The Lost Soldier (39 page)

“I certainly should,” the padre disagreed cheerfully. “Tomorrow I’ll be at the dressing station, but tonight I wanted to come up here, just in case, well in case anyone wanted to talk to me before he goes over, you know?”

“Yes, I know,” replied Captain Hurst. The two men shook hands, and the padre continued his round through the trench in one direction while Captain Hurst continued his in the other, each speaking softly, encouragingly, to the waiting men.

None of them got much sleep that night, as the barrage pounded on throughout the night. Each man checked again what was in the pack he must carry, shirt and socks, two days’ iron rations, a bandage wrapped round a bottle of iodine, a bottle of water, a rolled groundsheet and a gas helmet. They were heavy packs and cumbersome, but they were only part of the load. As well as their packs, their rifles and entrenching tools, they carried a small haversack of grenades, ready to hurl into the German trenches as they reached them, to clear out any final pockets of resistance that there might be. Some carried rolls of barbed wire for fortifying captured trenches, others were laden with picks or shovels, wire cutters and empty sandbags. Extra ammunition had been issued, the bandoleers slung across shoulders and selected men carried Lewis guns to set up in the enemy trenches. Laden as they were, bayonets fixed, they would cross no-man’s-land at no more than a steady walk, following the barrage of the artillery which would clear their way, pulverising the first then the second lines of enemy trenches, pushing the Germans before them.

Tom and Tony warmed their hands round a mug of tea heavily laced with rum as they waited in the grey dawn for the call to stand to.

“Should be a piece of cake,” Tony said, “young Short is right. No one could have survived that barrage, what d’you bet we find the Huns all dead or better still gone?”

“Pray God we do,” Tom said sincerely, “because if we don’t…” his voice trailed away and he and Tony both thought about Harry and the others who had disappeared into the mists of earlier assaults and raids and had not survived.

They were gathered ready to move, hundreds of men crammed into the narrow front-line trenches, pushing up from the support trenches behind. As they shifted uneasily, waiting in the press of men for the signal to go, they were glad to be moving at last. Tony and Tom waited with the rest of the platoon on the fire step. Ahead of them another unit had crawled out over the parapet under the shelter of darkness and were even now lying concealed in no-man’s-land ready, at the signal, to rise up and begin the attack. Behind, others waited to move forward as the second and third waves.

With ten minutes still to go before the attack was due to start the guns fell silent. So accustomed were they all to the constant boom and whistle of shells, the thud and crump of explosions all around them, that for an instant Tom wondered if he’d suddenly gone deaf. Silence rolled over the trenches like the smoke, which even then began to billow out from behind the lines in eerie spirals, seeping between the tree-stumps, enfolding them like a thick and heavy blanket. Tom glanced across at Tony who shrugged a shoulder, and then the air was shaken by a huge explosion; not the usual rumble or crump of an exploding shell, or the pounding crash of a heavy artillery gun, but an earth-shaking, sky-shattering bang, rolling on and on like an extended clap of thunder with echoing aftershocks.

“Christ!” exclaimed Tom almost falling backward with the sudden unexpectedness of it. “What the hell was that?”

Tony, equally stunned by the deafening boom, shouted over the dying echoes, “Sappers, I suppose. Must have blown a mine.”

As the sound died away, the expectation reached fever pitch in the waiting trench. Smoke wreathed round them, wafting out through the little copse; it rolled out over no-man’s-land, blanketing the bleak and barren land that lay before them, hiding the shell-holes, and smothering the barbed wire.

“For Christ’s, let’s get on with it,” came a muttered cry, and this was echoed up and down the lines. It was time to attack, so why weren’t they bloody attacking?

“They must know we are coming now,” growled Tony, “What the hell are we waiting for?”

Beside him Hughes and Farmer, who were to carry the Lewis gun with them, heaved the gun up onto Farmer’s shoulder, ready to haul it out as soon as Hughes was over the parapet. Hughes glanced across at Tony.

“You stick right with us, Cookie,” he said nervously. “We need that ammo.”

Tony, with two bandoleers of ammunition draped across his shoulders managed a grin. “Just don’t you get lost in that smoke, mate,” he retorted, “or I’ll be hefting this lot for nothing!”

