The general staff officer received me in his office, and tried in vain to impress upon me that I owed the loss of my men to an ill-considered and overhasty advance. I thought: “You can tell me a lot, sitting here twenty kilometres behind the line,” and I gave him to understand that in the enemy’s front line I had neither a green table nor the packs of cards upon it. Besides that, all the part I had had was the fighting itself; as for the plan, that had been thrust on me ready-made, though there was much in it to take exception to. I had asked that the objective should be altered to the well-marked line of the paved road, or at least that coloured lights might be fired from our lines in case any of us lost our way. The reply had been that this would draw the enemy’s fire. But what the devil did the enemy’s fire matter to me? I was used to it. But I was not an owl to see my way in the dark!
The divisional commander was more agreeable, and soon dissipated my low spirits. I sat next him at lunch in my torn tunic and with my hand bound up, and remembering the saying, “Only fools are modest!” I took care to put our doings of the morning in their true light.
Next day Colonel von Oppen inspected the patrol again, and distributed iron crosses and gave each of us fourteen days’ leave. At midday those of the fallen who were brought in were buried in the military cemetery at Thiaucourt. Among this year’s graves are some of 1870–71. One of these old graves had a mossy stone with the inscription: “Far from our sight but always near our hearts.” Cut on a large tablet of stone were the following lines:—
Heroes’ deeds and heroes’ graves
Rank themselves beside the old.
How to win and how to keep …
Here is told.
In the evening I read in the French communiqué, “A German raid near Regniéville failed. We made prisoners.” It was not stated that the prisoners were taken only because we lost our way in seeking an enemy who had fled before us. Had the French defended their trenches as soldiers of courage do, it would have been a different story.
I had a letter some months later from one of the missing, Fusilier Meyer. He had lost a leg in a fight with bombs. After long wanderings he and three others had been engaged by the enemy. When the others, among whom was the brave N.C.O. Kloppmann, had fallen, he himself had been taken prisoner, severely wounded.
I have been in many adventures during the war, but not one was more uncomfortable. It gives me the blues even now whenever I think of our wanderings through those unknown trenches in the cold light of dawn.
Flanders Again
On the very day that I came back from leave we were relieved by the Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 5. We then went into quarters in Labry, a village in the neighbourhood dirty enough to be typical of it. The vain search for a water-closet is the outstanding memory one has of the villages of Lorraine. Baths appear to be unknown. I have had some strange experiences of this description in France. One has to pass with a smile over certain shady sides of even the most magnificent mansions. Much as I esteem the French, I cannot help thinking that this is a characteristic side of their life. I know indeed that hostile races always call each other dirty, and that we were ourselves called “sales Boches” by the French. Nevertheless, I feel we are fully justified in returning this compliment to the Latin races.
On the 17th of October 1917 we were entrained, and after a day and a half trod the soil of Flanders once more, after an absence of two months. We spent the night in the little town of Iseghem, and next morning marched to Roulers or, in Flemish, Rouselaere. The town was in the first stages of devastation. Things were still for sale in the shops, but the inhabitants were already living in their cellars, and their ordinary way of life was being broken up by frequent bombardments. A milliner’s window opposite my billet seemed to me to be very much out of place in the tumult of war. By night looters tried to break into the houses of those who had already left.
I was the only person in my billet in the Ooststraat to occupy rooms above the ground-level. The house belonged to a cloth-merchant, who had fled at the beginning of the war and left an old housekeeper and her daughter to look after it. They took care of a small orphaned girl whom they had found during our advance, forsaken by her parents and wandering lost in the streets. They knew neither her name nor her parents. They had an extreme fear of bombs, and besought me almost on their knees to have no light upstairs, in case of attracting the hateful bombers. However, I found I had laughed once too often. I was standing with Lieutenant Reinhardt at the window and watching an English machine skim low over the roofs in the beam of a searchlight. Suddenly an immense bomb burst close by, and the window panes flew in splinters about our ears.
I was appointed intelligence officer in the coming operations, and attached to the regimental staff. To get my bearings I went, before we took over, to the headquarters of the 10th Bavarian Reserve Regiment, that we were to relieve. I found the C.O. very friendly, though at first he growled something about my “red band.” By
