“When I woke from a long fainting fit all was still. I tried to stand up, but I felt a sharp pain in my right shoulder that increased with every movement. My breath was short and gasping. The lung could not get enough air. ‘Hit through lung and shoulder,’ I thought, and threw away pack and belt and, in a mood of utter apathy, gas-mask too, and hung my water-bottle on the hooks of my tunic.
“After five steps I sank helplessly into a neighbouring shell-hole. After an hour perhaps, I made a second attempt to crawl on, as a light drumfire had started. This attempt, too, miscarried. I lost my water-bottle and sank into a state of exhaustion, from which after a long time the sensation of burning thirst aroused me.
“It began to rain gently. I succeeded in collecting a few muddy drops in my steel helmet. I had lost all sense of direction. There was a thunderstorm, but its peals were lost in a new onset of drumfire. I clung close to the side of the shell-hole. A clod struck my shoulder. Heavy splinters swept over my head. Gradually I lost all sense of time.
“Once two men appeared, hurrying by with long strides. I called to them, but they disappeared in the mist like shadows without hearing me. At last three men came straight towards me. I recognized the middle one as the N.C.O. of the day before. They took me to a little hut near by. It was crammed with wounded, whom two orderlies were seeing to. I had lain thirteen hours among the shell-holes.
“In a corner I saw Bachmann, who convulsively clasped his shattered knee and swallowed down his agony. We spoke in fragments. Now and then when anyone pushed against him he suppressed a groan.
“All the while the artillery fire kept at the same pitch. Shell after shell burst close to us, often covering the roof with sand and earth. My wounds were dressed, and I was given a new mask and a piece of bread spread with coarse red jam, and a little water. The orderly looked after us like a father.
“The English began to push forward. They came on by springs and then disappeared in shell-holes, as I could make out from the cries of consternation outside.
“Then my company commander, Lieutenant Sandvoss, came in. He asked me if I could walk, and then was called away by an orderly and vanished. Immediately I heard him giving orders. A machine-gun was mounted and began to tack out.
“Suddenly a young officer smeared in mud from his boots to his helmet, with the Iron Cross of the 1st class on his breast, rushed in. It was my brother, who days before, down the line, was said to be dead. We greeted each other, smiling rather awkwardly in the stress of our feelings. After a minute or two he left me and came back with the last five men of his company. I was put in a groundsheet and carried from the battlefield to the thunder of guns.”
Regniéville
On the 4th of July 1917 we got out of the train at the famous Mars-la-Tour. The 7th and 8th Companies were quartered in Doncourt, where for some days we lived an almost contemplative life. The only source of conflict for me was the shortage of rations. It was strictly forbidden to forage in the fields, and yet the military police brought me reports nearly every morning with the names of men whom they had caught potato-lifting by night. I had to punish them, for the crime of being caught, as it stood in my (perhaps unofficial) code.
I had to learn, too, during those days that wrongdoing never comes to any good. Tebbe and I had brought with us a princely lord-mayor’s coach from an abandoned Flemish mansion, and had contrive to include it in the transport unobserved. Now we planned a magnificent expedition to Metz, in order to taste life at the full once more. So we harnessed up one afternoon and drove off. Unfortunately, the coach had no brakes, since it was designed for the Flemish plain, not for the hills of Lorraine. Before we were out of the village we had already begun to roll, and soon found ourselves embarked on a mad career that boded no good. The first to jump for it was the coachman; then Tebbe, who fell full-length on a heap of agricultural implements, and lay there. I remained alone on the silken upholstery, but certainly not at my ease. A door flew open, and was knocked straight off by a telegraph pole. Finally, the coach leapt down a bank and crashed against the wall of a house. I left the wreckage by a window, and ascertained that, with my usual luck, I was none the worse.
On the 9th the company was inspected by the commander of the division, Major-General von Busse, who praised us for our conduct in the recent fighting. We entrained on the next afternoon for the neighbourhood of Thiaucourt. Thence we marched straight on to our new position in the line. It lay along the wooded heights of the Côte Lorraine, opposite the much-shelled village of Regniéville, so often mentioned in the orders of the day. I inspected my front the first morning. It struck me as being of very generous length for one company, and it consisted of a maze of trenches half fallen in, and by no means easy to take stock of. Besides all this, the front line had been flattened out in many places by a species of heavy mortar bomb commonly used on this front. My dugout was a hundred metres behind in the so-called Commerce trench, near the road from Regniéville. It was the first time for a
