Heart of War

by John Masters

  He stood up, sat down again, stood up … sat down … tried once more, failed.

  ‘Waiter!’ he called.

  The blue-jowled waiter appeared beside his chair – ‘Sir?’

  ‘Help me get up … There … Hold me … I have to piss … Help me to the W.C.’

  The waiter’s arm was firm round his waist, as Archie staggered across the anteroom, found the door of the W.C., found the door knob, found the urinal, and thankfully leaned against the wall above it.

  He began to relieve himself. The waiter cried, ‘Sir! … Your fly buttons!’

  ‘Too late, laddie, too late!’ Archie mumbled, feeling the warm flood down his legs.

  ‘Wha’s yer name?’ Archie said. ‘Ye’re a handy man, a gude man aboot the hoose. Seen you about, but wha’s yer name?’

  ‘Fagioletti, sir.’

  Archie’s whipcord trousers were wet down the front, but he was not totally soaked. He staggered back to the anteroom, and flopped down in the same chair. ‘Get me a drink, Fagioletti … Wha’s your Christian name?’

  ‘Niccolo, sir … I was a waiter at the Savoy.’

  ‘I knew you were a pro … Get me a drink, Niccolo, an’ have one yersel’.’

  He closed his eyes. Fagioletti came back with two drinks. Archie said, ‘Sit down, Niccolo. Nick, they call you, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I’m Arch, Archib, Archie, you call me Archie.’

  ‘Very well, sir … Archie.’ Archie tried to focus on the waiter. He’d been drinking, too, must have been … not a great deal, but enough to relax him, and put a reddish colour in his face … the fellow needed to shave twice a day, three times, perhaps. He said, ‘How do you like the Army, Niccolo?’

  ‘Oh, it’s all right, Archie.’ Fagioletti waved his glass of red wine expansively, ‘For me, it’s no different from before. They find out I’m a waiter, and they put me here … I never go to France. The wages are not good, and no tips, but better than going out there.’

  ‘Quite right, Niccolo, better than having your balls shot off … You got a wife? Lady friend?’

  ‘Lady friends, plenty,’ Niccolo said. He drank some wine … ‘Plenty of ladies will to fuck with a soldier these days …’

  ‘Good for you. I can’t get a piece of cunt for love or money … to tell the truth, I don’t try. I’m terrified of women since … well, I’m terrified of getting hooked.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Archie,’ Fagioletti said. ‘Fuck them and leave them. Another one will be around in no time, that’s a truth.’

  ‘Fuck ’em and leave ’em,’ Archie echoed. He raised his glass and the two shouted in chorus – ‘Fuck ’em and leave ’em!’ They clinked glasses and drank.

  A voice from the doorway lashed them with icy fury. ‘Mr Campbell! Private Fagioletti! Stand up!’

  The adjutant stood in the anteroom door, his face white, his knuckles gleaming, both hands clenched at his sides, his one eye burning. Archie stood up, and, by clutching the back of another armchair, managed to stay upright, Fagioletti beside him, rigid at attention but swaying gently, like an oak in a strong wind.

  Clifford glared at Fagioletti – ‘Lock up the mess. Then go to your quarter. You will be leaving for France with the draft on Sunday. Get out!’

  Fagioletti almost ran out into the pantry. Clifford turned on Archie – ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more disgraceful exhibition. Being filthy drunk is bad enough – Christ, you’ve pissed in your trousers, you unspeakable cad … but lolling drunk and using filthy language with an Other Rank. … You, an officer and a gentleman! You’re not fit to wear our uniform!’

  Archie said plaintively, ‘I never asked to be a gentleman, sir.’

  ‘You’ll go to France with the draft on Sunday. And I hope you get killed before you disgrace the Regiment in public. Get to bed now.’

  He turned on his heel. Archie called after him, ‘Sir, can I go to the 1st Battalion? Ye see, I’ve family connections there, and …’

  ‘You’ll go where you’re sent,’ Clifford said viciously, closing the door behind him.

  He didn’t slam it, Archie thought; there’s a real gentleman, and certainly an officer. He carefully lowered himself to all fours and crawled out into the night, and to his room, and into his bed.

