Black Hand Gang

by Pat Kelleher

  It pounced. Tulliver let off the last two shots. One passed straight through its skull scattering its brains out through the exit wound. As he dropped and rolled aside, the beast crashed into the wall and collapsed to the ground, sending loose bricks tumbling down, prompting another round of screaming from inside.

  "Edith! Do be quiet. I shan't have to slap you again, shall I?"

  "Sister, please, no more violence!" said a man's voice.

  "Well, if she don't, I will," came a third female voice.

  "Hello?" called Tulliver as he walked slowly down the short passage and tried the door. It wouldn't budge. He tried knocking and was encouraged by the sound of scraping as if someone were moving large objects.

  "Well for goodness sake, Edith, give the gel a hand."

  "Thanks awfully," came the reply, dripping with sarcasm as the door scraped open and jammed halfway. Tulliver was just wondering whether he should do the gentlemanly thing and put his shoulder to it when a final wrench from a pair of grubby hands freed it. The door crashed open sending a woman dressed in a khaki jacket and long ankle length khaki skirt reeling back into the arms of a middle-aged chap in an army uniform, under which Tulliver could see the black cloth and white collar of a Devil Dodger. Two nurses looked on.

  "Careful there, Padre, this is more my area of expertise than yours I think," said Tulliver, stepping into the room and setting the poor woman on her feet again.

  "Gor blimey, a... pilot!" said the khaki-clad FANY. She blushed furiously against her better judgement but recovered admirably. "Nellie Abbott," she said with a little bob of a curtsey. "Where's your machine, then? Can I see it? What sort is it?"

  "Driver Abbot! A little decorum, please!" said the Sister brusquely. "You are a pilot, then?"

  "Lieutenant James Tulliver, RFC," he said, clicking his heels and giving a little mock bow of the head.

  "Sister Fenton," said the nurse curtly, thrusting out a hand. "Red Cross. This is Nurse Bell," she said, nodding at a similarly dressed young woman.

  "Yes," said Tulliver, shaking her hand. "The red crosses on your uniform did rather give it away."

  "I don't think this is the time for flippancy, do you, Mr Tulliver?" interjected the Padre.

  The young woman in the nurse's uniform, her once carefully pinned hair now a-tumble, let out a sigh and crumpled to the floor.

  "Oh, for goodness' sake!" said Fenton, stamping her foot. "Edith!"

  "I say, I don't usually have that kind of effect," said Tulliver. "Is she all right?"

  "It's not you, you great oaf," snapped the other nurse. "We've just been though a lot, a motor crash, a freezing cold night in a cellar, the shelling and now to have that slavering great creature..."

  "It's dead now," said Tulliver. "But this place isn't safe. There are more of them. We'll have to get you into the trenches."

  "The trenches? Are you mad?" said the Padre. "There are hundreds of men there."

  "Padre, believe me," said Sister Fenton, "The likes of that lot hold no fear for me."

  "An' I've got four brothers so I've seen the worst of 'em!" said Abbott jovially.

  "There, that's settled then," said Tulliver.

  "It's totally out of the question. It's... improper," said the Padre. "We're waiting on a motor ambulance to take them back to the Hospital in St. Germaine."

  "Ah," said Tulliver, awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck and feeling the short bristles there.

  "What do you mean, 'ah'?" said Sister Fenton.

  "I mean, I don't think it's going to be possible, I'm afraid," he said. "At least for a while. Can she walk?" he asked, indicating Nurse Bell.

  "Oh she'll be fine. Abbott, give me a hand," said Sister Fenton.

  The khaki-clad girl hurried to put herself under the blonde nurse's arm in order to take her weight. The woman groaned softly.

  "Come on, Edi," she said. "Time for a little promenade."

  "Where to?" asked the dazed nurse weakly.

  "Padre, I need to report to, well, to somebody. Can you take me to an officer? Whose Company Front is this?"

  "13th Battalion Pennine Fusiliers. I can take you to C Company HQ. It's not far from here."

  "It may be further than you think," Tulliver said cryptically. "Wait here." He slipped out of the door and peered outside. He held his revolver for appearance's sake. The nurses needn't know it was empty. He had some spare ammunition, but it was in the aeroplane.

  "It's clear. Padre, you bring up the rear."

