No Man's Land:
Horror in the Trenches
By C.M. Saunders
© This is a work of fiction, copyright of the author, C.M. Saunders (2016).
No part of this work may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without explicit written permission of the author.
Dedicated to the men and women of the armed forces, past, present and future.
Chapter I:
The Misery of war
The Somme Offensive, Western Front, France.
October 21st 1916.
The smell of death and decay hung in the air, sickly and sweet. There was no escaping it. The stench was so strong that it clung to you, and as there was no way to launder, you were stuck with it. Stuck with the awful smell and the lice that infested your clothes.
Harry Doyle spent his first three days in the trenches vomiting and retching. It was either a stomach bug, or nausea brought on by nerves and plain old-fashioned fear. He suspected the latter. It wasn't the English way to show fear, stiff upper lip and all that rubbish. But fear was all around. It was almost palpable, and as inescapable as the stench.
People cope with fear in different ways. Some try to mask it with humour, laughing like lunatics at each other's forced chit-chat and their own weak jokes, while others talk too much, blabbing incessantly about nothing important. Most did the opposite and became quiet and sullen, withdrawing into themselves. Still others were permanently angry and bitter, seemingly blaming the Germans for everything that was ever wrong in the world. They were the dangerous ones. The unhinged. With such fierce rage and burning sense of injustice came recklessness and self-abandon.
When you first arrive in the trenches, and are learning to live with the knowledge that your life might be suddenly snuffed out at any second, you tend to reflect a lot. Your thoughts are naturally drawn to childhood memories, people and places you left behind. It’s almost as if your mind shies away from any thoughts of the future because you know there might not be one, preferring instead to wallow in past glories that offered at least a modicum of comfort.
But you soon learn not to think about home too much. It just makes you sad. For Harry, the worst thing was pondering on how his mother and father must sit up at night worrying about him. It wasn't fair on them. In the twilight of their lives they should be comfortable and stress-free, not racked with uncertainty, waiting for the telegram or letter that would break their hearts.
There were times when he would give almost anything to be back at home. But he knew that even if he were there, his conscience would never let him rest. Not while his friends and countrymen were still out here on the Front, fighting for their lives. When he’d first arrived he’d been excited. Eager to give the Huns what for. But the excitement had soon given way to frustration.
Damn this war.
Somebody coughed, long and rasping. It wasn't a nice sound. Unhealthy. The beginnings of bronchitis, maybe? That cough was a bad sign. But who was to say? Maybe they were all dead men walking, and the man taken ill with bronchitis might prove to be the lucky one.
Harry pulled his Enfield closer to his body as he huddled against the trench wall in the evening chill, knees pulled up to his chest. Since poor Dewi had gone over the top his rifle, the cold, lifeless chunk of gun metal and wood, had become his best friend. His only friend, really. When you start losing mates hand over fist, pretty soon you stop making new ones. You detach yourself, become disconnected. You construct emotional barriers and hide behind them. Trenches within trenches. How ironic. It’s a self-defence mechanism. It wasn’t worth making the effort to get to know someone with the knowledge that everything you build between you, every connection you make, could all be severed in the flash of a mortar shell or the crack of a sniper's bullet. What was the point?
The rifle he held so close was a state-of-the-art model, a bolt-action .303 with a ten-round re-loadable magazine. It had been brand new when he’d been given it. Fresh out of the factory box. A good marksman could fire off all ten cartridges, hitting a stationary target at sixty yards eight or nine times, and then reload a second magazine, all in under a minute. That’s if the mechanism didn’t jam up. Using the Enfield on a firing range was an entirely different proposition to using it in a field of mud while someone was taking pot shots at you.
Harry once heard about an instructor who had somehow managed to hit a twelve-inch square target a hundred yards away twenty-seven times in under two minutes. Twenty-seven times! Some of the lads had become so fast with the bolt-action that the Huns they faced must surely think they were up against ranks of machine-gunners rather than infantry rifles. More fool them.
The Enfield offered some measure of comfort and security during the dark, damp nights, but not much. The nights were by far the worst. Even though the two sides stopped shooting and firing artillery at each other, each replenishing their stocks and trying to bed down for the night, nobody slept much. The temperature dropped, and the wind blew through the trenches like a screaming banshee. Conditions were not conducive to a good night's rest. You’d be lucky to get an hour all-told, and rarely twenty minutes or so uninterrupted. The worst thing was the general uneasiness that accompanied nightfall, which sometimes developed into an almost irrational fear of what might be concealed within the darkness. There could be ranks of marauding Huns just yards away, waiting to slit your throat, and you wouldn't even see them coming until it was too late. In many ways, your own imagination did much of the enemy's work for them.
Everybody knew that one of these nights, the Hun might try to be clever and launch an all-out frontal assault under cover of darkness. It had happened before. The Allies had the dirty Huns on the run right now, but they were clever bastards and no one was really sure if they were in as much trouble as everyone on this side were led to believe. The general consensus was that they were planning something. Something big.
