Far, Far The Mountain Peak

by John Masters

  ‘Fall in for inspection!’ The platoon sergeant was at the door of the barn, his rifle on his shoulder.

  ‘What’s the matter, Sar’nt? We going, Sar’nt? We going up now?’

  ‘How the ‘ell do I know? Field Marshal ‘Aig forgot to tell me. Get fell in. You too, Smith. No packs or equipment, just rifles. You, Williams, stand sentry over the kit.’

  They fell in, blinking in the strong sunlight. The sergeant checked them with his platoon roll and stood aside as Second Lieutenant Hardcastle came down the street from the officers’ mess, swinging his swagger stick.

  He inspected them briefly, making no comments except to compliment Private Freeth on the cleanliness of his rifle, and to berate Private Smith, W., on the dirtiness of his clothes and person. ‘Filthy fingernails, Smith. You’re the dirtiest man in the platoon. See that they’re clean next time I inspect.’

  ‘Yessir,’ Peter said automatically.

  The officer walked out in front of them. ‘Stand easy. We’re going up the line at dusk to relieve the Lancashires in front of Thiepval. That’s over there.’ He waved his cane vaguely to the east, where a part of the living earth hovered above the rest in a permanent dark haze. A medium battery behind the village began to fixe steadily. The air heaved; the ground shook from the sound of guns north and south down the line. The German guns awoke, and from there too the clamour began, and from far and high steel birds whistled in the blue sky and the starlings rose spiralling from the ragged cornfields and the shattered trees.

  ‘The offensive has been going on for three weeks now,’ the officer said, ‘and the Huns have had about enough. The general expects them to break any time now--somewhere. We are attacking all the time. We shall attack the day after we get into the line, the whole division. Let’s see that the Huns break opposite us. Platoon guide to company headquarters at six, Sergeant. Evening meal at five. Platoon, stand at ease! Platoon, ‘shun. Slope--arms! Dismiss!’

  He returned their salute and walked away. They shuffled back into the barn, leaned their rifles against the wall where they had been, and in a minute there was no difference between this scene and the earlier, except that Freeth was standing beside him in the shadows near the far corner.

  ‘What do you want to be so dirty for, chum?’ Freeth said, sitting down. ‘Have a fag. I got a packet this morning. Won it off Lofty.... It only gets the officer down on you.’

  ‘I haven’t noticed you caring much what the officer says or thinks,’ Peter said, lighting the cigarette and leaning back against the wall of the barn. Freeth was about five foot four inches high, lean and wiry, about forty years of age. However much they were in the sun, he never sunburned, because his skin was a kind of pale yellow-grey, like parchment, bloodless, the muscles at either side of his neck sticking out in thin cords. He had twenty-two years’ service in the regulars, mostly in India.

  Freeth said: ‘That’s different. When you been in the Shiny as long as I have, you know you’ve got to keep clean if you’re going to keep well.’ The platoon called him Shiny Freeth because most of his sentences began and ended -with India, which he always called the Shiny. He kept himself to himself almost as much as Peter did, and he was the best shot in the platoon. ‘Ought to be,’ he’d mutter, ‘seeing I fired seventeen annual practices in the Shiny and was a marksman every time. Christ, I fired more rounds, snap, from the kneel, than you buggers ever fired in your lives, including Second Ypres.’ ‘You got to be what you are,’ he said now to Peter. ‘That’s the difference. Hardcastle and Old Taylor, everybody, even that dim corporal, know what I am. They all know what you are too, same as you and I do. That’s why you can’t do the same things the rest of us do.’

  ‘I’m the same as anyone else,’ Peter said.

  ‘You’re an officer,’ Freeth said. ‘We don’t know what you did, but you’re a gent. Maybe you been to jail. Most of the fellows think so, but I don’t.... No, I don’t want to know, one way or t’other, see? I’m just telling you what everyone thinks. I don’t think you’ve been to the Moor or the Villa or any other civvy glass-house. But you been to the Shiny, eh?’

  Peter said: ‘Have it your own way.’

  Freeth said: ‘You was a young officer, and you did something, so they court martialled you, eh? It doesn’t matter. What does matter is you aren’t being what you are. You been with us four months now. Look at you, always sitting back in the dark corners with the rats. It’s no good trying to hide, because you stick out more. See? If you want to be let be, act more natural, see?’

