by Thomas Wood
My head was swimming with thoughts and ideas, of McKay, my sister and everything else in between. But there was one thought that recurred far more than any of the others, the one that had been bugging me for hours.
The informant. What did we have in common?
I could not for the life of me work out why I had become so attached to her, when I knew so little about her. All I knew was that she had been an informer, who had made a dash for it shortly after providing the British with the information about the gas attack. Other than that, I knew nothing.
There must be something. There must be some reason why I feel closer to her.
I began to doubt myself, about whether I had a common ground with her, or that it was just the fact that she was a woman that I had felt attached.
Maybe it was because I imagined her as my own sister, the one that I had started to think of more the closer that I got to death. There was some truth in it, my sister was the only female face that I could recall at the moment and I must have spent hours staring at the ceiling as I saw her racing through the streets of France, the Germans hot on her heels.
I hoped she had got away.
I knew that my sister was safe however, she was three hundred miles away in Southampton.
As I thought about her, running through France and then Southampton, I double checked that I had my most valuable possession on me. They would certainly be coming with me tonight.
Once, it had been the hip flask, with its foul demonic liquid sloshing around inside that I had to depend on. But now, it was the letters that sat just above my heart that would become my talisman.
Maybe I will write to her, just the minute I get back.
If I get back.
7
I had been relishing the chance to get back out and over the wire to be able to fight. But the moment I had put my foot on the bottom of the trench ladder, all thoughts of relief and happiness went out of the window.
Dread and fear firmly took their place in my guts. I could feel my insides tightening, as if they were tensing up and hardening themselves for a bullet or another knife to find its way through my body.
I had not thought it until now, but this was the first time that I was going to be heading out without the hip flask. I needed it. I needed to at least feel it on my person.
GRHMN.
No, it was gone. It was all down to luck now and I wasn’t quite sure if I was deserving of a share of the portion.
I wanted nothing more, as we scurried our way across No Man’s Land like a colony of rats, than to be back in my bunk, where I felt relatively safe and secure.
Crack.
My body jolted, as if the round had passed through my skin somehow.
I froze.
It took me far too long to work out that the rifle crack had been a long way off, the bullet meant for someone else entirely. It could have even been an accidental discharge. But I had been away from this life for long enough to be lulled into a sense of security, into a reality where things like that do not happen. I had started to jump at every noise, every artillery shell that landed, every flare that fizzled, all because I had become so accustomed to the noiseless hospital ward, where screaming nightmares was the worst that it got.
I tried to distract myself as best as I could, to get my mind off how inadequate I was feeling. I didn’t want to be the one responsible for any more deaths, if I could help it. I wanted all of them to survive tonight.
I looked around in the dark, hopeful of seeing a face or two that might reassure me and so that I could reassure them. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to keep them all alive and, even if I tried my utmost, there was a chance that I would merely put more people in danger by trying to save one person alone.
That was where my weakness now lay. Previously, I had not really cared for anyone, particularly not myself, but now I cared too much, to the point where I would gladly put other people’s lives in danger just to get one person out alive.
I had become scared myself, about death, as I laid prone in that hospital bed back in Britain. The thought of it now terrified me. I did not want to die. I was only nineteen years of age. No one deserved to die that young.
I had remembered the advice of my very first Sergeant, George Needs, who had given me the hip flask many months ago now.
You must lose your hope. You will die here.
My hope was well and truly gone, but the fear of dying, the one that had been masked so excellently by the copious amounts of paraffin, had started to seep through strongly, the quiver in my mind growing more and more tremulous by the day.
The ground was cool, so cool in fact that it felt almost quite damp, as I felt large clumps of dirt beginning to stick to me and come along for the journey across No Man’s Land.
I felt comfortable with the way in which we crouched and ducked as we made our way through the dirt and debris to get to the Boche wire. Everyone that I was out with on that night, had been out with me before, and had proven themselves capable of avoiding detection. There was no cause for concern there.
Similarly, there was no reason to doubt the advance party who had been sent ahead of us some twenty minutes before. They had ventured out in much the same manner as we had done, approaching the German wire, before stopping and waiting.
We waited for the perfect time to go in, where the noise around us was at a minimum, where we could guess at how many enemy soldiers were in a trench.
The advance party however, waited at the wire for as much noise as possible, a quick volley of artillery to be exact, just behind the German lines, so that they could cut the barbed wire freely.
It was a risky business, waiting for the shells to scream directly overhead. All it would take would be one, slightly defective shell and there could have been four dead British soldiers waiting for us at the wire, rather than the gaping wound in the German frontline that we were met with.
They had done an excellent job. As always.
I wished that I knew who they were, so that I could thank them. Maybe they could see us right now, as we lay quite still, ensuring that we had not been spotted on our approach.
We hadn’t.
It was time for us to go in.
