No Man's Land

by Reginald Hill

  Josh! This was Lothar’s instant thought.

  Ignoring Hepworth’s injunction to go slow, he set off at a stumbling run back down the narrow corridor. Ahead he saw a strong pool of light and shadow which as he reached it settled into a circle of men with lamps and torches. At their centre were three figures. One was the English officer, waxen-faced and unconscious, a long wound at the side of his head bleeding copiously. Beside him, sitting upright and holding his jaw was a small dark man. Standing over them, wielding the billet of wood which had clearly been used to strike the officer down, was Viney.

  ‘What the fuck are you playing at, Taff?’ he snarled. ‘For Christ’s sake, do I have to do everything myself?’

  ‘He came at me sudden-like,’ said the man with the injured jaw. ‘Took me by surprise. Tell the truth, I didn’t think the poor bastard’d have the strength!’

  He seemed to have satisfied himself that his own injury was superficial and now he turned to Cowper.

  ‘No need to knock his head off, boyo,’ he said reproachfully. ‘I’d have held him, no bother, without this.’

  ‘Mebbe,’ said Viney.

  Lothar was interested to note the man called Taff seemed completely undaunted by Viney and Viney for his part didn’t find it necessary to confront him into subjugation.

  ‘Fetch me some water, one of you lot,’ said Taff, examining Cowper’s wound.

  ‘Let the fucker bleed to death,’ said Foxy, the scabfaced man with a high laugh. No one else joined in and someone went off and returned a moment later with a mess tin full of water.

  Emboldened by this show of concern and also by Viney’s relatively mild manner, Lothar said, ‘Please, the water, before you bathe his wound, has it been boiled?’

  All eyes turned on him. Viney exploded, ‘Jesus! What’s fucking well going-on here? Who’s supposed to be taking care of the Hun?’

  Before anyone could answer Lothar said, ‘Even the Hun must urinate, Viney. I see the state of things down here and I think perhaps this water is more dangerous than your club!’

  ‘What’re you on about, Fritz?’ demanded the Australian.

  ‘I don’t think he liked the look of the ablutions, Viney,’ said Hepworth, causing a general laugh.

  ‘It is filthy,’ said Lothar calmly. ‘There is high danger of infection.’

  ‘It’s fucking Hun infection then!’ snarled Foxy.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with our water, but,’ said Hepworth. ‘We go out and collect it from a stream.’

  ‘Think how many dead men lie beneath this ground,’ said Lothar. ‘Think how many bones this water may have washed through.’

  ‘Cheerful cove, ain’t he?’ said someone. But another man went off and came back with a can full of steaming water.

  ‘I was just brewing up,’ he explained.

  Lothar knelt beside the officer and, while Taff held his head, he bathed the wound, using a strip of the man’s own shirt.

  ‘You some kind of medic, Fritz?’ enquired Viney.

  ‘No. But I spent some time in a hospital,’ said Lothar, looking up at him. ‘I pay attention to what I see.’

  ‘Yeah. I bet you do,’ said Viney with a frown. ‘Get that joker back under restraint when Flo Nightingale here’s finished with him, and make sure he don’t go wandering again! Tie him up if needs be.’

  ‘And what about Fritz here?’ demanded Strother who had joined the group. ‘Do you want him tied, Viney?’

  The Australian glowered at Strother.

  ‘Yeah, he’s a real bloody menace, ain’t he?’ he said. ‘Just like them Huns in the papers, you can see he’s just prowling around looking for some nuns to rape and cut their tits off. But as we’re short of nuns and the nearest we’ve got to a tit is you, Strother, I reckon he’s out of luck!’

  He spat on the floor, turned and left.

  ‘What does he mean?’ enquired Lothar, who was not certain he had accurately caught the drift of the Australian’s remarks.

  ‘He means you can go and piss by yourself, I reckon,’ said Hepworth. ‘Let’s get sonny boy here back to his cot and then mebbe we can all get some sleep!’

  When Lothar returned to his dug-out a few minutes later, Josh turned as he crawled back beneath the blanket and said, ‘Wilf?’

  ‘It is I, Josh. Lott,’ said Lothar gently.

