by Mark Morris
When we received orders on August 9th that our battalion was to embark on a ‘bite and hold’ operation further up the line, I had a feeling that this was it, that Frank’s story, which he had related to me on the tube train after rescuing me from Queens Road Cemetery in Walthamstow, was about to play out. Our mission was to advance on a chateau close to the infamously desolate Menin Road. Held by the Germans, the chateau was surrounded by an interlocking series of pillbox defences, which, despite a prolonged shelling campaign, had so far stubbornly refused to yield. What we’d been ordered to do was launch an all-out attack – basically to charge into the enemy’s line of fire and take the pillboxes, and hence the chateau, through sheer weight of numbers. We knew that many of us would die, that row after row of us would be torn apart by German bullets. But some of us would get through – enough, it was calculated, to do what needed to be done. It was a desperate, horrible gamble, but we had no choice but to obey the orders we’d been given.
On August 10th we marched fifteen miles through a landscape of mud and shattered tree stumps to our destination, acutely aware that a fair proportion of us wouldn’t be coming back; wouldn’t be seeing England, or our loved ones, ever again. It wasn’t only because of our sombre mood that we marched mostly in silence, though. It was also because the going was tough, and we needed all our strength to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It had been a wet August and the mud was deep and clinging. Added to that we were each carrying not only our usual share of equipment, but also extra tools and ammunition, aeroplane flares, bombs, sandbags and various other bits and pieces. Plus we had to keep moving to the side of the road to let through droves of bedraggled-looking prisoners, or motor ambulances bringing the dead and wounded back from the Front.
Though distant, the noise of shell fire from up ahead was continuous and deafening. It went on all through the night, which we spent in the miserable remains of a wood, shivering and unable to sleep because of the relentless din. At sunrise we were off again, walking the last couple of miles to our rendezvous point – a bombed-out lodge adjoining a stable block. By the time we arrived we were pretty much the opposite of a crack fighting unit, but we had very little chance to rest and regain our strength. We were to launch our attack later that afternoon, and so, after a quick breakfast and a couple of hours of nervously sitting around, we were once more up and moving, all too aware that for some of us today would be our last on earth.
‘Bit of a bugger, eh, Alex?’ Frank said from behind me as we made our way in single file through a zigzagging maze of communication trenches. His voice was tight with apprehension and exhaustion. It was the first time either of us had spoken for a while.
I glanced over my shoulder, and the shock that went through me was like being doused with icy water. Frank looked deathly, his skin clammy and pallid, his eyes shadowed in hollow sockets. For a second I thought time was taunting me, thought I’d been given a glimpse into the future. Then I realised that Frank was just like the rest of us – scared, exhausted to the point of dropping, and so drenched in sweat that his hair was plastered darkly to his forehead. I tried to grin, but my lips were dry and peeled back from my teeth only slowly. The effect must have been both skull-like and sinister.
‘That’s an understatement,’ I croaked
‘We’ll be okay, though, won’t we?’
Maintaining my grin made my jaw ache. ‘We can but hope.’
Doubt flickered across his face, and I realised how desperately he needed my reassurance. Almost bullishly he said, ‘Course we will. There’s no “hope” about it, old chum. We’ll come through this lot with flying colours.’
We trudged on. Two hours slid by, then a third. At last a message began to filter back down the line: Nearly there. Even so, it was another twenty minutes or more of back-breaking plodding before we were finally able to halt. Regardless of the filthy conditions, we shrugged and wriggled free of our burdens, then pretty much collapsed where we stood into steaming, sweat-drenched heaps.
As soon as we were down the groans started. The pains we’d been holding at bay – from over-stretched limbs, aching backs, blistered feet –rushed in and overwhelmed us.
‘My poor plates,’ muttered Frank, who was slouched against a muddy wall, unconcerned by the fact that the wetness was seeping into his clothes.
