One afternoon I got a bicycle and rode into Cambrai. The dear old town was a desert. Shops and cafés were shut; the streets seemed dead in spite of the field-grey uniforms that thronged them. M. and Mme. Plancot, who had given me such a fine billet a year before, were delighted by my visit. They told me that conditions of life at Cambrai had got worse in every way. They complained particularly of the frequent visits the night bombers paid them. They often had to run downstairs and up again several times a night, disputing the point as they went whether it was better to die in the first cellar by the bomb itself or in the one lower by being buried alive. The old people’s careworn looks made me heartily sorry. A few weeks later, when the town was shelled, they had to leave the house, where they had spent their lives, at a moment’s notice.
On the 23rd of August, I was alarmed by a violent knocking at my door at eleven, when I had sunk into a happy sleep. It was an orderly with marching orders. Already the day before the monotonous roll and stamp of unusually heavy artillery-fire had surged over and warned us on duty, at meals, at cards, to have no illusions about being on rest much longer. We had coined an expressive front-line expression for this distant thunder of guns: “es wummert.”
We packed up in haste and were soon marching on the road to Cambrai in a storm like a cloudburst. Our destination was Marquion, and we reached it at five in the morning. The quarters allotted to the company were a farmyard, surrounded by demolished farm-buildings, in which each man found shelter as well as he could. I, with my one company officer, Lieutenant Schrader, crept into a little dungeon of brick that had apparently, in more peaceful times, been a goat-shed, but was now occupied only by several large rats.
At midday there was an officers’ powwow, at which we heard that we were that night to take up a position in readiness on the right of the great Cambrai-Bapaume road, not far from Beugny. We were warned that an attack by the new swift and more easily manoeuvred tanks was probable.
I paraded my company in battle order in a small orchard; and then, standing under an apple-tree, I said a few words to them as they stood round me in a horseshoe. The expression on their faces was serious and manly. There was little to say. By this time there was not a man who did not know that we were on a precipitous descent, and the fact was accepted with an equanimity that only the moral force which in every army accompanies its armed force can explain. Every man knew that victory could no longer be ours. But the enemy should know that he fought against men of honour.
On such occasions I took care not to be carried away by a spirit of daredevilry. It would hardly have been appropriate to show that one looked forward to the battle with a certain joy in the face of men whose dread of death was in many cases increased by anxiety for wife and child. It was also my principle not to raise their courage by big words nor to threaten the coward. I spoke rather to this effect:—I know well enough that no one will leave me in the lurch. We are all afraid, but we must fight against it. To be overcome by one’s weakness is only human. At such a moment look at your leader and your fellows. While I spoke I felt that what I said went home, and the results justified me in this psychological preparation.
Schrader and I had our meal at night on a door laid on a wheelbarrow in the farmyard, and drank a bottle of wine. We then rolled ourselves up in our goat-shed, till the guard woke us at two a.m. with the announcement that the motor lorries were in the marketplace ready to load up.
In the ghostly light we rattled over the war-torn country of last year’s Cambrai battle, through villages in grotesque states of destruction, with their streets bordered by billows of wreckage. Just before Beugny we were unloaded and led to our position. The battalion was occupying a hollow on the road Beugny-Vaux. During the morning an orderly brought orders for the company to push on to the road Frémicourt-Vaux. This typical forward movement made me sure that we were in for it till nightfall.
I led my three platoons strung out in file, through a country over which aeroplanes circled, dropping bombs and scattering bullets. When we reached our objective we dispersed in shell-holes, as an occasional shell came over the road.
I felt so bad that day that I lay down at once in a small length of trench and fell asleep. When I awoke I read Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, and thus the afternoon went by, while I lay in the sun with the apathy of an invalid.
At 6:15 a despatch-rider summoned the company commanders to Captain von Weyhe.
“I have to make the serious announcement that we are to attack. After half an hour’s artillery preparation the battalion will advance at seven (!) from the western edge of Favreuil and storm the enemy
