Storm of Steel Read online

  One of the more remarkable features of this army town was the way a couple of young orphaned French boys followed the troops around. The two boys, of whom one was eight or so, the other twelve, went around clad entirely in field grey, and both spoke fluent German. They referred to their compatriots as the soldiers did, as ‘Schangels’.1 Their keenest desire was to go with ‘their’ company up the line. They drilled faultlessly, saluted their superior officers, formed up on the left flank for roll-call, and put in for leave when it was time to accompany the kitchen-helpers on shopping expeditions to Cambrai. When the 2nd Battalion went to Quéant for a couple of weeks of instruction, one of the two, Louis, was ordered by Colonel von Oppen to remain behind in Douchy; no one spotted him anywhere on the way, but when the battalion arrived, there he was leaping happily out of the baggage cart where he had been hiding. The elder of the two, I was told, was later sent to petty-officer school in Germany.

  Barely an hour’s march from Douchy lay Monchy-au-Bois, where the regiment’s two reserve companies were billeted. In the autumn of 1914, it had been bitterly fought over, and had ended up in German possession, as the battle slowly fought to a standstill in a half-circle round the ruins of this once-affluent town.

  Now the houses were burned down and shot up, the neglected gardens raked by shells, and the fruit trees snapped. The rubble of stones had been heaped into a defensive installation with the aid of trenches, barbed wire, barricades and concrete strong-points. All the approach roads could be covered by machine-gun fire from a pillbox called ‘Torgau Redoubt’. Another strongpoint went by the name of ‘Altenburg Redoubt’, an entrenched post to the right of the village that was home to a detachment of company reserves. Also pivotal to the defence was a quarry that in peacetime had provided the limestone for the village houses, and which we had stumbled upon rather by chance. A company cook who had lost his water-pail in a well had had himself lowered after it, and had noticed a spreading cavern-like hole. The place was investigated and, after a second entrance had been knocked through, it offered bomb-proof accommodation for a large number of fighters.

  On the isolated heights on the way to Ransart was the ruin of a one-time estaminet – dubbed ‘Bellevue’ on account of the wide view of the front that was afforded from it – and this was a place I came to love, in spite of its exposed situation. From there, the view stretched over the dead land, whose defunct villages were linked by roads that had no traffic on them, and on which no living creature was to be seen. In the distance glimmered the outline of the abandoned city of Arras, and round to the right the shining chalk mine-craters of St Eloi. The weedy fields lay barren under the passing clouds and the shadows of clouds, and the tightly woven web of trenches spread its little white and yellow links, secured by lengthy communication trenches. From time to time, there was a puff of smoke from a shell, lobbed into the air as if by a ghostly hand; or the ball of a shrapnel hung over the wasteland like a great white flake slowly melting. The aspect of the landscape was dark and fantastic, the war had erased anything attractive or appealing from the scene, and etched its own brazen features, to appal the lonely onlooker.

  The desolation and the profound silence, sporadically broken by the crump of shells, were heightened by the sorry impression of devastation. Ripped haversacks, broken rifles, scraps of cloth, counterpointed grotesquely with children’s toys, shell fuses, deep craters from explosions, bottles, harvest implements, shredded books, battered household gear, holes whose gaping darkness betrayed the presence of basements, where the bodies of the unlucky inhabitants of the houses were gnawed by the particularly assiduous swarms of rats; a little espaliered peach tree despoiled of its sustaining wall, and spreading its arms pitifully; in the cattle byres and stables and barns the bones of livestock still dangling from their chains; trenches dug through the ravaged gardens, in among sprouting bulbs of onions, wormwood, rhubarb, narcissus, buried under weeds; on the neighbouring fields grain barns, through whose roofs the grain was already sprouting; all that, with a half-buried communication trench running through it, and all suffused with the smell of burning and decay. Sad thoughts are apt to sneak up on the warrior in such a locale, when he thinks of those who only recently led their lives in tranquillity.