  ‘Lott,’ echoed the boy. And after a few moments his breath resumed its even rhythm and once again he slept.

  4

  Settling into the Warren was so like settling into a new army billet that Lothar wondered if any of his fellow ‘volunteers’ had noted the amusing irony.

  He was not going to antagonize them by asking, however, not until he knew them a lot better.

  Even their resentment was a familiar part of the process. An aristo slumming it in the ranks of the Kaiser’s army gets used to being resented. But Lothar knew it would fade almost, though never quite, to vanishing point if he ignored the baiting and did his job efficiently.

  Having a job to do in the Warren was the problem. To his surprise, Viney himself solved it within forty-eight hours.

  ‘Fritz,’ he said, ‘this drum you’re giving us about the state of this shit-heap, any chance of you putting your money where your mouth is?’

  Lothar’s blank expression clearly delighted the big Australian.

  ‘What’s up, Fritz? Don’t these relatives of yours speak the King’s English?’

  When the question was translated, Lothar didn’t hesitate. His assumed expertise on the sewage and ventilation systems of an underground complex was based on a boring tour of Brigade HQ with a houseproud sergeant-major. But to have a function within the ‘volunteers’ was a step to safety.

  ‘I think I can work things out,’ he said. ‘But as for repairing, I should need practical help.’

  ‘That’s easy. Taff here’s a miner, or was. Knows all about tunnelling and such.’

  The small dark man who had stood up to Viney when he knocked out the English officer held out his hand.

  ‘Carwen Gwynn Evans,’ he said. ‘But these poor ignorant bastards call me Taff.’

  ‘Any hard labour needs done, put these idle fuckers to work,’ continued Viney, gesturing at the other men present.

  ‘I didn’t ship out of the line to be ordered about by no Hun and no Welshman,’ muttered a bald-headed man called Nelson, one of Strother’s circle.

  ‘It’s me who’s doing the ordering,’ said Viney. ‘Fritz, what do you reckon we can catch in this shit-hole if we don’t take care?’

  ‘Cholera, typhoid, plague perhaps. I am no expert.’

  ‘You’ll have to do. That answer your objections, Nelson? Too right it does! Now, let’s see some action!’

  In the event it turned out the work was most easily done by two men alone, or rather three, for Josh never strayed far from Lothar. It was good for the boy to work, thought Lothar. And for himself too. And a real bonus was the company of Taff Evans whose independence of spirit made him indifferent to his workmate’s nationality. Though he had little formal education, he had a sharp enquiring mind and was terrier-like in pursuit of an idea.

  It was with Evans that Lothar first discussed the question of what they were doing there, why they had deserted. He approached the topic cautiously. It was a strange thing. All around him he could see the haunted eyes, the nervous tics, the explosive irritability, which were the surface signs of that inner breakdown of endurance which must have caused most of these men to desert. Yet it was mixed in many of them with an inhibiting guilt, a conditioning shame, which made most references to their military lives almost hysterical outbursts of self-justification. Evans, however, was clearly pleased to have a serious listener.

  ‘I made a mistake,’ he said. ‘But it wasn’t all my mistake, see, and I paid for it all right; I paid dear. But they wouldn’t let me stop paying. I was a miner, see, that’s a protected job. I could’ve stayed back home, doing my work, no bother. But I thought, here’s this war, boy, best chan
ce you’ll have maybe to see a bit of life. There’s a whole world out there you know nothing of. This old valley’s still going to be here waiting when it’s all over, so why not take the chance, sow a few wild oats? So I tossed away my pick and went and got myself a rifle. Well, two years I had of it, two years of mud and trenches and shells and bullets and, well, you know what it’s like. Two years. I went to see my officer and I said, “Look, I’m a miner, it’s a protected job, I’d like to get back to it,” but all he said was, “You should have thought of that sooner, Evans. You shouldn’t have been so hasty.” We was in rest then, so when the order came to go back up the line, I just wandered off. No plan, like; just wandered off into the Desolation.’

  ‘Where you found Viney.’

  Evans grinned suddenly.

