Storm of Steel

The Great Battle

The battalion was quartered in the chateau of Brunemont. We heard that we were to move up on the night of 19 March, to be put in reserve in the dugouts in the line near Cagnicourt, and that the great push was to begin on the morning of 21 March 1918. The regiment had orders to punch through between the villages of Ecoust-St-Mein and Noreuil, and to reach Mory on the first day. We were well acquainted with the terrain; it had been our back area in the trench-fighting at Monchy.

I dispatched Lieutenant Schmidt, known universally as ‘Schmidtchen’ as he was such a lovely fellow, on ahead to secure quarters for the company. At the pre-arranged time, we marched out of Brunemont. At a crossroads, where we picked up our guides, the companies fanned out. When we were level with the second line, where we were to be quartered, it turned out our guides had lost their way. We found ourselves roving around in the poorly lit, boggy, cratered landscape, and asking other, equally uninformed troops for directions. To avoid overtiring the men, I called a halt, and sent the guides out in different directions.

Sections piled arms and squeezed into a vast crater, while Lieutenant Sprenger and I perched on the rim of a smaller one, from which we could see into the big one, as from a box in the theatre. For some time now, shells had been landing a hundred paces or so in front of us. A shell landed quite close by; splinters splattered into the clay sides of the crater. A man yelled and claimed he’d been hurt in the foot. While I felt the man’s muddy boot, looking for a hole, I called to the men to disperse among the surrounding shell-holes.

There was another whistle high up in the air. Everyone had the choking feeling: this one’s heading our way! Then there was a huge, stunning explosion – the shell had hit in our midst.

Half stunned I stood up. From the big crater, burning machine-gun belts spilled a coarse pinkish light. It lit the smouldering smoke of the explosion, where a pile of charred bodies were writhing, and the shadows of those still living were fleeing in all directions. Simultaneously, a grisly chorus of pain and cries for help went up. The rolling motion of the dark mass in the bottom of the smoking and glowing cauldron, like a hellish vision, for an instant tore open the extreme abysm of terror.

After a moment of paralysis, of rigid shock, I leaped up, and like all the others, raced blindly into the night. I tumbled headfirst into a shell-hole, and only there did I finally grasp what had happened. – Not to see or hear anything any more, out of this place, off into deep darkness! – But the men! I had to tend to them, they were my responsibility. – I forced myself to return to that terrible place. On the way, I saw Fusilier Haller, who had captured the machine-gun at Regnieville, and I took him with me.

The wounded men were still uttering their terrible cries. A few crawled up to me, and when they recognized my voice, wailed: ‘Lieutenant, sir, Lieutenant!’ One of my best-loved recruits, Jasinski, whose thigh had been crumpled by a splinter, grabbed hold of my legs. Cursing my inability to be of assistance, I patted him feebly on the back. Moments like that are not easily shaken off.

I had to leave the unlucky ones to the one surviving stretcher-bearer in order to lead the handful of unhurt men who had gathered around me from that dreadful place. Half an hour ago at the head of a full battle-strength company, I was now wandering around a labyrinth of trenches with a few, completely demoralized men. One baby-faced fellow, who was mocked a few days ago by his comrades, and on exercises had wept under the weight of the big munitions boxes, was now loyally carrying them on our heavy way, having picked them up unasked in the crater. Seeing that did for me. I threw myself to the ground, and sobbed hysterically, while my men stood grimly about.

After spending several hours, often menaced by shells, running hopelessly up and down trenches, where the mud and water were feet deep, we crept exhausted into a few cubby-holes meant for munitions that were set in the walls of a trench. Vinke covered me with his blanket; even so, I couldn’t close my eyes, and smoked cigars while I waited for the dawn, feeling completely apathetic.

First light showed the cratered scene full of unsuspected life. Troops were trying to find their units. Artillerymen were lugging crates of ammunition, trench-mortar men pulled their mortars along; telephonists and light-signallers were rigging up their lines. There were all kinds of chaotic activities going on, barely half a mile from the enemy, who, extraordinarily, seemed to have no idea.

At last, in Lieutenant Fallenstein, the commander of the machine-gun company, an old front officer, I met someone who was able to show me our quarters. He greeted me with: ‘Good Christ, man, you look frightful! You look like you’ve got jaundice.’ He pointed out a large dugout that we must have passed a dozen times that night, and there I saw Schmidtchen, who knew nothing of our calamity. The soldiers who had been supposed to guide us were also there. From that day forth, each time we moved into new quarters, I took care to choose the guides myself. In war you learn your lessons, and they stay learned, but the tuition fees are high.

After I had seen my men settled in, I returned to the site of last night’s horror. The place looked grisly. Scattered around the scorched site were over twenty blackened bodies, almost all of them burned and flayed beyond recognition. We had to enter some of the dead as ‘missing’ later, because there was simply nothing left of them.

Soldiers from the adjacent parts of the line were busy pulling the bloodied effects of the dead out of the horrible tangle, and looking through them for booty. I chased them off, and instructed my orderly to take possession of the wallets and valuables to save them for the men’s families. As it turned out, we had to leave it all behind the next day, when we went over the top.

To my delight, Sprenger emerged from a nearby dugout with a whole lot of men who had spent the night there. I had the section leaders report to me, and found out that we had sixty-three men. And the previous night, I’d set out in high spirits with a hundred and fifty! I was able to identify over twenty dead and sixty wounded, many of whom later died of their injuries. My inquiries involved a lot of looking around in trenches and craters, but it had the effect of distracting me from the horror.

My one, feeble consolation was that it might have been even worse. Fusilier Rust, for instance, was standing so close to the bomb blast that the straps on his munitions box caught fire. NCO Pregau, who, admittedly, went on to lose his life the next day, was not even scratched as he stood between two comrades who were torn to ribbons.

We spent the rest of the day in pretty low humour, much of it sleeping. I was frequently called away to see the battalion commander, as there were many details of the attack to be settled. Otherwise, lying on a bunk, I conversed with my two officers on all kinds of trivial subjects, all to escape our tormenting thoughts. The refrain was: ‘Well, thanks be to God, all that can happen is we get shot.’ A few remarks that I addressed to the men gathered on the dugout steps, to try to cheer them up, seemed to have little effect. I was hardly in a cheer-bringing mood.

At ten, a messenger arrived with instructions to go to the front line. A wild animal dragged from its lair, or a sailor feeling the deck sinking under his feet, must have felt like us as we took our leave of the warm, secure dugout and headed out into the inhospitable darkness.

There was already some activity. We dashed down Felix Lane under sharp shrapnel fire, and reached the front line without casualties. While we were wending our way along the trenches, over our heads the artillery was being trundled across bridges into forward positions. The regiment, whose most-advanced battalion we were to be, had been given a very narrow sector of the front. Every dugout was immediately jammed. Those left in the cold dug themselves holes in the trench walls, so as to have at least minimal protection against the artillery barrage that was to be expected before the attack. After a lot of toing and froing, it seemed everyone had some kind of foxhole. Once more Captain von Brixen assembled the company commanders to talk through the plan. For the last time, watches were synchronized, and then we all shook hands and went our separate ways.

I sat down with my two officers on the dugout steps, to wait for five past five, when the preliminary shelling was due to start. The mood had lifted somewhat, as the rain had stopped, and the starry night gave promise of a dry morning. We chatted and smoked. At three o’clock there was breakfast, and a flask went the rounds. During the early morning hours, the enemy artillery was so lively we feared the British might have caught a whiff of something. A few of the numerous munitions dumps dotted around blew up.

Shortly before the show, the following flash signal was circulated: ‘His Majesty the Kaiser and Hindenburg are on the scene of operations.’ It was greeted with applause.

The watch-hands moved round; we counted off the last few minutes. At last, it was five past five. The tempest was unleashed.

A flaming curtain went up, followed by unprecedentedly brutal roaring. A wild thunder, capable of submerging even the loudest detonations in its rolling, made the earth shake. The gigantic roaring of the innumerable guns behind us was so atrocious that even the greatest of the battles we had experienced seemed like a tea party by comparison. What we hadn’t dared hope for happened: the enemy artillery was silenced; a prodigious blow had laid it out. We felt too restless to stay in the dugout. Standing out on top, we gasped at the colossal wall of flame over the English lines, gradually obscuring itself behind crimson, surging clouds.

The only thing that took the edge off our enjoyment of this spectacle were our watering eyes and inflamed mucous membranes. The clouds of our gas shells, beaten back by a headwind, wrapped us in a powerful aroma of bitter almonds. I looked on in concern as some of the men started coughing and choking, and finally tore the masks off their faces. I was therefore at pains myself to suppress any cough, and breathe slowly and carefully. Finally, the cloud dispersed, and after an hour it was safe to take off our gas masks.

