No Man's Land Read online

  But there could be no such dip. Along the hollow before the line, stretching as far as they could see in both directions, was an unbroken barrier of barbed wire.

  Some men of either the first or second waves had reached it. They had attempted to pierce it with their wire-cutters. And now their bodies lay or hung there, reminding Josh of a keeper’s vermin wire.

  Josh and Wilf tumbled into a shallow depression left by one of the inefficient shells which had failed to cut the wire.

  ‘What’ll we do, Wilf? What’ll we do?’ whispered Josh, the old habit of dependency dying hard.

  ‘Lie here till it’s dark,’ gasped his brother. ‘Oh Jesus fucking Christ, why didn’t I stay at home and shear sheep!’

  They tried to burrow deeper into the ground, but it was hard and stony. At least, thought Josh, no one can say we didn’t advance as far as we could, not with that lot hanging on the wire.

  A few minutes later, he realized how wrong he was.

  A familiar voice came drifting out of the eddying smoke to their left.

  ‘Keep going forward men! Forward! We’ve got them beaten!’

  A moment later, Lieutenant Maiden came strolling along parallel to the wire. At least ‘strolling’ looked like the effect he was trying to achieve, but from time to time either the broken terrain or his own condition made him stagger so he looked like a drunken reveller making his slow way home. Perhaps the oddity of his behaviour made the enemy hold their fire, perhaps he simply bore a charmed life, but he seemed unhurt.

  ‘Jesus, that’s all we fucking need!’ groaned Wilf.

  Maiden paused now. A shell had tossed up a small platform of debris and he scrambled on top of this vantage-point and with his back to the enemy lines scanned the ground before him. His cap was at a raffish angle and his revolver dangled from its lanyard.

  Josh raised his head a little to get a better view.

  ‘Keep down,’ hissed Wilf, but it was too late.

  ‘You two there! I see you! Routledge, isn’t it? Both Routledges! I know you! Skulking there! Come on, men, on your feet! Advance! Follow me!’

  Reluctantly Josh began to scramble up the ramp of crumbling earth.

  ‘You fucking idiot!’ screamed Wilf, seizing his leg.

  ‘Good man, come on!’ cried Maiden, advancing towards them and leaning down to offer a helping hand.

  Wilf rose and took it. Then with a short sharp jerk, he brought the officer slithering on his belly down the side of the shell-hole.

  When Maiden rolled over on to his back, his face mottled with dust and rage, he found himself looking into the muzzle of Wilf’s rifle.

  ‘Listen to me, you mad bastard,’ hissed Wilf, who looked if anything rather more deranged than the man he threatened. ‘You want to get yourself killed, I’ll oblige here and now. But you’re not taking me and my brother with you.’

  ‘Wilf!’ pleaded Josh. ‘Stop it! Please, sir, he doesn’t mean it.’

  ‘Shut your gob, Josh!’ said his brother. ‘This bastard knows I mean it, don’t you, Maiden.’

  Slowly the lieutenant pushed himself into a sitting position.

  ‘Routledge,’ he said in a trembling voice. ‘I’m giving you one last chance. On your feet now and advance with me. That’s an order.’

  Slowly he rose. The rifle’s muzzle rose with him.

  ‘Go fuck yourself,’ said Wilf.

  ‘You, boy, are you coming with me?’

  Shaking now with uncertainty, Josh who was still clinging to the side of the hole said, ‘Wilf, we’ve got to go … we’ve got to …’

  ‘No!’ commanded Wilf. ‘If you try to go, Josh, I’ll shoot this silly fucker myself.’

  Maiden was now standing upright.

  ‘Right,’ he said almost gaily. ‘Here we go. One two three!’

  He scrambled out of the hole, turned to offer Josh his hand once more.

  The youngster instinctively reached for it. Wilf said softly, ‘I mean it!’ Josh said, ‘Please, Wilf, no …’

  Then Maiden straightened up, shrieked at a pitch almost above hearing, and fell back into the hole. For a second he looked undamaged, then blood came bubbling up along the right side of his tunic like water from an underground spring.

