Storm of Steel Read online

  It would be rather mean of me, in this book that has so much blood in it, if I were to withhold from you an account of a scrape in which my part was a somewhat comical one. Back in winter, when our battalion was a guest of the King of Quéant, I had, as a young officer, been called upon to inspect the guard for the first time. On the edge of town, I had promptly lost my way, and, meaning to ask for directions to the little station guard post, I had walked into a tiny cottage that stood there all by itself. Living there, I found, all alone, as her father had lately died, was a seventeen-year-old girl by the name of Jeanne. When she gave me directions, she laughed, and when I asked what was so funny, she said: ‘Vous êtes bien jeune, je voudrais avoir votre devenir.’1 – Because of the spiritedness of her remark, I had dubbed her Jeanne d’Arc, and in the subsequent trench-fighting, I had occasionally thought of that isolated little house.

  One evening in Croisilles, I suddenly felt an urge to go over there. I had a horse saddled up, and before long had left the town behind me. It was a May evening, perfect time for a ride. The clover lay like heavy burgundy cushions on the fields stitched with hawthorn, and outside the village gates the huge candles of flowering chestnuts flickered in the gloaming. I rode through Bullecourt and Ecoust, never guessing that in two years’ time I would find myself making ready to attack the hideous ruins of these villages, now nestling so peaceably among ponds and hills at eventide. At the little station I had inspected in the winter, civilians were still busy unloading cylinders of propane. I greeted them, and watched them for a while. Before long, the house appeared in front of me, with its reddish-brown, bemossed roof. I rapped on the shutters, which were already bolted shut.

  ‘Qui est là?’

  ‘Bonsoir, Jeanne d’Arc!’

  ‘Ah, bonsoir, mon petit officier Gibraltar!’

  I was made as pleasantly welcome as I’d hoped I would be. After tying up my horse, I went inside and was asked to share her supper of eggs, white bread and butter, all nicely laid out on a large cabbage leaf. Seeing such things, one really doesn’t need a second invitation.

  Everything would have been fine and dandy, but as I stepped out to leave, I found a torch shining in my eyes, and a military policeman asking me for my documentation. My talking to the civilians, the attentiveness with which I’d observed the gas cylinders, my unexplained appearance in this sparsely garrisoned district, all had aroused the suspicion of espionage. Of course I hadn’t brought my service-book with me, and so had to be led before the King of Quéant, who was, as usual at this time of night, presiding over his round table.

  Luckily, I found a sympathetic ear there. I was identified and made welcome. On this occasion, I came away with a rather different impression of the king; the hour was late, and he was talking about tropical jungles where he had spent a lot of time in charge of the building of a railway line.

  On 16 June, the general sent us back to our units with a little speech, from which we were given to understand that our opponents were preparing a large-scale offensive on the Western Front, with its left flank facing our own position. This was our first inkling of what was to be the Battle of the Somme. It marked the end of the first and mildest part of the war; thereafter, it was like embarking on a different one altogether. What we had, admittedly almost unbeknown to ourselves, been through had been the attempt to win a war by old-fashioned pitched battles, and the stalemating of the attempt in static warfare. What confronted us now was a war of matériel of the most gigantic proportions. This war in turn was replaced towards the end of 1917 by mechanized warfare, though that was not given time fully to develop.

  The sense that something was imminent hardened once we returned to our regiments, because our comrades told us of the increasing activity of the enemy. The British had twice, albeit unsuccessfully, essayed a raid in force against C Sector. We had retaliated with a well-prepared assault by three officers’ patrols against the so-called trench triangle, in the course of which we had taken several prisoners. While I’d been away, Wetje had been wounded by a shrapnel ball on the arm, but resumed command of the company shortly after my return. My dugout was somewhat changed as well, a direct hit had just about halved its dimensions. During the aforementioned raid, the British had fumigated it with a few hand-grenades. My replacement had managed to squeeze his way out through the skylight, while his batman had perished. His blood was still visible in great brown stains across the lining boards.

