by Thomas Wood
Hamilton’s eyes on the other hand were wide and raring to go, as if he had just awoken from one of those most refreshing of sleeps, ready to face what was ahead. His face, although covered in grease and cork, was one that had not changed in the slightest since he had been with us. I thought maybe that it was because he had not been with us for as long, but then realised it had been the same amount of time that I had been in the team before I got hooked on the paraffin.
Apart from a single puff on a cigarette, Hamilton had not changed in the slightest.
“Ready?”
I was, so I expected them to be as well.
I would go in first and nab the first figure that I saw. There would be no time for analysis, no questioning who I thought might have the most information or the easiest one to crack, although that would have been nice, there was simply no time.
A single shout from one of the occupants would be all that it took for the world to come crashing down all around us.
Hamilton stood poised over the fabric curtain. There was a faint flickering candle inside, weaker even than the one that had been outside, I guessed.
The curtain was pulled back. I stepped in.
There were no shouts of recognition of an enemy soldier, no bellows to attract the attention of everyone else, just a series of grunts and gasps as we did what we needed to do.
I tried to imagine what it would have been like for those men, quietly lying on their beds, waiting for their watch, or reading a book at the table in the centre of the small room, only to be suddenly interrupted. I tried to guess what the fear was like in their body, as three towering figures dramatically flew into the room, their faces hidden under layer upon layer of blackness. Their eyes would almost certainly gravitate towards the weapons that we brought with us, the truncheons, revolvers and knives that was the extent of our arsenal.
They would know who we were immediately. But before too long, it wouldn’t matter, as they would more than likely be dead.
I rushed over to the first figure that I could make out, just sitting up in his bed, writing a love letter to his sweetheart or a poem for his mother.
He looked up at me, his spectacles the size of two pocket watches, quite carelessly and as if he had been expecting us this whole time. His face was quite round in shape but at the same time gaunt looking, as if his cheekbones would slice my skin if I was to run my finger along them.
His face was, however, a kind one, which made what I was about to do all the more difficult.
I heard the final few gasps of the dead men just bounce off the walls of the room, as Hamilton and Earnshaw dispatched of the other men who were snoozing in their beds.
For some, unknown reason, my eyes had been drawn to the man who was on the far side of the dugout, which meant I had two or three more strides than the other two to do before I got to him. It was plenty of time to pull my fist backwards, as if drawing a bow ready to release the arrow.
As I charged at him, I simultaneously swung my arm around and forwards, smashing into the weak resistance of his nose as I did so. Blood sprayed everywhere, predominantly from his face, but also from my knuckle.
His spectacles hit the floor, as did the pencil that he had been using to pen his love notes. His head bounced around for a few moments, before the second blow really delivered the message to him.
“English? You speak English?”
“Yes,” came the babbling reply, as he fought with the blood that had gushed to his mouth.
Good. That was the only criteria that we needed.
“You’re coming with us. Up. Up.”
“Come on, get up,” emphasised Hamilton, gripping him under his arm and practically yanking him from his bed.
“My glasses…I need them…I need to see where I am going.”
I threw them towards him, before he shakily placed them back on the bridge of his bloodied nose, wincing pathetically as he did so.
I almost felt like apologising to him for a moment, the blows that I had delivered quite clearly awfully discomforting him, to the point where I thought he might cry.
“What is happening? What are you doing?”
“Shut up or I’ll put a bullet in you,” Earnshaw’s prayers seemed to have worked. He was back to normal.
“Harry, grab the Captain. We’re falling back, as per the plan.”
“Got it.”
As if the German soldier had trained with us, we moved effortlessly towards the trench, before forcing him up his own trench ladder.
We would now head back to the ruined farmhouse where, hopefully, both Chester and Lawrence were perched waiting for us, like a nervous mother. Our rifles would be there too, if they hadn’t run off with them.
The farmhouse was completely void of anything that might have distinguished it from any other piece of rubble out in No Man’s Land. There was no structure to it or form, just a series of half-walls that still defiantly stood at around shoulder height if I was to stand up straight.
It was a perfect bit of cover for what we needed it for, a quick interrogation out in the field, before heading back home. Once there, I would hopefully begin to feel safer, as it was one step closer to home.
However, the height with which the walls stood was also a major disadvantage, as it was the only thing that could offer some real cover from enemy bullets. As such, it was the ideal target for a salvo of artillery, or for a machine gun to begin sweeping through. It would also be the first place that a patrol would look for a missing soldier.
But it would have to do. Hopefully, if we were quick enough, we would be on our way back to our lines before they even realised that the oversized-spectacled German was missing.
“Thanks for waiting for us,” I muttered at Lawrence as we stumbled into the stone walls of the farmhouse.
“We’re more loyal than you give us credit for, Andrew,” he said, handing me a rifle. I checked that it was made ready by pulling the bolt back and having a feel for the brass round inside, before I focused on anything else.
