by John Harris
I caught Locky’s eyes on mine and he raised his hand briefly, then I heard once more the rattle of the machine gun ahead of us, penetrating the din. The bullets began to splash and chatter among the sandbags above our heads again, cutting the grass and sending little glissades of dirt into the trench.
Henny was still staring at them fixedly.
‘Don’t take any notice,’ I said. ‘We’ll pick the moment when he’s at the end of his traverse and we’ll be on to him before he can come back.’
Then the bombardment lifted, and we stared at each other in dazed relief at the cessation of all din. For a few seconds, the whole front seemed to be silent, then the German shells came down again on the forward assault trenches, and I saw Pine tramping towards us, armed only with a walking stick and followed by his brother. There was a trickle of blood on his cheek, and his eye-patch was lopsided.
‘Out!’ he was shouting. ‘Get out! Get up in front and lie down on the tapes! His next salvo’s going to drop in here or damn’ near! Get out!’
We all scrambled to our feet and I saw Bold reach towards the parapet and pull himself up.
The shells that were dropping in front of the trench came closer, and Ashton came along, forcing his way through the surging crowd of men.
‘Come on!’ he was shouting. ‘Out! Out!’
Locky looked round at me and gave me a push up towards the parapet.
‘“For what we are about to receive,”’ I could hear him saying, ‘“may the Lord make us truly thankful.”’
3
The German counter-bombardment was cracking and banging away all round us as we scrambled up the ladders and the earth steps that had been cut in the parapet.
My heart was hammering a mad tattoo in my throat, but as I got clear of the trench I slipped on a patch of muddy ground and went down under my load with a crash that knocked all the fear out of me. That’s a bloody fine start to a battle, I thought viciously as I scrambled up.
As I got to my feet, I saw a ruined church far in front and was aware of the heat of the brilliant sun that was climbing well beyond the slopes in front by this time. The mist in the hollows in front of us was masking the German lines now and the ground was white with chalk dust that had been thrown up by explosions and now lay on the grass like snow.
There seemed to be flowers everywhere, even more than I’d thought, and with the gay little pennants the bombers were carrying, it seemed absurd to think of death. At that moment, back in England people were sitting down to their breakfast of bacon and eggs and enjoying the summer sunshine, unaware that the greatest battle the world had ever seen had just begun.
I must have been one of the first out and, as I stood there, heaving the others up one after the other with their loads, I felt exposed and lonely in the flying dirt and smoke, but I was overjoyed to find I wasn’t afraid any more.
‘Lie down on the tapes,’ Ashton was shouting, but the tapes seemed to have disappeared and, judging by the number of shell-holes and the amount of scorched grass about, they must have been blown to blazes during the night.
We ran forward, each watching the man on his right for dressing, and tried to get into the two lines of artillery formation.
‘This way to eternity,’ Murray shouted. ‘Who’s for a soldier’s grave?’ He was still carrying his home-made flag with its slogan, Look out, Kaiser Bill! and waving it crazily.
‘Lie down! Lie down!’ I saw Bold standing as erect as a sign-post, shouting, and we all got down, awkward and off-balance under that awful weight we carried on our backs; and we lay on our faces in the long coarse grass that was still grey-wet with dew.
I had time now to look in front of me, but there was no sign of the first wave. There seemed to be no one else in that world of noise just then but us.
I thought I saw Serre just above the smoke which was rolling in the hollow in front, but where before there’d been thick trees and hedges, now they all stood bare and leafless, empty trunks and shattered branches with all the foliage blasted off them.
Then I saw red rockets fly into the air from the German lines in front of us and the shells came droning down on us again with a triumphant whooping fury, seeming to tear the earth apart in a vast black savagery. I was consumed with dread again, and tormented with a sudden envy of those luckier men who weren’t there with me, men who were at home with their families, eating their breakfasts or reading their papers. All standards of sanity seemed to vanish in the din.
A line of shells burst in front of me and I saw clods, earth and stones flung whining up into the air, and the smoke puffs that looked for all the world like a clump of trees suddenly sprouting from the earth.
