“Sometimes when there is a high possibility of capture they make you leave everything, so the Hun don’t ID you. Not right but it happens. Ahhhhh. Keep going. It hurts, but keep goin’. Can’t feel my feet, but somehow they still hurt.”
Desperately Cello dragged him slipping on the mud but making the first steps towards a piece of dry-ish bank. Once there they both collapsed, Cello with exhaustion and the Sergeant in pain. He could not speak from it. But their touch and physical contact had done something, established something between them.
After his breathing had become better Cello asked. “What happened Sarge?”
The Sergeant’s breathing did not get better. “Call me John, please. Can we talk about something else.”
“Do you want some water and biscuit?”
“I would like that,” said John Thomas Wall, at the top of a deep breath of expectation.
Cello pulled out his crumpled packet of Huntley and Palmers. There were three occupants of the packet. He offered a whole one.
It was taken and eaten almost in a flash. Then the sergeant searched for the water, his face showing sudden interest; the first real interest. The face was smooth and almost bloodless. Just as the face of the first casualty they had found. Cello felt a sudden need for medical help. But there was no medical help, so he had to give it himself. There was hardly any water. He held the bottle and put his hand under the sergeant’s head; who gulped then reached forward as the bottle was gently taken from him. “Got to keep some for later,” Cello said, straightening the man’s helmet.
“Later, yes… Will there be a later?”
“Let’s hope; I’m going to get you back.”
“Back, back where?”
“Back to get some help.”
“You sound like a medic. But where is back? I thought everyone was moving forward, to attack.”
“Supposed to be, perhaps they will pick you up as they go forward.”
“Except they never do that, the dressing stations coming up behind are supposed to pick up casualties but they will be more concerned with casualties from the assault coming back. I’ll be gone by then.”
“Well I’ll take you myself before the assault starts.”
“You going to carry me then. But where, coz we both outcasts now aren’t we.”
“I shall take you to a German med centre then,” said Cello.
John Thomas Wall managed a slow and painful laugh, “Aha-aha-aha that will guarantee you a Court Martial and a charge of desertion, if you ever get back.”
“I think I got one coming anyway. But what about you?”
“I was told to take some men into a bunker when we were caught in a bombardment a couple of days ago and went to the small bunker just over there. When we came out the rest of the patrol was gone and then we got caught in another shell burst which gave me this and the other men ran off saying they were going to testify against me that I had deserted.”
“But you didn’t, you were told to take cover.”
“Sometimes taking cover is as good as running away, as far as some people are concerned.”
“I have heard about the RSM, he might have that thought mightn’t he.”
“Yes, and he gives his attitude to others. They take it up because they want to become like him, they want his power.” John Thomas suddenly became listless and exhausted with the talking. He lay back.
“That’s why we have to go to the Huns.” Cello stared out away from the sergeant, across the muddy re-entrant and towards his side of no-man’s land, which was no longer his side. Any temporary home that the army had given him as they brought him into this war had been snatched away.
CHAPTER NINE
Witnesses
Cello had got Sergeant John Thomas Wall onto his shoulders. Quite a light man, he could be carried for some hours during the night on and off, struggling towards the occasional flash from the Hun side, where a bombardment had begun to land. They seemed strangely free of worries about this though, despite moving towards it. Cello had tied one of his puttees onto the Sergeant’s right foot to try to keep the foot in place, but the blood loss and infection setting in, made it inevitable that the foot would be lost. The main worry was how they would get through the wire.
At last exhaustion overtook caution and both slept where they collapsed. They awoke well before dawn. Hunger almost doubled Cello as he lay. But Sergeant Wall did not seem to be hungry. He was still listless and his shallow breathing seemed quicker and lighter. The bombardment boomed on, like a careless thunderstorm.
They took turns in taking sips of water. But denied themselves biscuit. They did try to eat some grass they came across, caressing it against their faces almost lovingly, then chewed it to get some juice. There seemed only grit and mud in it. But by touch Cello found some tiny shoots which did have some juice. It unlocked their sandpit mouths and gave them a tiny bit of saliva. They were becoming mad with a sort of closeness and terrible abandonment, like a pair of lovers, light-headed through lack of food, sleep and water and in sergeant wall’s case his loss of blood and injuries.
Cello’s thoughts turned to the night before last, when he had been with the other casualty and had imagined playing his cello. “What did you do before the war?” he asked.
“I was a boy. I’ve been in the army five years. I am twenty-two now so I joined at seventeen.”
“Oh, well you were a young man, man enough to join the army.”
“Just wanted to get away from the farm really, hated it… Now I just wish I could get back there.”
“A farm, that sounds marvellous.” Cello spoke in a sort of exhausted whisper his voice cracking regularly.
Their conversation was punctured by long pauses as each summoned the strength to reply.
“It was, now I look at this land, it was all good farming land, but it’s ghastly now, absolutely contaminated with all the war shit. Take years to make it back to farmland,” John Thomas sobbed.
Cello remained silent, sympathising in the emotional moment. Then he said. “I am a cellist. That is what I was training to do before the war, well… and during… up until last year when I joined the Artists’ Rifles.”
