The Devil in No Man's Land: 1917

by Will Hill

  “Find him!” he shouted. “Quickly, find him.”

  The rest of the squad turned on their torches and scanned the pool, the watery yellow lights illuminating foaming mud and swirling water.

  Nothing.

  Harker could hear his heart thumping in his chest.

  I can't see him.

  The water rushing through the collapsed wall of earth slowed to a steady trickle and the thick pool of mud started to settle.

  I can't see him.

  “There!” yelled Kavanagh, pointing at a spot about six feet from the duckboards. Five beams of light converged and picked out Ellis's pale white face. His eyes were closed; a thick stream of blood ran from his temple. The mud was up to his chin; his face, which looked strangely peaceful, was all that could be seen of him. As they looked at their friend, Harker saw the foul sludge creep up to his lower lip, and this awful sight broke his paralysis.

  “Kavanagh! McDonald!” he yelled. “To me.”

  He dragged his pistol out of his pocket and threw it to the ground, along with his helmet. From his pack he pulled a ten-foot length of rope, the end of which he handed to Kavanagh as the Private appeared at his side, his face white with panic.

  “Run this through my shoulder harness,” he shouted. “Give McDonald the other end. Quickly now!”

  Kavanagh did as he was ordered, running the thick rope through the loop at the top of his Captain's webbing and passing the end to McDonald.

  “Pull it taut,” Harker said.

  Nothing happened. McDonald was staring at Ellis, his eyes wide with terror.

  “Private McDonald!” bellowed Harker. “Pull this rope tight, at once!”

  McDonald's eyes seemed to focus and he looked at his Captain. A second later Quincey felt the rope tense at his back; he stepped forward and stood on the edge of the duckboard, looking out over the pool.

  “Brace,” he yelled, then leant forward until he reached the edge of the rope's tension, hanging suspended over the murky liquid.

  “Let the rope out!” he shouted, never taking his eyes from Ellis's face. The mud had reached his moustache. In a few more seconds, it would close over his nostrils and he would be lost. “Steady, boys, steady. Let her out.”

  Grunting with the strain, the two Privates let the thick rope slide between their fingers. Captain Harker descended slowly towards the mud.

  He stretched his arms out, the rope creaking with tension, his feet digging for purchase in the mud at the edge of the duckboard. Behind him, he heard Thorpe and Potts move to help their comrades with the rope, and the creaking lessened. He was almost within reach of Ellis.

  Another ten inches. That's all, ten bloody inches.

  He was almost horizontal now, the webbing on his front dangling dangerously close to the sucking mud. Ellis was right in front of him, the liquid earth cresting the neat brown hair of the schoolmaster's moustache.

  “That's all the rope, sir!” yelled Kavanagh. “Can you reach him?”

  Harker stretched his arms, straining muscle and sinew, and realised that he couldn't. His fingers grasped empty air.

  “I need another six inches!” he shouted in reply.

  “Sir, we don't have six inches.”

  Thorpe's voice. Calm, steady as always, even as one of his friends sank before his eyes.

  Harker looked at Ellis. The wound on the side of his head wasn't much more than a scratch. Perhaps he was dazed, rather than fully unconscious.

  “Ellis!” Quincey bellowed, his voice dangerously loud in the quiet night air. “Ellis, give me your hand. That's an order, Private!”

  He stared at his friend's face and saw his eyes flicker beneath their lids.

  “Ellis!” he yelled again. “Look at me!”

  Slowly, as though it was the most difficult thing any human being had ever been asked to do, Ellis opened his eyes and looked at his Captain. Then the creeping mud closed over his nose and his eyes widened in terror.

  “Give me your hand!” Quincey shouted. “I can't reach you if you don't.”

  The Private's eyes locked on to Harker's and, for a moment, nothing happened. Then slowly, horribly slowly, like a lazy volcanic eruption, the smooth surface of the mud breached beside Ellis's head and a hand emerged. It was coated in thick brown slime and reached out towards Harker, who gripped it with all his strength.

  “Pull!” he yelled.