Why was the damned artillery so useless, I kept thinking. Why didn’t they silence the German batteries? Why didn’t someone do something?
The fog shook and twitched with the shelling, and the world seemed to dance and flicker in front of me as flying fragments whirred and shrieked down around us. Every gun in Germany seemed to be pointed at us just then.
‘Spread out! Spread out! Don’t bunch!’ Ashton was standing wide-legged, shouting, pointing to offending groups of men with the ash-plant he carried.
The air rocked and trembled with the concussion and the hard high-pitched detonations hammered on my eardrums, and I caught the acrid smell of explosive. From horizon to horizon the earth seemed to be spouting dirt and stones, and the air was full of drifting smoke, snow-white, venomous green and woolly impenetrable black. My brain felt numbed with the sound, and my helmet rang with whirring stones.
Then I heard the swish of bullets going through the grass with a strange chipping whistle, and I heard someone yelp. As I turned, I saw a man dragging himself to the rear, his right leg covered with blood.
‘Lucky bastard,’ Billy Mandy called after him. ‘You’re well out of it, mate!’
We were still lying down and men kept running forward to join us, climbing out of the confusion of smoke where the shells were tearing the trench to pieces behind us. Ashton was still standing up in front of us, shouting to us not to bunch, and as I watched him I saw his left hand jerk, and a spatter of blood leapt from his finger-ends. He looked down at it, startled, but he went on standing there, flinching but upright, his hand limp by his side.
I heard a bang behind me and, looking round, I saw Spring with his face to the ground. I knew it was Spring because his helmet had fallen off and I could see his fair wavy hair. I knew he was dead. Alongside him another man was rolling about with his hands to his face, and I saw his fingers were red with bright blood. As he yelled and whimpered with pain, I realised it was Henny Cuthbert, who’d gone down on the tram that day with me two years before to enlist.
I caught a glimpse of a few scared faces – Mason, Locky, Murray, Eph Lott, Arnold Holroyd and Catchpole – then I saw Ashton look at his watch. He seemed to move slowly and with deliberate care. The sun beat on my shoulders and legs like the blast from an oven.
‘How much longer?’ I was saying to myself. ‘For God’s sake, how much longer?’
‘One minute to go!’ I couldn’t hear Ashton’s words and only saw them form on his lips. One-handed, he’d tied an orange handkerchief on the end of his ash-plant and was waving it.
‘Keep your eyes on this, lads,’ he was shouting. ‘Where this is, you’ll find me!’ He tucked his stick under his arm and, stooping, picked one of the enormous moonpennies that grew around his feet and stuck it with a self-conscious gesture in his buttonhole.
Then I saw Arnold Holroyd had a sandbag with him and he fished a football out of it.
‘How about a goal for the Rovers?’ he said.
Ashton’s whistle went just as he shoved it into my hand. It seemed a pointless gesture, but I scrambled to my feet, full of a wild senseless hope that, after all, it might be easier than I’d expected. I was aware of other men heaving themselves up with difficulty out of the grass on either side of me, and I gave the ball a tremendous kick and started to walk forward after i
t as it went bouncing into the grass.
What happened to the wave ahead of me, I don’t know. I never saw anything of them but for a few still khaki figures lying in the front trench as we clumped over a narrow bridge made out of planks. The trench looked as though it was pretty badly smashed up, and the sandbags were all lying in heaps in the bottom, among the bodies and the splintered timbers and the charred holes where the shells had landed.
There was another long row of figures just in front of the sandbags, the remains of the first wave lying where they’d been caught in the open by the machine guns and the slicing splinters of the barrage. I found it hard to believe there could be so many of them, for they were lying in a thick swathe, almost like corn cut down by a scythe, huddled all ways, some of them in shell-holes with their feet sticking out, looking like fish in a basket. Most of them were still, but a few of them moved awkwardly, with the clumsy horrifying slowness of crushed beetles, trying to get up, or turn over, or drag themselves on their elbows or hands and knees back to the safety of the trench.
