Winter, p.20
Winter, page 20
1918
‘The war is won, isn’t it?’
Leutnant Pauli Winter had never been in no-man’s-land like this before. He’d never known it in the full foggy raw light of morning. Like all the other front-line infantry, he’d come here only at night, on patrols to mend the great jungle of rusty barbed wire, which was constantly damaged by shell and mortar fire, or to raid the enemy trenches. Always under cover of darkness.
Until now his world had consisted only of narrow trenches and dark dugouts. The sky, seasonally grey, azure, or black with rain clouds, had been only a narrow slot framed by the muddy edges of the trench parapet. No one in his right mind raised his head above the parapet to stare across at where the unseen English inhabited their own subterranean dominion.
It was impossible to remember all the stories he’d heard about no-man’s-land. There were stories about fierce animals that were said to live out here, skulking in their warrens and emerging by night to feast on the dead and dying. And certainly some of the noises they’d all heard encouraged the belief. Other soldiers’ stories said there were men living out here in this great churned-up rubbish tip. Deserters of all nationalities were said to have formed a community, a bandit gang, who lived deep in the ground, stole money, watches and personal possessions from the bodies that littered the ground, and fed upon stores plundered from both sides of the line. It was all nonsense, of course, but hugging the ground out here, the barrage whistling overhead, the earth stinking of cordite, faeces and decomposing flesh, made such yarns seem only too likely.
But today was March 21, 1918, the start of the great attack that was going to break the British-held front line and end the war with a victory for the Kaiser. Pauli and two of his company – his runner and his youthful sergeant major – were crouched in a shell crater about a hundred metres in front of the German lines. The rest of his company were similarly hidden nearby, and so were other ‘Storm companies’ crouching unseen in no-man’s-land all along the front line.
The three men had their hands clamped over the sides of their heads to protect their eardrums against the deafening roar of the German guns. The preparatory bombardment had been going on for nearly five hours. Now it was nine-forty and the guns would stop, and in the pearly light Pauli would lead his men into the attack.
‘Nothing could have lived through that,’ shouted Feldwebel Lothar Koch as the artillery fire lessened. Koch was young – he’d given a false age to get into the army – a pimply fellow with a square protruding jaw that moved as he chewed on a plug of tobacco. Partly due to the immense pride his promotion had given him, he was still optimistic about the outcome of the war. Deep down in his heart, young Koch entertained the hope of being commissioned, or at least becoming a noncommissioned deputy officer by the time he took part in the promised victory parade through conquered Paris. He looked at the other two men with his mournful eyes. They both stared back at him blankly. ‘Nothing could have lived through that,’ repeated Koch.
Pauli touched the silk stockings under his collar: black, a pair of them knotted to form a long scarf that wound around his neck five times. It prevented the collar of his uniform from chafing his neck, and also reminded him of a glorious few hours in Brussels with a girl he’d met in church! He looked at his pocket watch – wristwatches did not survive in these conditions – and up at the heavy fog. Thank God for it. He dragged himself to his feet. His uniform was caked with mud; his canvas bag of stick grenades felt heavier than ever. ‘Bugler!’ he shouted and from a muddy hillock nearby the bugler slowly pushed up through a chrysalis of heavy mud. ‘Sound the advance.’
On every side German ‘storm troops’ emerged from the incredible collection of broken debris that littered the ground. They met with the clattering sound of a British Lewis gun and some intermittent rifle fire from Tommies who had not been rendered useless by the artillery’s systematic destruction of the British front line trenches. But the fog was too thick for the British to see what was happening, and the fire that greeted their advance was aimed into the white mist, so that only a few unlucky Germans screamed and fell. Pauli heard calls for stretcherbearers and a bugle sounding the advance.
‘Is the company advancing?’ Pauli asked the young Feldwebel. There was mud in his mouth and he spat it out and wiped his face with a dirty lace handkerchief. Her handkerchief! Her name was Monike. She spoke the Belgian sort of Plattdeutsch that he could understand. A tall, slim, shy creature with wonderful green-grey eyes, heart-shaped face, and all the mysterious promises of a first love. She’d taken him home and given him chicken soup that her mother had left on the stove for her. Thick chicken soup with beans and carrots. He loved Monike. He thought of her every day. And wrote her long letters, every one of which he carefully tore up.
