Storm of Steel

Retreat from the Somme

At the end of February 1917, I returned to the regiment, which had now for some days been in position near the ruins of Villers-Carbonnel, and there I took over command of the 8th Company.

The approach route to the front line snaked through the eerie and devastated area of the Somme Valley; an old and already badly damaged bridge led across the river. Other approach paths were on log-roads laid over the swampy flats; here we had to walk in Indian file, crashing through the wide, rustling reed beds, and striding over the silent oil-black expanses of water. When shells came down on these stretches, and sent up

great liquescent columns of mud and water, or when sprays of machine-gun bullets erred over the swampy surface, all you could do was grit your teeth, because it was like walking on a tightrope, there was nowhere for you to go on either side. Hence, the sight of several fantastically shot-up locomotives that had been stopped in their tracks on the high bank on the other side, roughly level with our destination, was each time greeted with relief that otherwise might have been hard to account for.

In the flats lay the villages of Brie and St-Christ. Towers, of which only one slender wall remained, and in whose window openings the moonlight flittered, dark piles of rubble, topped off by smashed beamwork, and isolated trees despoiled of their twigs on the wide snowy plain scarred by black shell-holes accompanied the path like a mechanical scenery, behind which the ghostly quality of the landscape still seemed to lurk.

The firing trenches had been tidied up slightly following a bad, muddy stretch. The platoon commanders told me that, for a while, relief had only been possible with the use of flares; otherwise there would have been every chance of men drowning. A flare shot diagonally over the trench signified: ‘I’m going off watch,’ and another, coming the other way, confirmed: ‘I’ve taken over.’

My dugout was in a cross trench about fifty yards behind the front line. It housed my small staff and myself, and also a platoon that was under my personal command. It was dry and quite extensive. At each of its entrances, which were draped with tarpaulins, were little iron stoves with long pipes; during heavy bombardments, clumps of earth often came down them with an awful rumble. At right angles to the principal shelter were a number of little blind passages that were used as dormitories. I had one of these to myself. Apart from a narrow cot, a table and a few hand-grenade chests, the only amenities were a few trusty items, such as a spirit stove, a candle-holder, cooking equipment and my personal effects.

This was also the place where we sat together cosily of an evening, each of us perched on twenty-five live hand-grenades. My companions were the two company officers, Hambrock and Eisen, and it seemed to me that these subterranean sessions of ours, three hundred yards from the enemy lines, were pretty curious affairs.

Hambrock, astronomer by vocation, and a great devotee of E. T. A. Hoffmann, liked to hold forth about Venus, contending that it was impossible to do justice to the pure light of this astral body from anywhere on earth. He was a tiny chap, thin and spidery and red-haired, and he had a face dotted with yellow and green freckles that had got him the nickname ‘The Marquess of Gorgonzola’. Over the course of the war, he had fallen into some eccentric habits; thus, he tended to sleep in the daytime and only came to life as it got dark, occasionally wandering around all alone in front of our trenches, or the British ones, it seemed to make little difference to him. Also, he had the worrying habit of creeping up to a sentry and firing off a flare right by his ear, ‘to test the man’s courage’. Unfortunately, his constitution was really far too weak for a war, and so it happened that he died of a relatively trivial wound he suffered shortly afterwards at Fresnoy.

Eisen was no taller, but plump, and, having grown up in the warmer climes of Portugal as the son of an emigrant, he was perpetually shivering. That was why he swore by a large red-chequered handkerchief that he tied round his helmet, knotted under his chin, claiming it kept his head warm. Also, he liked going around festooned with weapons – apart from his rifle, from which he was inseparable, he wore numerous daggers, pistols, hand-grenades and a torch tucked into his belt. Encountering him in the trench was like suddenly coming upon an Armenian or somesuch. For a while he used to carry hand-grenades loose in his pockets as well, till that habit gave him a very nasty turn, which he related to us one evening. He had been digging around in his pocket, trying to pull out his pipe, when it got caught in the loop of a hand-grenade and accidentally pulled it off. He was startled by the sudden unmistakable little click, which usually serves as the introduction to a soft hiss, lasting for three seconds, while the priming explosive burns. In his appalled efforts to pull the thing out and hurl it away from him, he had got so tangled up in his trouser pocket that it would have long since blown him to smithereens, had it not been that, by a fairy-tale stroke of luck, this particular hand-grenade had been a dud. Half paralysed and sweating with fear, he saw himself, after all, restored to life.