Gas was the biggest single threat. If the Hun launched a gas attack and the wind was just right, the noxious clouds would be on them in seconds. There wouldn't even be time to get their gas masks on. Harry had seen casualties of gassing before, and it wasn't a pretty sight. Ghastly mottled grey skin pulled tight over puffy, swollen flesh, burned eyeballs, and mouths frozen in eternal screams. Harry had seen once seen a man literally claw out his own throat in an effort to be rid of the terrible burning pain caused by the poisonous fumes he had inhaled.
And it wasn't just the enemy they were fighting.
Added to the creeping fear and the constant sound of the guns was the cold. It was constant and all-pervading, numbing Harry's extremities and chilling him to the core. It was only late October, meaning that as winter flexed its icy muscles the weather conditions would only get worse and there would be no respite. Harry couldn't even remember the last time he had been warm and dry. A few weeks ago the army had handed out thick grey, woolly blankets to everyone on the front line. But the blankets had soon become soggy with rain, turned mouldy, and were now more of a health hazard than a luxury.
The trench floor was perpetually flooded ankle-deep with a disgusting mix of rainwater and human waste, and you had to be careful of the disease-ridden rats which fed on the flesh of the fallen. Many men had awoken from their fitful sleep to find bold vermin nibbling away at their exposed fingertips, ears, or lips.
Oh yes, the conditions were terrible. And why wouldn't they be? This was war, after all. It wasn't a holiday camp.
There was never enough rations or equipment, everyone was cold, wet, scared and miserable. Illness was rife; dysentery, scurvy, influenza, typhoid, trench foot. Nobody except the newest of new arrivals could be consider
ed as being in good health, and they went downhill fast. Some of the boys even lost their heads and went stark-raving mad, buckling under the pressure of it all, talking nonsense and ranting at people who weren't there. It was an open secret that some were just trying it on in an effort to be shipped away from the front line.
To pass the time during rare lulls in the shelling, sometimes the men played cards. There was nothing else to do, except wait for death. When they played cards, they talked. The trenches were one big rumour mill and tonight, like every other night, they were alive with the low murmur of countless hushed conversations. The boys just loved rubbishing the Hun. That was invariably the main topic of discussion, and interspersed between the playful anecdotes and tall tales were the obligatory ghost stories. Harry supposed that was to be expected when you were surrounded by this much death. Sometimes all the conversation topics melted together, and these new hybrid tales spread like wild fire.
However much you were loathe to admit, it was obvious to all that the German army was no push-over. They were well-trained, well-equipped, and up for the fight. They were also adept at developing and utilizing less conventional weapons. Chemical warfare was just the beginning. Everyone knew they had some of the world's best scientists holed up in top secret facilities, carrying out all kinds of experiments and God only knew what else.
A persistent rumour was that they had developed some kind of super soldier, the precursor to an army of virtually indestructible warriors who never got wounded, never took a backward step, and never even got tired. Their only purpose was to prowl the battlefield, night and day, taking out whole platoons of Allied troops. One particularly colourful version, which came to light around Halloween, strangely enough, had the super soldiers as living skeletons, all the skin and flesh stripped from its bones by bullets and flying shrapnel. And, like some vision from a nightmare, still they walked.
Harry was familiar with the gruesome stories, but didn't know if they had any basis in reality. They had to be the product of overstretched, fevered imaginations.
Didn't they?
Most of what he heard seemed unthinkable. Too far-fetched, too implausible, to be true. However, he knew that where the Hun was concerned, anything was possible. Science and technology was progressing at an astonishing rate, and Germany was ploughing most of its considerable wealth into the war effort. For that reason, he was careful not to ever dismiss anything out-of-hand.
He remembered the day he first heard about the dogs. Young Percy Martins had started it, claiming that one afternoon he had overheard two senior officers talking about the Hun's latest weapon. Apparently, they had found a way to transplant the brains of soldiers killed on the battlefield into the heads of huge, ferocious, German Shepherds. But these were no ordinary hounds, having been genetically engineered over successive generations to dwarf the average specimen in terms of size. Those unfortunate souls who had seen them first-hand claimed they stood over four-feet tall and up to six-feet long. He didn't know whether or not that included the tail. He hoped so.
Despite the trauma suffered by the dog during surgery, and whatever damage there was to the dead soldier's brain, they still retained enough sense to know there was a war on, and which side was the enemy. So, half-mad with blood lust and vengeance, they were set loose in no man's land, that narrow strip of ravaged earth separating the two sets of trenches. There they would seek out wounded, lost, or stranded Tommies, chasing them down and ripping them to pieces with their savage jaws.
After young Percy Martins had spilled the beans about what he’d heard, other men began embellishing the story. The dogs grew in size and stature, soon becoming known as Hell Hounds. For a few weeks, that was all anyone talked about. Nobody Harry knew ever actually encountered the beasts, at least nobody who lived to tell the tale. So all the stories doing the rounds were recycled friend-of-a-friend diatribes that only served to spread the germs of fear among the already-petrified troops.
