The First Casualty

by Ben Elton

  ‘McCroon!’ Kingsley called out. ‘Private McCroon!’

  As he struggled along, he scanned the faces of the men he passed. He knew that McCroon’s unit was in the vicinity and he had some idea of what the soldier he sought looked like, but the minutes were ticking by and still he had not found him. The soldiers all looked the same, every one caked in mud, every one with his fag burning between his lips, every one hunched over his tot of rum, waiting, the water dripping from his helmet brim. Every one with an expression sitting somewhere between elation and terror.

  ‘Five minutes,’ an officer called out. ‘Fix bayonets.’

  Even the shelling could not cloak the unmistakable sound of shearing steel being drawn en masse.

  ‘Remember, lads,’ a company sergeant major called, ‘not too deep now. No sense wasting good steel on a Hun. Three inches is plenty, in the neck or the chest, then pull it out and go find another one.’

  ‘‘C’ Company? Is this ‘C’ Company?’ Kingsley appealed to the sergeant.

  ‘It is indeed, sir. Have you come to arrest the Germans for us?’ The men about him smiled and raised their mugs of rum. A good CSM could turn nervous wrecks into heroes simply by being steady.

  ‘McCroon, I’m looking for a man called McCroon,’ Kingsley shouted.

  ‘With respect, sir, it’s less than five minutes to zero. I think you should look for him some other time.’

  ‘Some other time may be too late!’

  ‘Sir, we are about to attack. This is no place for any man not ordered in the first wave. Not even military policemen. So I suggest you take your leave, sir, or grab a rifle and spike and give us a hand.’

  The boys gave a ragged cheer at this.

  ‘Sergeant, this is a matter of life and death!’

  The CSM actually laughed. The men laughed also.

  ‘You hear that, lads? Officer says it’s a matter of life and death and there’s me thinking it was something important.’

  Kingsley left them and waded further along the trench, pushing past the crowded men, every one now with eighteen inches of bright steel attached to the end of his rifle, the only shining thing in the dark grey of that wet and miserable pre-dawn.

  ‘McCroon, I must find a Private McCroon!’ Kingsley cried out and suddenly he could hear himself speak, for the thunder of the guns had stopped. It was like the moment in the Underground when a man raised his voice above the rattle of the wheels and the train stopped and he was left shouting over nothing but silence. Many heads turned at once.

  ‘Yes?’ a soldier replied, looking up from his cigarette.

  ‘ONE MINUTE!’ an officer cried out, staring at his watch as if all the world existed on its face — which for him, of course, it did.

  A man stepped forward.

  ‘I’m McCroon. Who are you?’

  ‘I need to speak with you. Fall out.’

  For a moment an expression of joy flooded across McCroon’s face. Was he to be granted a last-minute reprieve? But zero hour was upon them and it was too late for any reprieve. The officer who had just called out the time looked up from his watch in fury.

  ‘You, sir! Who are you and what the hell are you about?’

  Kingsley might be wearing the uniform of a captain in the Military Police but by this time he looked like just another anonymous creature of the mud.

  ‘I am a policeman and I am taking this man out of the line. I wish to interview him.’

  ‘The devil you are, you bloody fool. You will do no such thing. There are no interviews here and no bloody policemen either. This is ‘C’ Company and we are about to attack!’

  ‘I must speak with…’

  The officer raised his pistol and pointed it at Kingsley.

  ‘Stand aside this instant or I shall shoot you down. This company will do its duty. Every single man will do his duty.’

  He glanced down at his watch.

  ‘Zero hours, boys, and the best of luck to every one of you!’

  ‘See you in Berlin, sir!’ a voice called out.

  The officer blew his whistle, and all up and down the line other officers looked up from their watches and blew their whistles also. A chorus of whistling cut through the silence that had descended so suddenly. Then with a roar the men began to swarm up the makeshift ladders propped against the parapet walls,’ scrambling and gripping at the mud as the wooden posts sank down under their weight. As the first British heads emerged above ground a new sound was heard, which to Kingsley’s ear felt almost like a massive swarm of bees: the German machine guns two hundred yards away across the mud opened up.