  "Right you are."

  They stepped over the rubble and out of the back of the ruined farmhouse facing the front line, to avoid the creature's corpse out the front. It took the women a moment or two to catch their breath at the sight of the lush green vista now surrounding them.

  "Blimey!"

  "Oh. My..."

  "Hold fast, Abbott, Edith's going to faint again," said Sister Fenton. "Mr Tulliver, where exactly are we? These mountains weren't here yesterday. I should have been sure to spot them. How is this possible?"

  "That," said Tulliver, "is the very question. Well, Padre, any answers?"

  The Padre opened and closed his mouth several times before giving up and reluctantly shaking his head.

  A strange cry startled them. Above, flocks of things that were not birds were beginning to swirl and wheel above the mud. Up ahead, they could hear the marshalling shouts and barks of NCOs giving orders.

  "We'd best hurry. Watch your step, ladies," cautioned Tulliver as he led them across the mud and down into the nearest communication trench. He'd only ever once before had a trip up to the front lines, when visiting an artillery battery.

  "That smell!" said Edith, faltering as she looked round for the source while Sister Fenton dragged her on like a tardy child.

  "I know," said Tulliver, shaking his head. "Sweaty feet, unwashed men, cordite, army stew. If nothing else they should act as effective smelling salts, eh, Abbott?"

  As they worked their way up the trench the party attracted cat calls and whistles from weary, mud-soaked and bewildered men. Tulliver turned back to check on his charges. Sister Fenton strode purposefully on, doing her best to ignore them, while Edith seemed to have recovered enough to smile coquettishly as she was pulled along in her wake. Abbott strode confidently behind. She looked longingly at a private drawing on a fag. "Aw, go on, duck, give us a Wood, I'm gasping!" she said as she passed.

  The soldier leered at her. "Come 'ere, and I'll give you -" he began, before catching the eye of the Padre bringing up the rear. Flustered, he fished around in his tunic pocket producing two battered but serviceable Woodbines and offered them to her. "-- I'll give you a couple," he stuttered apologetically, smiling awkwardly as his mates jeered and jostled him.

  Abbott took them from his hand. "Ta, ever so, ducks," she called gaily as the Padre impatiently herded her away.

  One man flung himself desperately at the Chaplain.

  "Padre? What's happened. Where are we? We thought we was in heaven, like, but them devil dogs attacked so it can't be, can it? Is God punishing us? Tell us Padre, tell us!"

  "I - I don't know, my son" answered the Padre as he pulled away from the distraught soldier.

  Further along, the revetments leaned drunkenly, their sandbags askew. In places they threatened to topple over completely. In others they had collapsed and they had to scramble over the mounds of spoil. When they reached C Company HQ they found a captain sat in the remains of the trench with his head in his hands. There was a bustle of activity around him as men worked stoically shifting sandbags and timbers, using shovels, picks and buckets to excavate the dirt where the C Company HQ sign lay half buried.

  "Captain Grantham!" said Padre Rand, kneeling down by him. "What happened? Is the Major all right?"

  Grantham lifted his head from his hands. His face was streaked with dirt and tears.

  The Padre took him aside. "For God's sake, compose yourself, Captain. Not in front of the ranks. Remember you're an officer! Pull yourself together."
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  Grantham made an effort to regain his composure as he stood. He brushed the drying mud and soil from his tunic, cleared his throat and straightened his collar and tie.

  "Can we help?" asked Sister Fenton, stepping forward.

  "Eh?" The Captain looked at the women nonplussed.

  "The nurses I reported on last night, Grantham," said the Padre.

  "Ah. Right. Yes, well there's nothing they can do here," said Grantham waving away Sister Fenton's ministrations. "But I'm sure the MO can put them to work." He gestured to the pile. "The Major's dead, buried under that lot. I barely got out myself. There was a sudden jolt and the whole place just collapsed around us. There's the CSM, the orderlies and the signal chappie down there, too," he said earnestly. "And reports of other dugout collapses. I sent a runner to Battalion but he says it's gone. How can it not be there? And then there were those damn wolf things. I don't know what's happening."

  "This man might be able to shed some light on it all," said the Padre, introducing the Flying Officer.

  "Lieutenant Tulliver," said Tulliver, extending a hand.