  His squad didn't waste time answering. Instead, Harker felt the rope jerk and then he was being pulled up and back, Ellis rising from the mud beneath him like a golem. Behind him, he heard Thorpe exhorting the rest of the squad to pull harder, to haul for all they were worth. His arms flamed with agony as he squeezed Ellis's hand and dragged the scholarly, softly spoken teacher through the foul, grasping mud.

  For a terrible moment, everything stopped.

  Ellis hung half in and half out of the thick sludge at the end of his Captain's arms, until Kavanagh and McDonald gave one last giant heave. Harker was flung backwards into the collapsed remains of the wall of earth, as Ellis burst up out of the pool with an audible pop, like a cork from a champagne bottle. He crashed into Quincey, the two men tumbling to the ground, coated in thick, freezing mud.

  There was silence.

  Harker lay on the cold dirt, his chest heaving, his arms throbbing, his breath pluming in frozen clouds above him.

  “Ellis,” he heard Thorpe say. “Ellis, are you all right?”

  He craned his head to look at his friend. Ellis opened his mouth to answer, but was wracked by a fit of coughing and rolled over on to his back.

  Kavanagh stepped forward and knelt beside Ellis. He whispered something into the schoolmaster's ear, and he laughed; it set off a second torrent of coughing, but he laughed nonetheless.

  “How about you, sir?” Harker turned and saw Thorpe reaching a hand down towards him; he grasped it and hauled himself to his feet. Potts handed him his pistol and helmet, and he put them back in place.

  “I'm fine,” he replied. “Thank you.”

  The young Private nodded respectfully, then stepped back into line next to McDonald. Harker turned to see Kavanagh gently lifting Ellis to his feet.

  “Can you go on?” he asked.

  Ellis snapped a shaky salute. “I should take point, sir,” he said. “Nobody's going to see me coming.”

  Harker looked at the schoolmaster: his uniform was coated in mud and his face was splattered brown. He started to laugh and, after a second or two, Ellis and the rest of the squad joined in.

  It was the last joke any of them would make for some time.

  The Special Reconnaissance Unit moved carefully round the pool, through the gently rising valley of fallen trees and artillery holes, and came up less than fifty yards from the roofless shell of Crest Farm barn. The farmhouse stood a further hundred yards to the east, its windows lit by the faint orange glow of gas lanterns.

  Captain Harker ordered his men to the ground and led them past the barn on their elbows and knees. As they neared the house, a German voice rang through the empty windows, followed by the laughter of two, maybe three, men. The squad paused, listening for footsteps or the opening of a door, but all they could hear were the voices of the soldiers. They resumed their course, dead east, towards what was left of Passchendaele.

  When they reached the village's main road, rolled dirt now heavily rutted by the tracks of tanks and churned by thousands of pairs of Wehrmacht-issue leather boots, Harker stood up. The rest of the squad did likewise. They took cover in a small copse of oak trees and Quincey asked Ellis what the Germans had been laughing about.

  The Private smiled. “One of them was telling the others that it was their lucky day, because the Kaiser was on his way from his palace in Berlin to take watch, so they could all go to bed soon.”

  The men of the squad grinned. They had told similar jokes many times, substituting the Kaiser's name for Gough's, or Haig's, or any of the myriad others who sent men to die from behind the comfort of a desk.

  Ha
rker led them on a loose lap of the village. As expected, with the Allied attack so obviously imminent, the place itself was deserted; the German soldiers had been summoned to the front lines, apart from the tiny security force keeping warm and dry in the Crest farmhouse. But something nagged at the Captain.

  It's too quiet, he thought. Not even a single patrol. Not one.

  A chill shuddered up his spine. He trusted his instincts; they had saved his life more than once in the years since this godforsaken war had been declared. So when Lieutenant Thorpe suggested that they make their way back and report no changes in the German positions, as they had known there wouldn't be, Harker shook his head.

  “Let's check the village,” he said.

