A moment later I heard Hoffart’s leader hissing for him in the dark. “Hoffart … Hoffart!” There was a pause. “Hoffart, we are going! … Hoffart! Hoffart!” Then there was silence for a good minute. I was straining in the dark to see, but all I could make out was the indistinct shape of the wire before me and the line of the German parapet. “Hoffart, you fool!” The voice sounded desperate. I could hear the steps of the leader as he checked the wire Hoffart had recently been securing. He hissed again. “He has tied off the wire, but where has he gone?”
He walked confidently forward and stood not more than ten yards away from us. The leader slipped his rifle from his shoulder, dropped to one knee, and peered into the darkness. I could see he was wearing spectacles and a round field cap without any peak. He wasn’t a tall man and was probably an NCO. “Hoffart! Hoffart!” He hissed again louder than ever. At that moment he chose to leave and turned about. He whispered to the other man, “Hoffart has disappeared.”
I fully expected him at this point to scurry back to the safety of his trench line and report Hoffart’s mysterious disappearance. My plan was at that point to make best speed back to the crater, pick up my patrol, and move as fast as possible back to the safety of our own lines. This was not to be. Hoffart’s leader did something that made me forever more respectful of the calibre of the enemy we faced. The little man with spectacles moved off, beckoned for the other man to come near, and they both sat down not a dozen yards away and waited. I could see the muzzles of their Mauser rifles pointing steadily into the darkness. After a minute I breathed ever so faintly into Hoffart’s ear, “No sound.” My knife was back pressing at his neck. Hoffart wasn’t moving.
I probably waited an hour for the German NCO and his subordinate to leave. The German NCO reminded me of an old Indian hunter I once met at a friend’s cottage in Quebec. I was told the hunter could sit stone-still for an entire day waiting in one spot for his prey, but then the hunter wasn’t waiting for something that shot back.
I was inexpressibly relieved when they got up. The NCO wasted no time and moved off quickly in the direction he had originally come. I waited a further ten minutes, for I didn’t want them to go off a short distance and wait for me to surface. There was no sound. I whispered to Hoffart, “Now, come with me. Try to escape, I will kill you. Co-operate, you will be comfortable and safe, a prisoner. Do you understand?” Hoffart bobbed his head. “Let’s go.” We moved off slowly and quietly.
I found the shell hole. In fact, I almost walked by it but Lance Corporal Mullin called to me gently and stood up to relieve me of my prisoner. “Lord Jesus, sir, where the hell did you find him?” he exclaimed in a whisper. It was the same admiring tone I’d heard people use when someone brought a good-sized trout home at the lake.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said. I was suddenly terribly shaky. We frisked Hoffart but he didn’t appear to have any other weapons. We tied his hands behind his back and set off stumbling towards our own lines. Thirty seconds after we got to our feet a pair of German machine-guns opened up and began traversing our battalion frontage right to left and left to right. We threw ourselves to the ground and stayed put while rounds cracked closely above our heads and ricocheted around in the thickets of barbed wire.
When the firing stopped, we got under way again and seconds later I could hear Rivers shouting “Over here, over here!” Once inside the maze of our own wire, our machine-guns began to fire rapidly to cover the final torturous and dangerously exposed leg of this short journey. We were back with a prisoner. I was as weak as a baby and trembling like a leaf. I remember leaning against the trench wall feeling very wobbly and thirsty. Within a few minutes, Major Gault and the colonel were up to greet us, and Hoffart and I were hastily escorted off to the battalion headquarters’s dugout.
At the battalion headquarters’s dugout, we sat Hoffart on an ammunition crate and gave him a hot drink. He cupped it in both grubby hands, sipping it in the light of a flickering candle and looked around at us suspiciously. I spoke to him in German.
“Hoffart, you’re a lucky man. Luckier than we are, you’re going to spend the rest of the war in comfort. You’ll be dry, have good food and a clean place to sleep every night, and most importantly, you’re going to get home at the end of this – alive and in one piece. That’s a helluva lot more than the rest of us can say. But I want you to answer some simple questions first. Do you understand?”
Hoffart nodded his head doubtfully. He was sceptical as well as frightened. Prisoners of war were protected by international law in those days, but the expectations restricting information to name, rank, and regimental number were not nearly as severe as they were twenty-five years later.
Hoffart looked at me with exhausted innocence. “You speak very good German for an Englishman.”
“Thank you, but we’re not English. We’re Canadians.” I tried to be as pleasant as possible. “My mother’s German. I spent a lot of time near Hanover as a child. Where are you from?”
At that moment, I turned and asked Major Gault in English if Hoffart might have a drink and perhaps a cigarette. He rustled about in his pack and produced a bottle of brandy. I offered Hoffart a healthy shot in a mess tin. It was only then, in the warmth of the dugout, that I smelled Hoffart’s rank odour. The poor man must have fouled himself out in no man’s land. I didn’t find it funny. Braver men than me casually admitted to losing control of their bowels in the regiment’s earlier battles at Frezenburg and Belawaerde Ridge. Gault lit a cigarette and handed it to him. Hoffart began to weep. It wasn’t gratitude; it was relief from the terrible strain he’d been through.
I spoke as gently as I could without sounding patronizing. “It’s all right, you’re safe.” The other officers discreetly left the bunker and Hoffart and I chatted for fifteen minutes.
Hoffart was grey-faced and had a pinched and anxious look about him. He was in his mid-twenties and was a reservist from Allensbach. Before the war, he had worked as a carpenter’s assistant in a small furniture factory. He was married but had no children. He was called up in August of 1914; and, with the exception of four days leave in April, had been in a frontline division continuously.
Hoffart was in the Twenty-sixth Württemberg Division, not the Twenty-seventh. “The Twenty-seventh,” he said, “had been withdrawn a week ago and were now sitting on their asses doing who knows what.” The Twenty-sixth had been in the line for four days and were slated to rotate into a rest position the next night. Hoffart was certain they were going to be replaced by Bavarians. Just this morning he’d seen their officers doing their reconnaissance. After a day’s rest, his sergeant told him they were going to be employed re-loading artillery ammunition onto train cars in support of a major effort against the French.
I poured Private Hoffart another healthy measure and gave him another of the major’s cigarettes. He was a good man and I liked him. I didn’t feel that I’d used him. At the time, I took satisfaction knowing I probably saved his life. Hoffart was going to miss the next big offensive – and whatever came after that. I called for one of the headquarters runners to watch over him and ducked out under the hanging sandbag door to use the field phone. The brigade staff needed this information.
4
THE ROYAL FLYING CORPS confirmed Private Hoffart’s information the next day. Years later I learned it was corroborated by a sophisticated network of Belgian train watchers who at great peril to themselves reported on the movements of enemy trains. True to the estimate provided to me by Major Gault, the German army was fully engaged repelling a disastrous French offensive to the south of us, which meant, for a time, we were safely out of the