by Ken Follett
At nine o'clock in the morning he moved his men into their jump-off positions, the storm troopers lying on the ground behind the guns, the regular infantry standing in the trenches. Behind them were massed the next wave of artillery, the medical teams, the telephonists, the ammunition resuppliers, and the messengers.
The storm troopers wore the modern "coal scuttle" helmet. They had been the first to abandon the old spiked pickelhaube. They were armed with the Mauser K98 carbine. Its short barrel made it inaccurate over distances, but it was less cumbersome than longer rifles in close-quarters trench fighting. Each man had a bag slung across his chest containing a dozen stick grenades. The Tommies called these "tatermashers" after the potato-mashing tool used by their wives. Apparently there was one in every British kitchen. Walter had learned this by interrogating prisoners of war: he had never actually been inside a British kitchen.
Walter put on his gas mask, and gestured to his men to follow suit, so that they would not be afflicted by their own poison fumes when they reached the other side. Then, at nine thirty, he stood up. He slung his rifle across his back and held a stick grenade in each hand, which was correct for advancing storm troopers. He could not shout orders, for no one could hear anything, so he gestured with his arm and then ran.
His men followed him into no-man's-land.
The ground was firm and dry: there had been no heavy rain for weeks. That was good for the attackers, making it easier to move men and vehicles.
They ran bent over. The German guns were firing over their heads. Walter's men understood the danger of being hit by their own shells falling short, especially in fog when artillery observers were unable to correct the gunners' aim. But it was worth the risk. This way they could get so close to the enemy trench that, when the bombardment ended, the British would not have time to get into position and set up their machine-gun posts before the storm troopers fell on them.
As they ran farther across no-man's-land, Walter hoped the other side's barbed wire had been destroyed by artillery. If not, his men would be delayed cutting it.
There was an explosion to his right, and he heard a scream. A moment later, a gleam on the ground caught his eye, and he spotted a trip wire. He was in a previously undetected minefield. A wave of pure panic swept over him as he realized that he might blow himself up with the next step. Then he got himself under control again. "Watch out underfoot!" he yelled, but his words were lost in the thunder of the guns. They ran on: the wounded had to be left for the medical teams, as always.
A moment later, at nine forty, the guns stopped.
Ludendorff had abandoned the old tactic of several days of artillery fire before an attack: it gave the enemy too much time to bring up reserves. Five hours was calculated to be enough to confuse and demoralize the enemy without permitting him to reorganize.
In theory, Walter thought.
He straightened up and ran faster. He was breathing hard but steadily, hardly sweating, alert but calm. Contact with the enemy was now seconds away.
He reached the British wire. It had not been destroyed, but there were gaps, and he led his men through.
The company and platoon commanders ordered the men to spread out again, using gestures rather than words: they might be near enough to be heard.
Now the fog was their friend, hiding them from the enemy, Walter thought with a little frisson of glee. At this point they might have expected to face the hell of machine-gun fire. But the British could not see them.
He came to an area where the ground had been completely churned up by German shells. At first he could see nothing but craters and mounds of earth. Then he saw a section of trench, and realized he had reached the British line. But it had been wrecked: the artillery had done a good job.
Was there anyone in the trench? No shots had been fired. But it was best to make sure. Walter pulled a pin from a grenade and tossed it into the trench as a precaution. After it had exploded he looked over the parapet. There were several men lying on the ground, none moving. Any who had not been killed earlier by the artillery had been finished off by the grenade.
Lucky so far, Walter thought. Don't expect it to last.
He ran along the line to check on the rest of his battalion. He saw half a dozen British soldiers surrendering, their hands on their steel soup-bowl helmets, their weapons abandoned. They looked well-fed by comparison with their German captors.
Lieutenant von Braun was pointing his rifle at the captives, but Walter did not want his officers wasting time dealing with prisoners. He pulled off his gas mask: the British were not wearing them. "Keep moving!" he shouted in English. "That way, that way." He pointed to the German lines. The British walked forward, eager to get away from the fighting and save their lives. "Let them go," he shouted at von Braun. "Rear echelons will deal with them. You must keep advancing." That was the whole idea of storm troopers.