It was only temporary, though, because a few months later he too died in the battle at Langemarck. In his case, too, willpower had to come to the aid of his body; he was both shortsighted and hard of hearing, so that, as we were to see on the occasion of a little skirmish, he had to be pointed in the right direction by his men if he was to participate in the action in a meaningful way.

Even so, brave puny men are always to be preferred to strong cowards, as was shown over and over in the course of the few weeks we spent in this position.

If our sector of the front could be described as quiet, mighty poundings of artillery that sometimes came hammering down on our lines proved there was no shortage of fire-power in the area. Also, the British were full of curiosity and enterprise here, and not a week passed without some attempt by little exploratory groups to gain information about us, either by cunning or by main force. There were already rumours of some vast impending ‘materiel battle’ in the spring, which would make last year’s Battle of the Somme appear like a picnic. To dampen the impetus of the assault, we were engaged in an extensive tactical withdrawal. There follow a few incidents taken from this phase:

1 March 1917. Hefty exchanges of fire, to take advantage of the good visibility. One heavy battery in particular – with the help of an observation balloon – practically levelled the No. 3 Platoon’s section. In an effort to fill in my map of the position, I spent the afternoon splashing about in the completely inundated ‘Trench with no name’.

On my way, I saw a huge yellow sun slowly sinking, leaving a black plume of smoke after it. A German aeroplane had approached the pesky balloon and shot it in flames. Followed by furious fire from the ground, it made off happily in steeply banking curves. In the evening, Lance-Corporal Schnau came to me and reported that for four days now there had been chipping sounds heard below his unit’s shelter. I passed on the observation, and was sent a pioneer commando with listening apparatus, which registered no suspicious activity. It later transpired that the whole position was undermined.

In the early hours of 5 March, a patrol approached our position and began to cut at our barbed wire. Alerted by the sentry, Eisen hurried over with a few men and threw bombs, whereupon the attackers turned to flee, leaving two casualties behind. One, a young lieutenant, died shortly after; the other, a sergeant, was badly wounded in the arm and leg. From the officer’s papers, it appears his name was Stokes, and that he was with the Royal Munster Fusiliers. He was extremely well dressed, and his features, though a little twisted in death, were intelligent and energetic. In his notebook, I came upon a lot of addresses of girls in London, and was rather moved. We buried him behind our lines, putting up a simple cross, in which I had his name set in hobnails. This experience taught me that not every sally ends as harmlessly as mine have to date.

The next morning, after brief preliminary bombardment, the British with fifty men attacked the adjacent section, under the command of Lieutenant Reinhardt. The attackers had crept up to our wires, and after one of them had given a light signal to their own machine-gunners, by means of a striking surface attached to his sleeve, they had charged our lines as the last of the shells were falling. All had blackened faces, so as not to show against the dark.

Our men had arranged such a consummate reception for them, that only one made it into our trenches, running straight through to the second line, where, ignoring calls to surrender, he was shot down. The only ones to get across the wires were a lieutenant and a sergeant. The lieutenant fell, in spite of the fact that he was wearing body armour, because a pistol bullet, fired into him by Reinhardt point-blank, drove one of its plates into his body. The sergeant practically had both legs sheared off by hand-grenade splinters; even so, with stoical calm, he kept his pipe clenched between his teeth to the end. This incident, like all our other encounters with the Britishers, left us pleasantly impressed with their bravery and manliness. Later that morning, I was strolling along my line when I saw

Lieutenant Pfaffendorf at a sentry post, directing the fire of a trench mortar by means of a periscope. Stepping up beside him, I spotted a British soldier breaking cover behind the third enemy line, the khaki uniform clearly visible against the sky. I grabbed the nearest sentry’s rifle, set the sights to six hundred, aimed quickly, just in front of the man’s head, and fired. He took another three steps, then collapsed on to his back, as though his legs had been taken away from him, flapped his arms once or twice, and rolled into a shell-crater, where through the binoculars we could see his brown sleeves shining for a long time yet.

