No Man's Land

by Reginald Hill

  Nicole did not see him fall again. A jolt of the cart had thrown her flat on her back. She had a sense rather than a sight of something falling out of the star-torn sky. Then, close by, there was a violent explosion and the cart halted with a suddenness which sent her sliding against the hencrate with a sickening crack of her head.

  When she regained her senses after only a second or so though it seemed infinitely longer, she struggled upright and found herself looking by chance rather than design out of the back of the cart.

  The sight she saw was horrifying. The cow had been hit by the full force of whatever shell or bomb had caused the explosion. Its belly was ripped open, spilling blood and entrails on to the ground where it lay, a dead weight which had acted like a sudden anchor to the moving cart. Only its head moved, rising to let out a cry of pain and terror and to fix huge brown eyes on Nicole which to her spinning mind seemed both pleading and accusing.

  Turning to shout her news at Josh, to her horror she realized he had disappeared. Scrambling to the front of the cart, she looked down and saw him lying on the ground between the legs of the old horse, who fortunately seemed inclined to regard this unexpected halt as a rest stop and was peacefully grazing.

  Imagining simply that the violence of the stop had thrown Josh off his perch, Nicole scrambled down to tend him. He was lying on his face but he half rolled over on to his side at her touch. Instantly she saw that things were far worse than she’d thought. A fragment of hot metal had caught him on the side of his neck, wounding and half-cauterizing in the same agonizing moment. How deep the wound went she could not say, but at least there was no great arterial pulsing of blood and his limbs seemed to have some co-ordination and strength as she dragged him sideways away from the horse’s hooves. The worst thing was when he tried to speak and all that came out of his mouth was a strangled groan, fading into a harsh stutter like her grandfather’s death rattle.

  But this was no signal of death, she realized, just an effect of his neck wound.

  ‘Josh, please, can you stand?’ she said urgently, first in French, then in slow English. Another death-rattle. Unknowing whether this was yes or no, she put his arm over her shoulder and began to lever him off the ground.

  There was little strength in his muscles but what there was came to her aid; his other arm flailed out and caught the side of the cart. Half carried, half dragging himself, he got round to the back and let the top half of his body fall across the tail of the cart. Sobbing with effort and fear, Nicole lifted his legs and pivoted so that they too were in the cart. Then with nervous fingers she unpicked the knot on the rope by which the cow was tethered to the axle. The animal had kept up its piteous mooing all this time. Nicole’s upbringing on a French farm had left her little sentimentality as far as the farm animals were concerned, but now, even though every instinct in her body was urging her to the speediest of flights, she found it hard to leave this creature in its agony.

  In the cart Josh rolled over. Whether by accident or design, Nicole could not say, but his scrabbling fingers plucked at the length of sacking which covered the .303 Lee-Enfield rifle Lothar had placed there. Nicole had never fired a gun, but she had seen them used and cleaned and checked. Now she took it and released the safety-catch and worked the bolt and put the muzzle to the animal’s head.

  At that moment, that the Boche should be making her do this seemed their gravest crime against humanity in the whole of this monstrous war.

  To the sound of the shot ringing in her ears she added her cries of rage and hatred against the filthy Huns and all their works as she took the reins and sent the old artillery horse labouring back up the wind-steepened track down which he had so recently pulled his hopeful burden.

  In fact, Nicole was doing the Germans an injustice. It was not a German shell but an English mortar bomb which had blasted the cow and wounded Josh. And the noise of gunfire she could still hear from the village was not the Boche firing after the cart, as her fevered mind was firmly convinced, but the beginnings of a fierce struggle as the British forces counter-attacked.

