These were the darkest days we had ever lived through. Sergeant Hanley had done what all the bloody attrition in the trenches had never done. He had taken away our spirit, and drained the last of our strength, destroyed our hope. More than once as I lay there in my tent at night I thought of deserting, or running to Anna in Pop and asking her to hide me, to help me find a way back to England. But when morning came, even my courage to be a coward had evaporated. I stayed each time because I was too cowardly to go, because I couldn’t abandon Pete and the others, and not be there when Charlie got back. And I stayed, too, because Molly had said I was brave and had named little Tommo after me. I couldn’t shame her. I couldn’t shame him.
Much to our surprise we were granted one night of freedom before we were to be sent off up into the line again, and we all headed straight into Pop, to the estaminet. Most of us were going for the beer and food, and I longed for all that as well, but as we walked into town I realised I had Anna on my mind a lot more than eggs and chips. But Anna did not bring us our beers. Another girl did, a girl none of us had seen before. I looked around me, but I could not see Anna serving at any of the other tables either. When the girl brought us our egg and chips I asked her where Anna was. She just shrugged as if she didn’t understand, but there was something about her that told me she did understand, that she did know but would not tell me. Thanks to Pete and Charlie, my liking for Anna had not been a secret in the company for some time now, and now everyone was teasing me mercilessly as I looked around for her. Tiring of it, I left their mocking laughter behind me and went outside to look for her.
I looked first in the stable, where she’d taken me before, but it was empty. I walked down the darkening farm track past the henhouses to see if the horse might be out in the field, and Anna there with him. There were a couple of bleating tethered goats, but I could see no horse, and no Anna. Only then did I think of going back and knocking on the back door. I screwed my courage up. I had to knock loudly to be heard because of all the noise coming from the estaminet. The door opened slowly, and there was her father, not dapper and smiling as I’d always known him, but in his braces and shirt, unshaven and dishevelled. He had a bottle in his hand and his face was heavy with drink. He was not pleased to see me.
“Anna?” I said. “Is Anna in?”
“No,” he replied. “Anna isn’t in. Anna will never be in again. Anna is dead. You hear this, Tommy? You come here and you fight your war in my place. Why? Tell me this. Why?”
“What happened?” I asked him.
“What happened? I tell you what happened. Two days ago I send Anna to fetch the eggs. She is driving the cart home along the road and a shell comes, a big Boche shell. Only one, but one is enough. I bury her today. So if you want to see my Anna, Tommy, then go to the graveyard. Then you can go to Hell all of you, British, German, French, you think I care? And you can take your war to Hell with you, they will like it there. Leave me alone, Tommy, leave me alone.”
The door was slammed shut in my face.
There were several recently dug graves in the churchyard, but I found only one that was freshly dug and covered with fresh flowers, I had known Anna only from a few laughing words, from the light in her eyes, a touch of hands and a fleeting kiss, but I felt an ache inside me such as I had not felt since I was a child, since my father’s death. I looked up at the church steeple, a dark arrow pointing at the moon and beyond, and tried with all my heart and mind to believe she was up there somewhere in that vast expanse of infinity, up there in Sunday-school Heaven, in Big Joe’s happy Heaven. I couldn’t bring myself to think it. I knew she was lying in the cold earth at my feet. I knelt down and kissed the earth, then left her there. The moon sailed above me, following behind me, through the trees, lighting my way back to camp. By the time I got there I had no more tears left to cry.
The next night we were marching up into the trenches again along with hundreds of others, to stiffen the line they told us. That could only mean one thing: an attack was expected and we would be in for a packet of trouble. As it turned out, Fritz was to give us a couple of days’ grace — no attack came, not yet.
Charlie came instead, just strolled into our dugout as if he’d been gone five minutes. “Afternoon, Tommo. Afternoon, all,” he said, grinning from ear to ear. His arrival gave us all new heart. With Sergeant Hanley still on our backs, always on the prowl, we had our champion back, the only one of us who had ever faced him down. As for me, I had my guardian back, my brother and my best friend. Like everyone else I felt suddenly safer.