“Blimey, what have you done to him?” grunted Chester, harshly, as he scrabbled over to the German.
“Sergeant Ellis gave him a whack on the nose, Chester. Some Germans need a little physical persuasion. It’s not easy when you’re not just looking at them through your sights,” Earnshaw was feeling fired up and I could tell that he was yearning for some sort of a scrap.
“I’m not on about that,” Chester said, rebuking Earnshaw, “I’m talking about that.”
It was only at that moment, in the dim light of the French midnight, that I realised what it was he was on about.
The scarlet liquid had left some sort of a trail right the way through the rubble that we now occupied, until it started to pool around the German’s leg.
“My leg,” he said, wincing like he had done when he had replaced his spectacles. “I got it caught in the wire. I ripped it out of me.”
“Right, let me take a look at it,” announced Chester, beginning to lift the leg up to some light.
“Not yet,” Captain Arnold rasped stubbornly. “We need to talk to him first, then we decide what we do with him.”
It seemed like the situation dictated that we were to behave like animals.
9
“My name is Captain Arnold.”
The Captain knelt down in front of the German and spoke slowly and clearly, succeeding in patronising the young man before him, whether it was intentional or not, I did not know.
“He speaks perfect English, Sir.”
He looked to our new prisoner for confirmation.
“My name is Unteroffizer Franck Maas, Royal Bavarian, Twelfth Infantry Regiment. What do you want with me? To kill me?”
He seemed scared, which was not surprising considering the situation that he now found himself in. I was not sure that I would be reacting as calmly in his position.
“No…No…” the Captain sighed, pulling his woollen hat from his head, revealing the hair that was becoming just as greasy as th
e stubble on his chin. His voice trembled slightly, as if he was not even convincing himself of the fact that the German would remain safe.
Maas could detect the uncertainty in his voice.
“What are you going to do to me? Why have we stopped here?”
They were all fair questions, as one would assume that now we had a prisoner we would keep on going until we made it back to our line. The young bespectacled German would not get the answers that he was craving, only a distorted variation of an answer from the Captain.
“We are not taking you back to our lines. There will be no record of you ever being in our care. Do you understand what that means?”
The German began to look around fearfully, his eyes wide and tearful behind the thick sheets of glass.
He began to whisper something under his breath in German, which seemed to have the rhythm and feel of a prayer to it, but I could not understand a word that he was saying. It was at that moment, as a wave of cool air brushed over my skin, that I realised that we needed McKay. He was the only one of us who could actually speak any German.
I looked up briefly, at which point I caught Chester’s eye and I got the distinct impression that his gaze had been burning at the side of my cheek for a considerable amount of time. We locked eyes for two or three seconds, before he turned away again, to man his post and scour the route that we had just come down.
What had I done wrong?
Had he noticed something about me? Maybe he was harbouring the same doubts about simply sitting here and waiting for a helping of artillery, especially without the luck of the hip flask. He seemed to hate me, for whatever reason, but I could not for the life of me work out what I had done to scorn him.
None of that matters right now. The German at your feet does.
“Ja…Ja…Ich verstehe…I understand. I am here so that you can kill me if I do not do as you say.”
“You’re a fast learner.”
I caught the eye of Lawrence this time, who seemed to be staring at me in exactly the same way as Chester had been. I tried to push them from my mind for a moment, they would call me out if there was anything that would be endangering anyone’s life and, right then, that was all I could care about.
“We want to know about the attack.”
Lawrence looked back out across No Man’s Land as the Captain started to interrogate our prisoner. Maybe that was it. They were getting twitchy about being out here. They felt threatened. They felt like the war was about to come to them, it could get personal at any second.
There was something under the surface that was making these two imperceptibly nervous, the only reason I had picked up on it was because of their apprehensive glances.
Something was causing those fears, those glares. And I suddenly became adamant that I would find out as soon as I could, hopefully before we all got ourselves killed.
“What attack? I don’t know anything about an attack?”
“We know that there is an attack planned. We have valuable intelligence that tells us it is correct.”
Maas began to get panicked, flustered, as he began to rub at his cheeks in desperation.
“What attack? I know nothing of any attack! Don’t you think we would have known if an offensive was planned?”
“Oi, keep your voice down,” chirped Earnshaw, giving the German a slight prod with the barrel of his revolver. “We don’t want your chums over there coming for us. You know what will happen if that happens, don’t you?”
The German held his palms up in submission, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Now please take that thing away from me.”
“Does he mean you or the revolver, Earnshaw?”
The Captain shot him a dirty look. Now was not the time to be reigniting another playful feud. Earnshaw smirked at him like the elder brother who had just got his younger sibling in heaps of trouble.
