‘Just a rat, go back to sleep,’ he said calmly to the other men, who looked at him with disdain. He could just about make out Tom’s faint chuckling beside him, before he started snoring again.
Going by the light they still had a few hours until they were on duty, so George decided to try and sleep again. He lay there with the sound of the rats growing louder in his imagination. He daren’t open his eyes for fear of what he might see, and every movement in the trench made him flinch. He hoped they would find something to eat and leave him alone.
*
The sound was harrowing. The artillery dirge on their arrival to France had been nothing short of terrifying, but this was worse. Much, much worse. They had grown used to the sound of artillery in their short time in the trench, but it had never been as loud as this. It sounded like every gun in France was firing, and firing in their direction. All hell had broken loose, and it brought to mind the description of the apocalypse that had been read out from the Bible, or at least what George imagined it would be like.
Before the assault every gun had been put into service to soften up the Germans and to cut through the wires that kept them from assaulting the enemy trenches. The army high command were determined to throw everything they had. This time the Germans were firing at them. The rifles, along with the rest of their brigade, had relieved the thirteenth brigade on the hill designated Hill 60, just south of Ypres. It was the first major engagement that George had been part of, but he felt like he had been preparing for it for months. The German counter-attacks had been fierce, but they had managed to fight them off time after time. But still the Germans kept firing and firing, determined to push the British back out from Hill 60 – but they had managed to hold so far.
Mud flew up and scattered around no man’s land with each explosion, and with the rain, the site of the opposing trenches was heavily obscured from George. He couldn’t see anything but the sheet of rain and muddy explosions.
The thing that was most surprising to George was that not only could they hear the shells flying overhead, but often they could be seen too, a silver blur in the sky. The bigger ones travelled slowly through the air, labouring until they lost altitude and landed on something in an explosion of brown mud and blood. Everything he had heard about the artillery on the way to the front had been true, but the reality was much more than his imagination could have come up with. The different types of shells made different sounds, and the more experienced soldiers could tell you which one was coming, and which way to run. George couldn’t yet tell them apart.
Two machine gun pits in front of them fired, the guns seeming to chuckle in the dark, and spit hard rounds at the British troops. Men dropped as the guns strafed back and forth, only stopping to reload and then continuing the ceaseless attack. The Germans knew this ground well, they understood its strategic importance, with its views over the surrounding area, and they had brought all their available strength to this section.
George stole a glance along the horizon, careful to keep his head as low as possible. For miles around, the same sporadic light danced, showing the barrage that was taking place across northern France. The French forces to the south were being bombarded by their German counterparts, but the British were being hammered in their own sections. He couldn’t imagine there being much ammunition left after this, but since he had got to France he hadn’t known the artillery to run out. As far as he could tell they only stopped when they slept.
The Germans were coming at them up the hill, firing trench mortars to try and get at the British defensive position. They were forcing the Tommies to keep their heads low, but George and the others knew the need to fight back; they couldn’t let them get near their trenches, or all would be lost.
He could see them through the smoke from the cordite, spiked caps glinting in the afternoon sun. They wouldn’t attack in a desperate charge, but would use explosives to disorientate the defenders, then try to work their way up the hill, using the wreckage of the land as cover. It was fairly effective, but so far no German soldier had managed to make his way inside the British trench.
George leaned his rifle on the sandbag at the top of the firing step and sighted along it. With his eye closed he could move the rifle round searching for targets. A Lewis gun chattered intermittently along the trench from George’s position, forcing the Germans to attempt to flank them.
George saw one German soldier get up from behind a barricade and run to his left in a crouch. He squeezed the trigger of his Lee Enfield and felt it kick against his shoulder, its crack a familiar sound in his ear. The shape of the German soldier lurched and disappeared from view, but George had no idea if he had hit him or had merely caused him to duck. The smoke that clung to the ground obscured anybody from view. One of the most frustrating things was not being able to clearly see your enemy. Before Hill 60, he had spent most of his time in the trench under threat of bombardment and snipers, waiting for the Germans to attack, but never seeing a single enemy soldier. The entire war seemed to be a stalemate. The front line fluctuated, but no ground was ever gained. They had done well to keep Hill 60 so far, but how long would it last?
The machine gun barked out again as more Germans tried assaulting up the incline. One of them stopped to throw a bomb towards the British trench. George leaned into the firing step again and squeezed the trigger. This time he saw a stream of red from his victim as he fell from view. A few seconds later an explosion rocked the place where he had fallen, obscuring the body from sight.
George thought it odd that he didn’t feel anything about having shot the man. As far as George was concerned, he would have done the same had the situation been reversed. In the long downtimes he had often thought about how he would feel when it came to firing his weapon in anger. He had thought he would feel some disgust, but thanks to the heavy drilling the firing mechanism had become almost second nature to him. He could fire very quickly if needed.
He fired off two more rounds and his rifle cracked, causing the Germans below to duck. It was almost as if he was detached from the moment by distance. The German figures in the distance at the bottom of the hill weren’t human, they were only his enemies.
