Our delight was lessened by the tears and the burning of the mucous membrane caused by the fumes of our own gas-shells that the wind blew back on us. Many of the men were forced to pull off their masks when the unpleasant effects of our Blue Cross gas threw them into fits of choking and coughing. I was very uneasy, yet I felt sure that our command could not have made a miscalculation from which our destruction would necessarily follow. Meanwhile I exerted all my energy to keep the first cough back so as not to increase the irritation. After an hour we were able to take off our masks.
It was now daylight. The terrific tumult behind us rose higher and higher. In front stood a blind wall of smoke, dust, and gas. Men were running along the trench and shouting delightedly into each other’s ears. Infantry and artillery, engineers and signallers, Prussians and Bavarians, officers and men, were all alike in transports over this elemental expression of German power and were burning with impatience for 9:40, when we were to advance to the attack. At 8:45 our heavy trench-mortars, that stood almost touching one another behind the front line, started up. We could see the great two-hundred-weight bombs fly in a steep trajectory through the air and fall to the earth on the other side with Hephaestean explosions. Their bursts made a close chain of craters in eruption.
The very laws of nature seemed to have lost their validity. The air shimmered as though on a day of summer heat. The changing index of refraction made fixed objects dance to and fro. Black streaks of shadow fitted across the mass of smoke. The roar had become a norm and one heard no longer. One could scarcely hear the thousands of machine-guns in our rear that swept the blue sky with swarm upon swarm of lead.
The last hour of the artillery preparation was unhealthier than all the four preceding ones, during which we had walked about unheeding on the top. The enemy brought a heavy battery into action that landed shell after shell into our crowded trench. I went to the left to avoid them, and ran into the adjutant, Lieutenant Heins, who asked me if I had seen Lieutenant Baron von Solemacher: “He must take over the battalion at once. Captain von Brixen has just been killed.” I was shocked at this bad news, and went back and sat in a deep burrow in the earth. By the time I left there I had utterly forgotten the news I had heard. My brain had only one link with reality … 9:40. It seemed, though, that I was behaving very courageously, for everybody smiled approvingly when they looked at me.
The N.C.O. Dujesiefken, a comrade of the Regniéville patrol, came to a stop in front of my burrow and asked me to come out into the trench, as even a light shell bursting anywhere near might precipitate the whole mass of soil on my head. An explosion took the very words from his mouth. He fell to the ground with a leg torn off. I sprang over him and fled to the right, where I crept to earth again in a hole already occupied by two engineers.
The heavy shells were falling in a narrow circle all round us. Suddenly from a white cloud hurtled black lumps of soil; as for the detonation, it was lost in the general roar. Indeed, the sense of hearing was lost. In the piece of trench near us to our left three men of my company were torn to pieces. One of the last hits, a dud, killed poor little Schmidt, who had not left the dugout steps.
I was standing with Sprenger, with my watch in my hand, in front of my burrow, and waiting for the great moment. The rest of the company had collected round us. By jokes of a coarseness that unfortunately prevents me setting them down here, we succeeded in cheering and distracting them. Lieutenant Meyer, who peeped for a moment round the traverse, told me later that he thought us out of our minds.
The officer patrols who were to cover our advance left the trench at 9:10. As our front line and the enemy’s were here eight hundred metres apart, we had to move forward even during the artillery preparation and to take up our position in No-man’s-land in readiness to jump into the enemy’s front line at 9:40. Sprenger and I climbed out on to the top after a few minutes, followed by the men.
“Now we’ll show what the 7th Company can do!”
“I don’t care for anything now.”
“Vengeance for the 7th Company.”
“Vengeance for Captain von Brixen.”
We drew our revolvers and crossed our wire, through which the first casualties were already trailing back.
I looked to the left and right. The distribution of the host presented a strange spectacle. In shell-holes in front of the enemy lines, churned and churned again by the utmost pitch of shellfire, the attacking battalions were waiting massed in companies, as far as the eye could see. When I saw this massed might piled up, the breakthrough seemed to me a certainty. But was there strength in us to smash the enemy’s reserves and hurl them to destruction? I was confident of it. The decisive battle, the final advance, had begun. The destiny of the nations drew to its iron conclusion, and the stake was the possession of the world. I was conscious, if only in feeling, of the significance of that hour; and I believe that on this occasion
