I took an inventory of the valuables found on them. It was a horrible job. The candles flickered red in the vaporous air, and as the two men handed me pocketbooks and silver objects it seemed as though we were engaged in some dark and secret work. The fine yellow plaster-dust fell on the faces of the dead and gave them the fixed look of wax figures. We threw coverings over them and hurried out of the cellar, after taking up the wounded man in a groundsheet. With the stoical advice to set his teeth, we carried him through a whirl of shrapnel fire to the dressing-station dugout.
When I got back to my dwelling-place the first thing I did was to have a few cherry-brandies. The experience I had been through had touched my nerve. Soon we were being violently shelled once more, and with the example before our eyes of what artillery fire can do in cellars we made all speed into the dugout shaft.
At 5:15 a.m. the fire increased to an incredible violence. Our dugout rocked and trembled like a ship on a stormy sea. All round resounded the rending of masonry and the crash of collapsing houses.
At seven a.m. I received a message by light-signal addressed to the 2nd Battalion: “Brigade requires immediate report on the situation.” After an hour a despatch-carrier brought back the news: “Enemy taken Arleux and Arleux park. Ordered 8th Company to counterattack. No news so far. Rocholl, Captain.”
This was the only message that my tremendous apparatus of transmission had to deal with during all three weeks of my time in Fresnoy—though certainly it was a very important one. And now that my activity was of the utmost value, the artillery fire had put nearly the whole organization out of action. Such were the results of over-centralization.
This surprising information explained why we had heard rifle-bullets, fired at no very great range, clattering against the walls of the houses.
We had scarcely realized the great losses suffered by the regiment, when the shelling was renewed with increasing fury. My batman was standing, the last of all, on the top step of the dugout stairs, when a crash like thunder announced that the English had at last succeeded in knocking in our cellar. The trusty Knigge got a good squared building-stone on the back, but was not hurt. Above, everything was shot to blazes. Daylight came to us past two bicycles squeezed into the dugout entrance. We made ourselves as small as we could on the lowest step, while heavy explosions and the din of falling masonry convinced us of the insecurity of our refuge.
By a miracle the telephone was still working, so I explained the plight we were in to my chief at the Division, and received orders to withdraw with my men into the dressing-station dugout close by.
After packing up what it was most essential to take with us, we set about leaving the dugout by the second and only remaining exit. In spite of my peremptory orders, backed up by unequivocal threats, the telephone staff, which was not much used to war, hesitated so long to venture out of the protection of the dugout into the shellfire that this exit, too, was smashed in with a crash by a heavy shell. Luckily, no one was hit; only our little dog howled miserably, and from that moment was never seen again.
We now pushed aside the bicycles that barred the way out through the cellar, and, creeping on all-fours over the heaps of debris, got into the open through a narrow crack in the wall. We did not pause to observe the incredible change that these few hours had produced in the village, but ran out of it as fast as we could. The last of us had scarcely left the yard gates when the house got another tremendous hit.
A compact belt of fire covered the area between the edge of the village and the dressing-station dugout. Light and heavy shells with direct and delay action fuses, duds, empty cases, and shrapnel combined to produce a nightmare of acoustic and optical effects. Through it, passing to right and left of the witch’s cauldron seething in the village, the reserves were marching up.
In Fresnoy the shells were sending up the earth in fountains as high as church towers. Each seemed bent on outdoing its predecessor. As though by magic, one house after another was sucked into the earth. Walls collapsed, gables fell, and bare rafters were flung through the air to mow the roofs of neighbouring houses. Clouds of splinters danced above whitish swathes of vapour. Eye and ear hung as though entranced upon this dance of destruction.
We spent two days in a painfully confined space in the dressing-station dugout, for besides my men there were the staffs of two battalions, two relief detachments, and the indispensable corps troops. Naturally, the constant coming and going in front of the entrances was observed by the enemy. Soon the range was got to a yard, and at intervals of a minute shells fell on the track outside, and there were casualties all the time. Indeed,
