No Man's Land Read online

  ‘I heard from my sister yesterday,’ said Loewenhardt as they walked up the slope. ‘All’s well in Württemberg. You get any mail?’

  Lothar knew this was a discreet way of asking directly or indirectly if he’d heard anything about the conduct of the war from the top. His father, the Graf von Seeberg, was an official of the War Ministry in Berlin.

  ‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘I heard from my mother at Schloss Seeberg, but she hears as little from my father as I do, which is hardly at all. But I’ll write to my father if you like and invite him to spend a couple of days with Klipstein and give us all the benefit of his wide experience of modern warfare!’

  Loewenhardt said, ‘You don’t give a damn, do you? I’m not certain if you’re really a serious person at all.’

  ‘Who wants to be serious on a day like this? Lovely weather. And nothing to do but stroll in the sunshine and listen to those 75s sing!’

  He was referring to the French 75mm field-gun which could rattle off rounds at the rate of thirty a minute. The din of the bombardment had risen to a new pitch of ferocity in the last few minutes and Loewenhardt said, ‘You know, if it wasn’t the middle of the morning, I’d say that was pre-attack. But that would be lunacy!’

  ‘Since when did that make it impossible to the military mind?’ said Lothar. ‘Besides, what better time to attack than when no one’s expecting it?’

  As he spoke, the guns suddenly fell still. The two artillery men looked at each other in uneasy surmise.

  ‘Raising their sights?’ said Lothar.

  ‘Not wanting to hit their own advancing men?’

  Then with one accord they were running towards the crest. As the first shell exploded close by they dropped into a trench, exchanging speed for protection. This trench intersected at right-angles with another which snaked along the whole length of the ridge, with more short deep trenches branching off into tunnels leading into the dug-outs of the defenders.

  By the time they reached the ridge, earth and air were shaking and the sun’s brightness was dimmed with smoke and dust. In a landslide of rock and dirt they slid into the depths of the machine-gun emplacement, which was their goal.

  ‘’Morning, Loewenhardt,’ said Lieutenant Klipstein breezily. ‘Wondered if you’d come. Care for some coffee?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Loewenhardt. ‘It sounds as if you may get that action you’re hoping for today.’

  ‘You think so? I hope you’re right! Not that it’ll bother us,’ he went on gloomily. ‘Those lucky bastards down below will get all the fun.’

  Down below meant the forward line, five hundred yards before and two hundred feet below them.

  ‘You don’t think the Frankers can get through the line then, sir?’said Lothar.

  Loewenhardt shot him a warning glance, but Klipstein replied, ‘Alas, no, Sergeant. It’s quite impenetrable, I fear. But don’t be afraid. In the remote contingency that they did, we’re ready for them.’

  That at least seemed to be the truth. Not quite as domesticated as Brigade HQ, the dug-out still gave an impression of order and solidarity. The roof was high; it and the walls were firmly boarded. All around the gunners were sitting by the light of hurricane lamps oiling and checking their Maxim 08s. Nothing short of a direct hit from a thousand-pounder could reach them here.

  They sat and drank coffee and ate black bread and cold sausage. After half an hour the bombardment perceptibly slackened, and without needing instruction the machine-gunners began to prepare to manhandle their guns out of the dug-out. From time to time the Oberleutnant was summoned to the field telephone. After one of these calls, he spoke to Loewenhardt at some length. A little while later the captain joined Lothar.

  ‘What’s happened,’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘The French have broken through in a couple of places,’ murmured Loewenhardt.

  Lothar began to laugh.

  ‘Our impenetrable line and they’re through it in forty minutes! At that rate, they’ll be in Berlin by the weekend!’

  Loewenhardt did not reply but went up the dug-out steps and Lothar followed him.

  In the trench the platoon sergeant, a weatherbeaten veteran, was supervising the deployment of the Maxims with stolid efficiency. The Oberleutnant’s face was flushed with an excitement that did not fall far short of hysteria. It was a state which could produce acts of great courage, or great madness, thought Lothar. Probably the alternatives would appear indistinguishable.

