Half of the Human Race

by Anthony Quinn

  II

  On the morning of the 24th, the bombardment opened. In the preceding days Will had watched the batteries being hauled into position, and had wondered at the narrowness of the space into which so many horses and artillerymen had poured. It seemed a physical impossibility to fit them all into a sector already choked with infantry. Guns stood almost wheel to wheel. If it was like this the whole length of the line then perhaps they really would ‘wipe the floor with the Boche’. A concentrated barrage bumped and thundered for an hour and twenty minutes, like the rumbling of a celestial giant’s stomach, his hunger unappeased. In the afternoon Will glassed the horizon through the big periscope, intending to check the state of the wire. The enemy trenches had been strafed by the shelling, and certain parts looked a good deal knocked about. But while he could spot gaps in the wire here and there, most of it appeared intact. He would have to send out a team of wire-cutters. It would be a dangerous crawl for them, he knew; but if the job wasn’t done properly now it might be calamitous for hundreds of soldiers come zero hour.

  The days limped on, and a mood of dull anxiety settled over the men. They were caught between worlds, longing for an end to the waiting yet dreading the moment that lay beyond it. Will found himself in a queerly dissociated frame of mind, performing routines so mechanically that he no longer felt aware of them. He had set out to inspect the men one morning when he realised he hadn’t shaved; on returning to his dugout he discovered from the mirror that his cheeks were smooth – yet he had no memory of touching his razor.

  Early on the morning of the 28th, a runner arrived at Will’s dugout with a message from Louis, asking him urgently to a meeting at the dugout of a certain Captain Marsden. Will hauled on his riding boots and made his way along the zigzagging trench towards the Dartmoors’ sector. The fine summer weather had turned, and rain was leaking steadily out of a grubby white sky. On arriving he was surprised to find a little party of subalterns crowded around a table in the dugout. Louis, edging through them, greeted him with a look of tense excitement, and ushered him forward towards the object of their interest. At first sight it looked like an architect’s model for a golf course, with undulating hills, clumps of trees, fairways, greens and bunkers. He was staring at it quizzically when Louis nudged him.

  ‘Will, this is Captain Marsden.’

  He shook hands with a pleasantly boyish, dark-eyed fellow of about his own age, clean-shaven, with a pipe clamped to the side of his mouth.

  ‘This is yours?’ said Will, gesturing at the model.

  ‘Indeed. Perhaps I’ll send it to the gallery. I’ve never seen such a show of interest in my work,’ Marsden replied, in a deep ironic drawl. Will was wondering why he had been summoned to inspect it when he realised, abruptly, that it wasn’t a golf course at all. It was a sector of the front. Their sector. ‘Papier mâché and plasticine,’ the artist explained. ‘Made it while I was on leave, in case you think I’ve been wasting army time.’ The subalterns cleared a little space to allow Will a closer look. And now he saw how beautifully made the thing was, each part of the landscape individually painted – greens, greys, ochres, duns, blacks – while every dip and hillock duplicated its contours in miniature. Tiny copses and farm buildings had been fashioned from matchsticks. The whole trench system was outlined in meticulous grids, painted white.

  ‘It’s – remarkable,’ said Will.

  Marsden lifted his chin in casual acknowledgement. ‘I didn’t have time to make four thousand infantry,’ he said with a chuckle. He took the pipe from his mouth, and pointed the stem at the right flank of the model. ‘So, to begin. This is where Seventh Division are camped, and this –’ he took a tiny flag and pinned it on the front line ‘– is where 120th Brigade, us lot, will go over.’ Still using his pipe as a pointer, he outlined the next day’s plan of attack. Their objective was a line of German trenches in front of the village of Mametz, about four hundred yards from a small copse. ‘Now here, once we’re beyond these trees, no-man’s-land suddenly slopes, like so, and we’ll be advancing over completely open ground.’ He looked directly at Will. ‘Do you see the problem?’

  ‘If you mean the wire,’ he replied, ‘I sent out two of my best men the night before last to shear it, with decent wire-cutters. They reported to me that they’d given it a proper haircut.’

  ‘Yes, I’d heard that,’ said Marsden, with an approving nod. ‘But look again.’ He was pointing at a little clump of trees overlooking their approach. ‘This is Anselm Copse, with that wayside shrine on the ridge. There’s a German machine-gun emplacement, hidden right there. Did you know?’

