by Ken Follett
He was looking at thousands of men.
He stopped. The broad trench, whose purpose had not been clear, was now revealed to be an assembly trench. The British were massing their troops for the big push. They stood waiting, fidgeting, the light from the officers' torches glinting off bayonets and steel helmets, line after line of them. Walter tried to count: ten lines of ten men was a hundred, the same again made two hundred, four hundred, eight . . . there were sixteen hundred men within his field of vision, then the darkness closed in over the others.
The assault was about to begin.
He had to get back as fast as possible with this information. If the German artillery opened up now, they could kill thousands of the enemy right here, behind British lines, before the attack got started. It was an opportunity sent by heaven, or perhaps by the devils who threw the cruel dice of war. As soon as he reached his own lines he would telephone headquarters.
A flare went up. In its light he saw a British sentry looking over the parapet, rifle at the ready, staring at him.
Walter dropped to the ground and buried his face in the mud.
A shot rang out. Then one of the barbed-wire detail shouted: "Don't shoot, you mad bastard, it's us!" The accent put Walter in mind of the staff at Fitz's house in Wales, and he guessed this was a Welsh regiment.
The flare died. Walter leaped to his feet and ran, heading for the German side. The sentry would be unable to see for a few seconds, his vision spoiled by the flare. Walter ran faster than he ever had, expecting the rifle to fire again at any moment. In half a minute he came to the British wire and dropped gratefully to his knees. He crawled rapidly forward through a gap. Another flare went up. He was still within rifle range, but no longer easily visible. He dropped to the ground. The flare was directly above him, and a dangerous lump of burning magnesium dropped a yard from his hand, but there were no more gunshots.
When the flare had burned out he got to his feet and ran all the way to the German line.
{ II }
Two miles behind the British front line, Fitz watched anxiously as the Eighth Battalion formed up shortly after two A.M. He was afraid these freshly trained men would disgrace him, but they did not. They were in a subdued mood and obeyed orders with alacrity.
The brigadier, sitting on his horse, addressed the men briefly. He was lit up from below by a sergeant's flashlight, and looked like the villain in an American moving picture. "Our artillery has wiped out the German defenses," he said. "When you reach the other side, you will find nothing but dead Germans."
A Welsh voice from somewhere nearby murmured: "Marvelous, isn't it, how these Germans can shoot back at us even when they're fucking dead."
Fitz raked the lines to identify the speaker but he could not in the dark.
The brigadier went on: "Take and secure their trenches, and the field kitchens will follow and give you a hot dinner."
B Company marched off toward the battlefield, led by the platoon sergeants. They went across the fields, leaving the roads clear for wheeled transport. As they left they started to sing "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah." Their voices lingered in the night air for some minutes after they disappeared into the darkness.
Fitz returned to battalion headquarters. An open truck was waiting to take the officers to the front line. Fitz sat next to Lieutenant Roland Morgan, son of the Aberowen colliery manager.
Fitz did all he could to discourage defeatist talk, but he could not help wondering if the brigadier had gone too far the other way. No army had ever mounted an offensive like this one, and nobody could be sure how it would turn out. Seven days of artillery bombardment had not obliterated the enemy's defenses: the Germans were still shooting back, as that anonymous soldier had sarcastically pointed out. Fitz had actually said the same thing in a report, whereupon Colonel Hervey had asked him if he was scared.
Fitz was worried. When the general staff closed their eyes to bad news, men died.
As if to prove his point, a shell exploded in the road behind. Fitz looked back and saw parts of a lorry just like this one flying through the air. A car following it swerved into a ditch, and in its turn was hit by another truck. It was a scene of carnage, but the driver of Fitz's truck quite correctly did not stop to help. The wounded had to be left to the medics.
More shells fell in the fields to the left and right. The Germans were targeting approaches to the front line, rather than the line itself. They must have worked out that the big assault was about to begin--such a huge movement of men could hardly be hidden from their intelligence branch--and with deadly efficiency they were killing men who had not yet even reached the trenches. Fitz fought down a feeling of panic, but his fear remained. B Company might not even make it to the battlefield.