  ‘He found me, boyo. Haven’t you noticed? You don’t find him, he finds you. That was a couple of months ago. Coleport, his oppo, was a bit sick then. He’d been beaten up by some redcaps or something. Bastards! So they were holing up here till he got back on his feet. It wasn’t such a bad place then when there were only a few of us. But others came drifting along. You don’t notice, see, when things happen gradual. It’s like you said, get used to anything, we can! And we’d best get back to work before we get used to being idle, I think! Hey, Josh, boy! Don’t lay around all day!’

  Josh, who had been resting against a wall with his eyes closed, opened them and smiled. Though he spoke little, he had rapidly become a favourite of the majority of the men. Perhaps it was his complete, almost childlike air of vulnerability which touched their hearts. With most of these fugitives, the bitter experience of war and their own collapse in the face of it had been an ageing experience. Taff Evans, for instance, was twenty-five, but he looked nearer forty. Only with Josh had the horrors eroded rather than added the years, sending him back into boyhood so that he could easily have passed for sixteen.

  They were digging out a collapsed ventilation shaft. Josh was very useful here, his slim frame being able to wriggle through spaces which even the Welshman’s small but chunky body threatened to get wedged into. Lying on his back using techniques quickly learned from Evans, he was shovelling the fallen earth back down his body with his bare hands.

  Suddenly there was a slight creaking noise and then, with no further warning, earth came tumbling in upon the supine boy. His legs kicked wildly. Lothar screamed, ‘Josh!’ But Evans in one smooth movement seized the kicking legs and drew him back down the shaft, spinning him over and banging his back to help him retch out mouthfuls of earth.

  To Lothar’s relieved surprise, the boy seemed none the worse for his experience. Instead, as soon as he could speak he said excitedly, ‘Look, Lott! The sky!’

  They peered up the shaft. The fall of earth had just been the last thin layer barring the way to the surface. There, sure enough, was a blue circle of evening sky with a trace of white cloud drifting across it. Josh was regarding it as if it was his own personal discovery. In a way it was. They had been allowed up under careful supervision to taste fresh air, but only after dark. This was the first piece of daylit sky they had seen since their arrival, and Lothar suspected it was the first piece of daylit sky Josh had taken real notice of for many long days before that.

  Now his eyes were wide with the pleasure of it, and the sight of that pleasure brought a respondent joy to Lothar’s heart.

  ‘Can we go up, Lott?’ asked the boy excitedly.

  Lothar raised his eyebrows interrogatively at the Welshman, who looked uneasy.

  ‘Best not,’ he said. ‘You know how Viney is about going outside.’

  The rules which governed life in the Warren were few and unwritten. Disputes were settled by simple reference to Viney. But the one great commandment which had been clearly spelt out was that no one went above ground without the Australian’s knowledge and express permission. A sentry stayed on duty night and day in a hide close to the one entrance. His job was to check would-be exiters as well as to warn of intruders.

  ‘Please, Lott,’ begged Josh.

  Lothar hesitated. He had no desire to antagonize Viney on whose favour everyone’s survival depended.

  On the other hand, he thought, with a sudden flash of that arrogant wilfulness which had been the spring of so many of his youthful outrages, why the hell should I, the son of an old and noble family, the possessor of a first class degree from Heidelberg, kowtow to an unlettered brute from a British penal colony?

  His saving sense of irony immediately added: What an absurd socialist you make!

  But already, ignoring Evans’s protests, he was helping Josh to scramble back up the shaft and out into the open air.

  ‘Be careful!’ he urged. ‘Do not let yourself be seen!’

  In fact because the shaft opened on to the side of the tumulus, under which lay the Warren, opposite to the entrance, Josh was out of sight of the sentry. This was fortunate, for he had no thought of concealment, but stood there half in earth, half in air, like some newborn spirit in a classical allegory, his nostrils flared, his mouth and eyes wide, as if he would drink in all he saw at one draught.

  It was a fine clear evening, the end of a golden summer day. As heat declined, clarity had grown, and though the foreground and middle distance showed only an uninterrupted view of the Desolation, looking westward almost into the setting sun, Josh could see beyond the churned and ravaged ground to a horizon fringed with silhouetted shapes which his keen eyes and keener longing told him were trees in full leaf.

