by Thomas Wood
I thought of my Mum and how she had detested the idea of me leaving but knew I must. It was a mother’s prerogative to ensure that her son’s life, at the very least, was extended beyond her own and if I was in a foreign country, subjected to artillery and mortars, she would have no control over me. I was curious about how she would be holding up right now; no letters from me in a few weeks, no real news from the newsreels either I imagined and even then, it was probably untrustworthy.
I lingered on that last thought perhaps a little too long, as I began to question our motives for war and why the newsreels failed to explain why the German hadn’t splattered my brains all over the floor as soon as he saw all three of us.
As the sun began to bow so low that the light started to fade, I thought about Clarke. Alan Clarke had been a good man, more of a boy who had willingly given himself up for Red and me. I wondered whether he knew he would die in that moment, and if he had known that we had made good of his diversion and eventually got away.
I racked my brains as I tried to think more of his background, to see if I could remember where he was from and try and contact his parents if I was to make it home. It would be the least that I could do for him, apart from maybe try and get him a posthumous medal so his mother could have something to remember him by.
As I shut down the compartment of my brain that was housing all of the Alan Clarke thoughts, I noticed that I must have been quizzing myself about him for longer than I had anticipated as, by now, the sun was long gone, and the cool chill of the early hours of morning were now upon us.
Red stirred as I began to wake him, having had an hour or two more resting than I had done, something that was not his fault, but I was still tinged with a hint of jealousy.
“Time to go?” He queried after a few moments of bringing himself back to full alertness, “Cor…my head ain’t ‘alf pounding.”
“There doesn’t look like there’s any lights on in the village, I think we should make a go of it.”
Suddenly, his skull ache seemed to disappear as he finished rubbing it and pulled himself to his feet.
“C’mon then. Let’s do it.”
We edged our way out of the wooded area and slowly made our way towards the vague silhouette of the village, stopping every hundred yards or so to make sure we had not been separated, and that we hadn’t alerted any sentries who might be watching from a light-disciplined house in the village.
I heard a sickening crack from just behind me, just like when you send a branch smashing into a concrete wall and it shatters into nothing more than a pile of big splinters. As I turned, I expected to see Red standing behind me, apologising for standing on the branch he had managed to accidentally jump on in the dark. But instead, I was met with nothing, he wasn’t there, it was just me and the field. Almost as quickly as I had turned, my head suddenly exploded, and I felt myself crumple into nothing more than a heap of bones on the floor, stars bursting in my closed eyes as I did so.
Groggily, I began to become aware that I was coming round, as I fought off the stars that were flashing all across my vision. My eyes fluttered as I tried to keep them open, but as I did so, my hearing also began to tune back in to my surroundings and I heard voices, English ones.
“They’re with us!”
“How on earth did they make it over there?!”
“What the—”
“You better go and get the Captain.”
A mini row ensued while the figures who had welcomed us began to argue about who should inform their officer that they had just bludgeoned two British soldiers over the head as they walked through a field, before they noticed that I had woken up.
As soon as they did, their demeanour changed, and if being clattered over the head with some sort of wooden cosh had been the price to pay for a few sips of water, I would do it all over again, my mouth had never felt so relieved.
“Woah, easy mate…don’t drink it all at once.”
“How long since you last had a drink?” enquired another voice.
“At least three days…maybe more…I’m not really too sure what’s been going on.”
“Take it easy for a while, then we’ll fill you in.”
I felt so relieved as I began to make out the shapes of rifles attached to these men, so relieved in fact that I was almost prepared to completely forgive them for the excruciating pain that they had put me through with the cataclysmic pounding I had received across my head.
I dozed for what felt like a few hours, but in reality, must have been less than one hour, as I began to reacquaint myself with feeling like my thirst had been quenched. Very quickly, I began to feel more like myself. In the meantime, Red had woken up from his slumber and was being treated to the same reception as I was.
Before too long, apart from my empty stomach, that had stopped rumbling days ago, I felt like I was back to full strength, with only a mild headache lingering over me as a constant reminder to never get on the bad side of these boys.
“So,” I said, heaving myself up, “what’s the situation.” I found myself in a slit trench, now occupied by two standing figures, with Red still perched at the bottom. Obviously looking confused, my new-found friends began to fill me in.
“The Germans are in that wooded area up ahead. Where you were coming from. No idea how you made it through there without being caught, there’s loads of them apparently. We’ve dug these slit trenches as an initial defence, with the village as our secondary position if we’re forced back. We’re expecting them anytime soon really.”
In the hours that followed, Red and I chin wagged with the boys in our slit trench about everything that had happened; from what one of their Sergeant’s had said about our ‘medieval tactics,’ and how their section Bren guns had ‘For Drill Purposes Only’ stamped across their butts, to how we hadn’t fired a rifle since we had been in training and how we all agreed that we would no doubt be in a coffin by the end of the day.
