Storm of Steel

The Woods of St-Pierre-Vaast

After a fortnight in hospital and another fortnight recuperating, I returned to the regiment, which was positioned at Deuxnouds, hard by the familiar Grande Tranchee. For the first two days after my arrival, it remained there, and then two more days in the old-world hill village of Hattonchatel. Then we steamed out of Mars-la-Tour station back to the Somme.

We were taken off the train at Bohain, and put up in Brancourt. This area, which we often brushed by later, is arable farmland, but almost every house boasts a loom as well.

I was quartered with a couple and their very beautiful daughter. We shared the two rooms of their little cottage, and at night I had to go through the family’s bedroom. On the very first day, the father asked me to compose a letter of complaint to the local commandant, against a neighbour who had grabbed him by the throat, beaten him and, crying ‘Demande pardon!’, threatened to kill him.

As I was on my way out of my room to go on duty, the daughter pushed the door shut against me. I took this to be one of her little jokes, pushed back, and our combined efforts were enough to lift the door off its hinges, and we waltzed round the room holding it between us for a few moments. Suddenly it came down, and to our mutual embarrassment, and her mother’s great hilarity, I saw she was standing there completely naked.

Never in all my life, incidentally, have I heard anyone swear and scold as volubly as that rose of Brancourt did, when a neighbour accused her of having once worked in a certain street in St-Quentin. ‘Ah, cette plure, cette pomme de terre pourrie, jetee sur un fumier, c’est la creme de la creme pourrie,’ she bubbled, as she criss-crossed the room with her hands out in front of her like claws, lacking only a victim for her pent-up rage. [This affair of honour is conducted in almost literally ‘earthy’ language, in which the essential item is a ‘mouldy potato’.]

Things in this village had quite a baronial flavour to them altogether. One evening I was on my way to call on a comrade, who was quartered with the aforementioned neighbour, a rather coarse Flemish beauty, who went by the name of Madame Louise. I went the back way through the gardens of the two houses, and saw Madame Louise through the kitchen window, sitting at the table helping herself from a large pot of coffee. Suddenly, the door opened and in strode the man who had been given such a cosy billet, with the full self-confidence of a sleepwalker and about as fully dressed as one too. Without saying a word, he picked up the coffee pot, and poured a goodly jet of it through the spout straight into his mouth. Then, every bit as laconically, he walked out again. Feeling I would only get in the way of such an idyllic set-up, I quietly went back the way I had come.

There was a relaxed tone in this area, which was in odd contrast to its agricultural character. I think it must have been something to do with the weaving, because in towns and regions where the spindle rules, there seems to be a different spirit to those where, say, there are a lot of blacksmiths.

As we had been settled in various villages and hamlets by the company, there was only a small group of us in the evenings. Our clique normally consisted of Lieutenant Boje, who commanded the 2nd Company, Lieutenant Heilmann, a dogged warrior who had lost an eye, Ensign Gornick, later to join the Paris airmen, and me. Every night we dined on boiled potatoes with tinned goulash, and afterwards the playing cards came out and the odd bottle of ‘Polish Rider’ or Benedictine. The dominant personality was Heilmann, who was one of those people who are resolutely unimpressed by anything.

He was staying in quite a nice billet, had had quite a bad wound, had witnessed quite a sizeable funeral. The only exception was anything relating to his native Upper Silesia, where you could find the biggest village, the biggest goods station and the deepest mineshaft anywhere in the world.

I was now to be used as a scouting officer, and had been assigned to the division with a scout troop and two NCOs. Special assignments like that were really not my line, because to me the company was like a family, and I was loath to leave it before a battle.

On 8 November, the battalion travelled through streaming rain to the now entirely depopulated village of Gonnelieu. From there, the scout troop was detailed to Lieramont and put under the command of the divisional intelligence officer, Captain Bockelmann. Along with four of us troop leaders, a couple of observation officers, and his personal adjutant, the captain occupied a priest’s spacious house, whose rooms we divided among ourselves. On one of our first evenings there, there was a long conversation in the library about the German peace proposals, which had just been made known. Bockelmann put an end to it by remarking that during a war no soldier should be permitted to say the word ‘peace’.

Our predecessors familiarized us with the position of the division. Every night, we had to go to the front. Our task was to reconnoitre the situation, test the communications between the units, and make a picture of everything, so as to put in reinforcements if need be and perform special duties. My own allotted area was just left of the woods of St-Pierre-Vaast, and against another ‘nameless’ wood.

The scene at night was muddy and wild, often with heavy exchanges of artillery. Frequently, yellow rockets were shot off that blew up in the air, and sent a rain of fire cascading down, of a colour that somehow reminded me of the tone of a viola.

That very first night, I lost my way in the pitch black and almost drowned in the swamps of the Tortille stream. It was a place of unfathomable mystery; only the night before, a munitions cart had disappeared without trace in a vast shell-crater hidden under a crust of mud.