A ginger-haired lad to my right, whose name was Jud Barclay, was in so much pain his freckled face resembled a clenched fist. ‘No need to send me over the top,’ he gasped. ‘Just shoot me now and have done with it.’
It was an accepted fact among the men that the best cure for fear was tiredness. Get tired enough and you didn’t care what happened to you. All you wanted was to let everything go, to slip into oblivion. There’d been a lot of unspoken fear in the ranks when we’d first received our orders. You could see it in every set of eyes you looked into. You could feel it too, like the low thrum of a generator. But as we’d neared our destination, some of that fear had drained away, along with our physical energy. Not all of it, but enough to enable us to carry out our orders without question, to do what was expected of us. That was why men were able to run into hails of bullets, why they were able to function in situations that seemed, to an outsider, so terrifying that it was impossible to contemplate anything other than curling into a ball.
Fatigue was the key. Fatigue combined with the adrenaline of battle. It was a fine balance. Fatigue made you fearless, whereas adrenaline restored the mental and physical sharpness you needed to carry out your mission without also restoring the more complicated bits, like emotions and self-awareness. Fatigue and adrenaline made you into a robot, a machine. And if you survived it was usually only later, when your body was resting, recharging itself, that your ability to think, to contemplate, to remember and to respond emotionally was restored to you. And it was often then when it hit you – what you’d been through, what you’d done. And that was when it became hard to deal with. When you stopped being a machine and became a human being again.
At that moment, sitting in the trench, we were all machines. Even me, who had the bigger picture to give him perspective, who was able to see round corners, was not entirely immune.
I was detached enough, though, as the officers in charge told us what our country and our loved ones back home expected of us, to feel like an outsider looking in. I noted the dull-eyed compliance on the faces of the men; I noted their sheep-like acceptance. They were boys, most of them. They’d had their innocence torn away in the most brutal manner possible, and yet their instinct was still to obey without question, to trust that their elders and superiors knew best.
It was obscene. Obscene and terrible, and yet at the same time unavoidable. And it was a story as old as time. Sacrifice yourself and the Gods will smile down on your people.
The rest of the day was a limbo. We sat around, waiting for the order to advance, machines waiting to be switched on. My hand kept creeping restlessly to my hip pocket, kept patting the heart as if to ensure it was still there.
Then suddenly it was time.
It felt like late afternoon, 5 or 6 p.m. maybe. We were ordered to stand, to get in line, to make ready. The men had the self-absorbed, slightly glazed look of footballers in a dressing room about to run out onto the pitch. A quick battle with Jerry and then home in time for tea.
The bombers went first, their mission to crawl forward and lob their bombs in and among the German pillboxes, try to create as much mayhem as possible. While they were doing that, those in the front line would provide them with covering fire from within the trench before going up and over the top themselves. Then the rest of us would follow, wave after wave, the idea being to pour forward more men than the Germans had bullets, or at least the ability to fire them.
‘They’re cowards at heart,’ our officers assured us. ‘Soon as the Boche realise what’s happening they’ll turn and flee. We’ll do this with minimal casualties.’
Military spin doctoring bullshit, of course. Though some of the m
en might have believed it. We lined up like children in a school dinner queue, waiting our turn. Some way ahead of us – too far for us to see what was happening – a distant voice shouted an order. For long seconds there was silence… then the firing began, from both sides. Which meant the bombers were on their way.
We kept shuffling forward, until eventually we could see the men ahead of us, scaling the wooden ladders which had been set up against the long, muddy wall of the trench, plunging forward once they reached the top. Then starting to run – or rather wade – through the debris-strewn quagmire beyond, rifles at the ready.
‘Don’t start firing until you get a clear shot,’ we’d been told – though how many would panic in the heat of battle and start blazing away with their friends and colleagues still in front of them? How many British soldiers would be killed not by a German bullet, but by a British bullet in the spine or the back of the head?
