by Curran, Tim
The night was tenebrous, the air dank and cloying. Now and again, they could hear the Germans cry out as they made some grisly discovery.
“Bloody hell,” Burke muttered when he stepped on a body and three or four oily rats escaped the abdomen with meat in their jaws.
Creel found a corpse that was moving and Haines, using his bayonet, discovered why soon enough: there was a rat nest inside it. Worked into a mad frenzy, he slashed the adults into ribbons and stomped the blind squirming pups to paste.
Haines told them to don their gas masks when they started to see dozens and dozens of rats creeping about on their bellies like great fleshy slugs. They’d all been poisoned by the gas and were dying in numbers. A couple of the Tommies started kicking them like footballs, giggling as they went sailing away into the brown slop.
About thirty minutes into it, they found three corpses tangled together at the edge of a run of duckboard. They were men from the 12th and Haines and the others recognized them, despite the fact that they were covered in yellow slime.
“Look here,” Haines said. “Rats again.”
The bellies of all three had been hollowed out quite thoroughly, even the flesh of their throats were missing. Haines and the others stood around in their bug-eyed masks, swearing and kicking at anything handy while Burke had a closer look. He waved away clouds of flies that were thick as a blanket.
“See?” he said to Creel, out of earshot of the others, pointing to great gashes and punctures in the bones of exposed ribs by lantern light. “Ain’t no rat ever born had teeth like that. Too big.”
“Dogs?”
But Burke just shook his head and would not say.
“Footprints over here…small ones,” one of the Tommies said.
They went over to the duckboard and there was a crowding of muddy footprints on it which was not so surprising except for two things: they were the prints of bare feet and very, very small.
“Children,” Burke said. “Children’s prints.”
“Out here?” Haines said, stripping off his mask and mopping his sweaty, mottled face. There was something quite akin to stark horror in his eyes. “No kids…not out here…”
But the evidence was unmistakable: children had been out in No-Man’s Land stalking about barefoot. It seemed inconceivable, but to each man standing there, there was no denying what they were seeing. Sometimes mud could expand in size with the dampness, make prints larger than they were but certainly not smaller.
Nobody said anything for some time and Creel thought that moment would be burned into his brain forever: the Tommies standing around, ankle-deep in the Flanders mud, rain running down those grim gas masks, mist coiling about them, corpses rotting in the muck.
And as he framed that moment in his mind with something quite near to hysteria, a voice in the back of his head said: The prints of children. Children are out scavenging No-Man’s Land by night. Barefoot children. And these bodies have been eaten by something that is not rats or a wild dog, Burke says. You don’t dare make the connection because it would be insane to do so….yet, yet you know something is terribly, dreadfully wrong with this scenario. You can feel it in your guts, in your bones, in the shadowy recesses of your soul.
“Heard a story once about—” one of the Tommies started to say and Haines jumped on him, took hold of him and shook him wildly. “You’ll shut up with that talk! Do you hear me? You’ll shut up with it!”
After that, solemn as only undertakers can be, they finished up their work quickly, each man suddenly very aware of the long shadows stretching around them and what might be hiding in them. They wasted no time in getting back to the trenches.
For there was something damnably unnatural haunting No-Man’s Land and they all knew it.
7
Tall Tales
The Tommies, when they gathered in the dugouts to warm their fingers about the glowing little coal brazier at night, their bellies warmed from the daily rum ration, would start telling crazy tales by the light of the moon. And maybe sometimes that was because they had a story to tell and sometimes because they just needed to hear their own voices.
Creel understood that part of it just fine.
After a particularly violent barrage in the Le Touquet sector by German 18-pounders, whizz-bangs, which blew sandbags into fragments, a young private from the 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers with eyes like smoked glass kept touching his arms and legs and chest in the observation trench.
Standing there, knee-deep in the frozen mud, Creel said, “It’s okay, son. You’re still intact.”
“Oi, it’s not that, sir,” said the private, touching his grime-streaked face. “It’s not that at all, you see. It’s just…well, I’m making sure I’m solid and what, not a ghost. One minute you’re solid as brick, the next naught but a ghost drifting about.”
In the trenches where death came so swiftly there was a real need to prove to yourself that you were truly alive, a thing of flesh and blood. When you spent week after miserable week living in what amounted to sandbagged ditches with freezing drizzle raining down on you, ears ringing from machine-gun fire, the pitted landscape a cratered run of barbwire and unburied corpses lit at night by flickering green flares…it all became very surreal. And the need to prove to yourself that you were not in some desolate hell or purgatory whiling away eternity became very strong.
Creel had felt it himself more than once.
Scribbling down the vagaries of life in the trenches, the madness was always there and he was mute witness to it. Very often, it vented itself in the form of stories. Particularly after a fierce action or raid, like bad blood that had to be lanced.
He’d heard about monstrous packs of rats that took down living men. About visions of Christ and the Virgin Mother in the trenches. The phantoms of dead men patrolling the perimeters. And from one particularly terrified sergeant of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, he’d heard about a creature half-bird and half-woman, a hag that fed on corpses (later he learned that was an old one, so old it had hair growing on it, a twice-told battlefield tale that predated the days of Cromwell).
