Uhrgraben, 12 June 1915
[Saturday]
Dear family,
The other day I received Mother’s
letter of the 6th, and yesterday parcel nr 156, and one with
hardfuel, 1 with peanutbutter, 1 with butter and cigarettes, and another 2 with
butter. I bgelieve I already confirmed receipt of those parcels to you. I can’t
recall the numbers. Many thanks for everything.
Everything you send me is of course
very welcome, and is sufficient. What I do miss now, as I already wrote you, is
Marmelade and cigarettes. Especially
cigarettes, I smoke a lot these days. But it doesn’t do any harm as I’m always
outside. I don’t really smoke for the smoking itself, but rather to keep myself
awake when I’m on watchduty at night, and you can’t keep your eyes open because
of the sleep.
Furthermore they’re very good to
keep the flies away, of which there are millions here, and against the ghastly
smell of corpses [“schauderhaften
Leichengeruch”] which is very prominent now in this warm weather.
In the last 12 days in the trenches
I smoked no less than 310 cigarettes. I didn’t feel any adverse effects. But of
course I also gave many away. All of us smoke a lot. With this mass consumption
you shouldn’t send me expensive brands of course. If you can send me “Kleine
Zubau” of 2,5 pfg each [*1], and now and again a tin of a better quality, that
will be great.
Then I’d like you to enclose in a
letter at least 5 Mark. In about 8 days we are at rest again, and if I have
received it by then I can at least buy myself something nice.
It gives me great joy to hear
everything in the garden is flowering so beautifully. The first iris to be
flower should be the one first from the right, in the flowerbed at the end of
the garden. The yellow flowers in the garden are lilies. Has the light-red
papaver, with the white and black spots, flowered yet? Hope it did.
We have had rain for the first time
in a long while.
By the way we had a dreadful night
recently. In the pouring rain it was so dark you couldn’t see your hand in
front of your face. The English didn’t shoot at all, and that was definitely
not their style. The whole night no shooting, and not one flare.
We all thought ofcourse they were up
to something, and would come and visit us in this dark weather. You can imagine
how we watched and listened intensely and also how knackered you become. You
couldn’t see a thing, we could only hear something at our barbed wire defences.
We shot off a flare, and it turned
out to be a big rat rummaging around.
And on it went throughout the night,
it was excruciatingly scary. We were all glad when it got light again.
Especially at the Prellbock you have to take care, as
there is an old English trench, which is still connected to their trenches,
although most sections have caved in. But still they could send some men, not
many of course, to us to knock us out with handgrenades. [*2] I always fix my
rifle, when it’s still light, pointing into that trench. Then at night I send a
bullet down it every few minutes.[*3]
At the moment we’re again in the
reserve-trenches, and get some rest. Here you can at least sleep again, maybe
not at night but at least in the morning. And sleep is what everyone needs the
most.
Enough for today, I’ll write again
soon, as I will have plenty of time for that in the next 4 days.
With many warm greetings your Fritz.
[*1]
[*2] Trenchmap possibly showing the disused, formerly British, trench in front of the Prellbock
[*3] Capt. T W Sheppard describes something similar in his diary, in the section where he leads the reader around the Cuinchy sector [= opposite the Prellbock] (From "The History of the Kings Regiment Liverpool - volume 1")
"There was
another curious local effect, both by day and night. The
Germans have
batteries of rifles fixed on rests and trained on various likely
spots. They are
known as 'fixed rifles.' A man gets up at stated intervals and
pulls a trigger.
There were two of them, the flight of whose bullets was inter-
cepted by the
walls in our neighbourhood. One came over the canal and the
railway and had
worn a hole in the wall just behind our garden. The other
kept hitting the
top of the next roof outside our cellar window. This monotonous
'crack,' 'crack,'
went on all the week I was there, both by day and night.
"Our
casualties varied. Some days as many as a dozen, but mostly one or
two were hit
every day."
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