Storm of Steel

The Beginning of the Battle of the Somme

In mid-April 1916, I was detailed to attend an officer-training course under the overall direction of the divisional commander, Major-General Sontag, at Croisilles, a little town behind the divisional lines. There, we received instruction in a variety of practical and theoretical military subjects. Particularly fascinating were the tactical excursions on horseback, under Major von Jarotzky, a fat little staffer, who would get terribly excited about things. We called him the ‘Pressure-cooker’. A series of excursions and inspection visits to the very often improvised units in the hinterland gave us, who were in the habit of viewing slightly askance everything that happened there, an insight into the incredible work that goes on behind a line of fighting men. And so we visited the abattoir, the commissariat and gunnery repair workshop in Boyelles, the sawmill and pioneer park in the woods of Bourlon, the dairy, pig farm and rendering plant in Inchy, the aviation park and bakery in Queant. On Sundays we went to the nearby towns of Cambrai, Douai and Valenciennes, to remind ourselves of what ‘ladies in hats’ looked like.

It would be rather mean of me, in this book that has so much blood in it, if I were to withhold from you an account of a scrape in which my part was a somewhat comical one. Back in winter, when our battalion was a guest of the King of Queant, I had, as a young officer, been called upon to inspect the guard for the first time. On the edge of town, I had promptly lost my way, and, meaning to ask for directions to the little station guard post, I had walked into a tiny cottage that stood there all by itself. Living there, I found, all alone, as her father had lately died, was a seventeen-year-old girl by the name of Jeanne. When she gave me directions, she laughed, and when I asked what was so funny, she said: ‘Vous etes bien jeune, je voudrais avoir votre devenir.’* – Because of the spiritedness of her remark, I had dubbed her Jeanne d’Arc, and in the subsequent trench-fighting, I had occasionally thought of that isolated little house. [‘You’re so young, I wish I could have your future.’]

One evening in Croisilles, I suddenly felt an urge to go over there. I had a horse saddled up, and before long had left the town behind me. It was a May evening, perfect time for a ride. The clover lay like heavy burgundy cushions on the fields stitched with hawthorn, and outside the village gates the huge candles of flowering chestnuts flickered in the gloaming. I rode through Bullecourt and Ecoust, never guessing that in two years’ time I would find myself making ready to attack the hideous ruins of thes villages, now nestling so peaceably among ponds and hills at eventide. At the little station I had inspected in the winter, civilians were still busy unloading cylinders of propane. I greeted them, and watched them for a while. Before long, the house appeared in front of me, with its reddish-brown, bemossed roof. I rapped on the shutters, which were already bolted shut.

‘Qui est la?’

‘Bonsoir, Jeanne d’Arc!’

‘Ah, bonsoir, mon petit officier Gibraltar!’

I was made as pleasantly welcome as I’d hoped I would be. After tying up my horse, I went inside and was asked to share her supper of eggs, white bread and butter, all nicely laid out on a large cabbage leaf. Seeing such things, one really doesn’t need a second invitation.

Everything would have been fine and dandy, but as I stepped out to leave, I found a torch shining in my eyes, and a military policeman asking me for my documentation. My talking to the civilians, the attentiveness with which I’d observed the gas cylinders, my unexplained appearance in this sparsely garrisoned district, all had aroused the suspicion of espionage. Of course I hadn’t brought my service-book with me, and so had to be led before the King of Queant, who was, as usual at this time of night, presiding over his round table.

Luckily, I found a sympathetic ear there. I was identified and made welcome. On this occasion, I came away with a rather different impression of the king; the hour was late, and he was talking about tropical jungles where he had spent a lot of time in charge of the building of a railway line.

On 16 June, the general sent us back to our units with a little speech, from which we were given to understand that our opponents were preparing a large-scale offensive on the Western Front, with its left flank facing our own position. This was our first inkling of what was to be the Battle of the Somme. It marked the end of the first and mildest part of the war; thereafter, it was like embarking on a different one altogether. What we had, admittedly almost unbeknown to ourselves, been through had been the attempt to win a war by old-fashioned pitched battles, and the stalemating of the attempt in static warfare. What confronted us now was a war of materiel of the most gigantic proportions. This war in turn was replaced towards the end of 1917 by mechanized warfare, though that was not given time fully to develop.

The sense that something was imminent hardened once we returned to our regiments, because our comrades told us of the increasing activity of the enemy. The British had twice, albeit unsuccessfully, essayed a raid in force against C Sector. We had retaliated with a well-prepared assault by three officers’ patrols against the so-called trench triangle, in the course of which we had taken several prisoners. While I’d been away, Wetje had been wounded by a shrapnel ball on the arm, but resumed command of the company shortly after my return. My dugout was somewhat changed as well, a direct hit had just about halved its dimensions. During the aforementioned raid, the British had fumigated it with a few hand-grenades. My replacement had managed to squeeze his way out through the skylight, while his batman had perished. His blood was still visible in great brown stains across the lining boards.

