Storm of Steel

Guillemont

On 23 August 1916, we were put on lorries and driven as far as Le Mesnil. Even though we had already heard we were to be posted to the legendary heart of the Battle of the Somme, namely the village of Guillemont, the mood was extraordinarily high. Jokes and witticisms flew from one vehicle to another, to the general merriment of all.

During one stop on the way, a driver split his thumb in the course of crank-starting his lorry. The sight of the wound almost made me ill, I have always been sensitive to such things. I mention this because it seems virtually unaccountable as I witnessed such terrible mutilation in the course of the following days. It’s an example of the way in which one’s response to an experience is actually largely determined by its context.

From Le Mesnil we marched, after dark, to Sailly-Saillisel, where the battalion took off their knapsacks in a large meadow and prepared a storm pack.

Ahead of us rumbled and thundered artillery fire of a volume we had never dreamed of; a thousand quivering lightnings bathed the western horizon in a sea of flame. A continual stream of wounded, with pale, sunken faces, made their way back, often barged aside by clattering guns or munitions columns heading the other way.

A runner from a Wurttemberg regiment reported to me to guide my platoon to the famous town of Combles, where we were to be held in reserve for the time being. He was the first German soldier I saw in a steel helmet, and he straightaway struck me as the denizen of a new and far harsher world. Sitting next to him in the roadside ditch, I questioned him avidly about the state of the position, and got from him a grey tale of days hunkered in craters, with no outside contact or communications lines, of incessant attacks, fields of corpses and crazy thirst, of the wounded left to die, and more of the same. The impassive features under the rim of the steel helmet and the monotonous voice accompanied by the noise of the battle made a ghostly impression on us. A few days had put their stamp on the runner, who was to escort us into the realm of flame, setting him inexpressibly apart from us.

‘If a man falls, he’s left to lie. No one can help. No one knows if he’ll return alive. Every day we’re attacked, but they won’t get through. Everyone knows this is about life and death.’

Nothing was left in this voice but equanimity, apathy; fire had burned everything else out of it. It’s men like that that you need for fighting.

We were marching along a wide road, which ran in the moonlight like a white ribbon across the dark countryside, towards the thunder of guns, whose voracious roar grew ever more immeasurable. Abandon all hope! What gave the scene a particularly sinister aspect was the way all the roads were clearly visible, like a network of white veins in the moonlight, and there was no living being on them. We marched as on the gleaming paths of a midnight cemetery.

Before long the first shells landed left and right of us. Conversations grew quieter and stopped altogether. We listened to the whining approach of each shell with the strange tenseness that seems somehow to sharpen one’s hearing. The first real challenge that confronted us was crossing Fregicourt-Ferme, a small cluster of houses just past the graveyard at Combles. That was where the noose that had been drawn around Combles was tightest.

Everyone wanting to enter or leave the town had to pass through here, and so incessant very heavy fire, like the focused beams of a magnifying glass, was concentrated on this one little lifeline. Our guide had warned us about this notorious bottleneck; we passed through it at the double, while the ruins clattered around us.

Over the ruins, as over all the most dangerous parts of the terrain, lay a heavy smell of death, because the fire was so intense that no one could bother with the corpses. You really did have to run for your life in these places, and when I caught the smell of it as I ran, I was hardly surprised – it belonged to there. Moreover, this heavy sweetish atmosphere was not merely disgusting; it also, in association with the piercing fogs of gunpowder, brought about an almost visionary excitement, that otherwise only the extreme nearness of death is able to produce.

Here, and really only here, I was to observe that there is a quality of dread that feels as unfamiliar as a foreign country. In moments when I felt it, I experienced no fear as such but a kind of exalted, almost demoniacal lightness; often attended by fits of laughter I was unable to repress.

So far as we were able to see in the dark, Combles was a mere skeleton of its former self. Great amounts of wood and jettisoned household objects told us that its destruction was very recent. After crossing numerous piles of junk, sped on our way by a stream of shrapnels, we reached our quarters, a large house riddled with holes, which I chose for my base with three of my sections, while the other two settled into the basement of a ruin across the way.

At four o’clock already we were roused from our beds put together from bits of furniture, to be given our steel helmets. Coincidentally, we also stumbled upon a sack of coffee beans hidden in the cellar – a discovery swiftly followed by an eager brew-up.