The wire had been cut at the end of one of the fire bays, where the traversing trench ended and led on to another fire bay. It was best for us to try and slither in here if we could, for the Germans left the darkest corners of their trench alone, and so were less likely to see the spectral figures slithering into their trench uninvited.
It was also where General Palmer and his men had suspected that the canisters, if they even existed, would be located.
The four cold and damp corpses that lay in wait right above the German’s head, began to grow impatient with him, as he seemed determined to thwart our attempts to destroy their plans of attack. I heard the strike of a match, the accompanying smell of the burning stick slowly fading into the night, to be replaced by the stench of tobacco.
I hoped that Hamilton would not start choking at the smell.
It felt good to have just the four of us waiting for the German to move. It was just me, Captain Arnold, Earnshaw and Hamilton lying on our stomachs. Lawrence and Chester were further back, at the ruined farmhouse, waiting to cover our backs as we scarpered from an exploding enemy line.
It was not that I did not trust them, I had no choice but to, but it was the fact that they had not been able to prove themselves close up, not in my eyes anyway. They were snipers, long-distance killers, men who had not been in amongst a vicious and demanding hand-to-hand battle with the enemy.
And there was also the small matter of the huge scar that bubbled down the side of Sergeant Lawrence’s face. He had remained particularly coy over the matter, but there was something between him and Chester, that told me there was more to it than some kind of childhood accident. The scar still looked tender, it was recent.
It was for that reason, that I was glad that it was the four trench raiders, not the snipers, who were prepa
ring to enter the trench.
Eventually, the German began to move along the trench, at least his cigarette smoke did, which was the only signal that we needed. I made out the blackened face of the Captain, as he looked back at us all and gave us a curt nod.
Here we go. Back into the fray.
We took it in turns to slide down into the trench, my spiked truncheon and revolver sliding around in my sweating palms. I hit the floor, with a soft thud, before moving away to the other side of the trench to make way for the incoming men.
I bumped into the Captain. I stayed there, my face pressed into the back of his neck, while I felt Hamilton do exactly the same behind me. It was a calculated move, one that allowed us to group together and stay in the shadows until we knew that everyone was accounted for.
We waited for an age before Earnshaw joined the queue.
Hamilton lightly tapped me on my right arm, which I passed along to Captain Arnold. It was time for us to go.
There was very little light for us to go by as we stumbled along the trench, treading on the outsides of our boots so as to cut down on the noise that we would generate. It was inevitable that they would hear us coming eventually, but we hoped by then it would be far too late for them to do anything about it.
The singular source of light was from a very weak looking candle, that looked so pathetic I almost began to feel sorry for it. But it was just enough to hide our true identity while also affording us some guidance in the unfamiliar surroundings.
We moved along the trench as one body, sauntering past the sleeping soldiers who lay head to toe on the fire step. From what I could see, there was three of them there. We would leave Hamilton and Earnshaw to stand over them, to wait for their time to strike. They would need to be quick, ruthless, this all needed to be carried out with a frightful efficiency.
There was one sentry up ahead who stood atop the fire step, from what I could see from behind the Captain’s tall, statuesque figure, his cigarette chucking up a stream of smoke as he thudded along the trench. I thought I could hear him humming. Maybe that would help us.
As we approached the end of the fire bay, where the man was stood on watch, he started to turn, which was when the Captain spoke.
“Alles in Ordnung?”
He had been practicing his pronunciation over and over where, to my untrained ear, he sounded almost as naturalised as the Kaiser himself.
The German stood confused for half a second, as he tried to mumble out some sort of response to who he could only assume was a superior officer.
“Erm…Ja…”
His confused, stuttering response were the last words that he would ever speak, as Captain Arnold elegantly hopped up onto the fire step with him, as if he was about to take a look at the British lines, before a knife found itself embedded in the man’s chest.
He let out a low moan, as if he was merely being deflated, as the Captain began to twist and turn the knife so that it made a catastrophic wound.
As if he was some sort of a long-lost friend, the German threw himself on the Captain, who gradually helped him down from the fire step, and propped him up in a sitting position, as if he was just tired of standing. The man had no desires to make anymore noise, as he focused wholeheartedly on managing to get enough oxygen into his punctured lungs.
I heard the knives behind me withdraw and I knew immediately that the sleeping soldiers would never be waking up.
All of a sudden, a darkened shadow appeared at the end of the trench, as if he was a ghost who had mystically descended, to keep a watch on us.
As quickly as he had appeared, my mind began to fill in the blanks. The body slowly became enlightened, to reveal the khaki green coloured uniform, covered in a smattering of blood.
The body was small and compact, with a wiry frame that looked almost unable to support itself. The hair was blonde and floppy, so greasy that it was a much darker pigment than it should have been.
But then I saw the face, baby-like and innocent, devoid of anything truly remarkable, but a handsome face, nonetheless.
It was Bob Sargent.