On 20 June I was ordered to eavesdrop on the enemy trenches, to find out whether they were trying to undermine us, and with Ensign Wohlgemut, Lance-Corporal Schmidt and Fusilier Par-thenfelder, I set out a little before midnight across our own, pretty high wire entanglements. The first stretch we did hunched forward, and then we crept side by side over the densely grown field. Fourth-form memories of Karl May [German author and polygrapher (1842-1912), whose tendentious, patriotic, neo-colonialist tales were routinely read by generations of young Germans.] came to me as I slithered along on my front through dewy grass and thistles, anxious to avoid the slightest rustle, with the British lines visible barely fifty yards in front of us as a black stroke against the grey. From a great distance, a spray of machine-gun bullets came down almost perpendicularly on top of us; an occasional flare went up and threw its chill light on our already rather inhospitable patch of land.

Then there was a loud rustling behind us. Two shadows were dashing between the trenches. Even as we made ready to throw ourselves upon them, they had disappeared. Moments later, the thunder of two hand-grenades in the British trenches indicated that we had brushed past some of our own. We continued to creep forward.

Suddenly the ensign gripped my arm: ‘Watch out, right, very close, ssh, ssh!’ And then, no more than ten paces away, I heard sundry rustlings in the grass. We had lost our orientation, and had been creeping along parallel to the English lines; presumably the enemy had heard us, and had now emerged from his trenches to see what was going on.

These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass is an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsman, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.

A line of dim forms surfaced, their whispers carried across to us. We turned to look at them; I heard the Bavarian Parthenfelder biting the blade of his knife.

They took a few more steps towards us, and then started working on their wires, seemingly not having noticed us. We crept very slowly backwards, keeping our eyes fixed on them. Death, which had already loomed up expectantly between us, slunk away dejectedly. After a little, we stood up and went on, till we reached our sector safely.

Our expedition’s fortunate conclusion gave us the idea of taking a prisoner, and we decided to go again the next night. I had just lain down, therefore, for an afternoon nap when I was startled up by a thunderous din outside my dugout. The British were lobbing ‘toffee-apples’ across, which, even though they made very little noise as they were fired, were so heavy that their splinters ripped away the massive posts of the revetment. Swearing, I clambered up from my bed and went into the trench, only, the next time I saw one of the black weights arcing towards us, to shout: ‘Mortar coming left!’ and nip into the nearest shelter.

In the course of the next few weeks, we were so abundantly graced with trench mortars of all shapes and sizes that we got in the habit, each time we found ourselves walking along the trench, of keeping one eye aloft, and the other on the entrance to the nearest deep dugout.

That night, my three companions and I once more crept out between the trenches. We crawled along on our toes and elbows till right up to the British entanglements, where we hid behind clumps of grass. After a while, some British came out, dragging a roll of wire after them. They stopped close in front of us, put the roll down, snipped at it with wire-cutters, and talked in whispers. We sidled together, and had a hasty discussion: Toss a hand-grenade in there, and pick up the pieces!’

‘Come on, there’s four of them!’

‘Don’t talk rubbish!’

‘Quiet! Quiet down!’ My warning came too late; as I looked up, the

British were darting lizard-like under their wires, and disappeared into their trench. The feeling now got a little clammy. The thought: ‘Now they’re going to bring up a machine-gun’ gave me a bad taste in my mouth. The others entertained similar fears. We slid back as quickly as we could, with quite a jangle. The British lines woke up. Drumming of feet, whispers, running hither and thither. Pssht… a flare. All around it was as bright as day, while we tried to press our heads into the grass. Another flare. Tricky moments. You wish the earth would swallow you up, you’d rather be anywhere than where you are, ten yards in front of enemy lines. Another one. Paow! Paow! The unmistakably crisp and deafening report of rifle shots fired at almost point-blank range.

‘Christ! They’ve seen us!’

No longer worried about making a noise, we called to each other to run for our lives, and leapt up and raced towards our lines through the now pattering gunfire. After a few bounds, I stumbled and landed in a small and very shallow crater, while the other three raced past me, thinking I was done for. I pressed myself to the ground, pulled in my head and my legs, and allowed the bullets to brush over me. Every bit as menacing were the burning lumps of magnesium from the flares, which burned down very close to me in some cases, and which I tried to pat away with my cap. Eventually the shooting relented, and, after a further quarter of an hour, I left my hiding-hole, slowly and cautiously to begin with, and then as fast as my hands and feet could carry me. Since the moon had set by now, I soon became utterly disorientated and had no idea where the British or the German lines were. Not even the distinctive shape of the ruined mill at Monchy was visible against the horizon. The odd bullet from one side or the other streaked over the ground. In the end I lay down in the grass and determined to wait for morning. Suddenly I heard some whispers very close by. I prepared to do battle, and then cautiously made a series of indeterminate natural sounds that I thought might pass equally well for English as German. I resolved to reply to the first English call I received with a hand-grenade. Then, to my delight, it turned out that the whispering was that of my little troop, who were just in the process of taking off their belts, to carry my body back. We sat a while longer in a bomb-crater, and were overjoyed at seeing each other again. Then we made our way back to our trenches. All told, our adventure had taken three hours.