He was expecting some derision as he had got in the trench. But none came. “Ah I wondered about the badge,” was all sergeant Wall said. Then a thought was expressed. “Cellist! Would you play it here?”
“That’s exactly what I would do and I did it night before last, well in my imagination.”
“What did you play?”
“Well you know the cello is a great instrument for showing sadness. I played a lament for the soldier we had just killed.”
“So I’m a farmer and you’re a cellist out here waiting for the dawn, playing, farming, far away from all this.”
“Yes far away from all this. But still on this land.”
“Yes still on this land. It could be beautiful. It was beautiful.”
“Will it ever be again?”
They were lying on an exposed slope. It was gradually rising up towards the enemy. To the right it seemed to drop away, very gradually. They sensed rather than saw it in the darkness before the dawn. Cello put his hand down on the cold earth and tried to pick a piece of it up. He felt something move under his fingers. He pawed at it uncertainly without interest. Then he felt its shape. It was a worm. “Hey Sarge I got a worm.” He moved his hand across it in the dark and rolled it, then picked the whole thing up and brought it carefully up to his face. It was longer than he thought, perhaps five inches and quite fat.
“You eat it, I’m not really partial to worm for breakfast, never been a fish, or a fisherman for that matter.”
“Oh come on Sarge, its food, of a sort.”
“As I said you eat it.”
“If I eat half will you have the other half?”
“I might.” But the Sergeant’s head was turned away in disinterest and bent upwards with pain.
Cello put the worm to his nose. It smelt of earth. Then to his mouth and
in and screwing his eyes, bit into it. It tasted smooth and gritty and there was a bitterness about it. He swallowed though and then tried to spit the bitterness and grit. “God, I think that worm may have been gassed. Do you still not want it?”
“No, eat the rest.”
Cello threw it. “I don’t think so.”
“As I said, everything on this land has been contaminated with the war.”
They both lay back flat and began to laugh in a sobbing way that might also have passed for crying.
“I wish it would rain now. I would just lie here with my mouth open.” Cello’s mouth was open anyway and his breathing was shallow like Sergeant Wall’s.
The light strengthened and more earth became visible. It was undulating. There was no real cover. They could see more to the east, where the sun was supposed to be rising.
Suddenly the bombardment stopped. Smoke remained.
They could put their heads up and look. There was something small standing up, some way across the ground.
“There is going to be an attack, now that the bombardment has stopped,” said Sergeant Wall. “You can play them into battle… with your cello.”
“No that’s not what I would do… Sarge is that a gate over there?”
“Gate??”
“Yes… That thing over there, like a gate sticking up, on its own, with no fence, a farm gate, as if between fields.”
“In between fields.”
“Yea as in a farm.”
“A farm.” Sergeant Wall sounded incredulous, as if everything that had gone before in their conversation had not happened, had not been said.
“A battlefield…This is a battlefield, not a farm,” he said as if far away, as if slipping.
And suddenly the strength had gone from Cello’s fingers which he used to play, pretend to play, his cello. Was it a pretence? Was his whole life before, a pretence? The playing and the practise, driving towards an art-form. Driving towards something that kept moving away, further away with each practice, each performance.
You must improve. In order to play… Bach or…
That first night he had such strength; in order to play a lament for a dead man. Now he had a living man to protect, to share with, to play for. But it was slipping from him. All the hours, days, years of practise were leaving him, unravelling, passing out of his mind, his hands, as if the war was taking everything.
What about his heart? Was it beating?
He supported himself on his elbow. His eyes were very deep and looking at them you wouldn’t know whether there was sight in them. This time he looked beyond the thing, the gate or whatever it was and further away was a kind of crawling. Not like the worms of which he had found one. But these were still inhabitants of the earth, the mud, mud men, moving and crawling.
The attack, just as the Sergeant had said, was beginning.
His helmet was on but on a tilt, as if he was a Don Quixote, looking quizzically back to something he believed in and should have been a part of, but wasn’t. It had become a mystery. Was he the mystery or was the battle, the mystery? The values of the cello that he had brought to the war; were they real? Or was this, his now predicament; real?
Now he focused back on the gate thing. Something hung on it. “There is something on that gate Sarge.” He whispered with a small dread creeping on his voice.
But the Sergeant had swivelled round while Cello was in his reverie. He had drawn a little fresh strength. “It’s not a gate, it’s a wheel and that’s a man on it, crucified!”
“Crucified!”
“Yes, crucified. They do it, the Hun I mean, as a punishment. Normally it’s to a cart and when it goes along everyone can see him. But in this case they must have just left him.”
“But he would have been shot, or got blown up.”
“Or just starved to death,” added the Sergeant in a stronger tone. “One way or another you gonna die.”
He was scarecrow-like. “How long would you say…?”
They were beginning to catch some scent on the stronger morning air.
The Sergeant sank back. He couldn’t speak at present.