The noise was tremendous, the rain of explosions and bullets from both sides like a continuous, demonic screech of rage and fury. I felt a tingling like electricity inside me. This is it, a voice kept repeating inside my head. It was a voice full of disbelief, excitement and unalloyed terror. This is it. This is it.
But what if it wasn’t it? What if something went wrong? What if Frank and I got separated? What if I got hit? What if, in this timeline, I died?
Or would that never happen? Would the heart rescue me? If a bullet was heading in my direction, would the heart snatch me away, to another place, another time?
The line of men ahead of us started climbing the ladders. The ginger boy, Barclay, was among them. I watched his mud-caked boots clumping up the wooden rungs. Smoke drifted over the parapet, like wraiths eager to snatch away those about to sacrifice their lives. The smoke smelled acrid, metallic. As it caught in my throat, I coughed; it tasted like blood. Barclay became swathed in smoke, and then he disappeared over the top. The last I saw of him was the heel of his left boot. I wondered what sights had filled his vision as he’d gone over, what horrors he was looking upon now. In a few moments I’d find out.
Climbing the ladder I was overwhelmed by the momentousness of the occasion. I couldn’t get my head round the fact that the day I’d been grimly moving towards was finally here, and that in an hour or a few hours from now I could be a hundred years in the future, back with my loved ones, clean and warm, sipping the best cup of tea I’d ever tasted, sleeping in my comfortable bed.
But then another thought chased the fantasy down: What if today wasn’t the day? Frank had told me he’d died at the Battle of Passchendaele in August 1917, but the Battle of Passchendaele wasn’t a single skirmish; it was a campaign stretching over four months. So what if Frank wasn’t destined to die today? What if he was destined to die next week, or the week after? I had to prepare myself for that eventuality, had to be mentally ready.
All these thoughts whizzed through my head as I climbed the ladder.
And then my head was above the parapet, and I was looking out over the battlefield.
Smoke. Mud. Hunched shapes running. The flash of explosions and gunfire.
And bodies. Strewn across the ground, twisted into such unnatural shapes that they didn’t look human.
My gaze slid and jittered. Adrenaline revved my engine into overdrive, sped everything up, suppressed my emotions, erased my ability to think calmly and logically, while at the same time it boosted my instincts, my primal responses.
I went over the top and started to run, my hurtling thoughts carrying my cumbersome body along with them. My senses seemed to condense into a basic state – no frills, no subtleties. Tunnel vision; a roar of noise; the weight of the gun in my hand; the smell and taste of smoke and metal.
Did bullets whizz by me? Did they miss me by millimetres? If so, I wasn’t aware of them. The situation narrowed further, became unreal, like a computer game. Dark, moving shapes ahead of me. One of them fell, then another. I couldn’t see my destination, or what direction I was running in. All was haze, a shifting of light and dark.
Where was Frank? I should stay with him. I looked to my left, then my right, but couldn’t make him out. All the running figures were nothing but black shapes wreathed in smoke.
Shit. I felt the beginnings of panic. Tried to tell myself to calm down. I looked to my left again, willing my mind and vision to clear. The future could depend on this. I couldn’t afford to—
I ran into something. Or something smashed into me. I felt the impact in my right temple. My first crazy thought was that someone had hit me with a hammer. Whatever it was, it was powerful enough to spin me round. My body whirled like a top. Then I was falling. I hit the mud with a smack and seemed to keep on sinking, to slip right through the mushy outer skin of the earth. I put my hands out, but there was nothing there. I saw the sky beneath me. Was I dreaming? Had the heart snatched me away?
The barrage of gunfire, the roar of explosions so continuous they sounded like one unending burst, started to twist themselves into new shapes. I listened, convinced that something – the War itself, maybe – was trying to communicate with me. Was that a voice? What was it saying? After a moment I realised it was louder on my left side, and focused my concentration in that direction.
And all at once the blur of sounds became sharper. And I realised it was a voice. And the voice was yelling into my ear: ‘Alex! Speak to me, mate! Speak to me!’
