Last Train to Waverley

by Malcolm Archibald

  I sent a man to the most dangerous post possible today, and I am safe and well.

  Lying fully clothed on the damp mattress, Ramsay tried to close his eyes. The images returned to haunt him, reactivated by the sights and smells of the trenches. Images of men drowning in mud; images of fragments of men pleading for death; images of men mown down by the dozen, the score, the hundred; images of that deep shell hole filled with poisonous green water in which he had survived until the stretcher bearers came for him. He shook his head, feeling the sweat start from his pores and the familiar maddening itch that the memories always brought. He was back in the environment he loathed yet could never escape from, among men who were as doomed as he was. This was his reality and anything that had occurred before did not matter. Even that day did not matter, although it had nagged at his conscience with tearing claws and those accusing eyes were in his mind every morning he awoke.

  All the horrors of the war formed a veil, behind which that reality cowered, but night always eased back a corner of the curtain and the guilt peered through. He screwed his fists into tight balls and writhed on the rustling straw.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FRANCE

  21 March 1918

  The roar of the guns woke him. He rolled from the mattress onto the muddy duckboards as the enamel mug on the plank table jumped and rolled beside him. He looked up as McKim poked his head through the gas screen of the doorway.

  “Two hours, sir,” McKim said cheerfully. “That’s our counter preparation wishing Jerry a good morning.”

  Ramsay picked himself up from the floor. “Sorry, I fell off the bed.”

  “So I see, sir.” McKim grabbed his helmet as a shell burst short and red hot shrapnel clattered down the steps. One piece ripped through the gas curtain and fell onto the ground. It glowed a dull red for a few moments then gradually faded to black. McKim scuffed it aside. “I think the brass hats want to break up any possible German attack before it starts.”

  Ramsay nodded. “Thank you, McKim.”

  “We’ll sort out a servant for you today, sir.” McKim glanced around the dugout. “We’ll soon have this place looking like home. In the meantime, here’s a mug of char and a chunk of bungy.”

  “Thank you, McKim.” He stuffed the cheese in his mouth and sipped the tea. “Blighty tea,” he said, and glanced up. “Let’s get topsides.”

  Ramsay ducked through the gas curtain and up into the firing line. A quick glance behind him revealed flashes in the misty darkness; the muzzle flares of the British guns that were firing at the German positions. The shells arced overhead, ripping through the air with a relentless noise that made it hard to hear and harder to speak. Ramsay looked north and east and saw the results, the orange bursts over and on the German positions, only a few hundred yards away across No Man’s Land.

  “Poor buggers,” McKim mouthed the words and shrugged. “Better them than us.”

  Ramsay nodded but said nothing. He remembered all too well what it was like to be on the wrong side of such a bombardment. He also knew that however impressive the fire and fury looked, the Germans had taken far worse at the Somme and had emerged unshaken to wreak havoc with the British attack. He leaned closer to McKim and spoke in his ear. “Fritz is a tough bugger, he will be dug deep underground, laughing at us.”

  McKim screwed up his face. “That’s not bloody bon, sir.”

  “No,” Ramsay said. He tightened the chinstrap of his helmet. “That’s not bloody bon at all, McKim.”

  “The fog’s increasing, sir,” McKim said. “I would not like to be out there in that.” He nodded toward No Man’s Land where the mist clung to the closest coils of barbed wire. A patter of soil landed around them; debris from an under-shot British shell.

  “No,” Ramsay agreed. For a moment he thought of Kerr and Flockhart and then dismissed the thought. They would have to take their chances, just like everybody else. This was war. He commandeered a trench periscope and surveyed the lines before him. The fog made visibility nearly impossible and if it had not been for the orange flash of explosions he would not have been able to make out where the German front lines were. He moved the instrument from side to side, noting the shell bursts through the fog.

  “Once the barrage lifts, McKim, I want you to take out a patrol. Liaise with Sergeant Flockhart in the listening post, see if he has heard anything significant and then probe toward the German lines. Don’t get into a fight, just see if there is anything happening out there.”

