Starshine

by John Wilcox

  ‘And pigs will surely fly,’ murmured Bertie.

  ‘Once we are in the trench,’ continued the captain, ‘Sergeant Fellowes will take his party – he will nominate you – bombing up the trench to the left to clear it, Corporal Jenkins will do the same to the right with his men, and I, with Corporal Hickman and the rest, will go on and attack the machine-gun nest. The idea, chaps, will be to put the guns and the gunners out of action by throwing grenades through the slits. Then we will get away as fast as we can. Right. Any questions?’

  ‘Yessir.’ Hickman was amazed at the sanguinity of it all. ‘Are you saying that we charge directly into fire from three machine guns?’

  ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds, Corporal. As we near, you will see that the gun encasements are about twenty feet or so behind the trenches and – and this is the point – they are on the edge of the old wood and about fifteen foot or so above the trench. Because they are firing through slits in the concrete, they can’t depress the guns downwards to fire at us up close without moving ’em. And we shall be on them before they can do that. All right?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, sir.’ Jim exchanged glances with Bertie. It all sounded far too easy.

  ‘Ah well,’ whispered Bertie. ‘We’ve all got to die sometime.’ But his face was white under its dirt.

  Suddenly the night was broken by the crash of guns behind their lines as the bombardment began. At the same time, machine guns from the British line opened up far to their left. The immediate response was a couple of German star shells that climbed lazily into the sky, again to their left.

  The glow lit up the tight anxious faces of the raiding party for a moment. ‘I thought there was supposed to be no bloody light on this side,’ murmured Bertie.

  The noise of the gunfire was deafening and Smith-Forbes had to shout now. ‘Right, lads. I will lead, Sergeant Fellowes and his section will follow, then Corporal Jenkins and his lot, then Corporal Hickman and his men at the rear. At the German wire, Fellowes and Jenkins will cut it and toss in grenades to kill the sentries. I will hold the wire up and they will lead their parties in and clear the trench and hold it. Then the rest of us will go in quickly and attack the guns. After that, it’s every man for himself. Above all, we must be quick. Speed is the essence of this raid. We must clear the trench and put the guns out before the German support troops come up. It’s all got to be done in about five minutes. All right? Good. Ah, one last important point. The password for tonight when you approach our trench on return is “Newmarket”. Got it? Very well. Follow me and good luck.’

  In sequence, the party climbed up the trench ladder and they all squirmed under the wire and began the crawl across no man’s land. The noise continued on their left and was now joined by the chattering of enemy machine guns in reply, who were obviously expecting a night attack in some force. The guns that were the raiders’ target, however, remained silent.

  At the rear, Jim Hickman crawled after Bertie, close behind his friend’s muddy heels and his face a few inches above the mud. As ever, the smell of decayed, mulched bodies turned his stomach but he was more concerned, as he watched the little man’s grenades bounce up and down on his buttocks, that one would be dislodged and lose its pin. Ahead, he could dimly make out the captain’s helmet disappear and then appear again as he negotiated the shell craters, for it was no longer possible to crawl across no man’s land in a steady line. He realised that, as Bertie had pointed out, the enemy star shells that still climbed into the sky were near enough to cast some light over their section of the field and he prayed that the enemy sentries in the trench they were approaching were keeping their heads down.

  As they neared the wire, he could see the machine-gun emplacements clearly enough. It was true that the barrels of the guns were not poking through their firing slits, but their muzzles were protruding and they were slowly rotating from left to right! He licked his dry lips. The gunners were, then, very much alert. Could they see the raiding party now and were they cleverly holding their fire until it would be impossible to miss? He shook his head and crawled on, noting that the British mini barrage was now fading away. Damn!

  Now he could see the captain holding up the parted strands of wire and the shapes of Sergeant Fellowes and his men beginning to crawl through and, overtaking Bertie, he joined the others lying flat, waiting for the lead bombers to do their work. That would be the crucial point. If the machine-gunners could depress sufficiently to aim at the wire virtually under their noses, then those at the rear of the raiding party were as good as dead. Could he reach the emplacement with a thrown grenade from here? Might it deter the gunners? Unlikely. It was too far. He brushed the sweat away from his eyes, gritted his teeth and waited.