But he was a realist.
Seventeen years as a combat correspondent will do that. It will leech the poetry from your soul and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. War, any war, is bad enough without a fertile imagination complicating things.
But after the burial party…and what that German sergeant had said…he began thinking differently.
It was the state of those corpses and the footprints that haunted him for days afterwards. Maybe it meant nothing at all…yet, his mind would not let go of it. Over and over again, it went through what he’d seen out there and he began to get that feeling in his gut he hadn’t had in years…the sense that he was onto something. And when that feeling grew strong, when he smelled the blood in the water, he knew he’d have to track it to its source, one way or another.
But he went slow.
He went easy.
When you were in his position, there by the good graces of the BEF—even if their reasons weren’t exactly altruistic—you could not make waves. He wasn’t like some of the British newsies, guys like John Buchan or Valentine Williams, Henry Nevinson or Hamilton Fife, established accredited war correspondents. They had been selected by the Brits to shovel out the propaganda and were doing a bang-up job at it, steering the British public away from the godawful truth of the war and finely tuning their misguided perception of a valiant struggle against the bloodthirsty savage Hun (with only light, acceptable losses, of course). If they knew the truth of what was being done with their sons and husbands, brothers and fathers in the meatgrinders of the trenches, there would be rioting in the streets.
Creel was offended by censored news.
Maybe his own stories were watered down, but he did manage to keep a somewhat despairing undercurrent to them. He would not be a tool of corrupt politicians regardless of what side of the Atlantic they spawned on.
But he knew he had to be careful.
He had to step light.
So he didn’t make much noise at first, he just listened.
And he kept hearing the same thing again and again: there was something out there. Something that wasn’t a man. Something that fed on the wounded and dying. He jotted it all down in his notebook, thinking it was the sort of thing that might spice up yet another dreary account of war.
Then three men of the 12th disappeared from a listening post a stone’s throw from the German forward trenches. And this after not one but two wire-cutting parties failed to return.
“It’s nothing but the Jerries,” Sergeant Haines said. “They snuck up on ‘em, took ‘em prisoner. Them Jerries is quite good at things like that.”
It was always possible. But Sergeant Stone, who’d led the three, was extremely capable.
“So when are you going out?” Creel asked him.
“Tomorrow,” Haines said. “We’ll have a bit of a look. Be a morning mist coming in.”
“I want to go with.”
“You?”
“Yes.”
The sergeant sighed. “All right. But you carry rifle and kit like the rest. If you lag, you’re left behind.”
8
No-Man’s Land
Haines was right about the mist: it came with the dawn, white and fuming, a perfect enveloping wall that obscured everything, turned all the wreckage out in No-Man’s Land to gray indistinct shapes. As the sun rose higher and higher, it did not dissipate. It seemed to be steaming from the broken, mud-slicked ground itself. It fell over the trenches like a shroud and visibility was down to ten or twelve feet. Creel could hear the men and the clank of their equipment but not see them.
There was no time to admire the fog as the officers and sergeants called for the men to “stand to” and up on the fire step they went, bayonets fixed to guard against a dawn raid. It was the same every day. Afterwards came what the Tommies called the “morning hate” in which both sides exchanged machine-gun fire and some light shelling just to relieve the tension of waiting. It didn’t last long. The soldiers stood down, cleaned rifles and equipment, were inspected by the officers.
“Hear you’re coming for a walk with us,” Corporal Kelly said to Creel as they breakfasted on hard bread, bacon, and biscuits.
“Thought I might,” Creel told him.
“Won’t be good out there, sir,” Kelly said, shielding his rations from a light falling rain. “If I was you, I’d change me mind. You don’t have to go but we do.”
There was no getting past the dread underlying his words, but was that the understandable fear of the enemy or was it something else? Creel didn’t ask. No sense getting any of the boys worked up and nervous like he was.
“The bloody situations you get me in,” Burke said to him as he had a cigarette. “Think I’d be safer in combat.”
“Something’s going on out there,” Creel told him, “and I have to find out what.”
“Still on that, mate?” Burke said.
“Yes, and I’m going to be on it until I figure it out. You can’t tell me you don’t sense it like I sense it. It’s there. Something incredible. Something unreal.”
That made Burke laugh. “You believing them stories? Old Creel? The kingpin of cynical bastards everywhere? Cor, I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“You saw those prints. You felt something out there.”
But Burke wouldn’t have it. “Not me, not me. Didn’t feel a thing. And I didn’t on account I like to sleep at night.”
The mist still held thick after breakfast and Haines gathered them together—Creel, Burke, Kelly, and a Private known as Scratch because of his lice infestations—and they climbed up on the fire step. Captain Croton scanned the perimeter with his trench periscope. “Right,” he said. “Good time as any.”
As they went over the sandbags, Creel understood the fear that ate at every man on the line. As foul and disgusting as the trenches were, there was safety in them and out beyond was death waiting, hiding in every draw and pocket. They crawled over the muddy ground, slipping through breaks in the barbwire ramparts that were tangled with bird-picked skeletons, and soon enough they were out in No-Man’s Land.
