The Devil in No Man's Land: 1917

by Will Hill

  THE DEPARTMENT 19 FILES

  THE DEVIL IN NO MAN’S LAND: 1917

  Will Hill

  Contents

  200 YARDS SOUTH-WEST OF PASSCHENDAELE, BELGIUM: 29th OCTOBER 1917

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  In 1891, Abraham Van Helsing and a small number of his friends faced Dracula, the world's first vampire. They chased him across Europe, to the mountains of Transylvania, and the castle that bore his name. Not all of them returned ? but Dracula was destroyed.

  Other vampires remained, though, and so in 1892 Van Helsing and the other survivors were asked by Prime Minister William Gladstone to found the Department of Supernatural Investigation.

  The Department, which was originally based in a townhouse in Piccadilly, was charged with protecting the British Empire from the growing threat of the supernatural.

  Over the course of the twentieth century, the men and women of Department 19, as it became known, fought in every corner of the globe, holding back the rising tide of darkness, often at enormous personal cost.

  In a top-secret location, there stands a highly classified archive that records the long history of humanity's war with the supernatural. The papers within it list the names of every man and woman lost in the line of duty, and contain detailed accounts of every act of bravery.

  Beyond the men and women of the Department, these are accessible only by the Prime Minister and the Chief of the General Staff.

  These are the Department 19 files.

  200 YARDS SOUTH-WEST OF PASSCHENDAELE, BELGIUM

  29th OCTOBER 1917

  You never got used to the mud.

  It coated everything, turning the entire world a thick, cloying brown. In the Allied trenches it had been churned into a thick, sodden landscape of ankle-twisting ridges and valleys, through which scrabbled rats the size of Jack Russells. Out in the quiet hell of no man's land, in the deep craters and gorges sunk by the artillery shells that had fallen steadily for the last month, it ran like lava, collecting in sucking pools between the shattered trees and the wooden duckboards, wide ladders that had been laid across the blasted earth in the hope that they might provide stable footing.

  At night, the darkness made solid ground and treacherous mud indistinguishable. All too often, desperate cries would float on the cold night wind, screams of pure helplessness that were ended either by the merciful crack of a sniper's rifle, or when the relentless mud closed over the poor man's mouth and pulled him down.

  Captain Quincey Harker surveyed the darkness through his binoculars. His small unit had advanced maybe fifty yards from the maze of trenches the Allies had dug across the fields of Flanders, a labyrinth of damp timber and mud that stretched from the North Sea to the Swiss border. They were lying flat on the sodden ground, the blackened stump of a fallen oak tree shielding them from enemy eyes. In front of them lay the hundred scorched, shattered yards of no man's land and beyond that, in defensive trenches dug deep and reinforced with concrete, the soldiers of the German Army. Beyond even them, a further half a mile up the gentle incline that thousands had fought and died over, sat Passchendaele, the insignificant farming hamlet that was their destination.

  “How's it look, sir?” a voice whispered.

  Harker turned his head. “Much the same as it always does,” he replied.

  On the ground behind him were five men. The nearest, a respectful foot from his right shoulder, was Lieutenant Thorpe. A lifetime ago, he and Quincey had attended school together in Windsor, forging a friendship on the playing fields and in the ancient corridors that had bound them together ever since: to Oxford, Sandhurst, and all the way to this tiny, desolate corner of northern Europe. Behind Thorpe lay the four Privates who made up the rest of Harker's squad.

  Potts, their sniper, was only nineteen years old and already wore the look of a man who had seen more death than any one person could be reasonably expected to bear, much of it through the scope of his Lee-Enfield rifle. Ellis, the bespectacled, thoughtful schoolmaster, spoke fluent German and entertained the squad on long patrols with tales of Achilles and Odysseus. He could also speak of home in such eloquent terms that the men would close their eyes and believe, however briefly, that they were far away from the mud and horror of the Western Front. McDonald was a huge, cheerful Scottish highlander, whose red hair and beard provided a splash of vivid colour amid the endless browns and greys of the battlefield. Last was Kavanagh, the latest in a long line of Somerset farmers, with the weathered skin and long, ropy muscles to show for it. Six men, each of whom would have gladly laid down his life for any one of the others.

