Slaughter Fields

by Thomas Wood

  “Bit like you then, Beattie,” cut in Harris, as quick as flash, which got him the pleasure of a cigarette butt tossed in his direction.

  “Anyway,” announced the captain, for a final time, “if there are no other questions, I’ll be off. I’ll get food to you soon, maybe even a little rum. Hold fast gentlemen.”

  No one bothered to salute him as he disappeared, even I had learnt not to alert the possible German marksman to who was more important than who and where they were by now.

  “So, we’re the flanking movement,” Bob began, “aren’t they the ones that always end up dead?”

  “You’re learning young Bobby,” Beattie grinned. “They want us all dead.”

  9

  Within half an hour of leaving us, Captain Tudor-Jones had come up trumps, with a team of his orderlies arriving with armfuls of supplies, in truth too much for such a small section that we now were.

  I threw the coffee down my neck first, its lukewarm and rather lumpy consistency completely ignored by the fact that it had been the first thing that had stimulated my taste buds for twenty-four hours now, having dealt with the monotony of water and cigarettes for the last few hours.

  I felt eternally grateful to him, despite the fact that I had always got the impression from the others that anyone above the rank of a lieutenant was bound to only be in the army for their own gains.

  Even if that was the case, Tudor-Jones was the subject of all my gratitude and happiness that morning, and I felt particularly lucky to have him as my company commander for the time being, until, that was, he would end up dead, just like the rest of us.

  He was only about twenty-two or three, but he had experienced this war right from the off, being one of the first men in the BEF to set his boots in France and seeing what kind of a conflict it was going to be from the first few skirmishes of the war. He had been bandied about as he had been promoted, taking up various different commands to impart some of his experience and wisdom to some of the other, invariably elder but less experienced, officers that littered the whole of the army.

  I wondered if he had let go of his hope, in the same way that I was meant to, or if he could picture himself as getting back home and living an ordinary life. I supposed that the life that he would be going back to would be vastly different to my own, the aristocratic and landed gentry circles far more prolific and enjoyable than what would await me if I was to return home.

  I had surrendered my employment upon joining up for the army, and I doubted that I would ever get it back again, if the look on my uncle’s face was anything to go by when I had told him of my plans. Tudor-Jones on the other hand, would return home, his servants still at his beck and call for any of his daily needs, as he went back to his game hunting, or maybe even entering parliament.

  But, for now, in terms of our lives, we were equals. There was no discrimination of a marksman’s bullet, no deviation to the less fortunate when an artillery shell landed. In this war, both officers and other ranks were dying, those related to royalty or those related to pig farmers. Everyone was susceptible, and to me, the thought gave me an element of comfort.

  As I flicked the last of my post-coffee cigarette away in between the wooden boards of the trench, I pulled the small can of bully beef in towards me, having saved the bulk of my supplies to the end, giving myself something to look forward to, however meagre it was.

  I began to attack the can, ripping and tearing at it to get to the meaty treat that was captured within the tin walls.

  As I opened the tin fully, I looked up for a fleeting second, realising that, for the first time in a while, I was actually feeling happy. I knew that within a few hours I would be marching towards the spitting machine guns, but, for now, I wasn’t, and if I had learned anything in the last twenty-four hours, it was that a soldier’s life was to be lived in the here and now, not worrying about what might lie ahead, because you might not even make it that far.

  Etwell, as ever, had volunteered to go on watch, as if for some reason he didn’t trust any other man to spot the enemy out in No Man’s Land. In reality, he simply didn’t trust me or Bob Sargent, the two newest recruits who had only joined up for a little jolly to Europe.

  The rest of the platoon were dotted around the section of trench that we had made our own. Rifles were leaning up against walls, all perfectly spotless, which was more than could be said for the state of our uniforms, which were now caked in a thick layer of drying mud, that had begun to flake off in large sections like dinnerplates, but left an unmistakeable twinge on our kits.

  I was at the extreme left of the trench, my feet up on a wooden crate so that I was looking down the hallway that extended out slightly in front of our trench, leading to the other section manned by another platoon.

  I was quite content to sit there, on my own, feet perched up on a box while I tucked in to my delicious feast courtesy of the captain, and I was sure that the others too could sense that was the case, and so left me to it.

  Sargent, Beattie and Harris sat on the fire step, playing a game of cards that I had tried and failed to learn the rules of a few days ago, mugging each other of their wages before they had even seen a single penny of it. Beattie kept a small book in his top pocket that kept a record of who owed what to whom.

  Sergeant Needs had disappeared to receive more detailed orders of the planned attack, as our new commanding officer. As I looked at my watch, I realised that it was approaching twenty past six, and guessed that he would be back before too long, to prepare us for a dawn attack, probably at seven thirty.

  Suddenly a sound filled my head, as if someone behind me was taking in an abrupt inhalation of air, the sharp, prolonged hiss being the only thing that I could hear, the only thing that I could really focus on.

