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.