Then we sat ourselves in a half-dug trench and had breakfast. Kius pulled out his inevitable camera and took photographs. On our left there was some movement on the outskirts of Langemarck. The men began shooting at some figures that were running here and there, until I told them to stop. Immediately after a N.C.O. came up and reported that a company of the Fusilier Guards were taking up a position on the road, and that our fire had inflicted losses.
I gave the order thereupon to advance and occupy the highest part of the road. There was lively rifle-fire, some of the men fell, and Lieutenant Bartmer of the 2nd Company was severely wounded. Kius remained at my side and finished his piece of bread-and-butter as we went. When we occupied the line of the road, whence the ground fell away to the Steenbeek, we saw that the English had been on the point of doing the same. The first khaki uniforms were already within twenty metres of it. As far as the eye could see, the ground to our front was full of troops in line and column. They were swarming round the Rattenburg too.
We made full use of the surprise of our sudden appearance and at once opened a steady fire on them. Along the Steenbeek a whole column broke up. One man had a coil of wire on his back of which he was unrolling one end. Others jumped like hares this way and that while our bullets raised clouds of dust among them. A sturdy corporal of the 8th Company rested his rifle with the greatest calm on a shattered tree-stump and shot four of the enemy one after the other. The remainder crept into shell-holes and lay concealed there till nightfall. We had made a good clearance.
At about eleven o’clock aeroplanes tied with streamers came diving down on us and were driven off by a lively fire, which they replied to from above. In the midst of the wild clatter I could not help smiling when a man reported to me and desired to have it placed on record that he had shot down a machine in flames with his rifle.
Immediately after occupying the road I had made a report to regimental headquarters and asked for reinforcements. At midday detachments of infantry, engineers, and machine-guns came up in support. According to the time-honoured tactics of Old Fritz all of them were crammed into the already crowded front-line. Here and there the English laid out a few of the men who incautiously crossed the road.
About four o’clock a very unpleasant bombardment with shrapnel started. The volleys got the road to a T. It was clear to me that the aeroplanes had ascertained the line on which we were making a stand, and that there were worse times ahead.
And, in fact, we were soon being heavily shelled with shells of all sizes. We lay close to one another in the narrow and crowded ditch of the road. Fire danced before our eyes; twigs and clods whistled about our ears. Close to me on my left a flash flared out, leaving a white suffocating vapour behind it. I crept on all-fours to the man next me. He moved no more. The blood trickled from many wounds caused by small jagged splinters. On my right, too, there were many hit.
After half an hour it was quiet and we set to digging out the shallow trough of the ditch so as to have at least protection from splinters in case of a second bombardment. Our entrenching tools came against rifles, equipment, and cartridge-cases of 1914, showing that this soil was not drinking blood for the first time.
As dark came on we were given another thorough good do. I crouched beside Kius in a little hole that had cost us some blisters. The ground rocked like a ship’s deck under hit after hit at the least possible distances. We were ready for the end.
I chewed my pipe, my helmet pressed on to my forehead, and stared at the pavé whose stones showered sparks under the bursting lumps of metal; and I succeeded in philosophizing myself into courage. The most remarkable thoughts shot through my head. I took a trashy French novel, Le Vautour de la Sierra, that I had picked up at Cambrai, into lively consideration. I repeated several times to myself a saying of Ariosto, “A great heart cares nothing for death when it comes, so long as it be glorious.” It may seem extraordinary, but it helped me to keep control over myself. When the shells gave our ears a little peace, I heard fragments of the beautiful song from “The Black Whale of Askelon” close beside me, and I thought that my friend Kius must have had a drop too much. Everyone has his own manner of calming his nerves.
At the end of it a large splinter struck my hand. Kius took out a torch. We found only a scratch.
Hours such as these were without doubt the most awful of the whole war.
You cower in a heap alone in a hole and feel yourself the victim of a pitiless thirst for destruction. With horror you feel that all your intelligence, your capacities, your bodily and spiritual characteristics, have become utterly meaningless and absurd. While you think it, the lump of metal that will crush you to a shapeless nothing may have started on its course. Your discomfort is concentrated in your ear, that tries to distinguish amid the uproar the swirl of your own death rushing near. It is dark, too; and you must find in yourself alone all the strength for holding out. You can’t get
