Last Train to Waverley

by Malcolm Archibald

  Flockhart was waiting for an answer.

  “We hold fast as long as we can and then break out and head for our new front line.” Ramsay tried not to think of the three men who suffered on the bottom of the trench. “I am not surrendering to the Huns. Nor are you.”

  “And these lads?” Flockhart lowered his voice “What about them?”

  They are better dead.

  “Fritz will look after them. The Germans always care for the wounded as best they can.”

  “The Huns used the wounded for target practise at Second Ypres,” Flockhart reminded quietly. “I don’t want my men murdered as they lie helpless in the bottom of a trench.”

  “We shot their wounded too,” Ramsay reminded. “There is no bitterness on this front. Fritz will look after them.” He looked at the small body of men that was gathered around him. They looked back through eyes that showed various stages of exhaustion, pain, anger and fear. “We will defend this trench as long as we can.” Nobody protested. These were Royal Scots, they were not given to extravagant displays.

  “Right lads, you heard the officer.” Flockhart’s discipline took over. “Let’s make this place defensible. Niven, Aitken, make a wall across the traverse so Fritz can’t take us in flank. Blackley, Edwards, see if you can find some ammunition. Anderson and Mackay, look for German weapons. McKim, you make sure the parapet is more secure. Donald, see if you can check on the Lewis.”

  “And you men,” Ramsay pointed to a group of men. He did not yet know their names. “Check behind our lines and see what the situation is.”

  The chatter of a machine gun made them duck and bullets sprayed the parapet, some thumping into the sandbags at the rear wall of the trench.

  “Come on, lads! Get moving!” Flockhart lifted a sandbag and threw it on top of the parapet. For a second Ramsay contemplated acting the officer and merely watching, but instead he lifted a sandbag and manoeuvred it to the wall.

  “Sir!” Aitken almost had to duck to stand in the trench; he favoured the wound in his neck and the recent thump in his stomach. He had a deep voice and there was a recent scar still healing on his jaw. “What shall we use for the barrier? There are not enough sandbags that haven’t been ripped by the artillery.”

  Ramsay glanced around. Most trenches had a barbed wire barrier ready to thrust into place but the German guns had shattered that to pieces.

  “Use the corpses,” Flockhart said at once. “They don’t mind, they’re dead. We did that at second Ypres.” He gave Ramsay a meaningful glance. “When the Germans murdered the wounded.”

  “Jesus.” Aitken’s mouth dropped and he stared at Ramsay. “We can’t do that, sir.” Flockhart ignored him, grabbed the nearest body and dragged it to where the trench turned. A khaki-clad arm flopped to the side, a ring scraping on the duck boards.

  “That’s Jackie, sir. Davie Jackson.” Aitken stared at the hand. The ring slipped off the end of Jackson’s finger and lay, glinting silver, on the ground. “We trained together.”

  “Jackson’s dead, Aitken, but his body may save your life,” Flockhart shouted. “Keep working, lads!”

  Obviously reluctant, the men lifted the crumpled bodies from inside the trench, and those closest to the parapet on the outside, and built a barricade across the corner of the trench. Corpse on corpse, the wall grew, a macabre structure of broken bodies that had once been alive, with a bootless leg protruding at right angles and an array of hands and arms and gape-jawed faces.

  One red-haired private puffed smoke from the Woodbine that protruded from the corner of his mouth and shook hands with one of the dead. “Good luck to you, Willie, I never liked you alive, but you are a useful man dead.”

  One or two of the privates gave a small laugh. Nobody objected. The wall grew taller, with field-grey bodies among the khaki and blood seeping and dripping to form a mutual pool that greased the duckboards and seeped into the mud on either side.

  “Poor buggers,” Aitken said as he looked at the wall. There was a tremor in his voice and for a second Ramsay thought he would break into tears.

  “Lucky buggers,” Niven corrected and spat on the ground. “At least their troubles are over.” He flinched as an aircraft roared overhead, the great black crosses ugly on the underside of the wings, but it continued on its way without paying any attention to the battered survivors of the Royal Scots. “They’re well out of all this now.”