  Grantham took it. "Well I certainly hope you can. This is a right bloody shambles. The men are getting windy. It felt like a bloody earth tremor."

  "A bit more than that."

  "A mine explosion?"

  "If it was it's blown us to God knows where," said Tulliver, looking up at the mountains on either side as he pulled his trench maps from inside his double-breasted tunic. He took a stub of pencil from his pocket and, after studying the map for a few moments, drew a rough circle on the paper around a section of trenches and No Man's Land. "As far as I can tell, sir, this area is all I could see from the air. It's as if someone had taken a giant pair of scissors, cut it out and dropped it down somewhere else entirely."

  "Scissors? Talk sense man!" snapped Grantham.

  "From what I could see from the air, sir," said Tulliver, "this circle of mud is all that is left of the Somme."

  The tank rumbled and squealed its way implacably toward the trench and then stopped. Atkins could see where the beasts had clawed away at the trench paint - camouflage cover and the wire netting gable was torn and hanging off. By the time the engine had puttered and died Atkins and some of the others were out of the trenches and walking towards this new wonder machine. Its guns slowly lowered, as if bowing in obeisance or exhaustion. There were metallic clangs and bangs as a door, barely more than two feet tall, opened in the rear of the gun sponson and there clambered, from the pit of the armoured machine, one small man and then another. They were wearing oiled-stained khaki overalls covered with small burn holes and tight fitting leather helmets with leather masks across the upper halves of their faces, their eyeholes merely thin slits. From the bottom of the masks hung chain mail drapes that covered the rest of their face. They looked as if they'd stepped from the Devil's own chariot. Two more climbed out of a hatch on the top of the motorised mammoth and walked down the back of the now motionless track that encompassed the entire side of the tank.

  "Bloody gas! Now I'm going to have to strip everything down and clean it to stop the damn corrosion."

  "Jesus my head's banging!"

  Atkins had never seen a more otherworldly group of men. They would have looked fierce and impressive, almost like some primitive tribal warriors, if two of them hadn't then fallen to their knees and started vomiting warm beige splatters into the mud, coughing and retching worse than a retired coal miner.

  "Bloody hell!" said Porgy.

  The little bantam bloke pulled off his helmet and mask to reveal a pale face covered with flaky, livid red patches. He took a swing with his foot, savagely kicking the body of a dead creature.

  "That's for scratching Ivanhoe, you ugly mutt," he said, punctuating his invective with further kicks.

  The lanky Tank Commander strode over and made a curt introduction. "Lieutenant Mathers. Who's in charge here?"

  "That'll be Captain Grantham, sir," said Sergeant Hobson. "I'll get someone to take you to Company HQ."

  Atkins turned his attention back to the others who were talking to the tank crew.

  "Well if this ain't the Somme it's not my fault," the bantam tank driver was saying. "My map reading were bloody perfect!"

  "Then where on earth are we?"

  "Earth?" spat the bantam figure scathingly. "This ain't like no place on earth I've ever seen!"

  CHAPTER SIX

  "What's the Use of Worrying..."

  "I'm going to need numbers, Sergeant; roll call and casualties," Everson said as he inspected the fire trench along his Platoon Front. After the attack by what they were calling hell hounds, the men were stood to on the fire step, rifles at the ready. Any questions the men might have were silenced by Hobson's stern glance, for which Everson was thankful. He had no idea what had happened. Right now he was as ignorant as his men, which was not a position he liked to be in and one he was even less likely to want to admit to. Latrine rumours were flying about. You couldn't stop them. Those that thought they'd suddenly materialised in Paradise and the Just Reward they so richly deserved were quickly disabused by the attack of the creatures. Now they were convinced they were in Purgatory. Others thought it Hell, although that argument was soon sunk by the virtue of them having been on the Somme which was itself the very definition of hell. Best to nip such gossip in the bud, if you could. Having stalled after the initial confusion over the strange surroundings and the attack of the beasts, the great military machine was beginning to reassert itself.

  "I want you to keep the men busy," Everson told Hobson. "Don't want 'em getting windy. After they're stood down, set them to repairing the trenches. Work will keep them occupied until we can sort out what the hell is going on here."