There was a cry of pain beside him, and a thud as a body fell backwards. George didn’t see who. He fired his last round and ducked to reload. Another soldier was crouching down with the prone figure in the gloom. ‘It’s a mess, lad. Someone help!’ he shouted to George.
‘Who’s that?’ George asked, jumping down from the fire step to help.
‘Barnes,’ he said. ‘Someone help.’
George crouched down and the dark shape in front of him resolved into the prone form of Albert Barnes. He gave out a wet gurgling sound as his hands clutched his neck. The bullet had pierced an artery and he was trying to stem his own bleeding. His cap had fallen backwards into the mud and his eyes were bulging out of their sockets. Barnes stared back at George, a look of pleading in his eyes.
‘Oh God.’ A man behind George started muttering. ‘Oh God.’ He kept repeating the same words, insensible.
There was nothing that George could do. He kneeled, trying to get a better view of the wound, but bright red, arterial blood seeped out between Barnes’s fingers. It ran down and mixed with the mud underneath the hastily erected duckboards.
George put his hand under Barnes’s head, trying to support him. ‘Stretcher,’ he shouted, but no one moved. He shouted again, and finally heard the sound of running feet crunching away on duckboards. George didn’t know Barnes well, only that he worked at the newspaper with his brother Joe. At least, he had before the war.
Barnes’s eyes were boring into George’s, as he tried to pull in lungfuls of air, eliciting a gurgle. He tried to say something, ‘pain’, or ‘pay’, George couldn’t say for sure.
‘Stay with me, Albert, we’re getting help. Don’t try to talk. Easy now.’
Barnes started thrashing and coughing. Specks of blood splattered over both his and George’s uniforms as he be
gun to choke on his own blood. George knew that trying to clear the airway wouldn’t help and calling for a medic was futile; by the time any medic arrived Barnes would be dead. So he did his best to calm the dying man, shushing him and talking to him as he grew weak and the light passed out of his eyes.
Until Barnes lay still, dead.
‘Fucking hell.’
Tom leant over George at the dead private. Tom’s face was white with shock and his characteristic grin was nowhere to be seen. George had no words for him and leaned back on his haunches in defeat. He put his hands to his face to cover his eyes, and realised they were covered in blood, which was already going brown. He was suddenly very tired, and he wanted to screw his eyes shut and close out the world. Other men were dying around him, but he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to see it anymore. He screwed his eyes shut, but all he could see was the pleading look that the private had given him before he had died. He would picture it vividly for quite some time, and now he was scared to have his eyes shut at all.
‘You there, Private.’ The shout wrenched George’s eyes open to see the Sergeant storming down the trench. ‘What do you think this is, a bloody church? Stop praying and get up on your fucking firing step, Private. There’s half of bloody Germany out there storming up that hill!’
George grabbed his rifle and jumped up, still careful not to put his head too far above the trench line. Now that the private had been killed he knew there was a sniper or marksman out there.
The Sergeant wasn’t wrong, there were more Germans out there now, and they had managed to work their way further up the hill by another few metres. It was hard work, and they were being cautious, but they were making up ground. However, the more of them that pushed up the hill, the easier targets they became.
George pushed the bolt of his rifle forward and down and fired off two rounds in succession. The first winged an enemy soldier, causing him to dive for cover. The second caught another in the chest.
The Germans couldn’t be allowed to gain a foothold on the hill, their orders had been quite clear: hold Hill 60 at all costs. The British had been desperate to move the line forward to this vantage point, and it was the first bit of ground they had gained in months. The 15th Battalion were the only men stopping it from falling back into enemy hands.
George also thought about the fact that if they didn’t manage to hold on to the position, then he and Tom could lose their lives as the Germans invaded their newly worked trench. To him, that was far more important than some hill he had never heard of before.
But there were too many of them. Field-grey uniforms covered over half of Hill 60. Every now and then, they stopped on their charge to fire their rifles in the direction of the trench, trying to keep the defender’s head down. The sounds of rounds cracking and thudding into their targets filled the senses. The Germans were eerily quiet as they advanced. And it was working. More and more men fell, crying out in shock and pain.
George kept firing his rifle, keeping up a steady stream of rounds as he had been taught, only stopping to reload the weapon after every few rounds. It was more efficient than packing the weapon full, which could cause it to jam. It was amazing how much he had learnt about soldiering in such a small time, but he still had so much more to learn. It was too frantic to see what Tom was up to, but he could hear the crack of his rifle alongside him. Rounds whistled through the air around them in reply, and George heard one or two whip past his head. He closed his eyes for a second and prayed that they wouldn’t hit him.
The German artillery still bombarded sections of the trench. George could hear the low whine and crump of the German shells. Their section could be hit at any moment. It wasn’t worth worrying about, they wouldn’t be around long enough to notice.
An enemy soldier had got up to about twenty metres from the trench, which was far too close for George’s liking. His gun clicked dry and he stopped to reload.
The German stopped and pulled a stick from his belt. He leaned back one arm and balanced himself with the other in order to throw.
