The First Casualty

by Ben Elton

  ‘I tell you, this war is a war between two ruling classes. And we’re fighting it, more fool us! I’m a tram driver from Frankfurt. What has any of this to do with me? It’s so stupid it makes me weep.’

  The other soldier disagreed.

  ‘The English started this war,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ the first man replied. ‘Why would they start it?’

  ‘Because they’re bastards, that’s why, and they’re in the pay of the Jews. And that is also why the Americans are in, because they are all Jews.’

  Ah yes,’ Kingsley thought to himself, that was an element of German nationalism which thankfully was far less prevalent in Britain. The Germans always loved to blame the Jews.

  ‘It’s got nothing to do with the Jews. It’s about capitalism, you prick.’

  ‘Ah-ha! Exactly! And who invented capitalism?’

  ‘I suppose you think the Jews did.’

  ‘Of course they did, just like they invented communism.’

  ‘But communism is the opposite of capitalism.’

  ‘You see how clever they are? They have it all. Both ends and then the middle.’

  The last wire had been cut and Edmonds’s men were now gently bending back the strands to create a pathway. It seemed impossible to Kingsley that they had remained undetected for so long, but they had and now the hour had come. Three gaps had been formed; the men in front of Kingsley gently took up their weapons and crept through. As he followed, Kingsley could see that this was to be a battle as old as man himself, a desperate hand-to-hand struggle. The men carried hatchets and clubs. Some of the weapons they had clearly fashioned themselves during idle hours in the trenches; he saw maces studded with spikes, sometimes with a short stabbing blade protruding from the end. Stone Age man had done battle in exactly this way, leaping upon his opponent and attempting to slash, stab or bludgeon him to death.

  The section of trench to be attacked had been carefully chosen. It had been scouted on three previous nights and the Royal Flying Corps had taken a number of photographs. A complex including two large dugouts where men were quartered, it was approached by single slit trenches on either side, and if the British could once get into the complex a small force could hold its perimeters for a short period while the main battle was joined in the middle.

  And so Kingsley watched, as with a mighty yell the attack began. Having crept forward beyond the wire to the lip of the German trench, twenty Britons rose up and hurled themselves over it and down on to the heads of the soldiers chatting within. Kingsley followed as the first thuds and screams began, peering over the parapet into the darkness below where the crunch of metal on bone punctuated German cries of panic and bloodcurdling yells of pain.

  ‘Bombs in the hole! Sharp now,’ Edmonds’s voice cried out, and Kingsley watched as men approached the dully glowing patches of light that marked the entrances into the underground complex. One or two Germans were already stumbling out, attempting to raise their rifles, but as they did so they were stabbed or shot. Then Mills bombs and grenades were hurled into the dugouts, and almost instantly great bangs beneath the dirt were followed by a chorus of screams and pitiable whimpering.

  Now a flare went up and the whole scene was suddenly bright as day. The British were laying about themselves with wild and savage fury, and the Germans to whom Kingsley had listened only moments before were all dead or dying. At the edges of the battle the Germans were clogging up the approach trenches, attempting to get at the British but being held at the perimeters by those Tommies whose job it was to secure the area of attack. Kingsley could see Captain Edmonds in the midst of it all, with two dead at his feet, in the process of emptying his revolver into a third, a large man who appeared to be brandishing a cook’s ladle. Kingsley lay flat on the parapet, watching Edmonds’s gun.

  Now stunned and wounded Germans began to emerge from the smoky darkness of the bombed-out holes. They were attacked instantly and the dead piled up,’ blocking the entrances and muffling the cries from within.

  ‘Carstairs, Smith! Look to the edges,’ shouted Edmonds. Kingsley glanced to left and right and could see what Edmonds had already spotted: the perimeters were being squeezed, two or three Tommies were already dead and the Germans were pushing the remaining defenders back into the mêlée.

  ‘Warm work, lads! Too damn warm, prepare to withdraw!’ Edmonds shouted.

