The wailing shriek of shells continued as the enemy pounded the woods and the line, seeking to clear the way for their advancing infantry. Down on the left a shell found the trench, the sound of its detonation followed by shouts and a high-pitched screaming. George squinted at the thick mist that covered the lower part of the field; something darker was moving within it, like the greyness of a wave behind its foam. It began to take form and the shapes of men were discernible: lines of men moving shoulder to shoulder as one body. They broke through the mist, moving at a trot. There was no spacing out of the line, no ducking or weaving, but a continuous wall of men coming on towards them. They seemed massive to George; their packs and greatcoats rolled up together gave them bulk and their spiked helmets added to their height. They came on, with line after line following behind. He couldn’t understand why they didn’t attack in extended order. They would have no chance bunched together like that. It would be a blood bath. Along the Front, as far as the eye could see, came a solid formation of thousands of men, the sound of their cheering reaching him between the banshee wailing of the shells. He looked back at Edmund for direction. Edmund’s face was red and sweating, his cap pushed back from his brow. He was holding his pistol up in the air, his other hand clenched in a fist.
‘Hold your fire!’ Edmund shouted and George realised that he hadn’t even taken aim, had been staring at the advancing men as if mesmerised. He got his rifle up to his shoulder and braced his knees against the wall of the trench.
As the oncoming troops broke into a run, the staccato sound of cheering lengthened into a longer, lower note: a roar that built like an avalanche.
‘Fire!’
Rifle fire crackled along the trench with a sound like burning thorn. George couldn’t hear his own fire as he loosed fifteen rounds a minute into the lines of men. He couldn’t hear himself shouting, although words that he didn’t know he knew were coming from his mouth. Men fell in the swarm of rifle bullets and rattling machine-gun fire as easily as if a ripple of wind were running through corn. As the first line toppled, the next climbed over their sprawling bodies and came on.
George felt his guts turn to water; there were too many; they would soon be here … He fired on, his gun growing hot in his hands. A shell fell short and George saw wire, men and mud rise into the air. He dodged back as debris rained down into the trench: stones, clods of earth, decaying and newly smashed gobbets of flesh. Sick to his stomach, eyes staring, George fired wildly into the smoke. The wire had been blown into disarray. Nearby a body hung across it, twitching, and George saw Smith take aim and shoot the man in the head before returning to raking the line.
Suddenly, through the smoke, a figure loomed over him. Before his mind even had time to register that he must shoot, Wilmott swivelled round and fired. The German soldier seemed to halt for a moment at the lip of the trench, a stiff silhouette, before pitching forwards, his helmet knocked askew by George’s shoulder as he toppled face forward into the trench bottom. George turned to look along to the traverse, in dread of finding that they were over-run, but the others were still firing. He took his place once again at the parapet. The line of advancing men thinned in front of their section, and George could see that they were wheeling left to put pressure on the stretch that was nearest to the wood. Soon, all that was ahead of him were piles of bodies and a German who staggered with his hands to his head amongst the dragging and struggling of the injured.
On the other side of him, Smith was slumped with his arms out straight on the parapet, as though collapsed at a bar, half of his head blown away. George stepped down from the fire step and round the body of the dead German to lean against the back slope of the trench opposite the funk hole. His breath was coming in wheezing gasps. Edmund was talking to Wilmott, patting him on the back, both of them with filthy faces and uniforms.
Edmund came towards him, mouthing, ‘Well done,’ the words lost in the noise of the never-ending bombardment. George framed the words ‘Thank you, sir,’ but nothing would come out from his hoarse throat except an incoherent stammer. Edmund reached forward to squeeze his shoulder; he had blood on his hand and more was trickling down over his wrist. In the moment that George opened his mouth to say, ‘You’ve been hit, sir,’ there was a terrific whining sound: the drawn-out scream of a shell that was coming straight for them.
