Slaughter Fields

by Thomas Wood

  I took a quick look at the flask, and noticed that it had a series of letters imprinted into the bottom of one side.

  GRHMN.

  He caught me staring at it with an inquisitive eye, deciding to answer my silent question before I got the opportunity to ask.

  “My wife got it for me. George Robert and Helen Margaret Needs. She’s sentimental like that, my wife.” He paused for a moment as he clamped his giant hands back around it and looked at it himself for a moment, as if he had forgotten what it had inscribed upon it.

  “She got it a few years ago for my thirtieth birthday. Married for nine years, and it was the first of my birthdays that we had managed to spend together, if you can believe it.”

  I could. I knew that he was a career soldier, and that he hadn’t spent much of his time in Britain in recent years, instead being sent all over the empire to fight in various wars, put down sporadic uprisings and even ceremonial duties as and when the King had asked him to.

  “Do you hate the Boche, Ellis?” His question took me by surprise, and I immediately found myself stuttering as I tried desperately to answer confidently and with conviction.

  “Y-yes I do, Sergeant. Can’t stand them.” I wondered if this was some sort of a test of my character, to try and rile me up to hate the enemy even more than I already did, so that I might be able to fulfil my duties as an infantryman, rather than some sort of odd observer to the war.

  He raised his eyebrows for a moment, before nodding his head ever so slightly. “Thought so, thought so. A lot of you do,” he said, letting his speech hang tantalisingly in the air.

  “I don’t,” he announced, quite proudly and without any hint of shame. He took another swig of whatever the liquid was inside of his flask and handed it back over to me.

  “Do you know why I don’t hate them, Ellis?”

  I shook my head violently, trying to rid myself of the burning sensation that had settled on the insides of my cheeks, as much as I was disagreeing with him.

  “Because they are men, just like us. A lot of them haven’t seen their home for many months. There’s nothing that they want more than to be able to go home, just as we do.”

  He looked at me for an acknowledgement, as I simply sat stunned, trying to process what this battle-hardened and combat experienced man was saying to me.

  “I’ve been away from home for as long as I can remember, fighting wars that seemed to have no real consequence to me and my family. And all I pined for when I was there, was home. But, all I could do was follow orders, and pray that soon, I’d get to go back home. That’s how they’ll be feeling just over there. Remember, they are humans too, they’re just following orders.”

  “Yes, Sarge,” I croaked, still stunned by what I was hearing.

  “Their orders are to kill you though, Ellis. Yours are to kill them. That’s all there is to war. It is actually quite black and white.

  “Do you know what makes a man into a good soldier, Ellis?”

  I shook my head, like I was a young lad once again, doing everything my father told me to do, in case he got the leather belt out for another go.

  “Recklessness. That’s what makes a good soldier, above everything else. You have to care about nothing, not even yourself, to become a good soldier. But to become reckless, you need to let go of hope. That’s why I know that you will be a good soldier, Ellis. You’re still holding onto your hope, you still think that you might make it out of here alive, but you can’t think like that.”

  “Sarge,” was all I could mutter to him, but his harsh whispering wasn’t over yet.

  “Don’t worry, something will happen to you which will make you let go of your hope. Then you will be able to kill, then you will be able to fight back. That’s when you’ll get the respect of men like Etwell. Alright?”

  “Yes, Sarge,” I spluttered, as he packed his flask away and tapped me on the knee.

  “There’s a good lad. Don’t let it get to you, it was your first time out. We all get it.”

  He left me to my own devices, as he slowly made his way around all of the others who were still awake, offering each of them a sip of his paraffin, in between his own gulps.

  I did not know whether to feel buoyed or thoroughly depressed by his little speech. It had comforted me a great deal that a man of his experience and stature had recognised something in me, that my quietness and timidity had not been mistaken for any kind of cowardice or fear, but rather out of a desire to be better.

  It felt good to know that I had someone that was there looking out for me, and one that seemed to know exactly how I felt. I wondered what he had meant by ‘we all get it,’ toying with the idea that when he had first been into battle that he too, had made a mistake, that had ended up with another man dead. Maybe that was what had helped turn him into such a fine soldier.

  On the other hand though, I began to feel completely downcast and annoyed at the sergeant for his advice. To tell me that I must lose my hope was something that I had never expected to hear, and I couldn’t imagine how it would have made me a better soldier.

  Surely I was able to become an effective infantryman, whilst still retaining my desire to stay alive? But, maybe I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell, my head was all over the place.

  As I rubbed at my head, to rid myself of the thumping headache that I had taken possession of since Needs had left me, I realised that the thumps weren’t in my skull but were, in fact, just outside the trench.

  “Incoming!” screamed Etwell as the first few crumps of unmistakeable four-two shells began to hammer down into our position.

  The air was suddenly filled to bursting with shells falling from every possible angle, making me breathe in huge chunks of earth and dust, stirring up an incredible thirst as I did so.

  I, along with all the others, buried myself in the parapet, hoping that it would offer some sort of futile protection that you would not be able to get elsewhere.

