Slaughter Fields

by Thomas Wood

  As I watched boneshaking tremor after soul-crushing quiver in the side of the trench wall, I began to question why we were really here, why I was here.

  For the life of me, as I searched myself, I couldn’t think of a single reason as to why this war was happening, as it had seemed so far removed from my place in society, it was almost as if I hadn’t been worthy of knowing why we were here. But then, I realised that I was doing it for those around me, I was doing it for men like Sargent, Beattie, Harris and even Etwell, to give them some meagre chance at survival, so that it wasn’t their loved ones that would receive a telegram to say their son wasn’t coming home.

  We had all signed up at some point or another, for the sake of duty, like it had been the duty of young men for generations before us to defend our nation and what was right. It was just my turn, that was all.

  That’s where a lot of the soldiers that I had met had continued to take their strength from, in that ill-fated notion of for King and country, for the sake of national pride and standing, only to have all your ideals and beliefs blown out from your skull and painted down the side of the trench with a single sharpshooter’s bullet.

  I realised that, as the shells continued to howl overhead, that I was increasingly taking my courage and my strength not from some pathetic idea of patriotism, not even from the man that would stand next to me, but from the bottle, in particular, Sergeant Needs’ bottle.

  I sipped away at the awful concoction until it no longer burned my throat and nostrils, but merely warmed them, gently. The more I drank, the safer I felt, the better I felt.

  But I was gripped by a guilt that even the Germans weren’t entirely deserving of the thousands of pounds of bombs that were limply falling from the sky and onto their positions. They were doing it for the same reasons that we all were, and I was certain that more than one or two of them wanted nothing more than to pack up and get on the next train back to Germany.

  The others found it so easy to hate the Germans, particularly Etwell, but I was finding it increasingly difficult. The average soldier was merely following his orders, in the same way that I was, and I wondered what the chances were of either of us wanting to kill one another if we were to meet outside of the trenches, outside of this war. I had no desire to kill a man unless he was pointing a rifle at me, probably the same as him. Which meant we could have been in an endless stalemate until one of us gave in and lowered his weapon.

  As the thoughts continued to tumble around my mind, I realised that I was crying, great baubles of water launching themselves from my eyes and thumping into the ground with as much of an effect as the artillery shells.

  No matter how hard I tried to stop them, even poking my fingers into the tear ducts themselves, there was nothing I could do to prevent them from splashing all around me. Before too long, I had given up completely, allowing the tears to carve themselves a route through the grime and dirt that was all over my face, before eventually washing my cheeks over with the accumulated dampness that was on them.

  I rubbed my eyes for the hundredth time, trying to pull myself together and not let anyone else see that I had been bawling my eyes out through the barrage. When I lowered my hands and opened my eyes again, I caught the large, imposing silhouette of Etwell, as he strode his way towards me, aggressively.

  “Pull yourself together! You are weak! You are nothing!” he spat on me as his words tumbled from his mouth, wounding me with more of an effect than a German machine gun.

  “This is an industrial war! We have been sent here to die! The sooner you accept that fact the better! There is nothing you can do! Nothing!”

  My face burned ferociously as I recoiled from the slap that he had delivered expertly across my cheeks, before he gripped them tightly, forcing me to stare straight into his eyes.

  I had expected to see them burning a bright red colour, as his anger and malice towards me reached new levels. But all that I could see in his eyes was a sense of resignation, like he knew that he would die, and so would everyone else. There was an emptiness to his expression that told me he hadn’t had the life that he had wanted, hadn’t even experienced the same things before the war that many of us had, and I immediately wanted to know what it was that was missing from his life.

  For the first time since I met him he spoke, still in a shout to be heard over the screaming shells, but somehow softer, some might have even classed it as compassionate.

  “It is nothing personal, Ellis. It is just the way it is.” I was astounded with the way that he had spoken to me. I had known him for almost a month, half of that had been spent living in very close proximity to one another, and not once had he called me by my name, in fact he had barely spoken to me directly at all.

  As if it had somehow taken all of the energy in the world for him to have said that, I gave him a brief, curt nod, my head still in the grasps of his sweaty palms, out of a thankfulness for his strange way of imparting his experience and knowledge to younger soldiers.

  Immediately, he turned away from me and, as I wiped the final few tears away from my eyes, I felt somehow changed, like I didn’t really care about the shells anymore, I didn’t really care for the German soldiers on the other side of our trench. It was almost like I truly believed that they deserved everything that they were getting, for the first time in my life.

  I looked at my watch. It was six fifty-three, ack Emma, A.M. It wouldn’t be long now before the order was given to make weapons ready and to fix bayonets. It was nearly showtime, and I couldn’t have felt better.

  I grew impatient with the shells as they continued with their insanity-inducing wails, each and every shell that was launched over our trench just ratcheting the levels of anxiety that were present within our trench, inch by inch.

  But for me, although I was nervous and scared, I felt like I had a renewed energy, from the pits of my stomach, and it had come from the most unlikely person in the platoon.