  “None of that talk!” Flockhart snapped. “Attend to your duty, Niven!”

  Ramsay left Flockhart to it. He lifted a makeshift trench periscope and eased it over the parapet. “Fritz has been quiet for too long. It won’t be long before he’s back, and he knows all about us now.”

  “They should have been hammering us with artillery between the attacks,” Flockhart said, “and leaving much shorter times between the rushes as well. This is not at all like Fritz.”

  He sounds as if he disapproves that the Germans are not more efficient.

  Ramsay nodded. “I think we don’t matter much, Sergeant. If he is already behind us, then we are just a nuisance. We are not holding up his advance.”

  “So what purpose do we serve here, sir?” Flockhart asked.

  None. We are just waiting for the Germans to notice us and wipe us out. If you are dead, Flockhart, then I am

  free… “Not much, Sergeant. We may delay their advance by a few hours.”

  “Not if they are already behind us, sir. Listen to the guns.”

  Ramsay listened. The rumble of artillery was constant, but to the rear. “It sounds as if we are stuck well in front of our own lines.”

  “I’d agree with that, sir.”

  Ramsay considered for a moment. “We are serving no useful purpose here. We would be better back in our own lines.” He could see movement in No Man’s Land. “The Germans are strolling around as if they own the place, Sergeant.”

  “I think they do,” Flockhart said. “All the patrols we sent out give the same picture, sir. Fritz is everywhere, back, front and on both sides.”

  Ramsay nodded and swivelled the periscope in a 360 degree arc. The mist was nearly clear now, with only thin tendrils swirling around ruined dugouts and clinging to the shattered remnants of gun emplacements and corpse-strewn trenches. There were men moving, striding openly in their field-grey uniforms. Somebody shouted in guttural German and there was an outbreak of loud laughter.

  Ramsay looked toward No Man’s Land again. “There’s a whole column marching across towards us, Sergeant. Hundreds of the bastards.” He passed over the periscope.

  “There’s thousands, sir,” Flockhart said. “And with our lack of ammunition we would hardly dent them.”

  Ramsay took back the periscope.

  We could take them in flank and kill a score or more before they knew we are here. We can do something to dent the advance. But afterward they will wipe us out.

  He looked up the length of his trench where his men were. Some were trying to sleep, Blackley and Edwards were playing crown and anchor; Niven was cleaning his rifle; McKim was whetting his bayonet and muttering dark threats to himself; the stretcher bearers were kneeling beside the badly wounded.

  I can’t condemn these men to death merely in a show of bravado. Anything we do here will not influence the result of their push in the slightest.

  He checked the advancing Germans again. The column was four abreast and coiled across No Man’s Land like a never-ending field-grey snake that broke for craters and reformed on the far side, halted at the artillery-torn gaps in the barbed wire and then marched on. They were singing, the words bold and confident: a German military marching song that roared ominously at what had once been the British front line.

  McKim lifted his rifle and eased back the bolt. “I could get that big bastard of a Sergeant.” He aimed at a burly NCO who marched just to the side of his men.

  “No,” Ramsay pushed down the barrel of the rifle. “We can’t stop them. Get down on the bottom of the trench. Play dead, pass the word a
long. Everybody play dead. Quick!”

  McKim’s glower echoed the sentiments of the men.

  “Don’t argue. We can’t stop them and if they see us they will wipe us off the map. If we survive this we can kill more of them later.” Ramsay glanced up. The Germans were only a hundred yards away now and marching strongly, still singing, with the sergeant striding alongside his men. There were officers in front: tall, young, and as erect as guardsmen as they led their men toward victory.

  “Down, and look dead,” Ramsay ordered.

  One by one, reluctantly, cursing softly, the men lay on the duckboards or adopted artistic positions across the sandbags. Flockhart was the last of the ranks. He lay on his side with his rifle cradled in his arms and the muzzle pointed toward the German lines. Only when he was sure that all the men were down did Ramsay slide onto the duckboards. He lay on his side with his head resting on his right arm, facing the wall of bodies.

