by George R. R.
They had come back nasty, smelly, and in foul moods, and had been sent back to the baths miles behind the lines, to have the luxury of a hot bath and a clean uniform. Lucky bastards, thought Tommy at the time.
Tommy’s sentry duty that night, instead of the usual peering into the blackness over the parapet into the emptiness of No-Man’s Land, had been to accompany the officer to the listening post inside the plaster dead horse, thirty feet in front of their trench line. That the LP was tapped into the German field telephone system (as they were into the British) meant that some poor sapper had had to crawl the quarter mile through No-Man’s Land in the dark, find a wire, and tap into it. (Sometimes after doing so, they’d find they’d tied into a dead or abandoned wire.) Then he’d had to carefully crawl back to his own line, burying the wire as he retreated, and making no noise, lest he get a flare fired off for his trouble.
This was usually done when wiring parties were out on both sides, making noises of their own, so routine that they didn’t draw illumination or small-arms fire.
There had evidently been lots of unidentified talk on the lines lately, to hear the rumours. The officers were pretty close-lipped. (You didn’t admit voices were there in a language you didn’t understand and could make no report on.) Officers from the General Staff had been to the LP in the last few nights and came back with nothing useful. A few hours in the mud and the dark had probably done them a world of good, a break from their regular routines in the chateaux that were HQ miles back of the line.
What little information that reached the ranks was, as the Captain said, “probably Hungarian, or some other Balkan sub-tongue.” HQ was on the case, and was sending in some language experts soon. Or so they said.
Tommy looked through the slit just below the neck of the fake horse. Again, nothing. He cradled his rifle next to his chest. This March had been almost as cold as any January he remembered. At least the thaw had not come yet, turning everything to cold wet clinging mud.
There was the noise of slow dragging behind them, and Tommy brought his rifle up.
“Password,” said the Captain to the darkness behind the horse replica.
“Ah—St. Agnes Eve...,” came a hiss.
“Bitter chill it was,” said the Captain. “Pass.”
A lieutenant and a corporal came into the open side of the horse. “Your relief, sir,” said the lieutenant.
“I don’t envy you your watch,” said the Captain. “Unless you were raised in Buda-Pesh.”
“The unrecognizable chatter again?” asked the junior officer.
“The same.”
“Well, I hope someone from HQ has a go at it soon,” said the lieutenant.
“Hopefully.”
“Well, I’ll give it a go,” said the lieutenant. “Have a good night’s sleep, sir.”
“Very well. Better luck with it than I’ve had.” He turned to Tommy. “Let’s go, Private.”
“Sir!” said Tommy.
They crawled the thirty feet or so back to the front trench on an oblique angle, making the distance much longer, and they were under the outermost concertina wire before they were challenged by the sentries.
Tommy went immediately to his funk hole dug into the wall of the sandbagged parapet. There was a nodding man on lookout; others slept in exhausted attitudes as if they were, like the LP horse, made of plaster.
He wrapped his frozen blanket around himself and was in a troubled sleep within seconds.
* * * *
“Up for morning stand-to!” yelled the sergeant, kicking the bottom of his left boot.
Tommy came awake instantly, the way you do after a few weeks at the Front.
It was morning stand-to, the most unnecessary drill in the Army. The thinking behind it was that, at dawn, the sun would be full in the eyes of the soldiers in the British and French trenches, and the Hun could take advantage of it and advance through No-Man’s Land and surprise them while they were sun-dazzled. (The same way that the Germans hadevening stand-to in case the British made a surprise attack on them out of the setting sun.) Since no attacks were ever made across the churned and wired and mined earth of No-Man’s Land by either side unless preceded by an artillery barrage of a horrendous nature, lasting from a couple to, in one case, twenty-four hours, of constantly falling shells, from the guns of the other side, morning stand-to was a sham perpetrated by a long-forgotten need from the early days of this Great War.
The other reason it was unnecessary was that this section of the Line that ran from the English Channel to the Swiss border was on a salient, and so the British faced more northward from true east, so the sun, instead of being in their eyes, was a dull glare off the underbrims of their helmets somewhere off to their right. The Hun, if he ever came across the open, would be sidelit and would make excellent targets for them.
But morning stand-to had long been upheld by tradition and the lack of hard thinking when the Great War had gone from one of movement and tactics in the opening days to the one of attrition and stalemate it had become since.
This part of the Front had moved less than one hundred yards, one way or the other, since 1915.
Tommy’s older brother Fred had died the year before on the first day of the Somme Offensive, the last time there had been any real movement for years. And that had been more than fifty miles up the Front.
Tommy stood on the firing step of the parapet and pointed his rifle at nothing in particular to his front through the firing slit in the sandbags. All up and down the line, others did the same.