  None of the men said anything. He knew they wouldn't, but he also knew them well enough to read the disappointment in their eyes. Their mission, given to them by a demented old man determined to do them harm, had gone better than any of them would have dared to hope, and none of them were keen to push their luck. But when their Captain set off down the road towards the centre of Passchendaele, walking in a slow crouch, his rifle pointing forwards, they followed him immediately.

  The six men fanned out across the road in a wide inverted V and made their way forward, past the small cottages and silos on the edge of the village, past a general store and a stable, past the larger houses that had presumably once belonged to the area's merchants and landowners, and into the small, picturesque village square.

  It was empty. The entire village was empty.

  The residents had long since fled the advancing lines, but there should have been at least two German patrols, looping in figures of eight with the village square as their crossing point. But there was nobody. Just the empty buildings, the largest of which was the church that overlooked the square.

  It towered over the silent village, a wide brick building flanked by two sloping wings, with a tall steeple standing at its rear. A small courtyard lay to one side, in which a small wrought-iron bench sat between two skeletal trees.

  Where the roof of the church had been, there was now only a gaping, jagged hole. The glass in the windows was also gone, leaving dark slits in the red brick. But, as Harker led his men silently into the square, he realised that the church was not completely dark. A faint yellow light was visible in the doorway, illuminating the edges of a door that was standing ajar.

  “Sir...” Thorpe whispered, but Harker held up a hand and cut him off.

  “I see it,” he whispered.

  Quincey pointed his men towards the front of the church. They moved quickly across the cobblestones of the square and took up their positions: Potts and Kavanagh either side of the window to the right of the door, McDonald and Ellis flanking the one on the left. Harker and Thorpe moved to the door itself.

  “What do you see?” the Captain whispered to Ellis.

  The Private turned his head and inched it out across the empty window frame. He looked into the church for no more than a second, then pulled back and turned to Harker.

  “Two candles on the altar, sir. There's something in between them ? looks like a statue. The rest is darkness.”

  Quincey nodded. He turned to Thorpe and jerked his head towards the door. The six men peeled away from the brick wall and raised their rifles. Thorpe stepped forward, gripped the edge of the heavy door, and pushed.

  A creak rang out, enormously loud in the silent village, as the hinges protested. The Lieutenant put his shoulder to the door and it swung inwards. Harker and Potts stepped forward, their Lee-Enfield rifles pointing over Thorpe's shoulders, ready for the slightest sign of movement, but there was none. The interior of the church was as still and dark as a crypt, the only light coming from the candles on the altar that Ellis had described.

  There was a strong coppery smell in the air as the six men made their way into Passchendaele church. Above them, thick grey clouds hung low above the missing roof, blotting out the stars.

  Harker sent Potts and Ellis to the right and left. If the lanterns that would have once been used to illuminate the congregation still contained fuel, perhaps they could shed some light on the source of the strange, metallic smell.

  Familiar, though, thought Harker. I know that smell. If I could only place it. Matches flared in the darkness, first to the left and then the right, and Quincey heard the rasping squeak of lantern doors opening. The flames flickered, then the oil caught, and the church was bathed in pale yellow light.

  “Oh my God,” gasped Thorpe.

  Harker's breath caught in his throat.

  “This isn't a church,” Ellis said to his left, his voice trembling. “It's a slaughterhouse.”

  Sprawled across the pews and the ornate tiled floor of the church were at least a dozen German soldiers, their skin ghastly white, their mouths twisted into eternal expressions of pain and terror.

  Blood was splashed across the whitewashed walls and pooled in near-black ovals on the floor beneath the men. And, in the flickering light of the lanterns, the squad could see that the shape on the altar was no statue; it was the body of a soldier, little more than a boy, bare-chested with his braces hanging off his narrow frame. He sat between the candles, his body riddled with bullet holes, his head lowered towards the blood-soaked floor.

  “Dear Lord,” Potts whispered. “What is this?”

  Harker looked at his young sniper. His face was almost as pale as the corpse he was staring at, a middle-aged Captain who had died crawling towards the door of the church. The man's body lay in the aisle between the rows of pews, one hand pressed to his throat, the other gripping something tightly in his fist. Beneath him, a great streak of dried blood, smeared by his elbows and knees, led back towards the altar.