Having made good my escape from this wilderness, I tried to make my way to the ‘nameless woods’, where there was a low-level, but unremitting shelling going on. I headed for it pretty insouciantly, because the dull sound of the detonations suggested that the British were shooting off some rather veteran ammunitions. Suddenly, a little puff of wind brought up a sweetish, oniony smell, and at the same time I heard the shout go up in the wood: ‘Gas, gas, gas!’ From a distance, the cry sounded oddly small and plaintive, not unlike a chorus of crickets.

As I heard the next morning, in that hour in the woods a lot of our men died of poisoning from the clouds of heavy phosgene nestling in the undergrowth.

With weeping eyes, I stumbled back to the Vaux woods, plunging from one crater into the next, as I was unable to see anything through the misted visor of my gas mask.

With the extent and inhospitableness of its spaces, it was a night of eerie solitude. Each time I blundered into sentries or troops who had lost their way, I had the icy sensation of conversing not with people, but with demons. We were all roving around in an enormous dump somewhere off the edge of the charted world.

On 12 November, hoping for better luck, I undertook my second mission, which was to test the communications between units in our crater positions. A chain of relays concealed in foxholes led me to my destination.

The term ‘crater positions’ was accurate. On a ridge outside the village of Rancourt, there were numerous craters scattered, some occupied by a few soldiers here and there. The dark plain, criss-crossed by shells, was barren and intimidating.

It wasn’t long before I had lost communication with the chain of craters, and so I headed back, in case I fell into the hands of the French. I encountered an officer I knew from the 164th, who warned me not to hang around as it got lighter. Therefore, I strode rapidly through the nameless woods, staggering through deep pits, over felled trees and an almost impenetrable tangle of branches.

By the time I emerged from the woods, it was day. The cratered field stretched out ahead of me, apparently endlessly, with no sign of life. I paused, because unoccupied terrain is always a sinister thing in a war.

Suddenly a shot rang out, and I was hit in both legs by a sniper’s bullet. I threw myself into the nearest crater, and tied up the wounds with my handkerchief, having of course forgotten my field dressing. A bullet had drilled through my right calf and brushed the left.

Extremely carefully, I crawled back into the woods, and hobbled from there through the heavily shelled terrain towards the dressing-station.

Just before I reached it, there was an instance of the way tiny imponderables can determine one’s fate in a war. I was roughly a hundred yards from a crossroads when the commander of a digging detail I’d been with in the 9th Company called out to me. We had been speaking for barely a minute when a shell landed on the crossroads, which, but for this chance meeting, would probably have cost me my life. It is hard to see these things as completely random.

After dark, I was carried on a stretcher as far as Nurlu, from where the captain picked me up in a car. On the road lit up by enemy searchlights, the driver suddenly braked. There was a dark obstacle in the way. ‘Don’t look!’ said Bockelmann, who had his arm around me. It was a group of infantry with their leader, who had just been killed by a direct hit. The comrades looked like peaceful sleepers as they lay together in death.

In the priest’s house I was given some supper, at least inasmuch as I lay on the sofa in the common room, enjoying a glass of wine. But this cosiness was quickly interrupted by Lieramont’s evening blessing. Bombardments of towns and buildings are especially disagreeable, and so we hurriedly moved down to the cellar, having heard a few times the hissing song with which the iron messengers announced themselves, before they finished in the gardens or among the roofbeams of neighbouring houses.

I was rolled up in a blanket and carried downstairs first. That same night, I was brought to the field hospital at Villeret, and then on to the military hospital in Valenciennes.

The military hospital had been set up in a school building close to the station, and it was presently housing four hundred severe cases. Day after day, a procession of corpses left its portals to a leaden thump of drums. Doctors did their bloody best at a row of operating tables. Here, a limb was amputated, there a skull chipped open, or a bandage that the flesh had grown over was peeled away. Whimpers and cries echoed through the harshly lit room, while white-clad sisters bustled efficiently from one table to the next with instruments or bandages.

In the bed next to mine lay a sergeant who had lost a leg, and was fighting a bad case of blood poisoning. Mad periods of fever alternated with cold shivering. His temperature chart performed leaps like a wild mustang. The doctors tried to keep him alive on champagne and camphor, but the needle seemed to be pointing unmistakably to death. What was strange, though, was that, having been delirious for the past few days, at the hour of his death he was once more completely lucid, and made some arrangements for what was to be done afterwards. For instance, he had the sister read him his favourite chapter from the Bible, then he took his leave of us all, by asking our forgiveness for having kept us up at night so often with his fever attacks. At the end, he whispered in a voice to which he tried to give a humorous inflection: ‘Ey, Fritz, have yer got a bit of bread for me?’ and, a few minutes later, he was dead. That last sentence was a reference to our male nurse, Fritz, an elderly man, whose accent we sometimes imitated, and we were profoundly moved by it because it showed the dying man’s wish to cheer us up.