At that moment, Tom’s gun cracked beside George. The German was hit in the top of the chest and was thrown backwards down the hill. The grenade, already primed, fell into the dirt. There was a slight delay before it went off. A few field-grey clad figures disappeared in a yellow-white flash. There were several more to take their place.
‘Need more ammunition, here!’ George shouted over the cacophony. He stole a glance around the trench to see if anyone had heard him, and noticed that reinforcements were coming forward down the communication trench, trying to thread their way through the bodies that littered the ground.
Three men wrestled a Lewis gun into position, and the loader immediately dropped to his knees to get the rounds into its firing mechanism. The chattering sound as it opened fire was a welcome relief to George.
He looked back out into no man’s land and watched as a wave of German soldiers were mown down in front of the Lewis gun. They didn’t stand a chance. They fell into a heap, and began moaning in pain, the sounds drifting up the hill to the British positions. Others jumped for cover, and many turned tail and ran back down the hill.
George fired his two remaining rounds into a couple that had tried to find cover, adding them to the field of corpses. He let the fleeing enemy go, having neither the ammunition nor the inclination to shoot them. The sky was growing dark and the Germans disappeared into its welcoming embrace.
*
‘Gas! Gas!’ the sentry shouted, passing the call along the line, before the sound became a choking cough. Everyone was up in seconds, if they weren’t already standing. George didn’t wait to see what the others did, he pulled back from the edge of the trench, looking out for the cloud of gas. Immediately, a faint smell of chlorine permeated the trench. They had managed to survive the night, expecting a renewed attack early in the morning, but this was something else. They had heard that the Germans had used gas in attacks further along the line, but their section had yet to experience it.
‘Quick,’ the Sergeant shouted in his Scottish burr, as he passed George. ‘Wet your bloody handkerchiefs and put them over your mouth and nose. Get on with you!’
George didn’t hesitate as he pulled a white sheet of cloth out of his webbing. He reached down and grabbed a rum bottle at his feet. Not caring whether it was still filled with rum, or had been used for water, he propped his rifle up and doused his handkerchief in liquid, quickly sticking it to his face. He passed the rum bottle to Tom and picked up his rifle again. He didn’t want to be brought up on a charge for losing his weapon. He made sure the cloth covered his nose and mouth and was only happy when it cut out the smell of chlorine, to replace it with a hint of watery rum. It wasn’t an altogether unpleasant smell.
He was lucky that he was positioned a bit further back from the line. Other men hadn’t been so lucky, or so quick to act. Some of them were already choking and pawing at their weeping eyes.
George reached for the nearest man and helped him towards the back of the line. The man was crying out and clutching at his face in immense pain. George could only pass him along to the rear and hope that someone could get him to a dressing station. Tom took the man and helped him back, before returning to face the attack.
The green-white cloud was spreading along the trench now, the wind blowing it the length of the trench rather than into it. That was what had allowed it to sneak up on them so suddenly.
‘Bastards!’ shouted the Sergeant, coming up behind George. The shout was distorted through his handkerchief. ‘Using gas? This isn’t even a bloody war anymore. It’s a farce. Give me a gun and point me at my enemy, I’ll be bloody happy!’
George didn’t respond and the Sergeant ran along the trench to see what was happening. George watched the gas cloud drift and settle low on the ground. It didn’t float up in the air, instead seeming to drift around the obstacles and barbed wire fences that littered no man’s land. But that was no guarantee it was safe where the gas coul
dn’t be seen. It poured over the edge into the trenches like a waterfall, dropping down to the duckboards. George resisted the urge to try and jump out of its way, hoping that it would only harm him if breathed in.
The firing step was covered by the green-white fog, and none of the assembled soldiers wanted to get any closer.
‘If the Germans attack now, we’re done for,’ Tom said, from somewhere behind George. He had finished helping the wounded soldier to the rear. ‘We can’t see a bloody thing. For all we know they could be almost upon us.’
The Sergeant returned, a frown etched on his weathered face.
‘Bugger,’ he said, and continued when he saw Tom and George’s expressions. ‘The procedure for a gas attack is to move to the bloody flanks. But I’ve just checked, the wind is blowing the bloody gas into the trench at either end. So, we can’t form up there.’
The gas filled the trench at a slow speed, so they were safe for the time being. However, the weight of artillery shelling from the Germans was growing stronger. The sporadic explosions around their positions suggested that the Germans had begun firing high explosives as well as gas. They would have to do something quick, or they would succumb to the gas, or be overrun by another German counter-attack.
‘What do we do, Sergeant?’ Tom asked, eyes darting around him for another explosion.
‘I don’t think we can maintain our position here, it’s too bloody precarious.’
At that moment a mortar shell landed in a nearby section of trench, throwing up clods of dirt mixed with red, pink and khaki tatters of bodies. They all ducked instinctively. The trench collapsed in on itself cutting them off from the other end.
‘Retreat,’ the Sergeant shouted, turning towards the communication trench. He started grabbing the remaining men one by one and pushing them back towards their own lines.
Goodbye for Now Page 19
