The front held at several places in the sector. On the escarpment north of the village of Douaumant, in Caillette wood, east of Fumin and in the Vaux hills the German clung to their ground and threw themselves at the French with hand grenades and such machine guns as were undamaged. The fighting lasted all day, then night fell. The German’s resistance boosted their prestige, but it made no sense. The next morning the French artillery restarted their terrible games, and the Germans had nothing to set against them. Two days previously the French had been fewer in number than the German artillery; now they dominated the field, placed their long-range guns on Douaumont’s eastern slope and decimated the casemates of Vaux with wild salvoes. They combed Caillette wood with fire, clearing gateways for their infantry, and smashed the fortifying outworks of Vaux. The field batteries advanced on the German flank, obtaining a foothold on Douaumont’s steep eastern slope and cutting all rearward communications in much the same way that a doctor amputates a smashed arm hanging by strands of muscle and skin. Go back, German soldiers, you’ve done enough. In some places it took the French just two hours to conquer what they’d planned to take in four, in others it took four days. They took 7,000 German soldiers prisoner and killed and wounded three times that many. You have done enough for your 53 Pfennigs a day, German soldiers, and for the Briey-Longway iron ore basin. In the impenetrable fog, you gave the last of your strength to fulfil orders, not questioning whether they made sense or not. Men from Poznan, Lower Silesia, the Mark, Westphalia, Pomerania or Saxony: peace is all you need and now you have it – the peace of the dead. Protestants, free thinkers, Catholics, Jews: your bloated corpses will surface in the clay and fog of Verdun and then disappear again into our national pasts. You’ll be ungratefully forgotten, and the memories of those who were once your comrades will hardly be disturbed by even the palest reflection of your suffering. But what was to become of Douaumont?
Since the 23rd a column of smoke from the shell explosions had been hanging over Douaumont like a large black flag.
CHAPTER TWO
Breakthrough
IN THE DAYS before the decisive move, the Fosses wood detachment marched out in the morning and back in the afternoon with the regularity of a pendulum. To stop the mud getting into their boots, the men tied their bootlegs closed with string and so managed to march with confidence. Relaying railway sleepers higher up isn’t the most pleasant work in the world but it isn’t the dirtiest either, not by a long shot. And the lack of visibility took the danger out of it. Now that the air had turned to milky soup, the Frogs sensibly refrained from peppering it with shrapnel. A certain someone had predicted what a hard blow the transfer from Wild Boar gorge back to Steinbergquell depot would be for Bertin. You could see how disgruntled the men were by their puckered brows and tightly drawn lips, and by the way they stared straight ahead while their legs wrestled through the thick mush on the roads. It squelched and sucked, crackled and gurgled, and squirted up past the ASC men’s knees if they were too lost in thought to test the ground with their sticks and carelessly stepped into a sludge-covered hole. For days the pendulum swung undisturbed. But that day… They were already at Ville height when a dull rumble wafted over to them. Far behind, out of sight, a really heavy gun had bellowed after weeks of deceptive silence. While they were still listening and looking at one another, something started up behind, battering down like rain on a wooden roof, faraway and frightfuclass="underline" a barrage from Verdun just like in the worst months of summer – the French! They set off apprehensively on the march home. The air seethed and clamoured behind the horizon as they entered the barracks. The noise followed them into the kitchen, and they listened to it as they washed their canteens and hours later at their evening meal. At bedtime, Private Bertin thought about Kroysing, Süßmann, that poor, pitiable scoundrel Niggl, and the Saxons in their water-logged trenches, and he sighed heavily and turned over.
The noise swelled during the night rather than slackening off, and a wild clanging cascade was hammering down behind the hills by the following morning. The men heard it as they marched out and the German reply: a shot every two minutes. There were no shells. They shook their heads as they went about their work in the morning but found themselves back in the barracks before lunchtime. There was almost a sigh of relief in the ranks when the order came in the early afternoon: all working parties suspended, all men to stand by to unload ammunition. Naturally, the company had to wait a good two hours to be assigned its task. The men chatted and exchanged thoughts, and then finally two engines shunted a line of wagons up the track, maybe 40, maybe 50 – the ASC men lost count. The men spat into their hands as they were split into groups and set to it. Men who knew the ropes climbed into the open wagons and with a practised grip lifted on to their shoulders a wicker basket from which either a long or a squat 15cm shell stuck out like a bundle of spears in a quiver. Carefully balancing the unaccustomed weight, the men from the working parties trudged along the slippery boarded walkways. They groaned as they heaved the shells down from their shoulders and stacked them between grassy hillocks – the heaviest of them weighed 85 pounds. They recovered on the way back, rubbing their joints in preparation for the next steel load. Even before night fell, miners’ lamps were hung in the wagons, and their dim glow illuminated from below the faces of the three men between the sliding doors. And as they bent and lifted, while a constant stream of men passed them, presenting their shoulders to receive their loaded baskets, carrying on and then disappearing into the gathering twilight, they looked to Bertin like the labourers of destiny doling out to mortal men their allotted burdens. Men were just a number here, a shoulder and two legs. The tramp of hobnailed boots banished any thoughts coursing through their minds. When the last wagon had been emptied at almost 11pm, sturdy Karl Lebehde had carried exactly the same as Bertin who was much less strong and Pahl who was almost a hunchback.
The following morning, the milky dawn air breathed cold and damp across the barracks and ammunition dumps of the depot; the sun would not show itself there that day. From a few metres away, the cooks dispensing morning coffee looked like pale and shadowy demons in the steam from their kettles, bestowing a ladleful of the River Lethe on the souls of the dead. Then the working parties disappeared: the Orne valley commando, the commando for hill 310, the Chaume wood commando, the Fosses wood commando. But in barely two hours they were all back. All hell had been let loose in front. No one could get where they were going. The immobile wall of fog, thick as cotton wool, that hung over the camp dampened all sound, turning the depot into an island. The ASC men were delighted to be ordered to stay in their barracks and rest. The depot commander, First Lieutenant Benndorf, knew what had been required of them the night before and would be required of them again that night. Suddenly, around midnight, the rumour spread that the French had broken through, Douaumont had fallen, there was a gap in the front line. Within quarter of an hour, most of the men were in the grip of a vague anxiety. The NCOs were called out; they and the other trained men returned pale and silent. They had received ammunition, live cartridges and carbines, and in half an hour shooting would begin. This was no laughing matter for the ASC men. If things had got to the point where their peaceable NCOs were being called upon to fight, then they and the recruits from the depots in Crépion and Flabas would be thrown into the gap the French were meant to have torn in the front line too, wielding picks and shovels. Everyone agreed with Halezinsky the gas worker when he said: ‘Wow, if they haven’t got anyone better than the likes of us, they should sue for peace.’