Storm of Steel Read online

  For clarity’s sake, we gave a solemn mutual declaration of war, to commence three minutes after the end of our talks, and following a ‘Good-night!’ on his part, and an ‘Au revoir!’ on mine, to the regret of my men I fired off a shot that pinged against his steel loophole, and got one myself that almost knocked the rifle out of my hands.

  It was the first time I had been given an opportunity of surveying the battlefield in front of the sap, seeing as otherwise one couldn’t even show the peak of one’s cap in such a perilous place. I saw that immediately in front of our entanglements there was a skeleton whose bleached bones glimmered out of scraps of blue uniform. From the British cap-badges seen that day, we were able to tell that the regiment facing ours were the ‘Hindustani’ Leicestershires.

  Shortly after our negotiations were concluded, our artillery fired off a few rounds at the enemy positions, whereupon, before our eyes, four stretchers were carried across the open field without a single shot being loosed off at them from our side. I must say I felt proud.

  Throughout the war, it was always my endeavour to view my opponent without animus, and to form an opinion of him as a man on the basis of the courage he showed. I would always try and seek him out in combat and kill him, and I expected nothing else from him. But never did I entertain mean thoughts of him. When prisoners fell into my hands, later on, I felt responsible for their safety, and would always do everything in my power for them.

  As Christmas approached, the weather seemed to worsen; we had recourse to pumps in our efforts to do something about the water. During this muddy phase, our losses also worsened. So, for instance, I find in my diary for 12 December: ‘Today we buried seven men in Douchy, and two more were shot.’ And for 23 December: ‘Mud and filth are getting the better of us. This morning at three o’clock an enormous deposit came down at the entrance to my dugout. I had to employ three men, who were barely able to bale the water that poured like a freshet into my dugout. Our trench is drowning, the morass is now up to our navels, it’s desperate. On the right edge of our frontage, another corpse has begun to appear, so far just the legs.’

  We spent Christmas Eve in the line, and, standing in the mud, sang hymns, to which the British responded with machine-gun fire. On Christmas Day, we lost one man to a ricochet in the head. Immediately afterwards, the British attempted a friendly gesture by hauling a Christmas tree up on their traverse, but our angry troops quickly shot it down again, to which Tommy replied with rifle-grenades. It was all in all a less than merry Christmas.

  On 28 December, I was back in command of the Altenburg Redoubt. On that day, rifleman Hohn, one of my best men, lost his arm to a shell fragment. Heidotting received a bad thigh wound from one of the many bullets that were whizzing round our earthworks in the hollow. And my faithful August Kettler, the first of many servants to die in my service, fell victim to a shrapnel that passed through his windpipe as he was on his way to Monchy to get my lunch. As he was setting off with the mess-tins, I had called out to him: ‘August, mind how you go, won’t you.’ ‘I’ll be fine, Lieutenant!’ And then I was summoned and found him lying on the ground close to the dugout, gurgling, as the air passed through the wound into his chest with every breath he took. I had him carried back; he died a few days later in hospital. It was a feature of his case, as it was of quite a few others, that his inability to speak made him even more pathetic, as he stared at the nurses in bewilderment like a tormented animal.

  The road from Monchy to Altenburg Redoubt cost us a lot of blood. It led along the rear slope of a modest elevation, perhaps five hundred paces behind our front line. Our opponents, perhaps alerted by aerial photographs to the fact that this road was indeed much frequented, set themselves to rake it at intervals with machine-gun fire, or to unload shrapnels over the area. Even though there was a ditch running along beside the road, and there were strict orders to walk in the ditch, sure enough everyone tended to stroll along this dangerous road, without any cover, with the habitual insouciance of old soldiers. Generally, we got away with it, but on many days fate snatched a victim or two, and over time they added up. Here, too, stray bullets from all directions seemed to have arranged a rendezvous for themselves at the latrine, so that we were often compelled to flee, holding a newspaper and trousers at half-mast. And for all that, it seemed not to have occurred to anyone to move this indispensable facility to a place of greater safety.