Occasionally some Hun would take the opportunity to snipe away at them. The German sandbags were an odd mixture of all types of colors and patterns piled haphazardly all along their parapets. From far away, they formed a broken pattern and the dark and light shades hid any break, such as a firing slit, from easy discernment. But the British sandbags were uniform, and the firing and observation slits stood out like sore thumbs, something the men were always pointing out to their officers.
As if on cue, there was the sound of smashing glass down the trench and the whine of a ricocheting bullet. A lieutenant threw down the trench periscope as if it were an adder that had bitten him.
“Damn and blast!” he said aloud. Then to his batman, “Requisition another periscope from regimental supply.” The smashed periscope lay against the trench wall, its top and the mirror inside shot clean away by some sharp-eyed Hun. The batman left, going off in defile down the diagonal communication trench that led back to the reserve trench.
“Could have been worse,” someone down the trench said quietly “Could have been his head.” There was a chorus of wheezes and snickers.
Humour was where you found it, weak as it was.
Usually both sides were polite to each other during their respective stand-tos. And afterwards, at breakfast and the evening meal. It wasn’t considered polite to drop a shell on a man who’d just taken a forkful of beans into his mouth. The poor fellow might choke.
* * * *
Daytime was when you got any rest you were going to get. Of course, there might be resupply, or ammunition, or food-toting details, but those came up rarely, and the sergeants were good about remembering who’d gone on the last one, and so didn’t send you too often.
There was mail call, when it came, then the midday meal (when and if it came) and the occasional equipment inspection. Mostly you slept unless something woke you up.
Once a month, your unit was rotated back to the second trench, where you mostly slept as well as you could, and every third week to the reserve trench, far back, in which you could do something besides soldier. Your uniform would be cleaned and deloused, and so would you.
In the reserve trench was the only time your mind could get away from the War and its routine. You could get in some serious reading, instead of the catch-as-catch kind of the first and second trenches. You could get a drink and eat something besides bully beef and hardtack if you could find anybody selling food and drink. You could see a moving
picture in one of the rear areas, though that was a long hike, or perhaps a music-hall show, put on by one of the units, with lots of drag humour and raucous laughter at not-very-subtle material. (Tommy was sure the life of a German soldier was much the same as his.)
It was one of the ironies of these times that in that far-off golden summer of 1914, when “some damn fool thing in the Balkans” was leading to its inevitable climax, Tommy’s brother Fred, who was then eighteen, had been chosen as a delegate of the Birmingham Working-Men’s Esperanto Association to go as a representative to the Twenty-fourth Annual Esperanto Conference in Basel, Switzerland. The Esperanto Conference had been to take place in the last days of July and the first days of August. (Fred had been to France before with a gang of school chums and was no stranger to travel.)
The Esperanto Conference was to celebrate the twenty-fourth anniversary of Zamenhof’s artificial language, invented to bring better understanding between peoples through the use of an easy-to-learn, totally regular invented language—the thinking being that if all people spoke the same language (recognizing a pre-Babel dream), they would see that they were all one people, with common dreams and goals, and would slowly lose nationalism and religious partisanship through the use of the common tongue.
There had been other artificial languages since—Volapük had had quite a few adherents around the turn of the century—but none had had the cachet of Esperanto, the first and best of them.
Tommy and Fred had been fascinated by the language for years. (Fred could both speak and write it with an ease that Tommy had envied.)
What had surprised Fred, on arriving in Switzerland three years before, was that these representatives of this international conference devoted to better understanding among peoples were as acrimonious about their nations as any bumpkin from a third-rate country run by a tin-pot superstitious chieftain. Almost from the first, war and the talk of war divided the true believers from the lip-service toadies. The days were rife with desertions, as first one country then another announced mobilizations. By foot, by horse, by motor-car and train, and, in one case, aeroplane, the delegates left the conference to join up in the coming glorious adventure of War that they imagined would be a quick, nasty, splendid little one, over “before the snow flew.”
By the end of the conference, only a few delegates were left, and they had to make hurried plans to return home before the first shots were fired.
His brother Fred, now dead, on the Somme, had returned to England on August 2, 1914, just in time to see a war no one wanted (but all had hoped for) declared. He, like so many idealists of all classes and nations, had joined up immediately.
Now Tommy, who had been three years younger at the time, was all that was left to his father and mother. He had, of course, been called up in due time, just before news of his brother’s death had reached him.
And now here he was, in a trench of frozen mud, many miles from home, with night falling, when the sergeant walked by and said, “Fall out for wiring detail.”
* * * *
Going on a wiring party was about the only time you could be in No-Man’s Land with any notion of safety. As you were repairing and thickening your tangle of steel, so were the Germans doing the same to theirs a quarter mile away.
