I was glad when after fourteen days I was able to leave this abode of piled-up agonies, with my wound half-healed. I had read with pride, meanwhile, of the magnificent and successful attack of the Fusiliers on St. Pierre Vaast wood.
The 111th Division were still holding the same front. There were several explosions as my train trundled into Epéhy. The ruins of goods trucks lumped up together showed that it was no joking matter.
“What is going on here, I say?” asked a captain sitting opposite me. He had the fresh and rosy air of having been exported straight from home. Without wasting time by a reply I tore open the door and took cover behind the railway embankment. Fortunately they were the last ones, and only a few horses were wounded.
As I could not walk very well, I was given the post of observation officer. My field of observation was over the falling ground between Nurlu and Moislaines. I had a periscopic telescope built into a shelter, and with this I kept a lookout in the front line that I already knew well. My job was to ring up the division in case of heavy fire, coloured lights, or any other unusual events. All day long I crouched freezing on a chair behind the glasses in the November mist, with nothing to vary the monotony except an occasional call to test the wires. If the wire had been broken I had to have it mended by my breakdown squad. Apart from this I had nothing to do but wait for the moment of an attack.
The modern battlefield is like a huge, sleeping machine with innumerable eyes and ears and arms, lying hidden and inactive, ambushed for the one moment on which all depends. Then from some hole in the ground a single red light ascends in fiery prelude. A thousand guns roar out on the instant, and at a touch, driven by innumerable levers, the work of annihilation goes pounding on its way.
Orders fly like sparks and flashes over a close network, spurring on to heightened destruction in front and bringing up from behind a steady stream of fresh men and fresh materials to fling into the flames. Everyone feels that he is caught in a vortex which draws him on and on and thrusts him with unrelenting precision over the brink of death.
Every twenty-four hours I was relieved by another officer and betook myself to Nurlu, where fairly comfortable quarters had been rigged up in a large wine-cellar. I often think of those long, meditative November evenings which I spent smoking my pipe alone at the hearth of this barrel-shaped vault, while outside the mist dripped from the bare trees in the park and at long intervals a reechoing report broke the stillness.
On the 18th November the division was relieved and I went back to the regiment, now on rest in the village of Fresnoy-le-Grand. There I took over the command of the 2nd Company in place of Lieutenant Boje, then on leave. The regiment had four weeks of undisturbed rest in Fresnoy, and everyone did his best to enjoy it to the full. Christmas and New Year were celebrated by the companies with great festivities at which beer and grog flowed in rivers. There were exactly four men left in the 2nd Company who had spent the previous Christmas with me in the line before Monchy. I was billeted on a French rentier, in whose house I shared the so-called “salon” and two bedrooms with Fähnrich Gornick and my brother Fritz, who was spending six weeks with the regiment as cadet. We made ourselves very merry over the worthy married couple, who kept an argus-eyed watch over their plush furniture and alabaster vases and over their stack of wood in the yard, and who lived on terms of ceaseless animosity with the batman.
In this little retreat the bottle went round faster than ever. At night when walking late through the narrow streets one heard the sounds of carnival in every billet. Everything in wartime goes without reckoning, and hence came the preference of the soldier at the front for alcohol in its most concentrated forms. Our relations with the civil population, too, were, to a great extent, of an undesirable familiarity; Venus deprived Mars of many servants.
Needless to say, we were at once put on a footing of old Prussian discipline, and it said a great deal for officers and men that after fourteen days the regiment was once more at its old level.
There was an inspection by the commander of the division, Major-General Sontag. On this occasion the regiment was honoured for its valiant conduct in the attack on St. Pierre Vaast wood, and distinguished by a number of decorations.
As I marched past the general at the head of the 2nd Company I observed that Colonel von Oppen appeared to make some remark about me to the general. A few hours later I received orders to report at divisional headquarters, where the general handed me the Iron Cross of the 1st class.
On the 17th January 1917 I was sent from Fresnoy on a four weeks’ company commanders’ course at Sisonne near Laon, where there was a French manoeuvring ground. Captain Funk, who was in command of our detachment, made the work exceedingly pleasant. He understood to an exceptional degree how to put the spirit above the letter and to interest us in the matters in hand.
The catering was certainly the sorriest I ever experienced