  He joined Loewenhardt at an observation post.

  ‘Are they holding?’ he asked.

  ‘See for yourself.’

  The captain passed him the small telescope which was so much less dangerous for distant observation than binoculars. He peered through it at the forward line, at first only able to penetrate momentarily the swirl of smoke. Then gradually the fragments began to form pictures. The ground before the forward line, ploughed and harrowed by shellfire, was now sown with bodies. They lay on the broken earth and hung in the tangled wire; in some places they had fallen so close that they seemed to huddle together for a comfort they would never find. It seemed impossible that the attack had not been repulsed.

  But still they were coming, these poilus with their dusty blue uniforms and long rifles made even longer by their ferocious bayonets, no longer advancing upright and confident in the trail blazed by their artillery, but progressing in short dashes, scrambling from one shell-hole to another, slipping forward behind drifting smoke and under the cover of tossed grenades.

  ‘Incredible,’ said Lothar almost to himself. ‘The Frankers are going to do it.’

  ‘Rubbish! Rubbish!’ said Klipstein, shouldering him aside. ‘I know those men down there. They’ll not give an inch of ground, not while there’s German blood running through their veins!’

  Lothar caught Loewenhardt’s eye and made a worried face. The captain didn’t respond, but the platoon sergeant noticed and when Lothar moved past him, he whispered, ‘Never worry, I’ll take care of the lad. He just gets a bit excited, that’s all.’

  ‘He seemed so light-hearted about it all before,’ murmured Lothar.

  ‘Light-hearted? You’d be light-hearted too, mate, if you had his breakfast.’

  The sergeant made a schlurping sound with his lips. Lothar looked at him in surprise. Naïvely, he’d never associated Klipstein’s gaiety with drink.

  ‘The bastards! The cowardly stinking bastards!’ screamed the Oberleutnant behind him.

  Lothar sprang back to the observation post. The cause of the officer’s indignation was not far to seek. Some of the men in the forward line had decided enough was enough. In all directions grey-coated figures were scrambling back along the communication trenches, with one or two actually sacrificing cover for speed by running across the open ground.

  It was, thought Lothar, either a rout or a tactical withdrawal, depending on who was making out the report. There was no question which viewpoint the Oberleutnant was taking.

  ‘Sergeant Muller!’ he cried. ‘Give those yellow-backed swine a long burst from Number One gun! Hurry!’

  ‘Sir?’ said the sergeant. ‘But they’re our lads, sir.’

  ‘Ours? They’re bringing shame on us, Sergeant, do you understand that? Shoot them!’

  The sergeant glanced at Loewenhardt, who said tactfully, ‘It could be they’ve just been ordered to fall back on stronger positions.’

  And indeed it was true at least that most of the retreating infantrymen had stopped running, not because they were keen to set up a new line of resistance, Lothar guessed, but because they had the wit to recognize the dangers of further flight in broad daylight up the slope to the next ridge.

  But three of them were in such a state of panic that they kept on coming. Two of them were shot down still some distance from the ridge, but one seemed to have a charmed life. Less than a hundred yards away now, his features were clearly visible, distorted with terror and physical effort, but still the features of a mere boy.

  The Oberl
eutnant had drawn out his long-barrelled wooden-stocked Luger.

  Lothar said, ‘Dieter!’ and Loewenhardt turned and saw the younger officer taking aim.

  It is turning us into lunatics, this war, thought Lothar desperately.

  Then the war, which was never afraid of taking its own decisions; resolved the crisis by dropping a shell twenty yards behind the running boy. A red hot fragment of metal ripped open and cauterized his left thigh from hip to knee in a single operation. He screamed and fell, rose again, pushing his chest off the ground with his extended arms and lay there staring with fixed mad eyes at the parapet of the trench on the ridge and let his scream tail down to a dog-like whimper of pain and despair.

  Klipstein was still pointing his gun, but the barrel was wavering now and on his face was a dawning horror which Lothar guessed had as much to do with what he was beginning to see in himself as the scene before him. But this was no time for clinical observation. Lothar sighed like a weary lover, then went over the edge of the trench in a single athletic rolling movement.

