by Thomas Wood
“Right then, I’ll move up, tell my sergeant what’s going on. Hopefully you can knock out the gunner while he fires on me and my mates.”
They were pretty good shots. Within five paces of the water feature, the machine gun had begun to chip away at the cobbled streets around my feet, as I expectantly waited for the sinking teeth feeling again as a round or bit of stone embedded itself in my flesh. Within five more paces, the gun had momentarily fallen silent.
By the time that I had made it to the schoolhouse however, the gun was rattling away again, like a rabbiting vicar who couldn’t be deterred.
I found a rifle pointing square in my face and for a moment I braced myself for the explosion of pain as I was executed by one of my own.
“Who are you?!” screamed the voice, drowning in tears and pain.
“Beattie?” I queried, “It’s alright mate, it’s Ellis.”
Blood was pouring from his head and trickling down it from an invisible source on the top of his skull, his eyes bloodshot and apparently bruised from some sort of impact. He had gone totally blind. From the left side of his neck, he had what appeared to be an almighty splinter poking out from it, apparently only puncturing the skin but not one of his major veins, that throbbed even more in all the excitement.
“Where’s Needs?” I found myself screaming, trying to get to my sergeant so that I could relay the news to him.
“He’s over there!” came the hoarse reply, as Sargent bent down to take Beattie’s rifle from his grasp, passing his unloaded one to him for Sam to blindly reload.
I looked over to where he had nodded his head and laid my eyes on Sergeant Needs, who was staring unceasingly towards the pale blue sky, as if he was watching the birds pass over his head. He looked quite peaceful.
Even from here, I could make out what had killed him, a large hole nicely in the front of his neck, at least two inches in diameter, where a round had passed through his throat and out the other side. He would have been dead in a matter of seconds.
His blood was sprayed all over the wall, and he must have been lying next to Etwell at the time, who had a decent dosage decorating the left-hand side of his face.
The blood was almost as copious as the cartridge casings that now littered the floor, and, at the thought, I tore the bandolier from my person and pressed them into Beattie’s hand.
“There’s some more rounds in there mate, keep loading them for us.”
I laid down in the rubble, taking up position next to Bob Sargent and began firing slowly on the machine gun, which must have been close to expending all their ammunition.
“What’s the situation?”
“The right flanking movement was wiped out. Right hand gun was firing on the centre of the advance, leaving the central gun to pick their targets. New flanking movement was sent to engage the gun, freeing up the main advance to come up the centre, they were about to move as I left.”
We continued to fire repeatedly for a minute or two more, passing our rifles backwards towards Beattie, who was doing a fine job of reloading considering he couldn’t see a thing.
“This is hopeless,” I shouted above the din, “We’re never going to be able to take the gun from here. We’re going to run out of rounds.”
“What do you suggest?” Etwell asked, sarcastically.
He was surprised when he realised I had an answer.
“Well, we need to get Beattie out of here for starters. I think falling back to that fountain will help for now. There’s already two others over there, they can cover us. When we’re there, we’ll take stock of ammo and work out what we’re going to do from there. That gun is not going to advance on us, is it?”
He knew I was right, and began to make movements to get Beattie up and ready to fall back.
“Ready?” Etwell said, as he had Beattie’s arm over his shoulder, ready to guide him to safety.
“Go,” I announced, immediately firing a full complement of ten rounds towards the machine gun, in double time.
As soon as I had finished, I ducked down to reload, peering out towards the water fountain, where I hoped to see both Etwell and Beattie propped up behind the wall, introducing themselves to my new mates. But I was met with a sight worse than that.
Beattie was lying on his back, clutching at his chest as he leaked blood all over the cobbles. Etwell had been hit in the legs, and was trying to crawl to safety, as the Germans toyed with him by putting rounds either side of his body, as if they were deliberately trying to avoid hitting him.
Beattie suddenly rolled over, and I could make out the calls of the other two men, trying to guide the blind soldier in towards them.
Suddenly, his body convulsed, red rain suddenly scattering itself far and wide, as one of his hands was completely ripped from his body. For a moment, I was sure that he was still alive, his body twitching every second or so, before he came to a complete stop.
I looked at Sargent, knowingly. We both knew that we were going to have to make the charge sooner or later, and that our fate was as good as sealed.
Reloading our rifles, and flicking the safety catches forwards so we didn’t accidentally shoot one another as we ran, I watched as Etwell was dragged by his arms, as he came within touching distance of the other two soldiers.
“Get back there, join the main advance?” Bob piped up. “Safety in numbers?”
“Sounds good to me, mate.”
We smiled weakly at one another, before I noticed that the machine gun had suddenly stopped. Giving one another a nod, we leapt up, to run to the fountain before the machine gun was able to reload.
My joints felt like they were going to give way under the strain that I was putting them under, my mind even more fragile as I realised that I had left Sergeant Needs there without so much of a goodbye. At the thought, I touched my breast pocket, the flask was still there.
My trousers ripped as I skidded along the ground on my knees, ready to return fire the instant that we had made it to the fountain, but there was no need. The gun hadn’t restarted, the chattering of machine gun rounds suddenly falling very silent, across the whole village.