  The Western Front: Saturday, June 17, 1916

  The brigade runner had just delivered the bulky manila envelope and Boy Rowland, Adjutant of the 1st Battalion of the Weald Light Infantry, had just signed for it. Now Boy broke the red wax seals, drew out the contents, and swore under his breath. His clerk, writing out a long signal on an Army message form, with three carbons under it, looked up – ‘Trouble, sir?’

  Boy said, ‘Brigade Instructions for the Forthcoming Operations … twenty-seven typed pages …’ he leafed slowly through the pages – ‘Intention … the Divisional Plan … the attack of the flank brigade … our objectives … artillery support … instructions as to rebombardment – preliminary moves – ha, we’re going to be withdrawn from the trenches during the first part of the bombardment, which will last for five days … cutting of our own wire … composition of assaulting columns … method of assault … that’s the usual “steadily behind the artillery barrage” – those blasted brass hats should try to keep a steady straight line across country which a few thousand guns have been shelling for five days … mopping up … boundaries … action of reserve battalions – which is not us … Machine gun company … trench mortars … consolidation of positions captured … the subsidiary operation … concluding operation … smoke attack … Gas … Reports … Phew. I suppose I’d better take it right along to the C.O., though there’s nothing in it that I can see as to when Z Day will actually be.’

  ‘July the first, sir,’ the clerk said. ‘The R.Q.M.S. has a pool on it. I bought June the twenty-eighth, but the gup is that it’s to be the first.’

  Boy leafed back over the heavy bundle in his hand, and said, ‘If this ton of bumf is just a brigade order, what on earth must Division, Corps, and Army orders be like?’

  A voice behind him said, ‘The Corps Instruction is sixty-seven pages. The gunner major showed me a copy he’d got from somewhere this morning. And don’t think of it all as just bumf. Those are our orders! By following them, we’ll break through this time.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Lieutenant Colonel Quentin Rowland stepped down into the dugout and said, ‘Give me that order … and make ready to receive a draft of five officers and a hundred men.’

  The Daily Telegraph, Thursday, June 22, 1916

  ARABS IN REVOLT

  CAPTURE OF MECCA

  INDEPENDENCE DECLARED

  Cairo, Wednesday evening. Authentic news has been received that his Highness the Grand Shereef of Mecca, supported by the Arab tribes of West and Central Arabia, has proclaimed Arab independence of Turkey and of Ottoman rule, under whose maladministration and inaction the country has so long suffered.

  Operations commenced about June 9, and have resulted in the signal success of the Shereef’s forces. Mecca, Jeddah, and Taif have been captured, and the garrisons have surrendered, with the exception of two small forts at Taif, which are said to be still holding out.

  The numbers of the troops who surrendered at Mecca and Taif are not yet known; but at Jeddah forty-five officers, 1,400 men, and six guns were captured.

  Medina, according to the latest news, is closely besieged and all communications to the Hedjaz are in the hands of the Shereef … trade to the Hedjaz ports can now be resumed. It is therefore confidently expected that the difficulties which have attended the annual pilgrimages to the Holy Places during the past two years will now be removed. REUTERS

  So, Cate thought, perhaps the disaster at Kut will not have such serious and lasting effects as he had then feared. The war could hardly end now without the disbandment of the ramshackle Turkish Empire, and Kut would be forgotten. In a way it already had been, or the Arabs of the desert would not so readily have thrown in
their lot with Britain … with the Allies, officially, of course, but in that part of the world only one Ally – England – could give the Arab cause any practical aid. In a year or two there would again be Arab rulers from the Yemen to the borders of Anatolia, from the Mediterranean to the Persian mountain barrier, as there had been before the Ottoman Turks welded those lands into their empire.

  He laid the paper down. He had eaten a small breakfast, but had not felt hungry. The guns from France were speaking more insistently, a mutter by day, a rumble in the still summer nights. They must be making ready for the great assault that everyone seemed to be expecting – even demanding. Last night a nightingale had sung in the trees beyond the lawn for half an hour, as beautifully as another he remembered from his boyhood, when he had leaned out, listening under the full moon, breathing in the heavy perfume of night-scented stock and new-mown grass. But this night the bird’s paean had soared and swooped over a continuous bass diapason from the distant guns … a tragic diapason, preventing him from sleeping, for he had to listen, and in listening, think of the men who heard it close, and would soon hear it no more.