After breakfast, I took a little look around the place. In the course of a very few days, heavy artillery had transformed a peaceable town in the hinterland to the image of dread. Whole houses had been flattened or ripped apart by shells, so that the rooms and their furnishings were left hanging over the chaos like theatre flats. The smell of corpses oozed from some buildings, because the first abrupt assault had taken the inhabitants by surprise, and buried many of them in the ruins before they could leave their dwellings. On one doorstep lay a little girl, stretched out in a lake of crimson.

All that was left of the streets were narrow footpaths that went snaking through huge mounds of beams and masonry. Fruit and vegetables were mouldering away in the ravaged gardens.

After lunch, which we put together in the kitchen from an over-supply of iron rations, and which was concluded, of course, by a potent cup of coffee, I went and stretched out in an armchair upstairs. From letters that were lying around I saw that the house had belonged to a brewer by the name of Lesage. There were open cupboards and wardrobes in the room, an upset washstand, a sewing-machine and a pram. On the walls hung smashed paintings and mirrors. On the floor were drifts, sometimes several feet deep, of drawers pulled out of chests, linen, corsets, books, newspapers, nightstands, broken glass, bottles, musical scores, chair legs, skirts, coats, lamps, curtains, shutters, doors off their hinges, lace, photographs, oil paintings, albums, smashed chests, ladies’ hats, flowerpots and wallpaper, all tangled together.

Through the splintered shutters, the view was of a square furrowed by bombs, under the boughs of a ragged linden. This confusion of impressions was further darkened by the incessant artillery fire that was raging round the town. From time to time, the gigantic impact of a fifteen-inch shell drowned out all other noise. Clouds of shards washed through Combles, splattering against the branches of the trees, or striking the few intact roofs, sending the slates slithering down.

In the course of the afternoon, the bombing swelled to such a pitch that all that was left was the feeling of a kind of oceanic roar, in which individual sounds were completely subordinated. From seven o’clock, the square and the houses on it were subjected to fifteen-inch-shell bombardment at thirty-second intervals. There were many that did not go off, whose short, dull thumps shook the house to its foundations. Throughout, we sat in our basement, on silk-upholstered armchairs round a table, with our heads in our hands, counting the seconds between explosions. The witticisms dried up, and finally the boldest of us had nothing to say. At eight o’clock the house next door came down after taking two direct hits; its collapse occasioned a huge cloud of dust.

From nine till ten, the shelling acquired a demented fury. The earth shook, the sky seemed like a boiling cauldron. Hundreds of heavy batteries were crashing away at and around Combles, innumerable shells criss-crossed hissing and howling over our heads. All was swathed in thick smoke, which was in the ominous underlighting of coloured flares. Because of racking pains in our heads and ears, communication was possible only by odd, shouted words. The ability to think logically and the feeling of gravity, both seemed to have been removed. We had the sensation of the ineluctable and the unconditionally necessary, as if we were facing an elemental force. An NCO in No. 3 Platoon went into a frenzy.

At ten o’clock, this infernal carnival gradually seemed to calm itself, and settled into a sedate drumfire, in which, admittedly, one still was not able to make out an individual shot.

At eleven o’clock, a runner arrived with orders to take the men out on to the church square. We joined up with the other two platoons in marching order. A fourth platoon, under Lieutenant Sievers, had dropped out because they were to take provisions up to the front. They now ringed us as we assembled in this Perilous location, and loaded us with bread, tobacco and canned meat. Sievers insisted I take a pan of butter, shook hands, and wished us luck.

Then we marched off in Indian file. Everyone was under strict orders absolutely to stay in touch with the man in front. No sooner were we out of the village, than our guide realized he’d gone wrong. We were forced, under heavy shrapnel fire, to retrace our steps. Then, mostly at a jog, we crossed open country, following a white ribbon laid out to guide us, though it was shot in pieces. We were forced to stop periodically, often in the very worst places, when our guide lost his way. To keep the unit together, we were not allowed to lie down or take cover.

Even so, the first and third platoon had suddenly vanished. On, on! In one violently bombarded defile, the sections backed up. Take cover! A horribly penetrating smell told us that this passage had already taken a good many lives. After running for our lives, we managed to reach a second defile which concealed the dugout of the front line commanding officer, then we lost our way again, and in a painful crush of excited men, had to turn back once more. At the most five yards from Vogel and me, a middle-sized shell struck the bank behind us with a dull thump, and hurled mighty clods of earth over us, as we thought our last moment had come. Finally, our guide found the path again – a strangely constellated group of corpses serving as landmark. One of the dead lay there as if crucified on the chalk slope. It was impossible to imagine a more appropriate landmark.