It had become light. At our rear, the massive roaring and surging was still waxing, even though any intensification of the noise had seemed impossible. In front of us an impenetrable wall of smoke, dust and gas had formed. Men ran past, shouting cheerily in our ears. Infantrymen and artillerymen, pioneers and telephonists, Prussians and Bavarians, officers and men, all were overwhelmed by the elemental force of the fire-storm, and all were impatient to go over the top at nine-forty. At twenty-five past eight our heavy mortars, which were standing massed behind our front lines, entered the fray. We watched the daunting two-hundredweight bombs loop high up into the air, and come crashing down with the force of volcanic eruptions on the enemy lines. Their impacts were like a row of spurting craters.

Even the laws of nature appeared to have been suspended. The air swam as on hot summer days, and its variable density caused fixed objects to appear to dance to and fro. Shadows streaked through the clouds. The noise now was a sort of absolute noise – you heard nothing at all. Only dimly were you aware that thousands of machine-guns behind you were slinging their leaden swarms into the blue air.

The last hour of the preparation was more dangerous than all four of its predecessors, during which we had moved around insolently on the parapets. The enemy brought in a heavy battery that hurled shell after shell into our overcrowded lines. To move out of the way, I turned left and met Lieutenant Heins, who asked me if I’d seen Lieutenant Solemacher: ‘He’s wanted to take over command, Captain von Brixen’s fallen.’ Shaken by this news, I went back, and sat myself in a deep foxhole. By the time I got there, I had forgotten what I’d been told. I was as in a dream, sleepwalking through this storm.

NCO Dujesiefken, my comrade at Regnieville, was standing in front of my foxhole, begging me to get into the trench as even a light shell bursting anywhere near would cause masses of earth to come down on top of me. An explosion cut him off: he sprawled to the ground, missing a leg. He was past help. I jumped over him, and darted into a foxhole on the right, where a couple of pioneers had already sought shelter. Heavy shells continued to rain down all round us. You suddenly saw black clumps of earth spinning out of a white cloud; the sound of the explosion was engulfed by the noise level. In the sector to our left, three men from my company were torn to pieces. One of the last hits, a dud, killed poor Schmidtchen as he sat on the dugout steps.

I was standing with Sprenger, watch in hand, in front of my foxhole, waiting for the great moment to come. The rest of the company had clustered round. We managed to cheer and distract them with a few crude jokes. Lieutenant Meyer, who briefly stuck his head round the traverse, told me later he thought we were out of our minds.

At ten past nine, the officer patrols who were to cover our advance left the trench. Since the two positions were perhaps half a mile apart, we had to move forward during the artillery preparation, and lie ready in no man’s land, to be able to leap into the first enemy line as soon as nine-forty came. A few minutes later, then, Sprenger and I climbed up on to the top, followed by the rest of the company.

‘Now let’s show them what the 7th are made of!’

‘I’m past caring what happens to me!’

‘Revenge for the 7th Company!’

‘Revenge for Captain von Brixen!’ We drew our pistols and climbed over the wires, through which the first of the wounded were already dragging themselves back.

I looked left and right. The moment before the engagement was an unforgettable picture. In shell craters against the enemy line, which was still being forked over and over by the fire-storm, lay the battalions of attackers, clumped together by company. At the sight of the dammed-up masses of men, the breakthrough appeared certain to me. But did we have the strength and the stamina to splinter also the enemy reserves and rend them apart? I was confident. The decisive battle, the last charge, was here. Here the fates of nations would be decided, what was at stake was the future of the world. I sensed the weight of the hour, and I think everyone felt the individual in them dissolve, and fear depart.

The mood was curious, brimming with tension and a kind of exaltation. Officers stood up and exchanged banter. I saw Solemacher standing there in a long coat in the midst of his little staff, a short pipe with a green bowl in his hand, like a huntsman on a cold day, waiting for the gillies to do their work. We exchanged a fraternal wave. Often a mortar would fall short, and a shower of earth as high as a steeple would cover the waiting men, and no one would even flinch. The noise of battle had become so terrific, that no one was at all clear-headed.

Three minutes before the attack, Vinke beckoned to me with a full water-bottle. I took a long pull, as though it were indeed only water I was drinking. Now just the cigar was missing. Three times the air pressure snuffed out my match.

The great moment was at hand. The wave of fire had trundled up to the first lines. We attacked.

Our rage broke like a storm. Thousands must have fallen already. That was clear; and even though the shelling continued it felt quiet, as though it had lost its imperative thrust.

No man’s land was packed tight with attackers, advancing singly, in little groups or great masses towards the curtain of fire. They didn’t run or even take cover if the vast plume of an explosion rose between them. Ponderous, but unstoppable, they advanced on the enemy lines. It was as though nothing could hurt them anymore.

In the midst of these masses that had risen up, one was still alone; the units were all mixed up. I had lost my men from sight; they had disappeared like a wave in the crashing surf. All I had with me were my Vinke and a one-year volunteer by the name of Haake. In my right hand, I gripped my pistol, in my left, a bamboo riding-crop. Even though I was feeling hot, I was still wearing my long coat, and, as per regulations, gloves. As we advanced, we were in the grip of a berserk rage. The overwhelming desire to kill lent wings to my stride. Rage squeezed bitter tears from my eyes.

The immense desire to destroy that overhung the battlefield precipitated a red mist in our brains. We called out sobbing and stammering fragments of sentences to one another, and an impartial observer might have concluded that we were all ecstatically happy.

The shredded wire entanglements provided no obstacle at all, and we cleared the first trench, barely recognizable as such, in a single bound. The wave of attackers danced like a row of ghosts through the white seething mists of the flattened dip. There was no one here to oppose us.

Quite unexpectedly, the clatter of machine-gun fire rattled at us from the second line. I and my companions jumped into a crater. Another second, and there was a fearsome crash, and I sprawled on my face. Vinke grabbed me by the collar, and twisted me round on to my back: ‘Lieutenant, are you hurt?’ There was no sign of anything. The one-year volunteer had a hole in his upper arm, and assured us in groans that the bullet had lodged in his back. We tore the tunic off him and bandaged him up. A smooth furrow showed that a shrapnel shell had struck the lip of the crater on a level with our faces. It was a miracle we were still alive. It seemed the enemy were more obdurate than we’d given them credit for.

Others by now had overtaken us. We plunged after them, leaving our wounded man to his fate, having put up a piece of wood with a white strip of gauze hanging from it as a sign for the wave of stretcher-bearers that would follow. Half left of us the great railway embankment of the Ecoust-Croisilles line loomed up out of the haze; we had to get across that. From built-in loopholes and dugout windows, the rifle and machine-gun fire was pattering at us so thickly it was like having a sack of dried peas emptied over you. They could see what they were doing too.

Vinke had disappeared somewhere. I followed a defile, from whose sides flattened dugouts gaped. I strode along furiously, across the black opened ground that the acrid fumes of our shells seemed to cling to. I was quite alone.

Then I saw my first enemy. A figure in brown uniform, wounded apparently, crouched twenty paces away in the middle of the battered path, with his hands propped on the ground. I turned a corner, and we caught sight of each other. I saw him jump as I approached, and stare at me with gaping eyes, while I, with my face behind my pistol, stalked up to him slowly and coldly. A bloody scene with no witnesses was about to happen. It was a relief to me, finally, to have the foe in front of me and within reach. I set the mouth of the pistol at the man’s temple – he was too frightened to move – while my other fist grabbed hold of his tunic, feeling medals and badges of rank. An officer; he must have held some command post in these trenches. With a plaintive sound, he reached into his pocket, not to pull out a weapon, but a photograph which he held up to me. I saw him on it, surrounded by numerous family, all standing on a terrace.

It was a plea from another world. Later, I thought it was blind chance that I let him go and plunged onward. That one man of all often appeared in my dreams. I hope that meant he got to see his homeland again.

Men from my company were jumping down into the defile from above. I was boiling hot. I tore off my coat, and threw it away. I remember shouting: ‘Now Lieutenant Junger’s throwing off his coat!’ several times, and the fusiliers laughing, as if it had been the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Everyone was pouring across the open terrain, careless of the machine guns that can have been no more than four hundred yards away. I too ran blindly towards the fire-spitting embankment. In some crater, I landed on top of a pistol-potting figure in brown corduroy. It was Kius, who was in a similar mood to me, and who passed me a fistful of cartridges by way of greeting.

I concluded from that that our penetration into the cratered area in front of the railway embankment must have hit upon some resistance, because I had taken a good supply of pistol bullets with me before we set out. Probably it was the rest of the troops who had been dislodged from the trenches and had settled here, popping up in various places in among the attackers. But as far as this part of the story goes, I have no recollection. All I know is I must have got through it, and unhurt, even though there was firing from craters on all sides, not to mention the bullets fizzing down from the embankment on friend and foe alike. They must have had an inexhaustible supply of ammunition in there.

Our attention now shifted to that obstacle, which loomed up in front of us like a menacing wall. The scarred field that separated us from it was still held by hundreds of scattered British. Some were trying to scramble back, others were already engaged in hand-to-hand fighting with our forward troops.