‘Cover!’ Edmund bellowed down the trench and pushed George in the direction of the funk hole. For a split second – a moment’s hesitation – George froze. The dark hole in the earth yawned before him and his feet simply would not move. He knew he was going to die. Then Edmund tackled him, shoving him down into the gap, his shoulder barging him so that he was squeezed backwards into the hole and the smell of soil and damp straw. Edmund squatted down directly in front of him; he curled up with his hands covering his head. There was a stupendous crump that shook the very ground, and then utter darkness.
George was choking on earth. It was in his ears, in his nostrils, in his mouth, which he had opened in a scream. Part of the roof of the funk hole had caved in and crumbled around him. He gagged and spat. When he moved his shoulder gingerly, he felt soil move and settle behind it. Slowly, slowly, he worked his hand free, brought it up to his face and wiped it over his eyes and nose. He held his forearm across his brow to keep the earth off and with the other hand, reached forward. His fingertips touched something firm and textured: Edmund’s uniform. He moved his hand down and found the shape of an elbow. He pushed at it but there was no response.
At first, he couldn’t understand why there was no chink of light around Edmund’s form; then he realised that he too had been buried, in earth and sandbags thrown up from the lip of the trench. In panic, he pushed and clawed at Edmund but as he moved he could feel the sliding behind him and he stopped, afraid of further collapse: less space, less air. The sounds of battle were muffled and distant as though he were under water. Oh God! Oh God! It was no good shouting for help; no one would hear him. He cried silently, afraid to sob, enduring the pressure that was building in his chest, swallowing it down. He moved his fingers up Edmund’s arm; the material of his jacket was wet. At the top, the earth was looser in the crook between shoulder and neck. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to shift the weight of both man and earth, it was too heavy and the walls of the hole too fragile for him to brace himself against. Instead, he must work slowly at the earth above Edmund’s crouching shape and try to make a gap at the top of the entrance. He began to scrape with one hand at the earth, bringing each handful down between his knees and compacting it beneath him. As he worked, images flickered in his mind: the swinging light hiding his father’s face from him as they journeyed into the mine and the sense that he was squeezed inside a vast mass of rock; the flare of a match in a dark railway carriage, his hands over his ears, the rhythmic struggle and the horrible sound of the trapped horse screaming. He worked on, his breath fast and shallow, his body fixed in its unnatural stance, his shoulder muscles agonised by the awkward, repetitive movement. At length, after what seemed like a lifetime, he felt his hand reach into air – free air! He pulled his arm back and scrabbled at the hole, greedy for a great gasping breath. The cold sharpness of it was like a draught of iced water. He carried on scraping, making the gap bigger, got his arm … his head … one shoulder through and was able to dig then with both hands. He pushed away the fallen sandbags and hauled himself up, climbing over Edmund, his knee and then his foot on his back: to light, to air, to life.
He stumbled out, his legs weakened by the length of time cramped in one position. The trench was empty of living men. There was a crater in the field just behind them, about twelve feet across, the debris of displaced earth fallen in a rough circle: solid ground splattered as easily as if a marble had been dropped into a bowl of flour. The parados had been destroyed by the blast: earth, sandbags and shell fragments blown in on top of them. The sounds of battle continued: the moans of the injured nearby in no man’s land; the screams and shouts of hand-to-hand fighting with
in a few hundred yards; shells falling, more distant now. George began to scoop armfuls of earth towards him, trying to uncover Edmund. The second in which he had hesitated came clearly before him: Edmund’s shout, his own fear, time suspended as the shell raced along its trajectory towards them and his legs had refused to move, Edmund’s face, his mouth opening in a yell as he launched himself towards him and covered his body with his own.