On, on! Men collapsed while running, we had to threaten them to use the last energy from their exhausted bodies. Wounded men went down left and right in craters – we disregarded their cries for help. We went on, eyes implacably on the man in front, through a knee-high trench formed from a chain of enormous craters, one dead man after another. At moments, we felt our feet settling on soft, yielding corpses, whose form we couldn’t make out on account of the darkness. The wounded man collapsing on the path suffered the same fate; he too was trampled underfoot by the boots of those hurrying ever onwards.

And always the sweetish smell! Even little Schmidt, my orderly, who had accompanied me on the odd perilous reconnaissance, was beginning to reel. I snatched his rifle out of his hands, which even in his extremity, the good lad tried to resist.

At last we reached the front line, which was occupied by men huddled together in little holes. Their dull voices trembled with joy when they learned that we were come to relieve them. A Bavarian sergeant handed over the sector and his flare pistol to me with a few words.

My platoon’s sector was on the right flank of the regiment’s position, and consisted of a defile hammered by constant shelling into little more than a dip, running through open country from a couple of hundred paces to the left of Guillemont, to a little less than that to the right of the Bois de Trones. Some five hundred paces separated us from the troops to our right, the 76th Infantry. The shelling here was so heavy that nothing could survive.

Suddenly the Bavarian sergeant had disappeared, and I stood all alone, with my flare pistol in my hand, in the midst of that eerie cratered landscape, masked now by patches of creeping fog. Behind me I heard a stifled, unpleasant sound; with a degree of calm that astonished me, I registered that it came from a bloated disintegrating corpse.

Since I had no idea as to the enemy’s possible whereabouts, I went back to my men and told them to be ready for the worst. All of us stayed awake; I spent the night with Paulicke and my two orderlies in a foxhole no bigger than a cubic yard.

When morning paled, the strange surroundings gradually revealed themselves to our disbelieving eyes.

The defile proved to be little more than a series of enormous craters full of pieces of uniform, weapons and dead bodies; the country around, so far as the eye could see, had been completely ploughed by heavy shells. Not a single blade of grass showed itself. The churned-up field was gruesome. In among the living defenders lay the dead. When we dug foxholes, we realized that they were stacked in layers. One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors’ place. And now it was our turn.

The defile and the land behind was strewn with German dead, the field ahead with British. Arms and legs and heads stuck out of the slopes; in front of our holes were severed limbs and bodies, some of which had had coats or tarpaulins thrown over them, to save us the sight of the disfigured faces. In spite of the heat, no one thought of covering the bodies with earth.

The village of Guillemont seemed to have disappeared without trace; just a whitish stain on the cratered field indicated where one of the limestone houses had been pulverized. In front of us lay the station, crumpled like a child’s toy; further to the rear the woods of Delville, ripped to splinters.

No sooner had day broken than a low-flying RAF plane whirled towards us, and, vulture-like, began drawing its circles overhead, while we fled into our holes and huddled together. The sharp eye of the observer must have noticed something anyway, because before long the plane began to emit a series of low, long-drawn-out siren tones, coming at short intervals. They put one in mind of the cries of a fabulous creature, hanging pitilessly over the desert.

A little later, and the battery seemed to have taken the signals. One heavy, low-arcing shell after the other came barging along with incredible force. We sat helplessly in our refuges, lighting a cigar and then throwing it away again, prepared at any moment to find ourselves buried. Schmidt’s sleeve was sliced open by a large shard.

With only the third shell the fellow in the hole next to ours was buried by an enormous explosion. We dug him up again right away; even so, the weight of the masses of earth had left him deathly tired, his face sunken, like a skull. It was Private Simon. His experience had made him wise, because each time anyone moved around in the open while there were aeroplanes about, I could hear his furious voice and a fist waving from the opening of his tarpaulin-covered foxhole.

At three in the afternoon my sentries came to me from the left and stated that they were unable to hold out where they were any longer, as their holes had been shot away. I had to display my full authority to get them back to their stations. What helped me make my case was the fact that I myself was in the place of greatest danger.

