Creel was offended by censored news.
Maybe his own stories were watered down, but he did manage to keep a somewhat despairing undercurrent to them. He would not be a tool of corrupt politicians regardless of what side of the Atlantic they spawned on.
But he knew he had to be careful.
He had to step light.
So he didn’t make much noise at first, he just listened.
And he kept hearing the same thing again and again: there was something out there. Something that wasn’t a man. Something that fed on the wounded and dying. He jotted it all down in his notebook, thinking it was the sort of thing that might spice up yet another dreary account of war.
Then three men of the 12 ^ th disappeared from a listening post a stone’s throw from the German forward trenches. And this after not one but two wire-cutting parties failed to return.
“ It’s nothing but the Jerries,” Sergeant Haines said. “They snuck up on ‘em, took ‘em prisoner. Them Jerries is quite good at things like that.”
It was always possible. But Sergeant Stone, who’d led the three, was extremely capable.
“ So when are you going out?” Creel asked him.
“ Tomorrow,” Haines said. “We’ll have a bit of a look. Be a morning mist coming in.”
“ I want to go with.”
“ You?”
“ Yes.”
The sergeant sighed. “All right. But you carry rifle and kit like the rest. If you lag, you’re left behind.”
8
No-Man’s Land
Haines was right about the mist: it came with the dawn, white and fuming, a perfect enveloping wall that obscured everything, turned all the wreckage out in No-Man’s Land to gray indistinct shapes. As the sun rose higher and higher, it did not dissipate. It seemed to be steaming from the broken, mud-slicked ground itself. It fell over the trenches like a shroud and visibility was down to ten or twelve feet. Creel could hear the men and the clank of their equipment but not see them.
There was no time to admire the fog as the officers and sergeants called for the men to “stand to” and up on the fire step they went, bayonets fixed to guard against a dawn raid. It was the same every day. Afterwards came what the Tommies called the “morning hate” in which both sides exchanged machine-gun fire and some light shelling just to relieve the tension of waiting. It didn’t last long. The soldiers stood down, cleaned rifles and equipment, were inspected by the officers.
“ Hear you’re coming for a walk with us,” Corporal Kelly said to Creel as they breakfasted on hard bread, bacon, and biscuits.
“ Thought I might,” Creel told him.
“ Won’t be good out there, sir,” Kelly said, shielding his rations from a light falling rain. “If I was you, I’d change me mind. You don’t have to go but we do.”
There was no getting past the dread underlying his words, but was that the understandable fear of the enemy or was it something else? Creel didn’t ask. No sense getting any of the boys worked up and nervous like he was.
“ The bloody situations you get me in,” Burke said to him as he had a cigarette. “Think I’d be safer in combat.”
“ Something’s going on out there,” Creel told him, “and I have to find out what.”
“ Still on that, mate?” Burke said.
“ Yes, and I’m going to be on it until I figure it out. You can’t tell me you don’t sense it like I sense it. It’s there. Something incredible. Something unreal.”
That made Burke laugh. “You believing them stories? Old Creel? The kingpin of cynical bastards everywhere? Cor, I didn’t know you had it in you.”
“ You saw those prints. You felt something out there.”
But Burke wouldn’t have it. “Not me, not me. Didn’t feel a thing. And I didn’t on account I like to sleep at night.”
The mist still held thick after breakfast and Haines gathered them together-Creel, Burke, Kelly, and a Private known as Scratch because of his lice infestations-and they climbed up on the fire step. Captain Croton scanned the perimeter with his trench periscope. “Right,” he said. “Good time as any.”
As they went over the sandbags, Creel understood the fear that ate at every man on the line. As foul and disgusting as the trenches were, there was safety in them and out beyond was death waiting, hiding in every draw and pocket. They crawled over the muddy ground, slipping through breaks in the barbwire ramparts that were tangled with bird-picked skeletons, and soon enough they were out in No-Man’s Land.
Though the fog was still heavy, Creel could see the shattered landscape of shell-holes, oozing pink clay and pooling brown mud, heaps of pulverized brick. There had been a forest or wood here at one time and now it was just a wasteland of stumps and limbless trees rising up like telegraph poles amongst sucking black mud holes crisscrossed by duckboard.
“ All of you stay behind me,” Haines said. “Stay on the duckboard and be quiet.”
“ Do what the bloody git says,” Burke said under his breath.
“ What was that?”
“ Nothing, Sergeant,” said Burke, grinning.
Gripping his Enfield, sixty pounds of fighting kit on his back, Creel did as he was told as they moved single file down the duckboard which seemed to sink into the mud as their weight pressed down upon it. Dirty water sloshed over their ankles and the stink of putrescence rose from pools of muck that were inundated with assemblages of corpses, maggoty and green, white bone shining through graying hides. Corpse-flies filled the air with a steady low buzzing. Out in the mist, he could hear the splashing and squeaking of rats.
How Haines navigated, he did not know. No sun, no stars, nothing but the repetitious expanse of stumps and sinkholes, the rain coming down in sheets, bomb craters bubbling with brown water, a muddy slime sluicing over the duckboard itself. But Haines was an old hand. He’d been in the trenches since the beginning, fighting amongst the slapheaps and pitheads of the Mons coalfields and leading suicidal charges against German Jager Battalions at the Battle of Marne. Maybe he had the intelligence and personality of a toad, but he knew his business.
The duckboard sank away just ahead but they stayed on it, feeling it beneath them as they waded through thigh-deep water that was cold and heavy, floating with branches and abandoned ration tins and empty rusting cordite cans, all matter of refuse. Rats swam from one heap to the next, huge things, bloated and greasy. The duckboard carried them up out of the swamp and soon enough there was no more duckboard-just the remains of the forest ahead, the shafts of blackened trees like graveyard monuments, crowded, leaning, strung with rusting barbwire, mist like white lace drifting about their trunks.
Haines led on and the muck was up to their knees but thankfully got no deeper. The sergeant let them rest a moment while he took a bearing with his compass. There were rags and bones, boots and helmets everywhere as if the moist, steaming earth had regurgitated a meal of men. Scratch and Kelly sorted around a bit, finding shell casings and old Lewis gun drums, scaring carrion crows from the remains of Hun soldiers.
“ Look at this,” Scratch said, holding up a German helmet with a bullet hole channeled neatly through it. “He took it in the head, poor bastard.”
“ Aye, but it was quick, weren’t it?” Kelly said, gnawing on some canned Bully Beef.
“ You eating again?” Burke said.
“ I’m hungry.”
“ Swear you got the worms or something.”
“ Pipe down,” Haines told them, reading his compass.
Creel sat there smoking, clicking off a few shots of the wreckage around him with his Brownie. He did not need to be there at all and he knew it. He could have had a soft, cushy job back home in Kansas City. He rated an editor’s job, but here he was in this misting netherworld of rats and crows, carrion and mud. He didn’t belong here…then again, he hadn’t belonged in the Balkan Wars or the Mexican Revolution, the Second Boer War or the Boxer Rebellion, but he’d been there and now he was here.