He dug, frantically, not knowing how long he might have before the fighting moved towards him or death fell once more from the skies. His palm touched metal. He cleared the earth around it. A shell splinter. The jagged metal protruded from a massive wound in Edmund’s back, a bloody mess of flesh and pale knobs of spine beneath. If only he could get him on his side, free his face, see if there was breath … He pulled away the split sandbags, levered up a splintered prop that lay across Edmund’s shoulder and scooped the debris away until he’d made a space. He hauled him over, pulling him by the arm, which fell limply to his side as soon as he released it. Edmund’s face was smeared with earth. George took hold of his jaw and turned it towards him. His eyes were open, fixed in a stare. Small crumbs of soil adhered to them, speckling the whites and irises. George sat back on his haunches and put his hands over his face. He rocked himself back and forth. How could he be dead? His mind wouldn’t take it in. He couldn’t just leave him here; he started digging again; he would get him out …
He heard voices approaching – German voices. They were in the trench; they were coming his way. He scrabbled frantically at the earth; then, glancing behind him, he scrambled to his feet, grabbed his rifle and fled from them, stumbling along over bodies, packs and sandbags until he reached the communication trench and could run more freely, back towards the woods and the reserve line.
As he ran, he heard the sharp patter of Vickers guns from the edge of the wood, confirming that his section must have withdrawn to strongpoints there. Their new line would be the support trench, a shallow ditch dug amongst the trees. The communication trench between the two was incomplete and petered out twenty yards from the treeline. Flat on his face, with his rifle before him, he pulled himself along by his elbows, the stink of decaying flesh in his nostrils as he used the littered bodies as cover from the zing of bullets in the air above him.
He reached the wood and crawled in over brambles and dead bracken. He got behind the bole of one of the larger trees and looked around, trying to get his bearings. Ahead of him, trees were burning; one had fallen against another and wedged in its forked trunk, which had caught alight; flames crackled in the new wood and licked along the branches, smoke rolling from the skeletal outline. The sound of firing and shouting came from beyond them. One Vickers gun had stopped; they were being over-run. Bullets cracked and ricocheted among the trees and George hastily checked his rifle. It was badly fouled with mud from the collapse. Bloody useless. He threw it down in disgust; he would have to find another. Muttering to himself in fear, he cast about for an abandoned weapon. Bodies lay amongst the tree roots, rolled into the bracken or half covered in the dark mulch of leaves. George, searching amongst them for a gun, found they had been stripped. Their pockets had been emptied: rings and watches gone.
He went back and picked up his rifle, fixed the bayonet and set off, bent double, making for the place where he thought the support trench started. Ahead, and to the left, men were moving amongst the trees in quick, crouching dashes, and then taking cover, standing upright, plastered flat against a tree trunk before edging round to take a shot. George ran from tree to tree towards the trench, cursing the brambles that tripped him, the useless gun, the fucking war.
As he came level with a clump of spruce, he heard a branch crack. The hairs on the back of his neck rose as he felt eyes upon him. He wheeled round and found himself face to face with a German soldier. His senses heightened as adrenalin coursed and time seemed to lengthen and slow. The German wasn’t much older than George, well built, with a thick neck and shoulders, fleshy features and the stubble of several days on his chin. He had lost his helmet, revealing close-cropped brown hair through which the pale scalp was visible. His grey uniform was filthy and a badge hung, half torn off, from his collar. In the half-second that they stared at each other, George took all this in; he saw the man’s pupils dilate, the movement of his larynx as he swallowed, his grip tighten on his rifle. As the German lunged towards him, George threw himself sideways and his bayonet caught George’s arm, slitting his jacket and the skin beneath. His head filled with fear and rage, George sprang forward and was on him with an upward thrust to his chest. The man clutched at George, holding on to his arms, his mouth working as if attempting to speak. George tried to pull away; he had driven too deep; the blade wouldn’t withdraw easily. He squeezed his eyes closed as he tried to fire a round to free it, as he’d been taught, but the action jammed. George pushed the man backwards as hard as he could and he fell to the ground. As the blade came free, blood followed it, spreading over his chest and soaking through his tunic. His body became slack and his eyes vacant.
George stood over him for a moment. He felt numb. He stooped and wiped the red blade on the bracken; tiny fragments of golden-brown leaf stuck to it. He was empty and felt nothing. He turned and ran for the trench.