  Kingsley thought that this excellent officer might have left his order to retire a minute too long. The Germans who had come to the aid of their comrades were nearly in amongst the British now, and the fighting was shocking in its violence and frantic energy. For a second Kingsley was reminded of those ridiculous scenes in American moving pictures when entire Wild West saloons erupted into fighting, with every single person furiously thrashing away at everyone else. The trench was now a seething mass of flailing humanity.

  Looking down,’ Kingsley could see Edmonds draw breath to shout further orders, when a German buried his bayonet in him from behind. Instead of words, blood blurted from his open mouth. He fell forward to the boards, and in so doing dropped his revolver.

  Kingsley sprang forward over the parapet wall and leaped into the mob below. He did not hesitate. He did not think at all. Right from the first moment when he had accepted the assignment from Cumming he had known that it would almost certainly place him in enormous physical danger, but only a danger that millions of other men were facing every day. Since arriving in France he had taken a certain grim satisfaction in the prospect that he would now be able to give the lie to those who called him a coward; finally he would be able to share the dangers that his countrymen faced without compromising his conscience.

  Kingsley had almost sought this chance to see action. Now that it presented itself, he hurled himself into it.

  He had the advantage of having had an aerial view of the fighting, so he knew the current make-up of the struggle. He dropped in between two Tommies near where their captain had fallen and was about to duck and pick up the gun when suddenly a German loomed up in front of him, raising his Mauser pistol to shoot. Kingsley had in his hand the gun he had hoped to trade with Captain Edmonds. He had not intended ever to fire a weapon in this terrible war, but now he had no choice. His arms snapped into the firing position he knew so well from the pistol range at Met Small Arms, and he took aim and squeezed the trigger. The German fell back, shot between the eyes. As the soldier fell away, Kingsley saw another one directly behind him and a third and fourth approaching from either side. Kingsley shot them all, each between the eyes, turning his hips from left to right, his upper body firing position never altering: left arm up and crooked, barrel across the sleeve, gun held high, eye behind the hammer. Whenever Kingsley fought, he remembered the advice of his first fencing tutor: ‘It takes about as long to panic as it does to think. In a fight, think quickly but always think.’

  As the fourth man went down, Kingsley was looking about himself for Abercrombie’s gun. He had marked well where it had been dropped and there it should have been, next to the body of Captain Edmonds, but it was gone, kicked away in the movement of the fight, perhaps slipping off the boards or between them into the mud, perhaps still nearby but impossible to see amongst the skidding, thumping crowd of scrambling legs and boots. Fully forty men were upright in a space no bigger than half a rackets court. Another twenty must have been beneath them, dead or dying, trampled under the struggling soldiers. Kingsley could see that it was hopeless to try to find that gun now: in another few moments the Germans would overwhelm their attackers, and it was already a moot point whether any of them would get out alive. In front of him Kingsley saw the young subaltern with whom he had drunk tea spin round with half his head blown off. Both officers were now gone, the raid was being overwhelmed.

  Then Kingsley remembered the fat man Edmonds had shot. Where was he? Rolling away one of the men he himself had dispatched, he found the corpse of Edmonds’s victim, the cook’s ladle still between his fingers. Was his body fat enough to stop
a bullet? By rights a service revolver fired at point-blank range should send a bullet through one man and then perhaps another before drilling into the mud behind. But this had been an exceptionally fat man, wearing a big greatcoat, heavily webbed with leather and buckles. Kingsley dropped to his knees and rolled the man over. There was no exit wound.

  For the second time in less than half an hour Kingsley found himself burying his hand in a corpse. A fresh one was not so easy to penetrate, and he was forced to take a hatchet from the man’s belt and hack the dead cook open with it. The bullet had entered the chest, so whilst above him three dozen men stabbed and bludgeoned their lives away,’ Kingsley chopped at the man’s ribs, then took a knife and delved beneath. Having created an enormous incision, he put his hand inside and felt for the bullet. Sure enough, there it was, wedged between the man’s back ribs. Kingsley plucked it out and slipped it into his pocket, then stood upright in the mêlée to consider his position.

