by Thomas Wood
I pushed the Lee Enfield rifle further into my shoulder, so hard that it felt like it would permanently deform the shape of my body. I squinted with my left eye, almost to the point where it was completely shut and began to scan the landscape before me, through the iron sights that were situated on top of the rifle. I observed, Red observed, we all did, with synchronised level of anxiety and apprehension, as we waited to see what would come out of the tree line.
The sun had all but gone now, concealed by a blanket of grey cloud that had managed to catch up with it, plunging me into a coldness that now swept over my entire being as if I had just emerged from the sea after taking a dip. I told myself that the cover gifted to us by the clouds would play in our favour somewhat; we were in a defensive position and the enemy had just lost the weapon that they had been counting on, the sun was no longer in our eyes, we would be able to shoot freely.
My hands were chilled, but a thick layer of sweat began to glisten across my palms and I could almost feel it seep into the wood of my rifle, especially as I began to shift my hands all over the weapon to redistribute some of the slime.
Physically, I was ready to fire, my rifle moving wherever my eyes did, rounds in the breech, safety off, my finger hovering around the trigger area. Mentally, emotionally, I wasn’t sure if I was quite up to it yet, I was still focusing on the bulging eyes of the German as he realised that I had just sent a round straight through his own heart.
I felt pathetic as the tidal waves of emotions that I was powerless to, began to wash over me, disheartening me as if I was a child who had just had a disturbing dream. Like those nightmares that plagued me, I would have to push them to the deepest, darkest point of my mind, a place that was becoming more and more frequent in my train of thought.
We could hear voices again, not the jovial, laughing voices that we had heard last night, but excited shouts every now and then, aggressive voices that sounded ready for action. They were ready to kill.
The unmistakeable rustling sound of metal on metal as things were hastily packed away and canteens being thrown into haversacks started to chime its way towards our ears, echoing across the otherwise silent landscape.
Then nothing. There was total calm. Still, not one of us wanted to breathe, no one said anything. All I could hear was the thumping of my heart, the adrenaline surging around my body to the very tips of my fingers, giving me an element of confidence that I would so desperately need. My eardrums began to bulge as the thumping grew louder and louder, to the point where I had to wipe some of the sweaty residue on my hands, down the sides of my trousers, in an attempt to simply distract myself.
But then, all feelings of fear and foreboding evaporated into nothing as, from the silence, came figures. They were small at first, but they all too quickly grew larger. From the figures, uniforms began to appear. Then faces. Then guns.
Together, we all waited for that first round of the Bren that meant that we could take away our own, individual fear, in the form of a .303 round; our copper killer.
13
I began to deliberately move my index finger from the side of my rifle, sliding it through the trigger guard and finally resting it on the smooth, cold steel of the trigger. I slowly caressed the trigger nervously, as the clamminess began to cause my finger to slide around on it unpredictably. I tried to control my now laboured breathing as I began to squeeze the trigger gently, so as to get a better purchase but also to make sure I was ready at the first round from the Bren.
This was strange to me, I’m sure it was to Red too. We had never been here before, we were always behind a much thicker sheet of armour than a six-foot hole in the middle of a field and we were always much better armed than two bolt action rifles that had been in use for nearly forty years. I wondered whether the Germans were feeling as nervous about their advance as we were.
Keeping my gaze fixed firmly on the advancing silhouettes, I felt around with my thumb to make sure that my safety was in fact off and that I would be totally ready to fire when the time came. The moments that I took to ensure that I was not redundant as a rifleman, seemed to drag so much that they felt like hours, making me feel like I had forgotten to check something, or that I wouldn’t be able to do my duty when it all kicked off.
I was curious about the way that they were advancing, as it didn’t make strategic sense, or maybe they genuinely didn’t know we were here. They came at us in a long, suffocating line, men side by side, maybe two or three ranks deep, their shadows all infusing and overlapping so they seemed like one giant, dark mass coming towards us.
