He opens his mouth to reply when suddenly the artillery fire ramps up. It seemed impossible for the guns to work any harder but now they blast out a final hurricane. The ear-splitting bark of the eighteen-pounders, the titanic cough of the howitzers, the roar of every heavy gun in our arsenal flinging its fury from horizon to horizon. The noise throbs in my veins and makes my head scream.
Then: silence.
A heartbeat of stillness before Nature cries out, filling the void. Skylarks burst heavenward out of No Man’s Land and I hear a collective sigh from the men around me. It’s a beautiful sight, the little brown birds shooting into the blue before billowing together and then scattering to the winds. Life persisting in a place where Man has done his best to stamp it out.
Heads lower again. I glance at my men, knuckles white around their rifles. Further along, Captain Jackson stands with his gaze fixed on his wristwatch. In the dazzle of daylight, I see the sweat gleam on his brow. Someone coughs, another man sneezes, a prayer is offered up. Danny grips my wrist and then lets go. Our last touch, perhaps. I check my revolver, take the whistle from my pocket, place it between my lips.
We wait on the lip of the meatgrinder.
And suddenly a series of massive explosions rock the earth. The men gasp as a geyser of dirt sketches the same path as the skylarks. Parapets tremble, some shearing away and tumbling into the trench. Mines from Beaumont Hamel in the north all the way to our position, at the southernmost tip of the British line, all detonated simultaneously and all too soon. I glance at Jackson and see my frustration reflected back at me.
‘What is it?’ Danny cries above the echo.
‘They were supposed to go upafterwe’d gone over the top,’ I shout back. ‘Now the Germans will know we’re coming.’
But it’s too late to worry about that.
I glance at my watch.
Ten, nine, eight, seven...
I place the whistle between my lips.
I love you, Danny.
Three, two, one.
Zero hour.
My hand closes around my revolver. My heart pounds, stutters. I blow and my whistle is lost among the chorus that shrieks along twenty miles of winding ditch. I see Danny grip the ladder in front of him as an army of boots hit a thousand wooden rungs. Some men roar, some cry out, most keep their peace. And then, almost in unison, a fragile sea of humanity washes over the breakwater of the trench.
35
Shafts of brilliant sunshine penetrate columns of smoke, painting No Man’s Land in a poisonous kaleidoscope of burned orange and putrid green. As the last of the platoon staggers to its feet, we form up and, as instructed, begin to walk slowly forward. Rows of steel-hatted men with bayonets fixed, ambling across a landscape barely trodden by humans in almost two years. I cast a glance down the line, see a soldier stumble and another turn his head and throw up on the boots of the man next to him.
‘Steady,’ I call to them. ‘Steady, men.’
The tattered curtain of smoke drifts before us, parting and closing, teasing us with glimpses of our target. Less than a hundred yards to those unmanned German parapets and, in these first moments, all is quiet. For a fraction of a second, I let myself believe that Danny and I have been mistaken. That all our observations were at fault and that Gallagher and Beddowes had been right to doubt us. The bombardment has achieved its objective, their wire is cut and the enemy is wiped out. It’s a pleasant fantasy. But a sudden break in the curtain soon dispels it. The wire smiles back at me, cruel and complete.
In the next instant, silhouettes spring up like demonic jack-in-the-boxes in those elevated machine gun nests. I exchange a stricken glance with Danny. The German typewriters shatter the silence, tearing great holes in our row, felling soldiers smoothly as a scythe. Rifles clatter to the ground, dropped from hands both living and dead. Those who haven’t been hit either stand in shocked bewilderment or scramble to retrieve their weapons. Meanwhile a fresh harvest is added to that first reaping as the guns open up again and strafe back down the line. I see a wide-eyed Taffy throw back his head as if in laughter as a fist of bullets slams into his chest. Blood mists the air behind him, granting him the appearance of scarlet wings before he drops.
Others die less dramatically. I see them flop to the ground, some curling in on themselves like children at bedtime. They whimper a little before taking a last breath, that is all. I wonder absently if they’re crying for themselves or for those friends around them whose deaths are coming harder. Piercing screams and burbling pleas from throats choked with blood echo across the battlefield. Danny begins to reach for a clutching hand and I find myself moving with him, drawn to a man whose chest gapes in the morning sun.
‘Leave him,’ a captain from another company bellows at us. ‘You can’t help him now.’
He’s right. Even if we could somehow magically conjure him to a casualty clearing station, the life is already racing from his eyes. Still, it almost kills me to drag Danny away. But the whippers-in, those officers charged with keeping discipline during the assault, have their orders. Move on at all costs. On, on, on. If any pause, if any retreat, a friendly British bullet will find them.
‘That’s right, boys,’ the same captain nods. ‘Stay steady and keep up a good pa—’
I hear Danny gasp as the officer is thrown into the air, like a marionette wrenched skyward on its strings by some bored puppet master. A grenade has landed at his feet and he returns to earth now without them, both legs shorn off at the knee. His orders forgotten, he cries out to us and we race over to the shallow crater that cradles him. Danny skids down into the hole while I follow behind, wrenching free my field dressing kit, knowing all the while that it’s useless. The man already sits in half a body’s worth of blood.
We’ve just reached him when another face appears above the crater. ‘Leave him!’ the officer cries in a cruel echo of the captain’s own words. ‘Get moving again. Now!’
‘Puh-lease!’ the captain groans, his head snapping between us. ‘I don’t... I don’t want to... I don’t...’
His eyes roll to the smoke and then appear to fix on a point beyond where we can see. He’s dead and the order is repeated: ‘Leave him. Get moving. On! On!’
Climbing out of the hole, we rejoin our platoon, my gaze skating down the line to check who still stands. Percy, Robert, Spud and Captain Jackson remain together with about a dozen others from our original number of thirty-four. I notice Spud look back repeatedly, a longing in his eye for that cramped, muddy ditch that has been his home since he first arrived at the Front. He flinches as bullets whiz past us and spark against the barrier of our own barbed wire.