  As I was tossed through the air, like whatever hand had thrown me didn’t care about me in the slightest, I felt everything in my body go completely numb. In an instant, I didn’t feel like I had any arms or legs, and that I was just a brain, that was floating around somewhere in the trench.

  My eyes were tightly shut, but I could make out a wonderful, bright, red-orange glow right on the other side of my eyelids and for half a second, I felt almost peaceful.

  I realised that this must have been it for me, that the lucky shell had fallen on the unlucky section of the frontline and I was the poor little soldier who was going to cop most of it. I was almost certainly about to don my wooden overcoat.

  My mind suddenly switched to where my burial site might be, if there was going to be enough of me to bury, and whether or not my family would be able to visit my grave someday. I hoped that they would be able to.

  As the numbness began to wear off, I realised that I could feel all of my limbs, I could wiggle my toes and curl up my fingers. In the same second, I noticed that I had come to a stop, I was no longer cartwheeling through the air, but I was resting on something, something solid. I had landed.

  Still convinced that I was dead, I began to think of my grandfather and whether the next face that I saw would be his, as I had missed him so terribly since he had died some years before.

  But as the pain began to develop, like someone had bitten into my upper arm and were sinking their teeth in further and further, I decided that I must have still been alive. Wounded maybe, but alive.

  The sinking teeth penetrated my skin further and further as the final few remnants of numbness faded into nothing and all I could feel was the pain in my arm.

  I could hear nothing, apart from my breathing, which was so infrequent and sporadic that I may as well have been dead already. I supposed that the artillery shell that had flung me through the air had attacked too my eardrums and that I should settle for being deaf for the next few minutes at the very least.

  As I lay there, I realised that there was no point in me trying to work out if I could sit up or move or not, as I knew that I wouldn’t be able to, a decent helping of provoked earth was already pressing down firmly on my chest, and I knew that if I
was to move, it would likely do more harm than good. For now, I would wait, and hope that no one else in my trench had been unlucky enough to get hit.

  The only thing that I could do to try and keep myself alive was breathe, which is what I focused on for the thirty or so seconds immediately after I had come to a stop. Surprisingly, the pain began to subside for a moment, as I managed to find enough air in my makeshift grave to steadily calm myself down and work out what my next move was going to be.

  I began to make out faint thuds on the outside of my kingdom, and recognised them as the infuriating shells from the Germans that were carrying on, quite ignorant of the fact that they had got me.

  The crumps and deep pops as the other shells obliterated anything within its reach grew louder and louder, until I could, very faintly at first, begin to make out voices that were screaming with all their might above the din of the artillery barrage.

  It was difficult to make out what it was exactly that they were saying, but by their tones, I could make out that they were worried, desperate almost and I began to wonder what it was that was wrong. I thought maybe the trench had taken multiple hits, and the bedraggled platoon that was now nothing more than a section, was maybe now nothing more than two men armed with rifles.

  The possibility crossed my mind that the Germans were beginning to counter attack and, at the thought, I tried to manoeuvre myself as best as I could, trying to locate my rifle so that I could join in the defence.

  I was too weak however, against the piles of earth that pressed down on me with a fierceness, so much so that I resolved to lie there in wait, for rescue, for death and anything in between.

  “Got him! He’s here!” I couldn’t tell whose voice it was, but the fact that I could hear it, filled me with an immeasurable amount of joy that I was about to be rescued.

  I felt a hand resting on the side of my head as he called in to the rabbit warren he had created, “It’s alright Andrew, we’re going to get you out!”

  It was Bob Sargent, the only one who had seemed to understand what it was I was going through in the light of my first piece of action the day before.

  I tried to mumble back a response, but succeeded only in taking in a small mouthful of dirt, which I forced myself to swallow down, to stop myself from suffocating to death. By now, the air was warm and plagued with so much moisture that it felt like I might drown. At the thought, my breathing began to get more erratic, as I desperately craved the fresher air of what lay on the outside of the rubble.

  It didn’t take Bob too long to pull away at the dirt around my head, so that I could breathe with an element of normality. Even the air out there, thick with smoke and death that had been produced by the falling artillery, was more welcome than the fresh seaside air that one could take in on the shores of England.

  Two pairs of hands suddenly gripped just under my armpits, my right arm burning up in a fireball of pain that rushed the length of my arm as they did so. Tugging me out of the dirt, I realised that Beattie had been helping in the rescue efforts, although no sooner was I out, then he had turned and made off in a direction which I could not see.

  “You’re alright mate,” gasped Bob as he tried desperately to get his breath back, leaning over me to protect me from the falling dirt that was now raining down on us.

  Beattie suddenly returned with an aid kit, getting to work instantly on the piece of shrapnel that had come to rest in the top of my arm, right by the shoulder. I winced as he ripped it from its hole, feeling the skin tear as easily as a sodden piece of paper.

  “Sorry, mate. Got to be done.” He carried on patching me up, before slapping me quite unsympathetically just above the wound, which was just as tender as the hole itself.

  “There ya go, good as new.”

  It was then that I realised that this was as close to death as I was probably going to get, without the eternal silence that would follow if I was finally going to cop it.