  On 20 June I was ordered to eavesdrop on the enemy trenches, to find out whether they were trying to undermine us, and with Ensign Wohlgemut, Lance-Corporal Schmidt and Fusilier Parthenfelder, I set out a little before midnight across our own, pretty high wire entanglements. The first stretch we did hunched forward, and then we crept side by side over the densely grown field. Fourth-form memories of Karl May2 came to me as I slithered along on my front through dewy grass and thistles, anxious to avoid the slightest rustle, with the British lines visible barely fifty yards in front of us as a black stroke against the grey. From a great distance, a spray of machine-gun bullets came down almost perpendicularly on top of us; an occasional flare went up and threw its chill light on our already rather inhospitable patch of land.

  Then there was a loud rustling behind us. Two shadows were dashing between the trenches. Even as we made ready to throw ourselves upon them, they had disappeared. Moments later, the thunder of two hand-grenades in the British trenches indicated that we had brushed past some of our own. We continued to creep forward.

  Suddenly the ensign gripped my arm: ‘Watch out, right, very close, ssh, ssh!’ And then, no more than ten paces away, I heard sundry rustlings in the grass. We had lost our orientation, and had been creeping along parallel to the English lines; presumably the enemy had heard us, and had now emerged from his trenches to see what was going on.

  These moments of nocturnal prowling leave an indelible impression. Eyes and ears are tensed to the maximum, the rustling approach of strange feet in the tall grass is an unutterably menacing thing. Your breath comes in shallow bursts; you have to force yourself to stifle any panting or wheezing. There is a little mechanical click as the safety-catch of your pistol is taken off; the sound cuts straight through your nerves. Your teeth are grinding on the fuse-pin of the hand-grenade. The encounter will be short and murderous. You tremble with two contradictory impulses: the heightened awareness of the huntsman, and the terror of the quarry. You are a world to yourself, saturated with the appalling aura of the savage landscape.

  A line of dim forms surfaced, their whispers carried across to us. We turned to look at them; I heard the Bavarian Parthenfelder biting the blade of his knife.

  They took a few more steps towards us, and then started working on their wires, seemingly not having noticed us. We crept very slowly backwards, keeping our eyes fixed on them. Death, which had already loomed up expectantly between us, slunk away dejectedly. After a little, we stood up and went on, till we reached our sector safely.

  Our expedition’s fortunate conclusion gave us the idea of taking a prisoner, and we decided to go again the next night. I had just lain down, therefore, for an afternoon nap when I was startled up by a thunderous din outside my dugout. The British were lobbing ‘toffee-apples’ across, which, even though they made very little noise as they were fired, were so heavy that their splinters ripped away the massive posts of the revetment. Swearing, I clambered up from my bed and went into the trench, only, the next time I saw one of the black weights arcing towards us, to shout: ‘Mortar coming left!’ and nip into the nearest shelter. In the course of the next few weeks, we were so abundantly graced with trench mortars of all shapes and sizes that we got in the habit, each time we found ourselves walking along the trench, of keeping one eye aloft, and the other on the entrance to the nearest deep dugout.

  That night, my three companions and I once more crept out between the trenches. We crawled along on our toes and elbows till right up to the British entanglements, where we hid behind clumps of grass. After a while, s
ome British came out, dragging a roll of wire after them. They stopped close in front of us, put the roll down, snipped at it with wire-cutters, and talked in whispers. We sidled together, and had a hasty discussion: ‘Toss a hand-grenade in there, and pick up the pieces!’ ‘Come on, there’s four of them!’ ‘Don’t talk rubbish!’ ‘Quiet! Quiet down!’ My warning came too late; as I looked up, the British were darting lizard-like under their wires, and disappeared into their trench. The feeling now got a little clammy. The thought: ‘Now they’re going to bring up a machine-gun’ gave me a bad taste in my mouth. The others entertained similar fears. We slid back as quickly as we could, with quite a jangle. The British lines woke up. Drumming of feet, whispers, running hither and thither. Pssht … a flare. All around it was as bright as day, while we tried to press our heads into the grass. Another flare. Tricky moments. You wish the earth would swallow you up, you’d rather be anywhere than where you are, ten yards in front of enemy lines. Another one. Paow! Paow! The unmistakably crisp and deafening report of rifle shots fired at almost point-blank range. ‘Christ! They’ve seen us!’

