After brief coming and going and a hearty handshake we rushed back to our companies, as the artillery fire began in ten minutes and we had still a good way to march.
“By sections in single file at twenty metres interval. Direction, half left, treetops at Favreuil.”
A good sign of the spirit that was in the men now as ever was that I had to detail one man to stay behind to tell the cookers where to go. No one would volunteer.
I walked far ahead of the company with my company staff and Sergeant-major Reinecke. The shots of our guns were bursting out from behind hedges and ruins. Their fire sounded more like a furious yapping than a wave of destruction. Behind me I saw my sections advancing in perfect order. Close to them like dust flew the clouds of shots from aeroplanes; the shrapnel, bullets, empty shells, and driving bands drove with a hellish whirr between the files of the thin human line. On the right Beuquâtre lay under heavy shellfire, and jagged fragments of iron hurtled heavily overhead and drove with a sudden jab into the clayey ground.
Our advance was still more unpleasant behind the Beuquâtre-Bapaume road. A salvo of H.E. went up madly behind and before and among us. We scattered and threw ourselves into shell-holes. The smoke of shell after shell hung in clouds over the edge of Favreuil, and through it rose and fell again brown fountains of earth, one rapidly succeeding another. I went forward alone, as far as the first ruined houses, to find the way, and then gave the signal with my cane to follow.
The village was fringed with badly-shelled huts, and there detachments of the 1st and 2nd Companies assembled by degrees. A machine-gun had claimed several victims during the last part of the way. Among others, Vice-sergeant-major Balg of my company was hit in the leg. A figure in a brown waterproof came quietly across this fire-swept piece of ground and shook hands with me. Kius and Boje, Captain Junker and Schaper, Schrader, Schläger, Heins, Findeisen, Höhlemann, and Hoppenrath stood behind a hedge that was being raked with lead and iron, and held a great council of war. On many a day of wrath we had fought on one battlefield together, and this time, too, the sun, already low in the west, was to gild the blood of all, or nearly all.
Part of the 1st Battalion moved into the park of the château. Of the 2nd Battalion only my company and the 5th had come through the curtain of fire practically without casualties. We worked our way forward under cover of shell-holes and ruins to a sunken road on the western edge of the village. On the way I clapped on to my head a helmet I picked up, a precaution I never took except in critical moments. I was astonished to find Favreuil utterly deserted. Apparently the line of defence had been abandoned by the troops occupying it.
Captain von Weyhe, now lying alone and severely wounded in a shell-hole in the village, had given orders that the 5th and 8th Companies were to form the first attacking line, the 6th the second, and the 7th the third. As there was nothing to be seen so far of the 6th and the 8th, I decided to go ahead without bothering too long over the distribution of the attack in depth.
It was already seven. Looking from between fragments of houses and stumps of trees, I saw an attacking party advance across the open in two waves under moderate rifle-fire. It must be the 5th.
I drew up my men in the sunken road and gave the order to advance in two waves. “At a hundred metres interval. I myself will be between the first and second waves.”
It was our last storm. How often in years gone by we had stepped out into the western sun in a mood the same as now! Les Eparges, Guillemont, St. Pierre Vaast, Langemarck, Passchendaele, Mœuvres, Vraucourt, Mory! Again the carnival of carnage beckoned.
We left the sunken road quite according to programme, only “I myself,” as the formula of command finely puts it, suddenly found myself near Lieutenant Schrader far in front of the first wave.
Isolated rifle-shots rang out in front of us. My cane in my right hand and revolver in the left, I stumped ahead and, without observing it, left the advancing lines of the 5th Company partly behind us and partly on our right. Meanwhile I found that my Iron Cross had dropped to the ground from my breast. Schrader, my batman, and I began a zealous search for it, in spite of snipers, who seemed to be drawing ahead of us. At last Schrader extracted it from a tuft of grass and I fastened it securely on again.
The ground began to fall. Indistinct figures were seen in motion against a background of brown earth. A machine-gun spat out its bullets at us. A sense of aimlessness took hold of me. Nevertheless, we began to charge at the double. In mid-jump over a piece of trench a piercing shock through the chest took away my breath. I spun head over heels with a loud cry and fell stunned to the ground.
I woke with a sense of great misfortune. I was pinned between narrow walls of earth, and along a row of crouching figures the cry was taken up: “Stretcher-bearers! The company commander is wounded.”
An elderly man of another company was leaning over me with a kindly expression, loosening my belt and opening my tunic. Two bloodred circular marks shone out on the middle of my right breast and on my back. I was crippled and chained to earth, and the close air of the narrow trench bathed me in sweat. My good Samaritan revived me by fanning me with my map-case. My hope as I struggled for breath was for darkness to come soon,