  As already mentioned, the front line described a semi-circle around the village, connected to it by an array of communication trenches. It was divided in two, Monchy South and Monchy West. These in turn were formed up into six company sections, from A to F. The bulge in the front afforded the British a good opportunity for flanking fire, the skilful use of which occasioned us heavy losses. They deployed a gun hidden immediately behind their own lines that sent out little shrapnels, which seemed to be fired and to reach us practically simultaneously. Out of the blue a hail of lead balls would flash down over the length of a trench, as often as not taking a sentry with it.

  Next, let us take a quick turn through the trenches as they were at that time, to familiarize the reader with some of the recurring terminology.

  To reach the front line, the firing trench, we take one of the many ‘saps’, or communication trenches, whose job it is to afford the troops some protection on their way to battle stations. These, often very long, trenches are broadly perpendicular to the front, but, to make it less easy to rake them with fire, they most often follow a zigzag or curving course. After a quarter of an hour’s march, we enter the second trench, the support trench, which is parallel to the firing trench, and serves as a further line of defence should that be taken.

  The firing trench is wholly unlike those frail constructions that were dug in the early days of the war. Nor is it just a simple ditch either, but it is dug to a depth of ten or twenty feet. The defenders move around as on the bottom of a mine gallery; to observe the ground in front of the position, or to fire out, they climb a set of steps or a wide wooden ladder to the sentry platform, which is set at such a height in the earth that a man standing on it is a head taller than the top of the rampart. The marksman stands at his sentry post, a more or less armoured niche, with his head protected by a wall of sandbags or a steel plate. The actual lookout is through tiny slits through which a rifle barrel is pushed. The quantities of earth that were dug out of the trench are piled up in a wall behind the trench, a parados affording protection from the rear; machine-gun emplacements are built into these earthworks. On the front side of the trench, the earth is kept level, so as to leave the field of vision as clear and uncluttered as possible.

  In front of the trench, often in multiple lines, is a wire entanglement, a complicated web of barbed wire designed to keep the attacker busy, so that he presents an easy target for the defensive sentries.

  Rank weeds climb up and through the barbed wire, symptomatic of a new and different type of flora taking root on the fallow fields. Wild flowers, of a sort that generally make only an occasional appearance in grain fields, dominate the scene; here and there even bushes and shrubs have taken hold. The paths too are overgrown, but easily identified by the presence on them of round-leaved plantains.2 Bird life thrives in such wilderness, partridges for instance, whose curious cries we often hear at night, or larks, whose choir starts up at first light over the trenches.

  To keep the firing trench from being raked by flanking fire, it’s laid out in a meandering line, forever doubling and tripling back on itself. Each of these turns forms a traverse, to catch any shells fired from the side. The fighter is thus protected from behind, from the side and, of course, from the front.

  To rest in, there are dugouts, which have evolved by now from rudimentary holes in the ground to proper enclosed living quarters, with beamed ceilings and plank-cladded walls. The dugouts are about six feet high, and at a depth where their floors are roughly level with the bottom of the trench outside. In effect, there is a layer of earth on top of them thick enough to enable them to survive oblique hits. In heavy fire, though, they are death-traps, and it’s better to be in the depths of the shelters.

  The shelters are braced with so
lid wood joists. The first is fixed in the front wall of the trench, level with the bottom, and from this entrance each successive joist is set a couple of hand’s breadths lower, so that the amount of protection is rapidly increased. By the thirtieth step, there are nine yards of earth overhead, twelve counting the depth of the trench. Then there are slightly wider frames set straight ahead or perpendicular to the steps; these constitute the actual living quarters. Communication is possible by lateral tunnels, while branchings-off towards the enemy lines are used for mining or listening posts.

  The whole thing should be pictured as a huge, ostensibly inert installation, a secret hive of industry and watchfulness, where, within a few seconds of an alarm being sounded, every man is at his post. But one shouldn’t have too romantic an idea of the atmosphere; there is a certain prevailing torpor that proximity to the earth seems to engender.

