by S. C. Howe
‘I don’t believe this!’ he blurted as Briggs descended. ‘The brass hats want us to take out the machine gun emplacement. There’s no bloody way I’m running my men into that!’ he stormed, and scribbled something on the back of the note before thrusting it back into the hands of the runner waiting outside the dugout.
Briggs backed into the dugout, sat against the rough boarding. He looked over to Barratt who had slumped at the table.
‘There’s no chance that we can get that machine gun out,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘They’d have us down the minute we poked our heads over the parapet. I keep telling those bloody fools, but no-one’s listening!’
Joss alighted at the nearest railway station to ‘A’ company’s position. There had been a number of favours called in through his uncle to secure his place back with Barratt and ‘A’ company, strings had been pulled, as had they for Nico, and Joss had been shameless in pulling them. If the army insisted on owning him while this war was on, he would use any advantage he had to get back to Tom, for the separation had been unbearable. Rushing through the spring countryside, through spring-time trees and pastures, past arable fields showing new growth, through ever increasingly ruined settlements, he knew it was now only a matter of hours before he would be reunited with him.
Barratt stared at the slip of paper in his hand. For a moment, an intense feeling that this was not happening made his world stumble and dip. The brass hats had ordered – ordered – ‘A’ company to take out the machine gun by daybreak tomorrow at the latest. If he ignored this order, he and his company would be court-martialled. Sitting his officers down, he explained the situation and they nodded in grim resignation. Briggs walked back to his corner of the dugout and wrote a brief letter, and, without re-reading it, sealed the envelope and left it out for collection.
‘You and your bloody letters!’ Barratt snapped as they moved up the trench to tell the men. ‘Why can’t you just cope like the rest of us?’
As they waited to go up the ladders, Briggs looked around and saw it all anew. It was vile beyond belief. The sky was swollen with clouds layered in a furious blue-black mass and the ground beneath squelched with indescribable stuff. Feeling his body clench, he looked at Barratt holding the whistle to his lips. Briggs thought back through his life, saw the stiff, anxious little boy, the humourless, cramped child who was a swot and nobody’s friend. Saw the adolescent whom everyone found dull and odd, and thought of the stepfather who called him ‘sir’ at the age of 12 and whom he knew he would never please. He thought of the mother, increasingly relieved at his absences – all those years of anxiety and formality, and for what? Then he knew it didn’t matter a damn. For the first time in his life he knew life did not, should not, have to be this way.
The whistle blowing and the movement of men up the ladders seemed to happen in awful slow motion. Briggs followed up the ladders, revolver in hand, as men dropped back stone dead into the trench as machine-gun fire blew them into oblivion. Still Briggs walked; the only way was to move forward. Move forward. A violent rain was hammering, soaking his face, blinding his eyes but still he walked hearing but not hearing, the screams around him. Keep walking Briggs! Staring around he realised he had blundered onto the edge of a deep shell-hole. Pausing he stared deeper into the hole, heard the slop of liquid mud and muffled groans. He knelt down and looked more closely, and immediately turned away. There, bayonetting each other to ugly, violent deaths, were two soldiers. Weakened and hardly able to stand, they carried on thrusting and twisting in some appalling routine.
‘Stop it!’ Briggs screamed at them. ‘Please!’
The men looked up, the rain clearing the streaming blood from their faces.
‘Piss off officer!’ the British soldier croaked in a bloody whisper, then lunged at his German counterpart who was lying against the side, his head bowed, close to death. As the British man slumped forward, the German soldier thrust his bayonet so they met in one last deadly embrace. Briggs struggled down the side of the shell hole, caught hold of the British soldier but he was dead. The German soldier stared up, blood trickling from his gaping mouth, his eyes turning up. Crouching down, Briggs wept. Dragging himself up the shell-hole, he felt the blood constricting in his forehead, felt the pain of an understanding piercing his head. There was no night. No day. People fought to ugly, pointless deaths. No-one cared any more. The world stood in ruins. The sky was getting darker, the rain lashing down harder. Briggs shut his eyes – his old man’s eyes – felt the mud creeping cold into his clothes, felt his hands slipping, slowly giving way in the mud.