I was back on trench duty again at five. In No. 1 Platoon’s part of the line, I ran into Sergeant Hock standing outside his dugout. When I expressed surprise at seeing him out so early, he informed me that he was lying in wait for a large rat whose gnawing and rustling had kept him up all night. And from time to time he would look ruefully at his absurdly small dugout, which he had christened ‘Villa Fat-of-the-Land Chicken’.

While we were standing together, we heard a distant sound of firing, which boded nothing in particular to us. But Hock, who the day before had almost been brained by a large mortar-bomb, and was therefore very apprehensive, dived into the nearest shelter, sliding down the first fifteen steps in his haste, and finding space in the next fifteen for three virtuoso somersaults. I stood up by the entrance, laughing so hard I forgot all about mortars and shelters, when I heard the poor chap bewailing this painfully curtailed rat-hunt, all the while rubbing various sore joints and attempting to put back a dislocated thumb. The unhappy man went on to tell me he’d just been sitting down to eat the night before when the mortar-bomb had come along. As a result he’d got grit all over his dinner, and had made a first painful acquaintance with the flight of steps. He had just arrived here from home, and wasn’t yet used to our roughneck ways.

After this incident, I betook myself to my dugout, but today too there was no chance of any restorative kip. From early morning on, our trench was subjected to mortar attack, at shorter and shorter intervals. By noon, I’d had enough. With a few other fellows, I got our Lanz mortar set up, and aimed at our opponent’s trenches – a pretty feeble reply, admittedly, to the heavy bombs we’d been ploughed with. Sweating, we squatted on a little dip in the trench – the clay baked hard by the June sun – and sent bomb after bomb towards their lines.

Since the British seemed quite unperturbed, I went with Wetje to the telephone, where, after some thought, we agreed on the following form of words: ‘Helen’s spitting in our trenches. We need potatoes, big ones and little ones!’ We used this type of language when there was a chance that the enemy might be listening in; and before long we were pleased to hear back from Lieutenant Deichmann that the fat policeman with the stiff moustaches and a couple of his little friends would be brought up, and before long the first of our two-hundredweight bombs flew into the enemy trench, followed by a few units of field artillery, with the result that we were left in peace for the rest of the day.

Midday the following day the dance began again, but significantly intensified. At the first shot, I took my subterranean passage to the second line, and from there to the communications trench where we had set up our own mortar emplacement. We opened fire in such a way that every time we received a ‘toffee-apple’ we replied with a Lanz. After exchanging about forty mortars, the enemy gunner seemed to be finding his range. His missiles were coming down to the right and left of us, without being able to interrupt our activity until one was seen heading straight for us. At the very last moment we pulled our trigger one last time, and then ran as fast as we could. I had just made it to a mucky, wired stretch of trench when the monster blew up just behind me. The enormous air pressure threw me over a bundle of barbed wire into a shell-hole full of greenish water, and sent a sprinkling of hard clay shards on top of me. I picked myself up, feeling very groggy and dishevelled. My boots and trousers were ripped by the barbed wire, my hands and my uniform were stuck with thick clay, and my knee was bleeding from a long wound. Rather the worse for wear, I slunk back through the trench to my dugout to get over the experience.

Other than that, the mortars hadn’t done much in the way of damage. The trench had taken a battering in a few places, a Priester mortar was smashed, and the ‘Villa Fat-of- the-Land Chicken’ was no more. It had received a direct hit, while its unlucky owner was down in the deep dugout, otherwise in all probability he would have practised his third freestyle descent of the steps.

The firing went on all afternoon without a break, and by evening it had been increased to drumfire by numbers of cylindrical bombs. We referred to these missiles as ‘wash- basket mortars’ because it sometimes looked as though they had been shaken down from the sky by the basketload. The best way of picturing their design is imagining a rolling-pin with two short handles on it. Apparently they were fired from special revolver-like drums and were sent spinning end over end through the air, making a somewhat laboured wheezing sound. From a distance they resembled flying sausages. These came down so thick and fast that their landing was like the torching of a batch of rockets. The ‘toffee-apples’ had something crushing or stamping about them, these had more of a rending effect on the nerves.