  Thanks to Etwell, I had let go of all sense of hope. I wasn’t going to make it home, and the realisation that it was true, had made me feel infinitely better.

  11

  There seemed to be far more smoke in our trench than if a German shell had just landed slap bang in the middle of us all. Every single man in that hastily dug hole in a French field, now bolstered with reinforcements from some men from the Grenadier guards, had something smoking away from the corner of his mouth, one or two even chucking up the pungent smells of a pipe as they puffed away on them.

  As for me, I couldn’t even remember what it was like to have never smoked in my life, having made my way through so many of the things in the last few hours, that I must have more than made up for the few years that the others had all been smoking for.

  Sergeant Needs continued to keep a watch on all of us, checking for the tell-tale signs of an impending waterfall of tears, or maybe even the first movements of a deserting soldier.

  All the while, he continued to scribble away in his notebook, that he balanced nimbly between his thumb and forefinger, flapping away as he wrote down line after line of whatever it was he stored in there. I wondered if it was everything that was zipping through his mind, as if writing it down would help to make sense of them all, or maybe it was his observations and recommendations for the soldiers under his command. I even toyed with the idea that he was heavily into his poetry and that he thought the tough exterior that he possessed would somehow be damaged by the revelation.

  “Rum! Rum!” came the call from a man that was clearly making his way up and down the line spreading a meagre drop of happiness amongst the troops waiting to die.

  The private appeared with a large jar tucked under his arm, as he struggled to carry the thing in his tiny little arms.

  “Mugs out gents! Double rations this morning, courtesy of Major Barber!”

  Mugs were hastily produced out of thin air, each man necking the thick, dark liquid so quickly that they barely had time to taste the stuff.

  But, taste the stuff they
did, and the men who received the ration before I did were already coughing and spluttering long before I had been poured my allocation.

  “Blimey!” rasped Beattie, as it appeared that he was fighting for breath. “What on earth has he put in that stuff!”

  “I told you,” gasped Harris, clutching at his throat as if he had been poisoned, “they all want to kill us!”

  I swished the muddy like liquid around in my cup before I reluctantly drank it. The thought occurred to me that the rum was meant to give us an element of courage before leaping over the sandbags, but felt that, if that was to be the case, then the British Army should be far more liberal with their helpings than this young private had been, even if they were double helpings.

  The thick, oil type liquid slowly trickled its way through my mouth and down the back of my throat. Even though it was strong, it wasn’t quite as bad as my first taste of Sergeant Needs’ paraffin type amalgamation, and so, in some ways I quite enjoyed it. At the very least, it managed to stave off the headache that I had been experiencing for the last couple of hours or so.

  “Stand back, move!” came a call from over on my left, and I turned just in time to watch Bob Sargent drop his trousers and squat nervously in an unoccupied corner of the trench. He groaned and grimaced as he left his bowels all over the back of the trench.

  “Eugh,” groaned Beattie, with an element of laughter tinging his voice, “you’ve got it all down the back of your trousers.”

  “Dirty pig,” chimed in Harris as his accomplice.

  “Shut up,” strained Sargent, “it’s not my fault.”

  He wasn’t the only one who felt the need to relive themselves at a moment’s notice, with several others only adding to the horrific aroma of human excrement, vomit and sweat that lingered in the air like a poison gas.

  Others couldn’t help but shuffle around, like I was, trying to ignore the pains in my bladder, passing them off as merely down to a fear, one that would soon pass as the excitement of the advance would surely take over.

  The remainder of the occupants in the trench did nothing at all, except for simply staring at the walls with an intensity that made me think they could look straight through them. They wore blank, faded expressions on their faces, their skin so pale that they looked like a freshly laundered bed sheet that was being hung out to dry.

  There was nothing anyone could do for any of them anymore, there were various ways that men tried to cope with the fear, and that was their chosen method.

  I glanced down at my wrist watch and I watched as the second hand sped up for a moment, before it slowed right the way down, to the point where it was barely moving any longer. Seven twenty-six. Not long to go now.

  I found myself staring at my watch, as if I was transfixed on the way that it seemed to be counting down to my death. I willed it to stop completely, to give me some sort of a respite from the torture of being made to wait, while in the same second, I urged it to speed up, so that I could get over the sandbags and get whatever was about to happen over and done with.

  I was distracted by Sergeant Needs sidling up next to me, as he tucked his notebook away in his breast pocket, tapping it gently.

  “Oh…Sergeant,” I muttered fumbling around in my own top pocket, “I forgot to give this back to you.”

  “Keep it,” he growled, with a wink, “I’ll take it off you on the other side. But you’re paying to have it refilled.”

  I smirked at him weakly, as I struggled to see the funny side of his joke. He must have picked up on the sheer terror that was in my eyes as he sighed, staring straight at me.

  “Oh, come on, now. It was just a joke, Ellis. Besides, I know that you’re going to make it through, I’m confident of that.”

  “You really think so?” I responded, still maintaining my new-found belief that thinking you’re going to make it through does nothing but distract you from the task at hand.

  “Yeah…” he said, drawing it out so that it sounded more like a belch than a word, “I’ve seen far worse soldiers than you making it out alive, Ellis.”

