by John Masters
‘Jesus Christ,’ the corporal muttered. ‘What the hell’s going on now?’
Three men dropped into the crater. ‘Get moving,’ one shouted. ‘Get on, we’re attacking.’
‘Again?’ the sergeant yelled. ‘We’ve been here all day without food or water.’
‘Get moving,’ the man screamed, pushing his rifle forward. ‘That’s it, back,’ the lieutenant said, and scrambled out towards the Germans.
A shell burst in the crater, and Peter seemed to be the only man left unwounded.
Peering out to right and left, he saw the dim shapes of the infantry crawling forward like prehistoric animals, lit by the stuttering flash of the star shells. The machine-guns scythed them down, and even as he watched he saw the attack grinding to a standstill as so many had before. It was like a tide creeping up a beach, fated to get only so far and then to recede, leaving a rotting mess at the farthest point. He felt physically sick at the sight of the slaughter. He could not bear to watch, for there was nothing he could do.
But there was that gap in the German wire directly in front of him and only thirty yards away. More men were jumping into the crater as the new attack died away. He couldn’t tell how many there were--ten, fifteen, perhaps, with rifles and bombs and bayonets ready.
Something could be done, and he could do it. The taste of hunger and thirst was sour in his mouth, and the smell of death clung to his clothes. The lieutenant with concussion had come back, from God knew where.
Peter grabbed his arm and shouted: ‘There’s a gap in our wire that way, sir, that way.’ The poor devil was off his head, but for the moment Peter had to have his rank to get the rest of the men moving. The lieutenant whipped round on the rest of them and shouted: ‘Come on!’
‘Come on!’ Peter yelled, and started up the side of the crater after the lieutenant. He’d go on by himself, if need be. But they’d follow. They were only stunned and frightened and could be lifted out of it, turned into demons. He shouted once more, and then he was over the lip of the crater and running towards the orange-tendrilled jungle of wire ahead. He glanced once over his shoulder and saw that two, three men were following him, and another head had appeared, lividly pale, startled by its own temerity in the burst of a star shell. He turned and saw an astonished German sentry and shot him dead. The lieutenant was dead in his path. Peter threw himself down, the wire-cutters in his hand. Men were beside and behind him. ‘ You,’ he shouted. ‘Keep their heads down with grenades. Slow! Right into the trench! You, you, shoot at anything that moves. Keep their heads down. I don’t need more than a minute.’
They began firing and throwing, while in Peter’s hands the wire-cutters snipped and the wire sprang back, and he crawled on towards the enemy.
Chapter 28
Almost at once it began to rain. In the Alps, in Asia, the rain would have meant protection for fighting men who walked on silent feet with the long knives to kill in their hands, but here on the Western Front silence had gone, like the birds and the girls from the fields, and the rain meant only misery. The long handles of the wire-cutters kicked sharply once in his hands, and he knew that they had been hit in the dark by a bullet or splinter of steel. But he was untouched, and behind him the rain shone on the steel helmets.
The last strands of wire sprang apart with a humming of violin purity. He jumped to his feet, shouting: ‘Follow me, lads!’ The bayonet ran like an oriflamme in front of him, and his lungs were full of shrieking power. He came to the parapet of the enemy’s trench and went eight feet straight down, the bayonet point leading, down through a man’s neck just below the curved rim of his helmet, and out under the opposite armpit.
But he was not fighting mad, and it was a deliberate stroke. At any other time it would have been wasteful--three inches was enough--but now was different, with the eyes of a half- dozen men in field grey hypnotized on to him. They weren’t wounded. Nothing of the weeks-long bombardment had harmed them, and if he was to go forward now he had first to break their will. He stared at them while he lifted the corpse on his bayonet and with a short jerk threw it off at their feet. They raised their hands slowly, never taking their eyes off him.
A rifle cracked in his ear, and one of the surrendered Germans fell, shrieking, his hands to his stomach. Peter wheeled round and slammed the butt of his rifle into Freeth’s jaw. ‘Do you want all the **** to fight for their lives?’ he screamed. ‘Get on round the comer. No, that way, bombs first.’