Yes, they all heard the occasional howl in the dead of night, but there was no way of knowing if it was a real Hell Hound or just a lost dog. Both sides used dogs in close-combat situations. Some were purely attack dogs, others were used to sniff out bodies or gas, while other poor mutts were just there to clear mine fields. It was better to lose a dog than a soldier, and dogs were cheaper and more readily available than any other animal. If you ever saw a dog start spluttering and scratching at its face with its paws, it was time to get your gas mask on.
It occurred to Harry that the sounds they heard in the dead of night might not even be dogs at all. The unearthly noises could be manufactured by the Hun himself with the express intention of striking fear into their enemy. The Germans had been quick to harness the power of psychological warfare. Why, maybe they’d even started the Hell Hound rumours themselves and implanted them in Allied trenches via spies. To Harry's mind, it just made for a good story. He doubted the Hell Hounds were real. But of course, that could just be what they wanted you to think.
Bloody hell, there I go again, he thought to himself with a roll of the eyes.
One of the side-effects of war that no one ever talks about is paranoia. You question and second-guess everything so much that in the end objectivity becomes clouded and things begin to lose their true meaning. You lose sight of what’s real, and what’s false. No one really knew the truth about anything, and even if they did, it would certainly be buried in an avalanche of lies and disinformation. Even the Top Brass were full of shit. Maybe that was the whole point. To keep everyone guessing so that no one knew which way was up or what day it was any more. There was probably a posh word for that, but Harry didn't know what it was. It didn't really matter. This war had turned him into one cynical bastard.
The trenches had been his home for the best part of three months now, yet it seemed like a lifetime. The life he’d led before he signed up seemed so distant that he could almost be thinking about a character in a novel rather than himself. Often, he wasn't entirely sure if the memories he clung to had really happened, or if they were merely some fantasy concocted by his frazzled brain. During his time in the trenches, and before that in basic training, he thought he’d heard just about every tale that could be told. But however shocking the current revelation, there was always something else coming right behind it. Something you could never prepare yourself for. Inevitably, the crop of stories doing the rounds at the moment were spun around the disappearances.
Men going missing during a war wasn't unusual. They get captured, they get shot, or they just get lost. Nobody might ever know what happened to them. Some maybe even run away. Young Percy Martins had ran away, not three weeks ago. Or at least, he’d tried to run away. He’d frightened himself stupid with those tales of Hell Hounds and made a break for it one night. They say he was trying to get to the coast where he was hoping to sneak back over to Blighty on a fishing vessel. But he was caught a couple of miles away and sent back to The Front. And as if that wasn't punishment enough, when he got there they waited until first light then put him in front of a firing squad.
What a waste. Percy Martins had been so young, just twenty-two years old. They called him a deserter, a coward. Terrible things for his family to have to hear. Surely there was another, better way of dealing with the situation that executing the poor fellow. That was just doing the Hun's job for them, wasn't it? Who needs a hostile enemy when you turn your guns on each other?
But the officers wanted to make an example of him. If others saw what happened to deserters, they would think twice about trying the same thing. They say he died with half-a-dozen holes in his belly, trying to push his guts back in and screaming for his mother. It took more than twenty minutes for him to die. I bet they left that part out of the report.
So yes, men go missing. But this spate of disappearances was different.
At night, the infantry sent small teams of men, numbering just two or three at a time, out into no man's land on reconnaissance missions. To check the wire defenc
es were still intact, and make sure there all was quiet. It was one of the most dangerous assignments around.
The patrols were supposed to observe and report, never engage. But there was always the danger of getting too close to the Hun trenches and being spotted by an eagle-eyed sniper, or even worse, coming under attack from a machine-gun nest. There was also the risk of stepping on a mine, setting off a booby-trap, stumbling into a group of German counterparts or, indeed, anything else that was running around out there. Like Hell Hounds or Super Soldiers.
Late last week, the nightly patrols stopped coming back. After the first one, there was talk that they had legged it like Percy Martins had tried to, so the following night the brass sent out a recovery patrol. They also failed to return. Unperturbed, the brass kept sending out patrols, and the men kept vanishing. These were battle-hardened soldiers. Corporals, Lance Corporals, experienced men who had been at The Front since the war began. Between them, they’d seen everything you can imagine, and worse. And what was more, they were determined to see it through to the end. Most of them wouldn't go home before the job was done even if you paid them.
So why didn't they come back?
That was the question on people's lips.
Everyone had a theory. The most likely explanation was that they had either been killed or captured. But that didn't make sense. Perhaps one or two patrols could be unlucky enough to run into trouble, but nine or ten in succession? Twenty-six men in total, all gone, and not one single survivor.
That was the strangest part of all.
It wasn't that far between the trenches, no more than two hundred yards on average, and in some places a lot less. If the worst happened and they came under attack, you would think that at least one of them would be able to make it back. But no one ever did. Not a soul.
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