Again, he almost laughed out loud, and certainly he was grinning, and knew that close beside him Corporal Blaydon had noticed it and was watching him.
They had stopped and were fanning out, wriggling sideways in the mud. Barton peered ahead. Moved a little further. He was very close to their wire now, he heard a whisper quite clearly.
‘Nein. Wo ist der Kapitän?’
‘Achtung!’
He went still. But they were hammering stakes, he thought, the man had not been calling attention to his presence. Besides, the Germans would not imagine that anyone was mad enough to come out on a raid through this wet and darkness. The hammering noise went on, only slightly muffled and then another, unidentifiable sound, though the voices had ceased. It was impossible to see anything of the trench, even though he moved another yard further forward. The wire was much thicker than their own, and more expertly coiled. All of which they knew. All of which…
When the shell exploded, it threw Barton on to his back and he lay staring up, baffled, into the darkness, watching the livid flare of the explosion, and then the green of another Verey light. He felt strangely relaxed by the brightness and the patterns in the sky. Machine gun fire, and then another shell, much closer, the Germans must have got the measure of them. Beside him, Blaydon was whispering, ‘Get back, we’ve got to get back!’
Someone was crying out, and Barton wanted to tell him to be quiet before he realized that the man was wounded. He felt himself bump up against something, touched the cloth of a tunic. It had gone dark again and the rifle bullets were coming now, over the short space between them and the enemy front line. There was a soft thud to his left. Then Hilliard’s voice behind him.
‘Get on with it. Duck and run.’
‘There’s…’
‘Get on!’
Another shell but ahead this time, as though the enemy were trying to block their retreat. As Barton struggled forward, slipped into water, pulled himself out again, he wondered what had happened, what had raised the alarm. He thought they had been entirely unnoticed. Then there was the cry again. He had gone some way beyond it. Someone passed him, he could not tell who, and then, for a moment, he seemed to be quite alone in the darkness. The cry again.
‘Come on, Barton.’
‘There’s a man wounded.’
‘I know. It’s Coulter. I can’t help him. Get on.’
‘But he…’
‘Shut up. If you’re down first warn the sentry that it’s us.’
‘You can’t leave him there.’
‘He’s too bad to bring in now, we’d never find him, we’d never make it. And we shouldn’t be talking.’
Gunfire again. Barton was frantic. ‘Look…’
Hilliard said, ‘I order you to go on.’
Barton felt the water running down his back under the tunic, and mackintosh, and tasted it too, foul and rusty in his mouth. Behind them there was silence now. Hilliard said nothing else. They waited again. Still silence.
Barton got up and began to move forward, crouching and running like a monkey, ready to drop down. Once, a Verey flare went up, but too far away to mark them out, perhaps the Germans had given up, satisfied with what they had achieved.
Then they were back in their own trench, slithering down from the parapet and a long way from the place at which they had come up. There was a pain in Barton’s chest from alternately gasping and holding his breath, and from hauling himself forward on his arms.
He said, ‘What happened?’
‘You went too near, that’s what bloody well happened. They saw you.’
‘They couldn’t have seen me.’
‘I was trying to get you to come back, you were practically on top of them. Do you realize…’
‘It’s…’
‘Ferris is dead, Moreton is dead, Coulter is probably dead and Blaydon’s got a bullet – in his arm I think.’
A few yards away, some men from Prebold’s platoon were filling sandbags. Now one of them came over, handed Hilliard a mug. ‘Tea, sir, and there’s a splash of rum. It’s not very hot, I’m afraid. Are you all right, sir?’
‘I am, thanks.’ Hilliard drank, and then handed the mug to Barton.
‘No…’
‘Drink it.’
Barton drank. The men went on with their work, perhaps sensing from their voices that something was wrong.
‘I’ve just sent along for a stretcher, sir. The Private who came in just before you, he’s got a bullet through his shoulder and his hand’s in a mess.’
‘Blaydon?’
‘I don’t know, sir. He’s in a bit of a state. We put him in the dugout. Can I get you any more of that tea, sir?’
‘No thanks, we’ve got to get back to the other end of the trench.’
‘They got the wind of you good and proper, sir.’
‘They did.’
‘It was nice and quiet till you went out.’
‘Sorry. Everything all right here?’
‘Oh yes, they didn’t come near us, sir, it wasn’t us they were after! We’re all right.’
‘Good. But you’d better tell the men to watch out for a bit, now they’ve woken up. Keep it as quiet as you can.’
‘We know what we’re doing, sir.’
