He frowned at the sinister sky once more, and left.
Dawn, 24 April 1918
Aquenne Wood, near Cachy
At 3 a.m., all the way along the front line, as far as Stanley could see, the men of the 13th Brigade stood to on the fire step. He heard too the time-bomb tick-tick-tick of Fidget’s watch.
A platoon leader brought the rum ration round in a two-gallon stone jar. ‘Open up, open up,’ he said to each man.
His pulse throbbing like a drum, Stanley took the rum for the first time, hoping to still his pounding heart, but it burned his throat and took his breath away.
Haloes of luminous mist cradled the hollows and crevices of the plain. A whispered word of warning flew like wind along the trench. Stanley’s blood ran cold, fear for himself and fear for Pistol compounded into one.
At three thirty, platoon leaders up and down the front line blew their whistles. The Australians climbed over their parapets, bayonets fixed. Stanley scrabbled for his own bayonet, to poke a hole in the breastwork of the trench, boring like a worm through wood, a rivulet of sand spilling down the parapet wall. Like the gunners, he could now see without raising his head above the parapet. Eye to the hole, he saw buff and grey and blue lines of men bursting the bounds of trenches he didn’t even know were there – to the right the French blue, directly ahead the Australian buff and some English khaki, together, guns raised, bayonets fixed, a flood of men, advancing in silence.
Behind the wave of attacking riflemen followed four Signallers, two carrying a wire on a reel, paying it out as they went, two others carrying lamps, phones and spare wires. The wires would run from the posts the advancing Signallers hoped to set up back to the Signal Station.
The heavy guns burst into fire.
‘Three thousand howitzers – we’ve got three thousand howitzers along this front!’ yelled Fidget, his voice round with pride.
The howitzers flashed and blazed, firing shells that screeched like a vast tearing of linen in tremendous arcs across the sky, leaving red shooting-star trails till, at the top of their arc, they dipped and flashed red in a distant boom.
‘They’re forming a barrage – a barrage of fire, to move along in front of the infantry – to protect them.’ Fidget gestured to the horrifying, terrifying continuous arc of flame that ran for as far north as Stanley could see – perhaps ten miles long. Fidget laughed happily.
‘We caught him sleeping. Jerry was sleeping.’
At four Jerry opened up, and now every gun in the world was firing, the earth upheaving, the whole horizon alight. So long as everything went well, so long as the lines held, then there’d be no need for Pistol. ‘Keep advancing, hold the line, keep advancing,’ the boy prayed, his mouth dry with fear. ‘Hold the line and Pistol will be OK.’
You could no longer tell whose shells were whose. Between the smoke and the mist Stanley couldn’t see more than twenty-five yards ahead, could only see flares and flames, explosions, stabs and flashes of coloured light. Cordite filled the air and drifted towards him. The whistles and shrieks of shells, the roar of the artillery, the swishing of bullets all mingled into one tremendous, continuous roar so that his eardrums tore with infernal, maddening noise that seemed to come from both within and without.
The world was breaking into pieces, Stanley’s heart jumping as chunks of earth and rock and splinters leaped into the air. Pieces of stone and lumps of earth as big – bigger than – a man were falling like hail. Shells burst with a bluish hue, ripping the earth apart, spewing hundreds and hundreds of tons of earth skyward, turning the country into a mass of crawling flame, killing any feeling inside him other than fear for Pistol.
‘Four miles – that’s a four-mile frontage – The enemy’s replying over four miles,’ shouted Fidget into Stanley’s ear. ‘They want Villers . . . ’
There was a new jumpiness in Fidget’s fraying exhilaration, an excessive mobility in his face, in his fluttering fingers. Had Fidget spent too long at the Front? He’d had no leave, Stanley knew, had returned immediately to the Front after leaving Stanley and Bones at the ambulance.
To Stanley’s right a sudden, horrifying cliff of fire rose up, shades of green and brown and grey, all fused together. That was the front line surely – was enemy fire falling now behind the front lines? There to the right – was it falling behind the front line to Stanley’s right? There – just where Stanley had been watching, a Very light went up. That white magnesium blaze was the Allies’ SOS signal. Something was wrong up there on the right, where clouds of smoke bellowed out and shooting tongues of flame licked the sky. How could the lines of communication hold when the bowels of the earth were open? And if the lines failed, what then? They’d not send a dog, surely, into such an inferno?
At a quarter to five a feeble dawn began to creep across the battlefield. Not a bird had risen to greet the day. The Front was being very heavily shelled, the earth beneath Stanley shaking like a jelly, the air trembling and boiling. Seismic quavering rippled to the edge of the trench, triggering cascades of earth over his helmet. What was happening? Where was Pistol? Had the bombardment moved closer? Was it aiming for the reserve lines? It was impossible to see what was going on; the enemy might be putting down a smoke barrage. Stanley’s eyes ached and stung.
The heavens finally cracked. A thunderstorm crashed and rolled across the plain. Rain pounded and hammered the earth. Very lights soared like shooting stars above the Allied lines, flaring against the glistening curtains of rain. Things were going very badly.
Would Pistol be sent out into this? Was Tom out there? For a few seconds, Stanley closed his eyes, then turned away. The unbearable fear, the noise and the fear together, might fracture him, split him in two. It was beyond bearing; he must think of something else to fight it off. There – Stanley bent to the streaming wall of the parapet: a crowd of stag-horn beetles trotting up and down. That chalky soil, turned slippery in the rain, was now just the place for a stag-horn. They’d appeared with the rain, hordes of them, with their armoured bodies and antler-type mandibles. The stegosaurus of beetles. Beetles, Stanley remembered, were everywhere, in every niche on earth, from the most arid desert to the swampiest wetland. Everywhere except Antarctica.
Hamish had come up from below and was looking over the top. Stanley shrugged off his raincoat and held it over the two of them to shelter them from the rain that battered down through the netting cover.
‘We’ll never see anything like this again – never. It’s the largest artillery bombardment any of us will surely ever see,’ bellowed Hamish.
‘Are the lines holding?’ Stanley shouted back.
‘Aye . . . so far . . . So far they’re holding . . . but Villers is surrounded by enemy machine guns on the north, west and south. Amiens is under direct observation. The Hun’s got a pocket four miles wide and one mile deep around Villers –’ Hamish gestured towards the two groups of trees to the north-east, barely discernible – ‘and parts of Monument and Hangard Woods.’
There were shouts from the Signal Station, panic and pandemonium below.
‘A Company gone!’
Hamish leaped away down the steps.
‘B Company gone!’
‘C Company OK!’
‘Message from C Company. We are surrounded, sir, what do we do?’
Was Pistol with C Company?
Two linesmen rushed out and scuttled over the top, crawling like rats, forward and downward in the drenching rain.