  The Germans were in many places the victims of their own success. Conflicting orders were being received from different sources by the British front line units. Some, ordered to hold out, were offering bitter resistance to the last man; others, instructed to withdraw, had set off with a will, and at a gallop, in face of the huge enemy onslaught. Through these breaks in the line poured the Germans, Ludendorffs crack troops, tough men, battle-hardened men, but men who had been existing on the basic rations which were all that their war-starved father-land could provide, and men who had long looked out from the fastnesses of the Hindenburg Line across the desert they themselves had created in their spring withdrawal the previous year. Across this desert they had fought till finally they entered that other great desolation, the ripped and broken landscape of the great Somme battles of 1916.

  And finally, unexpectedly, just when it began to seem to them that the whole of France from Picardy to the Atlantic coast must be a desolate wasteland, they were out of it, into wooded and verdant highland, and rolling and cultivated pastureland, and villages and settlements untouched by shellfire, whose hastily vacated houses contained fresh food, comfortable beds and sometimes cellars full of wine.

  To ignore such luxuries was beyond human fortitude. In Barnecourt, the officers of the regiment of Württem-bergers who had spilled down the little river valley through one of these sudden breaks in the retreating British line had not been aware of the dangers of success until too late. Within a couple of hours, from being the potent spearhead of a devastating assault, the troops had become a happy, undisciplined rabble, still ready and able to loose off a fusillade at any suspicious newcomers such as the fleeing Volunteers, but in very poor state to withstand a properly mounted counter-attack.

  Not that the counter was very properly mounted in military terms. The British force which flung itself upon Barnecourt that night was an ill-assorted bunch of batmen, cooks, pioneers, and a handful of exhausted and demoralized fighting troops separated from their units. On having them paraded before him, Sergeant-Major Maggs had expressed grave doubts about accompanying them on any kind of operation let alone on a night attack, but when Denial offered him the serious choice (for the captain was little given to humour) between drunken Germans by night or sober Germans by day, he quickly chose the former.

  He was quite right. By dawn the only Germans remaining in Barnecourt were neither drunk nor sober but dead. Whether the village itself had suffered more from its attackers or its rescuers was hard to say. After the initial stray shots with their mortars, one of which had wounded Josh and killed the cow, Denial’s men had got range and considerable damage had been done. Also there was a slight tendency among some of the men to carry on where the Germans had left off, so far as the wine went anyway. Denial’s orders soon put a stop to this and he also sent out parties of fire-fighters to control the blazes in a couple of burning houses. This was in his nature and even if he could have been aware that within forty-eight hours a German field-battery would reduce Barnecourt to a spoilheap of smoking rubble, he would probably have done the same.

  He stood now and watched the wounded and the dead being brought in. The corpses were being laid out in regimental lines alongside a wall which, appropriately enough, ran round the village cemetery. Denial’s attention was caught by a trio of bodies whose scruffiness of clothing and unshavenness of feature was outstanding even in their present company.

  ‘Who are these?’ he asked the lance-corporal he’d put in charge of recording the dead.

  ‘Don’t know, sir,’ said the man. ‘No dog-tags, see. They was lying on the bridge back there. I think they’re ours. Leastways from what I can make out of their uniforms, they’re ours. There’s another one of the same with the wounded. They put him here first off, but I saw him twitch a bit and got him shifted. Mind you, I hardly think I need have bothered. He looks like he’ll be back here before breakfast, whenever that is.’


  Ignoring this hint, Denial made his way to the house where the wounded were being tended. The nearest thing they had found to a medic was a sergeant-cook who had volunteered gloomily, saying that after a long career in Army catering, at least there wasn’t much that could turn his stomach.

  He directed Denial to the resurrected corpse, confirming the diagnosis that the resuscitation was likely to be short.

  As Denial bent over the pain-etched bearded face, the eyes opened and stared full into his. ‘

  ‘What’s your name, soldier?’ asked Denial.

  The pale lips hardly moved but a wisp of sound trailed from them.

  ‘Taff Evans,’ he said.

  ‘And what’s your unit, Evans?’

  There was no answer.

  ‘Come on, man,’ urged Denial: ‘It’ll help us inform your next-of-kin.’

  Now the lips moved again, the words painfully emerged.

