At last we reached the front line, which was occupied by men huddled together in little holes. Their dull voices trembled with joy when they learned that we were come to relieve them. A Bavarian sergeant handed over the sector and his flare pistol to me with a few words.
My platoon's sector was on the right flank of the regiment's position, and consisted of a defile hammered by constant shelling into little more than a dip, running through open country from a couple of hundred paces to the left of Guillemont, to a little less than that to the right of the Bois de Trones. Some five hundred paces separated us from the troops to our right, the 76th Infantry. The shelling here was so heavy that nothing could survive.
Suddenly the Bavarian sergeant had disappeared, and I stood all alone, with my flare pistol in my hand, in the midst of that eerie cratered landscape, masked now by patches of creeping fog. Behind me I heard a stifled, unpleasant sound; with a degree of calm that astonished me, I registered that it came from a bloated disintegrating corpse.
Since I had no idea as to the enemy's possible whereabouts, I went back to my men and told them to be ready for the worst. All of us stayed awake; I spent the night with Paulicke and my two orderlies in a foxhole no bigger than a cubic yard.
When morning paled, the strange surroundings gradually revealed themselves to our disbelieving eyes.
The defile proved to be little more than a series of enormous craters full of pieces of uniform, weapons and dead bodies; the country around, so far as the eye could see, had been completely ploughed by heavy shells. Not a single blade of grass showed itself. The churned-up field was gruesome. In among the living defenders lay the dead. When we dug foxholes, we realized that they were stacked in layers. One company after another, pressed together in the drumfire, had been mown down, then the bodies had been buried under showers of earth sent up by shells, and then the relief company had taken their predecessors' place. And now it was our turn.
The defile and the land behind was strewn with German dead, the field ahead with British. Arms and legs and heads stuck out of the slopes; in front of our holes were severed limbs and bodies, some of which had had coats or tarpaulins thrown over them, to save us the sight of the disfigured faces. In spite of the heat, no one thought of covering the bodies with earth.
The village of Guillemont seemed to have disappeared without trace; just a whitish stain on the cratered field indicated where one of the limestone houses had been pulverized. In front of us lay the station, crumpled like a child's toy; further to the rear the woods of Delville, ripped to splinters.
No sooner had day broken than a low-flying RAF plane whirled towards us, and, vulture-like, began drawing its circles overhead, while we fled into our holes and huddled together. The sharp eye of the observer must have noticed something anyway, because before long the plane began to emit a series of low, long-drawn-out siren tones, coming at short intervals. They put one in mind of the cries of a fabulous creature, hanging pitilessly over the desert.
A little later, and the battery seemed to have taken the signals. One heavy, low-arcing shell after the other came barging along with incredible force. We sat helplessly in our refuges, lighting a cigar and then throwing it away again, prepared at any moment to find ourselves buried. Schmidt's sleeve was sliced open by a large shard.
With only the third shell the fellow in the hole next to ours was buried by an enormous explosion. We dug him up again right away; even so, the weight of the masses of earth had left him deathly tired, his face sunken, like a skull. It was Private Simon. His experience had made him wise, because each time anyone moved around in the open while there were aeroplanes about, 1 could hear his furious voice and a fist waving from the opening of his tarpaulin-covered foxhole.
In the platoon to the left of us, Sergeant Hock, the unfortunate rat-catcher of Monchy, aimed to discharge a white flare, picked up the wrong flare, and instead sent up a red barrage light, which was taken up in all quarters. Straight away our own artillery | opened up, and it was a joy to behold. One shell after another came yowling down out of the sky and showered the field ahead of us in a fountain of shards and sparks on impact. A mixture of dust, stale gases and the reek of flung carcasses brewed up from the craters.
After this orgy of destruction, the shelling quickly flooded back to its previous levels. One man's slip of the hand had got the whole titanic machinery of war rolling.
Hock was and remained an unlucky fellow; that same night, as he was loading his pistol, he shot a flare into his bootleg, and had to be carried back with grave burns.
The following day, it rained hard, which was no bad thing so far as we were concerned, as once the dust turned to mud the feeling of dryness in our mouths wasn't so tormenting, and the great clumps of monstrous blue-black flies basking in the sun -they were like velvet cushions to look at - were finally dispersed. I spent almost the whole day sitting on the ground in front of my foxhole, smoking and eating, in spite of the surroundings, with a healthy appetite.
~ From Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger, p. 97