‘All right. Thanks for the tea.’
As they moved up the trench they met the stretcher bearers. Standing aside for them. Barton thought he heard a cry again, from out in the darkness.
‘Hilliard…’
But he had already gone ahead. Barton waited. Still silence. In the end, he thought he must have imagined it.
Captain Franklin was waiting in their dugout. He said at once, ‘You’ve lost three men.’
‘Yes, sir. And one wounded.’
‘What on earth happened? They shelled you pretty accurately, didn’t they?’
‘Yes. I suppose we were quite close. And it was very quiet. They obviously heard something.’
‘Then you must have made a row.’
Hilliard’s face was stiff. ‘I don’t think so. We were unlucky. They found out where we were first go and let us have it.’
‘What did you see, anyway?’
‘Nothing much.’
‘Are they bringing up ammunition?’
‘I couldn’t tell. There was fetching and carrying, certainly.’
‘There is always fetching and carrying,’ Franklin said coldly.
‘Quite.’
For a moment the Adjutant stood, stick under his arm, his face, as always, expressionless. Then he turned. ‘Put your report in as soon as you can, will you?’ He went out.
‘John…’
‘Shut up. It’s all over and done with. You’ve never been out there before and it can happen to anyone. It probably wasn’t your fault anyway. Now forget it please.’
Hilliard sat down at the packing case, turned up the lamp and began to write. He was still wearing his mackintosh and the mud was drying in his hair.
Barton said, ‘Coulter…’
‘Coulter’s dead.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He must be. I saw the state he was in,’ Hilliard said shortly. He went on with his report.
It is still raining and very cold. They have moved us back again to where we were before, only in the front not the support line. But things are very slightly better because, in our absence, the 8th Division have been in and made very good work indeed of repairing these trenches. We spent two nights in billets in what had been a convent school which had a rather beautiful chapel with some 15th-century wall paintings. They had been badly neglected and damaged but the men took the place as a good omen for this next tour.
Our dugout this time is only a few yards away from the o.p. in which I sat to draw my map that terrible day – though you could scarcely believe it is the same place now the weather has changed. There has also been some bombarding of the wood along the top of the ridge by our guns, so that the trees there have begun to look a bit like the old familiar stumps of rotten black teeth. It is so easy to destroy landscape, it takes a couple of days of really bad fighting and strafing, plus this rain, to turn what was beautiful (in spite of the war and everything littered about) into the most frightful scarred waste. I feel we shall have this on our consciences every bit as much as the deaths of men. What right have we to do such damage to the earth? After all, you may say that man can do what he likes with himself but he should not involve the innocent natural world. John disagrees, he says that a tree grows again and grass covers the craters in no time, but a man is dead, is dead, is dead. The animal and bird life seem to survive as a sort of undercurrent to the life of the war, but I wonder how much we have destroyed of that too, and what it is like for these creatures to live down in the earth among the bodies, and to be deprived of leaves and grass and thickets for cover, or to live in the air which is rent by shell blasts and full of dust and smoke and flying metal objects. The men are forbidden to keep pets or to feed the birds, but some of Prebold’s platoon had a hedgehog to which they were giving bits of meat and sweetened tea. It then began to dig itself into the side of the trench among some of the sandbags, to hibernate. Until Fakely from that platoon (a strange and rather vicious person) began to get nervous and told everyone that hedgehogs were unlucky and boded evil and death (as if anything didn’t bode that, out here!). But he got himself believed – superstition, like the ghost stories, is rife here just now, it seems to pander to the prevailing atmosphere of fear and the constant tension, and also to add a sort of spice to boredom. So in the end they dug, and dragged the wretched small hedgehog out of its dark hole and slung it over the parapet, where it lay on its back, half stunned, half dormant. I happened to be going along just then and saw the whole incident. I can truthfully say it was the first sign of any kind of unfeelingness I have encountered here. I was very angry, irrationally so, and sickened. I then did a most stupid thing, which was to climb up over the parapet and go through the wire and crawl on my belly to retrieve the creature. I might very easily have been shot – I was a good target. Whether they thought I was attending to someone wounded (they often hold their fire if that happens, as we do) or whether I was simply not seen at all, I don’t know, but miraculously, there was complete silence, the enemy might just as well not have existed and I got back safely, the hedgehog in my hands. It was crawling with fleas and most prickly. I felt a very great fool but I put it back in the hole in the trench side and covered it up and if it doesn’t get blown out of hibernation into kingdom come it may live to see the spring and perhaps even a quieter world.