  ‘Aren’t you the cheerful one, then?’

  ‘I’m being realistic,’ said Denial, to whom this was the most powerful of arguments. ‘Now, tell me. What’s your unit?’

  The eyes which had closed again now opened wide. What looked like a smile but what Denial felt certain could only be a rictus of pain twisted Evans’s lips.

  ‘Why, man,’ he said in almost a normal voice. ‘I’m one of Viney’s Volunteers, aren’t I?’

  And he died.

  ‘Sergeant,’ called Denial. ‘He’s ready to go out with the others now.’

  Behind his back, the sergeant-cook made a nauseous face. At last he’d found something to turn his stomach.

  But Jack Denial did not notice and would not have understood if he had.

  He walked through the village to the bridge and let his eyes run across it and along the road, between the few houses on this side and, using his binoculars now, up the track which wound through the fields, passing what seemed to be a dead cow on the ground, till his gaze reached the ridge which marked the near horizon.

  Up there. He was somewhere up there.

  7

  That night those who remained at the farm had retired early. An impulse to huddle together round the fire in the living-room was douched by the needs of old Madame Alpert. After a troubled and distressed day, she had finally fallen into a shallow sleep and Madeleine was determined to avoid any risk of disturbing her.

  As well as Viney, Lothar and Hepworth, the remaining Volunteers were Fox, Nelson, Groom and Blackie Coleport. Coleport fortunately was not in one of his wild, excited, verse-reciting phases, but sat quietly as if in a trance. It was Viney who seemed the least disposed to sleep. Since the young couple’s departure, he had been in a dark and dangerous mood and the others all moved cautiously around him, as though he were some huge, unexploded shell fallen in their midst, threatening to detonate at the slightest disturbance.

  He had rifled the small store of liquor which Madeleine kept in her larder. No one had attempted to join him in his drinking, or to stop him either. Lothar hoped that the alcohol might anaesthetize his huge frame, but two bottles of wine and a good quantity of brandy had disappeared with no discernible effect. When the move to bed had come, he had arisen and made for the door, clutching the brandy bottle in one huge hand, but still steady-gaited.

  ‘Should we post sentries?’ suggested Lothar mildly.

  ‘I’ll watch,’ said Viney. ‘You sleep.’

  There was no discussion invited – or offered.

  Lothar lay awake a long time. Things were coming to an end. Curiously, it was a long time since he had envisaged a German victory. Now suddenly it was a real possibility. It gave him a strangely mixed feeling.

  He fell asleep at last, but hardly seemed to have closed his eyes when he was awoken by a tremendous crash as the barn door was thrown open.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, help me!’ roared Viney’s voice.

  It took some time to adjust his eyes to the dim light. Then he saw standing on the threshold the big Australian, his face twisted in grief.

  And in his arms like a child’s doll lay Josh, his limbs slack, and a scarf of scarlet blood around his throat.

  It took several minutes to persuade Viney to put the boy down. Lothar then quickly established that he was alive and breathing regularly. His eyes opened and there was recognition in them. He tried to say something but no words came. Lothar guessed at his meaning and said, ‘Nicole, come where he can see you.’

  The girl who was sobbing in her mother’s arms came forward and knelt beside Josh and took his hand, and he visibly relaxed.

  Lothar set about cleaning the wound.

  Viney demanded impatiently almost as soon as he had started, ‘How is it, Fritz?’

  ‘It could be much worse,’ said Lothar. ‘I don’t think that any metal slivers have stayed in there and it missed the big vein, thank heaven. But it needs proper medical attention. Quiet, Josh. Don’t try to speak. Just rest.’

  The boy was opening his mouth once more but nothing was coming out but a rasping croak. Lothar pressed his hand to his shoulder till he subsided into stillness. Then the German turned his attention to the girl whose distress was now under control.

  ‘He’ll be all right, Nicole. Believe me. Now tell me what happened,’ he commanded.

