by John Masters
Whitman was firing steadily now, and as Kellaway passed called back, ‘They’re moving up in their old second line trench, sir … probably going to attack us and C.’
Kellaway stumbled and slid on; but ten yards farther, a German heavy hit the back wall of the trench fair and square, the trench collapsed, tons of earth rose, fell, splashing. The trench was blocked … another shell, the same, twenty yards up. And the Germans were on them.
Kellaway clambered up into the open and started firing his revolver, aiming carefully at the Germans struggling toward him through the mud from their second line trenches. The German artillery fire had lifted. Two British Vickers machine guns and a score of Lewis guns had good targets at close range. Most of the soldiers were out in the open, as long sections of the firestep had collapsed. Kellaway dropped beside one of his platoon commanders, young Cate, and shouted, ‘Are you all right?’
Laurence looked round at him with a puzzled expression. ‘Yes, sir … What’s happening?’
‘The Germans, there, attacking, man!’
The mud-coated figure lying beside Cate shouted, ‘I’ll look after him, sir … shell shock!’ He fired, and again, and again.
‘Good man, Fagioletti,’ Kellaway shouted.
Cate didn’t know where he was, Kellaway thought … but he had no time to worry about that now. Cate had a competent platoon sergeant and Fagioletti was one of the best corporals in the battalion in a tight corner.
The German attack was wavering, men falling, a few turning back, others dropping out of sight into shell holes … They’ll drown in those, Kellaway thought grimly.
He slid back down into the trench and continued the way he’d been going, toward his right flank. Who had the platoon there? … Fred Stratton. He found him on the firestep, leaning his elbows on the mud, only his eyes and the bowl of his helmet visible above ground level, looking toward the Germans. Beside him two soldiers were working on a jammed Lewis gun. ‘How is it, Stratton?’ Kellaway asked.
‘All right,’ Stratton said, without turning. ‘The Huns are moving round Boy’s left, I think … They’ll be coming along the trench soon…’
The German shelling began again, heavies and field guns and mortars all firing at the captured trench. Kellaway shouted, ‘They won’t move in till this stops … Have some men ready to help me if I have to back up C.’
‘We may be busy ourselves,’ Stratton said. ‘What a balls up this whole bloody show has been. We never had a hope.’
‘You’d best keep your opinions to yourself,’ Kellaway said. Stratton was right, of course. The men would be on the verge of mutiny if it weren’t for the C.O. They were doing this for him … because he had faith in them, shared all their dangers, and more. They didn’t want to disappoint him. And he could see, could understand … nothing!
The shelling continued, hour after hour. Kellaway passed slowly back and forth along his company’s sector of trench. Here half a platoon sat in the gloom of a quaking concrete dugout, its mouth facing the wrong way, while two men took half-hour spells on sentry, watching for the Germans to renew their counter-attack. They sat silent in the mud, their backs to the dripping wall, their rifles held between their knees, their faces taut, the thunder and lightning continuous … Suddenly a man screamed, hurled his rifle across the dugout and began tearing off his clothes. Without a word a corporal and two privates seized him and held him down, while Kellaway watched, standing in the entrance of the dugout. When the man was quiet he said, ‘Thank you,’ and went out and on, through the mud.
In another place he found five men cowering behind the remains of a brick wall, that had been built into the trench by the Germans – the ruins of a small barn or shed, perhaps. The men were shivering and moaning, as though one had caught a fever and the others contracted it from him. They were huddled together, bodies, jammed into one another’s, their rifles lying in the mud beside them, tears streaming down their cheeks. Kellaway went back a few yards and found the platoon commander. It was Cate. He said, ‘Mr Cate, some of your men are in the last stages of panic up there. Go and shake them out of it. Take your sergeant.’
‘He’s dead, sir,’ Cate said. His eyes still had a vacant, wandering look – ‘I killed a German.’
‘I hope you killed many Germans,’ Kellaway said.
‘There was a flock of swifts, flying over the German lines,’ Cate said. ‘It’s a little late for them still to be as far north as this.’