  McKim grunted. “Kitchener wants me, does he?” He nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Despite the shelling the fog intensified and by three in the morning Ramsay could hardly see as far as the nearest edge of the barbed wire. At four o’clock the barrage lifted. One second there was the hellish drumbeat of shells and next there was a mind-numbing silence that pressed down upon him, punctuated only by the sound of a lark hidden somewhere in the fog.

  “McKim?’

  The corporal had already detailed two men to accompany him into No Man’s Land. “Ready, sir.”

  They stood with blackened faces, carrying rifles, bayonets and short, vicious knobkerries for close combat, but bereft of packs or belts. McKim wore an empty sandbag over his helmet so the steel would not reflect the light of flare or shell flash. Ramsay watched as McKim led the two privates over the top and crawled forward. Within seconds they vanished into the mist and perils of No Man’s Land.

  It was nearly dawn, the dangerous time. If the Germans were coming, this was the best time for them, when the men who had been on guard all night were tired and the others not properly awake yet.

  “Stand to,” Ramsay ordered, quietly. “Come on, lads.” The men stumbled wearily from their dugouts and shallow shelters. They took their positions in the firing bays and removed the Lee-Enfields from their covered positions set into the side walls of sandbags. A few of the men handled the rifles with the expertise of veterans, but most had the clumsy movements of the half-trained recruits they still were. “Fix bayonets, lads.”

  There was a sinister click as the Royal Scots prepared themselves for any possible German attack. The veterans probed makeshift periscopes of penny mirrors tied onto lengths of wood above the sandbagged parapet and a few bold men inched cautious heads into the castellated gaps above the fire steps. The steel shield of a loophole reflected the light of a weary flare for a second. There was the single sharp crack of a sniper’s rifle to the south, followed by the chattering reply of a machine gun. Then silence.

  “I hate this waiting,” one man complained.

  “Keep your mouth shut, Cruickshank!” an NCO snapped.

  The Royal Scots waited for whatever No Man’s Land would bring. Some looked eager, others resigned, a few hid their fear behind nervous grins, but all held their rifles. Ramsay glanced along the line. One recruit was trembling while his neighbour, a man of nearly nineteen, touched his arm.

  “Steady, Tam. If they come, then they come and we can kill them. If not, then we just wait.”

  It was just half light; obscured by the swirling mist, Ramsay patrolled his section of the trench. There was a strange beauty here, a Hieronymus Bosch surrealism of dim figures partly seen; magnified or decreased by shadow and form, with the twinkling of matches and the soft glow of cigarettes or pipes hazy through the mist and the slow awakening of another dangerous day. The dark eased westward, chased by relentless dawn.

  “Cannae see a bloody thing in this mist,” a tall private broke the spell in the uncompromising accent of Leith.

  “Something’s moving,” his neighbour said. He pushed his rifle forward on the sandbag, the barrel made a small hissing sound, the bayonet snaking forward, pointing towards the enemy lines.

  “Who’s that on the Lewis gun?” Ramsay whispered.

  “Black, sir.” The voice was tense.

  “Keep a good watch, Black,” Ramsay ordered. “As best you can in this muck.”

  “Aye, sir,” the voice was patient and the simple phrase revealed
that Black was fully aware of the necessity of keeping a good watch. The Lewis gun team clustered around him. They said nothing but Ramsay could hear their tense breathing. A breath of wind shifted the mist, obscuring the Lewis gun team.

  On either side of him the Royal Scots levelled their rifles. A man began to pray. Another sang softly between his teeth,

  “Après la guerre finie

  Soldat Ecosse parti

  Mademoiselle in the family way

  Après la guerre finie”

  “God save us, God save us,” another man mumbled.

  “Come on, you bastards,” a dark-haired corporal grunted. “Come on so I can kill you.”