  January also was a month of back-breaking work. Each platoon began by removing the mud from the immediate vicinity of its dugout, by means of shovels, buckets and pumps, and then, having firm ground underfoot once more, set about establishing communications with its neighbours. In the Adinfer forest, where our artillery was positioned, teams of woodcutters were set to strip the branches off young trees and split them into long struts. The trench walls were sloped off and entirely reveted with this material. Also, numerous culverts, drainage ditches and sumps were dug, so that things were once more made bearable. What really made a difference were those deep sumps that were dug through the surface clay and enabled water to drain into the absorptive chalk beneath.

  On 28 January 1916, a man in my unit was wounded in the body by a splinter from a bullet that shattered against his plate. On the 30th, another got a bullet in the thigh. When we were relieved on 1 February, the communication trenches were subjected to intense fire. A shrapnel shell landed at the feet of rifleman Junge, my former cleaner in the 6th Company, failed to go off, but flared up instead with a tall flame, so that he had to be carried away with grave burns.

  It was round about then too that an NCO with the 6th, whom I knew well, and whose brother had fallen only days before, was fatally injured by a ‘toffee-apple’ that he had found. He had unscrewed the fuse, and, noticing that the greenish powder he tipped out was highly inflammable, he put a lit cigarette in at the opening. The mortar of course blew up, and he received fifty separate wounds. We suffered many casualties from the over-familiarity engendered by daily encounters with gunpowder. A rather alarming neighbour in this respect was Lieutenant Pook, who was housed by himself in a dugout in the maze of trenches behind our left flank. He had collected a number of enormous dud shells, and amused himself by unscrewing their fuses, and tinkering with them as if they were bits of clockwork. Every time I had to go past his lair I made a wide detour. Even when the men were only chipping the copper rings off the shells to work them into paper-knives or bracelets, there were incidents.

  On the night of 3 February we were back in Douchy, following a taxing time at the front. The next morning, I was enjoying my first morning of ease, drinking a cup of coffee in my billet on the Emmichplatz, when a monster of a shell, the herald of a heavy bombardment, went off outside my door and sent the window glass jangling into my room. With three bounds I was in the cellar, where the other inhabitants also presented themselves in quick time. Since the cellar was half above ground, and was only separated from the garden by a thin wall, we all pressed together into a short tunnel that had been embarked on only a few days previously. With animal instincts, my sheepdog forced his whimpering way between the tight-pressed bodies into the deepest, furthest corner of the shelter. Far in the distance, we could hear the dull thud of a series of discharges, then, when we’d counted to thirty or so, the whining approach of the heavy iron lumps, ending in crashing explosions all round our little abode. Each time, there was an unpleasant surge of pressure through the cellar window, and clods of earth and shards came clattering on the tiled roof, while the anxious horses whinnied and stamped in their stables near by. The dog whined throughout, and a fat bandsman screamed as if he were having a tooth pulled each time a whistling bomb approached.

  At last the storm was over, and we could risk going out in the open again. The wrecked village street was swarming like a disturbed anthill. My quarters looked in a bad way. The earth had been blown open in several places against the cellar wall, fruit trees were snapped, and smack in the middle of the path lay a long and malign-looking shell that hadn’t
gone off. The roof was riddled with holes. A big fragment of shell had removed half the chimney. In the regimental office next door, a few sizeable splinters had drilled through the walls and the large wardrobe, shredding the uniforms that were kept there for wear on home leave.

  On 8 February, the sector received a vigorous pummelling. It began early in the morning when our own artillery dropped a dud on the dugout of my right flank, to the consternation of those within, pushing through the door and toppling the stove. This event, which could have passed off so much worse, was immortalized in a sketch of eight men trying to get out past the smoking stove through the shattered door, while the bomb lay in the corner, rolling its eyes wickedly. In the afternoon, three more dugouts were hit, but luckily only one man was slightly hurt in the knee, because all the others, except for the sentries, had withdrawn into the shelters. The following day, Fusilier Hartmann from my platoon was fatally hit in the side by the flanking battery.

