One morning, when, thoroughly wet through, I went up out of the dugout into the trench, I could scarcely believe my eyes. The field of battle that hitherto had been marked by the desolation of death itself had taken on the appearance of a fair. The occupants of the trenches on both sides had been driven to take to the top, and now there was a lively traffic and exchange going on in schnapps, cigarettes, uniform buttons, etc., in front of the wire. The crowds of khaki-coloured figures that streamed from the hitherto so deserted English trenches had a most bewildering effect.
Suddenly there was a shot that dropped one of our fellows dead in the mud. … Whereupon both sides disappeared like moles into their trenches. I went to the part of the trench opposite the English sap and shouted across that I wished to speak to an officer. Some of the English did in fact go back, and presently returned from their main trench with a young man who was distinguished from them, as I could see through my glasses, by a smarter cap. At first we conversed in English and then rather more fluently in French, while the men stood round listening. I put it to him that one of our men had been killed by a treacherous shot. He replied that this was the doing of the company on his flank and not of his men. “Il y a des cochons aussi chez vous,” he remarked when some shots from the sector next to ours passed close to his head; and thereupon I made ready to take cover forthwith. We said a good deal to each other in the course of the interview in a fashion that can only be described as sportsmanlike, and would gladly at the end have made some exchange of presents in memory of the occasion.
It has always been my ideal in war to eliminate all feelings of hatred and to treat my enemy as an enemy only in battle and to honour him as a man according to his courage. It is exactly in this that I have found many kindred souls among British officers. It depends, of course, on not letting oneself be blinded by an excessive national feeling, as the case generally is between the French and the Germans. The consciousness of the importance of one’s own nation ought to reside as a matter of course and unobtrusively in everybody, just as an unconditional sense of honour does in the gentleman. Without this it is impossible to give others their due.
In order to be on a clear footing again we made a solemn declaration of war within three minutes of breaking off our parley; and after “Good evening” on his side and “Au revoir” on mine, I had a shot, in spite of the regrets of my men, at his loophole. It was retured at once with one that nearly knocked the rifle from my hands.
This was the first opportunity I had of surveying the ground before the sap, for it was madness to show the peak of a cap at this dangerous spot. One thing I noticed was that there was the skeleton of a Frenchman just in front of our wire, whose white bones shone out from the rags of his blue uniform.
Shortly after this conference our artillery fired a few shells on the enemy trenches, whereupon, before our eyes, four stretchers were carried across the open without, to my delight, a single shot being fired from our side. From the English cap-badges we were left in no doubt after that day that we had the “Hindustani” Leicestershires opposite us.
The weather towards Christmas became more and more dreary. We had to set up pumps in the trenches in order to make a show of keeping even with the water.
During this time of mud, too, our casualty rate rose considerably above the average. For example, I find in my diary under December 12: “Today seven of our men were buried at Douchy and two more since have been shot dead”; and under December 23: “Mud and dirt get the upper hand. This morning at three o’clock a regular landslide came thundering down the entrance of my dugout. I had to set three men to work, and it took them all their time to bail out the water that poured like a mountain torrent into the dugout. The trench is waterlogged beyond hope. We are up to our waists in ooze. It is enough to make one despair. On the right flank a dead body is coming to light, the legs only so far.”
We spent Christmas Eve in the line. The men stood in the mud and sang Christmas carols that were drowned by the enemy machine-guns. On Christmas Day we lost a man in No. 3 platoon by a flanking shot through the head. Immediately after, the English attempted a friendly overture and put up a Christmas tree on their parapet. But our fellows were so embittered that they fired and knocked it over. And this in turn was answered with rifle grenades. In this miserable fashion we celebrated Christmas Day.
On the 28th of December I was commandant of the Altenburg Redoubt. It was on this day that one of my best men, Fusilier Hohn, had an arm torn off by a shell splinter. Another, Heidotting, was badly wounded in the thigh by one of the many stray bullets that buzzed round this low-lying strong post. My trusty August Kettler, too, was hit by a shrapnel bullet on the road