  What could I have done differently? Maybe I should have endeavoured to have learned the card game, that way I would have been on the far side of the trench, and would have escaped with nothing more than a pounding headache. Maybe I should have been more attentive to the situation around me, maybe then I would have heard the shell before it had landed, giving me some more time to react.

  As I dwelt upon it some more, I realised that there was nothing that I could have done and resolved myself to thinking that the shell hadn’t killed me for a reason, maybe it had just been a warning.

  The picture of home was slowly changing, morphing into one where maybe I didn’t exist. If being blown up had been down to anything that I had done, I would have ventured to change it, to make myself more alert. But there wasn’t a thing to be done, it was all down to luck. That and the fact that it seemed like no one was going to survive this war.

  I felt depressed, like I had lost the one thing that had set me apart from all the other dead men in this hell on earth. And then the depression got even worse.

  “Bob…my bully beef. It’s gone.”

  10

  The rumblings of my stomach, the ones that had mourned the loss of my bully beef, had been put to bed, courtesy of the other men’s generosity, as I was allowed a mouthful of each of theirs to satisfy my hunger. The price I’d had to pay was the constant teasing throughout, the nickname Bully Beef Ellis apparently being hilariously funny, so much so that it began to stick.

  The pain in my arm too, was not so bad, especially after Sergeant Needs had entrusted me with his flask, filled with his paraffin, that had started to numb the pain from the third or fourth sip onwards. I felt bad that I had it, as I tossed it over and over in my palm, and wondered what his wife would have said, if she was to find out that he had simply handed it over to a foolish young soldier, who had managed to get himself blown up.

  They couldn’t evacuate me to an aid station, as I was needed in the advance and for once, I didn’t actually want to leave the frontline. I felt like I had a duty of care to these men now, the ones that had managed to dig me out and share their rations with me, I wanted to fight alongside them.

  Almost as if they had been in retaliation for young Private Andrew Ellis, somewhere on the frontline with five platoon, the Field Artillery boys began to chatter back with the guns that were some way behind the German frontline, smashing the ground in front of us to pieces, and hopefully that machine gun nest that was settled nicely in the church.

  As I poured some more paraffin down my neck, burning everything that it came into contact with, I wished sincerely that it would numb my hearing once again, as well as the pain in my arm. The blood curdling screams of Satan’s own personal hell hounds as they howled overhead were truly harrowing, as if he had called in his attack dogs to kill as many as possible and drive the remainder totally insane.

  The ground trembled almost as much as my knees were doing with every sorrowful impact the shells made into the earth up ahead. I felt like my major organs were going to give up on me at any second, being shaken so much that I couldn’t imagine how much more they could put up with the abuses.

  I wondered how quickly the Germans had risen from their beds as soon as the first shell had landed, throwing themselves behind the nearest cover that they could find.

  “Oh, why are they doing that?!” screamed Harris as he gave up trying to sleep and sat up right on the ledge that had been his bed. “Keeping the Boche awake is fine, but they always forget it keeps us up too!”

  He was shouting with a great intensity, just to be heard above the din, but even then, he was as quiet as a fish in water.

  Even though it was shaking me within an inch of my life and it was keeping an irate Harris from getting any rest, I was still ever so slightly grateful to the sheer amount of ordnance that was being dropped on the Germans’ heads.

  There were so many shells, each one bursting not half a second after the previous one, that had it been daylight, I was sure I would be able to see a blanket of steel as it flew through the air tow
ards the Hun.

  Even if they weren’t going to be doing any real damage to the German defences, it felt quite nice to at least semi-believe that we hadn’t been totally forgotten. Even the officers thirty miles behind the line knew that to send us in without any kind of visible support would lead to nothing short of an all-out mutiny.

  Feeling that my apprehension was going to reach boiling point, I felt around in my breast pocket for the small talisman that I had kept in there, ever since I had left for France.

  It was a large, heavyweight coin that my father had carried around during his time in the South African republic. It felt good in my hands and comforted me to know that, in some way, my father was with me on the frontline.

  As I turned it over and over in my hand, switching between the front face, declaring it was a penny and the back, that housed a profile of some bearded man whose name I could no longer remember, I wondered if my father had ever been this scared.

  I began to think back to his tales of war, to recall a minor detail that might have exposed how he was feeling. But there had been nothing, not even a mention of how his mates and comrades had been feeling at the second before an attack. As ever, although I felt close to him, and to those who were sitting around me, I felt completely alone in my thoughts of despair and fear.

  I popped it back into my pocket, making doubly sure that the button was fastened before it fell out somewhere in No Man’s Land. There was one thing that I had remembered about my father’s experiences of war and that was the way that he, and the rest of his comrades, had questioned why they were even there in the first place.

  For them, it was a colonial war that was not worth fighting, it was one that was completely unwinnable. To them, there was no one army that they were fighting, not one cohesive group of individuals all coordinated and administrated from a central location. They were fighting the Boers, the men who had begun to split off into smaller groups, ambushing trains and army patrols in the most barbaric ways possible.