‘C Company gone!’
Hamish rushed up the stairs and along the trench, stern and grey, his coat running with water like a Highland waterfall. He put his eye to the telescope. A few seconds passed.
‘All gone. All dead.’ There was disbelief in his voice. ‘No communication with the front line.’
Stanley held his helmet over the lens to keep off the rain.
‘Dead!’ Hamish said again. ‘All of them, one by one, all dead.’
The linesmen were slithering onward. Stanley watched them, shaking and horrified. It was impossible, surely, under such rain, such fire, to find and repair the ends of wires, but he still prayed. ‘Find the ends. Please find the ends of the wires. Don’t let them send Pistol.’
Hamish swung the telescope back and forth, back and forth along the horizon. ‘C Company surrounded . . . All forward visual stations . . . destroyed. All gone. All lines of communication down.’ He turned aghast to Stanley. ‘We’ve nothing, no communication with the front line.’ Hamish shook his head in horror. ‘No semaphore. No signal lamp. Pigeons. Nothing in this –’ he gestured to the rain. ‘They can’t send for artillery support, can’t SOS . . . Nothing . . .’
‘Wh-where is he? Is Pistol with C Company?’
Hamish paused and looked shocked for a second. Then he turned and, as though talking to an uncomprehending child, said gently, ‘No, laddie. B – he’s with B Company.’
Hamish left, and Stanley stood under the pounding rain, eardrums tearing with the unending noise. To his forward right, the Allied lines looked thin and confused. No more than a brigade here and a brigade there. The church tower, on the vulnerable spur of the plateau jutting out to the west, was smouldering. What was happening? Where was Fidget? Fidget would know. Had the front line broken? Were men pulling back? Where was Pistol?
Still the drenching rain thundered on. The ditches had stretched out into glistening bogs, the intricate lacework of the streams blocked by the shelling, the ground turned to a quagmire. Soaked to the marrow, a stream of water pouring off the back of his helmet and down his neck, Stanley saw figures dribbling back from the front line, from the wood known as the Monument, stumbling and sinking in the soupy ground.
Everything was wringing wet. The sump ditch had overflown, the trench, already puddled, filled steadily. There was a frog on the duckboards. Funny how the frogs didn’t mind the shelling but the mice had the wind up and had gone underground. If he could only stop his legs shaking, his fingers, his heart shaking, Stanley thought, he could focus his field glasses on that shell hole below, the closest one, and there’d be more frogs, marsh frogs probably, ten or twenty of them in that. Trigger, wherever he was, would be amused by the marsh frogs.
Captain McManus came up.
‘Where’s the dog? Is he not in? Please God they’ll have sent the dog . . . They’ve nothing else . . .’ He started and clutched Stanley. ‘Look, Stanley – he’s here – he’s in – he’s in . . .’
Stanley leaped. There – in the confusion of smoke and fog and the glistening curtain of rain, was Pistol, racing like a silver shadow across the greedy, gleaming morass, skimming it as easily and lightly as a bird. There was that long grey head, the commonplace dog with the laughing eyes. Stanley spun on a Catherine wheel of love and pride.
There was the sudden screech of a heavy shell.
‘Run, Pistol, run . . . run,’ breathed Stanley.
The shell dipped at its arc and crashed to the ground some forty feet below Pistol. The ground beneath Stanley shook and rattled, the earth of the parapet cascaded down, but the dog never so much as flinched – was still running onward.
‘What a dog, laddie, what a dog!’
Stanley pulled aside the sodden, battered Queen Anne’s lace on the parapet to see, then yanked aside the camouflage, ready for Pistol, feeling for the titbit in his pocket, watching with bated breath as the dog leaped over the fire step and, in a single fluid motion, sat, breathless, tongue loose, panting, grinning, panting, grinning. There was something about this dog, this nondescript dog he’d once thought he’d never love, something in those laughing eyes, that gripped Stanley’s heartstrings now like a vice. Stanley knew, at this moment, and with total certainty, that he must never, ever lose him.
Stanley’s hands trembled as he unscrewed the cylinder. He noted the time of departure given on the note – 9.30 a.m. – and handed the message to James.
‘Good boy, good.’ Stanley fed Pistol the bully beef. James bent and patted Pistol, then, sheltering under Stanley’s raincoat, glanced at the note and checked his watch.
‘Nine thirty-seven. I salute your dog, Keeper Ryder. Nearly four miles in seven minutes.’ James looked down. ‘From B Company,’ he said, then read aloud so Stanley could hear. ‘Front-line companies, Second East Lancs and Second West Yorks forced back from the Monument to the north, to railway station, making our way westward along railway line to north-east corner of Aquenne Wood. Enemy troops have taken Villers and Monument, and infiltrating the Aquenne Wood from the Monument. All Signallers in forward Signal Stations killed or captured. All lines of communication down. Remains of Yorks and Lancs are surrounded in the Monument, have no ammunition, no supplies. German position attacking not known. Further attacks expected.’
Stanley looked up at James. The East Lancs? Tom – was he with them, surrounded and with no supplies? ‘Infiltrating the Aquenne’? Coming here? He clutched at James’s coat.
‘The East Lancs?’
But James had already turned, was hurling himself down the steps to the Signal Station shouting, ‘They’ll be decimated!’
The field glasses were streaming – Stanley must wipe them, but his hands were wet, his coat sodden. Men were pouring along the communication trench to Stanley’s right, crowding into the intersection beyond Fidget’s hole, collecting in the back lines – men with no puttees and torn tunics. There were shouts that the right flank was coming back in disarray.
Somewhere an officer bellowed, ‘Retreat! Retreat! Turn round and run like blazes!’
There was shooting in all directions.
‘Take cover! Take cover!’
‘Collect Mills bombs, arm yourselves. Keep moving backwards. Take up position one hundred yards back.’ Stanley’s parapet was whipped by a hailstorm of bullets. Everyone was down on all fours in the sump water of the trench. By Fidget’s hole, men were yelling and firing. In the division of the trench beyond Fidget was a shaft crowded with wounded men, helpless and immobile, a jumble of men of all stripes.
‘Move on! Move on!’
There was a screech. The earth of the parapet spewed up. Dirt rained over Stanley in avalanches. Showers of mud and metal collapsed the roof netting, shells pinging as they hit the corrugated iron cover of the Signal Station.
‘Move on, move on!’
To Stanley’s left, the artillerymen collected on the fire step, leaped down into the stream of wounded men, keeping low, half crawling along the duckboards.
‘Down the trench. Down the trench.’
Stanley hesitated. Where were the Signallers? What would James’s instructions be? He forced his way against the flood of men, towards the Signal Station, knowing without looking that Pistol would be at his heels. Bullets whistled and screeched overhead. There was James on the stairs to the Station. Behind him followed a caterpillar of signallers, runners, a trench mortar officer, the wireless operator – all mud-smeared, lugging boxes, cables, tables, the Fuller-phone, emerging, blinking into the light like strange, earth-dwelling slugs.
At the far end of the straight bay, the Australian Brigadier-General was running against the flow of crawling men, yelling at them.