Concertina wire, so haphazard-appearing from afar, was not there to stop an enemy assault, though it slowed that, too. The wire was there to funnel an enemy into narrower and tighter channels, so the enemy’s course of action would become more and more constricted—and where the assault would finally slow against the impenetrable lanes of barbed steel was where your defensive machine-gun fire was aimed. Men waiting to go over, under, through, or around the massed wire were cut to ribbons by .303-caliber bullets fired at the rate of five hundred per minute.
Men could not live in such iron weather.
So you kept the wire repaired. At night. In the darkness, the sound of unrolling wire and muffled mauls filled the space between the lines. Quietly cursing men hauled the rolls of barbed wire over the parapets and pushed and pulled them out to where some earlier barrage (which was always supposed to cut all the wire but never did) had snapped some strands or blown away one of the new-type posts (which didn’t have to be hammered in but were screwed into the ground as if the earth itself were one giant champagne cork).
Men carried wire, posts, sledges in the dark, out to the place where the sergeant stood.
“Two new posts here,” he said, pointing at some deeper blackness. Tommy could see nothing, anywhere. He put his coil of wire on the ground, immediately gouging himself on the barbs of an unseen strand at shoulder height. He reached out—felt the wire going left and right.
“Keep it quiet,” said the sergeant. “Don’t want to get a flare up our arses.” Illumination was the true enemy of night work.
Sounds of hammering and work came from the German Line. Tommy doubted that anyone would fire off a flare while their own men were out in the open.
He got into the work. Another soldier screwed in a post a few feet away.
“Wire,” said the sergeant. “All decorative-like, as if you’re trimming the Yule tree for Father Christmas. We want Hans and Fritz to admire our work, just before they cut themselves in twain on it.”
Tommy and a few others uncoiled and draped the wire, running it back and forth between the two new posts and crimping it in with the existing strands.
Usually you went out, did the wiring work, and returned to the trench, knowing you’d done your part in the War. Many people had been lost in those times: there were stories of disoriented men making their way in the darkness, not to their own but to the enemy’s trenches, and being killed or spending the rest of the war as a P.O.W.
Sometimes Tommy viewed wiring parties as a break in the routine of stultifying heat, spring and fall rains, and bone-breaking winter freezes. It was the one time you could stand up in relative comfort and safety, and not be walking bent over in a ditch.
There was a sudden rising comet in the night. Someone on Fritz’s side had sent up a flare. Everybody froze—the idea was not to move at all when No-Man’s Land was lit up like bright summer daylight. Tommy, unmoving, was surprised to see Germans caught out in the open, still also as statues, in front of their trench, poised in attitudes of labor on their wire.
Then who had fired off the flare?
It was a parachute flare and slowly drifted down while it burned the night to steel-furnace-like brilliance. There were pops and cracks and whines from both trenchlines as snipers on each side took advantage of the surprise bounty of lighted men out in the open.
Dirt jumped up at Tommy’s feet. He resisted the urge to dive for cover, the nearest being a shell crater twenty feet away. Any movement would draw fire, if not to him, to the other men around him. They all stood stock-still; he saw droplets of sweat on his sergeant’s face.
From the German line, a trench mortar coughed.
The earth went upward in frozen dirt and a shower of body parts.
* * * *
He felt as if he had been kicked in the back.
His right arm was under him. His rifle was gone. The night was coming back in the waning flickering light from the dying flare. He saw as he lay, his sergeant and a couple of men crawling away toward their line. He made to follow them. His legs wouldn’t work.
He tried pushing himself up with his free arm; he only rolled over on the frozen earth. He felt something warm on his back quickly going cold.
No, he thought, I can’t die like this out in No-Man’s Land. He had heard, in months past, the weaker and weaker cries of slowly dying men who’d been caught out here. He couldn’t think of dying that way.
He lay for a long time, too tired and hurt to try to move. Gradually his hearing came back; there had been only a loud whine in his ears after the mortar shell had exploded.
He made out low talk from his own trench, twenty or so yards away. He could imagine the discussion now. Should we go out and try to get the wounded or dead?
Does Fritz have the place zeroed in? Where’s Tommy? He must have bought a packet.
Surprisingly, he could also hear sounds that must be from the German line—quiet footsteps, the stealthy movement from shell-hole to crater across No-Man’s Land. The Germans must have sent out searching parties. How long had he lain here? Had there been return fire into the German work parties caught in the open by the flare? Were the British searching for their own wounded? Footsteps came nearer to him. Why weren’t the sentries in his own trench challenging them? Or firing? Were they afraid that it was their own men making their ways back?
The footsteps stopped a few yards away. Tommy’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness after the explosion. He saw vague dark shapes all around him. Through them moved a lighter man-shape. It moved with quick efficiency, pausing to turn over what Tommy saw now was a body near him.
It was at that moment that another weaker flare bloomed in the sky from the German trench, a red signal flare of some kind. In its light, Tommy saw the figure near him continue to rifle the body that lay there.