He ran on. For several hundred yards the story was the same: destroyed trenches, enemy casualties, no real resistance. Then he heard machine-gun fire. A moment later he came upon a platoon that had taken cover in shell craters. He lay down beside the sergeant, a Bavarian called Schwab. "We can't see the emplacement," said Schwab. "We're shooting at the noise."
Schwab had not understood the tactics. Storm troopers were supposed to bypass strong points, leaving them to be mopped up by the following infantry. "Keep moving!" Walter ordered him. "Go around the machine gun." When there was a pause in the firing, he stood up and gestured to the men. "Come on! Up, up!" They obeyed. He led them away from the machine gun and across an empty trench.
He ran into Gottfried again. The lieutenant had a tin of biscuits and was stuffing them into his mouth as he ran along. "Incredible!" he shouted. "You should see the British food!"
Walter knocked the tin out of his hands. "You're here to fight, not eat, you damn fool," he yelled. "Get going."
He was startled by something running over his foot. He saw a rabbit disappearing into the fog. No doubt the artillery had destroyed their warrens.
He checked his compass to make sure he was still heading west. He did not know whether the trenches he was encountering might be communication or supply trenches, so their orientation did not tell him much.
He knew that the British had followed the Germans in creating multiple lines of trenches. Having passed the first he expected soon to come upon a well-defended trench they called the Red Line, then--if he could break through that--another trench a mile or so farther west called the Brown Line.
After that, there was nothing but open country all the way to the west coast.
Shells exploded in the mist ahead. Surely the British could not be responsible? They would be firing on their own defenses. It must be the next wave of the German rolling barrage. He and his men were in danger of outstripping their own artillery. He turned. Fortunately most of his people were behind him. He raised his arms. "Take cover!" he shouted. "Spread the word!"
They hardly needed telling, having come to the same conclusion as he. They ran back a few yards and jumped into some empty trenches.
Walter felt elated. This was going remarkably well.
There were three British soldiers lying on the trench floor. Two were motionless, one groaning. Where were the rest? Perhaps they had fled. Alternatively, this might be a suicide squad, left to defend an indefensible position in order to give their retreating comrades a better chance.
One of the dead Brits was an unusually tall man with big hands and feet. Grunwald immediately removed the corpse's boots. "My size!" he said to Walter by way of explanation. Walter did not have the heart to stop him: Grunwald's own boots had holes in them.
He sat down to catch his breath. Reviewing the first phase in his mind, he could not think how it could have gone better.
After an hour, the German guns fell silent again. Walter rallied the men and moved on.
Halfway up a long slope, he heard voices. He held up a hand to halt the men near him. Ahead, someone said in English: "I can't s
ee a fucking dicky bird."
There was something familiar about the accent. Was it Australian? It sounded more like Indian.
Another voice said in the same accent: "If they can't see you, they can't bloody shoot you!"
In a flash Walter was transported back to 1914, and Fitz's big country house in Wales. This was how the servants there spoke. The men in front of him, here in this devastated French field, were Welsh.
Up above, the sky seemed to brighten a little.
{ III }
Sergeant Billy Williams peered into the fog. The artillery had stopped, mercifully, but that only meant the Germans were coming. What was he supposed to do?
He had no orders. His platoon occupied a redoubt, a defensive post on a rise some distance behind the front line. In normal weather their position commanded a wide view of a long, gradual downward slope to a pile of rubble that must once have been farm buildings. A trench linked them to other redoubts, now invisible. Orders normally came from the rear, but none had arrived today. The phone was dead, the line presumably cut by the barrage.
The men stood or sat in the trench. They had come out of the dugout when the shelling stopped. Sometimes the field kitchen sent a wheeled cart with a great urn of hot tea along the trench at midmorning, but there was no sign of refreshments today. They had eaten their iron rations for breakfast.
