No Man's Land Read online

  ‘We’re what you might call Viney’s Volunteers, friend. Only we’re a bit careful about who we let volunteer.’

  ‘That’s the strength of it,’ agreed Viney. ‘You’ll mebbe learn some more if it seems worth the breath, which don’t seem likely the way things look. So I’d start explaining, Fritz.’

  ‘Very well,’ said Lothar. ‘But first, about the boy, he is not well …’

  ‘The boy will talk for himself,’ said Viney softly. ‘Right, son?’

  To Lothar’s surprise, Josh nodded slowly. Once again tears filled his eyes.

  ‘Hey, take it easy, son,’ said Viney. ‘There’s nothing to cry about down here. You’re among friends. Look around. What do you see? Lads like yourself, that’s what. We’re all mates here, you’ll see.’

  Slowly the tearful eyes moved round the ring of shadowy faces as the boy turned a full circle till he faced the big Australian again. Now he opened his mouth and spoke inaudibly.

  ‘Sorry, son,’ said Viney. ‘Didn’t catch that.’

  ‘Wilf,’ murmured the boy.

  Then, throwing his head back, he let out a scream which made even these desperate, horror-sated men start with fear.

  ‘Wilf!’

  BOOK THE FIRST

  Dissolution

  PART ONE

  SOMME

  The Allied Somme offensive began on July 1st, 1916. On that first day, British casualties were 57,540, including 20,000 dead. The minimum weight of the infantryman’s equipment on that day was 66 lbs. Some carried more, including rolls of barbed wire on their backs. These proved to be redundant.

  1

  Shortly after midnight, a rum ration was doled out.

  Sergeant Renton took care of it himself, squeezing along the narrow rain-sodden trench to make sure his platoon got their fair share.

  Wilf Routledge downed his in a single draught and belched appreciatively.

  ‘Hey, Sarge,’ he said. ‘If them old legs of yours fold up today, just give us Outerdale lads a shout and we’ll take turns carrying you piggy-back!’

  Before the sergeant, a tough old professional, could reply, another voice came out of the dark.

  ‘I hope you fight as hard as you talk, Routledge. Empty vessels make most noise is what I was taught at school.’

  This was Lieutenant Maiden, the platoon commander. He had been a bank clerk before the war, and this was going to be his first experience under fire too, facts well known to Wilf.

  ‘At school, sir?’ he said. ‘Was that Eton College then, sir?’

  Maiden’s sallow face flushed and he said sharply, ‘I’ll keep a close eye on you, Routledge,’ and moved off.

  Behind him Wilf laughed and joked to the sergeant, ‘Temporary gent; permanent chicken. What say you, Sarge?’

  Sergeant Renton said sourly, ‘I say he’s likely as frightened as you ought to be, Routledge, but mebbe not as much as you will be. As for piggy-back, just make sure this lot of sheep-shaggers here get over the plonk with all their gear on, and I’ll be well satisfied.’

  Wilf laughed and made a rude gesture at Renton’s back. Josh Routledge regarded his elder brother with affection and pride. He was a hero, a prince among men. It would be almost a pity if there wasn’t any real fighting so that Wilf could prove his worth.

  Almost. But in his heart Josh prayed that the barrage which had been hurled across the skies for over a week now would have had the promised effect.

  ‘Jerry’s either dead or running,’ Wilf had assured them. ‘Haven’t you heard? They’re bringing buses up the line to take us through the gaps with the cavalry. We’ll all be back in Outerdale, shearing sheep, come Michaelmas!’ Now here they were, in the line, and so far there’d been no sign of buses. Nor of cavalry either.

  But at least the group was still together. Wilf was responsible for that. There were five of them from Outerdale. They’d not fallen over themselves to sign up as soon as the war began. Up there in the Cumberland fells, men didn’t rush into such things. So they’d watched Wilf and waited. And when he made the move, they’d readily followed: Jimmy Todhunter, squat and square as a mountain boulder; his young brother, ‘laal’ Jockey, who was Josh’s best friend; Ed Birkett, tall, spare, taciturn; and youngest of them all, so young he’d had to lie about his age, Josh himself.

