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 major action.
Shortly after my patrol, we found ourselves moved back to decent rest billets. We rotated in and out of a very quiet area of the line and during one of those spells in the rear I was promoted to full lieutenant. I’m sure my German friend, Private Hoffart, had a lot to do with it. The battalion officers were put up in a good-sized farmhouse a mile west of Armentieres, and for once I managed to find a nice dry spot for myself on the dining room floor. It was strange how things had changed. For a few days I actually thought of that patch of farmhouse floor as home.
Our actions during those weeks were minor. Like everybody else in the British Twenty-seventh Division, the Patricia’s were employed on quiet stretches of the front. The entire division was still recuperating from its near fatal mauling at the Second Battle of Ypres four months prior to my arrival. Other fresher divisions weren’t so lucky. To relieve pressure on the Russians and draw German troops from the east, the French and British armies chose to attack in the areas of Champagne and Artois, as well as around a small village called Loos. We were glad to be out of that one too. What we heard from our own rear-area troops was disturbing. British casualties at Loos were staggering and we were thankful at having been spared the horrors of that bloody campaign. Our stretch of the front was no more comfortable and it was often dangerous, but we felt immensely lucky that it was our turn to be tasked with relatively safe reserve and flank guard roles.
One morning in February stands out clearly during one of those stretches in the trenches. I was on a tour of my platoon area talking to the men, conducting routine inspections of weapons and sanitary arrangements. It was a grey, cold, foggy day and wet enough that we were thoroughly miserable. My boots were sodden and my trousers were caked with wet mud. I was chatting to one of my corporals about nothing in particular when we heard the whistle of incoming trench mortar fire a little further down the line. We threw ourselves against the parapet wall. Several rounds landed in the space of a few seconds and no sooner had they stopped than I heard men cheering and catcalling. The shouting was a good sign; it seemed all the mortar fire landed either in front of or behind our trench lines.
I hurried to the sound of the cheering, but as I rounded one of the bends in the traverse between Two and Three Sections, I was electrified. Private Reid, the young man who acted as my guide on my first night at the battalion, was on his stomach clawing at the duckboard. His face was drained of colour; his mouth twisted in a horrible grimace. Reid lay in a grotesque smear of blood and dirt, his legs shredded into trailing ribbons of mangled flesh and ragged bits of uniform. He died in my arms seconds later.
That morning was the first feeling of genuine hatred I had for the enemy. I wanted Reid to survive the war. He’d been kind to me. He was cheerful, resourceful, and I knew he would have made a difference to those whose lives he touched. For him to die so suddenly, so capriciously and in such agony and filth filled me with loathing and rage.
After Reid’s death I continued to be shocked by the closeness of death – but that morning something inside me went numb. I suppose it was what psychologists now call a survival mechanism. Whatever it was, it was another watershed moment in my life, one that fifty-five years later I recall in vivid detail. When the Loos offensive finally came to a shuddering stop over seventy thousand young men like Private Reid were dead. When the war was over, twenty million Private Reids had been slaughtered on both sides.
A week later, the entire British army went onto the defensive and the Patricia’s were at last