Before long, we had bid a quick farewell to our trench mates, as they were redistributed further over to one of our flanks by a disgruntled corporal, who seemed like he had just been woken up to find two rifles for the two pillocks who had practically stumbled into British lines. Red dozed at the bottom of our trench before I nudged him as a flare was sent up from just in front of the treeline we had staggered from earlier.
“Blimey…they must have been close then.”
As the flare was sent shooting into the sky, I made the most of its graceful descent to spin round and take in as much information as I could. We must have been reasonably well concealed, especially in the fairly limited light of a flare, for Red and I had both failed to spot the system of two and three man slit trenches that littered the field.
According to one of our friends, we were facing eastwards, towards the forest, in order to meet the German advance. Running from the treeline all the way into the village, which was now about eight hundred yards behind us, was a solitary dirt track road, which carved up the open field into two, almost equal square fields. To our far left, ran a river, which was marking the boundary of the northernmost part of the field, too wide it seemed to bother defending in the instance of a potential flanking movement by the enemy.
In the slit trenches that littered the field was the remnant of a rifle company, that had been engaging fresh enemy troops every single day since the initial violence broke out, with three Bren guns, supposedly only to be used in preparation for war, fixed intently on the road that divided the field.
If there really were as many enemy soldiers as predicted by our new acquaintances, we truly were in an awfully sorry situation.
12
As I looked behind me, I realised that the eight hundred yards or so that separated us from the confines of the village, would be one huge slog of a run, considering that we would be in full kit and carrying weapons. The likelihood too was that the retreat to the village would more than likely be determined by the Germans, who would throw everything that they had at us while we
floundered our way across the open ground, potentially in the middle of the day. It was a run that I was not looking forward to, particularly as the boots that we had been issued with would rub more when they were wet, which is how I now found them, meaning that the sodden, loose fibres of my socks, would now begin to attack the yellowing blisters that had now begun to scar my feet.
Voices began to saunter across the field, mixed in with the occasional raucous laughter that I instantly associated with the German column that we had crashed into some days before. I wondered about whether or not it was possible that it was that same German convoy that now taunted us from the other side of the field. Either way, they had been a lot hotter on our heels than Red and I had expected when we had stopped running and started crawling.
Red and I, as well as all the other men that we had attached ourselves to, stood in a perfect silence, simply observing as the flare continued to light up the field and we all clutched hold of our best friends, the ones that seemed like they could get us out of any situation, all it would take would be a simple squeeze of a trigger.
The flare hung limply in the sky for a while longer, allowing me to see large puddles of muddied water that, a few hours ago, would have been an oasis to me, one that I could have quite easily have lapped up like a dog. But now it was of a strategic advantage because, if they had tanks, the boggy ground would have slowed their progress somewhat, which would be helpful if we were going to be crossing open ground to the village with them following us. Unfortunately, their slow progress meant that they would also be gifted with a much more stable firing platform to throw shells at us with, a thought which Red and I both must have had, but kept it tightly locked away in the darkest corner of our minds, not wanting to dent the advantage that these boys assumed they had.
My outlook on the subject was made even darker by the assessment of a Sergeant Greene, who sorrowfully informed me that we had just one anti-tank gun and one mortar if we were to come up against heavy weaponry of a Panzer. I prayed there and then that we would only come up against men, with which we would be able to pour enough fire on them from the mortar to give the impression that we had much heavier weapons than they did, consequentially leading to them holding their tanks in reserve for the time being. I knew though, from experience, that it would probably cause the opposite to occur.
As the intense white, daylight bright light of the flare began to fizzle out into the inky blackness of the French countryside, I thought mournfully of home once again. I thought of my mother, lovingly running around my brother and me, preparing meals and cleaning up behind us, before she had to clear up behind my father too, arriving back from working on the fields of rural Kent. He was a proud man, one who had fought with distinction during the Great War, but he was a man that was not afraid of hard graft and advocated this best in his decision to work as a farm labourer nearby. He did not make much money, but he made enough, and he was more than happy to spend his days outside, with other like-minded men that he knew he could trust.
These idyllic, almost non-existent memories seemed childish now, foolish even as I began to pray that I would see them once again playing out in front of me. I knew though, that even if they did happen as they had done in my memories, they would be tainted, marred by the war that I had fought, by the men that I had already killed. But I have come to a realisation now that, wherever a soldier is in the world and whatever his situation, whether he’s about to go into battle or trying to sort out the conflict in his head, his heart always pines for the same place as always. He wants to be back in the place where he knows, where he is control, where he is safe. He always wants to be back home.
The flare died a quick and un-ceremonial death, forcing the countryside to be enveloped once more by the darkness of a midnight sky, rendering me almost totally blind as my eyes tried to readjust, night vision kicking in weakly a few seconds later. As I embraced the darkness that engulfed me, I began to force my memories of home back into the darkness too, and I made a mental note to keep them there for as long as I possibly could, for fear that it could end up getting me killed.