  With apparent calm Wilf sat back against the broken earth, laid down his rifle and began to roll himself a cigarette. Josh stared in horror at the bleeding figure on the ground.

  ‘Wilf, we’ve got to do something!’

  ‘Bastard’s a goner,’ said his brother. ‘Saved me the bother.’

  ‘But Wilf …’

  ‘You do what you like, Josh. It’s a waste of fucking time.’

  Josh knelt beside the wounded man. Normally blood didn’t bother him, animal’s blood, that was. Killing pigs, gutting rabbits, all this was normal in country life. But this was different. This was the very essence of a man, pulsing out before him.

  Taking his bayonet, he ripped open the tunic to reveal the gaping hole. His hands reddened with Maiden’s blood, he pressed a dressing to the hole. It did not seem possible a man could live with that damage done to him.

  Above them the roar of the guns continued, but now it seemed distanced, remote. A pall of smoke drifted across the battlefield, darkening the sky, and with it came a figure, rolling over into the shell-hole with swift efficiency.

  Wilf started up and grabbed for his rifle.

  ‘Easy, lad,’ said Sergeant Renton. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘It’s Mr Maiden, Sarge,’ said Josh. ‘He’s hurt bad.’

  Renton looked at the wound and whistled silently.

  ‘You’re right. That’s bad.’

  ‘In the back, you notice,’ sneered Wilf.

  Renton looked at him coldly.

  ‘Let’s see what we can do for him. We’ll have to turn him over, see if it came out the front.’

  Slowly he and Josh turned the officer over. As they did so, his eyes opened and fixed on Wilf.

  ‘That man refused my order, Sergeant,’ he whispered. Then they closed and his face went very still.

  ‘Is he dead, Sarge?’ said Josh.

  ‘Not yet,’ said Renton. ‘Though from the sound of it, for your sake, Routledge, he better had be.’

  He was looking at Wilf, who yawned with affected indifference.

  Josh spoke in a whisper, not because he was afraid of drawing attention but because he knew if he tried to talk normally, his voice would crack with sheer terror.

  ‘What shall we do, Sergeant?’ he asked.

  ‘Do?’ said the sergeant, glancing up towards the great vault of blue sky. ‘There’s fuck-all to do till either night comes, or reinforcements. And my money’s on night. So let’s make ourselves and this poor sod as comfortable as possible, shall we?’

  The long day dragged on. Renton was right. No one came. The sergeant attempted to wriggle out of the hole at one point, but a warning chatter of machine-gun bullets brought him slithering back down. All this time Maiden lay, white and scarcely breathing. Josh did not want the man to die but he kept remembering Renton’s grim words to Wilf.

  At last evening began to creep across the ripped and bloodied battlefield. It was a long time even then before it was full dark and the stretcher-bearers dared to penetrate so far forward of their own lines in their hunt for the wounded. The Germans seemed content to let this humane activity continue with only the occasional rifle round or mortar bomb to remind Tommy who was master of the field.

  Renton made contact with a party of bearers and brought them back for Lieutenant Maiden.

  ‘Blimey, hardly worth bothering about,’ opined one of them as he inspected the corpse-like figure, and Josh was ashamed at the pang of relief that shot through his heart.

  ‘You’d better bother,’ said Renton. ‘All right, you Routledges. Fuck off back ahead of us. We don’t want to sound like a platoon on the move.’

  Wilf who had spoken hardly a word all day led the way, his confidence increasing as they got a ridge between them and the Germ
an line. Even so, they made slow, nervous progress.

  Finally, after a hoarse challenge from a nervous sentry, they fell into the assault trench which they had left so hopefully more than twelve hours before.

  They were given hot tea laced with rum and hard biscuit which tasted like fresh-baked bread. Then, a little recovered, they were ordered to report themselves to the main command dug-out. Here the colonel, whose orders had forbidden him to participate actively in the attack, was sitting at a rickety card table with a bottle of Scotch at his elbow. A warrant officer with a face as grey as a winter sky wrote their names on a sheet of paper.

  ‘You two brothers?’ he asked in a dead voice.

  ‘Yessir,’ mumbled Josh.