They gradually stomped closer and closer, to the point where I thought that I would soon have to welcome them into our trench and offer them a cup of tea. Just as it seemed like I was going to either have to bayonet the poor bloke advancing towards me, or embrace him, I felt the high, angry crack of the Brens as they began to rain molten lead down on our opponents.
As soon as they did so, a cacophony of noise erupted, as rounds pulsated their way around the field as the rest of the line opened up, the snaps of the Brens overlapping the pops of Lee Enfields all chattering away to one another.
I watched as the carpet seemed to be pulled from under the Germans’ feet as they all threw themselves on their stomachs to avoid some of the fire, finding the solace of the ruts in the field. Whether or not we had been successful in hitting any of the enemy in our first burst of fire was unknown to me, but they continued to lie there like dead men, as we kept their heads down with sporadic, aimed shots.
Every now and then, a brave enemy soldier would poke up like a mole and loose off a few rounds in our general direction, only to be silenced by a volley from the sharp shooters that were on our side.
My rifle kicked backwards sharply, as if it was resisting being under my control, as I fired a round at a courageous soldier who tried to stand up to let us know they were still there. The round from my rifle kicked up a heap of dust just in front of his knee and he dropped back down, almost as quickly as he had appeared. I kept my eyes on where he had dropped, as I yanked the bolt on my rifle up and back, allowing the used round to spin out wildly like a copper sycamore seed and fall to the ground. I slammed the bolt back forwards, forcing it to select another round from the housing and into the breech, as I quickly replaced my finger back on the trigger where it belonged.
I doubted that I had hit him, but nevertheless he did not move. None of them seemed to, they all just lay stock still, out of our eyeline. We did the same, all keeping the barrels of our rifles pointing out over the field but making sure we kept our heads as far down as was possible.
All of a sudden, there seemed to be a lull in the battle. I half expected the Germans to simply get up and surrender, or just walk away and that would be that, but the other side of my brain told me that that simply wouldn’t be the case. I just hoped that they wouldn’t be lying there waiting for some Panzers to roll up to support their advance.
Just as it seemed like there would be an eternal stalemate, leaving us forever stranded in France, a sharp, high-pitched almost inaudible hiss filled my ears as the air around me was displaced, dislodged by something altogether different.
A ground-tremoring thud hammered into the ground, on my immediate left, sending great chucks of mud flying through the air, some of which deposited themselves neatly into my eyes and mouth. Spluttering and blinking furiously in equal measure, I collapsed into the bottom of our trench, making a squelching, splashing noise as I did so. I tucked myself in a ball, trying to get further into the demented safe haven that I thought I was in. Half a second later, I felt Red join me down in the pit.
“I think I’m going to need a change of pants in a minute Sir!” He screamed, his wild chuckling almost as loud as the constant thudding that now started to sound all around us. I was utterly convinced that his humour was a great façade, hiding the true fear that he was experiencing and the uncertainty that shouted at me from his eyes.
His smile was wiped clean from his face as a
group of three mortar rounds shook our small patch of ground as they all came very close to joining us in the trench. The rounds continued to fall as frequently as raindrops do on a gloomy November evening, each time showering us with another helping of dust and dirt, which completely ruined Red’s perma-smile.
As the Brens and a few rifles continued to aim pot shots towards the enemy, I realised how in that brief exchange of fire that we had had with the Germans, all sense of patriotism or justification for war had completely gone out of the window. As far as I had been concerned, it was just me, Red and my rifle, and for no other reason was I fighting but to keep Red alive, with the added bonus of maybe getting out of there unscathed myself.
My father had tried to prepare me for war, to make me understand what it felt like to be around when a wall of bullets came flying towards me, but as soon as that first one had been fired, I had felt like running, like giving up, but somehow, I hadn’t. I didn’t know if it was courage or stupidity that had made me keep my head up to try and fight, but right now, it didn’t really matter.