  There was the subdued rattle of bolts being pulled back. Somebody swore, somebody muttered an obscene joke, there was a short burst of laughter. The breeze dropped, the mist thickened.

  “Ready, boys.” Ramsay unfastened his holster and pulled out his revolver. It shook in his hand. He remembered buying it in John Dickson’s gun shop in Edinburgh.

  “Do you have a Webley Fosberry?”

  Gillian had widened her eyes in surprise. “I did not know you knew anything about guns.”

  “The Fosberry is renowned for its reliability,” Ramsay said. He did not tell Gillian that his knowledge came from the catalogues he had read the previous evening.

  The gunsmith nodded. “Off to France, sir?”

  “Yes, eventually.”

  The revolver was heavy and clumsy in his hand.

  “Would you care to try it out?” The salesman showed him how to load the revolving chamber.

  “No, I’ll just take it.” Ramsay tried to appear nonchalant, as if he bought a gun every day of his life. He hoped that Gillian was impressed.

  That seemed a very long time ago. Now he was in France once more, over three years later, and he held the revolver in a shaking hand. He took a deep breath and tried to control his nerves, or was it fear?

  I am not scared; I am an officer of the Royal Scots. I am not scared; I am an officer of the Royal Scots. I must show no fear in front of the men.

  A figure loomed up, giant in the mist; the legs elongated, the helmeted head shaded by heavy moisture. It stood for a second at the lip of the trench, the tails of its greatcoat sliced off and it appeared like some form of fancy dress. Shreds of mist wisped from the broad shoulders and the blade of the bayonet was darkened by smoke and caught no light.

  “Jesus, it’s Fritz!” Private Aitken, tall and lanky and with the hint of a moustache, levelled his rifle.

  “Wait!” Ramsay knocked up the barrel as he recognised McKim.

  “Stand easy, boys.” McKim almost dislodged the top sandbag as he slithered into the trench. The two privates followed him, landing with audible relief on the muddy duckboards. “Nothing happening out there, sir,” he reported. “Fritz is behaving himself.”

  Ramsay nodded. “Thank you, McKim. How was Sergeant Flockhart?” Is he dead or alive? Have I killed my own sergeant? Am I free of that day? Am I a murderer in all but name?

  McKim looked sideways at him. “All bon, sir. He’s still there. Lieutenant Kerr and he have had a quiet night, despite the bumps.”

  Ramsay nodded. “Good for them.” Why am I relieved at that? I tried to kill him; I failed. I should be disappointed.

  McKim hustled his privates past Ramsay. “Come on lads, time to get some scoff.”

  Ramsay looked to his right. Second Lieutenant Mercer was heading toward the furthest traverse. A tall, thin youth with pimples on his chin, he gave Ramsay a quick smile. “My post is round there, sir.”

  “Off you go then, Mercer. Good luck.”

  Mercer hesitated at the corner of the traverse. He looked over his shoulder, adjusted the chin strap of his helmet and stepped into the mist. He looked like a school prefect inspecting a dormitory, perhaps a bit younger.

  The first shell was a whizz-bang. It exploded without warning, a hundred yards to the left, scattering splinters over the neighbouring trench. The next landed in the midst of the barbed wire entanglement, thirty yards in front of them. It lifted the supporting stakes and dropped the whole lot in a tangled mess. Ramsay swore. “Here we go!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  FRANCE

  21 March 1918

  After the first few sighting shots, the shells came in force. A score, a hundred, a thousand shells screaming over from the German positions to smother the British positions. At first they landed in groups of six, and then in scores and the volume increased until the air was full of flying shells and the ground was a confusion of orange flames and flying pieces of shrapnel.

  “Dear God!” A private stared at his arm, which lay on the ground at his side, neatly severed. There was no blood, a sliver of white hot metal had cauterised the wound. He was still staring as a second shell fragment cut his head in half. Pink and grey matter oozed onto his shoulder as he slowly toppled onto the duck boards at the bottom of the trench.