A little before ten o’clock at night, a fire-storm was directed at the left flank of the regiment, which, twenty minutes later, had moved over to us. Soon we were completely wrapped in smoke and dust, but most of the shells came down just behind or just in front of our trench, if one can use that word for our smashed hollow. As the storm raged around us, I walked up and down my sector. The men had fixed bayonets. They stood stony and motionless, rifle in hand, on the front edge of the dip, gazing into the field. Now and then, by the light of a flare, I saw steel helmet by steel helmet, blade by glinting blade, and I was overcome by a feeling of invulnerability. We might be crushed, but surely we could not be conquered.

In the platoon to the left of us, Sergeant Hock, the unfortunate rat-catcher of Monchy, aimed to discharge a white flare, picked up the wrong flare, and instead sent up a red barrage light, which was taken up in all quarters. Straight away our own artillery opened up, and it was a joy to behold. One shell after another came yowling down out of the sky and showered the field ahead of us in a fountain of shards and sparks on impact. A mixture of dust, stale gases and the reek of flung carcasses brewed up from the craters.

After this orgy of destruction, the shelling quickly flooded back to its previous levels. One man’s slip of the hand had got the whole titanic machinery of war rolling.

Hock was and remained an unlucky fellow; that same night, as he was loading his pistol, he shot a flare into his bootleg, and had to be carried back with grave burns.

The following day, it rained hard, which was no bad thing so far as we were concerned, as once the dust turned to mud the feeling of dryness in our mouths wasn’t so tormenting, and the great clumps of monstrous blue-black flies basking in the sun – they were like velvet cushions to look at – were finally dispersed. I spent almost the whole day sitting on the ground in front of my foxhole, smoking and eating, in spite of the surroundings, with a healthy appetite.

The following morning, Fusilier Knicke in my platoon got a rifle shot from somewhere through the chest and against his spine, so that he lost the use of his legs. When I went to see how he was, he was lying soberly in a hole in the ground, looking like a man who had come to terms with his own death. That evening he was carried back through the bombardment, in the course of which, when the stretcher-bearers suddenly had to dive for cover, he suffered an additional broken leg. He died at the dressing-station.

That afternoon one of my men had me come over and look in the direction of Guillemont station, from behind a torn-off British leg. Hundreds of British soldiers were running forward through a flat communication trench, little troubled by the weak gunfire we were able to direct at them. The scene was indicative of the inequality of the resources with which we had to fight. Had we essayed the same thing, our units would have been shot to pieces in a matter of minutes. While on our side there wasn’t a single captive balloon to be seen anywhere, the British had about thirty clustered into one vast luminous-yellow bunch, watching with Argus eyes for the least movement to show itself any – where in the crumpled landscape, to have a hail of steel directed against it.

In the evening, as I gave out the password, a large shell fragment came buzzing into my stomach. Fortunately, it was almost spent, and so merely struck my belt buckle hard and fell to the ground. I was so astonished that it took the concerned cries of my men, and their offers of water from their canteens, to show me that I’d had a near thing.

At dusk, two members of a British ration party lost their way, and blundered up to the sector of the line that was held by the first platoon. They approached perfectly serenely; one of them was carrying a large round container of food, the other a longish tea kettle. They were shot down at point-blank range; one of them landing with his upper body in the defile, while his legs remained on the slope. It was hardly possible to take prisoners in this inferno, and how could we have brought them back through the barrage in any case?

It was almost one o’clock in the morning when I was roused by Schmidt from my half-sleep. Instantly I leaped up, and reached for my rifle. Our relief had come. We handed over what there was to be handed over, and as quickly as possible made our way out of this fiendish place.

But no sooner had we reached the shallow communication trench than a first clutch of shrapnels blew up in our midst. One ball smashed the wrist of the man in front of me, sending the arterial blood spurting everywhere. He reeled, and made to lie down on his side. I took him by the arm, pulled him to his feet in spite of his complaints, and only let go of him when we’d reached the dressing-station next to battle headquarters.

Things were pretty ‘hot’ along both the defiles, and we were panting for breath. The worst place was a valley we ended up in, where shrapnels and light shells seemed to go up uninterruptedly. Prruch! Prruch! went the spinning iron, sending a rain of sparks into the night. Wheel Another volley! I gasped because, seconds in advance, I knew from the increasing noise that the arc of the next projectile was heading almost exactly for me. An instant later, there was a heavy crash at my feet, and soft scraps of clay flipped into the air. It was a dud!