We sat tensed and ready in the shelter entrances, prepared at any moment to repel invaders with rifles and hand-grenades, but the bombardment died back after half an hour. In the night we had two more bouts of firing to withstand, during which our sentries stood at their posts and indomitably kept watch. As soon as the gunning relented, numerous flares lit up the defenders charging out from their shelters, and a brisk fire persuaded the enemy that there was still life in our lines.

In spite of the heavy bombardment, we lost only one man, Fusilier Diersmann, whose skull was smashed by a mortar-bomb landing on the parapet in front of him. Another man was wounded in the back.

On the day after this unquiet night, numerous bursts of firing prepared us for an imminent attack. In that time, our trenches really were shot to pieces, and the smashed timber from their revetment made them almost impassable; a number of dugouts were also flattened.

Brigade headquarters sent an intelligence report to the front: ‘Intercepted British telephone message: the British have precise descriptions of the gaps in our lines, and have requested “Steel Helmets”. It is not known whether “Steel Helmet” is code for heavy mortars. Be prepared!’

We resolved to be on the alert for anything the coming night, and agreed that anyone who didn’t give his name in response to a ‘Hallo!’ would be immediately fired at. Every officer had his pistol loaded with a red flare, to alert the artillery.

The night was still wilder than the last. In particular, one concentration of fire at quarter past two outdid anything there had been up to that point. A hail of heavy shells struck all round my dugout. We stood fully armed on the shelter steps, while the light of our little candle stumps reflected glitteringly off the wet, mildewed walls. Blue smoke streamed in through the entrances, and earth crumbled off the ceiling. ‘Boom!’

‘Good God!’

‘A light! A light!’

‘Get everything ready!’ Everyone’s hearts were in their mouths. Hands darted to release the pins on bombs. ‘That was the last of them!’

‘Let’s go!’ As we charged out of the entrance, a mine with a delay fuse went off, and hurled us back inside. All the same, as the last of the iron birds came whooshing down, all the sentry positions were manned by us. Bright as day, a firework display of flares lit the cloud-swathed field. These instants, in which the entire complement of men stood behind the traverses, tensed and ready, had something magical about them; they were like the last breathless second before a hugely important performance, as the music is turned off and the big lights go up.

For several hours that night, I stood leaning against the entrance to my dugout, which, irregularly, faced the enemy, from time to time looking at my watch, to take down notes about the levels of fire. I eyed the sentry, an older man with children, standing completely impassive with his rifle, lit from time to time by the flash of an explosion.

Oddly, it was after the shooting had subsided that we took another casualty. Fusilier Nienhauser suddenly fell from his sentry post, and came crashing down the shelter steps to join his comrades who were all assembled at the bottom. When they inspected the eerie arrival, all they could find on him was a small wound on the forehead, and a puncture over the right nipple from which blood was flowing. It remained unclear whether the wound or the sudden fall had killed him.

At the end of this night of terror, we were relieved by the 6th. In the grumpy mood produced by the appearance of the sun following a sleepless night, we marched down the communications trench to Monchy, and from there to the reserve line set back at the edge of the Adinfer forest that afforded us box seats for the overture to the Somme battles. The sectors to our left were still swathed in black and white smoke, one massive explosion after another sent the dirt spewing up past rooftop height; and over them, hundreds of speedy lightnings produced by bursting shrapnels. Only the coloured signals, the mute appeals to the artillery for help, indicated that there was still life in the trenches. This was the first time I had seen artillery fire to match a natural spectacle.

In the evening, just as we hoped for a good night’s sleep at last, we were given orders to load trench-mortar ammunition at Monchy, and had to spend all night waiting up in vain for a lorry that had got stuck, while the British made various, fortunately unsuccessful, attempts on our lives, either by means of high-angled machine-gun fire or sweeping the road with shrapnels. We were especially irritated by one machine-gunner who sprayed his bullets at such an angle that they came down vertically, with acceleration produced by sheer gravity. There was absolutely no point in trying to duck behind walls.

That night, the enemy gave us an example of his painstaking observation skills. In the second line, perhaps a mile and a quarter from the enemy, we had left a heap of chalk in front of what was to be a subterranean munitions dump. The British drew the unfortunately correct conclusion that this dump was to be masked over in the course of the night, and fired a group of shrapnels at it, succeeding in gravely wounding three of our men.

In the morning, I was shaken out of my sleep yet again by the order to lead my platoon on a digging detail to C Sector. My sections were broken up and divided among the 6th Company. I accompanied some of them back to the Adinfer woods, to get them chopping timber. On the way back to the trench, I stopped in my dugout for a quick catnap. But it was no good, I was unable to get any rest in those days. No sooner had I pulled off my boots, than I heard our artillery firing with unwonted animation from their position on the edge of the woods. At the same time my batman Paulicke materialized in the entrance to the shelter, and shouted down: ‘Gas attack!’