  I was sent to the 6th Company, and, a few days after my arrival, moved into line at the head of a platoon, where I was straightaway welcomed by a few English ‘toffee-apples’. These are brittle iron shells, filled with high explosive, somewhat resembling fruit on a stalk; or imagine a fifty-kilogram dumbbell, with one of the weights missing. They went off with a muffled thud, and, moreover, were often masked by machine-gun fire. It therefore made an eerie impression on me when sudden flames lit up the trench just next to us, and a malignant wave of air pressure shook us. The men quickly pulled me back into the platoon dugout, which we were just passing. We felt the next five or six mortar thumps from within. The mine doesn’t actually impact, it seems more to nestle down; the calmness of its devastation was somehow the more unsettling. The following day, when I first inspected the trench by daylight, I saw those big emptied steel casings hanging up by their stalks outside dugouts, serving as alarm gongs.

  C Sector, which our company held, was the regiment’s most forward sector. In Lieutenant Brecht, who had hurried back from the United States at the outbreak of war, we had the very man to defend such a position. He loved danger, and he died in battle.

  Life in the trenches was a matter of unbending routines; I will now describe the course of a single day of the kind that we had, one after another, for a year and a half, except when normal levels of fire were intensified to what we called ‘turbulence’.

  Day in the trenches begins at dusk. At seven o’clock someone from my platoon comes in to wake me from my afternoon nap, which, with a view to night duty, I like to have. I buckle on my belt, stick a Verey-light pistol in it and some bombs, and leave my more or less cosy dugout. As I walk through the by now highly familiar sector, I automatically check that the sentries are all in position. The password is given in low tones. By now, it is night-time, and the first silvery flares climb aloft, while peeled eyes scrutinize no man’s land. A rat skitters about among the tin cans thrown over the ramparts. Another joins it with a squeak, and, before long, the whole place is swarming with the lithe shapes emerging from their holes in ruined village basements or among the shot-up bomb shelters. Hunting rats is a much-loved change from the tedium of sentry duty. A piece of bread is put out as bait, and a rifle is levelled at it, or gunpowder from dud shells is sprinkled in their holes and torched. Then they come squeaking out with singed fur. They are repellent creatures, and I’m always thinking of the secret desecrations they perform on the bodies in the village basements. Once, as I was striding through the ruins of Monchy on a warm night, they came oozing out of their hiding-places in such indescribable numbers that the ground was like a long carpet of them, patterned with the occasional white of an albino. Some cats have moved in with us from the ruined villages around; they love the proximity of humans. One large white tom with a shot-off front paw is frequently seen ghosting about in no man’s land, and seems to have been adopted by both sides.

  Of course, I was telling you about trench duty. But one loves these digressions; it’s an easy matter to start nattering, to fill up a dark night and the slow hours. I would many times stop and listen to the tales of some character from the front, or a fellow NCO, and take in his chatter with rapt attention. As an ensign, I am often engaged in conversation by a kindly duty officer, who suffers equally from the boredom. Yes, the man even gets to be quite pally, talks in a soft, low voice, reveals secrets and desires. And I attend, because I too feel oppressed by the heavy black walls of the trenches; I too am yearning for warmth, for something human in this eerie desolation. At night, the landscape emanates a curious cold; a sort of emotional cold. It makes you start to shiver when you cross an unoccupied part of the trench that is reserved for sentries; and if you cross the wire entanglements, and set foot in no man’s land, the shivering intensifies to a faint, teeth-rattling unease. The novelists haven’t done justice to this teeth-chattering; there’s nothing dramatic about it, it’s more like having a feeble electric current applied to you. Most of the time you’re just as unaware of it as you are of talking in your sleep at night. And, for another thing, it stops the moment anything actually happens.

  The conversation winds down. We are tired. Sleepily we stand in a fire-bay, propped against the trench, and stare at our cigarettes glimmering in the dark.

  When there’s frost, you stomp up and down so hard that the earth echoes. The sound of incessant coughing carries for miles through the cold air. Often enough, if you’re creeping forward in no man’s land, that coughing is your first warning that you’re nearing enemy lines. Or a sentry will be whistling or humming to himself, in contrast to yourself, creeping up on him with murderous intent. Or again it’s raining, in which case you stand sadly with your collar turned up under the eaves of the dugout entrance, listening to the regular drip drip drip. But if you hear the footfall of a superior on the duckboards, you step out smartly, walk on, suddenly swing about, click your heels together, and report: ‘NCO on duty. Sector all quiet, sir!’ because standing in doorways is not permitted.