  9

  The Somme: July 1, 1916

  Boy Rowland waited, determined at all costs not to let the queasiness in his stomach and the creeping of his skin become a visible tremble. Last night the Post Corporal had brought him a letter from David Toledano, whose Field Battery was now in Palestine. David had described an idyllic life of warm sun, palm trees, orange groves, and swimming in the Mediterranean. Why the hell couldn’t the Battalion be sent to Palestine – or Egypt, Mespot, East Africa – anywhere, rather than here? He might be back at the Depot, where Hedlington would be busy with preparations for the Sheep Fair … only the Sheep Fair was not going to be held this year, or until the war ended … if ever. If ever the war ended.

  Beside him his uncle, Lieutenant Colonel Quentin Rowland, puffed on a pipe, the blue smoke drifting along the trench in a thin trail, past Regimental Sergeant Major Nelson standing properly ‘at ease,’ his hands behind his back, as though on a drill parade, his steel helmet set squarely and centrally on his head, not a muscle moving in the hard face or shaven bull neck … among the packed soldiers beyond, all waiting, bowed under full packs, extra bandoliers of ammunition slung over shoulders and around their necks, sand-blasted bayonets fixed on the rifles. High above, streaky wind-clouds hurried from west to east across the sky.

  The chalk of the trench side was dirty white, soggy from the rain of three days earlier which had caused a postponement of the assault. A look through any of the periscopes positioned at sixty-foot intervals along the trench would have shown, first, the rows of British barbed wire, cut at regular intervals, the gaps blocked by wired knife rests, which would be pulled aside to let the assaulting infantry pass through. Beyond the wire, the torn earth rolled in uneven rise and fall for three hundred yards to more wire – the German trenches. Fricourt Wood and village blocked the view to the north, and the stripped skeletons of Mametz Wood marched along the skyline to the north-east.

  No one spoke. If one had, he would not have been heard unless he placed his mouth close to the other’s ear, and shouted at the top of his voice. Head bent, appalled even after his nineteen months in the trenches, Boy strove with a sort of desperation to isolate something he could recognize – the burst of a shell, the whine of shell splinters, the rattle of shrapnel. He could not hear them: he could not hear anything, only be aware of a solid ceiling of sound arching over the battlefield from far west in the British gun positions to as far east, among the German batteries. The air above the battlefield had been welded into an enormous agony. The ground beneath, the walls of the trench, the pools and rivulets of water, shook, danced to the savagery all round. No part of that arc of fury moved: it was, and had been for five days.

  The C.O. looked at his watch and Boy looked at his: seven twenty-four … six minutes to zero hour. A swarthy soldier in the nearest platoon had turned to retch against the parados of the trench; he was one of the draft which had arrived a couple of weeks ago, Boy remembered – posted to B Company, a foreign name; shit scared now, and showing it … so was he himself. Was he showing it?

  The platoon commander was Bob Beldring, who splashed along the trench, easing among the tight-packed men, to pat the retching soldier on the back and yell something in his ear. The man straightened. Beldring held out a flask and the man took a swig and handed it back. Beldring took a big swallow himself. His eye caught Boy’s and he held out the flask. Boy shook his head. Soundlessly the earth leaped and shivered in terror, the solid air pressed down on them, battering at their steel helmets.

  His uncle shook the dottle from his pipe, banged the bowl against a wooden revetting beam and put the pipe away in his pocket. Seven twenty-eight. The men along the trench were stirring, moving back and forth. Beldring produced his whistle from the pocket of his tunic, still on its lanyard, and looked at his watch. The ladders were in place against the front wall. Men waited at the foot of each, one boot on the bottom rung.

  Whistles blew all along the trench. The men at the ladders climbed up, ran out and pulled aside the knife rests. Man after man followed, bowed, leaden footed, hands shaking, wet, ice cold with fear, going on, up, out, easing to right and left. ‘Good luck, good luck!’ Quentin shouted, his hands cupped, as he stood near the foot of a ladder. ‘We’ll be right behind you!’