“Look,” explained Maas, his heavily accented and crackled voice bubbling out into the Captain’s face. “I do not know anything about an attack. I would have told you if I did. What have I got to lose now? You have guns on my head.”
Captain Arnold glanced up at me, looking for some sort of a hint on what to do next or some guidance. The initial questions had been vague, as we didn’t want the man to just go along with anything that we had said. It is basic human instinct to tell your captors what they want to hear.
I pursed my lips and sucked my cheeks in, he knew straight away what my advice would be. We would need to get specific, gradually at first, but slowly drip feed him information until he could confirm or deny what we thought was the case.
After that, if he didn’t give us anything but the naivety card that he had played so far, we would have to get nasty. That was going to be difficult, seeing as the German that we had managed to pick up looked like everyone’s younger brother.
I was sure that Lawrence would have no issue with knocking him around a bit, however. He seemed like that sort.
10
“Honestly, I do not know anything about what you are on about. Please, you must believe me.”
I looked across to Captain Arnold, whose face was telling me the exact same thing that was flashing across my mind. We didn’t believe him in the slightest. It seemed like the more he tried to protest his innocence, the more we became convinced that he knew exactly what we wanted to know.
All he had to do was just spill the beans and then all of this would be over for him. He might even be able to make it back to the German lines before anyone realised that he had gone missing.
Everyone, particularly our two Canadian friends, were growing impatient with Maas, who seemed so defiant that I thought we would be better off returning to get ourselves a new prisoner. This one did not seem to be the right one for what we needed him for.
He could tell that we were getting irate, which only spurred him on further to defend himself, telling us various tid bits of information that we knew to be true already.
“When an attack is imminent, we are told about twelve hours before. Our officers are given maps and information on your lines to help prepare themselves. If you were to attack on one of those nights, imagine the amount of information you would be able to gather.”
“Hamilton,” said the Captain, “grab a rifle and go up on watch with Lawrence and Chester.”
“Yes, Sir.”
Maas seemed quite offended that his little speech had been all but ignored by Captain Arnold. In response, he simply sat and stared at his hands, muttering the same old prayer that he had mumbled a few minutes before.
But, this time, I could make out individual words, their harsh and dirty-sounding syllables resembling something like a throat clearing or someone who was quite unwell.
With all the words that I could hear, not one of them seemed to be ‘God’ and so I found it quite difficult to ascertain as to who it was he was praying to.
I could sense both Lawrence’s and Chester’s eyes burning into my skull, their gaze one of irritability and annoyance.
I looked up at them.
“We need to get a move on here gents. This isn’t one of your tea parties. We’re still a long way from safety out here.”
“Yes, thank you Sergeant.”
Arnold’s voice was just as highly strung as Lawrence’s, the air around us suddenly becoming thinner as everyone’s throats tightened somewhat. I didn’t like where this was going. We were all beginning to turn on one another, the longer that we stayed in the ruined farmhouse.
The Canadian was right, we would need to do something, and soon, whether that was releasing the German, disposing of him, or taking him back to our own lines with us.
The rest of the German army were going to discover the dugout soon enough, at which point I was sure there would be a thousand flares up in the sky, replaced by the howling hell hounds of the German artillery.
Captain Arnold had started to blink rapidly, again like he was trying to forbid the tears from streaming down his cheeks.
He was a broke
n man, a damaged officer, who wanted nothing more than this whole war to be one elaborate nightmare. He stood in silence for what felt like minutes, the embers that glowed behind his eyes slowly dwindling, as if someone had gradually poured on a cup of water.
Someone else was going to have to step up once again, someone else was going to have to make the decision that could quite easily result in seven dead bodies in a ruined farmhouse.
I wondered for how much longer the distant stares were going to be, not just tonight, but every night. I wasn’t sure if this was now what he was going to be like, every time he came up against something that might threaten his mind, that he simply shut down and gave up.
That was not the officer that had been leading me for the last few months. I felt partly to blame all of a sudden, as if my months of drinking and bickering with Bob had been a factor in his mental demise. It could well have been.
But there was nothing I could do about that now. It was all in the past, even if it had been something that had affected him.
As the one who felt partly responsible for his mental stutter, I began to take charge. I started to make decisions on his behalf.
There was no more time to be messing around. I pulled out my revolver and pressed it into his head.
I thought I could almost see Lawrence dancing a merry jig on the spot at the sight of what I was doing. Things were about to get messy, which was just the way the barbaric Canadian liked it.
“Franck. We know that there is an attack coming. We know. Do you get what I am trying to say to you?”
He tried to look up at me, but I kept his head pointing down towards the ground with the solid steel of my Webley.
“But…but—”
“We know that there is a gas attack coming. We know that it is imminent. Probably at some point over the next twenty-four hours. You are going to tell us the rest. If you don’t, we will leave you here. You will die slowly.”
