was early, and I found it amusing that one of the results of my patrol when I returned, if I hadn’t brought a prisoner back, would be to submit corrections to the astronomical tables.
We waited and watched the German lines for an hour. It was just after eleven that I heard muffled sounds from the area of the German trenches. A few minutes later we could hear the whistle of German artillery rounds passing close overhead and almost instantly artillery impacted three hundred yards to our rear. It was exactly what I’d hoped for.
I motioned for the men to get down into the craters and whispered, “Stay here, I’m going forward. For God’s sake, don’t shoot me when I return. Be prepared to move out as soon as I get back.” One of the men, I think it was Grey, made to question me. I silenced him with a wave of my hand. “If I’m not back by three o’clock, go back without me. I’ll get back on my own. Nobody’s to be caught out here in daylight.” I was gone into the night.
I crawled forward as fast as I could without making too much noise. I was moving towards the sounds near the German trenches. Sporadic artillery continued to fall behind me, and somewhere, a long way over to my right, a German machine-gun began shooting at our trench lines.
After crawling for about ten minutes, I stopped and carefully pulled my field glasses out from inside my tunic. Scanning the trench line I could see nothing but the forest of wire and some regular shapes that I presumed to be sand bags piled on the forward edge of the parapet. Near me, probably within a hundred yards of me, were at least a hundred heavily armed enemy soldiers. Despite this, the battlefield seemed as empty and as desolate as the moon. My speculations were interrupted by a dull red glow. Someone was lighting a pipe or a cigarette in one of the forward trenches. I watched intently for several more minutes, totally absorbed in my study of the ground. As my senses adjusted to the surroundings, a few seconds later, directly to my front a man coughed softly. Later I could very faintly hear stifled laughter. Whoever was in front of me was obviously in good spirits. I continued to watch the area before me. Suddenly, very close to me, a footfall and someone grunting almost made me swallow my heart. A German wiring party had come out of nowhere and was moving quietly and steadily across my front.
Two dark shapes in round field caps were struggling with a large coil of barbed wire concertina. A few yards behind them was another figure with a heavy-duty pair of wire cutters and what I guessed was probably a much smaller coil of fastening wire. They stopped in front of me and quietly began to bounce the wire out along the edge of the obstacle belt. After a few seconds the wire became entangled in itself and one of the men began tugging at it frantically. It made a loud metallic scratching noise and the man with wire cutters cursed and hissed in a South German accent. “Hoffart, you stupid oaf! Do you want to get us all killed? Make another noise like that and you will be out here every night this week.”
I didn’t know whether to be euphoric or terrified. It was exactly what I had hoped for. Despite having put a brave face on it, I knew I could never find a way to sneak through that thicket of wire and I had imagined us going forward, throwing a few Mills bombs, and then withdrawing empty handed and ignominiously. My best possible opportunity would be to find a wiring party – and truthfully, I didn’t expect to do that. Now I had one and they were literally within spitting distance. I watched.
Hoffart slowly untangled the wire and then turned his back to me while he attempted to fasten the end to one of the other concertina rolls. The other two men quietly moved off twenty or thirty yards back to the right and were absorbed in their task of stringing their end of the wire. They must have been standing in a shell hole for I couldn’t see them well. I only sensed that their backs were to me. Without giving it any further thought, I immediately stood up, drew my trench knife, and crept up behind Hoffart.
I placed the tip of my knife firmly against his neck, just under his right ear. He startled and made a sharp gasp. I whispered softly and slowly in German with a menace that surprised me. “Don’t make a sound, Hoffart, or you die!” I waited a second. The leader made some kind of hissing remark again and shuffled away with the wire coil. “Come with me. One sound, one move to escape and you’re dead. Move now.”
I tugged him towards the Canadian lines and he glided soundlessly through the darkness with me. We moved off about thirty yards into no man’s land and I gently pushed him down into a shell crater. He moved with a grace that I admired. Hoffart, whoever he was, understood the situation clearly. My knife was still pressing hard against his neck. “Lie down and don’t make a sound.” I increased the pressure on the knife to reinforce my point. With my left hand I pushed Hoffart’s face into the mud. I then reached around and gingerly slipped his rifle off his shoulder and placed it beside me. As I did so, my knife came away from his neck. He didn’t move and my knife went back under his ear.
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