There was one of them who was shot through the loins, and as I stooped over him, he only grunted and stared at me with hatred, as though he loathed me for being still unhurt and able to move.
I could hear Ashton shouting: ‘Keep your extension! Don’t bunch! Keep up on the left!’ and all the time my mind was ticking over like a clock. ‘Suppose the next one’s me!’ it kept repeating. ‘Suppose the next one’s me!’
Figures flickered around me, curiously unreal in the excitement, silhouetted by the sun on the haze of dirt and smoke. Shell-fragments were smashing into the ground and great clods of earth were thumping down on us and rolling end-over-end through the grass.
In front of us, there was a slight slope and we went up it in perfect alignment, masked for a moment by the crest.
‘If it’s all like this,’ Murray shouted, ‘it’s a cakewalk!’
The smoke and whiffs of lyddite fumes swam past me and everything started to become confused. Nothing after that seemed to follow rationally on anything that had happened before. It was as though a series of violent isolated pictures were flung briefly on a screen and I caught only glimpses of what was happening.
A group of men came pushing back between us, most of them wounded and bloody, and a fight nearly developed as they got in our way. The men going back were hurt and frightened and the men going forward were caught by the intoxication of the attack, their minds focused only on getting forward and down into the earth again, and I saw the wounded men brushed aside impatiently by others who thought of them only as an obstacle in their path.
I knew already that the barrage had moved too quickly for us and, with a sick feeling of horror, I guessed that things were beginning to go wrong. I felt a tremendous urge to turn round and run, abject and fearful, while I still could, for the shelter of the trenches, but everyone else was going forward and I stayed with them and just in front. Doubtless they were thinking the same way as I was, some of them probably even thinking they must do as I did.
We came up against a patch of wire that had been erected in the middle of No Man’s Land, half-hidden in the long grass, and we swung to the right to avoid it, and I remember thinking it had probably been put there to funnel us on to the machine guns.
As we closed up, breasting the crest, I saw men stumbling forward, heads down, backs bent under their packs, with the slow, steady, beast-of-burden stride that was so familiar in the trenches, rifles at the port, bayonets catching the sunshine, just as Locky had said they would. Then there was a sound like escaping steam all round me and little spurts of dirt began to leap from the ground. I saw men stagger and roll forward, still holding their rifles, sinking slowly to their knees and sagging forward until their heads touched the ground, and it startled me to realise they could die so quickly.
‘Don’t bunch!’ I turned and shouted to the men behind me. Young Murray was still there, I noticed, carrying the Lewis now, his flag gone, his helmet missing, a smear of blood on his face, and Eph Lott and a few more I recognised. Bold had disappeared, and so had Locky.
Then Arnold Holroyd seemed to lose his head. He was running about, waving his revolver, and shouting to the men behind me.
‘Come on, you bastards!’ he was yelling. ‘Or I’ll shoot the lot of you!’
He pointed the revolver at a man who was kneeling with his head down.
‘Get up!’ he shouted. ‘Or I’ll let you have it!’
I knocked the weapon out of his hand so that it swung on the end of its lanyard. ‘He’s dead,’ I shouted, and he looked stupidly at me.
‘What about all that lot?’ he shouted hysterically, pointing back to a row of men all crouching in the grass, their heads half-hidden.
‘They’re dead too,’ I said.
Murray had disappeared now, I noticed, somewhere among the drifting smoke and crashing shell-fire, but Ashton was still there ahead of me, still waving his little flag, and there was no wavering, no attempt by anybody to turn back.
As we approached the main German wire, great looping tangles of thick rusty ungalvanised stuff that my wire cutters would never have touched, I could see a few stakes had been uprooted, but it had been cut only in places and there were bodies lying in heaps in the openings. They looked like a lot of skittles knocked over in some giant game, whole rows of them, lying dead where they’d fallen, and whole masses more heaped up against the outside fringe of the wire, scarecrows with their arms spreadeagled, caught there in a moment of time.
Inevitably, we drew together at the gaps and it was there those patterned criss-cross streams of bullets caught us again.