I had pretty much been up all night and, as the royal blues of the early hours of the morning began to give way to the sun as it drowsily awoke from its slumber, Red offered a chance to let me get my head down. Not allowing him the opportunity to reconsider his offer, I pushed my back up against the wall of the trench and, clutching my rifle in between my legs, slid down till I hit the bottom of the soggy, water filled pit. The coolness of the water was almost refreshing to my skin, as it had become oily and greasy over the last few days after pints of sweat had poured out of me and the darkness offered by the bottom of the trench was also a surprising bonus as I tried to drift off to sleep.
I tilted my tin helmet around on my head, trying to block out the last remaining remnants of sunlight that still managed to sneak through, as I shuffled around, trying to get the haversack that I had strapped to me to align with the contours of my back. As soon as I was semi-comfortable, it seemed that I drifted off to sleep quicker than if I had been knocked out.
My eyes seemed to burn fiercely as I fought to open them, my vision completely blurred with the saline that was attempting to fight the dirt and tiredness, washing it out of me. I could just make out a pair of boots and a set of gaiters, belonging to Red, which had been muddied by the sodden ground that he had been stood in for however long. The pigment of mud at the top of his boots and around his gaiters were a slightly lighter pigment and had started to flake off in large chunks, in total contrast to the sticky, clumpy lumps that clung to the bottom of his boots like gossamer.
I watched as his right boot slowly made its way over to me again, before softly pushing its way into my stomach, treating me to a helping of both dried, flaking mud and its sodden, sticky counterpart. I looked up at him, a little bit annoyed that he had disturbed me in my slumber whereas I had left him well alone. As I reared my head, my eyes took the full force of the sun’s early morning brightness and I instantly forced my head back down in an attempt to recover some of my eyesight before it was burnt to a crisp. Red’s eyes were squinting over the top of our trench, his hand up in a naval like salute to protect himself further, but his gaze was unrelenting, not even to look and see if I had woken up, almost like a loyal dog who stares at his master, looking for direction on what to do next.
He must have noticed the corpse that was stirring at his feet, because the gentle nudges of his filthy boots ceased, and his head gave a subtle shake as he spoke. “Here we go,” it was clear he hadn’t spoken in a number of hours, for his speech was crackled and weak, causing him to cough up a decent amount of phlegm from the back of his throat.
In my exhausted mental state, it took me a while for the words to seep through, but finally they started to register in my mind, which made my depleted stores of energy suddenly very full again and I heaved myself from the soaking wet ground, peeling my now skin-tight trousers away from my buttocks and pushing the butt of my rifle firmly into my shoulder, swinging it up until it rested on the edge of our trench.
Red continued with his insightful dissection of the situation, as I expertly slid the bolt back on my rifle, to make sure there was a glistening brass round waiting in the breech for me.
“They were waiting ‘til the sun was in our eyes. That whole charade last night was just a show,” he started chuckling, “cocky little gits!”
I could just make out the murmurings of others as they nudged their pals awake and readied themselves for the inevitable onslaught that was heading our way. Even from here though, it was difficult to see how many men were in the trenches and exactly where we were. The lay of the land was such that it dipped and had grooves in it, making it harder to spot some of the hastily dug holes that was our redoubt.
As we stood patiently, the early morning dampness slowly making itself known to me as it seeped through my wool socks, a figure approached us from behind, his footsteps making a rather satisfying squelching noise as he manouv
eured his way around.
“Stand to. Do not fire until the section gunners open up with the Brens. Then, conserve ammo. Only shoot at what you know you will hit. We’re not in a tank anymore.”
Corporal Morgan, the man who had begrudgingly sourced a rifle for Red and me in the middle of the night was a funny looking man, of a slim stature but also too short for what I considered the average British Army soldier to possess. He was a Welshmen who, I could only assume, had moved away from the valleys some time ago, as his accent was mixed with a generous helping of East End cockney. As his hunched over frame stumbled and slid his way to the next trench, I couldn’t help but smirk at him as he retreated, I’d never met a Welshmen back in Britain before and, here I was, meeting one, but in France. It was a funny war so far.
It would have been a glorious morning, had it not been for the unsettled feeling in my stomach due to the imminent explosion of a firefight that was looming over me like a hangman’s noose. The sun’s warm embrace was able to stretch itself wide over the fields, and the heat it generated kissed my cheeks and made me feel almost content. A slight breeze began to whistle its way over the field, forcing the sun to play a game of hide and seek with all of us who were perched in our shallow graves, and I watched with fascination as the shadow of the clouds chased the sun kissed patch of the field that it had not yet conquered.
My childlike obsession was shattered by a series of short, sharp whistles, that erupted just beyond the treeline and I felt everyone in unison tense up, not one of us breathing, as if we were one body. I snapped my head back around to face forwards again, away from the daydreams and the reminiscing, to face the pure violence that had just been given the signal to advance.
I pushed the Lee Enfield rifle further into my shoulder, so hard that it felt like it would permanently deform the shape of my body. I squinted with my left eye, almost to the point where it was completely shut and began to scan the landscape before me, through the iron sights that were situated on top of the rifle. I observed, Red observed, we all did, with synchronised level of anxiety and apprehension, as we waited to see what would come out of the tree line.