Kius later told me things that I took in with the same sort of feeling as when some eyewitness tells you of amazing japes or stunts that you performed while drunk. For instance, he had been chasing a British soldier through a section of trench with hand-grenades. When he ran out of missiles, to keep his opponent on the run, he continued the chase with lumps of earth, while I stood up above, splitting my sides with laughter.

Amid such scenes, we had come up to the embankment, barely realizing it. It was still spewing fire like a great machine. Here my recollection begins again, with the registration of an extremely advantageous position. We hadn’t been hit, and now that we were right up against it, the embankment changed from being an obstacle to being cover for us. As though waking from a deep dream, I saw German steel helmets approaching through the craters. They seemed to sprout from the fire-harrowed soil like some iron harvest. At the same time, I noticed that right by my foot there was the barrel of a heavy machine-gun, stuck through a dugout window covered over with sacking. The noise was such that it was only the vibration of the barrel that told us that it was firing. The defender was only an arm’s length away from us then. It was that degree of proximity that kept us safe. And that spelled his doom. Hot haze rose from the weapon. It must have hit a great many men, and it was still mowing. The barrel moved little; its fire was aimed.

I fixed the hot, shaking piece of steel that was sowing death, and that I could almost brush with my foot. Then I shot through the sacking. A man who turned up next to me ripped it clean away, and dropped a hand-grenade in the hole. A shock and the issue of a whitish cloud told the rest of the story. The means were rough, but satisfactory. The muzzle no longer moved, the weapon had stopped firing. We ran along the embankment to treat the next holes in similar fashion, and so we must have broken a few vertebrae out of the spine of the defence. I raised my hand to let my troops, whose shots were ringing round our ears, know who we were and what we were about. They waved happily back. Then we and a hundred others scaled the embankment. For the first time in the war, I saw masses of men collide. The British were defending a couple of terraced trenches the other side of the embankment. Shots were exchanged at point-blank range, hand-grenades looped down.

I leaped into the nearest trench; plunging round the traverse, I ran into an English officer in an open jacket and loose tie; I grabbed him and hurled him against a pile of sandbags. An old white-haired major behind me shouted: ‘Kill the swine!’

There was no point. I turned to the lower trench, which was seething with British soldiers. It was like a shipwreck. A few tossed duck’s eggs, others fired Colt revolvers, most were trying to run. We had the upper hand now. I kept firing off my pistol as in a dream, although I was out of ammunition long ago. A man next to me lobbed hand-grenades at the British as they ran. A steel helmet took off into the air like a spinning plate.

It was all over in a minute. The British leaped out of their trenches, and fled away across the field. From up on the embankment, a wild pursuing fire set in. They were brought down in full flight, and, within seconds, the ground was littered with corpses. That was the disadvantage of the embankment.

German troops were also down among them. An NCO stood next to me watching the fighting open-mouthed. I seized his rifle and shot an Englishman who was tangling with a couple of Germans. They stopped in bafflement at the invisible assistance, and then ran on.

Our success had a magical effect. There was no question of leadership, or even of separate units, but there was only one direction: forwards! Every man ran forward for himself.

For my objective I selected a low rise, on which I could see the ruins of a house, a cross, and the wreckage of an aeroplane. Others were with me; we formed a pack, and in our eagerness ran into the wall of flame laid down by our own artillery. We had to throw ourselves in a crater and wait while the shelling moved forward. Next to me there was a young officer from another regiment, who, like me, was delighted with the success of this first charge. In a few minutes, the intensity of our mutual enthusiasm gave us the feeling we’d known each other for years. Then we leaped up, and never saw each other again.

Even in these frightful moments, something droll could happen. A man next to me pulled his rifle to his cheek and pretended to shoot at a rabbit that suddenly came bounding through our lines. It all happened so abruptly, I had to laugh. Nothing is ever so terrible that some bold and amusing fellow can’t trump it.

Beside the ruined cottage lay a piece of trench that was being swept with machine-gun fire from beyond. I jumped into it, and found it untenanted. Immediately afterwards, I was joined by Oskar Kius and von Wedelstadt. An orderly of Wedelstadt’s, the last man in, collapsed in mid-leap, and was dead, shot through one eye. When Wedelstadt saw this last member of his company fall, he leaned his head against the wall of the trench and cried. He wouldn’t get through the day either.

Below us was a strongly fortified position across a defile, with a couple of machine-gun nests on the slopes in front of it, one either side. Our artillery had already steamrollered past; the enemy seemed to have recovered, and was shooting for all he was worth. We were perhaps five hundred yards away, and the spurts of fire buzzed across it like swarms of bees.

After a short pause for breath, not many of us headed over the top towards the enemy. It was all or nothing. After a few paces, there was just me and one other man facing the left-hand machine-gun. I could clearly see the head under a flat helmet behind the earthworks, next to a fine spout of steam. I approached in very short steps, to leave him no time to aim, and ran in a zigzag, to elude rifle bullets. Each time I hit the deck, my man offered me another clip of ammunition with which to carry the fight.

‘Cartridges! Cartridges!’ I turned round, and saw him lying on his side, twitching.

From the left, where the resistance seemed to be weaker, some men came running up and were almost within hand-grenade range of the defenders. I covered the final yards and tumbled over some wire right into the trench. The British, under fire from all sides, abandoned their position and the machine-gun, and fled across to the other position. The machine-gun was half buried under an enormous pile of brass cartridges. It was steaming and red-hot. Stretched out in front of it lay my adversary, an athletic-looking Englishman with one eye put out by a shot to the head. The colossus with the big white eyeball against his smoke-charred skull looked gruesome. As I was almost fainting with thirst, I didn’t hang around but went looking for water. A dugout entrance looked promising. I put my head round the corner, and saw a man sitting at the bottom, fitting bullets into a belt over his knee. He seemed to have no idea that the situation had been transformed. I calmly levelled my pistol at him, but instead of squeezing the trigger, as common sense dictated, I called out: ‘Come here, hands up!’ He jumped up, looked at me wildly, and scampered into the back of the dugout. I threw a grenade after him. The dugout probably had a further entrance, because a soldier came round a traverse and observed laconically: ‘He won’t be doing no more shooting.’

At last, I managed to find a canister of cooling-water. I gulped down the oily liquid, slushed some more into an English canteen, and handed it to comrades who suddenly filled the trench.

As a curious footnote, I should like to mention that my first thought on forcing my way into this machine-gun nest concerned the cold from which I was suffering. All my life, I’ve had a tendency to throat inflammation; therefore, when I pressed my thumbs under my jaw, I was pleased to note that the vigorous exercise I’d taken had – like a sauna – helped me sweat off this latest bout.

Meanwhile, the right-hand machine-gun nest and the defenders of the defile sixty yards in front of us were still putting up a grim fight. The fellows really were giving it everything. We tried to aim their own machine-gun at them, but didn’t manage that; instead, as I was trying that, a bullet whizzed past my head, brushed the Jager lieutenant who was standing behind me, and finished up giving a private a very nasty-looking wound in the thigh. A light machine-gun crew had better luck setting up their weapon on the edge of our little semi-circle and began raking the British from the flank.

The troops attacking on the right took advantage of the distraction we provided and attacked the defile head-on, led by our still-intact 9th Company under the command of Lieutenant Gipkens. And now from every shell-hole figures poured forth, swinging rifles and chasing with a fearsome hurrah towards the enemy position, from where defenders emerged in great numbers. They started running away with their arms aloft, to escape the initial fury of the first wave of shock troops, in particular that of Lieutenant Gipkens’s orderly, who was rampaging like a berserker. I observed the confrontation, which took place just beyond our little earthworks, with rapt attention. Here I saw that any defender who continued to empty his pistol into the bodies of the attackers four or five paces away could not expect any mercy when they were upon him. The fighter, who sees a bloody mist in front of his eyes as he attacks, doesn’t want prisoners; he wants to kill.

The captured defile was lined with weapons, uniforms and supplies. Dotted all about were dead men in grey and brown uniforms, and groaning wounded. Soldiers from all different regiments were standing together in a thick knot, all shouting and chattering at once. Officers pointed out to them the continuation of the dip, and the heap of fighters, gradually, with surprising indifference, started moving forward again.

The dip ran up into higher ground, where enemy columns appeared. Occasionally stopping to shoot, we advanced until we were stopped by fierce fire. It was a sobering feeling, having the bullets smash into the ground round our heads. Kius, who had turned up again, picked up a flattened bullet that had stopped inches from his nose. At that instant, a man far to the left of us was hit on the helmet, and the ringing echoed throughout the dip. We took advantage of a momentary lull in the firing to scoot into one of the not very many shell-holes there were hereabouts. There I met up with the other surviving officers of our battalion again, which was now being commanded by Lieutenant Lindenberg, since Lieutenant von Solemacher had been fatally shot in the stomach during the storming of the embankment. On the right edge of the little valley, to the general amusement, Lieutenant Breyer – who had been seconded to us from the 10th Jagers – was strolling about seemingly oblivious of the flying bullets, walking-stick in hand, and long huntsman’s pipe in mouth, rifle slung over his shoulder, every bit as though out shooting rabbits.