  Officially, however, they didn't exist.

  The men were classified, by those with sufficient clearance to even be aware of their existence, as a Special Reconnaissance Unit, under the direct authority of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff.

  In October 1914, an emissary from the War Cabinet had intercepted the newly commissioned Second Lieutenant Harker, who was on his way from Sandhurst to join up with his regiment, the Queen's Own Hussars, and informed the young officer that his situation had changed. Following sterling recommendations from the Royal Military Academy, and the intervention of several influential voices in Whitehall, he was instead to be given twelve weeks to select a small squad of men from the thousands awaiting deployment to the front, then make them available for whatever duties the High Command might deem appropriate.

  Harker asked no questions. Instead, he set about his task with characteristic diligence and, by the Christmas of 1914, he had found the other five members of his squad. In the third week of 1915, the six men shipped out to mainland Europe and began their work.

  Throughout February and March, they sabotaged the Austro-Hungarian attack on Russian-controlled Poland, assassinating officers, blowing up ammunitions dumps and railway lines, appearing from the frozen eastern European woods like ghosts and disappearing without trace. They spent the summer in Isonzo, undermining Hungarian preparation for the imminent Italian offensive, before moving on to Serbia in October, where they assisted with the attempt to repel the latest Austro-Hungarian invasion.

  Throughout the first half of 1916 the squad had fought relentlessly, amassing a treasure trove of medals they could never be officially awarded, sustaining not a single injury between them. They waded through the mud of Verdun, launching dead of night hit-and-run attacks on the enemy lines, sowing fear and confusion among the exhausted German soldiers, until in late June they were summoned north to the River Somme, where Captain Harker made the decision that would ultimately cost one of his squad their life.

  It was immediately apparent that the plan for the upcoming attack was folly, lacking both strategic thought and any understanding of the true nature of this first modern war, so when Field Marshal Hubert Gough told his squad to infiltrate the German line and sabotage the supply chain, Quincey Harker flatly refused.

  He explained to Gough that the attack was an act of lunacy, one that could only result in catastrophic Allied losses. He begged the Field Marshal to reconsider the offensive, whereupon Gough had his entire squad arrested and sentenced to death for cowardice.

  On 1st July 1916 the offensive began, as the six members of the Special Reconnaissance Unit sat in cells thirty-five miles behind the front. Eighteen hours later nearly twenty thousand Allied soldiers were dead or dying.

  As news filtered through to headquarters, Field Marshal Gough received a telephone call from the War Cabinet. For several minutes, he shouted down the black receiver, at one point threatening to resign, before eventually hanging up the phone and following the orders he had been given. He sent his adjutant down to the cells to release their six occupants, and began waiting
patiently for the opportunity to exact his revenge.

  By June 1917, Captain Harker and his squad were tunnelling under the Messines Ridge, helping to lay the mines that would destroy the fortified German defences above, along with the town of Messines itself. During the aftermath of this successful operation, as plans were drawn up for the attack on Passchendaele, Gough saw his chance had come.

  “Remind me what we're doing here, Quincey,” whispered Thorpe. His pale, handsome face was spattered with mud, and his voice trembled slightly in the biting cold of the Belgian winter.

  Harker silently rolled over on to his back and faced his men. They looked as resentful as Thorpe sounded.

  “You all know why we're here,” he answered, “The official reason and the real one behind it. Tomorrow the Canadians are going up this salient for the second time, to try and take a little town with no strategic value, because we've been trying for so long now that we don't know how to stop. A good number, maybe most of them, are going to be killed. So we're going through the line to bring back a final positional assessment of this godforsaken village, in the hope of preventing at least a small number of them walking in front of a machine gun.”