  No longer worried about making a noise, we called to each other to run for our lives, and leapt up and raced towards our lines through the now pattering gunfire. After a few bounds, I stumbled and landed in a small and very shallow crater, while the other three raced past me, thinking I was done for. I pressed myself to the ground, pulled in my head and my legs, and allowed the bullets to brush over me. Every bit as menacing were the burning lumps of magnesium from the flares, which burned down very close to me in some cases, and which I tried to pat away with my cap. Eventually the shooting relented, and, after a further quarter of an hour, I left my hiding-hole, slowly and cautiously to begin with, and then as fast as my hands and feet could carry me. Since the moon had set by now, I soon became utterly disorientated and had no idea where the British or the German lines were. Not even the distinctive shape of the ruined mill at Monchy was visible against the horizon. The odd bullet from one side or the other streaked over the ground. In the end I lay down in the grass and determined to wait for morning. Suddenly I heard some whispers very close by. I prepared to do battle, and then cautiously made a series of indeterminate natural sounds that I thought might pass equally well for English as German. I resolved to reply to the first English call I received with a hand-grenade. Then, to my delight, it turned out that the whispering was that of my little troop, who were just in the process of taking off their belts, to carry my body back. We sat a while longer in a bomb-crater, and were overjoyed at seeing each other again. Then we made our way back to our trenches. All told, our adventure had taken three hours.

  I was back on trench duty again at five. In No. 1 Platoon’s part of the line, I ran into Sergeant Hock standing outside his dugout. When I expressed surprise at seeing him out so early, he informed me that he was lying in wait for a large rat whose gnawing and rustling had kept him up all night. And from time to time he would look ruefully at his absurdly small dugout, which he had christened ‘Villa Fat-of-the-Land Chicken’.

  While we were standing together, we heard a distant sound of firing, which boded nothing in particular to us. But Hock, who the day before had almost been brained by a large mortar-bomb, and was therefore very apprehensive, dived into the nearest shelter, sliding down the first fifteen steps in his haste, and finding space in the next fifteen for three virtuoso somersaults. I stood up by the entrance, laughing so hard I forgot all about mortars and shelters, when I heard the poor chap bewailing this painfully curtailed rat-hunt, all the while rubbing various sore joints and attempting to put back a dislocated thumb. The unhappy man went on to tell me he’d just been sitting down to eat the night before when the mortar-bomb had come along. As a result he’d got grit all over his dinner, and had made a first painful acquaintance with the flight of steps. He had just arrived here from home, and wasn’t yet used to our roughneck ways.

  After this incident, I betook myself to my dugout, but today too there was no chance of any restorative kip. From early morning on, our trench was subjected to mortar attack, at shorter and shorter intervals. By noon, I’d had enough. With a few other fellows, I got our Lanz mortar set up, and aimed at our opponent’s trenches – a pretty feeble reply, admittedly, to the heavy bombs we’d been ploughed with. Sweating, we squatted on a little dip in the trench – the clay baked hard by the June sun – and sent bomb after bomb towards their lines.

  Since the British seemed quite unperturbed, I went with Wetje to the telephone, where, after some thought, we agreed on the following form of words: ‘Helen’s spitting in our trenches. We need potatoes, big ones and little ones!’ We used this type of language when there was a chance that the enemy might be listening in; and before long we were pleased to hear back from Lieutenant Deichmann that the fat policeman with the stiff moustaches and a couple of his little friends would be brought up, and before long the first of our two-hundredweight bombs flew into the enemy trench, followed by a few units of field artillery, with the result that we were left in peace for the rest of the day.

