The Lost Soldier

by Costeloe Diney

  Even as Tom watched, another wave of men came from behind at a steady walk and threw themselves into the supposed breaches in the wire, only to be mown down, falling as hay before the scythe, their bodies covering those already fallen, the wounded among the dying, the living among the dead. Still they came, pouring up out of the trenches as the shells whistled and thudded from behind the German lines, and the steady rattle of machine guns poured the scything bullets from the entrenched nests of German gunners set up along the line of battle, still concentrating their vicious fire upon the few gaps in the protecting wire.

  The shriek of a shell made Tom dive down into the safety of his shell hole, and the explosion only yards away half buried him in flying muck and mud. Amid the din of the battle, he heard a new and closer sound, a man crying out for help, a man close at hand, his voice rising to a shriek. Once again, Tom risked his head above ground level, and saw that, where there had been rough ground, a low wall and a stunted tree, there was now nothing but a huge hole where the shell had landed. The cries were coming from there. Grasping his rifle again, Tom crawled from the relative security of his own hole, and, keeping his head as low as possible, scurried across the few yards of open ground and then flung himself over the edge of the next hole, landing heavily on two rag-doll bodies which lay in the bottom. They were both dead, one with half his head shot away, the other staring open-eyed at the sky as if watching for further shells. A third was cowering against the side of the hole, one leg severed at the knee, his foot in its boot lying in the dirt several feet away as if cast aside, the blood pumping out of the wound in steady, rhythmic jets. He held both hands across the stump of his leg as if trying to keep the blood inside and to stem the flow, and his hands and arms were bathed in his own, ever-flowing, blood. It was his cries that Tom had heard, the screams of a terrified boy, dying alone.

  Tom ripped off his pack and webbing and grabbing the field dressing from the pack, tried to hold it in place over the stump.

  “Hold this, hold this,” he screamed at the man, as he wound a piece of bandage round the leg and tried to twist it into a tourniquet, twisting and twisting again to cut off the blood, and the life, flowing from the boy. For a moment it seemed that nothing would work

  It’s got to be tighter! thought Tom in panic. He grabbed the wooden handle of his entrenching tool from his webbing and forced it through the bandage, twisting viciously, so that his makeshift tourniquet finally tightened enough to do its job, and Tom saw the flow ease and stop. The boy fainted, his hands fell away from the blood-soaked dressing he’d been trying to hold, and Tom could see the ragged end of the leg, cut through above the knee, white bone projecting, jagged, through the mangled flesh. He turned away and was sick, throwing up the contents of his stomach into the glutinous mud in which he sat. Then he heard a moan and realised that the wounded boy was beginning to come round. The remains of the lad’s pack was underneath him. Swiftly Tom pulled it free and took out the field dressing it contained, bandaging it as securely as he could over the exposed stump. He knew he must keep the wound covered if they were to try to get back to their own trenches and find help. His ministrations made the boy pass out again, and Tom was glad, for he knew the pain must be unbearable.

  There was nothing else he could do for him here, and there was little possibility of moving him back behind the lines until darkness fell and stretcher parties came out into no-man’s-land to drag the wounded back to safety… if stretcher parties did come. He looked more carefully at the man and saw that he was indeed a lad of about seventeen; his face, now deathly pale, had the unformed lines of youth about the chin and mouth. His ears stood out like jug handles, all the more prominent because his hair was plastered to his head with mud. Most of his uniform was gone, ripped away by the blast, and his shirt hung in shreds about his scrawny shoulders. The sun was up now, a blazing disc in a clear blue sky, burning off the coolness of the early morning mist. Tom knew the temperature would rise steadily and with no shelter from its pitiless heat at midday, any wounded would stand little chance without water and care. Tom looked at the youth and was suddenly determined to keep him alive. If the bleeding had really stopped, there was still a chance he might be saved. Tom peered at his makeshift bandage, and saw that it still seemed to be in place, and was not completely saturated with blood, so presumably the tourniquet was doing its job, but despite the heat, the lad was shivering violently. Somehow he must be kept warm. Stripping off his own tunic, Tom wrapped it round the inert body, pushing the arms into the sleeves to help hold it in place. The boy moaned, but didn’t regain consciousness. Tom looked anxiously at the tourniquet. He remembered Molly had told him that tourniquets must be loosened from time to time so that gangrene did not set in, but how often and after how long? Tom had no idea but he was afraid to release it now, terrified that the blood would start pulsing again. Rather than lose any more blood and face certain death, the boy would have to run the risk of the tourniquet. Tom propped him up as best he could, and while he was still out for the count he checked to see if there were any more injuries that needed attention. He could see none, but as he ran his hands over the boy’s chest he felt the identification dog-tags hanging at his throat. He peered at them and found that he was trying to save the life of Private Sam Gordon.