  On 25 February, we were particularly affected by a fatality that robbed us of an outstanding comrade. Just before we were to be relieved, I was brought the news in my dugout that volunteer Karg had just fallen in the shelter next door. I went there, to see, as so often before, a serious-looking group of men around a motionless figure, lying with rigid fingers on the bloodied snow, staring at the darkening winter sky with glassy eyes. Another victim for the flanking battery! Karg had been in the trench when it had started up, and had straightaway leaped into the shelter. A shell had struck the opposite wall of the trench high up, and at just such an angle as to cast a large splinter into the entrance to the shelter. Karg, who must have thought he had already reached safety, was struck on the back of the head; his death was instant and unexpected.

  That flanking battery was quite a feature of those days. On average once an hour, it would fire a round at us, out of the blue, whose fragments precisely swept out the trench. In the six days from 3 to 8 February, it cost us three dead and seven wounded, three of them seriously. Even though it was located on a hillside no more than a mile away from our left flank, our artillery seemed to be unable to do anything about it. We therefore tried, by adding to the number of traverses and building them higher, to restrict its effectiveness to small parts of the trench at any given time. Those stretches that were visible from it, we masked with screens of hay or material. Also, we beefed up the sentry posts with wooden beams and slabs of reinforced concrete. But even then, because of the way the trench was used as a thoroughfare, the odds favoured the English gunners in their effort to ‘pick us off’ without excess use of munitions.

  By early March, we had seen the worst of the mud. The weather turned dry, and the trench was now securely supported. Every night, I sat in my dugout at a little desk, reading, or chatting if I had company. There were four of us officers, including the company commander, and we lived together very harmoniously, drinking coffee in one or other of our dugouts, or having supper together, often over a bottle or two, smoking, playing cards, and enjoying rather baronial conversations. On some days, there was herring with boiled potatoes and dripping, which was considered quite a feast. In the memory, such congenial hours made up for other days of blood, filth and work. Also, they were only possible in this long stationary phase of the war, where we had all bonded together, and an almost peacetime routine had evolved. Our principal source of pride was our building work, which HQ broadly left us to get on with by ourselves. Through constant work, one thirty-step shelter after another was dug out of the chalk and clay soil, and linked by cross-passages, so that we could go from right to left of our frontage in safety and comfort, entirely underground. My own favourite project was a sixty-yard underground passage linking my dugout with the company commander’s, with other dormitories and munitions depots off to either side, just like a regulation corridor. All this was to come in handy in the fighting to come.

  When we met in the trenches after morning coffee – we even had newspapers delivered to the front, at least some of the time – all clean and with our footrules in our hands, we compared progress, and our talk was of shelter-frames, dugout designs, rate of progress, and other such matters. A popular subject was the construction of my ‘boudoir’, a little cubby-hole off the underground passage, dug into dry chalk; a sort of warren where we could have happily dozed through the end of the world. For a mattress I had set aside some fine-meshed wire, and the wall-coverings were of some special sandbag material.

  On 1 March, as I was standing by Territorial Ikmann, who was to fall not long afterwards, a shell landed the other side of a tarpaulin next to us. The splinters fizzed past us without hurting either of us. When we examined them later, we found hideously long and sharp steel needles that had sliced through the cloth. We called these things ‘whizz-bangs’ or ‘grapeshot’, because we could never hear them coming; it was like suddenly being in the middle of a whirring cloud of splinters.

  On 14 March, the sector on our right took a direct hit from a six-inch shell, and three men were killed, three others badly wounded. One simply vanished off the face of the earth, another was burned black. On the 18th, the sentry in front of my dugout was struck by a shell fragment that cut open his cheek and took off the tip of his ear. On the 19th, on our left flank, Fusilier Schmidt II was shot in the head. On the 23rd, to the right of my dugout, Fusilier Lohmann fell, shot in the head. That same evening, a sentry reported that an enemy patrol were stuck in our wire. I led a party to look see, but we found no one.