At last, just when it seemed that the order to attack would never come, Captain Hurst pushed his way through the crush of men to the bottom of a scaling ladder.

“It’s over to you now, lads. This will be a glorious day, this first of July, and we’ll make it ours.” With that he blew a loud and long blast on his whistle, which in the instant was echoed all down the lines. The artillery barrage began again and, to the accompaniment of whistling shells and mortar fire, the Belshires rose up from their trench and, with a ragged cheer, followed Hurst up the scaling ladders and scrambled over the top.

Tony Cook turned back to help Hughes haul the Lewis gun from Farmer and then to heave him up over the edge. Tom was up beside them, scrambling to his feet and heading into the smokescreen, and then all hell was let loose as machine gun bullets ripped into the smoke and men began to fall. Tom pressed doggedly forward, aware of a man on either side of him. A savage rattle of machine-gun fire removed Davy Short from his left-hand side, bowling him over so that he disappeared into the smoke. Ignore the wounded, they had been told, and another man moved up beside Tom and they plodded onwards, rifles held in front of them, into the wall of sound and bullets. There was a crump behind him and Tom was pitched forward into a shell hole, while earth and metal rained down around him. He lay, his face pressed into the foul-smelling earth, his chest heaving as he tried to regain his breath and fought against the singing in his ears. How long he lay there he didn’t know, probably only minutes, but it felt like eternity. At last he raised his head cautiously over the edge of the hole to look out on the battle raging around him.

The coils of wire had not been cut, the six-day barrage had done little to flatten it; the promised gaps for easy passage were not there, and as Tom peered out from the shelter of his hole, he could see men in their hundreds, stranded. The few carrying wire cutters struggled with the vicious wire, trying to force a way through, while the German machine gunners, from the undestroyed positions, trained their guns on the few gaps there were. Men crowded to push through, and the gunners continued to cut them to ribbons with sustained and rapid fire. Piles of bodies grew round the gaps; many hung like limp laundry on a line, wounded and dead together, easy target practice for the enemy gunners, their bodies ripped, fragments of flesh flying, combining with the ooze about them. Some men howled as they died slowly, the blood pumping from their bodies from severed arteries and gaping holes in head and chest; limbs were blown away as they called for aid, called for mothers and lovers, called on God or screamed pain-induced abuse. Others never knew the burst of bullets that ripped through them, they simply crumpled or pitched forward on to the ground in a heap; yet others were thrown on the wire, their bodies jerking and twirling on that grisly washing line.

Even as Tom watched, another wave of men came from behind at a steady walk and threw themselves into the supposed breaches in the wire, only to be mown down, falling as hay before the scythe, their bodies covering those already fallen, the wounded among the dying, the living among the dead. Still they came, pouring up out of the trenches as the shells whistled and thudded from behind the German lines, and the steady rattle of machine guns poured the scything bullets from the entrenched nests of German gunners set up along the line of battle, still concentrating their vicious fire upon the few gaps in the protecting wire.

The shriek of a shell made Tom dive down into the safety of his shell hole, and the explosion only yards away half buried him in flying muck and mud. Amid the din of the battle, he heard a new and closer sound, a man crying out for help, a man close at hand, his voice rising to a shriek. Once again, Tom risked his head above ground level, and saw that, where there had been rough ground, a low wall and a stunted tree, there was now nothing but a huge hole where the shell had landed. The cries were coming from there. Grasping his rifle again, Tom crawled from the relative security of his own hole, and, keeping his head as low as possible, scurried across the few yards of open ground and then flung himself over the edge of the next hole, landing heavily on two rag-doll bodies which lay in the bottom. They were both dead, one with half his head shot away, the other staring open-eyed at the sky as if watching for further shells. A third was cowering against the side of the hole, one leg severed at the knee, his foot in its boot lying in the dirt several feet away as if cast aside, the blood pumping out of the wound in steady, rhythmic jets. He held both hands across the stump of his leg as if trying to keep the blood inside and to stem the flow, and his hands and arms were bathed in his own, ever-flowing, blood. It was his cries that Tom had heard, the screams of a terrified boy, dying alone.

