Barton was watching him with something like glee. He said, ‘Who was talking just now about potential Commanding Officers? What about you? You’re enjoying this, it’s exactly what you like, getting something organized, giving out the orders, making sure it all goes like clockwork. You should be a General before you’re forty.’
‘It helps to pass the time, that’s all.’
‘Oh, come! You enjoy it.’
Hilliard stopped in the doorway, looked back. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No I don’t. And nor will you.’
‘Well, you can cope, anyway.’
‘That’s not exactly the same thing, is it? Are you ready now?’
Jenner and Moreton had been cutting the wire but there was still a good deal to get through before they made enough of a gap for the party to go out. Hilliard sent Coulter back to the dugout for his own pair of wire cutters, bought in the Army and Navy Stores. Waiting, he had a sudden recollection of that day, it seemed like a dream, a mirage of heat and sunlight and elegant crowds, of idleness and chatter and money to be spent at heaped counters, he could not believe in it. The wire cutters were far more use than the standard issue, with which the two men had been struggling.
There were six of them, besides Barton and himself, and including Coulter. He looked at them and saw how ludicrous they were, smeared with mud, their steel helmets exchanged for the ugly, dark woollen balaclavas.
The air smelled moist and thick with mud and stale shell dust, but there was still a faint sweetness, as in any countryside after rain. The sky was completely clouded over – the dry spell would not last. Along their own line they heard the night sounds, the breathing of the men coming up the trench with nightly rations and pit props, bales of wire, sandbags, the suck-plash of their boots in the mud, and then a bump, a soft curse, muffled at once, the occasional creak as someone trod on a duckboard as though into the bottom of a boat. The evening meal was over, and because of the rain it was hard to light fires now, even in the deepest dugout, so that the men lived on tins of cold bully beef, bread and jam and the stew which came up in the dixies and was lukewarm by the time it arrived. Only tea was made on the spot and came in the tin mugs, sweet and dark and boiling hot.
The news of their departure was passed along to their own sentries, then they climbed out one by one and slithered between the wire. Hilliard, going last, snagged the back of his tunic and felt his skin taken off.
They got down and moved on their hands and knees, in total darkness, and at once the wetness of the earth soaked through them. The going was slower than snail’s pace. But for several minutes there were no Verey flares sent up. Hilliard, at the far end of the line and a yard ahead, could not believe that their luck would last and as he thought it, a light shot up, green and beautiful as a firework from the enemy line. It soared and burst like a fan, casting a pale, haunting light over the whole area. They had flopped down on to their stomachs at once, heads pressed into the ground. Hilliard felt his face touch against the cold mud. Just behind him, Coulter had gone into a shallow water-filled shell-hole. Hilliard waited. There was a faint splash and plop, like a frog going into a pond, as the batman pulled himself out, half inch by half inch. Eventually, he touched Hilliard’s ankle, signalling that they could go on. The Verey flare had died away.
After another few yards, they could crawl on their hands and knees again. But weighed down as they were with revolvers and the grenades and bayonets, they felt the drag of each slow forward movement, their shoulders and thighs were already aching.
At the other end of the line Barton tried to release the cramp in his foot. He could see nothing at all, they might have been down a mine. So where was the point, how would they be able to tell anything at all about the lie of the land or the enemy front line which could not, as Hilliard had said, be seen through the periscopes in daylight, or on photographs taken from their planes in the air?
They seemed to be going on for hours. His foot was throbbing again and the thought of gangrene flitted through his mind, he smiled at the ludicrousness of it. All the same, he was worried that this was another thing the war had done to him. He usually took it for granted that he was never ill and that if he were it was nothing, he would get better quickly and without complications. Now, a small injury to his foot was worrying him disproportionately, his mind kept returning to it.