  He got up and wandered off to the card-players, his stub of cigarette hanging from his lower lip, his steel helmet on the back of his head, and his shirt unbuttoned to the navel; but his puttees lay in tight, neat spirals round his legs, his boots shone, and the rifle against the wall was bright-clean and slightly oiled.

  Peter lit another cigarette. He didn’t like them, but of course he couldn’t smoke cigars. Freeth didn’t understand. If he acted naturally, someone would suffer. The officers knew there was something strange about him, for sure, but he wasn’t the only one, even in this battalion of the New Armies. There was Henderson in B Company, a professor if ever he saw one; and Maurice, also in B, who raved in his sleep of Sandhurst, so they said; but they were not dangerous, except to themselves.

  The sun sank lower, the glorious July day wore to its end. The cigarette smoke faded as the evening light turned to an equivalent blue, and a bugle sounded from the far end of the village street. The war began to stir its limbs. In the woods behind the village big trucks came slowly to life with a roar of engines. Horses went down to the filthy stream to be watered. Ten shells burst in a field a quarter of a mile away. More and more men, loaded with the full accoutrements of war, trudged up the road, always on the verge, as far as they could get from the middle, where the dead horses lay with legs up. Motor cycles blared westward, and there were two pigeons making love in the dust.

  It was dark, and they had eaten and were moving up in fours on the road--a long, slow step at first, no sound in the ranks but the creak of the equipment, the slung rifles swinging and they breathing hard, the road soft as powder under the nailed boots. No one sang, because they were going into the Battle of the Somme, and they knew what they were going towards. They had been there before, except for the new drafts from England. Peter had been there. It was unbelievable, worse than anything the mind could conjure up. The dead lay not in drifts, not in piles, but in acres like wheat. The earth was not torn but dug down to its foundations, thrown into the sky and allowed to fall, all of it, with the men underneath and the birds under the men, and, lowest of all, trees; on top, worms and steel which should have lived deep but now glittered in the surface water. Yes, they’d dug up water in a dry place with their shells and made stinking ponds in the desert. None of that was the worst. The worst was what he had come to seek, and had found--utter helplessness. There was no room for thoughts of gallantry, fear, or cowardice, because no man had any room for choice. There was no leadership, because everyone had to go. No place to say, I will do this, not that; only the parapet, and beyond it the crawling earth, the rusty jungles of wire that ran across France. There was no room to deviate an inch to right or left, forward or back. The orders came, and they went or stayed. The machine- gun sang in the night, and where it stopped on a swinging traverse, and whether it swung to the right or the left, no man knew--or could avoid it if he did know.

  This was the war Harry Walsh had been in for nearly eighteen months now. How could he stand it? Harry was a brave man, and in his own way a leader, but this must be more harrowing to him even than Peter’s old kind of leadership had been. How could Harry reconcile this with his care ‘for the safety of all concerned’? No one had imagined anything like this--not even he, Peter, when he talked of ‘at all costs.’ A man would have to be very low-keyed to be able to come out of this as he went in, and Harry was not low-keyed. He had control, that was all; but how long could a man hold control of himself in this? It was some
thing Peter waited, still numb, to find out about himself.

  He acknowledged with a small burst of pleasure that he was frightened. The steel was frightening, and the night’s silence under the artillery, and the men marching silent up the road, the slow river of men moving up like rats to the trenches ahead. They stood bowed in the ditch, bowed under great weight, as another river passed by the other way--men on stretchers here, hundreds of them, on carts, on their feet, the bandages dim in that gloom, universal groaning while the night birds flew on muffled wings overhead and the steel sang higher in the sky and the fitful bursts of the shells ahead came closer while they watched and waited.

  ‘It’ll all be the same in a ‘undred years,’ the platoon funny man muttered.

  ‘I wish it was a hundred years now, then,’ someone else answered.

  ‘Quiet there,’ the officer whispered furiously.

  Oh, this was anonymity! Darkness, and the men moving, waiting, moving, strong and helpless as the tide. They moved on and came close.