‘Yes, Herr Leutnant. The company is advancing.’ Koch could see through the fog no better than his company commander, but they both knew that the men would do as they were ordered. They were Germans, and their readiness to obey instructions was a measure of their civilization, and their tragedy.
Pauli kept running over the uneven ground. With the swirling white fog wrapped round him, he stumbled into pot holes and tripped over the roots of trees, sandbags, corpses, balks of ancient timbers, and large sheets of corrugated iron that, together with untold other stuff, littered this old battlefield. The intelligence reports said no-man’s-land was two hundred metres wide at this place, but now it seemed much wider.
Sergeant Major Koch, a thin, wiry figure, was just a few paces ahead of him: hurrying as best he could, ungainly and uncertain about the going. His machine gun was slung over his shoulder, and in his hands he held a huge set of heavy-duty wire cutters. Bullets zinged past but the German bombardment was now no more than a few desultory bangs and crashes far in the enemy’s rear areas. How soon before the British artillery and mortars began to lob their explosives into no-man’s-land? Surely they must have guessed that the five-hour bombardment was a prelude to an infantry assault. Or were the British pulling their howitzers and field artillery back into safer, rear areas. Such defeatism was too much to hope for. Or was it.
Now Koch had started cutting through the wire. The artillery had done their job well; endless fields of wire – so carefully tended by the night patrols from both sides – were now a shambles. Koch found the weakest parts of this metallic thicket and cut a path just wide enough for the infantry to follow through. The wire sprang back with a loud noise like a peal of bells. At night such carelessness would have brought a burst of fire and almost certain death, but now speed was all that mattered. The stolid Koch, crouched low, went chopping his way through the undergrowth of rusty tendrils.
Behind Pauli the bugler was sounding ‘close up!’ the prearranged call to indicate the way through the defences.
‘Koch! Get back, damn you.’
Once through the last of the wire, Pauli pushed ahead of his sergeant major. In the storm companies it was a matter of pride that the company commander led his men into battle. More bullets came now: closer, for they no longer zinged but cracked like a ringmaster’s whip. Chest-high. Alongside him, two men bowed low to die, heads down, snorting and gurgling briefly as the blood flooded into their lungs. He ran on, stumbled and touched the silk stockings – or, rather, made a gesture in the direction of his throat – Monike had said that she would be his good luck. It was a childish thing to say, for she was a child, and he believed it, because, for all his brutal experiences, he too was little more than a child. She hadn’t given him the stockings, of course. She was not that sort of girl. He’d taken them from the laundry basket in her bedroom.
More firing of rifles and machine guns. Over to the left – and very close – there came the sound of a heavy Vickers gun, stertorous, like a wheezing generator. But it was too late now to worry about bullets. Pauli found himself on the brink – the parapet – of the foremost enemy trenchline. He jumped. It was almost three metres deep. Burdened as he was with bombs and machine pistol, his weight took him right through the damp duckboards that formed the floor of the trench. The rotten wood snapped with a loud noise, and Pauli went deep into mud, so that he had to bend and extricate his boots from the broken slats. Thank God this section of the trench was unmanned.
He ran along the trench, splashing his way through the stagnant, watery mud. God! Did the British stand in this shit night and day. He came to a surprised looking British soldier. Pauli pulled the trigger of his pistol and the youngster was punched backwards by the force of the bullets. He sank down without any change in the expression upon his pinched, pale face.
Pauli ran on, along the communications trench and then to a junction of the support trench. Here the conditions were even worse: he was ankle-deep in stinking mud. The trenches were unmanned here. Had the British gone over the top to face the attackers, or fled? A sign marked the rear trench ‘Pall Mall’, and there were other painted wooden signs pointing the way to Company HQ and a field dressing post.
The trench lines zigzagged to minimize the effects of blast. At the next turn half a dozen khaki-clad soldiers were bunched in the corner of the entrance to a dugout. They were wide-eyed with fear. Two of them were sitting on the fire step hugging themselves. Their uniforms were blackened with rain, and the heavy wet cloth hung on them like a dead weight. Pauli swung aside. From behind him Koch fired a burst from his MP 18, and the brown-coated soldiers stiffened and grew taller before toppling full-length like lead toys.
