We’ve found the tank. The good news is that it’s in one piece. I’m sure Lieutenant Everson will be pleased about that. The bad news is that the crew seem to have gone native and, as Porgy said, if you’ve seen the natives, that’s not a good thing!
On the positive side, we’ve had our first proper food after a couple of days existing on emergency iron rations.
I know I didn’t want Nellie Abbott to accompany us, but she really is a good sort. She’s kept up with the marching and hasn’t complained once, even when Gutsy got his feet out for a foot inspection. Talk about plates of meat! If those are a sample of his wares, I’ll not be shopping at his shop when I get back. She packed out a haversack and webbing full of first aid stuff. I’ve no idea where she managed to get it all from, but I’d say Mercy has a rival in the scrounging stakes.
I think you’d like her, Flora. She has a good heart and a strong spirit.
I’m scared, though. For days now, the perfume on your last letter has been fading. I dread the day I can no longer smell it, for on that day you will have drifted just a little bit further from me and Lord knows you’re far enough away already.
Tomorrow it seems we’re going hunting, but given the size of some of the game here, I’m never sure that’s too wise.
I hope you are well. I think of you and our baby often. Will it be a boy or a girl, do you think?
CHAPTER NINE
AS A NEW day dawned, the second Khungarrii attack advanced steadily on the trenches, but the Pennines were ready.The outer ring of fire trenches facing the enemy was fully manned. In the centre were the two full companies of Fusiliers fit enough for duty. Either side of them, ‘Fred Karno’s Army,’ the companies of partially drilled and trained urmen platoons, stood armed with spears, swords, slings and longbows. They only had about a hundred longbows; still, it was enough to assess their potential. If they didn’t get home first, the Pennines would have to get used to fighting with weapons like this once their ammunition ran out.
Salvaged Leach trench catapults, with a range of two hundred yards, and originally used for hurling grenades, were loaded with stones.
Over on the left flank, a copse of tall saplings had hastily been commissioned as rudimentary catapults. Bent back, ropes held the supple trunks under tension. They had been stripped of boughs, and large woven slings had been attached to their upper ends and the cups loaded with large hard-shelled segmented pods, shrapnel fruit or ‘shrapples’ as some of the men called them. They’d lost several men to the shard-like seeds as they exploded out from their pods. It had been Poilus’s idea. In nature, if you could ever call this place natural, the parent tree would fling these rugby ball-sized seed pods away from itself and the things would burst on impact, flinging seeds and shell in a wide circle with explosive velocity in order to propagate the plant. It was crude and difficult to aim, but they didn’t have to worry about accuracy. Unused to open warfare on such a scale, the chatts charged bunched up, with little cover.
Everson scanned the oncoming army through his field glasses. Assuming the chatts didn’t change tactics, his plan should hold together. If it didn’t he had a few surprises up his sleeves, but they were far from inexhaustible.
There had been days on the Somme when Everson had cursed having to stick to a battle plan devised days or weeks before; plans that only worked if conditions were perfect and the enemy did exactly what was expected of them, which they very rarely did. Nevertheless, the plan could not be deviated from and must be followed to the letter. Stilted thinking like that needlessly cost thousands of lives. Here, there was no immutable battle plan to which they had to stick. No pig-headed red tabs ready to march men into a maelstrom of machine gun fire, simply because that was what the original plan had said they must do, no matter what the changes of circumstance on the battlefield. He was free to respond as he saw fit, to adapt his tactics. God help him, there was a kind of exhilaration in that, especially as he watched the chatts marching towards them.
On the other hand, everything now rested on his shoulders and his shoulders alone.
It was a stroke of good fortune that somehow, the poppies seemed to disrupt their chemical communication and scent orders, confusing the chatt soldiers, and Everson had no hesitation in taking advantage of it. He would look into whys and wherefores later.
The plan involved something akin to a box barrage, boxing the enemy in, forcing them to attack the centre. That was their cone of fire. The heavy Vickers guns on the flanks would drive the chatts into the centre, where the poppy field spread out across the alien veldt. There, disorientated, unable to attack or regroup, the chatts would be in the Lewis guns’ cone of fire, with the Vickers guns then able to enfilade the chatts from their flanks. It was risky, but less of a risk than letting them flank and surround the encampment.
On the right flank, soft hollow whumps signalled the beginning of the defence as plum puddings soared smokily into the air from trench mortar positions, exploding amid the chatt ranks, throwing whole bodies and limbs into the air.
THE FUSILIERS MANNED the fire steps, bayonets fixed.
Sergeant Hobson patrolled the fire bays, holding the line. “Look to your front. Hold your fire,” he bellowed. “Look to your front. Hold your fire.”
The men of Everson’s old 2 Platoon stood nervously on fire steps. Behind them in the trench, Sergeant Hobson marshalled them, dispensing fatherly advice, bolstering a crumbling private here, sharing a joke to keep the spirits up there. “Make sure you keep your gas helmets handy, lads. You know what them buggers are like for spitting acid. Woodward, you keep ’em in your sights, son. Skelton, put that magazine cut-off back to its shut position. Did I give you permission to open it?”
“No, Sarn’t. I just thought—”
“You don’t have to think, lad. Thinking gets you into trouble.”
Hobson knew they couldn’t afford any nervous shooters. Every bullet that fell short or went wide was wasted and they couldn’t afford to squander a single round. Soon they would have to take the enemy on hand-to-hand, he had no doubt about that. The fighting would be hard and bloody and, for some, it would be short.
“Wait ’til you see the whites of their — Well, wait ’til you can see their eyes, you can’t bloody miss ’em, isn’t that that right, Benton?”
“Yes Sarn’t!”
THIS TIME, THE scentirrii general, Rhengar, held back its battlepillars. As the ranks of scentirrii came into range, sappers cut the lines holding the saplings and the trunks whipped up, flinging their rope slings into the air. Shrapnel fruit arced out across the wire weed entanglements. The seed segments exploded with a velocity that tore through carapaces, decapitating and shredding the chatts around the impact sites.
The first wave of chatts used the corpses of the already slain battlepillars as bridgeheads and springboards to leap across the wire weed. Slings, arrows and bullets picked them off and they fell into the waiting thickets, where the barbed tendrils pulled them down into a deadly embrace.
Once over the wire weed, they would again be in the poppy field.
“Watch your heads, lads. Fix staves!” ordered Sergeant Hobson.
Gas gongs were beaten. “Gas! Gas! Gas!”
Men fumbled at the gas bags on their chests and pulled on their gas hoods that would protect them not from gas, but the acid spit of the chatt scentirrii.
One man in every bay dropped from the fire step to fix sharpened, vertical twelve-foot staves into the sump of the trenches behind them. They had seen the scentirrii leap over their defences and into their trenches before. This time they would be ready.