‘A’ company, Worcesters?’ said the adjutant at battalion headquarters as he consulted a list. ‘Oh yes, they’re still up at the front line. What’s left of them. They took quite a hit.’ The place was in uproar. Field telephones rang incessantly, harassed clerks answered them two at a time, and runners came in with handfuls of new memoranda. Joss stood, unable to move. It was as though everything was going on in unbelievably slow motion, as though he was hearing the noise from under water.
‘What do you mean, “took quite a hit”?’
The adjutant looked at him irritably. ‘They tried to take out a machine-gun placement, and it got the better of them, by all accounts.’ With that, he picked up a ringing phone, waved Joss away.
‘C-casualties, Sir?’
‘No specific reports, but losses are heavy.’
Joss couldn’t move. Stood staring at him, his eyes blue targets. The adjutant replaced the receiver, picked up another ringing phone. Joss could hear a hysterical voice spewing out.
‘Go on,’ the adjutant snapped. ‘Go!’
The small office was filling to bursting point with more runners. Joss stumbled out, hauled himself into a waiting lorry. Sinking down on the plank bench seat, he braced himself as it lurched to a start. It was taking him to his future, or his end. It was out of his control: love and the war had made sure of that. The truck rattled and banged over a landscape he dared not look at for what it may suggest, so instead he sat, head bowed, staring at his large, muddy boots. If Tom was dead, he would find his own death; he would walk out into no man’s land, stretch to his full height and the agony would be over in a second. That was it. I don’t have to struggle. I don’t have to live on in an empty life. I can cheat it. A bullet. The end.
They shuddered to a halt at the start of the trench, which slipped down into the earth. Joss hurried down. Several times he stumbled, grabbed hold of a support that gave with a waterlogged tear. Forced himself on, past the faces of the dead lolling forward, like a nightmarish reception party. His pace quickened. Then he crashed through puddles and stumbled over obstacles before suddenly coming to a sudden bruising halt by Barratt who was sitting on an upturned ammo box, staring at a list and shuffling through the papers in some distracted, robotic motion.
‘Casualties?’ Joss whispered. His bowels almost gave way. Barratt looked up at him, as though he had never seen him before.
‘Fielder?’
Barratt handed him the list. Joss tried to steady the papers jolting violently in his shaking hands; tried to focus, blood banging in his temples, in his forehead.
F – Finch, Fitton – no Fie. Check again Fairfoot (fair of feet, he’d always thought), Finch, Fitton – no Fielder. Check again for misprints.
‘Fielder – Tom?’ It was almost a cry.
Barratt looked as though trying to recall why they were there, then waved vaguely down the trench, and went back to mechanically studying the list.
Joss pounded down the line, mud flying, his mind crawling away from comprehension. About half the company were dead, missing – injured. Stretcher-bearers he did not know were shouting for clearance. They jogged past with men writhing or deadly still on blood-soaked stretchers. Joss stood still for a moment, trying to see through the mass.
‘Get out the fucking way!’ yelled one bearer as he and his partner drove a way through the stunned and the dead. The mud was seeping blood, as though the very ear
th were bleeding. When they had passed, Joss shoved forward through the morass, felt his lungs tighten. Staring at each face for Tom, he looked desperately for the dark brown of Tom’s hair, but everyone was wearing the tin helmets. Scanned for Tom’s familiar stance but everyone was slouched against the fire step as though they had given up. Joss stared into the funk holes, was met with sullen, dirty faces, glaring back uncomprehending.
‘Where’s Tom?’ he shouted at them. ‘Fielder? Where is he?’ No-one replied.
Then a figure further up the line stopped stock still. Turning, Tom met the hulk of Joss’s body so they both staggered backwards. The next thing, Joss was grasping him so hard the breath was knocked out of his lungs as Joss wept, great racking sobs of tears and snot that ran down his face. When he finally stopped, Tom looked into his face. ‘What the hell are you doing back here?’ he whispered. ‘Why?’
‘I couldn’t stand it back there.’
‘You bloody idiot.’ Tom looked around, helplessly. ‘We’ve got to move more injured in. You’ll have to help.’
