Storm of Steel Page 10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  There was no attack that night; even so, the regiment lost another twenty-five dead and a great many wounded. On the 15th and 17th, we had further gas attacks to endure. On the 17th, we were relieved and twice suffered heavy bombardment in Douchy. One of them came just as we were having an officers’ meeting with Major von Jarotzky in an orchard. It was dangerous, but it was still ridiculous to watch the company suddenly burst apart, fall on their faces, force their way through hedges in an absolute trice, and disappear under various cover before you could count to ten. A shell falling in the garden of my lodgings killed a little girl who had been digging around for rubbish in a pit.