I broke out the gas mask, got into my boots, buckled up, ran out and saw a huge cloud of gas hanging over Monchy in thick white swathes, and drifting under a slight breeze in the direction of Point 124 on the low ground.

Since my platoon was for the most part in the front line, and an attack was probable, there wasn’t much time to stop and think. I leaped over the ramparts of the reserve line, raced forward, and soon found myself enveloped in the gas cloud. A penetrating smell of chlorine confirmed for me that this was indeed fighting gas, and not, as I had briefly thought, artificial fog. I therefore donned my mask, only to tear it off again right away because I’d been running so fast that the mask didn’t give me enough air to breathe; also the goggles misted over in no time, and completely whited out. All this of course was hardly the stuff of ‘What To Do in a Gas Attack’, which I’d taught so often myself. Since I felt pain in my chest, I tried at least to put the cloud behind me as fast as I could. At the entrance to the village, I needed to get through a barrage of gunfire, whose impacts, topped by numerous clouds of shrapnel, drew a long and even chain across the barren and otherwise unfrequented fields.

Artillery fire in open country never has the same effect, either physically or on one’s morale, as it does among dwellings or fortifications. I had therefore broken through the line of fire, and found myself in Monchy, which lay under an extraordinary hail of shrapnel. A shower of balls, splinters and fuses came hissing and whizzing through the branches of the fruit trees in the neglected gardens, or smacked against the masonry.

In a dugout in the garden, I saw my company comrades Sievers and Vogel sitting; they had lit a merry wood fire, and were leaning over the cleansing flame to escape the effects of the chlorine. I joined them there, until the fire had slackened off a little, and then went forward down communication trench 6.

As I went on, I looked at all the little animals lying in the pit of the trench, killed by the chlorine, and thought: ‘The barrage is bound to start up again any moment, and if you continue taking your time, you’ll be caught in the open, like a mouse in a trap.’ And yet, I continued phlegmatically at my own pace.

Exactly what I had anticipated happened: not more than fifty yards away from the company shelter, I found myself in a whole new and much worse bombardment, in which it seemed completely impossible to get through even this short stretch of trench without being hit. Luckily for me, I saw right by me one of the occasional niches that were carved into the trench walls for dispatch runners. Three dugout frames, not a whole lot, but better than none at all. So I pressed myself in there and allowed the storm to pass.

Unwittingly, I seemed to have chosen the liveliest corner going. Light and heavy ‘toffee-apples’, Stokes bombs, shrapnels, rattles, shells of all kinds – I could no longer identify everything that was buzzing and whizzing and crashing around me. I was reminded of my corporal at Les Eparges, and his exclamation: ‘What in God’s name are those things?’

Occasionally my ears were utterly deafened by a single fiendish crashing burst of flame. Then incessant hissing gave me the sense of hundreds of pound weights rushing down at incredible speed, one after the other. Or a dud shell landed with a short, heavy ground-shaking thump. Shrapnels burst by the dozen, like dainty crackers, shook loose their little balls in a dense cloud, and the empty casings rasped after they were gone. Each time a shell landed anywhere close, the earth flew up and down, and metal shards drove themselves into it.

It’s an easier matter to describe these sounds than to endure them, because one cannot but associate every single sound of flying steel with the idea of death, and so I huddled in my hole in the ground with my hand in front of my face, imagining all the possible variants of being hit. I think I have found a comparison that captures the situation in which I and all the other soldiers who took part in this war so often found ourselves: you must imagine you are securely tied to a post, being menaced by a man swinging a heavy hammer. Now the hammer has been taken back over his head, ready to be swung, now it’s cleaving the air towards you, on the point of touching your skull, then it’s struck the post, and the splinters are flying – that’s what it’s like to experience heavy shelling in an exposed position. Luckily, I still had a bit of that subliminal feeling of optimism, ‘it’ll be all right’, that you feel during a game, say, and which, while it may be quite unfounded, still has a soothing effect on you. And indeed even this shelling came to an end, and I could go on my way once more, and, this time, with some urgency.

At the front, the men were all busy greasing their rifles in accordance with the nostrums of ‘What To Do in a Gas Attack’, because their barrels had been completely blackened by chlorine. An ensign dolefully showed me his new sword-knot, which had quite lost its silver sheen, and had turned a greenish black.

Since our opponents seemed not to be making a move, I took my troops back to the rear. Outside the company office in Monchy, we saw a lot of men affected by gas, pressing their hands against their sides and groaning and retching while their eyes watered. It was a bad business, because a few of them went on to die over the next several days, in terrible agony. We had had to withstand an attack with chlorine, which has a burning, corrosive effect on the lungs. Henceforth, I resolved never to go anywhere without my gas mask, having previously, incredibly foolishly, often left it behind in my dugout, and used its case – like a botanist – as a container for sandwiches. Seeing this taught me a lesson.