Suddenly, they heard voices, he realized that they were much nearer to the German line than he had guessed. The sounds they could hear were the same as their own, the bump of sandbags, shovelling, soft footsteps, the clip-clip of wire cutters. He imagined a similar party, also making a reconnaissance raid, imagined both groups of men crawling steadily towards one another with muddied faces, until they bumped, nose to nose, and panicked, sprawling in confusion and, because they could not see, risked nothing except immediate retreat. It seemed so insane, so like something out of a boy’s adventure paper, that he snorted with laughter, and then stuffed his fist into his mouth to silence the noise. He was soaked and cold and cramped, but curiously elated, the whole movement had such an air of unreality. He imagined the report they would put in. ‘We progressed through thick mud in total darkness, and therefore were unable to get the expected clear view of the enemy line. We ascertained that there was a line, and that this contained men. This was deduced from the sound of a faint cough, and two whispers. The fact that these were German men was deduced from the foreign sound of the cough and whisper (see above).’
Again, he almost laughed out loud, and certainly he was grinning, and knew that close beside him Corporal Blaydon had noticed it and was watching him.
They had stopped and were fanning out, wriggling sideways in the mud. Barton peered ahead. Moved a little further. He was very close to their wire now, he heard a whisper quite clearly.
‘Nein. Wo ist der Kapitän?’
‘Achtung!’
He went still. But they were hammering stakes, he thought, the man had not been calling attention to his presence. Besides, the Germans would not imagine that anyone was mad enough to come out on a raid through this wet and darkness. The hammering noise went on, only slightly muffled and then another, unidentifiable sound, though the voices had ceased. It was impossible to see anything of the trench, even though he moved another yard further forward. The wire was much thicker than their own, and more expertly coiled. All of which they knew. All of which …
When the shell exploded, it threw Barton on to his back and he lay staring up, baffled, into the darkness, watching the livid flare of the explosion, and then the green of another Verey light. He felt strangely relaxed by the brightness and the patterns in the sky. Machine gun fire, and then another shell, much closer, the Germans must have got the measure of them. Beside him, Blaydon was whispering, ‘Get back, we’ve got to get back!’
Someone was crying out, and Barton wanted to tell him to be quiet before he realized that the man was wounded. He felt himself bump up against something, touched the cloth of a tunic. It had gone dark again and the rifle bullets were coming now, over the short space between them and the enemy front line. There was a soft thud to his left. Then Hilliard’s voice behind him.
‘Get on with it. Duck and run.’
‘There’s …’
‘Get on!’
Another shell but ahead this time, as though the enemy were trying to block their retreat. As Barton struggled forward, slipped into water, pulled himself out again, he wondered what had happened, what had raised the alarm. He thought they had been entirely unnoticed. Then there was the cry again. He had gone some way beyond it. Someone passed him, he could not tell who, and then, for a moment, he seemed to be quite alone in the darkness. The cry again.
‘Come on, Barton.’
‘There’s a man wounded.’
‘I know. It’s Coulter. I can’t help him. Get on.’
‘But he …’
‘Shut up. If you’re down first warn the sentry that it’s us.’
‘You can’t leave him there.’
&nbs
p; ‘He’s too bad to bring in now, we’d never find him, we’d never make it. And we shouldn’t be talking.’
Gunfire again. Barton was frantic. ‘Look …’
Hilliard said, ‘I order you to go on.’
Barton felt the water running down his back under the tunic, and mackintosh, and tasted it too, foul and rusty in his mouth. Behind them there was silence now. Hilliard said nothing else. They waited again. Still silence.
Barton got up and began to move forward, crouching and running like a monkey, ready to drop down. Once, a Verey flare went up, but too far away to mark them out, perhaps the Germans had given up, satisfied with what they had achieved.
Then they were back in their own trench, slithering down from the parapet and a long way from the place at which they had come up. There was a pain in Barton’s chest from alternately gasping and holding his breath, and from hauling himself forward on his arms.
He said, ‘What happened?’
‘You went too near, that’s what bloody well happened. They saw you.’
‘They couldn’t have seen me.’
