The terrible losses, out of all proportion to the breadth of front attacked, were principally due to the old Prussian obstinacy with which the tactics of the line were pursued to their logical conclusion.
One battalion after another was crowded up into a front line already over-manned, and in a few hours pounded to bits.
It was a long while before the folly of contesting worthless strips of ground was recognized. It was finally given up and the principle of a mobile defence adopted. The last development of this was the elastic distribution of the defence in zones.
Thus it was that there were never again such bitterly-contested engagements as those that for weeks together were fought out round shell-shot woods or undecipherable ruins. The names of the tiniest Picardy hamlets are memorials of heroic battles to which the history of the world can find no parallel. There it was that the dust first drank the blood of our trained and disciplined youth. Those fine qualities which had raised the German race to greatness leapt up once more in dazzling flame and then slowly went out in a sea of mud and blood.
At St. Pierre Vaast
After fourteen days in hospital and as long on leave I went back to the regiment, which was now in the line near Deux Nœuds, quite close to the well-known Grande Tranchée. After my arrival it remained two days there, and the same time in the old mountain town of Hattonchâtel. Then we entrained at Mars-la-Tour for the Somme region once more.
We detrained at Bohain again and went into quarters in the village of Brancourt, near by. This was a neighbourhood we often touched upon in later days. It was agricultural, and yet there was a loom in nearly every house. The inhabitants did not appeal to me. They were dirty and of a very low moral development. I was billeted on a cottage where lived a man and his wife and their daughter. I must own that in return for my money they made me most excellent dishes of eggs. The daughter told me over the first cup of coffee that she was going “to drink a good coffee with Poincaré after his return,” by which she meant, give him a piece of her mind. I have never heard anyone so fluent in abuse as this filia hospitalis, particularly on the topic of a neighbour whom she accused of having lived in a certain street of St. Quentin. “Ah cette p’lure, cette pomme de terre pourrie, jetée sur un fumier. C’est la crème de la crème,” she spluttered while she raged round the room stretching out her hands like claws in the vain search for an object on which to vent her wrath.
In the morning, when this rose of Brancourt was busied making butter or some other domestic matter, she looked unbelievably uninviting. Yet in the afternoon, when it came to parading the village street with pride or visiting her friends, the ugly grub had turned into the splendid butterfly. I always observed with some mistrust a large box of rice-powder that never left the table, for it seemed to me to be a complete substitute for soap and water.
One day the father begged me to forward an indictment to the town-major complaining of a neighbour who, not content with taking him by the throat and giving him a good beating, had shouted “Demande pardon!” while threatening him with death.
Little observations of this kind gave me the comforting assurance that national pride, even in France, is not a quality of the masses. Two years later, when we returned to our native land after honourable and exacting warfare, the knowledge of this helped me to get over the remarkable reception that some of our own people gave us. “Il y a des cochons partout!” as the English officer very justly remarked to me in front of the trenches at Monchy.
The 2nd Company was now under command of Lieutenant Boje. We spent our days here in the happy atmosphere of good fellowship. I must own that we often drank heavily until, indeed, we treated the whole world as no more than a laughable phantom that circled round our table. There were usually also uproarious sounds from the room occupied by our batmen. Those who have never known the brief spells that separate one murderous battle from another may hold up their hands at us if they please. In any case we were glad to indulge ourselves and our men with every hour of debauch that life would yield while we were still within its circle.
I shall not be taken for a dipsomaniac, though I mention drink so often. I have never flouted the time-honoured and social rites of the bottle. At the same time, both before the war and since I have often gone for months without drinking at all. But at the front one came out of the line covered with mud and in a bad temper, to have the few days on rest taken up in training … and then the night came in the mess, and the present was blotted out and only memory and hope were lit up. All the devastation of every kind that