I was there when Sergeant Hanley and Charlie came face to face in the trench. “What a nice surprise, Sergeant,” Charlie chirped. “I heard you’d joined us.”
“And I heard you’d been malingering, Peaceful,” Hanley snarled. “I don’t like malingerers. I’ve got my eye on you, Peaceful. You’re a troublemaker, always have been. I’m warning you, one step out of line …”
“Don’t you worry yourself, Sergeant,” said Charlie. “I’ll be good as gold. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
The sergeant looked first nonplussed, then explosive.
“Nice weather we’re having, Sergeant,” Charlie went on. “It’s raining in Blighty, you know. Cats and dogs.” Hanley pushed past him, muttering to himself as he went. It was a little enough victory, but it cheered all of us who witnessed it to the bottom of our hearts.
That evening Charlie and I sat drinking our tea over a guttering lamp and talked quietly together for the first time. I was full of questions about everyone at home, but he seemed unwilling to say much about them. I was taken aback by this, hurt even, until he saw I was and explained why.
“It’s like we’re living two separate lives in two separate worlds, Tommo, and I want to keep it that way. I never want the one to touch on the other. I didn’t want to bring horrible Hanley and whizzbangs back home, did I? And for me it’s the same the other way round. Home’s home. Here’s here. It’s difficult to explain, but little Tommo and Molly, Mother and Big Joe, they don’t belong in this hell hole of a place, do they? By talking about them I bring them here, and I don’t want to do that. You understand, Tommo?”
And I did.
We hear the shell coming and know from the shriek of it that it will be close, and it is. The blast of it throws us all to the ground, putting out lamps and plunging us into pungent darkness. It is the first shell of thousands. Our guns answer almost at once, and from then on the titanic duel is almost constant as the world above us erupts, the roar and thunder pounding us remorselessly all day, all night. When the guns do let up it is all the more cruel, for it gives us some fragile hope it might at last be over, only to snatch that hope away again minutes later.
To begin with we huddle together in the dugout and try to pretend to ourselves it isn’t happening, and even if it is, that our dugout is deep enough to see us through. We all know in our heart of hearts that a direct hit will be the end of all of us. We know it and accept it. We just prefer not to think about it, and certainly not to talk about it. We drink our tea, smoke our Woodbines, eat when food comes — which isn’t often — and go on living as best we can, as normally as we can.
It doesn’t seem possible, but on the second day the bombardment intensifies. Every heavy gun the Germans have seems to be aimed at our sector. There is a moment when the last fragile vestiges of controlled fear give way to terror, a terror that can be hidden no longer. I find myself curled into a ball on the ground and screaming for it to stop. Then I feel Charlie lying beside me, folding himself around me to protect me, to comfort me. He begins to sing Oranges and Lemons softly in my ear, and soon I am singing with him, and loudly too, singing instead of screaming. Before we know it the whole dugout is singing along with us. But the barrage goes on and on and on, until in the end neither Charlie nor Oranges and Lemons can drive away the terror that is engulfing me and invading me, destroying any last glimmer of courage and composure I may have left. All I have now is my fear.
When their
attack comes, in the pearly light of dawn, it falters before it even gets near our wire. Our machine gunners see to that, knocking them down like thousands of grey skittles, never to rise again. My hands are shaking so much I can hardly reload my rifle. When they recoil and turn and run we wait for the whistle and then go out over the top. I go because the others go, moving forward as if in a trance, as if outside myself altogether. I find myself suddenly on my knees and I don’t know why. There is blood pouring down my face, and my head is wracked with a sudden burning pain so terrible that I feel it must burst. I feel myself falling out of my dream down into a world of swirling darkness. I am being beckoned into a world I have never been to before where it is warm and comforting and all-enveloping. I know I am dying my own death, and I welcome it.
Sixty-five minutes to go. How shall I live them? Shall I try to sleep? It would be useless to try. Should I eat a hearty breakfast? I don’t want it. Shall I scream and shout? What would be the point? Shall I pray? Why? What for? Who to?