  Now the choice was speed or stealth. He opted for the former, running forward over the uneven ground towards the wounded boy who watched his approach with wide unblinking eyes. The fifty or sixty yards between them did not seem to diminish. Shells were still bursting, rocking him with their blast and sending drifts of black smoke which momentarily hid the boy from view, and when the smoke passed, he never seemed any nearer, till all at once a single stride seemed to cover a dozen yards and Lothar was almost stumbling over the recumbent body.

  He did not look at the torn leg. Nor did he speak. He just stooped and in a single movement lifted the boy over his shoulder, compounding the long high scream in his ear with the scream of French shells through the bright sunlit air. How blue the sky was over the ridge! Downhill it had seemed such a shallow slope, now the return seemed steep as a flight of stairs. The boy’s scream was louder now. No, not louder, just unique. For a moment the French guns had paused, like an opera chorus falling silent to leave the soloist in complete command of the melody. They must be raising their sights again. Fresh targets! Fresh attacks! There was no standing still if you wanted to win!

  The ridge was here. Loewenhardt and the Oberleutnant were reaching up to take the wounded boy from his arms. His screaming had stopped; dead or unconscious, it hardly seemed to matter which. Instead of dropping into the trench he paused, standing upright on the edge looking up to the rising sun, stretching his arms and closing his eyes as his face blushed in its warm caress.

  Loewenhardt looked up at him and screamed, ‘Lothar! For Christ’s sake!’

  Lothar looked down at him and smiled.

  A Frenchman, wishing he was a hundred miles and ten years away, strolling through the golden fields of his home village near Arles, taking potshots at any wildlife he disturbed, was able to put two bullets into the crucified silhouette before it fell forward out of sight.

  3

  The grass was lush and long, waist high in places, and the hot sun reaching down to the still damp lower stalks was releasing rich odours.

  Suddenly almost beneath Josh’s feet something moved. He caught a glimpse of grey, German field-grey it seemed for a moment, and his heart squeezed tight and small as a walnut kernel.

  Then the flash of colour was gone and only a ripple of fronds on the grass-sea ahead showed him its passage.

  ‘Here!’ he said excitedly to Wilf. ‘I nigh on trod on a bloody hare!’

  Wilf laughed. He looked flushed and excited. He’ll probably be disappointed if there’s no fighting to do, thought Josh. Himself, he’d be content if they saw nothing more frightening to shoot at than a few hares! Their steady progress had taken them over the first slight undulation, and now the line was breasting the second. They were in the smoke now. So far there had not been the slightest sign of resistance. Overhead the shells were still screaming, and seemingly still all in the same direction, to fall more distantly now on the enemy reserve and supply areas. They reached the top of the second undulation and stepped out of the drifting smokescreen at almost the same moment.

  There, less than two hundred yards away, was their first objective, the German front line trench. All seemed quiet.

  ‘It’s a walkover!’ someone cried enthusiastically.

  Hope crescendoed in the new boys, but now the sensitized ears of the old hands picked out a terrifyingly familiar pizzicato amid the soprano screams and bass rumble of the artillery bombardment. Josh hardly heard it, but looking to his left he saw a strange phenomenon. The feathery tips of the tall grass were rising in the air like chaff beneath a flail. And in strict tempo to the flailing grass, the figures of his comrades in the line were spinning and twisting in curious grotesque movements, reminding him of an old woodcut in one of his father’s few books, before they fell out of sight beneath the turbulent green.

  It must have been a matter simply of seconds, three or four at most, but he had time to observe, to grow curious, to recall the woodcut, to identify it as representing something he’d never really understood called the dance of death; but he felt no fear till in the final second he saw Ed Birkett’s tunic shred bloodily; Jimmy Todhunter’s steely muscles twist like rubber as he was spun round, his mouth screaming, towards his brother; and laal Jockey unable to return the scream as the machine-gun bullets tore his throat to tatters so that the unsupported head almost fell away from the little body.

