guns on either side set back a few traverses clattering away at each other. And in between men, leaping forward and darting back. The minor essay by the British had already been repulsed, but it had cost us a man lying behind the barricade, shredded by hand-grenade splinters.