In the sunken road leading from Noreuil I passed Brigade headquarters, and reported to Major-General Hobel, whom I had already informed of our success, and begged him to send reserves to support the attacking force. The general told me that I had been reported killed the day before. It was not the first time in the war.
In Noreuil a great pile of boxes of bombs was burning merrily by the roadside. We hurried past with very mixed feelings. Beyond the village I got a lift in an empty ammunition wagon. I had a sharp encounter with the officer commanding the ammunition column, who wanted to have two wounded Englishmen who had helped me along over the last part of the way thrown out of the wagon.
The traffic on the Noreuil-Quéant road was amazing. No one who has not seen it can form any idea of the endless columns of troops that go to make an offensive. Beyond Quéant the throng was incredible. It was a sad sight when I passed the little cottage of Jeanne d’Arc. Nothing but the foundation was left. I went up to an officer with a white armband, denoting that he was in control of the traffic, and he procured me a seat in a private car as far as the field-hospital at Souchy-Couchy. We often had to wait half an hour when wagons and lorries got mixed up and blocked the road. The doctors in the operating theatre of the field-hospital were feverishly busy. Nevertheless, the surgeon who attended me could not repress his astonishment at the fortunate nature of my wounds. Even the bullet that had passed in and out of the back of my head had not injured the skull.
After an excellent sleep I was sent next morning to the casualty clearing-station at Cantin, where I had the luck to meet Lieutenant Sprenger, whom I had never seen again after we went over the top. He had had a rifle-bullet through the thigh.
After a short stay in the Bavarian Field Hospital 14 (Montigny) we were conveyed to Douai and there put into a hospital train for Berlin. There, after fourteen days’ nursing, my wounds healed up again as well as their five predecessors had done.
To my sorrow I heard in Hanover that little Schultz, among many others I had known, had fallen during the hand-to-hand fighting. Kius had come out of it with a harmless abdominal wound. Anyone who saw us celebrating our meeting in a little Hanover bar would hardly have believed we had parted only fourteen days before to other music than the peaceful click of billiard balls.
English Gains
On the 4th of June 1918 I joined the regiment again. It was out on rest at Vraucourt, now far behind the line. The new commanding officer, Major von Lüttichau, gave me the command of my old 7th company.
As I drew near my quarters the men ran to meet me and, taking my things from me, led me in in triumph. It was like coming back to a family circle.
We occupied a number of corrugated-iron huts in the middle of neglected grass fields whose green was lit up with sheets of yellow flowers. This waste ground, that we had christened “Die Wallachei,” was grazed by herds of horses. If you went out of the hut you experienced the disquieting sense of empty spaces that sometimes grips the cowboy, the Bedouin, and every other dweller of the waste. We went long walks in the evenings in the country round, and looked out for partridges, or for war material hidden in the grass. One afternoon I rode to the sunken road near Vraucourt where there had been such hard fighting two months before. It was thickly edged with crosses, among which I found many a well-known name.
Soon the regiment was put into the line in front of Puisieux-au-Mont. We were conveyed by night on lorries, when the cone of light from the parachute lights of night bombers showed up the road as a strip of white in the darkness. Near or far the rushing swirl of the descending bomb was swallowed in reverberations as it burst. Then the searchlight’s quivering arm probed the dark sky for the treacherous nighthawk, shrapnel burst in a scintillating spray, and tracer-shells chased each other in a long chain like fiery wolves.
A repulsive scent of corpses hung about this conquered ground. Whether strong or almost imperceptible, it acted on the nerves as an irritant and wrapped one in a mood of overstrung and eerie foreboding.
“Offensive incense,” I heard a cynic and an old soldier say at my elbow, as we were passing for some minutes between rows of dimly-seen graves.
From Achiet-le-Grand we marched along the embankment of the Bapaume railway line and cut across country into the line. The shelling was lively. Two shells of medium calibre fell close while we were making a brief halt. The memory of the unforgettable night of horror, March 19th, drove us onwards. Close behind the front line we came on a noisy company that had been relieved, and chance took us past them just as their mouths were stopped by a dozen or two of shrapnel. Heaping them with abuse, my men jumped head over heels into the next communication trench. Three were hit and had to go back to the field dressing-station.
I was utterly exhausted when at three in the morning I reached my dugout. It was miserably small, and promised little for my comfort during the days ahead.
A candle glowed red in the indescribable atmosphere. I stumbled over a tangle