  The officer who had confronted Kingsley advanced a step or two, stick in one hand, pistol in the other, before staggering back under the force of the bullets that hit him and tumbling down into the trench on top of the men who were following. He was still trying to speak but there was blood geysering from his neck and chest and if he made a sound, Kingsley could not hear it. He fell back head first into the mud, with only his legs and boots to be seen.

  ‘Up, boys! Up, damn you!’ cried an NCO, and now the whole body of the trench seemed to heave itself over the crumbling lip of mud. McCroon went too: there was no question of staying. Army discipline did not allow men to hesitate once the whistle had blown. You got up and got on with it. A kind of hysteria gripped the men who had stood in the mud so long. They were finally to attack, to do their bit, to engage those bastards who had ruined everything with their frightfulness.

  Kingsley felt he had no choice but to follow. He had come to speak to McCroon and McCroon was advancing in good order towards the enemy. Kingsley gripped hold of the ladder and launched himself up into the maelstrom.

  He was later to ask himself what it was that caused him to follow McCroon over the lip of that trench and into the teeth of the German machine guns. He would very swiftly conclude that of the many emotions which crowded in on him as he ascended the rough ladder to the killing grounds, the foremost was the same desire that drove a million other men up those fateful steps.

  The simple desire not to funk it.

  Time and again Kingsley had heard soldiers speaking of just this fear. Not the fear of death but the fear of being found wanting, of having let the side down. Robert,’ Kingsley’s brother, had spoken of it often in his letters. ‘I am afraid of fear,’ he had written,’ ‘I only want to do my best.’ They all wanted to do their best. Indeed, after a yearning for home, Kingsley had read, the fear of letting the side down was the principal emotion expressed by the doomed generation that sat in ditches in France. Comrades living cheek by jowl in fear and squalor, dependent only on each other for comfort and support, and in each man’s heart the deep-seated desire not to let his mates down and the secret fear that when the ultimate test came, he might.

  Kingsley was of course not bound by any ties of group loyalty to the men he followed over the top; he had not lived with them and suffered with them. He had not drawn ever closer to them as one by one they died. They were not his pals. Nonetheless they were his brothers, fellow men who faced appalling hardship and danger because they considered it to be their duty. There was a job to be done and it was up to them to do it. Kingsley knew that he too had a job to do,’ a different job but still a duty.

  Here, as with the trench raid of the night before, was his chance to ‘do his bit’. To stand shoulder to shoulder with his dead brother but to do so without compromising the beliefs he held so deeply. He would not fight their war but neither would he shirk his duty. In his own way and by his own volition, he would do his bit.

  The first thing that Kingsley focused on as he breasted the lip of the trench was clouds of blue, yellow, black and green smoke hanging over what he presumed were the enemy trenches. For a nervous second or two he feared that these different-coloured clouds must be gas; whether German or British was irrelevant to Kingsley, for he had no respirator. In almost the same instant that the panic had begun it subsided, for all around and ahead of him Kingsley could see experienced soldiers
whose masks still hung from their belts or remained in their packs. Kingsley was thinking clearly, as he always did when in danger, and he knew immediately that this was not gas but the curious multicoloured residue of shellfire that was now all that remained of the British barrage which had lifted moments previously to allow the troops to advance.

  Ahead of him Kingsley could still make out McCroon, although how long he would last was anybody’s guess. In fact how long any of them would last seemed a moot point as all around him men began to fall, blown to bits by the shrapnel from German artillery (artillery which supposedly had already been destroyed by the British cannonade) or mowed down by machine guns. Kingsley’s one hope was speed. The battalion were advancing at a slow trot, as they had been instructed to do, in order for the assault not to break up in a helpless scampering mêlée but to arrive at the enemy trenches as a body. Kingsley marvelled at the courage of these men as they moved forward in good order into the eye of a storm of exploding steel. Men fell continually but no comrade stopped to help them. Later perhaps, but for the present every man was instructed to advance and keep on advancing as long as he had blood and breath in him to do so.

