On the first of July we had the sad duty of burying some of the dead in our burial-ground. Thirty-nine plain wooden coffins were lowered into the grave. The address by the Pastor Phillippi was so affecting that the men cried like children. The text was, “You have fought a good fight,” and he began with the words, “Gibraltar—that is your motto; and truly you have stood like a rock in a raging sea!”
The great value of ceremonial observances was made clear to me on this affecting occasion. We have often, one time and another, left ten times the number of dead on the field and yet not been so deeply touched by the loss as we were that day beside the open graves.
I learned during these days to value at their true worth the men with whom I had still three more years of fighting to go through.
You will not find a man in the whole army who can be relied upon so implicitly to do his duty simply and without fuss as the man of Lower Saxony. When there was the need to prove, “Here stands a man, and if need be here he falls … ,” not one of them ever wavered. It showed great self-mastery to leave the security of the deep dugout and face the storm of fire during those days in the trenches when the trench-mortar bombs were exploding by the hundred and when the flanking battery swept us with shrapnel and when bits and splinters were hurtling all ways. In the open field there may be some pleasure in showing your courage, but it is another thing to clench your teeth and to go to your post alone in the night and under fire. It is just this quality of courage that I have always marvelled at in those quiet, fair-haired Saxons.
On the evening of the 3rd of July we went back to the line. It was comparatively quiet, though there were still signs of there being something in the wind. The machine never ceased to throb and hammer. We often intercepted suspicious telephone conversations about gas-containers and mines addressed to an English R.E. officer in the front line. From early morning to dusk enemy aeroplanes kept our trenches under fire. The average daily bombardments were much heavier than usual. In spite of this we were relieved on the 12th July without having had any unpleasant experiences, and went into reserve at Monchy.
On the evening of the 13th July our dugouts in the garden were under fire from a 24-centimetre naval gun. The heavy shells came whistling over and exploded with a really frightful noise. During the night we were awakened by lively firing and a gas attack. We sat in the dugout round the stove with our masks on. Vogel, who could not find his, ran to and fro in great distress, while some of his comrades, who bore him no love, took a malicious joy in declaring that the smell of gas was getting stronger every moment. At last I gave him my spare refill, and he hugged the smoking stove for an hour like an image of misery and coughed and held his nose with a piteous air and pulled away at the mouthpiece.
On the same day I had two casualties in my platoon—Hasselmann with a rifle wound in the arm, and Maschmeier with a shrapnel bullet in the neck.
No attack followed that night. Nevertheless, it was a bad business and cost the regiment twenty-five dead and many wounded. On the 15th and 17th we had two more gas attacks to go through. On the 17th we were relieved, and were twice shelled in Douchy—once while Major von Jarotzky was addressing the assembled officers in an orchard. It was irresistibly comic, in spite of the danger, to see how the company flew apart, nearly falling on their noses in their extreme haste to get through the fences and vanish like lightning wherever cover was to be found. In the garden of my billet a little girl of eight years old was killed by a shell while rummaging for rubbish in a pit.
On the 20th July we were back in the line. On the 28th I arranged with Wohlgemut and the volunteers, Bartels and Birkner, to go on patrol. We had no other object in view than to make a little tour on the other side of the wire and to see what No-man’s-land might bring forth: for trench life had begun by degrees to be monotonous again. In the afternoon Lieutenant Brauns of the 6th Company, who was relieving me, paid me a visit in the dugout and brought one or two bottles of good wine with him. It was half-past eleven when we broke up the meeting, and I then went into the trench, where I found my three comrades standing together in the dark comer of a traverse. After picking out a few dry bombs I climbed over the wire in the best of spirits, while Brauns shouted after me: “Give ’em hell!”
It was not long before we had stalked the enemy wire. Close in front of it in high grass we discovered a stout and well-insulated wire. I thought the discovery might have some importance, and I told Wohlgemut to cut a piece off and take it back with him. While he was employed with a cigar-cutter in default of a better instrument, there was a clink of wire immediately in front of us, and a party of English appeared and began to work on the wire without observing us in the grass.
With the annoying experience of previous patrols in my mind I breathed an almost inaudible “Wohlgemut, bomb in the middle of them!”
“Better leave them to get to work, sir!”
“An order’s an order, Fähnrich!”
The spirit