  Midday the following day the dance began again, but significantly intensified. At the first shot, I took my subterranean passage to the second line, and from there to the communications trench where we had set up our own mortar emplacement. We opened fire in such a way that every time we received a ‘toffee-apple’ we replied with a Lanz. After exchanging about forty mortars, the enemy gunner seemed to be finding his range. His missiles were coming down to the right and left of us, without being able to interrupt our activity until one was seen heading straight for us. At the very last moment we pulled our trigger one last time, and then ran as fast as we could. I had just made it to a mucky, wired stretch of trench when the monster blew up just behind me. The enormous air pressure threw me over a bundle of barbed wire into a shell-hole full of greenish water, and sent a sprinkling of hard clay shards on top of me. I picked myself up, feeling very groggy and dishevelled. My boots and trousers were ripped by the barbed wire, my hands and my uniform were stuck with thick clay, and my knee was bleeding from a long wound. Rather the worse for wear, I slunk back through the trench to my dugout to get over the experience.

  Other than that, the mortars hadn’t done much in the way of damage. The trench had taken a battering in a few places, a Priester mortar was smashed, and the ‘Villa Fat-of-the-Land Chicken’ was no more. It had received a direct hit, while its unlucky owner was down in the deep dugout, otherwise in all probability he would have practised his third freestyle descent of the steps.

  The firing went on all afternoon without a break, and by evening it had been increased to drumfire by numbers of cylindrical bombs. We referred to these missiles as ‘wash-basket mortars’ because it sometimes looked as though they had been shaken down from the sky by the basketload. The best way of picturing their design is imagining a rolling-pin with two short handles on it. Apparently they were fired from special revolver-like drums and were sent spinning end over end through the air, making a somewhat laboured wheezing sound. From a distance they resembled flying sausages. These came down so thick and fast that their landing was like the torching of a batch of rockets. The ‘toffee-apples’ had something crushing or stamping about them, these had more of a rending effect on the nerves.

  We sat tensed and ready in the shelter entrances, prepared at any moment to repel invaders with rifles and hand-grenades, but the bombardment died back after half an hour. In the night we had two more bouts of firing to withstand, during which our sentries stood at their posts and indomitably kept watch. As soon as the gunning relented, numerous flares lit up the defenders charging out from their shelters, and a brisk fire persuaded the enemy that there was still life in our lines.

  In spite of the heavy bombardment, we lost only one man, Fusilier Diersmann, whose skull was smashed by a mortar-bomb landing on the parapet in front of him. Another man was wounded in the back.

  On the day after this unquiet night, numerous bursts of firing prepared
us for an imminent attack. In that time, our trenches really were shot to pieces, and the smashed timber from their revetment made them almost impassable; a number of dugouts were also flattened.

  Brigade headquarters sent an intelligence report to the front: ‘Intercepted British telephone message: the British have precise descriptions of the gaps in our lines, and have requested “Steel Helmets”. It is not known whether “Steel Helmet” is code for heavy mortars. Be prepared!’

  We resolved to be on the alert for anything the coming night, and agreed that anyone who didn’t give his name in response to a ‘Hallo!’ would be immediately fired at. Every officer had his pistol loaded with a red flare, to alert the artillery.

  The night was still wilder than the last. In particular, one concentration of fire at quarter past two outdid anything there had been up to that point. A hail of heavy shells struck all round my dugout. We stood fully armed on the shelter steps, while the light of our little candle stumps reflected glitteringly off the wet, mildewed walls. Blue smoke streamed in through the entrances, and earth crumbled off the ceiling. ‘Boom!’ ‘Good God!’ ‘A light! A light!’ ‘Get everything ready!’ Everyone’s hearts were in their mouths. Hands darted to release the pins on bombs. ‘That was the last of them!’ ‘Let’s go!’ As we charged out of the entrance, a mine with a delay fuse went off, and hurled us back inside. All the same, as the last of the iron birds came whooshing down, all the sentry positions were manned by us. Bright as day, a firework display of flares lit the cloud-swathed field. These instants, in which the entire complement of men stood behind the traverses, tensed and ready, had something magical about them; they were like the last breathless second before a hugely important performance, as the music is turned off and the big lights go up.