  Kingsley did not trot. This was not his battle and he was not under military command. He was a policeman in pursuit of a witness and so he sprang forward at a crouching run, leaping ditches and craters and dodging the corpses that were already beginning almost to blanket the ground.

  ‘You there!’ a voice screamed. ‘Steady pace, you bastard! Hold the line.’

  Kingsley ignored him and ran on, past other men, some of whom also called upon him to quit his ill-disciplined personal assault. Kingsley ignored them all as he ignored the shrapnel exploding overhead and the streams of bullets coming in at waist height. Once more he had no choice but to trust to luck, and in so doing there came upon him a curious and illogical feeling of exhilaration.

  When trying to describe it later, Kingsley realized that it was not necessarily bravery or foolhardiness either, but rather a feeling of helpless invulnerability. Fate was in motion, the dice were spinning in the air, he could do no more than trust his luck. And in the meantime to be part of such a body of men, moving for-ward together amid these awesome, cataclysmic forces that made the air and the ground explode with primeval power — it did have its own mad excitement. He felt an intense sense of being.

  In retrospect, Kingsley was to conclude that this madness did not replace the terror but numb it. A tingling numbness, like the helpless exhilaration of a dream. Or perhaps it was simply the concussive sledgehammer of the exploding ordnance that bludgeoned men into becoming momentarily careless of their fate.

  Whatever the reason, madness lent Kingsley wings and within a minute or two he had come level with the man he was seeking.

  McCroon, like all the soldiers still upright, was moving towards the enemy line with a fag in his mouth and a bayonet-mounted rifle held before him. No shield at all from the German fire.

  ‘McCroon!’ Kingsley shouted, falling in beside the man. ‘I must speak to you.’

  McCroon turned in surprise.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ McCroon shouted back.

  ‘My name is Marlowe. I am investigating the murder of Captain Abercrombie. It was I who found the evidence that freed your friend Hopkins.’

  ‘Hopkins!’ McCroon shouted above the din. ‘You want Hopkins?’

  ‘No, not Hopkins,’ Kingsley roared in reply, ‘it’s you I seek.’

  ‘Hopkins is here!’

  And before Kingsley had time to reply McCroon had pulled at the arm of the man marching beside him, who turned to face them.

  And there, beneath the dripping rim of his steel helmet, behind the glowing ember of his fag, was the grim face and staring eyes of the man whom Kingsley had met only once but whose fate was inextricably entwined with his own. The man whose release from military prison Kingsley had brought about just one day earlier. Whom Kingsley’s brave and careful detective work had saved from the firing squad.

  And they had sent him straight back into the line.

  Even in the midst of battle Kingsley felt the shock of it. Here was a man falsely accused of murder, who had been awoken from a shell-shocked sleep and dragged bodily from his hospital bed to face arrest for a crime of which he knew nothing, who had been held in brutal incarceration in fear of his life — and yet they had not given him even a day to recover from his ordeal. The smile that Hopkins must have smiled on hearing that he was to be released without charge must surely have disappeared instantly from his lips as he learned that he was to proceed directly from prison into battle.

  The argument Kingsley heard later went like this: Hopkins had always protested his innocence, and since it turned out that he was innocent he must be in a lucid and steady state of mind. Or, to put it another way, not sufficiently shell-shocked to be excused duty. In the midst of this most desperate of battles, with the body of the British Army haemorrhaging men as if from every artery, each extra man who could fight must fight. And so poor, bewildered Private Hopkins had been tossed from the temporary safety of gaol into the fierce heat of battle.

  Hopkins turned to see why McCroon had pulled his arm.

  Kingsley noted no spark of recognition in his eyes — eyes that, like every man’s in that cauldron of exploding sulphurous mud and smoke, were red and watery. Perhaps Hopkins’s vision was too blurred to see, perhaps a muzzle flash from the German fusillade had momentarily bedazzled him. For whatever reason, he was never to greet again the man who had cleared his name because just as he had turned to look, drawing upon the thin, bent cigarette clamped between his lips, just as the ember glowed hot, he died. He was blown into countless pieces of ‘wet dust’ by a German mortar shell.