George lay in the trench with the others, keeping up a desultory fire to stop further troops from coming into the wood. He had tied a field dressing around the flesh wound in his arm but it ached with every flexion of the muscle. It began to rain. Fat drops fell, pattering on the leafless branches, streaking the bark and dripping on to the leaf mould beneath. George was wet, shivering and exhausted.
They were told to keep their positions whilst a counter-attack was mounted and they heard fighting as an attempt was made to take back the trenches further along the line. From where he was, as the afternoon went on, George could hear the sound of digging as the Germans hastily started to reverse the trench and build a fire step facing the wood. The men around him doubted that the trenches would be retaken. Ground had been lost as well as lives. They had been driven back and miserably faced the prospect of starting work again, deepening the reserve trench to become the new fire trench.
Late in the afternoon, they were relieved by the French and trooped dismally further back into the woods to regroup beside the line of bunkers. Those who could, squeezed into the rough shelters; others slept with their backs resting against the trees, heads on their knees in the pouring rain, seeming as insensible as the bodies around them.
Captain Hunton came to speak to them. He said that the counter-attack had not been successful but that they should all feel proud of what had been accomplished. They had stopped a force that was far superior in numbers from breaking through. They had held them back from Ypres, and he believed that whoever held Ypres would eventually win the war. Afterwards he spoke quietly to Carey, telling him that the shelling had destroyed their billets at the farm: farmhouse, barns, stables, all wrecked. He asked him to take charge of the men while he sent for further orders.
George sat alone on a fallen tree. He was glad to see Haycock when he arrived but he couldn’t trust himself to speak. He smoked the cigarette that Haycock gave him, holding it between his thumb and forefinger inside the hollow of his hand to keep it from the rain. Only when he smoked it down to a stub and burnt his fingers so that a raised welt appeared did he realise that his hands were completely numb with cold.
Turland hobbled back with a sprained ankle, leaning on Rooke. When Carey took a roll call only half of the platoon answered. George listened dully as the names Smith, White, Wilmott were paused at and passed over. Carey asked if anyone had seen Lieutenant Lyne. George said nothing.
13
THE RUINED HOUSE
The battalion had been moved south into a different part of the line. From their trenches at the edge of this new wood, the monotony of flatness was much the same, save for the fact that here it was relieved by the distant view of a ruined church spire, ugly as a broken tooth. In the foreground
lay a scatter of burnt-out cottages, one of which, just behind German lines, was used by the enemy as a forward position for machine-gun and sniper fire. No man’s land was a wide ploughed field, its crop of beets spoiled. The mud was strewn with hundreds of bully-beef tins full of shit, lobbed by both sides into the open space as a means of relieving themselves without risking a trip to the foul and collapsing latrines. On one side of the field, a scatter of wooden crosses stood in haphazard remembrance, vastly outnumbered by the corpses of unburied men. They lay in the positions in which they had fallen, awkward as the carcases of the cows that lay with swollen bellies and stiff, ungainly legs. Both stank.
In the wet November weather, the water table had risen; the fire trenches were half full and men stood belly-deep in yellow ditch water and Flanders clay. The churned mud had a slippery consistency that made movement treacherous over the shell-pocked land. It clogged boots and matted the rough goatskin jerkins that they wore for warmth when in reserve in the woods; it weighed down the skirts of greatcoats. All movement was laborious. Impeded by the weight of water in the trenches and sodden clothing out of them, the men moved slowly. Even when travelling the corduroy paths through the trees – rough-hewn branches nailed on to trunks laid on the ground to provide dry standing – they moved as if sleepwalking through the days.
Defeated by the common enemies of rain and cold, both sides had been forced to dig in. There would be no Big Push, no war of movement, no quick victory. As the weather grew ever wetter and colder, a sense of hopeless stalemate crept over them and the memory of expectations that they would be home before the year was out seemed a hollow dream, a false and naive optimism that belonged to a different world.
The Moon Field Page 19