We told each other quickly what we’d been through, and handed round canteens and bars of chocolate, then, ‘by popular demand’, we resumed our advance. The machine-guns, apparently under threat from the flank, had been withdrawn. We had probably taken two or three miles back already. The dip was now swarming with attackers. As far back as the eye could see, they were advancing in open order, ranks and columns. It was unfortunate that we were so densely packed; how many we left behind on the attack we luckily had no way of knowing.

Without meeting any resistance, we climbed to the top. To our right, khaki-clad figures were spilling out of a trench. We followed the example given us by Breyer, who, without taking the pipe out of his mouth, briefly stood still to loose off a round or two, and then marched on.

The heights were fortified by an unevenly distributed series of dugouts. They were not defended; probably our approach had gone unnoticed by the men in them. In some cases, clouds of smoke showed that they had already been flushed out, elsewhere it was the men themselves that emerged, pale and with their hands in the air. They were made to hand over canteens and cigarettes, then they were pointed to our rear, in which direction they vanished with some alacrity. One young British soldier had already surrendered to me when he suddenly turned round and disappeared back in his dugout. Then, as he stayed there, apparently ignoring my call to come out, we put an end to his dithering with a few hand-grenades, and went on. A narrow footpath disappeared over the crest of the hill. A signpost said it led to Vraucourt. While the others were still busy looking over the dugouts, I passed the crest of the hill, with Heins.

Down below lay the ruins of Vraucourt. In front of it we could see the flashing muzzles of an artillery battery whose men took flight as our first wave approached and they came under fire. The occupants of a row of dugouts along the side of the path also ran away. I encountered one such as he was just about to leave the last one. [A little gnomic, but I think we are to understand EJ shoots him. Hence, below, ‘my British soldier’. Earlier editions were much more explicit on this point and others similar.]

Along with a couple of men from my company who had hooked up with me, I proceeded down the path. To the right of it was a fortified line, from where we came under heavy fire. We retreated to the first of the dugouts, over which the bullets of both sides were soon flying back and forth. It looked as though it had been a base for messengers and bicyclists attached to the artillery. Outside it lay my British soldier, little more than a boy, who had been hit in the temple. He lay there, looking quite relaxed. I forced myself to look closely at him. It wasn’t a case of ‘you or me’ any more.

I often thought back on him; and more with the passing of the years. The state, which relieves us of our responsibility, cannot take away our remorse; and we must exercise it. Sorrow, regret, pursued me deep into my dreams.

Ignoring the crescendo of firing, we settled into the dugout, and helped ourselves to the supplies left behind, since our stomachs reminded us that we hadn’t eaten anything since the beginning of the attack. We found ham, white bread, jam and a stone jar of ginger beer. After I had fortified myself, I sat down on an empty biscuit case, and browsed in some English newspapers, all of them full of invective against ‘the Huns’. After a while, we got bored, and scampered back to the beginning of the path, where a large number of men had by now assembled. From up there, we could see a battalion of the 164th already up alongside Vraucourt to the left. We decided to storm the village, and hurried back down the path. Just outside the village, we were stopped by our own artillery, which was pounding the same spot over and over again. A heavy shell landed plumb on the path, and killed four of our men. The others ran back.

As I found out later, the artillery had been given orders to carry on firing at the furthest extent of their range. This incomprehensible order snatched the fruits of victory from our hands. Grinding our teeth with fury, we had to make a halt before the wall of fire.

To look for a chink, we moved right, where a company commander of the 76th Hanseatic Regiment was just giving orders for an attack on Vraucourt. We joined in with gusto, but no sooner had we got into the village than we once more found ourselves under fire from our own artillery. Three times we charged in, and three times we were forced back. Cursing, we set up in a few craters, where a grass fire that the shelling had started, and that took off many wounded men, was extraordinarily unpleasant. Also, English rifle bullets accounted for a few men, among them Corporal Grutzmacher from my own company.

Gradually, it got dark. Except for occasional flare-ups, the rifle fire gradually died down. The tired fighters looked for somewhere to lie down. Officers yelled their own names till they were hoarse, in an attempt to reassemble their companies.

In the course of the last hour, a dozen men of the 7th Company had grouped themselves round me. As it was starting to get cold, I led them back to the little dugout outside which my Englishman lay, and sent them out to find coats and blankets from the fallen. Once I had settled them all, I surrendered to my curiosity, and had a shufti at the artillery in the valley below. It was a bit of free enterprise, so I only took Fusilier Haller with me, who was adventurously inclined. Rifles at the ready, we strode down to the valley, which was still taking a pounding from our artillery, and began by inspecting a dugout that had apparently only recently been abandoned by British officers. On a table sat a huge gramophone, which Haller straight away set going. The cheery melody that purred off the roll had a ghostly effect on both of us. I threw the box on the ground where it scraped on a little longer, and then fell silent. The dugout was the height of luxury, even down to a little open fireplace with a mantelpiece with pipes and tobacco on it, and armchairs pulled round in a circle.

Merry old England! Of course we didn’t stint ourselves, but helped ourselves to whatever we fancied. I took a haversack, undergarments, a little flask full of whisky, a map case and some exquisite little items from Roger & Gallet, no doubt keepsakes from some romantic leave in Paris. We could see that the inhabitants had left here in a hurry.

An adjacent space harboured the kitchen, whose supplies we stared at in wonder.

There was a whole crate of eggs, which we sucked on the spot, as eggs were little more than a word to us at this stage. On shelves along the walls were stacks of canned meat, tins of delicious English jam, and bottles of Camp coffee, tomatoes and onions; everything to delight an epicure’s heart.

It was a scene I often came back to later, when we lay for weeks in trenches, on meagre bread rations, watery soup and thin nondescript jam.

After that peek into the enviable circumstances of our foes, we left the dugout and investigated the valley, where we found two spanking-new artillery pieces. Great piles of gleaming, freshly fired shell-casings indicated that they had had a thing or two to say in the course of our attack. I picked up a piece of chalk, and chalked up the number of my company. I hadn’t yet learned that the victor’s rights were accorded scant respect by the following units; each one wiped away the mark of their predecessor, and wrote up their own, till the last one was that of some digging outfit.

Then, with our artillery still slinging iron about our ears, we went back to the others. Our front line, formed now from reserve troops, was a couple of hundred yards behind us. I posted two men outside the dugout, and told the others to keep their rifles handy. Then, after arranging the reliefs, having a little more to eat, and jotting down the day’s happenings, I went to sleep.

At one o’clock in the morning, we were roused by hurrahs and brisk fire from our right. We grabbed our rifles, plunged out of the dugout, and took up positions in a large shell-hole. From ahead of us came a few scattered German soldiers, who received fire from our ranks. Two of them remained on the path. Alerted by this incident, we waited for the initial excitement behind us to die down, shouted out who we were, and returned to our own line. There we found the commander of the 2nd Company, Lieutenant Kosik, with a wound in the arm and such a heavy cold he couldn’t speak, with roughly sixty men of the 73 rd. Since he had to go back to the dressing-station, I took over the command of his detachment, which included three officers. Apart from them there were also the similarly thrown-together companies under Gipkens and Vorbeck.

The rest of the night I spent with some NCOs of the 2nd, in a little dugout where we all but froze to death. In the morning, I breakfasted off looted supplies, and dispatched runners to Que-ant, to fetch coffee and food from the kitchens. Our own artillery started its bloody cannonade again, its first good-morning to us being a direct hit in a crater that was housing four men from a machine-gun company. At first light, our group was reinforced by Vice-Sergeant-Major Kumpart and some men under him.

No sooner had we managed to stamp the cold out of our chilly bones than I received orders to band together with what was left of the 76th and storm the Vraucourt positions – which we had already begun to take – to the right of where we presently were. In thick morning fog, we moved off to the jumping-off position, a plateau south of Ecoust, where many lay dead from the previous day. There was, as generally happens when orders are unclear, some argy-bargy among the officers, which was only settled when a machine-gun sent a spray of bullets whistling round our legs. Everyone dived into the nearest crater, except for Vice-Sergeant-Major Kumpart, who was left lying on the ground, groaning. I hurried across to him with a medical orderly, to get him bandaged up. He had a bad wound in the knee. With a bent pair of tongs, we pulled out several fragments of bone from the wound. He died a few days later. I was more than usually upset, because Kumpart had been my drill instructor three years previously, in Recouvrence.

In discussion with Captain von Ledebur, who was now in overall command of our assorted units, I spoke of the futility of a frontal attack, arguing that with part of the Vraucourt position already in our hands, we could roll it up from the left with far fewer casualties. We decided to spare our men the ordeal, and the events were to prove us right.

