The trench walls were of chalk, and this withstood the weather much better than the clay we were accustomed to. In places the sides of the trench were even carefully walled, and the floor of it concreted for long stretches, so that even in the heaviest rain the water could soon run away. The reddish-white rock abounded in fossils. Every time I went to my dugout with a pocketful of mussels, starfish, and snake-stone. My dugout was deep and drippy. It had a peculiarity very little to my liking, though I am a passionate entomologist. Instead of the usual louse, we had here its far livelier relative. These two varieties appear to have the same enmity to each other as the brown and common rat. It was no good adopting the usual remedy of a change of clothes, for the nimble parasites lay in ambush in the straw palliasses. At last the victim leapt up in desperation, and could have said with Mephisto:
I give the old rug another shake
And still one more to flight does take;
Up! and away! with all my soul
Go find yourselves another ’ole!
Rations, too, were very poor. Beyond the thin midday soup, there was nothing but the third of a loaf, and something infinitesimal to eat with it, usually half-mouldy jam. Most of mine was always eaten by a fat rat, for which I often lay in wait, but in vain.
This sparse living, which left us always half-fed, brought about a most unpleasant state of affairs. The men often suffered literally from hunger, and this led to pilfering of rations. It surprised me to find that I, though used to good and plentiful food, seemed to bear the privation much better than the men. Cabbage soup was their only thought. When it comes to food, the good manners that in Europe are mostly whitewash are soon scratched off. A man shows his real superiority when hunger is part of the meal, not at festive tables. Privation and danger tear away all that has been acquired, and then good form survives only in those in whom it is born.
The companies in reserve and on rest occupied hutments in picturesque situations deeply hidden in the forest. My quarters in reserve were particularly delightful. The camp was in a blind corner on the edge of a narrow forest gorge. My little hut was built half into the bank, and curtained with hazel and cornel bushes. From the window I had a view of the wooded hillside opposite and a narrow strip of meadow traversed by a stream. A collection of bottles of all sorts stacked at the back showed that many hermits had already spent meditative hours there, and I, too, strove to live up to its time-honoured associations. When the evening mist rose from below and mingled with the heavy white smoke of my wood fire, and I squatted in the open door at dusk between the warm fire behind and the keen autumn air in front, it always seemed to me that only one drink was appropriate—red wine and cognac, half-and-half, in a big-bellied glass. These intimate communings consoled me for the fact that a gentleman from the depot, who had seniority over myself, had come to take over my company, and that I was once more discharging the boring duties of a platoon commander in the trenches. I endeavoured to kill the endless hours on trench duty by frequent warlike excursions in my old style.
On the 24th August the gallant Captain Böckelmann was wounded by a shell splinter. This made the third commanding officer the battalion had lost within a short time. On the 29th, with the N.C.O. Kloppmann, the stoutest fellow of the 7th Company, I paid a visit to the enemy’s lines.
We crept up to a gap in the enemy wire, cut by Kloppmann the night before. It was an unpleasant surprise to find that it had been mended up again. Nevertheless, we cut it through once more, with a good deal of noise, and climbed down into the trench. We crouched behind the next traverse and listened, lying in wait. After a quarter of an hour we went cautiously on, following a telegraph wire that came to an end at a bayonet stuck in the ground. We found the post defended by wire entanglements of all kinds and also a trellised door, but unoccupied. After we had taken accurate note of everything we went the same way back, and carefully connected up the wire again across our gap, so as not to betray our visit.
The next evening Kloppmann again reconnoitred the post. However, he was greeted by rifle-fire and the lemon-shaped bombs we called “duck’s eggs.” One of them fell close to his head, which was pressed to the ground—without exploding. He had to take to his heels with all speed. The evening after that there were two of us again, and this time we found the front line occupied. By listening we accurately located four posts. One of them was whistling a very charming tune to himself. Finally we were fired on, and crept back.
When I was standing by myself in the trench again, Vogt and Haverkamp suddenly turned up. They had very obviously been having a jolly time, and the odd idea had come to them of leaving the comfortable reserve camp and journeying through a pitch-black night to the front line, in order to go, as they said, on patrol. I have always made it a rule to let anyone carry his own skin to market where he pleases; so I made no objection to them clambering out of the trench, though the enemy still continued in a high state of excitement. It is true that the sole purpose of their patrol was to look for the silk parachutes of French rockets; and that, having found them, they chased each other to and fro in front of the enemy’s wire, whirling
