by Unknown
Archer edged closer to Jenkins. Warmth was not a factor. Jenkins didn’t mind. He would have clasped Archer’s hand for comfort if he thought the Sergeant wouldn’t notice. Jenkins was still just a boy. He hadn’t even finished university when the war broke out. That seemed such an age ago now, though.
The rumble grew deeper.
The pitch rose, the whine assaulting the night air. It drew closer. Archer moved the periscope in the direction of the sounds but the low, light mist seeping in and out of the trenches obscured any view of the source.
The sound ceased.
There was silence again. Jenkins thought he could hear every breath the men took, if they dared breathe. A full minute passed. Jenkins’ gaze met Archer’s. Archer raised his eyebrows. Maybe it went off in a different direction, they pleaded.
The whine returned. The clanking and rumbling louder, closer. Jenkins heard the ratcheting sound of a rifle round chambering.
“You up there,” whispered Sergeant Jones at Jenkins and Archer. “Do you see anything? Anything at all?”
They both shook their heads.
“The mist, Sarnt,” said Jenkins, as Archer again tried the periscope.
“All right. You men, stand to,” he said, addressing the thirty or so soldiers huddled along the north-eastern wall. Cold hands chambered cold brass into colder rifles, a dozen warm ghosts of breath leaping from their mouths, giving form to the terror that gripped the trench.
Jenkins could actually feel the pulsing throb of the beast as it growled somewhere off to the west of their sector. Or was it the pulsing throb of fear in his own heart? Sergeant Jones strode off to wake the platoon’s lieutenant, Addler. They returned moments later, Addler already worried about what the noise would bring with it tonight. Jones appraised him of the developments: the men on watch, the noise from the west, moving this way.
The cacophony rose again, stronger still. Jenkins estimated it was no more than half a mile from their position, perhaps as close as a quarter mile from the most extended corner of the trench system. Lieutenant Addler drew his Webley revolver and checked that the chamber was loaded. It was just a pistol, thought Jenkins, not bloody Excalibur. It’ll just bounce right off the black tank, he thought.
“Right, listen here chaps,” said Addler, looking up at Jenkins and Archer. “Stay alert and give us as much warning as possible if you see the tank. If it looks like it’s coming for us again tonight, give three shrill blasts of your whistles. Understand?”.
Jenkins and Archer answered jointly.
“Yes, sir.”
“If it looks like its after the Hun then keep quiet. We don’t want it to come over this way again. Understood?”
Jenkins glanced over at the collapsed wall. No one wanted to see the carnage of four nights ago repeated. Twelve men had died when the great tanking beast had hauled itself over the wall,chewing up soil, soldiers and screams. For those poor souls at least, the war was over. Jenkins tried not to think about the panic of that night.
Or of any of the nights since they first heard that shrill siren-song of death two weeks ago.
Some nights were quiet. But most were like tonight. Why did the tank only come for them at night? he wondered. Why not in the daylight hours too? It didn’t matter. They couldn’t abandon their posts. They’d almost certainly be shot as deserters. What a bloody pickle, he thought. He wondered where the tank came from. Who was driving that bloody infernal machine? Whomever it was certainly didn’t differentiate between Tommy and Fritz.
Both became meals for the monster.
Archer nudged him. “Let’s hope it goes for the Hun this time, hey Jenks?”
Jenkins smiled pitifully. He nodded.
The platoon took positions at the base of Jenkins’ and Archer’s mud wall, leaning into the steep gradient, their tin helmets barely reflecting the thin moonlight. The rumbling had grown to a steady drone. Earth rattled and cascaded down the trench walls, showering the men in dirt. Jenkins’ heart picked up its pace, threatening to give up the ghost there and then. His heart didn’t care if it was caught and shot for desertion. Archer pulled his rifle up to him, risking a peek over the wall.
“Archie! Get your bloody head down!” Jenkins wanted to shout, instead settling for a sharp whisper. “Snipers!” he warned.