  I yanked at the sides of my cap, hoping to pull it down and over my ears, to block out some of the awful screams of the shells as they hared towards me.

  Large chunks of dirt and rubble began to pitter patter down onto the ground around me, splitting into a thousand smaller pieces when they connected with my skull.

  “I told you they’d be on their way soon, didn’t I!” hollered Beattie, as I caught sight of his face grinning back at me not fifteen inches away from where I was pressed into the wall.

  Shells fell from the sky like they were never going to end, the sheer crescendo staying at a constant volume for what felt like hours. I wondered how much longer I could stomach the incessant nature of the noise, as I felt myself slowly going insane from the constant torture that it was putting me through.

  Suddenly, just as I thought I wasn’t able to take anymore, there was an almighty wallop, followed by a roaring of air as the pressure wave expanded, obliterating everything that lay in its path. I felt the sandbags above my head immediately tear through the air, thwacking into the far side of the trench as they lost all their momentum.

  For a few seconds, I was thankful for the close call, as I went completely deaf, the crumps and scrapes as shells landed and things were thrown around becoming completely non-existent for a few seconds.

  My hearing returned, just in time to make out the first of the screams, as a roar of flames suddenly licked over the top of the trench further down the line.

  “Everyone, heads up, heads up. It could be an advance!”

  From the short time that I had been in the line, I had come to expect an enemy attack at dawn, not at four thirty-five in the morning, when it was still dark. But, then again, I had also learnt that there were no rules on the frontline, anything goes up there.

  Reluctantly, I grabbed my rifle, not knowing whether I’d actually be able to fire it if I was called upon to use it. Straightening my cap, in preparation to meet the enemy, I plonked my rifle down hard on the top of the parapet, my sandbag-less portion of the frontline now being significantly
less protected than the rest of my section.

  A great, rolling mist was all I could see directly ahead of me, the darkness and manufactured fog rendering me more or less completely blind.

  The curtain that had been pulled right across our frontline was unwearyingly renewed, as shell after shell continued to pummel the same sections of earth, never deviating from the same holes that they had attacked last time.

  I wondered for a moment if it was being done deliberately, and that the Germans merely intended to put us off from another advance later on in the morning, before I concluded it was far more likely that they had got their aiming slightly off.

  I prayed desperately that the German spotters were just as blind as I was, so that they wouldn’t be calling any corrective fire, more accurate fire, down on us anytime soon.

  The flashes of blindingly white light were tremendous, and for what felt like an age, I almost forgot that we were still in the grips of a wintry morning darkness, as each roll of thunder was quickly accompanied by a horizon-illuminating lightning.

  Suddenly, just as I was blinded by yet another flash of brilliant white, a figure came thundering into our section, while the shells finally began to fall less frequently.

  “Direct hit! Help, there’s some of them buried!”

  Needs suddenly sprang into action, “Beattie, Etwell, Harris, get back on your fire steps, keep a look out for any movement. If you see anything, pop them. Ellis, Sargent, you’re with me, let’s go!”

  Looking across at Bob, we mirrored one another, as we slid our rifles away from the frontline and hopped down from the fire step. We weren’t given a chance to prepare ourselves for what we’d see.

  7

  By the time that we had made it to the dugout, the private who had called out to us was already in floods of tears.

  I hadn’t noticed it when I first laid my eyes on him, but as we arrived at the scene, I realised that his uniform was all ripped and torn, a by-product of being so close to the initial blast site. Blood gushed from his head, faster than he could dab away at it, so he simply let it be, dribbling from somewhere underneath his hairline, and following his jawbone, before dripping from the end of his chin.

  The young private’s blood was the only blood that could be seen upon making it to the direct hit site, everything else being so strangely clean that I began to think that the poor fellow, who stood beside me crying, had been making the whole thing up.

  “You’re from number three platoon, aren’t you lad?” queried Sergeant Needs, obviously recognising the crying private.

  “Yes, Sarge,” he managed to squeeze out, in amongst the sobs as he tried pull himself together, “Private Shaw, Sarge.”

  “Okay then, Shaw, I need you to go back to our dugout, get yourself patched up. Hold it together now, there’s a good lad.”

  From the look on the Sergeant’s face, I realised that it was one of compassion, but also one of slight disgust, clearly disappointed with Shaw suddenly breaking down in the way that he had.

  As he scarpered off, the sergeant stepped aside, to reveal the full force of what had happened, so that Bob and I could see.

  The trench seemed to carry on as normal, the boards, that had been put down to help avoid trench foot, ran right the way up to around the centre of the dugout, before they simply stopped.

  The walls of the trench seemed fairly intact, the sandbags still perched patiently on the parapet, observing the scene of destruction below.

  There was only a small part of the wall that had been disturbed, and had now cascaded, like some sort of landslide, into the main body of the trench, filling a lot of it up so that it was difficult to see the other side.

  From the very bottom of the congregated earth, I could make out one, solitary hand poking out, as if it was somehow gasping out for air. My instincts were to simply reach out and grab it, but there was something holding me back, preventing me from wanting to help.