On the way back, meaning to buy something, I had gone into the 2nd Battalion canteen, where I found a dejected canteen boy standing surrounded by broken crockery. A shell had come through the ceiling and gone off in the store, converting its treasures into a mélange of jam, liquid soap and punctured containers of this and that. He had just, with Prussian pernicketiness, done his accounts, showing a loss of 82 marks and 58 pfennigs.

In the evening, because of the uncertain position, my platoon, which had so far been withdrawn to the second line, was moved forward to the village, and was housed in the quarry. We settled ourselves into its numerous nooks and crannies, and lit an enormous fire, whose smoke went up through the well-shaft, greatly to the annoyance of some of the company cooks, who were almost asphyxiated as they pulled up their buckets of water. Since we had been issued with strong grog, we sat on limestone blocks round the fire, and sang and talked and smoked.

Round about midnight, all hell was let loose in the curved front enclosing Monchy. Dozens of alarm clocks rang, hundreds of rifles went off, and white and green flares went up unceasingly. Next, a barrage of fire went off, heavy trench mortars crashed, drawing plumes of fiery sparks after them. Wherever in the maze of ruins there was a human soul, the long-drawn-out cry went up: ‘Gas attack! Gas attack! Gas! Gas! Gaaas!’

By the light of the flares, a dazzling flow of gas billowed over the black jags of masonry. Since there was a heavy smell of chlorine in the quarry as well, we lit large straw fires at the entrances, whose acrid smoke almost drove us out of our refuge, and forced us to try and cleanse the air by waving coats and tarpaulins.

The next day, we were able to marvel at the traces the gas had left. A large proportion of the plants had withered, snails and moles lay dead, and the horses that were stabled in Monchy for use by the messengers, had watering eyes and muzzles. The shells and ammunition splinters that lay all over the place had a fetching green patina. The cloud had been noticed as far away as Douchy, where rattled civilians had assembled outside Colonel von Oppen’s quarters and demanded gas masks. Instead, they were loaded on to Lorries, and driven to towns and villages set back from the front.

The following night we were in the quarry again; in the evening, I was given news that coffee would be provided at quarter past four in the morning, as an English deserter had said an attack was planned for five. And, indeed, no sooner had the coffee-bringers roused us the next morning than the almost familiar shout of ‘Gas attack!’ rang out. There was a sweetish smell in the air; and, as we were later to find out, this was phosgene to which we were being treated. In the ring around Monchy, powerful drumfire was raging, but that ebbed away before long.

This anxious hour turned into a bracing morning. From communication trench 6, Lieutenant Brecht emerged on to the village street, with a bloody bandage wrapped round his hand, accompanied by a soldier with fixed bayonet and an English captive. Brecht was given a triumphant reception in Headquarters West, and told us the following:

The British had let off clouds of gas and smoke at five in the morning, and had gone on to rattle our trench with mortar fire. Our soldiers, as was their custom, had leapt out of their shelters while the bombing was still in progress, and we had taken more than thirty casualties. Then, still hidden in the smoke, two large British raiding parties had appeared, one of which had got into the trench, and taken a wounded NCO of ours. The other never made it past the wire entanglement. The single exception Brecht – who, before the war, had been a plantation owner in America – now seized by the throat, and greeted with the words, ‘Come here, you son of a bitch!’ The captive was presently being treated to a glass of wine, and looking with half-frightened, half-puzzled eyes at the previously deserted village street, now filling with ration parties, ambulancemen, dispatch-carriers and various nondescript onlookers. He was a tall fellow, very young, fresh-faced, and with fair hair. ‘What a shame to have to shoot at such people!’ went through my head as I saw him.

Soon a long line of stretchers arrived at the dressing-station. A lot of wounded men came from Monchy South as well, because the enemy had also succeeded in breaking into the line – briefly – in E Sector. One of the assailants must have been an amazing character. He had leaped into the trench, apparently unremarked, and run along it, past the backs of the sentries, who all had their eyes on the field in front of them. One after the other, he leaped on them from behind – the gas masks restricted further their field of vision – and, having felled a number of them with blows of a club or rifle butt, returned, equally unremarked, to the British lines. When the trench was tidied up later, eight sentries were found with broken skulls.

Around fifty stretchers, with men lying groaning on them in blood-soaked bandages, were laid out in front of some sheets of corrugated metal, under which the doctor did his business, with sleeves rolled up.

One young fellow, whose blue lips shone rather ominously from his ghostly white face, was mumbling to himself: ‘I’m too badly… they won’t be able… I’m sure – I’ll die.’ A fat NCO from the medical corps looked at him pityingly, and several times breathed a comforting: ‘Come on, mate, come on!’