  Expected as it was, the sudden explosions from the trench made him jump. He crawled to the wire and held up the cut edge, opposite the captain, to allow the other bombers to move through now, crawling as quickly as they could. He turned to his rear. ‘Crawl up, for God’s sake, Bertie,’ he called. ‘The guns could reach you there.’

  Almost as he spoke, the chatter of the machine guns began, now frighteningly near, and he saw a row of holes appear in the mud as if by magic just behind Bertie’s boots. With his free hand, he unclipped a grenade, pulled out the detonating pin with his teeth, waited for three seconds, then hurled it overhand in the general direction of the gun emplacement. Without looking to observe the effect, he waved through the captain and followed him, scurrying desperately as the machine-gun bullets hissed over his head, praying that Bertie was under the arc of their fire.

  He levered himself over the trench parapet and tumbled onto the body of a German sentry. Two more lay groaning against the trench wall. Acrid smoke was issuing from the entrance to a dugout and a Tommy waved him away as he threw another grenade down the steps. To the left and right, the raiders were hunched by the traverses as, on the other side, their grenades suddenly exploded. Then, more grenades in hand, they scurried round the barriers to continue their attacks along the enemy trench.

  ‘The ladder, quick, help me.’ The cry came from Smith-Forbes, who was attempting to wrest the trench ladder away from the British side of the trench to prop it onto the other side. He rushed to help and found, to his relief, Bertie at his side. The three of them pushed the heavy steps to the opposite wall and followed the captain up the slippery rungs.

  Six men in all emerged from the trench and looked up at the gun emplacement. It took the form of a wall of concrete that, as far as Hickman could see, had three sides, the front facing the British line immediately opposite and the other two, at angles of forty-five degrees, commanding the approaches obliquely. It was, in effect, a pillbox, for a concrete roof had been thrown across to give protection from artillery fire. Each wall contained a narrow slit through which projected the muzzle of a machine gun, spitting flame.

  It was true, however, that their fire could not be depressed sufficiently to be directed at attackers up the slight slope that led to the fortress, for, although the guns blazed away, they were hitting only the already inert bodies of four of the attackers, sprawled on the far side of the German wire, too late to crawl through the gap before the guns got them.

  ‘Where are the—’ Smith-Forbes’s question was stillborn as a bullet took him in the chest and he whirled round and fell onto his back, his arms spread wide.

  ‘Rifles,’ shouted Hickman. ‘Through the slits. Spread out.’

  He threw a grenade at the gun nearest him, as much to create a diversion as in hope of harming the gunners. It bounced off the concrete wall, fell to the earth and exploded with a satisfactory shower of mud and stones. Head down, Jim sprinted up the slope and slid to a halt at the base of the wall. As he fumbled for a grenade, he saw three of his party stagger and fall as the rifles picked them off. Bertie, however, arrived breathlessly at his side. He could hear the gun crews shouting inside the pill box.

  ‘You take the slit on your left,’ he said. ‘I’ll do this one. Move NOW!’

  He
plucked out the ring pin, waited three seconds then stood and deposited the grenade through the slit, as though he was posting a letter. He heard it explode inside the pillbox before crouching and running to the right, where he heard Bertie’s grenade explode. With only three Mills bombs left he decided that he must save them for the escape, for surely no one could be alive within the emplacement. Bertie scurried back to him and they sat for a moment, their backs to the wall and their breasts heaving, looking down at the trench.

  Rifle shots rang out from right and left within the trench but no further grenade explosions. ‘We didn’t bring rifles,’ gasped Jim. ‘Our lot must be wiped out. Where the hell, though, is the last man who came up with us?’

  Bertie pointed. The last man lay to their left, only six feet or so from the redoubt, his head shattered by a bullet. ‘It looks like we’re the only two left, Jim. How the hell are we going to get out of here?’

  ‘There’s only one way. The way we came in. Come on, before the whole bloody German army comes back into the trench.’