Kellaway stared at the young man, thinking – he’s not here, he’s escaped to another world, where only birds exist, not this fury of madness. He wondered how he should treat him, and decided he must jerk him back to reality before he could do any damage to his platoon. He seized Cate by the shoulder and shook him violently, ‘You’re in a battle,’ he yelled in his ear. ‘You’re in command of a platoon of my company. Command it!’
From beside him Corporal Fagioletti cut in, ‘He was all right after you left last time, sir … killed a lot of Germans with a dead bloke’s rifle … walked up and down, telling the blokes it was all right … brave as a lion … Then the sergeant was blown to bits, all over him.’
Now, looking more closely, Kellaway saw blood and mucus and brains mixed with the mud on Cate’s uniform. But the young man was recovering. His eyes were focussed and he was trembling; as would any man in his right mind, in these hellish circumstances. Kellaway said, ‘Do you know where you are, Mr Cate?’
‘Yes, sir … we’ll stop them, if they come.’
‘Good man … Fagioletti, you’re platoon sergeant from now on … acting, of course. Only the C.O. can give you the real promotion.’
‘Thank you, sir. Don’t you worry about the platoon, sir … Father Caffin was by an hour ago. Made everyone feel good, he did.’
Kellaway nodded, and Fagioletti said, ‘Wish we could get some rum or whisky, sir.’
‘So do we all, but there isn’t any.’
Kellaway moved on along the trench. As soon as he was out of sight round the traverse Laurence Cate said, ‘We must see those men.’ He struggled up the trench, found the piece of broken wall, and the still cowering, still weeping men.
‘Get up,’ he said gently.
‘Can’t sir … can’t…’ one moaned.
Laurence stared unhappily at them. The shelling would never end. He could hardly make himself think, for the sound was inside his head, shaking his brains. The swifts had gone, there were no birds singing anywhere.
Fagioletti jumped up onto the low step where the men were crouched, and leaned over them with his rifle drawn back. ‘Up, you bastards,’ he cried fiercely. ‘Up!’ He jabbed an inch of bayonet into one of the men’s buttocks. The man yelled in pain, and stopped moaning. Fagioletti jabbed the others in the buttock, one after the other. They tumbled down into the trench proper. He jumped after them, and yelled, ‘Now, up on the firestep … you, there! … you, there! … Look at the Germans, not me!’ He fired a shot just over the nearest man’s head.
He turned to Cate, ‘They’ll be all right, sir.’
Cate leaned against the back wall of the trench, wiping mud off his face with a handkerchief. ‘Thank you, Sergeant,’ he said. A soldier slipped backward down into the trench and Cate saw that it was Fletcher, quite recognizable behind the muddied face.
‘Hullo, Fletcher,’ he cried. ‘What are you doing here?’
Fletcher glanced at Fagioletti and said, ‘I’m a battalion sniper, sir. Private Whitman.’ Poor Mr Laurence had forgotten, though he’d seen Fletcher only a day or two after he’d arrived from the Depot, and knew he was being called Whitman.
Cate said, ‘Did you get any Germans today?’
‘Six by sniping and seven when they attacked, sir … and three more wounded, but I don’t count them, ’cos they was holding up their hands, or swinging a pick up and down very slowly, from down in the trench.’
‘What do you mean?’
Fagioletti cut in, ‘Working a Blighty, sir … If they show an arm or a hand, they ’
ope one of our snipers’ll put a bullet in it – and that’ll be a Blighty for them.’
Laurence said wonderingly, ‘Do any of our men do that?’
‘Not in the Wealds, sir,’ Fagioletti said virtuously, thinking of half a dozen who had, since he’d come out. Four finally got their Blighties from kind Jerry; the other two had bad luck – showed too much, Jerry sniper wasn’t so sharp, bullet through the head; and of himself, who’d spent his first month out here trying that game, and failed.
Fletcher produced a tin of bully beef from his haversack, opened it, and offered it to Laurence Cate and Fagioletti. Both refused, and Fletcher began to eat, with an Army biscuit and his fingers.
Cate said, ‘What do you hear from home, Sergeant?’