Everywhere groups of men, either relieving or being relieved, were hurrying through the night and the bombardment, some of them utterly lost, and groaning with tension and exhaustion; shouts fell, and orders, and in monotonous repetition the long-drawn-out cries for help from the abandoned and the wounded. As we raced on, I gave directions to the lost, pulled some men out of shell-holes, threatened others who wanted to lie down, kept shouting my name, and so brought my platoon, as if by a miracle, back to Combles.

Then we needed to march via Sailly and Gouvernements-Ferme to Hennois woods, where we would bivouac. It was only now that the degree of our exhaustion became fully clear. Heads brutishly down, we slunk along the road, often forced off it by cars or munitions columns. In my unhealthy irritation, I couldn’t help but think that these vehicles followed no other purpose than to annoy us as they sliced past us, and more than once I caught myself reaching for my pistol.

After our march we had to put up tents, and only then could we throw ourselves on the hard ground. During our stay in the forest camp, we endured great storms of rain. The straw in the tents started to moulder, and many men got sick. We five company officers were not much put out by this external wetness, spending our evenings sitting on our cases in our tent, with a few goodly bottles that had been magicked up from somewhere. In such situations, red wine is the best medicine.

On one of these evenings, our Guards counter-attacked and captured the village of Maurepas. While the two sets of artillery were raging against each other over a wide area, a violent storm broke loose overhead, so that, as in the Homeric battle of gods and men, the disturbance below seemed to be vying with that on high.

Three days later, we moved back to Combles, where my platoon this time occupied four smallish basements. These basements were hewn from blocks of chalk, long and narrow and with arched ceilings; they promised security. They seemed to have belonged to a vintner – or that, at any rate, was my explanation for the fact that they afforded small fireplaces broken into the walls. After I’d posted sentries, we stretched out on the many mattresses that our predecessors had lugged into place here.

The first morning, things were relatively calm; I took a walk through the ravaged gardens, and looted delicious peaches from their espaliered boughs. On my wanderings I happened into a house surrounded by tall hedges, which must have belonged to a lover of antiques. On the walls of the rooms hung a collection of painted plates, holy water basins, etchings and wooden carvings of saints. Old china sat in piles in large cupboards, ornate leather-bound volumes were scattered about the floor, among them an exquisite old edition of Don Quixote.

I would have loved to pick up a memento, but I felt like Robinson Crusoe and the lump of gold; none of these things were of any value here. So great bales of beautiful silks rotted away in a workshop, without anyone paying them any attention. You had only to think of the glowing barrage at Fremicourt-Ferme, which cut off this landscape, and you soon thought better of picking up any extra baggage.

When I reached my lodgings, the men were back from foraging trips of their own through the gardens, and had boiled up a soup in which you could stand your spoon out of bully beef, potatoes, peas, carrots, artichokes and various other vegetables. While we were eating, a shell landed on the house, and three others came down nearby, without us lifting our heads. We had seen and been through too much already to care. The house must have seen some bloody happenings already, because on a pile of rubble in the middle room there was a rough cross with a list of names scratched into it.

The next day at lunchtime I went back to the china collector’s house and picked up a volume of the illustrated supplements to Le Petit Journal, then I sat myself down in a reasonably well-preserved room, made a little fire in the hearth with some sticks of furniture, and settled down to read. I had frequent occasion to shake my head, because I had picked up those issues that had appeared at the time of the Fashoda affair. [Town in the Sudan, and site of an Anglo-French colonial standoff in 1898 involving General Kitchener. The French climb-down paved the way for the Entente Cordiale. Rueful reading matter for a German officer in World War I.]

The time I spent reading was punctuated by four bombs hitting the house. At just about seven o’clock I turned the last page, and went down to the passage outside the basement, where the men were preparing supper at a small stove.

No sooner was I standing with them than there was a sharp report outside the front door, and, in the same moment, I felt a piercing blow low down on my left calf. With the immemorial warrior’s refrain ‘I’ve been hit!’ I took off, pipe of shag tobacco in my mouth, down the stairs.

Quickly someone brought light, and the thing was examined. As ever in these affairs, I had someone tell me about it, while I stared at the ceiling; in case it wasn’t a pretty sight. There was a jagged hole in my putties, out of which a fine spray of blood ran down to the floor. On the opposite side of the leg there was the round bulge of a shrapnel ball under the skin.