Joss nodded, still erupting into choked sobs and got to his feet.
It was dark when they finally fell into a hole in the side of the trench, Tom pulling a blanket over them as they lay, foetus-like, around each other, and slept the sleep of the exhausted.
It was late afternoon the next day when they were trucked back to billets in the bombed-out, almost obliterated village, where, against all the odds, several French families had returned to make their homes in the ruins. Somehow, a bathhouse had been cobbled together out of half barrels, and now the men who remained from ‘A’ company sat in clean uniforms, hair drying in the strong sunshine.
Joss sat by Tom, gave him a cake from his knapsack.
‘At least some things haven’t changed,’ Tom said drily. ‘But why the hell did you come back? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘It was my idea of trying to give you a surprise, but it completely backfired.’ Joss’s tone was dispirited.
Tom considered, then, ‘You shouldn’t be back.’
‘I coped yesterday.’
‘You know your back won’t hold out. Anyway, how did you get past the medical board?’
Joss gave a short humourless laugh. ‘Pretty easily. They’re so short of men now, they’ll take anyone, as long as they can stand up.’ Catching Tom’s incredulous look, he added, ‘Anyway, my back seems to have gone back to normal,’ and didn’t meet Tom’s eyes.
Barratt appeared that evening and sat heavily at their table in the rudimentary estaminet, which was little more than a shack, with a deal table, old wooden chairs and a flickering oil-lamp. It was then Tom realised that Barratt had lost all but one of his officers. Half the privates and several NCOs were dead. Sitting back in his chair, he went to speak but hesitated and instead drank a large mug of the rough wine. Joss held out a cigarette. Barratt absent-mindedly took it.
‘It’s Briggs I feel particularly awful about,’ he said suddenly. ‘I didn’t want it to end like this, you know.’ He poured himself another large measure. ‘Couldn’t work out why he had been so unusually happy in the last few months. Turns out he had met this French girl back at Beauterre and they had been writing ever since.’ Barratt pulled out a letter from inside his jacket. It was marked ‘Urgent’. ‘Turns out a couple of her letters had gone astray, hence his bloody obsession with the post. Today this came through, asking if he was all right, if he had received her letters, so that poor bastard went to his grave thinking she had given him the elbow. And now I have to write back and tell her the man she was falling in love with has been blown away.’ He waved his hand towards the Front. ‘Atomised. I do it nearly every day now, you know,’ he said, looking straight at them. ‘Destroy someone else’s life.’ With that, he took another large swig of wine and left the table.
Tom stared after him, his face stony. They were silent for a while, drinking, looking into space.
‘Barratt told the brass hats there was no feasible way we could take the machine gun out,’ Tom said.
Joss shook his head.
‘It’s like those bastards back there just want us out the way,’ Tom continued. ‘As though we’re an irritation they want to get rid of. Barratt stood his ground, I heard, but they were about to court-martial him.’
‘How did you find all this out?’
‘I sat with his second in command as he was dying and he told me everything. Those brass hats are criminals.’
Joss jerked his head up to look at Tom.
‘Sorry,’ Tom said.
‘Why sorry?’
The next morning Miller was standing close by, a grin on his thin face.
‘Captain says he wants you lot to go and help the blokes bring up the supplies.’
Joss was leaning against the fire step, hands in his pockets, watching Tom. They walked along, Miller out in front whistling, ‘We’re ‘ere because we’re ‘ere’, tunelessly as they slogged through the mud.
‘Parcels!’ The shout in the line made them look back. Reluctantly they walked on and the parapet became more decrepit, like an old man’s broken teeth.
The sharp crash of a shell flipped Miller off his feet and, as he somersaulted upwards, the last thing Tom saw was a mess where his face had once been. Joss was blown backwards, but spun round and thrust into Tom. There was a sharp crack of rifle fire and they collapsed, like poleaxed cattle in an abattoir. They lay motionless, Joss’s blood weeping into Tom’s wounds, like a bizarre act of love. Yet they heard and felt nothing. They saw nothing, for everything had gone dark.
