Storm of Steel

In the Village of Fresnoy

On this occasion, the furlough, which I took up a few days later, was to remain uninterrupted. In my journal, I find the brief but eloquent sentence: ‘Spent my furlough very well, in the event of my death I shall have no complaints.’ On 9 April 1917, I was back with the 2nd Company, who were quartered in the village of Merignies, not far from Douai. What took the edge off my pleasure at the reunion was consternation at being required to accompany the baggage train to Beaumont. Through showers of rain and driving snow, I rode at the head of a crawling column of vehicles, till we finally reached our destination at one in the morning.

After men and horses had variously been found shelter, I went looking for quarters for myself, but could find nowhere that wasn’t already taken. Finally, a commissariat orderly had the clever idea of offering me his own bed, seeing as he was manning the telephone exchange anyway. Even as I flopped on to it, still booted and spurred, he told me that the British had taken Vimy Ridge from the Bavarians, and quite a bit of land around. Kindly as he was to me, I could tell he was secretly resentful of the Way his quiet village in the back area was being adapted to a meeting-point for front-line forces.

The following morning, the battalion marched off into the direction of heavy firing, to the village of Fresnoy. There I received orders to establish an observation post. With a few men, I found a little house on the western edge of the village, and we knocked through the roof to make a viewing-place. We set up residence in the cellar of the same building. As we were clearing it, we made the welcome discovery of a sack of potatoes, to supplement our extremely meagre supplies. Thereafter, I had Knigge make me boiled potatoes with salt every evening. Also, Gornick, now occupying the deserted village of Villerwal with his platoon, sent me a few bottles of claret and a large tin of liver sausage – a comradely gift raised from the suddenly abandoned supplies in a foodstore. A booty expedition thereupon immediately dispatched by me, with baby carriages and similar conveyances to recover further treasures, was forced to return empty-handed, as the British lines had already reached the edge of the village. Gornick told me later that following the discovery of the cache of wine a spontaneous drinking session had ensued, even as the village was being bombarded, and that it had been difficult to reimpose control. In similar situations later, we were simply to shoot holes in barrels and carboys and other containers of alcohol.

On 14 April, I was given instructions to set up an intelligence-clearing station in the village. To that end, I had dispatch-riders, bicyclists, telephone- and light-signal stations and underground telegraph wires, carrier pigeons and a chain of flare positions all put at my disposal. In the evening, I looked out a suitable basement with annexes, and then returned for the last time to my old lodgings on the west of the village. There had been a lot to do that day, and I was pretty tired.

I had the impression, that night, of hearing a few dull crashing sounds and of Knigge calling to me, but I was so fast asleep that I merely mumbled, ‘Oh, let them shoot!’ and turned over on my side, even though the room was as thick with dust as a chalk mill. In the morning I was woken by little Schultz, Colonel von Oppen’s nephew, shouting:

‘Good God, do you mean to tell me you slept through that?’ When I got up and surveyed the debris, I quickly realized that a heavy shell had exploded on the roof, and smashed all the rooms, including our observation post. The fuse would only have had to be a little bigger, and they could have scraped off our remains with a spoon, and buried us in our mess-tins, as the grunts were given to saying. Schultz told me his runner had taken one look at the wreckage and said: ‘There was a lieutenant quartered in there yesterday, better see if he’s still there.’ Knigge was terribly impressed by my deep sleep.

In the morning, we moved to our new basement. As we were about that, we were almost crushed by the debris of the church tower, which was quite unceremoniously – and without any prior notification – blown up by our engineers, to make it harder for the enemy artillery to get their bearings. In one of the neighbouring villages, no one had troubled to warn a couple of lookouts who had been posted up their church. Miraculously, the men were pulled out of the wreckage alive and unhurt. That one morning saw over a dozen church towers in the area bite the dust.

We settled into our spacious cellar, and furnished it pretty much as we pleased, helping ourselves equally to items from the rich man’s castle and the poor man’s hovel. Whatever we ended up not liking, fed the fire.