  Bang!--then the short sharp bang-bang-bang and the whining of the steel birds. ‘****, they got me. I got it, Gerry.’ No, another Gerry. ‘In the leg--oh, ****, ****!’

  ‘Keep moving’--the officer’s voice. ‘It’s only harassing fire.’

  Only harassing fire. That was it. German whizzbangs firing from somewhere behind the enemy support line, less than a mile and a half from here. No, they’d seen nothing, but they knew that this was the last stretch of road before the communication trenches began. They were ranged in on it, and let off at intervals during the night, any night--bang-bang-bang.

  ‘I don’t like this.’

  ‘Keep your **** head down,’ Freeth muttered. ‘Keep moving. I don’t want to stand here and get my balls shot off.’

  They fell into the communication trench and shuffled on in single file. The sky was lazy with the curve of star shells; the artillery grumbled around them now, for there were guns ahead and guns behind, but it was a peaceful night in France until the machine-guns opened up, and then the bullets rattled harshly with a personal hate overhead. ‘Over,’ Freeth muttered.

  They reached the front line at last, and the Lancashires stood back. ‘Ere y’ar, choom, there’s your ‘ole. You’ll find it a little wet in t’ rain, but us can’t hov fairy queens for fourpence, can us?’ He was gone, and Freeth muttering: ‘All very well for him to be hearty, he’s going **** back.’

  ‘Smith ‘seventy-five, Freeth, sentry till eleven. Here’s the chart. Left front, a shell hole, twenty yards beyond the wire. There’s a dead German in it, his legs sticking up like a semaphore, and some silly **** put one of our steel helmets on it, so every sniper down the line likes to see if he can make the **** ring. Another hole fifty yards out, half-right, that’s empty except for some gas shells that didn’t explode and of course about a hundred corpses of fellows who jumped in when machine-guns opened on them and didn’t know Jerry has a mortar ranged so **** well on it that the first bomb falls right in the **** eye of the silly **** sheltering in there.’

  ‘Thik hai, Corpril.’

  The platoon lay down in the foot of the trench, on the fire- step, in the holes scooped out of the back wall. Peter leaned against the front wall, looking at the night. Boots and arms stuck out of the earth beside him. The whole trench was dug out of bodies, and riveted with bodies.

  ‘This ain’t war,’ Freeth muttered. ‘This is **** madness. It’s not right. Twenty-two years’ service I got, and look.’ He lifted his foot, and, looking down in the dim moonlight, Peter saw that he was standing on a platform of bodies, mixed British and German. ‘This is to keep my feet out of the mud,’ Freeth said. ‘It ain’t right.’

  No, it wasn’t right. Against all the traditions of war--and of mountaineering.

  The night passed. The day began, silent, with summer rain slanting down on the trenches and occasionally gleaming on a German helmet as a man moved along the trench opposite, the other side of the tangled thickets of wire. The attack was postponed twenty-four hours. At two o’clock the next morning the bombardment began, designed to cut the enemy wire. That lasted three hours--three hours more than the month it had already lasted. At four o’clock the engineers went out to cut and mark the gaps in their own wire for the British to go through.

  Peter slept fitfully, thinking of Emily and of Gerry, until they awakened him and gave him hot cocoa and a double tot of rum and a pair of hard biscuits. C Company came up to relieve the sentry posts. The wire snipped and the guns deafened and the earth roared and flashed, and down in the mud the men were playing cards, drinking rum, begging for another tot. Thunder-thunder-thunder the war shouted in his ear, but still impersonally. Second Lieutenant Hardcastle’s face was anxious. He was sharp-nosed and eager, a good young man. The whistle was in his mouth; the voice of the guns became a shriek as they propped the ladders in place and climbed up and over.

  Instantly, though nothing was silent, only the machine-guns had a voice for Peter. The field guns lifted and yet made as much noise as ever; the heavy guns were firing on the support trenches not two hundred yards ahead; the German guns opened up, and a fury of shells burst above the front line and among them, but in his ears only the enemy spoke, and the enemy was the machine-guns. He forced through the wire, moved five paces to his left, and began to advance slowly, his rifle held across his body and the bayonet fixed. The scythe of a machine-gun to the left reached out towards him and swung back. Hardcastle was dead, or gone, already. He walked slowly on.