  They all listened in silence.

  Hepworth said, ‘Bloody hell. Does this mean we’ve lost t’war?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Lothar. ‘It’s too early to talk of losing and winning. If they’ve reached Barnecourt without coming past here, that must mean a breakthrough to the north. They probably followed the river down its valley. It may be just a few to start with, but once they start coming in any number, the British will have to fall back on either side or else risk having their flanks completely turned.’

  ‘What’s that mean to us?’ demanded Groom.

  ‘It means that in not many hours we could see British troops retreating through here with German troops not far behind,’ said Lothar grimly.

  ‘What’s best to do then?’ asked Hepworth. ‘Viney, what do you think?’

  It was an instinctive turning to the man of action in time of need, but the big Australian who had slumped against the wall just shook his head.

  ‘Best listen to Fritz,’ he said indifferently. ‘This is his show.’

  The heavy irony which would normally have underlined such a remark was completely absent. For once, Lothar wished it hadn’t been. To have an alternative, or at the least to have a source of mocking objection, was suddenly very desirable. But this was no time for indecision. He got control of his thoughts by pushing them to an extreme of cold logic in the light of that political idealism which the last couple of years had internalized from mere gesture to motive. As a group, they were lost. As individuals, of the men only he and Viney had any real chance of survival. And in the real European conflict which would be raging long after this present useless carnage was at an end, he alone might have a usefully active part to play.

  Ergo he should leave now and devote all his energies to saving himself.

  Sic probo!

  And he smiled at the impossibility of it all, smiled at his own ineffectuality as a revolutionary idealist.

  He spoke carefully, first in English, then in French, to make sure that everyone understood.

  ‘The most, the only important thing is the protection of the women. Ideally they ought to move from here, but Madame Alpert is too ill to move. Madame Gilbert will not leave without her. And Nicole here will not leave without Josh who is also at present not well enough to move.

  ‘So they must stay.’

  ‘And what happens when the troops arrive?’ asked Groom.

  ‘If the British simply withdraw past here, that is well. We hoist a white flag so that the Germans may at least not shell the farm.’

  ‘And if the British want to use the buildings as a stronghold in a rearguard action?’ asked Groom.

  ‘I will try to dissuade them,’ said Lothar. ‘At the least, they may have medical help and som
e mechanical transport that will be able to take the women to safety.’

  It was a forlorn enough hope for the women and no hope at all for the rest. Lothar concluded, ‘There is, of course, no need for others to stay. I speak French, English and German, so whatever negotiations are needed, I can help with. Josh must stay and would I think wish to, even if he were not wounded. But the rest of you … there will be much confusion everywhere, I think. It may be a good opportunity to make for the coast. Or Paris. A man can vanish in Paris, even an Englishman, perhaps. Heppy, will you perhaps help me get Josh on to his bed while the others decide?’

  The Yorkshireman nodded and smiled his acknowledgement that Lothar had not deemed it necessary to state that he would also be staying.

  Fox, Nelson and Groom and three other Volunteers who had made their way back after the massacre at Barnecourt went into a muttered conference at the far end of the barn. Viney did not join them. Instead, he watched the two men carrying Josh into Nicole’s sleeping chamber but did not attempt to interfere.

  Blackie Coleport who’d been watching all this like a spectator at a play let out a single peal of harsh laughter and then began to recite in a loud, almost inhuman voice.

  ‘Away in the gloomy ranges, at the foot of an iron-bark,

  The bonnie, winsome laddie was lying stiff and stark.’

  Viney straightened up and went towards him.

  ‘Shut it, Blackie,’ he said with a return to his most belligerent manner. Then he added in milder tones, ‘The boy’ll be all right, you’ll see.’

  ‘Not your pretty little boy I’m talking about, Viney,’ said Coleport, grinning. ‘It was old Patsy I had in my mind.’

  Viney’s huge fist clenched momentarily. But it had already relaxed before Lothar interrupted.