  ‘Order them back,’ he heard a voice beneath him say, ‘or they’ll fight till they die. No officers left. Someone must give the order.’

  It was Edmonds,’ who much to Kingsley’s surprise was still alive.

  ‘For God’s sake get them out, man.’

  Kingsley took in the scene at a glance: the perimeter of the field of battle was within moments of collapse. More Tommies now lay dead at either end along with twice as many Germans, and it seemed to Kingsley that only the logjam of piled bodies was preventing the Germans beyond from coming to the aid of their embattled comrades.

  ‘Mills bomb!’ Kingsley shouted at the top of his voice. ‘Mills bomb here this instant! Captain Edmonds is fallen,’ I am in command. Mills bomb, if you please!’

  He put every ounce of calm and clarity into his command and it had the desired effect; even the Germans seemed to stop for a moment.

  ‘Mills bomb, sir!’ a trooper said, presenting himself as the fighting around them redoubled.

  ‘Thank you, soldier.’ Kingsley took one of the man’s explosives. ‘Now kindly oblige me by blowing up that end and I shall blow this.’

  The trooper understood what he intended.

  ‘Yes, sir!’

  ‘Throw it just beyond the fighting,’ Kingsley shouted, ‘into the fellows beyond. Steady now. One-two-three, throw!’

  Together he and the trooper pulled the pins on their bombs and hurled them into the crowded trenches just beyond the fighting. There could be no doubt what the result would be: at least half a dozen more dead bodies blocking the way and a lengthy moment of panic and bloody confusion. Two almost simultaneous explosions signalled the last chance for the British to make an escape.

  ‘Raiding party withdraw!’ Kingsley shouted. ‘Fall back in good order!’

  ‘Sir! The captain!’ It was the trooper who had thrown the other bomb, reminding Kingsley that Edmonds was still alive.

  Kingsley looked down at the seriously wounded officer.

  ‘Never mind me. I’m done for. Get our fellows back,’ Edmonds said.

  But Kingsley was not sure that Edmonds was done for. The bayonet wound was midway down his trunk, and Kingsley reckoned there was a good chance that the blade had gone in between the heart and the stomach, missing both those vital organs.

  ‘All right. Up with him,’ Kingsley said, ‘over the parapet.’

  Together he and the trooper were able to manhandle the captain’s bleeding body up on to the ridge of the parapet. The German trench was so well constructed that it provided firm walls for them to scale. Others in the British troop saw what they were about and covered them from above. Once clear of the trench, Kingsley was able to shoulder Edmonds in a fireman’s lift.

  ‘You spread the wire, Private,’ he ordered. ‘I shall carry him through.’

  The British withdrew through the German wire, leaving about a third of their number behind them along with five times as many Germans. Kingsley was able to get Edmonds halfway back at a stooped run, blundering from waterlogged shell hole to shell hole, before the Germans in the trench behind him had recovered sufficiently to begin firing. After that, more star shells went up and he and the men around him had to fall on their faces and crawl the rest of the way on their stomachs, creeping now from hole to hole, dragging their wounded with them, waiting ten or fifteen minutes between each move until finally they reached the safety of the British line.

  The violence of the raid had been clear even from afar and medical orderlies were waiting to tend the wounded. Kingsley was happy indeed to unload Captain Edmonds from his back and place him in the care of a stretcher party. Edmonds could no longer speak for loss of blood but he squeezed Kingsley’s hand and gave him a weak thumbs-up before he was carried off.