  Will stared at it, then shook his head. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Sure enough. And before you ask, the bombardment has missed it entirely. Our shells have been flying right over the position.’ He allowed Will some moments to digest this intelligence, then turned back to his model. ‘So the wire won’t matter. If we proceed with the battle plan submitted by Divisional HQ, the brigade will be cut to pieces before we even make it to those trench lines.’

  Marsden had spoken in a coolly analytical tone, but around him Will could sense a mood of unspoken dread among the assembled, like men who had just heard their death warrant read out to them.

  ‘Have you shown this to your battalion commander?’

  ‘Ex-cavalry. Knows horses and not much else – he says it’s a lot of fuss over nothing. I was hoping you had the ear of your man – Bathurst, is it?’

  ‘I could show it to him, but he’s no more likely to budge.’ Will had not forgotten the looks of disapproval when, in front of Bathurst and Otway, he had raised the warning spectre of Loos. Disapproval tinged with scepticism. It now occurred to him that they had perhaps thought he’d got the wind up.

  ‘Know anyone at Divisional HQ?’

  Will shook his head. ‘According to Bathurst, our Brigadier-General believes we’ll be able to stroll into the German trenches. His words. Which inclines me to think battlefield operations aren’t really his strong suit.’

  Marsden fell into a deep, silent nodding. Then, with all eyes back on him, he looked around the dugout and said, ‘It seems, gentlemen, our fate is on the knees of the gods. I’ll see you at stand-to.’ One by one the subalterns trooped out of the gloomy little den, until only Will, Louis and Marsden remained. For a while they stood there, gazing at the papier-mâché battlefield. Then Marsden broke the silence with a short gasping chuckle. ‘You know, I think I could take odds on the precise spot where the Boche will get us.’ He took another of the tiny flags, emblazoned with the Dartmoors crest, and leaning across his model placed it at the foot of the slope beneath Anselm Copse. ‘Pity I won’t be here to collect my winnings.’

  Will had just parted with Louis when another barrage started up. The rain was still coming down, greasing the duckboards and turning the sodden ground to mud. On his way back he almost took a tumble, but managed to steady himself against the parapet wall. Marsden’s grim prognostications seemed to have entered his bones and rendered him sluggish. He chanced to look up as two officers passed him and saluted; one of them was wearing a monocle, which reminded him of his old pal Reggie Culver. He had walked on a few paces when something stopped him in his tracks. Culver. That was the name of the Brigadier-General that Bathurst had mentioned the evening he dropped by. Of course. Now he remembered: Reggie used to talk of an uncle, ‘a brass hat’ in the military, years before the war began. This had to be the same man. Reggie was an officer in the Kensington Guards, stationed somewhere hereabouts. If he could be found, he might be able to secure an audience with the old goat …

  As he quickened his pace along the line, he spotted Bailey talking to a rations party and called him over. The subaltern’s guileless expression clutched at Will’s heart, and in the awkward moments of silence as he gathered his thoughts he felt an absolute unfitness to command. Why should he have the responsibility of so many lives? He asked Bailey to make enquiries as to the whereabouts of a certain officer in the 3rd Kensingto
n Guards, name of Reginald Culver – he needed to know double quick. Bailey hurried off, and returned a quarter of an hour later with the news that the Kensingtons were waiting in reserve just outside Albert. Six miles away. Even if he managed to locate Reggie, there was no guarantee he could arrange a meeting with the Brigadier-General today. And tomorrow would be too late.

  ‘Sir? I could get hold of a horse for you, if it’s urgent …’

  As urgent as your life, thought Will. If only Marsden had shown him that model a few days earlier. ‘Thank you, Bailey, but I’m not sure that’ll be necessary.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  He repaired to his dugout and wrote to Ada, whose letters had been struggling to maintain their cheerfulness of old; perhaps on the M—shire coast she could detect the mood of ominous expectation wafting from across the Channel. ‘We have been encouraged to think lofty thoughts about “our boys”,’ she wrote, ‘but when I think of you enduring the hideous discomfort and danger over there, listening to those guns roar day and night (I swear I can hear them myself ), it makes me catch my breath in terror at what might happen, and I feel fit only to hide my face away and cry. My dearest love, I pray that you keep safe.’ Her letter had the unfortunate effect of making him want to hide his face away and cry, though not for the same reasons. Eleanor, now living in Camberwell and working as a VAD, had also written, in a tone less obviously imploring, though no less concerned: ‘The hospital has received instructions to clear out all convalescents and to prepare for a higher number of wounded. The waiting is horrible – the sight of row upon row of beds, sinister in their starched white vacancy, already makes me queasy. I know you will be cool-headed and brave when the moment comes. But be careful, too, Captain Maitland, because you are beloved and your sister depends on you …’

