SETTLE IT ALL OVER A PINT?
Jackson gives them a rueful smile and tells them to take it down.
Today the bombardment begins. It breaks out all at once, shells screaming in unison, the stagnant air throbbing like an immense heartbeat. Instinctively, the entire platoon ducks into a crouch, many of them slamming their hands over their ears. They’ve heard the whine and blast of the big guns before, but nothing on this scale. None of us have. A theatre of howitzers and mortars roaring together. A roar so loud they will certainly be hearing it back in Blighty. I glance at Danny, hunkered beside me, and see his pale face turned to the sky. It’s all I can do not to grab his hand.
The earth shudders, duckboards leaping almost comically into the air before splashing back into the mud. It seems impossible that this can be maintained for the next five days. Surely we’ll run out of shells. Surely the gunners will drop dead from exhaustion. Surely we’ll all go mad from the incessant thunder. But as another huge body of metal rushes overhead, I know this isn’t true. If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that a man can become accustomed to any madness.
By three p.m., we are up and about as usual, reinforcing parapets and parados, oiling rifles, shouting jokes and orders. Half an hour later, a new bellow joins the bombardment, the sky split by lightning, as if Nature wishes to show that she too can make the heavens shriek. Rain buckets down and turns the trench into a lake.
25th June
Danny and I revert to our old habit of exchanging notes. It saves our voices and avoids the absurdity of trying to play Charades in the mud. Another grim morning, sticky and close, with bursts of bad-tempered rain drilling our helmets. No one has slept. As Danny licks the pencil and scribbles away, I see Taffy and Spud huddled together on the fire step, forlorn figures in drenched khaki nodding over steaming mugs. The laughter they shared on stage only a couple of days ago seems a very distant memory.
Can we get out of here for an hour or two? Is that allowed?
I read the note and write back:Let me talk to Jackson. Although I don’t think the scenery will be cheerier anywhere else.
We both glance up at that channel of black cloud boiling overhead.
The captain agrees that our freedom to move about the trenches still holds. We might even observe something useful ‘that can then be completely ignored,’ he adds drily. And so we set out once more. The communication trench leading away from the line is choked with men. Yet more new recruits shoved forward for the push, but without enough room in the forward trenches to accommodate them. And so they wait here, finding what shelter they can.
It takes hours to squeeze between the grumbling soldiers and reach higher ground. At last, we find ourselves on a hillside, a scene from Hell spread out before us. Fires burn and mangled metal litters the ground. High above No Man’s Land, the rain-slick belly of a German observation balloon bobs ponderously between the lines. Then, all at once, a British plane emerges from a cloud and makes an arc of the balloon, popping off shots that sound like a toy gun against the storm of the barrage.
Struck, the balloon sways drunkenly to one side before collapsing in on itself, the basket swinging high against the canvas. In the next moment, the gas cylinder bursts and the whole thing goes up in flames. It blazes brightly over the battlefield, a second sun plummeting and exploding in the wasteland.
‘Those poor bastards,’ Danny says in a horror-struck voice, then turns to me and asks, ‘Stephen, are you all right?’
I shake my head. How can I possibly save him from this?
26th June
We return to the rise behind our sector, grasping at each other as the wet ground slips under our boots. It feels good to hold his hand, even in these brief moments. Panting a little, Danny and I exchange grim smiles before turning back to take in the view. Coal boxes burst black against the teeming rain, clouds of dust and debris appearing like insistent full stops on the grey page of the morning.
‘Drink?’ Danny shouts above the clamour.
‘Champagne?’ I ask, taking his water canteen.
‘Only the finest, my love.’
The only soldiers close enough to overhear are those manning the howitzers a little way down the hill. If you know where to look you can spot them, the big guns stowed behind every clump of bush, their sleek black muzzles steaming in the downpour. The guns are only stopped now to let them cool, and then never for long.
27th June
Word comes down from HQ – the push has been delayed for forty-eight hours. We will now face our fate on the first of July. The reason? Bad weather has hampered the bombardment and the top brass want to make sure all the German wire is cut before throwing us into the meatgrinder. Danny raises an eyebrow when I tell him and I can see the scepticism in his look.
28th June
Smoke shoots up in spouts of yellow, grey and brown before spreading in filthy smudges across No Man’s Land. From our vantage point back in the hills, we can see that the German-occupied town of Montauban has been pummelled to near annihilation.
Danny shakes his head at me. ‘What’s going to be left for us to capture?’
29th June
The original zero hour comes and goes. The men do their best to keep cheerful, spending most of their time in heated debates over the details of the attack, drawing diagrams on the trench wall with their bayonets. Meanwhile planes scout low over the German line, flying back to drop messages to our artillery. After a minute or two to realign their target, a salvo of shells falls on a new location, columns of earth and stone, water and wire springing up like miniature volcanoes.
30th June
Days have melted into each other, like mud melts into mud until you can’t tell the texture of one moment from the next. Ten to ten on the last day before the push. I snap Grandpa’s watch shut. In a few short hours it will be taken from me by a runner and raced back to HQ where, along with a hundred other officers’ timepieces, it will be synchronised. Ready so that we can all blow our little whistles in unison – the signal for the latest chapter of this madness to begin.
