For the coming spell in the line I was appointed as scouting officer, and with a scout troop and two N.C.O.s was under the orders of the division.
On the 8th November the battalion moved in pouring rain to Gonnelieu. There the scout troop was detached to Lièremont and put under the command of the divisional intelligence officer, Captain Böckelmann. The captain, with us four scout officers, two observation officers, and his adjutant, was quartered in the priest’s house. There we lived very happily together in comfortably furnished rooms.
Our predecessors took us over the divisional front. We had to go up the line every second night. Our task was to ascertain exactly where the front line ran and to see that communications were maintained, so that if the need arose we should be able to take the troops into the line and carry out orders in an emergency. My sphere of action was a sector left of St. Pierre Vaast wood and immediately in front of the so-called “Nameless” wood. The first night, after nearly drowning myself in crossing a marsh flooded by the Tortille, I got into a thick cloud of phosgene shell-gas, and scurried back with weeping eyes to Vaux wood. On the way I fell into one shell-hole after another, as I could see nothing through the misted eyepieces of the mask.
On the 13th November, hoping for better luck, I set out again on my second tour of the line. My orders were to ascertain that touch was maintained between the shell-holes that constituted the front line. I struggled to my goal along a chain of posts concealed in holes in the ground.
The shell-hole line deserved its name. A plateau in front of the village of Rancourt was pockmarked with innumerable miniature craters which here and there were occupied by two or three men. The monotony of the scene, where nothing was heard but the whistle and crash of shells, filled the mind with the dread of its utter desolation. After some time I lost touch with the line of shell-holes and went back in case I walked into the French. Soon after I came upon an officer I knew in the 164th Regiment, who warned me not to stay any longer now that dawn was breaking. So I hurried on through “Nameless” wood, stumbling into deep shell-holes and over uprooted trees and through the almost impassable tangle of branches that covered the ground.
When I left the edge of the wood it was daylight. Before me lay an expanse of shell-holes without a sign of life. I stopped short, for, in modern battle, stretches of ground where not a man is to be seen are always suspicious.
Suddenly a shot from an unseen sniper got me in both legs. I flung myself into the nearest shell-hole and bound the wounds with my handkerchief, for, needless to say, I had forgotten my field-dressing. A bullet had passed through my right calf and grazed my left.
I crept back into the wood with the utmost caution, and from there limped over the shell-shot ground to the dressing-station. Shortly before this I had an example of the little incidents on which the chances of war turn. I was making for the crossroads about a hundred metres ahead of me, when an officer in command of a working party whom I had known in the 9th Company called out to me. We had scarcely been talking for a minute when a shell struck the crossroads where but for this chance encounter I should probably have been at that moment.
After dark I was carried on a stretcher to Nurlu. Captain Böckelmann was most kindly waiting for me with a car. We were proceeding along the chaussée in the light of the enemy searchlights when the driver suddenly applied the brakes. A dark obstruction barred the way. It was an infantry section with its N.C.O., which had just fallen a victim to a direct hit. It seemed as though death had united them in a peaceful sleep.
I had to be taken into the cellar of the priest’s house, as Lièremont was just receiving its evening benediction. The same evening I was moved to the Villeret field hospital, and thence to the war hospital at Valenciennes.
The hospital was installed in the gymnasium near the station, and accommodated four hundred severe cases. A funeral procession with muffled drums left the main entrance day after day. The whole misery of the war was concentrated in the spacious operating-theatre. The surgeons carried on their sanguinary trade at a row of operating-tables. Here a limb was amputated, there a skull chiselled away, or a grown-in bandage cut out. Moans and cries of pain sounded through the room in the flood of remorseless light, while nurses in white hastened busily from one table to another with instruments and dressings.
The soldier who after such a sight goes back under fire with ardour unquenched has indeed withstood a test of nerve; for every fresh and terrible impression claws itself into the brain, and is added to the prostrating complex of imaginings that make the moment between the rush and the burst of a shell ever more frightful.
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