  He was writing a hasty reply to her when Meadows knocked and entered, bearing a note from headquarters. He read it, and let out an exasperated sigh. Zero hour had been pushed back forty-eight hours. The bad weather had given them a reprieve, which was no reprieve at all. They would now go over at seven thirty on the morning of 1 July. He asked Meadows to send Bailey along – ‘And tell him to fetch me that horse.’

  Providence appeared to be toying with him. If he hadn’t run into Louis; if he hadn’t been privy to Marsden’s forecast of calamity; if he hadn’t glimpsed the monocle that prompted his chance recall of Reggie; if Bathurst hadn’t mentioned the name of Brigadier-General Culver, Reggie’s august kinsman; if, if … The possibility of rescue had been dangled before him, then seemingly snatched away because there wasn’t time. Now, a forty-eight-hour delay may have just allowed him to go through with this wild goose chase.

  Having secured permission to leave, he arrived at Albert at nine fifteen that evening. His journey, along rutted, puddled roads, had been serenaded by the continuous thump of the guns. A rich mauve-coloured sky was lit by the glare of star shells. The horse had shuddered a few times in fright but Will held him steady. He found the farmyard where the Kensington cavalry were stabled and left his mount there to be fed and watered. A passing CSM directed him to the buildings in which the officers had been billeted. He could hear singing as he climbed the stone steps to the larger of two barns; within, a few officers sat around, idling over newspapers. A servant informed him that Captain Culver had been out all day but was due back later that evening. He was handed a tea dixie from which he drank some thin but fiery beverage – plum brandy, perhaps. This, combined with the six-mile ride, had an instantly soporific effect, and he plunged down into a dream of blasted woods, of fields honeycombed with shell holes and craters, of mud the colour of fudge. He was hurrying through this forlorn landscape, wondering where everyone else had gone and why his footsteps were so clogged. Then he looked to the ground on which he trod and found it entirely made up of corpses. He could feel men’s ribs cracking beneath his boots, he was trampling on torsos and legs and faces, could find no room for his steps other than on the putrid slackness of dead flesh. And, what became as frightening, he seemed to be the last man moving – running, fleeing – through this infernal terrain. He woke with a start on hearing his name called.

  ‘Ah, the sleeping beauty awakes,’ cried Reggie Culver, his grinning face lit eerily from beneath by a candle in a bottle. Will struggled up from the couch where he lay, and glanced at his watch. It was nearly midnight. His mind’s eye still quivered with the phantasmal horrors of his slumber.

  ‘Reggie,’ he croaked, extending his hand. In the two years since they had seen one another Reggie had lost his monocle and gained a moustache. His air of bonhomie was unchanged.

  ‘I could scarce believe it when one of the fellows said that a Captain Maitland had poled over for the evening. You might have given a chap some notice!’

  Will smiled wanly, and confessed that his visit wasn’t exactly a social one. Reggie confirmed that his uncle was indeed Brigadier-General Hubert St John Culver, ex-Lancers, now in command of the Seventh Division. ‘Played golf with him this afternoon, as a matter of fact. Why?’

  He explained the dubious Corps Intelligence as it pertained to 120th Brigade’s orders for 1 July, and how Captain Marsden’s battlefield model exposed the dangers of advancing past Anselm Copse: an interview with the Brigadier-General might obviate needless bloodshed.

  ‘Yes, I see,’ said Reggie, absently stroking his moustache. ‘He’s a capital fellow, Uncle Bertie, but I have to say, he’s an awful stickler for following orders. He won’t like his authority being challenged.’

  ‘It’s not a challenge. Honestly, Reggie, I want only an introduction. I’m not going to make a nuisance of myself.’