He looked at me for a moment, tilting his head over to one side, as if he was inspecting my soul.
Why are you here? I thought I had got rid of you.
As the body turned and tried to run, I caught sight of the uniform once again. It hadn’t been khaki, it was a steely grey, the most depressing of colours known to man.
I hadn’t imagined the figure. I had imagined the face.
Immediately, I gave chase, my bones cracking louder than the footsteps that echoed across the whole of the Western Front.
The man had barely even made it to the end of the fire bay before he came within my arm’s reach.
Clump.
I felt one of the sawn-down nails get stuck in the shoulder of the man, which proved difficult to withdraw, especially as he fell to the ground. Some of his blood sprayed over me as I withdrew, knowing with a certainty that I was going to have to do it again to make sure this man kept quiet.
I closed my eyes and did what was necessary. The love of killing and maiming was never truly apparent in my heart, but it was even less so as I made sure that the German sentry would never get up again.
Bloodied and battered, I pulled him up onto the fire step, to let him sleep next to his two other compatriots.
“You alright?” whispered Hamilton, into my mind, as I sucked in air so furiously that I thought I might be the best defence mechanism against the gas attack.
I felt sick. Why had he been there? Why had he appeared in just the same way as he had done when I had shot him a few months ago?
I had got rid of the paraffin, that was what was causing all those hallucinations.
Wasn’t it?
Or maybe Bob truly was haunting me. Maybe he really did want to see me dead.
All I knew was that it had happened, and I would have to try with every ounce of my mental energy to block him out from returning.
Otherwise, I would be joining him on the other side of the mortal realm.
8
We all stared at one another for a few moments, as if no one really knew what to do next. I glared vigorously at Captain Arnold, willing him to speak, to do something other than just stand there and look at the body count that we had just created.
The bags under his eyes seemed to loom larger and darker than they had done before, so prominent were they on his face that the darkness of the dugout seemed to create a cave-like impression on them. He still had not had the motivation to have a shave, which meant that the stubble on his face was slowly coating itself in a layer of grease and grime, that would start to smell in a day or two.
It was as if he had lost every desire to look presentable, a worrying trait for a man who had previously been so immaculate in his appearance.
I was used to his unmoving stares by now, more often than not looking like he was engaging his brain to think about what to do next. But, in that moment, there was nothing, the dying embers behind his eyes a window to his mind, as if he was completely empty on the inside.
It was like he had lost every motivation to even command us. We all stood watching him, to tell us what to do next, but without the nudge from one of us, he would have quite happily have stayed stood there for the remainder of the night, I was quite sure of it.
He had always been so certain about why he was fighting in this war, instead of taking up a desk job that his father so easily could have sorted for him. But now, ever since the McKay situation had been found out by the other officers, he had become a changed man, one who was clearly conflicted about why this war was being fought.
I too had had the same reservations. Why was it that we were fighting against this evil enemy, and yet our own officers were prepared to line one of our own up against a wall to be shot?
It was a question that I desperately needed answering, but now was not the time, there were far better places to question those kinds of moral implications rather than the German
frontline.
“Sir?” I whispered, coaxing him from yet another of his trances. He blinked profusely, as if he was trying to get a speck of dirt out of his eye, or maybe to wash away the tears that had taken him by surprise.
His body jolted as if a current of electricity had shot through him from head to foot.
“Sir? We should move into the dugouts. Carry out the next phase of the plan?”
He said nothing, but vaguely nodded in my direction, not looking in my eyes but choosing instead to let his gaze soar right over the top of my head.
I immediately spun on my heel, leaving Captain Arnold to fend for himself, he was more or less completely useless to us at the moment and I hoped the alone time would be enough for him to pull himself together again. I had been able to do it, so why couldn’t he?
I pulled Earnshaw and Hamilton in towards me, pointing to the fabric flap of the dugout. We had to hope that there was at least one man in there, ready to be taken prisoner, but not too many that we would be overrun.
“That dugout there. I’ll grab a prisoner, you two deal with anyone else in there. Got it?”
They nodded, which filled me with an overwhelming sense of achievement and exhilaration. I finally felt like I was back where I belonged.
There was nothing pretty about what we were about to do, there was only one way that we could carry it out. We needed to be hard and fast, take everyone inside by surprise. That way, even if we were faced with ten men, then we could at least deal with a few of them before they pulled themselves together and worked out what was happening.
It was not an exact science, but we would have to make do.
Earnshaw had his eyes closed, which was odd, as I never had him down as a praying man. In fact, he was the only one of us in the whole team who seemed to have no faith in anything apart from himself. Maybe that was who he was praying to as he clamped his eyes closed. Or it could just be because he was dreaming of something much further away than this.
I tapped him on the top of his arm with my revolver, which awoke him and made him realise that now was certainly not the time to go into himself, especially as Captain Arnold had already reserved that space for himself.