A maze of barbed wire surrounded the trenches, and they picked their way carefully through it.
William was struck by the silence engulfing the valley. During a battle, when the heavy field guns, rifles, and machine guns were all booming at the same time, the noise was so tremendous that it seemed beyond the limits of human endurance. Amidst a storm of steel and fire, the riot of battle would change in character, volume and tempo; rising and falling with alternating diminuendo and crescendo in both a hurrying and slackening pace. Relentless, the deafening volley of reports had always sounded to William like the clattering of a clumsy and lumbering wagon, jolting heavily over the frozen ruts of a rough country lane. Sometimes it reminded him of the brisk hammering of thousands of carpenters and riveters. Or it could have been the rumbling of hundreds of heavy goods trains, thundering and bumping over uneven points in the line and meeting head on in a hideous collision.
But even more awful than that hellish cacophony were the sudden and unexpected silences, which made William hold his breath and wait for the storm to start again.
It was this silence that greeted them as they entered the trench system. And William finally gasped a new breath, because the barrage had truly halted. For a time, at least.
The ground was a heavy, impermeable clay that had been gouged and displaced in a series of tunnels and ditches. Thick mud puddles filled every hole and depression, forming a sticky mire for them to flounder through.
“Halt,” called a voice from the darkness. “Who goes there?”
Sterling brought up a hand, stopping them as they slogged through the water. “Who do you think? The bloody Red Baron?”
“I’ve got to ask. Wh-who goes there?”
William could just make out the young private who had issued the challenge, a skinny chap barely old enough to shave, with a uniform caked onto his body like a second skin. His eyes seemed far too big for his face. His rifle was shaking, the butt clinking against the lad’s belt buckle.
“We’re from the 3rd,” Sterling said. “Any good down here?”
“Good,” the boy said blankly. “Don’t be daft. How could anything be good?”
William frowned. He had seen many strange things during his last four months in France, but the private’s nonchalance when addressing the Crown Sergeant was something new and unsettling.
The boy lowered his rifle and slumped back against the side of the trench. He seemed to merge with the ground, such was his grubby appearance. William wondered if he’d ever move again, or would he be sucked into the trench wall, subsumed into the churned mud of the battlefield like so many of his mates?
Sometimes, they left dead men on the edge of the trench because they absorbed more bullets.
“Come on, you lot,” Sterling said. “Let’s get some grub inside us, then I’d better track down someone in charge.”
The young soldier began to laugh. It was a sickly sound, like gritty oil being poured through a sieve; more a hiss than a chuckle. “In charge,” he said. “In bloody charge!” He laughed again, but never once looked at William or his friends. He stared through them and beyond, as if he were talking to someone else entirely. As they shrugged past him, his laughter broke into a rapid volley of violent sneezes.
They slopped through the trench, up to their knees in muddy water most of the time, feces or rotten food floating on its soupy surface. William closed his eyes for a few seconds every now and then, navigating by sound alone, and tried to imagine the summery meadow back home. He could find the smells of flowers and the sounds of birds, the feel of grass beneath his hands and the sense of one of the girls from the village sitting primly by his side . . . but he could not see it. Even when he tried to make-believe, he could not see it.
Still, he had to try. Anything was better than this. Even despair was better than this hell beyond despair.
Again his mind drifted back to the previous battle. He thought of the wounded soldier left out in no-man’s land because it gave the enemy snipers something to shoot at. Dunhill.
“This’ll do,” Sterling said from somewhere up ahead.
William opened his eyes. The Sergeant had paused in a much wider area of trench, two further burrows running away left and right. Straight ahead, a depression had been carved from the earth and covered with roughly chopped branches and shattered tree trunks. It was flooded but there were seats gouged into the walls, an unopened crate of rations, and a dead soldier bobbing facedown in the water.
No one liked to touch a dead man. Some thought death was catching, like bad luck or a cold.
“I’m not going in there, with him like that,” Liggett said. “Someone should bury the poor sod.”
“Go on then,” Winston mumbled, just loud enough for the others to hear.
“You do it,” Liggett said. “You and Morris drag him out of there and—”
“No way I’m touching him!” A cigarette dropped from Morris’s lips as he spoke.
“Just stop it,” William sighed, shaking his head. He felt like crying. He often felt like crying, and when he thought it would really help, he did. When it was dark mostly, the night lit only by the intermittent flashes of the guns. It was yet another thing he envied the animals; they would never have cause to despair at the savagery of their own race.
He pushed past the bickering men, glanced at Sterling, and then stepped into the depression in the earth. The soldier was very heavy, weighted down with water, his rifle strap still tangled around one arm—
“Oh Christ!” William gasped as the body flipped over.
The dead soldier had no face.
There was a hint of eye cavities, a hole in his head where his nose should be, but all other features had been destroyed.
William closed his eyes and tried to dream of the meadow as he dragged the body into the trench. He left it against the sidewall. And he could sense everything of home apart from what it looked like.
“What did that?” Sterling whispered later.
William glanced at his Sergeant, unable to find an answer, unwilling to look.
Sterling’s gaze did not falter. “That dead chap over there. What did it to him?”
“A shell. A bullet. I don’t know.” William shrugged. “Perhaps he blew his own head off.”
“You know what I mean, Potter, I’ve seen enough dead men, so have you. His face was taken off after he died.”
Yes, thought William, I had thought that. I’ve tried to forget it, but it is what I thought at first. He wished he could lose the memory of the man’s ruined face as easily as he had mislaid the image of home.
“Rats,” he said quietly.
And then the first barrage of the night began.
The walls of the trench were shaking. Not just vibrating, but actually moving, shedding clumps of dirt as if there were something inside trying to break out. Shells staggered the trenches, some of them striking home in sickening explosions of water and smoke and flesh. The sky was blinking at them with each burst of energy, clouds grey against the night, moon barely peering out at the slaughter its erstwhile worshippers were committing. While down here Man was busy racing to his death, in the heavens time was frozen.
William ran through the trenches. Flowering eruptions of mud splashed the landscape, the ground shook, water sloshed around his feet, men shouted, men screamed, shells screamed, Morris shouted at him: “It’s all over now, William! The poem’s ending now!”