‘Talk of the devil.’
‘Speak of angels is what you should say, sir!’ Coulter ducked involuntarily as a shell roared overhead and crashed somewhere far off, down the road. But it had been quiet tonight and all the previous day. ‘Message from Captain Franklin, sir.’
Barton looked up. Hilliard read the slip of paper, got to his feet. ‘No sleep, no supper – get your boots back on, Second Lieutenant Barton.’
‘Oh Lord…’
‘A nice little reconnaissance party all the way out there through the lovely mud, in a downpour, just the sort of adventure you’d have enjoyed at the age of nine. Coulter, send Sergeant Davies up here, would you please?’
Barton was pulling his boots on again, and then the rubber waders, reaching to his thighs. He caught Hilliard’s eye. ‘It’s what you’ve been promising me,’ he said, ‘a recce party? I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks.’
‘Quite.’
Coulter ducked his head back inside briefly. ‘Cheer up, sir. It’s stopped raining and they’ve been nice and quiet as mice across there for hours. Just right!’
‘Coulter…’
He went again rapidly, his boots making a slopping noise down the trench. Hilliard paused a moment. Then said, ‘It’s absolutely bloody pointless. Even if the rain has stopped. We won’t be able to see a thing, it’ll be like going through mud soup, we’ll get soaked – what the hell do they think they’re doing? We can see all we want to see of their lines from the o.p. during the day and they’ve been sending planes over every half hour.’
‘What are we supposed to be finding out?’
‘Oh, everything.’ Hilliard began to look about for his compass and stick. ‘All possible information you know. Everything.’
‘Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted,’ Barton said. ‘Field Service Regulations Part I Chapter 6.’
Hilliard shot him a look.
‘Will you go and meet Davies? We need eight volunteers, but don’t let Devine come, though he’ll ask to – he isn’t fit. And not Lawrence, either, he’ll make a noise enough to wake the dead and then panic. Tell them to black their buttons and their faces. And you do the same of course.’
‘What with?’
Hilliard smiled. ‘Mud, dear boy, mud. If you look carefully you should find the odd bit of it around somewhere. All right?’
Barton was watching him with something like glee. He said, ‘Who was talking just now about potential Commanding Officers? What about you? You’re enjoying this, it’s exactly what you like, getting something organized, giving out the orders, making sure it all goes like clockwork. You should be a General before you’re forty.’
‘It helps to pass the time, that’s all.’
‘Oh, come! You enjoy it.’
Hilliard stopped in the doorway, looked back. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No I don’t. And nor will you.’
‘Well, you can cope, anyway.’
‘That’s not exactly the same thing, is it? Are you ready now?’
Jenner and Moreton had been cutting the wire but there was still a good deal to get through before they made enough of a gap for the party to go out. Hilliard sent Coulter back to the dugout for his own pair of wire cutters, bought in the Army and Navy Stores. Waiting, he had a sudden recollection of that day, it seemed like a dream, a mirage of heat and sunlight and elegant crowds, of idleness and chatter and money to be spent at heaped counters, he could not believe in it. The wire cutters were far more use than the standard issue, with which the two men had been struggling.
There were six of them, besides Barton and himself, and including Coulter. He looked at them and saw how ludicrous they were, smeared with mud, their steel helmets exchanged for the ugly, dark woollen balaclavas.
The air smelled moist and thick with mud and stale shell dust, but there was still a faint sweetness, as in any countryside after rain. The sky was completely clouded over – the dry spell would not last. Along their own line they heard the night sounds, the breathing of the men coming up the trench with nightly rations and pit props, bales of wire, sandbags, the suck-plash of their boots in the mud, and then a bump, a soft curse, muffled at once, the occasional creak as someone trod on a duckboard as though into the bottom of a boat. The evening meal was over, and because of the rain it was hard to light fires now, even in the deepest dugout, so that the men lived on tins of cold bully beef, bread and jam and the stew which came up in the dixies and was lukewarm by the time it arrived. Only tea was made on the spot and came in the tin mugs, sweet and dark and boiling hot.
The news of their departure was passed along to their own sentries, then they climbed out one by one and slithered between the wire. Hilliard, going last, snagged the back of his tunic and felt his skin taken off.
They got down and moved on their hands and knees, in total darkness, and at once the wetness of the earth soaked through them. The going was slower than snail’s pace. But for several minutes there were no Verey flares sent up. Hilliard, at the far end of the line and a yard ahead, could not believe that their luck would last and as he thought it, a light shot up, green and beautiful as a firework from the enemy line. It soared and burst like a fan, casting a pale, haunting light over the whole area. They had flopped down on to their stomachs at once, heads pressed into the ground. Hilliard felt his face touch against the cold mud. Just behind him, Coulter had gone into a shallow water-filled shell-hole. Hilliard waited. There was a faint splash and plop, like a frog going into a pond, as the batman pulled himself out, half inch by half inch. Eventually, he touched Hilliard’s ankle, signalling that they could go on. The Verey flare had died away.
After another few yards, they could crawl on their hands and knees again. But weighed down as they were with revolvers and the grenades and bayonets, they felt the drag of each slow forward movement, their shoulders and thighs were already aching.
At the other end of the line Barton tried to release the cramp in his foot. He could see nothing at all, they might have been down a mine. So where was the point, how would they be able to tell anything at all about the lie of the land or the enemy front line which could not, as Hilliard had said, be seen through the periscopes in daylight, or on photographs taken from their planes in the air?
They seemed to be going on for hours. His foot was throbbing again and the thought of gangrene flitted through his mind, he smiled at the ludicrousness of it. All the same, he was worried that this was another thing the war had done to him. He usually took it for granted that he was never ill and that if he were it was nothing, he would get better quickly and without complications. Now, a small injury to his foot was worrying him disproportionately, his mind kept returning to it.
Suddenly, they heard voices, he realized that they were much nearer to the German line than he had guessed. The sounds they could hear were the same as their own, the bump of sandbags, shovelling, soft footsteps, the clip-clip of wire cutters. He imagined a similar party, also making a reconnaissance raid, imagined both groups of men crawling steadily towards one another with muddied faces, until they bumped, nose to nose, and panicked, sprawling in confusion and, because they could not see, risked nothing except immediate retreat. It seemed so insane, so like something out of a boy’s adventure paper, that he snorted with laughter, and then stuffed his fist into his mouth to silence the noise. He was soaked and cold and cramped, but curiously elated, the whole movement had such an air of unreality. He imagined the report they would put in. ‘We progressed through thick mud in total darkness, and therefore were unable to get the expected clear view of the enemy line. We ascertained that there was a line, and that this contained men. This was deduced from the sound of a faint cough, and two whispers. The fact that these were German men was deduced from the foreign sound of the cough and whisper (see above).’