Freeth scrambled to his feet, mouthing: ‘Yes, sir,’ and spitting teeth into the mud. Peter didn’t know where he’d come from. A soldier dragged the pin from a grenade with his teeth and dropped it over the traverse. Freeth shouted: ‘One, two, three, four.’ They charged round the traverse as the grenade exploded. More British soldiers tumbled into the trench. Peter stood upright under the rain. Fierce stars gleamed over the battlefield, glaring, falling, dying in the rain. ‘This way, that way, this way, that way,’ he shouted, and sent the men running out from him to left and right. To the left the bombs receded along the trench. To the right, where Freeth had gone, they stayed close. Three traverses they’d made, no more. There was no way of telling in which direction lay the nearest communication trench leading to the rear. He grabbed a man’s shoulder and bellowed: ‘Stay here. Send everyone who comes left, that way!’
‘Yazzur,’ the man bellowed, and touched his finger to the rim of his gleaming helmet in a farmer’s-boy gesture. He had a red farmer’s-boy face, and rain and blood streaming down his scratched cheeks.
Peter ran right, found Freeth, and told him to keep trying but he’d get no reinforcements. ‘Yessir,’ Freeth said.
Peter ran back, past the farmer’s boy, and on. Steadily in front of him the bombing receded--crash! One, two, three, four, crash cra-cra-cra-sh! a series of vivid half-subterranean orange flashes, then the yells and screams. He came up with the front of the rush. They were flowing on like a white-hot river, there were dead men and wet, torn faces underfoot, and Germans staring dully, hands up, at the khaki running, shouldering past.
A trench passage opened up in the right-hand wall. This was it, the communication trench for this sector. The river stopped, eddied, wondering what to do. ‘Grenades!’ Peter yelled. ‘Give me grenades, for **** sake!’ Hands pressed three into his hands. He put two in his pocket, wrenched the pin out of the third, and lobbed it over the first traverse in the communication trench. Count four--follow the explosion, bayonet first, and everyone pushing and running behind him. Faster they went, and filled with a kind of ecstasy because they had made a revolution and overthrown the sovereigns of the battlefield, for the machine-guns were quiet on the parapet, and the gunners had become mortal, throats gashed behind the guns, or slumped over them, or fallen half-way back, faces staring at the rain, or standing, like ordinary men, their hands raised.
They cleared the communication trench and burst into the support trench. Peter stood aside to let the flood pass. They were going strong now, with pressure behind. It was safer in the maze of trenches than out on the swept battlefield where the shells still thundered without cease. From the point of his original entry a maelstrom of men was pouring into the German trenches, fanning out both ways, down the communication trench, right and left along the support trench.
They had momentum for a few minutes. He must think. What next? Where now to direct this torrent of confused courage, and its bombs and bayonets? There’d be another support trench ahead, a reserve line; and a communication trench leading to it. But on the right, where Freeth was, they were held up in the front line. If this were an organized battle, like the ones they’d taught him at Manali, he’d do better to lead on, knifing deeper in a straight line, as far as the mortar positions certainly, perhaps to the field guns. Then reserves would pour through behind him, and the Germans on the flanks would be shot up from the rear and both sides. They’d pull back, the British eating away the sides of the breach as the sea eats sand. But it wasn’t like that. Perhaps no battle was like that.
At any moment the Germans might pinch shut that gap behind him, by counter-attacking inward along the front-line trench.
He decided to feint forward, to keep the enemy reserves engaged, but to press his own attack sideways. He would roll the Germans back along the trenches so that the gap would be wide but not deep. It would be easier to reinforce and hold if no preparations had been made for a big advance. There were a dozen men round him now, and in the light of a star shell he saw a sergeant’s stripes.
‘Six Platoon, Forty-third Kents, sir,’ the sergeant shouted.
Peter told him to push on, not more than two hundred yards, keep the enemy busy, and prevent reinforcements from coming forward. ‘Right, sir!’ The sergeant scrambled up the back of the trench, followed by his men, and they all vanished into the rain. More men appeared. He saw a single cloth star and a young, eager face.