No. They will do what they will do. Field Marshal Haig is God out here, and Haig has signed. Haig has confirmed the sentence. He has decreed that Private Peaceful will die, will be shot for cowardice in the face of the enemy at six o’clock on the morning of the twenty-fifth of June 1916.
The firing squad will be having their breakfast by now, sipping their tea, hating what they will have to do. No one has told me where exactly it will happen. I don’t want it to be in some dark prison yard with grey walls all around. I want it to be where there is sky and clouds and trees, and birds. It will be easier if there are birds. And let it be quickly over. Please let it be quickly over.
I wake to the muffled sound of machine-gun fire, to the distant shriek of the shells. The earth quivers and trembles about me, but I am strangely relieved, for all this must mean that I’m not dead. Nor am I all that alarmed at first when I find that all I can see is darkness, because I remember at once that I have been wounded — I can still feel the throbbing in my head. It must be night and I am lying wounded somewhere in no-man’s-land, looking up into the black of the sky. But then I try to move my head a little and the blackness begins to crumble and fall in on me, filling my mouth, my eyes, my ears. It is not the sky I am looking at, but earth. I feel the weight of it now, pressing down on my chest. My legs cannot move, nor my arms. Only my fingers. How slowly I come to know and understand that I am buried, buried alive, but then how fast I panic. They must have thought I was dead, and buried me, but I am not. I am not! I scream then, and the earth fills my mouth and at once chokes off my breathing. My fingers scrabble, clawing frantically at the earth, but I am suffocating and they cannot help me. I try to think, to calm my raging panic, to try to lie still, to force myself to try to breathe through my nose. But there is no air to breathe. I think of Molly then and commit myself to holding her in my head until the moment I die.
I feel a hand on my leg. One foot is gripped, then the other. From far away I think I hear a voice, and I know it is Charlie’s voice. He is calling for me to hang on. They are digging for me, pulling at me, dragging me out into blessed daylight, out into blessed air. I gulp the air like water, choking on it, coughing on it, and then at last I can breathe it in.
The next thing I know I am sitting deep down in what looks like the remains of a concrete dugout, full of exhausted men, all faces I know. Pete is coming down the steps. He is gasping for breath like me. Charlie is still pouring the last dribbles from his water bottle on to my face, trying to clean me up. “Thought we’d lost you, Tommo,” Charlie is saying. “The same shell that buried you killed half a dozen of us. You were lucky. Your head’s a bit of a mess. You lie still, Tommo. You’ve lost a lot of blood.” I’m shaking now. I’m cold all over and weak as a kitten.
Pete is crouching beside us now, his forehead pressed against his rifle. “All hell’s broken loose out there,” he says. “We’re going down like flies, Charlie. They’ve got us pinned down, machine guns on three sides. Stick your head out of there and you’re a dead man.”
“Where are we?” I ask.
“Middle of bloody no-man’s-land, that’s where, some old German dugout,” Pete replies. “Can’t go forward, can’t go back.”
“Then we’d best stay put for a while, hadn’t we?” Charlie says.
I look up and see Sergeant Hanley standing over us, rifle in hand and shouting at us. “Stay put? Stay put? You listen to me, Peaceful. I give the orders round here. When I say we go, we go. Do I make myself clear?”
Charlie looks him straight in the eye in open defiance and does not look away, just as he used to do with Mr Munnings at school when he was being ticked off.
“Soon as I give the word,” the sergeant goes on, to everyone in the dugout now, “we make a dash for it, and I mean all of us. No stragglers, no malingerers — that means you, Peaceful. Our orders are to press home the attack and then hold our ground. Only fifty yards or so to the German trenches. We’ll get there easy.”
I wait till the sergeant moves away, until he can’t hear. “Charlie,” I whisper, “I don’t think I can make it. I don’t think I can stand up.”
“It’s all right,” he says, and his face breaks into a sudden smile. “You look a right mess, Tommo. All blood and mud, with a couple of little white eyes looking out. Don’t you worry, we’ll stay together, no matter what. We always have, haven’t we?”