  “Hold on, Sam,” he ordered the slumped figure. “Just you hold on and we’ll get you out of here.” Then he turned his attention to the two other bodies, and found their tags as well. Private John Dewar and Corporal David Shapwick. Tom looked at them. Should he take the tags with him, knowing that it was unlikely they would be recovered otherwise, or should he leave them with the bodies in the hope that they would be recovered for burial and thus identified? Tom didn’t know. Their only hope would be if the attack had achieved its aims and that the battle lines were now redrawn, with their shell-hole in friendly territory. He eased his head above the edge of the hole. The smoke from the guns mingled with the smokescreen, forming a curtain across the ground. He couldn’t see anything but ragged mist, forming and re-forming, giving glimpses of the wire, still festooned with bodies and parts of bodies, but for the moment no more men were appearing from behind. Perhaps the rest of the attack had been called off, or all those attacking from these forward trenches had already passed through to the German lines. It was impossible to tell.

  All round him the sounds of battle still raged, the unremitting pounding of the heavy guns, the whistles and booms of the shells, the clatter of the machine guns, none of them abated; yet Tom could see nothing. He dropped back down beside the wounded boy. Sam’s breathing was harsh and ragged, his face deathly, the face of an old man.

  If I am going to get him back to safety it has to be now, thought Tom. I can’t shift him alone, so I’ll have to crawl back to the trench and bring a stretcher-bearer back with me.

  He looked at the haft of the entrenching tool, twisted into the tourniquet and decided to leave it there. There was a rifle sticking out from underneath Corporal Shapwick. Tom pulled it free and tying a rag from Sam’s shirt to it, left it projecting a foot from the shell hole as a marker. He wanted to be quite sure that he and the stretcher-bearer would be able to find the hole again. Then, clutching his own rifle, he scrambled up over the lip of the hole, and, in crouching run, scurried back the way he thought he had advanced that morning.

  Tom heard the shell, screaming its way through the murk, and once again dived flat in an instinctive effort to save himself, and then there was the boom of impact and explosion and the world went black.

  When he came round again, Tom had no idea how long he had been unconscious, but it must have been some hours as the day was fading into twilight. He lay, more than half buried, with only his head and shoulders and right arm free, a weight of earth and debris pinning his lower body and legs. It was hard to breathe, and there seemed to be no feeling in his feet. Cautiously he wriggled his shoulders and moved his arm. Some of the earth fell away, and he pulled his other arm free. The noise of battle was interm
ittent now, with the whistle and crash of shells, and the occasional burst from a machine gun, not the ever-present thunder of earlier, but in the swirling smoke he could see nothing and no one; he could have been alone in the world. He scrabbled at the constraining earth with his hands, gradually shifting the stones and earth that imprisoned him. It was slow work as he could only reach so far, but at last he managed to loosen himself enough to lever himself to a sitting position and then finally to ease himself free. He lay for a long moment face down on the ground, exhausted by his exertions, and completely disorientated. His feet began to tingle and then to ache as the blood was restored to them, but he welcomed the pain, he knew it meant that there was no permanent damage done.

  He had a sudden vision of a severed leg, still in its boot and he remembered with a jolt, the dying Sam Gordon. Trying to orientate himself, Tom raised his head and looked round in all directions for the shell hole in which he had left the boy. He had no idea from which direction he had come. There was no sign of the rifle with its tiny flag, no sign of the shell hole. The shell that had buried Tom must have finished the work of its predecessor; Sam Gordon, David Shapwick and John Dewar had vanished, they had been completely obliterated. There would be nothing left of them to find or to bury, their burial had been completed by a German shell. Tom didn’t even have their identity discs. Their names in his memory would have to be enough.

  His rifle had vanished and without any weapon, his pack or his tunic and his uniform in rags, Tom decided it was better to go back rather than forward. He had seen the everlasting coils of wire still stretching out between him and the day’s objective, and knew there was little likelihood of him getting through them, let alone achieving anything useful even if by some miracle he did make it. The coming dark and the mist added to his disorientation. Which way was forward? Which way was back? With the guns thundering from both sides of the line, it was impossible to tell from which direction he had come.

  Still shaking from his efforts to drag himself free, Tom knew only that he had to get away from where he was. Keeping his head as low as he could, he began to crawl. Slowly he dragged himself across the uneven ground; he tried to move in a straight line back to where he thought the British lines must be. Downhill must be right, they had been moving up a slight incline this morning. There were shapes and shadows in the swirling mist, but when Tom called out to them his voice was swallowed by the thunder around him. Here were men, the remains of men, the debris of human bodies; flotsam tossed aside, grotesque in death. He could hear an occasional scream or cry, a voice begging for water, but Tom knew there was nothing he could do for the wounded man who uttered them. He had no field dressings, no water bottle, his own clothes were in rags; the shreds of his shirt wouldn’t even supply a makeshift bandage. He shut his ears to their pleas, and continued to make his way tortuously across the battlefield, at times falling into shell holes as the ground gave way in front of him, at others, crawling round them, becoming muddier and more exhausted by the minute. Once he saw the sprawled figure of a man he actually recognised, Sid Jackson, a private from his own platoon. Sid’s face was twisted to the sky, his eyes staring, his mouth open on a shriek of pain. Gently Tom closed the wild eyes, and crawled on, but to his horror, what felt like hours later, he found himself face to face with Sid’s lifeless body again. He had been crawling round in circles.