The platoon had an American-designed Lewis light machine gun. It stood on the back wall of the trench over the dugout. It was operated by nineteen-year-old George Barrow, the Borstal boy, a good soldier whose education was so poor he thought the last invader of England was called Norman the Conqueror. George was sitting behind his gun, protected from stray bullets by the steel breech assembly, smoking a pipe.
They also had a Stokes mortar, a useful weapon that fired a three-inch-diameter bomb up to eight hundred yards. Corporal Johnny Ponti, brother of the Joey Ponti who died at the Somme, had become lethally proficient with this.
Billy climbed up to the machine gun and stood beside George, but he could not see any farther.
George said to him: "Billy, do other countries have empires like us?"
"Aye," said Billy. "The French have most of North Africa, then there's the Dutch East Indies, German South-West Africa . . . "
"Oh," said George, somewhat deflated. "I heard that, but I didn't think it could be true."
"Why not?"
"Well, what right have they got to rule over other people?"
"What right have we got to rule over Nigeria and Jamaica and India?"
"Because we're British."
Billy nodded. George Barrow, who evidently had never seen an atlas, felt superior to Descartes, Rembrandt, and Beethoven. And he was not unusual. They had all endured years of propaganda in school, telling them about every British military victory and none of the defeats. They were taught about democracy in London, not about tyranny in Cairo. When they learned about British justice, there was no mention of flogging in Australia, starvation in Ireland, or massacre in India. They learned that Catholics burned Protestants at the stake, and it came as a shock if they ever found out that Protestants did the same to Catholics whenever they got the chance. Few of them had a father like Billy's da to tell them that the world depicted by their schoolteachers was a fantasy.
But Billy had no time today to set George straight. He had other worries.
The sky brightened a little, and it seemed to Billy that the fog might be clearing; then, suddenly, it lifted completely. George said: "Bloody hell!" A split second later Billy saw what had shocked him. A quarter of a mile away, coming up the slope toward him, were several hundred German soldiers.
Billy jumped down into the trench. A number of men had spotted the enemy at the same time, and their surprised exclamations alerted the others. Billy looked through a slit in a steel panel set into the parapet. The Germans were slower to react, probably because the British in their trench were less conspicuous. One or two of them halted, but most came running on.
A minute later there was a crackle of rifle fire up and down the trench. Some of the Germans fell. The rest hurled themselves to the ground, seeking cover in shell holes and behind a few stunted bushes. Above Billy's head, the Lewis gun opened up with a noise like a football supporter's rattle. After a minute the Germans began to return fire. They appeared to have no machine guns or trench mortars, Billy noted gratefully. He heard one of his own men scream: a sharp-eyed German had spotted someone indiscreetly looking over the parapet, perhaps; or, more likely, a lucky shooter had hit an unlucky British head.
Tommy Griffiths appeared beside Billy. "Dai Powell got it," he said. "Wounded?"
"Dead. Shot through the head."
"Oh, bugger," said Billy. Mrs. Powell was a prodigious knitter who sent pullovers to her son in France. Who would she knit for now?
"I've took his collection from his pocket," Tommy said. Dai had a stack of pornographic postcards he had bought from a Frenchman. They showed plump girls with masses of pubic hair. Most of the men in the battalion had borrowed them at one time or another.
"Why?" said Billy distractedly as he surveyed the enemy.
"Don't want them sent home to Aberowen."
"Oh, aye."
"What shall I do with them?"
"Bloody hell, Tommy, ask me later, will you? I've got a few hundred fucking Germans to worry about at the moment."
"Sorry, Bill."
How many Germans were out there? Numbers were hard to estimate on the battlefield, but Billy thought he had seen at least two hundred, and presumably there were others out of sight. He guessed he was facing a battalion. His platoon of forty men was hopelessly outnumbered.
What was he supposed to do?
He had not seen an officer for more than twenty-four hours. He was the senior man here. He was in charge. He needed a plan.