  Your thoughts drift. You look at the moon, and think of lovely, cosy days at home, or of the big city miles to the rear, where people are just now streaming out of the cafés, and big arc lamps light up the lively commotion of the city centre. It feels like something in a dream – incredibly remote.

  Something rustles in front of the trench, a couple of wires clink together. Straightaway all your dreams are out the window, your senses are stretched to the point of pain. You climb on to the fire-step, fire off a tracer round: nothing stirs. It must have been a rabbit or a pheasant, nothing more.

  Often you can hear the enemy working on his wire entanglements. Then you empty your magazine in his direction. Not only because those are the standing instructions, but also because you feel some pleasure as you do it. ‘Let them feel the pressure for a change. Who knows, perhaps you even managed to hit one of them.’ We too go unspooling wire most nights, and take a lot of casualties. Then we curse those mean British bastards.

  On some sectors of the line, say at the sap heads, the sentries are barely thirty yards apart. Here you sometimes get personally acquainted with your opposite numbers; you get to know Tommy or Fritz or Wilhelm by his cough or his whistle or his singing voice. Shouts are exchanged, often with an edge of rough humour.

  ‘Hey, Tommy, you still there?’

  ‘Yup!’

  ‘Then get your head down, I’m about to start shooting at you!’

  Sometimes you hear a whistling, fluttering sound, following a dull discharge. ‘Watch out, trench mortar!’ You rush to the nearest dugout steps and hold your breath. The mortars explode differently, altogether more excitingly than common-or-garden shells. There’s something violent and devious about them, something of personal vitriol. They are treacherous things. Rifle-grenades are a scaled-down version of them. One rises like an arrow out of the opposite lines, with its reddish-brown metal head scored into squares like chocolate, to make it splinter better. If the horizon lights up at night in certain places, all the sentries leap up from their posts, and take cover. They know from long experience where the mortars trained on C Sector are.

>   At last the luminous dial shows that two hours are up. Now wake up the relief, and head for the dugout. Maybe the ration party will have brought post, or a parcel, or a newspaper. It’s a strange feeling to read news from home, and their peacetime anxieties, while the shadows cast by a flickering candle flame brush over the rough low beams. After scraping off the worst of the mud from my boots with a piece of stick, and giving them a finishing touch against a leg of the crudely fashioned table, I lie down on my pallet, and pull the blanket over my head for a quick four-hour ‘gargle’, as the slang has it. Outside, the shots monotonously ring against the parapet, a mouse scrabbles over my face and hands, nothing disturbs my sleep. Even the ‘wee-er beasties’ don’t bother me, it’s only a few days since we thoroughly fumigated the dugout.

  Twice more, I am torn from my sleep to do my duty. During the last watch, a bright streak behind the sky to the east announces the coming day. The contours of the trench are sharpened; in the flat light, it makes an impression of unspeakable dreariness. A lark ascends; its trilling gets on my wick. Leaning against the parapet, I stare out at the dead, wire-scarred vista with a feeling of tremendous disillusion. These last twenty minutes seem to go on for ever. At last there’s the clatter of the coffee-bringers coming down the communication trench: it’s seven o’clock in the morning. The night-watch is over.

  I head for the dugout and drink coffee, and wash in an old herring can. That freshens me up; I no longer want to lie down. At nine o’clock, after all, I need to go to my platoon and give them the day’s tasks. We’re real Renaissance men who can turn our hands to anything, and the trenches make their thousandfold demands of us every day. We sink deep shafts, construct dugouts and concrete pillboxes, rig up wire entanglements, devise drainage systems, revet, support, level, raise and smooth, fill in latrines; in a word, we do all possible tasks ourselves. And why wouldn’t we, given that we have representatives of every rank and calling in our midst? If one man doesn’t know, then another will. Only lately a miner took the pick out of my hand as I was working on our platoon dugout, and remarked: ‘Keep cutting at the bottom, the dirt at the top will come down by itself!’ Strange not to have thought of something so elementary oneself. But here, stood in the middle of the bleak landscape, suddenly compelled to take cover, to wrap up against wind and weather, to knock together beds and tables, to improvise stoves and steps, we soon learn to use our hands. The value of skills and crafts is there for all to see.