  The sound of singing increased; the German voices raucous, arrogant in victory, confident that they finally had the British on the run. Ramsay felt his anger rise as he heard the tramp of boots and then there was a single unmistakable command to halt and the singing and marching ended. The abrupt silence was as unnerving as the previous drumbeat of marching feet.

  Ramsay heard a soft thud and guessed that a German had jumped into the trench. He opened one eye. A German officer stood between him and the wall. His boots shone as he turned around, obviously inspecting the corpse wall and the Royal Scots dead.

  He barked an order and another man jumped down. His boots clicked on the duckboards. The two men spoke loudly, one laughed. Ramsay froze as one stepped right over him and walked on, deeper into the length of the trench. He heard more boots thump on the damp duckboards; heard a staccato order from the other side of the wall of corpses and forced himself to remain still, with his eyes open. The urge to blink was overpowering.

  The German officers spoke together, their voices casual, and then there was a low moan from one of the badly wounded men. One of the officers raised his voice to bark an order and even from his restricted viewpoint, Ramsay saw a number of German infantrymen clambering into the trenches. The moan sounded again, louder, and there was the sound of a single shot.

  “You dirty Hun bastard!” That was Cruickshank’s voice.

  Oh God; now we’re all dead. I have to lead these men now; take the Germans by surprise and kill as many as we can before we are killed.

  There was a short, startled silence as Ramsay rose up from the ground. “Royal Scots!”

  He had no need to say any more. That single shot had roused the anger of the British infantrymen and they rose from their positions as one man. Cruickshank had been the first to react, thrusting his bayonet into the belly of the German private who had shot the wounded Royal. Ramsay grabbed the nearest German officer by the throat and wrestled him to the ground, gasping with the effort as he tried to strangle the man. The German was tall and strong, but Ramsay had the advantage of surprise and desperation. As the German put his hands up to break Ramsay’s grip, Ramsay let go and thrust his thumbs into the man’s eyes, bursting the eyeballs. The man screamed in his agony, writhing helplessly until Ramsay hauled the German’s pistol from its holster, pressed the muzzle against his chest and squeezed the trigger.

  The German officer fell. Ramsay looked around. His Royals had disposed of the Germans within their section of trench, but there were many hundreds more just beyond the corpse wall. He thought quickly. If they remained where they were, the Germans would be on them in seconds, and with their lack of numbers the outcome would not be in doubt for long. They only had one chance for survival.

  “Come on, lads!” Ramsay yelled as the madness of battle came upon him, “Charge the bastards. Roar your loudest, throw bombs and blast the Huns back to Berlin! Up the Royals!”

  “Royal Sco-o-o-o-ts!” McKim scooped up a stick grenade from a dead German and ran to the wall, priming the grenade as he moved.

  Flockhart stepped back. “Follow the officer, boys. Up the Royals!”

  Ramsay saw no more, for he was already climbing over the wall of bodies. The Germans on the other side were already advancing, some with their rifles slung over their shoulders, others carrying them at the high port, bayonets pointing wickedly upward. Ramsay aimed his captured pistol and opened fire, aiming at the nearest man as he slid over the unsteady wall of the dead. The Germans hesitated as he jumped into them, firing and shouting.

  “Up the Royals!” He heard McKim’s raucous roar at his back, but did not flinch as the grenade exploded a few yards away, the vicious splinters scything into the Germans packed into the narrow trench. He ignored the high screams and stepped forward, squeezing the trigger and watching his targets fall down. Their faces were anonymous, their suffering irrelevant in his new found battle madness. “Royals! Up the Royals. Push the Huns back to Germany!”

  Ramsay saw the levelled rifles, he saw the muzzle flash and the jerk of the recoil against the field-grey shoulders, but he neither knew nor cared where the bullets went. He fired until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber and then he threw the pistol in the face of a square-jawed NCO. “Come on the Royals! Charge!”

