There was a cluster of shell-shot tanks quite close to the embankment, and I often went to look at them. They bore names that were sometimes humorous, sometimes defiant, and sometimes affectionate, and they were camouflaged with paint; but they were all in a pitiable plight. The little cabin of armoured plate, now shot to pieces, with its maze of pipes, rods, and wires, must have been an extremely uncomfortable crib during an attack, when the monsters, hoping to baffle the aim of our guns, took a tortuous course over the battlefield like gigantic helpless cockchafers. I thought more than once of the men in these fiery furnaces.
On the morning of the 18th the 7th Company had to return to Puisieux on account of the uncertain state of affairs there, to be at the disposal of the C.O. of the troops in the line for carrying-parties or any other purpose. We occupied cellars and dugouts on the edge of the village nearest Bucquoy. Just as we arrived, a salvo of heavy shells went up in the surrounding gardens. In spite of this I did not refrain from breakfasting in a little arbour at the entrance of my dugout. After a while there was another of them; so I made a dash for it. It went up quite close. A stretcher-bearer of my company named Kenziora, who was passing by with some dixies of water, was hit in the lower part of the body. As we bound him up, great drops of sweat stood on his forehead; and when I tried to comfort him, he groaned out: “It is a mortal wound. I can tell that well enough.” In spite of this prophecy I shook him by the hand half a year later on our entry into Hanover.
In the afternoon I took a solitary walk through Puisieux. The village had already been pounded to a heap of ruins by the Somme battle, and now shell-holes and wreckage of walls wore a mantle of green from which the white disks of the ruin-loving elder shone out on every side. Numerous more recent bursts had made rents in this mantle and once more laid bare the soil of the gardens, so often churned up already.
The village street was fringed with the refuse of the advance now come to a standstill. Shell-shot wagons, abandoned ammunition, the weapons of hand-to-hand fighting, skeletons of half-decayed horses, surrounded by the hum of myriads of flies, all told of the vanity of all things in the fight for life. The church that occupied the highest point in the village consisted of nothing now but a dreary heap of stones. While I picked a bunch of wonderful roses in a waste garden a few shells came to remind me of prudence in this dancing-place of death.
After a few days we relieved the 9th Company in the line of resistance, about 500 metres behind the front line. Three of my men were wounded in the course of the relief. Captain von Ledebur was wounded in the foot next morning by a shrapnel bullet close to my dugout. Though far gone in consumption, he felt that fighting was his vocation. It was his fate to succumb to this slight wound. He died soon after in hospital. On the 28th, Sergeant Gruner, who was in charge of my ration-party, was hit by a shell-splinter. This was the ninth casualty in the company within a few days.
After we had been a week in the front line we had again to occupy the line of resistance, since our relief battalion was pretty well disbanded owing to Spanish influenza. With us, too, several men reported sick daily. Influenza was so severe in the neighbouring division, that an enemy flier dropped a pamphlet to say that the English would undertake the relief if the troops were not taken out soon. We heard, all the same, that the malady was spreading more and more on the other side too. With us the effects were worse owing to undernourishment, and in addition we were kept in constant readiness for an attack, as Wood 125 was being shelled incessantly with an intensity that boded no good. The 6th Company, who were in the line there, were many of them down with carbonic-oxide poisoning. Some were only saved by an oxygen apparatus.
One afternoon while walking along the trench I found several buried cases of English ammunition, and blew off the tip of my right forefinger through foolishly taking a rifle-grenade to pieces. The same evening, while I stood talking to Lieutenant Sprenger on the top of my dugout, a heavy shell went up close to us. We argued over the distance it was from us, and Sprenger estimated it at ten metres, I at thirty. In order to see how far I could rely on myself in such matters, I measured it and found the shell-hole twenty-two metres away from where we were standing. People are very apt to underestimate distances.
On the 20th of July I was again with my company at Puisieux. I spent the whole afternoon standing on the ruins of a wall and watching the front line, where, it seemed to me, something very suspicious was going on.
Wood 125 was often veiled in the smoke of violent shelling, while green and red lights were rising and falling. Often the artillery fire was silent, and then the tac-tac-tac of a machine-gun could be heard and the faint reports of distant bombing.
From where I stood the whole thing was like a pretty game. It had not the majesty of the first-class battle, and yet the relentless strife between