‘Second Lieutenant Gale,’ the man said. ‘F.O.O. with the Fusiliers, sir. I’ve lost them. I’d better stick with you.’ The young man was peering at his shoulders, puzzled at finding no rank badges, because Peter was obviously in command here.
F.O.O. That meant Forward Observation Officer. These were the young men who had wires to the guns. Yes, there was a signaller beside him, and the wire trailing back along the trench. ‘Did you hear what I told that sergeant of the Kents to do?’ Peter said.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Be ready to support him on front and flanks.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Freeth was there, his jaw sagging where the rifle butt had hit him, and a sly grin on his twisted face. ‘We’re all here, Major Smith, sir,’ he said. ‘I handed over that front trench to some fellows in the Kents.’
Peter collected them, found a lieutenant, and sent them along the trench to the right. They ran into a pocket of undemoralized Germans on the other side of the second traverse, and he went to get them started. For a few seconds grenades fell like rain, and everyone in the leading bay was wounded, including himself. A splinter took a piece out of his cheek, and he bled heavily. Then they were through, and all the Germans dead, and he left the lieutenant in command and returned to his post, where the communication trench led from the front to the support trench.
The hours passed like grenades, whirling through the night, falling leaden as mortar shells from the sky, dying in the aftermath of the endless explosions. Twelve o’clock, one o’clock, two o’clock, three ... He led half a dozen attacks, pushed back half a dozen German counter-attacks. The artillery subaltern was like a faithful sheep-dog at his heels. That was a capable, brave young man, risking his life all the time, quick and accurate with his orders, skilled and unhurried. Every time trouble threatened, within seconds shells began to burst--crump, crump, boom--all along the place where the counter-attack was forming or among the Germans advancing from their reserve lines.
In the captured trenches there were the beginnings of order and shape. Men stumbled up and down, calling for the Kents, the Fusiliers, the Staffords. God knows how many men were in the captured lines--perhaps a hundred and fifty, and Peter had several sergeants and at least three infantry officers among them, and Freeth calling him Major and muttering: ‘Did you ever see British trenches as good made as these bastards?’
An hour before first light a lieutenant-colonel and a captain appeared, looking fairly fresh, followed by a lot of soldiers loaded down with bright new grenades and full ammunition pouches.
‘I’m Jennings, commanding the Second Glasgow Rifles,’ the colonel said. ‘And this is Taliaferro, the battery commander supporting me. I have orders from division to take over this sector and consolidate. You’re in command here, aren’t you, er---?’
‘Smith, sir,’ Peter said. He leaned back against the wall of the trench and fumbled for his water-bottle. All the fatigue he hadn’t felt during the night now reached him.
The young artillery officer said: ‘Yes, sir, Major Smith’s in command. ‘
The Glasgow colonel said: ‘No one seems to know what’s been happening up here. Your fellows seem to have put up a good show.’ He peered at Peter, worried, like young Gale, because he couldn’t see any rank badges.
‘Thanks,’ Peter said. ‘Freeth, tell everyone to get back to our front line, quick. It’ll be dawn in less than an hour, and then---‘
Freeth said: ‘Yessir,’ saluted smartly, and ran off along the trench.
‘You’re dead beat, sir,’ the young gunner said, catching his arm. Peter found he was swaying, and had to let the young man help him. He’d lost a lot of blood.
They stumbled back along the trenches. The young man pushed and heaved him up what had been the front wall of the German front-line trench, and they were in No Man’s Land. They passed the crater, and later he remembered mumbling, ‘Spent yesterday there. Nice place.’
Then on, past the legs and heads. His old sergeant was there, smiling in the moonlight. Down into their old trench, and he saw faces there, and military police.
‘What regiment?’ they asked him.
‘Birmingham,’ he muttered.
‘Straight back. They’re shelling the reserve lines. Better hurry, mate. It’s .getting light.’