He reached the marshaling area without further incident. Several thousand men were there already, leaning on their rifles and talking in low voices. Fitz heard that some groups had already been decimated by shelling. He waited, wondering grimly whether his company still existed. But eventually the Aberowen Pals arrived intact, to his relief, and formed up. Fitz led them the last few hundred yards to the frontline assembly trench.
Then they had nothing to do but wait for zero hour. There was water in the trench, and Fitz's puttees were soon soaked. No singing was permitted now: it might be heard from the enemy lines. Smoking was forbidden, too. Some of the men were praying. A tall soldier took out his pay book and began to fill out the "Last Will and Testament" page in the narrow beam of Sergeant Elijah Jones's flashlight. He wrote with his left hand, and Fitz recognized him as Morrison, a former footman at Ty Gwyn and left-handed bowler in the cricket team.
Dawn came early--midsummer was only a few days past. With the light, some men took out photographs and stared at them or kissed them. It seemed sentimental, and Fitz hesitated to copy the men, but after a while he did. His picture showed his son, George, whom they called Boy. He was now eighteen months old, but the photo had been taken on his first birthday. Bea must have taken him to a photographer's studio, for behind him there was a backdrop, in poor taste, of a flowery glade. He did not look much of a boy, dressed as he was in a white frock of some kind and a bonnet; but he was whole and healthy, and he was there to inherit the earldom if Fitz died today.
Bea and Boy would be in London now, Fitz assumed. It was July, and the social season went on, albeit in a lower key: girls had to make their debuts, for how else would they meet suitable husbands?
The light strengthened, then the sun appeared. The steel helmets of the Aberowen Pals shone, and their bayonets flashed reflections of the new day. Most of them had never been in battle. What a baptism they would have, win or lose.
A mammoth British artillery barrage began with the light. The gunners were giving their all. Perhaps this last effort would finally destroy the German positions. That must be what General Haig was praying for.
The Aberowen Pals were not in the first wave, but Fitz went forward to look at the battlefield, leaving the lieutenants in charge of B Company. He pushed through the crowds of waiting men to the frontline trench, where he stood on the fire step and looked through a peephole in the sandbagged parapet.
A morning mist was dispersing, chased by the rays of the rising sun. The blue sky was blotched by the dark smoke of exploding shells. It was going to be fine, Fitz saw, a beautiful French summer day. "Good weather for killing Germans," he said to no one in particular.
He remained at the front as zero hour approached. He wanted to see what happened to the first wave. There might be lessons to be learned. Although he had been an officer in France for almost two years, this would be the first time he commanded men in battle, and he was more nervous about that than about getting killed.
A ration of rum was given out to each man. Fitz drank some. Despite the warmth of the spirit in his stomach, he felt himself becoming more tense. Zero hour was seven thirty. When seven o'clock passed, the men grew still.
At seven twenty the British guns fell silent.
&nb
sp; "No!" Fitz said aloud. "Not yet--this is too soon!" No one was listening, of course. But he was aghast. This would tell the Germans that an attack was imminent. They would now be piling out of their dugouts, hauling up their machine guns, and taking their positions. Our gunners had given the enemy a clear ten minutes to prepare! They should have kept up the fire until the last possible moment, seven twenty-nine and fifty-nine seconds.
But nothing could be done about it now.
Fitz wondered grimly how many men would die just because of that blunder.
Sergeants barked commands, and the men around Fitz climbed the scaling ladders and scrambled over the parapet. They formed up on the near side of the British wire. They were about a quarter of a mile from the German line, but no one fired at them yet. To Fitz's surprise the sergeants barked: "Dressing by numbers, right dress--one!" The men began to dress off as if on the parade ground, carefully adjusting the distances between them until they were ranged as perfectly as skittles in a bowling alley. To Fitz's mind this was madness--it just gave the Germans more time to get ready.
