Blog

Lais’ MG section remained with the artillery through the fourth day of the Winterberg battle. While this guard duty in no way compared with ordeal faced by their comrades atop the plateau, the conditions were still hazardous. The heavy German mortar batteries drew the attention of French railway cannon, which pounded the area with high explosive and gas shelling. Gas residue affixed on surrounding undergrowth, requiring the men to frequently don gas masks. The non-stop firing of the German mortars began to compromise their tubes, resulting in the bursting of a 21 cm mortar that wiped out its crew.

On the evening of 25 July, Lais’ section received orders to displace from the mortars and join the fighting on the Winterberg. The regular night-time artillery fire had slacked off somewhat, making it possible to send reinforcements and supplies up to crest. The platoon set off after midnight as it followed an infantry company that advanced ahead of them. Lais, rather dramatically, recalled this movement as ‘a gruesome passage up to this mountain of horror.’

Before ascending the steep slope, the men had to first get through the Ailette swamp. Scattered incoming artillery began to resume, with shells exploding in the marshland. The MG platoon, burdened with the heavy machine guns, carriages, ammunition and other accessories, gathered at the edge the marsh and waited for a gap in the firing to race across a dike. An interval seemed to emerge, and the Germans set off at a run. The dash was especially difficult for the men having to lug the carriage mounts. Midway across the marsh the platoon heard incoming shells and leaped face first into the mud. After the near-miss detonations, Lais looked around and saw the still-warm bodies of dead infantrymen from the column ahead, mixed among the rotting corpses of supply bearers from the previous weeks’ shelling. The section picked themselves up and hurried as best they could through the marsh. One of the privates, a giant of a man who was carrying a gun carriage, collapsed, gasping ‘I can do no more.’ An NCO came up behind and helped him drag the piece forward as the mission continued.

The platoon continued up the start of the slope when Lais called a halt to account for personnel. It was determined that two men were killed by a direct hit. Also lost were a gun carriage and three, 250-round cases of ammunition. Now close to the front, the remainder of the hike needed to be conducted in silence. NCO’s inspected the men to make sure all equipment was re-secured as not to rattle. The climb up to the top of the plateau remained grueling, with the men left breathless and exhausted when they finally reached the summit at 3:00 am.

With daybreak, Lais and his men witnessed how awful the preceding four days of combat had been. The stress of days of extreme battle showed on the faces of the survivors, many who carried shell-shocked, vacant expressions. Their faces were masked with the white dust of the clay soil, cheeks were hollowed from lack of food and dehydration and exhaustion marked by heavy bags under their eyes. The moon-like landscape was different from other battlefields. There were no barbed wire entanglements nor fixed trenches, just a network of loosely connected shell craters.

A limited resupply line up to the summit had been restored. Every other night, carrier squads brought up essentials such as food, water, schnapps and rifle and machine gun ammunition. There was no need to carry up more hand grenades, as there were still plenty of captured French ones about, weapons that the men preferred to their own, German-issued grenades. It was impossible to bring up the heavy construction materiel need to build reinforced dugouts. At best, some of the squads were able to salvage scraps of sheet metal from earlier defensive works to cover new positions with. This would at least provide some measure of protection from splinters and shrapnel from lighter caliber artillery shells.

The heat was insufferable. There was no shade from the direct July sunlight and the humidity was unusually high. Supply bearers arrived on the mountain soaked with sweat. One of the more bizarre supplies that were brought up were tins of butter. The heat liquefied the butter, turning it into a sticky, inedible mess that absorbed the taste of death.

One welcome resupply item was the ‘rot-gut quality’ schnapps was deemed an essential item was that its consumption helped numb the horrible stench of the dead. With the fighting now on its fifth day, the accumulation of so many bodies in such a small space had become a major problem. Lais provided gruesome descriptions of how the decomposing corpses bloated to the point of bursting, revealing inner organs that oozed from bellies. The dead could neither be carted off of the plateau nor buried, as there was little remaining ground not already filled by hastily dug graves.

he repositioning of lines required one Lais’ MG teams to move into a shell crater filled with enemy dead from the previous night’s fighting. These bodies were those of Senegalese troops, men from the French II Colonial Corps. The Germans held a deep loathing of these African troops, whom they considered barbaric in respecting the fundamental laws of warfare. The MG crews simply tossed out the bodies of the Senegalese dead out of the crater to build a crude rampart. The German’s disdain of this enemy was such that the dead’s ‘soul of brutality left them unaffected in this act.’

Next Post: The battle continues to a final stalemate.

Maps and Pictures:

(1) Map: A Google Map of the Winterberg battlefield. For an on-line version of the map and more information on IR 169’s complete history (Imperial Germany’s Iron Regiment of the First World War), see www.ironregiment169.com

(2) Northern Slope (German side): The Ailette marshland is at the bottom of this steep rise. The modern, thick vegetation belies the severe steepness of this slope. Lais’ MG platoon climbed up to the Winterberg in this vicinity of this location (pictures from June 2019 visit to battlefield.)

(3) The middle portion of the Winterberg Plateau, looking south, towards the French positions.