‘I was trying to get you to come back, you were practically on top of them. Do you realize …’
‘It’s …’
‘Ferris is dead, Moreton is dead, Coulter is probably dead and Blaydon’s got a bullet – in his arm I think.’
A few yards away, some men from Prebold’s platoon were filling sandbags. Now one of them came over, handed Hilliard a mug. ‘Tea, sir, and there’s a splash of rum. It’s not very hot, I’m afraid. Are you all right, sir?’
‘I am, thanks.’ Hilliard drank, and then handed the mug to Barton.
‘No …’
‘Drink it.’
Barton drank. The men went on with their work, perhaps sensing from their voices that something was wrong.
‘I’ve just sent along for a stretcher, sir. The Private who came in just before you, he’s got a bullet through his shoulder and his hand’s in a mess.’
‘Blaydon?’
‘I don’t know, sir. He’s in a bit of a state. We put him in the dugout. Can I get you any more of that tea, sir?’
‘No thanks, we’ve got to get back to the other end of the trench.’
‘They got the wind of you good and proper, sir.’
‘They did.’
‘It was nice and quiet till you went out.’
‘Sorry. Everything all right here?’
‘Oh yes, they didn’t come near us, sir, it wasn’t us they were after! We’re all right.’
‘Good. But you’d better tell the men to watch out for a bit, now they’ve woken up. Keep it as quiet as you can.’
‘We know what we’re doing, sir.’
‘All right. Thanks for the tea.’
As they moved up the trench they met the stretcher bearers. Standing aside for them. Barton thought he heard a cry again, from out in the darkness.
‘Hilliard …’
But he had already gone ahead. Barton waited. Still silence. In the end, he thought he must have imagined it.
Captain Franklin was waiting in their dugout. He said at once, ‘You’ve lost three men.’
‘Yes, sir. And one wounded.’
‘What on earth happened? They shelled you pretty accurately, didn’t they?’
‘Yes. I suppose we were quite close. And it was very quiet. They obviously heard something.’
‘Then you must have made a row.’
Hilliard’s face was stiff. ‘I don’t think so. We were unlucky. They found out where we were first go and let us have it.’
‘What did you see, anyway?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘Are they bringing up ammunition?’
‘I couldn’t tell. There was fetching and carrying, certainly.’
‘There is always fetching and carrying,’ Franklin said coldly.
‘Quite.’
For a moment the Adjutant stood, stick under his arm, his face, as always, expressionless. Then he turned. ‘Put your report in as soon as you can, will you?’ He went out.
‘John …’
‘Shut up. It’s all over and done with. You’ve never been out there before and it can happen to anyone. It probably wasn’t your fault anyway. Now forget it please.’
Hilliard sat down at the packing case, turned up the lamp and began to write. He was still wearing his mackintosh and the mud was drying in his hair.
Barton said, ‘Coulter …’
‘Coulter’s dead.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He must be. I saw the state he was in,’ Hilliard said shortly. He went on with his report.
It is still raining and very cold. They have moved us back again to where we were before, only in the front not the support line. But things are very slightly better because, in our absence, the 8th Division have been in and made very good work indeed of repairing these trenches. We spent two nights in billets in what had been a convent school which had a rather beautiful chapel with some 15th-century wall paintings. They had been badly neglected and damaged but the men took the place as a good omen for this next tour.