  They ran helter-skelter the short distance to the German trench, on the lip of which Hickman held up a hand and crouched. ‘A grenade to the left and one to the right, just in case,’ he gasped. ‘NOW!’

  They pulled out the pins and lobbed the bombs into the trench, lying flat, their hands over their ears, then, when the debris had fallen, they peered over the parapet. The trench was a scene of devastation. One wall had completely collapsed and bodies lay everywhere, British and German entwined in the final moments of death. It seemed that the remnants of the raiding party had been caught and mown down as they attempted to climb the trench wall on their return.

  Jim pushed Bertie down. ‘Get out of here,’ he ordered, indicating where the trench wall had collapsed, near where the wire had been cut. ‘Climb up there. Get as far out as you can and then dive into the nearest shell hole when all hell breaks loose. I’ll try and give you cover.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Get going. Out as far as you can before the lights go up. Go on!’ And he gave him a push.

  Bertie scrambled up the collapsed sandbags and rocks and squirmed under the wire. Slipping and sliding among the debris and bodies on the trench floor, Jim ran to the first buttress, where he lobbed a grenade over. Turning before it had exploded, he made his way to the other traverse, his revolver in hand. As the grenade exploded behind him, he was in time to see a bayonet-tipped rifle tentatively poked round the buttress. He dropped onto one knee and fired as the rifle’s owner came into sight. The man dropped immediately, his shoulder shattered. Hickman pulled out the pin on his last grenade and threw it over the top of the traverse. Only when it had exploded did he scramble back to the collapsed trench wall and haul himself up and under the wire. He had just plunged head first down into a shell crater, using his hands as a brake to prevent him sliding into the slime at the bottom, before a star shell broke above his head, a searchlight suddenly began probing no man’s land and a machine gun began stuttering and raking the top of the German trench.

  ‘Thank the blessed Mother that you made it,’ said Bertie, from the opposite lip of the crater.

  ‘Stupid bugger. You should have been halfway across no man’s land by now.’

  ‘I was just coming back to give you a hand up the wall when you started to blow everything up. In truth, Jimmy, all this killin’ is shakin’ me, so it is.’

  ‘Well let’s hope Fritz doesn’t send a party out to get us. But perhaps we haven’t been seen. There was so much going on that I think most of them would have had their heads down.’ He gave a sad grin. ‘That was the intention, anyway.’

  ‘Ah, Jim. You did well.’

  ‘Well let’s hope they believe they killed us all. They damned nearly did.’

  They fell silent for a moment. Then Bertie said quietly, ‘They was a fine lot of men, that came out with us. Particularly the officer. A good feller.’

  ‘That’s true.’ They crouched in silence for a little longer. Then, ‘Bertie.’

  ‘Yes, Corporal, sir.’

  ‘Do you remember the code word for getting through our wire?’

  ‘Yes, course I do. It’s Aintree.’

  ‘Ah, thanks very much. Now I remember it. It’s Newmarket. Fine lot of help you are.’

  ‘Ah well, I’m the only Irishman in the whole of Birmingham who never went racing. And anyway, I can’t do everything.’

  By dint of waiting until the firing had ceased and the searchlight had switched off its probing beam, they finally made their way back to the British lines. It took them some time, for dawn was beginning to send pink exploratory fingers out over the horizon to the east as they reached the wire. A sergeant major gave them both steaming cups of tea, which they held in trembling hands.

  ‘Did any of the others get back, sir?’ asked Jim.

  The warrant officer shook his head and gnawed at his moustache. ‘Not on this bit of the line, son. I’m surprised anyone made it. You put up quite a show over there and those machine guns certainly haven’t fired since you called on ’em. It looked as if the whole of their line was aflame. Well done, my lad. You’d better go and make your report to the colonel. But finish your tea first.’

  Minutes later they stood before the CO in his crowded dugout. He indicated a trestle bed and they both sat down as Hickman made his report.

  ‘You are the only survivors of the raiding party?’

  ‘Afraid so, sir. The captain and about half of our men got caught as we ran up to the guns. They couldn’t get the machine guns low enough to fire but they had rifles. Then the others caught it after they had bombed up the trench. They must have run out of grenades and the Jerries counter-attacked as they were trying to climb up the trench wall. They were all killed.’

