My sleep was heavy and oppressed. The H.E. shells falling all round the house in the pitchy darkness evoked a sense of indescribable loneliness and forlornness from the murdered landscape. Involuntarily I nestled up to a man who shared the same bunk. Once I was scared by a heavy thump. My men made a light and looked to see if the wall had been penetrated. It was found that a light shell had exploded against the outer wall.
I spent the next afternoon with the commanding officer of the battalion at the Mäuseburg, as there were still some important points on which I had to be informed. All the time 15-centimetre shells were falling round headquarters, while the captain, with his adjutant and the orderly officer, played an endless game of Skat over a soda water bottle full of raw spirits. Sometimes he put his cards down to send off a report, or to discuss very seriously whether our concrete shelter was bombproof. We convinced him, in spite of the warmth with which he argued the contrary (the wish being clearly the father to the thought), that we were not fitted to sustain a direct hit from the air.
In the evening the customary artillery fire rose to frantic intensity, and in the front line there was an unceasing display of coloured lights. Dust-covered despatch-carriers brought in reports that the enemy was attacking. After weeks of drumfire the infantry battle had begun.
I went back to company headquarters, and waited there for the arrival of the 2nd Company. It appeared at four in the morning during a very lively burst of shellfire. I took command of my platoon at once and led it to a position covered with the fragments of a shell-destroyed house, a spot most unspeakably forlorn in the midst of an immense and dreary waste of shell-holes.
At six in the morning the Flanders mist lifted and gave us a glimpse of our ghastly surroundings. At once a swarm of low-flying enemy machines appeared, scrutinizing the battered ground and sounding sirens. Any scattered detachments of infantry that were above ground instantly endeavoured to hide themselves in shell-holes.
Half an hour later a terrific artillery fire set in. It raged round our refuge like a typhoon-scourged sea round an island. The hail of shells thickened to a throbbing wall of fire. We crouched together, expecting each second the crashing hit that would sweep us up with our concrete blocks and make our position indistinguishable from the desert of craters all round.
The whole day passed in bursts of heavy shellfire like this, with pauses during which we prepared ourselves for the next bout.
In the evening an exhausted orderly turned up and handed me an order. From this I learned that the 1st, 3rd, and 4th Companies were to counterattack at 10:30, and that the 2nd Company after being relieved was to swarm into the front line. In order to get a little strength to face the hours ahead, I lay down, never dreaming that my brother Fritz, whom I supposed to be still in Hanover, was in a section of the 3rd Company, and passing close to my hut in a hurricane of fire on his way to the attack.
My sleep was disturbed for a long while by the pitiful cries of a wounded man whom two Saxons had brought in. They had lost their way, and were utterly done up and had fallen asleep. When they woke in the morning, their comrade was dead. They carried him to the nearest shell-hole, and after covering him with a few shovelfuls of earth they went on their way, leaving one more to be added to the countless lonely and unknown graves of the war.
I woke at eleven out of a heavy sleep. I washed in my helmet, and sent for orders to the company commander. To my astonishment, he had already gone, without letting me or Kius or our platoons know anything of it.
This showed the consequence of putting officers of another arm of the service in command of front-line troops, only because of seniority, and though they did not know even how to handle a rifle. Let such fetishes be followed when human lives are not at stake.
While I still sat cursing on my bunk and considered what to do, an orderly appeared from battalion headquarters with the order to take immediate command of the 8th Company.
I learnt that the counterattack of the 1st Battalion on the previous night had been repulsed with heavy loss, and that what was left had taken up a defensive position in a small wood called Dobschütz wood, and to right and left of it. The 8th Company had been given the task of swarming into the wood in support. It had, however, run into a barrage in the intervening ground and suffered heavy losses. As the company commander, Lieutenant Büdingen, was among the fallen, I was to lead the company on in a fresh advance.
After I had taken leave of my orphaned platoon, I made my way with the orderly across country. The desolation lay under a rain of shrapnel, and as we went along half-bent we were checked by a despairing voice. In the distance we could see a figure with bleeding arm-stumps raising itself from a shell-hole. We pointed to the hut we had just left, and hastened on.
I found the 8th Company crouching behind a row of concrete positions: an utterly dispirited little mob.
“Platoon commanders!”
Three N.C.O.s came forward and declared that a further advance towards Dobschütz wood was out of the question. It was indeed the fact that the shells were bursting on our front like a wall of fire. Next I had the platoons assembled behind three concrete positions. Each was about fifteen to twenty men strong. At this moment the fire lifted and came on to us. The scene was