Our dugout this time is only a few yards away from the o.p. in which I sat to draw my map that terrible day – though you could scarcely believe it is the same place now the weather has changed. There has also been some bombarding of the wood along the top of the ridge by our guns, so that the trees there have begun to look a bit like the old familiar stumps of rotten black teeth. It is so easy to destroy landscape, it takes a couple of days of really bad fighting and strafing, plus this rain, to turn what was beautiful (in spite of the war and everything littered about) into the most frightful scarred waste. I feel we shall have this on our consciences every bit as much as the deaths of men. What right have we to do such damage to the earth? After all, you may say that man can do what he likes with himself but he should not involve the innocent natural world. John disagrees, he says that a tree grows again and grass covers the craters in no time, but a man is dead, is dead, is dead. The animal and bird life seem to survive as a sort of undercurrent to the life of the war, but I wonder how much we have destroyed of that too, and what it is like for these creatures to live down in the earth among the bodies, and to be deprived of leaves and grass and thickets for cover, or to live in the air which is rent by shell blasts and full of dust and smoke and flying metal objects. The men are forbidden to keep pets or to feed the birds, but some of Prebold’s platoon had a hedgehog to which they were giving bits of meat and sweetened tea. It then began to dig itself into the side of the trench among some of the sandbags, to hibernate. Until Fakely from that platoon (a strange and rather vicious person) began to get nervous and told everyone that hedgehogs were unlucky and boded evil and death (as if anything didn’t bode that, out here!). But he got himself believed – superstition, like the ghost stories, is rife here just now, it seems to pander to the prevailing atmosphere of fear and the constant tension, and also to add a sort of spice to boredom. So in the end they dug, and dragged the wretched small hedgehog out of its dark hole and slung it over the parapet, where it lay on its back, half stunned, half dormant. I happened to be going along just then and saw the whole incident. I can truthfully say it was the first sign of any kind of unfeelingness I have encountered here. I was very angry, irrationally so, and sickened. I then did a most stupid thing, which was to climb up over the parapet and go through the wire and crawl on my belly to retrieve the creature. I might very easily have been shot – I was a good target. Whether they thought I was attending to someone wounded (they often hold their fire if that happens, as we do) or whether I was simply not seen at all, I don’t know, but miraculously, there was complete silence, the enemy might just as well not have existed and I got back safely, the hedgehog in my hands. It was crawling with fleas and most prickly. I felt a very great fool but I put it back in the hole in the trench side and covered it up and if it doesn’t get blown out of hibernation into kingdom come it may live to see the spring and perhaps e
ven a quieter world.
The men simply thought I’d gone off my head, though perhaps they also wondered if I wanted a way of Putting An End To It All! I felt ashamed of myself. And I have been thinking ever since that I felt incensed and hurt on its behalf and yet I had not thought of going out again and trying to bring back Coulter, after we’d left him in No Man’s Land that night. I have been haunted in my sleep and in my waking by the sound of his voice crying out, I have not been and shall never be convinced that we could not have done something for him, brought him back or at least stayed and comforted him in some way while he was dying. Did he die? Perhaps he wasn’t so badly hurt as John thought. (He won’t tell me exactly what he saw.) Perhaps Coulter started to crawl after us but we had gone and he couldn’t get any further. He might have died of exposure or neglected wounds or simply of despair that he’d been left behind. Anything. I cannot, cannot forget it.
There have been stories of men who have been lying out wounded and crying in pain and have stuffed their fists or the sleeves of their tunics in their mouths to stop themselves, knowing that they would only bring out rescue parties who would be risking their lives, for hopeless cases. The more I hear from John and the others, the more amazed I am by the astonishing bravery of many men and by their tolerance of pain and terrible conditions, and by the part that chance, accident and coincidence play in this war. But I wish that Coulter had died rushing towards the enemy line through a hail of fire with fixed bayonet – he was a strange, gentle man really, and yet he did have this passionate belief in the rightness of our cause and the essential evil of the whole German nation. A man after the hearts of all generals, politicians and recruiting officers. But worth the whole lot of them. He’d seen a lot of slaughter and though I abhorred all of his ideas and thought him entirely wrong-headed, yet I admired him, he was so cheerful and determined and amusing. I have written a sort of obituary, haven’t I? And yet I cannot get it into my head that he is almost certainly dead. I do not feel it. I wish I’d seen him, no matter what state he was in. John has not mentioned him for days now but I know he feels his loss greatly and though he had no real alternative but to leave him (Oh, I do know that really, I trust John’s military as well as his human judgement) yet I know he is also anxious and perhaps feels guilty, too.