For the time being, we made ourselves comfortable in some craters on the plateau. By and by, the sun broke through, and British aeroplanes appeared, dusting our holes with machine-gun bullets, but they were driven away by our own planes. In the Ecoust Valley, we saw a battery drive up, a rare sight for an old front soldier; it was pretty promptly demolished too. A horse broke loose and galloped over the landscape; a pale roan, looking ghostly as it flew over the wide, lonely plains under the shifting and variable clouds of explosive. The enemy aeroplanes were not long gone before we came under fire. First, there were a few shrapnels, then lots of shells, big and small. They had us on a plate. Timorous natures multiplied the effect of the fire by running mindlessly here and there, instead of getting their heads down in a crater somewhere and taking their punishment. You have to be a fatalist in such situations. I confirmed my adherence to that creed by sampling the delicious contents of a can of gooseberry jam I’d picked up from the British stores. And I pulled on a pair of Scottish woollen socks I’d found in the dugout. Gradually, the sun climbed higher.

For some time, we’d been able to observe activity on the left of the Vraucourt position. Now we could see the arc and the white puffs of German stick-bombs. That was our cue.

I gave the order to advance – or, rather, I raised my right arm, and set off towards the enemy position. We got into their trench without encountering much in the way of fire, and jumped in, getting a joyous welcome from a storm troop of the 76th. We made slow progress, rolling up the line with hand-grenades, as we’d done at Cambrai.

Unfortunately, it soon dawned on the enemy artillery that we were making remorseless progress along their line. A sharp bombardment with shrapnels and light shells just caught the back of those of us who were in the van, and did worse to reserve troops who were just running up towards the trench. We noticed the artillerymen could see what they were firing at. That gave us the gee-up we needed to finish off the job as soon as we could, and slip in under the fire.

It appeared that the Vraucourt position was still being built, because some stretches of trench were merely indicated by the removal of the turf. Each time we came across a piece like that, we drew fire on us from several sides. We repaid the enemy in kind when it was their turn to dash across these death-strips, so that these undug places were before long thickly sown with the injured and dead. There was a wild hunt under clouds of shrapnel.

We raced past stout figures, still warm, with strong knees under their short kilts, or we crawled past them. They were Highlanders, and their way of fighting showed us that we were dealing with real men.

When we had made a few hundred yards in this fashion, the ever-thicker hail of rifle- and hand-grenades forced us to pause. It seemed the tide was about to turn. There was some fear in the air; I heard agitated voices.

‘Tommy’s counter-attacking!’

‘Hold your ground!’

‘I want to check that we’re in touch!’

‘More hand-grenades to the front; hand-grenades, for Christ’s sake, hand-grenades!’

‘Watch out, Lieutenant!’

Small reverses can be a serious matter in trench-fighting. A little troop makes its way to the van, shooting and throwing. As the grenade-throwers leap backwards and forwards to get out of the way of the lethal projectiles, they encounter the men coming up behind, who have got too near. The result is confusion. Maybe some men will jump over the top, and get themselves picked off by snipers, which encourages the rest of the enemy like nobody’s business.

I managed to summon up a handful of men with whom I formed a focus of resistance behind a wide traverse. There was an open stretch of trench between the Highlanders and ourselves. At a distance of only a few yards, we exchanged shots with our invisible opponents. It took pluck to hold your head up when the bullets were pinging around, and the sand was being sprayed out of the traverse. One man beside me from the 76th, a huge Herculean dockworker from Hamburg, fired off one shot after another, with a wild look on his face, not even thinking of cover, until he collapsed in a bloody heap. With the sound of a plank crashing down, a bullet had drilled through his forehead. He crumpled into a corner of the trench, half upright, with his head pressed against the trench wall. His blood poured on to the floor of the trench, as if tipped out of a bucket. His snore-like death-rattle resounded in lengthening intervals, and finally stopped altogether. I seized his rifle, and went on firing. At last there was a pause. Two men who had been just ahead of us tried to make it back over the top. One toppled into the trench with a shot in the head, the other, shot in the belly, could only crawl into it.

We hunkered down on the floor to wait, and smoked English cigarettes. From time to time, well-aimed rifle-grenades came flying over. We were able to see them, and take evasive action. The man with the wound in the belly, a very young lad, lay in amongst us, stretched out like a cat in the warm rays of the setting sun. He slipped into death with an almost childlike smile on his face. It was a sight that didn’t oppress me, but left me with a fraternal feeling for the dying man. Even the groaning of his comrade gradually fell silent. He died in our midst, shuddering.

We made several attempts to work our way forward at the undug places, by crawling in among the bodies of the Highlanders, but were driven back each time by sniper fire and rifle-grenades. Almost every hit I saw was deadly. And so, the fore part of the trench was gradually filling up with the dead and wounded; but all the time reinforcements were arriving at the back. Before long, every traverse had a light or heavy machine-gun behind it. With the help of these, we held the British end of the trench in check. I took my turn behind one of the lead-spitters, and fired till my index finger was black with smoke. It might have been here that I hit the Scotsman who wrote me a nice letter from Glasgow afterwards, with an exact description of the location where he got his wound. Each time the cooling-water had evaporated, the canisters were passed around and topped up by a natural procedure that occasioned some crude humour. Before long the weapons were red-hot.

The sun was low over the horizon. It seemed as though the second day of battle was over. For the first time, I took a close look at my whereabouts, and sent back a report and sketch. Five hundred paces from where we were, our trench intersected the Vraucourt-Mory road, which was camouflaged by lengths of cloth. On a slope behind it, enemy troops were hurrying across the field, with shells bursting all around them.

The cloudless evening sky was crossed by a squadron of planes marked with our black, red and white. The last rays of the sun, which had already gone down, daubed them a shade of delicate pink, so they looked like flamingoes. We opened out our maps, and turned them face down, indicating to those above how far we had already pushed into the enemy line.

A cool breeze gave promise of a bitter night. Wrapped in my warm English coat, I leaned against the trench wall, chatting with little Schultz, who had accompanied me on the patrol against the Indians, and had turned up, in the timeless way of comrades, just where things were looking tough, toting four heavy machine-guns. Men of all companies sat on the fire-steps, the young, keen faces under the steel helmets, eyeing the enemy lines. I saw them looming stock-still out of the dim of the trench, as though on turrets. Their officers had fallen; it was by their own instincts that they were standing in exactly the right place now.

We were already settling in for a night of what we have we hold. I laid my pistol and a dozen British duck’s egg grenades next to me, and felt myself a match for all comers, even the most obdurate Scotsman.

Then there came the sound of more hand-grenades from the right, while on the left German flares went up. Out of the gloaming rose a faint distant cheer. It caught on.

‘We’ve got round the back of them! We’ve got round the back of them!’ In one of those moments of enthusiasm that precede great actions, all reached for their rifles, and stormed forward along the trench. A brief exchange of hand-grenades, and a bunch of Highlanders were seen running for the road. Now there was no stopping us. In spite of warning cries: ‘Watch out, the machine-gun on the left is still shooting!’ we leaped out of the trench, and in no time had reached the road, which was swarming with disorientated Highlanders. They were fleeing, but their own entanglement was in the way. Briefly they paused, then they started running parallel to it. To our tumultuous shouts, they had to run the gauntlet. And that was the moment little Schultz turned up with his machine-guns.

The road presented an apocalyptic scene. Death was reaping great swathes. The echoing cry of war, the intense fire of handguns, the dull force of bombs, all exhilarated the attackers and lamed the defenders. All that long day the battle had been smouldering away; now it caught and burned. Our superiority grew with every second, because the narrow wedge of shock troops, now fanning out, was followed by broad sections of reinforcements.

When I reached the road, I looked down on to it from a steep embankment. The Scottish position was in a deepened ditch on the other side, it was some way below where we were. In those first few seconds, though, we were distracted from it; the vision of the Highlanders charging along the wire entanglement was all we had eyes for. We threw ourselves down along the top of the embankment, and fired. It was one of those very rare moments when the opposition have been driven into an impasse, and you feel the burning desire to be everywhere at once.

Swearing and trying desperately to fix my jammed pistol, I felt someone striking me hard on the shoulder. I spun round and looked into the contorted face of little Schultz.

‘The bloody bastards are still firing!’ I followed the direction he was pointing in, and finally spotted a line of figures in the little warren of trenches barely the other side of the road from us, some loading, some with their rifles to their cheeks, feverishly busy. From the right came the first hand-grenades, one tossing the body of a Scotsman high up into the air.

Common sense advised staying where we were and disabling the enemy from there. He was an easy target. Instead, I threw away my rifle and plunged between the lines with my bare fists. Unluckily, I was still in my English coat, and my red-trimmed forage cap. There I was already, on the other side, and in enemy clothes! In the midst of the rush of victory, I felt a sharp jolt on the left side of my breast. Night descended on me! I was finished.