  Cries and moans from the wounded drifted over from No Man's Land, those wounded by Fritz in the initial attack and those poor souls left alive by the attacking hell hounds. That was the real morale sapper, he knew. In a Pals Battalion like the Broughtonthwaite Mates, those weren't just any soldiers, those cries came from people you'd known all your lives. That's what became unbearable; the knowledge that they weren't just going to die. With gut-shots or shrap wounds they could lie out there for days, begging for help, crying for their mothers, calling for you to help them, and you knowing that if you tried to help them, you'd be joining them on the old barbed wire. That's what broke men, that's what ground insidiously away at morale. Oh, the bombs and the shells and the sniping got to some after a while, but this was the clincher.

  "Sergeant?"

  "Sir?"

  "Best, get a party together with stretcher bearers, too, and start bringing in some of those woundeds while we've still got daylight. Those damned beasts are still out there somewhere. See to it, will you?"

  "Sir," he said. Everson left him to it, turned down the comm trench and began to work his way back to where the temporary HQ had been set up and a Company meeting arranged.

  Hours later, with only the occasional reappearance of a wily hell hound or two, the men were stood down with only sentries left on guard against further attack. Those not on duty retired to the support trenches.

  "Fuck, look lively here comes Hobson," said Porgy, sucking the last dregs of smoke from his Woodbine before dropping it in the mud to sizzle and die.

  "Great. Ketch'll be in charge of the Section. Bet he couldn't wait," muttered Mercy as they noticed the Corporal skulking along behind the Sergeant, "and Jessop barely cold."

  "Right, you lot, finished sitting around on our arses have we?" said Hobson. "Then there's work to do."

  "Sarn't," said Porgy, putting a hand to his grubbily bandaged pate, "Me head's spinning. I think it's that crack I got last night."

  Atkins could almost hear the rest of the Section groan and suppressed a smirk. Bloody Porgy. He had an aversion to manual labour. Had to keep his hands soft for his long-haired chums, or so he said.

  "Right, Hopkiss," said Hobson, almost wearily. "Let's get you to the MO then and see what he has to say.
If you're malingering, I'll have you. The rest of you fall in. Come on," he barked when they were slow to get up, "put some jildi into it!"

  They got up and put themselves into lacklustre order.

  "Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you're a sorry bunch. If your mothers could see you now they'd be ashamed!" he snapped. "You lot are on trench fatigue. I'll leave it to Corporal Ketch to sort the details out. They're all yours, Corporal." And he set off, escorting Porgy to the MO. Porgy turned and gave Atkins a quick wink before Hobson shoved him down the comm trench.

  "Right," said Ketch slowly once Hobson had gone, the sneer on his lips smearing itself across his face. "We're going down Broughton Street for a bit of digging, so grab your entrenching tools."

  There was a lot of muttering and sighing as they picked up the spades from their kits and began sloping off down the trench.

  "Not you, Atkins," said Ketch. "I've got another job for you. Don't think saving me from them hell hounds has won you any favours, cos it hasn't. You suffer too much from cheerfulness you do. Well, I've got the cure. You're a cocky little shit, d'y'know that?"

  "Here, steady on Corp!" said Mercy.

  Ketch shot him a look and carried on.

  "And shit should be in the latrine. Sanitation duty until I say so."

  "Corp!" objected Atkins, but knowing it was an argument he was going to lose, Atkins bit his tongue. Mercy had no such reservations.

  "Quit riding the lad, Ketch. You may be an NCO but apres le guerre I'll have you cold, mate," he said stepping between Ketch and Atkins and going to-to-toe with the Corporal.

  "For that you can join him, Evans, you like getting yourself in the shit so much."

  Once Ketch had dismissed them and they'd gone off to fetch their tools, Atkins turned to Mercy.

  "What up with him? Why's he got it in for me?"

  "Ketch? Regular four-letter man he is. He was foreman over at Everson's brewery before the war an' he didn't 'alf lord it over us. Thought he had it cushy 'til old man Everson decided to let the workers form a union, didn't he? Aggravated Ketch no end that did, but there were nowt he could do about it, was there? War broke out, we joined up to get away from the bastard only to find that, as a foreman, he'd been made an NCO. He's worse now than he ever was," Mercy said with sardonic grin. "He hates everyone and everything."