  Harker stepped forward and knelt down next to the man. He reached out, took the clenched fist in one hand and prised the cold, stiff fingers back with the other. There was a high tinkling noise as something fell to the tiled floor. The squad gathered round their Captain to see what the man had held on to, even as the last breath rattled out of his lungs.

  It was a small gold crucifix.

  Several of his men drew breath, sharply.

  Harker leant forward and moved the man's other hand away from his neck. A wide gash ran from his windpipe to almost the bottom of his ear. There was no blood around the wound and, even to Harker's untrained eye, the edges of the cut seemed jagged and uneven, not the smooth lines left by a knife or a bayonet.

  “That's a bite,” said Kavanagh, in a low voice. “Pa's wolfhound took one of the lambs spring before last. Ripped its throat right out. Looked like that.”

  Harker glanced up at Kavanagh. The Private was visibly trembling.

  “Check them,” the Captain said. “Check them all.”

  His men moved quickly through the church, examining the Germans for any signs of life. Harker stood up, stepped carefully over the corpse in the aisle, and walked towards the altar.

  The boy was as pale as the rest of them, his skin almost translucent. His head was lowered, his elbows on his knees, his feet dangling eight inches above the floor. As Quincey approached him, he could see that the bullet wounds covered his arms and neck as well as his torso.

  So many bullets for one man. Why so many?

  Then the boy raised his head and Quincey Harker bit his lip so he didn't scream.

  Blood, dried to a crumbling powder, coated the lower half of his face. His eyes were a deep crimson, centred with malevolent spots of shiny black. His mouth was curled into a terrible grimace of agony and as the rest of Harker's squad appeared at his shoulder, their rifles trained on the boy, shouting and gasping and crossing themselves in the oily, yellow-lit church, it twisted open.

  “Komm zu dir. Komm zu dir. Komm zu dir. Komm zu dir. Komm zu dir.”

  The boy repeated this over and over, his terrible red eyes never leaving Harker's. Quincey returned the stare.

  “What's he saying, Ellis? What in God's name is he saying?”

  “He's saying wake up, sir,
” answered the Private. “Over and over. Wake up.”

  “Wake up?” said Thorpe. “Wake up who? What happened to these men? Dammit, what happened here?” He stepped towards the boy, his rifle set against his shoulder. “Boy,” he said. “Look at me—”

  Harker felt ice race up his spine; he opened his mouth to tell his friend to keep back, but was too late.

  With a screech that sounded more anguished than angry, the boy launched himself off the altar and crashed into Thorpe, wrapping his legs round him and sending him sprawling on to the first row of pews. The movement was so fast, so impossibly fast, that none of the squad fired a single shot before the boy dipped his face to Thorpe's neck and tore his throat out in a shimmering eruption of blood.

  “No!” bellowed Harker, firing his rifle into the side of the boy's head, hurling him sideways with a gout of crimson trailing from the hole above his temple. The boy slammed into the tiled floor, but lurched round immediately to face the men, his eyes wide, his teeth bared. He tensed his body to spring again, as Harker yelled, “Fire!” The squad unloaded their rifles into the boy, driving him back against the wall of the church, where he slumped in a bloody heap beneath one of the empty, staring windows.

  Quincey ran to Thorpe and cradled his friend's head. Blood was pouring out of the hole in his neck, and his face was already pale. He looked up at Harker disbelievingly.

  Not like this. After everything we've been through. Not like this. Harker wiped blood from Thorpe's cheeks and forehead and told his friend he was going to be fine, it was just a scratch, he was fine, he was fine. Thorpe opened his mouth, but dark blood poured down his chin, and he made no sound other than a high-pitched whistle as his breath escaped through the hole in his neck.

  The rest of the squad stood helplessly behind their Captain, looking down at Thorpe. Tears stood in the corners of Ellis's eyes, and Potts looked like he was struggling not to be sick. McDonald and Kavanagh just stared, blank looks of incomprehension on their faces.