  “Jerry positions haven't changed in a month,” protested Thorpe. “Why would anyone think they would do so now, with our advance so clearly imminent?”

  “I think you all know the answer to that question,” Harker replied evenly.

  Private McDonald muttered something exceptionally vulgar under his breath, the kind of thing that could lead to a court martial if said in the wrong company. The rest of the squad grunted their agreement.

  “We're not expected to make it back,” Quincey continued. “As you know fine well, certain people are counting on it, people who have waited more than a year for the chance to put this squad in harm's way. People it will give me no small amount of pleasure to prove wrong a second time.”

  The five men of the Special Reconnaissance Unit looked at their Captain. Quincy Harker was tall and extremely thin; even in his thick tunic and webbing, covered in bulging pockets and flaps, and with his Webley pistol on his hip, he still cast a narrow shadow in the pale moonlight. His face was correspondingly slender, with a long nose below which perched a surprisingly bushy brown moustache. His cap cast a shadow over eyes that, in sunlight, flashed a sparkling emerald green. In truth, he looked little different than he had on those days in late 1914 when he had approached each of the five men who lay before him now and told them to trust him. They had, and they still did, without question.

  “Captain—” began Private Kavanagh.

  “No more talk,” said Harker. “There's work to be done, regardless of what we may think of it. Follow me.”

  The Captain raised himself into a low crouch and stepped out from behind the tree stump. He paused, absolutely still, waiting for the rattle of guns and the whine of bullets that would mean he had been seen. The jagged expanse of no man's land remained still, and after waiting a further long moment, Harker began to move north. The members of his squad lifted themselves silently to their feet and followed him.

  Their briefing held that the German line was weakest at a point between two trees to the north-west of Crest Farm, a smallholding on the outskirts of Passchendaele proper. Privately, Harker doubted the validity of much of the intelligence, given the nature of the mission, but it would not be helpful to convey this to his men; he would follow the plan until there was compelling evidence to disregard it.

  The six men moved across no man's land, shadows in the dark winter night.

  They advanced slowly, staying low, creeping round wide pools of mud, slipping between a cluster of small trees that had survived the artillery barrage, climbing carefully over ridges of displaced earth. As they neared the German line, winding through the patches of densest cover, they passed a deep crater full of thick liquid earth. Abandoned in the mud was a Mark I tank, partially submerged, its angular tracks caked in dirt and pointing woefully up at the sky.

  Thirty yards before them, sunk into the swamp of no man's land, a German sentry post was just visible in the darkness. The faint orange glow of a cigarette flickered through the concrete slit in the front of the box, illuminating the square, heavy shape of a machine gun, pointed no more than five degrees to the right of their position. Captain Harker checked his watch and whispered an order to his men, who immediately dropped to the sodden ground behind a wide bank of earth. Private Potts gently rested the barrel of his Lee-Enfield rifle on the top of the ridge, and waited.

  Far to the east, behind the Allied trenches they had emerged from, a series of deep booms shook the ground beneath them. The men of the squad lowered their faces to the ground and waited for the artillery shells to fall.

  Giant explosions detonated all around them, throwing earth into the sky in volcanic bursts of mud and stagnant water. The sound was so loud it appeared to come from outside the world; it seemed inconceivable that anything built by human hands could create such a noise, a blinding, deafening roar that shook each man to his bones and spun his stomach. For more than a minute, the shells fell steadily around the squad, filling the air with such a quantity of dust and mud that it became difficult to know where the earth stopped and the air began. Harker and his men didn't flinch. They had been in the eye of an artillery storm many times before.

  As the frequency of the explosions began to diminish, one shell dropped out of the sky directly on to the German sentry position, shattering the concrete roof of the post and obliterating the earth into which it was dug. Quincey raised his head and looked at Potts, who nodded at his Captain. He wore a look of grim determination on his face as he placed his right eye against the telescopic sight fixed to the top of his rifle.

