Close by was a dressing-station, a dugout covered with branches. Here I spent the night among a crowd of other wounded. A worn-out doctor stood in the midst of groaning men, bandaging, injecting, and giving directions in a quiet voice. I pulled the cloak of one of the dead over me and fell into a deep sleep, disturbed by strange and feverish dreams. I woke once in the middle of the night and saw the doctor still at work by the light of a lantern. A Frenchman uttered every moment a piercing yell, and near me someone grumbled irritably: “Just like a Frenchman! Oh, well, if they couldn’t yell they wouldn’t be happy.” Then I fell asleep again.
When I was being carried out next morning a splinter bored a hole through the canvas of the stretcher between my knees. I was taken across the Grande Tranchée, which was still heavily bombarded, to the chief dressing-station, and then moved into the church of the village of St. Maurice. Near me in the jolting ambulance lay a man with an abdominal wound who implored his comrades to shoot him with the orderly’s revolver.
A hospital train stood under steam in St. Maurice Station, and in two days we reached Heidelberg. As I saw the slopes above the Neckar wreathed in cherry blossom I felt a vivid pang of homesickness. How beautiful a country, worth bleeding for and dying for!
The battle of Les Eparges was the first I was in, and it was not at all what I had expected. I had taken part in a great military operation without coming within sight of the enemy. It was later that I experienced hand-to-hand fighting, that supreme moment of warfare when the infantryman comes into the open and when the chaotic vacancy of the battlefield has its murderous and decisive interludes.
Douchy and Monchy
My wound was healed in fourteen days. I was sent to the reserve battalion at Hanover, and reported there as a cadet. After going through a course at Doberitz and getting further promotion, I went back to the regiment in September 1915.
I left the train at St. Leger, the headquarters of the division, and marched with a detachment of recruits to Douchy, the headquarters of the regiment. On our front the autumn offensive was in full swing. Over a wide stretch of country the front line was marked by a swaying cloud of smoke. Over our heads were aeroplanes and the tac-tac-tac of their Lewis guns. Apparently we were spotted from a captive balloon, for at the entrance of the village the smoke of a bomb rose in a black cone in front of us. I turned aside and led the column into the village by another route.
Douchy, the headquarters of the 73rd, was a village of moderate size, and had not so far suffered a great deal from the war. It lies in the undulating country of Astois, and during our year and a half’s fighting in this part of the front it served us as a second depot and as a rest-place where we could recuperate after hard times in the front line. How often we heaved a sigh of relief at the sight of a lonely light gleaming on a wet night at the entrance of the village! There one had at any rate a roof over one’s head and an undisturbed nook of one’s own. One could sleep without having to turn out every four hours and without being pursued even in one’s dreams by the constant expectation of a raid. The first day of rest was like being born anew, when after a bath one puts on clean clothes and well-brushed uniform. There were drill and games on the fields about, to loosen the joints and awaken a sense of comradeship among men who had spent the long and lonely nights on guard. From this we got fresh zest for new and arduous days. At first the companies used to march up in turn to the front every night. This exhausting double shift was later given up by order of Colonel von Oppen, who showed in this his habitual commonsense. The security of a position depends on the freshness of its defenders and their fighting spirit, not on the length of the communication trenches and the depth of the firing line.
Douchy had many innocent recreations to offer us. There were numerous canteens well provided with eatables and drinks. There was a reading-room, a café, and later even a cinema in a large barn most skilfully converted. The officers had a splendidly-equipped casino and a skittle-alley in the vicarage garden. Often companies held festive evenings at which officers and men vied with each other in drinking in the good old German style.
As the civil population still lived in the village, all the space available had to be made full use of. The gardens were partly occupied with huts and temporary dwellings of one sort and another; a large orchard in the centre of the village was used for church parade; another was made into a pleasure-garden and called the Emmich Platz. Here in huts covered with branches were the barber and the dentist. A large meadow near the church served as a burial-ground. Nearly every day one company or another marched there to bury one or more of their number.
Thus in the course of a year the buildings appropriate to a garrison town overgrew the dilapidated village like a mighty parasite. The peaceful picture was scarcely recognizable. Dragoons watered their horses in the village pond, infantry training went on in the gardens, and all over the meadows soldiers lay and sunned themselves. Nothing was kept up that did not serve a military purpose, and all that did was in