I supposed I’d been hit in the heart, but the prospect of death neither hurt nor frightened me. As I fell, I saw the smooth, white pebbles in the muddy road; their arrangement made sense, it was as necessary as that of the stars, and certainly great wisdom was hidden in it. That concerned me, and mattered more than the slaughter that was going on all round me. I fell to the ground, but, to my astonishment, I got to my feet again straight away. As I could see no hole in my tunic, I turned to the enemy once more. A soldier from my company ran up to me: ‘Lieutenant, sir, take your coat off!’ and he ripped the dangerous garment from my shoulders.

A new cheer rent the air. From the right, where all afternoon they had been working with hand-grenades, a number of Germans now ran across the road in support, headed by a young officer in brown corduroy. It was Kius. He was lucky enough to have been sent flying by a trip-wire in the very instant that an English machine-gun was about to fire its last rounds. The spray of bullets flew past him – so close, admittedly, that a bullet ripped open a wallet he carried in his trouser pocket. The Scots were now dealt with in moments. The area around the road was covered with the dead, while the few survivors were pursued by bullets.

In the brief seconds of my unconsciousness, little Schultz had also met his fate. As I was to hear later on, in that raving of his with which he had infected me, he had leaped into the trench to carry on rampaging there. When a Scot, who had already taken off his belt to surrender, saw him charging towards him in that condition, he picked up a rifle off the ground, and brought him down with a mortal bullet.

I stood, talking to Kius, in the conquered stretch of trench, heavy with the fog of hand-grenades. We were talking about how we should take the field guns that must be very near by. Suddenly he interrupted me: ‘Are you wounded? There’s blood coming out under your tunic!’ Indeed, I could feel a curious lightness and a sensation of damp on my chest. We tore open my shirt, and saw that a bullet had passed through my chest directly under my Iron Cross, and diagonally over my heart. There was a little round entry wound on the right, and a slightly larger exit wound on the left. Since I had been leaping from left to right across the road, at a sharp angle, there was no doubt but that one of our troops had taken me for a Britisher, and shot at me from very close range. I strongly suspected it might be the man who had torn off my coat, and yet he had meant well by me, so to speak, and I had myself to blame.

Kius wrapped a bandage round me and with some difficulty prevailed upon me to leave the battlefield. We parted with a: ‘See you in Hanover!’

I chose a fellow to accompany me, and returned to the fire-swept road, to pick up my map case, which my unknown helper had pulled off me along with the English coat. It contained my diary. Then we walked back, through the trench we had fought so hard to take.

Our battle cries had been so loud that the enemy artillery had woken up. The area beyond the road and the trench itself was under an extraordinarily thick barrage. Since the wound I had was quite sufficient for me, I made my way back cautiously, dodging from traverse to traverse.

Suddenly there was a deafening crash on the edge of the trench. I got a blow on the skull, and fell forward unconscious. When I came round, I was dangling head down over the breech of a heavy machine-gun, staring down at a pool of blood that was growing alarmingly fast on the floor of the trench. The blood was running down so unstoppably that I lost all hope. As my escort assured me he could see no brains, I took courage, picked myself up, and trotted on. That was what I got for being so foolish as to go into battle without a steel helmet.

In spite of my twofold haemorrhage, I was terribly excited, and told everyone I passed in the trench that they should hurry to the line, and join the battle. Before long, we were out of range of the light artillery, and could slow down, as the isolated heavy shells would only strike you if your number was up.

In the sunken road leading from Noreuil, I passed the brigade headquarters, had myself announced to Major-General Hobel, reported to him on our triumph, and asked him to send reinforcements to help the storm troops. The general told me I’d been reported dead the day before. It wasn’t the first time that had happened in this war. Perhaps someone had seen me collapse in the assault on the first trench where the shrapnel wounded Haake.

I learned further that our progress had been slower than had been hoped. Evidently, we had been up against some elite troops of the British; our advance had gone through a series of strong-points. The railway embankment had barely been grazed by our heavy artillery; we had simply charged it, in defiance of all the rules of warfare. We had not managed to reach Mory. Perhaps we could have done, had our artillery not got in our way. The opposition had been reinforced overnight. Everything that could be achieved by will-power had been, and perhaps more; the general conceded that.

In Noreuil, we passed a great stack of grenade boxes well ablaze. We hurried past with very mixed feelings. Just after the village, a driver gave me a ride on his empty munitions lorry. I had a sharp difference of opinion with the officer in charge of the munitions column, who wanted to have two wounded Britishers who had supported me for the latter part of the journey thrown off the lorry.

The traffic on the Noreuil-Queant road was quite indescribable. No one who has not seen such a thing for himself can have any idea of the endless columns of vehicles and men that go towards making an offensive. Beyond Queant, the crush became mythical. I felt a momentary pang when passing little Jeanne’s house, which was reduced to its foundations.

I sought help from one of the traffic officers, distinguished by white armbands, who gave me a place in a private car to the field hospital at Sauchy-Cauchy. We were regularly made to wait for up to half an hour while wagons and lorries got disentangled on the road. Even though the doctors in the field hospital were feverishly busy, the surgeon found time to be surprised at the luck I’d had with my injuries. The wound to my head also had entry and exit wounds, and the skull had not been fractured. Far more painful than the wounds, which to me had felt like dull blows, was the treatment I received from a hospital assistant, once the doctor had stylishly pushed a probe through both wounds. That treatment consisted of scraping the edges of the wound to my head with a blunt blade and no soap.

After an excellent night’s sleep, I was driven the following morning to the casualty clearing-station at Cantin, where I was delighted to see Sprenger, whom I hadn’t seen since the beginning of the offensive. He had a bullet wound to the thigh. I also found my baggage waiting for me – further proof, if proof were needed, of Vinke’s dependability. He had, once we had lost sight of one another, been wounded in the attack on the railway embankment. Before taking himself to the field hospital, and thence back to his farm in Westphalia, he would not rest until he knew that the things of mine that were in his care were safely in my possession. That was him all over; not so much a servant as my older comrade. Often enough, when rations were meagre, I would find a piece of butter waiting at my place at table, ‘from a member of the company who wishes to remain nameless’, though it was never hard to guess who. He was no adventurer, like Haller, but he followed me into battle like the squires of yore, and he thought his responsibility lay in nothing less than the care of my person. Long after the war was over, he wrote to me for a photograph ‘so that I can tell the grandchildren about my lieutenant’. It is to him that I owe an insight into the stolidity and decency of the common people, of the character of the territorial soldier.

After a brief stay in the Bavarian field hospital at Montigny, I was put on a hospital train in Douai and taken to Berlin. There, this sixth double-wound of mine healed in a fortnight, just as well as all its predecessors had. The only unpleasant after-effect was an incessant ringing in my ears. As the weeks passed, it grew fainter and finally went away altogether.

It wasn’t until I was back in Hanover that I heard that, along with many other friends and acquaintances, little Schultz had fallen in the fighting. Kius had got away with a harmless abdominal wound. At the same time, his camera had been broken, and a number of photographs of our attack on the railway embankment were lost.

Anyone who witnessed the celebration of our reunion in a little bar in Hanover, at which my brother with his stiff arm and Bachmann with a stiff knee also attended, would hardly have thought that barely a fortnight previously we had all been listening to other music than the merry popping of champagne corks.

Even so, there was a shadow over those days, because before long we understood from the news reports that the offensive had bogged down, and that, in strategic terms, it had failed. This was confirmed for me by the French and British newspapers I read in cafes in Berlin. The Great Battle was a turning-point for me, and not merely because from then on I thought it possible that we might actually lose the war.

The incredible massing of forces in the hour of destiny, to fight for a distant future, and the violence it so surprisingly, stunningly unleashed, had taken me for the first time into the depths of something that was more than mere personal experience. That out the white ribbon of road from the surrounding darkness. The various whinings of the heavy bombs were engulfed by the rolling blasts of their detonation. Then searchlights probed the skies for the treacherous night birds, shrapnels exploded like toys, and tracer shells loped after one another in long chains like fiery wolves.

A persistent smell of carrion hung over the conquered territory, sometimes unbearable, sometimes not so bad, but always nettling the senses like an embassy from another country.

‘Eau d’offensive,’ I heard the voice of an old veteran next to me, as we seemed to have been going down an avenue lined with mass graves for the past several minutes.

From Achiet-le-Grand, we marched along the railway line leading to Bapaume, and then went cross-country to our position. The shelling was pretty lively. When we paused to rest once, a couple of medium shells landed very close. The memory of that unforgettable night of terror on 19 March assailed us. We were approaching the front line when we marched past a rowdy company that had obviously just been relieved, and was standing by; a few dozen shrapnels soon shut them up. With a hail of obscenities, my men dived into the nearest trench. A couple weren’t so lucky, and needed to go back to the field dressing-station to get themselves patched up.

At three o’clock, completely exhausted, I pitched up at my dugout, whose cramped dimensions promised a rather uncomfortable stay.

