Mein Kampf
ago, stood with profound reverence at this altar of “faithfulness and obedience unto death.”
The regiment had stormed this ground three years before; now it was to defend it in a bitter battle of resistance.
With three weeks of drum-fire the Englishman prepared for the great Flanders offensive. Now the spirits of the fallen seemed to come alive; the regiment braced itself in the filthy mud, and dug into the shell-holes and craters, unyielding, unwavering, and grew ever smaller and thinner, just as once before at this spot, until at last the Englishman’s attack let go on the 31st of July, 1917.
Early in August we were relieved.
What once had been the regiment was now a few companies; they staggered back, covered with mud, more like ghosts than men. But except for a few hundred yards of shell-holes, the Englishman had won nothing but death.
Now, in the fall of 1918, we stood for the third time on the stormed ground of 1914. Comines, the little town where we once had been quartered, was now our battlefield. But if the battleground was the same, the men had changed; the troops now talked politics too. The poison from home began to take effect here as everywhere else. The younger reinforcements were absolutely useless—they came from home.
On the night of October 13th–14th the English gas attack on the Southern Front before Ypres broke loose; they used Yellow Cross gas, whose effect was still new to us as far as personal experience was concerned. I was to find it out for myself that very night. The evening of October 13th, on a hill south of Wervick we got into a drum-fire of gas grenades lasting several hours, and continuing more or less violently all night. By midnight half of us were knocked out, some of our comrades forever. Toward morning I was gripped by more and more violent pains as the minutes passed; and at seven o’clock in the morning, my eyes aflame, I stumbled and staggered to the rear, taking with me my last report in the war as I went.
Within a few hours my eyes had turned to red-hot coals, and
200