At seven thirty a whistle blew, all the signalers dropped their flags, and the first line moved forward.
They did not sprint, being weighed down by their equipment: extra ammunition, a waterproof sheet, food and water, and two Mills bombs per man, hand grenades weighing almost two pounds each. They moved at a jog, splashing through the shell holes, and passed through the gaps in the British wire. As instructed, they reformed into lines and went on, shoulder-to-shoulder, across no-man's-land.
When they were halfway, the German machine guns opened up.
Fitz saw men begin to fall a second before his ears picked up the familiar rattling sound. One went down, then a dozen, then twenty, then more. "Oh, my God," Fitz said as they fell, fifty of them, a hundred more. He stared aghast at the slaughter. Some men threw up their hands when hit; others screamed, or convulsed; others just went limp and fell to the ground like dropped kit bags.
This was worse than the pessimistic Gwyn Evans had predicted, worse than Fitz's most terrible fears.
Before they reached the German wire, most of them had fallen.
Another whistle blew, and the second line advanced.
{ III }
Private Robin Mortimer was angry. "This is fucking stupid," he said when they heard the crackle of machine guns. "We should have gone over in the dark. You can't cross no-man's-land in broad fucking daylight. They're not even laying down a smoke screen. It's fucking suicide."
The men in the assembly trench were unnerved. Billy was worried by the fall in morale among the Aberowen Pals. On the march from their billet to the front line, they had experienced their first artillery attack. They had not suffered a direct hit, but groups ahead and behind had been massacred. Almost as bad, they had marched past a series of newly dug pits, all exactly six feet deep, and had worked out that these were mass graves, ready to receive the day's dead.
"The wind is wrong for a smoke screen," said Prophet Jones mildly. "That's why they're not using gas, either."
"Fucking insane," Mortimer muttered.
George Barrow said cheerfully: "The higher-ups know best. They been bred to rule. Leave it to them, I say."
Tommy Griffiths could not let that pass. "How can you believe that, when they sent you to Borstal?"
"They got to put people like me in jail," George said stoutly. "Otherwise everyone would be thieving. I might get robbed myself!"
Everyone laughed, except the morose Mortimer.
Major Fitzherbert reappeared, looking grim, carrying a jug of rum. The lieutenant gave them all a ration, pouring it into the mess tins they held out. Billy drank his without enjoyment. The fiery spirit cheered the men up, but not for long.
The only time Billy had felt like this was on his first day down the mine, when Rhys Price had left him alone and his lamp had gone out. A vision had helped him then. Unfortunately, Jesus appeared to boys with fevered imaginations, not sober, literal-minded men. Billy was on his own today.
The supreme test was almost on him, perhaps minutes away. Would he keep his nerve? If he failed--if he curled up in a ball on the ground and closed his eyes, or broke down in tears, or ran away--he would feel ashamed for the rest of his life. I'd rather die, he thought, but will I feel that way when the shooting starts?
They all moved a few steps forward.
He took out his wallet. Mildred had given him a photo of herself. She was dressed in a coat and hat: he would have preferred to remember her the way she had been the evening he went to her bedroom.
He wondered what she was doing now. Today was Saturday, so presumably she would be at Mannie Litov's, sewing uniforms. It was midmorning, and the women would be stopping for a break about now. Mildred might tell them all a funny story.
He thought about her all the time. Their night together had been an extension of the kissing lesson. She had stopped him going at things like a bull at a gate, and had taught him slower, more playful ways, caresses that had been exquisitely pleasurable, more so than he could have imagined. She had kissed his peter, and then asked him to do the equivalent to her. Even better, she had shown him how to do it so that it made her cry out in ecstasy. At the end, she had produced a condom from her bedside drawer. He had never seen one, though the boys talked about them, calling them rubber johnnies. She had put it on him, and even that had been thrilling.