‘My wife’s found a little house in Soho, sir – that’s where I want to live – you can get good Italian food in the grocery shops there, and I still like that. And there’s lots of restaurants I could get a job in, when this is over, if I can’t get back to the Savoy … or I could open a restaurant myself … But she has had trouble with the boarders. She’s had two, already, and had to throw them both out.’
‘What for?’
Fagioletti looked at Fletcher. Mr Cate was barely nineteen and very innocent. The men didn’t like to swear in front of him for fear of polluting his ears. He said at last, ‘They both turned out to be loose women, sir … er, prossies. There’s a lot of those in Soho.’
Cate said, ‘Give me the address, for when I get home on leave … I’d like to tell her myself how much you’ve done for me, since I took over the platoon.’
Fagioletti flushed with pleasure, and said, ‘46 Dean Street, sir … here, I’ll write it down …’
The shelling continued. The hands of the watches ground slowly on through the afternoon, and the twilight, to the night.
Lieutenant Archie Campbell leaned against the wall of the trench in the darkness, the sky lit by flares and the orange bursts of shells. He was so tired he could not keep his eyelids open. His body ached and sagged. It was one o’clock in the morning. The Germans had counter-attacked once more, at dusk, trying to retake the positions they had evacuated. Their shelling had been continuous until the actual moment when their infantry assaulted; and then it had lifted only from the captured trench system itself; the curtain of shells and bombs had never ceased to fall on all flanks of the Wealds, isolating them from contact with any world or beings except themselves, and their attackers. Madness, hell, demoniac lunacy, Archie thought through the dark fog of fatigue. What he had seen during the hours of daylight was burned into his brain, through his eyes. Surely his eyeballs would be scarred for the rest of their existence in his body?
The attack was beaten off, but night brought no rest, or peace. Still there was the underlying sense of fury: the war was not impersonal or inanimate – it had a being and a purpose of its own … The three companies of Wealds, and the Germans, surrounding them on three sides, were in the same pit, separated from homes, headquarters, supplies, superiors, supports, plans, maps, intentions, just struggling in the mud, and in it, sinking.
The C.O. said, ‘I’d better go round again, Campbell … They may try a night attack.’
His pipe was glowing faintly in the dark. There were no moon or stars, no sense of sky, only the brooding shifting darkness, and the rain.
The C.O. continued – ‘Must go and see B … Can’t have men pretending to be shell shocked. They need bucking up, that’s all.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Wish we had a rum ration. That would cheer them up … me, too, to tell the truth.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Archie didn’t want to stay here, under this never-ending shelling, alone, with the R.S.M. and the remaining runners. He said, ‘Shall I come with you, sir?’
The voice from the darkness said, ‘No. Someone has to be at headquarters at all times. How often have I told you that?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I’ll come with you, colonel. ’Tis like the bottom of a grave here.’
Quentin seemed to be about to say something, but didn’t. Campbell watched his bulky figure disappear, followed by the slender Father Caffin and the C.O.’s batman, slow-moving humps in the night, going away along the trench.
Hells … shells … hells … When they got out he must get a few days’ leave to paint this, before it faded … It must fade, or he’d go mad. No one could live with these memories as brilliant as they were now … if he did get out … if any of them got out … It was a queer feeling to know Fiona might understand what they were going through, for she’d seen his paintings, of course. The C.O. would ask for one or two and send them home … He should ask him whether there had ever been any real marriage between them, in terms of personal affection and understanding. But they did not discuss her; only, the C.O. said, when he got a letter from home, usually from his father or one of his brothers – ‘Fiona is well.’ The gruff words, thrown away, were somehow very moving, coming from him … an acknowledgment that he had been her lover, and had understood her better than himself, her husband, had. But that was not a discussion … and there had been nothing more. After the war, they must spend a long time together, as man and man. If he could get the C.O. drunk, he might be able to make him see what kind of a woman Fiona was … how to treat her … what to say to her, when … He might get his head bitten off, but it would be worth it. He must try. He dozed off.
He awoke to find someone shaking him. It was Sergeant Hawkins, of A Company, with a private he did not know.