  Tom collapsed full length on the ground beside Sid, and wept. He wept for himself and for Sid and the thousands of others he knew must have died that day. He thought of the thousands at home waiting for those who would never come back and he thought of Molly, his Molly, so pretty and bright and clean. He remembered the way her eyes shone as they laughed up into his own, the shy way she had kissed him and the passion that had followed. He thought of the child, his child, that she carried, and of his promise to marry her. They would be a family, he and Molly and the baby, a real family and it would be the first he’d ever known. For Molly and the baby he had to pull himself together and get out of here. In his tunic pocket was the permit to travel back to Albert and the convent, for forty-eight hours’ precious leave. Forty-eight hours in which they would marry, after which Molly would go back to England to have their baby in the safety of her parents’ home. Tom knew he had to get back, behind the lines, back to the convent, back to Molly. Even as these thoughts made him raise his head, he realised with a stab of panic and despair, that his special leave pass had been left with Sam Gordon in his shell hole. Intent on keeping the wounded man warm, he had wrapped his service tunic round Sam’s shoulders, and when he had been obliterated by the German shell, so the tunic and the leave permit had been obliterated with him. The precious letter of leave, Molly’s last letter and her photograph; he had kept them all in the pocket over his heart and now they were gone. He gave a bellow of fury and despair. There would be no leave.

  Molly. She was now his aim and his talisman. He had no idea where his unit was, if indeed there was anything left of it to be anywhere. Tom’s sole intention now was to get back to safety behind his own lines. Molly needed him.

  Once more he set himself to crawl back over the battlefield, and as the charcoal of early evening deepened into night, he gradually edged himself clear. The barrage seemed to have lessened, though there was still sporadic gunfire and the occasional whistle and crump of a shell.

  At last he came to the edge of a trench, not a firing trench, nor living quarters, perhaps a communication trench, or a sap pushed out into no-man’s-land for a listening post, or to give some sort of shelter to the sappers. It was hardly more than a slit in the ground, but Tom dived into it with relief, able to move at a crouch in its cover. He saw no one; there was no sign of life, no sign of death, indeed no sign that anyone had ever been there, except for the hardened, churned mud which lay along it. Rough going though it was, Tom made swifter progress here than he had on the ground above. He had no idea where it led, but clearly it was going somewhere, so he followed, hoping it led to safety, but before long the trench petered out, becoming shallower until he was crawling once more above the ground. The summer darkness surrounded him, but the feeble starlight showed him the emptiness of a lunar landscape. All he could see before him was a flat and blighted land, pitted with craters and broken earth. Round him were the sounds of war. Though the crashing boom of the artillery was intermittent, the darkness was still punctuated with the occasional rattle from machine guns on either side and the single, angry rifle shots of the snipers; and all the while there were the sounds of men, moans and cries, scufflings and scrabblings like the rats which scuttled about the trenches.

  I must get back behind our lines, Tom thought desperately, but which way? He crept cautiously through the darkness, making very slow progress as he skirted shell holes and crawled over the wreckage of battle, edging his way towards what he thought were the British lines. Occasionally a flare exploded into the sky and hung there illuminating the earth below in horrifying detail. Each time, Tom froze, lying motionless, face down, like so many around him who would never move again, until the merciful darkness covered him once more and he could begin to crawl forward again.

  Suddenly he was aware of soft voices nearby, only yards away. Once more he froze, straining to hear what language they were speaking. It was clearly a stretcher party that had crawled out into no-man’s-land to search for wounded, but from which side? A sharp cry of “Oh God!” hastily stifled, told him they were British, and he edged towards them over the pockmarked ground.

  “Who’s that?” The challenge came sharply through the darkness. “Who’s that? I can hear you. Show yourself.”

  Tom was about to do exactly that, when there was the whistle and crump as a shell hurtled to earth and exploded close by, blowing them flat, knocking the wind from them and setting their ears singing. As Tom shook his head, trying to clear it, he heard the same voice rasp, “Come on, mate, let’s get you out of here.” There was the sound of scuffling, grunting and a deep moan as the wounded man was heaved onto the stre
tcher, and then the whole scene was flooded with light from a bursting flare above the enemy lines. Tom saw the stretcher party grasp the handles of the stretcher and make off at a crouching lope away from him, zigzagging round the shell holes and stumbling over debris which barred their way to the safety of the British lines. Tom followed, also running at the crouch to the illusory safety of a shell hole. As he dropped into its shelter, he heard a husky voice coming from a parched throat, and, in the light of the still blossoming flare, he saw a white face, only inches away, peering at him.

  “Give us a hand, chum,” said the voice, calmly.

  The very calmness off the voice made Tom pause. He reached out a hand and was greeted with a tired grin. “Glad you could drop in,” the voice drawled. “Can’t get out of this bloody hole; legs don’t work.” The control in the voice faltered for a moment, and the owner added, “Have you got any water?”

  Tom found his voice at last. “No, sorry, no water. But I’ll get you back to the dressing station. How bad is it?”

  “Legs broken,” came the reply, with only the slightest waver in its tight control. “Both buggered.”