The sergeant waits a minute or two by the opening of the dugout until there is a lull in the firing outside. “Right,” he says. “This is it. We’re going out. Make sure you’ve all got a full magazine and one up the spout. Everyone ready? On your feet. Let’s go.” No one moves. The men are looking at one another, hesitating. “What in Hell’s name is the matter with you? On your feet, damn you! On your feet!”
Then Charlie speaks up, very quietly. “I think they’re thinking what I’m thinking, Sergeant. You take us out there now and their machine guns’ll just mow us down. They’ve seen us go in here, and they’ll be waiting for us to come out. They’re not stupid. Maybe we should stay here and then go back after dark. No point in going out there and getting ourselves killed for nothing, is there, Sergeant?”
“Are you disobeying my order, Peaceful?” The sergeant is ranting like a man demented now.
“No, I’m just letting you know what I think,” Charlie replies. “What we all think.”
“And I’m telling you, Peaceful, that if you don’t come with us when we go, it won’t just be field punishment again. It’ll be a court martial for you. It’ll be the firing squad. Do you hear me, Peaceful? Do you hear me?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” says Charlie. “I hear you. But the thing is, Sergeant, even if I wanted to, I can’t go with you because I’d have to leave Tommo behind, and I can’t do that. As you can see, Sergeant, he’s been wounded. He can hardly walk, let alone run. I’m not leaving him. I’ll be staying with him. Don’t you worry about us, Sergeant, we’ll make our way back later when it gets dark. We’ll be all right.”
“You miserable little worm, Peaceful.” The sergeant is threatening Charlie with his rifle now, the bayonet inches from Charlie’s nose and trembling with fury. “I should shoot you right where you are and save the firing squad the trouble.” For just a moment it looks as if the sergeant really will do it, but then he remembers himself, and turns away. “You lot, on your feet. On my word, I want you men out there. Make no mistake, it’s a court martial for anyone who stays.”
One by one the men get unwillingly to their feet, each one preparing himself in his own way, a last drag on a cigarette, a silent prayer, eyes closed.
“Go! Go! Go!” The sergeant is screaming, and they do go, leaping up the steps of the dugout and dashing out into the open. I hear the German machine guns opening up again. Pete is the last to leave the dugout. He pauses on the step and looks back down at us. “You should come, Charlie,” he says. “He means it. The bastard means what he says, I promise you.”
“I know he does,” says Charlie. “So do I. G’luck, P
ete. Keep your head down.”
Then Pete is gone and we’re alone together in the dugout. We don’t need to imagine what is going on out there. We can hear it, the screams cut short, the death rattle of machine guns, the staccato of rifle fire picking them off one by one. Then it goes quiet and we wait. I look across at Charlie. I see there are tears in his eyes. “Poor beggars,” he says. “Poor beggars.” And then: “I think I’ve cooked my goose good and proper this time, Tommo.”
“Maybe the sergeant won’t come back,” I tell him.
“Let’s hope,” says Charlie. “Let’s hope.”
I must have drifted in and out of consciousness after that. Each time I woke I saw that another one or two had made it back to the dugout, but still no Sergeant Hanley. Still I hoped. Then I woke to find myself lying with Charlie’s arm around me, my head resting on his shoulder.
“Tommo? Tommo?” he said. “You awake?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Listen Tommo, I’ve been thinking. If the worst happens—”
“It’s not going to happen,” I interrupted.
“Just listen, Tommo, will you? I want you to promise me you’ll look after things for me. You understand what I’m saying? You promise?”
“Yes,” I said.
Then after a long silence he went on: “You still love her, don’t you? You still love Moll?” My silence was enough. He knew already. “Good,” said Charlie. “And there’s something else I want you to look after too.” He lifted his arm away from behind me, took off his watch, and strapped it on my wrist. “There you are, Tommo. It’s a wonderful watch, this. Never stopped, not once. Don’t lose it.” I didn’t know what to say. “Now you can go back to sleep again,” he said.