  Wilf, six foot, athletically muscled, golden-haired, had taken on the Army single-handed, making sure they stayed together throughout training, in transit, at the Bull Ring, and here in the line.

  But now as the minutes trickled away, all his powers of unification and inspiration were being called upon. Ed Birkett was the most in need. Even during training, separation from Outerdale had seemed to cut him off more than the others from some source of vital nourishment. Now he stood aside, indifferent as an old horse to the huge burden of equipment he had to bear, completely still except for his right hand scrabbling at his lips from time to time as if there was something in his mouth it wished to pluck out.

  Laal Jockey too had gone very quiet, while his brother Jimmy, who normally used words like half-sovereigns, became almost voluble. When dawn came and passed, confirming what they’d already been told but found hard to believe, that the attack was timed for seven-thirty, Jimmy burst out indignantly, ‘It’ll be broad fucking daylight, clear enough to shoot a gnat’s cock off at half a mile!’

  ‘They’ll need to be crack shots to hit thine!’ laughed Wilf. But laughter couldn’t soothe the unease caused by this fresh example of High Command stupidity.

  Jockey, crouched next to Josh, said, ‘If there’s no Germans left to shoot, it’ll not matter if it’s dark or light, will it?’

  The little man was shaking uncontrollably. Josh too was suffering from intermittent attacks of the shakes and it was a not altogether unselfish gesture for him to put his arm around Jockey’s shoulders.

  ‘We’ll be all right, lad, you’ll see,’ he whispered. ‘It’ll be a quiet walk. This time tomorrow we’ll be supping plinketty-plonk in Bapaume, waiting for the peace to begin.’

  After a while he felt his friend’s trembling subside, and his own too. Best of all, Wilf gave him an approving glance.

  Shortly after dawn there was a slight shower of rain, but it didn’t last, and soon the rising mist showed that the sun’s heat was beginning to penetrate the damp ground. As the warm rays carded the fleecy vapour, drawing it up in curls and threads, the lines of chalk thrown up when the Germans dug their trenches became quite clear. There had been little real fighting here for almost two years and often the chalk was embroidered with vivid yellow flowers, while in no-man’s land, which was a strip of pasture rising in four undulations to the enemy line, the uncropped grasses of two summers rose high, wreathed with weeds, smudged with poppies and flecked with the delicate hues of wild flowers.

  There was no sign of activity in the enemy trenches and, better still, the only wire visible to Josh and his friends was that of their own defences through which paths had been cut in the dark of the night. Hope began to rise that perhaps their officers’ optimism was right. But not all the hope in the world could still the rising pulse of fear or slacken the tight racking of the nerves as the minutes oozed by.

  There had been some shelling during the night but relatively things had been quiet. Then at six twenty-five, the British batteries exploded into their final outburst of fury. The effect was devastating, on many of the British troops at least. Here with the shells screaming low overhead to explode only two hundred yards away, Josh felt the noise was tangible, like the weight of his mother’s cheese-press being screwed tighter and together on his yielding brain, squeezing his essence out to trickle down into the sump of the trench to join the mingled rainwaters and urine stagnating there. He felt himself being pushed lower and lower down the muddy wall against which he leaned. Others were suffering the same reaction, Ed

  Birkett with his hands clasped tight over his ears, and laal Jockey with fingers clinging desperately to Josh’s sleeve in search of a comfort he did not h
ave the strength to give.

  Then his shoulder was grasped and he felt himself being dragged upright.

  ‘Look at this, Josh!’ whooped Wilf excitedly. ‘This’ll finish the bastards off good and proper. Oh my, give it to ’em, my lovely boys!’

  A ragged noise ran along the trench. It was a mingling of cheers and gleeful laughter. Men were pulling themselves up on to the parapet to view the devastation being done to the enemy’s front line. Like spectators at a boxing match, they roared their approval as black, white, yellow and ochre fists of smoke marked where shell after shell punched destructively against the German trenches.

