I surveyed our trench next morning and found little to cheer me. I had scarcely left the dugout when I met two coffee-carriers bleeding from wounds inflicted by shrapnel bullets in the communication trench. A few steps further Fusilier Ahrens reported to me with a hit from a ricochet.
We had the village of Bucquoy in front of us and Puisieux-au-Mont behind. The company was without support in a front line that was both shallow and narrow, and we were separated from the 76th Infantry Regiment on our right by a large unoccupied gap. The left flank of the regimental front comprised a piece of splintered woodland, known as Wood 125. By orders, no deep dugouts were excavated. The men were accommodated two at a time in little dugouts held up by so-called tin Siegfrieds.
As my dugout was situated behind quite another part of our front, the next thing I did was to seek new quarters. A hut-like affair in a length of trench that had fallen in seemed to me to meet the case when I had put it into a defensible state by collecting a few lethal instruments there. Once installed, I lived a hermit’s life among fields of green, disturbed only by an occasional runner or orderly, who carried the paper war even into this retired spot.
One was able then to shake one’s head between two shell-bursts over many matters of grave importance, such as that the town-major of X had lost a terrier with black spots, answering to the name of Zippi, if one had not lost oneself with savage humour in the suit for maintenance of the servant-girl Makeben against Corporal Meger. The pro formas and returns, too, provided us with needful distraction. One was kept so fully occupied with the inner organization that time was scarcely left over for the little affair of holding the line. And indeed one was asked little about it. It often appeared that collecting empty cartridge-cases was of far greater importance. Whenever the visit of a superior officer was announced I hurried along the trench collecting paper and cartridge-cases and instructing the men on guard how they were to report themselves and click their heels together. Also that they were not to commit the crime of averting their eyes from the enemy in the course of the operation (though not even the tip of the enemy’s nose had been seen for three months past), nor even to let their rifles out of their hands. The sure reward was three days’ solitary confinement.
These things were typical of us and did much harm. The letter stifled the spirit. The war was bureaucratized. At the same time, the front-line officer had far too much discipline in his bones to raise these matters, though they were the object of curses in every platoon commander’s dugout. Yet it was for him to fuse the old Prussian spirit with the methods of modern warfare.
To return to my dugout, to which I gave the fine name “Wahnfried House.” Its roof was my only worry; for it could only be described as relatively shellproof—that is, only so long as it was not hit. However, I comforted myself with the thought that I was no worse off than the men. Every afternoon my batman put a blanket down in an immense shell-hole approached by a sap we had excavated, and there I had a sunbath. My siesta was, I confess, frequently interrupted by the bursts of shells nearby or the whizz of bomb-splinters when we were bombed from the air.
We were often heavily shelled at night. I lay on my bunk on a mattress of fresh grass and listened with a quite peculiar and a quite ungrounded sense of security to the shells falling around, while the soil descended in showers at each shock. Or else I went outside and looked from the fire-step across the sad night landscape, that was in such strange and indescribable contrast to the fiery spectacle whose dance-floor it was.
At such moments there crept over me a mood I had never known before: a certain falling-off of the fighting spirit, a war-weariness occasioned by the length of time I had been exposed to the war’s excitements. Nothing but war and danger; not a night that was not convulsed with shells. The seasons succeeded each other. Winter came and then summer, and one was always in the war. Tired of it and used to it, one was all the more dispirited and fed up with it just because one was used to it. One was blinded no longer by appearances. The war had raised deeper problems of its own. It was a singular time.
The front line had comparatively little to suffer from the enemy fire. Otherwise it would have been untenable. It was Puisieux and the hollows near it that were chiefly and almost continuously shelled; and in the evenings the bombardment rose to quite extraordinary intensity. Ration-parties and reliefs were consequently very risky matters.
On the 14th of June I was relieved at two in the morning by Kius, who also had returned and was in command of the 2nd Company. We spent our time on rest behind the railway embankment at Achiet-le-Grand, which gave shelter to our huts and dugouts.