The diagnosis was straightforward enough – a typical ticket home: nothing very bad, but nothing too light either. Admittedly, I’d left it to the latest possible moment to get ‘a puncture’ if I wasn’t to miss the bus to Germany. There was something deeply improbable about that hit, because the shrapnel had burst on the ground on the other side of the brick wall that surrounded the courtyard. A shell had previously knocked a little round hole in this wall, and a tub with an oleander plant stood in front of it. The ball must therefore have gone through the shell-hole, then through the oleander’s leaves, crossed the yard and the open door, and, of the many legs in front of it, had picked precisely this one of mine.

After my comrades had bandaged up the wound, they carried me across the street – needless to say, through fire – to the catacombs, and there laid me on the operating table. While a breathless Lieutenant Wetje held my head, our medical major cut out the shrapnel ball with scissors and knife, and told me I was a lucky man, because the ball had passed between shinbone and fibula without harming either. ‘Habent sua fata libelli et balli,’ the old corps student observed, while he left a medical orderly to bandage up the wound. [‘Books and bullets have their own destinies.’]

While I lay on a stretcher in a niche in the catacombs waiting for nightfall, I was pleased that a lot of my men came to say goodbye to me. They had a heavy ordeal ahead of them. My revered Colonel von Oppen managed to pay me a short visit.

In the evening I was carried along with the other casualties to the edge of town, and there loaded on to an ambulance. Paying no attention to the cries and screams of his passengers, the driver raced over the craters and other hindrances along the road, heavily bombarded as ever around Fregicourt-Ferme, and finally passed us on to a car that delivered us to the village church at Fins. The switch of cars took place in the middle of the night outside an isolated group of houses, where a doctor examined the bandages and decided our destiny. Half feverish as I was, I had an impression of a young man whose hair had turned completely white, but who tended our wounds with unimaginable care.

The church at Fins was full of hundreds of wounded men. A nurse told me that in the course of the last few weeks; more than thirty thousand casualties had been tended and bandaged here.

Faced with numbers of that order, I felt pretty insignificant with my silly leg wound. From Fins, I was taken along with four other officers to a hospital that had been set up in an affluent house in St-Quentin. When we were unloaded, all the window-panes were jangling; it was exactly the moment when the British, with maximal help from their artillery, were taking Guillemont.

When the stretcher next to mine was lifted out of the car, I heard one of those toneless voices that have remained with me:

‘Take me to the doctor right away, if you will – I’m very poorly – I have a gas phlegmon.’ That was the term for a horrible form of blood poisoning that often sets in after a man has been wounded, and kills him.

I was carried into a room, where twelve beds stood so close together that one had the impression of a room entirely filled with snow-white pillows. Most of the wounds were grave, and there was a commotion in which, in my feverish state, I dreamily participated. Soon after my arrival, for instance, a young man with a bandage wrapped round his head like a turban, leaped up from his bed and addressed us all. I thought it was some rather extravagant sort of joke, only to see him collapse as suddenly as he’d leaped up. His bed was rolled out through a dark little door, amid a rather grim silence.

Next to me lay a pioneer officer. He had trodden on an explosive in the trench, and the contact had caused a long tongue of flame to leap up. His mutilated foot had been placed under a translucent gauze wrapper. He seemed to be in a good humour, and was happy to have found a listener in me. On my left, a very young ensign was on a diet of claret and egg yolks; he was in the very last stages of emaciation. When the sister wanted to make his bed, she picked him up like a feather; through his skin, you could see all the bones in his body. When the sister asked him at night whether he wouldn’t like to write his parents a nice letter,

I guessed it was all up with him, and, indeed, later that night, his bed too was rolled through the dark door to the dying ward.

By noon the next day I was lying in a hospital train that was taking me to Gera, where I was extremely well looked after in the garrison hospital there. A week later, and I was already skipping out in the evenings, though I had to be careful not to run into the head doctor.

It was here that I signed away the three thousand marks that were my entire fortune at the time as a war loan. I never saw them again. As I held the form in my hand, I thought of the beautiful fireworks that the wrong-coloured flare had sparked off – a spectacle that surely couldn’t have cost less than a million.

I return now to the dreadful defile, to view the final act of the drama. My sources are the reports of the few men who were wounded and survived, in particular my orderly, Otto Schmidt.

Following my wounding, my subordinate, Sergeant Heistermann, took over the command of the platoon, and it was he who a few minutes later led the men to the cratered field at Guillemont. With barely a handful of exceptions – those men who were hit during the march, and were fit enough to get back to Combles – the outfit disappeared without trace in the fiery labyrinths of the battle.