I didn’t know my eyes had been closed until I opened them. I thought I’d been fully aware, thought I’d been falling upwards and trying to slow myself down by grabbing the edge of the sky. It was only when my eyes opened that I realised those thoughts made no sense, that they must have been part of a dream. But if I’d been dreaming that meant I’d been asleep, so where was I now? In bed? In which case, why was I so cold and wet? And why was my head hurting? And why were insects scurrying over my face, filling my eyes and stinging my eyeballs?
No, not insects. Mud. The voice was saying, ‘Hold on, Alex. Hold on.’
Then something was brushing at me. Fingers. A hand. Brushing the mud off my face, picking flecks of dirt out of my eyes. My eyes still felt gritty, but now I could see Frank leaning over me, concern on his face.
‘Wha,’ I said, and felt mud in my mouth. I spat it out and tried again. ‘What happened?’
Hearing those two words, Frank started to grin. ‘You got shot, you daft old sod.’
‘Shot?’ I tried to shake my head, but it hurt like buggery. It felt as though my skull had been broken into several pieces and the sharp edges were rubbing against one another. The pain made my eyes water, which at least washed out more of the mud. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not me who gets shot.’
‘Well, you did,’ Frank said. ‘Right in the noggin.’ He must have seen the expression on my face, or maybe it was his own relief that made him laugh. ‘Don’t worry. It was a glancing blow. Ricocheted off the edge of your helmet. Made a right dent, it did. I saw you spin and go down. Bang! Thought you was a goner.’
I was recovering now, starting to remember where and when I was, what I was supposed to be doing. The roar of battle was still going on. Men were running past us, their feet thumping through mud. I tried to rise, but the mud held me fast. Frank slid a supportive hand behind my back.
‘Give yourself a minute,’ he said. ‘I don’t reckon—’
Then he stopped talking, and suddenly, shockingly, the life went out of his face. I saw it go, like an invisible mask. He sagged, went limp, then toppled forward, right on top of me.
I caught him, wrapped my arms around him. ‘Frank!’ I shouted. ‘Frank!’ My right hand was on his back, and all at once I realised how wet and slippery it was. I held it up, raising it above his left shoulder to look at it. It was bright red, drenched in blood.
Using all my strength, I heaved myself on to my left side, Frank’s limp body rolling off me. Now our positions were reversed. He was the one lying on his back in the mud and I was kneeling over him. And now I could see the hole in his chest, just left o
f centre. Blood had been pouring out of it like water from a punctured bag. The fronts of our uniforms were sodden with it. I realised the bullet must have entered his body through his back and exited through his chest, passing through his heart en route. What was it he had said to me about his own death? ‘Bull’s-eye, right in the heart. Snuffed out without so much as a by-your-leave.’ Something like that, if not those exact words.
Well now here we were, at that moment. When he’d related his story on the tube, it had been in his past and my future. Now it was in both our presents, and it was up to me to play my part.
Around us the battle raged on, but I felt as though we were enclosed in our own little bubble. My head throbbing from the bullet that had glanced off my helmet, I reached into my pocket with a hand covered in Frank’s blood and withdrew the heart. I pressed it to his chest, as if plugging the hole, and held it there, closing my eyes and letting my mind go blank, trying to focus on nothing but siphoning my energy through the heart and into Frank. I didn’t know if that was what I was supposed to do; I was operating purely by instinct.
I pictured the underside of the heart softening, changing. In my mind’s eye I saw tendrils extending outwards, cautiously at first, probing at the ragged, wet edges of Frank’s wound, and then sliding forward, into his body. I saw the tendrils working away busily inside him, like the nanites in my own body that were even now fixing whatever minor damage was causing the throbbing percussion in my head. I saw them repairing Frank’s ruptured heart, sealing his wounds, patching him up. And then, once his body was whole again, I imagined life-energy pulsing from the heart and rippling along the tendrils, filling his body and bringing him back to life.