As they ran forward again, a British officer put his head out of his dugout immediately ahead of them and shouted loudly. He was a middle-aged fellow with a neat moustache. He looked not unlike Pauli’s father.
Pauli stopped, undecided what to do, but Koch hit the officer with the butt of his gun and then threw two stick grenades down through the dark entrance and raced on. There was a tremendous bang and muffled screaming. Pauli looked back. He saw the British officer as the blast caught him. The wretched man was blown to pieces in a pink cloud of blood. The mangled body, its khaki sleeve and insignia intact, hit the sides of the trench. Round the upper part of the arm was a mud-stained white armband with a red cross on it. The dugout was of course a temporary casualty station. Too late now.
Ahead of them the sound of firing and, emerging from the white fog, more men. ‘Wer da?’ He climbed up one of the trench ladders and ran along the edge of the parapet.
‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ They were Germans from the next company. ‘Wer da?’ More challenges as grey-uniformed men appeared like wraiths in the dispersing fog. Pauli recognized the faces of some of them. The bugler sounded the close-up signal again. Pauli saw their officer, a captain named Graf, a thin, irritable man with a red nose, his heavy steel helmet grotesquely large for his small ferret face.
‘Keep going, Winter. We’ve got them on the run.’
‘Ja, Herr Hauptmann.’ He turned and shouted to the rest of his men to hurry. The Punishment Battalion had changed Pauli. At one time he would have been terrified by a man like Hauptmann Graf. Now it took a great deal more to frighten him.
There was a loud roar behind him, and the narrow trench was suddenly lit by a brilliant orange glow. Pauli turned to see the great balloons of ignited fuel ripping a hole through the white fog. The flame throwers were systematically burning out the dugouts all along the support trench. Poor devils – even a bayonet in the guts is better than that.
They hurried on; the earth was firmer behind the support trenches and the fog much thinned. Crossing the sunken road that the British had used for their supplies and reinforcements, the Germans chased across the open ground. No one was firing at them now. To the left was a forest of tree stumps, the trunks short, broken, and bared white like pencil stubs. To the front of them the ruins of a village, with only waist-high walls remaining. The church had been devoured by the war: its relics and valuables stolen, its doors and pews chopped into firewood, the roof collapsed, its lead improvised into drains for waterlogged trench-lines, and its tower reduced to rubble by artillery fire to deprive the British of an observation post.
Behind the village were twenty or thirty brown-clad soldiers, British service troops without rifles, an officer wearing the badges of the Royal Engineers, and two men carrying wooden crates. At the first sign of the Germans they raised their hands in the air. The Germans, in too much of a hurry even to rob them, pointed back the way they’d come. Reluctantly the British shambled off to the east, walking slowly, in the hope that a counterattack would free them before they got to the German rear.
In the ruined village was a mobile bath unit. It had been abandoned hastily by men who’d left behind parts of their uniforms, towels, webbing and even a rack of Lee-Enfield rifles. But even the sight of clean hot water and the wonderful fragrance of disinfectant and soap did not halt the advancing Germans.
They pressed on. Pauli was fit and strong, but the pace was wearing. He sniffed the air. Was it gas? And if so what type? Not mustard gas anyway. That was the one most to be feared, but the plan of attack said that the artillery would only put mustard into British rear areas, into which the Germans would not advance. So it couldn’t be mustard. Could it? He stopped and bent down to prod loose a clod of earth and sniff at it. Foolhardy, but it was what was expected of men in the storm companies. He started running again and swung his gas mask round to the front of his belt as he ran. Soon they slowed: the pace was too demanding even for young, fit bodies, and there was no sign of the enemy.
