I am not aware that the claim was that he was wounded in a drunken brawl in Lille?
Nobody made that claim. I was being sarcastic.
The purpose of my sarcasm was to draw attention to the essential point that it does not really matter whether a German soldier was wounded by enemy fire while standing in the first line of defences or while standing in the dugout of the forward position of regimental headquarters some two kilometres behind the first line of defences.
In either case the soldier is "in harm's way", vulnerable to enemy fire. The soldier in the dugout of the forward position of regimental headquarters cannot reasonably be said to be "hiding behind the front".
No sane man willingly exposes himself to enemy fire; even the soldiers in the first line of trenches keep their heads down as much as possible. Yet Dr Weber treats Hitler's own concern for self-preservation as if it were something that made him different from, and less worthy than, the average member of the List regiment.
For example, on page 45, he writes, in relation to the fighting of 29 October 1914 around Gheluvelt:
At any rate, it is unlikely that Hitler survived because of his superior combat abilities. He was a rather weak young man with scant military training, who had been rejected for military service by the Austrian authorities because of his poor physique less than a year prior to the outbreak of the war (they had eventually caught up with him after his attempt to dodge the draft). Hitler thus almost certainly just tried to stay alive, knowing when to duck, rather than attempting to fell any battle-hardened Highlanders.
In other words, Hitler acted like any sane man who does not want to throw his life away needlessly, especially when faced with a hairy Highlander who might lift his kilt at any moment. Hitler wrote to Ernst Hepp about the battle, describing how the men of his unit, when advancing through enemy machine-gun fire, flung themselves down and crawled through a gully; again a totally sane response and in no way an indication of cowardice.
Dr Weber's outlook, the ideological basis of his analysis of Hitler's wartime experiences, is demonstrated on page 49, where he writes:
Hitler's survival was in part due to his assignment to 1st Company. Had he joined any of the companies of 3rd Battalion, he would have been twice as likely to die during the first seven days of combat. Had he been put with Ludwig Klein in 11th Company, the chances of him today being buried in some grave in Flanders and of a dramatically different twentieth centruy would have even been three times higher that the odds he faced through his service in 1st Company. The Higlanders of the Black Watch and the Coldstream servicemen had missed their golden opportunity to kill Hitler on the List Regiment's first day of battle.
Dr Weber is here making the common mistake of seeing the course of German and European history from the end of the First World War until 1945 as determined by one demonic personality, Hitler. In fact, the effect on Germany of its defeat in 1918 and of subsequent destructive events, including the Great Depression, was such that it was well-nigh inevitable that an extreme nationalist group would come to power in that country and attempt to reverse the outcome of the First World War, regardless of whether that group were led by Hitler or some other person.