Also during these days, there was a whole series of dogfights, which almost invariably ended with defeat for the British, since it was Richthofen’s squadron they were up against. Often five or six planes in succession would be chased away or shot down in flames. Once we saw a pilot tumble out in a great arc, and come down separately from his plane, no more than a little black dot. Admittedly, looking up to watch was not without its attendant dangers; one soldier in the 4th Company was fatally wounded in the throat by a falling splinter.

On 18 April I visited the 2nd Company in their position in an oxbow around the village of Arleux. Boje told me that so far he’d only had a single man wounded, since the pedantic preliminary bombardments of the British left ample time to vacate the target area.

After wishing him luck, I left the village at a gallop, as heavy shells had begun to fall. When I was about three hundred yards away, I stopped to watch the clouds thrown up by the spurting explosions, red or black, depending on whether they’d struck brickwork or garden soil, and mingled with the soft white of bursting shrapnels. When a few clusters of small shells began to fall on the narrow footpaths linking Arleux and Fresnoy, I decided I’d seen enough, and cleared the field to avoid being ‘a little bit killed’, as the current expression in the 2nd Company had it.

Such excursions, sometimes as far as the little town of Henin-Lietard, were pretty frequent in the first fortnight because, in spite of my large staff and resources, I was given no intelligence whatsoever to clear.

Beginning on 20 April, Fresnoy came under fire from a ship’s cannon, whose shells came whining up with a hellish hiss. Following every explosion, the village was wrapped in a vast reddish-brown cloud of picric acid gas, which mushroomed out. Even the dud shells were enough to cause a minor earthquake. One soldier in the 9th Company, who was caught by a shell like that while in the castle grounds, was launched high over the trees and broke every bone in his body when he hit the deck.

One evening, I was on my bicycle, heading back down to the village from a local vantage-point, when I saw the familiar reddish-brown cloud go up. I dismounted and stood in a field to wait for the bombardment to finish. About three seconds after each explosion I heard the gigantic crash, followed by a vast twittering and whistling, as if a dense flock of birds were approaching. Then hundreds of splinters would come dusting the dry fields around. This happened several times, and each time I waited feeling half embarrassed, half simply nosy, for the relatively slow arrival of the splinters.

In the afternoons, the village was under bombardment from all sorts of weapons and calibres. In spite of the danger, I was always loath to leave the attic window of the house, because it was an exciting sight, watching units and individual messengers hurrying across the field of fire, often hurling themselves to the ground, while the earth whirled and spat to the left and right of them. Peeping over Destiny’s shoulder like that to see her hand, it’s easy to become negligent and risk one’s own life.

As I entered the village at the end of one of these ordeals by fire – as that’s what they were – I saw a basement flattened. All we could recover from the scorched space were the three bodies. Next to the entrance one man lay on his belly in a shredded uniform; his head was off, and the blood had flowed into a puddle. When an ambulanceman turned him over to check him for valuables, I saw as in a nightmare that his thumb was still hanging from the remains of his arm.

With each day, the bombardment became more intensive, and it soon seemed all but certain that an attack must follow. On the 27th, at midnight, I had the following telegraph message: ‘67 beginning 5 a.m.’, which in our code meant that from five o’clock tomorrow we were to be on a heightened state of alert.

I promptly lay down right away, so as to be up to the anticipated exertions, but as I was on the point of sleep, a shell struck the house, smashed the wall against the basement steps, and filled our room with rubble. We leaped up and hurried into the shelter.

As we sat on the steps, by the light of a candle, tired and sullen, the leader of my light- signalling troop, whose station had been destroyed that afternoon, including two valuable signalling lamps, dashed in to report: ‘Lieutenant, the basement of No. II has taken a direct hit, there are some men buried in the rubble!’ Since I had two bicyclists and three telephonists among them, I hurried over with some of my men.