‘Runner from Brigade, sir. He fell into our trenches an hour ago. He has a message for the C.O. Captain Weeks told me to bring him up here.’
‘Why have you been so long?’ Archie asked.
‘Mud, sir … We fell into a shell hole in No Man’s Land, what was. Took us half an hour to get out … near drowned, we did.’
By the unsteady light Archie could see that both men were slimy with mud from neck to knee – below that they were standing in the mud, as was he himself. He took out his torch, switched it on and, crouching, read the message:
‘To 1 WLI … Withdraw to old position front line trench AAA artillery will fire box barrage round your present positions from 3.00 am AAA commence withdrawal at 3.30 am.’
‘What’s this? What’s this?’ It was the C.O., stooping over him, Father Caffin behind.
‘Message from Brigade, sir.’ He handed it up, keeping the light on it. Colonel Rowland read, then muttered, ‘We can hold out here. They ought to reinforce us instead of … Damn it, it’s just like Feuchy, and what an opportunity they threw away then.’ He stopped short, realizing that he was criticizing his superiors in front of his juniors.
He turned to Sergeant Hawkins – ‘A Company in good order?’
‘Yes, sir. They’re back in the front line – the old one, still.’
‘The shelling wasn’t too bad when you were crossing No Man’s Land?’
‘It wasn’t like a walk in the Park, sir, if you know what I mean.’
Quentin stood thinking, the light switched off. He said, ‘It’s half past one now. Half an hour’s box barrage will warn the Germans exactly what we are going to do … and give them half an hour to lay on a barrage that will wipe us out, when we move. It’ll take fifteen minutes to get back to our old trenches … Could you take a message back, runner?’
‘Yes, sir … Brigade Headquarters is still at Jack Johnson Farm, sir.’
‘That’s another two miles, nearly,’ Quentin muttered. ‘There isn’t time to ask the general to change our orders … Switch that light on again, Campbell. Give me a message pad.’
He wrote on his knee, and then again; and gave the two messages to the Brigade runner. ‘Take this one to our A Company … And this one to the Brigadier General. You go with him all the way, sergeant. Off you go!’
When the men had climbed up and out of the trench and vanished in the noisy darkness, Quentin said, ‘We’ll start our withdrawal at two-thirty. I’ve warned A Company to look o
ut for us from then on.’
‘No artillery cover, sir?’
‘No. Nothing. Just all three companies here get up and go back, at the same time … leave the trenches at two-thirty ack emma, exactly. Synchronize watches. It’s … one fifty-four … now! Send the R.S.M. to C, you go to D, I’ll warn B.’
‘Very good, sir.’
Two days later:
As the shadow fell across the opening of the dugout Quentin looked up from the scraps of paper in his hands. They were message forms, spotted with mud and rain, some torn, all covered with names scrawled in pencil – the names of the killed and wounded in each company, submitted by company commanders this second day after the return from the German trenches. He could not see clearly, for his eyes were blurred, but could distinguish the red and black armband and the red gorget patches of a staff officer.
‘A staff officer from Corps,’ he snapped. ‘We don’t see much of your sort down here.’
His adjutant, standing beside the visitor in the dugout entrance, said, ‘Colonel Venable, sir.’
Quentin stood up, saluting. Now he saw that it was indeed a full colonel. He hadn’t seen anyone that exalted since the offensive began on July 31 … except, twice, his brigadier general and, once, the divisional commander; no one at all from Corps … Before the battle they used to be condescended upon by the occasional young lieutenant or captain, puffed up with self-importance by the gorget patches and red banded hat: since July 31 – nothing.
The colonel was tall and suave, and pretended not to have heard Quentin’s ill-natured greeting. He put out his hand, ‘I’m G.S.O. 1(I) at Corps. We’d like to talk to you about German morale and methods. We get reports, of course, but it’s better to be able to ask questions, follow up leads. I have the division and brigade commanders’ permission to take you back to Corps HQ now, to talk to us all afternoon, and spend the night with us – we can find you a comfortable bed – and send you back tomorrow about this time.’