The reddish light of a candle was burning in a thick fog. I tripped over a tangled mass of legs, and the magic word ‘Relief!’ brought some animation to the place. From an oven-shaped hole came a series of oaths, and then by and by there appeared an unshaven face, a pair of tarnished shoulder-pieces, an ancient uniform, and two clumps of clay, which presumably contained boots. We sat down at the rickety table and sorted out the hand-over, each trying to do the other out of a dozen iron rations and a couple of flare pistols. Then my predecessor was disgorged through the narrow entryway, predicting that the rotten hole wouldn’t last another three days. I remained behind, the newly promoted captain of A Sector.

The position, when I came to inspect it the following morning, was not a gladsome sight. No sooner had I left the dugout than I saw two bloodied coffee-carriers coming towards me, who had been hit by shrapnel in the communication trench. A few steps along, and Fusilier Ahrens reported himself hit by a ricochet and unfit to continue.

We had the village of Bucquoy ahead of us and Puisieux-au-Mont at our backs. The company was without support in a shallow position, separated from our neighbours on the right, the 76th infantry, by a wide untenanted gap. The left edge of our sector was formed by a piece of splintered woodland, known as Copse 125. In compliance with orders, no deep dugouts had been excavated. We were not to dig in, but remain on the offensive. We didn’t even have any wire entanglements in front of the line. The men sheltered by twos in little holes in the ground with so-called tin Siegfrieds in front of them – curved ovals of corrugated metal about three feet high, which we put in front of the tight oven-shaped hide-outs.

Since my own dugout was behind another sector, I started by looking for new accommodation. A hut-like construction in a collapsed bit of trench looked like just the thing to me, once I had made it into a defensible proposition by hauling together various murderous weapons. There, with my orderlies, I led a hermit’s life in the open, only occasionally bothered by runners or messengers who brought their pieces of bumf even into this secluded spot. I would shake my head as I read, between the explosions of shells, of how, among other less-than-earth-shattering items, the local commandant of X had lost his black-and-brown terrier who answered to the name of Zippi; that is, if I didn’t happen to be reading about a suit for maintenance brought by a serving girl, Makeben, against one Corporal Meyer. Sketches and frequent announcements kept us continually on the hop.

But to get back to my refuge, which I named ‘Casa Wahnfried’. My only worry was its relative porosity; though it was secure enough, so long as nothing landed on top of it. At any rate, I was comforted by the thought that I was no better off than my men. At lunchtime, Haller would lay a blanket in a huge crater, which we had made a path to, for me to use as a suntrap. There, I would work on my tan, disturbed, on occasion, by shells or whizzing fragments of metal coming too near.

The nights brought heavy bombardments like swift, devastating summer thunderstorms. I would lie on my bunk on a mattress of fresh grass, and listen, with a strange and quite unjustified feeling of security, to the explosions all around that sent the sand trickling out of the walls. Or I would walk out to the fire-step to take in the mournful nocturnal scene, and the strange contrast between its heaviness and the fiery spectacle whose dance-floor it was.

At such moments, there crept over me a mood I hadn’t known before. A profound reorientation, a reaction to so much time spent so intensely, on the edge. The seasons followed one another, it was winter and then it was summer again, but it was still war. I felt I had got tired, and used to the aspect of war, but it was from this familiarity that I observed what was in front of me in a new and subdued light. Things were less dazzlingly distinct. And I felt that the purpose with which I had gone out to fight had been used up, and no longer held. The war posed new, deeper puzzles. It was a strange time altogether.

The front line had relatively little to suffer from the enemy bombardment, which was just as well, because it could not have held if it had. It was principally Puisieux and the hollows around that were targets for the bombardments that in the evenings worked themselves up into extraordinary ferocity. Bringing food and relieving other units were both greatly complicated. Now here, now there, a chance hit would knock out a link of our chain.

On 14 June, I was relieved at two in the morning by Kius, who like me had come back and was now commanding the 2nd Company. We spent our rest period at the railway embankment at Achiet-le-Grand, in barracks and shelters in the lee of its protective bulk. The British often sent heavy low-trajectory shells our way. Rackebrand, a sergeant with the 3rd Company, fell victim to one such. He was killed by a shard that drilled through the wall of the flimsy hut that he had set up as a company office on top of the embankment. A few days before that, there had been a real catastrophe. A bomber pilot had dropped a bomb right on top of the 76th regimental band as it was playing, surrounded by listeners. Among its victims were many men from our regiment.

In the vicinity of the embankment, looking like stranded hulls, were many shot-up tanks, which I would inspect closely in the course of my peregrinations. Also, I would have my company cluster round them to study methods of combating them, their tactics and their weak points – these ever-more commonly seen elephants of the technical war. They carried names and emblems and designs that were variously ironic, menacing or lucky; there was the clover leaf and the pig (for luck), and the white death’s head. One was distinguished by a gallows with a noose dangling from it; that one was called ‘Judge Jeffries’. All of them were in a bad way. To be in the narrow turret of such a tank, going forward, with its tangle of rods and wires and poles, must have been extremely unpleasant as these colossuses, in efforts to outmanoeuvre the artillery, were forced to zigzag over the country like huge helpless beetles. I felt keen sympathy for the men in those fiery furnaces. Also, the countryside was dotted about with the skeletal wreckage of downed aeroplanes, an indication that machines were playing an ever greater part on the battlefield.

One afternoon, not far from us, the huge white bell of a parachute came down, as a pilot leaped from his burning aeroplane.

On the morning of 18 June, on account of the volatile situation, the 7th was obliged to go back to Puisieux ahead of time, to be at the disposal of the commanding officer of the line troops for carrying parties and other purposes. We moved into shelters and basements facing out towards Bucquoy. Just as we arrived there, a group of heavy shells came down in the surrounding gardens. Even so, I wasn’t deterred from taking my breakfast in a little gazebo in front of my shelter. After a while there was another one came whistling across. I dropped flat on the ground. Flames spurted beside me. An ambulanceman in my company by the name of Kenziora, who was just bringing several cooking pans full of water, fell, hit in the stomach. I ran over to him, and with the help of a signalman, dragged him into the dressing-station, whose entrance, as luck would have it, was just opposite the place where the shell burst.

‘Well, did you at least have a proper breakfast inside you?’ asked Doctor Koppen, a real old sawbones, who had had me under him once or twice in his time, as he bandaged up the big wound in his belly.

‘Yes, I did, a big dixie full of noodles!’ whimpered the unhappy fellow, perhaps catching a ray of hope.

‘Well, there you are then,’ Koppen said reassuringly, before turning aside to me and nodding at me with a grave expression on his face.

But gravely wounded men have very acute instincts. Suddenly the man groaned, and large beads of sweat stood out on his forehead: ‘That shell’s done for me, I can feel it.’ But in spite of his prediction, I was able to shake his hand six months later, when the regiment returned to Hanover.

In the afternoon, I took a solitary walk through the devastated village of Puisieux. It had already received a hammering in the course of the battles of the Somme. The craters and ruins had been overgrown with thick grass, dotted about here and there with the gleaming white plates of elderflower, which loves ruins. Numerous fresh explosions had ripped holes in the cover, and exposed the soil all over again.

The main village street was lined with the debris of our recent stalled advance. Shot-up wagons, discarded munitions, rusty pistols and the outlines of half-decomposed horses, seen through fizzing clouds of dazzling flies, commented on the nullity of everything in battle. All that was left of the church standing on the highest spot of the village was a wretched heap of stones. While I picked a bunch of half-wild roses, landing shells reminded me to be careful in this place where Death danced.

A few days later, we relieved the 9th Company in the line of resistance, some five hundred yards behind the front. In the process, we of the 7th suffered three men wounded. The following morning, just by my dugout, Captain von Ledebur was wounded in the foot by a shrapnel ball. Even though he had galloping consumption, he felt the war was his vocation. It was his fate to succumb to that slight wound. He died soon after, in hospital. On the 28th, the commander of my ration party, Sergeant Gruner, was hit by a shell splinter. That was our ninth casualty in a short space of time.

Following a week on the front line, we were again moved back to the resistance line, since the battalion which was to relieve us was almost wiped out by Spanish influenza. Several men a day reported sick in our company as well. In the division next to ours, the epidemic raged to such an extent that an enemy airman dropped leaflets promising that the British would come and relieve them, if the unit weren’t withdrawn. But we learned that the sickness was also spreading among the enemy; even though we, with our poor rations, were more prone to it. Young men in particular sometimes died overnight. And all the time we were to be battle-ready, as there was a continuous cloud of black smoke hanging over Copse 125 at all times, as over a witches’ cauldron.

The shelling was so intense there, that on days of no wind the explosive vapours were strong enough to poison part of the 6th Company. We had to go down into the shelters, like divers with oxygen masks, to drag the unconscious men back to the surface. Their faces were cherry-red, and their breath came in nightmarish gasps.

