The night was tenebrous, the air dank and cloying. Now and again, they could hear the Germans cry out as they made some grisly discovery.
“ Bloody hell,” Burke muttered when he stepped on a body and three or four oily rats escaped the abdomen with meat in their jaws.
Creel found a corpse that was moving and Haines, using his bayonet, discovered why soon enough: there was a rat nest inside it. Worked into a mad frenzy, he slashed the adults into ribbons and stomped the blind squirming pups to paste.
Haines told them to don their gas masks when they started to see dozens and dozens of rats creeping about on their bellies like great fleshy slugs. They’d all been poisoned by the gas and were dying in numbers. A couple of the Tommies started kicking them like footballs, giggling as they went sailing away into the brown slop.
About thirty minutes into it, they found three corpses tangled together at the edge of a run of duckboard. They were men from the 12 ^ th and Haines and the others recognized them, despite the fact that they were covered in yellow slime.
“ Look here,” Haines said. “Rats again.”
The bellies of all three had been hollowed out quite thoroughly, even the flesh of their throats were missing. Haines and the others stood around in their bug-eyed masks, swearing and kicking at anything handy while Burke had a closer look. He waved away clouds of flies that were thick as a blanket.
“ See?” he said to Creel, out of earshot of the others, pointing to great gashes and punctures in the bones of exposed ribs by lantern light. “Ain’t no rat ever born had teeth like that. Too big.”
“ Dogs?”
But Burke just shook his head and would not say.
“ Footprints over here…small ones,” one of the Tommies said.
They went over to the duckboard and there was a crowding of muddy footprints on it which was not so surprising except for two things: they were the prints of bare feet and very, very small.
“ Children,” Burke said. “Children’s prints.”
“ Out here?” Haines said, stripping off his mask and mopping his sweaty, mottled face. There was something quite akin to stark horror in his eyes. “No kids…not out here…”
But the evidence was unmistakable: children had been out in No-Man’s Land stalking about barefoot. It seemed inconceivable, but to each man standing there, there was no denying what they were seeing. Sometimes mud could expand in size with the dampness, make prints larger than they were but certainly not smaller.
Nobody said anything for some time and Creel thought that moment would be burned into his brain forever: the Tommies standing around, ankle-deep in the Flanders mud, rain running down those grim gas masks, mist coiling about them, corpses rotting in the muck.
And as he framed that moment in his mind with something quite near to hysteria, a voice in the back of his head said: The prints of children. Children are out scavenging No-Man’s Land by night. Barefoot children. And these bodies have been eaten by something that is not rats or a wild dog, Burke says. You don’t dare make the connection because it would be insane to do so… yet, yet you know something is terribly, dreadfully wrong with this scenario. You can feel it in your guts, in your bones, in the shadowy recesses of your soul.
“ Heard a story once about-” one of the Tommies started to say and Haines jumped on him, took hold of him and shook him wildly. “You’ll shut up with that talk! Do you hear me? You’ll shut up with it!”
After that, solemn as only undertakers can be, they finished up their work quickly, each man suddenly very aware of the long shadows stretching around them and what might be hiding in them. They wasted no time in getting back to the trenches.
For there was something damnably unnatural haunting No-Man’s Land and they all knew it.
7
Tall Tales
The Tommies, when they gathered in the dugouts to warm their fingers about the glowing little coal brazier at night, their bellies warmed from the daily rum ration, would start telling crazy tales by the light of the moon. And maybe sometimes that was because they had a story to tell and sometimes because they just needed to hear their own voices.
Creel understood that part of it just fine.
After a particularly violent barrage in the Le Touquet sector by German 18-pounders, whizz-bangs, which blew sandbags into fragments, a young private from the 2 ^ nd Lancashire Fusiliers with eyes like smoked glass kept touching his arms and legs and chest in the observation trench.
Standing there, knee-deep in the frozen mud, Creel said, “It’s okay, son. You’re still intact.”
“ Oi, it’s not that, sir,” said the private, touching his grime-streaked face. “It’s not that at all, you see. It’s just…well, I’m making sure I’m solid and what, not a ghost. One minute you’re solid as brick, the next naught but a ghost drifting about.”
In the trenches where death came so swiftly there was a real need to prove to yourself that you were truly alive, a thing of flesh and blood. When you spent week after miserable week living in what amounted to sandbagged ditches with freezing drizzle raining down on you, ears ringing from machine-gun fire, the pitted landscape a cratered run of barbwire and unburied corpses lit at night by flickering green flares…it all became very surreal. And the need to prove to yourself that you were not in some desolate hell or purgatory whiling away eternity became very strong.
Creel had felt it himself more than once.
Scribbling down the vagaries of life in the trenches, the madness was always there and he was mute witness to it. Very often, it vented itself in the form of stories. Particularly after a fierce action or raid, like bad blood that had to be lanced.
He’d heard about monstrous packs of rats that took down living men. About visions of Christ and the Virgin Mother in the trenches. The phantoms of dead men patrolling the perimeters. And from one particularly terrified sergeant of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, he’d heard about a creature half-bird and half-woman, a hag that fed on corpses (later he learned that was an old one, so old it had hair growing on it, a twice-told battlefield tale that predated the days of Cromwell).
But he was a realist.
Seventeen years as a combat correspondent will do that. It will leech the poetry from your soul and sometimes that’s not a bad thing. War, any war, is bad enough without a fertile imagination complicating things.
But after the burial party…and what that German sergeant had said…he began thinking differently.
It was the state of those corpses and the footprints that haunted him for days afterwards. Maybe it meant nothing at all…yet, his mind would not let go of it. Over and over again, it went through what he’d seen out there and he began to get that feeling in his gut he hadn’t had in years…the sense that he was onto something. And when that feeling grew strong, when he smelled the blood in the water, he knew he’d have to track it to its source, one way or another.
But he went slow.
He went easy.
When you were in his position, there by the good graces of the BEF-even if their reasons weren’t exactly altruistic-you could not make waves. He wasn’t like some of the British newsies, guys like John Buchan or Valentine Williams, Henry Nevinson or Hamilton Fife, established accredited war correspondents. They had been selected by the Brits to shovel out the propaganda and were doing a bang-up job at it, steering the British public away from the godawful truth of the war and finely tuning their misguided perception of a valiant struggle against the bloodthirsty savage Hun (with only light, acceptable losses, of course). If they knew the truth of what was being done with their sons and husbands, brothers and fathers in the meatgrinders of the trenches, there would be rioting in the streets.