  As Josh looked, he felt the weight easing from his mind. This noise, this violence, was his Friend. The enemy was being destroyed before his very eyes. No one could survive such an onslaught, or very few, and they must surely have no will to resist. He found that he had started cheering too. Beside him, laal Jockey was on his feet now, shouting and laughing. Only Ed Birkett remained crouching at the foot of the trench, hands on ears, wide, unblinking eyes fixed on some landscape of the mind.

  And now the minutes began to trickle, and then to run. The mood of euphoria caused by the commencement of the barrage evaporated as rapidly as it had erupted. The German guns had been stung into life and though nothing came very near their sector of trench, this reminder that resistance could still be met was like a breath of frost on too-early shoots.

  Just before seven another rum ration was issued and the thick sweet liquid brought a warm glow of comfort for a little while. Some men became inordinately cheerful, laughing and making ribald jokes and threatening to go over the top in advance of the rest to do the dirty work for them. Others relapsed into introspection or sometimes half-audible prayer. Next to Josh, Jockey had started shaking again. Ed Birkett was leaning like a felled tree against the parapet. Jimmy was standing next to him, silent now. And even Wilf was curiously quiet, with an uncharacteristically inward-looking expression on his face. It was going to be all right, Josh assured himself. Just one quick rush – no, not even a quick rush. They’d been drilled to form up in lines which would advance in waves a hundred yards apart at a sedate pace of no more than two miles an hour. They hadn’t got to cheer or shout in case they warned the enemy, though as the enemy were notionally mainly dead, it seemed an odd prohibition. So, no quick rush, nothing at all like the glorious cavalry charges which had thundered through his boyish imagination. A quiet stroll across the grass, like walking with Wilf over the fields down to the lake after their evening meal. At the end of it, a pipe of tobacco for Wilf and a quiet chat, or simply a companionable silence. That was how it would be, Josh assured himself. That was how it was going to be.

  At 7.28 the earth suddenly tremored and rippled beneath their feet. Men staggered against each other, the drunk startled out of their merriment and the pious out of their prayer.

  ‘Mines,’ said Wilf, suddenly his old self again. ‘They’ve set off the mines. Another little surprise for Fritz. We’ll be off over the plonk any time now!’

  Two minutes later, the guns fell silent. There was a moment of complete peace, broken only by a brave bird which chattered its pleasure that the cloudless sky had been given back to its rightful owners once more. It seemed to Josh that all they had to do was hold their breath and this peaceful moment could be made to stretch forever.

  Then whistles began to shriek, orders were shouted, and the British guns which had been having their sights adjusted from the German front line to his rear defences drowned the little snatch of birdsong again.

  Officers and NCOs ran along the parapet urging the men out of the trenches. Sergeant Renton’s voice was calmly authoritative, but Lieutenant Maiden, his face flushed with effort or perhaps with drink, his revolver in his hand, was having difficulty in remaining sub-soprano.

  ‘Out, out, out!’ he screamed, gesturing wildly with his gun. ‘You there, Routledge, get a move on, man! No malingerers today or, by Christ, we know how to treat them!’

  Wilf, who was giving Ed Birkett a bunk up out of the trench, looked at the officer with contempt but said nothing.

  Soon they were all above ground and filing through a gap in their own wire to form the assault lines on the other side. They were in the first wave, and as they waited for the order to advance, Josh glanced to his left where Wilf stood, his handsome young face touched with a faint smile, his athletic body making the burden of his heavy equipment seem negligible.

  A whistle blew a double blast. Maiden and Renton confirmed its meaning with commands. The first wave began to move forward. The attack had begun.

  2

  Feldwebel Lothar von Seeberg dreamt, but knew he was dreaming. His cousin Sylvie knelt astride him with his penis held deep inside her body, and rose and fell in an accelerating rhythm, her face flushed with desire and her mouth gaped wide to let out hoarse screams of ecstasy.

  He forced himself awake; forced himself back to awareness that Sylvie was now his sister-in-law, married to his twin, Willi; back to awareness that he was lying on a narrow truckle-bed, sixty feet below the ground, sixty feet below the air, sixty feet below the war.