They could hear the Germans in their trenches and bunkers across the battlefield. Panicked voices. The Hun could hear it coming too. Neither of them spoke any German but they knew from the tone that the Hun was as terrified as they were.
Fear is a universal language. It requires no translation.
The clanking-dragging-clanging was at full throttle now. A rhythmic hum filled the air. Less than quarter of a mile, thought Jenkins. They would be able to see it if it wasn’t for this damned ground mist!
A scrabbling snapped him from scanning the night. Sergeant Jones appeared next to him, face down beneath the lip of the dirt wall. He held an illumination flare in one hand and an Enfield rifle in the other. By now the German voices were shouts.
“There!” hissed Archer.
The three soldiers craned their heads into the mist. Something large and shapeless moved behind the ghostly screen. The mechanical snarling was almost unbearable. Below, worried faces beneath tin hats squeezed eyes shut as more dirt from the vibrating ground fell on them in great clods.
A German heavy machine gun opened fire, tracer rounds streaming out to the hulk lurking in the mist.
The machine gun burped in long, loud cycles. Every few seconds a tracer round would hit something large and hard, tearing off into the night and carving a vertical arc of orange. The tank rumbled to a stop, its engine ticking over. Debating.
Then it rolled north.
“Its going after the Hun!” shouted Sergeant Jones through his frosted moustache at Lieutenant Addler below.
Addler could hardly hear him through the juttering guns and roaring mechanical screech.
More rifles and machine guns opened up from the German lines. More colourful displays lit the night sky as they poured fire at the black shape soughing in and out of view. Jenkins, Archer and Jones watched in fascinated fear.
It was huge. Metal. Tracked. A rusted and pitted carapace of darkness. A mottled crab scuttling amongst the detritus of war. The huge tracks on either side of the hull formed a pair of diabolical rhomboids, dipping the armoured dervish up and down across the pockmarked battlefield. On either armoured flank was a turret and a short, fat gun barrel. The barrel on the starboard side was smashed and splayed like the petals of a flower. They moved back and forth like the antennae of some ungodly insect. The whole thing was caked in mud, oil and rust. It had no colour. No markings.
The right side was torn, exposing an orange glow flickering in the blackness of the beast’s belly. Jenkins thought it looked like there was a fire burning inside the thing.
A shrill shriek split the sky as someone on the German lines speared a flare into the night. It deployed a small parachute, fizzing loudly as it drifted, casting shimmering light patterns on the desolate mud plains.
The great dirty tracks kicked up mud behind them as the tank heaved itself toward the German trench wall. Frozen corpses left in the emptiness of no man’s land snapped and cracked as the tank rolled over them. Jenkins had thought the great iron monsters were a masterstroke when they first rolled over the battlefield out here in the blood-stained and mud-flayed fields. He’d never seen anything like them. Not even his father’s tractor came anywhere close.
But this tank was different from the others.
It took no sides.
It gobbled up men and didn’t care what uniform they wore. Not that anyone could tell. They all lived in mud and filth. British and German alike wore only one uniform out here near Cambrai, near the lair of this evil - black fear. This leviathan seemed to feed on that squalor. It taunted them in the long nights. Jenkins said another prayer as the tank disappeared over into the German trench system. God help the poor Hun.
Tomorrow,
it might be us.
It was a terrible night.
Jenkins lay in the mud and listened to the heavy shattering noises from the German lines until he and Archer were relieved by Privates Johnny Pounds and Charlie Weeks.
As he had lain there, listening to the horror a few hundred yards away, his mind had flashed images of smashed and cracked bodies. Of young German boys with frightened and desperate faces. He had imagined the German equivalent of Sergeant Jones rallying them. Threatening them with his pistol if they turned and ran. He heard the tank feasting as it rolled over them and destroyed them. It was hungry tonight. Let it sate itself and leave, Jenkins prayed. Just don’t roll over our way.
Just before dawn, the tank and its mechanical symphony receded back towards the west, and the plains of Cambrai seemed themselves to fall into an exhausted sleep. When all was silent, when they were sure the tank had disappeared, Jenkins fell silent too. He slept hard until the wafted scent of heated porridge dragged him back to consciousness.