Men began to crumple and disappear out of sight, and the line of bobbing helmets I’d had in the corner of my eyes all the time seemed to thin away to nothing as the gaps widened in the scattered ranks.
I saw the spurts of dirt move towards me, the ground jumping and stirring in all directions, and I remember I was horrified to realise the bullets were coming from the flanks as well as from the front, then they changed direction at the end of a traverse and moved away again, ploughing little furrows in the earth. Men were running backwards and forwards trying to find an opening in the wire, and all order seemed to have gone out of the attack. Figures were stumbling about in the haze as though bewildered. The ground seemed to be littered with dud shells, I noticed.
Ashton appeared through the smoke. He’d been wounded in the head now, I saw. His helmet had gone and there was a lot of blood on his face, but he still held that little orange flag of his. He was gesturing frantically to his right and I joined him and we got going again. I saw Catchpole and the Mandersons and Tom Creak, still sticking together, and Mason and Bold, who’d turned up again. Locky had vanished completely and I wondered briefly where he was, when I saw a crowd of men bunching behind me and I waved to them to spread out.
‘Come on,’ Bold was shouting, magnificently erect. ‘The beggars can’t shoot for toffee! Look ’ow they’re missing us!’
Up ahead I could see a group of Germans dragging a heavy machine gun up on to the parapet. I noticed they wore no equipment and moved easily, and still struggling under that cursed weight on my back, I envied them their freedom.
‘Come on,’ I shouted. ‘Before they start firing!’
But we were too late and the bullets caught us like a hail of sleet once more, and I saw the whole line go down round me, some dead, some wounded, some in an instinctive dive for the earth. There seemed to be only half a dozen left when I turned round, half a dozen unwounded men looking to Ashton for orders, and in a rage at that stupid load on my back that was impeding my movements, I undid the buckles and left it where it fell.
The machine gun swung away from us and we scrambled to our feet again, but it came back at once. I saw Mason’s head go up and he took two or three steps forward with his head in the air, his rifle dropping from his outstretched hands. Then he stopped dead and began to stagger backwards and fell. The wire caught him and seemed to bounce
him half-upright again, his arms stretched out wide as though in appeal, and I saw him moving them feebly as he tried to free his clothes from the barbs.
‘No!’ I heard him screaming, his face twisted in an agonised expression of horror. ‘No! No! No!’ Then his cries were sliced in half by a spurt of bullets and his head fell back and his body sagged inside his clothes.
I plunged on, my head bowed as though against the weather. More men fell about me but, just then, I was conscious only of a desire to get out of that appalling storm of flying steel and dirt and stones. I saw more wire and it tripped me and I almost fell.
Then I saw a battered stretch of trench with dazzle-painted sandbags and stumbled towards it, but a strand of wire caught my trousers and pulled me to a stop with a loud twang. For a second, I saw myself caught up and crucified like Frank, then I wrenched myself free, my trousers torn, my flesh scarred by the barbs. Bombs were being flung from the trench and someone was flinging more bombs back. The machine gun seemed to be jammed and I could see a big German crouching over it shouting and hammering at it with his fist. There were more Germans just behind him, scared and grimacing, and I realised they were as frightened as we were. I caught a momentary glimpse of Bold away on my right, his arm drawn back with a bomb in it, then there was a brilliant flash in front of my eyes and I saw the gun and all the men round it topple over backwards and disappear.
I smashed desperately through the last few strands of wire, and went forward in a final tempestuous rush. A falling body crashed against me as I reached the parapet and knocked me forward so that I slid into the trench on my face. Someone fell on top of me, and we sprawled on the duckboards, both of us yelling with rage and fear.
I felt as if I’d run a five-mile race, and the breath was tearing at my lungs. When I sat up, I saw I was in a flattened ditch full of splintered boards and wreckage that looked like nothing I’d ever seen on maps or on exercises and I decided it couldn’t be the front line. But then I saw two or three Germans lying in stupid attitudes, their faces the colour of old bone and marked with dribbles of brilliantly coloured blood, and I realised it must be.