‘Call an officer “sir,” ‘ Gale said furiously, but he was too tired to pursue the matter. ‘Where’s Two-sixty-seven Field Battery?’ he asked.
The M.P. peered at a paper by the light of a torch. ‘Same position, as far as I know, sir.’
They moved on. They tramped down endless trenches to the rear, among stretcher-bearers and carrying parties and walking wounded. They got out into the open shortly after first light and trudged along the sides of the road among the skeletal poplars.
The young officer said: ‘I’m going to make a report, of course, sir, and I dare say it’s none of my business, but--I’ve been out for seven months now, and I’ve never seen anything like the way you got that mess organized. Or anyone so--well--brave, sir.’ He said the word awkwardly, as though mentioning something indecent.
‘Thank you,’ Peter said. The daylight streamed in long, flat bars across the earth, and the rain was stopping.
‘Jolly good idea not even to wear cloth badges,’ the young man said. ‘The snipers have been learning to pick them up.’
Peter said: ‘I am a private.’
The young man chuckled appreciatively, but he was tired, and he said: ‘Major Smith, Birmingham Regiment, isn’t it, sir? I have to know for my report--and if I and your Private Freeth have anything to do with it, sir, you’ll get a V.C.’
‘Anything you like,’ Peter said. ‘Call me Wilcot, South Wiltshire Yeomanry--or Walsh, Rifle Brigade. It doesn’t matter.’ His head was spinning, and he really felt that he might be Harry or Gerry just as easily as Smith or Savage.
The young man stopped anxiously. ‘Are you sure you’re all right, sir?’ He looked up and down the road, but there was no one near them just then.
‘Quite all right,’ Peter said. ‘You’re a good boy. Don’t believe in anyone, or you’ll get into trouble.’
‘I’ve got to go,’ the young man said. ‘My battery’s behind the wood. Can’t I get someone to look after you till you reach hospital, sir?’
‘No,’ Peter said. He grabbed the boy’s hand, said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and walked on. The poor boy was staring at him, not knowing what to do.
But everyone on that road was near the end of his tether and when Peter glanced back, a hundred yards farther on, the young man had given up and was stumbling slowly across a muddy field towards his battery. The German heavy artillery from five or six miles behind the front line was ranged in, and every now and then huge, dull explosions tore up the fields or crashed on the road. Peter kept trudging back and back, and gradually men caught up with him so that again he was in a tide, but now he was of it also, and it had no leadership and no will, just the power of automatic movement. If he had stood up there and raised his hand, or even taken each paste-skinned sleepwalker and turned him round, they would all have walked the other way with as little knowledge
or care.
He had done it again, and even in his extreme exhaustion he could feel a thin tightening of hatred and fear of himself. Glory, glory trailed about him, and the young man would remember him all his life--the brave hero he had met in the trenches before Thiepval.
If he had not led through the gap in the wire, they would all have stayed in the crater. The attack would have wholly failed, as it was destined to do. He had torn a gap in the German wire and launched men against grenades and bayonets until they had wrenched victory and glory from defeat. Tonight the Germans would mount a full-scale counter-attack and, since they could fire into the gap from three sides, they would succeed, and more men would die, and afterwards all would be as it had been before.
Worse than any thoughts of the men he had killed was the realization that he had no real power of self-control. In spite of his vows to be among people instead of in front of them, he had fallen to the first serious temptation.
He trudged ever more slowly, because some day this road that stretched on and on in front of him would come to an end, and he did not know what he was going to do when he got there. If he had lost control over himself, where else could he turn?
There was a sign at the edge of a little farm--BIRMINGHAMS--and a couple of soldiers. But that wasn’t his place any more, with so many men lying dead in the German trenches because of him, and the rest agog with the heroism of Private Smith. He couldn’t face them, because he knew what they’d have waiting for him--a good big medal, the V.C. or the D.C.M., and a commission. All their faces would be proud, as Gerry’s used to be, as Adam Khan’s used to be, as Emily’s used to be, because the elemental shape of power had come among them and taken them to places where they would be glad, tomorrow, not to have been.
