In the evening I received orders to lead the company back to Puisieux, and when I arrived there I found I had instructions to go on a small-scale initiative with two sections of men the next morning. The purpose was to roll up the so-called Valley Trench from red point K to red point Z, and this was to happen at three-forty in the morning, following a five-minute artillery and mortar barrage. Unfortunately, this enterprise, for which Lieutenant Voigt would lead a storm troop, and I a couple of platoons, had clearly been dreamed up from the map, because the Valley Trench, as its name suggested, followed the lowest line, and could be seen into from many vantage- points from top to bottom. I wasn’t at all happy with the whole thing, or at least I wrote in my diary, after the order: ‘Well, with luck I’ll be able to describe it tomorrow. On account of pressure of time, I must reserve my opinion of the order – I’m sitting in the bunker in F Sector, it’s midnight, and I’m being woken at 3.’
Still, orders are orders, and so three-forty found Voigt and me with our men all ready in the breaking light at the jumping-off point by Elbinger Alley. We were in a knee-deep trench from which we could look down into the valley, which began to fill at the agreed hour with smoke and flames. A large splinter that flew up from this seething mass to our position hurt Fusilier Klaves in the hand. I had the same spectacle before me that I
had had so often already before attacks: the image of a group of men waiting in poor light, inclining their heads each time the guns fall short, or else prostrating themselves on the ground, all the while excitement steadily mounts – a scene that grips the spirit like some terrible silent ceremonial that portends human sacrifice.
We jumped off precisely on time, and were favoured by the dense pall of smoke that the bombardment had cast over the Valley Trench. Shortly before Z, we encountered resistance, and forced our way through with hand-grenades. As we had reached our objective, and were not keen to continue fighting, we erected a barricade and left behind a platoon with a machine-gun.
The only satisfaction I took from the whole event was from the way the storm troops comported themselves – they strongly reminded me of old Simplicissimus. They were a new breed of fighter so far as I was concerned, the volunteers of 1918: still raw, but instinctively brave. Those young dashers with long hair and puttees would start quarrelling among themselves twenty yards in front of the enemy because one had called the other a scaredy-cat, and yet they all swore like troopers and threw their weight around no end. ‘Christ, we’re not all such funks as you are!’ yelled one, and rolled up another fifty yards of trench single-handed.
The platoon I’d left at the barricade came back in the afternoon. They had taken casualties, and not been able to hang on any longer. I must confess, I’d already given them up for lost, and was amazed that anyone could make it back alive down the long line of the Valley Trench in daylight.
In spite of that, and various other counter-punches, the enemy was well entrenched in the left flank of our front line, and in the barricaded communications trenches, and threatening our line of resistance. This kind of semi-detached arrangement, with no no man’s land dividing us, felt distinctly uncomfortable in the long run; we had a clear sense of not being safe even in our own lines.
On 24 July, I went off to reconnoitre the new C section of the line of resistance, which I was to take over on the following day. I had the company commander, Lieutenant Gipkens, show me the barricade along the Hedge Trench, which was unusual inasmuch as on the British side it comprised a disabled tank, which had been integrated into the fortifications like a strongpoint. To take in the details, we sat down on a little seat cut into the traverse. As we were talking away, I was suddenly grabbed and pulled down. The next second, a bullet struck the sand where I had been sitting. By a lucky chance, Gipkens had noticed a rifle barrel slowly being poked through a loophole in the block only forty paces away. His sharp painter’s eyes had saved my life, because at that range I was a sitting duck. We had happened to sit down in the short stretch between the lines, and were as visible to the British sentry as if we’d been facing him across a table.
Gipkens had acted promptly and sensibly. When I came to analyse the scene later, I wondered whether I might not have frozen at the sight of the rifle. I was told that this harmless-looking place had seen three men of the 9th Company shot in the head; it was a bad place.
In the afternoon, a not especially heavy burst of shelling lured me out of my coal-hole, where I had just been sitting and reading comfortably over a cup of coffee. In front of us, the signals for a barrage were going up in monotonous succession. Wounded men hobbling back told us that the British had entered the resistance line in B and C Sectors, and were approaching it in A Sector. Straight afterwards, we had the bad news that Lieutenants Vorbeck and Grieshaber had been killed. They had fallen in defence of their sectors, and Lieutenant Kastner was badly wounded. He had had a near miss only a few days previously, when his right nipple had been sheared off by a bullet. It was as neatly done as if by a scalpel, and he suffered no other injury. At eight o’clock, Sprenger, who was in temporary command of the 5 th, came into my dugout with a splinter in his back, took a pull at a bottle to ‘steady his nerves’, and exited with the words: ‘Go back, go back, Don Rodrigo.’ His friend Domeyer followed shortly afterwards with a bleeding hand. His parting words were a little less literary.
The following morning, we reoccupied C Sector, which had once more been cleared of the enemy. We had pioneers there, Boje and Kius with part of the 2nd, and Gipkens with what was left of the 9th. There were eight dead Germans in the trench, and two British, with the badge on their caps reading ‘South Africa – Otago Rifles’.
Hand-grenades had made a mess of all of them. Their contorted faces were horribly mutilated.
I gave instructions for the block to be manned and the trench to be tidied up. At a quarter to twelve, our artillery opened fire rather wildly on the positions in front of us, doing more damage to us than they did to the British. Shortly afterwards tragedy struck. The cry ‘Stretcher-bearers!’ was passed along the line from the left. Hurrying to the spot, I found the scattered remnants of my best platoon sergeant at the barricade in the Hedge Trench. He had taken a direct hit from our own shell amidships. Tatters of his uniform and underwear, ripped away by the force of the explosion, were spread out across the ragged branches of the hawthorn hedge that gave the trench its name. I had a tarpaulin draped over him, to spare us the sight. Immediately afterwards, on the same spot, three more men were hurt. Lance-Corporal Ehlers, deafened by the air pressure, writhed on the ground. Another man had both hands severed at the wrist. He tottered back, his arms laid across the shoulders of a stretcher-bearer. The little procession reminded me of a heroic relief, the helper was walking stooped, while the wounded man struggled to remain upright – a young fellow, with black hair and a fine, determined, and now marmoreally pale face.
I sent one runner after another to headquarters, demanding that the shelling either stop forthwith, or else that artillery officers present themselves in the line. Instead of any form of reply, we had a still-heavier mortar, which turned the line into a complete shambles.