For a moment, it was almost a perfect calm, apart from the agonising groans of Etwell, as he dealt with the two large holes that had splintered his shin bone.
Then, just as I thought the whole battle would be over, I made out a few low thumps, like a distant bass drum in a marching band, slowly waft down the canals of my ear.
I turned to look at Bob. He shrugged, dejected.
14
The Germans began to shell their own positions, after what had appeared to be a rigorously timed, coordinated retreat.
As the shells began to smash into anything that would put up some sort of resistance, I chanced a look down at my watch. It was exactly eight in the morning.
I quickly glanced over the top of the small stone wall, just in time to watch the sandbags over at the church explode in a cloud of dust and a wave of pressure that made my ears erupt in pain. Feeling like they were about to start bleeding, I slid back down and looked across at Bob.
“They’re going to put us in the ground,” he said, shakily.
“Yep. We need to move, and fast.” As if it had been waiting for my cue, a shell suddenly burst not thirty yards from where we were sitting, as the German barrage advanced away from their abandoned positions, and began to have a go at the floundering soldiers that littered the village.
The ground shook tremendously, like a mini earthquake had suddenly rumbled from the core of the earth, doing nothing at all to steady my nerves or convince me that I might live.
“Fall back,” Bob began to croak, “link up with the main advance. Then we might find someone over there that can tell us what to do.”
“Good idea,” I moaned back, glad that he had the brain power to make a decision that I was far too afraid to be making.
“What about ‘im?” queried one of the soldiers that I had picked up from the lieutenant, nodding towards Etwell.
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br /> “We’re going to have to drag him. Come on, let’s go,” I announced, trying to take control of our very desperate situation.
Etwell grimaced and let out a long moan as I picked him up under his shoulders, struggling greatly with the gaping hole in his shin that was now pouring blood everywhere, faster than a milk jug that had toppled over sideways.
We began to move away as one group, Bob picking up Etwell’s right arm so that I had less of a burden to carry. The other two moved slowly, but efficiently, acting as our beacons on where we were headed and where we could stop for some cover.
With every second that passed by, the constant rush of air as another shell destroyed a small patch of the village, began to draw even closer to me, with one golf ball sized lump of concrete coming just inches from taking my ear clean off as it zipped past.
The two rifles were behind a low garden wall, watching our approach but, at the same time, making sure they weren’t as near to the danger as we were. Without warning, Etwell’s weight dragged me down, as Bob suddenly fell to the floor, clutching the side of his head, a gash dribbling blood down the back of his neck.
“Bob, get to cover! Go! Go!”
At first, I wasn’t sure what he’d been hit by and for a split second assumed that it had been a marksman perched in one of the abandoned ruins, taking pot shots at the retreating soldiers as they ran past.
But then, as two or three other shells sent bits of concrete and glass in every direction, I realised that it must have been a bit of debris or shrapnel that had caught him in the back of his head.
He did as he was told, and I could make out one of the figures breaking from cover to come and pull Etwell along with me.
In the meantime, I changed my grip, ignoring the pain in my knees and the excruciating burning sensation in my chest, so that I would be able to drag Etwell alone. I dribbled and spat into Etwell’s hair, grunting with exertion to make it to the only piece of cover that was left.
It can’t have taken the young lad more than five seconds to reach me, but by then, it was far too late. An eruption of brilliant white light in my vision, told me all that I needed to know, as I felt the air rush through my hair and whizz in my ears.
I was cartwheeling through the air, for the second time in a number of hours, this time the numbness I had experienced before completely ineffective. It felt as though my chest had been forcibly ripped open, a searingly hot branding iron being pressed into my skin as I descended. My arm, where the biting pain had been before, suddenly erupted with a renewed vigour, as if the pain was working in tandem with each other, trying to bring me to tears.
As I landed in a crumpled heap on the solid ground, my lungs felt like they had collapsed as I struggled to breathe. I focused on sorting myself out, before I was interrupted by Etwell.
Suddenly ignoring the pain altogether, I sat up and more or less immediately turned away from him and began scrabbling to the young lad who had been on his way to help me.
“Forget him! He’s gone! Get into cover!”
The boy did as he was told, as the artillery barrage crept closer and closer to us all.
“Ellis! Ellis!” came the weak, rasping call of Etwell, quite clearly drowning in his own blood. “Don’t leave me, will you?”
I looked at his body, the gaping holes in his right shin bone now looking like nothing more than a school yard graze in comparison to his left leg. The sinews of muscle and shards of bone that could be seen coming out of his thigh were a burningly bright red in colour, which matched the deep, sticky liquid that Etwell now found himself lying in.
His left leg was some way away, perhaps five or six yards to his left, surprisingly close to where his arm now lay solemnly, detached from its original owner. The whole left-hand side of his face was painfully burned, the skin blackened and bumpy from the sheer force of what had happened.
I knew that it was only the adrenaline and initial shock that was keeping him alive now, and that in a matter of seconds, he would pass out, never regaining consciousness.