Though the fog was still heavy, Creel could see the shattered landscape of shell-holes, oozing pink clay and pooling brown mud, heaps of pulverized brick. There had been a forest or wood here at one time and now it was just a wasteland of stumps and limbless trees rising up like telegraph poles amongst sucking black mud holes crisscrossed by duckboard.
“All of you stay behind me,” Haines said. “Stay on the duckboard and be quiet.”
“Do what the bloody git says,” Burke said under his breath.
“What was that?”
“Nothing, Sergeant,” said Burke, grinning.
Gripping his Enfield, sixty pounds of fighting kit on his back, Creel did as he was told as they moved single file down the duckboard which seemed to sink into the mud as their weight pressed down upon it. Dirty water sloshed over their ankles and the stink of putrescence rose from pools of muck that were inundated with assemblages of corpses, maggoty and green, white bone shining through graying hides. Corpse-flies filled the air with a steady low buzzing. Out in the mist, he could hear the splashing and squeaking of rats.
How Haines navigated, he did not know. No sun, no stars, nothing but the repetitious expanse of stumps and sinkholes, the rain coming down in sheets, bomb craters bubbling with brown water, a muddy slime sluicing over the duckboard itself. But Haines was an old hand. He’d been in the trenches since the beginning, fighting amongst the slapheaps and pitheads of the Mons coalfields and leading suicidal charges against German Jager Battalions at the Battle of Marne. Maybe he had the intelligence and personality of a toad, but he knew his business.
The duckboard sank away just ahead but they stayed on it, feeling it beneath them as they waded through thigh-deep water that was cold and heavy, floating with branches and abandoned ration tins and empty rusting cordite cans, all matter of refuse. Rats swam from one heap to the next, huge things, bloated and greasy. The duckboard carried them up out of the swamp and soon enough there was no more duckboard—just the remains of the forest ahead, the shafts of blackened trees like graveyard monuments, crowded, leaning, strung with rusting barbwire, mist like white lace drifting about their trunks.
Haines led on and the muck was up to their knees but thankfully got no deeper. The sergeant let them rest a moment while he took a bearing with his compass. There were rags and bones, boots and helmets everywhere as if the moist, steaming earth had regurgitated a meal of men. Scratch and Kelly sorted around a bit, finding shell casings and old Lewis gun drums, scaring carrion crows from the remains of Hun soldiers.
“Look at this,” Scratch said, holding up a German helmet with a bullet hole channeled neatly through it. “He took it in the head, poor bastard.”
“Aye, but it was quick, weren’t it?” Kelly said, gnawing on some canned Bully Beef.
“You eating again?” Burke said.
“I’m hungry.”
“Swear you got the worms or something.”
“Pipe down,” Haines told them, reading his compass.
Creel sat there smoking, clicking off a few shots of the wreckage around him with his Brownie. He did not need to be there at all and he knew it. He could have had a soft, cushy job back home in Kansas City. He rated an editor’s job, but here he was in this misting netherworld of rats and crows, carrion and mud. He didn’t belong here…then again, he hadn’t belonged in the Balkan Wars or the Mexican Revolution, the Second Boer War or the Boxer Rebellion, but he’d been there and now he was here.
War and the litter it produced, always drew him.
Sighing, he watched Kelly and Scratch.
Just kids. That’s all they were. Maybe the atrocities of the trenches had bleached the innocence from their eyes and replaced it with a perfect hollow glaze of indifference, but they were still kids. He watched them scavenging, playing in the mud while Burke j
ust shook his head. They found the fully articulated skeleton of a Hun officer gripping a tree trunk for dear life. They could not pry him loose…he had grown into the tree with ropy tendrils of decay like the fibers of woodrot threading through a deserted house.
Haines gave the word and they moved on, splashing through the muck, rain running from the brims of their steel helmets. It grew very quiet. Nothing moved. Nothing scurried. Water dripped from the trees, but little else. The mist blew around them in churning clouds. Creel wiped a mixture of cold sweat and colder rain from his face, very much aware of the beat of his heart. His greatcoat and mud-slicked boots seemed like concrete. He thought if he stopped completely he would simply sink away. He was seeing things moving around them, but he knew it was imagination…ghosting, long-armed forms at the periphery of his vision.
“Down,” Burke suddenly said.
They crouched in the mud, not seeing anything or hearing anything…then three ghostly forms emerged from the fog: a German reconnaissance patrol, faces blackened, bayonets fixed. They moved with an eerie silence over the boggy ground, not muttering a word. They faded into the mist and Creel could not be certain that they hadn’t actually been ghosts.
Ten minutes later, fighting through mud pools and crawling over the exposed roots systems of blasted trees, they sighted the trench system and ruined dugout Sergeant Stone and his men had been using. Creel could see a nearly-obliterated sandbag rampart enclosing a series of trenches flooded with a slimy yellow muck which bobbed with rat corpses. There was a crumbling brick wall that looked like the remains of a house or hut that had taken direct hits from heavy artillery. A single dead tree rose up above it, hooded crows gathered on its remaining branches.