One afternoon, stepping out of my sector, I came upon several half-buried boxes of British munitions. To study the construction of a rifle-grenade, I unscrewed one, and took out the detonator. Something was left behind, which I took to be the percussion cap. However, when I tried to unpick it with my nail, it turned out to be a second detonator, which exploded with a loud bang, took off the tip of my left index finger, and gave me several bleeding wounds in the face.

That same evening, as I was standing talking to Lieutenant Sprenger on top of my dugout, a heavy shell hit near us. We disagreed about the distance, Sprenger reckoning it was about ten paces off, I nearer thirty. To see how trustworthy my estimates might be in this respect, I stepped it out, and found the crater -of a size to accord with an unpleasant manufacture – to be twenty-five yards away.

The 20th of July found us back in Puisieux. I spent all afternoon standing on a piece of crumbling wall, and watched the condition of the line, which looked rather ominous to me. Occasional details I wrote down in my notebook.

Copse 125 was regularly sheeted in thick smoke rising from the massive explosions, under red and green flares that rose and fell. If the artillery was silent for any time, you could hear the tactactac of machine-guns, and the dull crack of hand-grenades going off in the distance. From where I stood, the whole thing looked almost like a game. It lacked the brutish scale of a big battle, but one could feel the tenacious wrestling for all that.

The copse was like a festering wound that both sides nagged and worried at. Both sets of artillery toyed with it, like a couple of beasts of prey, wrangling over a victim; they shredded its trees and flicked them into the air. It never had very large numbers of men in it, but it could be defended, and, as it was so conspicuous in that wasteland all around, it was always available as an instance of the way that even the most gigantic confrontation of forces is nothing but a mechanism by which today, as in every era throughout history, a man’s weight is taken.

Towards evening, I was summoned to the commander of the troops in reserve, where I was told that the enemy had managed to penetrate the trench network on our left flank. In order to clear a little space in front of us again, the instructions were that Lieutenant Petersen with the storm company was to clear the hedge trench, while I with my men cleared the communication trench that ran in a hollow parallel to it.

We set out at daybreak, but immediately came under such strong infantry fire that we postponed our mission. I ordered Elbinger Alley to be occupied, and caught up on some sleep in a huge cavern of a dugout. At eleven in the morning I was woken up by cracks of hand-grenades coming from our left, where we had put up a barricade. I hurried over, and found the usual scene of close-quarters fighting. White hand-grenade clouds whirling over the barricade, machine-guns on either side set back a few traverses clattering away at each other. And in between men, leaping forward and darting back. The minor essay by the British had already been repulsed, but it had cost us a man lying behind the barricade, shredded by hand-grenade splinters.

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.

At seven-fifteen, I received very belated orders, from which I understood that at seven- thirty a strong bombardment would commence, and that at eight o’clock two sections of the storm company under Lieutenant Voigt were to break out across the barricade in the Hedge Trench. They were to roll up the trench as far as point A, and meet up with a shock troop that would proceed along a parallel line to the right of them. Two sections of my company were to follow on behind and occupy the trench.

I quickly issued the necessary commands – the artillery barrage was already beginning – picked out the two sections, and had a brief discussion with Voigt, who set out a few minutes afterwards, as per the instructions I’d received. As I thought of the whole business as a kind of glorified evening constitutional, with no further consequences, I strolled behind my two sections, in a cap, and with a stick-bomb under my arm. At the moment of the attack, announced by clouds of explosions, every rifle anywhere near was directed at the Hedge Trench. We darted forward from traverse to traverse, and made good headway. The British retreated to a line behind, leaving one casualty.

To explain what happened next, I must remind the reader that we were not following the line of a trench, but one of many communication lines, where the British, or rather the New Zealanders, had established a foothold. (We were fighting, as I learned after the war, from letters addressed to me from the Antipodes, against a contingent from New Zealand.) This communications line, the so-called Hedge Trench, led along a ridge; on the left and below was the Valley Trench. The Valley Trench, which I had rolled up with Voigt on 22 July, had been abandoned, as described, by the section we had left there; it was now once more occupied, or at least controlled, by the New Zealanders. The two lines were connected by various cross trenches; from the lower parts of the Hedge Trench, we were not able to see down into the Valley Trench.

I was following the section as it worked its way forward, feeling quite chipper, for as yet all I had seen of the enemy had been several figures fleeing over the top. Ahead of me, NCO Meier was bringing up the rear of the section, and, ahead of him, I could sometimes see, depending on the twists and turns of the trench, little Wilzek from my own company. And so we passed a narrow sap, which, climbing up out of the valley, connected with the Hedge Trench, like a kind of tributary. In between its two separate entrances, there was a sort of delta, a mound of earth perhaps five paces long, which had been left to stand. I had just passed the first juncture, Meier was approaching the second.

In trench-fighting, with forks of this kind, one usually posts two men as a sentry to guard the rear. This Voigt had either forgotten to do, or in his haste he had overlooked the sap altogether. In any case, I now heard the NCO ahead of me shout out in alarm, and saw him raise his rifle and fire just past my head into the second fork of the sap.

Since the block of earth meant I couldn’t see into it, I was mystified by this, but all it took was a step back for me to be able to look down the first fork. What I saw was enough to freeze my blood, for there was a strongly built New Zealander practically near enough to touch. At the same time I heard the shouts of still-unseen attackers running up from the valley to cut us off. The New Zealander who had, as if by magic, appeared at our rear, and whom I stood gawping at helplessly, was unhappily for him unaware of my being there. All his attention was on the NCO, to whose shot he replied with a hand-grenade. I watched him detach one of his lemon-shaped bombs to throw at Meier, who tried to escape his death by charging forward. At the same time, I took out the stick-bomb, which was the only weapon I had on me, and didn’t so much throw it as lob it at the feet of the New Zealander in a short arc. I wasn’t there to see him go up, because it was the last possible moment in which I had any chance of being able to make it back. So I dashed back, and just caught a glimpse of little Wilzek, who had been sharp and calm enough to duck under the New Zealander’s grenade, dash past Meier and follow me. One steel egg that was hurled in his direction ripped his belt and the seat of his trousers, but did no further damage. That was how tight the noose was that had been drawn around us, leaving Voigt and the other forty attackers surrounded and doomed. Without guessing anything of the strange event I had witnessed, they felt pressure behind them pushing them to their deaths. Shouts and numerous explosions suggested that they were selling their lives dearly.

To come to their aid, I led cadet Mohrmann’s section forward along Hedge Trench. We were forced to pause by a rain of Stokes bombs. One splinter struck me in the chest, but was stopped by the clasp of my braces.

A vehement artillery bombardment now began. All around geysers of earth spouted up out of various-coloured steam, and the dull thump of shells bursting deep in the earth mingled with a high-pitched metallic yowl that sounded like a circular saw. Blocks of iron burst with incredible vehemence, interspersed with the singing and flickering of clouds of splinters. As there was every prospect of facing an attack, I put on one of the steel helmets I saw lying around, and hurried back to the firing trench with a few companions.

Figures surfaced in front of us. We laid ourselves on the mangled trench walls and fired away. Next to me, a very young soldier was fumbling with the trigger of his machine-gun, and not getting off a single shot, so I tore the thing from him. I fired some shots, but then as in a nightmare the thing failed again; luckily, though, the attackers vanished into trenches and craters as the artillery heated up. As for our own – it seemed to be directed equally against both sides.

As I went into my bunker, followed by an orderly, something struck the trench wall between us, ripping the helmet from my head and hurling it away into the distance. I thought I had caught a whole load of shrapnel, and lay half numbed in my foxhole, whose rim a moment later was struck by a shell. The little space was filled with thick smoke and a long splinter shattered a jar of gherkins at my feet. So as not to be crushed to death, I crawled back out into the trench, and from below urged the two orderlies and my batman to be alert.

It was a grim half-hour; the already reduced company was further mangled. After the artillery fire had abated, I walked the line, inspected the damage, and established that we were down to fifteen men. The long sector could not be held by so few. Therefore I assigned Mohrmann and three men to defend the barricade, and with the rest formed a hedgehog in a deep crater behind the back wall. From there, we could take a hand in the fight for the barricade, or, if the enemy succeeded in breaking into our line, attack him with hand-grenades from above. In the event, further action was limited to a few light mortars and rifle-grenades.

On 27 July, we were relieved by a company of the 164th. We were utterly exhausted. The commander of the relieving company was badly wounded on the way out; a few days later, my bunker was hit, and his successor buried. We all sighed with relief when we finally turned our backs on Puisieux and the storm of steel of the finale.

Their advances showed how much the enemy’s strength was increasing, supplemented by drafts from every corner of the earth. We had fewer men to set against them, many were little more than boys, and we were short of equipment and training. It was all we could do to plug gaps with our bodies as the tide flooded in. There wasn’t the wherewithal for great counter-attacks like Cambrai any more.

Later on, when I thought of the way the New Zealanders triumphantly ran up and forced our sections into that deadly bottleneck, it struck me that that was exactly what had happened on 2 December 1917 at Cambrai, but with roles reversed. We had looked into a mirror.