He felt giddy.
‘We’ve had enough silly bloody accidents.’
Garrett drained his tea and looked about for matches. ‘You’d better go back,’ he said, and now he seemed abstracted, no longer sure why he had sent for Hilliard or what he was going to do next. But as an afterthought, as Hilliard reached the door, he said ‘Keep quiet about all this of course.’
‘Certainly, sir.’
‘I suppose they’ll change their minds, as I’ve told you, we shall find ourselves shunted off somewhere or other. It may all come to nothing.’
But it will not, Hilliard thought, and knew that Garrett knew it would not. Sooner or later, they would be going up to Barmelle Wood, the ridge, Queronne – they were on the plans, to be attacked and captured now, since they had not been taken that summer. There would be the long, tedious preparations by night, the waiting and the orders and then, over the top. They would take the place of the Hampshires, who had failed here in July, and the City of London Regiment, who failed last month. For some reason known only to those seated round the tables with their maps, this particular place mattered so much.
So tomorrow, then, or the day after, or at the beginning of next week, sometime, they would leave their dugout with the comfortable bunks and the gramophone, and march a mile along the communication trenches, and up the road to the front line, and into the thick of daily shelling and nightly raids, they would spend hours without sleep, fetching and carrying up and down the dark winding trenches, hours writing more and more reports, and the atmosphere would be more strained and tense than ever. It had been the same in July.
Yet it would not be the same as July, they had been excited then, they had planned for the coming battle, which was to be the last, the battle to end the war, they had been confident and purposeful, jubilant even, they had not minded the tiredness and the heat and the slow, tedious work of preparation, the accidents and the danger.
1 July had come and gone. And all the days after. It was not the same now. But it had all begun again.
Hilliard dropped down into the trench, and began to walk along towards the dugout. The smoke was going up from the cooking fires ahead. It was quiet for the time being, the guns might not have been there, hidden towards the east.
Coulter came round a traverse. ‘There you are, sir. The Adjutant wants to see you. Some trouble over kit inspection.’
‘All right. Thanks, Coulter.’ He paused. He did not want to go on. He wanted to stay here, in the sun.
Coulter said casually, ‘I take it we’re not expecting Mr Barton back until dark, sir?’
‘No.’ Hilliard forced himself to take a breath, to relax. ‘No, of course.’
He went to find Franklin.
When they began to make their way along the front line trench, Barton felt excitement churning in the pit of his stomach. It was his first real job, one for which he was entirely responsible, he had nobody, not even John, behind him. Only the runner, Grosse, guiding his way.
He had not been prepared for the full extent of the noise, which was deafening when the shells came over. They were falling very close but they were mainly the heavy sort, which came with a sudden roar and at such speed that escape was impossible. You could do nothing about them, moreover, could not predict in advance where they might land, and so you simply went on, trusting to luck.
The trench was quite deep, cut into the chalk, and at the beginning the sandbags had been renewed and the parapets built up again. But as they went further on, work had ceased, the floor was a mess of rubble, and the sides badly broken. Pit props, shovels and bales of wire cluttered every traverse, and the duckboards, laid in preparation for the coming winter, and the wet weather, were often broken or rotted away.
Grosse went ahead steadily, vanishing every few yards round a traverse, so that Barton felt that he was following his own shadow, felt time and again that he was completely alone. The chalk of the trench was bright, dazzling his eyes in the midday sun. But he was exhilarated, glad that he had been chosen to come here. There was an element of chance, but that did not yet seem to be the same thing as danger.
The shells were whining down often and seemed to be falling in a direct line ahead of them as they walked. Barton came around a traverse and almost bumped into his guide.
‘What is it?’
Grosse had his head slightly on one side. ‘Just seeing which way they’re coming, sir. They’re working them to a pattern.’
There was a pause, and then, from nowhere, the loudest explosion Barton had ever heard, his eardrums seemed to crack and his head sang, the whole trench rocked as though from an earthquake. Just ahead, soil was thrown up like lava, and then there was the sound of it splattering down, mingled with pieces of shrapnel, into the trench bottom. As they moved on a few paces, they heard a scream, which came with a curious, high, swooping sound and then dropped abruptly, became a moan. Then, behind them this time, another shell.
Grosse had thrown himself down, his hands over the top of his steel helmet, pushing it almost into his skull, but Barton had only dropped on to his knees. His heart was thudding.
‘Grosse?’
The man moved, lifted his head. ‘Are you all right, sir?’
‘Are you?’
The runner stood up cautiously, brushing down his tunic. His face was still impassive. He nodded.
‘Shall we go on then?’
But as they rounded the next corner walking towards the spot from which the cry for stretcher bearers had just gone up, they came upon a total blockage in the trench-way, a mess of burst sandbags and earth, shrapnel and mutilated bodies. Blood had splattered up and over the parapet and was trickling down again, was running to form a pool, mingling with the contents of a dixie which had contained stew. The men had been getting their mid-day meal in this traverse when the bomb had landed in the middle of them.
‘Grosse…’
‘Better hold on, sir.’
‘Stretcher bearers!’
Barton said, ‘Is there an officer here?’
A man was crouching, knees buckled and apparently broken beneath him, and he looked up now, his face white and the eyes huge within it. ‘There was, sir.’ He vomited, shuddered, wiped his mouth on his tunic sleeve.
Grosse leaned over him.
It was impossible to tell how many men there had been, and now the shells were landing again, following the line of the trench further ahead. Barton wondered if they were going to meet a scene like this at every corner. He found himself staring in fascination at the shattered heap of limbs and helmets, at a bone sticking out somehow through the front of a tunic, at the blood. He felt numb.
The stretcher bearers came up, and sent back at once for more help, to dig the men out and clear up the mess. The trench parapet had a hole blown out of it like a crater.
‘We could go on, sir,’ Grosse said eventually. His voice was calm.
They went on and for a short way nothing happened, they came across parties of men eating and drinking tea and they made room for them to pass. The shell might not have fallen, such a short distance away, killing perhaps half a dozen soldiers.
They found the C Company Captain and Barton reported his presence to him, he was cleared to continue.
‘Get down!’
He got down though he had heard nothing. But the smaller, minenwerfer bombs were different, they could just be spotted, sailing down like crows through the blue sky. They watched, waited, tried to guess where this one was going to fall, ducked again.
Nothing. After a moment, Grosse got to his feet. ‘Dud,’ he said. From behind, their own guns began to fire towards the German line.
They went on again. He wondered how he was going to sit in the Observation Post and make any sort of accurate map if this heavy shelling went on, and if his eyes were drawn again and again by the sight of the minenwerfers, if he was so tense, trying to gauge each time where they would fall. But he was still somehow unafraid for himself, though his initial excitement had gone long since. Grosse’s face was grey with dust and soil. He supposed that his own must be the same.