It seemed like a daydream, and he had to keep reminding himself that it had really happened. Nothing in his upbringing had prepared him for Mildred's carefree, eager attitude to sex, and it had come to him like a revelation. His parents and most people in Aberowen would call her "unsuitable," with two children and no sign of a husband; but Billy would not have minded if she had six children. She had opened the gates of paradise to him, and all he wanted to do was go there again. More than anything else, he wanted to survive today so that he could see Mildred again and spend another night with her.
As the Pals shuffled forward, slowly getting nearer to the frontline trench, Billy found he was sweating.
Owen Bevin began to cry. Billy said gruffly: "Pull yourself together, now, Private Bevin. No good crying, is it?"
The boy said: "I want to go home."
"So do I, boyo, so do I."
"Please, Corporal, I didn't think it would be like this."
"How old are you anyway?"
"Sixteen."
"Bloody hell," said Billy. "How did you get recruited?"
"I told the doctor how old I was, and he said: 'Go away, and come back in the morning. You're tall for your age, you might be eighteen by tomorrow.' And he gave me a wink, see, so I knew I had to lie."
"Bastard," said Billy. He looked at Owen. The boy was not going to be any use on the battlefield. He was shaking and sobbing.
Billy spoke to Lieutenant Carlton-Smith. "Sir, Bevin is only sixteen, sir."
"Good God," said the lieutenant.
"He should be sent back. He'll be a liability."
"I don't know about that." Carlton-Smith looked baffled and helpless.
Billy recalled how Prophet Jones had tried to make an ally of Mortimer. Prophet was a good leader, thinking ahead and acting to prevent problems. Carlton-Smith, by contrast, seemed to be of no account, yet he was the superior officer. That's why it's called the class system, Da would have said.
After a minute, Carlton-Smith went to Fitzherbert and said something in a low voice. The major shook his head in negation, and Carlton-Smith shrugged helplessly.
Billy had not been brought up to look on cruelty without a protest. "The boy is only sixteen, sir!"
"Too late to say that now," said Fitzherbert. "And don't speak until you're spoken to, Corporal."
Billy knew that Fitzherbert did not recognize him. Billy was just one of hundreds of men who worked in the earl's pits. Fitzherbert did not know he was Ethel's brother. All the same, the casual dismissal angered Billy. "It's against the law," he said stubbornly. In other circumstances Fitzherbert would have b
een the first person to pontificate about respect for the law.
"I'll be the judge of that," said Fitz irritably. "That's why I'm the officer."
Billy's blood began to boil. Fitzherbert and Carlton-Smith stood there in their tailored uniforms, glaring at Billy in his itchy khaki, thinking that they could do anything. "The law is the law," Billy said.
Prophet spoke quietly. "I see you've forgotten your stick this morning, Major Fitzherbert. Shall I send Bevin back to headquarters to get it for you?"
It was a face-saving compromise, Billy thought. Well done, Prophet.
But Fitzherbert was not buying it. "Don't be ridiculous," he said.
Suddenly Bevin darted away. He slipped into the crowd of men behind and disappeared from sight in a moment. It was so surprising that some of the men laughed.
"He won't get far," said Fitzherbert. "And when they catch him, it won't be very funny."
"He's a child!"
Fitzherbert fixed him with a look. "What's your name?" he said.
"Williams, sir."
Fitzherbert looked startled, but recovered fast. "There are hundreds of Williamses," he said. "What's your first name?"
"William, sir. They call me Billy Twice."
Fitzherbert gave him a hard stare.
He knows, Billy thought. He knows Ethel has a brother called Billy Williams. He stared straight back.
Fitzherbert said: "One more word out of you, Private William Williams, and you'll be on a charge."
There was a whistling sound above. Billy ducked. From behind him came a deafening bang. A hurricane blew all around him: clods of earth and fragments of planking flew past. He heard screams. Abruptly he found himself flat on the ground, not sure whether he had been knocked over or had thrown himself down. Something heavy hit his head, and he cursed. Then a boot thumped to the ground beside his face. There was a leg attached to the boot, but nothing else. "Oh, Christ," he said.