On 9 March, the British once again slathered our sector with everything they had. Early in the morning I was awakened by a noisy barrage, reached for my pistol and staggered outside, still half asleep. Pulling aside the tarpaulin in front of my shelter entrance, I saw it was still pitch black. The lurid flaming of the shells and the whooshing dirt woke me in no time. I ran along the trench without encountering anyone at all, until I came to a deep dugout, where a leaderless bunch of men were cowering together on the step like chickens in the rain. I took them with me, and soon livened up the trench. To my satisfaction, I could hear Hambrock’s squeaky voice in another sector, also galvanizing.

After the shelling abated somewhat, I went irritably back to my shelter, only for my temper to be further exacerbated by a call from the command:

‘What in God’s name is going on here? Why does it take you so long to answer the bloody telephone?’

After breakfast, the bombardment resumed. This time, the British were nailing our position slowly but systematically with heavy bombs. Finally, it got a bit boring; I went down an underground passage to pay a call on little Hambrock, see what he had to drink, and play a few rounds of cards. Then we were disturbed by a gigantic noise; clumps of earth clattered through the door and down the stove-pipe. The entrance had collapsed, the wooden revetment was crushed like a matchbox. Sometimes an oily bitter-almond smell seemed to waft through the passage -were they hitting us with Prussic acid now? Well, cheers anyway! Once, I needed to answer the call; because of the continual interruptions from heavy shells, I did it in four separate instalments. Then the batman rushed in with the news that the latrine had been blown to smithereens, prompting Hambrock to comment approvingly on my dilatoriness. I replied: ‘If I’d stayed out there, I’d probably have as many freckles as you do.’

Towards evening, the shelling stopped. In the mood that always befell me after heavy bombardments, and which I can only compare to the feeling of relief after a storm, I inspected the line. The trench looked awful; whole stretches had caved in, five dugout shafts had been crushed. Several men had been wounded; I visited them, and found them relatively cheerful. A body lay in the trench, covered by a tarpaulin. His left hip had been ripped away by a shell fragment as he stood right at the bottom of the dugout steps.

In the evening, we were relieved.

On 13 March, I was assigned by Colonel von Oppen to hold the company front with a patrol of two platoons until the regiment had withdrawn across the Somme. Each one of the four sectors was to be held by one such patrol, under the command of its own officer. From right to left, the sectors were to be under the command of Lieutenants Reinhardt, Fischer, Lorek and myself.

The villages we passed through on our way had the look of vast lunatic asylums. Whole companies were set to knocking or pulling down walls, or sitting on rooftops, uprooting the tiles. Trees were cut down, windows smashed; wherever you looked, clouds of smoke and dust rose from vast piles of debris. We saw men dashing about wearing suits and dresses left behind by the inhabitants, with top hats on their heads. With destructive cunning, they found the roof-trees of the houses, fixed ropes to them, and, with concerted shouts, pulled till they all came tumbling down. Others were swinging pile-driving hammers, and went around smashing everything that got in their way, from the flowerpots on the window-sills to whole ornate conservatories.

As far back as the Siegfried Line, every village was reduced to rubble, every tree chopped down, every road undermined, every well poisoned, every basement blown up or booby-trapped, every rail unscrewed, every telephone wire rolled up, everything burnable burned; in a word, we were turning the country that our advancing opponents would occupy into a wasteland.