Walking now. The girl came back to his mind. The house was empty, she said, her parents visiting her grandmother. They’d kissed and ended up in bed. First time for Pauli and first time for the girl. What a fiasco. All his sexual fantasies shattered by two minutes in bed. The girl had cried. I’m still a virgin, she’d said. Then, her mood changing, she’d laughed. Well, it wasn’t funny for him. He’d fled from the house with only the stockings around which to weave stories for his fellow soldiers. But by the time he’d got back to his company, he had no wish to mention her to anyone. There was no one to whom he could confide his story. He was in love; he wanted her too much to talk about her. What a fool he’d been. If only he’d let the relationship develop at its own pace. Then perhaps he wouldn’t have got the letter telling him that she never wanted to see him again. He blamed himself unceasingly: a girl you meet in church doesn’t expect to be treated like a whore.
Twice they were halted by pockets of determined resistance: fierce Scots veterans whose rapid, accurate rifle fire caused severe casualties among the by-now careless Germans. Soon the regiment’s trench-mortar units arrived, and after a relentless pounding the Scotsmen came out, calling, ‘Kamerad!’
By this time it was late afternoon and already the wintry daylight was beginning to go. They moved on again. They were all more cautious now, and tired. On the left, the bugler for the next company was sounding rally. Pauli stopped and his bugler did the same. Time for reforming, and a moment for the fleet of foot to recover their breath and the slower men to catch up.
A runner from Battalion Headquarters told him to consolidate his position and take possession of a British twelve-inch howitzer battery several hundred metres to the west. They found it without trouble. Hauptmann Graf was already there. His men were energetically plundering the enemy stores.
The captured battery was a revelation to the German storm troops. The Germans were trying on the superb sheepskin coats that the British supplied to their sentries, and there were many who wanted one of the fine leather jerkins. More than one fellow was striding around in British officers’ hand-sewn leather boots. In the officers’ mess were all manner of forgotten luxuries, including Stilton cheese, smoked salmon, and a dozen unopened cases of Scotch whisky.
Pauli looked around with interest and apprehension. These were specially selected and well-trained soldiers. Given the order, they’d abandon their booty and continue the advance. But what of the ordinary German conscripts behind them? What would they be doing tonight?
Pauli decided that such conundrums were best left to the generals. He went to report to Captain Graf. ‘It’s disgraceful,’ said Graf. He took off his heavy helmet. He was a jug-eared little man, gnomelike: a homosexual it was whispered. But homosexual or not, Graf was a fearless soldier, respected by every man in the regiment. ‘Shells were ready and fused. I blame the officers. No attempt to disable the guns: dial sights in position, breech blocks in full working order. It’s disgraceful.’
‘Yes,’ said Pauli, amused that Graf should be so indignant about the enemy’s lack of soldierly dedication.
‘Cowards.’
‘We must have come five kilometres,’ said Pauli. ‘There’s never been a breakthrough like this before.’
Captain Graf grunted. He was smoking and holding in his hand a gold-coloured tin of fifty English cigarettes. ‘Try one,’ he said and offered the open tin.
Pauli lit one up and, after breathing out the smoke, said, ‘If the advance has been the same all along the battlefront, we must have captured a huge piece of ground.’
‘Like them?’ said Graf. ‘English cigarettes: damned good.’
‘Yes,’ said Pauli. He’d never smoked anything so delicious. He studied the pale tobacco appreciatively and decided that if he ever became rich enough he’d smoke such cigarettes all the time. In the sandbagged shelter behind Graf, one of the men had found a gramophone and was winding it up. ‘Do you think we’ll go all the way to the coast, Herr Hauptmann?’
‘The coast?’
‘The war is won, isn’t it?’
‘Look at those stores, Winter,’ said Captain Graf, turning to look at the German soldiers gobbling the captured food. ‘Last week I severely punished four of my men who’d ground up horse fodder to make flour. They said they were hungry. They were, of course. We are all hungry. We ration out the shells to our artillery. We don’t have enough rubber to make more gas masks.’ He blew smoke. ‘Have you seen what’s in that mess hut, Winter? Food for the rank and file. Tinned beef, plum jam, good white bread, that yellow English cheese. Did you see how much of it there is? They told us the English were starving, didn’t they?’ He sniffed. ‘No, the war is lost, Winter. The courage of our young men and our meagre supplies of shells and bullets can’t prevail against this sort of plenty.’