  I pondered his words for a second, “But seen far better ones killed?”

  He smirked at me, turning his head back towards the ladder that was propped up against the wall, awaiting us to clamber up and over it.

  “Just keep hold of that flask for me, would you? Keep it safe, now.”

  It was at that moment that I realised someone was talking, and for a moment I thought that maybe it was me, and that I had gone completely mad and had started talking to myself. But the voice was not one that I recognised as my own, it was Harris.

  He was clutching hold of a small, battered and browning book that fit snugly into the palm of his hand, his dirtied fingernails digging in hard into its spine as he clutched it. His eyes were clamped firmly shut and his head was tilted to the sky, as if he was worshiping the falling artillery shells.

  But it wasn’t the deity of artillery that he was praying to. He muttered his dreams over and over, interspersed with several repeated seconds of, “Please, Lord. Please. Please. Please…”

  I stared at him for a moment or two longer, my eyes beginning to fill with tears at the sight.

  “For my comrades…keep them safe. Keep them safe, even if you don’t keep me safe…”

  No one seemed willing to stop him from his mutterings, even if they didn’t believe. It just felt good that someone was there that did, making me anyway, feel slightly more confident now that we had God on our side.

  As I scanned the faces of the rest of my platoon, I caught sight of Bob Sargent kissing his ring finger, despite the fact that he wasn’t even married, and I wondered why he had done it. Maybe he was married, but he had failed to tell us, or maybe it was on the promise of an engagement if he was to make it home that had made him do it. Whatever reason, I left him to it, I didn’t want to pry at a moment like this.

  As for myself, I felt momentarily for my father’s coin, as if it was going to bring me some sort of relief, but as I gripped it, I realised it would do nothing for me. I found that I was getting far more comfort from the faces that were around me, the pale faces, the ones that had the faint dribblings of vomit in the breath, the ones that were crying and the ones that were praying earnestly. I wasn’t the only one to be feeling scared. I wasn’t alone in this.

  I could almost hear the watches ticking up and down the line now, and as I looked at my own again, I noticed that we had made it into the final two minutes before the advance. Seven twenty-eight.

  Flicking my head over to the other side of the trench, I observed Beattie, as he suddenly dropped his rifle to the ground, as if it had some sort of electric current passing through it. He whipped his cap off, and began to run his hands through his hair, licking at his muddied palms before wiping down at varying tufts as if his life depended on it.

  “Beattie, what on earth are you doing?” queried Needs, picking up on his antics at the same time as I had done.

  “Doing my hair, Sarge. You never know who we’re going to meet over there. I need to make the right first impression!”

  “You really are one obsessed fool,” chuckled Needs as he turned to face me, his eyes rolling comically. I smiled half-heartedly back at him, before readjusting my gaze to stare back down at my wrist.

  One minute left to go. Seven twenty-nine.

  As I looked around at the sweating, tearful faces, for what I presumed would be the last time, I noticed something about them all. They were all fatalists, each one of them utterly convinced that they were going to die and, for the most part, it was a fate that was generally accepted. But each one of them, in those final few seconds before the push, still had a small ember of hope in the back of their minds. Maybe one day they would get home.

  At the very least, not one of them looked like they were ready to die, not one of them looked like they wanted to die.

  Thirty seconds to go.

  The quaking legs and the shaking hands, some drumming nicely on the side of thei
r rifles, seemed to intensify somewhat, to the point where they almost rivalled the noise of the artillery that was still zooming overhead. The closer we got to the agreed time, the more intense the little quirks became.

  “Okay then, gents,” bellowed Sergeant Needs, a slight tremor even in his, experienced voice. “Fix bayonets!”

  The chimes of bayonets being drawn from sheaths and slotted onto rifles made the trench sound more like the battle of Agincourt than the Western Front, and it acted as a reminder to myself that I was petrified, my fingers dancing all over the place so that the bayonet struggled to click into position.

  Eventually, I got there, just in time to check my watch one last time, before pulling my rifle up and off the top of my boot, where I had been resting it to keep clean.

  Twenty seconds to go.

  Needs shuffled around to my left and drew out a sparkly little piece of metal.

  “A parting gift from the Captain,” he said, this time without a wink and altogether far more solemnly.

  I gave him a nod, just waiting for the whistle that he played with in his fingers, to give off the shrill scream that would signal our advance.

  I felt sick to the very pit of my stomach as I watched the final few seconds tick by, a cool sweat suddenly rolling down from under my arms. My hairs all stood on end.

  As the second hand hit twelve, I noticed that the final dull crump of artillery seemed to sound at just the right moment, before nothing. That was that then. The generals had done their bit. The field artillery had done theirs. Now it was just down to us.

  I looked up from my watch face to be met by the sergeant’s, as he raised the whistle to his lips.

  He blew down on it hard, and repeatedly, in case someone, somewhere wasn’t able to hear its harrowing battle cry.

  He broke our gaze and turned away from me. My heart thumped. I gripped the bottom of the ladder.

  12