  ‘Pair of brothers here, sir,’ the WO called, in a falsely animated voice. ‘Routledge W. and Routledge J.’

  ‘Brothers?’ said the colonel. ‘Something, I suppose. What’s the count now?’

  The WO examined his paper.

  ‘That takes us over fifty, sir. Fifty-one.’

  The colonel passed his hand over his face.

  ‘Well done, lads,’ he said, addressing the brothers directly.‘Well done.’

  They stood there, uncertain of what it was they had done well. The WO ushered them out into the trench and said, ‘All right, lads. Off you go. Get some rest while you can.’

  ‘Sir,’ said Josh. ‘That fifty-one you mentioned. Were that fifty-one come back from our company, sir?’

  He knew it was a stupid thing to ask even as he asked it. The WO was regarding him with weary pity.

  He said softly, ‘Fifty-one from the whole battalion, son. From the whole fucking battalion!’

  PART TWO

  CASUALTIES

  The Battle of the Somme lasted till November 18th, 1916

  Total casualties were:

  German – 437,500

  British – 420,000

  French – 203,000

  Grand Total 1,060,500

  Allied gains ranged from one mile at the flanks to six miles at the centre of a twenty-mile front.

  1

  Lieutenant Neville Maiden had been taken to the Red Cross Hospital at Barnecourt to die.

  The hospital was situated in what had been a medium-sized hotel, the irony of whose name – Hôtel de la Paix – had long ceased to cause amusement. Barnecourt itself was a small town, or rather a large village, straddling a tributary of the Ancre. During the two years of comparative quiet on the Somme Front, which at its nearest point was only three miles to the east, the hospital had been adequate for the demands made on it.

  Since July the first, all that had changed.

  Someone had had the foresight to order the erection of wooden huts in the grounds before the battle, but these had filled so rapidly that the fields behind the hotel had sprouted with bell-tents till the hospital’s capacity had redoubled four times.

  And still it was not enough. In the warm summer weather, men sat or lay on blankets in the open air and the crowded ambulances streamed in and out, day and night.

  But Neville Maiden knew nothing of this. A surgeon patched him up, certain he was wasting his valuable time. At least once an hour a nurse checked to see if his bed could be vacated yet, but Maiden would not die, though his appearance mocked death. While green July matured into golden August he lay quite still, his eyes fixed on a stain in the ceiling plaster which his mind turned into a man’s face. It seemed to him he made bargains with God in which he offered that man’s life for his own.

  At last one morning the surgeon allowed that he would probably live and could now be prepared for the journey home.

  Maiden spoke.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ said the ward sister who was changing his dressing. She was not used to Maiden speaking. Her name was Sally Thornton, a slender, grey-eyed, auburn-haired woman who until she came to Barnecourt had thought of herself as a girl. Before, she had been working in a large, well-equipped hospital in Rouen. The work had been hard, but not too far removed from the world of civilian medicine. Then had come July the first, and she had come forward with many others to be close to the source of this unprecedented carnage.

  ‘I want to speak to someone from the Provost Marshal’s office,’ said Maiden. ‘At once! Before I’m moved.’

  Sally Thornton recognized the voice of hysterical obsession. She knew better than to argue.

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said.

  She told the doctor in charge.

  ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘It makes a change from sodding padres!’

  There was a Military Police corporal directing traffic through the hotel grounds.

  ‘It’ll be the Assistant Provost Marshal you want, miss,’ he said. ‘Captain Denial. I’ll pass a message on, if you like. Here, what time do you come off duty then?’

  Sally Thornton smiled wearily at his lustful jocularity, but her mind was elsewhere. Captain Denial, the man had said. It wasn’t a common name. To her it meant not a captain, but a young lieutenant in a hospital bed at Rouen, his left leg shattered to the point where amputation seemed certain. But the young man had refused with a quiet strength which had cowed even the godlike surgeons. That had been a year ago. But even if he’d kept up his resolution back in England, he must surely be still in a wheelchair or on crutches at least. It couldn’t be the same man.

  But somehow she knew it was.