Seated next to a dozen young men, all of them malnourished and terribly skeletal, eating spoonfuls of porridge in the cold and dark of the bunker, Jenkins tried not to think about the cries from the Hun side of no man’s land.
– Help us Tommy. Please! – in rough English, amidst the shooting and crunching and growling.
Squeals of pain and fear. Pleading for mothers. Jenkins knew the German word for mother. It made him think of his own mother. He wondered what she and Pop were doing just then. It made him long for home more than ever.
Sergeant Jones ducked into the bunker.
“Right, everybody outside with rifles and satchels in five!” he boomed, turning on his heel and heading for the next bunker to deliver the same news to the soldiers there. Archer licked his mess tin clean and managed a smile. He was good like that.
“Maybe the war is over, hey Jenks?”
“I blimmin’ well hope so,” said Eddie Batcher, already standing and wiping down his rifle, hefting his canvas satchel. “I can’t take much more of this. I can’t.”
He left the bunker without another word. Jenkins took a deep breath.
“Hey, Arch. Reckon we’re going over the top?” he asked.
“Maybe. Maybe we take advantage of the mess of last night and surprise the Hun. Makes sense.”
“Bit unsporting, though.”
“All’s fair, my friend. All’s fair!”
They were not going over the top.
The gruff sergeant and the platoon lieutenant lined the men up along the trench, checking that each man carried his rifle and satchel. Tin helmets clinked against each other as the men hopped from one foot to the other in the freezing light. A gunmetal sky towered over them. The sun was rising slowly but it didn’t seem too concerned with heating anything today. Breath and mist blurred into a phantom presence.
Lieutenant Addler cleared his throat. “Right, men. It’s been a long night, I am aware of that. But we are soldiers. We have a duty to perform admirably despite persistent hardships. This is what war is. I am as tired and hungry as you are. I want to go home to my wife and family just as much as you do.”
Jenkins didn’t like where this was going. Archer frowned quizzically at the lieutenant.
“Bleedin’ heck,” whispered a voice along the line. “We’re goin’ over the top!”.
“Quiet!” Jones roared, his voice bouncing off the hard-packed walls of the trench.
Addler continued. “I have just received orders from HQ that we are to press into a new quadrant of operations and reclaim an evacuated trench.” He paused. Jenkins saw the hesitation. Addler feared the men’s reactions as much as any other horror out here. “The position lies to our west.” Addler finally managed.
The men instantly began voicing their disapproval in murmurs and grumblings. The West. Oh, bloody hell. Jones stepped in like a true platoon sergeant.
“Listen here you lot!” he bellowed, his face somehow mustering enough warm blood from his body to flush his cheeks a bright red. The men fell silent. “There will be no dissent! There will be no questioning orders! Need I remind you that mutiny or cowardice is punishable by a bullet?” He pulled his revolver out for emphasis. A long cord dangled from the gun’s butt and back to the holster like a hangman’s noose, waiting for the condemned. No one spoke.
“Now, pick up what ammunition you can and muster back here in two minutes sharp!”
Three minutes later they were under way. It was just before ten in the morning.
They walked for several hours in single file through the thick mud. They soon left the trenches which had been their home for the past six weeks and began trudging through an older, shallower trench system, slowly wending their way west. Jenkins didn’t like that the trench walls only came up to their waists out here. He felt naked. The trenches angled away toward the western horizon as far as they could see, transcecting old and new lanes of mud every hundred feet or so.
Sometime later, they stopped for a brief rest. Jones hustled the exhausted young men.
“Drink fast, lads. We’ve a ways to go yet.”
By early afternoon they had entered a deserted area of the battlefield. They had not seen another person, German or English, or even French farmers, since before lunch. Jenkins trudged wearily behind Archer. The German lines were off to their north. He thought the Hun had left this area too, and he didn’t blame them.
Not with that hungry tank rolling around here at night.
“You alright, mate?” asked Archer.
“I’m OK. Knackered is all,” he replied. “How much longer do you reckon?”