  He tried to pull himself fully out of the shaft, but Lothar had been prudent enough to reach up and take a hold of one of his feet.

  ‘All right, Josh,’ he said. ‘Come back now, please.’

  There was a moment’s hesitation. It made Lothar anxious, but it also gave him pleasure. For the boy to be even thinking, no matter how briefly, of independent action was a sign of his recovery.

  Then Josh slid back down, his eyes shining with remembered pleasure.

  ‘I could see trees, Lott, away in the distance. Trees!’ he said excitedly.

  ‘That is splendid,’ said Lothar gravely.

  ‘Can we go where the trees are, Lott?’

  ‘Soon, yes. Very soon.’

  The boy appeared content with the answer.

  Evans said, ‘We’d better get that hole camouflaged. Some kind of grille made from deadwood should do the trick, I reckon. Let the air in, but keep bodies out, that’s what we need.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lothar thoughtfully. ‘Though it could be useful perhaps to have an alternative door, could it not, friend Taff?’

  ‘What the hell are you getting at, boyo?’ said the Welshman, alarmed.

  ‘All I mean is an emergency exit. For fires or other alarms,’ said Lothar, all wide-eyed innocence. ‘That is all I mean.’

  ‘It’s a sight too fucking much to mean,’ said Evans savagely. ‘And if there’s any sense left in that Jerry head of yours, you’ll understand that! Now, let’s get on with the job.’

  Grinning to himself, Lothar obeyed.

  5

  Corporal Arnold Tomkins was not happy. By rights he should have been drinking his evening cocoa prior to going to bed in the Château d’Amblay which was currently housing Division HQ. But disaster had crept up on him from behind. There had been some confidential orders for an RFC unit. The staff sergeant in charge of despatch had suggested to the general’s ADC that they could go with the RFC supply truck, shortly due to leave. ‘Must be delivered by hand,’ said the ADC importantly. ‘And that doesn’t mean one of those disgusting drivers’ hands.’

  And the eye of the staff-sergeant, who hated him, had fallen on Tomkins.

  So here he was crushed in the cab of a Crossley GS truck, bumping along what might once have been a road till shells and rough usage had flayed off its surface, autumn, rains washed out its hardcore and the frosts of a violent winter split it down to the raw earth.

  As for the surrounding countryside, the incidental devastation of the Somme battl
es merged into the deliberate devastation of the German withdrawal and to Tomkins, brought up in the crowds and bustle and endless buildings of London, it was like a landscape of hell.

  The driver, a rough-tongued Scot called Shawcross, had listened to this balding, thick-spectacled, middling-aged moaner for thirty patient minutes, then advised him, ‘Haud your whisht, Jimmy, and count your fuckin’ blessings.’ Shawcross didn’t hesitate to complain himself whenever his truck encountered a more than usually deep pothole, but he was on the whole not too discontented with his lot. It was late evening and the sun was setting behind the trees in a pretty watercolour of gentle pinks and pastel yellows. But it was not from the west that he derived his comfort. In the eastern sky there were colours too and these would grow brighter as darkness fell. A hoarse grumbling of artillery rolled across the intervening miles without cease, and, to his mental ear, a deeper grumbling of men as they crouched in their trenches for the evening stand-to. To be spared that made the discomforts of this obstacle course of road seem an easy penance.

  He negotiated a roughly filled shell-hole which had the old engine labouring like a bronchitis case. Tomkins touched his arm to draw his attention above the din and pointed ahead to where two figures, vague in the gloaming, had appeared by the road.

  Shawcross, sensing his unease, shouted, ‘Pair o’ fuckin’ Huns, Jimmy. Wi’ a bit o’ luck, they’ll mebbe cut your tits off and only rape me.’

  But his ghoulish humour faded too when he saw that the waiting men were wearing the red caps of the military police. Police meant trouble just the same on the Western Front as they did in Glasgow.

  One of them, a big man wearing a sergeant-major’s crown on his sleeve, waved him down.

  ‘What’s up, sir?’ enquired Shawcross through the open window, as the truck stopped.

  ‘Let’s see your orders, laddie,’ replied the sergeant-major. He had a voice and manner used to command. His accent sounded vaguely cockney to the Scot, but not to Tomkins.