The mortars seemed to ease up on us slightly, their rounds being redirected to my right, where until now they had received little attention, maybe the Germans were big advocates on sharing. As they did so, my officer’s instinct and curiosity kicked in and I decided that now would be a good time to risk poking my head above the parapet and take a look around at the situation. I almost wished I hadn’t.
The mortars continued to fall, a few feet in front of our frontline which was enough to keep the likes of me firmly planted at the bottom of my trench and to continue threatening us. The dust cloud that the incessant mortars had created lingered across the whole of the field, as if the clouds that had rolled overhead earlier had descended as they got wearier. I could not see the wood now, I struggled to see where the Germans were or what they were doing, just as one dust cloud began to thin out, another would erupt like a natural spring, accompanied with yet another sobering thud.
Flashes of light began to flicker on and off in amongst the mist, like a torchlight tapping out Morse code to us. The popping noise accompanying the flashes told me all I needed to know about the rate of fire their machine guns were capable of.
To my right, men had begun to leave their trenches and venture out into the world of high explosives and bullets, tending to the wounded that had been blasted from their holes, or lay helplessly at the bottom of them.
I began to feel every single rifle crack, each and every round from a machine gun, as they reverberated around in my gut, just to make sure that I was getting the full war experience. With every snap that vibrated around my body, I felt my neck jerk in a different direction, a subconscious reaction to try and dodge the latest bullet that might have been reserved for me. I began to realise that I was being shot at, from as many directions as I had fingers, but not one of the rounds had yet hit me, filling me with an exhilaration that has never been matched by any other experience in my life.
I started to fear that the emotions that were running through my body weren’t normal and that what I was experiencing in fact was cowardice. But this situation was far from normal, I was standing in a boggy trench where the next second could be my last one on this earth or I could find myself immediately separated from my limbs, so I could think and feel whatever I wanted to.
The screams of injured and dying men began to waft their way to my ears, hanging over the fields and quite easy to hear despite the thunder claps of the roaring mortars. I watched as one man initiated a retreat from one of the trenches, dragging another, lifeless figure from it, tugging away at his webbing. I wondered where the man’s destination was, there was no cover from these mortars except our foxholes, there was no safety. Just as I considered yelling at the man to get back in a trench, the two figures were suddenly enveloped in a cloud of dust, a red mist infused within it, and they were gone.
Other figures carried on as if nothing had happened and I could make out the figure of Corporal Morgan as he made his way over towards one of our increasingly exposed foxholes. Suddenly, just as he knelt down to issue an order to two steel helmets poking their heads into the firestorm, his own head seemed to rock backwards, as a liquid suddenly sprayed from the front of it, and he collapsed in a heap, without the two perched in the trench even knowing he was there.
I was affected by Morgan’s death, not because I had liked the man at all, but because he had been a career soldier, he had been in action before and out of all the soldiers I had ever met, along with Major Perkins, he had seemed almost invincible and I couldn’t help but think it was a crying shame that the Germans had managed to splatter Morgan’s winning personality all over the ground of a French field.
Dejected, I slid my way to the bottom of the trench, where I found myself face to face with Red, his perma-smile now so far away that it felt like I had imagined it had even existed.
“Any sign of them, Sir?”
“Who?” came my weak, pathetic response.
“The Royal Family! Who do you think, Sir!” he cried, and I felt a twinge in my subconscious somewhere to scream at him to have a look himself and to reprimand him for his arrogance and sarcasm towards an officer.
Instead I did nothing, apart from rebuke myself, in my adrenaline-fuelled scan of the uncontrolled chaos that I was met with, any idea of the Germans and where they had been, had been completely wiped from my mind.
I felt foolish, and if the Germans had suddenly peeked over the edge of our dugout, I would have felt wholeheartedly responsible, so I began to make movements to revaluate the situation, to take a look at where the enemy were positioned, whether they had advanced in conjunction with the mortars, or if they had retreated back into the forest. I could only pray that the latter was true.