  Hoping his men were behind him, but not daring to even glance over his shoulder in case he was alone, Ramsay lifted a bayoneted rifle that lay beside a dead German soldier and walked on into the reeling mass of soldiers. He fired without compassion, uncaring of the danger, knowing only that he had to kill Germans until he was killed in his turn. He heard voices behind him, he knew the roaring was in Scottish accents as well as German, but he walked on, firing, working the bolt of the Mauser and firing again. German bodies piled up, grey and red, still or writhing, dead or wounded; they were human beings, but Ramsay thought no more of them than of the duckboards on which he trod.

  “They’re running!” Flockhart stood at Ramsay’s side, panting; the bayonet on his rifle dripped with blood. “You’ve done it, sir. Dear God but you’ve done it.”

  Ramsay glanced at him. Why are you not dead? Why have you survived, you stubborn bastard?

  “We’ve done it, Sergeant, but not for long. Look.” He pointed to the lip of the battered trench over which the Germans were scrambling to melt into No Man’s Land.

  The Germans were running, some even dropping their rifles in their haste to escape from what they may have believed to be a major British counter attack. There were scores of them; an irregular mass of men in field-grey vanishing toward the shambles that had been No Man’s Land. But it was not that to which Flockhart was pointing. The retreating men were splintering around another formation entirely, a body of marching soldiers who were advancing steadily toward the line of trenches. Even as Ramsay watched, the officer who led the Germans looked up and for a second their eyes met across the shambles and horror of the front. The manacled face of the German officer he had encountered earlier that day stared back at him. The officer lifted a hand in cold salute as if he also recognised an earlier protagonist, and Ramsay looked at the ranked men who marched at his back.

  Each soldier was well over six foot tall, erect as if they were on parade and moving in perfect unison despite the littered mess of the battlefield. Their long grey coats hung precisely from squared shoulders on which their rifles slanted at precisely the same angle and the dying sun glinted from buttons that were burnished until they glittered. On a single bark from the officer, they halted as if they were a multi-legged machine rather than hundreds of men with their own individuality, thoughts and aspirations. They stood at attention, facing the battered British trenches, as immobile and unwavering as statues even as a shell burst overhead and rained shrapnel on their ranks. Three of their number fell. None of the others flinched.

  “Jesus save us. Prussian Guards.” Ramsay stared at the magnificent formation that now opposed them. “Prussian bloody Guards.”

  “Prussian Guards,” Flockhart confirmed. “The Kaiser has sent his finest to finish us off.”

  “He
has.” Ramsay looked behind him to what had so recently been the British front line. He saw only devastation and ruin, smoking craters marking the site of gun emplacements and dead bodies in khaki and field-grey strewn as far as the gathering dark. “They are not for us, Sergeant. I think he has sent his best to finish this war.”

  As Ramsay looked the sun slipped behind the western horizon and darkness crept over the world.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FRANCE

  21-22 March 1918

  “If the Prussian Guards are coming, then we had better get out of here,” Flockhart said. “There are hardly enough of us to stand against a group of school pupils let alone the Prussians.”

  “Let the bastards come,” McKim muttered darkly. “They’re only bloody Huns. We’re the Royals. Let the bloody bastards come.” He banged the butt of his rifle against the duckboards on the bottom of the trench, stamped his feet and spat on the ground.

  Ramsay grinned briefly. “Good man, McKim, but there are about twelve of us left, with enough ammunition to shoot a one-legged crow, and there must be a battalion of Prussians there, plus what remains of the unit we just chased halfway to Berlin. I think the odds are stacked against us, somewhat.”

  “They ran very easily,” McKim said. “They knew they were facing the Royals.”

  “Look,” Flockhart pointed to the nearest of the dead Germans. The man lay on his back with his face up. “How old would you say he was?”

  Ramsay glanced down. The man’s face was too smooth to have ever experienced the bite of a razor; his eyes were wide, his dying terror evident. “He must be all of seventeen,” he said.

  “So were his chums.” Flockhart indicated the heaped German dead. Young faces and immature bodies were slumped in the obscenity of death. “I doubt that any of them are twenty years old yet.” He nudged the nearest man with the toe of his boot. “It looks as if the Kaiser is throwing everything he has at us this time, from the best he has to the scrapings of the schools.”