In the shelter, I found one lance-corporal and one wounded man, and received the following report: As the first shells began to land ominously close, four of the five inhabitants decided to take to the shelter. One of them ran down right away, one of them stayed in his bed imperturbably, and the other three sat down to pull their boots on. The most cautious man and the most carefree, as so often in the war, survived, one of them being quite uninjured, the sleeper receiving a splinter in the thigh, while the other three were torn apart by the shell that flew through the basement wall and blew up in the far corner.

Following this account, I lit a cigar and entered the smoky room, in the middle of which was piled almost to the ceiling a bolus of straw sacks, smashed bedsteads, and other furniture. After we had set down a few candles in niches in the wall, we set about the sorry task. We seized hold of the limbs sticking out from the wreckage, and pulled out the corpses. One man had lost his head, and the end of his torso was like a great sponge of blood. Splintered bones stuck out of the arm stump of the second, and his uniform was drenched with blood from a great wound in his chest. The intestines of the third were spilling out of his opened belly. As we pulled him out, a splintered piece of board caught in the wound with a hideous noise. One orderly passed a remark, and was rebuked by Knigge with the words: ‘Shut up, man, you don’t waste words over something like this!’

I made an inventory of their personal belongings. It was a ghastly job. The candles flickered reddishly in the dusty air, while the men handed me wallets and rings and watches, as if we were a bunch of gangsters. Fine yellow brick-dust had settled on the dead men’s faces, and gave them the rigid appearance of waxen effigies. We draped blankets over them, and hurried out of the basement, having first wrapped the wounded man in a tarpaulin. With the stoical advice ‘Better grit your teeth, comrade!’ we dragged him through wild shrapnel fire to the dressing-station.

Once back in my lodging, I first of all took some cherry brandy to recover. Before long, the firing got worse again, and we hurriedly gathered in the shelter, having just been given a vivid demonstration of the effects of artillery on cellars.

At precisely fourteen minutes past five, the bombardment, in the space of a few seconds, reached an extraordinary pitch. Our intelligence service had been dead right. The shelter was shaking and trembling like a ship in a storm, while all around came the sounds of crashing walls and the splintering of the houses near by collapsing.

At seven o’clock I received a light signal addressed to the 2nd Battalion: ‘Brigade requires immediate report on the situation.’ An hour later, a deathly tired runner came back with the news: ‘Enemy occupying Arleux and Arleux Park. 8th Company ordered to counter-attack. No news as yet. Rocholl, Captain.’

That was the single, albeit crucial, item of news that I was able to pass on with my big staff in the course of my three-week stay in Fresnoy. Now, when my being there was of the utmost value, the artillery had put almost all my means of communication out of commission. I myself was caught like a rat in a trap. The setting up of this intelligence post had proved mistaken; it was a case of over-centralization.

This surprising bit of news now explained to me why rifle bullets had been rattling against the walls for some time and from fairly close.

No sooner had we grasped the extent of the regiment’s losses, than the bombardment recommenced with full power. Knigge was the last man standing on the shelter stairs when a thunderous crash told us that the British had at last managed to score a direct hit on our cellar. The stolid Knigge caught a lump of rock on the back, but was otherwise unhurt. Above, everything was in pieces. Daylight reached us through a couple of bicycles that had been crushed into the shelter entrance. We retreated to the bottom step, while the continuing thud and rattle of masonry reminded us of the uncertainty even of this refuge of ours.

As if by a miracle, the telephone was still working; I informed the divisional chief of intelligence of our situation, and was given orders to withdraw with my men to the nearby dressing-station dugout.

So we packed up our few essentials, and set off towards the shelter’s alternative exit, which was at least still intact. Even though I didn’t stint with threats and orders, the rather un-battle-hardened telephonists took such a long time to leave the relative protection of the shelter and expose themselves to direct fire that that entrance was hit by a heavy shell and collapsed with a great crash. It was fortunate that no one was hit, only our little dog set up a howl, and was never seen again.