Even though the British had thoroughly prepared this little attack – designed to tie up our forces here, to favour their offensive on the Somme – with plenty of trench-mortar attacks and clouds of poison gas, they only managed to take alive a single, wounded, prisoner, whereas they left plenty of dead on our wires. Of course our losses were also substantial; the regiment later that morning mourned over forty dead, among them three officers, and a good number of wounded as well.

The following afternoon we finally moved back for a few days to our beloved Douchy. That same evening, we celebrated the success of the engagement with several well-earned bottles.

On 1 July, it was our sorry task to bury a proportion of our dead in our churchyard. Thirty-nine wooden coffins, with the names written in pencil on the unplaned planks, were laid side by side in the pit. The minister spoke on the text: ‘They have fought a good fight,’ beginning with the words, ‘Gibraltar, that is your motto, and why not, for have you not stood firm like the rock in the sea surge!’

It was in the course of these days that I learned to appreciate these men, with whom I was to be together for two more years of the war. What was at stake here was a British initiative on such a small scale as barely to find mention in the histories of both armies, intended to commit us to a sector where the main attack was not to be. Nor did the men have very much to do, only cover the very small amount of ground, from the entrance of the shelter to the sentry posts. But these few steps needed to be taken in the instant of a great crescendo of fire before an attack, the precise timing of which is a matter of gut instinct and feeling. The dark wave that so many times in those nights welled up to the traverses through raging fire, and without even an order being possible, remained with me in my heart as a personal yardstick for human trustworthiness.

Especially strongly marked is the memory of the position, broken and still steaming, as I walked through it shortly after the attack. The day’s sentries were already in position while the trenches had yet to be cleared. Here and there, the sentry posts were covered with dead, and, in among them, as it were, arisen from their bodies, stood the new relief with his rifle. There was an odd rigidity about these composites – it was as though the distinction between alive and dead had momentarily been taken away.

On the evening of 3 July, we moved back up to the front. It was relatively quiet, but there were little indications that there was something afoot. There was soft and insistent hammering from the mill at all times, as though metal were being fashioned. We intercepted numerous telephone calls to an English pioneer officer at the very front, concerning gas cylinders and explosions. From dawn to the last gleam of light at the end of the day, English aeroplanes kept up a dense pattern of overflying, to keep us and the hinterland apart. The trench bombardments were substantially harder than usual; also, there was a suspicious change of target, as though new batteries were set to finding their range. In spite of it all, we were relieved on 12 July, without too much disagreeableness, and went into the reserve in Monchy.

On the evening of the 13th, our dugouts in the garden came under fire from a ten-inch naval gun, whose massive shells rumbled at us in a low arc. They burst with a terrific bang. At night, we were woken up by intense fire and a gas attack. We sat round the stove in the dugout in our gas masks, all except Vogel, who had lost his, and was running around like a madman, looking in all the corners, while a few sadistic fellows whom he’d given a hard time reported that the smell of gas was getting stronger and stronger. In the end, I gave him my refill, and he sat for an hour behind the smoking stove, holding his nose, and sucking on the mouthpiece.

On that same day I lost two men from my platoon, wounded as they went around the village: Hasselmann had a bullet through the arm, while Maschmeier caught a shrapnel ball through the throat.

There was no attack that night; even so, the regiment lost another twenty-five dead and a great many wounded. On the 15 th and 17th, we had further gas attacks to endure.

On the 17th, we were relieved and twice suffered heavy bombardment in Douchy. One of them came just as we were having an officers’ meeting with Major von Jarotzky in an orchard. It was dangerous, but it was still ridiculous to watch the company suddenly burst apart, fall on their faces, force their way through hedges in an absolute trice, and disappear under various cover before you could count to ten. A shell falling in the garden of my lodgings killed a little girl who had been digging around for rubbish in a pit.

On 20 July we moved back up. On the 28th, I arranged with Ensign Wohlgemut and Privates Bartels and Birkner to go on another one of our patrols. We had nothing more in mind than to wander around between the lines and see what was new in no man’s land, because we were beginning to get a bit bored with the trench. In the afternoon, Lieutenant Brauns, the officer in the 6th Company who was relieving me, paid me a call in my dugout, bringing a fine Burgundy with him. Towards midnight we broke up; I went out into the trench, where my three companions were already assembled in the lee of a traverse. After I’d picked out a few bombs that looked dry and in working order, I climbed over the wire in a high good humour, and Brauns called out a jovial:

‘Break a leg!’ after me.

In quick time, we had crept up to the enemy barrier. Just before it, we came across a pretty stout and well-insulated wire in some long grass. I was of the opinion that information was important here, and instructed Wohlgemut to cut off a piece and take it with him. While he was sawing away at it with – for want of more appropriate tools – a cigar clipper, we heard something jingling the wire; a few British soldiers appeared and started working without noticing us, pressed as we were in the long grass.

Mindful of our hard time on the previous expedition, I breathed: ‘Wohlgemut, toss a hand-grenade in that lot!’