Tom came to in a rack in a jolting canvas-covered truck. He stared at the ceiling, at the steadying strap hanging above him. For a moment, he had no idea why he was there, of anything that had happened. Trying to sit, he yelled with an intensity of pain he would not have previously thought possible. Next, he was vomiting down the side of his face. A young nurse hurried over to him, started wiping the mess away. Tom stared ahead at the other men, young men, some hardly boys out of childhood, lying in difficult patience. It was draughty in the truck, which mercifully blew away the odour of vomit, excreta and infection.
‘Joss,’ Tom whispered, tried to whisper. ‘John.’
The nurse leaned in to catch what he was saying.
‘Deerman.’
‘John Deerman?’
He murmured something that sounded like ‘yes’.
The nurse smiled, looked overwhelmingly relieved. ‘Just there. Look.’ She gestured to a sleeping figure, supine, with bandages disappearing from his head under the sheet. They were stiff with blood by his mouth.
‘How is–’ Tom let his head flop back, the ability to talk leaving him.
‘Much the same as you.’
Tom frowned at her.
‘You were both injured by a shell.’
‘We’re friends...’
‘Yes, we know you’re both stretcher-bearers from the Worcesters.’
He frowned again.
‘It’s on your details.’
Tom tried to smile but his face felt tight and he realised he was bandaged there. He tried to touch it.
‘Best leave it,’ she said. ‘We had to cut some shrapnel out.’
Tom’s eyes swam and he slipped back into unconsciousness.
At a railway station, they were transferred to a platform where bored orderlies talked over them as they waited for the next train, which at last pulled in sluggishly from the night. Lying there on the stretcher, swaddled so movement was impossible, Tom stared at the sky, helpless. Joss was still unconscious. They were loaded onto different carriages and that was the last Tom saw of him in France.
As the train swayed back towards England, Tom descended into spates of crowded sleep where he walked up the ramparts of Brown Clee. It was late summer. Pits and hollows patterned the fern pastures beneath; he liked to think the coal mines dated back to the Romans, why he wasn’t sure. Yet Brown Clee had grown back, had healed itself. It was so quiet, he could hear his mind working, h
ear it echoing in his head. The air lifted with the heat rising from the sheep-cropped pastures below. He reached the top rampart, which turned into a parapet and looked out into Wales, blue-hazed in the distance. Heat made the landscape indistinct, almost monochrome. Looking out across the peaceful fields, which belied their harvest activity, he saw Wenlock Edge undulating in the sun-mist like the lazy, outstretched coils of a snake. It was familiar, comforting, a memory from a visit years ago. Looking up, he saw a tall figure walking towards him, the way he moved was Joss, only Joss, the familiarity of his bearing, his walk.
‘Nurse?’ Tom cried into the darkness. Carefully, he tried to sit up. It was night. The darkness was impenetrable. Only the occasional creaks of other beds and a cough or a splutter broke the heavy silence of the place. It smelled thickly of carbolic.
‘Where’s John Deerman?’
The nurse shook her head.
‘He was on the same train. John Deerman, stretcher-bearer, Worcesters, ‘A’ company.’
‘I’ll see if I can find out,’ the nurse said and returned a few minutes later.
‘A John Deerman was taken back to his home.’
Tom sank back into his bed. Felt the slap of anger, of visceral hurt. Shaking his head, he tried to squeeze out the feelings, but they rippled through him. He wanted to weep.
The nurse saw his look.
‘Is there anything I can have to help me sleep?’ he whispered close to tears. Within minutes, he felt the needle in his arm and the soft gentle wave of nothingness closing over him.
It was daylight when he opened his eyes to find Mrs Deerman looking down at him with distaste. Tom looked down at a fly cleaning itself on the blood-caked dressing that was plugging a hole in his shoulder. He tried to flick the insect away; Mrs Deerman averted her eyes.
‘Is Joss – John – all right?’ he asked.
‘He’s bearing up,’ she said. ‘And I know he will be very relieved when he knows I’ve located you.’ She considered for a moment. ‘I’ve cleared it with the hospital. You’re coming back to Woodham Hall for your treatment.’ It was a statement, brooking no dissent. ‘John’s been unbearable – you would think we had deliberately split you up at Victoria.’