Tom ripped off his pack and webbing and grabbing the field dressing from the pack, tried to hold it in place over the stump.

“Hold this, hold this,” he screamed at the man, as he wound a piece of bandage round the leg and tried to twist it into a tourniquet, twisting and twisting again to cut off the blood, and the life, flowing from the boy. For a moment it seemed that nothing would work

It’s got to be tighter! thought Tom in panic. He grabbed the wooden handle of his entrenching tool from his webbing and forced it through the bandage, twisting viciously, so that his makeshift tourniquet finally tightened enough to do its job, and Tom saw the flow ease and stop. The boy fainted, his hands fell away from the blood-soaked dressing he’d been trying to hold, and Tom could see the ragged end of the leg, cut through above the knee, white bone projecting, jagged, through the mangled flesh. He turned away and was sick, throwing up the contents of his stomach into the glutinous mud in which he sat. Then he heard a moan and realised that the wounded boy was beginning to come round. The remains of the lad’s pack was underneath him. Swiftly Tom pulled it free and took out the field dressing it contained, bandaging it as securely as he could over the exposed stump. He knew he must keep the wound covered if they were to try to get back to their own trenches and find help. His ministrations made the boy pass out again, and Tom was glad, for he knew the pain must be unbearable.

There was nothing else he could do for him here, and there was little possibility of moving him back behind the lines until darkness fell and stretcher parties came out into no-man’s-land to drag the wounded back to safety… if stretcher parties did come. He looked more carefully at the man and saw that he was indeed a lad of about seventeen; his face, now deathly pale, had the unformed lines of youth about the chin and mouth. His ears stood out like jug handles, all the more prominent because his hair was plastered to his head with mud. Most of his uniform was gone, ripped away by the blast, and his shirt hung in shreds about his scrawny shoulders. The sun was up now, a blazing disc in a clear blue sky, burning off the coolness of the early morning mist. Tom knew the temperature would rise steadily and with no shelter from its pitiless heat at midday, any wounded would stand little chance without water and care. Tom looked at the youth and was suddenly determined to keep him alive. If the bleeding had really stopped, there was still a chance he might be saved. Tom peered at his makeshift bandage, and saw that it still seemed to be in place, and was not completely saturated with blood, so presumably the tourniquet was doing its job, but despite the heat, the lad was shivering violently. Somehow he must be kept warm. Stripping off his own tunic, Tom wrapped it round the inert body, pushing the arms into the sleeves to help hold it in place. The boy moaned, but didn’t regain consciousness. Tom looked anxiously at the tourniquet. He remembered Molly had told him that tourniquets must be loosened from time to time so that gangrene did not set in, but how often and after how long? Tom had no idea but he was afraid to release it now, terrified that the blood would start pulsing again. Rather than lose any more blood and face certain death, the boy would have to run the risk of the tourniquet. Tom propped him up as best he could, and while he was still out for the count he checked to see if there were any more injuries that needed attention. He could see none, but as he ran his hands over the boy’s chest he felt the identification dog-tags hanging at his throat. He peered at them and found that he was trying to save the life of Private Sam Gordon.

“Hold on, Sam,” he ordered the slumped figure. “Just you hold on and we’ll get you out of here.” Then he turned his attention to the two other bodies, and found their tags as well. Private John Dewar and Corporal David Shapwick. Tom looked at them. Should he take the tags with him, knowing that it was unlikely they would be recovered otherwise, or should he leave them with the bodies in the hope that they would be recovered for burial and thus identified? Tom didn’t know. Their only hope would be if the attack had achieved its aims and that the battle lines were now redrawn, with their shell-hole in friendly territory. He eased his head above the edge of the hole. The smoke from the guns mingled with the smokescreen, forming a curtain across the ground. He couldn’t see anything but ragged mist, forming and re-forming, giving glimpses of the wire, still festooned with bodies and parts of bodies, but for the moment no more men were appearing from behind. Perhaps the rest of the attack had been called off, or all those attacking from these forward trenches had already passed through to the German lines. It was impossible to tell.