  Once more Kingsley was coated with the remains of a British soldier, but this time it was the remains of a British soldier whom he had killed. Kingsley understood it all in an instant. Even as the man disintegrated in front of him. Even as his suddenly dead flesh splattered into Kingsley’s face, coating his mouth. Even as Kingsley tasted Hopkins’s blood, he knew that he had killed the man. For had he not proved successful in his investigation of the murder weapon, had he not retrieved a bullet from the chest of a German cook, had Kingsley never come to France at all but instead refused and returned to prison, facing the fate he had chosen for himself, then Hopkins would still be in his cell. Safe for a few more days at least.

  Kingsley had lifted the shadow of the death sentence from this man only to witness a different death sentence being passed upon him instantly.

  The guilt and the confusion of these momentary reflections would return to haunt Kingsley many times, but for the moment they were literally blown from his head by a second mortar shell, which briefly concussed both him and McCroon and hurled them together into a shell hole.

  It was fortunate indeed that the concussion was brief, for the hole into which they had been flung was at least five feet deep and, like every other indentation upon that blasted plain, was entirely full of water. Kingsley, half drowned when he regained consciousness, spluttered and puked his way to the surface and was then able to reach down and pull up McCroon. He had swallowed even more water than Kingsley and was in a poor way. Kingsley held the man’s head above the water, jammed him against the side of the hole and attempted to revive him with a slap. The moment that Kingsley perceived the signs of returning consciousness in McCroon’s face, he turned once more to the task that had led him into the battle.

  ‘Tell me about visiting Hopkins on the night Abercrombie died,’ he shouted.

  For a moment there was total incomprehension on McCroon’s face.

  ‘What the fuck…’ he said finally, coughing up the filthy water he had swallowed.

  ‘Tell me about your visit to Hopkins,’ Kingsley shouted a second time.

  McCroon stared at him in amazement.

  ‘Hopkins is dead, you fucking lunatic. He just fucking died, didn’t you see?’

  ‘What did you hear going on in
the ward next door?’

  ‘This is a battle, you mad bastard! Do you hear me?’

  A third voice intruded, loud and commanding. That accent again, the one which ruled the world.

  ‘You men! I say, you men down there! Attend to me! Are you hurt?’

  Kingsley looked round to see an officer standing on the edge of the shell hole staring down at them.

  ‘You don’t look hurt,’ the officer said. ‘Get out of there this instant, you bloody cowards, and do your duty!’

  ‘I am a police — ’

  The officer levelled his pistol at Kingsley. He was clearly in no mood for a debate and what was left of Kingsley’s military policeman’s uniform was concealed below the surface of the water.

  ‘This instant, you malingering swine! Advance towards the enemy immediately or I will shoot!’

  Kingsley saw the man’s finger whiten on the trigger. He knew that the British service revolver, once cocked, responded to very little pressure.

  ‘I shall count to three!’ the officer shouted. ‘One…!’

  Kingsley could scarcely believe it but he was going to have to rejoin the assault.

  ‘All right!’ he cried, and began to search about himself for a way to climb out of the hole.

  Just then, however, the officer disappeared, or at least his head did. Something had blown it clean off at his shoulders. The headless body stood where it had stood a moment before, the gun still in its hand, and then it toppled forward into the shell hole, splashing down beside Kingsley and sinking beneath the murky surface under the weight of its kit.

  Once more Kingsley turned his attention to McCroon.

  ‘Tell me what you heard the night you made baskets with Hopkins.’

  ‘He’s dead, you lunatic. Don’t you understand? It doesn’t matter. We’re all going to die!’

  Kingsley slapped McCroon again across the face, and even in that moment he reflected that this was the first time in his career that he had ever laid a hand on a witness during an interrogation.

  ‘Just answer my question, Private!’