  This last Josh can hardly have seen, for he was already throwing himself sideways against Wilf, bringing them both crashing to the ground as the traversing machineguns, brought up by the Germans from their untouched deep dug-outs, scythed grass and men all around in one undiscriminating harvest. But he saw it immediately afterwards, for his first reaction after a moment of still terror in the grass was to pull himself out of Wilfs restraining grip and wriggle towards where Jockey lay.

  He couldn’t believe it. He lay with eyes no more than a foot from the bloody ruin, his nose full of the fume of fresh blood, and he couldn’t believe it.

  He moved on, not driven by courage or friendship but by this sense of unreality. Jimmy by contrast looked scarcely touched, but the bullet which had pierced his heart had left him equally dead. Ed Birkett looked much more of a mess with his chest laid open to the ribcage, but curiously he was still alive. One word, Josh thought it was ‘Outerdale’, rose in a red bubble to his lips, then the bubble burst and he too was gone.

  He crawled back to Wilf in search of comfort, of protection.

  ‘Wilf,’ he said. ‘They’re dead, all dead. Jockey and Jimmy and Ed.’

  Wilf’s arms folded around him and the brothers held each other tight. It took a few moments for Josh to realize that Wilf’s clasp was not the comforting hug of an elder brother offering reassurance, but more like the despairing grip a drowning man takes on any would-be rescuer that comes near him.

  ‘Wilf!’ he said, ‘Wilf! What shall we do?’

  But no answer came unless a gasping dry sob were meant for an answer.

  Josh raised his head slightly and peered backwards. The second wave was approaching at the same steady pace at which the first had strolled into the hail of bullets. It wouldn’t do to be found lying here unwounded, while the attack was still in progress. Josh had some vague idea that they could be killed instantly for cowardice.

  ‘Come on, Wilf!’ he urged. ‘We’ve got to get up. We’ll go on with the second wave. Come on! Get up.’

  It wasn’t courage. It was partly a naïve young man’s fear of military law. And it was also a desire to get as far away as possible from those dreadful shards of human flesh lying just a few feet away.

  But Wilf refused to move. He had sufficient control of himself now to gasp. ‘No. Rest here. Safer. Josh!’

  The scream of his brother’s name was his reaction to a huge explosion about thirty yards away. Even before the fountaining earth had ceased to spatter down on them, there was another explosion almost as close, then another, and another.

  The
German artillery, receiving the message that the attack was in progress, had commenced a bombardment of no-man’s land.

  Now the soft grass was no protection. Shells do not care if a man hides or not. Their sport is with the solid earth and the air itself, and they send shards of white-hot metal in search of cowering men, or toss them casually skywards with their hurricane blasts. Not even the dead can lie at peace. If one explosion throws a decent pall of earth over their shattered bodies, the next can disinter them. A huge blast to the left of Josh and Wilf set them hugging ground as though by sheer pressure they would bury themselves in it. The showering earth was full of heavy stones. One thudded into the ground just a few yards from their heads. Wilf opened his eyes and started screaming. And when Josh looked, he saw that the shell-burst had ripped Ed Birkett’s head and torso from his lower body and dumped it alongside his friends.

  And still the assault troops were coming. The second wave, what was left of it, arrived where the first had broken. The machine-gun was traversing again, but there was no long line of targets ready to be knocked down. The shells had seen to that. Instead, little groups of survivors moved forward, some at the old steady pace as instructed, others staggering even more slowly, and others again running now, as men hasten to confront that which they fear in the belief that it can be no more horrible than the agony of delay.

  Josh rose, dragging Wilf up alongside him. He felt obscurely that this was what he’d come here to do and that not to do it to the best of his endeavour would be somehow to put himself in the wrong. Whether this was how the other advancing soldiers saw it, he couldn’t tell. Whatever their reasons, they kept going forward and that was his direction too.

  Wilf did not resist. Perhaps he had no sense of direction left and the feeling of movement was stimulus enough for him. They advanced slowly and whenever the scream of a shell seemed threateningly close, Josh pulled them both earthwards again. In this way, somewhere between the second and the third waves, they reached the crest of the final undulation. One more dip and they’d be up at the German front line.