Just as my head began to elevate itself, my movements were interrupted by a calm, clear voice.
“Tactical withdrawal gents! Tactical withdrawal!” I had not yet met the Captain in charge of this company, but the men we had spoken with a few hours before had held Frost in a very high regard. He seemed cool to me and as his large, stocky frame hauled himself out of his own trench and calmly made his way to the village, I couldn’t help but respect the way he held himself. He wore no helmet, no cap, almost as if he was showing off the curly brown locks that were knitted to his scalp.
He maintained his coolness as he broke out into a jog, a signal for all the NCOs in the company to completely lose their heads it seemed.
“Get out! Get out now!”
“Move! Move! To the village!”
“Bishop! I will not be writing to your mother – get a move on now!”
I took a look at Red, who was still cowering at the bottom of our trench. Grabbing him, I screamed in his face, “Let’s go! Follow them, go!”
My voice was hoarse, and I almost expected to begin coughing up blood as we started our long, heavy sprint to the village.
As if on cue, as we had started our retreat, the mortars seemed to stop falling, but I put it down to the fact that I was running so unnaturally fast and all I could hear was my own breath as I fought to stay alive. I pushed myself harder and harder, until I plateaued and could push no further, acutely aware that the cessation of mortars could simply be a ruse by the Germans to draw us out into the open, before taking pot shots at us to pick us off individually.
I watched as more boys began to tentatively pour from their holes and start their journey backwards. Some ran, some hobbled, others simply did not move at all.
I felt like a lousy officer, as I was forced to leave so many of our wounded and dead to the perils of enemy occupation, but I told myself that I would be of far more use with a rifle in the village, than if I was sprawled out in the field, with my skull smashed to pieces by a mortar round.
Vomit gushed from the pit of my stomach and I managed to swallow most of it back down, leaving a vile taste and an intense burning in the back of my throat, but some of it spilled from the corners of my mouth and more still dripped from
my nose. I must have looked a right state; some of the vomit had already seeped into the stubble that I had sprouted over the last few days and my breath smelt worse than ever.
All of this made it even more surprising to me when I was met with a cheery Sergeant Major who greeted us into the village.
“Oh, hello Lieutenant, I didn’t know you were with us. Second building on the left there please sir. Your new defensive position.”
I soon found myself, stretched out in an attic, head resting on the chimney breast that ran through the centre of the building, with my trusty comrade Red, and my new colleagues in the form of a Lance Corporal Pritchard and Privates Evans and Stephenson. Evans had his rifle poking out of a hole in the roof, resting on its side as he peered out through a pair of battered binoculars.
I was overjoyed to discover that we were to be defending a bakery and before too long, we were all sick with the starchy, slightly stale bread that we had found downstairs. Coupled with the wine found in one of the cellars and sausages courtesy of the section in the butcher’s, I found myself well and truly on my way back up to full strength. I was still about a twelve-hour nap away from feeling myself fully again though.
Apart from the constant presence of a lookout in that attic, for an hour or two, we almost forgot that there was a war on and instead, we became a group of friends, swapping stories and anecdotes from our lives and telling one another all about our life before the war.
The wine was watered down, but even still, Evans, the youngest of our contingent, was sound asleep within an hour of necking a mug of the stuff. Red took over, the pair of binos permanently glued to his skull as he looked out over a gorgeous, sweeping panorama of the French countryside.
In my contentment, I took my pocket bible from inside my tunic and from amongst its well-thumbed pages, I slid out a battered and slightly torn photograph. My family smiled back out from it, at me, the cowl of an oast house just poking up from behind their heads. My mother, father and brother, arms intertwining as they were linked together in love, stood in the field where I had spent many happy hours as a child. Holding the photograph in between my thumb and forefinger, I flipped it over and ran my other thumb over the words scrawled onto its backside.
