On the 8th February, C sector was badly shelled. Already in the early hours our own artillery landed a dud into the dugout of my right-flank section. The inmates had an unpleasant surprise when it pushed in the door and overturned the stove. A witty fellow drew a caricature in which eight men were rushing for the shattered door over the smoking stove while the dud observed them from the corner with an evil wink. Besides this, at midday we had three dugouts smashed in. Fortunately, only one man was wounded slightly in the knee; for everyone, even the posts, had been withdrawn into the deep dugouts. On the next day Fusilier Hartmann of my platoon got a mortal wound in the side. It was from a shell from the flanking battery. On the 25th February we had a very severe loss through the death of a very fine fellow and a great favourite. Just before the relief I got word in my dugout that Karg, a volunteer, had been hit in the deep dugout near by. I went along and found, as so often before, a sad group standing round a motionless figure. The hands on the bloodstained snow were clenched and the glazed eyes stared into the sky. One more victim of the flanking battery. Karg, when the first few came over, was in the trench and at once jumped into the shaft of the deep dugout. A large splinter from a shell that struck the wall of the trench just opposite flew into the dugout entrance and hit him in the back of the head when he thought himself in safety. He died an instant, unlooked-for death.
The flanking battery was, indeed, very active during those days. Almost hourly it fired a single unexpected salvo and the shell splinters fairly swept the trench. In the six days from the 3rd February to the 8th it cost three dead and three severely and three lightly wounded. Though it was at the utmost 1,500 metres from us on a hillside on our left flank, it was beyond the power of our artillery to silence it. The only means we had of diminishing its effectiveness lay in increasing the number of our traverses and heightening them so that the range of a shell-burst was confined to short lengths of trench.
With the beginning of March we had the worst of the mud behind us. The weather was dry and the trench freshly revetted; and now and then we had an hour or two of leisure and comfort. I sat every evening in my dugout at my little writing-table and read, or talked when I had a visitor. We were four officers with the company commander, and we passed our days together on the best of terms.
We met for coffee in the dugout of one or the other of us every day, or sat together in the evening over a bottle or two and smoked, played cards, and comported ourselves like soldiers of fortune. Those pleasant hours in the dugout outweigh the memory of many days of blood and dirt and exhaustion. They were, too, only possible during the long periods of, comparatively speaking, quiet trench warfare, during which we became completely at home with each other and fell into almost peacetime habits. Our chief pride lay in our building activities, to which the gentry further back contributed very little. We sank a shaft of thirty steps near the other deep dugout into the soft chalky ground, and connected the two by a gallery at right angles to the shaft. By this means we could go in comfort six metres underground from the one flank of our platoons to the other. My pet enterprise was a gallery sixty metres long running from my platoon headquarters to the company commander’s dugout, provided on the right hand and on the left with chambers for ammunition and living-rooms. These places were of the utmost value during the subsequent fighting.
When, after morning coffee (one even got the paper pretty regularly), we met each other washed and shaved in the trench footrule in hand, we compared progress in our respective parts of it, while the talk turned on dugout frames, pattern dugouts, hours of work, and such matters. At night when I lay down on my plank bed I always had the pleasant consciousness of having in my sphere fulfilled the expectations those at home had of me. I had given all my energies to the defence of my two hundred metres of the front line, and cared for the well-being of my sixty men.
It was only now when there was time for it that I was able to experience this feeling to the full. In the winter months we had not a thought in the trenches but of digging and “Will this damned business never end?” It is not danger, however extreme it may be, that depresses the spirit of the men so much as over-fatigue and wretched conditions. People who have leisure can afford themselves every luxury, even that of heroic feelings. This is true for the people as a whole. Its moral worth can only reach its full height when the pressure of work is not crushing upon any section of it.
On the 1st of March, as I was standing behind a groundsheet with Landwehrsman Ikman, who was killed not long after, a shell burst straight in front of us. The splinters flew about us without a hit. When we took a closer look we found that numerous fragments of steel of a length and sharpness that