He was long past getting angry about the incompetence of his superior officers. That was all part of the class system he had been brought up to despise. But on the rare occasions when the burden of command fell on him, he took little pleasure in it. Rather, he felt the weight of responsibility and the fear that he might make the wrong decisions and cause the deaths of his comrades.
If the Germans attacked frontally, his platoon would be overwhelmed. But the enemy did not know how weak he was. Could he make it look as if he had more men?
The thought of retreat crossed his mind. But soldiers were not supposed to run away the minute they were attacked. This was a defensive post, and he ought to try to hold it.
He would stand and fight, at least for now.
Once he had made that decision, others followed. "Give them another drum, George!" he shouted. As the Lewis gun opened up he ran along the trench. "Keep up a steady fire, boys," he said. "Make them think there's hundreds of us."
He saw Dai Powell's body lying on the ground, the blood already turning black around the hole in his head. Dai was wearing one of his mother's jumpers under his uniform tunic. It was a hideous brown thing, but it had probably kept him warm. "Rest in peace, boyo," Billy murmured.
Farther along the trench he found Johnny Ponti. "Deploy that Stokes mortar, Johnny bach," he said. "Make the buggers jump."
"Right," said Johnny. He set up his two-legged gun mount on the floor of the trench. "What's the range, five hundred yards?"
Johnny's partner was the pudding-faced boy called Suet Hewitt. He jumped up on the fire step and called back: "Aye, five to six hundred." Billy took a look for himself, but Suet and Johnny had worked together before and he left the decision to them.
"Two rings, then, at forty-five degrees," said Johnny. The self-propelling bombs could be fitted with additional charges of propellant in rings to extend their range.
Johnny jumped up on the fire step for another look at the Germans, then adjusted his aim. The other soldiers in the vicinity stood well to the side. Johnny dropped a bomb in the barrel. When it hit the bottom of the barrel, a firing pin ignited the propellant and it was fired.
; The bomb fell short and exploded some distance from the nearest enemy soldiers. "Fifty yards farther, and a touch to your right," Suet shouted.
Johnny made the adjustments and fired again. The second bomb landed in a shell hole where some Germans were sheltering. "That's it!" shouted Suet.
Billy could not see whether any of the enemy had been hit, but the firing was forcing them to keep their heads down. "Give them a dozen like that!" he said.
He came up behind Robin Mortimer, the cashiered officer, who was on the fire step shooting rhythmically. Mortimer stopped to reload, and caught Billy's eye. "Get some more ammo, Taffy," he said. As always, his tone was surly even when he was being helpful. "You don't want everyone to run out at the same time."
Billy nodded. "Good idea, thanks." The ammunition store was a hundred yards to the rear along a communication trench. He picked out two recruits who could hardly shoot straight anyway. "Jenkins and Nosey, bring up more ammo, double quick." The two lads hurried away.
Billy took another look through the parapet peephole. As he did so, one of the Germans stood up. Billy guessed it might be their commanding officer about to launch an attack. His heart sank. They must have guessed they were up against no more than a few dozen men, and realized they could easily overwhelm them.
But he was wrong. The officer gestured to rearward, then began to run downhill. His men followed suit. Billy's platoon cheered and fired wildly at the running men, bringing down a few more before they got out of range.
The Germans reached the ruined farm buildings and took cover in the rubble.
Billy could not help grinning. He had driven off a force ten times the size of his own! I should be a bloody general, he thought. "Hold your fire!" he shouted. "They're out of range."
Jenkins and Nosey reappeared, carrying ammunition boxes. "Keep going, lads," Billy said. "They may be back."
But, when he looked out again, he saw that the Germans had a different plan. They had split into two groups and were heading left and right away from the ruins. As Billy watched, they began to circle around his position, staying out of range. "Oh, bugger," he said. They were going to slip between his position and neighboring redoubts, then come at him from both sides. Or, alternatively, they might bypass him, leaving him to be mopped up by their rearguard.