  The colonel ran his fingers across his eyes. ‘Good men, all good,’ he muttered, his head down.

  The adjutant, his hair tousled by sleep, interjected, ‘Have you two had any tea or anything?’

  ‘Yes, thank you, sir. When we got back to the line.’

  The colonel lifted his head. ‘Do you think you put the guns out of action?’

  ‘Oh yes. We put two grenades through the slits and it was only a confined space. Everyone inside would have been killed and the guns would certainly have been destroyed. The sergeant major down the line confirmed that they hadn’t fired since and they won’t now. I can tell you that, sir.’

  The CO stood up and held out his hand. ‘Well done, the pair of you. Go and get some breakfast. You might have difficulty in getting sleep, I’m afraid, because there is bound to be a bit of retaliation from our neighbours, so it will be noisy. But congratulations. I’ll see you get sent down the line as soon as I can arrange it.’

  Bertie summoned up his brightest beam. ‘Ah, that would be nice, Colonel, so it would. Thank you very much.’

  The colonel was prophetic about the noise. A barrage was immediately summoned and it continued for most of the day. Shortly after dusk a night attack was tried by the Germans but the colonel had ensured that the battalion had stood to through the night and the attack was rebuffed with no casualties on the British line, although the shelling had killed six men during the daylight hours.

  Bertie and Jim were summoned to see the colonel the next morning.

  ‘Normally,’ he said, ‘I would have recommended both of you for a decoration. Unfortunately,’ and he gave a wry smile, ‘army regulations in their stupidity tell me that I can only do so on the recommendation of an officer who witnessed the act of bravery. As you know, Captain Smith-Forbes perished, so I am afraid I cannot make the recommendation. The least I can do, however, is to promote you. You, Corporal, will be made up to sergeant with immediate effect and, similarly, you, Murphy, will become a lance corporal. It’s not sufficient, I fear, but it’s the best I can do. Congratulations again.’

  They shook his hand again and wearily – for they had had no sleep for the second night in succession – they made their way back to
their section in the line and sat exhausted on the firing step.

  Bertie took off his steel helmet and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘To tell you the truth, Jim lad,’ he said, ‘Stripe or no stripe, I am not sure that I can take much more of this.’

  Jim looked at him sharply. ‘Now, come on, Bertie. It’s the same for all of us. We didn’t start this bloody war but we’ve got to see it through. Jerry must be suffering just as much as we are.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t see how the blessed Lord can allow all this misery to go on.’ The blue eyes were now beginning to fill with tears. ‘All this killin’ and stuff, yer know. I was always taught “thou shalt not kill”, and here I am killin’ all the bloody time. Now I’ve been made a lance corporal because I am getting good at it. It’s not as though it’s doing any good. We kill them but they still keep coming at us. It’s all so pathetic and so—’

  He was interrupted by a mighty roar from a familiar voice. ‘And what do you two think you’re doing, lounging about as though you’re sittin’ out at the bloody ’unt ball, eh?’

  ‘Oh bloody hell,’ said Bertie. ‘Sergeant Flanagan!’

  ‘Oh no.’ He strode towards Bertie and held up his sleeve so that the badge on it brushed his nostrils. ‘Address me properly, you papist arsehole. “Sergeant Major” to you, sonny. Company sergeant major. I’ve been sent back to look after you – and by God I’m going to see to it, I can tell you. Get up on the fire step. You’re on lookout duty.’

  Hickman took a step forward. ‘We’ve been out on patrol the night before last, Sergeant Major,’ he said, ‘and up standing to last night. We’re due some shut-eye. We’re dead beat.’

  A look of exaggerated sympathy crossed the leathery features. ‘Ah, diddums. Did the nasty Germans keep you awake, then? Oh dear. Oh dear.’ Then the bellow: ‘Get up on that fire step and keep him company, Hickman.’ He put his moustache close to Jim’s ear and breathed into it. ‘I haven’t forgotten you, sunshine. I’m going to make your life hell. See if I don’t.’