  She saw him next day before he saw her, standing at the reception desk, a slight, pale figure leaning unobtrusively on a walking stick. Then he looked up and saw her and his eyes widened in a shock of recognition.

  It’s just because I’ve changed, she told herself. He’s wondering if it’s really me! Her mirror told her every day that the colour and freshness of youth which had been hers a few months ago had faded, leaving her haggard and pale except where a smudge of dark shadows highlighted her eyes.

  Captain John Denial wiped all emotion from his face as he watched her approach. A year ago he had been disconcerted to find himself in love with this girl. No thought of speaking his feelings had entered his head. A curious sexual diffidence made him doubt that he could be attractive to a woman, and the coldly analytical mind which had brought him success in his civilian job as a Metropolitan Police detective had told him that patients always imagined themselves in love with their nurses. He assessed it as a false emotion which would quickly fade. He had gone back to England and persuaded himself that it had.

  Now here they were again, the false emotion and the real woman.

  ‘Captain Denial?’

  ‘Sister Thornton, isn’t it? We met at Rouen.’

  ‘Yes, I remember. Left leg, multiple fracture. You want to see Lieutenant Maiden? At least, he seems very keen to see you. This way.’

  She set off up the stairs at a pace to match both her brisk manner and the rapid beating of her heart. By the time she got up the second flight, she was well ahead. Becoming aware of the gap, she halted.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  The usual coldly dismissive response to references to his leg rose on his lips. Instead, he tried a smile and said, ‘I’m better going down.’

  ‘How did you get back to France? I should have thought …’

  Denial smiled again, grimly, remembering the categorical refusal of the medical board to certify him fit for active service, the eagerness of his Scotland Yard superiors to have him back in the Force, and then the suggested compromise from a staff officer who spotted his background.

  At the outbreak of war, the Corps of Military Police had consisted of barely 500 men. It had expanded rapidly to meet the needs, not always obvious, of the biggest army ever known.

  ‘It’s an active job, you’ll probably return to France, possibly quite near the front,’ he’d been assured. ‘It’s not a popular job, but it’s essential. It needs officers with the right experience who are in it for the right reasons, not shirkers or bullies, but men with a sense of service and duty.’

  The right words had been spoken. Earl
y in the summer, Denial had returned to France as an APM, responsible for the maintenance of military discipline, the flow of traffic, and the maintenance of good relations between the civil and military authorities in an area the size of Middlesex.

  ‘I persuaded them that even a cripple has his uses.’

  He meant to speak lightly, but he was not used to lightness, and it must have come out bitter. She glanced at him indifferently, and said, ‘In here. Mr Maiden’s third bed on the left. Good day, Captain Denial.’

  As she moved away, his voice came after her, impersonal and authoritative.

  ‘Nurse.’

  ‘Yes?’ she said, pausing.

  ‘Will you go out with me one evening?’

  She looked back at him and said in a puzzled voice, ‘Are you challenging me to a duel, perhaps, Captain?’

  Confused, he said, ‘No. I’m sorry. All I meant was …’

  She laughed at him, bringing back the fresh young girl of Rouen.

  ‘Yes, I’ll go out with you, if you like. I should get off at eight this evening. Would you like to meet me at the hospital gate?’

  Then she was gone without waiting for an answer.

  Amazed at himself, and at life, Denial went into the ward. The pale young man in the third bed looked about eighteen, but the eyes that opened at his approach were old and haunted.

  ‘Denial, APM,’ he said. ‘You wanted to see me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maiden in a low voice. ‘I want to make a report. About a man in my platoon. Refused an order. In the face of the enemy. That’s a court martial, offence, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, of course. And very serious,’ said Denial, surprised. ‘But surely you should be reporting this to your commanding officer? And discussing it with him first, perhaps?’

  ‘He’s not here, is he?’ said Maiden. ‘In any case, I don’t want it smoothed over. Regimental punishment. That kind of thing. I want … justice!’

  The word was spat out. For the second time in a few minutes the normally imperturbable Denial felt himself amazed, and this time it was not a pleasant emotion. Hate too could crop up as unexpectedly as love.