  Another private tried to hold in intestines cascading in an obscene pink stream from his belly. He made small mewing noises as he watched his life slip away. When he looked up, Ramsay saw the hopeless fear in his childlike eyes.

  “Stretcher bearer!” Ramsay’s roar was lost in the maelstrom of noise and the confusion of ten thousand shell bursts.

  The boy began to scream, endlessly, in a high-pitched falsetto that reached above the roar of the bombardment. “Help me, sir,” he mouthed, as he pushed his intestines back inside his body. “Please, help me.” The words were unheard amidst the hellish din of the bombardment, but the message was clear.

  Ramsay knelt beside him and stuffed handfuls of slimy guts back in the ragged hole in the boy’s stomach. “You’ll be all right, you’ll be all right,” he muttered, again and again. Oh God, you poor wee boy. Die quickly, please die quickly.

  The boy stiffened, gave a convulsive shudder, vomited blood and died. Ramsay cowered as a shell exploded just on the far side of the sandbag wall and showered him with dirt. A pebble clattered from the crown of his helmet, making him wince and his head ring. He remained crouched in the bottom of the trench beside the dead boy until his head cleared, and then looked around his command.

  There was no need to order anybody to take cover. Ramsay saw that his men were hunched into the deepest corners of the trench or had dived into the dugouts. A shell exploded directly behind the firestep, throwing a score of sandbags in the air as though they were packed with feathers. The dead boy vanished completely, a crater occupying the space where he had died. Other shells exploded overhead, scattering shrapnel down upon the men sheltering below.

  “Gas! Gas! Gas!” There was panic in Aitken’s voice and Ramsay scrambled for the gas mask that hung around his neck. He fumbled with the fastenings, slid the apparatus around his face with shaking hands and stared out through an eyepiece that was already beginning to mist over. All around him, men were doing the same. They hated the masks only a little less than they feared the invisible killer, the German gas.

  “Bastards,” Ramsay mumbled, “bloody Hun bastards.” He looked at the thick white mist, wondering how much was natural fog and how much gas. The scientist that invented gas as a weapon of war should be choked to death by mustard gas and condemned to the deepest pit of hell.

  The bombardment increased. Ramsay could no longer distinguish the individual shell bursts. He existed within a constant roar of noise punctured by shrill screams and the whistle and clang of ricochets and whirling shrapnel. He slithered through the gas screen and fell head first into his dugout, lying on his face, his hands holding the steel helmet tight on his head, trying not to scream. There was a man beside him, but he did not look to see who it was. It did not matter. In this situation there was no rank, all were merely men in terrible danger of maiming or death.

  “Bastards, bastards, bastards,” his fellow sufferer repeated the single word in a continuous monotone. “Bastards, bastards, bastards.”

  The noise continued as Ramsay lay there with the ground shaking benea
th him and sand sliding through the corrugated iron roof from the piled sandbags above. He lost all track of time. Seconds merged into minutes and minutes into hours but none of that mattered. There was only the noise and the slow seeping gas that lay around him. That and the fear. Ramsay felt the shakes return like an old friend, or a newer enemy. Fear was worse than the Germans. He could see the Germans, he could understand them. They were men like him; solid tangible, creatures of flesh and bone and blood, animals that breathed and spoke and ate and slept and bled; they were him but in a different uniform. Fear was different; insidious, intangible, unseen. He could feel it creeping up on him, slow and soft at first but gradually building up with every bursting shell and every tremble of the ground. There were screams somewhere, but Ramsay did not move. To leave the dugout was to ask for death.

  The private removed his gas mask. “They’re throwing everything at us, sir!” He was an anonymous man, with mingled excitement and panic in his wide blue eyes. Ramsay could only nod. He did not trust himself to speak. A near miss shook the dugout and dirt cascaded from a ruptured sandbag above.

  “This isn’t just morning hate, sir. This is to destroy us!”

  Ramsay grabbed the private’s mask and rammed it back on his face.