As I say, the scenes were reminiscent of a madhouse, and the effect of them was similar: half funny, half repellent. They were also, we could see right away, bad for the men’s morale and honour. Here, for the first time, I witnessed wanton destruction that I was later in life to see to excess; this is something that is unhealthily bound up with the economic thinking of our age, but it does more harm than good to the destroyer, and dishonours the soldier.

Among the surprises we’d prepared for our successors were some truly malicious inventions. Very fine wires, almost invisible, were stretched across the entrances of buildings and shelters, which set off explosive charges at the faintest touch. In some places, narrow ditches were dug across roads, and shells hidden in them; they were covered over by an oak plank, and had earth strewn over them. A nail had been driven into the plank, only just above the shell-fuse. The space was measured so that marching troops could pass over the spot safely, but the moment the first lorry or field gun rumbled up, the board would give, and the nail would touch off the shell. Or there were spiteful time bombs that were buried in the basements of undamaged buildings. They consisted of two sections, with a metal partition going down the middle. In one part was explosive, in the other acid. After these devil’s eggs had been primed and hidden, the acid slowly, over weeks, eroded the metal partition, and then set off the bomb. One such device blew up the town hall of Bapaume just as the authorities had assembled to celebrate victory.

On 13 March, then, the 2nd Company left the position, and I took it over with my two platoons. That night, a man by the name of Kirchhof was killed by a shot in the head. Oddly, that one fatal shot was the only one fired by our enemy in the space of several hours.

I arranged all sorts of things to deceive the enemy about our strength. Shovelfuls of earth were flung over the ramparts up and down the trench, and our solitary machine-gun was to fire off bursts now from one flank, now from the other. Even so, our fire-power couldn’t help sounding rather thin when low-flying aeroplanes buzzed the position, or a digging party was seen crossing the enemy hinterland. It was inevitable that patrols were sent out every night to different points, to attack our wire entanglements.

On our second-to-last day, I had a close shave. A dud shell from an anti-balloon gun came plummeting down from the sky, and exploded on the traverse where I happened to be leaning. The air pressure picked me up and hurled me across the trench, fortunately into the mouth of a shelter, where I picked myself up, feeling rather confused.

On the morning of the 17th, we sensed that an attack was imminent. From the advanced English trench, which was very muddy and usually unoccupied, we heard the splashing of many boots. The sounds of laughter and shouts from a strong detachment of men suggested they were nicely lubricated inside and out. Dark forms approached our wires, and were driven back by rifle fire; one of them collapsed wailing, and lay there. I withdrew my groups in hedgehog formation to the mouth of one communication trench, and tried to keep the field ahead lit up by flares, as artillery and mortar fire suddenly commenced. We soon ran out of white lights, and moved on to coloured; it was a veritable firework display that we put on. As the designated hour of five o’clock rolled round, we quickly blew up our foxholes with bombs, those of them at any rate that hadn’t already been fitted with fiendish contraptions of one sort or another, on which we expended the last of our munitions. It was several hours now since I’d last laid hands on a chest, a door or a water-bucket, for fear of blowing myself up.

At the appointed time, the patrols, some of them already involved in hand-grenade battles with the enemy, withdrew towards the Somme. We were the last to cross the river, before the bridges were blown up by a sapper detachment. Our position was still coming in for drumfire. It wasn’t for another few hours that the first enemy outposts reached the Somme. We withdrew behind the Siegfried Line, then still in the process of construction; the battalion took up quarters in the village of Lehaucourt, on the St-Quentin Canal. With my batman, I moved into a cosy little house, whose cupboards and chests were still well supplied. My faithful Knigge would not be persuaded by anything to set up his bed in the warm living room, insisting, as ever, on the chilly kitchen – typical of the restraint of our Lower Saxons.

Our first evening off, I invited my friends round for mulled wine, using all the spices left behind by the previous occupants of the house, because, in addition to praise from our superiors, our patrol had won us all a fortnight’s furlough.