Archer gave him what he wanted.
“Not long, I reckon. Hopefully we’ll be there before nightfall.”
Archer was good like that.
Jenkins heard a rustling ahead, snapping him out of his trance-like marching state. Everyone around him was dropping to the floor of the trench. A hand pulled him down. It was Archer.
“Look!” he said, pointing over the low mud berm.
In the distance, maybe a half-mile away, he could make out a stationary tank standing sentinel. His heart picked up the pace again. Oh Christ, he thought. Now we’re for it. Caught out in the open.
The thirty men kept silent, each to a man hoping it hadn’t seen them. It seemed unlikely. Everyone was so utterly exhausted that no one had even noticed it until it was too late. Jenkins met Archer’s eyes. He shook his head. Incredible. Archer smiled. Sergeant Jones crawled through the filth past them to the front of the prone column.
“Is it the tank?” whispered a voice. “The black tank?”
“Keep low and quiet, men,” Jones kept repeating as he squirmed forward to the lieutenant.
All eyes remained on the tank. It did nothing. It simply sat there, the rusted canons pointing away from them. It was silent. No engine noise. No clanging and dragging tracks. Silent as a corpse. Up at the head of the line, there was some conferring between the lieutenant and the sergeant and presently Sergeant Jones crawled towards Jenkins and Archer’s position.
“Listen here, Chapman, Smith, Pounds - you three are to crawl towards the tank and investigate.”
The three men started to protest before Jones silenced them.
“That is a direct order. If the tank starts to move, throw the grenades and hightail it back here as fast as you can.”
Pounds was as white as the ever-present mist. Jenkins prayed that Jones had no orders for him.
“If it remains as is, investigate further. Signal to us if it is empty. If it isn’t then bloody well shoot ‘ooever you find in there.” He dropped his voice. “I don’t care if they’re ours.”
The three privates crept slowly towards the tank. Jones watched them through binoculars like a hawk. After a few tense minutes, one of the men waved. Empty.
Thirty hearts left thirty mouths and smiles returned to faces they’d vacated months earlier.
“It’s not all bad news out here then!” said Archer.
“I tell you wh
at, old boy, I don’t think I can handle much more of this,” said Jenkins.
Jones stood gingerly. “Right boys, up! Rifles at the ready. Approach the tank in a line abreast!”
Jones and Addler led the way. The platoon cautiously edged towards the three men, one of whom was already clambering on top of the still, steel beast.
The ripe smell of decay reached Jenkins’ nostrils as they closed on the tank. A foetid stench. It smelt like no man’s land on the worst days of a hot summer. Warm. Invading. Repulsive. Sweet.
“It’s empty!” shouted Chapman from the tank’s roof. The platoon encircled it. They swarmed over it, climbing on and over the great rhomboid caterpillar tracks, now broken and loose. The men on top of the tank, hanging off every inch of it, made Jenkins think of children playing on a rusted metal climbing frame during a summer lunch break.
The platoon relaxed. Some lit cigarettes. All of them stared in awe and fear. The tank was obviously derelict, no threat. It was the first time they had been close to one of these metal machines without terror propelling them in the opposite direction.
Men peered into the narrow slits at the front of the tank. Inside, it was a foul pit of blackness. But it was empty, just as Chapman had said.
Devoid of anything, in fact. No engine. No seats. Nothing. As empty as the feeling inside all of them. This war had taken its pound of flesh and more.
“I think it’s one of ours. A Mark IV. I can’t see any identifying markings on it, though,” said Addler.
“Look!” said a voice, a finger pointing to the barrel of the starboard gun turret.
It hung from the turret, limp and smashed, next to a large two-foot tear in the tank’s armour.
Recognition crossed every face.
It was the tank that terrorised them in the night. It was their black tank. No doubt about it.
Weeks kicked the machine. Another spat on it. Everyone jumped off and backed away. Everyone except Archer.
Jones and Addler conferred with one another. Archer ran his hand over the rusted and dented carapace. He wiped away the filth.
“What is it, Arch?” said Jenkins.