Sergeant Wall’s words hit Cello. Yes this was a sort of warning, this wheel, or gate, gateway to battle and crucified on it a body, a warning that ‘one way or another you’re gonna die’. Were these the remnants of a man who wouldn’t go forward. He was therefore not allowed to go back. He was a gateway to the battle. Go forward because if you don’t, ‘you gonna die anyway’.
It had often been told that if you don’t go forward in an attack when ordered, when the whistle blew; you would get a bullet from behind. Was that what the Sergeant was referring to. Who would deliver that bullet? Would it be an officer, or a sergeant or an RSM perhaps, or a general, with a twisted idea of discipline… Not so twisted, this was the reality. Someone would do it, because those harsh disciplinarians always won in the end. The harshness was the right way; at school, the flogging. Boys were flogged into a bitter hateful compliance, from behind. Here some would be shot so that the others would comply, with a bitter fear, because the discipline was right.
How then can it be a glorious thing to go into battle? From somewhere inside, Cello held, as did all boys, a thought of the glories of war. What glories now? Where were the glories in front of him in this show? Men moved like thin caterpillars across a blasted land. Cello could see it was a broken land on which they advanced. The maggots of the dead man he had crawled through were here wriggling gleefully to their death, disappearing, some down holes like craters full of wire and mud and gas, to greet other dead men there.
Somewhere behind, instead of the casualty collectors would be those shooting soldiers who refused to go forward. Perhaps they would be together; the shooters and the casualty clearers, separating the injured from the malingerers. Some would be cowering in holes saying “Please shoot my leg, so that I can be picked up by a stretcher bearer.” And the officer shooting would say, “No I must kill you so that the others will still go forward.” But the man might argue, “They have already gone, no one would see you shooting my leg, please I beg you sir, shoot my leg.” But if the casualty clearing people were there, they would say; “No, you would not be a real casualty then, shoot him in the head sir!”
So while the man cried and begged for mercy the officer would coldly shoot him in the head. It would be obvious to all that it was not an enemy shot. But then who would find out, who would know, except the stretcher bearer, who would leave him to be collected with the other dead, or to rot more likely, into the mud. Then no one would be any the wiser. So many bodies lay there rotting, unknown, unlooked for, uncared for, uncared about.
Better then to be like the Hun, crucified, not killed, as a punishment. At least he was here for all to see. He would get picked up by someone, eventually.
Cello was very still, fixated by the images in front of him. His mind running over these things.
But Sergeant John Thomas Wall was more awake. “Well once that little show is over, we might be able to get ourselves picked up by our own medics… Might!” He suddenly had an innocent hope about him, a desire to get back what he had lost. He had seen a ship that might rescue them stuck in an ocean.
Cello turned to look at him and saw a face hardly recognisable even from the night before. It was a sallow and flat face. The eyes did not challenge and nose did not protrude. Everything had sunk back into the darkness. The light did not want to see him.
“But Sarge they may shoot us as deserters and malingerers,” Cello said after a long pause.
“The medics won’t, but an officer would question you as you don’t have no weapon… Everything comes back down to basics in the army, you ain’t a soldier if you haven’t got one of these.” His rifle was slung. Cello had carried them both.
They lay on their sides, exhaustedly watching. Cello was buoyed up by the Sergeant’s sudden urge of hope. Perhaps after all everything would be alright. Instead of going to the Germans, who crucified men on wagon wheel
s; they would be able to go back to their own side, without being shot.
“Should we move down there Sarge?”
They considered the question, not able to raise up more than to elbow height. But somehow they could have stood and wandered over there. No Man’s Land had been compromised. It was no longer a place of secrets and creeping, where each side watched the other. A new No Man’s Land would be formed.
Some obscene desire made them want to get closer to the body hanging on the wheel. They couldn’t go past him and down towards the battle or advance, or whatever it was, without paying a compliment to him, acknowledging his presence. He was after all a fellow soldier and was no longer a threat. Something about his predicament, akin to their own, created a fellowship.
“Let’s take a closer look at our Hun friend,” said Sergeant Wall voicing the thought.
Moving now took a great effort. They were very weak and Cello’s spirit had dried to a tiny thing, like a fragment of muddied biscuit, or a dead worm withered by the morning sun. His hair was strands of mud instead of straws of blonde. His youth had gone.
Sergeant Wall’s maturity and strength had carried him through his days in the open mud. He was three years of war senior to Cello and two years in actual age. His youth had long since gone and been replaced by some hardening of character but his English faith had endured. Now this had ruptured badly and was leaking away. What did he have left to keep him alive?
Still they moved together in a kind of dragging motion, an elbow and knee crawl with Cello supporting. Sergeant Wall’s breathing became more quick and he coughed suddenly, deeply. “You can do it John,” said Cello, sensing a deterioration in his casualty.
“Finally you calling me by my name mister Cello.”
“You’re not calling me by mine.”
“No but Cello has something about it, a mastery. I’m sure you are a master. I mean if you were a top marksman I might call you rifle!”
“In music they call it maestro and I’m nowhere near that yet.”
“Fancy name, means the same.”
A Cellist Soldier Page 8