‘Lieutenant, shouldn’t we let them work a bit more first?’

‘Ensign that was an order!’

Even here, in this wasteland, the magic words took effect. With the sinking feeling of a man embarking on an uncertain adventure, I listened to the dry crackle of the pulled fuse, and watched Wohlgemut, to offer less of a target, trundle and almost roll the grenade at the British group. It stopped in a thicket, almost in the middle of them; they seemed not to have seen anything. A few moments of great tension ticked by. ‘C-crashh!’ A flash of lightning lit up their sprawling figures. With a shout of ‘You are prisoners!’ we launched ourselves like tigers into the dense white smoke. A desperate scene developed in fractions of seconds. I held my pistol in the middle of a face that seemed to loom out of the dark at me like a pale mask. A shadow slammed back against the barbed wire with a grunt. There was a ghastly cry, a sort of ‘Wah!’ – of the kind that people only produce when they’ve seen a ghost. On my left, Wohlgemut was banging away with his pistol, while Bartels in his excitement was throwing a hand-grenade in our midst.

After one shot, the magazine had clicked out of my pistol grip. I stood yelling in front of a Briton who in his horror was pressing his back into the barbed wire, and kept pulling the trigger. Nothing happened – it was like a dream of impotence. Sounds came from the trench in front of us. Shouts rang out, a machine-gun clattered into life. We jumped away. Once more I stopped in a crater and aimed my pistol at a shadowy form that was pursuing me. This time, it was just as well it didn’t fire, because it was Birkner, whom I had supposed to be safely back long ago.

Then we raced towards our lines. Just before our wire, the bullets were coming so thick and fast that I had to leap into a water-filled, wire-laced mine-crater. Dangling over the water on the swaying wire, I heard the bullets rushing past me like a huge swarm of bees, while scraps of wire and metal shards sliced into the rim of the crater. After half an hour or so, once the firing had abated, I made my way over our entanglements and leaped into our trench, to an enthusiastic reception. Wohlgemut and Bartels were already back; and another half an hour later, so was Birkner. We were all pleased at the happy outcome, and only regretted that once again our intended captive had managed to get away. It was only afterwards that I noticed that the experience had taken its toll on my nerves, when I was lying on my pallet in my dugout with teeth chattering, and quite unable to sleep. Rather, I had the sensation of a sort of supreme awakeness – as if I had a little electric bell going off somewhere in my body. The following morning, I could hardly walk, because over one knee (over other, historic injuries) I had a long scrape from the barbed wire, while the other had caught some shards from Bartels’s hand-grenade.

These short expeditions, where a man takes his life in his hands, were a good means of testing our mettle and interrupting the monotony of trench life. There’s nothing worse for a soldier than boredom.

On 11 August there was a black riding stallion loose outside Berles-au-bois, which a territorial was finally able to kill with three bullets. The British officer it had escaped from wouldn’t have been too pleased to see it in that condition. In the night, Fusilier Schulz caught a spent part of an English bullet in his eye. In Monchy, too, there were more casualties, as the walls brought down by shelling now afforded less and less protection from random sprays of machine-gun bullets. We started to dig trenches right across the village, and erected new walls near the most dangerous places. In the neglected gardens, the berries were ripe, and tasted all the sweeter because of the bullets flying around us as we ate them.

The 12th of August was the long-awaited day when, for the second time in the war, I had a home furlough. No sooner had I got home and settled in, though, than a telegram came winging after me: ‘Return immediately, further details from local command Cambrai.’ And three hours later, I was on the train. On the way to the station, three girls in light dresses swayed past me, clutching tennis racquets – a shining last image of that sort of life, which was to stay with me for a long time.

On the 21 st I was back in familiar country, the roads swarming with soldiers on account of the departure of the IIIth and the arrival of a new division. The 1st Battalion was based in the village of Ecoust-St-Mein, whose wreckage we were to reoccupy on our advance two years from now.

I was welcomed by Paulicke, whose days were also numbered. He told me that the young fellows from my platoon must have inquired about a dozen times whether I wasn’t back yet. It stirred and revived me to hear that; I realized that in the hot days that were ahead of us, I had a following based not only on rank, but also on character.

That night I was put up with eight other officers in the loft of an empty house. We stayed up a long time, and, for want of anything stronger, sat drinking coffee that a couple of Frenchwomen made for us in the house next door. We knew there was a battle impending, the like of which the world had not seen. We felt no less aggressive than the troops who had marched over the border two years before, but we were more experienced and therefore more dangerous. We were up for it, in the best and most cheerful condition, and expressions like ‘avoid contact with the enemy’ were not in our vocabulary. Anyone seeing the men round this jolly table would have to tell themselves that positions entrusted to them would only be lost when the last defender had fallen. And that indeed proved to be the case.