  Then he turned and his swollen glans penis rubbed against the rough blanket and that was enough. For a moment love and shame and depth and darkness and the whole damned war were blanked out in a magnesium flare of ecstasy. Then it was gone, and war, darkness and shame crowded back.

  He swung his legs over the edge of his truckle-bed and started cleaning himself up. He could have switched on the electric bulb but he didn’t want to wake the other man in this narrow underground chamber.

  It was a vain stealth. The light came on and Artillery Captain Dieter Loewenhardt blinked sleepily at him.

  ‘So that’s why you’ve stayed a sergeant,’ he said. ‘Once you’re commissioned, they stop you having wet dreams.’

  Lothar smiled at his captain’s rare attempt at humour. It was a sign of the easy relationship which, after a stuttering start, had developed between them.

  The two men were of an age, twenty-six, but Loewenhardt looked older. Stocky and dark, he was the youngest son of an impoverished Junker family who had joined the artillery because he wanted to be kept by the Army rather than having to subsidize it, as happened in the smarter regiments.

  When Lothar von Seeberg had been posted to his section, his reaction had been one of resentment and suspicion. The officers’ mess was full of von Seeberg stories, amused, envious, or plain contemptuous, and Loewenhardt found it hard to understand why a man who seemed born to be one of the most glittering ornaments of his class should be slumming it in the ranks instead of following his brother into the crack cavalry regiment of which their uncle was colonel.

  His first inclination was to regard his new sergeant as a pain in the arse, but gradually, reluctantly, he had had to admit that he knew his job and was good with the men. And finally had come affection. In public, they observed all military form. In private, they relaxed as friends. From time to time Lothar suspected there was a strong homosexual element in the other man. It didn’t bother him. In his own social and cultural circles, anything was admissible except indiscretion, which was why he had always embraced the indiscreet. But he guessed that to Loewenhardt self-knowledge might be destructive, so he held his peace.

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Half past five.’

  ‘Broad daylight outside. There’ll be no attack today.’

  The two gunners had been summoned from the artillery lines four days earlier to help interpret the intense bombardment which the enemy had been mounting for almost two weeks.

  The first three days they had risen an hour before dawn and made their way from Brigade HQ to the reserve defence lines where they’d sat with a squad of machine-gunners, recording and analysing the bombardment.

  Yesterday their report had gone to the Brigade Commander, probably simply confirming what he already knew. It was almost certainly pre-offensive, though it might be a feint. And it was causing far le
ss damage than the enemy probably believed. A large proportion of their shells were duds, they had very little wire-cutting capability, and in the two years of stalemate on this section of the front, the Germans had dug their defences too deep to be troubled by anything less than a direct hit from a thousand-pounder.

  They had also used the time to make themselves incredibly comfortable. Lothar still smiled every time he looked at the chamber in which they were housed. Two sergeant-majors had been shifted out of here to make room for them. The walls were lined with planks, smoothed and stained almost to the order of panelling and hung with a sentimental painting of a mother and child. The light bulb had a fringed shade and on the boarded floor was a small square of carpet.

  He could feel the floor trembling gently as he shaved. The bombardment was still going on half a mile away.

  They breakfasted separately. After breakfast they expected to be summoned before the Brigade Commander to discuss their report, but at nine o’clock word came that he would not be available till midday. There were reports of a massive British offensive to the north and the General had more important things to do than waste time on artillery men.

  ‘I think I’ll go and say goodbye to Klipstein,’ said Loewenhardt. ‘You coming?’

  Klipstein was the young machine-gun Oberleutnant who had been their host for the past three days. He tried rather too hard to cut a dashing figure and his studied nonchalance was a little too studied, but beneath it all he was a likeable and perhaps a slightly frightened young man.

  ‘Why not?’ said Lothar.

  Outside, they stood in silence for a moment, letting the douche of golden sunlight slough off the foetid atmosphere of the command post. Here they were on the eastern side of a long chalk down so far only lightly pocked by the French bombardment and with green vegetation fringing the white scars. As long as you kept a keen ear cocked for the odd shell which overflew its front line target, you could walk up to the crest in comparative security.