The hole is in France. It is ten feet across and five feet deep. Edgar lies in it, rotting with terror though still sound in every limb, encompassed by the squalid rammel of the battlefield. Three corpses are on the anal lip of the crater, their khaki uniforms stained red and purple. Before falling into it Edgar saw them lying asleep in clumps and rows. Others were still screaming in horrible dreams: the sky was reality but they could not reach it.
Another man is wounded by a shrapnel bullet entering his stomach. He tries to spit out his shoulder-blades but they won’t come loose, so he falls. Edgar has ammunition, but no rifle. The overcast sky is a vast and awful noise of bursting shells. The soil-and-chemical smell of explosions is as piercing as the sounds they make. It attacks another part of the senses. A massacre is taking place. Sixty thousand soldiers are being shot or blown to pieces for no reason at all, and Edgar wonders how as a human being he ever got into it.
36
The British Army has done for him — by hoping to move the battalion to which he belonged across a few inches of the 1:10,000 trench map — FONQUEVILLERS, SECOND EDITION, 57D N.E. SHEETS 1 & 2 (parts of) 1916.
His own officers, I heard him tell my father with a sort of crazed respect at their utter callousness, had lifted their revolvers to make sure the men went over the top. He remembered the voice petulantly barking as if they were cattle: ‘Get on! Get on, then! Get on! Come on, you, get on. Get on, then. Get on!’
During their move to the battlefront, Edgar had been singled out by his battalion commander for a special talk because he had been a deserter. He was told that if there was any shirking of duty now that he was on active service he would be court-martialled for it and shot. To ram home the threat he was a read a list of half a dozen names belonging to men who had so perished on that sector in the last month.
Two hundred and fifty of these heroes of common sense were murdered by their own firing-squads during the war, and many more were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. The English war machine had spent nearly the whole of the nineteenth century limbering up for the super-butchery of the Great War. They tasted blood when Napoleon began his rampages, and had a go later in the Crimea, where thousands died. But the scores of minor colonial campaigns since then did not satisfy them, and they envied the Americans the slaughterous encounters of their Civil War. The great Henderson, who wrote so lovingly on Stonewall Jackson, theorized no end about it and regretted that the noble slave-owning south had lost. Observers were sent to the Russo-Japanese War, which was studied in every detail, so that the Army Office in London could produce the most intricate maps and monographs. But not until 1914 did the military caste hone up their ineptness, and sniff the possibility of real homebrewed slaughter — or as near to home as they thought it reasonable to get.
37
In the diversionary attack at Gommecourt the 5th and 7th battalions of the Sherwood Foresters came out of their trenches, which were a foot deep in mud, and went towards the German lines.
During the week prior to the attack both battalions, like the rest of the 46th Division, had been continuously soaked to the skin, set in pouring rain at the hardest physical labour on trenches and earthworks. None of them had a night’s sleep during this time, so that when they walked to their deaths on the morning in question they were like men only half alive. ‘I just went with the others,’ Edgar said to my father, ‘when the officer pointed his gun and shouted. None of us knew what we were doing. Or what to expect. We were all done in.’
If August 8th, 1918, was, as Ludendorff said, the blackest day in the annals of the German Army (and there is no reason to disbelieve him, though it was even blacker in 1945), it is equally true that July 1st, 1916, when Haig commenced his attack on the Somme, was a similarly dark day in the history of the British nation. Within ten minutes of the attack starting 60,000 men had fallen to the fire of a hundred German machine-gunners, and to their artillery. This is nearly as many casualties suffered by all sides during the whole day of the Battle of Waterloo.
‘Still,’ Edgar went on, ‘we hadn’t far to go. Not much more than a quarter of a mile between us and the Jerries. About from the White Horse to the Boulevard pub. We might as well have been trying to get at the moon.’
Laden with 70 pounds of equipment they clambered over the parapets and walked across no-man’s-land in parade-ground formation, a fact which all official and many unofficial histories mention with pride. The Germans who watched them advance under a cloudless sky and shot whole lines of them down spoke highly of their courage. A seven-day bombardment before the attack had merely driven the Germans into their underground dugouts, some or which were forty feet deep and supplied with electric light, so that when on July 1st the bombardment stopped as a clear signal that the attack was about to begin, their machine-gunners rushed up to what remained of the parapets to meet the ‘flower of British manhood’.
At half past seven in the morning it came across no-man’s-land at a slow walk, having been led to believe that the guns had by this time smashed every living and resisting thing in their path, and that they more or less had only to stroll forward and ‘take over’ the German defences. In fact the walls of barbed wire had hardly been breached by millions of shells, which they discovered to their short-lived horror when they bunched up in hundreds at the few gaps open, and fell in heaps under the fire of the German gunners.
Those few who came back crawled across no-man’s-land at dusk, after waiting in shell-holes all day. Edgar wasn’t killed or wounded, and neither did he return to his own side. They would only have sent him on some other stunt, he said, which might really have killed him off, or he would have deserted on active service and got shot for it. With a dogged sort of insanity and courage he stayed in a shell-hole between the opposing trenches, hoping to surrender to the Germans as soon as it was possible.
Tortured by hunger and thirst, but above all fear, he many times wanted to go back to the comfort of his own unit but was afraid that, being unwounded and without his rifle, he would be caught on a charge of desertion. Cries of dying and wounded surrounded him. On the attack across no-man’s-land he had gone through rolls of wire as high as walls, and back through them again without knowing it. Just before dropping into the shell-hole he was aware of a young officer, his arm hanging bloodily loose, running by him and shrieking: ‘Hopeless! Hopeless!’
Edgar had collapsed through total exhaustion, and nobody bothered him because they were too intent on trying to save themselves, though few of them did. He did not know how long he lay in the crater, nor could he remember being picked up by the Germans, but after what seemed years he found himself sitting in one of their trenches, and recalled that they had treated him with every kindness.
When a German aeroplane on a mission of mercy and courtesy flew over the British front on July 4th and dropped a list of wounded and unwounded prisoners that their side had taken, Edgar’s name was on it.
Both battalions of Sherwood Foresters were wiped out in this diversionary attack. No gains were expected, and none were made. Blinds were drawn in every Nottingham street, for the battalions had suffered over 1,200 casualties on this small sector, and another Forester battalion lost 500 men further south. The only small advance was on the extreme right of the twenty-mile front where British troops, attacking in co-operation with the French left, had the assistance of their more efficient artillery.
The British staff considered the day’s battle a success because the New Armies, over which so much care was said to have been taken, had stood up well under fire. In other words, they had died rather than run away, though some officers were to complain afterwards how difficult and at times impossible it had been to get men who had been designated to carry wire into no-man’s-land to form up and become part of an attacking wave.