  On 7 April, on the right flank, Fusilier Kramer received head wounds from some bullet fragments. This type of wounding was very common, because the English munitions were so soft as to fragment on contact. In the afternoon, the area immediately around my dugout came in for some heavy and sustained bombardment. The skylight was smashed, and, on every new impact, a hail of dried clay came sprinkling through the opening, though we made a point of finishing our coffee together.

  Afterwards, we fought a duel with a daredevil Englishman, whose head peeped out over the rim of a trench that couldn’t have been more than a hundred yards away, and who sent a stream of extremely well-aimed shots pinging round our shooting-slits. I returned fire with a few of the men, but immediately a shrewdly aimed ball on the edge of our plate kicked sand in our faces, and gave me a scratch on the neck. We weren’t to be put off, though, popping up suddenly, taking swift aim, and disappearing again. Then a bullet smashed the rifle of Fusilier Storch, the splinters bloodying his face in at least a dozen places. The next shot nicked a piece out of our armour plating; and another shattered the mirror we were using for observation, but we had the satisfaction of having our opponent disappearing for good after a series of shots had struck the clay ramparts directly in front of his face. For good measure, with three rounds of hard munitions, I made a mess of the armour behind which this fellow had done his mischievous worst.

  On 9 April, two British planes flew repeatedly low over our position. All the men raced out of their dugouts and started banging away into the sky like crazy. I was just remarking to Lieutenant Sievers: ‘I hope to God the flanking battery don’t get any ideas!’ and already the steel shreds were flying about our ears, and we had to leap into the nearest shelter. Sievers was standing by the entrance; I urged him to go further in, and smack! an inch-thick splinter dug itself into the damp clay in front of his feet, still smoking. For afters, we were sent shrapnel mortars, whose black balls exploded over our heads with great violence. One man was hit in the armpit by a piece of one, no bigger than the head of a pin, but extremely painful. In return, I planted a few ‘pineapples’ in the British trenches, as we called those five-pound mortars that resembled tropical fruit. There was a tacit agreement between the infantry on both sides to restrict themselves to rifle fire; all recourse to explosives was punished by a double load back. Unfortunately, our opponents tended to have more munitions than ourselves, and so could play the game for longer.

  To get over the shock, we downed several bottles of red wine in Sievers’s dugout, which got my d
ander up to such a degree that I took the high road back to my cubby-hole, in spite of the bright moon. Before long, I lost my way, wound up in a vast shell-hole, and heard the British working in their trench hard by. After causing a breach of the peace with a couple of hand-grenades, I hurriedly withdrew into our trench, in the process catching my hand on the prong of one of our lovely mantraps. These consist of four sharp iron spears assembled in such a way that one of them is always vertical. We left them out on scouting paths.

  There was a lot of activity in the field altogether in those days, some of it not without its funny – or bloody funny – side. For instance, a soldier on one of our patrols was shot at because he had a stammer and couldn’t get the password out in time. Another time, a man who had been celebrating in the kitchens in Monchy till past midnight, clambered over the wire, and started blazing away at his own lines. After he’d shot off all his ammunition, he was taken in and given a sound beating.

  The Beginning of the Battle of the Somme

  In mid-April 1916, I was detailed to attend an officer-training course under the overall direction of the divisional commander, Major-General Sontag, at Croisilles, a little town behind the divisional lines. There, we received instruction in a variety of practical and theoretical military subjects. Particularly fascinating were the tactical excursions on horseback, under Major von Jarotzky, a fat little staffer, who would get terribly excited about things. We called him the ‘Pressure-cooker’. A series of excursions and inspection visits to the very often improvised units in the hinterland gave us, who were in the habit of viewing slightly askance everything that happened there, an insight into the incredible work that goes on behind a line of fighting men. And so we visited the abattoir, the commissariat and gunnery repair workshop in Boyelles, the sawmill and pioneer park in the woods of Bourlon, the dairy, pig farm and rendering plant in Inchy, the aviation park and bakery in Quéant. On Sundays we went to the nearby towns of Cambrai, Douai and Valenciennes, to remind ourselves of what ‘ladies in hats’ looked like.