It was during this stay in hospital that I suffered an attack of the glooms, a contributing factor in which was surely the memory of the cold, slimy landscape where I had been wounded. Every afternoon, I would hobble along the banks of a bleak-looking canal under bare poplars. I was especially upset not to have been able to participate in the regiment’s attack on the woods of St-Pierre-Vaast – a shining effort that won us several hundred prisoners.

After two weeks, when my wounds had pretty much closed, I returned to my troop. The division was still based where I had left it. As my train rolled into Epehy, there was a series of explosions outside. The twisted wreckage of freight wagons lying by the rails showed that the attack was in earnest.

‘What’s going on here?’ asked a captain who appeared to be fresh out of Germany. Without stopping to give him an answer, I tore open the door of the compartment and took cover behind the railway embankment, while the train rolled on a little. None of the passengers had been hurt; but a few bleeding horses were led out of the cattle car.

Since I wasn’t able to march properly yet, I was given the job of observation officer. The observation post was on a downhill slope between Nurlu and Moislains. It was nothing more than a periscope through which I could view the familiar front line. If the bombing was stepped up, or there were coloured flares or anything else out of the ordinary, I was to inform the divisional command by telephone. For days I perched shivering on a little stool behind the two layers of glass, and the only variety on offer was if the line broke down. If the wire had been shot through, I had to get it repaired by my breakdown squad. In these men, of whose activity I had been all but unaware hitherto, I now found a special type of unappreciated worker in the most perilous conditions. While most others strained to leave a shelled zone, the breakdown squad had to enter it calmly and professionally. Day and night, they went into still-warm shell-holes to tie together the ends of two severed wires; their job was as dangerous as it was unglamorous.

The observation post was well camouflaged in the landscape. All that could be seen from outside was a narrow slit half hidden behind a grassy knoll. Only chance shells ended up there, and, from my safe hiding-place, I was able to follow the activities of individuals and units that I hadn’t paid that much attention to when I myself had also been under fire. At times, and most of all at dawn and dusk, the landscape was not unlike a wide steppe inhabited by animals. Especially when floods of new arrivals were making for certain points that were regularly shelled, only suddenly to hurl themselves to the ground, or run away as fast as they could, I was put in mind of a natural scene. Such an impression was so strong because my function was a little like that of an antenna, I was a sort of advance sensory organ, detailed to observe calmly all that was happening before me, and inform the leadership. I really had little more to do than wait for the hour of the attack.

Every twenty-four hours, I was relieved by another officer, and I recovered in Nurlu, where there were relatively comfortable quarters set up in a large wine cellar. I still remember long, pensive November evenings, smoking my pipe by the stove in the little vaulted space, while outside in the ravaged park, the fog dripped from the bare chestnut trees and the occasional echoing blast of a shell broke the stillness.

On 18 December, the division was relieved, and I rejoined my regiment, now on rest in the village of Fresnoy-le-Grand. There, I took over the command of the 2nd Company from Lieutenant Boje, who had a spell of leave. In Fresnoy, the regiment had four weeks of uninterrupted rest, and everyone tried to make the most of it. Christmas and New Year were marked by company parties, at which the beer and grog flowed. Only five men were left of the 2nd Company with whom I had celebrated Christmas in the trenches at Monchy, a year ago.

With Ensign Gornick and my brother Fritz, who had joined the regiment for six weeks as cadets, I occupied the living room and two bedrooms of a French rentier. There I started to relax again a little, and frequently only got home when it was light.

One morning, as I lay half asleep in bed, a comrade came in to escort me to duty. We were chatting, and he was toying with my pistol, which as usual was on my bedside table, when he fired a shot that narrowly missed my skull. I have witnessed several fatal accidents in war that were caused by careless handling of weapons; cases like that are always especially irritating.

In the first week, there was an inspection by General Sontag, at which the regiment was praised for its deeds in the assault on the woods of St-Pierre-Vaast, and numerous medals were given out. As I led the 2nd Company forward on parade, I caught a glimpse of Colonel von Oppen leaning across and talking to the general about me. A few hours later, I was ordered to divisional HQ, where the general awarded me the Iron Cross First Class. I was all the more delighted, as I had followed the order half thinking I was going to be carpeted for something. ‘It seems you have a habit of getting yourself wounded,’ the General said, ‘well, I’ve got a little plaster for you.’

On 17 January 1917, I was ordered to leave Fresnoy for four weeks, to take a company-command course at the French manoeuvring ground of Sissonne near Laon. The work was rendered very agreeable by the head of our section, Captain Funk, who had the gift of distilling the great plethora of regulations into a small number of basic principles; it is a method that always Works, no matter where it is applied.

At the same time, the victualling left something to be desired. Potatoes seemed to have become a thing of the past; day after day, when we lifted the lids of our dishes in the vast mess hall, we found nothing but watery swedes. Before long, we couldn’t stand the sight of them. Even though they’re better than they’re cracked up to be – so long as they’re roasted with a nice piece of pork, and plenty of black pepper. Which these weren’t.