  Kingsley was a vain man and he knew that he had done exceptionally well, but he took no pride or pleasure in Edmonds’s thanks. The truth was flooding in on him with horrifying clarity. He had joined the combatants, he had fought in the war. The thing for which he had sacrificed everything and thrown his life away to avoid had happened anyway. In vain could he argue to himself that he had killed in self-defence; if he had not been there, he would not have needed to defend himself. He had been pursuing evidence certainly, but for what? A murder trial? There was only one defendant facing the death sentence, while he had personally killed four men in his first moments in the trench. He had ordered the tossing of the Mills bombs. He himself had thrown one, thrown a high explosive into a metre-wide mud corridor packed with men. How many had he killed with that single action? Six at least, perhaps more. How many had he maimed?

  Kingsley staggered along the trench, sickened by the realization of what he had done. He had killed at least ten Germans. The majority of servicemen would not kill anything like so many in their entire service, and he was a conscientious objector! The perverted irony of his position filled him with horror.

  Just then a soldier scurried up behind him and called respectfully for his attention.

  ‘Sir? Please, sir? If you please, sir?’

  Kingsley turned wearily.

  ‘You got us out, sir. You saved half the troop. Without you we’d have been slaughtered for sure.’ It was the soldier who had supplied him with the Mills bomb. ‘I hope you won’t mind me saying as how I shall never look at a copper in the same way again.’

  Was this some comfort? Kingsley wondered. Some moral salvation? It was true that he had played the crucial role in saving the Tommies who had made it back. There had been many capable men on that raid but no one else with the authority to order a retreat. Could Kingsley find some comfort in his actions in bringing the party home? He had killed Germans, he had saved Britons. He had done so whilst defending himself and in the pursuit of criminal evidence.

  But try as he might, he could not argue that his conscience was clear. Looking at it from whatever angle, he still emerged a hypocrite. Having lost everything on a point of principle he had then tossed that principle aside in his desire to be a good detective, and probably also to prove his own courage to himself. Whether he saved Hopkins from the firing squad or not, the blood of at least ten Germans, innocent conscripts in a wicked war, would always be on his hands.

  FOURTY-THREE

  Further investigations

  Back in the reserve trench,’ Kingsley sat for a long time on an upturned ammunition box. He thought hard about chucking it in. Returning immediately to England and facing whatever fate might await him. Slowly, however, he began to change his mind. The element that influenced him most was the same one that guided all his steps. Logic. After all, the Germans were dead; what possible use could there be in abandoning his investigation because of them? He had retrieved the evidence, in what was definitely a fine bit of police work. If he did not use it, the men he had killed would, in a way, have died in vain. The bullet in his pocket had been fired by the weapon currently assumed to have killed Viscount Abercrombie. It was his duty as a policeman to ascertain if it had.

  Such were the musings of a man who knew in his heart of hearts that
he could never abandon an investigation. Once he had the bit between his teeth, it simply was not in his nature. And so, instead of heading back to England, he set off to seek out Abercrombie’s commanding officer, the colonel whom he had seen address the audience after the concert party the night before.

  Kingsley had already learned that when he wasn’t in the front line Colonel Hilton made his headquarters in a ruined farmhouse a mile or so behind the guns. Wearily he trudged back up the Menin Road until he found what he was looking for. It was now nearly dawn and the colonel had just had news of the trench raid. To his surprise, therefore, Kingsley was greeted like a hero.

  ‘Good God, man! You brought the platoon home!’ Hilton said, saluting him. ‘Saved the life of one of my finest officers. Tophole bit of soldiering. Absolutely splendid effort! I intend to recommend you, Captain. No! I shan’t hear another word about it. I absolutely intend to recommend you in dispatches. If last night’s show ain’t worth a gong then I should like to know what is. Why, I’ve been told your blood was so up you were tearing the very innards out of the enemy, hacking him open with a hatchet! Now there’s an example to set. I always say to the chaps, if you’ve got no ammo and your bayonet’s broke, bite the bastards! Eat his Hun head off! And there’s you organizing an orderly withdrawal under heavy fire, calm as y’please, and ripping Boche hearts out with your bare hands to boot.’