  The British artillery lifted off the German front line, and in that moment the German gunners opened up. Heavy shells trundled in like moving wagons, or blocks of concrete, that burst with tremendous explosions among the khaki rows. Machine guns came to life as the lyddite smoke drifted off No Man’s Land. Watching through a periscope, Boy saw the lines of the two leading companies, B left and C right, silhouetted against the smoke, begin to thin. Great gaps were torn in them by huge invisible hands, but the lines moved steadily on.

  ‘Ready, Boy?’ his uncle yelled.

  He nodded, and followed up the ladder. Up on top the churning in his stomach ceased. He felt suddenly hot, and raging. The chalky upland was strewn with dead, blood drained in a hundred streams from smashed bodies and torn bowels, rifles and bayonets lay like cut reeds, packs torn open by shell bursts, their contents scattered – socks, housewife, photo of a woman and a child … Machine guns were traversing … left to right … three, at least, mowing down A Company to his left. Five days of shelling and they were still there, still manned, still firing … He saw his uncle, a few paces to his right and just ahead, start, and grab his left arm below the elbow with his right. Soon the sleeve was dark with blood. German artillery shells were falling so thick among the advancing lines that Boy could not see more than a few yards except intermittently, when a gust of wind, or the bursting of another shell, for a moment dispersed the smoke … Such a moment came and he stared … one man crawling on hands and knees near the edge of Mametz Wood … another walking forward far to the left … for the rest, humps, and lumps, and grotesque shapes.

  He shouted, ‘They’re gone, sir!’

  ‘Most of ’em knocked over, poor devils.’ Quentin shouted back. ‘The rest, gone to ground … Who’s due to follow us?’

  ‘14th York and Lancs, sir,’ Boy looked back over his shoulder, still trudging forward, and dimly saw fresh lines of khaki men coming out of the British front line trenches. ‘They’re coming now.’

  ‘Wait for them,’ Quentin said. ‘We’ll gather our fellows together … close them up, here … You go that way, I’ll go left.’

  He walked off, his ash plant swinging, shouting to the few men crouched or lying on the ground, ‘Go to the R.S.M.… line up near him … Sergeant, line them up over there … Get a move on, Corporal!’

  Boy broke into a stumbling run. ‘Move!’ he said, leaning down to jerk a lying man to his feet. The man was lying in the correct prone position, rifle outthrust, legs spread, heels pressed flat to the earth. His head flopped over, revealing a round blue hole in the middle of his forehead … But others heard and j
umped up and ran to the R.S.M. who was kneeling, a rifle taken from a dead soldier in his hands, firing carefully aimed shots at the German trench, now barely a hundred yards away.

  The leading men of the York and Lancs arrived and Boy and Quentin and the R.S.M. shouted together, ‘Up, lads! Up, Wealds, up!’

  The R.S.M. doubled over, falling, the rifle hurling away in the convulsion of his death, machine-gun bullets tattooing his falling body. The York and Lancs trudged up, past … but, as though a wand had been waved, a cloth wiped across a dirty spot, they were not there. The machine guns traversed on, but there was no one standing, only dead lying piled on top of each other in the mud and water, and a few living and wounded crouched in the new, smoking shell holes.

  Boy found himself close to his uncle, both lying against the forward slope of a huge hole left by a large calibre German shell, probably one of their 17-inch guns. Half a dozen soldiers lay to right and left, some of them Wealds, some of them York and Lancs, together with Father Caffin, the battalion’s R.C. padre.

  An unreal quiet fell on the field. Boy muttered to his uncle, ‘Do you think it’s been like this everywhere, sir?’

  Quentin said energetically, ‘Of course not, Boy! We’ll be able to advance again as soon as the other brigades get past the flanks of these fellows in front of us. Here, put my first field dressing on this, will you? … There, thanks. Where’s the R.S.M.?’

  ‘Dead, sir. Just back there.’

  ‘Poor chap. His wife’s having another baby next month. Have to think about appointing someone else …’

  ‘Dalley’s the senior C.S.M., sir. A Company.’

  ‘Is he fit for it?’

  ‘I think so … He may be dead. The German artillery nearly wiped them out as they left our trenches …’

  Quentin hauled himself up to the lip of the crater, and put his binoculars to his eyes. ‘Swine!’ he muttered under his breath. ‘They’re waiting … machine guns on the parapet … wire uncut.’