The platoon relieved their predecessors, and settled into the now familiar foxholes. The gap on the right flank had now widened, thanks to the incessant withering fire, so that there was no longer any visual communication. On the left side as well, there were now spaces, so that the position resembled a little island adrift in titanic streams of fire. The whole sector was made up of nothing more than similar islands, greater and lesser, but all of them dwindling. The attacker found himself confronting a net whose meshes had grown too wide to catch anything.

And so the night passed, with increasing disquiet. Towards morning, a two-man patrol from the 76th showed up, having groped their way through with incredible difficulty. They went away again into the sea of fire, and that was the last the platoon saw of the outside world. The fire concentrated with ever-growing force on the right flank, and slowly worked to widen the gap, knocking out one pocket of resistance after another.

Towards six in the morning, Schmidt reached for the cooking tin that he kept outside our old foxhole, to get some breakfast, but all he found was a piece of flattened and riddled aluminium. Soon the shelling started up again, and slowly raised itself to a crescendo that was inevitably interpreted as the sign of an imminent attack. Aeroplanes appeared, and, like jabbing vultures, began circling low over the ground.

Heistermann and Schmidt, the only occupants of the tiny hole in the ground that had miraculously survived so long, knew that the moment had come for their stand. As they stepped out into the smoke- and dust-filled defile, they saw they were utterly alone. In the course of the night, the bombardment had smashed the last sparse bits of cover between themselves and the right flank, and buried their occupants under quantities of earth. But to the left of them as well, the rim of the defile turned out to be devoid of defenders. The last remnants of the platoon, among them a machine-gun unit, had withdrawn to a narrow shelter, covered over with planks and a thin layer of soil, half-way along the defile, and in its rear slope, with an entrance at either end of it.

Heistermann and Schmidt now made for this refuge. On the way there, however, the sergeant, whose birthday it happened to be that day, disappeared. He was following Schmidt, coming up to a bend, and was never seen again.

The only man who made it to the little group in the shelter from the right flank was a lance-corporal, with a bandaged face, who suddenly stripped off his bandage, spewed a torrent of blood over the men and their weapons, and lay down to die. All this time, the power and intensity of the bombardment was still waxing; at any moment, the overcrowded shelter, in which no one now could speak, could reckon on being hit.

Further left, a few soldiers from No. 3 Platoon were still tenaciously defending their crater, and it seems that the position was crushed from the right, where the breach had been forced, which was by now a huge cavity. These soldiers must have been the first to have become aware of an incursion of British storm troops following one final inferno of bombing. At any rate, it seems the occupants of the shelter were alerted to the presence of the enemy by a shouted warning from the left.

Schmidt, the last man to have reached the shelter, and therefore sitting nearest the entrance, was the first man to emerge into the defile. He leaped into the spurting cone of a shell. As the smoke cleared, he saw to his right, just by the site of the foxhole that had so stoutly sheltered us, some lurking khaki figures. Simultaneously, the enemy broke through in numbers on the left of the position. What was happening beyond the projecting rim of the defile could not be seen, because of its depth.

In this desperate situation, the next occupants of the shelter, in particular Sergeant Sievers, plunged out with the intact machine-gun and its operator. To set it up on the floor of the defile and aim it at the enemy on the right was the work of seconds. But even as the gunner had his fist on the belt and his finger on the trigger, British hand-grenades were hobbling down the front slope. The two men fell beside their weapon, without managing to get off a shot. Anyone else leaping out of the shelter was received with rifle bullets, so that in the space of a few moments there was a cluster of dead round both entrances.

Schmidt was laid out by the first volley of hand-grenades. One splinter hit him in the head, others tore off three of his fingers. With his face down, he remained close to the shelter, where an exchange of rifle fire and hand-grenades continued for some time.

At last there was silence, and the British took over the last part of the position. Schmidt, perhaps the last living soul in the defile, heard footfalls announcing the approach of the attacker. Shortly after, rifle shots rang out, and explosions and gas bombs, as the shelter was pumped clear. Even then, towards evening, a last few survivors came crawling out of the shelter, from some nook at the back. They probably made up the little group of prisoners that fell into the hands of the enemy storm troops. British stretcher-bearers picked them up and took them away.

Shortly afterwards, Combles too fell, once the noose had been drawn tight around Fregicourt-Ferme. Its last defenders, who had taken refuge in the catacombs during the bombardment, were mown down fighting round the ruins of the church.

Then things went quiet in the area, until we retook it in spring 1918.