  Reggie dismissed any such possibility with a complacent waggle of his hand. ‘Of course I’ll clear your way to the old boy. We’ll be up bright and early tomorrow to catch him before he goes out.’ He stood up purposefully. ‘In the meantime I’ll fix drinks. I think we’ve some plum brandy knocking around.’

  Reggie was as good as his word, shaking him awake just after reveille next morning with the news that their horses were ready. They drank coffee that was thick as treacle and he borrowed Reggie’s razor to shave his face. He still felt bone-tired, having listened for most of the night to the leaking gutters outside his window. By seven thirty they had saddled up and were riding down sodden country lanes towards Divisional HQ, three miles west of Albert. Reggie kept up a merry prattle along the way, though as they neared their destination his high spirits seemed to evaporate along with the early-morning mist. Will, keeping his powder dry, had made very poor company, rehearsing what he might say to ‘Uncle Bertie’. Chateau Beaucaillou was set in its own grounds, approached by a long gravel avenue lined with aspens. Servants were folding back dark green shutters from the high windows and sweeping the forecourt as Will and Reggie dismounted, the latter greeted with such deference by the staff that Will assumed he was a regular guest here.

  Inside he felt a low-key vibration of activity – staff officers huddled in conference and engineers fiddling with telephone wires – though the atmosphere was quite orderly and unpanicked. One would never have thought that the push was less than twenty-four hours away. Will followed Reggie through the main hall, their boots ringing on the parquet, and thence into a high hushed drawing room that stank of cigar smoke. Gleaming floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto a wide lawn, and beyond it a placid panorama of farmland, copses, a solitary spire. While Reggie consulted with one of the minions, Will stalked about the room, unable to relax. Heavy gilt mirrors kept surprising him with his reflection. Over the fireplace hung a dark-hued oil painting of a hound, and clamped between its jaws a lifeless bird with rust-coloured feathers. A pair of Louis Quinze sofas pompously faced one another, one of them occupied by a brindled cat that watched Will with unblinking eyes, as if it were the remaining trustee of all that belonged to the requisitioned house. Had it not been for the faint thunder of the guns you might have forgotten there was a war going on at all.

  Reggie, bending his knees squir
ishly, had also noticed Will’s absorption. ‘Gracious living, what? I gather the family’s had the place for centuries.’

  Will nodded. ‘I hope they get it back in one piece.’

  ‘Oh, they needn’t worry,’ said Reggie complacently. ‘The Hun will never get this far.’

  ‘No. I don’t suppose they will.’ His voice had dropped to a murmur. A door at the corner of the room opened, a head dipped round, and at a wordless signal he and Reggie were invited to follow. The divisional operations room was also long and airy and high-corniced, but all evidence of its former occupants had been banished. Trestle tables spread with maps had usurped most of the space, and around them hunched various ‘brass hats’ whose unspeculative gaze betrayed not the smallest interest at their arrival. From one knot of officers in a corner there issued a resonant guffaw, and at his side Reggie, answering it with a breathy chuckle of his own, whispered, ‘That’s Uncle Bertie.’ Through the cigar smoke Will made out a stocky, jovial figure with an aldermanic paunch and a face as brown as a crab apple.

  ‘Ah, Reggie!’ cried Brigadier-General Culver, recovering from his laughter. ‘Come to crow about that lucky putt of yours yesterday?’

  Reggie smiled and shook his head. ‘Wouldn’t dream of it, sir! I wanted to introduce my very good friend Captain Maitland. He’s with the 1st M—shires near Mametz.’

  ‘Jolly good,’ boomed Culver, saluting. ‘Lieutenant Colonel Bathurst told me we should expect some early successes there tomorrow, hmm?’

  Will, hearing the interrogative note, decided to grasp the nettle straight away. ‘I wish I could feel so confident, sir.’

  Culver frowned at this. ‘Oh?’

  ‘If I may –’ He gestured at the map and began to explain, with a fluency that surprised himself, why the Anselm Copse attack was fraught with peril.

  ‘A machine-gun nest? Very unlikely to have survived our bombardment, hmm?’

  Will now sensed that the Brigadier-General’s habit of ending every other sentence with a ‘hmm?’ was merely a tic: he was assuming agreement, not inviting debate. He would have to plough on.