Now we had to heave aside the bicycles that were blocking the cellar exit, creep on all fours over the debris, and slip through a crack in the wall into the open. Without stopping to take in the unbelievable change that had come over the place, we headed out of the village as fast as we could. No sooner had the last man of us got past the front gate, than the house took one more huge hit, and that was the coup de grace.

The terrain between the edge of the village and the dressing-station was receiving a total artillery barrage. Light and heavy shells with impact-, fire- and time-delay fuses, duds, empty cases and shrapnels all participated in a kind of madness that was too much for our eyes and ears. In amongst it all, going either side of the witches’ cauldron of the village, support troops were advancing.

Fresnoy was one towering fountain of earth after another. Each second seemed to want to outdo the last. As if by some magical power, one house after another subsided into the earth; walls broke, gables fell, and bare sets of beams and joists were sent flying through the air, cutting down the roofs of other houses. Clouds of splinters danced over whitish wraiths of steam. Eyes and ears were utterly compelled by this maelstrom of devastation.

We spent the next two days in the dressing-station dugout, in conditions of great overcrowding, because in addition to my men it housed the staffs of two battalions, two relief detachments, and the inevitable odds and sods. The coming and going around the entrances, where there was a continual buzz of activity as around a beehive, of course didn’t go unnoticed by our opponents. Soon wickedly aimed shells landed at one-minute intervals on the footpaths outside, and the calls for the ambulancemen were never-ending. To this unpleasant bit of target-practice I lost four bicycles, which I had left next to the entrance. They were comprehensively remodelled and cast to the four winds.

At the entrance, stiff and silent, rolled in a tarpaulin, his big hornrims still on his face, lay Lieutenant Lemiere, the commander of the 8th Company, who had been brought here by his men. He had received a shot in the mouth. His younger brother was to fall only a few months later, hit in the same way.

On 30 April my successor took over from me with the relief regiment, the 25th, and we moved to Flers, the rendezvous for the 1st Battalion. Leaving the heavily shelled limekiln, ‘Chezbontemps’, on our left, we strolled blissfully across the fields to Beaumont in the balmy afternoon. Our eyes once more appreciated the beauty of the earth, relieved to have escaped the unbearable constriction of the shelter hole, and our lungs drew in the intoxicating spring air. With the rumble of guns behind us, we were able to say with the poet:

In Flers, I found my designated quarters had been occupied by several staff sergeant-majors, who, claiming they had to guard the room on behalf of a certain Baron von X, refused to make room, but hadn’t reckoned on the short temper of an irritated and tired front-line officer. I had my men knock the door down, and, following a short scuffle in front of the peacetime occupants of the house, who had hurried along in their nightgowns to see what the matter was, the gentlemen, or gentleman’s gentlemen were sent flying down the stairs. Knigge was sufficiently gracious to throw their boots out after them. After this successful attack, I climbed into my nicely warmed-up bed, offering half of it to my friend Kius, who was still wandering around looking for an abode. The sleep in this long-missed fixture did us so much good that the following morning we woke, as they say, fully refreshed.

Since the 1st Battalion had not lost many men during the recent fighting, the mood was pretty cheerful as we marched to the station at Douai. Our destination was the village of Serain, where we were to rest and recuperate for a few days. We had a friendly welcome and good accommodation from the villagers, and already on our first evening the happy sounds of reunited comrades could be heard from many of the dwellings.

Such libations after a successfully endured engagement are among the fondest memories an old warrior may have. Even if ten out of twelve men had fallen, the two survivors would surely meet over a glass on their first evening off, and drink a silent toast to their comrades, and jestingly talk over their shared experiences. There was in these men a quality that both emphasized the savagery of war and transfigured it at the same time: an objective relish for danger, the chevalieresque urge to prevail in battle. Over four years, the fire smelted an ever-purer, ever-bolder warriorhood.

The next morning, Knigge appeared and read out some orders, from which I understood that I was to take over the command of the 4th Company at around noon. This was the company in which the Lower Saxon poet Hermann Lons fell in the autumn of 1914 outside Rheims, a volunteer at the age of almost fifty.