  “Can anyone hear me?” called out Sergeant Needs, quietly at first, before raising his voice to ask the question a second time. He got no response.

  “Right lads,” he said to us, taking on an air of practicality and coldness. “There’s going to be bodies in here. They’re going to be dead, but we still need to be careful, take our time. No entrenching tools. Just our hands. Move the earth gently but quickly.”

  We were soon scrabbling around, redistributing the disturbed earth and pulling it away from the mound that lay all around us.

  The first body that we uncovered, about half way down the pile, was a complete mess, his chest opened up as if a surgeon had just been about to start some sort of major operation on the bloke. His uniform was no longer a khaki colour, but a deep brown, perfectly dyed from the collar of his shirt, right the way down to the very sole of his boots.

  Sergeant Needs and I grabbed under his arms, gently trying to avoid any unnecessary ripping to his limbs that might cause the poor fellow even more discomfort, with Bob gripping a hold on his ankles.

  We moved him clear of the rubble and set him down, pulling a German blanket over the top of him, to cover him from any further exposure.

  The body was immediately ingrained in my mind and, as we began to excavate even more of the collapsed trench, I realised that every body that I saw was slowly becoming less and less apparent to me. Each one seemed less of a human being, until I was practically throwing the bodies around, without a single thought for what they might have been like when they were alive.

  One of the bodies however, was gripping tightly onto a single, silver metal spoon, that I noticed had three numbers imprinted on the handle, possibly part of his service number or even his birthday. I found myself trying to forget the spoon, as it had led to a gateway of imaginings of what he had been doing moments before the shell had struck. He had been getting ready, I presumed, to tuck into some of his rations that he had been looking forward to for hours. Now, he would never get them.

  “Right, that’s all of them,” announced the Sergeant, mournfully. “You two, take watch here, I’m going back to headquarters, seen if I can scrump together some replacements, maybe even a few stretchers if we’re lucky.”

  He scurried away, his boots thumping down the boards as he left the two of us to fend for ourselves.

  “You okay?” Bob muttered to me as we heaved ourselves up onto what was left of third platoon’s makeshift fire step.

  I couldn’t answer him for a few moments, as I tried my hardest to scan the pitch-black landscape before me, hoping desperately to see a dreamlike world, one that was full of green grass and maybe even a cow or two, just anything to distract myself from what lay a few yards away from me.

  A couple of the blankets that we had managed to throw over the bodies were beginning to become soaked in blood too, the volumes with which the bodily fluids had begun seeping out of the corpses, becoming unimaginable as soon as we had disturbed them.

  I felt bad for them, not because they had been killed, but because they were going to have to have a second burial, the ground upon which they had fallen deemed far too important to have let them stay there.

  A few minutes later, the sergeant returned, with the remainder of our depleted platoon, announcing that fourth platoon were being moved up from the reserve as we spoke, to take control of our dugout.

  “Poor gits,” announced Beattie as the bodies were dragged onto stretchers ready to be buried in some mass grave somewhere, “didn’t know what was going to hit them.”

  “I reckon that’s how I’m going to go, you know,” sighed Harris, as he started to light up a ciggy and offer them round.

  “What, waiting for your elusive rations?” smirked Beattie.

  Harris gave a weak snort, the kind that someone gives at a slightly distasteful joke. Beattie knew immediately that he’d said the wrong thing and began to drum his fingers on the top of his rifle out of uneasiness.

  “Give us one of those would you?” I was surprised to hear myself utter the words, as was Beattie, but he
chucked the small cardboard packet towards my face, which I caught with an expert hand.

  “Keep the lot,” he said, as if he wasn’t quite sure that I had converted or not, and he was expecting me to chuck the packet back at him in rebuttal.

  “Told you!” cried Bob, triumphant that he had managed to finally get me onto them. “You two both owe me some money!”

  He shot an accusing, but half-hearted look at both Beattie and Harris, who both began to hold their heads in shame.

  “That’s if we live long enough to be able to claim our pay,” called out Harris, now striding over to me to have the honour of lighting my first cigarette.

  I felt the smoke envelope my nostrils to begin with, before I felt the burning sensation float down my throat and encompass my lungs. It tasted foul to me, and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why these small things were such a popular commodity in the trenches, but it was taking my mind off the events of the hour before, and so, soon after finishing my first, I sparked up a second.

  As I finished the last cigarette in the packet, the others finding it eternally funny that I had become so hooked on them so quickly, I began to meander on the image of the poor lad clutching hold of his spoon.

  He had been expectantly waiting for his rations, not even imagining for a moment that he might not get them and had died in the half a second it had taken for a fluke shell to land on his head.

  As I pictured his body, his sorrowful, mournful eyes that were locked in a desperate eternal glare, I came to the conclusion that it had all been down to luck. I had never been one to believe in fate or chance before but, in that moment, I decided that was all that it could possibly come down to.

  He had been sitting in his section of the trench and I in mine. Both of us had been eagerly awaiting news of our rations and when we might be able to fill the hole that was in our bellies. Both of us had been sat on the fire step, surrounded by the rest of our platoon and what we could safely say were the best friends that we had ever had.