  He wanted to run. Now was the worst time. Now was the time to break into a run and bear down on them over there, screaming, the bayonet low and long and searching in front. Now one man could lift a hundred beyond fear and fatigue, so that they’d forget the leaden feet and the machine-guns.

  But no, now, deep in the tide of death, he would flow with it, no faster, no slower. A man to his right pitched forward silently.

  The sergeant beyond him was shouting, but no one could hear. The sergeant fell flat on his belly. Dead too? No, he’d found that the German wire was uncut. The Germans were twenty yards away, helmets and faces peering over the wire. Peter fumbled for grenades and began to throw carefully while the sergeant tried to cut the wire. The Germans shot him, and the long wire-cutters in his hand fell down in the noise, and Peter could not see them. The machine-gun scythes hissed back and forth, like slowly torn canvas.

  He found the wire-cutters, ran back, and jumped into a shell hole, falling in sideways as two machine-gun arcs from opposite directions met overhead. There were twelve men in the shell hole already, besides the uncountable dead who lay among the rotting seed potatoes and rusted steel. The attack had died away, and no one was moving. Smoke drifted across the crater, obscuring the pale sky, and a lance corporal said: ‘That’s to let us get back. Quick, for Christ’s sake! Up and run for it, while the smoke’s here.’

  ‘I’ll shoot you if you do,’ a lieutenant said. He was from another regiment altogether, and Peter didn’t know how he’d got there with them. ‘That’s for the support waves to get over the top and cut the wire,’ the lieutenant said angrily. ‘Stay here until they get this far, and then up and join them.’

  The shelling increased, and every now and then a shell or a mortar bomb dropped into the crater, usually killing or wounding someone among them. As though to replenish the stock, half a dozen more men fell in on them from the second wave of the assault, most of them Bristols. Now they had two corporals and a sergeant, but the lieutenant had been hit on the helmet and was singing and muttering to himself as he lay on his side in the bottom of the crater. It was about six o’clock in the morning.

  Helplessly pinned down in a hole in the ground with ten frightened strangers, Peter thought. This was what he’d been looking for.

  Every now and then during the following hours he crawled up the side of the crater and peered over the top. The German wire was about thirty yards away, lying in mountainous coils, torn and piled so that it was impossible to tell where
or whether there was a gap. Smoke drifted across the churned soil, yellow from cordite, black, grey, green, a thin multi-coloured pall. There were no men in sight, nothing moving as, in this billionth year since the slime, man knew movement--only a crawling here and there where maimed things raised an arm; or a headless, legless, armless trunk rolled down a slope to the near burst of a shell. The sun wheeled across the sky, the guns crashed, and the sky held curious streaks and bars of colour and single points of light. When all other sounds hushed for a moment, the master devils of both sides sat back above the thick barrels, and the machine-guns recited long monologues over the dead and the dying.

  Yet, in the wire, every time he looked, he thought there might be a place, directly in front, where a man could get through. He’d wait. If they were to advance again in the night, that was the place to head for. One of the corporals was dragging himself round telling them to get ready to go back as soon as it was dusk. The lieutenant nodded vaguely and pointed to the Germans. ‘Back,’ he said. ‘Yes, we’ve got to go back.’ The corporal could not make him understand that that was not back but forward, and after a time gave up because the lieutenant began to abuse him.

  Night dropped slowly on them, and with it the light grew stronger, for now more flashes prickled along the low horizons and the guns on both sides were firing star shells. When it was full dark a sergeant said: ‘Go back now, in twos and threes.’ ‘What’s the password?’ somebody mumbled.

  ‘I don’t know. It was “Piccadilly” yesterday.’

  A salvo of German mortar bombs burst a few yards outside the lip of the crater. The lieutenant said: ‘Ready, everyone, time to go back,’ and climbed the opposite lip, towards the Germans.

  ‘Not that way, sir! Stop him, someone, for Christ’s sake. You!’ The sergeant pointed at Peter. ‘Pull him back. Hit him.’ A wall of men loomed up from the direction of the British trenches. The German machine-guns opened up all along the line; for miles to north and south the long golden streams of machine-gun bullets howled and screamed across the earth.