It was near midnight, the relief was in the basement of a shot-up chateau. The guard, on a scaffold, peering through loopholes made in a stone wall, was watching Rockwell sentinel at the advance output and alongside. They saw him stop, heard a familiar sound (the striking of a grenade cap), but it was in the rear. Suddenly Rockwell yelled, “Aux Armes.” Metteger, the burly Alsatian corporal, ran out, just in time to catch the explosion of a German grenade, and was killed. Rockwell, standing between the grenade and the corporal, was so thin the charge missed him and lodged in the fat man. Simultaneously, the guard at the wall heard a rush, a noise, a rattle of musketry from behind, and turned about face. The relief rushed out of the basement. The Germans, caught between two fires; cursing, disappeared into the darkness.
When the guard turned to repel the attackers, they jumped from the scaffold to the ground. Capdeville’s hair was singed by a bullet, a ball went through Soubiron’s cartridge belt. When Brooks, the cockney Englishman, jumped, another Englishman, Buchanan, fell on him, pushed his face into the ground and filled his mouth with mud. Brooks struck out and hit Buchanan, who tried to get away to chase the Boche. “You blankety, blank, blank.” Biff! biff! biff! “You will, will you?” The two Englishmen were still fighting when the guard came back. Buchanan had discovered that some one had made his gun unworkable, tramping mud into the magazine. He stopped and had it out with Brooks.
It was at La Fontenelle and Ban de Sapt, La Viola and Viola Nord, opposite St. Marie aux Mines, in reconquered Alsace, among the Vosges on the Franco-German frontier. Seven long, weary months we spent among those perpendicular mountains, with sunburned base and snowy, dripping tops. Dog trains carried provisions in winter. Pack mules clamber in summer, wearing breeching to keep from slipping down hill.
The continuous snows of winter, and the ceaseless flow of water down the middle of the trench in summer, while it also dripped from the roof of the dugout, and seeped up from the ground below, dampened both clothes and spirits, as we carried wet blankets and our misery about, up among the clouds of mist, in drizzles, sleet, snow and the intense cold. A sieve was a water-tight compartment compared to those shut-up dugouts.
The constant bombardment often changed so completely the topography of the mountains, one could hardly be sure when daylight came that he was the same man, or in the same place, as he was the night before.
We were beyond civilization. Not a flower, a garden, a cow, a chicken, a house with a door or window, or roof, not a civilian or a woman was to be seen. All work or fight, no recreation, it was a long, continued suffering. We had the Boche part of the time, bad weather all the time.
The trenches were so close together we fought with grenades instead of rifles. The wire in front, thrown out loose from the trench behind, was all shot up. The trench itself from continued bombardment was thirty or forty feet across the top, with just a narrow path down the middle, where one walked below the ground level. The hills were a wilderness of craters, blown out trenches with unexploded shells about.
Crosses leaning over dead men’s graves, were littered with ragged, empty sandbags, while pieces of splintered timber, tangled wire, mingled with broken boulders and lacerated tree trunks of all lengths and thickness. Holes grew now where trees had stood. Roots and stumps, upturned, replaced splintered branches and scorched, withered leaves. A few straggling, upright trunks, eighty to one hundred feet in the air, were festooned with sections of blown-up barbed wire.
The towns belonged to the dead, wholly deserted by civilians, with even the old women gone. Roofless, doorless, windowless ruins, twisted iron girders and fantastically broken walls, stood out against the sky, grimly eloquent, though silent, monuments of kultur.
Face to face with death, what is in a man comes out. I shall never forget one, who, right name unknown, came from Marseilles. We used to call him “Coquin de Dieu.” He had some system whereby he got extra wine—even at the front. That additional cup or two was just enough to make him happy and start him singing. Handsome as a woman, he looked the careless, reckless ne’er-do-well. During a terrific bombardment, I was sent to relieve him, out between two German outposts, one eight, the other fifteen yards away. Instead of going to the safety of the sap in the rear, that Frenchman insisted on staying with me. Germans broke into the French trench at the adjoining post, and went to the right. Had they come left, we would have been the first victims.