  Slowly, horribly slowly, three German soldiers emerged from the sentry box. In the pale light cast by the moon, Harker could see the blood running thickly from their ears; the direct hit had struck all three men deaf.

  Another shell crashed to earth, maybe fifty yards to the left of the squad's position, and Potts squeezed his trigger. The explosion masked the crack of the rifle, as a plume of scarlet sprayed up from just below the helmet of one of the German soldiers, who crumpled to the ground. His compatriots did not appear to even notice. They staggered in an erratic circle, eyes wide, mouths hanging open. As the final shells of the barrage landed, Potts put them both out of their misery.

  Harker waited until he was sure the assault was over, then ordered his men back into crouched positions and led them through the newly empty section of the German line.

  Walking beyond the German trenches was like entering an alien world.

  The relentless artillery barrage had contorted the ground into great undulating rises and troughs, and the going was slow. The men picked their way carefully over vicious outcrops of shattered stone and wood, between fallen tree trunks and round half-hidden pools of mud, lying in wait to pull a man down.

  To their right, a searchlight swung in a wide, long arc, painting the blasted landscape a pale white. To the left, a low hill rose above them, thickly tangled with the exposed roots of broken trees. The men of the Special Reconnaissance Unit were funnelled between these two obstacles, down a narrow valley of sliding mud and shifting rock, Quincey Harker in the lead, followed by Lieutenant Thorpe and the four Privates.

  “Have you ever seen worse?” muttered Private Kavanagh.

  “No,” replied Ellis. “This is like nothing I've seen before.”

  As the men reached the floor of the valley, the walls of earth now rising above their heads on both sides, the path widened, revealing a large pool of gently shifting mud. Water ran down the valley wall to their left, splashing into the pool from an outcrop of rock and causing the thick liquid to bubble and ripple. A narrow border of solid earth ran round the right-hand edge of the pool, along which the Germans had laid duckboards, end to end.

  McDonald crouched down, picked a stone from the earth beside his feet, and flicked it out into the middle of the pool. It vanish
ed into the brown ooze, leaving no trace. The Scottish Private swore under his breath.

  “Careful men,” warned Harker. “Very careful.”

  He led his squad on to the duckboards. There were four of them, laid end to end in a crooked semi-circle that skirted the edge of the pool. The wall of earth beside it ran with water and shifted constantly, in and out, as though breathing. Harker stepped on to the creaking wood, trying to watch the ground and the pool and the wall at the same time. Potts and McDonald followed him, Ellis and Kavanagh behind them. Thorpe brought up the rear, facing the way they had come, his rifle set against his shoulder in case they were being followed.

  Harker was a third of the way across the boards, his back to the wall, moving in short, careful side steps, when the earth behind him let out a spluttering groan and a small torrent of icy water poured over his shoulder and down the front of his tunic. He froze, whispering for his men to do the same. The six members of the squad stopped and waited. The wall moved again, liquid mud oozing out of cracks and holes in the surface like blood from a slow wound, then settled with an unnervingly human groan that shook the ground beneath their feet.

  Quincey waited as long as he dared, then shifted his shoulders away from the wall, very slowly, in case they were now all that was holding it in place. He jerked a thumb towards the far side of the pool and started to inch his way along the duckboards. Behind him, his men did the same.

  Harker was about to step back on to solid ground when there was a deafening roar of water behind him. He turned in time to see a section of the wall give way completely, the clotted earth disintegrating into sludge, and a sheet of dark, freezing water sweeping Ellis off his feet and out into the thick brown pool.

  “Stand where you are!” he roared at his squad, who immediately pressed themselves against the remains of the wall. He ran back across the duckboards, his feet slipping and sliding on the newly slick wood, and stood at the edge of the breach through which the water was pouring. He looked out across the dark surface of the pool, now churned and frothing, and could not see Ellis.