He stared at me with forlorn little eyes, his pupils so dilated I thought it a wonder that he was still able to move them around. In that half second of a glare, he realised that he was done for and that it was game over for him.
He began to mutter something to me, so quietly in the din that I had to pull myself closer just to hear him. It took me a while to work out what he was saying, but I soon realised that he was merely repeating what he had screamed in my face during the artillery barrage some hours before.
“…personal. It was never personal, Ellis.”
I felt almost bad for him, as he slowly lay there dying, in the most hellish of circumstances. I had always been under the impression that everything would stop if I was to go down, there would be no gunfire and no artillery consistently banging down around you. There would be a brilliant silence, maybe even a bird or two tweeting.
But, for Etwell at least, there was none of that, as shell after shell continued to rain down around us, until I finally thought that it was my time to leave.
“I’m sorry, Etwell,” I managed to squeak out weakly, which was met surprisingly with a wry smile.
“Don’t be an idiot, Ellis. Get out of here before you end up here with me.”
The young lad who had scrabbled out from cover to recover both me and Etwell had ignored my command, and was now helping me to my feet, at which point I felt like my left leg was on fire. Upon inspection, my trouser leg was soaked in a deep red colour, adding a flare to the otherwise monotonous khaki.
“Can you walk?” questioned Bob as soon as I had been heaved into cover. He was still clutching at the side of his head, this time with a clean dressing pressed firmly into it.
“Yeah,” I croaked, trying to sound like the hero, when in actual fact I was terrified of what sort of an injury I had sustained.
Together, now just the four of us, we half-sprinted, half-hobbled to the edge of the village, where we hoped desperately to see a friendly face.
It took us a few minutes, but eventually we did see a friendly face, well, one that we recognised anyway.
I noted the tall, imposing figure of Captain Tudor-Jones, Two Company’s commander, the man who had been to see us to tell us the good news of this wonderful advance.
Except, he didn’t look as confident and sophisticated as I had seen him only an hour or two before.
“Blimey,” muttered Bob when he laid his eyes on him, each one of us stopping in turn at the mere sight of the fellow.
Tudor-Jones was crying, not small reluctant tears that you might expect of a member of the aristocracy, but huge, overwhelming tears, the kind that make a man go blind momentarily before they drop to the floor.
Although there were tears in plentiful supply, it was not accompanied by crying of any sort, no loud uninterrupted sobs that one might expect to resound alongside those kinds of tears. But, I wondered, if he had been able to, then maybe the sobs would have come.
Tudor-Jones clutched at his face, just underneath his jaw, tirelessly holding it together with the rest of his face. It seemed so limp and uncooperative in his palm that I suspected that, if he were to remove his hand, it would simply fall to the floor. There was an unprecedented amount of blood dripping from the whole of his lower face.
“Shell landed right next to him. Shrapnel ripped through his lower jaw,” screamed a young looking corporal as he caught us all staring at him. “Get a move on, we’re falling back. Start making your way there now, if you want to live.”
We all stood stock still, each one of us marvelling at the captain for a moment or two longer, while the corporal dashed away to find the rest of his men.
Remarkably, even though he looked like he was for the grave at any second, Tudor-Jones was still flinging his left arm around wildly, moving people around silently, writing furiously on a pad that was held loyally by his batman, who also had a bandage wound tightly over a bloodied eye.
Men ran up to him, waited for a mome
nt, read what he had written before bounding off to direct the men that were beginning to congregate around the edge of the village.
Suddenly, he caught sight of the four of us and immediately began thrusting his thumb back in the direction that we had advanced, his order as compelling and forceful as if it had been bellowed across the parade square.
We wasted no time whatsoever in actioning his plan, and began to hobble back down the broken road, as more shells began to fall in and around our position, threatening us from every single angle.
As I leant on my new acquaintance, I realised that this was where I was about to die. Everywhere I looked, there were artillery shells bursting; behind me, to my left, to my right and, most worryingly of all, dead ahead of me, exactly where we were headed.
Men lay strewn all over the place, not all of them quite dead and most of them in our immediate pathway, each one of them begging for help and compassion to take them back to our lines. Others still merely asked for a round between their eyes, to speed up the inevitable.
I could see no way out, whatsoever. I felt like the ones who were already dead, were the lucky ones, and that those of us that were still making for safety, whether that was walking, limping or even crawling, were merely being funnelled towards an inevitable butchery that would result in an entire division being wiped out.
It was at that moment that I realised I had quite quickly heeded Needs’ advice to me. I had no hope. I was going to die, and that was all there is to war.
We had lost a lot of good men, all in the space of an hour and somehow, it had been the two new boys of the platoon who had made it out alive, the ones that were looked down on in a way by the others, as we hadn’t been professional soldiers like them.
In some ways, I felt proud of myself, but in others, realised it had been down to a pure luck that I was alive and, if it hadn’t been for Needs sending me to link up with that lieutenant, then there was every chance that I could have ended up the same way that he had done.
I looked across at Bob, his dressing now so sodden that it was doing nothing to contain the blood, but still he kept it there, pressed firmly into the side of his skull. I wondered what the next few days, or even hours would bring for us.